Review: Essential Web 2007 - Session 3
After my reviews of the first 2 sessions at the Essential Web 2007 you would probably have expected another grumpy review of session 3. I have to disappoint you a bit as I am actually excited about some of the next companies. If you follow Four Starters regularly then you will know that we already reviewed some of these companies before.
The third session of the Essential Web conference was the last one of the morning, and the panel was formed by Chris Seth (UK Managing Director, Piczo Inc), Judy Gibbons (Venture Development, Accel Partners) and the ever merry Paul Walsh (Segala).
Jaiku was obviously one of the most interesting companies present at Essential Web. Jyri held a very calm talk, explaining what Jaiku is and where they would be going. The talk was much different than the Geek Dinner talk of a couple of weeks ago, but it was still very interesting to hear Jyri talk about things like cooperation with mobile telcos, and what their monetization strategy would be. Basically they are thinking about adverts and premium packages for the future.
Besides this being the first time that I heard Jyri talk about the monetization of Jaiku, I was amazed how he was able to convince the entire audience that Jaiku and Twitter are not mutually exclusive and therefore not competitors. Hell, he even envisioned them being compatible in the future, as he thinks we have enough silos of instant messaging already. It is just amazing how this guy totally understands his users and business audience at the same time. I am so glad I am part of the Jaiku experience!
A while back we had our first look at LouderVoice. The concept behind LouderVoice is first of all to make it possible to easily search for reviews that are now spread across blogs, and secondly to take those other reviews out of their silos like Amazon. The idea is actually pretty good, as they have a Wordpress plugin and use Microformats, but still it isn’t perfect.
When I had lunch the first a couple of weeks ago with Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice and Paul Walsh of Segala I was pretty new to the LouderVoice product, but in time I began to understand what it takes to make a really good web2.0 tool. At the moment LouderVoice has a couple of issues involving community, usability and understandability which they have to really solve before they can appeal to a big crowd. As someone I spoke during the conference said: “I signed up and the first thing I noticed is that I didn’t understand what to do next.” Luckily for us and LouderVoice they seem to understand these issues and they are working on a new release.
Anthony Eskinazi from ParkAtMyHouse is a regular at the London Open Coffee Meetup, so I talked with him a couple of times before. I was amazed by his speech, as I had some small comments about his product before. The idea behind ParkAtMyHouse is simple: if you live in a place where there is a clear lack of parking spaces (read every metropolitan area), but you don’t use your own parking space: rent it out!
The problem with ParkAtMyHouse is that it’s success tends to be very local, and reaching a success in every other big city therefore takes a critical mass over and over again. Luckily for Anthony he seems to have found a couple of deals with companies like Zipcar. I hope to see his dreams come true, as he already has plans for SleepAtMyHouse.com and LiveAtMyHouse.com
WAYN is short for for Where Are You Now? The idea is that you tell them where you are (sounds like Plazes?) and it is clearly aimed at the MySpace generation (read: it is an ugly and confusing page). Furthermore the page annoyed me a lot as it kept giving me messages in JavaScript Alerts whenever I did something irreversible like emptying my messages recycle bin.
Although this is probably a fun product for some people, I think it is just a bit too confusing for me. The product on one hand sounds a lot like Plazes, but on the other it also allows you to build a profile much like MySpace, sharing photos, news, videos, interests, stories, trips, etc. With 8 million users they seem to have done quite well until now, but I rather have quality over quantity and somehow this overload just doesn’t do it for me.
The stupidest idea of this session was definitely Zubka. The idea behind Zubka is that you should profit (money-wise) from bringing together people who need a job and people who need an employee. The reasoning by the founder was that it already happens a lot when people bring their friends together to solve job issues like these, but that they rarely get any compensation or it.
I was sitting next to two people during this session who both kind of immediately went: “yes, you do get compensation for it!” The compensation that you get is the trust you build and the relationship you establish with these people. The clearest advantage here is that when you eventually need a job or employee, you will be more likely to get the favor returned to you than when you asked money for it. Not to mention the obvious point of being biased if you ask money for every deal you make in this system. I think there is a lot of research to be done (or already done) that will prove that this is simply a stupid idea.
alper http://www.alper.nl
July 6th, 2007LouderVoice: I am a firm believer in a microformatted world, but when I talk to real implementors on the ground it is quite hard to sell them on implenmeting microformats without showing some real benefits.
hCard is firmly being adopted right now and has lots of interesting uses. hReview is not there yet and the only sites that I can think of that make meaningful use of it are Technorati and LouderVoice. Definitely a case of a —hard to break— catch-22.
WAYN: I actually have a WAYN account do I don’t know why anymore. I get their newsletters regularly but I have no way of unsubscribing from them. Locking in and spamming your users is a nice way to get to 8 million.
WAYN actually mixes a lot of features from the regular social networks and travel oriented sites such as CouchSurfing where Couchsurfing has a very solid non-profit oriented community and an actual goal of travelling and bunking at other members’ houses.
Zubka: I can say that this idea has been tried several times already and that the quality of job referrals decreases extremely as soon as money comes into the equation. You basically open up the market so instead of only headhunters mailing you stupid job offers, everybody can do it.
Steve Sole
July 7th, 2007When I refer someone for a job on Zubka I overcome any potential trust issues by sharing the referrer’s fee with the candidate, which in turn encourages them to use Zubka, and reciprocate when they refer someone. Win/win. Works for me.
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
July 7th, 2007@steve: who is the candidate? the employee or the employer? why not share with both?
eugene http://www.intruders.tv/
July 7th, 2007cristiano, check out the interview that we did at Essential Web 07 with Jyri
Cristiano Betta http://ibbydibby.com/
July 7th, 2007I already did
Alasdair Bailey http://www.jobtonic.com
July 9th, 2007Hi,
Just read your comments on Zubka - Jobtonic operates a similar model and I work for those guys. In defence of our model, it’s not about replacing the model you describe where at an exec level you might operate like that within a close knit network, it’s about expanding it to other areas of the employment market. In your example, the employer and the candidate are both known to you. We like that model and are expanding it by allowing the employers to advertise in order to connect to more people like you who know good candidates. At some levels in the labour market, there are lots of guys who will know a lot of good candidates socially but will not have contacts amongst business owners or management, it is the knowledge of these guys that we also intend to leverage.
The feedback from our recruiters has been that the level of candidates is good and that they have not had any issues with poorly matched applicaitons. Every one of our advertisers has signed up with us so they have posted the vacancy so it’s very different to the flood of recruiters you might get on the phone after you post an ad in a local paper for example. These employers have seen the benefits of our peer 2 peer model and are ready to exploit the benefits.
Kind regards,
Alasdair
Steve Sole http://Zubka
July 12th, 2007Cristiano, the candidate is the potential employee, or person I referred for the job, whom I share my finders fee with. The employer/hirer pays Zubka around 8% of annual salary instead of ‘traditional’ recruiter fees. On reflection its win/win/win.