Technology Marketing

OpenID Reaches the 60 Million User Mark!

Avery — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 14:21:50 -0800

AOL's recent move to embrace OpenID (right behind Microsoft and the rest of world+dog) has taken the next step, with all AOL and AIM screen names becoming an OpenID URL.

With this, in one fell swoop, over 63 million new OpenID accounts have just been created. read more »

All Users

OpenID Usage Statistics from Ma.gnolia.com

Avery — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:15:13 -0800

Ma.gnolia.com, a popular social bookmarking site, added OpenID as an alternative method for new user registration in December, 2006. OpenID is a decentralized user-centric identity architecture that allows a user to use a URL based ID (think of it like a username) to log into a variety of websites.

Earlier this month, Larry Halff, founder of Gnolia Systems shared usage statistics of 5467 users that registered for new service between December 15 and January 31. No specific user data was provided.

Sample Sizing: read more »

All Users

Authentify and Purdue University Post Speaker Verification Results

Avery — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:45:00 -0800

On February 6, at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Andy Rolfe of Authentify and Dr. Stephen Elliot of Purdue University presented the results of a study on Authentify's implementation of voice biometrics/speaker verification. It should be noted that this study should not be considered to be a statement on voice biometrics on the whole, but on a specific implementation of a a single vendor's hosted authentication solution. read more »

All Users

OpenID and CardSpace to Play Nicely Together

Avery — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 10:53:35 -0800

OpenID, the most visible of the new identity management schemas - and CardSpace, Microsoft's browser based initiative to help users control and protect their identity online have decided to play nicely together in the User-Centric Identity space. The press release is here .

A team consisting of Microsoft, VeriSign, Sxip and JanRain has been assembled to implement the new interoperability model. read more »

Technology Marketing

Customer Council or Customer Counsel

Avery — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 12:28:16 -0800

Back in the late 1990s, when I was a Product Manager back at MCI, we implemented a Customer Council - bringing a couple hundred of our corporate customers together, breaking them into groups based on the products that they were either using or were in the process of evaluating and getting honest feedback and direction. No sales people were allowed in the building - just Product Managers (and the occasional Product Marketing person). We would talk about what we had recently implemented, what was on the roadmap and then we'd stop and listen. Really listen.
read more »

Technology Marketing

Is DEMO Dead?

Avery — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 16:02:49 -0800

Jason Calacanis (Sequoia Capital) and Michael Arrington (techcrunch.com) have announced a new conference called the TechCrunch20. Twenty companies over two days will get an opportunity to present to 250 to 500 of their peers (and competitors, the media, VCs, the press, etc.). read more »

All Users

Delivering a speech for PR is a lot easier than delivering PR for speech

daniel — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:27:34 -0800

I have been tracking the number of publicly announced speech recognition deals for the past two years and the results are midly disturbing (for those in the speech market). In 2005, there were approximately 160 publicly announced customer wins; in 2006 there were only 95. That's almost 50% less. Now here's the half-full, revenue figures and port shipments from vendors clearly indicate that the speech market has grown in 2006. In 2005, I projected that the number of publicly announced customer wins would eclipse that of those in 2005 but I was wrong. Now as an analyst I try to be accurate in my assumptions and methodologies but I know that I cannot divine the future with precision (as much as I would like). So I'm left to ponder and analyze what has happened in the market in retrospect and analyze that data and apply that to future forecasts. Here are my conclusions for the lack of PR for speech in 2006... read more »

All Users

RSA Conference

Avery — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:48:54 -0800

Start: 02/05/2007 - 00:00

End: 02/09/2007 - 00:00

Timezone: Etc/GMT

RSA Conference

Moscone Center, San Francisco

http://www.rsaconference.com

Technology Marketing

The Markster is No Longer CEO of Digium

Avery — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 18:10:19 -0800

Giga Om is reporting that Mark Spencer, the originator of the open source PBX Asterisk is stepping down as CEO of Digium.

Digium was founded by Mark Spencer back in 1999 as a consulting company to contain consulting revenue he was generating while at university. This company, Linux Support Services, grew into Digium - which was created to provide support and associated hardware for Asterisk. read more »

Voice and VoiceXML

Zork Marketing

JohnH — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:51:51 -0800

You’re in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Have you ever felt that way at a high tech trade show? In no time flat almost every booth looks the same and almost every sales pitch sounds like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in a Peanuts cartoon. What does that tell you about the state of marketing in most high tech companies? Customers shouldn’t have to work that hard to grasp a positioning message and clearly understand what makes a product different and compelling. read more »

Technology Marketing

Identity Meets Digital Society

MarkL — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:02:08 -0800

Did you know that Time magazine has made "YOU" their Person of the Year 2006?
We’ve now entered the era where the web is providing previously unseen capabilities to the masses. The result is a myriad of new communication and information service providers and hundreds of new logins and passwords.

The growth of these silos of ‘Unmovable Identity Data’ (e.g.: usernames and passwords accounts locked into vendor silos) is being replaced with a new breed of identity-centric technologies now being called Identity 2.0. read more »

Identity 2.0

Ma.gnolia and OpenID Adoption

Avery — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 10:57:40 -0800

David Recordon, one of the originating developers of OpenID, noted in his blog that social bookmarking service ma.gnolia has posted some initial statistics on new user adoption of OpenID.

Per the ma.gnolia newsletter, since the ability to log in via OpenID was enabled, 15% of all new users use OpenID as their primary method of logging in. read more »

Identity 2.0

The Changing Environment

daniel — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:54:47 -0800

The last five years have witnessed fundamental shifts in customer buying patterns which have changed the marketing strategies employed by companies today. Traditional advertising in print publishing and audio / visual media like radio, newspapers, magazines and television are slowly diminishing. The emergence of satellite and internet radio is negatively affecting radio advertisements. Pay-per-click online advertising from Google, Yahoo and MSN are eroding newspaper and magazine advertisement revenue. read more »

Technology Marketing

Predicting the Future

JohnH — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 17:17:47 -0800

Most technology marketing people I know love lots of data. Most are engineers by training, so they’ve been taught to crave it. I’m an engineer too, but somewhere along my career journey I stepped out of bounds. I still crave data. I just don’t trust most of it anymore. Especially marketing data. read more »

Voice and VoiceXML

An Exercise in Branding: To the losers go the spoils

Avery — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 21:49:05 -0800

Typically, when a company goes through a big acquisition, you end up with either a hybrid hyphenated name or a new name all together - or the acquired company just gets enveloped in the new parent's name:

De-Branding

Genesys + VoiceGenie = Genesys
Verizon + MCI = Verizon
Intervoice + Edify = Intervoice

Hyphenated names:

Alcatel + Lucent = Alcatel-Lucent
St. Paul Insurance + Travelers = St. Paul Travelers Group

New Names: read more »

Voice and VoiceXML