John Wilson is fascinated by the application of technology more so than technology itself. Having spent 15 years working in and around capital markets involved in systems, process and projects, he has too often seen "solutions looking for problems" - he derives great pleasure in finding those problems and marrying the two up.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer bein the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Is Ringside Startup anything other than a media/publicity stunt and can budding entrepreneurs really learn much from it?
The idea behind it is that the founder, who is understood to be a former Techcrunch journalist, is attempting to raise $20k to fund a new business, and will get advice from a series of investors/entrepreneurs on key issues, all of which will be transparently reported on a blog.
Issue 1: The business idea has yet to be chosen, albeit there is a paragraph outline on a handful of ideas, yet the key objective so far is to raise the money. Hmmm. Cart and horse inversion problem in my view. I concede that this is exactly how VC funds work, namely raise a fund and then identify companies to invest in, but that's not what this project is reportedly about.
Issue 2: Do I receive equity for a financial contribution? Errr, no but you do get free publicity on the blog and your wise words can be seen by all, as your advice is posted in the comments section of the blog (if I have correctly understood the process).
Issue 3: The motivation of the founder seems to be around the media opportunity than actually creating and running a business, which generates actual value. At least the MillionDollarHomePage project was naked in its' desire to raise a ton of cash for nothing.
After 3 days or so, the venture has only raised a few hundred dollars, much to the evident dismay of the founder, who is already lowering his(?) aspirations to $10k and looking for a Plan B. Yet, anyone involving in raising funding would appreciate it is often a slow process - giving up after a few days is not really in tune with the audience experience that the site is reportedly going to educate. Heck, if the site had raised $20k in a few days that would have been very worrying especially with no business to speak of. It might have re-enforced the bubble view.
It's crass, silly and probably unfathomable to most people, but I have a habit of making prices on every day things in casual conversation.
See, I lost you already.
For instance, whilst having a few IM chat's prior to tonight's England game I was asking/making prices in England goals (2-3) and first goal time (17-25). What that means is that I was willing to "sell goals at 2" and "buy goals at 3" or in English - if you thought England would score more than 3 goals tonight then you would have taken my price of 3 with the result that I would have paid you for every goal over 3 that England scored at a rate (pounds per point/goal). Conversely if you felt England would choke, then you would have taken my price such that I would have paid you if England had scored less than 2 goals. I would make money if the number of goals was between 2-3 goals, which was my spread, assuming that I took an even number of offsetting bets.
Similarly, if you thought England would score quickly and in less than 17 minutes, then by buying from me at 17 I would have paid out for every minute under 17 minutes. Alternatively, if you knew England were useless you may have correctly bet that it would take them longer than 25 minutes and I would have paid you for every minute over that.
You can do this on all sorts of things - how long the bus will take to arrive; number of runs; number of peas in a serving from the cafeteria.
This type of "spread betting" is big business for firms like Sporting Index, Cantor Index and Betfair, where the latter service is entirely peer-to-peer betting (pre-dating in vogue services like Zopa by years)..
Anyway, I mention this because I was interested by a new site called Gottabet, which Sam Sethi of Vecosys covered here. It records, administers and collects peer-to-peer personal bets.
Have you ever told a friend “I bet you can’t do this”? At the office, in the pub, while watching TV… Rather than leaving them as casual comments, you can go straight to Gottabet and record the bet, enlist others to participate and then settle up.
I'm with Sam Sethi in believing this could take off. There are considerable numbers of bets made every day in all sorts of circumstances and this provides an easy mechanism to record and administer them. Why would people bother? Well, there's the bragging rights for a start, with a visible record of the bet and the outcome. Also the collection process is dealt with.
Sure, many of you may think this is childish behaviour, but that's fine. It's called being a sports fan and a bloke for starters. Moreover, if you take an investors stand-point you should think less about whether you would use it than would it resonate with others. After all, I think Twitter is fairly pointless - would I invest in Twitter? Possibly, given the evident demand (albeit doubt I'll get the chance). Would I invest in Gottabet? Subject to them having a credible "go to mass market" plan, probably.
Whilst I don't believe it will be as popular as betfair for a bunch of reasons, it does serve a large existing market that might readily adopt this. Will I use it regularly? Wanna bet?
It's a generality but buyers hate choice and are scared about making the wrong choice. Consequently things that reduce choices (brands) and allay our fears about choices are always going to generate some resonance.
