OK, OK, no more 2.0 ‘clichesuffixes’

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the launch of Wesabe (not to be confused with the nuclear horseradish) for several weeks. Firstly, it’s an interesting concept and secondly, one of the co-founders is Marc Hedlund - O’Reilly Media’s entrepreneur-in-residence and author of hugely entertaining and informative talks on VC Funding for Geeks.

Wesabe essentially helps users figure out where they can save money and manage their finances better by anonymising, aggregating and analysing  their personal financial data and comparing it with that of other Wesabe users. Users can tag each entry in their spending (lunch, movies etc.), set goals for themselves and tag their spending entries to find tips and shared goals from other users.

Wesabe is a great concept - a 43 Things for your money - and it’ll be interesting to see how the community evolves over time. Users are already sharing useful tips and advise, many of which can be glaringly obvious, but nevertheless hearing it from another person with a similar lifestyle can be valuable. Perhaps with a future layer of reputation, the tips may be eminently trustable.

Though Wesabe is a US startup, it emphasises a gap in the British financial services sector and UK startup scene. Britain has one of the largest concentrations of financial sector expertise in the world, a population that favours digital transactions over cash (and is very much in debt!) and yet the world’s fiscal hub is not giving rise to the emerging generation of Money 2.0 startups - the likes of BillMonk, ChipIn, FEED Tribes, Fundable, Prosper, TextPayMe and indeed, Wesabe.

Is this a consequence of conservatism in the financial sector, the glamour and glitz of social and entertainment based Web 2.0 services or simply the superior entrepreneurial abilities of American startups. Ironically, the one exception is Zopa, founded by former VPs and execs from Barclays, Tesco Personal Finance, Abbey and Egg; the latter, of course, led many innovations in online banking and lending in the first dotcom boom.

There’s perhaps a structural change that could help move things forward. Wesabe has shown that unbundling our banking data from our banks can help create new areas of value and usefulness - coincidentally, Marc led a panel discussion on Open Data at Web 2.0. Perhaps if banks began to offer platform services, like secured RSS feeds from your current account, they could assist in ushering in an ecosphere of innovative services that add value to their business and create growth for others…perhaps creating future acquisitions for themselves as those startups flourish.

A few years ago, the DaVinci Institute hosted a summit on the Future Of Money - I think it might be an interesting time to revisit those themes

This week, BBC News is running a series of stories on the Future Of TV - of course, YouTube, IPTV, mobile TV, BitTorrent and other forms of online TV figure a great deal in these articles; the UK is notoriously namechecked as the source of between 10 and 25% of all TV piracy.

It’s fair to say that one of the consequences of Web 2.0 is the increased bias of binary content amongst traditionally XML media and marked-up text. Consequently, there’s be an increased demand for services that can understand the nature of binary content like photos, audio and video. London-based Nativ TV is seeking to provide under-the-hood solutions for the management of rich media.

Nativ’s recently launched Mio solution provides video-based services with workflow tools for the ingest, validation, filtering, cataloging and manipulation of video content…the kind of capability that future YouTube’s, Revvers, broadcasters and content owners will need - to automate and manage large volumes of complex video content. Notably, Mio includes a set of APIs to aid integration into existing enterprise systems.

Nativ founder Jon Folland has a respected track record in working with broadcasters like Channel4 and the BBC as well one of the first IPTV channels, MTV Live. Though Nativ appears to understand the video workflow needs of braodcasters with a perspective others may lack, the applicability of Mio to managing large volumes of user-generated content is unclear.

Now what’d be really interesting is racing Mio against an equivalent Mechanical Turk powered workflow platform…Human vs. Cylon

Social Networks really came to the fore in 2006. Millions of people have created profiles and in many cases they have created multiple profiles on multiple social networks. I must admit I don’t use any of the consumer social networks, just LinkedIn if that counts and my own blog. But what comes next with social networking; more friends, more pageviews, more widgets?
Well the answer may come from Bebo who today launched their new personal “home” page which I think would have been better off being called “My World”. This new home menu tab is a link to an aggregated landing page that shows you what new things your friends are doing in their profiles. Below is Jose’s page from Bebo and it shows his friends new friends, their new photos and the new bands they are listening too.

In many ways this is a social discovery engine, as opposed to search, based on your friends attention metadata. i.e what they are listening too, looking at or learning about.

