Ramona Ann Cotrupe, 1935-2011: greatest person I have ever known

   
It is hard to put into words what most of us feel when we lose a parent. My Mother was the sweetest, kindest, bravest, most caring, considerate, unselfish and pound-for-pound strongest person I have ever known. Life dealt her vastly more than her “share” of challenges–starting right in her own household with Dad, my brother and me, and continuing when cancer snuck in like a cowardly thief in the night 12 years ago. Yet from her perpetually smiling face and sunny demeanor you would never know it.

So much of what passes for “conduct” in today’s world is people behaving like idiots, being as loud and obnoxious as they like. Ready to stomp their fellow human beings if it means being first in line at Starbucks. Braying like burros if one inconveniences their Supreme Highness for a second. My Mom was always about quiet strength, not making a loud spectacle of yourself, putting others first. Over the course of her life, and especially as she waged a 12-year battle with cancer, she endured things 10,000 times worse than the complainers will ever see, and through it all radiated class, grace and patience they could not begin to comprehend. Yet she would chastise me–and I can feel her giving me her “I disapprove but I still love you” face right now–at the thought of me speaking ill of anyone. She did not throw “Jesus” and “religion” in your face, but she was devoutly religious and more importantly, the way she lived her life was the textbook example of what I believe our Creator put us all on this earth to do. She simply loved everyone. The one thing she would not tolerate? Someone hurting one of us. Do so and you had a small but lethal tornado heading rapidly in your direction.

There has never been anyone quite like my Mother, nor will anyone quite like her ever pass this way again. If you did not know her, you missed a great one…but hopefully through words such as these in venues such as this you can know her at least enough for the warmth of her heart and the power of her love to wash over you and comfort you. That is what she lived for.

I’ve said to family and friends that when I pass from this world, if I am given serious consideration for Heaven it will only be because Mom pulled a favor with God to get me in. That and, if for reasons unknown (and by definition indefensible) in the cosmos my Mom were not in the company of God in Heaven, then I don’t want to go. I want to be wherever she is. 

JEFF COTRUPE (XeeMe, @MarketPowerLLC) is a researcher, writer, product manager and marketer who has launched more than 20 products and services to help employers and clients generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, M&A and capital.
Proudest achievements, always and forever: Michelle and Heather.

Skype this: Do you ooVoo?

Over the past five years I stopped having to be pioneer and Chuck Yeager test pilot-style early adopter for all household technologies. Oh, I still hold a firm grip on my job as IT and network administrator, which on the IT side means I get to wrestle with software and hardware if something goes wrong with a family computer, printer or other peripheral. On the network side it usually entails resetting cable modem and wireless router a few times a year to bring the signal back to life, or calling Cox when the service is really out. The real heavy lifting is long since done: first my dear friend Oliver Robinson, currently deployed in the Middle East, wired our entire home with Cat 5 cable–and with a modicum of help from me–before wireless home networking was readily available. With the advent of wireless networking for the masses, I deployed a Linksys (now Cisco) wireless network, then replaced it with Netgear draft N.

The point is, while my household appreciates my tech support, and is alternately impressed and bemused with my forays across the outer reaches of the social media cosmos, it turns out that we have produced two new cutting-edge technology explorers: our daughters. “Skype is great but with the free version we can only do a two-way call,” said the explorers. With older daughter at Cal Poly, younger daughter at Boston College and home base north of San Diego, we need three-way calling–and with two daughters in college, free is good. So a few weeks ago I was summoned to my wife’s computer for a three-way video call on a service our daughters had discovered: ooVoo.

Video Chat with up to 12 parties

ooVoo’s website says you can chat “with up to 12 people at once,” but I think the company is underselling itself. What it really connects are up to 12 webcam-equipped computers (desktop, laptop or tablet) and/or smartphones; there is no limit to how many smiling, laughing faces you can assemble, via those 12 connections, around the warm glow of the ooVoo video campfire. All you do is download the ooVoo software on PC, Mac, smartphone or tablet and you’re set for HD-quality ooVoo Video Chat. The catch, if this truly qualifies as one, is that the free version of ooVoo currently allows you to video chat with “only” six connected parties; connecting with 7-12 parties requires the paid version.

ooVoo’s value transcends the video chat itself: you can record and send video messages, record and upload calls to YouTube and send instant messages to your contacts on ooVoo and Facebook.

Coming sOOn: V’Rooms; available now: Video Conferencing

ooVoo Video Conferencing enables online meetings, web conferencing, web presentations, online training and remote support. In addition to all Video Chat features above, ooVoo Video Conferencing adds desktop sharing, the ability to send large files to conference participants and advanced security settings.

