Atul Patel’s Blog

It’s about time that helping our planet has become fun. Jonny Hal has launched a web series that tracks his attempts to be removed from marketer’s mailing list. This is pretty funny stuff! The preview is below. And check out his first episode on Verizon.

GreenDimes provides an easy way to get you off the list and is worth the $3/month. They even plant trees on your behalf. GreenDimes was founded by Pankaj Shah, who had previously founded 4INFO among other companies.

ProQuo is another company that can reduce your junk -snail- mail, and is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. On that same note, who said you can’t launch a company that does exactly what the other does. If there’s a big enough market, it’s fair game. I’ll signup for ProQuo because it’s free.

UPDATE 10/25/2007: Just found another provider of junk mail elimination: 41pounds

I live in Irvine, California, which has been experiencing the fire frenzy of late (President Bush FINALLY declared a State of Emergency). Outside of my patio, I saw Portola Hills light up in a massive fire. It has been two days since I’ve seen the fire because it has moved north east. Walking outside of the apartment is a bit gloomy and eerie, and it reminded me of the atmosphere in the movie, Fifth Element (picture below).

And so I took a picture of the sky where I could contrast a clear blue section of the sky with one that was filled with smoke, and I thought, this could be how 2040 is if we don’t take action. I’m no scientist that knows how the sky would be if global warming continues, but this was just a thought. It came to mind, partially, because I recently watched a great presentation at TED made by John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist.

Here’s a picture of the Irvine sky right now. I’ve hypothesized how part of it might be how things are in 2040. A picture follows of the hellish scene out here.

I’ve seen it at places like Panda Express and parking garages. The sign reads, “your purchase is free if you do not receive a receipt.” I’m confused!

So here’s a scenario:

• I order a product or service
• I receive the product or service in exchange for money
• I do not receive a receipt
• I alert the cashier that I did not receive a receipt and that my money should be refunded
• Instead of going back into the cash register system and printing a receipt, the cashier gives me my money back!

WHAT!? I haven’t yet had the situation where the receipt has been forgotten. But, if I do, and tell the cashier that I didn’t receive a receipt, I’ll bet that she will just print one out for me.

Take a look at this picture from a local park. “Your parking is free if you do not receive a ticket.” To even have a chance to receive a ticket I have to pay. Should I have simply drove in past the attendant and refused to “receive a ticket”? Wouldn’t my parking be free? What a confusing idea.

This reminds me of the blog inspired by Seth Godin called This Is Broken.

I was digging around for videos from the Zeitgeist (I wish I had a login to that site), and finally found some new ones a few days ago. The founders of Google don’t often show up in presentations, but since the Zeitgeist is a Google event, it was fitting.

Sergey and Larry talk about some interesting things about Google and where they see its and the Internet’s future. An audience member had asked what content creators can do to better align with the vision of Google’s. Sergey said, “I think one of the things that tends to really decrease, perhaps, the utility of sites is when they go overboard with the fanciness; really fancy Javascript and Flash flying around. It has two negative effects: (1) harder for users: it might slow down your computer or…mobile device, (2) make it somewhat harder for search engines to parse through the stuff; what’s the real information on the site.”

Thank you for that! I wrote about how “Loading pages should not take this long” last week, and as I said, it wasn’t because I didn’t like advertising and the “fancy [stuff] flying around”, but it just makes the Internet slower.

Food fighting has come a long way, and its quite intriguing to see how history repeats itself, and concepts continually evolve while maintaining an undercurrent of themes, values, rules, and such. Some are keen enough to identify those opportunities, quickly. Business 2.0 published an article, called “The man who started the foodfight“, highlighting Seth Goldstein’s new company, SocialMedia. Seth has an interesting way of becoming his surroundings, his ideas, his vision. I know Seth through his previous company that acquired the software company I co-founded.

What is quite interesting about the underlying concepts of SocialMedia is that it creates a true application of the social graph. The term application in Seth’s case is not just the concept of utility, but rather applying real -life social concepts into our online interactions. Granted, we can’t throw food, or shit in this case, at each other in real-life, it surely would be fun.

The key here is that foodfighting is not new. This online social interaction existed over ten years ago! If you remember BBS’ing (logging into Bulletin Board Systems), you remember everything from FidoNet to the text-based role playing games. That was about the same time I was playing Wolfenstein 3D and Hero’s Quest.

Surprise, surprise…one of the most popular games was Food Fight! I recall playing it in third grade (it’s too far back to keep track). Food fight was one of many games that ran on the BBS door “platform”, we can call it. Here’s the Food Fight logo — yes in ANSI!

You can still play the original version at this site or install the app in Facebook. From the early 90s, foodfight has made it into the new century and it’s hot as ever.

