AT&T announced a new privacy policy today.
AT&T’s new policy states: “While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others or respond to legal process.”
Safeguard others or respond to legal process. OK, I get that.
Protect its legitimate business interests? Hmmmm……
It will be interesting to see where this goes.
I am a semi-avid photographer. While we have a Canon PowerShot that we absolutely love for point and shoot, I still get serious with my trusty Nikon N80.
Until today.
Nikon recently lowered the price on the D70S to the point I was willing to take the plunge. I now have the gleaming camera and cannot wait to spend some time getting to know it on my upcoming vacation to the beach.
But there is more of a story here.
Do a simple search on Nikon. One of the top Adword placement is for Ritz Camera. $699, free shipping, no sales tax. Reputable shop. It’s priced about the same on Amazon.
So I go into my local camera shop, Showcase to pick up my $80 worth of developed film. I have been going there for at least six years. Taken several classes. A somewhat loyal customer.
After picking up my pix I stroll over to the camera desk to talk about the camera. The conversation goes something like this:
Lance: I am going to buy a D70 today. I can get it off the Internet from one of your major competitors for the same price that you are advertising but I don’t have to pay sales tax if I buy it from them. Drop the price so that the total is the same and I will buy it from you right now.
Sales Lady: But you won’t get our expertise.
Lance: Your expertise is not worth paying 8% more to me.
Sales Lady: We don’t discount our cameras unless you are buying more than one.
Lance: I only need one.
Sales Lady: We don’t match Internet prices.
Lance: I am going to buy this camera today, and I really want to buy it from you guys. Will you match the price.
Sales Lady: No.
Lance: OK, sorry, good bye.
And I proceeded to walk out the door. I am most likely never walking in it again.
I was a good customer of theirs. Over the years I bet I have spent over $10,000 on products and services in there. Due to the lack of a little flexibility on there part, I don’t think I will be spending much more.
Moral of the story. Be flexible with your good customers to keep them around.
As an aside, just for fun I walked into the local Ritz Camera to ask them if they would match the Internet price of their own company. The answer was no. Great strategy to drive your customers away from your bricks and mortar stores onto the Internet where the products that you sell have a greater chance of being commoditized.
Great progress with the Alele concept over the past couple of days.
The ATDC asked me to apply to become a member company. Which to me is big, big news, and I am literally flattered that they think enough of the concept and the team to think we could be a valuable addition to the ATDC community. Amazing fact: 75% of ATDC companies are still in business or ended with what is considered to be a successful exit. That is almost the flip of the standard 20% of companies making it.
We also had the chance to make a presentation to an angel group yesterday. It was the first time that we got in front of investors. Smart guys with great feedback. As a first timer it is very important to me to get people that have been through the process involved with the company. Just as important, they want to move us along in the investment process.
Coke does not get it.
Mentos is tickled pink that they are getting $10 million in free buzz from an experiment.
Coke’s reaction: “Craziness with Mentos does not fit with the brand personality of Diet Coke.” The folks over on North Avenue need to loosen up.
Speaking of lossening up. Check this out:
Back when he was at OmniSky and before we got to how each other very well Elan Amir and I were in a meeting discussing something or the other. Out of nowhere he looked at me and asked. “Are you a marketing person or a technology person?” After a brief bit of thought I replied, “I am a business person.”
He liked that.
Dharmesh Shah put up a nice post yesterday about Business Geeks.
Business Geek. I like that.
Somehow or the other I came across a terrific post by Scott Burkett about the state of venture investing in Georgia. Scott laments over the lack of Web 2.0 companies in Georgia and you can read about the reasons why in his post. I added him to my feed and started thinking about some of the things that he said.
It also just happens that I just returned from the Talk to An Angel panel hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta. Nelson Chu did a great job running the group over the past year. But last night was really was a stellar show.
A few weeks ago Paul Graham had this excellent post on how to be the next Silicon Valley. I don’t want Atlanta to become the next Silicon Valley. Just a little and more diverse from a technology perspective would do me fine. Take the time to read Paul’s long post. It is well worth it.
As a budding entrepreneur with a passion for consumer-oriented companies I have a few insights of my own on what we need to do to take Atlanta to the next level.
Mix The Types
Paul talks about how only two kinds of people are needed to create a tech hub. Rich people and geeks.
Atlanta has both. There are enough millionaires in Atlanta to fill Turner Field. And with Georgia Tech being a top four ranked engineering school lord knows we have our share of geeks. We just need to figure out how to get the rich folks and the geeks together so that more technologies have an opportunity to be commercialized and that technologies that can turned into businesses are explored.
