Behold the Chatroulette speed painter at work: armed with just a Wacom tablet and a preternatural drawing ability, he’s able to create incredible sketches of his chat partners in no time flat. And you thought the Chatroulette pianist was good. More »
I’m not going to pretend HotelChatter’s chart works, so I’ll just point to their list of best hotel Wi-Fi (Holiday Inn for mega-chains) and worst (avoid mid-high-enders like DoubleTree). My hotel criteria? Waffle House proximity. [Hotel Chatter via Lifehacker] More »
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
The motto of Bonanzle is “everything but the ordinary.” That about sums up the latest news from this Seattle-area startup, which has built a fast-growing online marketplace for niche items and collectibles. I learned through the grapevine that Bonanzle founder Bill Harding has closed a $1 million funding round led by angel investor and venture capitalist Geoff Entress, with participation from a long list of well-known angels around town—plus three prominent venture firms.
It’s a small deal, a classic angel investment, but it’s particularly interesting for this reason: Seattle-area venture firms Voyager Capital (led by Entress) and Ignition Partners (Michelle Goldberg), plus Bay Area firm Matrix Partners (Josh Hannah), have all invested in the deal. All together, the venture firms put in less than half of the total funding amount—but presumably they will be watching to see if this is something they want to put more money behind.
“I have not seen it before. It’s something unusual,” says Entress, who has joined Bonanzle’s board. “Probably an example of the experimentation” that VCs are doing around “how do you play at this earliest stage, especially when a lot of these companies don’t take much money.” (Venture firms usually need to put in a few million dollars to make it worth their time.)
And here’s a partial who’s-who list of angels participating in the deal: Dan Shapiro, formerly of Ontela and Photobucket, Andy Liu from BuddyTV, Kelly Smith from Inkd and Curious Office, Kevin Saliba from Imagekind and CafePress, Ben Elowitz from Blue Nile and Wetpaint, and Chris DeVore of Founder’s Co-op. Let’s just say that’s a lot of investor firepower for a $1 million deal; the closest thing we’ve seen might be when all the tech investors in town agreed to back TechStars, which opens in Seattle this fall.
I first wrote about Bonanzle on April Fools’ Day, 2009. But this company is no joke. Founded in 2007, it started out as a Craigslist-like service for local sellers, but shifted to become a national, social online marketplace. Bonanzle rolled out its public site in September 2008 to connect buyers and sellers of collectible items like comic books, posters, and jewelry. Its key advantages over others in the sector are its social features—buyers and sellers can send messages to each other in real-time—and the fact that it focuses on rare, used, and hard-to-find items. The company has been profitable since February 2009, and its sales have quadrupled in the past year. Its site now has more than 3 million items for sale, a quarter-million registered users, and almost 2 million unique monthly visitors. All without taking any outside investment.
So why take the money now? A year ago, Harding told me the company was “waiting for [an investor] to make an offer that shows us they understand the vision of Bonanzle and will work with us to make a plan.” Well, it sounds like he has found the right group of investors and expertise. For example, Matrix Partners has deep experience with companies like eBay and PayPal. And the track record of the Seattle-area investors speaks for itself.
Harding says the new money will allow him to hire two more developers, a designer, and a product manager, to add to the current team of three full-timers and a handful of contractors. “It’ll still be a small company,” he says. The key is to “provide users with a really strong …Next Page »
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Erin Kutz wrote:
March was a big month for little deals—at least when it comes to investing in New England’s startups.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the venture investing deals worth $1 million and up for March, which totaled to $194.5 million across 17 deals, according to data provided to us by private company intelligence platform CB Insights. That made March the slowest month this year for $1 million-plus deals, but at the other end of the spectrum New England companies inked 16 deals under $1 million, by far the biggest list this year. (There were 10 such “under-the-radar” deals on the January list, and nine on February’s.)
Not only did the number of under-the-radar transactions increase in March, so did the proportion of them that were based in equity. March’s list had a dozen equity-based transactions, and four debt-related financings. As far as February under-the-radar deals go, there were five equity-based transactions, three debt-based fundings, and one sale of securities to be acquired through the exercise of options and warrants.
