Messagr is a “new presence-based search engine” that helps you find other skype users with similar interests to yourself. To participate you simply register yourself on messagr with your skype details and then add some tags that describe the topics you might like to chat about.
For example if you wanted to discuss music with someone right now, you could search for the term music or click on the tag cloud to find those people that were online (which is determined by their skype presence) and interested in music. You can then initiate a call or a chat session via skype. [note: the tag cloud dynamically updates as members change their Skype presence which is a feature I really like]

Of course there are similar services out there on the web such as Jyve which is more like Yahoo! Answers via Skype as opposed to a personal interest/tagged communication.

Speaking with Joel Selvadurai last night, a 22 year old computer science graduate from Durham University in Newcastle, he told me that he built messagr in less than 3 months from concept to beta using java, jsp and the SkypeWeb presence service.

“I am a single founder and am based in Marylebone in London. I am self funded and am looking for funding to take my idea further. I think there is great potential in this field of ‘presence search’. I shall be attending the Second Chance Tuesday event this coming Tuesday.”

What I really like about messagr is the fact that Joel has taken his idea to market without funding and in such a short space of time. This seems to be a trend right now with opensource software and intellectual capital combining to make ideas a reality or at least a proof of concept that helps VC’s envisage the the idea as a functional web application.

After what seems an age since the last successful event, Second Chance Tuesday the investor, startup “dating agency” organsied by Judith Clegg and Michael Smith, is back and with a bang!

After several lengthy discussions it was felt that it would be of greater value to the potential start-up community [attending] to initially hear from an experienced Entrepreneur and/or Venture Capitalist who had been there (raised money), seen it (built a successful business) and done it (sold it successfully) before every retires to the bar to exchange war stories and bend the ear of the nearest Angel.

Well in the UK space there are very few people who fit this bill but one person certainly does and that is Saul Klein, “currently” VP ecommerce of Skype and Founder of Video Island. I had coffee with Saul the other day and the majority of that conversation will remain private but we both agreed on one thing that right now there is a lot of me-too investment opportunities in the UK space but very little that is unique or ground breaking.Some of the companies that Saul finds interesting today include Moo, Mind Candy and SpotRunner and as a successful Angel Investor himself it is worth hearing his views on why he likes these companies above the vast majority.

So next week is:

Update: The evening was very well attended and although I turned up only to catch the end of Saul Klein’s presenation (due to traffic into London), I enjoyed meeting a whole host of friends and new faces. Thanks Judith and Mike for putting on a great event once again. I look forward to the next one. For the rest of the photo’s from the event Mike has kindly put them here on Flickr.

I am often challenged to name the UK’s few globally known start-ups and quiet often I forget that WeeWorld, the creators of the popular WeeMee avatars, is a “global” example of a successful UK company. The others being Bebo, DropSend and Last.fm.

Basically WeeWorld lets users create a cartoon character that can act as an avatar for them on instant messengers, blogs and social networking sites, as well as mobile devices. Users pay $2 to create a WeeMee, as well as paying for additional updates to their character via a mobile phone. To the right is my own “business” WeeMee.In May this year, WeeWorld received $15.5 million in a second round of funding from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, enabling it to grow its digital identity business internationally. CEO Celia Francis said the London-based firm would use the funds to expand its presence in the United States, support further advertising and sponsorship deals, and achieve what Ms. Francis jokingly referred to as “WeeWorld domination.”

Well true to her word, WeeMee took another step towards global domination this week by forming a strategic partnership with AOL which allows the millions of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users across the UK, North America and Canada to create and communicate via their own personalised WeeMee. You can also use your WeeMee on MSN, Skype, Friends ReUnited and Excite.

According to the WeeWorld Corporate website, “the company is not yet profitable” but 10 million users have already created WeeMees with 500,000 new users joining monthly.

Celia Francis, CEO of WeeWorld said “Users easily create their unique WeeMee identity to use across all their digital communications channels – from instant messaging to email, blogging, VoIP, picture messaging and mobile IDs – and can search for other WeeMees worldwide, based on interests, looks, location, passions, enthusiasms and opinions.”

I spoke with Celia about a month ago when news of this partnership was circulating. Although I had heard hints of it being AOL, I had actually hoped it was a leading social Network such Bebo, MySpace and/or Piczo which I think is certainly more “strategic” and of higher value, given that AOL is selling most of its European companies and seriously lagging behind the big three in the USA.

We also spoke about two other strategic directions that I felt WeeWorld might look to develop. The first was supporting Microsoft’s meta-identity solution called CardSpace which will be part of Windows Vista and also available for Windows XP (SP2 + .NET3). Below is an example screenshot from my own CardSpace, using my own WeeMee avatars to create two persona’s – my businss and my personal – each with a different address, email and phone number.

Therefore if I came across sites that accepted Microsoft’s “Federated Identity” CardSpace, I could then choose which card persona to use in order to provide my login credentials. [note: This is a mockup I created and is currently not a service available from WeeWorld.] Of course, if this were possible, I am sure there would be no reason why WeeWorld couldn’t extend that support to the other identity solutions e.g OpenID, Yadis or sxip.