Soon ooVoo users will be able to launch their own web-based Video Chat Rooms where up to 12 friends can connect on the fly with no download required. V’Rooms, as ooVoo likes to call them, will be fully connected with your other networks like Facebook. In a surprising burst of permanence in today’s limited-timeframe, limited-liability world, ooVoo says you can “create a temporary room or keep a room for life – it’s up to you!” Users will be able to Group-IM with people in the V’Room.

ooVoo who?

Based in New York, ooVoo provides high-quality multi-party video chat to nearly 30 million users worldwide. About 60% of ooVoo users are under 25 years of age, and more than 50% have reported new introductions over ooVoo as they use the service for social video. ooVoo’s cloud-based technology enables consumers and businesses to experience real-time video calls on PCs, Macs and mobile devices with up to 12 users simultaneously. Product features include multi-party video calls, high-resolution video, desktop sharing, text chat, video recording, file sharing and phone calling to landlines and cell phones.

THE BIG FINISH*

I liked my first-ever ooVoo video call. Our three video windows, arrayed in a video wall, filled the desktop. The video was pretty solid throughout, with a few freeze-delays on random windows but overall a great experience. Audo, too, was pretty good and never cut out, but we did notice random volume loss not caused by head-turns but simply mid-sentence with speaker in identical position. When launched, Video Room (V’Room) will do for video calling what conferencing services such as FreeConferenceCall.com do for audio concalls: provide ad hoc, on-demand group calls. Skype does that, too–for a fee. ooVoo’s messaging does not say whether V’Room will be free or a paid service, but while I downloaded the software its messaging stated the standard, up-to-six-parties Video Chat service “is and will always be free,” and that is good enough for me.

JEFF COTRUPE (XeeMe, @MarketPowerLLC) is a researcher, writer, product manager and marketer who has launched more than 20 products and services to help employers and clients generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, M&A and capital.

Top business achievements to date:
[a] Helping put $10M software company CommTech on the map, acquired in three years by ADC for $185.5M; and
[b] Naming Stratecast (“strategy + forecasting”)…then finally joining the firm more than a decade later, in 2010, and launching a brand-new Stratecast research program, ACEM, in 2011.
Proudest personal achievements, always and forever:
Michelle and Heather.

* At Stratecast we conclude each report with The Last Word. On MarketBLOG: THE BIG FINISH.

Can uXeeMe Now?

I’m on Klout, which purports to assess a company’s or individual’s “social capital” by the networks they belong to and the interactions they generate in those networks. You may be there, too. It’s a pretty good platform and I like the way it incorporates elements of other networks, such as importing the lists I’ve created on Twitter. Yet a new social media friend, Nate Riggs (@nateriggs), has shown how Klout can be gamed to artificially inflate one’s score. More broadly, right now Klout only lets one connect a handful of social networks (currently 12)–including some that are of marginal importance, and I can only guess are on the roster due to relationships between principals and organizations. So while there is no doubt it has some use as a social media indicator, I question its ability to fully assess and quantify one’s social capital. Klout recently added connectivity to WordPress, but WordPress users or organizations such as me who operate multiple sites based on WordPress–in my case MarketBLOG and my MarketPOWER News 2.0 Newsroom–must choose just one to connect to Klout, and the story is the same for individuals who operate multiples on other networks such as Twitter.

As I say, I’m on Klout, but my approach may best be described, in the words of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, as “Trust, but verify.” Another new social media friend, Elijah R. Young (@elijahryoung), has done a far more thorough job than I could ever aspire to of discussing the pros and cons of Klout here.

XeeMe: Global Social Presence Management

Another network with real clout is XeeMe (@uXeeMe), brought to you by the founders of the Social Media Academy, considered to be the leading school for applied social media in business. XeeMe is a social media software company focusing on social presence management; a “XeeMe” lets users or brands organize, grow and monitor their social presence by concentrating all profiles and presence in one place, helping its owner to quickly grow in popularity. XeeMe currently supports about 200 social networks, and users can add other venues as custom links to give the system the truest picture of their online presence. XeeMe analytics help users monitor their progress and success, learn about network relevancy and compare themselves or their brands with others. The Silicon Valley-based company (Palo Alto, California, USA) was founded in 2010 and has users in more than 100 countries.

XeeMe pulls together all of a user’s social media profiles, sites and tools on a single personalized page and URL that enables users to share their presence wherever they go (write/post/publish); a XeeMe address immediately plugs the user into the global social grid to accelerate social presence awareness. The integrated XeeMe analytics provide a broad range of data points to measure progress and success as well as comparing and ranking users. XeeMe offers different flavors of the service so as users advance in their quest to perfect their social presence, they can avail themselves of additional applications and tools to support continued social expansion.

