SOUND INTERNET SOLUTIONS
Using existing elements to answer a need in a new way
By John Ashenhurst
The elements of new products and services lie right before our eyes ... we can all appreciate and adopt innovation if
we're awake to it.
Our house on Orcas Island sits on the side of a hill, facing southwest and nearby Deer Harbor. A tidal lagoon west of Cayou Valley Drive--a narrow gravel road--reflects the afternoon sun to our deck and kitchen window and is particularly welcome in winter. It's a lovely spot. The air, with 6,000 miles of the Pacific to scrub it, always smells good and this time of year our days are sunny and dry but not hot.
The problem is the hill, plus the fecundity of life in the Pacific Northwest. Everything wants to grow--from Douglas Fir, Yellow Cedar, and Madrona (Arbutus) to ferns, wild grasses, and the ever-present blackberry (in its carbon rather than silicon form). If you take your eyes off the yard for a few minutes, when you look back, you'll find it covered with an impenetrable green covering about 100 feet deep.
So you have to attack the green wave regularly and cut it back, or it will overpower you and you won't be able to get out of your house.
But how do you do it?
In Switzerland years ago, I watched three gray-haired men on a steep hillside swing scythes in perfect unison, mowing the grass. These specially grown grasses are fed to cows whose remarkable milk is then converted into Swiss cheese. Seeing an old scythe at a garage sale last year, I made a major executive decision. How hard could it be? I'd follow in the footsteps of the Swiss masters. My wife, Yvonne, seeing that I was buying another useless thing to store in the boathouse, smiled patiently. I brought the $25 scythe home and hung it on a peg. It hasn't moved since. I've reclassified the scythe from yard tool to collector's item, and I'm certain it appreciates in value every day.
Well, with the scythe too precious to use on our hillside, our problem wasn't solved and nature began to exercise its right to eminent domain--until Yvonne bought an electric Weed Whacker at another garage sale for $5. Then she went to work, up and down the hillside demonstrating to all those green aggressors who was really boss. Just to show her what a sport I was, I got her a new trimmer, a Toro, at Home Depot, for $29.95 for Mother's Day this year. She's in heaven.
George Ballas invented the Weed Whacker in 1971, making the first one out of some fishing line, a tin can, and an electric lawn edger. Within two years the world had caught on and we had Weed Eaters, Weed Whips, Weed Crashers, Weed Wonders and every other kind of weed thingamajig. Think about it. In 1970 there was no Weed Whacker. Not even the idea of one, though all the parts were readily available.
In addition to the plant-infested hillside--where only an invention like a Weed Whacker can make a dent--we have about a half acre in grass--calling it a lawn wouldn't be quite accurate. And it needs mowing every so often. We hired Ed Cocq but he's busy and shows up only when he has time. And he's expensive. The yard is on a slope, bumpy, and in parts rocky. It's not a good place to run a conventional lawn mower.
Our friend and carpenter/designer/raconteur, Ken Woods, told me about a new invention, Weed Whackers on wheels that you can run over anything and they'll cut it right down--high grass, even blackberries. These wheeled machines have gasoline engines and they're called "string trimmers." You can use them in place of a rotary mower, more or less. I got an Ariens version on my next trip to the mainland and Home Depot. On sale for $300. It's wonderful. I like to wait until the grass is really high before I mow just to exercise the power of this wheeled wonder.
But what's really interesting is that the Weed Whacker was invented in 1971 and wheeled string trimmer didn't show up until almost 30 years later. How do things like that happen--or not happen? Even with mature products, there are new ideas waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves.
The elements of new products and services lie right before our eyes, waiting to be combined in some novel way to create something really useful. Perhaps it takes an unusual mind to put the pieces together--but we can all appreciate and adopt innovation if we're awake to it.
There's always some new way to pull together existing pieces to answer a need in a new way. I recently reviewed a brand new agency management system from XDimensional Technologies and found that it had some clever functionality that could have been part of systems 25 years ago--if someone had just thought of it. It's a pleasure to see innovation materialize out of the void.
Freeconference.com
I was particularly happy recently to find and use a new conference call service--an innovation combining multiple-caller infrastructure with Web-based self-service administration--and all for free. You may want to look into the service for some of your conference calls.