The second opportunity might be if WeeWorld decided to support the hCard microformat. Again below is an example of how my WeeMee might be used inside of a hCard microformat. I created this using the simple hCard creator which is free. Additional microformat support could include a person’s social network and profile (xfn & xmdp) as well as including their interests and their Geo Location. [note: Again this is a mockup by me and not a service currently available from WeeWorld]

London-based, Unruly Media recently launched Viral Video Chart “the first chart to independently monitor the popularity of videos” from the world’s most influential video-sharing sites i.e YouTube, MySpace and Google Video. They tried looking for references to videos on Yahoo AOL MSN for a while, but nothing ever made the top 25 so they stopped!? This is surprising given that according to Hitwise, the top 5 sites in the US for online video are YouTube (43% market share), MySpace (25%), Yahoo! (10%), MSN (9%) and Google (6%) (Hitwise,24 May 2006)

So if you want to know the number one video that people are talking about today, you can find it on www.viralvideochart.com. Equally there is also a weekly and monthly chart available, plus an archive of previous number ones.

The chart is compiled by listening to a variety of ping servers that scour millions of websites every day – 100,000 per hour or nearly 2,000 per minute – and looking for new links and embedded videos on people’s blogs and/or personal websites. They then count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded before publishing a daily list of the top 25 videos. Technorati Video already does this but only for YouTube.

Today Unruly Media is a three-person technology-driven media company, based in London, UK. Founded in January 2006

Scott Button, CEO of Unruly Media, believes that the chart will be a valuable resource to web users looking for a quick fix of entertainment: “Over three billion snack-sized videos are now being viewed every month on top video-sharing sites like YouTube, with millions more being added every month. We wanted to bring the best of this stuff together in one place in an objective and authoritative way.”

The creators of the site have been surprised by the broad range of content that the chart contains, from the usual clips of fat kids falling over through classic internet humour (Gary Brolsma, the author of 2004’s Numa Numa craze just released a new video) to trailers and premieres for large media corporations (a trailer for the new series of the Simpsons claimed the number one spot last Monday). Today the no.1 video is the moving and inspiring video “Free Hugs Campaign” which has the brilliant backing track “All the same” from the Aussie band Sick Puppies. [note: if you like Hoobastank, Dishwalla, Green Day etc. then you will like the Sick Puppies.]

Sarah Wood, one of the company’s founders added: “The chart provides a fascinating snapshot of a single day’s cultural zeitgeist. Taken together, these snapshots will form a compelling archive of cultural moments. Just imagine how powerful it would have been if we’d had an archive of the top user-submitted video clips from the day that Kennedy was assassinated or the day the Berlin Wall came down? From now on, every major event gets such a companion-piece.”

Talking with Scott this morning, clearly it is early days and there are some exciting new features to come and improvements in the UX. The revenue model will be a combination of advertising and/or sponsor placed videos on the side of the page.

There’s a real buzz beginning in the London start-up space, I’m not sure if there is elsewhere around the UK? In the last few weeks there have been some really good events and meetings. I was at Mashup, Beers & Innovation but sadly missed the most recent Geek Dinner and Ruby on Rails conference/party.

Last night was the Internet Peeps dinner organised by Robert Loch at the Adam Street club.

The room was full of UK entrepreneurs and VC’s getting together to share ideas, to make new connections and to exchange war stories about raising money, finding good developers and how they got started.

The speakers were Daniel Waterhouse (3i), Paul Fisher (First Capital), Michael Smith (MindCandy) and Sean Seton-Rogers (Benchmark).

From the QnA session, the one thing I took away was the fact that VC’s are struggling to find start-ups to invest in. The point being that start-ups no longer need to raise the £1m+ previously needed in the web 1.0 period to get an idea up and running. Now £20-£40k gets you on the web and with actual subscribers/users to prove the model. In some cases the start-up can actually be profitable before they need to raise new growth capital. The thing that is still missing is the angel investment capital which Philip Wilkinson describes as the equity gap.

The rest of the evening I spent talking to some very interesting people about their companies: Michael Birch (CEO Bebo), Cary Marsh (CEO MyDeo), Philip Wilkinson (CrowdStorm) Alex Tew (Million Dollar Page) Matt Ogle (Last.fm), Walhid Al Saqqaf and Sokratis Papafloratos (Trusted Places) Ed Freyfogle (Nestoria), Peter Nixey (WebKitchen), Valerie Taylor (Ariadne Capital) Nic Brisbourne (Esprit Capital) and Paul Birch (co-minded) to name but a few. Sadly I didn’t get to talk to Robert’s Brazilian friends

Robert also runs a number of smaller Internet Dinners regularly. The next dinner dates are: Tuesday 10th, Wednesday 11th, Thursday 12th, Tuesday 17th, Tuesday 24th and Thursday 26th of October.

The format is – meet for drinks at 6.30pm followed at 7pm by chaired roundtable discussion over a three course dinner with wine and coffee for 8-12 people. The price is £50 for members and their guests, £75 for non-members.

Hopefully it will be as good if not better than this one!

dotMobi, the Internet new top level domain for mobile content, launches to the public today, opening up registration to the public.

