Alex Guest

Does Zeebox flop sound early death of Social TV?

2012-01-20T15:52:00.001Z

News this week that Zeebox has received a lukewarm response from users might announce the stillbirth of Social TV.

Zeebox ran a trial with E4 show Desperate Scousewives but found that only 100 Twitter updates were made via the service out of 80,000 posted during the series, despite promotion and close collaboration between the program and the app.

The app is just one of many in the Social TV landscape, dominated by fast-built American offerings such as Fav.tv and a host of others including Clicker, which was acquired by CBS Interactive in March 2011.

Zeebox was founded by ex-iPlayer CTO Anthony Rose and former EMI board director Ernesto Schmitt with $7 million of seed funding. It is perhaps most similar to GetGlue, which started off life as a service to show you who's visiting what on the web but refocussed its business on social check-ins and has partnered with a whole host of channels, including the UK's Channel 4, in 2011.

Last year, 31,000 people checked in to the Oscars on GetGlue. While the figure is supposed to demonstrate traction, it's a tiny percentage of the people who watched the Oscars. How can such small user numbers ever generate significant revenue for the services?

So is Social TV dead?

Perhaps that's the wrong question. TV has always been social. From its origins as a box in the living room to the present day, TV has generated conversations between its viewers. And it seems the predominant app today for interaction in real time is Twitter.

The question then arises, is there any need for a conversation platform that is dedicated to TV? or even a Twitter app for it, a Tweetdeck for TV?

BSkyB thinks so. Murdoch's business acquired a ten percent stake in Zeebox not two weeks ago for an undisclosed multi-million pound sum, according to the FT. It transpires part of its intention is to sell advertise alongside BBC programming in the Zeebox app on the companion screen, be it smartphone or tablet.

For that to work, scale is required. It doesn't cost much to buy eyeballs - no one has used the term since 1999 - but what's required is engagement - can we say stickiness and get that 90s feeling again? - for users to keep returning and advertisers spending. Is a Twitter app, albeit with some bells and a couple of whistles, sufficient to do that?

Wait and see.

In the meantime, a few million pounds is a small punt for the Murdoch empire that could result in substantial returns if Zeebox takes off.

Viral marketing is as much about context as content

2012-01-14T18:35:00.000Z

Saturday and @Madeupstats is running another #madeupstaturday for Fyneales. This weekend's theme: the Internet.

Sadly lacking in creativity today, I was amused by some quite clever quips.

Then I saw this:

1 sperm has 37.5MB of DNA. An ejaculation is a data transfer of 1587GB in 3 seconds - via @bsiscovick & @nivertech #BigDataForTheWeekend
— Michael A. Jackson (@MAJACKS0N) January 14, 2012

Nothing to do with #madeupstaturday, it was a bunch of numbers and vaguely Internet-related.

So I appropriated it.

1 sperm has 37.5MB of DNA. An ejaculation is a data transfer of 1587GB in 3 seconds. #madeupstaturday
— Alex Guest (@AlexGuest) January 14, 2012

While Michael Jackson's tweet got 8 retweets and 1 favourite, mine received 50+ tweets in moments. Twitter won't tell me the exact RT count but it looks like 100s and over 20 favourites within 4 hours. As I stood chatting to a potential new flatmate, my iPhone was going insane with notifications from Twitter with replies, retweets and new followers.

Also, Michael has been informed that his information is a @madeupstats!

So what?

Getting a tweet to spread - and to spread all over the world from South America to Russia - in quick time, is not just about the content. My taking the tweet and associating it with a different hashtag, with far more watchers, meant that it propagated far outside my usual Twitter network. Let's call it 'reproduction marketing', taking content and repurposing it in order to disseminate it far and wide.

Meanwhile, you may well be curious to know if the original information is accurate.

I ran a search for 'MB of DNA in sperm' and discovered that Reddit had the exact same information back in 2009! And it's been repeated over and over in various corners of the Internet. But it appears to be false.

According to UTheGuru.com,

approximately 21.45 megabytes of ‘data’ is transferred during each act of human sexual reproduction in the form of gametes.

So the figures really were @madeupstats.

Social media: ubiquitous but not quite there yet

2011-12-13T15:10:00.000Z

IKEA UK YouTube Store

I came across a presentation recently from The Social Practice, which talked about the trend for social media to go from being a destination to a dispersed network. In particular, it touches on the nature of 'Social' as ubiquitous, intuitive and dynamic.

A nice illustration of the ubiquity of Social, which the presentation mentions, is in the IKEA UK YouTube Store, which we are told is powered by Facebook data. I thought this was fascinating, so I took a closer look. And was a little disappointed. As The Social Practice state, "We're not quite there yet".

I compared the experience of a user who logs into the YouTube store with Facebook credentials with that of one who doesn't. Taking the latter first, we are asked "who's in your bedroom?" and asks you to click and drag an icon of a man, a woman or a baby into a circle. It allows for single sex couples with a child but you can't have a ménage à trois. If you go for a childless couple, whether gay or not, you are then asked "How long have you lived together?"

After that IKEA brings you a video exposé of 'the bedroom that might be', albeit without any options to pause rewind or fast-forward. You can then click on one of several items to be taken to its page on the IKEA online store. Altogether quite a nice idea.

So what's the difference if you log in with Facebook? Well, you'd think it would pull your relationship status and length of time since you were together, along with whether you have one or more children and their ages. That would neatly populate the questions that the app requires.

But it doesn't do that.

All it does is take your name and mine some text from your newsfeed then puts it into a little box that shows up while the bedroom of your dreams (sic) is pulled together. Like this:

(I've airbrushed out friends' names)

So, The Social Practice seems to have it right: we're not quite there yet, to which I'd add, ever so close.

What irks me, however, is the misalignment of the video window and the navigation menu above it.

