Podcast Archive

I am live here at Search Engine Strategies and just wrapped up the Google session on how to drive traffic to your site using the tools Google offers.

Pretty good session overall, though they couldn’t get the computers to work correctly. How many Google engineers does it take to run a PowerPoint presentation. :)

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Rather than bore you with text, I recorded the session and below you can listen to the audio files. Each file runs about ten minutes in length.

Just a quick announcement that our podcast with the guys at FeedBurner is now an official FeedBurner Podcast! Pretty groovy! Check out the podcast either on CenterNetworks or on Feedburner.

Though I will say that if you like the Yankees (who doesn't) then you should listen to it here to show the pinstripe pride! Those guys like the Red Sox (boo) and the White Sox (boo).

And don't forget — our RSS feed will get you the content quicker than Fedex, UPS, your Postal Carrier, a pigeon, a moose, 2 sheep, and doing so shows that you care. Isn't it nice to care about a site like this. We think so and we appreciate your feed subsciption.

We posted about GrandCentral’s launch earlier this week and I had a chance to interview Craig Walker from GrandCentral. His new web app has received a lot of press and I wanted to find out more about the product. Also we will discuss where the company is going in the future and where Craig sees VOIP in the coming years.

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Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (or download the mp3):

Below is a partial text transcript of the audio interview. Please listen to the audio for the entire discussion.

How did you come up with the idea for GrandCentral?
I came up with the idea just looking around and seeing and having worked in the VOIP space for a while with DialPad before this in how could you use VOIP technology to do unique stuff on the application side rather than just getting cheaper minutes. And having multiple phone numbers was something that was beginning to bother me, needing to check multiple voice mail messages, taking more calls on my cell phone, etc. So I started thinking about if this could be solved by coming up with a new service and actually believed that it could. And set out to do it.

What is the meaning behind the name GrandCentral?

We were trying to come up with a name that would embody how you could manage all of your calls using one number. GrandCentral was a perfect fit for it, as it’s where all these roads meet at one central place. Luckily enough, we knew the person who owned the URL and trademarks so we acquired it from them. They were not using it at the time so it has worked out very well.

What does the current revenue model look like for GrandCentral?
Currently we are offering a free beta service. If you sign up during the beta period, we will give you 60 days of our free unlimited premium service. Once we come out of the beta period and go into our commercial launch, we will have two tiers of service initially. One is a free service, where you pick a local number, get free voicemail, forwarding to four phone numbers, and 100 minutes of connected minutes. If you want you can purchase a bucket of overage minutes that will rollover month-to-month for $10.00/400. The other plan is an unlimited plan for $14.99 that will give you unlimited inbound connected calls, save voicemails for life, forward up to 7 telephones and you can even upload up to 100 mp3s to select as unique ring shares for callers.

Can you speak to your user base?
We are seeing all sorts of different users. There are a lot of users like me that have multiple phone numbers and multiple voice mailboxes and tired of missing a lot of calls or tired of getting too many calls on their cell phones because that is where people have gravitated to for finding someone. And so we are seeing a lot of unifying type users but we are also seeing a lot of users just using it for fun. Because it does a lot of cool things. You can screen every call, so you can find who’s calling and why, you can listen to voicemails live as they are being recorded and then jump into the call. Even people who only have one phone are using it to listen into their voice mail and to customize how different callers are treated. So we have the productivity guys and the personalization crowd. And we are seeing two main groups emerging her.

You certainly have received a ton of press coverage. Can you share any insight into your marketing plans?
Our marketing plans are really focused around viral marketing growth. We believe that if we do our job right, our users will be our best ambassadors to spread the word that there is this great service that I use and love and has all these cool features. How can we spread viral growth? We also demo’ed at the DEMO conference and that generated some good publicity and PR and if you have a service that people like you just need to get the ball rolling and hopefully they will tell other users and they will tell other users. And everyone can relate to having a telephone and to why every caller gets treated the same and its annoying to deal with voicemail systems where 7 is delete on one, 3 on another, its frustrating. And so to have a service that gives all these features in simple, easy-to-use, free (or low price), allows the viral aspect of this to grow.