I won’t say much about it here, because I am not exactly unbiased^*, but read what BBC and Financial Times are saying. Whatever your opinion on the usefulness of new top level domains, it’s clear that the launch of dotMobi is creating a lot of buzz about using the Web on your mobile, which is a “good thing.” Also, it’s important to understand that the dotMobi guidelines for Mobile Web content development are based on the best practice guidelines developed in the W3C Mobile Web Initiative.

For more information, or to register a dotMobi name, visit mtld.mobi or take a look at the dotMobi blog for up to the minute news on the launch.

^*Disclosure: Vodafone, my employer, is an investor in dotMobi and I have personally been involved in its development.

Israeli startup Fring is pushing the envelope on Mobile VoIP with an application that is knocking the socks off the competition on Series-60.

I’ve been using Fring for about a week and a half and I can say: I’m impressed. The integrated presence features (allowing you to see which of your Skype or Google Talk buddies are online) combined with IM are enough to sell me. I would say the interface and integration into the phone platform are better than Google Talk on the Blackberry.

Fring has about 20 employees and the technology has been in development for two years. They are wisely adopting a viral approach to distributing this software. Right now it’s available by invitation only.

One question remains: can Fring do something about the talk quality and delay? One of the differentiators of VoIP services like Skype on the PC (when they work) is great voice quality. Can Mobile VoIP bring this kind of high quality voice to the mobile phone experience? Right now, latency is the key issue for the service. Fring say they are currently in the process of moving some servers to the UK which they claim will bring the Fring service in line with PC based VoIP standards.

Also, Skype and Google are both immanently rolling their products out onto smart-phone platforms as well (Skype is already available on Windows Mobile and has been for some time). If Fring continues to add more services (such as Yahoo! messenger and MSN) then it could easily differentiate itself.

Nestoria, the privately funded vertical search engine, has just announced that it can now provide housing details nationwide. Nestoria see this as the next step on their path to make it as easy as possible for people to find properties across the UK. Nestoria make their money by selling advertising, instead of charging estate agents to list their properties.

“We’re a search engine that gathers property listings. We don’t sell houses, we don’t sell mortgages, we don’t sell anything. The same way that search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN help you find websites you’re looking for, we help you find exactly the property you are looking for. Like other search engines, we gather our data from across the web.”

Like OnOneMap, Extate and Zoomf; Nestoria is a mashup of house listings with Google Maps. What’s most interesting about all of them is the fact that they are each at different stages of their developmentFor example, OnOneMap is the oldest, being the grand old age of one now, and has very good UK coverage of properties and has really integrated advertising into the user interface without it being over bearing but I do find the need to click on every housing icon a little labourious now. This is where the newer sites, I think have improved on OnOneMap (OOM).

With Extate I like the really simple search engine and the way it lists the housing results so that you can dynamically filter them in the browser to find just what you want but as I said before this site needs to better integrate itself with a mapping provider. In fact as the mapping integration is so poor with MultiMap, it would be nice to see Extate integrate with either Yahoo or Microsoft maps just to differentiate itself from every other Google Map mashup site. Extate like OOM has very good UK housing coverage but OOM still has the most extensive coverage of all. What isn’t clear is the revenue model for Extate and/or its advertising strategy.

With Zoomf, it has gone one stage further than both OOM and Extate. Firstly the initial search bar is an Ajax service much like Google Suggest, so that as you type the name of a place it dynamically delivers a list of housing suggestions which you might like to click on. Zoomf has also integrated the housing results list with the Google Map very well. They are displayed side by side, making it quick and easy to see the property’s details and its location on the map in the same browser view. At the moment Zoomf only covers the London region and its advertising model to generate revenues is not as clear as OOM.

And finally we come to Nestoria which i think has leap frogged them all. It too uses a Google suggest like Ajax search bar to make housing suggestions as you type. It too lays out the housing search results side by side with the Google Map but again I think Nestoria has moved the genre on one stage.

This time Nestoria allows you to overlay a number of other data sources – pubs, schools etc using the Google KML format onto your chosen map view. This is great because being able to see the additional data sources reminds me of UpMyStreet.com which allows you to search for information about the local schools, crime statistics and council tax bands etc. in your prospective new home’s area.

This flexible data overlay model should allow Nestoria to partner with multiple other relevant data sources. Of course because the other sites also use Google Maps in their mashup, there is nothing to stop all of them implementing exactly them same feature in their future versions.

Having said all of that about each site I still have a problem with all of them because none of them use the hlisting microformat standard and that includes the source content provides such as – Foxton’s, Hampton’s etc. whereas sites like CraigsList, Edgeio and Dealtagger

Below is an example of a Georgian property for rent in Reading costing £515 per month which comes free on the market in October. This markup would make it easy for sites like http://kitchen.technorati.com/ to use its search engime to find them. I’m fact instead of being aggregators each of these housing sites should be microformat search engine with all of the mashup features they offer today. A great example of a product listing site in the UK is DealTagger more about them later.

Priceshout, a self funded UK based company, has just launched a price tracking/price comparison/social shopping/wishlist website. Think of what Kelkoo.com might have looked like if it had been created in this web 2.0 period.

Basically it allows you to build up a personalised price comparison mini-site that tracks the products you are most interested in, and enables you to search, sort and filter the products using tags and other constraints (such as currency, stock level, price range, popularity etc.).

