Voxeo's Hiring a VP of Marketing - Come Be My Boss!

Voxeo logoHere at Voxeo, we're looking to hire a VP of Marketing! We've got a great team of people in our marketing group who are doing an amazing amount of work... and we're looking for someone to lead that team and help lay out a strategy to take us even farther!

Yes, I'm part of that team - I'm looking for my new boss!

Opportunities like this don't come along all that often... are you up for seizing the chance?

A word of caution... if your idea of a "VP of Marketing" job is someone who sits down in week-long strategy sessions, has long alcohol-fueled lunches, spends half the time at fancy conferences "networking"... and takes a few weeks to create fancy PowerPoint slides before handing the work off to staff or agencies to create glossy direct mail pieces before heading out to the golf course... well... please don't waste our time by applying!

Voxeo is a %#$&@$ rocketship that is taking on the traditional players in the industry and winning pretty much every major deal out there. You have to be able to grasp on to that rocket and if you can't... you're going to be burned to a crisp. (And, oh, by the way, you're supposed to be helping steer that rocket!)

It's an incredible place to work with an amazing team of people and an incredibly open culture. Coming up on 4 years here at Voxeo, I can say definitively that this company is going places... and this is an incredible opportunity to join the company and help shape that growth.

It will probably be one of the most rewarding jobs you'll ever do - and one of the most fun - and, well, a heck of a lot of work!

As the job description says:

The Vice President of Marketing will run Voxeo’s Marketing organization from Voxeo’s Orlando, FL Headquarters. Executives at Voxeo are expected to create strategy and high-level goals, and then jump in with their team and help get the job done. We are all “doers” at Voxeo. We work hard. We play hard. We’re in this to win it. Pure thinkers who don’t like to get their hands dirty won’t work well here.

Voxeo has the best products in the industry, a rapidly growing customer and partner base, an insanely high 62% Net Promoter Score, and recognized by analysts at Gartner and Ovum as one of the top vendors in our industry.

What we need now is a phenomenal Vice President of Marketing who will strategize, implement, analyze and improve marketing with a focus on lead generation.

We have an existing team of top-notch experts in SEO/SEM, social media, event marketing, and analyst relations. We need to improve our messaging, press relations, and again… lead generation.

And here's a key point:

At best 1 in 20 buyers in our market know who we are. When they know who we are we win almost every time. You need to get us into the minds of the other 19 buyers.

Ready for the challenge?

The job description has more of the responsibilities and requirements of the position. This position is based in our Orlando office as many of the marketing team members are remote and you need to be interacting with the other executives and staff. And if all you know of "Orlando" is Disney... forget what you know... downtown Orlando is a completely different world from the empire of the Mouse.

To learn more about what we do, visit our website ... but then look at our many blogs, our presence on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the many (20+) other web sites and services that make up Voxeo's offerings.

I'd give you the links... but if you can't find them you don't deserve a chance at an interview, let alone the job! :-)

Come join us... it's going to be fun!


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MarsEdit Offline Blog Editor For Mac OS X Has a New (Minor) Version Out

Yesterday Daniel Jalkut released a minor update to MarsEdit, my favorite offline blogging tool, and while the 3.3.2 release itself was really just about bug fixes, I thought I'd mention the tool again here on this blog for those who may have recently moved to Mac OS X and are looking for an offline blog editor. I've written about MarsEdit a number of times before and continue to find it probably the program I use the most on my Mac outside of email and web browsers.

Granted, I write across a lot of blogs... but that's the point! MarsEdit gives me a consistent editing interface across all the blogs, no matter what platform they are running on. I also never have to login to any sites because I'm doing all the editing on my local Mac. For the same reason, it's very fast to get in and start editing... and I can easily drop in graphics... and everything else I want to do to write posts.

If you are on a Mac and write blogs posts, do check out MarsEdit. Yes, it's NOT free software... but I've found it well worth the price.

Marsedit332

P.S. I have no financial relationship with Red Sweater Software other than being a happy customer, i.e. I am not getting any compensation or anything else if you buy the software.


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Facebook Acquires eBook Maker Push Pop Press - See The TED Video To Understand

PushpoppressIs Facebook going to get into eBook publishing? That was the first question I had when I saw the news that Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, developers of a very cool eBook technology that was used mainly by Al Gore for his latest "Our Choice" book. The announcement on Push Pop Press' site said this:
Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook.

Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.

Which was similarly confirmed in a statement from Facebook that was published on All Things D (and other sites):

Facebook isn’t planning to get into the digital book business, but some of the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook

I'd not seen their book myself prior to this news, but to understand how cool Push Pop Press' "publishing technology" is, check out the video of co-founder Mike Matas' demoing the technology at TED:

It will be fascinating to see how Facebook adds Push Pop Press' technology into the Facebook user experience... could be fun!


