I spent the second half of the week out at Al Peterson’s new talk radio conference at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort in Arizona. It was a great experience and we got a great response from the talk radio community. Jon Sinton, who is working with us to understand the industry was out here too and made a ton of great introductions.

It’s an industry in flux. Music radio is in deep weeds. Talk is somewhat better off but still in trouble. The industry has major assets with rapidly depreciating value (the FCC license and to a lesser extent the transmitter and other paraphernalia). Their metrics are practically Dickensian (people keep diaries of what they listen to and mail them in for money). The metrics are starting to get a little better with PPM (portable people meter), but it’s still in testing, not terribly accurate (the demo they did gave 7 quarter hours of credit to a single listener in a one hour stretch) and no where near as powerful as the metrics and data available in Foneshow.

The good news is they know they have a problem and they are eager for solutions. Most of the folks I talked with (owners, networks, syndicators, consultants, national and local talk hosts) immediately understood the power of what we’re doing and how it applies to them. You know you might have something cool going on when you chat with a guy in the morning and he mentions your product on stage during his panel in the afternoon.

To follow up my post yesterday regarding VZW and AT&T offering flat rate…

T-Mobile has joined the fray

The daily email news from Eric Rhodes at Radio Ink magazine included the following passage:

The Big Enchilada: Accountability
Just as innovation in radio often comes from smaller markets (necessity is the mother of invention), advertising trends usually emerge from big markets. What Madison Avenue does trickles down to Main Street. And advertising trends are alarming for radio. Accountability is what advertisers want — and guess where they find it? Online media. National brands love the idea that you can track how many clicked, what they viewed, and what they bought. It’s the ultimate seduction for advertisers, and they are abandoning traditional “non-click” media at a rapid pace.

Major brands are making statements like, “TV, newspapers, radio, and outdoor are no longer attractive to us unless they can offer the same accountability and data tracking offered by online media.” This, my friends, is the big enchilada. This theory of advertising has hit Madison Avenue in a big way, and it is already starting to trickle down to the local level. That’s why radio, a local medium, needs to heed the warning to become an interactive medium. It’s not because we’re losing listeners (we’re not); it’s because advertisers at the smallest, local level will demand the ability to measure data.

Detailed metrics were built into Foneshow from day one, we can tell you the demos of who listened to your ad. Not an estimate, the specific people (minus names of course). Furthermore, our CPC advertising (cost-per-click, or in our case cost-per-call) provides the ultimate in accountability. Advertisers pay only for demonstrative results.

It’s finally happening; the incremental cost of voice minutes is going to zero. Verizon Wireless is rolling out an unlimited minute, flat rate, voice plan. What’s interesting is that this is more af a marketing change than anything else. The vast majority of cell phone subscribers currently use less than their alloted minutes every month. But the minute timer is still there in the back of their heads. This lowers that psychological barrier.

Now this doesn’t mean that we expect users to start listening to longer Foneshows. We still believe the medium is about content snacking. We don’t believe anyone wants to listen to a three hour talk show on their phone.

Follow up:
Mere hours later AT&T also has a flat rate plan available.

Amazon S3 is down. We use S3 for a variety of storage applications, hence there are parts of Foneshow that are broken this morning.

Our apologies. More info as we get it.

Edit: S3 is back up as of 10AM Eastern time.

Jon Sinton and I are headed to Scottsdale next week to go to Al Peterson’s Talk Media Conference. I’m looking forward to continuing to work with the talk radio community. We’ve got a few talkers already signed up to publish with Foneshow and we’re looking for more. There’s way more here than just piping your radio show onto the cell phone network. It’s about extending your brand into the mobile space. It’s about using the skill set you already have mastered (the power of your voice) to reach your audience in new ways.

If you’re going to be in Scottsdale and want to find out more about Foneshow, let me know.

P.S. It will also be nice to escape from the Maine winter for a few days in the desert.

As we are resource limited (like all start ups) and Foneshow is primarily a mobile application we have not spent nearly enough time focusing on the web aspects of the product and process. The site didn’t do a good job communicating what it is Foneshow does or how to use Foneshow.

With today’s relaunch of the foneshow.com site we’re taking steps to ameliorate that situation.

Check it out. Send feedback . We’ll be rolling out a couple of other pieces over the next few days.

Great work by Alana, Mike, and Nic.

Paid Content is reporting that CBS has joined NBC in working with TiVo on their new second-by-second audience measurement program, Stop//Watch (clever name).

Foneshow offers this kind of second-by-second measurement of audience for programming on our platform.

Check out a screencast of how we present second-by-second measurement data.

Start ups go through cyclical phases of insane and normal work levels. I have a startup in the crazy busy cycle (we’ve got a board meeting tomorrow) and a 3 week old baby at home. I’m burning the candle at both ends.

My wife is an angel.

We’re working on our conference calender for the next few months.

Looks like we’ll be at NAB in April in Vegas, Radio Ink Convergence in San Jose in March, and Talkers in NYC in June. Maybe SXSW (but it’s hard to make a business case for it).

We’d love to go to a bunch of “Web 2.0″ tech type conferences but we’ve reached the point in our business that we need to go where our customers are.