Review: Essential Web 2007 - Session 1
Essential Web is over, and due to a nice dinner with Jyri that involved some wine, I ended up with having to sleep a bit more than I hoped for. In the end I noticed that I had some agenda left at the end of my day, as I wanted to do this write-up Thursday, but I only got to it now.
First Impressions
The most outed comment I heard at Essential Web 2007 was probably something like: “damn, there are a lot of VCs here!”. This was really the first event I attended here in London where there were probably as many (maybe even more) VCs as startups. Even worse was the fact that even the amount of bloggers was less than the amount of VCs, which obviously scared us.
The day was divided over 5 sessions in which 4 to 6 companies got exactly 5 minutes to present their products. After all the presentations, a panel would then get a chance to reply to the company’s ideas and strategies and ask them questions. Obviously where time was available, the audience was allowed to ask questions. In this post I will cover just the first session which covered 6 products that tried to make the internet a more manageable experience. The first panel was formed by Saul Klein (Venture Partner, Index Ventures), David Soskin (CEO, Cheapflights and Howzat Media) and Graham Sadd (CEO, PAOGA).
Migoa announced themselves as being a “vertical search engine”, which to me sounds like the lamest term I have ever heard besides their company name. It just sounds too much like I spend all my days on Google lying around horizontally. A bit more seriously, their product is probably more technical than it is full of web2.0 amazement, but I still think it is kinda cool. The idea is that they try to make specific search engines for areas where Google doesn’t work. For example, searching in Google for a room in London with rent between £100 and £175 a week won’t get you that far. For now they only want to focus on cars, houses and jobs. They are still in private beta but they will be opening up soon.
If you think I was harsh about Migoa, think again. Quintura don’t only have a stupid semi-web2.0 sounding name, they also have a pretty lame product. Basically they use the concept of tag-clouds to let you explore and refine your search on Google. For this reason this isn’t really a product but more of a gimmick. Yes I enjoyed typing in my name and seeing what my relevant tags where, but it seriously does not compete with Google as the founder would have liked. In the end it is also NOT working in Safari and for that simple reason I will never mention them here again.
Extate is another vertical search engine, this time only focusing on UK properties though. I think their product (when well marketed) could be a good competitor to Gumtree but they need to do some more work. In my opinion we will have to look for the real rival to agencies and Gumtree in that company that manages to efficiently filter the crap (scammers, expensive agencies, lying property letters, etc) from the good guys like my land lady. Just creating a nice portal to poor content is simply not enough. In the end I was just really missing the Web2.0 inspiration in this company.
Trexy has a technology that tries to visualize your exploring habits in search engines. I think this is pretty cool, but again probably a gadget that will additionally fail under a mass community. Let me explain the principal: when you browse for example Google, you might refine your search terms to get to the site you intended. Basically this info is already being gather by Google, but it hasn’t been used yet visually. The idea of the guys behind Trexy is to enable you to find useful tracks of others that already did a similar search, this way allowing you to do a quicker search and take a shortcut. Now here is where this fails: most people don’t do complex searches, and if they do they won’t look like my search. I noticed for example when I used their product that there were a lot of tracks with only the start search (as in people found what they wanted in 1 go). Now let’s say 5 million people started to use this product, then I would have to search in search paths, sending me back to the same place I was before Trexy. Nice product, but again failed.
Garlik was the first company to attract my attention with their “Revolutionary Online Protection” service. The idea is that it is worthwhile to have a service that can easily show you how much of your personal details are floating around on the web. Some people really worry about these kind of thing and their service could really give them an insight. The downside of their service is that they are (1) a UK optimized company, (2) non-free, and (3) they don’t offer a solution. The last point worries me most. It took me a while to read around their nice advertisement on the front page, but in the end I understood that they don’t actually do any “protection” besides giving you an insight and raising awareness. They do give advice on any actions you could try to protect your data, but what these are is unknown to non-paying visitors to their site.
The Todeka Project sounded to me to have some vague ideas, and in the end I was not so clear what they did. Something about certification and OpenID was outed but that was all I got. Their website doesn’t offer extra info so that leaves me stranded. It all sounded cool though, but I think that you won’t get masses to go with this yet as my mother doesn’t even understand OpenID yet, let alone any certification issues.
