Wingmap is the beta site for a stunning new flight search tool based around a point-and-click map interface.

Co-founder Tom Wood exlained to TCUKI that the site allows users to search for flights leaving the area surrounding a city – not just the city or a single airport itself. Trying the site it becomes totally obvious what this means and I found it actually makes the process of finding a flight almost fun because it is so visual. I can see this approach suddenly being copied or at least aped by other sites given its ease of use.

In a classic bit of user interface reverse engineering, Wood says: “We realised how frustrating it is when you have to go back to the beginning of your search and try again from another neighbouring airport. We plot flights straight onto the map, illustrating the position of airports – this allows the user to factor in the cost of that long transfer from a low-cost airport outside the city.”

The interface is built for ease of use and claims a 3-click booking process, possibly the simplest on the web, but don’t take my word for it (although it is pretty easy).

The map also offers users geographical assistance, allowing them to mouse-over potential destinations and perform a search without having to know anything about the local airports, or their tortuously spelled names.

Plans for the near future include two-way searching and a more comprehensive list of European cities. These will be included in the full release at due by the end of this year, apparently.

Wingmap is wholly owned by Tom Wood and his partner Thomas Kay who each hold an equal share.

Irish software startup Panthius.com has gone live with a demo site. The hosted eBusiness suite offers a pretty wide collection of integrated tools to help people run their business, not dissimilar to the Salesforce.com ASP model of offering things like accounting packages online. Right now the system is live and showing demo companies for users to trial the site and kick the tyres before a full launch at a later date.

In an email interview with TCUKI, Panthius’ Chief Architect Robert O’Leary said: “The model is similar to Salesforce.com in that the system is offered as a service to subscribers, with a monthly cost associated. However, the entry cost is very low at just 49 euros per month, and we’re offering a full suite of tools, not just CRM.”

The Panthius Plus version offers tools like webstore management, CRM tools, warehouse management, supply chain management, business intelligence tools, a full accounting package, and so on.

O’Leary said all of the tools are integrated on the site, which will also offer customisation services and public APIs for third-party developers in the new year. (Great, we like public APIs at TechCrunch).

The company was started in early 2004 is based in Blackrock, Dublin, and has 6 full-time staff, aside from contractors. It’s privately backed , although they say VC is being “lined-up.”

Technology-wise the system is a J2EE enterprise application. The entire platform is based on open-source tools and – according to O’Leary – runs on a JBoss Application server with a Postgres back-end, all hosted on Linux servers.

Most telecoms professionals are not confident that their industry is set up to cope with the threat from new internet and IP-based services.

According to research from STL, a telecoms analyst firm which surveyed over 550 people, over 75% now believe that telcos need to “dramatically alter their business models” if they are to prosper in the Web 2.0 world.

The suggestions from these worried executives include structurally separating the sector into different businesses – one focussing solely on the network, and the other on the retail and services business.

Simon Torrance, CEO of STL, commented: “The Telco industry has woken up to the threat posed by the internet and Web 2.0 business models. It now needs to address those issues.”

Other key findings from the survey include:

• 75% of respondents lack confidence in Telcos’ ability to create long-term sustainable growth in an IP-based world

• 68% felt Telcos have lost control of their core product – Voice and Messaging are no longer the exclusive domain of Operators
• 76% felt that the controlling culture of Operators (manifested in a “walled garden” approach to services) is no longer viable and that the openness found in the internet world is far more relevant
What can I say? It looks like they are smelling some strong coffee for a change.

However, the health-check on all this is that STL is clearly in the business of making telco executives more scared than they are already and selling them consultancy off the back of it. So bear that in mind.

For more on the findings see Telco 2.0TM – How can telcos make money in an IP-based world?

Zubka – which allows people to tangibly benefit form their network of contacts and suggest them for jobs – has embarked on some pre-Christmas marketing. It’s promotion offers users a case of Champagne if their candidate’s details are accepted by a hirer between now and December 28th. How does it work? You send the job details to a candidate, provide a hirer with key facts and give each the other’s contact details.

