Skype Office Toolbar released

Release of a Skype Toolbar for Office apps happened last week. Technically, it isn't that hard to do once you've created a toolbar for Internet Explorer.

REALLY useful if you're ploughing through a list of contacts in Excel for example. It's simply another way that Skype is further (usefully) embedding itself into the fabric.

QR codes on buildings and in fields

Those that know me well, know that I am big fan of QR codes and how they can enable the mobile internet.

Scenario: a camera-phone takes a photo of the 2D bar code (as above) and the phone decodes it and launches a browser at the web page that is encoded in the bar code. (Very big in Japan.) Mobile discovery made easy, n'est-ce pas?

Anyway this article, claims that the largest QR code ever created is 10 metre square one that was projected onto a building in Ginza, Roppongi Hills and Shinjuku (ie Central Tokyo) for Northwest Airlines.

This got me thinking about large QR Codes.

• A QR code created by selectively turning on and off the lights in a building to create the code (An organisational nightmare, I admit!).
  
• A QR code made by ploughing a field. (Similar to crop circles and ploughing pictures).
  

Any others, people?? Cars or humans in a car park?

Gizmo & Jajah offer free international calls

At the end of June, Jajah started to offer free calls to users in United States, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. (Jaja sets up the call using landlines or mobiles - no need to download an application). The only catch to this seemingly very generous offer is that both caller and receiver have to be registered to use Jajah.

Now Gizmo Project is offering free calls to 60 countries now. (Catch: both caller and receiver have to have downloaded Gizmo, but you can call your contact on their landline or mobile.)

Doesn't it remind you of the 'landgrab' of the late 90s? It's a race to the bottom of the barrel that can easily end in tears.

Poor usability and lack of service pre-configuration results in dismal mobile experience

Poor usability, mis-selling and lack of service pre-configuration are blamed for the UK mobile industry wasting millions of pounds on ‘No Fault Found’ returns of mobile devices - 63% of mobile devices returned as faulty are in perfect working order. With each device returned costing operators, manufacturers and retailers in the order of £35, the overall bill to the UK mobile industry is approximately £54 million in wasted expense. According to a report from WDSGlobal. .... never mind the lost revenue opportunity, the increased difficulty of reselling to a mobile user who has had a poor experience. Conclusion: You gotta get it right - particularly on a mobile.

Yahoo-Messenger IM interconnect

Yep, it has finally happened (apparently). MS Messenger users can now IM Yahoo users at last. Just like when SMS interconnect happened, we can anticipate an upsurge in usage. Bad news for stalwarts like Trillian and my favourite, GAIM, who provided IM interconnects.

I say apparently because you simply log into the Live website, agree to the terms and then log into Messenger. Except that Messenger server is down.....

Tribe to be bought by NBC???

Apparently it has got as far as a letter of intent, according to this article.

In comparison to the spectacular MySpace price tag, this looks dirt cheap - the end of the road for sky-high SNS valuations?? Particularly so, if you recall that Tribe raised $3m in February. Perhaps not. Apparently, the community / number of users isn't worth much, but the platform is.

Facebook might be ruing that rumoured offer of $750m.

Sport 'n' Skype

Above is a plot of the number of SkypeOut calls from Brazil, during Brazil's match with Croatia on 13th June.

I wonder if the same effect will occur this weekend with Mauresmo winning the Ladies' Singles at Wimbledon yesterday and the French team playing in the World Cup this evening? What do you reckon?

Friendster is granted a patent on social networking

Red Herring reports that Friendster has been granted a patent concerning entering a personal description and relationships to other users, mapping relationships and degrees of separation and connecting to others through these friends.

To be precise:

The Friendster patent’s main claim applies to networks that limit relationships to a certain number of degrees of separation - for example, you cannot connect to someone who doesn’t know someone who knows someone you know.

Interestingly, the article makes mention of other patents:

Six Degrees of Separation, another failed social networking startup, had obtained a patent on social networking technology in 2001. It was bought at auction in 2003 by the founders of LinkedIn and Tribe.net.

Note also that ol' Friendster, despite being too successful for its own good, resulting in dismal server performance, IS actually making money from ad sales in US and SMS in Asia (users pay to recieve alerts when users update their profile). 

Google AdWords like Product Placement in grocery stores

I went to a Cambridge Usability Event on Monday night: Nick Lansley made an interesting presentation about enabling partially sighted people to use Tesco.com more effectively.

In the chatting afterwards, I was struck by the similarity between Google Adwords (and paying for your position on your ad specifically) to product placements in grocery stores, whereby the washing powder manufacturer pays a premium to the retailer to place his product at chest height, rather than at ankle level (where the own brands are).

So it ain't all that new. As Sherlock Holmes said, "Everything comes in circles - even Professor Moriarty. . . It's all been done before, and will be again."