The Secret Sauce

XeeMe created a sophisticated algorithm to measure social presence popularity and site relevance. Unlike scores that are based mainly on a company’s or individual’s social media penetration, XeeMe’s XeePV Social Presence Value is measured by the user’s engagement with the market.

The Team

Social Media Academy Founder and Director Axel Schultze (XeeMe, @AxelS) is CEO of XeeMe. Schultze is one of the early advocates and users, and an experienced advisor, in the social media space. As one of the Alpha users of LinkedIN, a beta user of Twitter and one of the first business executives on Facebook, he has a profound understanding of applied social media in corporations. Social Media Academy Co-Founder and Academy Manager Marita Roebkes (XeeMe, @MaritaR) has been involved in social media since 2003 and has a deep understanding of the social web, its dynamics and tools.

THE BIG FINISH

I like XeeMe, and (here’s the full disclosure part) I liked it long before I was ranked #7 in the world on its Wall of Fame. I was first attracted to it as a way to avoid the growing “logo farm” of social sites starting to overtake every facet of an individual’s or company’s market messaging: just post my XeeMe and that was that. The application of a sophisticated algorithm to capture and quantify social presence value, and comprehensive analytics to help users optimize their social presence, have completed the package–and explain the growing popularity of XeeMe around the globe.

Do you have your XeeMe yet?

JEFF COTRUPE (XeeMe, @MarketPowerLLC) is a researcher, writer, product manager and marketer who has launched more than 20 products and services to help employers and clients generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, M&A and capital.
Top business achievements to date:
[a] Helping put $10M software company CommTech on the map, acquired in three years by ADC for $185.5M; and
[b] Naming Stratecast (“strategy + forecasting”)…then finally joining the firm more than a decade later, in 2010, and launching a brand-new Stratecast research program, ACEM, in 2011.
Proudest personal achievements, always and forever:
Michelle and Heather.

I’m not dead…

…it has just been an incredibly busy summer. Since my last entry, Dispatches From Dublin, in what, May(!), we’ve proudly/tearfully watched our younger daughter graduate from high school and be accepted by almost every college to which she applied, including NYU, and some to which she didn’t even apply. [Lone boneheads who failed to accept rhyme with, well: "fail."] She decided on Boston College, and we could not be prouder! So here was our summer:

• Helping our little BC Eagle prep for college
• Beaming with pride at our older daughter who’s already at a great school, Cal Poly, as our battling Bronco continues to rack up successes in the classroom and out–including a year ’round job where she’s now been promoted–to position herself for the future and help keep family finances healthy
• Thrilled that our younger daughter won a paid job for the summer to take the edge off Freshman personal expenses
• Working with a long-time friend to nail down a no-cost refinance saving us $300/month on mortgage (and thank God, with both daughters in college)
• Celebrating our younger daughter’s 18th birthday…and mine with fire-department-permit-required candle count
• Reveling in the fun as in a 36-hour period our younger daughter got to meet Mark Wahlberg in person through her work and see Paramore live in concert
• Work weeks that aren’t 24/7 but have felt like it as my team continues to achieve revenue levels and report counts ahead of plan, and I prepare to launch a new program to try to help my employer double its money

Not sure about you, but I’m stoked yet exhausted after all those bullets. So in the immortal words of Monty Python: “And now for something completely different.” If you haven’t treated yourself to Dio at Donington, or some of the best downbeats in recorded history in Dark New Day’s Free…or to Janelle Monae, BoB and Bruno Mars tearing the roof off the most recent, otherwise-lame-as-usual Grammy Awards…or to P!nk’s Sober (The Metal Version)…or to the deliciously, viciously comical (and “adult content warning”-ready)  Jenna Marbles: what are you waiting for?

Happy end-of-summer.

My pilgrimage to the musical motherland: U2

…and other dispatches from Dublin during Management World 2011

Aye and Begorrah. The week I traveled to Ireland, President Obama did as well. Honestly not sure why he did not consult with me to sync up schedules…at any rate, the big news of the week for me professionally was attending an event-within-an-event, featuring the team I lead at Stratecast, at the world’s largest IT show for the communications industry. The Innovation Spotlight at Management World 2011 was built around the Rat Pack/10 to Watch report our team publishes each year identifying and analyzing the market’s hottest emerging companies. Check out some great videos from the event here.

Management World (MW) was chock-full of meetings each day plus working breakfasts and dinners, but in a few brief free moments I was able to snap a decent pictorial’s worth of pertinent pix.