What is the technology behind GrandCentral?
The backend we have taken a proprietary soft-switch that we have enhanced and our border controller on it. It is a highly customizable soft-switch that we have put our layers of applications on top of it. That’s where all of the interesting call control features happen. We want to make all of your devices work together.

On the front end, MySQL and some PostgreSQL, and some Flash, Ajax and PHP. There is some interesting stuff you can do now with Flash and Ajax with the way our player works and it is a powerful combination to put the two of them together.

What percentage of the area codes in the usa do you have covered? So far I have heard the most comments about no numbers in Texas, but I also noticed that there is nothing in NYC.
So we have tons of DIDs on the way, we probably have about 60-70% of the US population covered and we have a whole lot more coming to fill it in. Sometimes its hard to get numbers in the most populous places because there is a shortage of them. We are a startup and are not going to sit on 4 million numbers waiting for users to come.

Do you see toll-free numbers coming at some point?
Yea, we definitely launched with a consumer focused, get people using it and get a lot of feedback on what they like and what they think could be improved. We also think that it has a lot of applications for a small and medium sized business. There will be more business features and business plans coming in the future but right now we are cranking getting everything ready for the consumer launch getting everything ready for the end of the beta period.

Do you envision any growth in Europe or Asia?
It’s an opportunity in a lot of markets around the world, because people have the same problem everywhere. And Asia and Western Europe are two of the more attractive markets.

Who are GrandCentral’s main competitors?
You know it is interesting, we have tried to define a new space. There are a lot of companies who did a find me follow me type service in the past, but this is a lot more than that. We are finding from our users, even if they live on their cell phone only, that they still love it. There are people who have done pieces of this but we have not seen anyone who has done all of it. I am sure if we do well competitors will come out of the woodwork, but right now that we don’t see as competitors. We do see a lot of potential partners.

Any upcoming partnerships, collaborations or integrations?
Ever since we have had some soft discussions while we have been developing the product. Since the launch on Monday, we have had a lot of interest from a lot of interesting companies to do things together. Unfortunately, most of them are under NDAs so there is not a lot we can talk about, but there is a lot of interesting potential partnerships.

If I am outside of the home, and I forgot to forward calls to my cell, is there a way to do it remotely away from the computer?
The nice thing is that the way we setup is that you don’t need to keep coming back. At sign up you give us the phone numbers you want the call forwarded to and that’s pretty much it. Say you give me work, cell and home phone number and we will use those numbers to find you at. If you are on the road and need to add another number, just call your number and you can easily add another temporary number. So it is really simple.

Can you talk about the portability issue in taking a GrandCentral number to another provider at a later time?
Our stance on that issue is that we want happy users, we aren’t just going to keep you because we have access to the number. If you want to leave and take your GrandCentral number with you, we are not going to stand in your way. If you have a provider that you want to take the number to, we will work with our partners where we got the number from to make sure to help you get it transferred to that provider. We are not going to hold our customers captive just because we can. Our view is to create a company that consumers will want to work with and be part of. We are going to earn the customers we have.

Where do you see GrandCentral going in the next 1-3 years?
The vision of GrandCentral is to continue to build on the promise of having a personal communications service that gives you basically all of the communications features that you want in one place that will work no matter what provider you are using for your inputs. I see us growing our user base and continuing to add features and expand our mission without losing focus on what users want.

Where do you see VOIP going in the next 1-3 years?
I don’t know. I ran DialPad for 5 years and we saw the price game eroding and now Skype is giving free phone calls to US phones and others are giving free calls to international destinations. It seems like 1999 all over again when DialPad was giving free calls all of the world and it is interesting. The end point charging per minute VOIP seems in question now and the companies who add real value are those that provide features that are unique that people want and stick around for and not just people trying to save a penny a minute on a long distance call. The price game in VOIP has been taken down to a zero sum game sometimes.