By coincidence or not, over the weekend a story appeared on USA Today about social shopping and how people would like to see this as part of their social network. Imagine if Bebo enabled people to rate/recommend products or places within their own profile and that this information then appeared on their friends aggregated home page i.e social shopping meets social networking.
Philip Wilkinson’s [CEO CrowdStorm] blogged about this over the weekend.

What it goes to show is that shopping can, and indeed is, a social activity both on and offline, and that it can be one of the most powerful word of mouth marketing activities due to the “trust factor”. As the article says, a lot of the big social networks would benefit immensely from integrating a social shopping element and they will know that this is not an easy task to do organically. Thinking back to my old price comparison days, ask any of the big players what happened to their own efforts at creating a price comparison engine and then ask why they gave up and partnered with a specialised player…

Either way we will see if the big social networks try and do this themselves or if they seek to acquire specialists like CrowdStorm, TrustedPlaces and/or other social recommendation sites.

Over the last couple years, the rise of remix culture has begun to penetrate hardware design and consumer electronics. The emergence of SQUID Labs, O’Reilly’s MAKE community, Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab, open source projects like the TuxPhone and Greenphone coupled with the decline of companies like Sony, have all contributed to new possibilities in opening the design and specification of devices to the consumer. Open source mobile handsets, in particular, offer the possibility of making an end-run around artificial barriers to innovation in the mobile industry.

Scottish-French startup, Crowdspirit, is looking to capitalise on these unfolding trends and help consumers to ’scratch their own itch’. The service lets members submit ideas and projects, collaboratively define specifications, invest real money if they wish, and finally purchase the product they desire.

As the service isn’t yet open for registration, it’s unclear how sophisticated Crowdspirit’s collaborative tools are, nor how flexible and cost-effective the manufacturing or supply chain will be. Nevertheless, the concept is appealing and creates a valuable mediation between consumers and producers in a market where consumers have little influence and could potentially share in the co-creation of value. On the other hand, we could end up with a generation of Homer-centric products…

I just hope they launch in time to make the rumoured iPod phone fulfil everyone’s projected desires

I’m still astonished how quickly Second Life has mainstreamed, Duran Duran gigs aside, there’s a surprisingly rapid corporate adoption of virtual presences by the likes of IBM, Reuters and American Apparel. Recently I learned that Theakston is also seeking to establish a virtual pub in SL!

Linden Lab’s creation is giving rise to a interesting secondary economy of real estate, avatar accessories, in-life artefacts and indeed an emerging consultancy market on how best to exploit SL. Next month, Linden is hosting a pair of workshops, in London and Boston, for agencies looking to help their clients establish projects and presences in Second Life. The London event, How to position Second Life to your Clients, will take place on 13th December.

I wonder if I can convince Sam and Mike to hold a future TechCrunch event in SL

Boo.com - a notorious dotcom bubble startup - is planning to relaunch. The confirmation has been made in Swedish media magazine “Komet” by Jonas Arnberg, who works for Handelns Utredningsinstitut (HUI), a respected retail research institute in Sweden. Arnberg told Komet that given that the internet shopping market had developed so much over the past couple of years, it was a sign of the times that “boo.com will be relaunched in 2007″.

In an email interview, Arnberg said “According to their website they are supposed to open during this year, since they still haven’t opened I’m not sure if its not going to happen or if it’s just delayed.”

“However, what’s interesting and which I talked about in the article was that Swedish e-commerce now is starting to matter, and also be an important player in some industries (in home electronics the share of total sales is about 10-15 percent). In this second e-boom the concepts are a lot more mature and successful, and even clothes are selling well on the internet, mainly driven by the former mail order firms but also by new companies” he added.

In 1999 Boo.com, a fashion retail site, burnt through $120 million in six months, in part because it’s call centre was situated in London’s fashionable Carnaby Street, as opposed to a cheaper location. The web site was also built by three different development teams spread across the globe, while it’s home page was notorious for its slow load time and use of - then less common - Flash.

Founded by Ernst Malmsten, Kajsa Leander and Patrik Hedelin, Boo.com’s largest backer was Omnia, a fund backed by members of Lebanon’s wealthy Hariri family, which put nearly $40 million into the company. Over 400 staff and contractors were made redundant when Boo went into receivership in May 2000.

Fashionmall.com is believed to be the last known owner of the Boo name and the Miss Boo character, while the ecommerce software UK IT firm Bright Station.