Matt Marshall at Venture Beat reports on Oodle, which is a classifieds service with add-on tools to help you make better buying decisions. Take its car classifieds, for example. If you’re searching for a Honda Accord, Oodle gives you market price data, and availability — data that you can’t get at the other sites. If you’re looking for a 2003 Honda Accord with 40,000-50,000 miles, Oodle will show you that the market price for this car is between $12,000 and $17,000 (see screenshot below). The bar chart tells you (apologies, the font size is small) a few of these cars are going for $12,000, you’ve still got a great deal at $14,000. It gives you other features, such as an alert that tells you when Oodel gets a listing for this car priced at $12,000.
Another service I saw recently is about to launch something similar but with the added twist that it will monitor multiple types of market - stores, auctions and classified. Can't say which one presently, but I was greatly impressed particular when it was possible to identify sizeable price discrepancies between these markets mechanisms. Shame there's no easy way to arbitrage between them!
In case you happen to be working at a large corporate and need to kill some time between project meetings where everyone reports nothing has moved on for reasons unrelated to them, this may assist - Kongregate has tons of free games for you to play online.
Aside from being crushed, bombed, suffocated and trapped for hours by signal failure, London Underground users now face a new peril - being knocked down by skiers on the escalator!
I wonder how Tom Morris's twitter tube announcement service will cope with that one?
I was out watching the (dire) England football match tonight in a bar in the West End of London. During the long walk round trying to find a pub with Sky Sports (very few left these days which surprised me - presumably as a consequence of the charges), I was outlining to my chum some of the ventures we are involved in. He is a senior exec at a large hedge fund and was intrigued by a) the possibility of the ventures being emulated and b) our ventures being ripped off by the large companies, who we often try to partner with for distribution purposes, by having their idea copied.
I explained that in some cases technology barriers or first mover advantage may give us a head start etc, and also referred to my recent blog post about big companies being generally hopeless at rapidly responding to change/innovation. For good measure, I also lobbed in the reputation risk that big companies may run if they plagiarise ideas from pitches - aside from being bad mouthed, they may be excluded from seeing future big ideas!
So it was with some interest that tonight I read about Peasy, which looks almost identical to Parkatmyhouse which I recently wrote about, and which offers a service advertising offers and demand for parking spaces.
Is there any recourse? Almost certainly not. Is it legal? Yes. Can I stop it? No. So what should you do in this situation? Be the best and make sure people know it, love it and proclaim it.
Dennis Howlett has an interesting post on an attempt by TomorrowNow, a SAP subsidiary, to cut into Oracle's $2bn annual maintenance revenues by offering the same service for less.
The real threat to Oracle is the $1 billion of those maintenance revenues it potentially loses (Check TN's 50% offer to Hyundai UK) as increasing numbers of marquee customers realise they can get adequate software maintenance at affordable prices. Oracle claims it cannot understand how TN can make a profit at TN's prices. It uses that as an argument to imply that software developers need north of 50 percent to cover maintenance costs.
Software maintenance benefits from juicy margins As Dennis observes, according to Oracle's latest results, support services yield 90% margins.
In many ways, this will be just the beginning of an interesting initial price war, which may of course result in counter-offers and retaliation against SAP's own maintenance charges - customer may query how it is they can charge less to service Oracle products than SAPs.
Of course, price is one thing but it would be great if they went head to head on the real thing - service.
In many ways, this battle is reminiscent of the car service market. Warranties are considered "impaired" if anyone other than one of the over-priced annointed dealerships touches the car in the first few years. Worried about their second-hand value, customers glumly stump up for an indifferent service at inflated price.
I suspect that this will be the next phase of the Oracle play - i.e. following "Must be a lousy service if they are doing it so cheap", may be the "we can't be held responsible for your business critical applications if other companies mess with the application", with an immediate "Only we have access to the creators!". At that point, I bet a number of CIO will have second thoughts.
Jason Ball over at London Seed has this excellent summary of the history of blogging
Having already explained I really don't get Twitter (yet), I was interested to see this post from Mike Butcher over at Vecosys, which followed up on the FT article today.
Today’s FT article estimates Twitter is sending - conservatively - 70,000 text messages a day across its service. If, as Ed Frenchcommented on my personal blog, mbites.com, each text costs a minimum of 1p to send, Twitter is burning through 700 quid a day or $1,379.57, or $38,627.96 a month. It could in fact be three times as much if they are using a more robust SMS gateway service which costs more like 3p a text, or $115,883.88 a month. All this for (apparently) no return since there is no advertising on the messages, none on the web pages and no subscription business model either. As I said before, Twitter is really onto something here, especially the API aspect, but now I’m wondering if this isn’t just starting to smell like a ‘dotcom boom’ era story. The one thing in their favour right now is great mojo and press, and an ability to capture the community. They just need to work out what to do next - the hard bit. All the while their adoption is going through the roof. Or maybe they just sell it for squillions and someone else has to figure it all out…
To be fair, many large companies would consider that pocket change to achieve the buzz that Twitter has achieved. And as a stake on being bought out, I know a few VCs who would take that bet. However, given the history that the owner of Twitter had with the VCs involved in Odeo, from which Twitter span out, maybe he is going to keep this one for himself.
