New Search

A fascinating short story by Cory Doctorow over here....here's an excerpt:

He hugged her back, suddenly conscious of the way he smelled after a night of invasive Googling. "Maya," he said, "what do you know about Google and the DHS?"

She stiffened as soon as he asked the question. One of the dogs began to whine. She looked around, then nodded up at the tennis courts. "Top of the light pole there; don't look," she said. "That's one of our muni WiFi access points. Wide-angle webcam. Face away from it when you talk."

In the grand scheme of things, it hadn't cost Google much to wire the city with webcams. Especially when measured against the ability to serve ads to people based on where they were sitting. Greg hadn't paid much attention when the cameras on all those access points went public—there'd been a day's worth of blogstorm while people played with the new all-seeing toy, zooming in on various prostitute cruising areas, but after a while the excitement blew over.

Google TV is different...it watches you

.....move over Jennifer Government

Jason Calacanis has launched Mahalo in alpha.....its a "Human powered" search engine that aims to only search the "fat head" of search topics, and aims to have the top 10,000 or so in by year end. As Valleywag put it:

Points for a contrarian approach: the orthodoxy is that only machine indexing of the web can satisfy users' obscure curiosity; Calacanis says that doesn't matter because the top 10,000 search terms account for about a quarter of all queries. They're also the terms against which the majority of text advertising is bought.

It is interesting....Google is observably getting less useful as it gets more gamed (and as the web simply gets richer in content) so humans can surely add value - but using humans rather than algorithms means it is far harder to scale the operation, so this probably forces the economics of Pareto (the 80/20 or "fat head") on Mahalo, rather than that of the Long Tail.

However, it is probably also reflecting the reality of online Ads today - the Long Tail may be great for flogging stuff directly, but no Adman wants to pay anything interesting for that eyeball in the long grass. In theory interactive advertising will change all that, but today the value is still in volume - - probably more out of history than economic reality, but things take time to change.

But, will this business scale - rather than sale - as its not hard to imagine doing the same 80/20 job with a far more automated service and still hoovering up the Ad cents. Also, will people really be happy to continually go to a site that doesn't search everything and anything?

Autonomy is spinning out the consumer arm of its search technology and will float on AIM (aka get a tranche of money in a heating up Tech market). This technology allows audio and video search.

In essence they will demerge their "consumer" technology, roll it into Blinkx, a consumer search company they have invested some $12m in over the years which they will also take over, and then float the new entity on the London Alternative Investment Market (AIM).

Simple then....no matter what Wired says (see previous article)

The FT comments on it here. They note that:

The consumer division will be renamed Blinkx, and listed on London’s AIM exchange for growth stocks in May. Autonomy will retain around 10 per cent of the shares following the float.

The company is considering issuing new shares at the time of the float to provide funding for the new business, which is expected to be initially lossmaking.

Blinkx is looking to create an advertising-funded business, along the lines of the Google business model.

So - take an existing brand and customers in the USA, add sexy new technology area, promise losses, but dangle Ad funded business model for a great future - a made-for-float company !

Last time round the NASDAQ was where it mainly all happened....but is that now too regulated for these sort of plays? Will AIM be the NASDAQ for Bubble 2.0?

(Postscript - GigaOm says it more bluntly here and here)

This post is about talent in a user generated content world. It's sort of influenced by the Digitise or Die talk earlier in this week, a piece in the Washington Post I read about on Guy Kawasaki's blog, and a TV program the kids are fascinated by, the search for a Joseph (as in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat).

Take the Washington Post story first. Guy summarises it:

Basically, the Washington Post convinced a world-class violinist named Joshua Bell to act like a street musician to see how many people would stop to listen to him play and how many would donate money.

He would play his $3.5 million violin made by Antonio Stradivari in 1713. It must be a helluva of violin because it has a name: “Gibson ex Huberman.” The Violin Maker is filled with stories of how violins come to be named, by the way. (Should I give my MacBook Pro, made by Steve Jobs circa 2006, a name?)

Bell played pieces like “Partita in D minor for solo violin,” the Johann Sebastian Bach composition. To summarize: this experiment involved a world-class musician playing Bach on a Stradivari in a Washington D.C. Metro station at 7:51 for forty-five minutes one Friday morning while approximately 1,097 commuters walked past.

What do you think happened?