Anything else you would like to add?

I would say that we are very consumer focused. We started this because we were frustrated with the lack of features across all of our services. This is our initial feature set and during the beta period we are going to continue to refine it and make it fantastic. And then launch paid service and continue to add more features as time goes on. We will always be evolving and innovating.

When do you expect to exit the beta period?
That is the beautiful thing about a beta period. It can depend on how many things we find and how quickly we fix them. But it has been going relatively well so far so I hope it won’t be too long but I can’t put any date on it.

Well we have reached the end of our interview with Craig. Thanks to Craig for participating and to you for reading and listening.

If you would like to participate in a conversation on CenterNetworks, or if you have any comments or questions, you can contact me via e-mail at allen===at===centernetworks.com or visit CenterNetworks for all of our news, reviews, insights and conversations.

Technorati Tags: Grand Central | GrandCentral | Craig Walker | interviews | center networks

I recently had a chance to interview Geoffrey Arone from Flock. Geoffrey is one of the co-founders. He will speak about where Flock comes from, where it is today and where it is going. He also addresses the CEO leaving. You can listen to the interview in several ways listed below. The interview is about 30 minutes long.

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Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (or download the mp3):

Below is a text transcript of the audio interview.

Allen: How did you guys come up with the idea for Flock?
Geoffrey: At the time I was working at Real Networks as product manager for the real player and my cofounder was working for the Mozilla Foundation. This was in very late 04 to early 05. We were seeing a revolution on several fronts. The browser space was becoming reinvigorated thanks to Firefox. So 10 years of dormancy in the browser space was coming to an end. The other thing was that Microsoft was falling all over itself. There was also a revolution in user generated content, and this was anything from blogs to videos and photos. And other innovative things like delicious were starting to take off as well. So I talked to my cofounder and we were thinking about what we like about our jobs and what would we do differently. It quickly dawned on us that we like the consumer space and the internet space and wanted to be part of the participation revolution so looking at what tools were available to us it seemed clear to us that the Mozilla platform was a wonderful one to work from. It is open source, we both believe in open source. Users are passionate about it, we felt that Firefox was focusing on the right things at the time. We thought it was a great opportunity to look at extending the platform to address a different set of users.

Allen: What’s the meaning behind the name Flock?
Geoffrey: We held group sessions and brainstorming sessions to figure out what would be the best name. The one thing that kept rising to the top was people kind of coming together and expressing themselves with some degree of organization. It was like formation, expression and so I was thinking of things that capture things like Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist wasn’t very catchy for a browser and had already been used and I also wanted something kind of catchy and snazzy. My wife mentioned a few different words. Most were animal behaviours that didn’t sound quite as good and then it just dawned on me, Flock. I think she said something like herd, hive. But when you think of a flock, groups of people flocking to something. Something that captures the essence of a hotspot that is capturing people’s attention. There you have it. I came up with it and then went out and bought the domain name and the rest is history.

Allen: Did you start with funding or self-funded entity?
Geoffrey: We started mostly just working for free, just me and the co-founded. We worked in the off hours to build the business plan to see if this is a viable company or just an interesting project. Once we realized that this was something we wanted to dedicate our full-time to, we generated a small amount of seed funding, which was then added to by two other rounds of funding, an A round and a B round. Our last round of funding was last November (2005) where we got a full and proper C round.

Allen: What is the current revenue model look like for Flock?
Geoffrey: So it’s going pretty much as we expected. Browsers are not a new business. Just like Firefox uses Google as its default search, we do something similar with our search partners. So basically that means the browser is free, we get a share of the revenue from searches directed to our search partners.

Allen: So are you still doing the Amazon affiliation?
Geoffrey: Yes, they are a partner.

