The eBusiness Race

Running a Virtual Business - One Year On

2010-07-21T22:47:00.005Z

It's been a year since I co-founded Comrz, somewhat from the ashes of my previous venture Emojo. A lot has happened in that time, most of it great. The key decisions we made at the outset have all worked out well and we're looking to build on the new ways of working and not look back.

Below are some of the key Virtual Company premises we built the business on, and the pros and cons over the past year.

No Office / Location Independence

This was a key decision, and so far, so great. We still have no office, and have no intention of getting one. Not all the team is with us since some members felt they needed to work in an office environment, however most team members stuck with Comrz and have benefited greatly by having location independence.

One member of the team has moved back to India for a year, another has been working in Slovakia for the past few weeks, another is happily working from the Cote-d'Azure. Those left in the UK no longer have long commutes, they can work from home or from local venues, or great business clubs such as the Like Minds Club or One Alfred Place.

The down-side has yet to come, which will happen when we have to grow the team, I'm sure we'll need to develop some innovative teaching / learning tools to get people on board as effectively as possible. That said, we have outsourced very effectively (see below) with minimum effort for some pretty complex financial / payroll / HR stuff.

The best thing is that we now only meet up for fun, parties and entertainment. Every couple of weeks, those members of the team who are able to make it to London get together and go out. That's the only time we meet in person, but because we talk together so frequently each day it's worked out pretty well so far.

Outsourcing the Infrastructure

Right from the outset we decided to not run any of our own equipment and did a lot of research as to the best cloud providers. We chose Amazon and Yotta, and they've both been great. Neither has been without it's hiccoughs, and we had to do a lot of development to make our Affino platform work reliably on the cloud, but the benefits have been immense in terms of cost, reliability, reduced stress, reduced workload and cost compared to running our own infrastructure.

One of the best aspects of running off the cloud is that we can increase our capacity on-demand and provide massively scalable sites. It also means that peaking sites, e.g. event-based / news-based can have temporary increases in capacity without having to invest in year-round increases in server capacity.

Outsourcing

The first thing we did when starting Comrz was to outsource key book-keeping, payroll and financial related functions. We now also outsource elements such as design and in-effect a fair amount of development. This has gone extremely well.

Not only has the quality and value of the services been excellent, but in dealing with seasoned pros, we have benefited greatly from solid advice and efficient service. It means that outsourcing is now our Number One approach when it comes to increasing capacity or delivering new services.

Working and Communicating Online

Skype, Google Apps, Google Talk, Twitter, Tweet Deck, Google News Reader, DimDim and Affino have been the keys to great communication within the company. The latest generation of mobile tech including Apple's iPhones and various Google / HTC / Android devices have kept us in close contact whatever our location.

Great mobile services including the latest generation of 3G dongles, MiFi devices and now Android 2.2 have meant that we don't even need to have broadband to be working and communicating effectively online. Phenomenal when staying abroad or working in un-connected locations.

We've made a lot of improvements to our own Affino platform over the year with massively improved forums, which have driven over 30,000 conversations in the past year. Team Time our Team Time In/Out board with logs all the work-time and tasks has been key to managing both the full-time team members and external contractors. We're also rolled out great enhancements to our blogs, status updates and integration with Facebook and Twitter which really optimise our public comms.

The Downside (Not Much)

We've yet to experience these in any significant way. There's obviously disruption for team members when they work from home from their family and friends, but in terms of productivity it's fair to say that the team has been incredibly productive on the whole, with no loss of productivity at all when compared with the office environment.

We've also not suffered from being virtual in terms of our status. Our customers buy into what we're doing and our approach, and increasingly it is how they also operate and see Comrz as being leaders in the field.

Not having an office and all associated infrastructure, insurance, security / maintenance headaches, equipment et al has greatly freed up management time and allows us to stay focused on the things that matter like building a great product, supporting our customers to the max and growing the business.

The Future

The future for Comrz, and the world in general, will involve many more collaborations, working with partners and customers in innovative ways and always striving to be, and work with the best in the market.

We're liking the way the tech world is going with more integration, services being opened through APIs, everything migrating to the cloud and seamless global comms which makes working on different continents seem as close as working in the office next door.

Taking Control of your Inbox

2009-12-04T13:19:00.005Z

I had the chance to change the way I manage my emails with my latest venture (Comrz). The truth is that it was quite frustrating at my previous venture (Emojo) in that every morning I had 300 fresh emails in, and would get a further one or two hundred messages each day. Clearly taking any time off made for many days of catchup when I returned.

The great news is that the tools available today mean that I now rarely spend more than ten minutes in the morning filtering out all the non-urgent, non-essential stuff and am able to deal instantly with all the urgent issues without any clutter.

There are three key tools that I use to make this happen:

The first thing I did was not transfer most of my email subscriptions over to my new account. In fact I cancelled 90% of them. What I did instead was either subscribe to the same people / organisations through Google Reader and Twitter where possible, and in some instances where this was not an option I simply dropped out.

Having all the news feeds come in through Twitter and Google Reader means that I catch most of the info at the same speed, but stuff that I miss or gets dated doesn't clutter up my inbox. If my Google Reader has too much of a backlog I simply mark everything as read, same with TweetDeck.

It is noticeable that I don't use as many news sources as previously on the the same subjects, but I have broadened my subscriptions to include a broader range of news stories. It's fair to say that I consume 99% of my news through Twitter and Google Reader.

It's taken a fair bit of tweeking and effort to adjust to Gmail for my corporate email. Given that I've been using Outlook for the previous decade. It's clear that once you get used to them that Tags are the way to go. Superb. Being able to tag an invoice with Finance and Accounts Payable at the same time is very useful. I then simply un-tick the Accounts Payable option when the payment has been made.

Running a small company means that I need to keep a close eye on things. It means I have Five inboxes and around thirty tags that I use. It's a great feature in Gmail that it can present five inboxes on the same screen.

My Inboxes are:

Inbox - i.e. fresh stuff as well as urgent stuff
Starred - important (but not urgent)
Active Opportunities - the latest correspondence on all the deals we're working on
Accounts Payable - moneys to pay
Accounts Receivable - moneys coming in

To make everything more streamlined I have set up lots of rules for automatically tagging incoming emails, e.g. support forum posts are all tagged with Support; any correspondence with financial people is always tagged Finance. It means I simply archive my emails after I've read them, since they're already automatically tagged.

The fact that Gmail, TweetDeck and Google Reader work everywhere, and on all devices, means that it's always possible to stay on top with minimal effort.

The Art of the Re-Start (UK)

2009-10-26T12:36:00.008Z

I'm still in the middle of starting up my new venture Comrz and closing down my previous company Emojo (I was the majority share holder) so things are a bit raw (and un-finished) but here are some key lessons I've learnt from the process so far.

1) If you're in pain, seriously look at your options

I spent way too long trying to 'save' Emojo, and in retrospect it made my life far harder than it should have been and made me personally much more out-of-pocket.