The answer is that he went unrecognized and unrewarded. What does this mean? Maybe that people make assessments about quality based on context and the rest of the herd. (The Violin Maker mentions a story, perhaps apocryphal, about how another world-class musician played a concert with a cheap violin, and the audience had no idea that he did so.) Or, maybe it illustrates what happens to people who are around politicians, lobbyists, and lawyers all the time…

And then there was the Digitise or Die discussion at the London Book Fair.....one of the issues noted was the increasing production of "beans books" - basically crap written by slebs to sell on the shelves of supermarket booksellers like tins of beans, to be consumed like tins of beans. This is apparently threatening to drive out the more delicate and beautiful literary flowers - the Literary Long Tail.

There was another point made by the CEO of Faber that essentially blogging was great because it relieved them of having to wade through the huge amount of manuscripts of earnest attempts by wannabe writers, as all these people were now writing it in the blogosphere.

....and making movies and podcasts and music, and distributing it over the New Digital media.

So are these wannabes untalented? Not necessarily. Firstly, as Guy points out, talent is about context. There are enough similar stories about wine cognoscenti fooled by plonk, art panels by kids and chimps etc etc - fame is very context driven, but talent is different, its about ability.

But its also about opportunity.

The "Joseph" search essentially allowed many people - from enthusiastic amateurs to trained singers and thespians - to take part in a national search for a person to play the role of Joseph in the musical. After screening auditions they whittled it down to about 40 and in various (televised) rounds it's being whittled down further, its now at about 11.

Sure there is a lot of drama in the whittling process, but the thing that hit me last week in the last 12 run-off was pretty much all those people were pretty damn good, and their backgrounds were pretty random - clerks, brickies and supermarket attendants as well as trained people among the finalists.

Point being that there are a lot of people out there who, for various reasons don't have access / know how / etc and in the past would never have got heard. In other words, "talent" is far more common than we think, the issue is giving it access. Traditional Media, with its (artificially?) high access costs, has tended to create an artificially high value for talent, and has tended to reward those who could pay the price to access that media, rather than talent per se.

What is happening with the New Media is cost of access is falling, and thus more of the talent pool will out - the closed shop is being prised open.

That this is potentially disrupting the traditional Meedja system is a given, much e-ink has been spilled on that...what is more interesting is what it means going forward.

Does it mean that the value of talent will fall, or does it mean that value is constant but everyone will only get their 15 minutes of fame before the next one comes in?.

Or will this just mean that the New Media will follow form and eventually be "stitched up" by people who can pay the New Prices - who have made early reputations, have access to Big Media, to marketing funding etc etc.

So...step one is to incentivise all the talent. If today's rights systems are unworkable, or lead to unwanted outcomes, how to make it work for them?. But how can all those 12 Josephs be incentivised to let their talent shine?

In my view today's Rights systems are more about keeping current aggregators' value artificially high - the actual amount of money in the chain that goes to the talent is quite small in most cases - so large swathes of cost can theoretically be removed without actually disincentivising the talent....and in theory some of that surplus could go to fund more talent

ie if for eg music was 1/2 the price would one spend less or buy twice as much (I would buy twice as much) and if the artist still got roughly the same amount thats twice the number of artists supported per $ or £ spent

For this to work, it is key to be able to find that talent at a lower search cost than today...(I will take it as read that cost of music production is massively lower, by definition)

Traditionally, artistic media have tended to follow power laws (eg Zipf's Law), driven (sometimes manipulated) by the way our social networks tend to select according to what other people are doing - ie for mass popularity - the tyranny of democracy.

Great for governing, less great for discovering great talent. Can search engines or social media help?

Sheer volume makes it harder to find those fascinating niches through all the noise - there is some evidence of this even now in emergent mediums such as the blogosphere, where early-in players continue to grow simply by being easy to find, but do not necessarily have the highest quality content anymore.

Sadly, the "big" search and social media sites seem to be increasingly "gamed", so are becoming less efficient - the signal to noise ratio is going down.

But all the while a lot of us are continuously out there discovering this new talent over the web - new writings, new music, new videos - but how do those who like what we like find us, and how do we find those who are finding the stuff we like in an increasingly congested and gamed space? If we can't the risk is we increasingly get channelled down the massed paths of the dominant social networks.

So if today's (fairly crude) social media technology is now part of the problem, how do we tweak it to be part of the solution?