Despite it’s terrible name in the industry, among the general public there is probably enough name recognition to make this - and I say this hesitantly - almost a savvy move on Boo’s behalf. Just the amount of pure PR it would get from the mainstream press - usually happy to damn the latest wave of innovation as another “bubble” for the sake of a good story - might justify a new launch.

What’s happening with mobile social networking? It suddenly seems to be the new frontier for Web 2.0, in particular now that moves by Three on flat-rate Internet access and T-Mobile’s Web and Walk are starting to gain traction.

Pitch is - supposedly - new mobile social networking tool which - their PR at least - seems to think is a ‘MySpace killer’. But not so fast.

There are plenty of online social networks already moving into the mobile realm, and bringing their existing customer base with them. So can a mobile play come from the opposite end of the spectrum and start building in mobile, and emphasise the mobile experience, rather than starting with online?

Let’s review a couple of the “MoSoSo” (Mobile Social Software) developments to date. MySpace tested the water when it partnered with the Helio service in the US, with fair results. In part this was a response to software projects like EQO which let you carry your MySpace network around with you via the mobile. Here in Europe Playahead.se (also now launched in the UK) has worked with Kenet Works to mobilise it’s online community and display the “presence” of users on the mobile.

And we recently wrote about BuddyPing, the one-man startup that already has several thousand users and has an implied location-based advertising model built discretely into its social networking features.

Now, of course, MySpace is looking for European partners for its service. Since MySpace has 130m users, it’s going to be pretty hard for a mobile start-up to start from the mobile and work backwards / simultaneously into online.
But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

So, according to Pitch:

The Pitch service includes messaging, chat, picture upload and sharing, free mobile content and more - but it’s 100% advertising funded so doesn’t cost a penny and users don’t need to worry about being landed with an enormous bill at the end of the month (Users are also guaranteed a maximum of two to three ads per week so they don’t need to worry about spam).

Pitch customers can build a personal a mobile home page, message inside the service to friends of groups, IM etc - think Yahoo Groups on a mobile. There is also, says Pitch, going to be video and picture sharing, but the web application only launches in December.

Obviously, the service is not actually going to be free to the end user. There is always the ever-present issue of data charges from the network provider.

But who or what is Pitch?

Pitch says it was founded in 2000 by CEO David Warburton who also appeared to be CEO of The Music Solution in 2004, a ringtones company.

The background to Pitch is explained more fully on their corporate site, which details that while The Music Solution secured contracts with the likes of Motorola and Carphone Warehouse among others, it dumped the B2B model to go B2C in 2004, relaunching as SplashMobile (ringtones club), doing some European deals and then relaunching as Pitch Entertainment Group this year.

So a former ringtones company has suddenly got Web 2.0 fever?

One can’t help feeling that behind all this hype, we may be being subjected to a “MySpace bandwagon” spin on an old press announcement.

Back in June TotalTelecom ran a story about the beta launch of the mobile advertising-funded service as just being a pure opt-in advertising network. This had zero mention of MySpace, Web 2.0 or social networking.

Either that or Pitch really will tick all the right boxes in December when the Web application comes out. But frankly the jury is out on this one, to say the least.

Whatever the case, Pitch will have hefty competition.

As the Guardian reported yesterday, Bebo is understood to be in informal talks with mobile networks and Friends Reunited is expected to launch a mobile version of its service in mid-2007 (although I predict it will could be rather late to the game by then, even if it is more of a mainstream audience).

But where all of these new services will have to deliver is in the area of the user experience. We have all been beaten over the head by talk of the personalisation and customisation of the web for years. Well, guess what? The mobile is the most personal space of all. Get that wrong and you can really screw up. Look at the hoo-ha surrounding the Crazy Frog debacle.

If social networking providers hope to have any kind of success in the mobile environment they are going to have to make the experience utterly easy, beautiful and unobtrusive to the users. Sending them adverts is probably not going to cut it.

BT Contact “your personal communication hub”  has officially entered its public beta phase. We previously wrote about BT contacts when it was still in alpha.  The goal for this product is to provide a one stop website for all of our “federated communication” needs -i.e combining in one place various IM + Email + Address Books + SMS + Directory Enquiries etc. 

Going forward I assume BT Contact will want to become our browser homepage and offer us a similar widgets plugin strategy like PageFlakes, NetVibes, Google, Live etc.

