1. Tell us about 60by80 and the niche it serves? What do you see as the market opportunity here and how are you meeting it?

60by80 is an online travel guide service for the modern gay traveller. The market opportunity is easy to see – according to one official study UK gay people spent GBP 4.8bn on travel and related services in 2008. The Montreal Tourist Board has data showing that the annual gay parade celebrations are the second largest revenue generating event for the city after the Formula 1 weekend.

So we are focusing on serving this high end gay consumer segment – worth over $500 billion in disposable income by some measures. And we believe that it is probably one of the most undermarketed consumer groups because it’s difficult to identify, reach and keep satisfied. These are consumers who have high disposable income, travel frequently for business and leisure and are likely to read The Economist, Vanity Fair or Wallpaper as much as purely gay media.

It’s a group that can be frustratingly difficult to target, but we believe that travel content is its common denominator. Our audience travels at least 3 times a year (some do easily 10 trips per year). When it comes to destination choices and service requirements, this segment has very high yet similar needs and that’s where 60by80 comes into the picture: providing high quality, up-to-date travel information not exclusively gay but written specifically with that audience in mind. For the users it’s a much needed and missed product, and for brands, marketers and travel businesses, it’s a tremendously attractive opportunity to connect with this audience in a targeted way.

2. The online travel space is obviously very crowded. How do you plan on standing out?

The travel space is crowded but there is no quality global service, created specifically for our target segment. Big sites treat content for gay travellers as an afterthought. And local gay sites can be difficult to find or sometimes in the local language. We believe that providing one trusted and up-to-date source of travel information is something badly needed by professional gay men who have increasingly busy lifestyles.

To get there, we’re investing heavily in creating original quality content, we will extend coverage to 20 cities over 12 months plus we will have regular contributions from both famous people showcasing their own city or their preferred destinations and holiday activities. And we have a few surprises for our members, like special offers, competitions and sweepstakes from selected hotel, airline or frequent traveler program partners plus special blog features on things like spa and yoga holidays, horse riding and adventure weekends.

3. You’re someone who has seen the full spectrum of the European internet: you’ve successfully launched a consumer brand in eastern Europe, you’ve worked for a major American internet brand, and now you’re doing a start up in London. How would you say the European internet scene has evolved, particularly in eastern Europe?

A few years ago, most of the internet start-ups in Eastern Europe were of the “copy-paste” type, i.e. ideas which worked in the West were transplanted and modified to local tastes and market conditions. Despite of this the road for internet entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe was still very rocky, simply because of the very low internet penetration rates and the virtually non-existing access to initial capital. People not only needed to come up with a viable idea, but implement it and bring it to market and often turn a profit practically on their own.

However lately there has been a resurgence in activity. Online advertising is becoming a viable business model as international firms shift part of their ad spending online also in Eastern Europe. Internet access and telecom infrastructure are rapidly improving. Plus there is a rising interest and investment by venture funds, driven by successful exit stories in the internet space in Eastern Europe. Some sectors, like e-commerce or online travel are still in their infancy because of the very limited penetration of credit cards or electronic payment systems. However local social media start-ups are successfully, cornering niche markets and are being much more aggressive in usage of the mobile internet and payment options. The real problem for local companies remains how to bring a successful local product idea to regional or global markets.

4. You have a lot of mobile experience, having worked for an operator and a mobile focused consumer service company. Has the mobile internet finally arrived? What’s next?

Until the launch of the iPhone, the mobile internet always used to promise services and features which in reality were five years in the future. This led to massive frustration for customers and huge lost investment for mobile operators. It is little surprise that an industry outsider made a breakthrough with a device which focused on user needs rather than technology. The new smart phones are finally achieving things promised to consumers almost 10 years ago – browse the internet, download and upload photos, music and video. Sending a micro-update via mobile to Facebook or Twitter is not much different in terms of user motivation than sending a text message to your friends. However the new devices make it possible for users to connect via their preferred media channel, free from any operator limitations and often at lower or no cost. So indeed the mobile internet is finally living to the high expectations. It was logically unleashed by a wave of 3rd party innovation (both in handsets and applications) and hugely boosted by higher speed 3G networks, flatrate data plans and lifting of operator restrictions on browsing and services.