From this month Zubka is also partnering with Ecademy.com, a largely SME-focused business social network which claims over 100,000 members [though how many of those are dormant profiles like mine?].

This Alexa page shows Ecademy’s hey-day was about three years ago (feels about right to me) – a while before co-founder Thomas Power (note: he has a “Centurion Star”!) started letting his rabid Plaxo software loose on members and before other social networks, like LinkedIn.com had got their act together.That latter site’s traffic went almost off the scale this year as you can see. Ecademy has also gone largely subscription which will have affected traffic.

Given that one of the questions posed by Loic Le Meur at Le Web3 was how will the web change the political system, I thought this link from Stuart Bruce’s was apt. Simon Dickson who writes the brilliant theyworkforyou.com has created a new mash-up of UK MPs using Google Maps.  From time to time I like to keep an eye on what my local MP Theresa May is doing, how she is voting on my behalf and where she is spending our taxpayer money.

It made me wonder why we still have overpaid (expenses, pensions, oversee jollies) (Euro) MP’s representing us. In the past they carried our voice to parliment but given the modern means of communication digg (voting), email and blogs (bi-directional communication), rss (topics of interest) etc do we still need to retain the same political system?  

(Subscribe to the RSS feed) 

It’s day one of Le Web 3. So let’s start with the good. One Thousand people from around the world have converged on Paris. Loic and his team have worked really hard to pull together an impressive list of speakers, sponsors and attendees.

Everyone I spoke to last night at the warm up party is hoping the event will live up to the billing and better last years excellent event.

The bad: The speakers are all saying the same old thing and nothing new. Loic’s interview of Niklas Zennström, Founder Skype and Kazaa was certainly not going to worry Jeremy Paxman. As for Lorraine Twohill, Marketing Director EMEA Google, thanks for the internet history lesson and the insight that social networks are big news!?

The rest of the day was fairly bland with one or two speakers standing out. Danny Rimer (Index Ventures), Hans Rosling (Gapminder) and Tristan Nitot (Mozilla Europe). Like too many web conferences of late, the better conversations occurred outside of the conference program during the lunch and coffee breaks.

The ugly: The wifi for the event did not work and this has annoyed many people. Equally there is no backchannel this year and the speakers could have done with the audience feedback to make them a little sharper and more insightful.

Overall the event feels like it has run its course just like the Web 2.0 conference earlier this year. Le Web 4 will be a hard sell, certainly as far as I am concerned. The statement repeated often and frequenty by people I spoke with – “it’s very corporate this year”. The question is how big can an event go before it loses its soul and raison d’etre?

I am off to the party tonight and will update this post after. Tomorrow hopefully will be better?

Update: The party was great fun, thank you Netvibes. Photos to follow.

Scoopt, the self-styled “citizen journalism picture agency”, will now allow Flickr members to tag their images with the keyword ’scoopt’, enabling Scoopt to push tagged images to their media outlet buyers. Scoopt will also encourage buyers to use Flickr as a commercial image resource.

Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae said the new feature makes sense as “there’s no easy way to connect Flick members to buyers” and “Flickr members are not allowed to advertise their content commercially”. The Scoopt move is unofficial and does not have a formal relationship with Flickr.

Sales revenue is split 50/50% between Scoopt and the photographer. The photographer always keeps full copyright. It’s free to join Scoopt.

Scoopt has 12,000 members and is based in Scotland.

What lies ahead for Yahoo! and mobile? It sounds like Yahoo! Go for Mobile will be given a big push, now that Yahoo! is downgrading its SMS messaging services in favour of services which run over the mobile data network.

The evidence has come in the form of the closure of Yahoo!’s mobile division in London.

In the last couple of months about 15 or so people, mostly engineers in the Mobile division in London, have been made redundant and Yahoo! is to shut down some services in Europe like Yahoo! Tones, Premium SMS Mail Alerts and Compose SMS in Yahoo! Mail.

