Tucows is a proud sponsor of this evening’s CaseCamp Toronto 7. Hundreds of folks from Toronto’s digital marketing, social media, and communications community have signed up (on the wiki and/or the Facebook group) to attend. Tonight, our very own Bill Sweetman will be on stage to talk about the Tucows domain name portfolio to this group of digital gurus.

The action for this free communications and social media unconference gets started at 6:00 p.m. The event starts with networking and interactive art in the bar, followed by four 15 minute case-study presentations from the good people at TD Canada Trust, RedFlagDeals.com, Story2Oh!, and the Hospital for Sick Children.

Happy Friday faithful readers! Spring appears to have finally sprung here at Tucows HQ in Toronto (at least most of the snow has melted).

One of the most important parts of my job is finding and keeping talented people. Right now, I’m looking for a Marketing Manager to join the herd. This might just be one of the best digital marketing jobs in Canada.

Here’s the pitch:

As our Marketing Manager, you’ll get to come to work every day with a bunch of bright, passionate people who are really smart about the Internet and good at what they do. You’ll apply your creativity and innovative ideas to design, implement and manage our marketing programs. You’ll never hear, “but we’ve always done it THIS way” at Tucows. In fact, we want you to blaze a trail. It’ll be your job to deliver email marketing, promotions, retention/acquisition campaigns, search engine marketing & optimization and to manage media and analytics. We’re one of Canada’s oldest Internet companies. As a wholesale Internet services provider, we offer domain names, SSL certificates and email to our resellers (thousands of web hosting companies and ISPs around the world). At Tucows, we believe the Internet is the greatest agent for positive change world has ever seen. We know that people find the Internet complex and confusing, so our work is to make things simple and reliable. We’re big on innovation and creativity and believe it is found in every employee, customer and partner we have. And finally, we know that through teamwork we can achieve remarkable things.

If this sounds like your dream job, cruise on over to our Careers site to read all the details of the job and drop us your resume. If you’d like to learn more, drop me a note and we’ll connect for a chat.

Tomorrow is the night for the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner. As of this writing, there were seven spots left. If you’re into networking with a bunch of women who are passionate about technology, head on over to the wiki and sign up. I’m looking forward to seeing some of my girl geek buddies for the first time this year and hearing about what they’re up to so far in 2008. The featured speaker tomorrow night is Malgosia Green, co-founder of Savvica, an online teaching and learning company. Malgosia will share her perspective on entrepreneurship and using web tools to further goals in education and training.

The Mad Cows, our Dragon Boat team was in action at the 13th Annual GWN Dragon Boat Challenge this past weekend. Here are reports from team members Sheilagh Rennie and Maria Estepa, who are account managers here at Tucows:

Sheilagh writes:

On Saturday September 8th, the Tucows “Mad Cows” took part in our first Dragon Boat tournament. The event played host to over 5,000 participants and 20,000 spectators. Our team was racing in support of Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Toronto and we raised over $1,000 for the cause. The Mad Cows took part in 4 races: 2 on Saturday and 2 on Sunday. Sunday proved to be our better day, although we got off to a rocky start in our morning race. Our final standing was 3rd in our division, which we thought was quite an accomplishment for a beginner team which unfortunately did not get as much practice as we would have liked. Everyone had a great time and many family members and friends came out to support us. Most importantly, the Mad Cows stood out to others as a team with great spirit: our Tucows chants and our mooing could be heard from miles away! Thanks to everyone who came out to support us and for those who participated. I’m looking forward to racing again next year!

Maria writes:

As a first timer of Dragon Boat racing I found the experience to be quite exciting. Considering we had only minimal practice and only 1 or 2 experienced paddlers, we gave it our all and fared well against the competition. The victory in my eyes was us successfully finishing the race with lots of team spirit even though it included no gold medal. All weekend we laughed, practiced, ate, drank and mooed together like a herd of cows. We made up a wonderful chant that got us looks from different teams but we paid no attention. Saturday’s weather was wonderful and some of us got to enjoy the sun by sitting outside of our tent, walking around or playing volleyball in a circle. Unfortunately Sunday morning weather was muggy and drizzling with rain but we conquered it and managed to still paddle our hardest in the cold damp weather. All in all a fun experience and I’d be more than happy to try again next year! Thanks to Adam and Donna our team captains for making it happen.

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p align=”center”> Go Mad Cows Go! The Tucows dragon boaters.

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p align=”center”> The Mad Cows at practice. Look at those happy smiling faces!

