Since behavioural targeting company Phorm launched recently I’ve looked at the ins-and-outs of the system and it does look pretty interesting. Phorm is basically an add-on service for an ISP which looks at all your web surfing and attaches an anonymous cookie to your machine. ISPs trying to target advertising based on this packet data appeared way back in the first dotcom boom, but no-on could make it work. Phorm uses a technology called ‘deep packet inspection boxes’ to track EVERY website you visit. Normal cookies are tied to just the one web site they came from, or the ad-network, like DoubleClick’s. Phorm’s cookie looks at all of them – with some exceptions, like banks – and collects information on browser type, response to advertising, the URLs of some of the web pages viewed and search terms entered. Where the Phorm cookie sees a page with a Phorm advert tag on it, it serves an ad. So it wouldn’t, say, put an advert on the BBC web site because the BBC wouldn’t have put the Phorm tag into the page.
But despite this sounding like a privacy nightmare, the Phorm cookie is given a randomly generated ID number attached to a nameless profile of the categories sites a user appears to be interested in. This profile is then matched against advertisers to target ads against that user who’s actual identity (email addresses, surnames, street addresses etc) is not known. What information they do have – which is just the surfing habits of that PC – gets deleted after a few hours. Phorm’s privacy claims have been approved by Ernst & Young and Privacy International. The cookie doesn’t track you on sites like SSL or forms you fill in. Of course, data is secure as the companies that keep it – and it’s possible to de-anonomyse data. Phorm says it wouldn’t mix surfing data with, say, an ISP’s billing data on users.
Phorm’s system also alerts users to a list of blacklisted sites, in a scheme called Webwise. This is the carrot to keep people from switching off the Phorm cookie, which they are given access to and told it is watching them.
Phorm has so far launched in the UK with BT, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media.The Phorm cookie also recognises publishers signed up to Phorms ad system, so the partners for that are the FT.com; iVillage; Universal McCann; MGM OMD and Unanimis.
CBS-owned Last.fm says 3rd party web widgets hooked into its API added 19 million music users to its user base in January, in addition to the 21 million active users accessing the service through the Last.fm site itself. As a result it has launched a dedicated showcase site to highlight the best widgets and tools. The site opened to developers in 2003 but has not set up a dedicated home for them at build.last.fm. Some of the widgets that have come from this innovation include a tool that shows favourite CD covers on Wordpress blogs, a tool that graphs music preferences and one that tracks listening habits on a user’s mobile phone.
So here’s a question. Why was is it that at last night’s Mashup event on widgets on London last night, so many audience questions about widgets were along the lines of “Where’s the money?”. Was the audience just plain dumb or did the eminent list of speakers not get the information across well enough?
I noticed that plenty of ‘brand managers’ in the audience seemed to be worried about what would happen if someone put a widget containing their brand on a site which did not portray their brand in the best light. But I have to ask, what about lots of people putting the widget in the perfect place for their brand? Ever heard of the long tail? This feels like a very old and dead conversation. The people who don’t get this are seriously in trouble.
After a period involving a few technical issues, I’m happy to report that the TechCrunch UK & Ireland jobs board, otherwise known as CrunchBoard, is now open for business. As a special opening offer for all advertisers, it will cost just £20 per job for the first month of its operation. After that the price will revert to £50 per job posted, so feel free to get your jobs in at the discount ASAP.
The CrunchBoard job board gives you access to millions of technology and business savvy readers of TechCrunch, MobileCrunch, CrunchGear and other top technology blogs. CrunchBoard is permanently linked from these sites. So join other leading companies, such as Facebook, MySpace, CNET, Yahoo, Microsoft, Digg and others that have posted jobs with CrunchBoard.
UPDATE: Sigh, OK, so we seem to have a slight technical hitch, so hold off from posting jobs for today. Should be fixed by Monday.
As largely expected, the Apple iPhone will arrive in Ireland courtesy of UK-based carrier O2, which has the exclusive contract – from March 14th costing €399 (8GB) and €499 (16GB). Tariffs will range from a €45 to a €100 monthly charge. And it now looks like March 6th will be when Apple unveils the Software Development Kit for the device, which will allow outside developers to write native applications for the handset.
It will be interesting to see what Irish mobile startups make of development for the platform. Personally I am starting to think that any soical network worth its salt should really concentrate on iPhone development because the browser is so good and the kind of demographic that buys the iPhone is often interested in mobile apps.
Making voice calls from within the browser, and the growing links between voice applications and the web of data is a big trend online today. Last DecemberRibbit, a startup that calls itself “Silicon Valley’s first phone company,” launched a bid to spread Flash apps for voice.