In an email to TechCrunch a Yahoo! spokesperson officially confirmed the company is “phasing out Yahoo! Tones and premium SMS alerts over the next several months to focus on the mobile services that are core to Yahoo!’s future growth. We are going to continue to focus on creating unique and compelling services, such as Yahoo! Go for Mobile, that make using the Internet on mobile devices fun and engaging for consumers, as well as look to further extend the reach of Yahoo!’s leading sponsored search and branded advertising services into the mobile experience.”

Sources say Marco Boerries – the guy who runs Yahoo! Connected Life in the US and was formerly the brains behind Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice – wants full control of all the resources in his business unit, and it looks like the London team was surplus to requirements.

We gather some of the London developers made redundant were offered jobs in the US or in Hamburg with Verdisoft which Yahoo! acquired in February last year for $96m. Who used to run Verdisoft? Marco Boerries.
One former Yahoo! mobile employee spoke to TechCrunch, who said: “It is just funny that they had to let the whole engineering team in London go to refocus in such a way. That is more a result of them being the only engineers that did not report into Marco Boerries.”

All engineering teams in Yahoo! report into Zod Nazem, Yahoo!’s CTO, except for the engineers in Yahoo! Connected Life. They all report into Andreas Meyer, VP of engineering. Who is Meyer? He has worked with Boerries since 1989, variously on Starsoft and Verdisoft. His current boss is Boerries. Again.

Meanwhile, it will be interesting to see what Yahoo! does with Swedish mobile company Kenet Works, which made mobile social software for Sweden’s Playahead.se. Swedish newspaper Dagens Industri put the price of Kenet at EUR 16.6 million, according to Gigaom. Kenet Work’s presence software allowed for quite sophisticated mobile social networking, linked with online, so expect to see some of that turn up in the Go service next year.

Here come the niche Wiki launches. Following on from JobberWiki, the career information resource site that anyone can edit, comes Tiptheplanet.com (quoting):

Tiptheplanet is a project to create a green wiki website that encourages discussion and the generation of tips that benefit you and the planet – From tips for individuals about staying happy and healthy to tips for multi-national companies to limit their carbon footprints, with accompanying explanations.

The site is coming out of the UK and has a nicely random feel to it, as in: “Switch to green energy; Find out about distributive power”. The site has been launched by Tom Savage, who also run Blueventures.org, a not-for-profit organisation which facilitates projects in global marine conservation and research.

The whole Web TV thing seems to be heating up right now, what with the US blogsite GigaOm setting up a new blog called NewTeeVee

That site led me to this rather good summary of just some of the ‘Net Video plays out there over here.

Quite a list….and most of the UK plays like Mydeo, TIOTI et al are missing from it.

In addition, older model ‘Net players like Brightcove have suddenly discovered social networking and user generated content, and Olde Media guys like MTV are getting ‘Netting as fast as they can too. Even Second Life has its own TV channel now….

Now, is all this interest because (i) something has intrinsically changed in the way TV can be delivered over IP in the last 6 months or (ii) Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion

(Though research seems to imply that blog-standard Web 2.0 sites are in fact growing faster than online video)

Problem still remains, as media analyst Bruce Springsteen put it:

“A message came back from the great beyond

There’s fifty seven channels and nuthin’ on”

Except that 57 seems a very small number now…finding all that stuff you want is going to be a major challenge…

This week Nik Roope of Poke London assembled a great gaggle of Internet creatives and players. Billed as “Webby Night at the ICA”, the idea was to promote UK talent and enourage people to enter the internationally recognised Webby Awards (the deadline for entries is December 15th by the way).

On Wednesday night at the Institute for Contemporary Art, some drinks were laid on and a panel was assembled to showcase digital creativity in the UK. But the panel was tarnished by Shooting People which managed to earn the annoyance of the assembled crowd with an unnecessarily long-winded, rambling presentation. When they were eventually riled by a frustrated heckler I found myself hearing what I what really wanted out of them at the start, which was what they actually did: distribute indie films.