Here's the presentation:

New Twitter UI is a car-crash waiting to happen

2011-12-09T15:38:00.000Z

There are all sorts of reasons why the new Twitter UI is just as bad as the last new UI. Why are direct messages buried in a drop-down menu? Why is there an option to 'Open' tweets that provides almost no additional detail.

One, slightly arcane UI tomfoolery is the rearranging of the columns.

Left-hand navigation columns have been common since the very earliest days of the WWW. Later, it became standard to have a main section in the middle column and on the right-hand side, further links and details. The placement of the content in this third section is so typical of online media that it has become convention.

Guardian

Telegraph

It isn't just online newspapers with their millions of pageviews that adhere to this unwritten dogma. Facebook adopts this principle too, with navigation top and left, the main content in the middle and extra gubbins to the right.

So, should we blindly follow what everyone else has done before? Well, actually, in this case, yes. Conventions are good for User Experience. A word on a page, which is underlined and in a different colour, we know by convention links to another URL. By the same token, we know that stuff on the left is navigation and stuff on the right is your side salad.

Twitter is asking us to drive on the wrong side of the road.

MediaGuardian 100 most powerful people in media shun Twitter

2011-07-25T22:06:00.001+01:00

The Guardian today published its annual list of 100 most influential media people in the UK, the MediaGuardian 100. I set out to discover how influential the top 100 are in the online world by using PeerIndex, one of a number of services that map the social web. I discovered some surprising truths. In particular, the large majority of the most influential people in media have never registered on Twitter.

Only 26 of the 100 most influential media people in the UK are active on Twitter.

I've created a Twitter list of them. Now I might be wrong about that and failed to find some or all of the others but I did search high and low. Please let me know in the comments if there's anybody I missed out.

Of the 26, only two are registered on PeerIndex.

Daniel Ek, founder of music-streaming service Spotify, at position 40, and Iain Dale, radio presenter and former political blogger, squeezing in at 93, are the only two who are sufficiently concerned with their only presence to have registered on PeerIndex.

The PeerIndex ordering bears no resemblance to that of MediaGuardian.

Jeremy Hunt is 13th of the MediaGuardian 100 but with a lowly PeerIndex of 19, he comes just nine off the bottom of the 26 on this list.

Zuckerberg's PeerIndex is lower than mine.

According to PeerIndex, I'm more influential than the founder and CEO of Facebook. Today, my PeerIndex is 48 compared with 31 for Zuck. The man who leads the greatest social network in the world has little influence online, apparently. Meanwhile, the average for this group as a whole is actually 47, which makes me more influential online than the MediaGuardian 100, on average.

The PeerIndex list

How secure is your password?

2010-12-22T16:16:00.000Z

Image via WikipediaOnline security blah blah blah

Or so I thought until I started reading an article from Life Hacker about it, following the well-documented Gawker password imbroglio.

How secure do you think your password is? Want to try? How secure is my password? shows you just how difficult it would be to crack yours. Suppose your password just happens to be "secure"...

...it would take a desktop PC about only 30 seconds to crack your password. You might as well not bother having a password.

Four basic rules for strong passwords

The first rule for creating a strong password is to make it longer: "securitisation" might take 204,000 years to crack.

Mixing upper and lower case letters helps enormously: "Securitisation", with an upper case S, might take 3 billion years to unravel. That's more than 10,000 times longer, just by switching one letter to upper case.

Throwing in a number, "Securitisati0n", pushes things out to 39 billion years. While changing a letter to a special character, "Securitisati0#" takes us to 564 billion years.

Use different passwords

Part of the problem with the Gawker situation was that members were using the same password for Gawker as for other sites, like Twitter. The problem is, with so many site registrations, how can you recall all your different passwords?

Life Hacker recommends using a password manager, specifically LastPass, which is free and, they say, "remarkable secure". Another option is to select your standard password and then add something to it which makes it unique, while easy to remember. You could add, for example "AG!" to the end of "Securitisati0#" when you register at alexguest.me (if that were possible). This would be your password strength now...

238 quadrillion years is a long time: the universe is reckoned to be 13.7 billion years old... but just as important, your password would be unique to every site you use. So if, for whatever reason, your password is compromised, it would be difficult to break your email/password combination at another site.

Except...

Don't use real words

"Securitisati0#:AG!" might be easy to decipher because it looks like a real word that has been modified.

An acronym formed from a memorable phrase is much better: "Tqbfj0tldAG!" looks like absolute nonsense. But it comes from "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", which typists will recognise as a sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet.

So I've updated my passwords now. It should take hundreds of billions of years for a PC to crack them.

The one big reason why your online ads fail to convert

2010-12-17T15:30:00.000Z

I see it time and time again. I can't take it any more.

This morning, I see a cute picture of a baby in a snow globe. Cootchy-coo! (and all that). The picture is an ad. So I click on it. Lo! and behold! I find myself on the Kodak Gallery website. Here's what I found:

I'm wondering to myself, how on earth do I get a snowglobe? That's what I want. That's why I've clicked. Yet there isn't a single mention of snow globe anywhere on the page. Not a word, nor a picture. I don't want calendars, cards or mugs. I don't want to share on Facebook.

Meanwhile, the publisher has made a little money either because they were paid by 1000 impressions or per click (unless it was an affiliate deal or on a cost per action basis). There was probably an intermediary ad sales house. It made money too. Kodak Gallery, however, lost money. It paid for advertising but didn't make a sale.

Thanks for (not) shopping!

While the page is quite nicely designed, as a landing-page it is a total user experience disaster.

There is no relationship between the page and the paid-for source from which the visitor came. There is no quicker way to baffle visitors to your site if you don't follow through with the offer. I arrived at the site looking for a snow globe but there was no snow globe on the page. As soon as the visitor has to think about how to get what they've come for, they will most likely hit the back button on the browser.

