are hidden beneath the unit but that doesn’t muffle the volume. The only drawback is that the speakers, despite being touted as stereo, do not sound that good compared to other basic notebooks. A better-sounding earphone or headset can be plugged into an audio jack on the left side (facing screen), which is also joined by a microphone jack.

Bwahahahahaha. Some of us more churlish types would call that “loss-making”. Oh well, by TechCrunch standards I guess that does count as a “healthy business”.

Incidentally, we are not smarter than me. For starters, me know to put the subject in the nominative and to expand a subordinate clause if me am not sure whether a pronoun is subject or object. I.e. “we are not smarter than I [am].”

Secondly, to paraphrase Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, I am smart, we are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. (More distinguished philosophers have said much the same thing over the years, but I like this version best.)

That said, this is one of the less stupid ideas to make money off social networking… if there are enough brands whose customers would actually use a social network on their site to generate revenue. Personally my brand loyalty is nil, but the dumb and panicky herd can, with sufficient mental beatings, be made loyal enough to brands for this to work.

… this some kinda racist thing?

I have a question about Techcrunch MeetUps. Do you have a page/website where the events are announced? I checked Meetup.com and Eventbrite but search results didn’t return anything.

Back to the topic. If a company doesn’t have a brand worth engaging, it won’t be engaged no matter how expertly it is implemented.

“What we are finding is that companies like to write a check to make it successful”, as if writing a check will make it successful? Please name one, just one, success story.

There is no reason a company couldn’t have this system built for $5-10K. The real value is in “recruiting and managing” the community (I hope those are your words Erik, that is not how I like to be thought of as a loyal customer). However, if the marketing group at a particular organization does not *know* their customers as well as this 3rd party, I’d suggest some staffing changes are in order.

If this company found success at my company, I would feel that I failed at my job.

Also, it’s useful to think about how much a company would need to spend on additional employees, who receive overhead and benefits, to operate the self-service solution–and probably achieve a less successful result. My guess is that it is more than the extra cost of $17,000 a month.

Bruce Judson
Founder, Search Free Apps
http://www.SearchFreeApps.com