iLinc Layoffs Sales!!!

iLinc lays off sales team!!!

The writing was on the wall as iLinc deregistered from the stock exchange on Feb 13th. iLinc has officially laid off a large portion of their sales force! iLinc has approximately 80 employees but the actual number of those laid off has not been confirmed.

Not sure if and when the company will officially close its door but I can only imagine that the investors and shareholders have lost all their investments. The stock last traded at $0.08 share before deregistering and Return on Equity was almost (-90%.)

It's unfortunate to see any company go through layoffs and under these tough economic times, it's clear that iLinc could not whether the storm...all the more reason why partnering with companies that are financially stable, have a proven management team, own the intellectual property on theie technology and have a strong and loyal customer base.

The iLinc layoff is no surprise. A moment of silence please...(5 seconds later)

Okay, everyone back to business!

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Sales 2.0 Conference 2009

Yesterday I attended day 1of the Sales 2.0 Conference 2009 in San Francisco hosted by Gerhard Gschwandtner: Founder and CEO of Selling Power Inc and David Thompson: Founder and CEO of Genius.com Inc.

The focus of the conference was, "How to Accelerate Sales in a Slow Economy." Most of the speakers stressed that the most successful companies in a down economy are the companies that are deploying the right strategy and using the right tools to win more deals.

Though at times I felt like I was sitting through sales pitches, the point was to demonstrate companies that are moving forward are those that invested in Web 2.0 applications which provided visibility, data analytics, improve lead management and sales effectiveness while decreasing costs and enhancing the customer experience. A list of some of the companies covered are listed below.

Featured Sponsors and Web 2.0 Technologies:

• ConnectandSell: call management and automated appointment setting for sales prospecting
• Genius.com: email marketing and marketing automation
• InsideView: sales intelligence application
• SalesGenie: sales list and email list management
• Xactly: sales performance management and analytics
• Hoovers: contact, company, prospecting database
• Miller Heiman: sales training: strategic selling
• Ribbitt: voice to text conversion, integrated with Salesforce.com
• LucidEra: on-demand sales analysis and reports
• JigSaw: contact management database
• Holden International: sales training: power base selling
• Xobni: Outlook plug-in for email management. One of my personal favorite applications out there today.
• Selling Power: publication
• Birst: business intelligence and reporting
• Marketo: email marketing and marketing automation

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Federal Gov't Invests $13.8M in Telepresence

The Federal Department of Finance in Australia will deploy 20 Telepresence units: 13, 3-screen CTS 3000's (USD: $299,000) and seven single screen CTS 1000's (USD: $59,000) to link seven Commonwealth offices, Prime Minister and Cabinet Offices and the offices of Premiers and Chief Minister agencies in every state and territory.

This is the largest Government deployment of Cisco Telepresence in the world to date.

On the assumption that an average business class domestic flight costs around $700 (with flexible business class fares in Australia ranging from $300 to up to $2000), the system would need to enable ministers to defer travel on some 20,000 occasions before the Finance Department could calculate a direct financial benefit from the system.

Today, Cisco Systems conducts over 4,000 Telepresence meetings and the combination of Telepresence and WebEx has reduced corporate travel by more than $400M year over year. The average cost per employee for travel has also been reduced by almost 50%.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

RescueTime for Effortless Time Management

RescueTime is an great web-based application that helps you manage your time by providing real-time stats on where you are spending most of your time and which applications are you using the most. This information helps you optimize your day so you can have the most productive and efficient day possible.

To RescueTime's credit, they have been mentioned in The New York Times, Newsweek, US News, TechCrunch, PC World...and now The Web Conferencing Blog!

I have been using RescueTime for about a 1/2 year now and have found it very, very easy to use. It's typical of a web 2.0 application: easy, simple, no training needed, intuitive. I can modify and set my alerts and scoring parameters just the way I like them. For example, if I think email communication is a highly productive activity, I can assign a higher weighting to this category compared to another person who does very little email, in which case a lower weighting will be assigned. I can do this for every application that I want RescueTime to track. (Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Email, Google Searches, internal applications.)