The URL is also a bag of unfriendly rubbish: http://www.kodakgallery.co.uk/Welcome.jsp?utm_source=30243&utm_campaign=30243&utm_medium=BAC&utm_content=300-250_swf_FL003_eindsl_KG101110_RES_UK_v003

Could they not do http://www.kodakgallery.co.uk/snowglobe ?

Take two

I then went and typed snow globe into my Google toolbar:

Top of the sponsored links, there's Kodak Gallery! Spending hard marketing cash on PPC Google AdWords. This time of year, I imagine "snow globe" is quite a competitive keyword. I wondered what would happen if I clicked on the link. Would I come to the same page as before or would there be a dedicated landing page?

It was a dedicated landing page that looked like this:

3 for 2, the page cries out. Hang on, I don't need three snow globes: I don't even need two. I just want one snow globe made from a cute picture that I've taken. OK, they're going to make me work for it.

Let's scroll down... Calendars, Photo Books, Gifts. Well, I suppose it might be gifts. I'll take a closer look.

Here's what it says in the hard-to-read small print:

These personalised Photo Gifts are the perfect gifts every occasion. We have a range of photo gift ideas from Mugs to Crystals, and Teddybears.

No snow globe. I'm going to click anyway but by now you've probably lost your customer to the next sponsored listing on Google.

I scroll down the page past the 'Mugs' category, 'Wall Décor', 'Home Décor', 'Stationery', 'Games, toys and more'... it must be there. Oh, no. The stuff further down doesn't seem right. Let's go back up. Maybe Home Décor is what I want.

And indeed it is!

But the picture's different to the one I saw earlier and I don't like this one so much. Meh, it was a dumb idea anyway.

How Kodak Gallery might improve its results

Fashion a landing page which deals only with snow globes.
Make an offer in the ad (for example 3 for 2, or 25% off until Christmas) and convey the same offer on the landing page.
Have one stand-out call to action on the page: 'Upload a picture and get started'.
Get a friendly URL. http://www.kodakgallery.co.uk/snowglobe is currently unused.

Rinse and repeat for each product on sale.

Any other thoughts?

In the meantime, search Amazon.com for books on 'user experience'.

Facebook "Like" button drives up traffic for publishers

2010-09-30T10:46:00.000+01:00

Image via WikipediaMashable ran a story this morning showing how much traffic Facebook's "Like" button is bringing to sites that have implemented it. Among the many stats quoted by Jolie O'Dell was the 200% increase in Gawker's traffic - and 500% increase in that of Sporting News - "due to this kind of plugin". So, perhaps, she's not really crediting Facebook for all the increased traffic.

I wrote about the relative influence of various social media about nine months ago, when ShareThis released some interesting figures showing that Facebook drove more 'shares', even before the Like button was released, but Twitter delivered more 'clicks per share'.

The Mashable piece includes this presentation to publishers from Facebook Director of Media Partnerships Justin Osofsky.

Working Together to Build Social News

AOL acquisition values TechCrunch readers at $5

2010-09-29T17:37:00.000+01:00

Image via WikipediaTwo days ago Om Malik reported that AOL was close to acquiring TechCrunch and, sure enough, the deal was sealed live on stage - if you believe the theatrics - at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday. According to several reports the acquisition is for $25 million, although CNBC has claimed $40 million.

If the lower figure is correct, Business Insider says the deal values the company at 2.5X revenue, since Mike Arrington claimed revenue was nearly $10m. But what value does that put on TechCrunch readers?

Taking a look at DoubleClick Ad Planner, a Google product, TechCrunch has 4.7 million readers worldwide. The figures, which are estimates, value each reader at just over $5 each. So has AOL got a great deal or - as it did with Bebo - grossly overpaid for a product whose value depends on its founder?

Hottest European startups of 2010 Q1

2010-03-31T12:50:00.003+01:00

Analysis of the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 reveals the startups that have accelerated fastest during the last three months. This is a quick guide to the hottest European startups of Q1 2010, based on YouNoodle's success-prediction algorithm.

Voddler Billed as the Spotify for video, the Swedish company's mission is "to provide high quality home entertainment on-demand". Currently only available in its home country, it's basically a VOD site that will compete with the likes of Hulu and SeeSaw. They claim to have over 400,000 members and streamed 1 million films in January. Their catalogue carries 839 movies, 192 TV series and 143 documentaries. The service is ad-supported, which could lead them into the same difficulty plaguing other video and audio streaming services.

Their TC Europe/YouNoodle score increased a stagerring 92% to 50 points in Q1.

Graze The service allows "British office workers to improve the way they eat at work. They can order tasty food online and get it delivered to their desks." Each box costs from £2.99, including delivery. The company raised £1.4m in funding from Octopus Ventures in July 2009 and has William Reeve (LoveFilm etc) as a non-exec director.

It's score is up 57% to 28.

aka-aki networks Winner of two Webby Awards in 2009, this Berlin-based mobile social networking service "lets users discover and connect with members as they go about their days." The idea is that you can connect with other users who are in proximity to you. An interesting take on location-based services, more real-time than FourSpam or Gowalla. It's totally free, including the iPhone app. The startup has received an undisclosed sum of funding from Creathor Venture.

Up 56% to 31.

Songkick A graduate of Y Combinator, Songkick is the online database of concerts for music enthusiasts. The service allows you to track your favourite artists and venues, keeping you informed of any new gigs that are happening. It can scan your iTunes library to make it quick and easy to load your data. It then has links to ticket vendors, from whom it takes a commission. The company has a total of $4.5m of funding, including $3.5m in Series A from Index Ventures.