Telephone conference calls can be an important part of the insurance process. A peripatetic producer may need to connect simultaneously with an agency CSR and a carrier underwriter to
work through issues about a submission. Or remote offices and telecommuters may need to be included, by phone, into a Monday morning meeting. Some agency phone systems are adequate to link together a number of outside parties. But not always. And sometimes the agency phone system just isn't available for the purpose.
Traditionally, third-party conference call services have been expensive--too expensive for a cost-conscious agency. Having an 800 number for dial-in is nice for the participants, but the minutes add up quickly and an agency may find itself with a three-figure bill for the call. Sometimes it's better when participants all pay their own way. Then perhaps they'll have more motivation to be succinct and to see that the call is actually useful.
Freeconference.com is one viable alternative to traditional agency and third-party conference call hosting and management. The service is well thought out, convenient to use, and free. Well, not quite free since the participants must pay for long distance service to the host's site in Las Vegas. But with long distance rates in the low single digits (under four cents a minute), that's pretty reasonable. And, by the way, the service is global, so it's easy to set up international conference calls--an increasingly important option on our interconnected planet.
Conference calls have administrative overhead that we often don't pay much attention to and some traditional services do nothing to help notify, confirm, and, if necessary, reschedule. Freeconference.com makes inventive use of the Internet to help you organize and manage conference calls with very little effort. It handles all the notification and confirmation chores.
Here's how the service works. Let's say you want to organize a call for tomorrow at 3 p.m. EDT. You'll need to reserve a conference time, let everyone know, and then get everyone's confirmations back. And if the time doesn't work, you'll need to reschedule. You'll also need to provide instructions to all participants so they know where to call and how to log in. How many times have you been asked to be part of an upcoming call and then not received the details on time?
The first step is to go to the Freeconference.com Web site (www.freeconference.com). If you haven't used the service previously, you'll have to sign up. That takes a minute or two but it doesn't cost a cent. With your log-on ID and password in hand, you can log on and begin the call scheduling process. That takes you to your "Free Telephone Conference Center" Web page where you can manage existing scheduled calls, set up new ones, add or change your contact/groups list, get some online help, or arrange an immediate, reservation-less call.
Selecting the "set up a new call" option takes you to a series of pages where you specify the number of participants, time to start, and duration. You then enter an access code you want participants to use (or you can let the service create one) and make some choices about how the conference will work (e.g., does it start when the conference leader enters? Do chimes sound when each new participant enters? Are participants allowed to join in the discussion or are they there to listen only?).
If you tell the service that you want notification e-mails sent to participants (that's where the service provides real administrative help), it will ask you for a subject description and text to describe the conference and then who's to be included in the conference. You can choose individual participants or groups from your conference contact list (if you've set one up) and you can add to your list as a by-product of each call you organize. The service then recaps your specifications and lets you confirm the call.
Once you've confirmed, you can print the conference details, download them into Outlook to create a reminder, get a PDF of a (blank) conference call fax cover sheet, or look at the touch tone controls you can use to manage the call once it's underway.
The service sends out e-mails to each participant and one to the organizer (who, after all might not be on the call). The e-mail that goes to participants includes the subject and text you entered earlier as well as the time, call-in number, access code and other details about the call. The participant can then accept or decline the e-mail invitation via e-mail or via the Freeconference.com Web site. The e-mail response triggers a notification e-mail to the organizer for each RSVP. You, as an organizer, can go to the service Web site at any time to see who has accepted and who has declined.
I've used the service and it works as advertised. Freeconference.com has done a particularly good job thinking through how the service should work and then implementing it through the Internet. And it's free! How do they do that? Their FAQ page says that they plan to sell banner ads and that they earn revenue by generating lots of telephone traffic. Is the service a "bait and switch"? Will they start charging for it? Integrated Data Services, provider of the service, says no.
It's an amazing world. Weed Whackers, wheeled string trimmers, free conference calls, creativity in old software genres--all unexpected and unpredictable ingenuity. As my father used to say, "Who would have thunk it?" *
The author
John Ashenhurst's company, Sound Internet Strategy, provides consulting, Web site evaluation, and seminar services to independent agents and their trading partners. He can be reached at johnashenhurst@soundingline.com or (360) 376-1090.