Review: Essential Web 2007 - Session 2
Lets directly dive in for session 2. We only got 10 seconds to stand up and relax after session 1, so I only took a minute to relax after my previous review to write this. The second session was lead by Mike Reid (Director of Venture Capital), Nadim Saad (Result UK) and Paul Fisher (Advent), and the presenting companies where all about how to get the consumer attention. I must say it didn’t get much better as some of the companies where even more amazingly non-web2.0 than others. It is amazing how so many businesses don’t get that people seriously do not like advertising. You will understand what I am saying in a moment.
Spotify is probably the first or second-most ridiculous idea I heard during essential web. When the founder started talking about the concept, it all started out very interesting. They had taken a look at society and they noticed that people just prefer downloading music from illegal sources because it is free, quick, easy, and DRM free. To solve the issue of it also being illegal they ventured on a journey to make music available to anyone both legally and freely. How are they planning to do this? Through advertising. By placing ads in your free music they will try to convince people to download the music via their service.
Are they serious? Nobody wants to go to the trouble of downloading music to get a free advertisement with every MP3. If people would like that, they would all be listening to radio! I am seriously not convinced by this concept as I think it will either become a source for people to download music and then rip out the ads, or it will just never lift of because it annoys people. We don’t know yet as they haven’t launched yet, but I will be looking forward to their release.
If Spotify isn’t the worst idea of the day that maybe We7 is. Basically they offer exactly the same value (none?) to consumers as Spotify. What the difference between them both is is difficult to say as Spotify hasn’t released yet, but I think it is probably the same stupid idea. The weird thing is that I tried the We7 site and was amazed by how badly it was implemented. The interface of the site is messy and they send mixed signals with both “buy” options and “add to playlist” options.
I tested the songs from some vague Latin band (they only seem to have vague bands) and basically every song has a 8 second intro going something like: “The time for We7 is now”. How annoying is that?! It is like having a radio station that keeps broadcasting the same advertisement over and over again on a very high frequency. Really want to see where they are going, as I again don’t think they will get far.
ImageLoop could at best be called interesting. They try to venture where YouTube has ventured before, but in this case focusing on slideshows. Their reasoning is that slideshows offer a middle ground between photos and videos. I admit, I recently had to be creative to post my Flickr photos of Essential Web to this blog so I was interested in a good tool. It is a bit sad though that their product focuses a lot on the MySpace folks with a whole set of cheesy themes, frames and animations. Additionally they forgot to integrate support for Facebook, which is quickly becoming more massive than MySpace.
In the end this product has some clear disadvantages from a technical perspective. Where YouTube became a success for their big repository of videos and quick integration with blogs, Imageloop doesn’t seem to have their own content or community that creates photos. Like Jyri from Jaiku said during the recent Geek Dinner: “every social network needs an object to revolve around”. And although you might say that this would be slideshows in the case of Imageloop, you will still need to have photos to make them. In the end they do offer a weird Flickr integration, but I wonder if this will convince any photo fanatics (who will be on Flickr) to use this tool.
Seatwave caused some mixed reactions. Their idea is to have an online portal for the selling of second hand concert tickets. Their biggest strength really is the guarantees they offer, as they track ticket-IDs and all other details of the ticket, this was guaranteeing you will get the exact ticket as advertised. They even offer 150% refunds if anything happens to go wrong, which kind of means that they are taking control of any trust issues you might have. Their business model seems to rely on selling cancellation insurances, which is a new concept to me for concert tickets.
I’m not that much of a concert goer, but the founder of Seatwave used to work for Ticketmaster and really seemed to understand the frustrations people get when buying second hand tickets. The mixed reactions Seatwave got though were because even though they did all this checking, they somehow hadn’t taken care of the issue of people only buying tickets to sell them with very high margins. Recently this has been a real issue, with many concerts being sold out but still leaving empty seats during the concert. The founder of Seatwave admitted that this was sad, but unfortunately very legal.
The last company of the second session was Wonga. Besides sounding a bit too much like Willy Wonka, the company announced themselves to offer a socially responsible solution to getting a quick very-short-term loan. All I actually heard was something in the direction of most of the current extremely annoying TV commercials where they try to get you more into debts than you already are.
Their idea of socially responsible is a short term loan of at most Ł200 (although I remember them giving a higher amount during the presentation) for at most 30 days. Besides paying back the debt, they would take 1% interest and a Ł25 fee. The organizer of the event quickly calculated this to be an annual interest rate of more than 50%, making their claim of a socially responsible solution very doubtful. In the end all the social they did proved to be all but web2.0 social. I actually think they meant to say transparent, as in just 1% interest and a Ł25 fee transparent.I just don’t like this company to the core. I rather have something like TipIt.to do something financial that is really social.
alper http://www.alper.nl
July 1st, 2007I love this series. Seeing actual criticism being aired in the web startup world is a breath of fresh air.
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
July 1st, 2007Thanx, I hope I am not being too cruel. I just like to give an honest opinion to get the winds out of those lousy startups that blur the value of all those actually good startups.