By the time they had left the stage, they’d taken up so much time, the crowd was in even less of a mood to listen to the more succinct presentations from award-winning animator Joel Veitch of Rathergood.com and Régine Debatty from We-make-money-not-art.com.

But I would like to question the idea that what is coming out of the UK right now in terms of innovation is not culturally lead, but technology lead. In saying this, I am opposing the view that creativity has to be defined purely in terms of an art film or animation – rather I would put creativity in terms of astoundingly clever and useful web sites or mobile services, many of which are becoming world-class players. Look at the design and functionality of TIOTI.com or Sleevenotez.com or BuddyPing.com (to take just three examples) and you’ll see where I am coming from. (And no, none of these have had big budgets, they are all the work of very small teams with very little money and no formal funding).

Viz. Shooting People: Both the business model and the site itself seems to be stuck in a Web world of about 7 or 8 years ago. I can view a profile of a director (here’s Cath Le Couteur, co-founder of Shooting People), but although it links to her work on YouTube, the link is not even live. How basic an error is this?

I also have to ask, hands up who has heard of YouTube and who has heard of Shooting People? YouTube is an aggregator of video uploaded to it and by allowing people to embed the video on other sites it has effectively given away distribution, making it even more pervasive and powerful. Shooting People does none of that and even its member profiles are stuck in the last century.

Furthermore, there is a reason why no-one in the TV world talks about owning the channel anymore. TV programmes are the brands now. That’s why ITV is doing so badly, and only lifts its audience by resorting to torturing celebrities in the jungle – which is what is talked about, not the channel itself. Likewise, we talk about stuff we see on YouTube, not really the site itself. We talk about the community and the content, but the brand would be nothing without this. Conversely, to do anything or view things on Shooting People’s site I have to log in. It’s just so old fashioned.

I sincerely hope that some decent UK sites enter the Webby’s this year and showcase what the UK is really capable of in online creativity.

On Tuesday night I attended the The Music: Ally Debate Virtual Worlds, Real Potential event on the commercial potential of virtual worlds. Keynote talk was from Justin Bovington, CEO of Rivers Run Red, and panelists were:

Barney Wragg, global head of digital, EMI Music

Daniel Heaf, interactive editor, BBC Radio 1

Roo Reynolds, metaverse evangelist, IBM Labs

Paul Van Gerven, founder, PVG Virtual Concerts

Christian Batist, regional director Europe, Sulake / Habbo Hote

The event was chaired by Toby Lewis, Editorial Director, Music Ally.

Justin gave a talk and demonstration of some of his work on Second Life. I had seen some of this before (see the TechCrunch UK article here for example) but some new factoids emerged.

- There are now some 1.7 million 2^nd Life users (though I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than about 10,000 online at a time – it wasn’t clear if this was real users or Avatars)

- Anshe Chung (the first 2^nd Life real life (R/L) millionairess) uses 50 people in China to build habitats (is this sweatshop software?), and over 10,000 people are making real money trading on the site.

- He estimates c 900,000 of the 2^nd Life users are pure mass market, with very different expectations from the early adopters

It was also interesting to hear some of Justin’s views on future trends, most high impact I think were that:

- Second Life is becoming a media channel – from launch the 2^nd Life TV station VirtualLifeTV has had c 475,000 people view it. YouTube videos and music are heavily streamed into 2^nd Life.

- The backlash against Big Brands advertising is real, but every time there is anti-brand buzz, more people visit and the sales go up. Brands are also learning the lessons that they have to contribute to 2^nd Life to really resonate, since behind every avatar is a person – and these people are some of the most net literate out there and are highly vocal, for good and ill.

- Tax (and contract) implications are still a muddle, he does not see that area being sorted out within 3 years at earliest.