Up 44% to 39.

uberVU In these times of social media ROI, uberVU tracks the buzz from all over the Web around a story in near real time. Its service is on a subscription basis, beginning at $30/month for its basic offering. The startup was a winner of Seedcamp 2008 and has secured a further €400,000 from Eden Ventures.

Up 39% to 53.

Foursquare spam is wrecking twitter

2010-02-09T09:25:00.006Z

Image by cote via Flickr

I have deleted my Foursquare account. Not being able to log in was a problem that was limiting the experience. The bug arose soon after I discovered that I was the first to check in at my gym. So the sweet glory of becoming mayor of my sweat-room was snatched from under my pinkies by a piece of dodgy programming.

The idea behind Foursquare (for my less geeky readers) is that it's a kind of location-based social networking iPhone app that enables discovery. As well as collecting 'badges' and gunning for 'mayorships' all over town, you can share and receive suggestions for things to do in different places.

And the best bit, you can ping your friends and your whole Twitter cabal. My Tweetdeck increasingly tells me that X is at [pizza chain], Y is at [coffeeshop chain] and Z is at [train station].

Sorry, Rich!

Moonfruit was lambasted for its marketing campaign and yet somehow we're allowing Foursquare to fill an otherwise interesting, useful and entertaining stream of tweets with individuals' mindless attempts to become mayor of their local crack house. There is no value to your entourage of these tweets but I don't want to stop following these otherwise interesting people.

Image by gumption via Flickr

Foursquare says to establishments, look, you can offer special discounts to the mayor, or anyone who checks in. That will encourage people to keep coming and to check in more often in order to get a cheap cardboard pot of frothy warm brown milk.

That's not a novel business model, which is why I think it has real potential to thrive. In the meantime, I'd really like an end to the growing Fourspam.

The iPad Generation comes of age

2010-01-31T17:55:00.000Z

Ines connected with Amina, 2007 from the series 'Connected' by Catherine Balet. Two teenage girls, two iPods, a phone, a Mac and, out of frame, a television. Welcome to Generation iPad.

The picture, which won third prize at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008, tells of a whole new way of consuming media (as well as revealing an emerging social culture where media consumption is dominant over interpersonal activity - but that's for the behavioural psychologists to explore).

Despite 15 years of supposed digital democratisation, the millions of videos on DailyMotion, pictures on Flickr and blog posts Dugg, the majority of the content on the Internet is produced 'professionally'.

Meanwhile, an article by Jakob Nielsen in 2006, corroborated in a study by Rubicon Consulting in 2008, showed that 99% of web users are either silent lurkers or just occasional contributors, while

1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.

That leaves the vast majority of people to consume content. For Generation iPad, the media is not experienced as it was by their parents, choosing between print, radio and television, by accessing simultaneously two or more types of content by means of 'tech' devices.

This is where the iPad comes in. It is not designed for those who know their Drupal from their Joomla, it's for the 99%, who have no idea what a content management system is anyway. The iPad is for Generation iPad, the middle-class, educated late teens and early twenties, who have grown up listening to music, playing games, chatting online and watching TV simultaneously.

Generation iPad is here. Are you ready for it?

SeeSaw under the spotlight

2010-01-28T16:21:00.004Z

SeeSaw has been a long time coming. It's what the BBC's Project Kangaroo became after it was forced by the Competition Commission to sell it off and Arqiva acquired it. Now in beta, it's due to go live to the public in the next few weeks.

The first impression is of something that has been thrown together very fast. The typeface is unpleasant and the layout is difficult to navigate. What is most obvious immediately is that there is very little content on the site. I can only expect that much more will become available before public launch and that it will continue to increase thereafter.

Programme discovery

The challenge for SeeSaw is going to be in programme discovery. The intention of Project Kangaroo had been to make available the entire archives of the Beeb, C4 and Five. If it becomes reality, it is a huge amount of content to sort and a very difficult task to display it to the viewer in a meaningful way.

At the top of the page is a 'carousel', a style of menu deployed by many of the Video On Demand (VOD) players, including Joost, Hulu, Livestation and the iPlayer. SeeSaw are using it to highlight a small amount of featured content. There is a challenge to keep this fresh and interesting for the individual viewer and there is currently no way for the individual to provide preferences.

Below the carousel is a box offering catchup TV. Although it does not specifically state it, this section has links to programmes that have recently aired. There are only seven shows on it, all from Channel 4 properties. This leaves big questions about the role of SeeSaw in catchup television - as opposed to archival - and where the content is going to come from: just Channel 4 or will it include Five and BBC material? Kangaroo was supposed to carry anything older than what is available on the iPlayer.

The box beside it "If you really love TV..." seems to me totally redundant. I cannot understand its purpose. There are three further boxes below: 'Classic comedy'; 'The best years of your life?'; and 'Critically-acclaimed modern drama'. These categories seem to be entirely arbirtrarily chosen and the content within them is unexpected. Girl Who Cries Blood is in 'The best years of your life?'. The category does have a '?', I admit.

Meanwhile the top navigation bar has: Categories, with a limited number of them; Channels, containing BBC, 4oD and Five, only the last of which is a channel; and a search box. In principle this makes sense but the sub-menus need to be extended.

Choosing what to watch

Clicking on a channel provides series names, showing by default 'Featured'. These appear to be a random assortment. It is not clear whether these will remain constant or how they will be updated. There is, once again, no option for individual filtering. You can select by A-Z.

I chose the first programme, The Line of Beauty. The programme page is quite nicely laid out but also the easiest part of the interface to get right. There is a video screen at the top and below are the programme details in a column next to an episode menu. There is some guidance both on the screen itself and at the bottom of the page referring to strong language and scenes of a sexual nature.

On clicking to play, a guidance note pops up, asking me to confirm my age. In small type there are links to setting up parental controls and 'find out more' presumably about parental controls. The parental controls, if they're going to be part of the service, should be much more evident. There are links to them in the footer but even if you scroll down, you might not see the reference in the tiny writing.

