And so to Mashup* DEMO: fifteen-or-so five-minute presentations from new or new-ish web companies, presented one after another, without questions. I quite enjoy this style of event, though I reckon an additional three minutes for questions to each of the outfits represented would have added a lot of value. At the very least, though, it provided a bit of a crash course into the current state of Web 2.0 UK.
Video
Web TV continues to bubble away. This came in the form of a marketing tool — 15SecondTV personalises video clips — the example was the presenter’s face superimposed onto a character in a clip from 300. Brands can create a Simpsonize-Me style experience in video and potentially feed it back onto users’ mobile phones. BabelTV — no relation to Babelgum, apparently, and who don’t appear to have a web site (update: it’s http://www.babel.tv/) — is at the other extreme, offering an actual physical appliance similar to Media Centre PCs, but with what looked like a rather more foolproof interface than Redmond can currently provide, and which integrates back-up to a central server to create more of an internet appliance than a computer. Lastly, came Testcard.tv. This is an internet video aggregator, akin to TIOTI: it can find and play episodes of your favourite shows from various online sources. I have to wonder about the legality of these kinds of services. Were I a savagely litigious media company, like err… every media company, I’d have them shut down as soon as I heard of them. Like piratebay, they could claim that they’re simply directories of content, not publishers, though I reckon including a site-specific player — like Testcard has done — tips them into the status of publisher, and thus exposure to IP suits. Let’s see.
Local
WeLoveLocal and Tipped and Rummble were the latest incarnations of local search incorporating recommendations and reviews from friends (cf. FridayCities, TrustedPlaces in the UK alone). All these services seem to suffer a common flaw: there isn’t enough content on them for them to be useful for new users. There are no reviews of ‘florists’ in ‘Mortlake’ on any of those services; Tipped returned zero results (there are about six of them). Why shouldn’t I save time and just use Google Local instead? And what incentive do users have to add a review of anything? The proliferation of these almost identical services leads me to think that there’s also going to be a fair amount of rationalisation soon cf. the gazillion social bookmarking services that were around this time next last year. The one that manages to import networks from Facebook or MySpace — or creates a two-way widget for those services — probably stands the strongest chance of survival. [added] Let’s hope it isn’t just about funding and a war of attrition.
Other
Mobestar makes social networks for mobile communities, a white-label ‘off portal’ solution that brands could use to deploy mobile networks in short order. One interesting feature is the ability to conduct anonymised voice or video calls. Sounds potentially useful for dating or adult sites.
rollSense is a blog widget which finds interesting posts from your blogroll using contextual information to find related posts. Quite a neat idea, let down by execution — you can’t just add your whole blogroll, or let it automatically grab it from WordPress or Google Reader. No, you add them one at a time.
meecard is an online business card that you can put into your blog or email signature and thus connect readers to your various online presences. Bit like profilactic, but with some automation of the profile creation, I gather.
Kwiqq provides social networks for brands. They have a library of social widgets that they can put together with varying business logic and presentation layers to create very different social sites quickly. Jack gave the example of the 2wentys site they put together for First Choice holidays: +100% internet bookings for the firm in just two months provided a pretty compelling case for proprietary networks, though I reckon finding the right product or service to base that around probably makes a big difference to the results.
Serena mashup composer allows “ordinary” users to create their own corporate mash-ups, without the involvement of corporate IT. I’ve tried a couple of these tools and would rather involve IT, on reflection.
edocr is about document interactivity — YouTube for documents — a lot like scribd. Having signed up for the ‘Friends of edocr’ group on Facebook, I’m going to have a closer look at this and hopefully find something more constructive to say about it.
Brandwatch is a social media monitoring tool for brands. You can see what the blogosphere (and social networks) is saying about you. It renders this as a score and a graph, with drilldown into the results. It strikes me that it’s easy enough to do this with free tools and also that if you’re satisfied that you’re doing enough to monitor your brand by looking at a graph, then you’re not really cut out for a job in reputation management.
Fav.or.it is a new RSS reader, plus commenting, plus blog-writing, plus ungame-able recommendation solution. It looks absolutely fantastic, but unfortunately there’s no reason for me to write about it here, since Mike wrote everything you could possibly want to know about the service yesterday. I’ll definitely be giving it a whirl, though. About time Google Reader and Digg and Bloglines faced some serious competition, eh?
Bondaii aka. Mobiglu is a ‘pervasive identity bonding’ solution. Your mobile phone (perhaps) as your personal key to every aspect of managing your identity. All our ‘things’ are becoming connected to the cloud, but they exist in digital bubbles. Connecting all those bubbles together could potentially make all those bubbles a lot more useful as they become aware of your preferences and relationships, etc. The short story published by Cory Doctorow the other day makes for an entertaining lunchtime read, and ably demonstrates why this sort of thing ought to be absolutely terrifying to any right-minded person.
Phew. You probably feel, dear reader, like I did at the end of the session. I reckon we deserve a pint.
Share this post:
Great write-up Ian. Shame a security alert on my trains meant I couldn’t make it.
Yeah. I left the event before the party to get work done. Then got ‘security-alerted’ for an hour. Need to get work to pay for web-as-you-walk or similar.
Hi Ian, good summary of the event, I too think a QandA would have been a good addition.