You can then monitor the searches you created in your RSS reader which in turn then alerts you when new results are found or as products’ details change.

Then on the server-side, PriceShout’s software automatically fetches and updates the details for your products from their partner supported stores (currently 15 stores are supported, and they are looking to expand this number to 30 by next week).

The site has developed and evolved over the past 12 months and been in a private alpha for around 3 months.

If you read sites like TechCrunch, then it is a fair guess that your friends and family probably think you are some sort of computer expert, someone they can turn to when they need computer related help and advise. This is often a blessing in disguise because once you’ve been successfully identified as an expert, often what was supposed to be a five minute quick question soon becomes a time consuming reinstall and/or virus health check etc. After a while you begin to fear the knock on the door or the phone ringing, feeling you will never be left alone again!

Well thankfully help is at hand, more precisely thousands of hands. Last week BT announced their new home-based broadband customer support service, BT Home IT Visit.

BT Broadband customers can now arrange for an engineer to visit their home and install broadband from £50.00 per visit. In addition, anyone with a BT line can request a Home IT Visit for assistance with any IT-related problem or situation for £75.00 for the first hour and £25 for each subsequent half-hour. said Emma Sanderson, Director, Value Added Services for BT Retail

Following three months of successful trials, BT now has a team of up to 2,000 specially trained engineers nationwide who can visit customers in their homes to help them get on-line and get the most out of their broadband. Customers, for example, can request an engineer to help set-up a wireless router or network, and attach printers or other devices. An engineer can also give your computer a health check and show customers how to back-up data. In addition they can give help and advice with installing and configuring a new PC, including backing-up and transferring data across from an old PC.

The Home IT Visit service follows the launch in March of BT Home IT Advisor – a service which gives customers a single point of contact with a team of BT trained advisors dedicated to providing comprehensive support for customers’ PCs, networks, applications and up to 20 devices for the home. The service can even create a ‘virtual engineer’ in your home by enabling an advisor to securely ‘log on’ to a customers’ computer remotely and troubleshoot a problem for no additional fee, above the £9.99 a month subscription.Great news then, you’re off the hook. So when the next door neighbour calls round with “just a quick question”, you can politely point him/her to the BT service(s) and get back to what you were doing before but wait, like London buses it seems there has been a rash of Home IT services launched recently and now that neighbour wants to know which service you think he should call!?

One new service is Geeks on Wheels (GOW) which was formed by Jamie Shaw and Michael Scates. It provides a “no fix, no fee offer and 10% discounts for silver surfers”. The service is similarly priced to BT but GOW seems geographically restricted to Sussex and London and appears more expensive than BT on some of the same services it provides e.g a wireless network setup costs £199 +VAT

Next there is Steve Moore’s Digital Plumbers service which again provides a home IT help service. Steve was once chairman of CEDIA and after leaving set up his own high-end audio and lighting installation service called SMC which targeted the £1m homes of the rich and occasionally famous. Digital Plumbers is Steve’s new consumer service aimed at mass marketing what he learnt from SMC. It appears that Digital Plumbers can offer a nationwide service and have in fact recently branched out into Ireland. Once again the installation and service costs are comparable to BT but once again fractionally more expensive. And talking of BT, Digital Plumbers have recently recruited Andrew Burke from BT to head up their operation.

Next up is the newbie on the block called DT3 which was set up by Darren Turnbull and Toby Treacher in April 2006. Once again DT3 is a home IT support service with a menu of standardised “fixed cost” services which seems to be the cheapest/best value in this review. DT3 “guarantee that they will setup, upgrade or fix your problem, and if you are not 100% happy, you don’t pay a penny”.

Finally there is DSG (Dixons Stores Group) have also decided to enter the market for home IT support services by forming a new operation called The TechGuys which already has over 3,000 experienced advisors available throughout the UK capable of doing 16,000 home visits per week! Over the next five years DSG expects to invest £50 million into The TechGuys. The aim is to open 200 standalone service locations in the UK and service points at 150 PC World’s, as well as a number of concessions, creating potentially 2,000 new jobs. This is a substantial investment because the DSG estimates that the market for digital home support services is currently worth £1billion in the UK alone and could even double in size within 5 years.

The range and costs of the services are again comparible but the phone support is based on two grades of telephone: a general enquiries line financed by a national call rate (0845) number; and a PC helpline charged at £1.50 a minute. The latter is a rebranding of PC World’s current PC phone support. Hands-on support such as drop-in clinics and home visits are priced from £10 upwards on a no-fix, no-fee basis.

Of course all of these services are based on the original US Geek Squad which recently announced that they will be creating a 50:50 joint venture with the CarPhone Warehouse to create the European Geek Squad and expect to launch in January.

So who do you call … well clearly it depends on the level of service you require and the length of time it might take? I would add that having started a business like this myself, aimed at the new home market in 2004 and experienced first hand the issues of providing home IT services, I would say the biggest issue facing each one of these services are scalability and profitability. Providing the right level of quality service on a nationwide scale whilst remaining profitable will be difficult.

If you are a British expat like – Alex Barnett and Ben MetCalfe - then getting hold of Tetley teabags, Heinz Beanz and/or Marmite can prove difficult. Asking friends to send you food parcels every now and then maybe one solution. Another maybe to use UK2YOU, a new UK focused website with more than 200 shops ranging from Hamleys to Harrod’s to Thornton’s chocolates which delivers to all E.U. Member states plus most of North America and much further afield.