Longer term I can imagine new BT services being integrated through this personalised homepage e.g the new BT Digital Vault already has been. What about BT Vision? Overtime I am sure current stand alone BT (older) services such as online bills, friends and family, dabs.com, BT Shop etc will all be accessible from this interface via one single BT login.

The problem is BT is caught between a rock and a hard place right now. On the one-hand BT want to convert their old & newly acquired customers to use these new BT services but on the otherhand BT’s deal with Yahoo requires that their joint walled garden portal is the first place that most of these new BT HomeHub customers are sent.

I recently got my shiny new BT HomeHub and as part of the installation process I ended up having to install  Yahoo Toolbars, IM/Email client as well as some BT software etc.  Of course I uninstalled every bit of it because all I really wanted was to use the software I had before and benefit from the faster BT broadband connection.

Om Malik pointed out this week that BT were not the only short sighted telecom company that signed up to this stupid one-way Yahoo deal. So whilst BT wait for their contract with Yahoo to expire, at least they have a chance to experiment with these web 2.0 apps.

Another problem for BT is that more agile competitors are starting appear. Today Cerulean Studios released some more information on Trillian Astra, the long-awaited next version of its popular multi-protocol instant messaging client which now supports social software features and widgets.

Another company BT would do well to look at is Germany’s Dial O which has taken Deutsch Telecom’s white and yellow page services and given it a bit of web 2.0 map magic by integrating it with microformats, social networking, tags and google maps.

BT is at a cross roads trying to rollout its next generation 21CN network onto which its new revenue cash cows will run i.e BT Vision, Fusion etc. whilst trying to maintain its broadband market share by buying up smaller rivals .  BT really needs to accelerate its platform and services rollout before and integrate what it has.  BT Contact is a very brave project that has many stronger competitors in the market right now.  It needs to find a unique selling point but maybe that will come in the form of free broadband or cheap calls?

MySpace is on the hunt for mobile tie-ups to launch and promote MySpace mobile services across Europe.

Jean-Paul Sanchez, vice-president of mobile, Europe, at MySpace - who recently joined from Vodafone - is negotiating the distribution deals, which are likely to incorporate marketing partnerships. According to Sanchez, MySpace is focusing on three key business areas: mobile, video and international expansion.

MySpace already has deals in the US to offer mobile services through the Cingular and Helio networks. Sanchez said that the mobile service was launching in Europe in response to demand from the site’s 130m users.

AOL have just added a nice new feature to their beta RSS aggregator called personalised content recommendations.

“We hope that our recommendations can help you to combat information overload as well as introduce you to appealing content suggestions.”

Recommendations were added in a two pane design highlighted in the lower pane of My AOL below, The two panes are explained as follows:

1.) Recommended Content (left) - These are personalised content recommendations. As you click on headlines within My AOL, AOL  “learn” what you like and suggest similar stories. This information is used solely within My AOL and strictly for the purpose of delivering new, relevant content to you. Your preferences are stored in your history file, you can clear that file at any time.

2.) People Like Me Content (right)– Leverages “wisdom of the crowds” to offer additional suggested readings. As other people use My AOL, they occasionally click on stories that are similar to the items you have selected. The AOL system recognises these similarities and provides additional content that might be of interest to you. This information is stored in your history file, which you can clear at any time. Both of these features use a simple and confidential process used to provide friendly suggestions: We hope you find something you like!

This feature is based on the attention metadata stored in your history file.  AOL appear to be aggregating this centrally in order to then make recommendations based on what everyone clicked on.   This is a good step forward in helping people discover new feeds, although I doubt it will help fix the information overload problem in fact I think it will probably add to the overload burden.

What this new service lacks is a social discovery element so that the recommendations only come from people in your trusted network - family, friends, co-workers etc. but that might be in the next version?

Last night was the Internet People event with Robert Loch. I turned up with Paul Walsh from Segala where earlier we had debated about what is Web 3.0? Basically we concluded that it’s the Semantic Web with technologies like RDF, Microformats, GRDDL and ContentLabels being just a few of the newer technologies that will form part of the vocabulary which we will all be rattling off in 2007, just like RSS, tagging and UGC were newer terms that entered the mainstream conversation in 2006. – but more about that later.