In June, I attended the inaugural Toronto Girl Geek Dinner. Over thirty women in Toronto technology gathered to connect, share ideas and hear guest speaker Sandy Kemsley. When I returned from the event I was buzzing from exposure to so many passionate women from the Toronto technology community coming together in one place. It made for an outstanding night.

The idea for Girl Geek Dinners started in London and was brought to Toronto by social media dynamo, Maggie Fox. Providing a welcoming atmosphere to make technology accessible and interesting to everyone, particularly women makes a lot of sense to us, so we decided to sponsor the second Toronto Girl Geek Dinner on September 19. The speaker for the dinner is Leila Boujnane, CEO of Idée Inc. - who like us is passionate about technology and the potential of the ‘net.

For more details about the event, visit the official Toronto Girl Geek Dinner blog. To sign up, please visit the wiki. Students take note, there are 25 sponsored spots for female students to attend, network, mingle, connect, and of course, enjoy a nice meal!

Thanks to Rosie Sherry of the Brighton Girl Geek Dinners for sharing her awesome logo.

Our President and CEO, Elliot Noss is at Supernova 2007 in San Francisco this week. Yesterday, he participated in a panel discussion titled “Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy?” along with Ge Jin, Max Levchin, Andrea Matwyshyn and Ellen Siminoff.

Reaction to the discussion is starting to appear around the web:

The Supernova Conversation Hub has a great set of session notes to give you a flavour of what was discussed. Read about it here.

Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls also attended the session and shared some thoughts on his blog.

We'll keep an eye out for anything else that might continue the conversation started at Supernova 2007.

photo:  Supernova 2007 uploaded by JasonDeFillippo

It was standing room only for this session. In what has become an ISPCON tradition, Mike Cassidy (site) (blog) a marketing consultant for service providers, presented the hottest products and services for 2007. Mike’s Advice: - not every VAS is applicable to every type of ISP - establish your role, take advantage of your role, but never abuse it - know your customer base - create communication channels - increase your bottom line with new services - survey your customer base quarterly - stay current on new product/services available Opportunity for support services: For those ISP who market to home network owners and intenders, consider wireless print server capability, parental controls, automatic backup and central storage. Broadband adoption leads to home networks. Understanding the appetite for broadband, the market for consumer support services will continue to grow. On the small business side there’s an opportunity gap for support. Consumers are supported by the likes of Dell and the Geek Squad. Large enterprise customers are serviced by tier 1 ISPs. There are 80 million SMBs worldwide. According to Gartner, IT spending by SMBs will outpace large enterprises in 2007. Mike advised ISPs to create long-term contracts with SMBs and use support/IT guys as a sales channel. Many providers are providing incentives for IT staff to sell product in the field. Onsite support is profitable value-added service. Geeks on Call (and the like) cannot handle networks, security and support. It presents a great customer loyalty builder and allows ISPs to charge over cost. People pay plumbers and mechanics $100/hour to fix things, they’ll pay you for support. The trends: Software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0, Office 2.0 - whatever you want to call it is here. With it come new opportunities for email, web mail, CRM, ecommerce, billing, CMS workflow, human resources, SEM… the list goes on. What’s different is SaaS is now a proven business model - Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are a couple of examples. Business customers are becoming accustomed to outsourcing all of their IT. Storage and/or backup of personal content (photos, videos, movies and music) for the consumer market. People have a small fortune on their computers in music purchased from iTunes. Losing your music sucks. Not to mention all your digital pictures and home movies. According to Parks and Associates, 84% of consumer have digital pictures on their PC. Home and SMB security and surveillance. The product offerings may be new, but the concept certainly isn’t. There are a few products floating around out there that allow users to keep an eye on the kids, the elderly, the vacation home, and everything. The elder care market alone is huge. Cameras use wireless or homeplug connections. Some services are offering SMS/email alerts from systems; video clip to phone options and door/window sensors. Bell South and Adelphia, for example, have been offering security and surveillance solutions for almost a year. Digital/Connected Home/Networking/Automation. The home appliances of the 21st century are here - they are smart devices that simplify, automate and inform. Internet products are being used to control specific home applications like lighting, entertainment, home monitoring, PCs are more. Today’s digital homes open vast possibilities for new consumer solutions. Advertising. There are now products available for most ISPs to share in online advertising revenues. Some are intrusive, some are not. As ISPs, you are the conduit to the holy grail in the online advertising world - “behavioural” and “contextual” marketing. ISPs have never been cut into the pie, until very recently. VoIP. From Mike’s presentation: “new converged infrastructres that allow voice and data to be transported over a single network are changing the face of business communications. By adbandoning expensive circuit switches and leaded lines and linking voice and data servies together on IP networks, business can realize cost savings. Rather than implementing IP telephony in-house, many businesses prefer to have their voice services managed by a qualified service provider who have the expertise to handle its complex nature. Interest in out-tasking managed business voice services is steadily increasing as organizations take note of the cost and operations benefits. Service providers can provision, monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot business voice infrastructures.” VoIP is creating a huge distruption in telecom as conventional PBXs are approaching end-of-life. The opportunity is to make the small business customer comfortable and make it work for them. The SMB VoIp is starting to hear but decision markers still don’t know which providers to turn to.