Now another startup, is also aiming at voice and ‘messaging 2.0′ services from a different angle. Ireland-based VoiceSage, a hosted ’software as service’ Interactive Voice Messaging (IVM) company, is seen by some telco industry analysts as part of the next wave of “Telco 2.0″ and it’s just closed a €3m round from private Irish backers. The cash will be used to push further push into the UK.
The 12 person startup has already closed a deal with a leading catalogue company in Europe (Scotts of Stow & Otto), and some big banks, as yet unnamed. Its interactive messaging meshed with enterprise software means VoiceSage inhabits a space being called “Communications Enabled Business Processes” (CEBP), which is gaining traction in the voice world. VoiceSage also has a “click 2 Talk” technology which could integrate with contextual advertising.
If you like watching moody-looking (or are they just bored?) models standing around in the background of a TV commercial shoot, while Keira Knightley walks around in curlers, then I have the very web TV channel for you. SQUA.RE is an online video portal (yes, I said portal) dedicated to luxury and style. Its various channels around luxury and fashion are delivered via Flash and look pretty damn expensive to make to be honest. The company behind this is based in Notting Hill, one of the most expensive parts of London and has 25 staff, including part time people and people working from other cities (Paris, Monaco…).
The co-founders are Olivier Bassil (a self-described socialite), Jeremy Genin, CEO Paul-René Albertini (most recently Chairman and CEO of Warner Music International) and Jacqui Timothy, Chief Operating Officer (formerly a manager in Accenture London’s Media & Entertainment practice). I can just imagine the suits these guys wear (and yes, I’m slightly jealous).
Now, the problem is that despite the site’s smart focus on one market (18-35 year olds interested luxury goods) none of the media they are generating is portable outside of the site. I can’t embed the video into another site. This doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t care that it is organised into channels. I want to put Keira Knightley on my blog/social profile! In a way they could just dump the channels and put up a list of embed codes. Set your media free guys.
To me this is a TV 1.0 model shoe-horned online. The video is great, but it’s wasted stuck on this old-fashioned ‘portal’ site. And their advertisers can’t be getting that much value out of it.
ShopWindoz is a new startup enabling independent design labels to build a business online with a few clicks. It’s an Etsy-esque site aimed at ‘micro-brands’ with niche design products. The site originally went live in November of last year in Germany but this week was launched in English, aiming at the UK market. Initially, products are mostly from Berlin based designers but the aim is to hook in UK designers who tend to face high costs and competition.
ShopWindoz is not the only new European site aiming at this long tail of niches, another is the recently launched Moli, a US-owned site with $30m in backing. Interestingly ShopWindoz founder Darryl Feldman is an Englishman in Berlin who was most recently head of Yahoo!’s product development efforts across Europe. The jury is out on whether the more ’social shop’ based approach of ShopWindoz or the ’social networking, plus a shop’ idea of Moli will prevail. Horses for courses, perhaps, but history shows that startups which are more focused tend to win out.
If you’re into the idea of putting your finely honed commercial web dev and strategy skills to the benefit of society then check out Social Innovation Camp 4th-6th April. The basic idea is to get a group of software developers and designers together with social entrepreneurs and people who fund/provide in-kind support to early stage start-ups for 48 hours over the weekend. Think of it as a cross between Seedcamp and a Hackday, but for social change. The ‘call for ideas’ lasts for another week – it closes on Friday 7th March. So far ideas submitted include Barcode Wikipedia, a tool for sharing cycle routes in London and an idea for how the web could help the UK prison system become a more humane institution for those with friends or family serving jail terms. The original idea and funding proposal came from Dan McQuillan of the Make Your Mark Campaign, Paul Miller, co-founder and CEO of web start-up, School of Everything and Christian Ahlert of OpenBusiness and Minibar. Funded from NESTA, Yahoo! is the tech partner and the Young Foundation is providing in-kind support.
TwitPlus is a new Twitter application based on the popular microblogging platform. It is basically a photo, video and file sharing system built on top of Twitter. It also works with secure files. A longer list of features being worked on includes timeline view, mobile access, API, desktop app, integration with Flickr and picture editing. The creator is Dan Field, of ClearMyMail, the UK firm which specialises in email spam filtering, so its clearly an interesting a different dirrection for him. TwitPlus is worth checking out.
The Next Web awards are back again to celebrate Europe’s startups: In collaboration with Techcrunch UK & France, Loogic & The Next Web Blog, The Next Web Conference will be organizing these awards for the second time. Vote for the most Entertaining site; Best Company & social site; Most influential Web Celebrity and Weblog; Rookie of the year and best On-stage Start-up at The Next Web Conference. Should be fun, especially as it’s run by those crazy guys in white suits you see at conferences. Very Amsterdam.
