Four NYU/Courant students are busy correcting a disturbance in The Force.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy stopped talking about the privacy shenanigans of dominant social networks and started building a better decentralized solution: Diaspora.

Their timing couldn’t be more prescient — The Social Network, a Scott Rudin/Kevin Spacey produced movie (IMDb) releasing in October based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, sheds light on the real genesis of Facebook — and it ain’t pretty:

There’s your deadline, Diaspora.

Charlie O’Donnell from First Round Capital offers an intriguing path forward.  Ping me if you need bitchin IP strategy/defense — I’ve yet to lose an IP battle and for your cause I’ll do it for free.

• Full-screen browsing (see settings)
• Dial-pad start page for quickly opening sites
• Find-in-page searching
• Site compression (a band-aid solution for AT&T’s crap 3G network)

I’ve run across many first-time users complaining about the default Opera interface and all of its flourishes, but I’m guessing they didn’t bother to poke around to discover the unique features the app offers.  A simple tweak in the browser’s settings (the crescent wrench button) allows toggling full-screen browsing!  For that alone, I’ll discard Safari, but there’s more…

Browsed pages are compressed by Opera servers before being sent to your phone for decompressed display, thus achieving faster browsing — it appears notably faster than using Safari over 3G and Opera reports an average compression of 63.6% (peaking at 90%).

Opera’s server-side compression system is mentioned as a feature of both WinMo Mobile and Mini, but implemented differently — Mini uses compression automatically and Mobile requires the Opera Turbo Add-on:

Using Opera to browse the Web with your mobile phone can save you money on your phone bills, by reducing your data usage substantially. Opera Mini uses only a tenth of the bandwidth of other browsers, compressing Web pages by up to 90%. On Opera Mobile, turning on Opera Turbo compresses data up to 80% or leave Opera Turbo off to get full Web site data, as you would on a PC.

Opera Turbo Add-on:
http://www.opera.com/business/solutions/turbo/

Opera Flash Add-on: psych!

See ya in Trash Bin Hell Safari.

I have a theory that Nordstrom culture informs Amazon.com’s excellent service, but no matter the venue, customers expect prompt and effective support. Never before has competitive advantage in the contact center held more relevance as economic woes mount and eCommerce tramples retail sales (the sad green line):

Companies have to accomplish more with less as evermore consumers seek online savings and competition for their attention intensifies. They need solutions to boost productivity. New insights on the efficiency of text-based communications in the contact center are revealed in an InstantService white paper.  Most notable are the needs for a unified console for chat/email to enable automation wherever possible, and separating text from other communication channels to capitalize on the unique text skill set required.

A properly designed console allows support agents to access information from any application without switching between screens. Anything from CRM, ticket and order management to knowledge base systems and SaaS offerings neatly tie into a unified console.

The unified approach reduces contact center handle time per incident, allowing agents to manage more simultaneous sessions with greater effectiveness.  Abracadabra – increased productivity leads to huge cost savings across the board:

• Reduce handling time
• Spiegel response time fell from 36 to 5.5 hours, less than half the industry standard

• More capacity
• Charter Communications grew from handling 80K to over 300K chats per month

• Decrease expenses
• McAfee cut wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds, reducing costs by 86%

Further details can be found in InstantService’s white paper available here.