We like to look at our under-the-radar list as helping to paint a richer, more complete picture of startup investing in the region, and I think March’s list revealed that the startup investing for the month was much more diverse than one would conclude from the $1 million-plus deals. The healthcare industry accounted for more than half of the big-dollar deals, and nearly 75 percent of the total money invested, but the under-the-radar list includes companies working in a vast array of sectors. In addition to the few medical device and health IT companies, March’s under-the-radar list included companies in online learning, marketing automation and customization, solar energy, energy auditing, water treatment, and mobile travel guides.
Also, for the first time this year, Massachusetts companies didn’t take the majority of New England’s smaller transactions. Connecticut took the top spot with seven deals, and Massachusetts followed with six. (My allegiances are conflicted here; I’m a Connecticut native but have been in the Bay State for about five years.) Two startups grabbed under-the-radar funding in New Hampshire, and Vermont inked …Next Page »
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Health IT is one of those innovation sectors that is exploding around us here at Xconomy. Every day we’re hearing about a new company, or health-related website or gadget, or experienced financier who’s getting into the act. It’s still pretty early, but it won’t be for long. And the Northwest is already positioning itself as a big player in this complex field. (Just look at top business leaders like Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, and Nick Hanauer getting involved with Seattle healthcare firm Qliance, for example.)
Which is why Luke and I are particularly psyched as we gear up for our Seattle event on May 12 titled, “How Information Technology is Transforming Medicine and Healthcare.” This half-day forum is loaded with more than a dozen expert speakers who are using IT to create more effective medicines, help consumers monitor their health, enable providers to deliver healthcare more efficiently, and store and analyze the vast piles of data from our genomes that are the key to the future of medicine. (See Luke’s recent preview of the event and speakers here.)
Coming on the heels of our successful Boston healthcare IT event earlier this week, I’m particularly pleased to highlight a couple of recent additions to the Seattle program here.
—Peter Gelpi, the CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based Clarity Health Services, is working to make referrals between doctors a much more efficient process, through a simple Web-based interface and a deeper understanding of the health community. That’s just part of the story, though; Gelpi, a veteran of Aldus, Adobe, and MedOrder, will tell us more at the event.
—Sujal Patel, the CEO and founder of Seattle-based Isilon Systems, is finding that biomedical and genomic data storage is one of the fastest-growing markets for his company’s technology. As of last fall, the medical and health sector made up about 10 percent of Isilon’s revenue, thanks to A-list customers like Merck, Sanofi-Aventis, the J. Craig Venter Institute, and the Broad Institute.
What do these folks have in common with our other invited speakers, like Don Listwin, the former No. 2 executive at Cisco and founder of Canary Foundation, Rod Hochman, the CEO of Swedish Medical Center, and David Cerino, general manager in Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group? They’re all using IT to help create the future of healthcare. Come find out how on May 12 (registration info is here).
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Thomas Thurston is a startup predictor. Tell him about your company, and he’ll tell you whether it will survive or fail.
No, he’s not an investor, or a psychic. By day, Thurston is a mild-mannered researcher and consultant whose training is in law and business. He’s the founder of Portland, OR-based Growth Science International, a research firm that works with entrepreneurs, investors, and corporations on their business strategy. By night, though, he’s testing every possible angle of a theory that could change the way a lot of people think about startup strategy.
Here’s the upshot of Thurston’s recent research, and why it’s important. Pretty much every startup you’ll ever meet will say it is better than its competitors. However you want to measure it—speed, technology, revenue model, whatever—a young company will say it outperforms others in its class. What’s more, it’s smaller and nimbler than the big companies, so it will be able to innovate faster and stay ahead of the curve.
Just one problem: That’s exactly why it will fail.
What a startup should do instead—to give itself the best chance of surviving—is enter the market at the low end of performance, Thurston says. That is, offer a product that’s not necessarily as good as its competitors, but is cheaper and more accessible. “Lower cost, lower performance, and gets better over time,” is how Thurston puts it.
If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably read Clayton Christensen’s books on business innovation. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, is the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Prescription, and Disrupting Class, and he is coming to Seattle on May 17 to give the keynote at the Technology Alliance’s annual State of Technology Luncheon. The connection to Thurston is that he and Christensen have collaborated on testing predictions about startups and other companies.