It was also good to hook up with several entrepreneurs friends including Iain and Cary from Mydeo. Sadly I missed the debate due to a prior party invite from Jay Patel of NewMediaSpark (Thanks) but I did arrive just in time to hear Alex Tew from Milliondollarhomepage.com do a fine beatbox rendition to close the evening and briefly tease the audience with fact that he is launching his new project in a few weeks. Having spoken to Alex for part of the evening, all I can say right now is good luck and we’ll cover the his new venture shortly.

Interestingly though ever since Alex made world headlines with his Milliondollarhomepage, there have been many copycat wannabee ideas. One of those on a similar theme is Leah Culver’s aim to buy a new MacBook Pro by selling ad space on its lid. So not really the million dollar MacBook but she has achieved her goal.

Personally I am getting a MacBook Pro for Christmas instead of upgrading to Microsoft’s Vista.

Remember Excite? The web portal pioneered the “My Excite” home page when ’start pages’ like Netvibes and Pageflakes were barely a twinkle in their creators’ eyes and Widgets were still strange things made by Apple which nobody used (OK, so that’s still true). Well now Excite is back to claim it’s start page crown - if there is such a thing.

Excite MIX is Excite’s new personalised homepage and it’s being pioneered first in the UK, starting this week. The beta version is part of a total redesign of the Excite.co.uk portal, obviously targeted specifically at the UK audience.

Excite MIX looks to be pretty sleek start page which allows users to do what they normally do on start pages, which is pull in RSS feeds and their favourite widgets. The service contains a feed aggregator, podcast player, mail modules, multipage functionality and notepad.

Click on a link and an Ajax window pops up with the story and offering functions like posting to Del.icio.us, Digg and Newsvine. Could this be the beginnings of a full Web 2.0 makeover for Excite? It looks like it.

In the lead-up to the launch Excite’s Rome-based Amanda Lorenzani has been writing an ‘official’ Excite MIX blog about the service while they ran in stealth mode, in part in an attempt to create a little ‘word of blog’ about the service.

Meanwhile the Excite UK portal has been redesigned and updated to coincide with the launch of Excite MIX, which went properly live over the weekend, and now features a MIX icon top right.

Excite Europe is currently owned by Ask.com (part of Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp), however it operates entirely autonomously of the US operation, out of Rome.

Evening panel session:

Matt Cohler of Facebook
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn
Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google
Alan Morgan, Mayfield, Silicon Valley VC firm
Chaired by Jonathon Guthrie from the FT

[Note: All quotes are paraphrased. Apologies for typos.]

Matt Cohler of Facebook: A pertinent question is how do you bring Silicon Valley to Oxford? Yale modelled itself of Oxford, and both are highly theoretical universities, doing ‘non-applied’ research. This contrast sharply with Stanford University, an engine for Silicon Valley, where students are encouraged to do work and research which will have tangible application.

Alan Morgan, Mayfield, Silicon Valley VC firm: Is VC over? Since startups don’t need money any more and the exits are only $30m and the only question is how much Google will pay. However, he’s been through a lot of cycles. Most new companies are what we call features, not companies. They have am interesting product, but not a full company. They get sold for $10-15m but it’s not enough to support the VC community or the Silicon Valley. The other part of the story is that the IPO market is killed for tech firms in the US. The added cost of IPO market makes it only possible for large companies. Plus the sell-side analysts who covered young tech firms, that class of people, was destroyed after the bubble during the ‘nuclear winter’. It always has take 4-6 year stouild a companies with any endurance, as the oldest stuff. So keep your eyes open for the next 12-24 months. The long term health of the business is

Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google: Please use quote marks around actual quotes, he says. He’s admits been twittering and blogging today, but he he thinks it is incumbent on people to stop and think before they blog quotes marks around what people say. However he thinks that the quality and expanse of blogging has never been better.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn: In the next ten years there will be a lot more identity on the Net. There will be social costs to being a “Troll“. What has happened is that the systems for identity are coming into place. Wikipedia tried to be democratic, but around political or intense subjects, they had to introduce controls.

Morgan: We are in the early days of the Web and all behaviours have pre-existing forms offline. But in the future there will have to be more accountability. A light-weight version of ‘letters to the editor’ where there is a name and address attached to someone’s comments. Anonymity does not always bring out the best in people.

Morgan: Today we have an environment where there are a lot of people with experience in this space, so the pressure on deal is increasing but there is more prudence than in 1999.