Dane Jasper, CEO, Sonic.net Jonathan Snyder, president, CEO and director, KeyOn Communications Dan Hoffman, president and CEO, M5 Networks Rich Bader, president and CEO, EasyStreet Online Services Moderator: Paul Stapleton, managing director, DH Capital LLC. What is your go-to-market plan? How are you reaching your customer base? Jasper: We deliver products at a commodity price-point that appeal to “prosumer” customers who are recommenders. We also take very good care of our customers. Good customer service surprises and impresses end-users and that leads to more customers. Snyder: Since no-one knows who KeyOn is, we are very gorrila in our approach. Our focus is on agents and resellers. We also do things in our communities through our customer base. If you provide a good, reliable service you customers are best sales force. We keep it very simple. Our product is a mass product, the core of the strategy is to keep very localized and augment with a local presence in the market, which a lot of the incumbents don’t have. Hoffman: It is easier to build an identity in a community rather than create a brand nationally. We use public relations to try and get to influencers when they make decisions. We target key tech publications thru PR and it is very cost-effective. Our sales teams are selling trust. That trust is first created by a sales person who is honest, candid and knowledgeable. I agree with the comments about deliverying great service so you have references. Bader: We look to our customers to generate leads, especially in the consumer business. When we switched our focus to the enterprise market we had to do more to cultivate our own leads and relationships. IT managers are hard to reach so sponsored events and try to find them. We host seminars, events and work with community organizations. We try and plant our positioning in minds but not do a hard sell. We do find they calling us. We also have a direct sales force. Where are you spending money and making investments? Jasper: We need to invest in all sectors of our business. A large portion of our revenue is DSL products and the regulatory uncertainty is a little scary. So we’re investing in diversification while also entrenching deeper. We’re expecting growth and investing resources in partnerships. Snyder: These days that capital is being spent on break-fix and making networks more reliable. We’re really staying core to the network focus and spending where we have to increase reliability. We’re acquiring businesses and adding to our network footprint. Hoffman - Our focus is business and the phones have to run reliability. It is horrible to have phones down across the client base. After our investment in reliability, we’re looking at sales and marketing expansion. Spend a lot on people and knowledge management. Because we’re in New York, recruiting costs and labour costs going up. We’re opening up in Chicago and Boston. Our focus is technology we need to move ahead of curve by focusing on vertical industries and build technology around our core phone system. Bader: Recently invested about in our facilities and expanded our data centre to improve curb appeal. Our customers come and visit the data centre and it looks like a special place. Now we’re working to fill the data centre - by end of next year our new expanded space should be full. Also placing investment on scaling system and processes. Our customers are looking for us to reliably manage their gear. Change control and management is a lot of what needs to be done. We’re investing in systems to help customers set up and provision, enlarge and maintain. We’re becoming more of an IT shop. How is the wind blowing? Jasper: We’re very optimistic, but concernsed about the regulatory environment. The technology is maturing and the access space is growing rapidly. Snyder: Telecom is coming back - equipment costs are coming down and there’s an appetite for these products all over again. That makes it exciting and challenging because there are other things on the horizon you have to pay attention to. Each of us has an amazing focus on our respective business. Our business focus is that it is the product that makes us successful. Bader: So many companies are technology and product oriented instead focused on customer. Ask the customer what services they want and have enough variability in the people to be able to deliver the services they want. Jasper: Customers understand technology better and IT awareness has risen. It makes selling easier. Snyder: We see drafting - as big companies create awareness of broadband and wireless, we benefit because now it is a product you can’t live without. What’s your best idea for someone entering the ISP business today? Jasper: Today, people need to develop an understanding of various sectors, the silos that Internet Service has become - hosting, VOIP, Internet Service and Access. People need to understand what’s happened and ook at economics of today. Look at what the market place looks like and the benefits of tech changes and ebay-driven equipment marketing. Tech costs a fraction of what it did 5 years ago. It is a little bit difficult sometimes. Many of us started out as Internet providers in the mid-90s. Spent so much time dealing with challenges now is the time to set aside assumptions. Bader: Explore key trends and then apply them to your expertise. For example the SaaS trend means IT technology is more important to every organization. Most struggle and can’t rely on themsleves. Hosting services is one of the answers. Find a customer base, find a platform and a way to deliver service. Another trend is open source, every VAR is scared to death of open source. We know how to make money with free software and deploy for client. Take advantage of open source. The big boys are investing heavily. It is a big opportunity. Hoffman: Picking up on SaaS; access is a new business relative to most business. All bandwidth is not created equal. Offer differentiated bandwidth products; from a provider that does a good job optimizing for VOIP, network performance. It is not anywhere on the market and is a huge opportunity. Snyder: We see incredible, insatiable use of our access. Our bandwidth costs are rising. Usage patterns have fundamentally changed. There’s perpetual streaming. It is growing and a huge opportunity to provide services to the end consumer who is going to use that bandwidth. Bader: You gotta figure out how to take advantage of the assets you’ve got and move them forward. That’s what this show is all about. If your goal is to maximize value and grow business; this show is where to figure out what to do next.