There are great options in the UK now for struggling companies to do a structured turn-around if you have a business which is viable under all the mess which surrounds it, which may-or-may-not have arisen because of the recession.

If the company is basically sound, and you still have some finances in place, but are collecting bad debts (like we were) and in turn becoming a credit risk (ditto), then the Pre-pack insolvency is a great option. You will need funds, and should contact an insolvency practitioner at the earliest opportunity. Essentially you can buy back your company as a going concern, but with all your debts wiped. This needs to be done in a highly structured manner, and clearly can't be fraudulent, but for a well run company which has been brought down by the economy it's a great option.

The other alternative is a liquidation. You can still buy back all of the company's assets, but have to start from scratch as far as the brand and marketing efforts are concerned. This may be no bad thing if your plight became a headline, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of re-invention. It creates much more of a clear slate, but obviously means a lot more graft required to re-establish yourself. In the end, this was the option I went for. I was able to buy up all the assets of my previous company, including the IP assets, and have now re-sold some of them to my new company to clear up my overdraft.

Looking back, I should have done this a year ago, but was too mentally tied in to my previous venture to look at the big picture. Had I done so I would have been at least hundreds of thousands of pounds better off ... c'est la vie.

2) Aim for a quick turn-around and continuity

We've done everything we could to get things turned around and launched with the new company, and two months after we closed down the previous one, the new one is up and running, and most of our customers have had seamless continuity of dialogue, support and service. We did execute on this very rapidly, and what it has done is give our customers a solid platform (at least for them to be comfortable whilst re-thinking their options) and it's given us the start-up capital we required without seeking any finance.

My recommendation is always going to be to do whatever it takes to avoid taking money from others. Signing up customers quickly to your new venture is a big priority in minimising any external funding requirement.

3) Use the chance of a fresh start

The great thing about starting again is that you have the opportunity for a fresh start, to leave many of your headaches behind and to go with your gut instincts in a way that were previously complicated with contracts and commitments.

Use the opportunity before you get cluttered again.

4) The world has changed since you started your previous venture

It really has. The way the web has come of age in the past year means that companies can be run completely differently today than the could have been even six months ago. Look around, do serious hands-on trials with all the new tech and services and go for it.

5) Outsourcing is much better now than before

I can't recommend outsourcing highly enough. You have to be comfortable with it; have good procedures in place; and most importantly have an excellent communications setup and good skills for it to work. When it does work you'll find yourself slashing your costs, not just by 10% but up to 90%, no wonder India and China are doing so well. The Internet has really transformed the ability to communicate over distance and work together in a distributed virtual enterprise.

Since my new venture is a smaller scale, we're working with the 'generic out-sourcers' such as Google and Amazon, and small companies and individuals. It's fair to say that 70% of what we previously owned and did in-house has now been outsourced. It allows us to focus on our core skills, whilst reducing commitments and greatly improving our bottom line.

6) Distributed working is now a reality

It really is possible to work in a distributed setup, with no office, and using the new setup of professionaly business clubs such as One Alfred Place, and the myriad of cafes, hotels and other business clubs which are available. More often than not you're going to be more effective at meeting up virtually than physically. All comms can now run through an individual's PC and mobile devices and the emergence of personal Wi-Fi (MiFi) means you can carry your own network with you.

At the start of the new venture we met up for all our project meetings, now they're all done through Skype and take 30 minutes versus 3 hours of lost productivity (per person) previously. Now we just get together for key meeting, client engagements, and to party.

7) Revisiting the Ideal

When I was thinking and soul-searching about the new venture, I spent a lot of time thinking about all the things that had not worked out, or gone the way I envisaged with my previous venture.

There were a lot of ideas that I had which simply weren't possible the last time round (10 years ago). In so many ways Comrz is the company I wanted to found 10 years ago but was prevented from achieving by real-world constraints. Luckily this time around almost everything has just fallen into place nicely, and after initial (inevitable) gremlins, things are looking pretty good.

8) Learn from your mistakes

It can be painful to review your mistakes (it certainly is for me) but it's essential if you're not going to re-live them.

Have a low annoyance threshold, if something feels wrong with the new setup, nail it straight away, don't take any bullshit. It will only get worse.

9) Love many trust few

The best advise my mother gave me. Keep things simple with the new venture, you'll need to, if only to get through all the corporate paperwork you have to deal with.

Outsource wherever possible, on short-term contracts in case you need to evolve things quickly. Only tie things down once things become settled and always keep things simple (until you've got the scale to have a legal and HR team).

Do whatever you can yourself (and save on the salaries and man management time required). Having fewer staff has a downside in that you need to have great self-management skills, but it will save you big bucks and lots of headaches.

10) Some things take waaaaaaay longer than you would expect

It took two months for me to get all the banking and payment services set up for the new venture, which is precisely six weeks longer than I had anticipated. This can cause chaos when it comes to receiving moneys and making payments. Luckily I was prepared, but I never expected it to take so long.

The other problem is that when starting up you have to be very controlled when it comes to prioritising. It does mean that you'll be doing some essential tasks months after you've started, but so be it.

Wrap Up

My last venture was the first one to actually fail, and as such I've had to learn a whole new set of skills. The best thing was finding a good insolvency practitioner who was able to advise me on what steps to take. Just remember though that they're in it for the money so always research your options further online and seek a second opinion.

This is a great time to be starting up in terms of what is possible, not a great economic environment, but at least your money goes a great deal further than previously and the technology enablers are now pretty much all there.

The key thing with a re-start is that you have to keep things simple, so use the opportunity to either out-source or stop doing anything which was not profitable previously.

UK Start-up Tech Autumn 2009

2009-10-26T01:45:00.006Z

It was a long summer and things have moved on dramatically as far as tech is concerned. My own career has gone through a couple of back flips with the odd somersault thrown in for good measure. My project for the past ten years: Emojo hit the wall as the funding dried up from most of our start-up clients and prospects.

It meant doing a complete re-think as to what to do with my career, and where to go. In the end I've started a new venture Comrz, which is a Social Commerce consultancy, working with companies to build profitable communities. It's given me the chance to have complete re-think of the tech I use, and I've made some big changes over the last few months.

Email, Chat and Document Sharing - Google Apps Comes of Age

Google Apps has dramatically improved over the past year. Possibly the biggest change to my way of working has been the shift to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange. When starting up the new venture it came down to a straight choice between hosted Exchange and Google Apps. In the end Google Apps won out because Gmail works brilliantly with email on all our devices, and Google Docs provides a great online platform for live editing of the documents. The tight integration with Google Talk means that it is now a must-have component of our setup. The fact that Google provides Apps for free for up to 50 users and allows you to use your own domain made it a simple choice in the end since I didn't have a 100% feeling about any of the hosted Exchange options.

Voice and Teleconferencing - Skype

It's clear that Skype wasn't the cash cow eBay hoped it would be, but it's reliability, good quality audio (even in low bandwidth), great chat and most importantly incredibly intuitive conferencing options make this the key voice comms platform for us. It's still leagues ahead of Google Talk, and probably the reason Google invested in building up Google Voice. The ability to pull together a quick teleconference with the key players on a project is a key productivity cornerstone.

