I honestly can't remember if it was Tuesday or Wednesday of this week but I had a great conversation with Robin Hopper, the CEO of iUpload. I don't remember how I initially stumbled upon iUpload, it was either via Fergus at Nooked or via Renee Blodgett from down the ave. It doesn't really matter now anyway, all that matters is I had one of the most inspiring conversations ever.

The converesation started off with a relaxed CEO and a not so relaxed Jason. I'm in Raleigh this week and that means 80 hour plus weeks of non-stop chaos and action. Since I'm only up here a week out of each month, I'm pulled into one meeting after another and in rather high demand. That makes it a bit difficult to get anything meaningful put on Marketing Shift since there's literally no time to think. I thought having a 3 month old and a 2 year old was nuts but it pales in comparison to my Raleigh trips. Plus at home I have a secret weapon, my beautiful wife Shannon, to do the tough stuff with my girls. But I digress.

Robin wasn't what I expected from a bright and talented CEO of a diamond-in-the-rough technology firm. He's a good listener who thoroughly understands his iUpload service / application offerings but doesn't get too excited about them unless the people he's talking to about them share his enthusiasm. I think it's like not throwing your pearls before swine. It was funny because as I learned more and more about iUpload and their offerings I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility to get their message out. They're literally doing things with blogs, CMS [content management systems] and translation services that are 3 years ahead of anything in the Valley right now. I'll have to expand more on that later but for now you'll just have to take my word for it. Robin's team knows what they're doing and any company lucky enough to cross paths with the iUpload will be part of something truly special and unique and poised for greatness in their vertical. No joke!

A Q & A session with Robin will follow on later but I encourage those of you interested in building a community around any subject or theme need to get in touch with iUpload. Their enterprise blogging application is taking many established companies like Cannondale, the Sierra Club and the Farm Bureau into the next generation of user / business relationships.

I'm about to step on a plane and head back to Florida so I doubt there will be any more posts today. Thank you so much Renee for putting Robin and I in touch with each other. I have now seen the light and it's brighter than I ever could've imagined.

I can't even begin to tell you how many things are wrong with Lycos' dating search engine business model. I don't want to pull a Star Jones and gush about become.com, but I can't resist in showing the right way and wrong way to launch a niche vertical search engine.

Here's Where Lycos Messed Up
They're charging a fee in order to be guaranteed your site is included in the search index. This means they don't trust their crawler or dating search algorithm enough to guarantee the quality of results and they're going to put the burden on the site owners to contact Lycos about getting their site included. Secondly it shows they're behind the search times because none of the major search engines require a guaranteed inclusion fee to be listed in their index. Yahoo's the only one that has a guaranteed inclusion program and it's a flat cost per click based on the business model and there have been rumors since it's inception that it may go the way of the dinosaur.

They're looking at a per-acquisition model. This is such the wrong way to build a business because essentially you're a huge affiliate program. There is typically no single database storing the visitor requests and if there is one then there is a level of distrust about whether or not a click or form submission was even valid. Anything based on per acquisition fees smells of affiliates and affiliate programs, something even Google has recently laid the law down on. Not that affiliates are a total nuissance but they're susceptible to all forms of spam because their pay is based on acquisitions and not on raw traffic. Techniques like cookie stuffing inherently flaw this business model.

So they're going to allow you to view personals information that would normally require a registration on each dating site which is good. But then they go and screw it up by not offering [or at least mentioning it anywhere in the clickz story] a crawl based natural search result set. This is the exact same limiting issue major shopping sites like Shopping.com and Froogle are facing. Because the index is based on a feed or a "crawl that's not really a crawl" but a guaranteed inclusion and requires special agreements between publishers and the search engine. It removes any of the objective and subjective research data and reviews that sites like blogs bring to the table. Become.com solved this problem and they're heralding in Search 2.0 but Lycos is going back to 5 year old technology, slapping a fresh layout and logo on it and calling it NEW! Nothing erks me more than old technology dressed up like it's brand new technology when most consumers won't know the difference.

Here are some quotes that are total classics from the ClickZ post and prove how delusioned Lycos is about this dating search site.

The move is the beginning of what Adam Soroca, general manager of search services, calls a "year of revitalizing search at Lycos." The company re-launched a search-centric home page at the end of January, bringing back the iconic Lycos the dog logo and the "Go get it" slogan.

"There's a renewed focus on search here at Lycos, and Dating Search is just one step in that direction,"
Soroca said.

"People still know Lycos as a search engine, but we've been unable to clearly articulate why a searcher would come to Lycos. Our mission this year is to answer that question."

Now don't get me wrong, I love the Lycos lab. My childhood dog was a lab and I love the Lycos commercials where the dog fetches the results, they're almost iconic. But I don't like how off they are with their implementation of search.