There are frequently two ads followed by a programme sponsor. This is frustrating but I doubt that SeeSaw will fill all of its inventory if the service takes off, meaning that double spots disappear. Clicking on an ad, hoping to pause, I was taken to the brand's page that should make sense commercially but these sorts of click-through deals are few and far between, largely unproven to generate revenue for publisher or advertiser.

Video streaming experience

You click to play and the lights go down. I like this. It's not a novel idea - Hulu has it, for example - but it's good. Moving your mouse brings the lights back up.

There are frequently two ads followed by a programme sponsor. This is frustrating but I doubt that SeeSaw will fill all of its inventory if the service takes off, meaning that double spots disappear. Clicking on an ad, hoping to pause, I was taken to the brand's page.

Some sites have toyed with adaptive bitrates, which means that you get a quality of stream that adapts to your downstream bandwidth, as it varies. It is possible with SeeSaw to fix Low, Medium or High bandwidth by moving the mouse over the screen when the ads have finished and the programme begins. These should just be under the screen, as should the volume and 'full screen' controls.

The screen size is fixed, unless you opt for full screen. This is a weakness. I particularly like the way Zattoo manages screen size, so that you can set it to whatever you like, regardless of the bandwidth that you have chosen.

That said, the flash-based video is of good quality and consistency, even at low bandwidth.

Final words

I'm left disappointed by SeeSaw. Arqiva bought the assets of Project Kangaroo but it isn't entirely clear what they picked up with that bargain. The user interface is poor. The available content is minimal, although I expect that is temporary. There are no social aspects, even just for sharing what you're watching on Facebook, let alone a proper integration with it or Twitter. Project Kangaroo was expensive to develop.There are some very significant challenges for SeeSaw and it appears from the beta that there is still a lot of work to do.

A thank you movie!

2010-01-05T18:44:00.000Z

Radiotjänst, the Swedish equivalent of the UK's TV Licensing Authority, has come up with a new viral video campaign to get people to pay their broadcasting fee. I can't imagine anyone will be persuaded but it's great that you can be the hero in your own video.

Here's my video.

Watch the video above then make your own version. Hat-tip to Richard Baker.

Here in the UK, a Conservative government, should they win the general election, is likely to scrap the TV Licensing Authority and fund the BBC through general taxation. This change would save around £150m in collecting costs per year.

I've no idea how much Radiotjänst paid for the viral campaign. If you know, please share!

Last year's top stories on alexguest.me

2010-01-03T11:36:00.001Z

Along with everyone else who runs a blog of some sort, I had a look at the most popular posts on alexguest.me for 2009. It seems the topic area that attracted most visitors was Twitter and related platforms. Here are the top five.

Still sceptical about Twitter: three ways in which Twitter has made a difference to my life and working practices. Just three examples but very indicative of the many possibilities.

Bing - Microsoft restarts search engine: a look at Microsoft's relaunched search service, Bing. I speculate that market share in search is closely tied to browser market share.

Sky earnings undermine ad-funded online TV: BSkyB's earnings report reveals the extent to which satellite broadcasting is set to remain far more lucrative and profitable than online TV for years to come.

Image via CrunchBase

Tweetdeck v Seesmic: ten deciding features was just that, a comparison of Tweetdeck and Seesmic. So similar in many ways but ultimately the bugginess of Seesmic led me back to Tweetdeck.

#Moonfruit marketing on Twitter: both an entry into the Moonfruit Twitter competition (by virtue of using the hashtag in the title) and a criticism of the campaign, which ultimately was stopped by Twitter itself.

In 2010 I fully intend to spend more time writing about the London/UK/European start-up scene and also share some of my learnings and experiences of building my business.

Les 3 Vallées iPhone App Review [updated 02-01-10 with screenshots]

2009-12-24T11:59:00.004Z

My father-in-law kindly invited my wife and I to join him for a week's skiing at the start of January in the small resort of Les Menuires, part of Les 3 Vallées. Well, guess what? There's an app for that!

The app promises to "revolutionise the comfort and safety for everybody on the slopes." It includes the following features:

Ski run map

A cool integration with the GPS functionality of the iPhone, places you on the ski runs making it a lot easier to navigate to the next vin chaud.

The map also includes a feature for open/closed runs and lifts and an avalanche warning page.

Clicking on the red cross button gives you the Aid Station Number along with your GPS position so that you can quickly call help to your location. This could be a real life saver, with the time taken to find lost skiers in the night often a factor leading to fatalities.

Weather forecast

A five day forecast gives you wind speed and direction, temperature and weather conditions. You also get open and close times for the ski lifts, as well as overall snow depth and fresh snow cover.

Webcams

Live webcams allow you to see the conditions and the crowds around the ski terrain, helping you to avoid the teams of school children, who are almost certainly better skiers than you. You get a still from the webcam rather than streaming video.

Mountain restaurants

There is a thorough listing of restaurants in each of the resorts of Les 3 Vallées. Choose the resort, select a restaurant and you get contact details so you can make use of your time on the ski lift to book a table.

Just be careful not to let your iPhone slip out of your gloved hand.

Les 3 Vallées iPhone app is free.

The developers, Skiplan Lumiplan Montagne, backed by the French State, earlier launched a similar app just for Méribel, one of the resorts in Les 3Vallées. It seems they will be releasing a number of variants on a resort by resort basis. Skiplan is the company that provides electronic communication boards around the ski slopes of France

This is the kind of app that has great potential to be rolled out to ski resorts globally. I believe keen skiers would pay a fair sum to have one app which covers several - or all - resorts.

Sadly I won't be going on the ski trip, what with a broken elbow, sprained wrists and shoulders, gained while cycling to the gym to get fit for skiing.