This is just the start. The mobile phone has literally transformed the lives of billions of people by allowing instant calls and text messaging around the globe. Now its being used for always-on communication and entertainment in the developed world. In the future it will become a major financial tool for payments, storing cash and why not credit balances. It will help us control our house, car and even health. Lets just hope it does not take over our live completely.

Many thanks Stoycho. While we don’t offer Nestoria users the glamour that they might find on 60by80, we can relate to the challenge of building a business to focus on one particular thing. Best of luck. For those interested in learning more about 60by80 I recommend subscribing to their travel blog.

past Nestoria interviews: Mark Keating, Jason Trost, Christopher Parker.

Not yet clear if anyone from Nestoria will be speaking at the event, but given our 3+ years of scaling up Nestoria from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users, I think we should have at least some relevant source material to draw from.  Always nice to share a few war stories, but also very much looking forward to hear how other European web companies are integrating the long list of new scaling-related technologies out there – especially those from the FOSS community.

good news, after a summer hiatus #Geomob is back with an event on the 19th of November at UCL. I’ll be seizing the opportunity to speak about Mapstraction, an open source javascript library we use on Nestoria.

Long time readers will recall that we sponsored the original development of Mapstraction over three years ago. We and many other websites have been reaping the benefits ever since. Recently a new version of Mapstraction (mxn v2) was developed to be faster, lighter, cleaner, and more easily extendable. We made the switch a few months ago with great results. I’ll be discussing the details of why to use Mapstraction generally and the benefits of v2 specifically. Many thanks to all the developers who have contributed over the years. Every Nestoria user benefits.

We look forward to seeing you at #Geomob!

Nowadays DST is popularly regarded as a disrupting legacy practice of little benefit. Every six months we all have to adjust our behaviour, which of course is reflected in seasonal peaks of interest in DST:

We had the suspicion that many of the UK residents spent that additional time to sleep one hour more on a particularly lazy Sunday morning.

Back at the office, we were curious enough to check the impact of the time change on our metrics. We are always trying to improve how Nestoria users make the most of the property search engine. We measure that by looking at, among many other parameters, the number of visitors, their time on site and what they exactly do, particularly clicking on navigational features, property listings, pictures of houses, etc.

Impact of DST on the last Sunday in October 2009 on Nestoria.co.uk

We compared the activity on the Sunday 25th October, when clocks were adjusted one hour backward, with the previous Sunday, October 18th with the standard duration of 24 hours. The duration of the day was adjusted to identical periods of 24 hours and the number of visits normalized for the two days of comparison.

The distribution of the visitors in percentage of the total daily hardly varies beyond 7% on the total daily average, measured as the differences in the sum of percentages of visits of the visitors. Sundays are usually the days of the week with the longest average time on site, followed by Saturdays.

We found that Daylight Saving does show a significant shift in the hourly pattern of usage of the web site: up to 10% of users shifted the beginning and end of their visits during the beginning and the end of the day. Whilst the total variation is small in numbers, the shift of activity shows the expected behaviour of visits that start earlier in the day and start to decline also earlier.

No evidence that one additional hour of duration of the day generated proportionally more visits

The additional hour of the last Sunday in October increased by 4% (from 24 hours to 25 hours) the real duration of that day. The number of visits increased by 4%. It is unclear whether this variation in total number of visitors is due to weekly seasonality and/or increased duration of the day. It seems that additional availability of time is not spent in more activity online. That extra hour that day could dedicated to rest or leisure.

You may find a complete description of the analysis at Archive.org

As we tweeted yesterday, we’re expanding Nestoria to new territories, specifically Australia. We need help. Please join us if you’re up for the challenge (and qualified).

Not findable on Nestoria. Yet.

(photo thanks to andy_tyler)

I’m pleased to announce that we are now working together with leading classifieds site Gumtree. Property searchers can now find Gumtree listings on Nestoria. Here’s the requisite screenshot:

A big welcome to our new partner as we celebrate another small step on the path to making it as easy as possible to find your next home. Enjoy!

here at Nestoria we pride ourselves on a rigorous adherence to “just in time” production methods. As such it was appropriate that our team Summer event took place on almost the final official day of summer a few weeks ago.