How to harness our own Inner A&R Men in this search?

It seems to me, at any rate, that there will need to be an emergence of trusted "taste aggregators", people (or social subnetworks) who can be relied on to find great talent that I will like. This is not the same as "Friends of Friends" networks, nor "Peopel who bought this also boiught that" systems - it needs to be more discerning and thus needs some form of "ungameable" critical input.

This is not an argument for going back completely to the Old Media's "editing" function, but it does seem that the optimum is some sort of approach that actively prevents the re-emergence of strong power laws in talent recognition and navigation, as clearly the level of talent in the Long Tail is far far higher than the "traditional" models would have us believe.

To make it work, seems to me that it needs:

- more sophisticated knowledge about me
- a capability for serendipity that is (imho) missing in most of todays social networks
- a certain ability to be "discerning" - anyone patented "discerningness" yet?
- higher levels of proof against "gaming" by vested interests or payola plays

Thoughts?

We were one of the companies invited to develop technology in the BBC Innovation labs of 2007, so here we are in leafy Surrey this week contemplating memes, memetics and the BBC. Our project, in short, is to:

Capturing the Conversation

How does the BBC monitor, capture and reflect how users are engaging with our programmes, channels, actors and presenters away from the BBC? How do we represent the latest BBC related memes and reflect that zeitgeist in both our tv and radio journalism and integrate it into bbc.co.uk?

This sort of stuff is just what we started Broadsight to do, and just to think about solving it has been educational in itself - so to spend 5 days offsite to further develop and hone the technology is exciting to say the least, and our inner geeks are happy - not least because we may even possibly find a use for memetic algorithms. (Wikpedia note):

Some researchers view them as hybrid genetic algorithms or parallel genetic algorithms (GAs). If a GA is combined with some kinds of Local Search, the algorithm is termed as memetic algorithm.

And not just Local Search in our opinion......

Postscript...Matt Locke,who is running these labs, wrote a piece on it here

So, blogsearch engine Technorati down 2 mornings in a row with "Scheduled Maintenance". I haven't had my new posts displayed in 2 days now, despite repeated pings - most disappointed, I thought the Flickr Slickr, Usrs Sickr headline was inspired and I wanted it out there dammit, not buried 7 pages deep when it finally pung !

However, in this Time Of My Troubles, Technotime was clearly found to set up a new and annoying (1) feature called WTF (no, it means Where's the Fire*.....) that intrudes on my search delight, with some other A-hole getting front billing to give his/her paltry opinion of what I've spent my time and energy writing yet another lucid and witty post about.....in other words they have overlaid a digg type system on top of the search, but its different content in it, rather than what is in the blog posts.

Here's the measly justification from Technocrapi CEO Dave Sifry

When you see a top search with an orange flame next to it, it means at least one person from the community has written their view as to why that topic is hot - right now. The community is also invited to either write their own explanation or vote on the WTFs they view as most helpful. Based on a combination of number of votes and timeliness, the top WTFs by search topic appear on the top of the results page.

So one person (how chosen?(2)) gets to write "why" this is hot and gets top billing above all us scribblers who have slaved over our hot lattes with our blognum opuses(opii?), and then this WTF metasystem rides above the Search for all our blog posts? This isn't what search, (or blogging) is about, and it isn't even good social media PR either (and thats according to the Edelmaniacs .

More seriously, its not even good Social Networking - Social Networking is about using the wisdom of crowds, letting the best solutions rise to the top - yes, it is gamed, but gaming it yourself is pushing it an iota too far - there isn't even a semblance of fairness, or representation, or democracy etc etc, and its not even any good(3) - why can't they choose the best blog post, or the most linked, or even the best headline (mine! mine! mine!).

Its in danger of killing the golden geese - why bother blog if you can just write Techno Op-ed?(4).

These are very important things to get users' Trust...I did predict that 2007 would be the year that Social Media would be scraped and pillaged to justify the fantastic prices people paid for it in 2006 (or for those unsold to get bought), at the expense of Trust - and probably any Integrity - but I think Technorati is playing With The Fire here. Up till now I for one have preferred Technocrapi to Google (its independent and I like to see links as I don't believe "gamed most linked" is the best way to define content quality), but this play invalidates their differentiator without any real user benefit.