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Walled Garden Deja Vu: Facebook Provides "facebook.com" Email Addresses

Over the weekend, I had a severe case of deja vu... and found myself humming that song from Styx that includes the line "Haven't we been here before...".

Why?

Because Facebook followed through on its earlier statement around letting people receive email to a "facebook.com" email address:

Facebook email

So yes, indeed, because clearly I need more email addresses, you can now send me email to:

[email protected]

[On a side note, I will be very curious to see what kind of anti-spam measures Facebook puts in place as these addresses get out there. Consider this my little test... putting that email address out here on a public blog site where it can be easily scraped.]

The deja vu part is that ... we've been here before. Remember AOL? CompuServer? Prodigy? Delphi? MCI Mail? GENIE?

Remember all those "walled gardens" of the original "computer information services"?

And remember those glorious days when you could FINALLY get an email address so that you could send and receive to people outside the walls of whatever service you used? (Even if those addresses were sometimes hard to write or remember? ex. CompuServe's numerical addresses.)

While I realize that some % of readers of this post in 2011 were probably not born in the heydey of those services, for those of us who were around those were big days when we finally got those email addresses.

Soon everyone had an open Internet email address... the walls came down... and communication happened across all services.

Over time, though, the walls started coming back up. I wrote about this four years ago in a May 2007 post, "Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the Return of the Walled Gardens of E-Mail" and drew my view of the evolution of email:

Evolutionofemail

[Another side note: Notice how things change in 4 years and some of the services I mentioned on the right that are no longer around or relevant...]

And so now we Facebook giving us a way to receive email messages. We've had the ability to send email messages out of Facebook for some time now, but it was sent from cryptic, ugly addresses that changed. Now we have a "regular" email address... and indeed an outbound message from Facebook to my "[email protected]" address looks fine in my regular email client:

Fbemailmsg

Note, of course, that since Facebook does not let you set a "Subject" line on an outbound message you create, the subject is simply "Conversation with Dan York".

When a message is initially received from the outside, the subject line of that email is preserved, as you can see here:

Fbemailinbound

The "Hidden Text" in this case was my normal Voxeo email signature.

All in all it works quite well. I'm not naive enough to think that this is some great idea by Facebook to open up to the outside world... the simple fact is that they want to keep you inside of Facebook where you interact with people on Facebook... and, oh, yes, view all the advertising.

If Facebook can convince you to use the site as your email portal, instead of, oh, GMail, then Facebook and their advertisers win against Google and its advertisers.

Of course, Facebook still has its incredibly onerous Terms of Service that basically says all your email - and any other content - belong to Facebook... so I don't see me personally using my "[email protected]" email account all that often outside of the regular FB messaging I'll be doing there.

Still, all cynicism and deja vu aside, as an advocate for the open Internet I am pleased to see this move by Facebook. Some people have made Facebook their portal of choice... and this now lets people choose other sites as their portals of choice, yet still communicate with Facebook users.

In the end, this openness - and ability for us to control our choice of communication - is exactly what we need.

Have you "claimed" your Facebook email address yet? Will you use it?


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One Simple Reason O'Reilly ROCKS as an Ebook Publisher

Like many technical folks, I've long been a fan of O'Reilly books, having purchased my first "animal" book sometime back in the late 1980's, but as we collectively make the transition to the world of ebooks, I've discovered one simple reason O'Reilly truly rocks as a publisher:

http://oreilly.com/e/

That's it! Enter that one little URL into the browser on your tablet, mobile phone or e-reader and after you login... ta da... there are all the O'Reilly ebooks you have purchased! No need to sync to a program on your laptop or desktop ... just straight downloads to your device to open in whatever program you use - iBooks, Kindle, Stanza, whatever...

Here's how it looks on my iPad:

Oreillyebooks ipad

As you can see, books are available in whatever formats they were produced in... so you can grab ePub for iBooks or Stanza, Mobi for Kindle, or just a straight-up PDF for use in other apps. You aren't limited to one format, either, as you can download all of the formats if you want. O'Reilly has also taken the step to deliver their downloads DRM-free, so you can use them on any device.

Oreillyebooks iphoneThe image on the right shows the same screen on my iPhone. The URL will naturally work on a laptop or desktop, too, but the beauty of it is that the URL is so trivial to enter into a mobile device. About as small a URL as you can get.

The great thing about ebooks is, of course, that you always get the latest version of whatever the author has uploaded. And O'Reilly routinely alerts you via email whenever there are new updates for you to download.

That one simple URL makes it so easy to obtain whatever books you purchase and whatever updates there are.

