Charles Landemaine contacted me about Interaction, a text chat application that can be inserted into any web page. This AJAX product comes in three flavours. It’s free for the basic functions, but that includes advertisements. Professional and Enterprise variations on the service are available as a paid-for upgrade. These will remove the adverts, allow for multiple users and company customisation.

The service is intended for full screen operation, as opposed to some sort of side-bar widget. For this reason, it’s a lot more relevant for help and sales desks than it is for regular bloggers, who will be happy with some sort of meebo plugin.

Sceptics about anything that might be described using the expression ‘Web 2.0′ will be pleased to note that Interaction has (a) a genuine reason to exist that pre-exists the Web 2.0 boom; (b) a marketplace that goes well beyond the audience of digg and techcrunch and © a progression to solid revenues that scales quickly and doesn’t rely entirely on Google AdSense.

What nailed Kiko was Google Calendar. Once that came out, not only did Kiko’s growth stop, but a lot of existing users defected.

Google as villain, the new Microsoft, buying up or crushing their competition, seems to be the collective wisdom on the whole affair.

It’s easy to blame Google, but I think more important and less sensational lessons lie elsewhere. To start with, there are at least 15 online calendars out there (see Bob Stumpel’s big list of Web 2.0 applications). If you then look at online products with an integrated calendar as well as other features, such as Basecamp and BusinessITOnline, then there are probably dozens. The majority of the standalone products will fail. Not because they are bad, but because they face so much competition. Some of those calendars will be more usable, innovative and helpful than the others. Kiko was actually better than most of the products on the list, I think. I don’t believe it was the quality of their offering that killed it off.

You’ve also got to think about the sort of person that signs up for Kiko, and its ilk. The chances are that they’ve come from digg or Techcrunch. They aren’t looking for a business solution that solves a specific need. They aren’t migrating their enterprise calendaring system. They’re looking for something new and they’re interested in cool web apps. That’s how I signed up for Kiko. And 30boxes, and Google Calendar.

If your users are signed up to your service because it’s cool and new, then you need to watch out. If you can’t add features fast enough to keep it fresh, then they are going to leave as soon as something else catches their eye. It doesn’t matter if that’s Google or a tiny startup. Unless there is a business case for staying where you are, then the users will disappear as soon as Calendar 2.01 gets launched.

Viral marketing goes a very long way, and it’s really helped to democratise product development, but it doesn’t always help. If you can’t get the sort of user who is going to stay on your site, then it may be a wasted effort. Or a short-term boost at best.

Good web 2.0 services, or the ones that will survive at any rate, work by locking their users in. Think about flickr. Their free service allows for 20MB a month of uploads. By the time the next coolest photo site comes out, you might have hundreds of megabytes on the service. The thought of starting again is going to feel pretty unappealing, no matter how pretty the new service. Another good example would be MySpace. Why do you think the default pages look so bad? Why is it so easy to make friends? Because that way you’ll invest time and energy into making your page look slightly less awful. You’ll invest emotional energy into making, visiting and sending messages to all those friends. Want to start doing that again on another social network? I don’t think so.

If Kiko was able to lock users in somehow — and I think that 37Signals and Google have found ways to do this by integrating the calendar among a wider offering of products — then they would potentially have been able to last longer. It’s in very poor taste to offer this sort of 20/20 hindsight, though, and I’m sorry that they weren’t able to do more.

God willing, it’s not all bad for the Kiko guys. Paul Graham reckons they’ll be able to raise as much money from selling their code as they spent on launching and running the project. I’m told that writing calendar apps is by no means easy and hopefully they’ll be able to white box it to the enterprise space. And obviously, when they start their next project, they’ll have me as one of their first sign-ups…

Again, this has been produced by college students. Intended for students, the site allows you to lay down your course’s structure and create notes, and also the beginnings of a social network, within that. There are a number of other PIM tools, such as bookmarking, a calendar and an address book.

The work they have produced is promising, if not at all finished. I wasn’t able to edit homework assignments, for example, and a couple of actions produced PHP errors. It also requires internet connections in lecture theatres, to be able to do the central task of making notes during lectures. Is this now the norm? When I went to university, the presence of girls was quite enough distraction as it was.

I’d have to say that this a crowded marketplace, in most respects. All the major educational suppliers in the UK, RM, Blackboard, Viglen, Microsoft, Capitas, Granada Learning and a number of others already have Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) solutions. mynoteIT might work, though, for informal groups of students, who can share notes.

While moodle and some other wiki solutions remain free, they are not nearly so easy for newcomers as mynoteIT.

(a) Describe your product offering briefly.

mynoteIT is a simple and easy way for any student to take, store and search through school notes and papers quickly and easily. You can also store all your professor contact information, keep track of all your current grades, be reminded of upcoming assignments and much more. A couple newer features are mynoteIT groups, which allows you to join class groups with other people in your classes. We also have workspace utilities, which allows you to find the definition of a word, or translate a phrase between languages instantly without leaving your workspace.

(b) What is your business model?

Our business model consists of ads from Google AdSense. We offer mynoteIT for free but we still have to pay server charges.

© How long did it take to set up mynoteIT and how much money did it cost? Any funding?

mynoteIT was first thought up and created in December, 2004. We only have two developers working on it right now (twin brothers, myself and my brother Justin). The only thing it costs is monthly server charges and a lot of time. So far we have not had any outside funding, but hopefully that will change.

(d) To what extent is this a Web 2.0 product?

Although “web 2.0″ is hard to define, the usability and functionality of mynoteIT make it more advanced than your normal website. For example, workspace utilities are use AJAX in your workspace so you can look up words and translate words without leaving your workspace.

(e) How many users will you need to make a profit?

We aren’t worried about making a profit from mynoteIT. Although both the developers are college students, we both have jobs and can pay server fees with what we have right now. We’re a lot more concerned with making school life easier than making a profit.

Is this a toy? Marc Fawzi, whose opinion I respect a lot, said that the radio app I talked about last week was a toy. On this… no, it is not a marketable product that you could charge for as a service. But I feel it’s a rough draft of something that could potentially get funding towards a bigger thing. Or be picked up by a major developer. Or at least, Alex and his brother could.

Hopefully the PM will have left with some ideas about how to create an environment in which dotcom and tech start-ups can flourish here in the UK.

The visit saw Blair urged to set up his own blog, as well to change attitudes to failure in business.

“In the US and especially in Silicon Valley, if you have taken a risk and you fail, you in fact become more interesting and potentially more valuable because now you know something,” said Sun Microsystems’ Jonathan Schwartz.

“Frankly, if you hop over the pond (to Europe) you end up with a very, very different perception of risk and how risk should be viewed.”

I think it’s worth drawing a clear distinction between those putting their livelihoods on the line to run a new business and the institutions that are (or aren’t) backing them. I’d like to wave the flag (though not rattle the sabre) a little and point the authors to JigsawUK, a wiki detailing dozens of UK internet, mobile and technology startups, some of which I’ve had the privilege of talking to recently.

I’d say that the main difference is not that we don’t have a climate of innovation and the willingness to have a go, what we lack is a risk-taking investment community. Go to your UK bank and tell them you want £50K for a Web 2.0 startup and I’m not at all positive they won’t call security, as opposed to offering up the millions that one hears about US-based startups receiving every week to all sorts of companies.