Allen: What can you talk about in the technology behind Flock?
Geoffrey: The browser is built entirely upon the Mozilla platform. Essentially it is exactly the Firefox codebase under the hood. We license from Mozilla and share back to them whenever we have fixes. Anything beyond that is also developed on the same technology platform. We use XUL, which is the same language used to develop the browser, same rendering engine. Extensions to the platform are developed in C++.

Allen: Can you talk about the about:Duck project?
Geoffrey: Oh Duck project? If you go to flock.com/about/duck you will see all of the Flock employees on a Duck. It is really a top secret project that we don’t talk about.

Allen: So if you share with me, you would have to kill me kind of thing?
Geoffrey: Yea, or just find a way to silence you. But I would prefer not to have to go down that path.

Allen: Can you talk about who your main competitors are?
Geoffrey: So the easiest way to explain it is that it really depends on which perspective you are looking at the browser from. Certainly if you view Flock as just a web browser, then any other web browser could be a good subsitute for Flock. But from my perspective we like to think about it as the first product that takes into consideration the full lifecycle of web content from finding it, sharing it, consuming it, and to creating new content. Those are the 4 aspects. I probably got them out of order. So when you look at the browser from that perspective there are individual companies or products that might be demand subsitutes for any one of our features but in terms of harnessing the overall lifecycle of web content there really no one that is doing it quite to the extent that we are. I joke sometimes when people ask me about who is our main competitior and sometimes I think that it is ourselves. We are always asking tough questions about what problems we are trying to solve and how we can solve these problems and make a fun experience for folks.

Allen: If you have a chance to make any friends since starting Flock. Other software companies, other projects that you meet with regularly?
Geoffrey: Absolutely, our biggest and earliest partner was Yahoo!. So we worked very closely with Yahoo! and they are e-products are well integrated into Flock. Outside of Yahoo! one of our absolute biggest and best partners is Photobucket. If you go to photobucket.com, you will see they actually distribute Flock. We have worked very nicely with them to get them integrated into the browser and it’s interesting not to long ago few people in the valley heard of photobucket. They were based in Denver and they now have on the order of 26 million users. These users are very active in social networking and in the blogosphere and they seemed like a perfect fit. So for us, its been a perfect partnership and we meet with them once or twice a week. And there are an upcoming partnership that I can’t talk about yet but there will be 1 or 2 major partnerships coming up that will share some light on where this is going.

Allen: Can you talk a little bit about your user demographics?
Geoffrey: This is always a tough question for me as I don’t like to draw lines in the sand but I would say its primarily folks that are active in either “power consumption” or “power expression” online. And what I mean by that is some folks casual web users maybe use the web browser once a week and either end of the age demo then they are probably not in our target. What we are finding is the people who are using Flock the most are people are really keen that want to be in the know and keep up-to-date. And that can take various forms, it can take active bloggers, people that are participating in social networks, people who like to share photos online.

Allen: Since you are about a year old, do you believe you have accomplished what you set out to do?
Geoffrey: Absolutely, I am a lot more confident in Flock’s potential for success now than I have ever been but I have a lot more understanding about how hard it is to build a quality product. A year ago I might have assumed that by now we would be out the door with a 1.0 product. You know it is still about a month and half off. Yea, I am confident but I realize now it is a lot more work than expected. The good news is that we have a great team in place. We just passed the 30 mark and have one of the best engineering teams assembled.

Allen: Do you see Flock becoming a mainstream browser?
Geoffrey: Absolutely and in fact our downloads outside of the tech and geek community have been skyrocketing and that’s largely because folks are starting to realize that we are more than just focused on the blogosphere. When the project got some early recognition, it was mainly geeks like myself. The way we are designing the product is so that its useful and enjoyable for anyone who wants to do things like share photos online and that anyone that wants to participate can.

Allen: I was looking at Mashable and on September 13, 2006 they noted that the Flock CEO jumped ship and that Flock is an unnecessary product. They also noted that the Photobucket partnership is helping. Can you speak a little bit to this and about why Flock is necessary.

Geoffrey: Let me draw a bit of color on both sides. When we started Flock, my partner and I sat around a table with our original investor and mapped out the future of the company would look like and how we would want to grow it and for starters Bart did not quit Flock. That was a big misstatement that was picked up by folks. When we started the company, Bart and the investor were like you will be CEO for a year but if this things starts to take off we will want some professional management and that’s what happened. He was here for just over a year and just had a baby two weeks before the board made the decision and the board is actively seeking someone who has a lot of industry experience and can make the partnerships happen.

You know I am not in the business of telling people what they need. I think a lot of companies make that mistake. What we want to do is create something that we think is really useful and fun and people will vote with their downloads. What we have noticed of late is that we have to ask ourselves questions about what compels users. We do a lot of outreach and speak to Flock users. We have a lot of loyal users that submit feedback and help make it a product they will enjoy. We think we are speaking to the right group of people and they are voting and expressing their interest by continuing to use the product.

Allen: What are the top 2-3 things since you have started Flock?
Geoffrey: One thing that I have learned is that I find it very difficult to build successful products if you are not totally passionate about them or at least for me. I think with what Flock is trying to do we need to make sure we are always building a product that we passionately believe in and we believe will make an impact on the world.

The other thing I have discovered is that you really need to listen to what users are telling you. There are sometimes when others outside of the organization can really open your mind and we have gotten much better about it and in both getting feedback from users who love the tool but also those who hate it and uninstall it. It is important to speak to both sets of users.

The last thing I have learned is it is really difficult to build the right product. You have got to surround yourself with a great team. Hiring must be done well. My advice to anyone is that you grow your team with the right people. It is a lot more expensive to learn later on that you did not hire the right people.

Allen: What would you say is the top mistake since you started?
Geoffrey: I think the top mistake would be a combination of my 2nd point above (listening to users). When I was at MIT for grad school I took this class called Listening to the Consumer and it given all the math classes I was taking, I thought this would be a slam dunk. But 4 years later it really takes a lot of discipline to see what needs you are addressing. So what I have learned is that you don’t build anything until you have a plan for what you are trying to accomplish and for whom you are trying to accomplish this mission.

Allen: Where do you see Flock going in the next 1-3 years?
Geoffrey: So where I see Flock going is I expect it will be a little more of a platform then it currently is today. When someone launches Flock we want it to enable interaction. Once these core interactions are understood, I want people to take advantage of the fact that it is open source and that they will work with it. We have done most of the integrations including Flickr, Photobucket and Webshots will be in soon, Yahoo! Photos is another one. In terms of one offs – we can integrate it with a variety of different products and services. I would love it if the architecture that you can integrate anything you want with the browser. I want it to be as open as possible so anyone can choose to integrate anything they want to.

Allen: Where do you see the Browser going in the next 1-3 years?
Geoffrey: I view the browser as a great facilitator of interaction. And right now we are just focusing on nailing these experiences on the PC but I would have to agreed with Ted that the browser will become more and more pervasive whether on computers or on consoles. The question is how can you make the experience consistent across all of these and using Flock on all of these devices allows for a seamless integration. I want to make sure whatever we build that we are always mindful of the fact that the intended interaction should never be subordinate to the technology delivered or consumed.

Allen: Do you have any other thoughts about Flock that you want to share?
Geoffrey: If there is a message to the world, I would like to say thank you to the users who have stuck around and really helped us evolve and grow. For those who have not tried us out, I really encourage you to check out the latest beta and keep your eyes and ears peeled on the upcoming news and releases. This is certainly going to be an exciting quarter for us.

Well we have reached the end of our interview with Geoffrey. Thanks to Geoffrey for participating and to Mike at Atomic PR for setting everything up.

If you would like to participate in a conversation on CenterNetworks, or if you have any comments or questions, you can contact me via e-mail at allen===at===centernetworks.com or visit CenterNetworks for all of our news, reviews, insights and conversations.

Technorati Tags: Flock | Geoffrey Arone | interviews | center networks