It’s also worth noting some of Christian Batist’s thoughts about Habbo Hotel and Virtual Worlds in general. Habbo is a much less “free form” model, the world is pre-constructed for the Habbos (avatars) to inhabit and they mainly get to furnish their room in the Habbo Hotel as their form of creative expression (like a 3D Profile really). It is significantly bigger than Second Life, with some 7m users, and is mainly aimed at teens. Interesting commonalities between Habbo and 2^nd Life are:

- They both find the “newbies” dress up their avatars initially but return closer to the “real person” over time

- Both have business models largely based on a tradeable currency – Linden dollars and Habbo credits – which allow 2^nd Life and Habbo to monetize the businesses. Habbo rents rooms and sells hotel furniture, Linden rents land and sells virtual goodies.

- High levels of female participation – near 50% – which is unusual in standard gaming.

- Both have problems if too many people are in a small space, so need to control access at times.

I thought Toby Lewis compered the panel discussion rather well, asking some very sharp questions rather than letting the panel members give prepared talks. I loved his point that these were all just glorified chat rooms – the sound of heresy being spoken

This approach did lead to some very instructive conversations, some I have noted here.

Barney Wragg noted that from an EMI point of view, although much of the material in 2^nd life was copied (which was morally and ethically unsound of course – no word of the EMI / Yahoo trial announced that day), the major labels were still looking at how best to use these media as there are interplays between the commercial and promotional value, and this differs by label and artist type. There seems to be considerable latitude for interpretation (aka confusion) as to whether 2^nd Life is a common carrier or a content hoster, and if its is covered by WIPO “safe harbour” rules – and if so, under which country’s rules.

Roo Reynolds was put on the spot about the downsides of virtual worlds. Issues with 2^nd Life are that it takes time to master, and it is hard to find people in such a vast place until you are plugged into the social network. (Christian Batist noted his real life 2^nd Life experience when a huge apartment block was erected between his carefully chosen and constructed habitat and his view of the ocean.). Issues with simpler worlds like Habbo are stickiness – what do you do when you have mastered it?

Hans Timmerman noted that to do a virtual concert performance in 2^nd Life it took a similar crew to that in a real concert – even down to the bar staff. He also reflected that it was now much harder for independent music to make an early splash, given the hundreds of thousands of pounds big brands were spending on getting themselves known ( One event mentioned apparently cost c £100k for about 5,000 participants – £ 20 per customer captured)

Daniel Heaf talked a little more about the BBC Radio 1 event, big learning was that it is a global event that runs 24 x 7 and this has to be planned for, as do the details like “virtual bouncers” if you want to have a 2^nd Life event of the same quality as a real life event – and you also need to think about what to do with your 2^nd Life building once the show is over.

I also caught up with Adam Reuter (Real Life name Adam Pasick) again to get his take on 2^nd Life over the last 3 months since we last met. I think he made a good point which is that the world is so vast (apparently you cannot now visit it all in one lifetime) so one could avoid all the commercial hoopla very easily if one wanted to.

In the Q&A sessions there was quite a lot of testing of the numbers – how many people as opposed to Avatars, how many were live and not dormant, how long anyone stayed etc etc – no real conclusions but I suspect the real active user base is quite a bit smaller than the topline numbers. I asked about interim approaches, i.e. something between a Second Life and a Habbo in complexity. That brought the discussion on to the Role Playing “Sword and Sorcery” worlds such as World of Warcraft and RuneScape, which overall still have many more users than either Second Life or Habbo Hotel. I picked up this discussion later with Roo Reynolds, and I have blogged a bit more about my further thoughts on the next evolution of virtual worlds over at our blog at broadstuff.

All in all, a very interesting evening.

Mad For Toys is a new search engine that uses Google’s Co-op service to do a niche search on the UK’s 250 toy stores which are online. Toys are grouped into four categories, Traditional, Contemporary, Collectibles and Models (like model cars etc), although a lot of the shops have been hand-picked. Mad For Toys is produced by the Internet creative consultancy Futurescape.

It works pretty well, but without being too unkind to Futurescape, it’s clearly a bit of punt (hey, good luck) and it’s no surprise they have launched it in time for Christmas. I should think we’re going to see a lot more of these attempts to create a brand around a simple implementation of Google Co-op, and this is one of the first in the UK that we are aware of (although there are probably more).