Cloud Hosting - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

What a brilliant solution. I had heard about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for years, and when it came to setting up our new venture, 'not' having to run the servers was a key criteria. This comes from having to do so with my previous four ventures and finding it a never ending drag. We trialled many offerings (no names mentioned) but needless to say pretty much none of them worked for us (or even came close). The one which did was Amazon. The recent changes to their tariffs have made their offering dramatically more price competitive as well. This is a great platform for basic virtual servers, applications and storage.

High End Hosting - ACC Yotta

Great as Amazon is, it is also seriously limited in what it can offer at the high end (e.g. only one IP Address per server, unbelievable). When looking around, it was clear that we needed to work with a real high-end hosting innovator as well and we found one in Yotta. The shift to running all our operations off the cloud has been very complex, with hundreds of updates required in our core solutions and changes in the way we work. Yotta have been great at providing valuable feedback, and have also enabled us to embrace all the latest hosting tech to improve the performance of our high-end hosting solutions.

VOIP - Talking Platforms

Our telco setup was easily sorted. We have been through years of working with one unreliable VOIP provider followed by another, until we started to work with Talking Platforms. What a great outfit. They sorted us out quickly, provide an extremely reliable service, and supported us on all our various VOIP devices (Snom handsets and X-Lite PC soft phone). Now I have the three comms Icons sitting next to each other on my Windows 7 toolbar, and can communicate with ease wherever I am.

OS and Office Suite - Microsoft BizSpark

What a programme. Microsoft BizSpark is essential for any startup (i.e. free Microsoft software). I think it is a great move for Microsoft, since otherwise I can see companies wholesale trying to go with free competitors even though they are inferior. It also buys Microsoft time to get it's online offerings in place. That said this is a real productivity boon and a great cost-saver for us and we love Microsoft for it. Especially with Windows 7 and Office 2007 which are just superb. Why can't Adobe do something like this. I love their tech, and it is a cornerstone of our company, but it sure is expensive for a startup.

Mobile Tech - Apple iPhone, Android, 3 Mi Fi, Kensington Ultra Portable Battery Pack

I'll do a bigger post on this later (see earlier posts), but the fact is that I've done a 180 degree turn on this over the past few months. Android has come such a long way over the past six months, and the 'Donut' / 1.6 release running on my Dev Phone One (G1 for developers), coupled with it's tight Google integration is now my main mobile work device. My primary phone is now without doubt the iPhone. The push integration with Google Apps is just the icing on the cake, what a package.

The other new tech is really enabling, and solves key frustrations for and online Entrepreneur. The first is the Three Mi Fi solution which allows me to have my own personal Wi-Fi setup wherever I am. What a great solution which 'just works' if only all tech was as easy as this. The other great enabler for all my power hungry devices, which just don't get through the day, is the Kensington Ultra Portable Battery (currently out of stock on Kensington's own online store).

PC / Laptop Hardware - Dell

I've been with Dell for a few years now, and whilst I really don't like the way every add-on is over-priced, the core hardware is reasonably priced, works well and comes with the great Dell service, which I'm happy to pay a premium for. I used to be a Sony guy for years, but they really need to solve their 'crapware' mentality for me to take them seriously again. They're great at taking good hardware, loading it with terrible software, and turning the resulting user experience into a dog.

Social Apps - TweetDeck, and iPhone Apps

I'm sure others will come to mind, but right now I've removed pretty much all my social apps from the PC / Mac with the exception of TweetDeck. Their execution across the board from the desktop to the iPhone is simply superb. I must have 50 odd iPhone social apps, so that will have to be a separate post, but I am using the Facebook app, Layar and Nimbuzz fairly regularly now alongside TweetDeck.

Entertainment - Spotify, iPlayer and iTunes

I always like to be legal for all my software and media, given that I've spent years running software related ventures, so finding services that make it easy to be legal is a big deal for me. You always need to chill out, and Spotify Premium is now my go-to service for music, it really makes my Android phone a great music device (when used with a good Bluetooth headset). The fact that it now works on all my machines (PC and Mac) and mobile devices (iPhone and DP1) means that I don't have to use anything else. The offline mode really is the killer feature.

For light entertainment and news the BBC iPlayer is superb, and I'm still an iTunes user, although no longer for tunes, but instead I find myself downloading the odd movie, Podcast and TV series.

Web Platform - Affino from Comrz

It's been a lot of work to completely start from scratch with a web presence, but I've been having great fun with Affino from Comrz (my new venture). We've been refining the user experience greatly over the past few months and it's become pretty slick now. It's a great Social Commerce platform, designed to run modern integrated commercial sites, and the fact that we've been able to roll out our entire online presence on just one platform is such a productivity boon. The fact that it is super scalable now on the cloud is even better.

Office - One Alfred Place (plus lots of home offices)

One thing I absolutely did not want to do when starting up this company was have an office (we'll see how well that goes). A key criteria with the new venture is that we can work with the best people wherever they are, and I wanted to force things so that we wouldn't build any kind of centralised base, and instead keep everything light and cloud based.

Our strategy was to find the best business clubs wherever more than one of us was based (currently just London) so we could meet up and meet customers and prospects. After a fair amount of research (and also based on my experience of having meetings in London over the past 15 years) we settled on One Alfred Place which has the slogan 'A better way to do business'. So far it's been great (just looking forward to the network being upgraded). It's a highly professional environment, with great networking events and great working spaces.

Wrap Up

I've always believed that the enabling technologies we're seeing will result in smaller, more distributed companies. The problem traditionally was that the technologies which were available to start-ups were inferior to those available to the Fortune 500 and the FTSE 100 and therefore left them at a great disadvantage. That really is no longer the case. It's hard to see how we can imrove on the tech we can enjoy right from the outset as we scale up.

Now we just need to get the financial system sorted in the same way to cater for start-ups. Given the way it's virtually disintegrated in the UK over the past 12 months (and never was very good before) there's a lot of scope for a 'killer app' here.

Broken Businesses - how Best of Breed solutions lead to Failed Online Businesses

2009-05-31T10:33:00.013Z

After having met thousands of entrepreneurs, CTOs, CEOs, marketing and sales directors over the years, not one has felt that they've been making the most of their online business(es). Frequently their companies have multiple websites serving up multiple different content and community streams as well as multiple disparate ecommerce sites selling everything from books to videos, DVDs, clothing, events, networking, memberships and subscriptions. Few feel that they are making a decent return on their investment (if any).

There are numerous reasons for this, some strategic, some staff related. A lot though is down to the limitations of their infrastructure. There are four possible approaches when rolling out an eBusiness: bespoke, open source, best-of-breed solutions or an integrated eBusiness suite.

A term which crops up continuously when companies are launching a new CMS, newsletter, ecommerce, social networking solution is 'best of breed'. The fact is, if you run your online business using a mixture of solutions then you will seriously reduce your revenue generation and online customer service. You will also guarantee less effective SEO (search engine optimisation) and fewer cross-selling and promotions opportunities.

