sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

I have a fairly complicated personal IT set-up. We have a Mac at home, I use Vista on my “work” computer, and I carry my Asus eee (running Ubuntu in its eeexubuntu flavour) practically wherever I go. Gradually, little by little, Google is stitching it all together for me, creating a little ecosystem of applications that mean I have my stuff wherever I happen to be.

The latest thing is Google Docs, Google’s online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software, which has been developing well for a while now, but which has just rolled out offline functionality. This uses something called Google Gears to store copies of the documents I work with on Google Docs in an offline cache, with the code they need to work, so that I can edit all my Google Docs on the train, and they just get updated automatically next time I’m online.

My personal email account (for my own domain, not a gmail address) is now Google driven too. And I at last have the ability to sync my Outlook calendar with Google Calendar, which allows me to share my free time with anyone who has a web browser, ending all those daft unsolicited meeting requests I get at a stroke.

How’s Google going to get the money back for all this? The application development might be a one-off, but the storage bill (and the electricity for the data centres is the big one nowadays) must keep going up and up. Theorists will point out that a central storage infrastructure replacing all those local ones in peoples’ personal computers is more efficient in the long run, but where’s the money going to come from? Advertising seems somehow inappropriate as a revenue stream for this kind of service. My bet is they’ll end up charging for it directly somehow, but I’m sure they have some interesting ideas in the pipeline for monetising the Google desktop.

Last week I bought an Asus eee laptop. It’s a tiny machine, weighing less than 2 pounds with a 7 inch screen, and it runs Linux as its operating system.

The experience so far has been really good. The machine works well, the software’s great, and for £250 I’ve got a machine that’s faster and more enjoyable to use than my very expensive work laptop. But what’s really impressive is the way that support, enhancement, improvement, has been taken up by the users of these machines.

Asus themselves provide some support, but the really good stuff is on blogs and wikis that have been set up by people who have bought the machines themselves.

If you compare http://vip.asus.com/ with  http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ it’s obvious that the open source offering is better, more up to date, and more responsive than the manufacturer’s. This is a very interesting trend. Actually, I’m happier that there is this community developing and that so much open information is out there than if I was reliant on a secretive, commercially sensitive company. Probably it’s so noticeable here because the eee is a Linux (i.e. open source) machine. You don’t see wikis cropping up for all products, so what makes one more or less likely to be a community hit?

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/11/ad-zappers-for-facebook.html lists a variety of plug-ins for Firefox that will remove contextual ads from your Facebook experience.

It might get a bit tricky charging for ads that are being removed at the browser. Whether they’re counted as valid ad impressions before they’re removed isn’t made clear in the article.

A few months ago I put myself on the mailing list for something called myfootballclub, a group that was going to attempt to raise enough support and money to buy a football club. The subscribers would then be involved in setting the direction of the team, player selection and such like.

A couple of months ago they emailed me to say they had enough supporters to collect our money (£35 per supporter) and that they were in discussion with various football clubs about acquisitions. I paid my £35, frankly wondering whether anything more would happen, or whether someone was going to an awful lot of trouble to con me.

This morning I found out that we’d bought Ebbsfleet United, a team in the Conference League, currently in 9th place, and it all seems to be legitimate, because it’s been reported all over the media. All I know about the team so far is that they’re based in Kent, and if they get promoted they’ll be in the Football League for the first time in their history. Oh, and their nickname is “the Fleet”, imaginatively enough.

Their website is down this morning, because of high volumes of traffic. The Wisdom of Crowds thesis is about to be tested in a very interesting way. It’s a very English web 2.0 story.

This article in Director (the monthly magazine of the Institute of Directors) contrasts the start-up options of the US with those of the UK. The US situation sounds extremely favourable:

• Rents are low
• Investors are very open to investing in start-ups
• Bright people want to work in start-ups, rather than big established businesses
• The market is huge compared to the UK, meaning you need a much smaller share of the customer base to be a success, and you don’t have to do lots of translating if you don’t want to

There are several people in the article who started out in the UK and moved to California to really get their businesses off the ground. From personal experience, I’ve seen a wide range of ways that funding can be obtained for start-ups in the UK, but it is really hard work, and it sounds a lot easier in the US.

It was nice to read about some UK success stories, though, including Zoomf.com:

But a growing cluster of successes is beginning to provide UK graduates with an alternative. Zopa, Garlic, Monitise, OnOneMap, Nestoria, Zoomf and Zubka are all original, scalable UK tech firms. Says Klein: “Not only is there access to an amazing ecosystem of talent, but you now have sophisticated venture capital. People are being myopic when they think of Silicon Valley as the only place to build Web businesses.”

Yesterday, I read at Gizmodo that Reevoo (a leading provider of online review services to retailers) is warning shoppers to be careful when relying on reviews they read on the Internet. This might seem like an odd thing for a provider of reviews to be doing, but Reevoo’s business model involves pooling reviews across all its customers, and building its own brand as a trusted supplier of independent information, perhaps a bit like Which? Magazine. So Reevoo’s message can be translated as “our reviews are independent and reliable, beware other peoples’”.