For some time, I've used Crazy Egg to understand where people click on this blog, which uses a several techniques include a heatmap to report the results. However you only see what works post event.
Large companies use focus groups to test site layouts, during which they both monitor where people click and also eyeball movements. However, such tests are prohibitively costly for most firms. Hence, this is an intriguing site called "Feng GUI - Feng Shui for Graphical User Interfaces".
It analyses a website page and presents back what purports to be a "scientific" result highlighting the visual hotspots on the page, as you can see in the example above of the Google's home page.
I was at a meeting on Thursday with one of the most senior executives of a significant US Bank. The purpose of the meeting was to introduce them to an early stage venture we are involved in, which we believed that might wish to take a stake in.
We were asked by one of the attendees why one of the big companies in the space wouldn't simply copy it and kill this venture. We acknowledged that it was always a possibility but I added "I'm in dangerous company saying this, but big companies are usually too busy to get round to doing sensible stuff. There are simply be too many other projects they have to get done before they would even assemble an evaluation team to consider it and fill in all the project paperwork."
The Senior Executive turned and smiled - "We certainly understand that problem".
On Friday I met with COO of one of Europe's largest brokers, who is an old friend. During the "hellos" we reminisced about how in the 1990's it had been possible to analyse retail broking transactions and identify clusters of investors that might have appetite to participate in IPOs.
I mentioned how similar crowd "knowledge" was being generated amongst communities online now and gave him a few examples. In each case people are acting for personal gratification but their actions/behaviour is providing useful indicators when aggregated with other individuals.
PicksPal which is a sporting event prediction site. Its' users vote on amateur and professional sporting events but do so for fun rather than money. You to spend points to try and beat the odds makers - you win or lose points depending on the accuracy of your picks and your risk appetite. PicksPal does award prizes to the top performers and says they've over 100,000 registered users, albeit not that many playing regularly.
Like Betfair and Sporting Index, you can bet on a lot more than just the outcome of the game. such as who will be winning at various points in a game, or which player will score the most runs.
The value add though is that PicksPal sells "expert" picks, based on the selections of their top performing members, on which people can bet real money. They claim to have a 52% win rate for their last 25 picks, with a 63% win rate overall.
In similar fashion, Marketocracy looks to monitor the best investors and aggregate their collective knowledge to create a virtual fund. Users are allocated an initial $1 million when they sign-up and 60,000 users have joined to date.
However, Marketocracy went a stage further in November 2001 in launching a real mutual fund based on the virtual investments of its 100 most successful members (as determined by a computer ranking). The Masters 100 Index fund, has $44 million in assets and has outperformed the S&P 500 Index with an average annual return of 11.4% since its inception.
The only issue with these two system is that the users don't face any moral hazard or financial impact of participating. Consequently, users can "afford" to take greater risks than they otherwise would with their own money - it's not clear they would follow their own forecasts. In the case of Marketocracy, the output assumes that all investors have the same risk profile, when clearly that is not the case. In the "game" the experts are deemed to be those generate the highest returns. Yet the real world doesn't work like that. Certainly everyone wants to see their wealth grow but people temper that by the amount they are prepared to lose in an investment strategy.
It is for this reason that one has look a little deeper when looking at the results of "crowd knowledge" - are people really behaving as they would in the real world and will they suffer the consequences. If not, it's likely to be unreliable as a guide on which to base real world actions.
Back in my University days at Loughborough, I was involved in Student Radio and "Ents" (the society that staged music events). Both were enormous fun and taught you a huge amount about running a business as both were commercial ventures in their own right. Personally I'm far more willing to hire an graduate that did student radio that one that claimed membership of the "Entrepreneurs Society". Usually the latter group wanted membership on the CV and did visit to businesses, whereas the former group actually got involved in a business. Of course, there is some personal bias/allegiance here in similar fashion to any alumni relationship but I believe that this one has genuine merit.
Funnily enough, doing student radio often was often considered incredibly geeky albeit some of the beautiful people did it as prep for their TV careers (you'll know which camp I was in).
So it was a great delight to attend the Alumni of Student Radio Association ("ASRA") which met for a social gathering in London last night. I only stumbled on this group by accident whilst recently researching the story on online music royalties which are subject to some change right now in the USA as I recently wrote about.
It turns out it has 500 or so members and there were about 100 there last night drawn from many UK universities, with graduates of various ages present (ok, I was probably in the oldest 10%) . Many lived outside London, with some people having travelled down from Scotland, the Midlands, Norfolk and Somerset to attend.