The argument put forward by niche vendors (and this includes the market leaders) is that Best of Breed Solutions (BOBS) will maximize the effectiveness of each aspect of your online business and as a result you will have a higher level of customer engagement and sales. You will be able to use their APIs to pull all the information and services together and create an uber presence, or at least be standards compliant.

I have yet to meet anyone who has gone down the best-of-breed route who actually has an integrated eBusiness. The practical hurdles to achieving integration with so many solutions are immense: how many technologies are being used; what version are they on; are the APIs complementary; what are the release cycles like (some fast others slow); can the applications share user sessions; can they bundle online services, access and media with traditional goods in single transactions; are there embeddable components for elements such as shopping carts?

Open source solutions tend to have all the above problems and have some additions of their own. The fragmented nature of OSS (open source software) means that as more business elements are rolled out online the level of complexity grows exponentially. It is quite easy to manage two or three OSS solutions in parallel for your eBusiness, but in practice often achieving basic cross-selling and promotions can require a dozen additional plugins to the already significant number of solutions being used. OSS also has random elements thrown in, including: product forks (i.e. split into two competing solutions); sudden 'professional' versions and pricing (where things were free before suddenly have a big cost attached); and commercial limitations where you can't use the solution for commercial gain or are forced to share your IP.

Many companies try to grapple with this problem by building their own solutions, typically by cobbling together open source elements with their own proprietary code. For most ventures this is a dead-end which fails to keep up with the market realities. Companies are often worried that they have to own the code (i.e. their own IP) which runs their online business. This makes no sense, and rarely adds value, in fact in most cases it destroys it. The problem is not always apparent with the first generation of their eBusiness presence, but by the time they're working on the second or third it is all too real. The costs mount up, the sites look dated, the customer experience is diminished and less than what it might be.

There is no way that in ten years time anyone will consider building their online businesses on such a dysfunctional setup. In the same way that the office productivity suite superceded the stand-alone spreadsheets and word processors, so will a new generation of eBusiness Suites replace the current hodge-podge of solutions.

Where is Everybody? Social changes mean companies are losing control of their Brands, Communities and Staff

2009-04-19T23:06:00.007Z

I've been thinking about this subject a lot recently, and posted some initial thoughts on the Internet World 2009 site.

The social land-grab is seeing many companies loosing control of their brands and communities as these enter the social spaces such as Facebook and Linkedin Groups, Ning communities and the Twitter sphere. A quick search on many brands will bring up high rankings for these domains and user generated communities, meaning that these are the places people will go to evaluate the brands.

It also means that the millions of dollars companies are investing in promoting their websites via search engines is becoming an increasingly speculative process.

Is it Irreversible?

What is amazing is that most companies don’t seem to be doing anything to reverse this wholesale move of customer relationships from the traditional direct channels through to 3rd party communications spaces. Companies are losing out in particular to their own staff are ad-hock setting up social spaces around the target markets for their companies, and where the ownership lies with the individual and not the company they work for.

The web is a beautiful thing in that it allows for greatly improved self-service and 24/7/365 service times. What it also does is reduce the level of intimacy between companies and their clients. Most organisations have invested heavily in improving their online revenue generation and servicing, however little has been done to improve loyalty or engage better with their communities.

Where’s the Loyalty

A simple scenario is a person who regularly buys airline tickets. A decade ago a regular buyer might have gone to the airline’s booking office, met their regular customer service representative and been advised on the best ticket / package to get. A few years ago the person might simply have phoned up, had the advice, and paid by credit card, they would still have experienced personal service and a human touch. Now the person does everything faster and more easily online, without any human interaction. The problem with this is that it means that there is much less to bind the person to the organisation on a personal level. People now simply look for the best price / availability fit and typically go with that. Customer service ’on the ground’ might help, but Ryanair has proven that it doesn’t affect buying decisions as much as it should.

Companies must engage to rebuild loyalty, and that involves being ’out there’ in the social spaces and virtual cross roads. It involves helping their community and being responsive to issues as they are raised. It also means that companies should do something about providing the community services required by the customers. You can’t force the creation of a community, but you can facilitate it and help it to develop and re-build lost contact.

Who's Making Money from your Community?

One of the great things about being on the eBusiness frontline is that I get to meet some great people. One person we've recently started working with is a top musician and DJ who has two million followers on MySpace, his videos have been seen hundreds of millions of times on YouTube and he's yet to see a penny of revenue from either site.

To make matters worse, he's now in the situation where the site owners are selling his back-catalogue through a 3rd party on via his profile page, and are in effect promoting material that he gets minimal royalties for at the expense of his more recent materials.

The fact is that if you don't have ownership of the platform which the community is running on then you have minimal ability to generate revenues from the community. Not only that but you run the risk of 3rd parties and even competitors taking ownership of your community or changing the terms of your engagement at any stage.

For a start-up it's particularly dangerous since ownership of a Facebook or LinkedIn community has minimal value, even though it might be the largest grouping in existence.

The fact is that many social media sites strictly forbid the selling of communites or accounts in their terms and conditions. This in turn puts a major question mark on the long-term return on investment in building up communities on these sites.

Are Individuals Benefiting at the Expense of Companies?

Yes.

A simple scenario is two senior sales professionals. One builds up his sales contacts and monitors everything through the company controlled CRM, uses the company telephone and computer and then one day loses his job through no fault of his / her own. That person, unless they’ve been very careful, and possibly working against the terms of their contract, will have a very hard time to piece together their professional profile, contacts, relationships and status.

The second sales person builds up their client acquisition network through Linked-In (or similar), sets up numerous interest groups, syncs everything with Plaxo, does status updates via numerous Twitter accounts, and manages much of their activity through their own personal iPhone or Blackberry. You now have someone who can move seamlessly between companies, often with the considerable ownership of the customer relationship in a way that was previously not possible.

But that needn’t be a bad thing if companies are able to leverage their ’enabled employees’ and social networks.

The fact is that the process of loyalty switching from brands to individuals is going to speed up. The tools and networks which were previously only available to companies, often exclusively large companies, are now in the hands of individuals, and no longer in the hands of those employing them.

What can Companies do to Regain Ownership of their Communities

The first thing companies need to do is to take ownership of the platform that they're developing their communities on. These need to be self-contained and managed around their brand, or as independent brands sponsored by the company. It's worth noting that my company Emojo makes such a platform (Affino) so there is a certain bias here.

A good community site requires great moderation, good infrastructure, good media, good content, effective promotion and much more. It should have the infrastructure in place to allow for the growth of a social marketplace where community members can do business.

The Social Networks and Social Media Hubs should then be used as feeder sites for these commercial community hubs.

Commercial Communities require Constant Engagement

A constant evolution is required to respond to the needs of the community. It typically takes one to two years to evolve a site to the level where the community has settled down and the tools broadly meet their requirements. In practice these requirements vary extensively from one community to another and a lot of granularity is required to get the mix right. For example one community might want powerful media management whilst the another might prefer minimal (but fast) image uploads and nothing more.

