2009 vs 2010, what we did and what we want to do.

Last december we posted about our goals and just checking the accomplisments we are partially happy. We survived a very tough year, with dramatically reduced innovation budgets in telcos and big companies. The common feeling was "wait and see", both, for big companies needing technology and new services to launch and also for VC.
About ou goal of being funded from international VC, we were contacted by several VC's and also we contacted a few ones and we learnt "for A rounds, VC's invest only where they have office", then, we focused in our portfolio, trying to increase references and revenue and will come back to them again :-)
Other important goal, partnerships with big telco suppliers, we explore it, it seems our product fits someone else, and in the very next future we could offer together new mobility and UC use cases. About other listed 2009 goals, public references for our LiveServe video solutions will be disclosed Q1-2010, and we were mentioned in analyst reports from 2 important firms.
We finally become a Red Herring Top 100 Global last January.
We could not grow the staff but we managed to increase the revenue while saving costs, and increase brand awareness combining few events and the use of social media.
We invest in our new product, RCS Solution Gateway, to approach coming telco opportunity to the world of the web for CRM, Social Media and advertisment.
It was a difficult decision, as with limited resources, the RCS platform development delayed the global cloud/saas offering of our previous platforms, but, for sure, we are not forgetting our vision about communication solutions as a service and our RCS platform is including this vision (API's) from the beginning.

We are participating in the RCSdevChallenge next January, and unveiling our RCS portfolio coming Mobile World Congress. Stay tunned, also unveiling RCS client, no mobile, no desktop :-)
2009 was a hard year, and survived, and 2010 looks better, as the pic tries to describe, now we see the goal bigger, more space to score: our portfolio getting awareness and with sinergies with other suppliers, VC's needing to invest againg the new funds raised, M&A activity last months shows the big players are moving to strengthen their portfolios and most important, carriers needing to offer compelling service to compete with internet style service providers.

We strongly believe 2010 will be a very important year for Solaiemes, the long telco developement/sales cycle was completed in our first products and is being monetized, and for new "challenge/venture", the RCS, we are arriving just in time, no too soon, no too late.
Yes, we know some people think 2010 will be similar of worse than 2010, but it is better to focus in working everyday to exceed expectations during 2010, isn't it?
Let us dream !!!

Start-up's marketing, Twitter helps !

I suppose it would be very nice to have full pockets to have resources for marketing and brand awareness, but being a technology "bootstrapping" start-up, resources are very limited :-)
We have to decide each brand/marketing action valuable to spend our restricted marketing budget, and our own time.
We learnt about social networks by doing, and started with Twitter shyly and being a bit skeptical, but now, our first tweet was written 18 months ago.
Today, we read in a Nurun (a global presence marketing & communication company) report (report available in spanish) that Solaiemes is the 4th spanish most "conversational" brand in Twitter. Of course we are not leading by number of followers (about 300, more or less as following but not symetrica at all) or number of tweets, mere activity, we are happy because we are well positioned just where we need, conversation.
We used Twitter to announce products, our blog posts, our slideshare keynotes, and try to generate debates. We could create conversation with analysts, other start-up's, potential partners and costumers, communication managers of very nice companies able to provide feedback, where we suppose cold door email will never work, it seems tweeter is not a cold door if used properly, with non invasive style.
Of course we are aware that we should keep posting, creating presentations to share producs ot views, shooting video-demos of our portfolio, being at Facebook & Linkedin and of course, we need to update the website (be patient), but...Twitter becomes the circle around the communication strategy, and we recommend start-up's to use it, learning slowly but avoiding the risk of being considered spammer, or just 1 way emitter and use it to announce new info available in the other social or corporate communications channels.

Thanks Twitter for your help and thanks Nurun to just seeing us in the middle of so many brands using Twitter.

What about including Push to Talk in RCS ?

When talking about RCS (Rich Communication Suite) current features are Presence, Instant Messaging, VideoShare (enriched call) and file sharing...With all of them, using a "common use" a lot of applications and services could be offered on top, and Solaiemes is also working in a platform to make really easy for 3rd parties reach their customers using RCS.
But....we still miss the Push To Talk there.
Half duplex VoIP could be a great enabler for user generated content (UGC) to social media, voice alerts, and voice updates from social media and CRM universes.
Being triggered from the enhanced phonebook, Push To Talk is the missing feature to ensure the RCS success and complete the types of media directly reaching the web world from mobiles. PTT deserves a second chance to show its potential, more focused to subscriber <-> solution use cases system rather than subscriber <-> subscriber use case.

Come on !!! GSMA people...for mobility's sake, let's include PTT in the RCS specs !!!