Update: The TechCrunch UK site search is powered by Google Coop but unlike Mad for Toys it has no commercial aspirations.

Thanks to Colin Donald over at JigsawUK who has pointed out this new program from the British Council:

Digital Pioneers is an international mentorship programme that aims at identifying and nurturing a new generation of creative entrepreneurs in the digital media industry. This programme will run in parallel in both Hong Kong and UK, annually. Six outstanding entrepreneurs aged 21-35 who demonstrate leadership potential and international vision will win the chance to work with and learn from top players in the industry in both Hong Kong and the UK.

Contact details are on the site, but ignore the application date – we understand it’s been extended to 10 Dec.

Ian Forrester has just sent out the final guest list for this weekend’s London Xmas party. Please see if your on there. Plus keep an eye on this URL for developments around a possible Club wide Twitter system and other late breaking news.

Ian is also looking for help from people on the main list. If you can spare a couple of hours before the doors open to help out for the good of the community, signup on the helpers wiki page.

Date: Saturday 9th December

Time: 1830 – 0100

Venue: The Cuban, Citypoint

Address: One Ropemaker Street, London, EC2Y 9AW

Nearest Tube: Moorgate

Cost: Free

In recent years, the School of Informatics at the University of Bradford has produced graduates that have gone on to staff the likes of AOL and Freeserve (now Orange’s broadband division). Indeed in the late-90s and the first era of the British internet industry, one department alone provided Freeserve with a co-founder of the company, a number of designers, developers and project managers.

The school is now reaching out to digital industries, to gather advice and guidance on shaping its current and future programmes; notably undergraduate courses, research groups and knowledge transfer activities.

I’ve recently been asked to join the school’s Industry Advisory Board to contribute some industry perspective to the school. I’d welcome any ideas, thoughts and comments from the TechCrunch UK audience on what they feel computing, digital media and internet courses and academic institutions can do to contribute to the Web 2.0 ecosphere. I’ve also been in discussion with a few other institutes, such as Leeds Met’st Innovation North school, so there’s a growing call from academia for collaboration with industry.

Whether it’s thoughts on startup funding, joint ventures with universities, internship opportunities or academic content, or other areas, I’d love to hear everyone’s views and see if we can articulate a manifesto for Web 2.0 in academia….please send your thoughts as comments, I’d like to keep the dialogue public and sharable

Update: (Sam Sethi)
Connecting Academia with the real world of commerce as Imran explains is a great idea. e.g Google and FaceBook. In fact one group of university students at Imperial College, London has already started to tap into the wealth of knowledge within their student body. They founded Imperial Entrepreneurs in April, 2006. The President of the group is Sumon Sadhu, 22, who in his spare time is studying a PhD (Infectious Disease) and their mission is:

“to drive innovation from within the student body through providing inspiration, education, networking opportunities and the chance to learn by doing for the next generation of disruptive technology entrepreneurs from Imperial College, London. Our vision is to create an ecosystem which enables the top student talent to interface with the London entrepreneurial community similar to those that have empowered MIT and Stanford students.”

One factor I think that has been crucial to their success, has been the support they have recieved from almuni and seasoned investors such as Paul Birch (Birthday Alarm), Michael Smith (Firebox & MindCandy) and Danny Rimer (Index Ventures).

Proving the point that this symbiotic relationship between academia and commerce can work, is a startup called Extate, who hale from Imperial College. Extate is a very clever property search engine. “The Extate engine does not use any datafeeds whatsoever – data is retrieved from Webpages solely by crawling and parsing. This is arguably the biggest technological distinction between Extate and its competitors. Scalable parsing (the process whereby meaningful information is extracted from Webpage source code) is very difficult. The Extate crawler and parser are believed to be the market leaders, worldwide.”

The other thing I really like about Extate, that also seperates it from the others, is its support for microformats (hlisting) and simple list extensions. In the future, being able to discover via metadata using personalised preference rules will certainly make finding timely and relevant information much easier.