In full disclosure, I now am an "O'Reilly author" with my latest book, "Migrating Applications to IPv6", but that is just recent (last month) and I started purchasing O'Reilly ebooks quite some time ago for my iPad.

The whole world of ebooks is undergoing an amazing amount of innovation right now... and it's great to see publishers like O'Reilly trying out new ideas to see what works. And in my mind, having an easy-to-access portal to all your ebooks at a super-simple URL is a great idea!

Thanks, O'Reilly, for making it so simple to get to your ebooks!


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Fascinating Chart of Growth of Google+ Relative to Facebook and Twitter

Fascinating chart on the growth of Google+ relative to Facebook and Twitter, courtesy of Leon Håland:

Growthofgoogleplus 1

Now, of course, being the newcomer Google+ benefits from already having Facebook and Twitter out there to spread the news about Google+ ... and to spread the links to Google+ material.

Google also has the massive directory of users of Google services... from Gmail to Google Docs and everything in between.

So on one level it's no surprise to see the phenomenal growth... still, it's quite impressive by any measure.

P.S. And of course I am on Google+...


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The Insanity of the Rush To Buy Books At Borders' Going Out Of Business "Sale"

BordersWhy in the world are people buying these huge stacks of books at Borders right now? Where are the "deals" that are supposed to be there?

I asked myself these questions when, like carrion drawn to roadkill, we naturally had to visit our local Borders here in Keene, NH, over the weekend.

The signs, of course, broadcast out "10-40% Off", but closer examination showed naturally that almost everything was at "10% off" except for a few categories.

So let's do some math… there was a book my daughter wanted that cost:

$12.99

Take of the 10% and you get:

$11.70

What a deal, right? But consider that here is the cost for the exact same book on Amazon.com:

$8.00

In doing some quick spot-checking (gotta love a smartphone with a browser), it seemed pretty much the case that most all the books were priced about 40% higher than you could buy them online.

So here's the math quiz for anyone thinking about going to Borders' "sale" right now:

If the book prices are 40% higher than online, and you subtract 10%, you are still paying ____ more than you would pay online.

Umm… how many ways can you spell "F - A - I - L"?

Even if you don't have Amazon Prime and still need to pay for shipping, odds are that your shipping costs probably will still make it cheaper to buy online.

Sure, this is standard liquidator practice… pump up the promotion, get people coming in thinking there are great deals, and hope they stumble upon a few things to buy. (And in fact, I did buy a book that had a list price of $16 and was on a discount rack for $3.99.) Try to milk every last $ you can...

But it did astound me to see the long lines of people with big stacks of books…

As for me, now that I've seen the lines and the shelves, I'll tune out the news for a couple of weeks… when the deals actually start to get real, maybe I'll make another visit… :-)


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Google+ App Finally Comes to the iPhone! (But Not The iPad)

At last, we iPhone owners who have been watching our Android-owning friends play with Google+ for the past couple of weeks, particularly with uploading photos, can now play, too! The iOS app for Google+ is now available.

A couple of quick screenshots:

Googleplusiphone1 Googleplusiphone2

The app worked great, too, for uploading photos to my G+ account. It also has some interesting features like the ability to swipe with two fingers to switch between your main "Stream" and the "Incoming" and "Nearby" streams. I have only started using it, so we'll see how well it works in repeated use.

Sadly, though, the Google+ app will NOT install onto an iPad, even in just the reduced-size iPhone mode. When I go to the iTunes URL for the app, the iPad flips over to iTunes, and then gives this error message:

Gplus on ipad

A couple of other folks commented (on Google+ naturally) that they were unable to load the app onto an iPad through other means.

Too bad, really, since the Google+ browsing experience on an iPad is so miserable. :-(

Regardless, it's great to have an iOS app available for Google+ ... I'm looking forward to using the service more!

P.S. And of course you can find/follow me on Google+...


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How Badly Has Your Online Writing Impacted Your Offline Writing?

Offlinewriting
Do you still write offline at all?

You know... using one of those pen or pencil thingies and some type of non-electronic media? Like, oh, maybe that wild concept known as... (gasp)... paper?

Personally, I've been writing in journals for literally decades. In fact I recently opened a box and came across a couple of my journals from back in the 1980's. I have many of these floating around in various boxes.

Writing is just part and parcel of what I do and who I am.

But, of course, like most of us these days, my writing has been increasingly online.

I started "blogging" (although it wasn't called that yet) back in May 2000 at a site called Advogato and have continued on through LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress to where I routinely write across about 15 or so different blogs and sites. Every work day (and often weekends, too) usually starts with writing blog posts and often ends with writing posts. My brain is always firing with a zillion ideas of what to write about... my constant struggle is to find the time to write all the posts I want to write.

What is losing out in this battle for time, I've found, is my offline writing.