With speculation rife over the last year about the collapse of the global economy – lead by a fall in house prices in the UK and Spain (two of our biggest markets) – we thought it appropriate to focus on honing skills that will help us succeed in a post-apocalyptic world. As such we headed out of the old office and into the wild to do a bit of team building via wilderness skills training.

For all of our fans out there here are some pics of the Lokku team in action:

Firestarting contest – no matches

A chance for reflection on the challenges ahead.

Doing our part to solve the UK housing shortage

The weather gods smiled upon us and a good time was had by all. Most importantly we’re well positioned for the future.

In seriousness, we’ve had a great year so far despite the bumps in the road thrown up by the global financial meltdown. A big thanks to the team for their hard work and to all of our partners for their support. We look forward to great things ahead.

BTW – if this looks like the kind of backwoods internet fun that you’d be interested in being a part of please get in touch as we’re hiring.

as we hinted in our recent Nestoria interview with Mark Keating, we’re going to be sponsoring the London Perl Workshop for the fourth year in a row. This year’s LPW will be on Saturday, December 5th at Westminster University’s New Cavendish Campus.

If past experience is any guide, the day will be a great mix of interesting technical talks ranging from the introductory to the advanced. Hopefully a few members of the Nestoria team will be on the speaker roster as in years past (please let us know if there are any topics you’d particularly like us to cover.

We’ve benefited greatly from the support of the global perl community, and and thankful for the chance to once again participate as a sponsor. We’re also keen to do our part to raise the general level of the event. Specifically we’ll be building on the tradition started last year and awarding prizes based on attendee voting/mob rule in the following categories:

• Best overall talk
• Best topic
• Best lightening talk
• Best new CPAN module of the past year

What the prizes will be exactly remains to be decided, but rest assured winners will be the envy of their perl hacking peers. So get to work on your talk!

Many thanks to the organisers and the other sponsors, and most of all to London’s great perl community. We look forward to seeing everyone there.

As in past years Nestoria is very proud to be a sponsor of the London Perl Workshop and we invite any one with an interest in open source software to come along. More details about that in an upcoming post.

Mark, thanks for making the time to tell us about LPW.

1. Why does London in particular have such an active perl community? What’s the essential ingredient in maintaining an active open source community?

There are a combination of factors that make up London’s strong Perl community. The first to my mind is the steadfast support of its more senior, and I am not going to say mature, members who have been active in promoting the group. London held one of the very first YAPCs and the first YAPC::EU and has always encouraged strong involvement from its members in the wider community.

Another contributing factor is the manner of the social meetings, they always try to make newcomers feel welcome, will organise emergency socials at the drop of a hat for visitors to London and strive to make the socials as non-Perl specific as possible. No matter what your background you feel included by these people.Then there is the mailing list. At some times trivial, always busy and with great historical events such as the Willow vs Buffy trauma, the LPM mailing list is perhaps the most subscribed to list of any monger group and with good reason.

These to me are a basis for the essential, and sometimes elusive, ingredients of maintaining a community. There is no silver bullet or single approach, it is a combination of factors and the inclusiveness, support and notion that one is working amongst equals (though I always feel surrounded by giants) is a strong factor in this.

2. The last few years have seen a renaissance in the perl community, with great new modules, an emphasis on testing and “enlightened” development techniques, more conferences, and a more vocal community (big thanks to blogs like perlbuzz). What’s responsible for this?

Still going for the easy questions . That is a very complex situation to assess as there are many factors affecting the Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modern Perl that we have today. On a side note my personal preference to that is that Perl is in an Enlightenment that is the motion towards what we can know as Modern Perl, the Renaissance, for me, came and went around Perl 5.8.

The changes started a good deal of time ago. I think the dawning of the current movement happened around the time between Perl 5.6 to 5.8, or at least that’s when the effects could be seen. Since that point there has been a maturity of projects and the developers both in their approach and output. At the same time there has been changes in the language itself, projects such as Moose, Catalyst, Dbix::Class and Devel::Declare to name a few, who seek to utilise, and in some cases form, the language changes that have been under continuous development in Perl. We should value the importance of CPAN and its breadth of resources that have allowed Perl development, projects and libraries to start with a strong foundation.