Imagine, if you are in a sales role, how great would it be to know if your day was filled with revenue-generating activities or it was a day of Facebooking and reading articles from ESPN or CNN News. If you are in a sales role, RescueTime can tell you how much time is spent in revenue generating activites/applications: a CRM application, order entry system, email, Excel, etc. Same holds true if you are a financial analyst or in Operations...you are most likely going to be in Excel running numbers vs. a CRM, inventory tracking system, case ticket system, etc.

If you are truly looking to understand your day to day business activities, you need to try RescueTime!

There is a free personal version, as well as, a small business and enterprise version. For a team of 10 people, it's only $8.50 per person.

RescueTime Highlights:

• RescueTime scores group and individual "Efficiency" (a ratio of productive stuff vs. distracting time) and "Productivity" (a measure of the sheer volume of productive time)
• RescueTime shows total active computer time spent
• RescueTime breaks down application and site usage by category
• RescueTime gives flexibility to look at your data with tags
• Total time broken down
• Top applications and website tracking
• Unique individual scoring compared to the RescueTime community

At the end of the day, RescueTime provides me with real-time visibility on how my day is going. Simply saying, "I think I had a good day," doesn't cut it in today's competitive economy where companies are constantly looking for ways to increase employee productivity and corporate performance. If you want to be more productive, more efficient, and take your business to the next level, try RescueTime.

Click graphic to enlarge:

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Telepresence for Consumers

We all know that there is a huge market opportunity for telepresence at the enterprise level. From what I have heard, telepresence is the fastest growing product line at Cisco and John Chambers: CEO will continue to push telepresence as it's one of the top 5 corporate initiatives. In fact, John Chambers has said that his own company hosts 4,000 telepresence meetings per week!

What about the consumer market?

Is there a place for telepresence in every consumers home?

I've mentioned in past blogs that it will only be a matter of time before telepresence goes downstream and is available at the consumer level. What about those that already have an HDTV and don't want to spend extra money for telepresence? What I want to see is some sort of internet connectivity device that I can easily add on to my existing HDTV...essentially telepresence-enabling my HDTV but also providing some basic computing capabilities like a hard drive and applications.

Imagine if you were booking a vacation with a travel agent and you used your telepresence-enabled HDTV so you could see the travel agent as if you were there. Have trouble with your cable TV, well you could call a tech rep and explain the situation as if the tech rep was at your house. What if you are feeling sick? You could call your doctor with your telepresence-enabled HDTV. The doctor could even ask you to stick your tongue out and do a quick diagnosis as to if you should come into the hospital now or later.

This is all going to happen!

Surfing the internet, chatting with friends, watching internet videos from YouTube or Hulu.com, leveraging VoIP and a webcam, all from my couch and on my HDTV that's telepresence-enabled. A wireless keyboard and I'm set!

It's only a matter of time before this happens!!!

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Act On Software for e-Marketing Programs

Act-On Software is a spectacular e-marketing application that enables marketers to create and manage programs for demand generation and lead qualification while working in conjunction with WebEx Event Center, a webinar-based delivery platform solution.

With any demand generation and lead qualification system, the goal is to generate demand/leads, qualify prospects, and close deals. The challenge for marketers is that one needs to manage multiple data systems and manually transport information from one system to another system. There is zero integration across systems and there is no real-time dashboard to track and measure results easily.

Running insightful, real-time analytics is next to impossible. Seeing if the sales team has followed up on the leads never happens because there is no accountability measure in place. Spending too much time on the wrong leads is common place for sales since there is no prioritization or lead scoring in place.

Shawn Naggiar, Director of Sales and Business Development, echoed similar marketing challenges, "Prior to Act-On, advanced marketing capabilities like lead scoring and behavior tracking were only available to large corporations with huge marketing budgets. Furthermore, the systems themselves were very difficult to use and took months to implement. Act-On is demystifying these advanced marketing concepts by offering a complete solution for as little as a few hundred dollars a month, which can be up and running within minutes and requires no technical expertise. If you can surf the web, you can use Act-On."