The truth is that the vast majority of my writing is "public" and so it's perfectly fine online. In fact, it is better that it is online because it is much more easy to find... it is searchable... it is easy to "back up" (if I do so)... and in some ways it probably has a much longer lifespan than my offline journals, should, for instance, they meet with our wet basement. (Of course, the contrary might be true int that they may outlast some of the online sites hosting my content.)

But there are some topics I don't care to share online. Some of them are more "personal" thoughts... some of them are sketches for ideas for future stories - not yet ready to be put online... some of them are notes about our kids that I want to preserve for us, but don't want to share with the world. I've also been writing poems for years and they, too, are not yet ready for me to share online (or more precisely I am not ready to share them).

And sure, in our culture of "transparency", many people simply dump ALL that information online somewhere... maybe on public sites... or maybe in private sites... or in walled gardens like Facebook. I'm not personally ready to be THAT open.

I didn't quite realize, though, exactly how much my offline writing had been impacted. On a recent weekend, I opened my current offline journal and leafed back through the pages. I was rather shocked to realize that I began this particular journal in October 2006!

Almost five years ago.

Go back a decade and I probably would have filled up a journal like this one in a few months... and here it's been five years and I'm maybe only 2/3rds of the way through it.

An amazing change...

How about you? If you ever wrote offline before, do you still do so? Or have you moved entirely online? Have you seen a drop-off like I have?

P.S. And with that drop in offline writing, I've also noticed that my cursive handwriting - never terribly legible - has declined even further without the regular usage. :-(


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Do You Have A Favorite Time of Day To Write? (And What Happens If You Miss It?)

Clock

Do you have a favorite time of day when you like to write your blog posts or other online content? What happens to you when you can't write during that time?

Yesterday (Wednesday) morning, I found myself just a bit jittery in the morning and seemingly out-of-sorts. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on... and then it hit me:

I was missing out on my "normal" writing time!

You see, my wife is recovering from breast cancer surgery and during this period she can't do things like, oh, lift up our 2-year-old daughter and change her diaper! Or simply hold our 2-yr-old if she falls ... or just wants to be held. (Needless to say, this is immensely frustrating for my wife!) Or reach up into kitchen cabinets to get plates or glasses. Nor can my wife drive right now with her limited range of motion.

The result is that for this week my mornings prior to 9am have been spent getting both kids ready and off to camps or friends. (Our 9-year-old has been in a day camp and our 2-yr-old has been visiting each day with friends or family.) Plus all the other typical morning activities in a household.

Now, don't get me wrong... I am definitely glad to help in doing all this. My wife has been making an amazing recovery and each day she's getting better and better. It's no big deal for me to do what I'm doing to help her out - and I'll keep doing it as long as she needs me to do so.

What I didn't expect was the disruption to my own habits by starting my work day one hour later.

Here's the deal... for years now I have always started my formal "work day" around 8:00 am. And yes, I'm often checking email and Twitter, etc. before that time... but 8am has generally been the time when I go "into my office".

And what's the first thing I do when I go into my office?

Write!

Indeed, I have formally blocked off 8-9am every morning on my calendar as "Blogging Time". It is a time when I try my best to just FOCUS on writing.

Before getting sucked into the zillion Skype group chats that are part of my IM-centric company.

Before getting sucked into my email inbox.

Before getting sucked into the mega-timesuck that is Twitter/Facebook/Google+/whatever.

Before getting sucked into whatever Voxeo projects are on my plate for that particular day.

Before any of that... I try... to just spend an hour where I'm entirely focused on writing.

Typically my focus is on cranking out at least one post for Voxeo's many blogs and then often a post for one of my many other blogs. My goal is to try to always have a queue of posts that will be going out over time to keep content flowing out online. (Confession: right now with everything going on, I don't! My queue of written posts is empty - tons of ideas, no text!) Sometimes my focus is on an article for some other site... regardless, I try to spend that time writing.

Sometimes that block of time stretches on beyond an hour... maybe it turns into a couple of hours. Sometimes it winds up only being 15 or 20 minutes before something high priority interrupts the time.

This week, though, I haven't had that block of time in the mornings. And to my chagrin I've found that this does have an effect on me. :-(

Now, the effect on me will be temporary as next week we don't have quite the same schedule of camps and such and I'll probably be able to resume my early writing block. And if it's not next week it will be the week after.... or somewhere in here as my wife keeps getting better. So I'm not too concerned in the grand scheme of things.

But this whole episode has made me realize just how important that little block of time has become to me!

How about you? Do you have a favorite time of day to write? Have you formally blocked out a period of time? Or do you just try to catch some time when you can? Does it bother you when you can't write?

Image credit: kobiz7 on Flickr


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