Convention Centre Dublin (CCD) was our show venue and is featured in this first set of photos. TM Forum has held its global annual events in Nice, France, for as long as anyone can remember. It’s hard to beat the weather in the South of France, and braving the occasional 30mph “gusting rain” in Dublin was not our idea of fun. Yet the consensus of the 3,500 attendees at this first-ever MW in Dublin was that the spectacular CCD as a venue, and the friendly, ultra-professional service by every member of the CCD staff, beat our recent experiences at the aging Acropolis in Nice by a kilometer.

Below | The “leaning tower of glass” was gorgeous from every angle, inside and out, framed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s Samuel Beckett Bridge, also known as the Irish/Celtic “harp”

Once upon a time I led a team that covered the marquee space at a Supercomm event venue with a massive banner about my company at the time, CommTech (later acquired by ADC, now rebranded TE Connectivity). So special kudos to our friends at NetCracker for capturing the marquee space–as pictured at left–on what is thus far the most breathtaking venue ever to host a TM Forum event.

Bucket List fulfillment: U2 venue visits

One of my Bucket List items was to break bread at the hotel restaurant owned by members of U2 in Dublin. Meantime, rumor had it U2’s base of operations in Dublin was in two brick buildings directly across the “harp” from the CCD, complete with full studio for each band member, and that the door to what for many has been a lifetime of musical nirvana would be emblazoned with the name Principle Management. Indeed it was, and below are views at and around that location.

 

In the interview on the front end of one of my favorite U2 songs, Exit, the band says the album Rattle And Hum is “a musical journey.” Part 2 of my Dublin U2 journey was to the Tea Room restaurant in the hotel owned by Bono and The Edge: The Clarence.

Below | The Tea Room at The Clarence: culinary chapel for those with a reverence for great food

   

Thanks to the hard-working, fast-moving Tea Room team for their patience and good cheer as Tea Room regulars enjoyed what to them is a normal dining experience…while I snapped photos and asked for Tea Room menus to bring home like the tourist I was.

Not unique to the Tea Room but I noticed in all Dublin restaurants what I called “90-degree knives”: with the handle sitting flat on the table, the blade sits up vertically at a 90-degree angle. The global road warriors out there may be old hands at this, but I never saw these in my life until Dublin.

After dinner I went out the back door of the hotel to check out the street scene. As you can see, it features agreeable buildings and the old-world charm of the cobblestone streets.

According to comments on some travel sites, when the sun goes down, club noise back here goes up, clattering off the cobblestones. Word on the street (!) is that when booking rooms at The Clarence, wise travelers insist on “the quiet side by the River Liffey.”

Best hotel staff…EVER…at the Morrison

My hotel, the Morrison, was in The Quays on the Liffey. Having a look at our distant “neighbors across the Liffey” as we headed to the CCD each day was stimulating and anchoring.

I have stayed in some truly world-class places but never has any done as much to ease and enhance my stay, always (always!) professionally and with a smile, as the team at the Morrison. I can never thank Grace and her colleagues enough for all the acts of service and kindness. They, even more than the vaunted boutique hotel décor, the quiet, comfortable accommodations and the high-tone yet relaxing restaurant/cocktail lounge, are why I will look to the Morrison when MW returns to Dublin in 2012.

NetCracker analyst dinner at National Gallery of Art was a masterpiece

      
The NetCracker analyst dinner, held in the National Gallery of Art, was beyond wonderful. With no driving all week, the opportunity to quaff luxurious glasses of “beer milkshakes” (Guinness on draft) amidst ornate ceilings and stained-glass windows was…well…a religious experience. Joanna Larivee and all of our hosts from NetCracker and SmartMark: thank you for an unforgettable experience in every way.

Dublin effortlessly blends fast pace, high tech and the charm of the Irish

From the neon-lit-yet-classy 02 building, Dublin office of global telecom powerhouse Telefonica O2…

to soaring views of the Beckett bridge…

to the Ferryman hotel-restaurant-pub, where you may encounter someone from Principle Management, O2, or other movers and shakers…to the peaceful river views from ANY bridge traversing the Liffey…

 

I found Dublin intriguing and picturesque.

A local representative of NetCracker served as tour guide on our bus ride to the analyst dinner, and mentioned Dublin is the only city in the world thus far to produce three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: George Bernard Shaw, William Butler Yeats and Samuel Beckett. You can make book on that.

Passing the quaint little plaza shown at left, nestled between buildings near our hotel, I was charmed by its outdoor ambience and the “Christmas all year” lights twinkling overhead.

Thank you, Dublin, for a Merry Management World, and I hope many more to come.