In 2005, Thurston was working at Intel Capital when he got interested in whether a mathematical model could predict startup success or failure better than chance. He plowed through obscure academic papers and popular books, tried different things, and settled on building a sophisticated model based on Christensen’s principles of “disruptive innovation” (more on this definition shortly). Thurston got a hold of 48 business plans from within Intel—new businesses that had corporate funding—and checked how they did (survive or fail) against what Christensen’s model would predict. To his surprise, the model made accurate predictions more than 85 percent of the time, and the results were highly statistically significant.
Thurston decided to take a year off from his job in 2007 to continue the research with Christensen in Boston, co-sponsored by Intel and Harvard. They expanded their analysis to include all new businesses Intel has supported (roughly 100), as well as hundreds of outside companies across different industries and geographies. The result was the same: 85 percent accuracy.
Skeptics would say the model was tested by its own proponents, so it’s not surprising they would find it accurate. But Thurston maintains he is an independent researcher; he would happily switch to another model if it worked better, he says. He has since returned to Portland and continued the work at Growth Science, where doing the modeling is part of his consulting gig. He says he’s been getting lots of interest from companies and venture capitalists seeking advice.
So here’s how the predictions work, in a nutshell. First, a company is classified according to whether its market strategy is “sustaining” or “disruptive.” Sustaining means it is positioned as …Next Page »
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Instead of charging you overage fees for using more than 5GB of data in a month with one of its webConnect 3G data plans, T-Mobile’s just going to slow your internet down instead. A novel trade-off, though I’d prefer to choose whether I get hit with fees or slowdowns. More »
Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:
The high-tech industry lost 245,600 jobs, or about 4 percent of the nationwide technology workforce, as the recession hit bottom last year, according a report being released today. But there are still jobs to be had in high-tech fields. Unemployment in several high-tech sectors remained below 5 percent at a time when overall unemployment soared above 9 percent nationwide, according to the 13th annual Cyberstates 2010 report issued by the TechAmerica Foundation.
All tech sectors lost jobs, but “even during the depths of the recession, most high-tech workers were still employed,” says Kevin Carroll, TechAmerica’s regional director for Southern California. The report, which relies on the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, covers tech employment nationwide in 2009—and provides state-by-state information on employment, wages, and other data in 2008.
Considering all that has happened to the economy over the past year, Carroll acknowledges that the 2008 data for California and other states is too outdated to provide many insights. But he says a few points are worth extracting from the 2009 data:
—The four main components of the high-tech industry—manufacturing, communications services, software services, and engineering and tech services—all lost jobs in 2009.
—Software services experienced the smallest decline nationwide, losing 20,700 jobs in 2009. That’s about one percent of the 1.7 million software jobs that existed in the previous year.
—Communication services lost …Next Page »
Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:
If a consumer-oriented Web-based services company goes out of business, shouldn’t its PayPal account expire too?
I’m just wondering if other online consumers have had a similar experience to Encinitas, CA, resident Judd Handler. He says he recently discovered that he had been charged $17.95 on his PayPal account for a junk-mail screening service provided through ProQuo, a San Diego-based startup that went belly up last October.
Handler says he vaguely remembers signing up for the service just over a year ago at a booth during the 2009 Earth Day festivities in San Diego’s Balboa Park. He says he hates junk mail, and signed up for what he thought was a free Web-based subscription service to block unwanted catalogs, flyers and other snail mail marketing come-ons. But ProQuo’s offer was only free for the first year. After that, the company began charging its subscribers $17.95 a year for the service, whose actual function enabled users to fill out an online form that specified the junk mail they wanted to block.
After conducting a quick online search, Handler saw that I had reported last fall on the demise of ProQuo, which had raised $15 million in venture capital before ceasing operations. He asks, “Wouldn’t you think the merchant account would be shut down?”
Good question.
As it turns out, I happen to know Bob Nascenzi, an experienced software industry executive who was hired by ProQuo’s board to unwind the business after the founding CEO departed at this time last year. Nascenzi was surprised by the story. “I don’t know where that money would have gone,” he says, “because ProQuo doesn’t exist any more.”
Good point.
Nascenzi checked with ProQuo’s former CFO and says he learned that when she was terminating the company’s business relationships last year, PayPal told her it could not cancel the ProQuo account. He says that Handler “should definitely challenge that charge, because there’s no place for the money to go.”
This particular transaction seems less interesting to me than the concept that a company might go out of business, while its billing arrangements continue to live on. PayPal has not responded to my requests for comment. I sent a couple of e-mail inquiries to Kimberly Conley and another public relations representative last week, and left a voice message for Conley again today.