UK2YOU was created by a partner of a British Foreign Office employee to service British expats and those people abroard wanting to buy British goods. Noticing a gap in the market UK2YOU only promotes shops that “deliver” to the international audience and thus takes away the annoyance buyers sometimes feel when getting to the checkout only to find the shop doesn’t deliver to their country.

They say there is a mug born every minute and the internet is clearly no sanctuary for mugs. Irish Actor Stephen Francis Brady recently launched a new website with the intention of giving away £1 Million ($1.8 Million) to someone out there. How very nice and grand of him but it’s not his money!

He has setup a website called “Step up to a Million“ or should that be pyramid selling in disguise. However, with room for only 21 people, amazingly the first four spaces have already been sold for more than their asking price on eBay.

Now with only 17 places left Stephen is planning on going viral with ”Step up to a Million“ and believes that the last remaining places will also get snapped up.

he says “Winning the money is just a bonus, the real goal is to generate huge interest and traffic to the sites of those 21 involved. I then plan to have the draw which will hopefully take place on live TV, which in turn will generate even more interest. Each time a space goes, demand grows for the remaining places and when people see the site I believe they will continue to come back as they will be curious to see who the next place will go to”.

The idea behind his website is to sell 21 banner spaces that start at £1 and double in price each time a space is sold and believe it or not, it only takes 20 double-ups to reach over £1 million. 

TV Presenter, Mark Ryes who secured space No.3 for nearly five times the asking price says, “It’s a good Idea and something different that might just work, hopefully it won’t lose momentum half way to the top, but that’s the chance I took.”

Everytime I see sites like this I groan because they are all trying to replicate the success of The Million Dollar Homepage - oh well Caveat Emptor, buyer beware.

Not to be out done, there is also Entrepreneur Island which is a contest and a way for youth to get advertising to back their business idea. Kari Peters started the site so she could raise capital for her business ideas and provide support to other budding business people. She will also use some of the money to buy a real island and turn it into a members-only resort for the 100 lucky Web site members. All this for a sign-up fee of only $50.

The site is based on a simple premise: Entrepreneur Island has 100 spaces available for business barons with $50 and good ideas. Once 100 have joined, the race to use the page for advertising and to raise $2 million capital is on. Half of the money raised by each business person will go toward starting their business and surprise, surprise “Peters will keep half”. Along the way, there are three treasures – two $2,500 and one $5,000.

One will be released when the 100th member joins. One will be awarded in an online poll of Entrepreneur Island visitors. The last is hidden on Cyber I-land and available to the first member of the public who cracks the clues contained in the site’s weekly newsletter.

A few weeks ago I wrote about two new London based companies Truphone and ConnectMeAnywhere which offer cheap international calls on your mobile by redirecting a local call via VoIP. I also briefly mentioned the Swedish company RebTel which offers a similar service. 

According to the Business 2.0 blog  ”RebTel have just raised $20 million from Danny Rimer at Index Ventures and Benchmark Capital.”

Although I am unclear why the investment was so significant, what this investment does show however is that even though the VoIP market is beginning to become crowded with many me-too services, it’s only now that the VC’s are beginning to place their bets on who they think will eventually become the next big 21st century “digital” phone company.

Of course the 20th century analogue (POTS) phone companies, such as BT, hope they can remain our incumbent communication providers by [slowly] transitioning their 18m users over to VoIP based services such as the BT SoftPhone and BT Fusion.

Personally I prefer to use Skype and Skype mobile on my T-Mobile MDA Pro to achieve much the same things. For example whilst in France recently, I recieved both free Skype to Skype calls as expected as well as Skype in-calls from the UK i.e people called my local Skype UK number and only paid for the local call charge even though I was in France. Equally by using Skype it also means I only have one Skype contact list to manage both on my PC and mobile device. 

At the moment I try and use my Skype enabled mobile phone as much as possible to make free VoIP calls where and when I can but due to the limited wifi access i.e at home or in hotposts, it is rather infrequent. But everytime I do so, I either save money on my international call charges and/or I save money on my local call charges. 

I can imagine therefore that once the metropolitan wifi networks, being installed right now, become ubiquitous, I will begin to use my VoIP phone more often to replace a number of GSM/GPRS calls.

RebTel of course isn’t Danny Rimer’s only investment. One of his other ($18m) investments is FON.  FON is a mesh network of users freely sharing their home/hotspot wifi for the benefit of other FON members. IF (and I have my doubt’s) FON can manage to create a nationwide and/or international free mesh network, then services like RebTel will become immensely valuable which is why I guess Danny invested in RebTel?

Personally I am not sure if any of these companies, RebTel, CMA, TruPhone or FON will eventually become the next 21st century [purely digital] phone company. But what do I know, Danny was one of the earlier investors in Skype, so maybe he can see something I can’t in RebTel and FON but thankfully I am not alone in airing my concerns and doubts.     

TrustedPlaces is a “word of mouth” social network where people can review, rate and recommend places they know for their friends or just use the site to (re)search places for their own benefit.