Here’s the low-down on the session from the show guide:

The web hosting industry is undergoing a shift. For the past decade, web hosts and ISPs have focused on marketing technology features such as storage space and bandwidth. But increasingly, service providers are emphasizing their ability to support end-user-centric functions such as messaging and collaboration. Hosted applications and software as a service (SaaS), give web hosts unprecedented opportunities to enhance profitability and improve the rate of customer retention. With these opportunities come marketing, implementation and legal issues.

Isabel Wang identified trends and David Snead provided legal advice. Unfortunately, the session didn’t touch marketing or implementation. The rise of ecosystems (where developers work seamlessly together through open APIs - for example the 400+ third-party products on SalesForce.com’s AppExchange) present opportunities for web hosting companies to offer a range of third-party products without expending resources on technology integration. These third-party products can improve customer experience and can reduce churn. Of course, setting up this kind of relationship presents some legal challenges. David provided some questions to consider: - Who owns what? - What is the ultimate goal? - How will new inventions and derivative works be owned? - Does money count more than work? - Who owns customers? - Do non-compete/non-solicitations work?

Isabel called out new business models in hosting like Amazon S3 storage and EC2 utility computing and ServePath’s grid hosting sold per RAM/hour. She raised some interesting questions. According to Tier 1 Research, Internet traffic doubles each year. If that is the case, will bandwidth overselling be sustainable in the long run? Is the traditional bandwidth + disk space combination the most profitable way to monetize your data centre and hardware investments? Socialtext, for example, charges $95/month for a 10GB wiki. David suggested service providers ponder these questions when considering a new business model: - Do your current contracts work in the context of a new business model or offering? - Do you need an SLA to guarantee 100% uptime? - How will you police conduct? - Does the new offering put you in conflict with your vendors, i.e bandwidth providers?

Personalization and data aggregation is another area of emerging opportunities where hosting companies are making progress, said Isabel. She cited the automated recommendations based on browsing activity (a la Amazon) and called our FreshBooks a service that lets you benchmark by comparing your financial performance to the industry average. Some of her ideas, to applying these concepts to the hosting business - provide tagging capabilities so users can classify their website; allow customers to create wishlist or rate equipment within their accounts. David called out the privacy issues that can result from capturing personal data and marketing to people based on their web habits. Data aggration makes hosts information providers. While it is a great business opportunity, web hosting companies need to think about their business is in a different way. They need do lots of front-end analysis and homework, or they may end up in hot water. Consider privacy from the viewpoint of the customer. What is the expectation of privacy? What is the end-user’s expectation of privacy?

The shift to managing data versus infrastructure means that customers will expect your SaaS to work, and their data to be safe. As hosting evolves, customers will hold their service provider responsible for generating incremental business, according research from Tier 1. The implications - the closer you are to customer data, the higher your potential profit. However, the expectations of customer are rising. Redundancy is taken for granted, hosting providers will face greater responsibility for record keeping, and hardware failure could mean bigger trouble than lost revenue. Meeting customer expectation, says David, is the key issue in limiting legal liability. Data back-up and transparency and owning up to problems are crucial. Your legal documents need to be designed around your business. Work with lawyers who understand your business, the risks and your tolerance for risk. By adding new value-added services, web hosts and ISPs start to manipulate data and therefore assume responsibility for data.

