One of the things I like about American business processes is the merciless confessional process companies go through as they do an initial public offering. Vonage is stripping itself naked right now. Among the risk factors: It’s losing money at an increasing rate as it buys ads to gain marketshare – It’s got 1.6M users. It’s in violation of the E-911 regulation (which does not fit easily on VOIP providers). Vonage chairman and founder settled with the SEC over fraud accusations at his previous company; he will own 33% of the outstanding common stock. Plus, of course, Vonage could be wiped off the board if carriers are allowed to violate Net neutrality by charging more for Vonage’s VOIP bits than for their own. (There’s also stuff at the top of p, 20 about the dilution of common stock. Is that usual?)

Vonage is enabling its early customers to participate in the IPO, which is nice of them. I’m eligible, but won’t participate: I’m a happy Vonage customer but I almost never buy stocks. (I should perhaps note that a blog post from a couple of years ago about Vonage continues to attract comments about how awful Vonage’s customer service is. I personally have no complaints.) [Tags: vonage ipo voip net_neutrality]

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I’m interviewed (via email) about commerce, knowledge management, security and the like over at Management First. [Tags: ecommerce km security]

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I posted a question to the Logitech customer forum because my new MX1000 mouse seems to pull downward— I have trouble getting it to point precisely where I want it, so I’m doing a lot of mis-selecting. Today I received an auto-mail message from Logitech telling me that they’ve noticed that no one replied to my question, so they’re escalating it to a human Logitech support person.

Cool!

BTW, if you care about the problem I’m having with the mouse, you should know that I have another Logitech mouse (a Click! model) plugged in simultaneously and it doesn’t have that problem. Yes, I have the latest drivers. [Tags: marketing customerSupport logitech mice]

It turns out that laser mice like slick surfaces. So, I’ve taped a shiny page from a magazine to my mouse pad and the mouse is working much better now.

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I ate at restaurant in Watertown yesterday. I had trouble enjoying the food because the place is so in love with itself, starting with its menu descriptions, that it was like watching a Chevy Chase movie.

Here’s a scene from The Matrix done as ascii animation. [Tags: marketing ascii matrix]

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Go to Google Base and search for “gold’s gym” (no quotes required). (Clicking here will perform the search for you.) The first entry, at least today, is from Mark Dionne who provides Gold’s corporate address, information that Gold’s Gym doesn’t like to make public, perhaps to ignore letters from unhappy customers such as Mark. [Tags: google marketing]

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Tom PlasticBag Coates blogged about how he found his father who’d gone missing for 28 years. Excellent. One of the commenters wrote:

“Hi Tom, Always remember one thing. Life is very, very short and nothing is worth limiting yourself from seeing the ones you love. I hadn’t seen my father in 15 years until 2 years ago. I was apprehensive but I kept telling myself that no matter how estranged we’d become there was no river to wide to cross. Drop me a line if I can be of any more help. Cheers, Barry”

Tom comments:

Sounds fine, doesn’t it? Except that ‘Barry Scott’ isn’t a real person – he’s a marketing vehicle for a brand called Cillit Bang and his weblog is a barely disguised viral marketing platform for the product.

As Tom said last night at dinner, it’s like getting a warm personal message from Ronald McDonald.

Tom has the full story here… [Tags: marketing TomCoates]

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Pedro De Miguel Asensio from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid is talking about the European Union’s rules on consumer protection and how they differ from the US’s.

When it comes to jurisdiction, the general rule seems to be that if a consumer sues a vendor, the suit occurs in the customer’s country of domicile if the vendor’s site is directed at that country. Otherwise, it happens in the vendor’s country. E.g., if it’s a Danish site, written in Danish with only Danish phone numbers, and someone in Spain buys a product from it and then sues, the suit will be heard in Denmark, not Spain. Consumer groups push for suing in the consumer’s country. Businesses don’t like that — imagine opening up a site to sell your music and you get hauled into court in West Elsewhere by a consumer who thinks you’ve defamed her religion.

Pedro says that currently, although the scope of protection differs, the EU and the US are in substantial agreement.

Terry Fisher says that the first generation of Internet lawyers thought sovereign states would stay out of the Internet. It’s just too messy. The new generation, he says, which includes Tim Wu, thinks sovereign states are definitely in and we should be encouraging divergencies (e.g., the French can’t buy Nazi paraphernalia, but Yankees can). Terry says that Pedro diverges from this, recommending coming together on standards.

Bill McGeveran points out that once you’ve decided the forum (e.g., California), you can also choose which law applies: A California court can apply Danish law. And then there’s the question of enforceability.

John Palfrey asks if the Internet is different enough that there should be special procedures and forms of arbitration for it. Pedro says it’s a point worth considering.

When googling “Rome Convention” during Pedro’s talk, I came across a page that uses the phrase “aural fixation.” It doesn’t mean anything like I first thought. (By the way, the Rome Convention to which Pedro referred is not that one. It’s this one.)

[Tags: berkman law internet ecommerce eu]

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Dave Rogers takes issue with Doc’s famous assertion and disputes the chapter on marketing Doc and I wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Dave says that markets were always about “the sale,” not about the conversation that surrounded the sale.

Dave is right (IMO, of course) that markets have always been places where buyers and sellers have different roles and interests. But I disagree with Dave that the fact that we have the phrase “caveat emptor” means that sellers are always rapacious and untrustworthy. Quite the contrary, we only need such a maxim because sellers generally are trustworthy. People route around frauds, making fraud a bad marketing strategy.

In any case, “Markets are conversations” doesn’t mean “So take the first price quoted” or “And all conversations are among people without competing interests.” Nor does it mean that markets are nothing but conversations. What it means historically is that markets were also social places, not merely locations for the exchange of goods. And, today it means that markets are not merely demographic abstractions but are actual customers talking with one another about what they’re buying. Smart companies engage in those conversations honestly, openly and with passion.

There is, of course, also a place for frictionless transactions. The Net has many mansions, and in some of them there’s no talking allowed.

As for Dave’s claims that large groups can’t operate efficiently without a hierarchy, we either disagree about how large groups operate or we disagree over what constitutes a hierarchy. Or we may agree, although I think it’s useful to differentiate organic hierarchies from imposed ones. [Tags: cluetrain DocSearls ChristopherLocke RickLevine marketing DaveRogers]

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Vincenzo Susca, whom I met during my fantastic weekend with Derrick’s grad class in Capri, is in Toronto for the year. He talks about the current technological change in political and power terms. There is a power in the Net, he says, that transcends traditional political structures.Our present culture is like Frankenstein’s monster: It transcends and exceeds its creator’s intention. What type of power does that entail? He introduces a new term: Communocracy. He means both physical and virtual communities. [Sorry for the crappy blogging of this interesting talk.] [Technorati tags: ArsElectronica2005 VincenzoSusca]

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I’m the subject (object?) of a 3-question interview over at the FastCompany blog. And here’s a lagniappe: Brian actually uses the word “lagniappe”! [Tags: marketing FastCompany pr cluetrain]

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