If I start whining about how I didn’t see this coming or act on it, I might as well do the same for email, chat, portals, search, and everything else. But this continues to encourage me that there are new undiscovered territories to apply learnings from history.

Virgin Money US recently launched, with the rebranding of the acquired CircleLending, the P2P lending service focused on family and friend lending and servicing.

As I love to keep tabs of the massive conglomerate of Richard Branson’s, I was anxious to check it out. But, unfortunately, the site pulled up a DotNetNuked error!

What an embarrassment. Maybe because it is the traffic they received from the recent TechCrunch post. Or they just forgot to point the web application to another.virgin.co.uk.

UPDATE: I just checked the site and they found the server! Now that the site is back, I can see that they have launched a full-service bank — not just a Prosper or LendingClub. I’m signing up.

Since I departed from LeadROI and our acquiring company, Root Markets, I have still stayed relatively informed on the happenings in the space. I was researching the latest in lead management and found some interesting things. Although LeadROI’s product was focused on lead management for the mortgage space (as our acquisition press release reads), here I’ve taken a broader view of lead management software.

The Hottest Silo: Mortgage Lead Management

The lead management players in the mortgage space have been in hyper-competition mode for little over two years now. Granted I was in the space for those years, when I look outside in now, I can see that the innovation, competition, and best practices were in silos — mortgage lead management enjoying the most movement of late. It just came down to LeadROI, Leads360, and Kaleidico competing over features and outselling each other.

Leads360 closed its first round of funding to extend its presence into other verticals. I believe that Leads360 will do a terrific job extending into other verticals. I don’t believe that it’s a question of “how easy will it be for them to transfer their mortgage related, feature rich platform into these verticals” as the leadcritic.com author put it, but when.

Kaleidico will be announcing a new product or feature soon. I have this strange feeling that it might be related to being able to launch Google Adwords and your own landing pages from with their icoSales product. Maybe icoMarketing? If I’m wrong, Bill, you should launch this next.

Since I left LeadROI three months ago, my knowledge of the developments there are very limited to comment.

Other Silos: Automotive, Real Estate Lead Management, Multi-Channel

The automotive industry enjoyed this innovation and consolidation cycle far more earlier than the mortgage industry. AVV Web Control was launched in 1995 and was subsequently acquired by AutoByTel in 2003. Microsoft was raving about their auto dealer lead management offering DealerPoint.net in 2001, and then later sold it off to Reynolds and Reynolds in 2003.

Now, I imagine that the incumbents, large or small, control such a large share of the auto dealership space that it may be difficult to enter this space easily. On one hand you have a decade of features and best practices built into the software, on another you most likely have limited innovation. I can’t speak to this because I don’t come from that space.

Real estate has also experienced this cycle. Katabat was acquired in late 2005 by Dominion Enterprises. Katabat provides more than just a lead management system to Realtors, but also landing pages, advertising, content, and so much more. Another player in real estate is Broker1Suite.

When you start to expand beyond industry-focused lead management, and include lead management for multi-channels companies and partner management, I think of players such as Salesforce.com and BlueRoads. These solutions go as far as helping companies manage their partners who work their leads — much more complex than managing a set of loan officers that sit in your office.

Innovation in a Silo - Ignorance is bliss?

What does this all mean and give me an example of why I should care? you ask. Let’s take a look at when Kaleidico launched the feature to allow sales persons to ‘pull’ a lead when they are ready to work one. That sparked a lot of buzz around the concept. First, Jeff Solomon of Leads360 wrote his thoughts on this pull methodology. I disagree with Jeff’s statement that “This method is not as quick, but works well in situations where your sales team is not working in a real-time environment.” Simply put, with a lead pulling methodology you are asking the computer do all the thinking of what lead to work next. I’ll bet on the computer. Then, Bill Rice of Kaleidico wrote a response on why he introduced pull into the mortgage space, and I agree with most of what he says.

All that said, BlueRoads, a company founded in 2001 by Axel Schultze the co-founder of Postini (purchased by Google), introduced pull concepts in their early years, far before Kaleidico, Leads360, and LeadROI even existed. To put things in perspective, they have received a total of $25M, $9M in a recent round.

Further, one can view on the wikipedia page on lead management that there are others outside the mortgage lead management space that participate in updating the page.

Breaking up the Silos

I think that Leads360 can certainly be poised to expand to other verticals with their core offering. I believe that the value-add to other industries will be high because the mortgage space was a strong laboratory for lead management. Just from the acquisitions of LendingTree, LowerMyBills, and Nextag alone (over $2B collectively), we know that the mortgage space is among the pioneers in lead generation. I’m surprised that there is no lead management software specific to the education space (or is there?), yet we’re starting to see the massive funding and also consolidation of companies (examples here and here). Leads360 seems to even target vacuum salesmen — look at this closely. (Sorry 360, having a little fun with your dynamic landing page.)