We’re not consumer advocates here at Xconomy, and I’m not in a position to help anyone resolve their billing disputes with PayPal. But we are curious about just how widespread this issue might be. So add a comment below if Handler’s tale sounds all-too-familiar to you.
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
A fairly busy week for deals in the Northwest. Twitter bought its first Seattle company. A prominent young mobile startup and a biotech company out of the Accelerator each got some important funding. But let’s start with the cleantech/energy news, of which there was plenty.
—Seattle-based construction firm McKinstry acquired the Enterprise Energy Management software group from its longtime partner Itron, the Spokane, WA, utility tech and smart grid company (NASDAQ GS: ITRI). Financial terms weren’t announced, but the move should strengthen McKinstry’s efforts in promoting energy efficiency in its buildings.
—Verdiem, the Seattle energy-IT company, has teamed up with Cisco Systems to develop and market energy-management software for PCs and networked devices including IP phones and wireless access points. Financial terms weren’t given, but it sounds like a way for Verdiem to get its software into a wider array of products. The two companies have been working together for more than a year already.
—Seattle-based EnerG2, the University of Washington spinout developing nanomaterials for energy storage, raised another $3.5 million from an undisclosed investor. EnerG2 raised money from OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital in 2008, and last August it got a big grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a manufacturing plant in Oregon. The company focuses on materials for making better ultracapacitors for hybrid vehicles and other applications.
—Seattle-based Ground Truth raised a $7 million Series B round, led by new investor Emergence Capital Partners. OpenAir Ventures, Voyager Capital, and Steamboat Ventures also participated. Ground Truth came out of stealth in January and provides detailed data on how consumers use the mobile Internet. CEO Sterling Wilson told me about the startup’s culture and expansion plans.
—Mirina, a developer of microRNA-based therapies out of the Seattle-based Accelerator, has secured another 12 to 15 months of funding led by Versant Ventures, as Luke reported. The amount was not disclosed. Other participants in the deal included Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Arch Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, and WRF Capital.
—Seattle-based ExtraHop Networks formed a partnership with F5 Networks (NASDAQ GS: FFIV) to work on new products and marketing strategies together. Financial terms weren’t released. ExtraHop was founded in 2007 by F5 veterans Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, to help companies monitor and manage their applications environments and network transactions.
—Seattle-based Cloudhopper, a mobile messaging startup, was acquired by Twitter for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. Cloudhopper founder Joe Lauer has joined Twitter full-time but is staying in Seattle. His startup’s software, which optimizes the flow of text messages (among other things), is helping Twitter expand its SMS service around the world.
—OK, one more cleantech deal. UW professor Shwetak Patel’s energy-monitoring startup, Zensi, was acquired by Los Angeles-based Belkin for an undisclosed price. The company’s technology helps consumers monitor electricity use (and other resources) in the home. It was licensed from the University of Washington and Georgia Tech, where Shwetak did his Ph.D work.
Geocities might be dead, but its spirit lives on. The Geocities-izer does you the enormous favor of transforming your favorite (or least) website into not just a Geocities page, but a really bad Geocities page. And my god, the music! More »
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Seattle-based McKinstry, the construction and energy efficiency firm, said today it has acquired the Enterprise Energy Management software group from longtime partner Itron, the Spokane, WA-based utility technology and smart grid company (NASDAQ GS: ITRI). Financial terms of the deal were not released. Itron’s Web-based software will help McKinstry manage and monitor energy and water consumption in its customers’ buildings.
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Seattle-based Ground Truth, a mobile measurement and intelligence startup, is announcing a new $7 million Series B funding round today, led by new investor Emergence Capital. OpenAir Ventures, another new investor, also participated, as did existing backers Voyager Capital and Steamboat Ventures.
Ground Truth CEO and co-founder Sterling Wilson calls the deal “great confirmation of what we’re doing.” The startup came out of stealth mode in January. It provides data and analysis on how consumers use the Internet on mobile devices—things like traffic estimates for a large number of sites, how long people visit those sites, and what other sites they visit. The basic idea is to help advertisers, publishers, mobile operators, and media companies make more money on the mobile Internet.
What Ground Truth has going for it is strong relationships with wireless carriers and other partners who have access to mobile data, and patent-pending technology for processing all that data. Big players like comScore, Nielsen, Hitwise, Google, and Quantcast have lots of data on the traditional Web, but don’t yet have the equivalent information on mobile Web use.
