One of my earliest Ingk Labs spinoffs was sold this week. InstantService was acquired by ATG (NASDAQ: ARTG) and will be merged with their growing suite of enterprise e-commerce services.

Upon debuting InstantService, I recall AT&T, IBM and Motorola asserting, “We believe our customers prefer to [disconnect from what was then mostly dial-up and] call us in our call centers. And chatting is free.” ~ [ palmface ]

My how times change — they are all customers today and InstantService continued to grow through the dot-com collapse and our ongoing recession. As it turns out, customer support is among the last services that corporations consider on the recession chopping block. Sony reduced phone use by 50% and achieved over 90% customer approval. McAfee now handles 80% of all support through InstantService chat, cutting average wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds and reducing support costs by 86%. At Ingk Labs, we call this an experiment in recession-proof technology.

http://bit.ly/isartg2

Posted via email from Damion’s posterous

Dan Bricklin

I was just 9 when VisiCalc debuted, but already engrossed in computing at the offices of my dads (one director of pharmacology, the other an accountant/entrepreneur). Both had impressive systems in their respective labs/offices, and both used VisiCalc. Our first home computer, a Tandy Model 4, was bundled with pfs:file, ScriptsIT word processor, and VisiCalc for around $4,000 ($99 for VisiCalc).

Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet, is presenting tomorrow (Tuesday) at the New York Tech Meetup. If I weren’t ensconced on Lake Lucerne for two more weeks of slinging code in the North Woods, I wouldn’t miss it — http://bit.ly/Tziks

He based this conclusion on just two data points: rapid Internet adoption (1990s) and dial-up-to-broadband switchover (2000s) have both petered out.  Only the irretrievably lazy would buy into this crap.

When did investment upside get tied exclusively to broadband growth?  By that measure, television must be a horrid business to get into – you know, ’cause everyone already has a TV.  ~  [ eye roll ]

Let’s briefly consider some further data.  The largest year-over-year rise in broadband subscription growth added 11 million households.  Perhaps impressive, on the surface.  I can fathom this used as supporting evidence for an investment in 2003-2005, but it is hardly the industry-wide bellwhether for Internet startup potential that Dear VC is pitching.  Oh if it were only that simple (minded).

How many new users first venture onto the Internet each year?  Annual United States births have risen to 4.29 million, ranking 137th worldwide.  International growth is even higher, yet US births alone accounted for 1/4 of the largest broadband spike in Dear VC’s data set.  By the nature of the world they enter, Millennials use technology at higher rates than previous generations (2007, Junco and Mastrodicasa). They’re characterized as goal-oriented with a desire to make a difference, a need for immediate communication (SMS, chat, email), and access to the Internet everywhere – not merely from their home broadband connection.  Startups need to build tools that Internet users want to use.   Empower them to achieve their goals and your success will have little if any correlation to broadband growth (or cement).

If a business can’t find a market amongst tens of millions of new customers arriving every year, it wouldn’t likely have survived during a broadband boom.  Who is this genius* venture capitalist? Entrepreneurs would do well to avoid him.

Opera, the formerly innovative, long since fledgling Norwegian browser minter, has a new big idea… so big they claim to have “reinvented the web.“  ~  [ chuckle ]

Opera Unite bundles the company’s browser with a server – allowing any computer to serve content without need for third-party servers. Marketing terms this “cutting out the middleman.”  You know, because supposedly he’s doing such a ghastly inefficient job of it.  Let’s not get bogged down in technical details: Opera is a seriously lame browser that next-to-no-one cares about, which accounts for its struggle to retain a 0.7% market share.  This isn’t an innovation in client/server technology or personal publishing. Server application bundles and collaboration tools have been freely available for over a decade.  And let’s face it – anyone likely to try Unite has been using something else rather successfully.

Still, Opera clearly has great aspirations for Unite’s “revolutionary potential.”  I’m curious how far they thought this out whilst busily reinventing an unremarkable web server, and how Unite fits into the company’s Environmental Policy:

Opera Software ASA understands the importance of supporting the environment. For this reason, Opera has adopted an environmental policy to indite the Company’s mission in preventing any environmental impact of its activities. Opera shall:

1. Act according to environmental laws to limit the environmental burden on earth, air, water and ecosystem.
2. Commit to using environmentally safe products in the workplace.
3. Educate staff about company environmental regulations.
4. Evaluate the consumption of energy and other resources to determine means of control.
5. Ensure the development of environmental protective procedures.

Consider what happens if they gain the traction they’re after; Millions of home computers always on – each consuming 120 watts/hr – endlessly waiting to serve content to few who are interested. And in most cases, serving through an upload connection incapable of supporting more than a smattering of visitors. Sounds too clever by half, if not two steps backward to an era of irresponsible power waste. Haven’t we already turned that corner?

Shamembarassing.

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.