Others doing similar things:

• Sparkacompany
• LSE Entrepreneurs
• Oxford Entrepreneurs
• Cambridge Entrepreneurs

So if you are interested in finding out more, you might like to see if there are any spaces left for the “Million Dollar Mayhem” party tomorrow night.

Friday, 8th December 2006
5 Cavendish Square, Mayfair
10:00pm start

Hosted at the classy No.5 Cavendish Square in Mayfair and connecting Imperial, LSE and Oxford Entrepreneurs members as well as special guests from the London entrepreneurial scene, anyone else welcome, this is the hottest entrepreneur party in years, to be filmed by BBC1 TV.

Coming to the party are…

• ALEX TEW – Founder, MillionDollarHomepage.com and Pixelotto
• SYED AHMED – From BBC’s The Apprentice
• CHARLIE OSMOND – CEO, FreshMinds
• MICHAEL SMITH – CEO, Firebox and Mind Candy
• DARIUS NORELL – Founder, Real World magazine
• JAMES MURRAY-WELLS – CEO, GlassesDirect, UK Entrepreneur of the Year

Note: Smart dress code, ladies free all night, guys £10 before 10.30pm, £15 after.

All welcome! To get on the guestlist, email mdm@alphaparties.com before 6pm on Friday 8th December or visit http://www.AlphaParties.com

I guess I should go along and maybe catchup with Alex to better understand Pixelotto

A few months ago I was speaking with Clive Gringas a partner from the city legal firm Olswang about the UK startup market. Having been a software developer in his past and now a commercial lawyer focusing on e-commerce, the Internet and IT, Clive has a unique insight. We began to discuss how different it was developing software today, mainly because of the simplicity of the development tools and the seemingly limitless opportunity to quickly create new companies by mashuping existing technologies.

Amongst the companies discussed, we highlighted OnOneMap, Zoomf, nestoria, TrustedPlaces, Reevoo and CrowdStorm and agreed it’s great to see all of these startups launched and doing so well but Clive also cautioned the over use and potential reliance on 3rd party technologies by some of these companies given they probably have an exit strategy to be bought by a larger player.

“What’s concerning; some investors is that mashed-sites are binding themselves too tightly into the 3rd party API’s. Due diligence by an investor may investigate a site’s architecture and code to ascertain how difficult it would be to remove one mashed element or API and then to substitute in another. You might ask why it is so important to be able to remove and substitute a mashed element if the integrated site is working well and bringing in revenues?One reason is to reduce the impact of the owner of particular API or mashed element going out of business. There is little risk of that, of course, when you mashup giants like Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. But there are even risks when you work only with giants. If a Web 2.0 site is too tightly integrated with one particular giant’s API’s, the risk and cost of decoupling that code may scare off its potential purchasers, so closing down potential exits for the investors.“

One company that does use Google Maps today is nestoria but it seems they have already heeded Clive’s note of caution and are forming open source partnerships with some really interesting crowdsourcing projects. The first partnership is with geograph.org.uk who’s self-proclaimed mission is to “produce a freely accessible archive of educationally useful, geographically located photographs of the British Isles”. Another partnership is with openstreetmap “a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them”. here is an example from the Isle of Wight.

Of course right now both of these projects are embryonic and the data they have is very sparse which means nestoria are still reliant on commercially licensed maps and data sources. It will be interesting to see what happens when VC investors start to do due diligence on them and if it effects their valuation one way or the other?

&

Zoomf, another of the property search engines, has taken a slightly different angle and have decided to partner with a fellow startup called Trusted Places. Zoomf knows that the final decision to purchase a property is not solely about the price of the bricks & mortar, its also about the surrounding locality and its amenities. And yet just knowing that there is a school, pub and/or restaurant nearby your potential property purchase doesn’t tell you if they are good or bad. So instead of Zoomf trying to organically acquire this social knowledge themselves, they sensibly sought to partner with TrustedPlaces. This is a great win:win deal as TrustedPlaces extends the reach of their brand and possibly finds new reviewers via the Zoomf website. On the otherhand Zoomf enrichen their property search for their users by adding another layer of knowledge.