I fear new search engines like this one will cause users to become delusioned because only the sites with large advertising budgets can compete. Why in the heck do you thnk blogs are so stinking popular? Cause some milk farmer in Idaho can share his views on the milking industry and what's going on and overnight become a trusted resource. Without natural results this milk farmer would stay in oblivion and the internet would be no better than it was before this milk farmer started his blog. Lycos search is a step in the wrong direction and against everything Google, Yahoo and MSN are striving for in their efforts to uncover the hidden web.

So those are my 2 cents, comments are welcome.

Voxeo Corporation provides standards based, hosted and customer premise IVR solutions. They've been in the VOIP / IVR game since '99 and pride themselves on being the best in the business. Voxeo's customers have come to expect a level of service and support no other IVR firms can reproduce.

I've sat in Voxeo's offices from time to time and have been amazed at the conversations the Voxeo support personnel have had with their customers. Their support department is staffed by a group of experienced and talented developers. The normal [high profit / low expenses] mentality that pervades corporate America doesn't drive Voxeons [voxeo employees] or it's management. They are focused on the bottom line, and would be foolish not to do so, but the bottom line doesn't drive every decision... unmatched service and support is their driving force. They intentionally hire the best and allow their customers access to the best and this distinguishes them from all of their competitors.

On a related note, today they announced the launch of a new suite of products that set them even farther apart from their competition. They've taking blogging technology, improved upon it, and integrated it into their customer / employee facing systems in yet another revolutionary way.

Here's some info from their press release.
Voxeo Corporation announced today the launch of its ExpressCRM Customer Relationship Management platform. The new platform supports interaction via web, email, blogs, instant messaging, and automated, spoken commands via traditional telephones and Voice over IP (VOIP) devices.

“Voxeo ExpressCRM was born from our customers’ desire for a simple CRM solution with support for modern forms of customer and vendor communication,� said Stephen Lewis, Vice President of Support at Voxeo. “Few existing platforms supported our requirements. Those that did often added these capabilities as an afterthought.�

Voxeo’s ExpressCRM platform is based on the BizBLOG engine. Created and field-tested by Voxeo over the last two years, BizBLOG is a scalable, secure, Blog content engine [leveraging Java J2EE, SQL data replication, RSS syndication, and an XML-based extension API]. The ExpressCRM solution uses BizBLOG to support:

- Account Journals: facilitate general communication between Voxeo and its customers. The Account Journal can store meeting notes, service history, customer orders, bills, and more. Each Account Journal can be viewed and sorted by recent entries, date range, or search query.

- Account Tickets and Tasks: can be opened by Voxeo and its customers to create support requests, detail outstanding tasks, and announce updates or events. Account Tickets and Tasks can be assigned to individuals, groups, or roles within a customer/vendor relationship.

- Global Tickets and Tasks: can be opened by Voxeo to share global updates, service outages, and support issues across multiple customer accounts.

- Knowledge Bases: can store valuable support information contributed by Voxeo’s Extreme Support and Engineering team members

- Forums: enable shared, public information between all Voxeo employees and customers.

- Annotation Boxes: can be embedded on any existing web page, including those in Voxeo’s documentation and support sites. Annotation boxes let customers actively suggest fixes, improvements, and new content for such sites.

The ExpressCRM platform features an integrated contact manager in which individual, role, and group contacts can be configured. Each contact can have multiple telephone, email, AOL/ICQ/Yahoo/MSN/Jabber IM, pager, and fax addresses. Customers can establish notification rules for each address. Contact rules are then used to automatically place phone calls; send emails, instant messages, or faxes; and page contacts when any account journal or ticket is opened or updated. Those contacts can respond via web, IM or spoken commands to instruct ExpressCRM to add additional blog comments and communicate with other account users and groups.

“Voxeos ExpressCRM solution enables efficient, flexible customer support and communication between Voxeo and companies like J3,� said John Higgins, President and CEO of J3Communications. “With ExpressCRM, Voxeo has again demonstrated its commitment to providing the best customer service and support available.�

Voxeo's CEO, Jonathan Taylor, is a personal friend of mine whom I've grown to respect over the past few years. So when he told me about these new features they'd implemented into their internal and external systems I told him I had to blog about it. If you like finding the diamond in the technology rough then JT's someone you'll want to follow. He's an established entrepreneur and visionary but more important he's a proven leader and all of the Voxeons respect and trust him. The secret, in my opinion, is that he respects his employees as much as the respect him. This mutual respect has created a cohesiveness I've never witnessed in any other company before.

If you're a developer and you're interested in experimenting with IVR or VOIP but can't afford the infrastructure necessary to get up and running then you're in luck. Voxeo is extremely friendly with developers and offers free access to their IVR API through their evolution program. Whether you're a web developer or a telephony develoer, you can sign up for free.