I wrote last week about the benefits of consumer reviews on e-commerce websites: they help with search engine optimisation, and there is evidence they improve average basket value, conversion rates and return rates for many retailers. There is a real concern about the extent to which some retailers might edit unfavourable reviews, while others at the low end might just make up good ones. If 6 out of 10 consumers are strongly influenced by consumer reviews, there’s obviously an incentive for some to improve, or even manufacture, better feedback than they would otherwise receive.

This issue is on a continuum of questions regarding online trust. At one end we see trusted, peer reviewed academic writing, at the other unauthenticated random messages on Twitter, Facebook and Bebo, which might be inaccurate, slanderous or even criminal in some cases - the name of someone who might have been involved in a murder briefly appeared in comments on a Youtube video last week, according to this article.

Clearly you shouldn’t believe everything you read, and this is why trust models like ebay’s have become so successful. Tim Berners-Lee addressed the question at his lecture at the BCS in March. There might be better technical solutions on trust soon, but for now it’s not surprising that people are questioning consumer reviews. If Wikipedia can be amended by the CIA, to suit their world view, we should be careful before trusting anything we read.

One of the powers of a brand is to create that kind of trust for the information it provides. Would John Lewis fix its reviews? The reason most people would say not is that their brand is so strong. And that’s based on decades of hard work.

As part of its recent design upgrade, the team at Zoomf.com has introduced a very interesting new feature: the ability to search visually within a defined polygon on a map. Here’s an example.

Here’s how it works:

• Go to http://www.zoomf.com and start a property search (e.g. type in “NW3″ and press search)
• Once you’re looking at the search results, hit the visual search link
• Click the “add search area button” to start drawing your polygon
• Add each point you want as part of the boundary of your search area
• When you’ve finished, click back on your starting point

It’s beta software, but it’s clear it has stacks of possible uses, like keeping track of properties within school catchment areas, on specific bus routes, near your favourite chip shop… Given that you can save your searches and get an RSS feed of them, or even check them on your mobile, it’s set to be a very useful feature.

This article at the Economist makes some very strong points about Facebook as a business, and is well worth reading. Given that the whole value of the company is in its right to market to its users, the value of that marketing really has to be thought through. Lots of people are predicting Facebook will be the next behemoth Internet business, comparing it with Google, but is this a valid argument?

One of the first creative directors I worked with used to talk about “mission marketing”, creating advertising that online consumers were responsive to because it helped them with whatever task they were carrying out. If they’re searching on Google, adwords are a perfect example of this, and that’s why they’re so successful. But you can do it in other ways too: mortgage calculators on property sites, entertainment for our downtime, even cleverly placed 468×60 banners can help users complete their missions.

But what’s our mission when we’re on Facebook? We’re catching up with friends, gossip, making plans for the weekend. Sure, some advertising might help us with that, but an awful lot of brands have nothing to do with this particular mission, and could easily be seen as a nuisance or distraction.

It’s certainly possible to develop clever campaigns that help people research their holidays, or swap tips on the best DVD player, or whatever, and to incorporate those in Facebook, but how scaleable is that model compared to sponsored search listings? How many Facebook apps will one person install and use? It seems pretty clear (and this is one of the Economist’s points) that the comparison with Google is specious.

Which takes me back to the valuation question: is Facebook really worth $15bn? When people value companies, they do it on the basis of long term expected return on investments. If I invest $100 in one company, instead of another, or a savings account, I expect my money back eventually, and I expect an income that is greater than I’d get elsewhere, especially if there’s some risk attached. A company’s value (number of shares in issue times price per share) is often worked out as a ratio to annual earnings or profit. British Airways, with earnings of $500m, is worth about $5bn, so the price/earnings ratio is about 10 (11.18 when I looked, but I’m simplifying!)

What do those numbers look like for Facebook? $100m in earnings this year, and a $15bn valuation based on the Microsoft deal, means it would take them 150 years to earn back their market cap. Obviously they’re expected to grow, but how much growth is possible? And will they be around for long enough to repay all this enthusiasm?

News International is (according to this article) about to launch a vertical search engine focussed on the UK property market. To some, this might seem like a fairly uninteresting development in online property advertising. There are lots of property websites in the UK, Rightmove being the most prominent. Zoomf (who I’m involved with as a non-exec director), Propertyfinder and a host of other companies are also in this very competitive niche, so you might ask who needs another property website?

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This is a great presentation I picked up yesterday, from the team at Dopplr. It’s somewhat technical, and useful for developers for that reason, but it’s making some important points about business trends as well.

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The first big point is that you don’t have to build a huge online service to do something truly useful. Dopplr actually does a very simple thing, but it does it in an open way that makes it easy to integrate with other things. The presentation gives lots of examples of this: blog badges, Facebook integration and even a tool that can tell you how much CO2 you’re producing with your business travel, all powered by trip data at Dopplr, but integrated with other things, to make 1+1=3.

The second big point is about identity management. OpenID is emerging as a standard for identification online: Dopplr, 37 Signals (with their Basecamp application) and many, many others are turning to OpenID to manage authentication and identification. This will make it much easier for applications to stitch together bits of information from different sources. But there are also standard APIs (Google has one, Facebook has one, Flickr has one) that make it easy for users of the Internet to authorise applications to access the data from each others’ systems on behalf of the user. OpenID will be a big part of lots of services looking forward.