Cerdafied...startups, people & the variety Hour

Purple Minutes/Voice 2.0

It's interesting to follow the various perspectives on Voice 2.0. When I did my morning RSS viewings, I came across Michael Arrington's blog coverage for Ingenio's new Ether. They are apparently doing a web + phone + presence service of some kind. Anyway, the blog referenced VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver's blog Voice is Purple.

Therein he cited: "purple minutes refers to IP traffic that is more than just plain old telephone traffic (or "black and white" traffic); it's traffic with a value-added component."

I think the point of this is that the cheap or free calling services that have emerged as a result of voice over IP, are really only a part of the promise of VoIP. This being acknowledged by the VoIP pioneer himself holds water because he has been involved in some of those services, like Vonage and FWD. The more consumer impacting and perhaps real promise of VoIP is lifestyle based.

What's real interesting is that every perspective I see on this topic refers to IP traffic being the place where all this happens. The ONLY problem with this, is that to get there, everyone also seems to believe that we all as consumers need IP to get IP features. If I'm a VoIP die hard, I'm going to preach this gospel all day. If I'm a lifestyle die hard however, I'm going to preach another gospel...the Buzzage gospel...which says these kinds of features and services need to make my life easier, better, more fun, convenient, private and personalized, on WHATEVER communications channel I'm on, be it mobile, landline, VoIP, etc. Some people may want these kinds of features and services on their VoIP services, but me and I'm guessing hundreds of millions of others want these services to be agnostic to the channel. I for one want these service on my mobile phone channel.

BTW, when I think purple, two things come to mind: Prince and Seth Godin.

-MC

The Year of the Dog

We're fixing for a great dog year, so hoping you are too. We've begun our initial beta preview last month and are opening it up to more users this month. Reaching our first beta within 2 months of being a real company is a rewarding milestone-especially for me who has been with some companies that even at the 2 year mark didn't have product yet! To be fair, those were hardware plays though, but still!) As we've been alluding our initial focus is on privacy as it pertains to phone numbers, whether mobile, VoIP, PSTN, whatever. This serves as a base from which to grow and expand our services throughout the year.

We're happy to note the addition of Kyle Sims, probably one of the more sensible guys we've come across, when it comes to a user's experience with a service. Kyle's done time at TellMe, Netscape and Verizon so brings a lot of relevant background and utility to the team. We can't wait to see his impact on Buzzage. When building an early stage team, everybody counts in large amounts (and "everything counts in large amounts" in the words of DM). We're rounding out the remainder of the initial team this week, but can't yet say names. The tricky part now is determining which market segments we optimize and target the service for...it's getting fun.