&

I am sure there are many more similar partnerships taking place and we would love to hear about them. One I read about last night, has a more social rather than commercial aspect to their partnership with CrowdStorm forming a listening group on Last.fm which will sure beat listening to all of the crappy department store music – so long as it’s not Wham and last Christmas again.

This is huge breaking news and is all over the web today. Sky and Google are to partner over offering Sky-branded, but Google-based services. The two companies will team up to offer online video (both Sky content and user-generated), voice communications and search advertising.

Sky will launch a user-generated video portal powered by Google’s video tools – whether that’s going to be YouTube tools or Google video is not clear as yet.

Sky broadband customers will get an @sky.com email address powered by Google’s services for domains.

Sky also says it plans to “explore opportunities” in Google’s VoIP capabilities.

Google’s AdSense advertising tools will also be used across Sky’s websites.

Financial terms of the deal have not been revealed.

We’ll do some more analysis of this later today. But suffice it to say this is really going to change the game, especially for Sky which is battling the tectonic shift of audiences from TV to the Web and online video. It also means a significant foothold in the UK market with a content player which will further power its ad revenues.

Fedafi, the Glasgow-based startup which makes it possible for anyone to create, manage, market and track valid RSS and Podcast feeds, is for sale.

According to the blog today by founder Gary Reid:

“After some major changes here it’s with a certain sadness that I have decided to sell Fedafi. Fedafi is a business I’m passionate about, in an industry I think is on the edge of something amazing – RSS and so it’s not a decision that was easy. Fedafi took 9 months to get to where it is, it has been thoroughly tested and is ready to come out of beta, providing both a download application and hosted version it has a sound business model that can produce income that doesn’t rely on advertising/eyeballs. I am putting together details of the sale and interested parties can contact me directly gary [at] firstpagedirect [dot] com to grab a copy of this, to avoid ‘web sale rubbernecking’ I won’t be sending this information out to everyone and anyone – NDA and disclosure required. Do I have a guide price? No. Do I have a BIN price? No. I will be taking offers, this isn’t a fire sale and I’m not in a hurry to sell. As for Fedafi itself it is business as usual.”

This is highly ironic, given that I went to a First Capital breakfast seminar this morning on selling tech companies (of which more later). I put in a call to founder Gary but the phone didn’t seem to get through – perhaps he’s swamped with offers…

I just got off the phone to Gary (who got a ping-back to his post!), who says he is drawing back from the site for personal reasons pertaining to his private life (hence the sale), but would prefer someone took it over and built on the progress so far rather than just shutting it completely.

Looking at the Alexa rank (for what it’s worth) it looks like the site stil has plenty of life in it:

Following up from our recent story about how the data strangelhold on mapping is being attacked by projects like OpenStreetMaps, it’s now emerged that the influential CTO of Ordnance Survey, Ed Parsons, has announced he’s leaving on his blog, in what appears to be a joint statement with the organisation.

There is the obligatory “We wish Ed every success…” from Vanessa Lawrence, Ordnance Survey’s Director General and Chief Executive and Parsons adds:

“I am not is a position to add any more to this statement, but of course I am sorry to be leaving a great group of very committed GI professionals, the future for me is not completely clear at this point – but whatever it turns out to be, you will read it here as it happens !!”

The statement does not make clear why he is leaving, but we gather from sources that it may have been because he was interested in rocking the boat at Ordnance Survey, especially over its Web 1.0 attitude to sharing data with outside firms, and his declared interest in the free data debate.

Furthermore, why might this be correct? He is not going to another firm, just plain leaving. And there’s a hint there in that he actually has a blog, unlike the outfit he is leaving.

As the Guardian’s Free Our Data blog says:

“We found him an interesting person who was certainly prepared to engage in the debate about free data and constantly looked for what the future holds in mapping. Who will succeed him, and will they bring that same drive to OS?”

Who indeed…. And which Internet company is planning to snap up this guru of mapping who would surely be a catch for Google or Yahoo! Maps right now…