TrustedPlaces is a project that Walid Al Saqqaf and Sokratis Papafloratos have been passionately working on since the beginning of the year with consultancy help from Peter Nixey. This week TrustedPlaces announced that they had became a public beta and in this release they also added a handful of new features. Last night at Mashup I met up with the TrustedPlaces team who are very excited about reaching this milestone. They also told me that they were already working on the next release candidate and had more new features coming down the track to extend the value/fucntionality of the site. e.g microformat support for hcard, hreview and geo microformats.

“With this release you’ll see a new home page, some very useful options for your reviews, favourites and friend’s favourites, quite a few design tweaks, but you’ll also be able to search for places that are near you.”

I think they have done a really good job and have implemented most of the useful web 2.0 features and functions you now come to expect on social networks – tag clouds, profiles, friends networks, ratings but one of the most interesting aspects of TrustedPlaces is the reward system which they have implemented for reviewers.

“You earn different set of points for certain actions you do on the site such as adding a review or adding pictures to someone else’s reviews. Each of those points counts as a single ticket towards a lottery draw that we will hold regularly. You can increase your chances of winning the prize by being more active on the site and collecting more points. The system notifies you on how likely you are to win, by placing you in 3 different categories:

• cold: > 20% of winning
• warm: 21 – 60% chance of winning
• hot: > 61% chance of winning

At the end of each month we will randomly draw a ticket. If your ticket is drawn you won the monthly prize. At the end of each year will also randomly draw a ticket for the yearly prize. If your ticket is drawn you win the yearly prize.”

Like TrustedPlaces, I firmly believe that sites which rely on ”User Generated Content” to increase their profitability or to increase their overall value – Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo! with Answers and TechReview to name but a few – should reward their contributing users in some way, either in the form of prizes, coupons, credits or micro-cash payments (if feasible) in order to ensure a sustainable flow of valuable content.

For example it should be easy enough for Amazon to use their mTurk service to reward people who place reviews on their site. I know Microsoft are working on a points reward system similar to the one they have for Xbox Live points which they will use across their Live sites such as Expo.

Yahoo! Points are already available and I can imagine this eventually linking to their recently introduced Yahoo! Answers points reward systems. Not to be out done, Google of course plan to have their own points sytem.

The only problem I foresee with rewarding people using points is that we have been here once before with Beenz, who tried to create a global points system.  Maybe this time around, like “Federated ID’s”, maybe we will get a Federated Points exchange? The only fly in the ointment will then be how much is a point worth and when it comes to exchanging points will 1 Google be worth 2 Yahoo!’s???

Ian Forrester from BBC BackStage is holding a VERY last minute Geek Dinner tonight.  

“If your in London today and would love to meet up for Dinner with Howard Rheingold of the SmartMobs and Virtual Community fame please email on mobileian at cubicgarden dot com or text me on 07870554816.

This is very last minute and we are going to have a meal rather than the usual geekdinner. So expect to pay for a meal and drinks. The venue is undecided and will be decided on at some point during the evening. But I expect it will be near Victoria or Kensington.”

Howard Rheingold is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. Over the past twenty years he has traveled around the world, observing and writing about emerging trends in computing, communications, and culture. One of the creators and former founding executive editor of HotWired, he has served as editor of The Whole Earth Review, editor-in-chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and on-line host for The Well. The author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Virtual Reality, and Tools for Thought, he lives in Mill Valley, California

If you are in London this week, there is the next in the Mashup Series where the topic this time is Digital LifeStyle Aggregators. DLA’s are personal homepages for your browser that enable you to aggregate all the information sources you want in one place. On the panel for this event are Tariq Krim (CEO & Founder) of Netvibes and Marc Canter (CEO & Founder) of People Aggregator.

I think it will be very interesting to hear what Tariq plans to do with his recently acquired $15m and how he intends to compete against the GYM club personal homepages. The evenings keynote speaker is BT Retail’s Stephen Stokols, the recently appointed Vice-President of strategy and business development, who will be outlining BT Retail’s new web strategy. This speech is especially timely given the recent announcement by BT that they will be offering a social networking and podcasting service.

Mashup is on 21st September 2006 and registration is promptly from 6:00pm with the evening expected to finish around9:00pm. The location is BT Centre, St Paul’s, London EC1A 7AJ.(51:30:57N 0:05:53W)

Update:

Photos from last nights event can be found here.

This morning’s paper featured something interesting: a full page ad for 3 featuring the Nokia N73 with the Yahoo! Go application front and centre. 3 has certainly been daring where others fear to tread, recently launching a partnership with Skype, and now Yahoo! One wonders how this meshes with 3’s over-all content strategy since the Yahoo! Go application essentially makes the phone into a Yahoo! phone. One also wonders what is next for Yahoo! Go.

This application was released in January last year and presented at Mobile Monday London by Christian Lindholm of Yahoo! (after he debuted it at the less-well-known CES in Las Vegas). At the time, it got a great reception, but there have been few updates (although the team was probably working on the recently released Windows mobile version).

The 3 tie-up is definitely a coup for Yahoo! however and could spell the beginning of something new for the Go mobile application. Christian is no doubt pleased that this campaign also features the N73, which he recently praised on his blog.