Community members quickly become disengaged once the community moderators and leaders become inactive so continuity, recognition and rewards are all important. This means companies must invest in building up in-house community teams if they are going to succeed online.

Companies which get this right will be the brand and thought leaders of tomorrow. Those who don't will see a gradual diminishing of their brand and will be sidelined from their communities over time.

The Current State of Personal Internet Devices

2009-04-05T09:32:00.012Z

Recap

For those who are not familiar with me, I've used almost every mobile platform there is, and gone through four or five handsets each year for the past decade. I also spend most of my time designing applications so care a lot about getting the most out of my mobile experience. This post is purely based on my personal experience, but may be interesting if you want to get the most out of the personal internet.

What a difference a year makes. It's interesting to see Firefox demo it's mobile browser (currently known as Fennec), on a Nokia 810. I have the same device in my collection and a year ago it was my main PID (Personal Internet Device). Now the only thing I do with it is to check out if there are any useful updates, which there aren't since Nokia has discontinued support for the device, in effect, less than a year after it was released. The main reason for this is that the new Maemo OS which drives the N810 will only support the new generation of chips. The reasoning for the decision must have been quite simple for Nokia: the old generation is much too slow.

The iPhone is in the Lead, Can it Extend it?

The fact is that the personal internet experience must be fast to be engaging. The latency of the network means paradoxically that the devices themselves and the applications running on them need to be even faster. The current winner is hands-down the iPhone 3G. It's an absolute no-brainer that Apple should bring out a larger device, with a keyboard, running a variant of the iPhone OSX. In fact this does look like it's about to happen, and I for one will be queueing for it if it does. Apple is also solving most of the actual phone issues with the OS3 generation coming out this summer which will enable essentials such as Bluetooth, copy / paste and more effective SMS / MMS messaging.

Nokia Goes All Out

The reality is though that the iPhone is not currently a very good phone, short battery life, poor reception, poor Bluetooth etc. which means that a second phone is a must. My current 'Phone' handset is the Nokia 5800 and it's something of a mixed-bag to own one of these devices. The last week though has seen the experience improve a great deal. The negatives, for me, start with the terrible look and feel: cheap plastic and rubber, ugly screen and icons, lack of kinetic scrolling and an adherence to old, worse, user interface elements in the name of keeping things consistent with older devices.

Nokia, forget about backward thinking and look forward. The iPhone user interface is superb, and the metaphors it's introduced such as kinetic scrolling are not going to be complex for people to understand, especially when compared to the painfully slow metaphors currently used for scrolling in the 5800. The other basic problem is that the screen is too small. It makes things too fiddly, and in turn slows things down considerably. The final basic is that the 'home screen' is well short of what it should be in terms of giving you rapid access to key applications (actions). Instead we're faced with a tripple interface approach through the Media Bar, Home Screen and Application menu which just slows you down.

What's changed in the last week for my Nokia experience is three-fold: New OS, an upgrade from the previous 1.1 to 2.0 release. There's nothing obviously new in that, but it does seem a bit faster, and more importantly i can now download BBC iPlayer videos to watch when travelling. The second thing is that the 5800 now has a great Twitter client called Gravity. What makes it quite exciting is that this is the best mobile twitter client I have used on any device. It's interface does everything that Nokia's don't. What makes the experience even better, is that unlike the iPhone, the client can run in the background.

The third aspect which has me excited about my personal internet future from the Nokia side is the announcement that thousands of vendors have signed up for the Ovi Application Store. The store should allow Java, native apps (including Python) and Widgets to be sold / distributed directly through to the device, much as the iPhone App store does. This will greatly reduce the cost of rolling out applications to the Nokias, which in turn should mean lots of great apps, and a greatly improved experience.

Nokia really is pulling out all the stops for the N97 in a way that it never has before for any device. It's going to be the device which either sees Nokia regain it's leadership crown, or the end of an era. What's more I believe Nokia knows this and is doing everything it can to make it work out in the same way that the N95 was the clear leader when it was launched.

Android Still Sucks

For me the most over hyped player is the Android platform. Without the iPhone I would consider the G1 a complete breakthrough device, the problem is that the iPhone exists. I've blogged earlier on just how disastrous I think the G1 is, and the recent Cupcake upgrade hasn't really changed anything for me. The problem is that it isn't as good as the iPhone as a PID and it's applications are light-years behind, and it also is a bad phone, in fact it is rubbish. All the mock-ups I'm seeing of next generation devices don't seem to add anything either, and the new generation of apps all seem to be second-rate iPhone app copies. In practice it is now sharing the same role as the Nokia N810 (bag & desk but not pocket).

Blackberry Must Lead in More than Email

I'm not a big mobile email person, since 90% of my email requires more than a simple yes / no. If I was I sould no doubt have swapped my Nokia 5800 for a Blackberry Bold. Blackberry is announcing an endless rush of firmware updates and new (but very similar) devices. It's leadership in email is for me the main thing going for it, but is something that it will need to build on quickly if it's not to be eclipsed. The Storm suffers from too many poor UI decisions to warrant much of a lookin.

Palm Pre, The Dark Horse?

The Palm Pre does look like it could be a great device, but I don't see myself buying it. Why, because it doesn't have a full landscape QWERTY keyboard (as opposed to mini vertical one). The notifications screen, already on Android and coming to the iPhone 3OS is the hot feature for me, but the key will be how many 3rd party apps are developed, which means that I'm unlikely to buy this handset for some time.

The Others

The most notable absentees are probably Microsoft, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and LG. My problem with all of these is that they don't seem to have the right mix of handsets and ecosystems. The HTC HD handsets seem to be leading when it comest to Microsoft devices, and Microsoft has made a fair amount of headway with it's own ecosystem developments, but it seems to have stalled when it comes to developing the user interface of its mobile paltform.

Samsung and LG are probably too wedded to Korea to make much headway, in particular with services. Samsung is quite agressive at partnering, but that won't be enough to become the future leader. Sony looks like a 'dead-man-walking', whilst Motorola just looks dead.

What I Expect to be Using

The next gen devices I'm expecting to be using later this year are the Nokia N97 and the next gen iPhone, but time will tell. The dark horses are the update to the Nokia N810 (although I'm feeling a little burned with this product line) and the Pre if it turns out to be a great phone as well as PID.

eBusiness Crunch Trends

2009-03-30T08:51:00.003Z

Being on the eBusiness frontline I get to see first-hand what's happening in the eBusiness space. It's clear that it's not business as usual.

Some of the key trends we're experiencing at the moment, in no particular order:

Lots of Activity

There is a lot going on in the eBusiness space, in fact the feeling is that there's more going on now than there has been for a while. The major driver for this is undoubtedly the fact that one of the few growing revenue channels for most organisations is eBusiness.

A fair amount of activity is coming from new business innovators who have identified a gap in the market and believe that the general disruption in the marketplace, coupled with the relative decline of many key brands, and the willingness of companies and individuals to explore and embrace online business makes for perfect timing in launching innovative business concepts.