I think you’re right local, services such as ours need to gain a critial mass of reviews, it’s our top priority, and will be for sometime. Looking across the pond, it took Yelp some 2 and a half years to get the traction it now has, and TripAdvisor even longer.
The point you raise about Facebook and the other social networks is right too. We don’t expect WLL to define your time online, merely be an extension of it. We plug in with facebook, we offer an API, and we’re working on tools for bloggers and local communities too. In fact if there is a way you want to play with WLL that we haven’t thought of you’re welcome to drop us an email.
Finally, while Google offers some great tools, it’s hardly local, if you ask me Google would work much better as engine for local sites such as ours, rather than a competitor, but that’s a different story.
It’s an exciting time in the local space in the UK, the yellow books days are numbered and there is lots of startups who want a piece of the action.
Great comments, Daniel. The ‘winner’, I think, will incentivise users somehow and hook into the popular social networks.
Don’t get how you are more local than Google Local Search.They do an excellent job on aggregating news. If they cared enough about this space, they’d do the same on local reviews. And they’d lock you out of maps at the same time.
Ian, thanks for the write up. Acknowledge there are lot of similarities between scribd, docstoc and us. Our concentration is on corporate documents such as product articles, white papers, press releases, case studies, etc.
We will also target certain segments, such as EIPP (e-invoicing) — this could lead to edocr having the largest database of EIPP documents in the world.
It’s early days. Keep commenting. And once again thanks for the coverage
Best regards Manoj
Manoj, Daniel: I deserve the heat for this opinionated coverage, but if I don’t add my own (uninformed) opinion — to be correctly bashed — then I’m not adding any value, I think.
On edocr, I picked up on the corporate angle listening to your presentation, but why then have a public database of documents? Surely, that is the last thing any corp would want and sends out totally the wrong message?
Ian thanks for your response. In future, edocr might offer number of broader functionality, e.g. private secure data space for M&A Data Room (we have a potential client asking for this service).
Right now, we provide an environment for public facing documents that you could find in public domain, i.e. generally from websites of companies. These websites do not provide interactivity for business documents, hence the birth of edocr.
“My edocr” yet to be fully built will provide on one side (say left hand) performance of your uploads, and on the right hand side the documents you want, e.g. you inform edocr that you are looking for most recent white papers with more than five comments on “private mobile radio”. As the relevant documents are uploaded, these will appear on “your edocr”. Now we begin to add value.
The benefits are obvious to some users. Other’s do not get it. So, on our part, continuous and consistent education is needed. And this is where you and other bloggers (like myself) can help. Please continue to engage in conversation. On behalf of edocr team, we appreciate your engagement very much.
Hi Ian. Excellent write up and thanks for the mention.
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the write up and glad you found rollSense interesting.
We have been in other startup events and I must say the Mashup Demo has been one of the most useful events to date. Very interesting and friendly people, easy chatting, good atmosphere and free drinks! ;) On the other hand, I think we were the only non-UK company, so I guess this event could benefit from more international exposure.
Regarding our service, actually you don’t need to enter each and every url by hand, which I agree is a tedious task. You can also upload your OPML file, which is the most standard way available today to list the feeds in your blogroll. Almost any feed reader supports exporting all your feeds as an OPML file. Google Reader certainly does under the Settings — Import/Export tab.
Nevertheless, I completely agree that an extra level of automation would be better, i.e. automatically grabbing your Google Reader feeds or your WordPress blogroll. Thanks for the advice.
Hey Ian, don’t worry about throwing in your own opinion, it makes the world a much more interesting place.
On the topic of Google, I think the problem it faces is that local means something different to everyone. To paraphrase Simon Willison, in London it’s about where the nearest tube is, and in Oxford it is about where to lock up your bike. This kind of information can only be determined through close interaction with local communities, something a monolithic company like Google will struggle to do.
That said I completely agree that as a republisher (call it aggregator if you like) Google has real strength, but in that scenario it still needs sites like ours to fuel it.
I think Google’s local API is where it’s strength lies, the geo-spatial work they do and the search that sites like ours can leverage. Imagine if Google provided an accurate, freely available directory of businesses all over the world that any local site could plug in, now that would be cool.
Ian, pleasure to have met you today. Best regards, Manoj
@Manoj — you too — I love freaky coincidences like that!
@Daniel — interesting thoughts about the meaning of local and why a multinational will struggle to create an algorithm for ‘locality’.
@Ramon — I saw the feature but it fell down with my OPML of around 250 feeds.
Ian,
Thanks for the mention of Serena Mashup Composer (www.serena.com/mashups) . While we have talked quite a bit about how business users can also use the product, we are by no means excluding IT.
There is definitely an application for IT to use this for rapid application development to also address the long tail of IT applications.
Since we plan to offer online deployment, enlightened CIOs and IT departments will also give access to these types of tools to their internal customers in the business as long as they can feel secure that it meets their governance guidelines.
Happy to talk about it anytime if you’d like.
Kyle
Kyle — I guess three minutes was a bit tight for you to explain your service, and for me to understand it. I’ll try to find time to look at it more closely.
[…] more, and there are companies that are focused primarily on providing widgets (such as rollSense, reviewed briefly on twopointouch) and services that make it easier to find relevant and interesting information based on your […]
[…] Geist in the Machine from Ian Delaney, whom I met briefly at FOWA the next day. […]