Thursday night I was in Soho, London for the monthly Beers and Innovation event organised by NMK’s Deirdre Molloy. The topic of the debate was “the future of RSS”. On the distinguished panel were Richard Edwards of MyZebra, Peter Nixey from Webkitchen along with Ivan Pope from Snipperoo.

In summation, all the speakers unanimously agreed that RSS is great, as did most of the audience. Some people even spoke about how RSS had changed their lives. So surprisingly during the Q&A session some idiot had the audacity to proclaim that RSS is dead! Oh yes now I remember (strong stuff that beer) that idiot was me.

What was I thinking? Why would I commit such as a faux pas in a room full of my peers and why would I further compound the issue by blogging about it here? I could have simply buried the bad news and hoped no-one else in the room remembered or worse still blogged about my stupid rash statement. Obviously that was never going to happen, after all this is the blogosphere.

So why did I make so bold and bonkers a statement? In my defence there are a couple of valid reasons which I would like to elaborate on here. Firstly I wanted to be controversial and spark a debate in the room and secondly and more importantly, I struggle to see where RSS 2.0 is heading (the most commonly used version today) which is presumably why I attended the B&I event in the first place.

Right now RSS 3.0 is not something we should expect to see any time soon; no-one is working on it! Dave Winer the author of RSS 2.0, is currently focused on his “river of news” idea and has even stated that as far as he is concerned “the RSS 2.0 spec itself is now frozen” but of course new features can still be added to extend RSS using namespace modules, for example the Yahoo! media module – mRSS.

In fact for many people the Atom 1.0 spec could be considered RSS 3.0, if you are interested and would like to read more about Atom 1.0, Dave Johnson gave an excellent talk on the differences between the two feed formats and the forth coming Atom Publishing Protocol.

But do we even need another version of Atom or RSS? For many subscribers the adage seems to be “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Personally I think RSS is great because, unlike email newsletters, I can anonymously subscribe to content and then choose to read it when or how I like. And better still, if I don’t like the content, I can simply and anonymously unsubscribe. So given this use case, RSS is great and “news of it’s death may have been greatly exaggerated”.

So what’s the problem? Well in this age of ad-supported free web content and free applications, advertisers see it differently and may prefer to use another adage instead to describe RSS “if you can’t measure it, you can’t monetise it”. And as a publisher, if we are not to kill this golden goose, then it is vital to provide the right type of feedback information to advertisers but worryingly there are very few reporting tools out there right now that can help do so. i.e how can I report how many people read the RSS feed and which channels/posts they read or ignored?

This reporting problem is not new, over two years ago Alex Barnett was asking the very same questions about RSS metrics but this probelm was never properly addressed but may need to be now because Dave Winer is once again questioning how publishers “measure rss” traffic.

TechCrunch’s reader statistics are determined by FeedBurner because it has the widest possible breadth of browser and aggregator support needed to help best measure and report on our RSS traffic. This report by Feedburner explains in depth how TechCrunch.com recently exceeded 100k subscribed readers.

But given the wide and varied ways people can now subscribe to a RSS feeds – i.e autodiscovery in IE7, Firefox and via other aggregators (Attensa, PageFlakes, Live.com, NetVibes etc) accuratley measuring how many people subscribe to your RSS feed is tricky and at best only a guesstimate.

For example I read TechCrunch.com via my Attensa RSS Reader in Outlook which is not supported by FeedBurner which in turn means I am not counted in the 100k+ user statistics. [note: Attempts were made by the industry to create a universal subscriber method (USM) but these seem to have died.]

But are advertisers really interested in subscription numbers alone and is this the best measure of content value? I have lots of subscribed feeds in my aggregator(s) that are unread, partly due to time constraints and partly due to the fact that only one or two of the actual post items are of interest to me. The rest remain unread and will be automatically deleted after 30 days.

So I believe that it is the actual number of readers that consume RSS content rather than the number of subscribers which advertisers and publishers would prefer to measure.

Maybe what is needed instead is a new RSS ping service that reports when a feed item has been read/viewed. Therefore it won’t matter what client aggregator is used to subscribe to the feed. In many ways this would be similar to the read notification functionality found in many email clients i.e when someone reads an email of mine, I can setup the email client to alert me with a read notification message. With a RSS ping reporting service built into RSS aggregators, it could achieve the same thing whilst still maintaining my anonymity as an RSS reader by not passing back any of my personal details to the ping server. In fact blog tracking sites like Technorati work in much the same way. Every time I post a blog entry it alerts a ping server via XML-RPC that I have a new post I wish it to index.

In many ways ping services like pingomatic and/or pingerati are already capable of supporting this type of RSS ping “reproting” service today. All that is needed is for RSS publishers to write their feeds in the manner as shown below.

So is RSS really dead? In some ways yes because what RSS needs is a new injection of life to help it develop to the next level. As a purist I am saddened to see advertising within my RSS feeds but as advertisers and publishers begin to realise that less of us read websites/blogs where their adverts are displayed and more of us read the content via our RSS aggregators, advertising in the RSS feeds is inevitable.

I could of course choose to unsubscribe in protest to any RSS feed with adverts but that would be cutting of my nose to spit myself because more often than not the content I want is contained within the very same RSS feed and as a publisher I need to monetise my content in order to ensure it remains free for subscribers. Right now I do not have adverts within my RSS feed.