TM Forum publishes my “Let’s Make it a Good (Mobile and Web) Experience”

Hello again. TM Forum, the world’s leading industry group/consortium on all things network management, published a little piece I did on what mobile and website operators (everyone from AT&T, Verizon and Telecom Italia Mobile to Amazon.com) are doing to see not just that their own networks and sites are “up” but what WE are experiencing as users, and how to fix it. The piece appears in the Forum’s Inside Leadership newsletter; invite you to read more if you like here.

We categorize the capabilities these companies are providing as application performance monitoring (APM), one area of customer experience management (CEM), which also includes things like customer service assurance (CSA). Not enough tech-ronyms for you? These things are all part of the global market for operations/business support systems (OSS/BSS). The simplest and best definition of OSS/BSS is that it takes into account all of the software and systems that help communications service providers (CSPs), also known as operators in different parts of the world, to automate and manage every aspect of their businesses.

Let’s Make it a Good (Mobile and Web) Experience

Is Facebook the new email?

We’ve certainly discussed the pros, cons and security angles around Facebook here and here, and as promised we’ve been adding useful links to one of these, our Facebook Privacy page. Worth mentioning in passing but today I’m thinking more of another entry, Is Social Media Really Bankable, that cited examples of how some of the largest companies in the world—and maybe yours—are starting to leverage social media to build their businesses.

Bloggers normally look outward for suitable subject matter, but in this case my own tendencies have caused me to question whether we’re part of a larger trend.

Here is the question: When you want to reach out to someone today online, with a menu of communications capabilities (figuratively speaking) arrayed in front of you, which button do you push? (No, not the bright-red Staples EASY button, fun as it may be.) Research by HubSpot  and others indicates that whether you’re looking to close the deal or simply stay in touch, you’re doing a lot more of it these days via LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter, Xing, Spoke or other hubsites.

Social media and OSS/BSS pack a powerful one-two punch for business

This article is also syndicated here

Heard about a conversation recently that I just had to share with you. A group had gathered at an industry event and a client asked whether a supplier participated in social media: “Are you on Twitter, do you have a blog, things like that,” to which the vendor replied, “Um, we don’t do any of that, we only spend time on real business.” Rarely do I hear of something as proudly, defiantly and arrogantly wrongheaded as that, especially when, as it turns out, all of the company’s clients and top prospects have at least one Twitter persona, and some as many as 10-20. Yet when I learned that same speaker later described the rest of the company’s business model as, “Doing the impossible for less money than the competition”—I understood. The speaker and company are riding a business model rooted in thinking small that is destined to hit the wall.

I’ll admit I had misgivings about social media earlier on, too. Back when Twitter was still about mundane daily activities (“Now I’m eating breakfast; now I’m signing off to take a shower”), and a global micro elite was mainly blogging back and forth with each other about online esoterica, it was hard to see the value. I also understand why the word “social” still conjures up images of the game-playing, mindless web chatter or worse that some still engage in on company (or taxpayer) time. Yet outside the most determined backwaters such as those described above, and notwithstanding that there will always be time-wasters and trust abusers among us, social media is rapidly coming of age in corporate America/World. As we’re about to discuss, combining it with operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) can produce some strong business-building results.

The problem is a LOT bigger than Facebook

Facebook is the first or at least the most high-profile flash point where the notion that everything on the Internet is (or ought to be) free runs smack into the reality that, without being compensated for what they do, organizations have no reason to exist.

Read more on New Media Edge…

When you add it all up, this is one hot browser

This blog entry is also syndicated here

Email clients and web browsers are now essentials of business and personal life for most of us. Your choices of browser and email client impact pretty much every move you make online including your active participation in new media. As such, while my quest for the perfect browser is hardly a life and death matter, I hope it makes for a decent read and gets you to try some new options, including some I guarantee many of you have never heard of before.

I wanted to like Firefox for years. Internet Explorer was and is too slow and cumbersome for my taste. Safari is sometimes really fast, sometimes comically slow, sometimes renders pages perfectly and sometimes…well, it’s “like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.” (Shudder…could that one sentence unleash the Apple police, and the real ones, after me Jason Chen/Gizmodo-style?) Chrome feels feature-poor with Safari-like page-rendering challenges. Opera, which self-touts as “the world’s fastest browser,” never blew me away speed-wise and bench-testing vs. other browsers to check page changes on my core website, I learned how it achieved its speed: Cached pages. (Never see my latest site changes unless I manually refresh. With Opera, how many other sites on the web am I seeing cached images for instead of the very latest?)

An opinion piece like this is almost guaranteed to bring out of the woodwork the warring factions of zealots for each of these browsers. Hey, there’s a right browser for everyone; they all have their good points. Let’s move on.