Twitter still not popular sharing channel

2009-12-17T22:08:00.001Z

ShareThis reports that email is still the most popular method of sharing across its installed base.

46 per cent of sharers choose this method, more than any other by a long chalk. However, recipients are not very likely to click on the link. And yet, if they do, they'll go on to visit more of the site than those clicking from links shared via other means.

Meanwhile, "Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel", according to the report from ShareThis. Just six per cent of sharing is to Twitter.

But 40 per cent of clicks on a link are from Twitter. The broadcast-to-many nature of the platform, along with the viral potential of retweets, means the opportunity for clicks is massively increased. Much more so than from Facebook, which receives more shares than Twitter.

You can read the full story on the ShareThis blog.

ShareThis competes with AddThis and other similar services.

Google's Real Time Search: the biggest disappointment of 2009

2009-12-16T10:51:00.001Z

Everyone's talking about Real Time Search. RTS. You don't even need to spell it out anymore. Even the Torygraph talks about the 'Revolution'.

Run a search for 'real time search' and you'll get a whole bunch of results with enthusiastic descriptions such as

"Scoopler is a real-time search engine for discovering what people are talking about on the internet right now."

"OneRiot is a realtime search engine. Search with OneRiot to find fresh, relevant search results as they emerge on the social web - the news..."

"Search Twitter in realtime - see what the world is doing right now."

This is a short video of Google's RTS in action.

Well, here's my take on Google's RTS. It's just a stream of random people's drivel coming out of Twitter, Yahoo! Answers and, soon, Facebook and MySpace. How is this good?

Google's search has always - ALWAYS - been about authority. It boils down to: each link is a vote; the page with most votes wins. That's it in a nutshell. But now Google wants to serve up a stream of tweets that happen to contain the keyword.

Google ran an experiment. You could try out RTS by adding "&esrch=RTSearch" to the end of the URL when you search. For example: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=obama&esrch=RTSearch.

I gave it a spin during the pre budget report. While I was watching the live broadcast (on Zattoo), I mentioned George Osborne in a tweet. All I said was: "Obviously, I meant George Osborne". A few seconds later (in "real time"), my tweet streamed through Google, adding a transient puff of valueless "information" to the first page of search results.

The problem is twofold. RTS is fleeting. Being "real time", it comes and goes through people's lives with barely a chance to mould your thoughts. And, while some RTS results don't even deserve to appear, some grander pronouncements - surely, there must be some - are treated as the chirping of a distant robin amongst the winter foliage: barely heard and soon forgotten.

I had thought that real time search would mean that links tweeted and retweeted at a moment in time would give a momentary boost to the page to which the link points. Scoopler is much better at it, giving one column to popular 'shares' of videos, images and links; and another to live 'posts', essentially tweets. Try it.

There are a number of other contenders in the RTS field and VentureBeat did a good round up in June. Why hasn't Google done as well as some of these offerings?

I hope that Google does better in its next iteration of Real Time Search and gives us a product that is really worthwhile. Will 2010 be the year in which it comes to pass?

Online advertising can make money

2009-12-07T10:56:00.000Z

Image via Wikipedia

Business models involving online advertising are unlikely to get you VC funding these days. You're better off not having any idea where the money's going to come from than suggesting that advertising is going to turn you a decent profit.

A few years ago, you could walk into an investor's office and say "Google AdSense" and you'd receive a cheque in the post the next day. Nowadays, the sentiment is rather different. It's summarised rather well by John Naughton in the Observer yesterday:

Google is a special case because it specialises in search, the only area where online advertising really works. The explanation is obvious: people searching for something are likely to be deeply interested in the results, and are therefore more likely to click through to an advertiser. But in other situations – say when browsing web pages – advertising is peripheral and we have become very good at ignoring it.

Fortunately, this is completely wrong.

Google ads are sold on a CPC basis. That means the advertiser pays for clicks, rather than impressions (CPM), which is how most of the industry works. So Google only makes money when someone clicks on an ad. And that happens very rarely. In other words, John Naughton's explanation is totally wrong. The click-through rate (CTR) on Google ads is negligible. People very rarely click on Google ads.

So how can Google be making money?

1. Selling on a CPC basis is ingenious. It means the advertiser knows exactly how much it's going to cost to acquire a visitor to its site. It can then work out the cost of acquisition based on percentage of visitors converting etc. So the advertister bids up to a certain price for a keyword. Since the advertiser can set the maximum price to pay, many advertisers will be attracted to certain keywords, thereby preventing the price drifting too far down.It gets more complicated (not least with regards to page quality) but this will do as an overview.

2. When a media company serves up a page, it makes money from the advertising on it, at a much higher rate per impression than Google. Yet the media company produces far fewer impressions than Google AND the cost of producing a page is nearly zero for Google, while for the media company it requires the relatively costly 'creation of content' (journalists, editors, sub-editors...).

3. Google does not give away any of its revenue to another party. Strictly that's not accurate because it shares revenue with publishers on its content network but this is incremental gain for Google. Most publisher/advertiser deals include third parties such as ad sales houses, media buyer/planners and ad servers.

In a nutshell, Google makes money from advertising by selling almost infinite inventory at almost no cost, for a very low price.

In contrast, online media businesses have been losing money by having high overheads, diluting the value of their inventory by increasing the number of impressions, while trying to sustain a premium price. It's strategically inconsistent.

Can other publishers make money from ads online?

It's become trendy to talk about affiliate marketing, where the publisher has you click on a link to a retailer and if you buy, the affiliate (ie the publisher) takes a cut. You can make from this but you're unlikely to become a significant player. You're better off being an intermediary, like Skimlinks.

One solution is to create valuable content - to both users and advertisers - at the lowest possible cost; reduce inventory in order to create demand for scarce supply; insist on premium prices. It is possible to earn per impression 100 times more than Google.