So I believe the future of RSS is better reporting via a ping service that enables advertisers to include contextual advertising within the RSS feed. RSS 2.0 doesn’t natively provide this capability today. A proposed RSS module does enable this functionality to be added but I would like to see this as a standard component of RSS which is why I said RSS 2.0 is dead at the B&I event.

Maybe I would have been better of to have said its dead Jim but not as we know it?

Personally I would like to see this functionality also included inside of the Atom 1.0 Publishing protocol which hopefully will replace the metaweblog API and XML-RPC. Of course there might be an alternative method to update publishers, and thus report to advertisers in turn as to how many feeds and post items have been read, using Microsoft’s bi-directional RSS extension called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE)?

Either way RSS cannot remain the same. It needs to evolve and to include better reporting capabilites. RSS 2.0 is dead, long live the next version!

Like London buses you wait an age for one to come along and then two appear at the same time!? Yesterday I heard about two UK start-ups. TruPhone and ConnectMeAnyWhere that want to save you money by routing your calls over the internet rather than via traditional telephone operators. 

Truphone is a piece of free software, you download, that enables Mobile over IP (MoIP). Once downloaded, you will be allocatted a Truphone number, which you can use to get a number of benefits over your current mobile. To begin with only users in the UK and US will get Truphone numbers appropriate to their countries (i.e. +44 and +1 respectively) but more countries are coming shortly.

Truphone works wherever you have access to the internet via Wi-Fi. i.e your home, office, public areas or commercial hotspots (coffee shops, airports etc). which means free mobile calls to other Truphone users or very cheap calls to anyone else. And as a remarkable launch offer, they are offering free calls to 1.6 billion landlines until Dec 31st 2006. Much like the recent SkypeOut offers in France and America which Skype haven’t yet introduced in the UK? 

One of the unqiue and most impressive things about Truphone, apart from the company started out in a cow-shed in Kent, is the fact that they are a software-only network operator and better still, have built the network using freely-available open source technology and internationally-recognised open standards. For example, the core PBX platform is based on Asterisk. If you want to know more about the software used, you can read about it here.  

They also have a very interesting http://www.testyourvoip.com/ service to help you configure your wifi which was very enlightening about the different wifi standards. At the moment, Truphone is only available on the Nokia’s E-series, but there aim is to quickly be available on other compatible phones.

In contrast London based ConnectMeAnywhere (CMA) also would like you to use your mobile phone for international calls, also saving you money by using VoIP network (SIP backbone), but they can do so without you having to download any software or install any new hardware. In fact users don’t even need to connect to a computer to make a call.

What makes us different is that we allow anyone who can register to call almost anyone else from a real phone, not a pc.  This means that you can call from your mobile, your land line and/or your work number.  We do almost the opposite that Skype are doing with the DDIs.  We don’t route inbound calls to you, we route your outbound calls to whoever you choose.  We are focussing heavily on the phones and not the web to make the calls which makes the quality better (no pc or desktop software).” said Rayan Gallagher from CMA

Babble.net who will be offering CMA’s services to their users, allowing them to access their VOIP credit online, or off.  Here is a link to their HTML Demo. If you owuldlike to seem more of ConnectMeAnywhere they will be featured on BBC Click tonight. 

Other companies in this the same MoIP space include RebTel a Swedish based company who launched a product that will allow users to dial any international number at the cost of a local call. It works by having the two ends of the call use local connections (over low-cost local calls) to a VoIP point and then bridge the call to the recipient at the other end over the net.

And here is a list of other VoIP alternatives:

• BT Softphone or BT Fusion (UMA)
• Vonage Wireless Mobile Phone
• JaJah
• Skype
• Net2Phone

UK-based social shopping startup Crowdstorm is creating a buzz of its own right now. It recently announced the public beta to the world at large on its blog.

Crowdstorm was founded and funded by Philip Wilkinson (creator of the shopping comparison site Kelkoo UK) and Christopher Scollo (formerly VP of Technology at Ciao.com).

“Crowdstorm takes the experience of online shopping one step further by helping people find what to buy through buzz and recommendations from friends, as opposed to knowing exactly what you want already and just looking for the best price. It was something I always wanted to do at Kelkoo but the market was never ready, but with more people now being experienced online and using social networks, the opportunity is definitely here for us to pioneer the social shopping space.”

What I like about Crowdstorm is the way it has successfully “mash’d up” several web 2.0 technologies – tagging, rating, social networking, recommendations, QnA to create a digg-like product review service.

Speaking with Philip yesterday it’s clear Crowdstorm have lots of exciting plans coming down the line, such as microformat support (hcard, hreview, rel=tag, votelink), creating a mobile web version and possibly integrating Crowdstorm expert reviews into the search results of the mainstream search engines using technologies like OpenSearch and Google Coop.

Right now Crowdstorm is creating a points system to reward users for the number of reviews they write. As yet, they have not implemented the reputation system but I guess it will be along the lines of ebay and Yahoo! Answers. In the UK Crowdstorm have a number of competitors – Reevoo and Trusted Reviews

UPDATE: CrowdStrom is going to feature on Channel4 news today at lunchtime.