As it happens I didn't know a single person. But I did know that they all had been involved in Student Radio.
I had an excellent evening and by the end of the evening I had met some absolutely fascinating people doing great things, most of whom operate in a sector I don't spend much time in, namely broadcast media. Some of the people I met included
- Sam Potts, who's at Warner Brothers Records (ex Edinburgh Radio) promoting artists - Person who must remain nameless, who is working on Radio 2 and who most recently sprang to fame with the 31Days project, which was a journalistic insight in 21st century dating. Every day for 31 days between Jan 14 - Feb 14 she had to undertake a different means of finding a date. She even auctioned herself off on ebay and got a winning bid of £210 for her to be a dinner date! - Ian Gardner, who is a Sky TV presenter - Nick Prater who works at Radio Monitor - Will Jackson who is one of the Radio Regulators at Offcom - Ed Nell, who is ex Lufbra, and hosts the morning show on Beacon Radio in the Black Country (my old home radio station!). After spending the evening in London, he had to drive back to Wolverhampton ready for his show this morning at 9am. As someone that did a few shows with a hangover and deprived of sleep, it was easy to predict it would be a tough morning for him. Sure enough, he pinged me an email about 11am confirming as much. - Matt Deegan, who is at Gcapmedia in their strategy group and who is spending much time on interactive projects - Alistair Wilson (no relation) who is at the Dept of Constitutional Affairs but still does community radio - The producer of the UK Chart Show - John, the deputy programme Controller for Beacon Radio who was also ex Lufbra.
It turned out there were about 10 ex Lufbra Campus Radio ("LCR - blasting out loud and proud") in the room stretching back to the late eighties (Me!). We were able to swap stories about the times we'd each had in the studios and I learnt about the fabulous new studios that were recently built at a cost of £1m and which put many commercial stations to shame!
Great people, with interesting stories. But two things really stood out for me. Firstly, many of the attendees were in senior positions in broadcast media or related businesses as a direct consequence of their student activities. Secondly, these people understand about the battle their industry is in and are in the front line of remaining relevant to their audience.
Penelope Trunk has a good article entitled on "Networking for People Who Hate Networking"
Networking is a vital skill and shouldn't be shirked. Of course, it seems to come easier to some people. But that's partly a mental attitude. "What if they don't want to talk to me or don't like me" or "we have nothing in common" are common concerns/fears. But let me make the following observation - most people will talk about themselves if given the opportunity. So, if in doubt, ask questions about them to get the conversation going.
You can have enormous fun and learn a huge amount doing it. Walk into a room of people you don't know - well that represents a lot of new stuff you're going to learn and new potential friendships.
I'm a strong believer that you must network only on the basis of a fair trade, which I've blogged about before. By this I mean you can't go into it expecting to be "taking" from everyone you meet. Sadly too few people adhere to this and go into conversations along the lines of "how can you help me".
As a minimum you have to "give" something too and it may be you spend a whole evening just "giving" e.g. introducing people to each other or making suggestions as to who a person should contact. Let me assure you, this is a great reputation to have and the returns normally come back several fold.
I've raved several times about Zoho and their incredible capacity to churn out great online applications. The quality of product and service is excellent. Whilst not as functionality rich as desktop apps such as Microsoft Office, they generally provide 80% or so of the functionality, which is the stuff people actually use.
Their latest offering is a web meeting capability they are calling Zoho Meeting. The video below provides an intro.
newsvine
reddit
It analyses a website page and presents back what purports to be a "scientific" result highlighting the visual hotspots on the page, as you can see in the example above of the Google's home page.
PicksPal which is a sporting event prediction site. Its' users vote on amateur and professional sporting events but do so for fun rather than money. You to spend points to try and beat the odds makers - you win or lose points depending on the accuracy of your picks and your risk appetite. PicksPal does award prizes to the top performers and says they've over 100,000 registered users, albeit not that many playing regularly. 
In similar fashion, Marketocracy looks to monitor the best investors and aggregate their collective knowledge to create a virtual fund. Users are allocated an initial $1 million when they sign-up and 60,000 users have joined to date.
The only issue with these two system is that the users don't face any moral hazard or financial impact of participating. Consequently, users can "afford" to take greater risks than they otherwise would with their own money - it's not clear they would follow their own forecasts. In the case of Marketocracy, the output assumes that all investors have the same risk profile, when clearly that is not the case. In the "game" the experts are deemed to be those generate the highest returns. Yet the real world doesn't work like that. Certainly everyone wants to see their wealth grow but people temper that by the amount they are prepared to lose in an investment strategy.