Another driver is a large number of highly experienced executives being made redundant, or chosing to leave their current employer. This is especially true in the creative industries. Rather than take a pay cut or simply step into another comparable job many are looking to develop their own concepts or becoming independent consultants.

This is adding up to a lot of creativity in the eBusiness space with innovative approaches to existing markets and frequently simply the movement of traditional business segments online.

Credit Crunch

There is no question that credit lines are being slashed, along with marketing and research & development budgets. It means that start-ups are taking longer to raise funds, and when they are coming through they are on tighter budgets and shorter cycles.

It means that companies who are dependent on marketing / advertising revenues are facing an extremely tight market.

There is an increase in Government backed funding (especially in the UK) but this is always a time-consuming lottery and not something most commercial ventures can rely on.

Declining Growth Projections

It is very hard to project massive online revenue growth at a time when online revenues ad sales have started to decline in key market sectors such as US Newspapers, and break-out brands such as Twitter have a hard time building a revenue model. This is scuppering many business models.

You are more likely to win the lottery than to build a major enterprise driven by online advertising. Just a personal view.

That said, companies who are focused on multi-channel revenue growth online are succeeding, as are many online retailers and organisations which provide value added services.

Extended Timelines for Startups

Where things are happening, they're happening slower. This is largely down to the funding cycle, but also the result of resource constraints, additional due diligence and the fact that launching an online venture has become a more demanding proposition than it was a year ago.

Social Media Boosting Will See Declining Returns

Many organisations are benefiting from the new social promotions channels, however the declining returns on these channels are already becoming apparent as more individuals and companies embrace them.

Embracing the Freedom of the Online Corner Shop

Many ventures are embracing free technologies, information sources and promotions channels. With some products and services this is the way to go, however an equal number of businesses are simply condemming themselves to low-growth, low-margin business, something akin to online 'corner shops', which involve a lot of hard work and long hours for little return.

Other companies are building more targetted, higher value added services, online stores and social marketplaces which, although higher risk, are much more likely to become dominant players in their sector and in turn to build up a critical revenue generating mass.

Free Fighters

One thing that is having a big impact on many eBusinesses is the fact that there is a growing band of Free Fighters, people willing to share information for free or offer free services online in the hope of generating revenues by other means. This has the effect of removing the value added aspect from a number of online service models.

It means that many service and information based eBusinesses must evolve considerably to deliver value added to their customer base, which it is willing to pay for.

Multiple Revenue Streams

eBusinesses are diversifying their revenue streams. Media based ones are extending their traditional models to selling content in a broad mix of packages, i.e. video-on-demand, subscriptions, pay-per-view, downloads as well as DVDs. Others are taking the model further to selling participation in the actual media creation.

Social eBusinesses are no longer relying purely on advertising and sponsorship. They increasingly run (or outsource) stores targetting their community; syndicate their content professionally; run professional memberships (with a lot of value added services); and sell trends information to 3rd parties.

The sales channels are also becoming both more diversified and more tailored with an increase in customisation and bespoke eCommerce interfaces, and the definitive shift to integration between commerce, media and community.

Enterprise Technology Consolidation

Most enterprises are consolidating their technology platforms. It means that whereas before they might have used a dozen solutions within the enterprise for similar tasks, they are now aiming to use fewer vendors, even if there is a temporary (or even long-term) loss of productivity within specific business units.

Harder Times and Greater Rewards

Some industries will need to go through major evolution as the traditional sales channels and revenue streams collapse. In many cases this will happen before the online streams develop fully, which will result in major turmoil in an increasing number of industries.

Most companies with a weak eBusiness arm, and who fail to embrace fully digital commerce are likely to see a reduced level of growth permanently; and a load of new 'Online Cornershops' will develop for low-margin services.

My gut feeling is that this adds up to harder times for many eBusinesses, but the resulting innovation and winnowing out of competitors over the coming years will mean greater returns for the successful players.

Having a Big SEO Footprint (with the minimum effort)

2009-03-09T07:18:00.008Z

Every few months I do a push to maintain / boost the search engine rankings for my company's site (emojo.com). Given that it is just one of a number of roles I have, the effort must be as effective as possible with the minimum effort. I read a lot of SEO articles and try to keep abreast of what people say ranks well, but in practice I don't really have enough time to follow every nuance.

At the end of the day I believe Google (and the other search engines) are simply looking to present the best content to their users, which is packaged nicely and will deliver the best overall experience and value to their users. To that end, that's what I look to deliver, but with the minimum of effort.

There are three parts to this:

Knowing what ranks
Tricks to get the most for the least effort
Analyse and evolve

Knowing what Ranks

The most important thing is to know what elements of a page help it to rank. The following list is what I've found to be the most important:

Google Elements
Making sure you've got the right elements that allow the listing to display properly on Google: Title (the right one, i.e. that of your story / section); Meta Data which aides the user; Keywords the key Meta Data; Time stamps so users know when the article was published (currency); and Friendly URLs so that users can see immediately the key description of the content.

Content, Images and other Media
Having the right content, with the appropriate keywords is important, but so is having images and other associated media.

Related links (embedded and otherwise)
Make sure you link out effectively to useful sites on the same topic, don't try and go for reciprocal links, just make the article useful.

Currency, i.e. recent updates
Make sure that you keep things current. If the article is going out of date, refresh it, and comment on your updates. Make sure that your content, whatever it is, has a social dimension so others can comment on it as well, which helps to keep it fresh. Google hates stale content.

External and Internal inbound links
It is important to have good incoming links to your ranking pages. The ones you can do the most about are the ones on your own site. Make sure that the key ranking pages are well referenced on your main pages with highlights / top tens etc.

Indexing / Google Sitemap
Have a Google Sitemap and share it as well as possible. It will greatly increase your footprint.

How long has the site been going
The final factor is one of time, make sure you get something up quickly and build on it. The longer your page has been around, the better, just make sure you keep it fresh.

Tricks to get the Most for the Least Effort

Unless your fulltime job is SEO, you're not going to have too much time to work on it, so make sure that what you do is effective. The most important trick is to start of with a solution platform which is designed from the ground-up to assist you, such as Affino (my day job). It will save you a lot of time and effort. The rest are tricks you can do on any platform with varying amounts of effort.

Pick Your List
Be smart about picking your keyword / key terms list, and evolve it as you go along. If there are topics you simply can't get a ranking on, go for the more innovative angle, or an aspect you are particularly strong on. Focus on the trending and up-and-coming topics since these are the ones people are buying on.

Engage with the Top 30
Probably the most time consuming part, but essential is to engage with the top sites in each of your key term categories (if possible), i.e. become a member, post content / comments. Don't expect all the links to point directly at you (i.e. no follow tag), and write intelligent content, not spam. You will find that if what you're writing makes sense then others will engage with you.

Single Domain
With Google, everything is judged by the domain, keep it simple, make sure your presence is as single-domain as possible, i.e. content, comments, catalogue, media, promotions, newsletters etc. The more domains you have, the more you dilute your footprint. Be extra careful of using 3rd parties for the social content of your sites since it means most of the benefits will go to their sites rather than your own.

