I promised to make some video-interviews with the startups at Essential Web 2007, but at the last second I couldn’t get the camera that I was promised. Lucky for me there is a new video-blogging  website  called IntrudersTV that attends many of the tech events here in London and around the world.

They were also at  Essential Web and they were cool enough to make videos with almost all presenting startups. Have a look at their site and the interviews with the people behind Jaiku, ParkAtMyHouse, Blognation, etc.  Seriously top-quality site, and I hope they will enable you to host their interviews on your own site in the future.

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.

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 £200 (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 £25 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 £25 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.

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.

Essential Web 2007 is over, and I am working on my first writeup. After the dinner last night with Jyri and Mark I got a bit hammered and really needed a good night sleep for the first time in days. In other words: I don’t have a writeup yet, but here are the photos.

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

So, another few sessions have come and gone and I am seriously getting tired. This conference is realy, realy VC oriented and this is most noticable when you consider the abnormal VC vs startups ratio. The last session we enjoyed was about Enterprise2.0 with the guys from Yuuguu and G.ho.st presenting their products. Although the panel liked them I was actually anoyed by how “small” all these companies where thinking. The only company that really earned the respect was Trampoline Systems who realy offered a web2.0 approach to solving business issues without “just” introducing the standard web2.0 concepts to business. I hope to upload more photos later, for now you will have to do with the ones in the previous post.

We just had some nice presentations from companies including Jaiku and Loudervoice. I must say that this conference is much less conceptual like The Next Web, as both Jaiku and Loudervoice had to answer the question of how they would make a profit. It was interesting to see Jyri’s answer on how to monetize Jaiku in the future with targeted adds in your Jaikus and maybe premium packages without adds. Another interesting player in this session was ParkAtMyHouse (another regular at OpenCoffee) that showed us some nice stats about their affiliate deals and increasing userbase. I would really like to see how companies will start to use this service to promote their commercial parking spaces.

SideNote: Interestingly enough Jyri just said that he would like to see interoperability between Twitter and Jaiku. This in contrary to having them compete, it just sounds very interesting and unlikely at the same time.

I’m sorry for not providing more info about Essential Web 2007 before today. I was somehow stuck with playing Wherewolf and attending a geek dinner. I am now blogging live from the conference, and we already had 10 small presentations. I must say that it really works much better to have a conference in an IMAX theatre which really gives a nice atmosphere (see photo). Jyri from Jaiku is up now, so more info later.

Next Wednesday it’s time for the Essential Web conference. I was invited by Jeremy Knight to come and blog about the startup companies that are presenting, but I decided to arrange for a camera (a good one this time, not the one I used during The Next Web conference) and do a few short interviews with the most interesting companies. Only problem is to get access for Dan W. who will have to do the interviews while I operate the camera.

Since I last talked about the Essential Web conference, the organizers (LibraryHouse) have offered some more information about the day’s agenda and the presenting companies. To start getting into the atmosphere of the conference I will therefore be handpicking some of the companies and showcase in the following days. I then hope to be able to get an interview with their CEOs and post them on FourStarters for your enjoyment. Keep an eye on this blog for the following few days.