Those advantages have helped Ground Truth amass raw data from about 3 million mobile subscribers, and update it weekly instead of every month or two like other services. (Some recent trends Ground Truth has unearthed: social networking is really exploding on mobile devices, and mobile-centric sites make up the majority of website visits on mobile devices.) Wilson says the company has “dozens” of customers and data partners, but declined to be more specific, other than to say its strategy has been “more of the same” in terms of signing up “infrastructure providers and wireless operators.” The company’s revenue model is based on paid subscriptions, not advertising.
One connection that helped seal the VC deal announced today is that Emergence Capital co-founder Jason Green had previously invested in Seattle-based aQuantive together with Voyager Capital; Emergence also has collaborated with Steamboat Ventures on investments. Meanwhile, OpenAir brings to the table strong expertise in the mobile industry and has worked with Emergence as well. (Also, $7 million is a pretty healthy amount, and it sounds like the company got it at a decent step-up in valuation compared to its $2.6 million Series A funding last year.)
The new money will be used “to expand the product offering throughout the year,” Wilson says. Part of that means going global. Ground Truth will identify countries that have a lot of mobile …Next Page »
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
Just a quick roundup of Seattle-area tech leaders making the national news this weekend:
—The New Yorker has a very interesting feature by Ken Auletta about the competition between the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s iPad, and what it means for the future of books. I haven’t had time for it to sink in yet, but a couple quotes in the story stand out. One is an unnamed Apple insider saying, “[Steve Jobs] thinks Amazon is stupid, and made a terrible mistake insisting that books should be priced at $9.99.” The other is an unnamed book publisher, who says, “Amazon sees itself as much as a competitor as a retailer. They have aspirations to be a publisher.” (Does anyone have the guts to speak on the record anymore, even when they are just stating the obvious?)
—Speaking of Seattle vs. Silicon Valley, TechCrunch reported that Seattle-based Redfin, the online real estate firm, is making $30 million a year in revenue and is poised to “rip apart” the real estate industry. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman sat down with Michael Arrington for a revealing video interview over beers (always a dangerous proposition).
—Tech industry leader Jeremy Jaech, the co-founder of Aldus, Visio, and Trumba, and currently CEO of Seattle-based Verdiem, got some nice exposure in the New York Times Sunday business column called “The Boss.” Among other things, Jaech talks about trying to retire a couple of times when his companies have been acquired, but always going back to work for “the joy of collaborating with a bright team of people to move an idea forward and watch it grow.”
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:
SciVee CEO Marc Friedmann tells me the San Diego startup I profiled previously as a YouTube for scientists, has struck a partnership with ScholarOne, the peer-review workflow management system operated by Thomson Reuters. The agreement will give users of ScholarOne Abstracts (previously known as Abstract Central) the ability to capture and share multimedia content from scientific presentations. Friedmann says financial terms were not disclosed.
UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS
Erin Kutz wrote:
Already in the week, we’ve had a few moves at some local venture capital firms. Read below for the details.
—Rob Go, formerly a senior associate at Boston-based Spark Capital, announced on his blog today that last Friday was his last day at the firm. He didn’t specify where he’d be going next, but says in the biography section of his blog that he is the “cofounder of a new entrepreneurial venture.” Other members of Spark were tied up in meetings when I called for additional information on his move. (If I hear back from them, I’ll be sure to update this space.) Prior to joining Spark, Go worked in marketing at eBay, where he launched products that enhanced the website’s browse, search, and merchandising functions.
—Commonwealth Capital Ventures announced today that it added Alex Laats to the investment team as a general partner; he will focus on investments in software, defense, Internet, and security companies. It’s a homecoming of sorts for Laats. He worked for the Waltham, MA-based firm before as a venture partner, specializing in enterprise IT and communications infrastructure. He then took a job at BBN Technologies, a company funded in part by Commonwealth that was purchased by Raytheon in 2009. At BBN Laats created and ran the company’s Delta division, which worked to turn intellectual property and R&D materials into sources of revenue.
Como su nombre lo indica Opera mobile emulator nos da la facilidad de tener en nuestro escritorio un emulador para ver como se ve una pagina web en cualquier celular que lo ejecute. Algo similar al emulador de opera mini 5 que se ejecuta desde su web. Con la diferencia que aquí podemos redimencionar la pantalla y ajustar a la resolución del navegador a nuestro gusto.