In short, Act-On Software solves these common and tough business challenges for marketers with a turnkey and fully integrated e-marketing solution.

"When prospects see our online demo, they get very excited. The interface is so user friendly that people feel very comfortable and quickly realize how easy it is to be a better marketer using Act-On. Customers often tell us they don’t know how they ever managed their prospects and lead flow without it," stated Shawn.

Act-On Software Highlights:

• Email campaigns and email marketing
• Demand generation
• Lead nurturing
• Qualification and scoring
• Web forms
• Landing pages
• Prospect tracking
• Activity history tracking
• Website analytics
• Drill-down reporting
• Salesforce.com and WebEx Event Center integration
• Microsoft email connector

Shawn summed up the Act-On Software highlights by saying, "Internet marketing practices have created a new breed of prospect that will travel further along the sales process on their own before they are willing to engage with a salesperson. Prospects essentially self qualify themselves by responding to ad campaigns, attending webinars, visiting your website, downloading documents, opening emails and filling out forms. The key to successful lead management is being able to track and report on all of these marketing channels collectively to determine which leads are ready for sales and which require further nurturing. This is one of the key values behind the Act-On Marketing Service."

When I communicated with Act-On Software Founder and CEO, Raghu Raghavan, this is what he had to say about his company's value proposition and its position in the e-marketing space:

"We built the Act-On Marketing Service around the premise that every business with a web presence needs a lead management service. We have created an affordable service that is unusually easy to learn and to use. Our service is the only one to truly recognize that webinars are a staple of marketing departments everywhere. We have taken special care to build in tight integration with the best of breed webinar service – WebEx.

Our Cisco/WebEx Connect partnership holds huge potential for our company. With Connect, customers will get the convenience of a bundle of integrated communication and collaboration services for a single monthly fee from a trusted vendor, Cisco/WebEx. We know that every business needs marketing and sales. Connect gets our marketing and sales services in front of Cisco/WebEx’s prospects and customers with Cisco/WebEx’s implicit stamp of approval."

If your MBO's are tied to lead generation, cost per lead, market awareness or market share, the quickest way to achieve your marketing MBO's is to use Act-On Software. There is not another more powerful and complete e-marketing application that I can think of in the market today. All other solutions only offer pieces of what Act-On Software delivers.

Easy to use, tight integration, real-time analytics to measure your marketing program success.

* There is no financial compensation for this blog.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Citrix OEMs IP Technology from Global IP Solutions

About a month ago, Citrix and Global IP Solutions, a provider of IP technology, entered into a OEM license and distribution agreement to provide VoIP and PSTN audio conferencing for GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar.

I'm curious what happened to the $26.6M investment Citrix made in Nov 2008 to acquire VAPPS, a provider of VoIP solutions. From my understanding, the acquisition was made so Citrix could provide better VoIP to its customers. Was the VAPPS integration more challenging than expected? Did management opt to scrap the integration project in favor of OEMing with a VoIP provider instead? Was positioning VoIP as an audio solution hard for the Citrix sales team?

I thought the VAPPS acquisition made sense but like all acquisitions, execution and integration can be very challenging.

Global IP Solution's Voice ConferenceEngine and VoiceEngine are the two components that will be utilized by Citrix.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Mobile Meetings: WebEx on Apple's 3G iPhone

The Apple 3G iPhone now supports WebEx Meetings! This is the first device to ever support "Mobile Meetings." Leveraging Apple's 3G Network and WebEx's MediaTone Network for "Any Device Connectivity," iPhone owners can host and join WebEx meetings.

With already over 50,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and a Top 10 Business Application rating along with the "Best in Show" Award from MacWorld, WebEx on the iPhone is taking the business world by storm. (There is even a group on Facebook called "I Love WebEx on my iPhone"!!!)

Whether it's joining a WebEx meeting from your iPhone or accessing documents via WebEx Connect on your iPhone you are always connected and ready to do business.

In a recent survey conducted by the NASCIO Summit, one of the top technology priorities of CIO's is "mobile workforce enablement." WebEx on the iPhone or "Mobile Meetings," is right in line with this strategic initiative. Improved productivity, increased corporate performance, better collaboration and communication with customers, partners and colleagues.

