Here’s my prediction for 2008: The deadpool is going to fill up with VoIP services. The first one to jump in may be VoIP conference-call service Foonz. News flash. There’s just no money in giving people free calls.
The CMO of Foonz’s parent company, RPM Communications, tells GigaOm that he has “shifted focus” to a new service called Utterz that lets people post voice messages, photos , and video from their mobile phones to their blogs. (Imagine an audio Twitter that actually forced you to listen to everybody’s thought-of-the-day updates instead of just being able to skim through, or ignore, everything in text). Although the Foonz site is still up and the service is available, we are putting it into the deadpool for now. If the service is still ringing in a couple months, we will pull it out again.
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you sound down on utterz, yet you all are up on seesmic, what gives
Does anyone else find it amusing that the they jump from Foonz to Utterz…
talk about grasping for web 2.0 acceptance.
@matt - that very topic is discussed here http://tinyurl.com/2eukxr - with these exact names as examples.
They just closed a $4 million round, the company isn’t going away too soon.
Most people keep their utterz under a few minutes, so it really isn’t that big a deal, ye pompous man ^.~ And the website makes it easy to sort through useless crap
recently there was a front page article in the Wall Street Journal on the big money the guys that run freeconferencecall.com were making–by legally exploiting a loophole in telcom rules set up to help rural carriers—-maybe foonz can do the same, maybe its too soon to deadpool them. pk
I hate big mouthed CEO’s, this guy should shutup!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Wow, you guys are really obsessed with the TechCrunch “deadpool” becoming this bubble’s Fucked Company, huh.
Just want to jump in here and clarify a couple of points. First, I’m the CMO of the company, not the CEO and also our marketing focus on Utterz should not be construed as us moving away from foonz. Utterz is off to a great start, and we continue to attract new users to foonz every month.
You might want to read my op-ed piece about why I retired from telecom. Most of what used to be good categories have become low/zero margin businesses dominated by established companies.
http://gigaom.com/2007/12/24/t.....m-telecom/
@10 Brian
Your piece was spot on. Though I agree with another one of the posts on GigaOm that the ONLY piece left for making money is in the *services* as described as hosted IVR/call center. Everything else is just dial tone with a twist!
As both the headline and the post indicate, the deadpool status for Foonz is provisional. If it turns out to be a roaring success, we will write an update.
How can you be provisionally “dead”?
Dead is pretty much a binary concept.
Erick,
You can not put a company in the deadpool, just because you don’t agree with the business idea or business model.
Foonz should be removed from the deadpool till they announce that shutting their doors. I might start using the service out of complete site of your post.
This deadpool thing has more devotees than I thought.
All Voice 2.0 companies must have scale, meaning the ability to generate millions of calls a day to either succeed by: 1) charging some variant on a per minute rate (unlikely); 2) generating enough diverse impressions to create an ad channel, or 3) do the recip comp thing and make a little money before that loophole closes.
These guys are going no where fast, and they know it. It is stunning anyone would put a penny in to this company. Clearly the investors don’t know telco.
Activist deadpooling = growing signs of Techcrunch hubris = growing signs of increasing TC irrelevance? I am noticing: TC is phenomenal when reporting from the start-up “trenches” (definitely including lots of Facebook and Google stories, by the way). TC is entertaining, but less relevant when a bit more naively taking on more complex matters such as company valuations and legal matters. TC is significantly overreaching when trying to make (edgeio, seesmic) and break (this example) companies. It’s good to explore these grounds, but it doesn’t cut it for me. Personal opinion.
I’m with you on this one, VoIP startups will go down hill.
I recently signed up with Packet8 VoIP and I’ve been quite happy so far, but we’ll see how well it goes in the coming months — I expect good things from them though.
“The deadpool is going to fill up…” Yikes! What happens when it does? Will all moribund startups hang around in a sort of purgatory?
So the really funny / interesting thing is back when the idea of twitter was being created and thrown around. One of the possible prototypes was a voice version. You call in, leave a message, and hear the messages from your friends you’re following.
I left odeo soon after that, but the rest of the team went on to build out twitter instead. Probably a wise choice.
Why do we need more VoIP providers. I use Skype and here Gizmo is great as well. Everybody else should do value-adds for these providers.
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I’ll have to update my post regarding free and cheap call services.
http://blog.beyond438.com/2007.....p-maxroam/
Thanks for the update.