Keep The Winners In
Someone made the observation last night that when we have winners in Atlanta they tend to pack up and go to the beach and not help those that follow. This is true to an extent. Take MindSpring for example. Not a single start up of note has been spawned from the company (something I intend to change). There are lots of reasons for that that I will not get into. But one of them may be that Charles Brewer and Mike McQuary, while they both have great mentors to me since our time there, have gone on to new passions in real estate and music and are not generally part of the Atlanta technology start up community.
We need the winners and their personna to stay in the game at some level.
Create The Ideas
Once you get the rich people and the geeks together something really interesting will start to happen. They will start to talk about things that are interesting to them. Very specifically if the geeks are talking about that is interesting from a technology perspective, the rich people will generally be able to tell them how to turn it into a business. An innovative business. Once you do that you are off to the races.
Expand The Clusters
Atlanta has three technology start up clusters which is in and of itself, a bit of a cluster. The clusters are security, logistics, and payment processing. If you have a great idea outside these areas, you may as well pack up and leave town. Nobody is going to invest in it.
Here is a good recent example. I was talking with Stephen Fleming the other day. Stephen a great guy doing a great job. Here is a brief summary of our conversation.
Lance: “I am looking to get connected with some of the geeks over in the College of Computing that are working on consumer oriented Internet technologies.”
Stephen: “We don’t do that.”
With the building they are putting in over there has got to be someone. Maybe two. If the richest thirty something in the States started a consumer tech company you would think there might be a few at Tech that want to do the same thing.
Stephen promptly connected me with Gregory Abowd who runs the aware home initiative, but come on, Venture Lab needs to broaden its horizons a bit.
Change The Game
The power of any start up company utlimately rests with the founders. A start up with the best people and the best execution will beat those that are better funded. Its not all about money. It is playing the game smart. Playing the game smart includes aligning with the forces that are committed to building great technologies in Georgia regardless of where they happen to be.
Yes, JBoss went north. I don’t know Marc but my guess is that were pressures to move. He stayed here. The jobs stayed here. A good chunk of the capital gain stayed here. He played the game his way.
If you are starting a business it is yours. Find like minded people with the same principles as you. Run it your way.
And if you can’t, maybe it ain’t that great an idea or maybe you ain’t the person to run it.
As Stephen said last night. “It’s hard raising capital. The reason it is hard is that running a company is hard, and getting through the process of bringing in funds is just a test to see if you might have what it takes to do that.”
A Note on Web 2.0
My interest is on consumer oriented Internet companies. I spend a lot of time talking to like minded people. Beyond those that can be self funded for a long time like Convex and Kaneva, I am started to see more and more bubbling up every day.
Heck, I just heard of a new one today. Congrats Dennis!
I was forunate to have lunch with Said Mohammadioun today. Said goes way back. The first company he founded Samna was the first, yes first Windows based word processer.
Said was kind to spend some time with me. I was looking for some advice on Alele. Alele is a company concept that I have been working on. Alele is a personal online media storage center that allows consumers living a digital lifestyle to securely store, access, share, and publish digital files.
Sounded good to me.
Said asks great, I mean great questions. At a pace that I could not answer them until he was off to his next point. One of them, was that if the core product, which is online storage, does not stand on its own then there is no need to start adding on other things. He was telling me to focus, which is something that I often tell others to do.
Said distilled the issues surrounding the concept down to two. The first was can I market the service. The second was what about AOL, GOOG, and MSFT. He went on to say that I can’t really do anything about the latter. As for the former he told me to figure it out as inexpenisvely as possible.
Great advice from a good man.
According to Siobhan Hughes at the WSJ the Web toll was voted down by a house panel.
WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday voted to ban the nation’s phone and cable companies from charging extra fees to companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. for speedier delivery of their content.
[no wides]By 20-13 the panel backed legislation being pushed by more than 100 consumer groups and businesses. The vote was a blow to Verizon Communications and AT&T Inc., which have said that new regulations may undercut their ability to invest in high-capacity networks.
I won the Bills baseball memories contest this week. You can read my entry and others.
They are shipping me a pair of M1 twills in cement. They are the best.
Made my day. It’s the little things. And they got me to talk about their product. And I will continue to do so for a long time.
Imagine that.
A while back I read an article by Fred Wilson when he mentioned Carbonite. They rolled out their backup service.
I signed up for the 14 day trial. That was 11 days ago. They are asking me to sign up now. Only issue I have is that it has taken 11 days to backup 29% of the 44 gigs I want to back up.
According to my trust download calculater that is about right. But I’ll be darn if I am going to pay them before I know if it works. Given the amount of data I want to backup they might not want me as a customer anyway.
Stay tuned for the outcome.