And I am not the only one who thinks so, it would appear...read here, or here, or even here (5)

So, to Technorati - big hint - Do what you do do well, boys, that will stand you in far better stead than trying to digg another hole.(6)

Postscript - it is very interesting to read the (mainly very negative) blog posts about WTF and contrast them with the (all astoundingly positive) WTF blurbs). Now, which medium will you Trust?

* It also means World Taekwondo Federation, hence the relevant Ads

Some Updates now that its working properly......

(1) Just read the blogs!

(2) Its up and working properly now again, my pings have pung and I have tried a Blurb about WTF .....simple process, so that is good. Lets see how the voting works.

(3) Its working now, so access is possible - but my key point here is the relationship - read the Blurbs and the Blogs for WTF itself and you will see the total difference in opinions that are expressed - it is two totally different worlds (talking about the first 8 or so blurbs vs the blog sturm und drang).

(4) This is, I think the main issue - by having a social network of blurbs that talks about the blogs in their social network, the danger is that the site is trying to do 2 conflicting things - and I for one do not believe they have got the Search going properly yet.

(5) Its hit techmeme now

(6) For example, Broadstuff is a 28 link blog - ie a "blog with some authority" in Technorati speak - yet it only shows up as a "blog with any authority" in searching for this topic...are some links more equal than other

Seems like its not just us at Broadstuff who wonder if its Google who is going to break the next major wave in Search...this note from Sarah Milstein, co-author and editor of Google: The Missing Manual, published on the O'Reilly Radar echoes a lot of what we have been saying about the future of Search.

I quote it here in full, its very interesting:

A couple of things I've noticed since writing/editing the second edition of the Google Missing Manual earlier this year. Nothing ground-breaking here; more that in aggregate, the observations may spark some interesting conversations.

- As the Web gets bigger, search results contain more irrelevant stuff. In many cases, it's getting harder to find what you want. Appreciably harder.
- Assuming search winds up lasting 100+ years, it's still in its infancy. Still, it surprises me that the presentation of Google's main search results pages barely changed in the two years from one edition of the book to the next. The main difference is that now, onebox results with specialized information appear more frequently (though randomly) at the top of results listing. At this point, I'm ready for a better results interface.
- Other search companies are doing some cool stuff with their main results. For many searches, Microsoft Live presents a super-useful list of related searches; also, somebody hit them with the clean-interface stick. Ask.com does a nice job with simple natural-language questions. Clusty has been offering very handy clustered search results since at least 2004. Daylife (still in alpha) does what is essentially clustering with a thoughtful interface.
- Vertical search is a hot trendlet; for the most part, it's about clustering and improving the results interface. (Those aren't trivial things; they're really important aspects of helping you find stuff.)
- As search results get more unwieldy, recommendation engines like Amazon's or iTunes' could become more important tools. (Bonus: they're an iteration of the architecture of participation, so we can claim some kind of credit. Presumably, implicit relevance (based on search-result clickstreams) is going to be a big part of this if it's not already.
- I wonder when/if search is going to be real-time (i.e. live Web) rather than index-based. And I wonder if the main barrier to it now is hardware or software (to the degree you can separate them). At Web2, I met a woman from Intel R&D who's working on a continuous refresh data system that would allow real-time searching but for which you need multi-core processors that aren't yet ready for primetime. Still, an interesting glimpse of the possible future. [Sidebar: I brought up the idea of real-time Web search with Tony Stubblebine, and he thought it was hilarious. Totally unrealistic viz computing capacity. I thought it was laughable that he thought we wouldn't eventually have the bandwidth and cycles to do it. Tune in in 10 years for an update.]
- When do the implicit conclusions of hardcore data-mining and analysis become part of search results? For example, Marc Smith's newsgroup analysis can point to potential experts on a topic. If I want to find an SEO guru, when will search results from a major engine contain implicitly derived info from Marc's project?

A couple of thoughts on Google as a company:

- During the two-year period from one edition of Google TMM to the next, Google began adding features and services at such an increasingly quick clip that while the second edition was at the printer, we missed out on eight new tools. That was in a 10-day period. (Some of those new tools are search-related; many are not.)
- The other big change from the Google customer POV is that now, a lot of Google services require an account. It's not yet clear, though, how/whether having an account will lead to improved search results.
- Moreover, it's no longer clear that Google is a search company. They're certainly an ad-brokering network (I'm sure everyone saw the announcement last week that they're reaching into newspaper ads now, with plans for basically all major media). And they're a provider of (mostly) Web-based productivity tools of all kinds. But a lot of those activities seem to have little to do with their mission of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful." They do seem to have organized the world's top search experts. But as a customer, I'm not sure I'm feeling the benefit of that in my everyday searching.