Conclusion
In the end this first session was a very disappointing, with the panel focussing on questions like “what is your monetizations strategy?” instead of “why would real people use this?”. It was the first session though and after a short break where we got to stand up for 10 seconds we went on for the second session. More on this soon.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
July 2nd, 2007Spot on analysis, Cris. Especially that age old monetization question. I’m the first guy in line to whale on an idea, because mindless shoulder patting is not doing anyone any good, but the one line of questioning that is completely useless is ‘monetization strategy’.
Take a look at delicious. You can barely run ads on this thing. Serious delicious users use toolbars and tools that virtually eliminate the ability of delicious to toss ads your way. The server is at least relatively easy to copy, so milking it for all its worth wont last you very long, and yet it sold for 100 dollars per user simply because it’s a good product, well written, offering something that people need.
The right questions to ask are:
Do you have something specific? Being vague about what your startup is doing is the last thing you need. If you have delusions of grandeur (and don’t we all?) that’s fine, but start with something simple and specific. Tipit, for example, exists primarily to allow you to tip blogs. We actually want to expand into a music distribution model, a way to donate to charity, a way to allow setting up bounties for any job - basically a way to micro-finance anything, a way to become the new article aggregator, becoming the new alexa, and more. The list is longer than my, uh, leg, but if people ask me what tipit does: It allows you to tip blogs.
Do you have something that people actually NEED? Creating a need out of thin air is possible but extremely difficult to pull off. Lots of new web2 companies out there are trying to create new ‘needs’. Contrast this to the older crop. Google - search engines. Duh, people need that. Youtube - sharing video: Yeah, it was new in the sense that you couldn’t do it before, but the idea that people want to share media has existed ever since the invention of photography. delicious - bookmarking. Obvious need there. Finding articles on the web (reddit, digg, stumbleupon, linkblogs, and other things) - ’surfing’ has been around since the earliest days of the http://WWW. etcetera.
Do you have something that people can use? Basically, does your web app work nicely. This one is obvious, and fortunately it’s usually taken care of.
Do you have something viral? As annoying as it sounds, you really need something that drives your marketing for you, because you don’t have the money for a huge advertising campaign, and a site which is just pretty cool to use isn’t going to spread the word fast enough. I’ve reviewed ‘my hippocampus’ before, and this one totally fails the viral test. Yes it’s cool (so cool that I had to write a review about it), but that isn’t enough. It’s not that hard to make that kind of thing viral by allowing you to make some sort of widget to show off e.g. the movies you’ve been watching, and a way to interconnect your islands to those of your friends. ( Review is at: http://fourstarters.com/2007/05/12/preview-myhippocampuscom/ )
If you’ve got all those bases covered, the money thing will sort itself out.
Nigel Hamilton http://trexy.com
July 2nd, 2007I think you missed a number of key points about Trexy:
* it works on 4,000+ search engines, not just Google - Trexy will lead you to relevant results on other search engines too.
* it reverses the polarity of relevance ranking. Publishers (SEO etc) don’t decide what comes first - search users do!
* it captures relevance plus authority
* the system is designed to converge at shorter trails
* the majority of intersection points do not appear in the first three pages of Google.
http://trexy.com/technology.html
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
July 2nd, 2007Hi Nigel, I think you are missing my point. All your additional points here might well be valid, but they still don’t offer a better package. Honestly, I tend to be able to find stuff on the first page of Google, and I think I have a lockin with the search-and-look paradigm of Google/MSN/Yahoo/etc.
In the end your technique might have a future, but not as a product. I hope that Google becomes interested in you guys and buys you to incorporate the technique as a feature, as that is all that Trexy is.
Charles NouĆærit http://www.todekaproject.com
July 17th, 20075min to present your project in English and in front of 250 persons when it’s not your mother tongue, is really a difficult experience, I’d love to see you in French…
You could have come to me asking for more detail also.
The Todeka Project is a digital ID certification plateform, allowing users to certify that they really who they pretend to be online and that nobody else is using their digital ID on their behalf.
We aim to become your Digital Life Management platefrom by aggregating all your digital service on one shareable page with different privacy settings.
I’m at your disposable to talk more about it if you’re interested.
Cristiano Betta http://cristianobetta.com/
July 17th, 2007I am sorry for not understanding your English, and I might be even more sorry for doing the obvious and going to your website. You gave a non-clear description of your product in 5 minutes, while I think you should be able to describe your product in 30 seconds. If you then spread around flyers with your company name and URL, than I would also expect to see a bit more on your website than a signup form.
I would have liked to talk to you during the conference, but I am sorry to say that I was busy. Maybe you care to explain HERE in 500 words what makes the Todeka project an interesting concept for my mother to use?