SMO - Social Media Optimisation
Get this bit right, do the land-grab right now (before everything is gone), make sure you've got the right Facebook group(s), LinkedIn (groups), Twitter IDs (personal, company, brands, target areas), as well as the others which may be relevant. Establish these as base / feeder pages for you core site.

Highlights / Stream Pages
Make sure you create Topics based highlights pages which aggregate your content for given topics, e.g. a page on Goldfish should pull in all your Goldfish content from your site. These pages are useful, on-topic and current, all things people and Google love.

Key Topic-lead Landing Pages
Create useful Topic-lead landing pages which act as great reference pages for the best the web has to offer on that topic, don't be shy about linking out to competitors.

Relate content from Ranking Pages
If you've got ranking pages which don't have much going on, yet are No. 1 on Google, make them more useful, link them to other more useful content on your site.

Keyword Density
Don't overdo this. I tend to completely ignore it, focus instead on creating the best / most useful content.

Community Content is the key to Currency
It's impossible to keep everything up-to-date on your site so try and enable as much of it to be community engaging as possible. This will keep the site fresh, even if your content is getting a bit dated. Any page will slump down the rankings sooner or later if things go stale.

Analyse and Evolve

Make sure you always start your efforts by analysing what's there already, and how successful (or otherwise) your efforts have been to-date. I've spent the best part of the last year working on some nice eBusiness Dashboards which are incredibly useful in my day-job, but I also use a number of other resources to check in with my efforts, the most important of which are:

WebPosition
This is where I start and is the baseline for any work I do. The Reporter reports are superb in identifying what pages are ranking, which ones have dropped off, visibility statistics, visibility index, competitor rankings, search engine saturation etc. It's hard to be effective without this app.

Google Analytics
This is the essential app for seeing how people are coming into your site via searches, i.e. ranking the practical success of your seo efforts. There's a lot more possible with Google Analytics but that's a separate post.

Google Webmaster Tools
Essential for identifying how Google sees your site and what id does / doesn't like about it. This is also where you let Google know about your Google Sitemap.

Copernic Agent Professional
Great for everyhing but Google, no idea why it excludes Google, but it does. It offers an overview of your pages across dozens of different search engines and most importantly allows you to spot where your pages are ranking on some of the lesser terms. Also great for pin-pointing content on your brands on 3rd party sites.

Wrapping Up

Go with the flow. Don't spend too long trying to get ranked on some key words, focus on the big picture. Don't get hung up on the No.1 position, it's a bit of a lottery. Have fun with it. If the content you're having to create isn't to your liking, you're in the wrong job.

If you know any tricks I've missed out on, share.

Developing a Split Twittering Personality

2009-02-16T11:12:00.004Z

Following on from some great advice I received from John Welsh, the digital director at UBM Live, I've split my Twitter personalities:

www.twitter.com/MarkusKarlsson

Which will be my professional twitter, focusing on my professional passions.

www.twitter.com/Affino

Which will now be primarily the Twitter channel for the Affino eBusiness Suite which is the key product of my company Emojo.

www.twitter.com/Krusi

Which is my personal, family and friend's space, and has protected updates.

I've also created a fourth Twitter account just to consume entertainment news and gossip. This makes certain I don't clog my other Twitter channels with my usual daily social media slurps.

Why did I do this?

1) I don't like to read all the bumf people write about their personal life in a professional context. In practice I find it distracting and 'cluttering' and inevitably I end up removing them from my follow feed.

2) I already have multiple 'personalities' on the social networks, since it makes for a much more productive life (I'll post more on this later).

3) It allows me to segment my day better and makes me more productive

In practice I was using my single Twitter account for lots of different things: being entertained (Stephen Fry); being informed, staying in touch with friends, the team at Emojo, and with clients, researching prospects, getting a feel for upcoming trends, promoting Affino, learning, and probably a host more.

For a (short) while I've been using TweetDeck to group the incoming tweets into numerous groups, essential to take away clutter and allow me to focus on the job at hand.

The fact is that I should have been doing the same with my outgoing Tweets.

It's early days yet, and I've had to change my Twittering clients to Twhirl and Tweetie (on the iPhone) since these do the best job of handling separate accounts, which in turn allows me to focus on different tasks at different points in the day.

It will be interesting to see if Twitter actually develops a useful interface to handle the real-world ways that people are Tweeting. It is something of a frustration that I have to use multiple browsers or login / out to transition between different accounts. I will also be interesting to see which of the two desktop clients win the feature battle. The ideal for me would be TweetDeck having the ability to flip between accounts in the way that Tweetie does on the iPhone.

The key thing to bear in mind if you decide to go the route of multiple personalities is that you will need to do a lot of manual labour. Twitter itself doesn't support the process at all, in fact by blocking you from re-using an existing email address or sharing a session with multiple accounts, they make the job as hard a possible. No chance of 'moving' tweets or followers between accounts.

Have you taken the leap from a single to multiple online Twittering personalities? What would you do differently?

Dispatches from the eBusiness Frontline

2009-02-15T21:01:00.003Z

This blog is going to evolve a bit from the recent 'review' and comparison posts I've been doing to be more of a direct commentary of my experience with eBusiness, as well as observations and thoughts on the goings on in the world of Social Marketplaces.

I've worked with eBusiness sites for over a decade, and have worked with many different organsations ranging from Casio and Audi through to the Royal Opera, MasterCard and Macmillan. At the same time I've launched numerous start-up sites and most of my focus now is on evolving online businesses to become social marketplaces.

I'm a firm believer that most business will transition online during my lifetime. It means that in the future, even when you buy something from a shop, the transaction will happen in advance of the shop visit, or virtually whilst you are there.

I believe that individuals and networks will replace much of traditional manufacturing and service industries. Not only do I believe this, but I've made it my life's goal to see it through. Fortunately it seems that it is the natural course of things, so I get to come along for the ride.

Having lived through the last decade of boom and bust (repeated), it has become clear to me that the most important thing for a successful ebusiness is:

A simple idea, well executed, with good financial backing.

It must also have an end-goal which is:

Profitability

It means, any project should be simplified to it's core strengths and everything must evolve around these strengths.

The process of rolling out an eBusiness is always multi-phased. Always budget for this and distill each phase down to the requirements which will have the biggest financial benefit.

The single biggest mistake is that idealists will want to deliver on their complete vision on day one. All that happens is that day one moves further away, and meanwhile the world moves on.

The second rule is that whatever you think the next phase will be, it won't. Your ideas will have moved on, and the world will have moved on.

In practice we're in the early bronze age of the internet. Web 1.0 was in effect teh stone-age where we learn't to make virtual fire and move things with virtual wheels.

The promise of the Net is that it will allow all people and all machines to communicate with one another. We're experiencing its early infancy and it will transform humanity on its completion.

