hubbub

The Frog Has a Place at The Crunchies

This one came as a surprise:  our new client, Ribbit -- which launched just this week -- has been nominated for two awards at The Crunchies, a new ceremony that aims to "recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year."  It's a joint project involving some of the tech world's leading blogs -- GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch.  But what I really like about this ceremony:  it's the only show of its kind in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley.

Ribbit is competing in two categories:  best enterprise startup, and  best new startup of 2007 .  We're proud of them, of course, and wish them well.

Ribbit launches

Big day for our client, Ribbit, a new kind of phone company that's promising to change the way the market -- consumers, businesspeople, and developers -- think about voice.  Congrats to the entire team, including Chuck Freedman, director of the Ribbit developer platform.  To get the story, listen to Chuck:

gBox & Virtual Gifting: Making it Real

So, over the past two weeks, we've been helping to roll out gBox, a new digital commerce company that's getting lots of buzz for inking a deal with Universal Music Group (UMG), the world's largest music label. The deal -- part of UMG's recently announced test to sell hundreds of thousands of tracks without DRM -- makes gBox an online store for consumers who find the tracks through Google AdWords. The UMG test, and gBox, go live today. But there's something else that gBox disclosed today: a gifting widget that enables consumers to easily create and share wishlists on their personal Web sitess, blogs and social network pages. It's a new take on virtual gifting -- making it (gifting) real, keeping it real.

Also see: today's story in the BBC. You can get 50 Cent for 50 pence.

Social Media for B2B: PR Week

PRWeek has a feature story on B2B companies (businesses that sell to other businesses) that are working with social media. Hubbub client SAP is one of three companies in the article. The challenges for B2B companies are rather complex, especially for enterprise tech giants like SAP -- many markets, many constituencies. But it can be done. SAP's Mike Prosceno observes:

"Every niche of the market is represented in some way, shape, or form. We engage to ensure that those speaking of SAP understand what we're doing and why, to listen, and to learn from the market."

Live from SAP

So, it looks like the Social Media Club workshop at SAP will be broadcast live tomorrow on Ustream. I'm a fan of this service, and I am thrilled to be restreaming (or is it "co-streaming?") the event here. Chris Heuer has a great lineup: Shel Israel (the keynote), Jeremiah Owyang, Deborah Schultz, and Brian Solis. And, oh ... I will do a bit about best and worst practices. Be sure to tune in.

JAJAH & Intel

Many people have been asking me lately why I have slowed down with the blogging. Well, first there was FASTMedia, and today we announced JAJAH's strategic investment from Intel. A few more launches to go this month, and then things will calm down, maybe.... In the meantime, I gotta say that the JAJAH/Intel deal is quite interesting. Good commentary from Olga Kharif at BusinessWeek, and Eric Auchard at Reuters. Phones will be computers, and computers will be phones. I've been confident about that for some time, and today's news was a big reminder.

JAJAH Reaches Two Million

A big day for our client JAJAH -- they have registered two million customers in their first year, and appointed a CEO. Congrats to the whole team.

Son of a Niche

A niche that's rich.

Our client Berggi opened for business this morning, beating Macy's to the Christmas shopping season. As we wrote on Tuesday, this is mobile messaging -- including email -- for the masses. And the first three months are free.

Traffic to the site today has been brisk, and the reception from the media has been great (especially in the English, Spanish, and Italian-speaking worlds). We'll keep you posted on the company's progress. In the meantime, I recommend you take a few minutes from this busy holiday weekend to try the service. I think you'll like it. It's not a BlackBerry killer. BlackBerry is a great product, with a great market. If anything, Berggi is "son of BlackBerry," for the large, emerging consumer audience that, as CNET noted today, wants easy access to email on cheaper phones.

Berggi Q&A

If you follow technology news or hang out on mobile tech blogs, you may have noticed today that a small start-up called Berggi (a Hubbub client) came out of stealth, vowing to bring mobile messaging to the masses (Eric Auchard at Reuters broke the story). At some point soon, there will be a blog on the Berggi site, which is under construction. For now, I will use this post to field questions about the company. Already, there are several:

--what's the service:

Berggi provides consumers with a simple, intuitive mobile messaging service -- email, text, IM -- that they can use over regular, commodity cell phones. Founded and led by some of Europe's top mobile messaging technologists -- Jorge Mata and Raul Lorenzo -- and serial entrepreneur Babur Ozen, the service and business plan were both designed in a way to overcome the barriers to mass-market adoption.

--what are those barriers?

In our opinion, there are at least three:

First, mobile messaging for the mass market needs to work over any phone, any service. That's the vision. The reality today is that Berggi operates on most commodity phones, over most services, with the exception of Verizon and Nextel in the U.S.

Second, the service has to be dead simple -- simple, clean and efficient. No bells and whistles.

Third -- and this is perhaps the biggest -- the service must be an easy purchase. There will be two ways for consumers to get Berggi. On Thanksgiving Day, they can go to www.berggi.com and get the service directly. An even easier way will come soon, when more consumer brands begin bundling and selling the service to their own customers. This white-label strategy shows a lot of promise for Berggi. In its first such deal, Berggi registered close to 100,000 users.

--if I buy the service directly, how much will it cost?

$9.99/month, and it will appear on your monthly phone bill.

--do I need to purchase a data plan from my carrier?

No -- you just need a data-activated phone (not a problem for most consumers)

Any other questions, please feel free to: (a) ask them here, (b) call me at 650-279-8415, or (c) email me at giovanni at hubbubpr dot com. I'll be on my Berggi.

Rough and Tumble

It's the end of the week, and what a long one it was -- I was at Jajah HQ in Mountain View helping Marketing VP Don Thorson direct one of the wildest and most exciting product launches in quite some time. The product is the first IP-based voice service for regular cell phones. What's the big deal? Well, with Jajah Mobile practically anyone with a cell phone -- any cell phone, once the SMS version becomes available -- can make free or cheap calls to anyone around the globe. Lots of supporters -- both in the traditional press and in the blogosphere (and thanks to eastwikkers for the mention) -- and a few detractors. Me -- I'm a believer. And I haven't had this much fun since my days as in-house PR guy. It's a world that's rough-and-tumble, high cost in energy, huge payoff in results. All the folks at Jajah who participated in this launch -- the engineers, the product people, the marketing team, the execs -- deserve a good weekend. But not much rest after that. There's a raft of competitors hot on Jajah's trail. Come Sunday night (Monday morning in the EU -- this is a global company), the whole team will be back in full force.