Jubii - Not quite, yet

Had another mess around with Jubii. I was hoping the service had improved after its launch a couple of weeks ago. Actually it was the comments in the blogosphere that clarified whether / how some of the functionality worked.

So, it comes from Lycos Europe, it's all Web 2.0:

• You get an email address. When you receive emails, they are divided between a public and private inbox based on whether the sender is in your address book
• Send SMS - not available yet
• VoIP (landline to landline, a la Jahah, rather than using PC's speakers + mic)- 30 mins of free calls per day to Austria, Canada, Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, UK and USA (an interesting mix of countries!). Each call is limited 5 mins. Free while in beta.
• Blogging, photo and file storage and sharing. You can selectively share content with your contacts like etribes or vox (10Gb storage for the first million users)
• Interconnects with AOL & ICQ messengers

Several key features are idenabled yet, launching SMS or VoIP is pretty unintuitive. IE7 reports errors from time to time. Overall, some of the concepts that it is aiming for make lots of sense, something that the original Midentity desktop application was aiming for.

It looks reasonably good, but it's buggy - I'd rather not right it off at this point in time - it might be revved up into something reasonable.

Importance of the cost of land on entrepreneurship

One other factor that weighs heavily on entrepreneurship is the cost of land (and therefore the cost of living). The UK is cramped nation of 60 million people - space is in high demand, driving up the cost of land. The US is a vast nation that remains sparsely populated, even with 300 million people in it. The risk of starting a business (and possibly losing your home) is much more significant in the UK than US. For the more extreme contrast, compare with Japan (130 million in a country most mountainous that 75% is uninhabitable).

As a side note, land is more expensive in California than elsewhere in the US, approaching the value in the UK. In my experience, Texas with a reputation for cheap land, hard work and can-do attitude, is much more entrepreneurial than California. Silicon Valley has historically built an innovation cluster (compare with London's financial industry) and now has all the ingredients to make building new high-risk businesses much easier.

Lack of Entrepreneurship in UK - stop whining

Why Britain needs to change its view of entrepreneurs

http://www.nesta.org.uk/informing/articles/rebecca_harding.aspx

I find the point of view that UK lacks a culture of entrepreneurship short-sighted - get over it - innovation is a second class career in the UK. This is from a Brit that has bounced between both sides of the Atlantic, who has founded an internet company in the UK, but now lives in the US tech community.

As Napoleon described UK as a nation of shopkeepers 200 years ago, the same is true today. The UK is blessed with historical existence of the City of London, a financial trading power house that generates billions of dollars of value. It's an center of excellence whose contribution to the UK FAR exceeds that of other trading centers of similar size. As a result, the UK (and the Scottish even more so) are supremely skilled in dissecting risk and reapportioning it and trading it. This contribution is something that the UK should be thankful for and, at the same time, recognizes what is disables.

So, imagine I am a bright, young thing in the UK, fresh out of school or university. The most profitable method of being successful is to be drawn to the bright lights of the metropolis and work in 'the City' - where I use other people's money to buy and sell resources and to shave off a commission out of other people's ventures. Would I even consider assuming the majority of the risk of a venture myself? You must be 'havin' a laugh'.

It is well known that immigrants are much more likely to start new businesses for the reasons that they usually lack powerful networks of local contacts and cannot bring an existing reputation in their new country. They rely on their own intuition to build a shelter for themselves and their family.

UK enviously looks over its shoulder to the US, a nation of immigrants with an immense repository of raw commodities and natural resources. It's a nation so large that it can't be dominated by the financial industry in New York (a country can only have one financial center after all). As a result, any bright, hard-working American considers entrepreneurship to be perfectly valid career choice.

Speaking from personal experience, I have found the UK venture community to be superb at quantifying the risk in a start-up business - analyzing it, slicing it and dicing it, synchronizing it perfectly with the rest of their portfolio of investments. They may (or may not!) provide the cash for the venture, but infrequently the practical expertise to assist the new business.

The venture community in the US, on the other hand, provides not only the cash, but also the understanding of the fledgling business (as frequently those with the cash have been successful entrepreneurs themselves, thereby perpetuating the cycle) and are more likely to jump into the ditch and dig or into the boat and row (you chose your metaphor!).

So my answer to British whiners is: if you don't like the golden egg, then kill the goose, otherwise recognize its limitations and be grateful!

Social software goes corporate?

A sign of the times, Cisco (yes, those router people) acquires tribe.net, a social networking site. Interestingly, Cisco wants to provide "MySpace in a box for its customers", according a comment from the Head of Strategy and Marketing for the Cisco “Media Solutions Group,” which leading Cisco’s Web 2.0 foray.

Now, this is the first sign that I have seen of social networking (typically the domain of consumers or end users) crossing over into the enterprise arena. Caveat 1: I discount LinkedIn-type services as they aren't 'corporate mandated'. Caveat 2: Corporate wikis not included.

The thinking is that Cisco will now be able to approach any brand and create a social networking site for its brand followers, paid for by the brand.

I have no idea why Cisco is charging into corporate fan sites, either. If you know the answer, then please comment below. Thx.

Our digital lifestyle, content publishing, privacy - a good thing

A USA Today article decries the loss of privacy as a result of everyone having a camera phone & the easy ability to publish content.

Far East Asia, then Europe and now the US is realizing the implications of our near 'always-recording' lifestyle in the 21st Century. From 2003, Camera phones banned in changing rooms of leisure centre.

There are positives: at the bottom of the US Today article, it mentions the Dog Poop Girl whose refusal to clean up her dog's mess on the Seoul subway was captured and posted and resulting social shame and capitulation. User generated journalism (most famous being Korea's OhMyNews) and consumer crime prevention (eg text your incriminating photos to your local police station) are other examples.

It is said that you shouldn't put anything in an email that you don't want published on the front page of the NY Times. See this list of career-limiting email blunders (the Claire Swire email, US banker in Korea from 2001).

However, what struck me was that teenagers / early twenties have ONLY lived in an era with the ability to snap 'n' publish content so willingly. Now these students are looking for a job little realizing that all those photos from yesteryear might come to haunt them.

I do think camera phones, the easy ability to post content will make for a cleaner and more just society - it will certainly make things harder to conceal in public.

Facebook - should it exit or not?

Great article on Facebook at CNN, discussing when Facebook should sell. (It has spurned a $1billion offer from Yahoo! already. Its ticket price is apparently well over that now.I mentioned previously that a rumoured price of $2b was greedy. Or should it - shock novelty factor - IPO?)

Myspace sold to News Corp for $580 million. Marc Andreessen, who founded Netscape Communications comments, "Had MySpace remained independent, it would probably be worth $5 billion now".

The story contrasts with Friendster, who turned down $30 million in Google stock in 2003 (now worth $1billion today).

Web analytics in the 21st century

I went to a discussion on Web Analytics on Thursday evening at SDSIC. (Definition: Web analytics provides usage & segmentation strategies for web services to serve up more relevant and timely information eg cross selling or provide advertising.)

The issue of profiling customers and customer behavior was front and central, then two minutes later it was followed by privacy and identity.

When an end user / consumer manages their identity in the 21st century meaning of the world, will internet profiling be easier? Read this article on why it's important: Win the keys to the customer kingdom - Retailers will fight for ownership of online user identity.

The knee jerk reaction would be YES, of course - if a user provides a richer set of identity information, the analysis of web traffic and usage would be much easier.

But in reality, the answer yes, to a small extent, but mainly no. Here's why.

Some sites we demand unique personalization: eg logging into MY internet banking account. Other sites become more relevant if the web service knows a little more about us - whether we've visited the site already or that we have an interest in news stories about London for example.

Most of our internet usage is anonymous... which is great for the most part. Sure, we have to surrender our internet (IP) address which can (usually) be tracked down to a pretty precise location (a sub-section of a city for example) using IP lookup - a feature that most web service don't use. In general though, that's it.

Having to create and manage username & password pairs & profiles on every site that we visit would be painful and needless. If you've signed up for a Yahoo! account, then the profiling is ridiculous - websites that provide valud usernames+passwords such as bugmenot become very useful.

21st century ID solutions such as Microsoft's CardSpace (check out an overview of Cardspace in use - technical, but good) will make identification easier - users will create several identity cards for different purposes. Those identities with lots of information accessible by the service provider will be used with highly personalised sites (eg financial institutions). Users will also create a range of weak identities that allows them to glide easily onto websites.

These sites will be unwise to needlessly prompt users for their 'Identity Cards' - imagine being prompted for your household salary or whether you have children if you surfed onto a news site - it would be even more irritating than pop-ups.

So users will remain largely anonymous, unless the site can coax an identity out of a surfer in return for a better experience (hmm, marginal) or other benefits (eg 5% off price).

As a result, web analytics will divide into analysis on those with identity and those without - the latter requiring all the skills that are required to match usage to segmentation.

SMS predictations are revised upwards

Portio Research takes an optimistic outlook for Mobile Messaging Futures 2007 - 2012. It upwardly revises previous predictions from 2005 - SMS growth has not flattened out in mature markets but continued to boom whilst the US market has grown much faster than expected. By 2012, global SMS revenue will reach $67b, driven by 3.7 trillion messages.

The report states that just in Asia 450 people every minute will get their first mobile phone - and the adoption will tick along at this rate for the next 6 years.

Portio reckons that Mobile IM will supplant SMS as the principle messaging service by 2011. I strongly disagree - because IM currently requires opt-in. Admittedly, interconnectivity between IM providers has occurred technically, but the mass market certainly hasn't appreciated this yet, nor is IM embedded at all with the weak exception of the US.

Showing their true colors - Skype & Google

Two announcements, one shortly after the other, indicate the intended strategic direction of some big players.


Skype has announced SkypePro in Europe for €2 per month:

• Pay nothing per minute to numbers in your country
• Free Voicemail
• Ability to purchase SkypeIn at a discount
• Bunch of other discount vouchers, freebies

Interestingly, Skype will still charge a 'connection fee' of about 3.9 Euro cents per call. This sounds a trivial charge for Skype to eat in comparison to the zero cost per minute.

Frankly, I'm surprised Skype haven't put this bundle together years earlier.


Google finally announces an Office-like suite of productivity tools for business called Google Apps Premier Edition for $50 per user, per year: online e-mail, calendaring, messaging, and talk applications, as well as a word processor and a spreadsheet.

It differs from the the consumer version (launched last August) with an API to permit businesses to interface to their existing applications.

Missing from the line-up are a presentation tool (I wonder if the Google M&A team will be busy??) and full-on contact management capabilities.

And in the Microsoft corner: Office 2007 for $499 or MS Live (and Ray Ozzie: Chief Software Architect, creator of IBM Corp.’s Lotus Notes). I wonder what Yahoo's reaction will be?

Emap buys Yospace - sounds familiar?

Just as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp purchased MySpace last year for $580m, then Emap purchases YoSpace at a steal for £8.7m. Here's the press release.

Emap is a print and digital publishing house. YoSpace provides a platform for mobile user generated content - best known for 3’s (ie the mobile operator) SeeMeTV which allows mobile users to share and get paid for mobile video clips. Customers receive 1p for every clip watched - 3 has paid out £100,000 up to March last year.

YoSpace also provided the platform for O2’s Look AT Me TV service. And topped the 'UK 50 to Watch in Mobile 2007’ (sponsored by O2) published earlier this month.

Handset manufacturers getting into Location Based Services?

The world's two largest handset makers (Nokia and Motorola) have each introduced their own navigation services that use GPS on their phones. From a CNET article:

The company also said this week that it plans to make application programming interfaces to its software available to third-party developers so that they also can develop new services and applications that leverage location through GPS.

This is a great prod in the right direction, as the mobile operators (as least outside of US - see the excellent article for the reasons why) have been slow to deploy or make much value out of LBS. However, this won't really work as a platform to enable innovative (and compelling) 3rd party applications to appear - you know the sort of services that are always showcased:

Where's are my friends? Then lets go to a nearby Italian restaurant that has a fish promotion on.

The reason being is that these LBS APIs needs to be inter-operable so that someone on a Nokia handset can find out where their friends are on Seimens, Sony Ericsson, LG handsets. Sadly, this isn't a strength of handset manufacturers - operators do a better job of this generally. However this announcement may spur the operators to innovate.....

Debate about DRM hits the headlines

Quite astonishing that the technical subject of DRM has reached the headlines of the consumer press.

Apple's Jobs posted an open letter carefully articulating the history of Digital Rights Management and why Apple chose to copy protect the music that it sells. Its conclusions that content (at least music) should be freely available appear to be perfectly reasonable.

Being Jobs, it has generated a lot of discussion. Chatter describes Jobs as a hypocrit. Macrovision's CEO defends DRM, but clarifies some of the points.

Interoperability between devices is the most important issue in my mind: consumers expect to be able to move their content from their MP3 device, phone, home entertainment system, car etc easily. Content must licensed to an individual, rather than to a device - achieving this is complex and implementing it to a consumer market, even worse.

AOL supports OpenID too

This doubles (approx) the OpenID user base. As the article says, 'Come on, Google and Yahoo!'.

Microsoft to back open ID scheme

Open ID

Microsoft (contrary to most of their corporate history) intends to make its identity technology, CardSpace, interoperate with lots of other identity projects. This announcement embodies that far-sighted approach. Here's what it enables (from Seattle PI) : After users type their identifier into a participating site, they're momentarily redirected to their chosen OpenID Provider. They need only remember the name and password they've set up with the provider. That provider, in turn, sends the participating Web site an encrypted message, known as a token, confirming the identity of the person logging in. For a meatier description of this announcement (plus other partners), see Kim Cameron's blog entry (Kim being MS's chief identity architect).

BT to partner with FON for more phone ready wi-fi hotspots

A rumor from earlier this month hasn't been substantiated yet: a deal between: BT -- broadband ISP and more importantly providers of BT Fusion, a dual-mode phone that connects to your wi-fi router at home, but roams on cellular network (Vodafone) elsewhere and FON --the largest WiFi community (250K) in the world grown by purchasing a modified wireless router that allows to connect to other 'Foneros' when you're roaming. Nice deal, of course, which makes oodles of sense. Two comments that I thought were interesting: BT can separate VoIP packets on their side of the broadband connection, providing a higher-quality service than a company like Vonage, which must push VoIP packets over the broadband connection out to the Internet, over an unpredictable route. Clearly if the call terminates with BT too, otherwise the consumer won't see too much difference. The article claims that BT could push software to its routers to enable Fon. Possible I suppose, but sounds messy.

Internet social software YouTube partners with Vodafone

Vodafone allows users to update their YouTube site - more here.

The internet social software services have, frankly, struggled with the whole mobile scene. I am skeptical that today's successful internet SoSos are going to able to migrate to mobile successfully - I think a new generation of social software will appear that is equally at home on the desktop / laptop AND the mobile.

Mobile handsets for the developing world

This BBC article reports on the user growth in India and the associated scrum from the handset manufacturers.

Interestingly, the article mentions the fact that improved phone locking techniques (ie locking the handset to a SIM or locking it to a network provider) means that phones 'stay with' the network provider. This in turns enables the operators to subsidise the cost of the handset to the subscriber, thereby lower the entry barrier to adoption - further driving growth.

This, of course, will reduce handset churn (a essential component if the network and handsets are rapidly evolving; Question: has development plateaued suitably for this step to be appropriate) and hamper the second hand market (good at preventing theft and resale of mobile phones - a big problem in London, for example).

Preview of GSM, Barcelona

The great and good (50K of them!) gather in Barcelona this week for 3GSM. Here's an interesting preview from John Strand, a telco consultant that got his head screwed on and from Informa.

Hot topics for this year:

• mobile-TV (so last year)
• IMS
• mobile VoIP
• user generated content (so last year and the year before that)
• mobile advertising (worth US$11.3 billion by 2011 according to Informa)
• Location based services (another any-day-now service, but this time GPS-based, rather than cell-based)
  

There is no doubt that the industry is facing large changes, but who will be the future heroes: "the big old boys" or "the small new kids on the block"?

I think this year will be the last year that we can state with confidence 'the big old boys'.

Next year's conference will raise the question: 'Lots of new technology - SO WHAT? - show me the end-consumer benefit!'. Read this excellence article on Pricing and User Experience in Industry Remembers Customers from 160 Characters.

Linking all your profiles together

Following my previous post on profile aggregators, there's the other side of the coin: managing the multiple profiles that you maintain. Having just relocated a couple of times in the last six months (including internationally), this is a real pain in the neck.

Some players (or associated players as this space has ill-defined edges)

• Profile Linker
• People Aggregator - which I have mentioned previously
• GoingOn - see comparison between People Aggregator and Going On here
• Spokeo

When searching other profiles marries managing my (multiple) profiles, we'll have digital lifestyle aggregators - a term coined by Marc Canter - see his excellent description at Broadband Mechanics.

Marc is a good friend of Midentity and its service etribes, the company that I helped to found.

O2 allows users to store pictures, messages and contacts online

O2 (UK) intends to allow its mobile users to store photos from their camera phone and text messages online. (The initial service requires users to text content into a short code, but, in the future, reports 160 chars, these messages will cached automatically.

Additionally, users will be about to store all their contacts. ShoZu, a favorite application of mine, has been doing this for at least 18 months.