As for the vocal community, I think we are finally coming to realise that we know how good the language and its associated tools are, but it often feels that the rest of the world is under some impression that we are just gluing things together with CGI scripts. So I think there is a common feeling that we must firstly discuss the current state of Perl and secondly educate people away from ‘legacy’ techniques bringing them up to date with the current best practices.

3. This year LPW’s theme is “Beginning Perl”. Who is the target audience? What types of talks can attendees expect? Why are universities in the UK typically not teaching perl, despite the high level of demand from companies?

As always the LPW seeks to bring new people through the doors, and these can be Perl developers with years of experience ‘under the belt’ as well as welcoming back old friends and stalwart community giants. The theme is broad and is intended to give the speakers and audience a chance to explore the notion of beginnings. This could be starting Perl for the first time, or a ‘How To’ for people not familiar with the language or a project, it can also be taken as a chance to present how something began, such as a piece of development. One could even go further and look at the great advances in Strawberry Perl, Raduko, Padre and see this as Beginning Perl and Perl 6 on Windows. But at the same time the current movement in Perl, the feeling that in Perl since 5.8 we have been passing versions instead of point releases, so that we currently stand at Perl 5 Version 10.1 and the changes in the projects and the core itself seem to reflect that. So Beginning Perl could be seen as truly that for all of us. I am hoping that a lot of people will come to the event and decide to begin something new in Perl.

There is a culture in UK Universities to teach Java in computer science degrees and this is going to be difficult to change without a level of investment and commitment. There is also the fact that there have been non-educational forces on the universities as well, on a business sense it is wise for them to push .net and Java to their students as it gives them a broader job market when they leave university which satisfies a governmental focus. Part of our task should be to educate universities as much as possible to the job market for Perl skills. At this year’s LPW we will be running a free ‘Skills in the Workplace’ seminar that will be initially offered to University students to help towards this issue.

4. As someone who started a business working with open source software, please describe your experiences. How has the level of acceptance of open source changed in the business community in the past few years?

The movement towards open source becoming accepted has been slow, and in many cases quite tortuous. In the last few years though we have seen a big push inside some Governments for open standards and open document formats for the sharing of information and resources, particularly in the European Union, and OSS already works towards this. For most Small to Medium Enterprises though, there is a great deal of struggle to convince them that the software pre-installed is the best way forward, especially since their staff will have a great deal of experience in using it and this to them outweighs the cost of ownership versus OSS solutions. Where we have come forward has been in the acceptance of projects such as Firefox and the general awareness of the populace that many servers use Open Source to function. The pushes by Google to open source Android has given businesses faith in the idea that a business model can be built on OSS.

The transparency of Open Source, the ease of availability and the fact that we are a far more computer-orientated culture has also helped to strengthen acceptance of the possibilities of using it as an alternative. There is still a long way to go though.

It has certainly helped that open source is reported and discussed in the general media, at one time we would spend the first hour or so of any meeting explaining what open source software was in comparison to proprietary/closed software, we no longer have to say as much. I still feel that there is a culture of treating it as a ‘ham radio’ or academic-orientated which is an uphill struggle.

There are even deeper changes caused by the flow and availability of data, expertise, as to whether businesses can now rely on a closed-model of business focus if it seems to stymie innovation, and if using a proprietary route will mire you in the circumlocution of patents, intellectual property, copyright and trademarks but I think they are out of the scope of this answer.

Certainly if we examine the last twenty years there has been a broader uptake of Open Source in the last five years, how much this has been influenced by the stronger computer-orientated culture is interesting. I hope that the future we will see more companies realising that OSS represents a real choice to a formerly dominant closed software system.

Thanks Mark, and also big thanks to you and everyone else in the global perland open source community. Nestoria would not be possible without all of your work. As a result we’re very pleased to once again support this year’s LPW. Last year’s event was great and I have no doubt this year’s will be better.

On a related note, we’re always on the lookout for talented people looking to get started in perl. Please contact us if interested, or say hello at the LPW.

past Nestoria interviews: Jason Trost, Christopher Parker, and Ryan Notz.