Question: There is a British paranoia about not being ale to produce a Google. How could we do better?

Morgan: There is an acknowledgement in Silicon Valley that failure can be a positive. That culture doesn’t exist many other places in the world and it’s one of these subtle things which is a huge factor in entrepreneurship.

Sacca: Claims he lost the equivalent of the Liberian national debt in one day in 2000, but now finds himself retelling that easily in his work in Silicon Valley. He also made the point that he had been asked where he went to school more times in the last five hours at the event today than he has in the last five year sin Silicon Valley.

Morgan: Sites that sell things have found that the more data they allow users to put on the site about themselves, the more they are trusted.

Sacca: The future of the web is much more personalised and persistent. That connection will be concurrent across devices, mobile tv, etc. Within 5-0 years you might finally start to seem some humility amongst networks and mobile device will talk to PC etc.

Question (asked by Peter Nixey): At what point does the market cap and tax dollars from Google mean that a threat from another company becomes a threat to the States itself?

Hoffman: There are other search engines than Google. But you can imagine in a Hollywood fllm, might want to hack the search and query flow from the people in the Pentagon.

Sacca: We have no formal relations with the Pentagon [that was a joke]. It’s incumbent upon all of us that we stay within the law on how that data is used. It’s at the core of our company.

Flipping companies for sale:

Hoffman: It’s almost never wise to do a ‘build and flip’.

Sacca: Good Technology was built in the MP3 player market, and instead they changed the company to be a mobile firm and sold to Motorola, so they did adjust.

Morgan: There are not as many acquisitions as people think. The number of deals by the likes of Google or Yahoo to buy smaller firms are much smaller than the reality.

Sacca: We probably do four deals for every one that makes the news. Most are 2-4 person teams which are pre-funding.

Entertainment?

Hoffman: Invest in the consumer internet, then you are investing on one of the seven deadly sins. Paying users might work, but this is not just entertainment it’s also about vanity - and that is a powerful motivator.

Sacca: Across the Net people . People don’t want an 18 cents check. We’ve entered a new era of intellectualism 2.0 (joke). It’s predicated on data - there is a lot ore available now. Margin revolution and Freakenomics talk about this. At Google we worship data, and it can teach you so much about humans.

Cohler: Game theory has something to say here. The general lessons apply to the social networking environment.

How do we start up?

Morgan: In 38 years in the VC business Mayfeild has probably never invested in a company we weren’t introduced to by someone else in person.

Hoffman: In real estate it’s location location location. IN the consumer Internet is distribution, distribution, distribution. Nothing else matters.

Identity?

Cohler: Social networks have indexed people the way Google indexes pages. A social network enables more richly evaluate a person. Linked IN is a place where people are pretty much they are who they say they are. That’s all driven bottom up by users and these have potential to protect identity not undermine it.

Sacca: Recalled a site which had fake email addresses. Incentivised people to authenticate their email with one dollar - and it worked.

Google in China?

Sacca: He says Chinese users complained to Google that it’s links were broken. So what do you do? Ignore them or give them a search engine that gives them MP3 links or pictures of Shakira when they want them?

Hoffman: It’s better to be more engaged in society than not engaged.

Live blogging this:

Lunchtime Panel:

Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn
Allen Morgan, MD of Mayfield
Alex Welch, founder of Photobucket
Matt Cohler of Facebook
Julie Farris of Scalix
Pete Flint of trulia.
Mike Malone, editor of ABCnews.com’s Silicon Insider
Villy Wang, Executive Director and Co-Founder of BayCat
Ellen Levy is an Network Advisor at Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Alex Welch, founder of Photobucket: “There is not a big crash coming in social software as there are plenty of niches ready to be filled.”

(Comment form the floor: “FaceBook is MySpace for people who know how to read”)

Matt Cohler of Facebook: “If 15 year old says they are going to quit MySpace or us, then I think that’s rare.”

(Show of hands on MySpace - 3 - hands up for Facebook - 50% - SBS students like Facebook).

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn: “We’re still in a growth phase.” He said the bottom will not drop out of the market.

Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google: “What happened last time was that there was a pervasive bubble in hardware/broadband. Now there is a bubble in the consumer internet, but we haven’t seen one in access of the chip side, so it’s less macro-economic.”

Julie Farris of Scalix: “The open source movement is very disruptive and part for the reason why there has been a collapse of capital needed to start up a company.”