A final note: I use a slew of Google tools every day, my life is richer for them, and I'm not looking to bash the company. But I do wonder where the next search innovations are going to come from, and I'm surprised to find that Google isn't the obvious answer to that question anymore.

Lots in here, most of it known and we have covered it before, but very succinct and its just interesting to hear a Googleluminary like Sarah think the unthinkable. Google is no longer really a SearchCo, its an AdCo. Question is, which comes first? If a better SearchCo comes along, do teh Ads migrate to it? If so, rapidly or slowly?

By the way......notice that little stinger about new Google services requiring an account - ie more data about you? Now that is the most interesting link in the whole post. The Metadata War is heating up..............

Update...very interesting little article from teh New York Times over here...to quote:

Even gathering the crumbs of business left behind by Google could generate a lofty market capitalization. Don Dodge, a Microsoft manager who works outside of the company’s search group, made this argument in a post on his personal blog last month: “Why 1% of Search Market Share Is Worth Over $1 Billion.” Mr. Dodge reasoned that 1 percent of the 7.3 billion searches performed in the United States in March, multiplied by 12 cents in advertising revenue per search, would yield annualized revenue of $105 million. Assuming a market cap that is 10 times revenue, his arithmetic leads to a billion-dollar company.

Here is another attraction: Any company that offers a superior search service would be able to poach the customers of everyone else. No long-term contracts keep Google users in place. In addition, even though each search engine conducts a search in its own way, users do the same thing — typing in a word or a phrase — no matter which service they are using. Therefore, no daunting learning curve will frighten customers who are considering moving to another search engine.

Not to mention who gets the Adwords.....

Video and Picture search is hard, as the many PhD's in Universities and R&D labs who have tried to do this will testify. (Yahoo and UC Berkely started an entire research lab to get into this overall space, after all). Getting it right, you would think, would open amazing opportunities.

Not so, it would seem. Today Riya.com, an early pioneer, has metamorphosed into Like.com - allowing shoppers (mainly women judging by the content) to take a picture of some piece of bling worn by a sleb and then search for similar items of like watches, boots etc in online mail order houses.

The last time I saw an application like this being used in anger was for porn, an application called MiltonSoft

So, the true monetisation for picture search is Sex and Shopping?

Actually, the thing that interested me most about this was the sheer volume of commentary from the Big Blogs. It appeared as expected on TechCrunch and on GigaOm - but what was fascinating was the sheer number of comments (up at 72 and still going on TechCrunch as I write, a very high number for a relatively small startup), and that luminaries such as Robert Scoble and Don Dodge appear on the comments pages giving their opinions.

So, why all the hoopla - is it picture search itself, or is it sound Blogmarketing?

No doubt a succesful picture based search model will be followed closely by many players, as the potential applications are (in theory) far greater than sex and shopping. However, I think this is also a great lesson for Marketing in the Blog Age.

Riya and Like's CEO Munjal Shah has appeared on the various majors' comments pages, giving more details about Like. But he has also been authoring a blog about his experiences as CEO of a small company in a changing world - anyone who has been in his position will definitely empathise!

As to whether Like.com will work - Scoble is positive, Don Dodge is more skeptical and Liz Gannes over at GigaOm is fairly neutral.

My view...this is a Blog age Marketing masterclass, well done to Like.com !

Postscript....seems like my suspicion of Blog Age marketing was spot on...here is Michael Arrington's personal blog on the matter, looks like it was Scoble-izing wot did it. Interesting lessons indeed.

O'Reilly Radar has an article by Tim O'Reilly called "Search Startups Are Dead, Long Live Search Startups". He notes that "In my talks on Web 2.0, I always end with the point that "a platform beats an application every time."