The recap, the shift in web hosting services means: - New contract issues - Data retention is high risk - Conduit status may be affected - Pay attention to intellectual property

As a Tucows newbie, I’m at ISPCON to soak up insights about the industry, meet our partners and pick up on trends. The Hotshows in Hosting session was an interactive round-table featuring perspective from: - Christian Dawson, director, corporate development, ServInt Internet Services - Will Charnock, vice president, technology, EV1 Servers/The Planet - Christopher Faulkner, founder, president & CEO, C I Host - Ted Smith, vice president, dedicated hosting, Peer 1 Networks Moderated the by Candice Rodriguez from Web Host Industry Review, the panel focused largely on how these companies became leaders in web hosting. Tell us how you became ” hotshots” in hosting? Dawson: For ServInt, our success is completely shaped by earlier failures. We started with core dedicated server business and then built a backbone network. Next we built a content distribution network. Then we built a DSL arm. Eventually, we realized we were getting fairly big and disparate and it was difficult to keep the beast together. We found we were slipping away from what gave us early success in the business. After the bubble burst, we realized we had many arms that didn’t relate to our core business. We ended up chopping off the arms and scaling down. We returned to the roots of how a small company gets business: by exciting people about the product you have and the service you offer. We talk about what makes our service different and customers tell their friends. Our central focus is organic growth. We’re doing it the old school way. Charnock: The success we’ve enjoyed has been viral in nature. We set out to build a solid, affordable service. Our customers ask: “How can you do it so cheaply?” We don’t spend thousands of dollars advertising. Our growth has been organic in nature. Organic growth is the engine for sales. Our primary sales experience is the in-bound sales call. We rely on our customers to relay the message about what a great product/service they’re getting. We look at incentives and referral programs, but there’s nothing more powerful in this industry right now than word-of-mouth. The community is very clique-ish. Focus on pleasing your customers, the word will get out and you’ll experience some growth. Faulkner: Forty per cent of our sign-ups last month were via word-of-mouth. We do of outbound marketing via telemarketing - to small business lists, new corporation sign-ups, sales tax permits. Everyone needs a web site these days. We also market using our network of resellers. Our resellers’s customers call in and speak of one of our agents as if they were speaking to the reseller. We manage back-end support/technical support for our customers. This allows customers to focus on sales. Slow and steady, managed growth pays off in the long run. Smith: We’ve been successful when we try and work the customer’s desired solution into a more supportable environment for our support team. Where we can partner and if the customer is willing to talk, we can garner commitment. What specific tactics and marketing have you used? Dawson: We don’t spent a lot of money on marketing – no print, radio. We run a few banners. The number one thing you can do is get executives into popular formus, like webhostingtalk.com. Lots of people who hang out there are looking for what it is you’re offering. Become part of the community - answer questions, ask questions. You don’t need to give everyone your secret sauce, but there are ways to ingratiate yourself to the community. It is all about trust these days in the industry. Charnock: Let your product speak for itself. Stay engaged with the customers you have, so you can build trust. Most customers don’t want to deal with a nameless, faceless entity. Make your customer feel like they are the most important customer you have. As you grow, it is a challenge to give that personal touch and scale the business. It is important to make sure that you’re out there involved in the community. From the marketing side, I’m don’t think there’s a magic bullet. It varies from company to company and a lot of times you have to explore what you want to do with your product. Faulkner: I’m a true believer in specific targeted marketing as web hosting is crowded and competitive. Take a look at very specialized markets - build packages and services around a specific niche (i.e. lawyers, doctors). You can use public relations to position yourself as an expert in topics and industries. There’s also that fear factor, especially the small business owner who doesn’t understand [web hosting] and wants to align with someone who knows what they are doing. For the last 10 years we’ve tried every kind of advertising (tv, print, radio). It doesn’t work. If you’re big enough to build the brand, great. Put the money where the clients are – brand isn’t worth anything if you don’t have any customers. Faulkner on publicity stunts [background: CI Host got buzz a few years back when they sponsored Jim Nelson to tattoo the company logo on the back of his head.]: It [the stunt] was money well spent in terms of our name. Lots of people forget what is was all about, but it did brand our name in people’s brains. Stunts work when coupled with other things. Although, you should be careful not to associate yourself with a weird negative event, i.e. the risk of sponsoring the birth of child. We sponsored Evander Holyfield having our logo on the back of boxing