I can think of a lot of questions. Could it be the case that lead management systems are better as niche software companies? Will or do CRM systems (Siebel, Salesforce, NetSuite, SalesNet, etc) or call center systems (Aspect, Promero) provide the necessary features needed for lead management and could this be a process silo altogether (lead management versus customer relationship management). Is there a reason why Microsoft sold off their auto product to an auto-specific service provider? AVV was acquired by AutoByTel, LeadROI was acquired by Root Markets, Katabat was acquired by Dominion Enterprises — these are all industry specific plays. If this is the case, any player wanting to provide a software for multiple niches will have to develop industry-specific integrations, hire experts in each vertical, build an understanding of the features necessary for the space, and so on.

This will be interesting to watch. Bottom line: we do need to see innovation that blends the knowledge, features, and best practices from the cumulative learnings across all silos.

I’ve noticed that browsing the web has progressively taken longer over the past few months. If it isn’t some movie trailer on an expandable ad, it is a floating rich media advertisement or a push down banner. Most pages render fine, but get locked up trying to load content from atdmt.com (Microsoft’s Atlas ad server), or doubleclick.com (Google’s DoubleClick ad server), or cdn.this and cdn.that (content delivery networks). Add to the issue, multiple tabs each running rich content and you will feel like you need to upgrade your computer.

I had tried to use Adblock Plus several months ago and removed it. Reason being, I like to stay in tune with the latest advertising campaigns and methods. But, because my browser seems to be hanging on many of the sites I visit, I’ve re-enabled Adblock. I must say that now my browsing is a tad-bit faster. I’ll take what I can get.

Just a clarification and a recommendation, Adblock Plus blocks all ads from displaying in your browser — display (banner, skyscraper) and text ads. Even when you use Google, you will not see any ads on the right side of the search results. Like I said, I prefer seeing ads, so I will most likely use it on occasion. Its use is drawing a lot of protest from publishers, but I agree with Robert Andrews at PaidContent.org — show ads that don’t degrade the user experience and that I want to see. In my case, this includes less rich media that requires my browser to load.

I have had good success in maintaining consistency in my username across all online sites. You can find me most anywhere as “atulapatel” or “atulapatel@yahoo.com”. I’m a legacy Yahoo user and continue to use it as my email and username hub.

However, I was not as successful at some very important places — Gmail and Hotmail. I do log into each service as atulapatel@yahoo.com, and Google even provided me with goog.atulapatel@gmail.com, but that’s not enough. In the frenzy of the Gmail invitations, I believe individuals invited themselves over and over again and signed up for as many iterations of their name as possible. I, unfortunately, was left behind. And, with Hotmail, I have a strange feeling I actually do own that address. But, I cannot seem to answer the security question correctly. I may have lied about that information back in the mid 90s when I lied about everything when registering online.

It is unfortunate because I would love to explore replacing my Yahoo with either Gmail (advanced searching) and Hotmail (IMAP accessible), but I have an obsessive need to own the “atulapatel” username or I will most likely not use the service. It’s a twist to the usual adoption issues such as features and functionality, ease of use, need of use. My adoption usually depends on if I can obtain “atulapatel”.

For this reason, I have emailed atulapatel@gmail.com and atulapatel@hotmail.com offering to buy the names from them. Given that I have yet to receive even a courteous decline, I believe these are both dormant accounts.

If there is anyone at Google or Microsoft that can steal these names for me, I’m willing to pay some big bucks. Maybe someone needs to start an exchange where individuals can buy and sell usernames.

I purchased my iPod Nano 8gb Black three months ago. I love the iPod and use it to listen to podcast at my desk, in the plane, at the gym, and in the car. I paid the $199 price tag for my little gadget, so when I saw that Apple was launching a new iPod series with video as a standard feature I figured it would be at least slightly more expensive.

The problem is that it wasn’t more expensive! This is utterly unfair. It has been only 90 days and the new device costs the same as what I paid for my -now- dinky iPod Nano Sans Video, but packs a lot more punch.

This raises an interesting problem that my father has when researching new products — he is always reluctant to make a consumer electronics purchase because in a week, a month, a quarter, the same device will be significantly cheaper or there will be a new model with much more capacity, battery life, and features.  Clearly, he has good reason to be concerned.

I will attempt to sell it on eBay, but the prices are ranging from $62 to $122. Is it worth taking a $75 dollar loss to enjoy the new iPod with video?

The fundamentals of Moore’s Law that explain our advances in technology, also show how it’s such a bad time to be an electronics consumer.