For many publishers it's not going to be possible to do this because the overheads are too high. Investors may be ignoring the variability of the cost side of the equation. Can a music streaming business be profitable with ads? Almost certainly not. The licensing fees are far too high. Other media, however, might be able to overcome their costs.

Another possibility is to mimic Google and serve vast numbers of pages at close to zero cost and sell cheap advertising against it. Difficult to do, unless you're Wikipedia or some other vast site, like Facebook.

What about 'Freemium'? Well, that's just a way of saying, we'll make it free to attract the largest possible audience, (annoy them with ads) and hope that enough will pay for a subscription (without ads).

A final note

The curious thing about Naughton's article, which is all about Facebook, is that it's written towards the end of the year in which Facebook has begun turning positive free cash flow. How does Facebook make money? Vast numbers of nearly zero-cost pages, carrying low-price ads on a CPC basis. No surprise, then, that Google sees Facebook as a very real competitor.

nextstop - more cool stuff from Google alumni

2009-11-18T14:37:00.002Z

"Why do ex-Googlers start such interesting companies?" asks ex-Microsofter Robert Scoble.

...and then it dawned on me: because Google sets out to hire those people who are likely to set up interesting companies when they move on.

The point is not that Google somehow creates people who do cool stuff. It's the other way around. People who do cool stuff want to work at Google because it has a reputation for letting people do cool stuff. Meanwhile, Google is looking for these cool-stuffers, precisely because they can and want to cool-stuff.

When these cool-stuffers get up and leave Google, they go off and cool-stuff with some other ex-Googlers. Is Google unhappy about it? Of course not! Everyone looks at ex-Googlers and says "wow!" The reputation of the ex-Googlers is part of the Google recruitment toolkit.

[Hint: there's a lesson in there for start-ups]

So what is nextstop?

According to the blurb...

nextstop is a community of people who love to discover the world around them. We enable members to exchange short, positive recommendations for the places and experiences they love most, and through this collective effort, are building a rich repository of information about the best things to do that spans the globe.

Sounds like a ton of other companies out there like Qype, Yell, trustedplaces, Trip Advisor and all their pre-cursors like Lonely Planet, Fodor's or Bradt Guide. But it's a little different: "we're a place to discover new things to get out and do wherever you are".

The approach is different because it works a bit like a search engine. The homepage has a Bing-like feel to it. You type in the place you want for recommendations and whoomf! you're carried across to a whole bunch of recommendations relating to it, in thematic categories, with keyword filters etc.

Is there space in the crowded market for a new take on an old (very old) concept? Perhaps not. I know from talking to the founder of one of the companies I mentioned above that revenue is very hard to come by. Nothing wrong in itself with entering a market where there's proven demand.

Still Sceptical about Twitter?

2009-11-10T18:22:00.001Z

So you're still sceptical of the value of Twitter? Well, these are three little anecdotes from my life on Twitter. They're all very fresh and recent.

1. The Apples

Cover of Buzzin' About

Here I am, sitting at my laptop, my fingers tapping in rhythm to an album I've just downloaded from iTunes. The album is Buzzin' About by The Apples. Do you know them? The Israeli band that dub themselves "a mixing pot of funk, hip hop, big band jazz, rock and turntablism – all delivered in their energetic and off-kilter style". Whatever you call it, I love this kind of acid-jazz-funk trip.

I've been using music streaming service Spotify for a few weeks now. Occasionally, I bash a search into its engine to find something 'new' to listen to. I've run searches looking for tracks with the words 'coffee' and 'chocolate' in the titles. This evening I wondered if there was a band called The Apples and what it would be like. One word. Nice.

Too bad for you if you like the sound of Spotify and aren't a registered user. You need to buy premium membership (and so avoid the ads) or somehow get an invite. The service loses money. With each additional user it loses more money. The cost of streaming is greater than the revenue it gets from ads. I got my invite from Milo Yiannopoulos. As a tech writer (formerly of TechCrunch Europe), he had some invites to spare and was touting them on Twitter...

2. FreshCase

I had a delivery on Friday afternoon from FreshCase. In the cardboard package were two FreshCase wine boxes of Hardy's Nottage Hill, one white, one red.

I heard about FreshCase from Christian Payne (aka Documentally), who referes to himself as "a freelance mobile media maker who also specialises in Social Media & photography" on his website OurManInside.com. He wrote about FreshCase on his blog. He said they were offering free wine to bloggers, who'd try them out and write about them. I'll be doing that shortly.

To receive the delivery, it was necessary to follow FreshCase on Twitter and take up the offer on Twitter. Within a few minutes, I was being followed by Sarah Belizaire-Butler, who sent me a direct message to arrange delivery.

Incidentally, Documentally, was one of the first people I came across on Twitter. About a year ago, he'd made a comment about Zattoo on Twitter and I was tracking all mentions of Zattoo at the time. I'd seen the link to his blog on Friday morning on Twitter. A few hours later I had four and a half litres of wine delivered to my door. Free.

3. All play and no work?

Well, no, that's not the case. I mentioned already how I was keeping an eye on what people were saying about Zattoo. However, Twitter isn't just about what's said on the service.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the OSCR project, the initiative from Orange with NESTA, to pull in ideas from small businesses. They're looking to create services that heighten the experience of being an Orange customer. Orange have Orange Wednesdays and O2 have their concert tickets. They're competing on experience now, not minutes and pricing, as they did in the 1990s and early 2000s.

I went along to the OSCR presentation and met some people from Orange, also the co-founder of Worldeka and the founder of Intruders.tv, amongst others. Then I came back home and after mulling it over for a few days, sent in my application. We'll see what comes of that.