Mobile Meetings on the iPhone Virtual Tour

Blackberry and Smartphone support is coming April 2009.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

New Adobe Reader, Acrobat Vulnerability

Hackers are targeting a zero-day vulnerability affecting Adobe Reader and Acrobat with malicious PDF files. Adobe officials say a fix for the issue will be available for Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat in the coming weeks. (This vulnerability has raised some concern of starting Adobe Connect meetings directly from PDF files.)

Hackers have once again turned to PDF files to spread their wares, this time assaulting a zero-day flaw affecting Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Fortunately, the unpatched bug is on the company’s radar, and fixes for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 are slated to be available March 11. Updates for earlier versions will come later, company officials said in an advisory.

The bug is due to an error in the parsing of certain structures in PDF files. If exploited successfully, the bug could allow a hacker to take complete control of a vulnerable system.

“In parsing a specially-crafted embedded object, a bug in the reader allowed the attacker to overwrite memory at an arbitrary location,” blogged McAfee researcher Geok Meng Ong. “The attacks, found in the field, use the infamous heap spray method via JavaScript to achieve control of code execution.”

“While the distribution of this exploit thus far appears to be targeted, new variants are expected as more information is made public,” the researcher continued. “As with the Conficker experience, the lack of good patch management is a very worrying trend that deserves more attention from IT security practitioners. Adobe is expected to release a patch very soon.”

In the meantime, security researchers at the Shadowserver Foundation recommend users consider disabling JavaScript. Symantec also recommended Adobe users keep their antivirus up-to-date.

“While we continue to investigate this issue, customers are advised to follow best practices and only open email attachments from people they trust,” blogged Symantec researcher Patrick Fitzgerald. “Enabling DEP (Data Execution Prevention) for Adobe Reader will also help prevent this type of attack.”

Brian Prince: eWeek

iLinc Deregisters from Stock Exchange

On February 13, iLinc, a provider of web conferencing services, filed paperwork with the SEC to end the company's registration under the SEC and will no longer be listed on the American Stock Exchange.

The iLinc Board of Directors concluded that the benefits of being a publically-traded company and having to report financial numbers no longer made sense and that de-registering was in the best interest of the shareholders. (Return on Equity or Shareholder Value was -89.26%!)

iLinc last traded at $0.08 per share.

Recent financial data provided by Yahoo Finance:(See below)

VALUATION MEASURES

Market Cap (intraday)5: 2.78M Enterprise Value (16-Feb-09)3: 7.47M Trailing P/E (ttm, intraday): N/A Forward P/E (fye 31-Mar-10) 1: N/A PEG Ratio (5 yr expected): N/A Price/Sales (ttm): 0.39 Price/Book (mrq): 0.71 Enterprise Value/Revenue (ttm)3: 1.04 Enterprise Value/EBITDA (ttm)3: -2.909

FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS

Fiscal Year Fiscal Year Ends: 31-Mar Most Recent Quarter (mrq): 30-Sep-08

Profitability Profit Margin (ttm): -29.70% Operating Margin (ttm): -43.39%

Management Effectiveness Return on Assets (ttm): -11.62% Return on Equity (ttm): -89.26%

Income Statement Revenue (ttm): 7.20M Revenue Per Share (ttm): 0.21 Qtrly Revenue Growth (yoy): -39.00% Gross Profit (ttm): 7.29M EBITDA (ttm): -2.57M Net Income Avl to Common (ttm): -4.69M Diluted EPS (ttm): -0.07 Qtrly Earnings Growth (yoy): N/A

Balance Sheet Total Cash (mrq): 3.32M Total Cash Per Share (mrq): 0.096 Total Debt (mrq): 8.01M Total Debt/Equity (mrq): N/A Current Ratio (mrq): 1.534 Book Value Per Share (mrq): 0.112

Cash Flow Statement
Operating Cash Flow (ttm):	-2.88M
Levered Free Cash Flow (ttm):	-1.36M

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert