broadstuff

It's now official - the iPhone is open for business, says Gartner.

Now we knew this at least two weeks ago, because of our diligent and perceptive research - we read Apple's public announcement on the 6th March

Anyway, sez Gartner:

The iPhone will soon be tailored for enterprises. Gartner recommends "appliance-level" support status once firmware 2.0 and improvements are released. iPhone will become a popular tool alongside BlackBerry and Microsoft devices.

Now this will shock you....some of our clients were actually thinking of avoiding crackberry and going on to iPhone, and they had the temerity to do this before Gartner officially announced it was OK! In fact, we ourselves had the audacity to actually ask the London Mobile Monday group for opinions on Crackberry vs iPhone for business use earlier this week.

Comments included:

- Just hope his users are happy with the virtual keyboard. I've not heard
any positive comments about this. The odd text message whilst sitting
down isn't too bad - but typing longer emails whilst moving/bumping on a
train etc is going to be more annoying.

- Why not go for HTC? Notably the tytn2 with full keyboard,blackberry support is available and html email support as well? And considerably less expensive!

- I have a Blackberry from my employer and an iPhone of my own. I actually struggle with the Blackberry now. The keyboard is feels so “pointy” and the buttons seem very small. I really miss the iPhone’s predictive text, which is brilliant, and don’t get me started on the rest of the Blackberry UI/OS which is utter rubbish in comparison.

- What the iPhone will enable with the enterprise announcements, is for
people to wear two hats, consumer and business, which with almost all
other devices today, it's just not possible in as graceful and elegant
way.

- Well, consider that in the similar period of time that the iPhone had
been out (just a couple of weeks longer), and Apple had sold 4 million
iPhones - HTC sold 2 million of their newly released iPhone like Touch
devices. Considering the publicity of the iPhone, and the hype Apple
commands and their marketing budget - I think that's a very good for
HTC. In total they shipped 12 million handsets over the year, up 12%.

- Could try looking at a Nokia E90 also. Can download free from Nokia
the Blackberry Connect or MS ActiveSync software clients and the
keyboard is quite ok. Has wifi, gps, 3mp camera, good battery life,
etc, etc. I'm using one to write this just now in fact, and regularly use it in
"on the move" situations. I'm very happy with it anyway!

I note the Gartner report that tells you this is 5 pages for $95, and 2 weeks after the fact - it's interesting in a way that there is still a market for this, as a quick scan on Techmeme or a few of the blogs on the day would have told you all you needed to know. I suspect its the cachet of a "trusted source" that allows in-corporate staff to put such notes forward as evidence in their business cases.

Deal for MoMo-ers - next time we'll print up a 5 page report of people's comments and some analysis and flog it for $95 a shot, and the proceeds can sponsor a booze up at the next MoMo meeting

Update - judging by the 100% karma to date I can only assume its the MoMo-ers voting for beer

Update 2 - Apple 2.0 reminded me - Forrester still has to change its mind after panning the iPhone at 2007 year-end

Well now....a real hooha on TechMeme re Blog Networks raising VC money, started off by TechCrunch (as always )

More blogs are raising venture capital, we’re hearing from people they’ve pitched. Newcomer Silicon Alley Insider is looking for a $3 - $5 million round, if reports are correct. And PaidContent is pitching for a second round in that same range (PaidContent raised a round of “less than $1 million” in 2006). We’re also hearing that PaidContent is trying to sell the company for $15 million or more, and just bail out with some spending money.

There is of course the standard litany of denial of cash raising, being for sale, the amount etc etc as per usual in these things, for example here on PaidContent:

I can’t say this clearly enough: he is wrong on ALL counts. Let me elaborate:
-- We may raise some more money but it is nowhere in the range Mike reports.
-- We raised considerably less than a million in our first round from Greycroft partners...we didn’t disclose the round, but all we said was it was less than a million.
-- No, we are NOT looking to sell...not now, not in the near future.

But underneath the standard hoopla there is one fundamental strategic issue - they are all doing basically the same thing, ie reporting on the same limited pool of stories to the same fairly limited audience in much the same way. Add to that the issue that there are few real barriers to entry, and that many of the new entrants are "enthusiastic amateurs" - ie low cost, high quality and prolific - and you have a fairly textbook strategic problem - there is too much supply.

And even worse, modern search and aggregation makes it increasingly easy to find and rate that long tail....and tell all your friends too.

In other words, Mr Arrington's main thrust is right - there will be a consolidation, one way or another, at some point. When depends on how long people will work on a wing and a prayer to good times later. Whether it is his Harlem Blogtrotters model that will win is debatable, I think the model is more a last men who can hold onto the lifeboat.

No wonder there are calls for unionisation and other ways to raise the drawbridge to protect the current incumbents!

But, as any economist will tell you, this will hasten consolidation...........

Yes, 2008 is going to be a blog eat blog world out there

Update - Kara Swisher does a very good take on this....one might think she wasn't taking it all seriously

Sez CNet:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--The consensus here at the Dow Jones Web Ventures conference this week seems to be that the world doesn't need another social network.

That's considering that the advertising model for even the largest social networks like Facebook has yet to fall into place--despite that company's projected $15 billion valuation. Or that sites supported only by advertising will get squeezed in a down economy and that venture capital is cooling for Web 2.0 startups. Or, more likely, that some audiences--like CEOs or cat lovers--simply don't need their own social networks.

"If I see another business plan for a social network, I might blow my brains out," Barry Schuler, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said during a panel discussion this week.

"It seems like 2000: Everything is the next big social network, even though no one has figured out a real business plan for that yet."

The answer is of course obvious - a Social Network for people who are fed up with social networks to use, to get together.

I mean, these VC's are high net worth guys, they have to be worth advertising to, right

Fred Wilson notes, re Friendfeed and the new new forum:

But it means I have to log into FriendFeed every day now and check out what people are saying and weigh in. Which I've been doing in the past couple weeks. And that increases the chances that I'll comment on someone else's posts at FriendFeed.

So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog, and twitter, I have to pay attention to whats' going on in FriendFeed. So it's gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That's the way to play the game on the web.

But I would like to see them get those comments portable in some way. Or I'd like to see someone aggregate those comments.

I love the last line's implications - I need another aggregator to aggregate the stuff this aggregator is aggregating so I don't have to visit yet another website

Fred also quotes Umair Haque:

Umair, who is so right so often, said:

The real point is: Friendfeed is a next-gen, open version of Facebook's social feed.

Sorry guys, I'm being a bit slow here - which bit of the "yet-another-proprietary-service-that-I-have-to-have-an-identity-and-a-social-graph-in" is the next-gen, open version here?

Or is it that it pumps out stuff in that hate-object of the Web 2.0 faithful, email?

Robert Scoble on the Scale of two (startup) Entities - First he notes that Andrew Mobbs, managing director of the Hatchery, has a big dream. He wants to move the world off of credit cards and onto using their cell phones to pay for things. Sez Scoble:

What I found really interesting was his dilemma as an entrepreneur. What is it?

1. His product is too difficult to use, so it needs some more work. That takes capital, but he’s not able to land Silicon Valley capital (at least not yet).
2. Because he’s chosen a “boil the ocean” strategy (getting, say, Starbucks or Amazon to adopt his technology) he’s finding it hard to get adoption.
3. Because he doesn’t have adoption, investors aren’t interested.
4. Plus he’s going against big companies (PayPal, Visa, MC, American Express) which makes investors nervous, unless you have a clear differentiator that’ll be defendable for some time.

Second, Omar Hamoui’s story of Admob, a mobile advertising network. He walked into Sequoia Capital and had a term sheet in his hands in about 24 hours.

How did Admob land the capital it needed?

1. They had customers and rapid growth BEFORE they walked onto Sand Hill Road.
2. They didn’t try to boil the ocean, nor did they try to go up against entrenched competitors.

As Robert notes, both picked the rapidly-growing world of mobile. So, what gives?

First, the grauitous advice - Mobile phones as credit cards is at least 10 years old, (I know because we were looking at such projects 10 years ago), and the Hatchery guys need to understand why all the previous big scale plays failed, and what has worked instead. The general case for “web 1.0″ is that the “ocean boil” Big Exchange plans failed usually because they needed to use a lot of Other People's Money to break into an existing industry, often in a scale and manner that guaranteed the existing incumbents would fight them tooth and nail and deny them the access they needed. The risk/reward of that profile is appalling, so what has tended to work is niche plays, either too small initailly to attract resistance, or quite frequently in collaboration with one of the industry players. Its not that big, supply-chain spanning play's don't work, just that its far harder - and longer - to execute. In fact there is an excellent summary of this on Simon Wardley's blog today, talking about innovation of new services:

To show this in action, consider the three little piggies building a house. Let's say each house requires 100,000 bricks and whilst the big bad wolf can blow down an unfinished item, any stable component is too strong to be blown apart. Our three little piggies will follow different strategies:-

Piggy 1 : Build the house in one go.
Piggy 2: Build stable components, each component containing 10 sub-components. i.e. 10 bricks = a line. 10 lines = a section of wall etc.
Piggy 3: Build stable components, each component contain 100 sub-components.

OK, let's say on average you can put together 1,000 components before the big bad wolf returns. Then :-

Piggy 1 : will never be completed.
Piggy 2 : will be completed by the 12th visit of the wolf.
Piggy 3 : will be completed by the 2nd visit of the wolf.

It sounds obvious, but knowing the lifecycle stage of an activity and componentising those activities which can be componentised is essential for innovation.

Schumacher's Law of Startups - Small is Beautiful !

Second, a point that is pertinent to both companies' experiences - Go West, young man. Quite simply, and despite a few notable exceptions, getting money in Europe to do anything relatively radical is harder than in the USA. (We blogged on this a few days ago re Peter Nixey's experience, which is the far more common - and less reported - countercase to Skype et al). It's getting better, but as Andrew Scott notes on Scoble's comments section, the Equity Gap is very real to anyone who has looked at getting funding. To those who argue that if you want to build a billion dollar software tech company in Europe by using European VC money, it’s perfectly possible to do it - just look at Skype - Andrew writes:

I’d challenge you to give me 5 companies in this category who have grown to a billion dollar company, purely on European VC money (let alone UK), other than rolling out the usual suspects such as Skype et al. In contrast, I can probably name you 20 U.S. in the consumer internet sector, without breaking a sweat.

There is problem in Europe - its the equity gap. And its big. There are of course always exceptions to the rule, but in general U.S. seed investment is larger, and VC investment is earlier. In contrast, seed investment in the UK/Europe is smaller and VCs invest much later. That leaves a gaping hole between around £250,000 and £2m ($500k and $4m U.S.)

Everyone knows this, everyone will discuss it private, but nobody wants to spoil the party at European conferences by saying it. Which is a pity, as it needs to be said; because there is so much good stuff going on in Europe in the startup scene, thats its a disgrace that more support and more risk capital is not made available early enough.

Europeans (of which I am one) sometimes ask why there is no Yahoo, Google, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc etc of Europe; I believe the reason is what I have just described. Sadly, the same fate awaits us again in 4 years time when the consumer mobile internet services mature, and the same conversation will be had again.

Now I would argue that there are some structural reasons - smaller overall markets, setup cost of deal vs size - that mitigate against this in Europe, but its clear its still an issue at this scale, this is not the funding that is going for the Big Event - and even with the UK government for example offering to co-fund 50:50 in many new areas, prising money out of the private funding sector remains non trivial.

Whereas buying a plane ticket to sunny Santa Clara is very easy........ in fact, in this globalising world I'd argue it behooves any would be entrepreneur to look at global funding.

Died today. One of my personal deities. His books rest that bit more heavily on my shelf.

At the time of the Sarah Lacy / Mark Zuckerberg interview I was working at my desk in London, and started to see the Twitters rolling in, and after a while (and a bit of searching other people's feeds) it felt to me like mob behaviour was breaking out - I blogged on it at the time in fact.

Now a very interesting post by Kee Hinckley analyses the Twitter traffic at the time. Its great to see analysis rather than the pure opinion that is the usual standard fare in these issues - especially if it backs me up

The graphics are also very good.

The predictions at the end of the piece are good too:

This experience, and the past month that I've spent intensively using Twitter, have led me to a few beliefs about where this all is leading us.

The first one easy. Anyone who runs a conference, panel or large meeting without monitoring the backchannel is simply asking for trouble. Ironically, SXSW did have an official chatroom for the keynote, but that did not receive as much traffic, nor was it being monitored as a backchannel should be.

The second one is longer term. For several generations social networking on the computer has been derided as not having the depth or value of real life social interactions. Tools like Twitter (and Facebook), which blur the lines between work and home, important and trivial, and which deliberately create a malleable and ambiguous set of simple tools ("status", "poke", "what are you doing") are the primitive forerunners of what the next generation will take for granted. The always-on aspects will surely migrate to phones and become a constant part of our online life. The interfaces may be crude, but I am already more connected to the lives of people halfway across the world than I am with my next door neighbors.

Friendfeed has friends in high places indeed - now TechCrunch has signed up to the sch(l)ock and awestruck club . This story is about a new feature for Search, and judging by the hullabaloo on Techmeme you'd think Search had only just been invented - damn these boyz' PR is good

OK, time to get serious though - TechCrunch says this makes Friendfeed a destination site. Actually, I don't think that's the Friendfeed use case at all. I use it for the very simple reason it does two things simply:

(i) It aggregates more sources than my RSS reader does
(ii) It pumps the whole lot to email, so I don't need to go near a website nearly as often.

However, I've largely turned it off due to sheer volume of stuff - now what I really want is not search, but filtering - I'd like to screen the stuff coming into Friendfeed so that it only pumps stuff to email that I want. (I was thinking of a similar need on Twitter, I don't want to block people, its just that I don't want their musings on breakfasts and other assorted trivia).

Filtering out trivia is of course non trivial (its harder than search in fact) but in these days of info overload just giving me more ways of getting more stuff is pretty low value.

So to be a real feed Friend, be a Filter...........

Data portability has been climbing the Tech Buzztrends for awhile, but this BBC note from Sir Tim Berners Lee implies to me that we need to get the privacy horses sorted out before the portability coach is harnessed up:

Sir Tim said he did not want his ISP to track which websites he visited.

"I want to know if I look up a whole lot of books about some form of cancer that that's not going to get to my insurance company and I'm going to find my insurance premium is going to go up by 5% because they've figured I'm looking at those books," he said.

Sir Tim said his data and web history belonged to him.

He said: "It's mine - you can't have it. If you want to use it for something, then you have to negotiate with me. I have to agree, I have to understand what I'm getting in return."

This is probably my main interest area in the development of VRM - my data has a value, and I'm damned if the Internet is going to be a system that extracts it from me without some benefit. And long before I am worried about its portability, I want some guarantees as to its privacy. In particular, Sir Tim was worried about Phorm, a company which tracks web activity to create personalised adverts - the BBC says that its:

...system offers security benefits which will warn users about potential phishing sites - websites which attempt to con users into handing over personal data.

The advertising system created by Phorm highlights a growing trend for online advertising tools - using personal data and web habits to target advertising.

In our view the best way for the ISP-level Web to go is as a neutral supplier of service, as Sir Tim notes:

"I myself feel that it is very important that my ISP supplies internet to my house like the water company supplies water to my house. It supplies connectivity with no strings attached. My ISP doesn't control which websites I go to, it doesn't monitor which websites I go to."

More worryingly for us, it looks like our ISP, BT, has signed up for Phorm. The thing is, I am already paying for my ISP connection, I really, really don't want advertising models on a paid-for service.

Well, we objected strenuously to Facebook Beacon, and are now no longer on that site. Rest assured we shall evacuate any provider that tries to foist Beacon, or Phorm, or whatever comes next, on us.

Update - I've just found out that there is an e-petition against Phorm, over here.

Update II - I am seriously enjoying the Slashdot discussion on this

Update III - the FIPR have written a letter to the Information Commissioner alleging this is illegal.

Quick look in on the blogosphere this Sunday shows a bunfight breaking out over Friendfeed. Leaving aside the personalities, I had a little play with the software, and found myself agreeing with Andy Beard:

- It seems to take forever for FriendFeed to update - posts I did Friday pm are still not there
- I honestly hate any application that thinks it is ok to share Google account details - do you really want to give them access to your private email, Adsense and Adwords account? For ex-Googlers to think this is OK is extremely perplexing, or even worrying

Actually, its for exactly those concerns I don't have any Google accounts.... any company where you have to sign an NDA just to get in the building is saying a lot about its own DNA....

Also, despite Duncan Riley's rather direct way of putting it, I agree with this point:

....when I want to comment on an item, I’ll do it at the source, like the vast majority of people would. If it’s a Tweet I’ll reply on Twitter. If it’s a blog post, I’ll leave a comment. Why the f*ck would I want to use a third party service? Why the f*ck would I want to comment on a Tweet on FriendFeed? Or is it that I should just because he says so?

I put Broadstuff on Friendfeed because I'm quite interested in this genre of aggregator (and fav.or.it never invited us onto their private beta ;-), and it publishes to email which imho is very useful (I know email is the Great satan of the Web 2.0 crowd, but it works for me...). My take so far is better said by Brian Solis:

It’s not about you per se. It’s about those who enjoy following your activity online. And yes, there are many tools that do this, but at the end of the day, why not make it easier for people to connect with you using the tools that they’re most comfortable with.

The consensus is that FriendFeed is fun and definitely makes it easier and by far, more elegant, as a way of keeping a “pulse” on your network. The one thing that I need though is the ability to link directly to a “reply” option.

Kudos to the Friendfeed PR guys, you've played a blinder, but there is in reality far less to it than meets your eyes - imho quit the puffery while you're ahead