trunks. We could have got a lot of negative buzz from that, fortunately he went the distance. You have to be creative. Don’t do anything twice. The cool things about stunts is that they create longevity. Reporters and people still talk about it, five years later. Grass roots and publicity stunts can be affordable and effective. Smith: For us, about half of our monthly sales come from existing customers. Don’t forget about your home-grown market. Big spends don’t equate to new accounts. Charnock: Focus on existing customers; they grow and you want to grow with them. Dawson: Give customers an avenue to grow. Allow them to buy more services at the click of a button. Faulkner: Most customers have multiple vendors. They don’t know about your other services. We have a life-cycle program where we contact customers about their growth and success. It is very important to have some sort of life-cycle program, where you ask: “Hey how do you like services?” and you can ensure you fit their needs. Making them feel like you’re a partner in their success is very important. The customer thinks: “I can stay here and grow here. They care about me, and not just the fact I give them 100 bucks a month on the credit card.” Dawson: We use internal forums open only to customers. They talk about their experiences, ask questions and tell us if we drop the ball. We communicate with customers there, but more importantly they communicate with each other. For example, a customer might need a system admin to fill in for a weekend, or they have PHP script that’s giving them tough time. All of a sudden your hosting company is also a killer resource for these individuals. They feel like they’re part of a community. We’re also building a wiki with FAQs to teach customers to use services we provide. It allows customers to collobarorate, contribute. Use your web tools. Charnock: Our active forum community is open. Customers appreciate they aren’t censored and their complaints are addressed. The idea of participating in online community is very valid. It may morph into a social network. We don’t know how it’ll transform. It is one of the ideas we are kicking around. We do have active users on forums who are not our customers. Our forums help build engagement with customer base. We’re putting it out there. We’re participating. We reply to customers who may have concerns. We get good ideas. It is a great place to mine customers for information. It goes to building a stronger bond with customers. Customers like to know you’re listening and if they see results from the input it builds the bond. What works best for the call to action in marketing? Charnock: Don’t do anything that devalues your product (i.e. give it away for free). Coupling with promos is a good idea. Faulkner: It is a crowded space. The issue when you give away too much is a lot of people have a get-what-you-pay-for syndrome. “I want bang for the buck, but I don’t want K-mart hosting.” I like free value-adds – something small, where the value is increased but the price stays the same. You have to realize the type of customer you’re going to attract with discounting. They’ll cost you a lot of support, and are price conscious shoppers who won’t stay. It means wasted time, money and effort. It is best to show value to the business owner – free seminar, free book, file corporation papers for free. You want a hook – be careful, who you’re trying to attract. Dawson: My favourite promo is to “pay moving costs” and offer 10 days free. Charnock: The offer should be complimentary - free domain with a server. It should be complimentary to the product you’re trying to sell the customer. Dawson: We’ve done fun give-aways like disposable cameras with the message: go on vacation, we’ve got you covered. Smith: It is important to drive traffic to your site. Give-aways work, i.e. iPod. They can be done well. Do a variety things, not everything will get customers. Charnock: Run a zero set-up special. It is an effective away to get customers to go ahead and push the buy button and not be dinged 200 bucks to try the service. What about competition and the rise of alternate business models from competitors outside the space? Smith: Amazon’s S3 new storage offering is a big deal. It is the ability to load content and securely distribute based on storage and transfer. Charnock: With services like Amazon’s EC2, the proof will be determined over next few quarters. It is a potentially disruptive technology to some of us up here. Ultimately Amazon has a big trust bridge to build with customers. How comfortable will they be? Can they ensure data being backed up? What’s the infrastructure looking like? Will change how we look at future products? We don’t want to get caught off guard, so we’ll keep a close eye on it. It may change some things. Faulkner – A lot of companies think hosting has the connotation of a cash cow. On the flip-side it is a resource cow and not as easy as a lot of folks think. These new services create an additional pipeline for customers coming in who need a web host. They create catapulting effect. Amazon’s technology and all their different revenue streams means their competency is not in web hosting. Unless they have extremely disruptive technology, a lot of times these companies create market awareness and additional revenue streams for us. Charnock: A lot of companies might work starting out but may not scale. Time will tell if this is something that’s got legs. Dawson: Even if it is great, we can adapt and move. The importance is not tech innovations but service innovations.