Expect another review per day for the next 3 days including today.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
July 2nd, 2007That spotify thing is in real trouble, I think. The RIAA doesn’t exactly have a spotless (heh!) track record for being reasonable and open to new things. The fact that Apple has managed to get EMI to release DRM-free music is one thing, but I doubt a startup will get there. And that’s not even considering the idea that ads in mp3 files sounds like something that won’t really catch on. Far too annoying. People are primarily emotional about music. What iTMS has shown is basically that (illegal) music downloads wasn’t about the ‘free’ bit, it is about easily getting music in a format that is flexible.
Wonga isn’t the only entry in the web2/loans mix, however, what I don’t get: Why is wonga a web company? The paperwork required to hand out a loan is sufficiently involved that the convenience of ordering from your webbrowser is pretty much out the window in the first place. As far as the money angle goes: That could actually work, in that the USA has already proven that milking idiots who failed basic economics is a viable strategy. It is, however, morally and socially repulsive - especially if you call yourself ’socially responsible’.
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
July 2nd, 2007Wonga is a webservice because they clame that through the web you can have your money within 20 minutes. The actual LACK of paperwork (no fax etc) makes this possible. But seriously, ÂŁ200, I can always borough that from someone else, right?
Guido West http://www.imageloop.com
July 6th, 2007Alper says he loves criticism as it brings a breath of fresh air to the start up world.
I agree with him that it doesn´t make sense to support every single idea simply because it made it to a startup company. In addition, it might be even healthy for every single startup and for the business sector as a whole to identify misleading approaches at early stages.
But I would like to stress that it is important to be very precise when judging business models. I was not present at Essential Web and I haven´t analyzed myself business plans of the participating companies. Christiano is commenting on all of them. As far as the imageloop analysis is concerned his criticism remains superficial, vague and unclear.
1) When he tries out imageloop slideshows I would expect e.g. to learn about the ease-of-use or the handling of the slideshow creation process. Maybe get some practical advice. Instead, Christiano talks about the imageloop strategy. And my first question arises: How can it be “sad” to implement a strategy which is to focus on “MySpace folks” that like “cheesy themes, frames and animations”? Is it sad to have a strategy focusing on a relevant group of people? As far as I know is MySpace still one the most popular social communities on the Web.
2) Not clear to me is how in his logic it then can be right to support Facebook. In our logic it makes sense of course. And indeed, we will in a foreseeable future offer an Auto embed functionality for Facebook.
3) Then Christiano talks about “clear” technical disadvantages. Again, he lacks to point out where the technical problems could possibly be. Instead, we read once again about a strategic question: imageloop doesn´t have its own community. In fact, not yet! Actually, we call it focus: the concentration on strengths and on one major eco system in the first period of growth.
4) And why is the flickr tool - we call it “imageloopr” - a weird one? Actually, we think it is a great tool for people who like to see their flickr photo content daily refreshed in a slideshow.
I think Alper is right to ask for a critical reflection of new ideas and business models. But indeed, it doesn´t make sense to remain at the surface just to have a breaking headline which goes like “everything crap”. I would appreciate to see rather in-depth approaches instead of reading angled blog entries.
I am looking forward to receiving many critical and thoughtful comments.
Reinier http://zwitserloot.com
July 6th, 2007I agree with your assessment on the vagueness of the ‘technical merits of photoloop’ schtick, but the remark that it’s ’sad’ that it’s catered to myspace types is perfectly obvious to me.
Cristiano was hoping it was going to be a tool he could use, and it turned out it wasn’t, which made him sad.
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
July 6th, 2007Hi Guido, thank you for your response. I want to mention first of all that this is a blog and that we are always happy to get clarifications from the people we write about, and that we enjoy the fact that people are so engaged in the tech-business these days that they actually take time to respond to blogs.
I think Reinier was almost spot on with his explanation of why I was sad about the Myspace problem. I wrote this post not only from my perspective, but also that from my friends: big Flickr fans with their own blog/site/company who are looking for a nice way to put a professional slideshow on either their Facebook account on blog or website. The fact that you focus that much on the MySpace crowd is not that much a loss to you as to us, and that is why I was sad.
(Additionally I want to put a little side note here that Facebook gets 100.000 new users a day these days, meaning that they aren’t only going to surpass MySpace in users soon, but it also means that FaceBook has at least 100.000 ACTIVE users each day, where with MySpace this is just a guess.)
Lets clarify some last details: issue nr (3) is all about what I wrote above, meaning overactive support for MySpace, the lack of support for a simple professional look for photographers. Only after this I go and talk about the community issue which I think is a real major issue. For this reason I don’t think ImageLoop (for now) is a poduct, but maybe more of a feature that can be copied by Flickr and other photosites in no-time.
Talking about flickr: issue nr(4) was more about the fact that you don’t authenticate my Flickr account the normal Flickr way, allowing anybody to fetch any fotos of my account. This is probably a non-issue that I shouldn’t have mentioned as it works actually works perfectly.
All and all I like the product, but don’t see it as a real difference maker in the current state of the web. In the end that was what I was looking for and that gor me disappointed. Admittedly I was also very annoyed when writing this post because of companies like We7 and Spotify that think that Web2.0 means gullible in contrary to community.