Thanks to everybody who dialed in for today’s Voice Mashup conference call, especially to Jim Courtney, Andy Abramson and of course, our host, Alec Saunders.   We talked about what a mashup is, how we make money at them, why are they written and who (in general) really cares.  If you didn’t happen to be one of the people in the audience, no big deal… you can listen to it over on Alec’s blog.     Dan York’s experience wasn’t entirely positive, as his hand was raised and the teacher didn’t call on him, but I thought (on the whole) it worked out beautifully.   On a personal note, I couldn’t help but feel the benefits of the whole “social networking” thing from the process of doing this call.  There are many reasons I don’t often write on that topic, not least of which is that I’m pretty darn focused on mashups, but I found so many good points about this experience that I just had to share:

1. On the message wall, Luca chimes in with his monetization insights for mashups, and  Dean reminds me of our steak bet that Ooma is dead meet in twelve months.
2. I can share it with you guys by linking to the podcast itself.
3. I saw people who I  added to my Facebook friends list by looking on the attendees to the call.

I had a pleasant conversation with Ooma CEO Andrew Frame last night. No, really, it was mostly pleasant. Apparently, of my three blog readers, one of them is an Ooma employee. Hey – big shout out. Hollywood in the house.

So, I’m not going to go into too much depth here about our conversation. Andrew promised me my own Ooma box to play with, and I’ll give you an honest appraisal of it when it arrives. We couldn’t talk long (as my cell phone kept dying), but I frankly didn’t hear anything from Andrew that was earth shattering from a business perspective. I hope that Andrew’s sudden “I have to go” response to “Tell me why your customer acquisition costs will be substantially less than Vonage’s” was about schedule, and not about an uncomfortable question. We’ve planned to speak again after the box arrives, and I’ll tell you how that goes.

No, what I want to mention is a good Ooma feature. According to Andrew, one Ooma feature is that when you are on the phone, if another call comes in, the other phones in the house ring. I love that feature – and I’ll tell you why. It’s a feature that doesn’t require customer education, and doesn’t require the customer to change his habits : the two killers of value added services. And, as Andrew rightly states, it works almost by surprise, which might be the best way that consumers learn about their product.

The second reason why I love that feature is because I’m getting excited to see some good engineering. What I mean is, I can’t wait to see how they pulled that one off without causing serious head-aches for the installers. Near as I can tell, you need to drive each wired phone in the house independently to pull this off. If you had a multi-line wireless phone driving your house, it would be pretty easy, I suppose, but how many people have that? Typically, don’t those Comcast installers cut the main line into the house, and then drive all the phones from their set top box? I don’t think most houses have a system where all the wired phones go to the same place in the house, then are bridged together. Andrew told me these guys are the best in the business. I am truly excited to see how good their product is, and how innovative their solutions to problems like this will be.

A massive shout-out to my man Dean at Cognation, who has taken up my recent challenge about the future success (or lack thereof) of Ooma. From his recent comment :

Ok Thomas I’m prepared to step up and take that bet from you, easy money in my books.

In 12 months from now I bet that Ooma will still be in business and am prepared to wager a dinner here in New York.

Reply post here to your blog to accept so we have this on public record.

It may be because of some of the consulting projects I’ve been involved with here at www.Cognation.net but I think Ooma have capture some very interesting aspects;

1/ Ease of use and design (so sorely lacking in a large number of basic projects I see) their ATA is ‘the’ best ata I’ve seen, nothing revolutionary but it’s just well designed plain and simple.
….and whats dissapointing about this fact is that with all the brains in the voip industry no one else came up with this design until now.

2/ Ease of uptake (keeping original number is such a barrier to entry to skypein and similar – yes I’m looking at you Grand Central).

3/ Ease of implementation in their business model (peer to peer using existing ethernet/internet infrastructure with zero billing – how easy is that).

Like I said easy money and I look forward to accepting your bet.

I’ll set up a page on the www.cognation.net website to track developments over the next 12 months.

Now, since they’ve raised a bazillion dollars, there’s no reason why they should EVER go out of business, so we’ll need a better measure than the doors closing. That aside, I’m up for this bet, partly because I think it will be fun, but partly because I love dinner in New York. I’m betting that ease of use, ease of implementation and ease of uptake will spiral into the ground because it’s simply not that valuable to the target customer. I say we pick a number of Ooma subscribers, and let’s see if they go over that number. I’m not going to suggest that Ooma get a five million subscriber number, like the iPhone – or even a moderate number, like a million, that Vonage had. Can anyone think of a good metric? Outside of dinner, it’s not that I’m hoping for Ooma’s demise. In fact, I’d be tickled pink for them to succeed. My breath? Not holding it. I’m just hoping, just like many others, that this is the last effort at a business model that seems to fail nearly every time it’s tried.

How long have you been saying that carrier based telephony is a race to the bottom? Well, you can stop saying it, as we’ve arrived.  When you purchase an Ooma phone, you never need to pay for your minutes again. You might shell out four Bennys for the privilege, but that’s it.  Yes, that’s it folks – no more paying by the minute ever again.  We’ve pressed the bottom button on the ol’ telecom elevator, and the doors have opened.  And what I love about this story is how complete the bottoming out is.  Andy is always telling me to be as positive as I can in my posts, and when I criticize, to give an example of somebody who’s doing it right.  A challenge here, my old friend – but I’ll try.