Su descarga esta disponible tanto para windows, mac o linux.
Readers have told us the best way to save money on your cable bill without the hassle of actually switching is to call them up and negotiate… but what should you actually say?
Pre-Game Warm-Up:
Research: The first thing you’ll want to do is look around and see what the other companies are offering. Don’t forget to include Dish Network and DirecTV, particularly if you enjoy sports and can speak intelligently about the superiority of DirecTV’s sports packages.
Locate Evidence: Gather a copy of your bill as well as any deals you’ve been offered by the competition so you can refer to them during the negotiation.
Kick-Off:
Call your cable company and get transferred to the retentions specialist. You don’t want to be negotiating with someone who isn’t authorized to help you. You can also try to go directly there by using the annoying phone tree robot and expressing intent to cancel or reduce services.
Once you get to the retention specialist, begin the negotiation. Remain calm, be firm but friendly, and try to relate to the person on the other end of the telephone. A friend who can save you money is a good friend indeed:
You: Hi, this is Captain Awesome III, [that is, your name, right?], and my cable bill has recently increased. I noticed that [competing cable/satellite company] has a promotion that would save me [amount of money.] I’m interested in lowering my cable bill.
They will likely argue with you, or offer you Free HBO. If you wanted Free HBO, fantastic! Take your Free HBO. If not, try saying stuff like:
You: I appreciate the offer, and I do like HBO, particularly when its free, but I really called to lower my bill. Is there anything you can do to bring your offer down to where the competition is?
If they are really giving you a hard time, try negotiating based on your value as a customer. From what we’ve heard, those of you who subscribe to expensive sports packages or get your telephone services from the cable company have the strongest negotiating positions.
You: Did you realize that I pay full price for a lot of services? I’d really like a discount on some of these [read all full price things from your bill, line by line.]
Remember, timing is everything. The best time to call and negotiate is after your “deal” expires. Once you’ve got a new one, be sure to lock in a time period. Some cable companies will want you to agree to a contract with a termination fee. It’s really up to you whether you want to do this, but there’s no harm in trying to avoid it.
Sudden Death Overtime: It’s possible that these tactics won’t work. Either this is because there isn’t sufficient competition in your area and thus not enough “churn” to warrant negotiating with customers, or it’s because your rep’s dog took a dump in her shoe that morning and she’s taking it out on you.
In order to make sure it’s not the dog’s fault you’re overpaying for cable, call back in a week and try again.
Did this script save you money? Did we miss something? Did you find something that worked better? Send us what you said to your cable company at [email protected] and we’ll share it with the world.
This is actually a happy story, despite my inability to write cheerful-sounding headlines, so pay attention if you’ve ever been told that your whole apartment complex can get cable/FiOS/whatever, but you can’t because you are special and not allowed to be happy. You’d be surprised at how many letters we get from people who have this problem. One such person, Andrew, Consumerist Reader, decided to email the CEO.
Here’s what happened:
Thanks to Consumerist, I was able to get Verizon FiOS installed in my apartment. You may be asking yourself, how is that possible? Well here’s how it happened…
I am moving apartments and currently have Verizon FiOS in my home. I love it and did not want to go back to Cablevision, so I went on Verizon.com to check if it was available and it was not (tear). After some research I found out that the my new apartment was the only apartment in the entire complex that Fios was not available for. I called Verizon and posed this question, and every service representative I spoke with said, “that is impossible, if your complex has Fios, you should have FiOS.” However, no one could figure out why my apartment did not have it. After countless calls and hours wasted, I finally got an answer saying the apartment “structure” was not conducive to FiOS and thus will not be able to get it.
I literally could not believe the service rep said my particular apartment “Structure” was different that every other apartment. But alas, I just gave up and ordered Cablevision.
Then yesterday (4/21), I was reading Consumerist and I opened an article about how a person contacted the CEO of Verizon to get his bill fixed. So I sat in my office thinking, maybe I should contact him; so I did. I did not think I would even get a response and if I did, it would be rather late.