Dopplr has released the “Singapore” version of the site this week. Here are the details from their user newsletter. Two new features stand out:
1. More happy coincidences
Dopplr now informs you of “nearby” and “near-miss” coincidences. You can see when someone adds a trip to a place near where you’ll be, and see who you’ll just miss by a day or two. Anytime you coincide with someone you can send them email by simply clicking on the “Send email?” link on the trip page. Dopplr will then send the email on your behalf and you can take it from there. We hope that both these features will help you get more out of your trips.
Many heavy travellers have requested that Dopplr should automatically import future trips from electronic calendars. This is now possible. For example if you use Google Calendar you can now set-up Dopplr to “listen” to your calendar and add future trips automatically. See this blog post for more:
Perhaps they have been stung by criticisms that adding future events is too much of a hassle? I rather doubt it. However, one wonders how much more the site can squeeze out of ‘optimising’ your travel and whether it will have to go more into social networking around the actual places and venues people visit in cities, pushing the ’share tips’ feature it added a while back.
Fav.or.it, the RSS reader with integrated commenting (a story TCUK broke), has launched its beta, though you’ll still need an invite to get in while they scale up. With Fav.or.it you can make comments on blog posts from within its reader – no need to click into a browser to the original post. Disqus, the distributed commenting system, will be using the fav.or.it API. So if you use Disqus for comments, fav.or.it users will be able to leave comments too. Fav.or.it is more feature rich than Google Reader and has community features like story voting, sharing, tagging. The site already has lots of feeds to pick from and an approach called slices. Some developers are already building features on top of Google Reader’s shared items data, such as ReadBurner and RSSMeme. But fav.or.it is as early as any of those guys, so it’s still a wide open game.
In a small acquisition UK mobile services provider 3Bill has acquired UK social network Profile Heaven for an undisclosed sum. The youth-focused network will be integrated with 3Bll’s mobile software and content platform, presumably as yet another of the many attempts to crack the mobile social (MoSo) networking nut. A relaunch of the site is planned for early summer of 2008 focusing on entertainment. riht now it’s tough to call who will win at this game, and lately people have started talking about iPhone web apps as the new MoSo driver.
Is Google really the “highest regarded brand in the UK” as the FT writes? Apparently it’s overtaken the BBC, Microsoft and British Airways to become the most highly regarded business brand.
“It’s times like this that investment in building engagement, trust and loyalty with a customer base really gets the successful businesses through difficulties caused by wider economic problems,” says Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the Superbrands council. Superbrands warns sternly against cutting ad budgets to keep your brand going. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising showing that British companies had made their deepest cuts to advertising budgets for almost two years in the last three months of 2007. The table is compiled by surveying 1,500 professionals using a list of 1,300 brands.
I have two points to make.
Baloney:
This is whole ‘Superbrands’ way of thinking assumes Google ended up investing more in its ad budget than its product. As if Google spends a cent on marketing. Perhaps if British businesses spent more on their intrinsic offering than marketing they might be perceived better, and lauded online. Ever think about that?
Double Baloney:
The entire media industry knows – but never tells because they all want to be in the list – that Superbrands compiles its list then goes to the companies named and asks them if they want to pay to be in the list. If the firm says no, they don’t make the list. So given that a firm with a perfectly good brand might have been left out because they weren’t bothered about paying, the list is therefore meaningless. Superbrands business model only continues because the concept of ‘brand’ is so subjective in the first place.
Europe: The number of new internet firms started in Germany in 2007 more than tripled compared with the previous year, according to a survey by tech blog Deutsche-startups.de. Some 323 new web firms were registered last year, up from 97 the previous year, and 50 in 2005, although it looks like the growth will slow this year. The 2007 total was the highest in the last five years. Most new online startups are focused on social communities and shopping. The German economy expanded by 2.5 percent in 2007, rounding off the strongest two-year burst of activity since the country re-unified in 1990. But most analysts expect German economic growth to slow to around 1.7 percent this year. It’s hard to say what happened last year in the UK and Ireland, but I would say the big period of growth was probably mid-2006 to mid 2007.
Over many years Bucks of Woodside in Silicon Valley has become known as a place where entrepreneurs and venture capitalists meet over coffee or brunch to discuss their next project. As you can see from the video of owner Jamis Macniven below, Hotmail was started there, at table 15. Of course, other ‘normal’ people go there for breakfast, but it helps that you can ‘run into’ fellow startups and VCs there. Even Valleywag has looked for spies there. Today there are many more places in the Valley where startups go to network, even kite-surfing.
However, here in the UK and wider Europe we are only just really getting going with the whole startup schtick. We need places to hang out in and meet each other. Yes, OpenCoffee has been a great engine of networking startups and investors across Europe. But this is essentially a networking event and although it happens in a real venue, what do you do the rest of the time? Simultaneously, many startups are grappling with the high cost of office space, especially in the UK. Projects like the Social Media Cafe, established by Lloyd Davis, are proving to be a great success amongst consultants and agencies, but that is focused on social media, not on startups (and fair enough).