Pete Flint of trulia.com: “Admitedly you still need to have product and marketing people, so you still need that investment.”

Alex Welch, founder of Photobucket:” There’s definitely a lot of pros about being the Valley. Facebook is just down the street from us. Making meetings is easy. There’s still a lot to be said for facet-time.”

Sacca: “We have 11 core offices around the world. I met the team that built Skype and Kazaa in Tallin estonia and was astounded to learn none of them had had formal IT training. As teenagers they took the manuals home from the Police computers and without any Internet access built software.”

Generally there was a lot of talk about the advantages of clusting in Silicon Valley, and how other centres should reproduce clusters.

Is there a future for more locally branded social networking sites?

Hoffman: “I think silo-ing networks in small niches won’t be as valuable as the bigger networks. In general you want them to be as big as possible to be valuable.”

Most interesting business plan in the last month?

One panelist: “I can’t tell you.”

Answers: Not just Web 2.0 - batteries, electronics. Ringtones, Open source. Rapid diagnosis of chemicals. Tesla Motors. Alternative Energy. Emissions reduciton, Solar power. China deals - unlimited potential. Uploading video - indie film distribution.

Julie: OpenStreetmap in the UK is the most interesting project I’ve seen recently.

Twitter.com - SMS messages about what you are doing in the day, and anyone can get those.

Welch : SodaHead.com: a social prediction web site - you predict anything you want and over time you get ratings for your preditctions.

Sacca: “I Like Maraki.com. It’s the Kazaa of access.”

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian: “Who or what can stop Google taking over the world.”

Flint: “Google can do things for free because of the ad model which others had to charge for, hence it’s scary. At the same time the Net has an effect of increasing fragmentation, so I don’t think they will take everything.”

Sacca: “There are few aspects of our business that can’t be beat, look at YouTube - they spanked us.”

What market would you enter to startup?

“I’d go to Google”

Harris: “I’d start in a larger organisatoin first.”

Flint: “I would look at Silicon Valley - Many US firms won’t bother launching in the UK, so I’d adapt a US model for the UK.”

“Personal healthcare and technology for aging populations. Or mobile.”

“Second Life.”

“Social Entrepreneurship: Alleviate poverty and make money at the same time.”

Welch: “Don’t look at anything mainstream.”

Hoffman: “The consumer Internet is still a great place for business. But you need to find an area that is unique.”

Sacca: “Don’t wait until you graduate. Meet geeks and befriend them. Become one. I like business to take the job in as big a company as you can go where you get to touch every aspect. 30-60 people companies are the best.”

I recently heard about Qlockwork an new add-in for Outlook (2003/2007) from workingProgram which automatically tracks your attention to help you control and measure your time more effectively.

Unlike timer based systems, once installed, Qlockwork automatically records how you spend every 5 minutes of your day, so you don’t need to remember to start timers. Qlockwork works in the background to track almost all Windows applications including: MS Office, Internet Explorer, Firefox, MSN Messenger, Skype and many more.

Attention Metadata is a subject close to my heart and for the last twelve months there have been a variety of companies developing applications to record attention metadata. e.g RootNet TouchStone, Attensa, RootVault , GestureLab, LastFM etc. Most of these companies are focusing on capturing attention metadata in order to provide better 1:1 advertising except LastFM. Qlockwork on the other hand is the first company I know of to capture people’s attention metadata in order to provide better time-management and reporting.

Soon there will be a Qlockwork:Team which pulls together your team’s individual activity logs to give you a view of your overall project and where time is being spent.

If you are interested to know more take a tour or download a 30 day trial version.

Finally Qlockwork also provides a number of reports both in HTML or CSV. Below is a quick summary my time this morning. Additionally there are detailed breakdown reports showing where I focused my attention whilst in each application.

Qlockwork Report -
Summary by Application

Total time using computer: 2 hours 50 minutes

Today I’ll be at Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford which features, among others, people like Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn.com), Om Malik (author of GigaOm and contributing editor to Business 2.0) and Alex Welch, CEO, founder of Photobucket. Tune in later today for some coverage of the event (assuming they let me into the WiFi, of course).

In our first “Money Mondays” we showcase two startups looking for their first round of proper funding. If you would like to be part of a Money Mondays showcase, see here for more information and here for details, and here for the contact form.