However, sometimes you underestimate large corporations. I sent an email to Ivan Seidenberg (CEO of Verizon) at 11:01 AM EST yesterday and got a response from the President of the Mid-Atlantic Region of Verizon (Thomas) at 12:30 PM EST. I was literally in a state of shock at how quick the Verizon CEO delegated this minuscule issue to his subordinates. I was not signing up an entire company for internet use, I was signing up 1 apartment for cable and internet. The fact that a president of a region of Verizon, (the 13th largest corporation in America) took the time to email back and forth and then follow-up with a personal call to me really speaks to their customer oriented business model.
So after 1 email, Tom said we would be sending a manager to the apartment complex to check the apartment. He was not blowing smoke, within 1 hour Tom sent me an emails saying that FiOS manager went to the building and determined that Fios is available in my apartment, and that I will be able to sign up for Verizon and leave Cablevision (Thank GOD!). I signed up and got a window of installation from 12-5, however Verizon wanted to make sure I was happy and they said the technician will be at my apartment promptly at 12pm to install. Literally AMAZING!!
Due to reading Consumerist, not only was I able to get FiOS installed in my apartment, but as cliché as this sounds, it makes me feel like I am not just a number or a wallet, but that my issues matter.
I hope this makes it up on your website as I want your readers to know that Verizon is a corporation who cares about their customers and not only about the bottom line.
Gregory T. Huang wrote:
It’s an exciting day for Joe Lauer. The Seattle entrepreneur and founder of Cloudhopper, a mobile messaging service, just told me his startup has been acquired by Twitter, the micro-messaging giant based in San Francisco. Financial terms of the cash-and-stock deal weren’t released, but Lauer and fellow employee Kristin Kanaar have joined Twitter full-time. Lauer says he will stay in Seattle and commute to San Francisco regularly.
Lauer couldn’t give any specifics about the purchase price, but he says, “I’m super happy with it. It’s a great early exit. It was good enough to get me to exit early, let’s put it that way.” The deal is Twitter’s fourth acquisition overall, after Surmise, Myxer, and the Tweetie iPhone app. It is Twitter’s first Seattle-based purchase.
Lauer founded Cloudhopper in late 2008. Previously he had co-founded Simplewire, an SMS text-message aggregator, in 2001. That company was bought by Seattle-based Qpass in 2006. Lauer stayed there for two and a half years before using the money he made from the acquisition to start Cloudhopper.
Cloudhopper makes software and infrastructure to help optimize how text messages flow, so that companies can make SMS programs that work at huge volumes and across different geographies. “As Twitter grows around the world, if we want to service Indonesia really well [for example], we want to keep SMS and tweets localized in a data center in Asia,” Lauer says.
In other words, Cloudhopper handles the routing through data centers in an efficient way, with a focus on international mobile operators. “We’re going to really aggressively expand and keep adding on carrier partnerships overseas,” he says. “It’s going to become more and more important as we add more countries around the world.” Currently people can tweet via SMS in about 30 countries. Lauer says that “about 100 operators are coming up over the next year.”
Lauer’s connection to Twitter actually dates all the way back to his days at Simplewire. “We were Twitter’s first SMS aggregator years ago,” Lauer says. At that time, Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams were running Odeo, and that’s how Lauer knew them.
Twitter has been using the Cloudhopper service for the past eight months. “I had no plans of selling now,” Lauer says. “It was kind of a coup when I won the Twitter business.” The bulk of his business before that was in wireless consulting for companies including Seattle-based Ground Truth (another “Qpass mafia” connection, as Ground Truth is led by former Qpass CEO Sterling Wilson).
Lauer says Cloudhopper was handling a billion SMS messages per month on behalf of Twitter. “With those numbers, they’re the single largest mobile program in the world,” he says—much bigger than, say, “American Idol” SMS voting. (Which is interesting, because until recently nobody really knew how big Twitter was.)
Cloudhopper had seven employees before it was acquired, some of whom will be joining Twitter full-time. Lauer now works in Twitter’s mobile group, which has a dozen people. He reports to Twitter’s head of mobile, Kevin Thau, who also used to work at Qpass, out of Atlanta.
Lauer says there are now a handful of Twitter employees based in Seattle, but no local office space as of yet. “Twitter’s hiring like crazy,” he says. “There’s a lot of good momentum in the area.”
Meanwhile, at San Francisco headquarters (where Lauer was today), late-night TV personality Conan O’Brien stopped by to meet and greet the staff. “It’s more like a media company these days,” Lauer says.
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