But there are things we can take away from Social Media Cafe and Bucks which would help startups. These are: desk space (or ‘cafe table’ space) for on-the-go working, coffee, the right ‘crowd’ of similar minded people, an easy to access location (with public transport). It goes without saying that you need WiFi. It would help, also, if it wasn’t so out in the wild country that the odd VC or Angel investor could not stop by. Perhaps the obvious choice – at least in London – might be a converted warehouse near the Heathrow Express in Paddington!
So, here’s the question: Where do you hang out to work on your startup? Do you hang at the local coffee shop? Would you love to have a place where other people like you could run into each other? And are there any cafe/restaurant entrepreneurs out there who would like to create a franchised brand of tech-focused restaurants across Europe? Hell, a guy can dream…
Ireland-based reviews aggregator LouderVoice is prepping a new version soon and blogged about it today. Some of the things we can expect to see include a busier home page with more links to reviews, as well as:
• Reviews and comments in-site so you no longer need a blog to write full reviews
• Review images
• Instant sign-up
• Instant sign-up via SMS
• Community features enabling you to follow other users and see their activity on the site
• Avatar images
• Review Drafts
• A new voting system
• Major improvements to tag navigation
• Basic support for Google Maps
• A faster search back-end
• And a ton of other under the hood improvements
• Keep an eye out, we know you’re going to like it.
Argolon Solutions’ LouderVoice was demo’d at LeWeb in 2006, launched properly in May 2007 and appeared again at Le Web 3 last year, spearheaded by energetic founder Conor O’Neill. Members of the site write a review of anything on their own blog which is then aggregated into LV. Move your blog and the reviews move with you. How does it work? Users write the word “review” then add a rating from one to five, the name of the thing being reviewed and then a colon. If you don’t have a blog you can review something on the LV site itself. The end result is a trusted community tied into information about the reviewer which sets the review in context. You can also SMS text a review into the site and also integrates with Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce. Because the site uses the hReview Microformat it can be fairly easily integrated into existing blogs. Revenues models include contextual advertising on the site, a white-label version for partners, and a partner customer feedback system.
By the looks of it LV is on its way to becoming quite an interesting startup. It’s tying into one of the big cultural trends of our age, microblogging on platforms like Twitter and also the continuing rise of SMS. The problem is that those sites are not focused on reviews, but LouderVoice is, which is the gap in the market it may be able to fill.
It’s a truism to say property is expensive in London. And the latest victim of rising prices is – ironically enough – real estate search engine Nestoria, which is moving out of its current home “because the building is to be renovated and turned into luxury flats.” However, despite the nostalgia associated with “little quirks like the window that never closed, the stolen furniture…” I’m sure they won’t really miss the “lack of heat in mid-winter” and the “the mice, meeting rooms with doors that won’t shut, the mysterious corridors that lead nowhere, the occasional ear drum shredding alarm.” However, it’s not out to the sticks just yet as they will be staying near Covent Garden and Holborn.
As a recent visitor to Moo’s brightly-lit offices in Clerkenwell, I can confirm that not everyone has to make do with bad facilities – but then not every startup has backing from Index Ventures. Meanwhile, some startups like to stay ‘virtual’. Crowdstorm (privately backed still) completely dumped their offices in Waterloo last year and started meeting in a London club and coffee shops (actually, that doesn’t sound to bad), while plenty of others just do the coffee shop thing. Let us know what you think of the whole property game viz. your startup…
Badoo, the UK-based social network where you literally vote yourself to the front page via text message, plans a site relaunch this week. Last week it hit 13 million users. Recently I sat down with Lucy George, global communications director, to tease out the background to this sleeping giant.
In 2006 the site started with seven languages but never intended to launch in the UK. The business model is based partly on users being able to ‘rise up’ the network by texting themselves to the top. It costs one euro. About 20% of their user base uses this service between seven and eight times a day. As a result Badoo doesn’t have advertising, but advertisers can get their own profile page. There was also some suggestion that Badoo might launch a platform for developers at some stage.
I think it’s interesting how Badoo has been a sleeping giant in the social networking scene. The site doesn’t really appeal to me personally. It could use a UI makeover, and the blogs don’t have RSS which feels like a basic omission. However, given they won $30m from Russian investor Finam last month, valuing the company at $300m, I’m sure we’ll be hearing more from them soon.
UPDATE:
Right after I posted this Badoo came back to me with more details of their new features, and they run like this:
Beyond this they have, or are in the process of adding the following features:
- Slideshow facility
- RSS on all pages
- Subscribe to your favorite users
- Badoo mobile applications
- Mobile uploads (upload photos direct from your phone)
- Badoo widgets
- Easier sorting of contacts
- Collaborative entries and advanced sharing of photos.