Hmmm.....I think there is actually more of a "helix" effect between platform and application. Platforms are critical until they become standardised - ie commoditised, at which point applications above that layer rise in importance - until they in turn become subsumed in the emerging next level platform structures....and so begins the Circle of Life again

To be fair, I think Tim O'Reilly may imply this when he says:

We're entering the platform phase of Web 2.0, in which first generation applications are going to turn into platforms, followed by a stage in which the leaders use that platform strength to outperform their application rivals, eventually closing them out of the market

Clearly, starting any search business to compete directly with the old platforms is pointless, it seems to me that the new applications area is where the value lies now - searches we get now are based on smart algorithms to search lousy metadata. If that metadata can be enriched, searches can get a lot better.

In my view the social network approach is already driving a new sort of search, more intelligent than the first generation, as users add tagging, rating and recommendation metadata to basic search, forming the folk taxonomies or "folksonomies".

However, this has its limitations, its unpredictable both in terms of coherent metadata structure and rollout - so the challenge is to arrive at easily structured metadata. I can see 3 possible approaches to this for a new player:

(i) Carve off (valuable) pieces of the searchspace and structure better metadata on the content than the majors can provide in that niche (sorry, vertical is the new "in" word I am told) space.
(ii) Add value on top of an existing search platform by structuring better activity based metadata
(iii) Add value to "me" by knowing "me" better - and this probably means some form of opt in where you volunteer information for a more relevant search.

These will most likely ride on top of the exisiting search engines, like the Trexy system I wrote about earlier.

O'Reilly also quotes a post from Bill Burnham which notes that:

For start-ups, having core search become just another part of the Internet’s infrastructure is actually great news. This frees them from the huge capital costs required to build a competitive core search platform and instead lets them focus on building a great consumer/enterprise application.

So not only is building search applications the best strategic option at present from a competitive viewpoint, it actually is a better option from an infrastructure viewpoint too.

Burnham also notes that:

....some of the most interesting opportunities will come not from trying to improve the accuracy and context of a single query, but from looking at aggregate information about search indexes, results, and queries across time. In other words, the marriage of this search infrastructure, with persistent queries and advanced analytics will likely create an entirely new class of applications.

Quite - New Search needs to be integrated into the feedback system of the closed loop architecture of my life - know who I am, what I want, who is like me and wants the same. Oh, and it has to be simple, intuitive and available on my mobile 'phone too.

Not much to ask, is it

Its interesting....you look at loads of new search technologies for years until you can't see the woods for the algorithms, and there is hardly a murmur - and then suddenly its all hot. Vertical search, Natural Language search, Serendipity Search.....suddenly its all happening. Again. (just Ask Jeeves).

Sigh deja view

So...back to some basics. Search 101 (expurgated version):

(i) You can only search what is searchable - ie what has some form of understandable taxonomy and metadata. If a fact falls in a forest and no one hears it.....

(ii) It is damned expensive to do this logging centrally, and it is an exponential curve...even the mighty Google runs out of oomph about...oh, 2006 anyone?.

(iii) The best way over this so far is the "folksonomy"...McTagging - the users input the metadata *as the content is created*.....

(iv) ...except users don't do this, or at best do it partially, or differently to every one else - unless you bribe 'em in some way. There is no user self interest in play yet (though there are some Flickrs of hope), so the folksonomy is a tragedy of the commoners

This is where we are today. Bad metadata and worse puns.

Now, Patrick's 2nd Net Rule states that The Long Tail shall always Rise. This means that the huge Content-o-Sphere out there will resolve into lots of niches, and these will be colonised by different metadata ecosystems, and will (very) probably be optimally searched in different ways. Let these be called Verticals if that helps sell your biz plan to the friendly VC.

Some are, shockingly dear reader, much, much more valuable than others. For these areas the race to colonise, contextualise and commercialise is already on.

Let the Metadata wars begin!!!

And the devil take the hindmost, and Google loses its shorts...er no, shirt. It gains shorts, right?

Now, there is one fascinating area which is - as yet - less trodden than most, and that is mobile search. Have you ever tried to search Google on your mobile? Right...its enough to make you want to actually call someone up and just ask!

So, getting search on a mobile to be easy will be a challenge, since the device is so darn small and the UI so darned clunky...when will they get this stuff on a Blackberry or even a Nintendo Lite for crying out loud!

But, getting it right on mobile will be very, very valuable because search is so very, very hard to do on them - but so, so useful. And they have a monetisation model today that doesn't need Web 2.0 adverts!

However, its non trivial to do because of that awful UI, so it will need to be a hybrid web/mobile play, and...well, you can pay for the rest of the advice....alan.patrick@broadsight.com


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