OSCR might, or might not, radically alter how TV Pixie progresses in 2010. I found out about it on Twitter.

So, what are you up to? any plans for dinner? what are you going to have for breakfast in the morning?

And if a journalist - or anybody else, for that matter - doesn't get it, please just send them this way.

Tweetdeck v Seesmic: ten deciding features

2009-11-05T18:48:00.006Z

Mashable is running a series of weekly face-offs between various web apps: Firefox v Chrome, Wordpress v Typepad and now Tweetdeck v Seesmic Desktop.

I've been using Tweetdeck now for a while, after switching from Seesmic's older client Twhirl. Relatively satisfied, I haven't checked out too many alternatives. Yes, that appears to be an atypical lack of curiosity.

Now there's very little to decide between Tweetdeck and Seesmic. They both have very similar user flows. Both have Twitter and Facebook integration.

So where are the differences?

When I make Seesmic full-screen, the left edge of the window is cut off. This appears deliberate but I like to have a just a tiny margin of space between the edge of the screen and the text on it. It's a small design point only.
Changing the size of the window in Seesmic is a pain. You have to click on the bottom right corner. I usually keep my Twitter client open on the right side of my screen. So to get the right width I have to narrow from the right then drag it across to edge of the screen. Once done, however, this ceases to be a problem.
Worse than this, Seesmic has a limit to how narrow you can have your window, which means that I don't have full control over how I set up my screen.
Tweetdeck has buttons across the top of it for your different accounts. To post to Facebook or Tweet a message, you select which accounts you want to use by clicking the button. Seesmic's solution reduces the space used by putting a drop down menu next to the update window.
One of my gripes with Tweetdeck is that the menu of options largely disappears when you reduce the window because the options are along the top. Seesmic has cleverly put them along the side and also allows you to minimise the menu so just icons are showing. Very tidy.
The HOME Timeline in Seesmic is one of the best features. You can include replies, direct/private messages and search results in the same column. And at the bottom of the column is a cunning menu, enabling you to quickly move through, @ replies/mentions, DMs, messages you send, favourites and user search. This functionality existed in Twhirl and I missed it on switching to Tweetdeck.
The other timelines in Seesmic allow you to mix and match different accounts or keep them separate. This is not possible in Tweetdeck.
One of the clear differences between the two clients is in the image upload. With Seesmic, I can take a picture with my built-in webcam and upload it directly to Twitpic or similar service. Since I'm taking daily pictures of my facial hair growth for Movember during this month, this is a feature that is for the win!
Closing Seesmic does not mimise it to the system tray, as Tweetdeck does since the last upgrade. However, it irritates me that I can't close Tweetdeck without going to the system tray.
Other handy buttons on Seesmic include the toggle sound on/off for notifications, for one-click ease of use.

I haven't looked into CPU usage. For many people, this could be the deciding factor. For me that's not an issue: my current laptop has enough processing power and memory that I have not yet found myself grinding to a halt, as I did with the 2006 machine.

I'm going to give Seesmic Desktop a few days' use and then decide but I have feeling it might stick.

Updated: Orange launches startup competition with NESTA #OSCR

2009-10-22T19:43:00.007+01:00

How does one of the world's biggest mobile telecoms companies, with 180,000 employees worldwide, remain innovative in a market that risks becoming commoditised?

This is the challenge that Orange is facing and why today they launch the OSCR ("Oscar") Project at NESTA's headquarters in central London.

Back in the 90s, Orange was the quirky mobile phone company that launched with the inspiring tag line "The Future's Bright, The Future's Orange".

Then, about ten years ago, they were acquired by Mannesmann of Germany, which in turn was bought by Vodafone. The EU Commission then forced it to divest Orange and France Telecom ended up the eventual owner.

Orange has a multitude of venturing programs. The OSCR project is a way for Orange to tap into the creativity of the UK tech scene, to develop services for great customer experience in order to deliver significant revenue back to Orange, all the while protecting the IP of the companies taking part.

Mark Watts-Jones, Head of Product Marketing at Orange, gave the example of Orange Wednesdays as one of the ways in which customer relationships are strengthened. Orange is looking for other similar cross-platform (mobile/web/TV) services that develop communities, enhance messaging or offer personalisation, amongst other opportunities.

How it works

In a nutshell, companies have until ~~next Friday~~ 12:00 AM on 6th November to submit an application in response to the brief. The applications are then reviewed, not by Orange, but by a third party 'Trusted Agent Team' consisting of NESTA, live | work and Wireless Innovation.

Ten days later, five to ten companies will be selected to share in £100,000 to prepare to pitch to Orange. The companies will then work with Orange over the next 90 days to determine whether a commercial partnership can be agreed.

After that, well, the future's bright.

Full details of the programme, including slides and videos from today's launch event will be available on the OSCR project website as of tomorrow.

Kevin Rose: How to go from 1 to 1,000,000 users

2009-10-19T16:44:00.001+01:00

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, gave a talk at FOWA on getting users to adopt your web app. Here it is in full:

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Deezer gets funding to stay ahead of Spotify

2009-10-12T12:55:00.000+01:00

Ten days ago, I mentioned Spotify amongst the hottest European start-ups in the TechCrunch Europe Top 100.

With its recent round of funding, Spotify has been making a lot of noise and moving fast up the league. Deezer, its older, French competitor, was still just ahead in the rankings.

Today, TechCrunch reports that it's Deezer's turn to bring in the cash. AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé are investing €12.2m. This is considerably less than the $50m raised by Spotify recently.

The French player has been around far longer but its userbase is still mostly in France. The new cash, I imagine, will be used to develop new offerings and market itself more aggressively both at home and, especially, overseas.

The news today that BSkyB is launching Sky Songs a streaming rival to iTunes as early as next week, with all the major labels on board, means the music online distribution market is going to get nice and spicy.