Best business networking site for Europeans is OpenBC

According to alarm:clock

New LinkedIn Outlook Toolbar - looking more like Plaxo

 
LinkedIn has a new Outlook Toolbar 2.0 (came out in March apparently - don't know how I missed it) which has:

• Ability to view mini-profile ('info box') if the email comes from a fellow LinkedIn user
  
• Invite Contacts from Outlook
  
• Build Contacts Wizard
  
• Grab Contacts
  

LinkedIn is looking more and more like a replacement for Plaxo.

Interestingly enough, the LinkedIn and Plaxo toolbars are slightly incompatible and they are apparently 'working together' on the issue.

Mozes raises $750k for MiContacts idea

Mozes, a Palo Alto start-up, has raised $750k for "old-school" MiContacts (for those that remember!):

From SiliconBeat:

You can create an account at Mozes and choose a code (we'd select MattMarshall, for example). Others can then message Mozes with your code, and you can respond with a virtual business card or other information.

Looks like the US is about 4 years behind on SMS keyword.

Ramparts have been breached - the end of 3's 'walled garden'

At LONG last, 3 opens up its network to non-3 authorised sites for its mobile users. The deal between Yahoo & 3 allows 3's customers to browse wherever they wish, not the totally restricted on-portal sites specified by 3. According to this CNET report, no launch date has been specified, but it's supposed be across 3's international operation. Pricing hasn't been determined either. Will this precipitate a GPRS / 3G per megabyte price war? Boy, I hope so, but I suspect that we might have to wait until early 2007 for that.....

Marc Canter pulls off the covers of PeopleAggregator

I got an invitation to PeopleAggregator late on Monday evening. The site was so skeleton that I had no idea of its purpose, even though I had worked out that it had come from Marc.

They offically launch today at Gnomedex, but what is it?

• An Identity Hub: the user will control who has access to their personal data, who can use it and how.
• The ability to move data around between different platforms (hmm, I don't have this one as a massive upside)
• A set of common actions which will interconnect social networks and personal publishing systems – together. (Uniformity - I like, but this will be technically tough to do and, of course, will only be able to employ the lowest common denominator approach)
  

Here's a good history + critique + links to more about it of PeopleAggregator from SiliconBeat. I haven't explored it - not even watched the demo vid yet.

Anyway, CONGRATS, Mark - I know you have been banging on about it for ages - so great to see it out there.

Mobile Networks sensitive to VoIP traffic - whatever next!

T-mobile UK apparently its 3G datacard customers from using VoIP apps (& IM apps - which I find plain bizarre), according to cnet article.


"Vodafone does not operate a policy of blocking VoIP on its network, and we have no plans to restrict IM services," said the company spokesman.

Does that mean they aren't able to or strategically see no need - only time will tell!

Mobile Operators' brands are being watered down

Tom Weiss, in the The Decline of the Operator?, suggests that the mobile brand pecking order will change to:

• Distributor/MVNO
  
• Handset manufacturers
  
• Network Operator
  

He's right .... for now.

In the future, I'd like to think that they'll be a Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) play that pops out: most probably it will be a quadruple play that will be fresh and new that attracts the consumers' attention.

Following that, I see 'communication' brands coming in to segment the market eg Disney for Kids, Saga for Retirees, Financial Times for Business etc

Community Site Gold Rush is transitory

Rafe Needleman comments in this interesting Release 1.0 article about why social software sites are 'misguided' - he really means transitory. As he says, "the more powerful a community site, the easier it is for the alpha users on it to get people to switch over to another site".

Churning to a site usually makes churning away just as easy. Admittedly, "The biggest community sites are populated by young people, an audience that is constantly renewing itself", so fashion moves on, so does the clientelle: Friendster to Facebook to MySpace to ???.

In conclusion, segment and don't be all things to many people as possible - do one thing well and hope that you can become recognised for sticking to the knitting.

Send money via Skype

+
According to those at the ebay conference, then you'll be able to send money via Skype (in conjunction with Paypal).

The article indicates that this feature is in the new Skype Version 2.5 - just out of beta - but not in my version.

Soonr (mobile to PC company) raises $4m

Soonr, which allows you to access the functionality on your PC from your mobile (see previous post) has just raised a first round of $4million from Clearstone Venture Partners.

They can raise another $2million as part of this round, but have decided against maxing out, according to Silicon Beat. I always say take all the money that you're offered - you never know when you'll need it.

Update on Bebo.com

• Bebo has just raised $15m from Benchmark Capital (see article)
  
• It has 24 million registered members with 2.5 billion monthly page views - pretty good when it was 'officially' launched in July 2005 (but I first noticed it in Feb '05).
• It has outstripped MySpace in the UK & Ireland.
  
• Picked up a Webby Award for best Social Networking website too (see their blog).

Note this very interesting point also:

Bebo is showing strong growth, and it stems in part from having the same "limiting" features as Facebook, Birch says. Bebo wants to encourage its users to engage with their real-life community, so is shying away from a completely "open" model like MySpace, where people create Web pages independent of a community. While Bebo allows such open behavior, it is doing everything it can to encourage people to network with others they are really associated with, whether high schools friends or other. It is getting 100 million page views per day, up 30 percent in just two months.

See quote from SiliconBeat.