They say: “CreateMyNet allows people to build business and professional network communities… via secure environments that deliver rich interactive multimedia, messaging, mobile, telephony and wireless services. The business has the potential to grow exponentially and at 81% gross profit on over a £1,000,000 turnover represents a significant return on investment for all investors into the business. £150,000 is required within the first year for this start up business. Initial response has been positive. Revenue streams are subscriptions, advertising, equipment sales and affiliate marketing.”

We say: CreateMyNet is a plucky effort, but since it is licensing Userplane software for most of its service, it appears to have little intellectual capital inside the service. And the online business networking space is already utterly crowded with bigger rivals. See our earlier review here. Next!

Contact: seyi [@] createmynet.com

They say: “SiteVista is a web-based service which allows web designers and web application developers to test the sites they develop across different platforms and web browsers. Running since June 2004, with a team of three developing the service alongside our own freelance client work. Good number of real customers who subscribe for $29/month. A new tool ready to launch which will let our customers test their HTML email newsletters across a broad range of both web-based and software email clients. Equity of the company is split between its three founders, Paul Farnell, David Smalley and Matthew Brindley.

We say: Someone had to call the site testing “gurus” - who often charge thousands - one day, and it looks like three lads may have done it. This is an admirable effort from some clearly talented developers who have really kept their focus, rather than gone off in unrelated directions to the task in hand. Worthy of a look, even at the demo video, and quite possibly worth hiring as an entire team in one fell swoop, whether you like the application or not.

Contact: paul [@] salted.com

Following the news that Benchmark Capital Europe has raised €430 million for its new (third) European venture capital fund, I spoke to Barry Maloney (pictured), partner with Benchmark.

The fund has found itself significantly oversubscribed, making it one of the largest venture capital firms in Europe. Past investments include Bebo, BetFair PageFlakes, RawFlow, RebTel, Zopa and Setanta. Maloney is on the board of Bebo.

Prior to Benchmark he spent five years as CEO of Esat Digifone, Ireland’s second largest GSM mobile operator, subsequently acquired by British Telecom at a market value of IR£2 billion and now part of the O2 Group.

Maloney said the overall approach of the new fund will not be “all that different from the second fund. It’ll focus on media and definitely the Internet.” Around 70% of investments are at early stage ’series A’ round, but he says there are still opportunities in Europe to “do later stage deals”.

One area Benchmark will be looking at is “clean tech” deals - in other words companies which are able to create intellectual property in relation to the new wave of interest in saving the environment: “In the last 5 months we’ve seen emerging technologies around the energy generation, energy saving and building efficiency arenas,” he says. “We’ll do a few of those deals in the next few months.” These could include hardware plays - such a lower power devices - and I would speculate that there may be web services plays in this as well which save companies energy.

As for this year’s poster child - social networking - Maloney says “our view is that it’s still early days for social networking and it’s still exciting.” He mentioned YourIgloo, which takes on real estate agents. Taking on “innefficient models” like the real estate business via the web will be a focus for Benchmark in the new year. Perhaps he should look at Nestoria.com… or Ononemap.com.

As for mobile, he says “We’ve looked at mobile search and at a few MVNO startups and we’re still interested” but they’ve not seen anything worthwhile just yet.

The quality of UK and Irish entrepreneurs, he says “it’s improving - but still not where we’d like it to be.” However, “4-5 years ago we would have been struggling to find anyone good, now its easier.”

Making entrepreneurialism more mainstream and “presenting it as an honest way of making a living is hard in the UK where lots of people can have comfortable careers in large companies. The more governments can do to encourage entrepreneurs the better. In smaller countries like Ireland or Finland, people have a tendency to try things more.”

TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher spoke to Dr. Andy Tiller, CTO of ShoZu.com, about their latest moves (including enabling the uploading of content from the mobile via WiFi), and whether the concept of “Mobile 2.0″ really does have “legs”. The audio is 15 mins long.

Taking a cue from Sam’s analysis of the X-series launch and Three’s inclusion of Windows Live Messenger on a pair of non-Windows handsets, I thought I’d post up a presentation I stumbled across outlining Microsoft’s vision for embedding Windows Live services in various consumer electronics devices.

There are a couple interesting clues on the future relationship between MSN.com and Windows Live and the opportunities for embedding voice and video messaging capability in OEM devices.

Download Creating Devices With The Windows Live Hardware Platform here (18mb Powerpoint deck).