Meanwhile we're just mucking along, evolving our ideas, experiencing new technologies and means of communications and being entertained along the way. And as with every human endeavour we're looking for how we can profit from this one.

In my day job I'm the CEO and chief software architect for Emojo. It means I get down to the nitty-gritty of what makes a Blog; how to create a page designer; what is an acceptable compromise between accessibility for some and usability for everyone else.

It also means that I have hundreds of conversations every week with companies about their goals, requirements, frustrations and desires. Now I just have to do my best to get my thoughts down in writing, keeping some of the raw emotions, whilst making sure I don't reveal any confidential secrets along the way.

I'm also hoping that people will join me in on this conversation and to help it along, and keep me in check when I start to go awol.

Network Monitoring Software Shortlist

2008-09-19T15:36:00.009Z

We've recently updated our network monitoring software and did a fair amount of research into the what was available today to provide us with the insight we needed to manage our systems and software on a day-to-day basis.

In practice the answer will probably be that we'll need more than one solution, but we have set up SpiceWorks internallyat Emojo's HQ and it is a first-class solution.

We also looked at both What's Up Gold from IPSwitch and Pocket Trap 360. These solutions both look great as well, but the key differentiator is the fact that SpiceWorks is both an online social solution and a free one.

What Spiceworks have done is used the wealth of information made available through the diagnostic abilities of the platform to promote online community interaction in appropriate communities, i.e. we have a lot of Dell equipment, and as such we're encouraged to participate in Dell forums. It also is able to show highly targeted adverts, which no doubt is the basis of the revenue model.

What makes this all work is the fact that there are now 400,000 system administrators using SpiceWorks and interacting in the community forums and spaces, providing highly useful feedback and information on most day-to-day network administration tasks.

SpiceWorks has a very useful Wizard approach to setting up your network analytics and works especially well if you are running primarily Windows based networks. Useful tools such as warning widgets, Exchange monitors and inventory drill-downs provide at-a-glance status information which greatly reduces the response time in emergencies.

SpiceWorks also extends it's usefulness by having a full ticketing system for dealing with technical issues to round out the other pillar of what a great network monitoring solution should do.

UK Business Broadband Providers

2008-09-19T15:36:00.005Z

We've been having an interesting time since we moved Emojo to Camden from Regent Street in June. On the one hand we love being in Camden, there's a great (although slightly edgy) buzz to Camden, a lot of life and considerably more sociable than being down in Regent Street. Another big benefit is that the cost of living, i.e. entertainment and dining is half that of the West End and just as varied (have yet to find a great Thai place though).

One of the key challenges for us (after security) has been sorting out a business broadband connection on a temporary basis whilst we wait for a higher guaranteed bandwidth solution. Since most of our support and monitoring is run from our office, both for the hosting and the Affino eBusiness Suite, we have had the need for a reliable connection and one which delivers good value for minimum guaranteed connectivity.

The key element we've been looking for has been good contention ratios, and hence a usable minimum guaranteed bandwidth.

Initially we had to go for the fastest setup time, and since we're in the UK that means getting in BT Business Broadband, however this solution does not deliver if you are running email, need to upload media and content, use VOIP and do online demonstrations.

What we needed to do was extend the network upload capability and we looked into different ways of doing this on a rapid delivery basis. We initially looked at going with WIMAX, but this simply doesn't work outside the City or West End, and certainly not when you're surrounded by tall buildings.

This left SDSL as the only other rapid alternative. The BT solutions simply don't add up on a cost and delivery basis, and we looked at providers such as Zen Internet who offered a good solution, but it was also relatively pricey and more importantly they were quoting weeks in install lead times.

The hands-down winner is Eclipse Internet which is the current ISPA Best Business ISP and offers the best pricing, package and delivery time-frame.

Since we were moving our network from one of high guaranteed connectivity to one of variable (at best) broadband connectivity we've had to make a number of significant alterations in our bandwidth usage and network infrastructure. The most beneficial ones have been the use of a perimeter email spam defence which means that spam email is prevented from even entering our network, the second is putting everything through proxies.

It was interesting when we were asking around for providers and a large proportion of our clients use two or more broadband providers for more reliable connectivity.

There is a slight jury out on all this because it remains to be seen how reliable the delivery is going to be from Eclipse, but from our research so far it looks as though they have a great service record, something that we hope to experience.

The Nokia N800 a Great but Flawed eBiz Gadget

2007-04-13T02:13:00.000Z

This is a gadget I've been using for the best part of a month now and love it for what it does well which is: GMail, Browsing, Internet Radio, Ambient Email, RSS / Blog Reading and the bit I don't like is that it does little else.

The great parts are how well the browsing works. The screen is large and offers a serious amount of resolution when compared to the average 'mobile' device. This means you can cover much more detail in a considerably faster time than if reading on a phone.

The email works very well since the touch screen offers a neat feature of allowing you to type with your fingers as well as a stylus, it also works well with a Bluetooth keyboard (allegedly). I was confused at first how to get the large input keys since I only got the small stylus sized keys initially. This was solved when I became frustrated and simply prodded the screen with my finger and hey presto it figured I was using my fingers and presented me with the larger keys.

Where it falls down and where I'm really waiting for advances is in the software. There's been an announcement that Skype will be available on it in the summer which means that I'll finally be able to put the video camera to good use. There's also talk of improved Flash so I can watch the news and YouTube on the device, something which doesn't really work with the older version of Flash currently available.

The unfulfilled potential of this device is all in the software and availability of 'completed' and 'professional' applications. Most of what's out feels rather hacked and you're asked to install Python followed by some toolkit followed by some graphics kit and then you can install an application which ultimately crashes and leaves you needing to re-flash your N800.

The strength and weakness of the platform is that it's based on Linux which means that companies and individuals can develop neat solutions quickly and readily but also means that many commercial developers are completely ignoring the platform. Nokia really needs to step up and support this baby since it's clear that they could be defining a new product category here if they get a broader software portfolio for this device.

I have a feeling that things will become much better over the year with the N800 and Nokia are on the whole doing great work with their software updates but in the case of the N800 there's a lot more that needs to be done on the platform to make it a real eBiz Gadget.

The Nokia N95 is a Great eBiz Phone

2007-04-13T01:50:00.000Z

I've been on the lookout for a replacement handset which had high speed 3.5G connectivity and would be an all rounder but also a work phone first and foremost. This meant it had to be reasonably small, have a good screen, sync contacts and events effectively, handle email and navigation and have a good browser. It also had to have wifi so I could minimize my bandwidth costs.

Having used every kind of handset ranging from the Palm based Treo to a multitude of Windows and Series 60 phones over the recent years they've all fallen well short of being an ideal phone. The N95 is the first one which genuinely starts to deliver the goods.

The truth is that this is one of the best looking and feeling handsets out there. The build quality is very solid and it's snappy for all the key phone functions.

The overall feel of using the N95 is that it is simply phenomenal and without doubt is a milestone in mobile phone development. I'm fortunate to be based in London and get to benefit from all the 3.5G goodness and speed, and have to say that the browsing, navigation (GPS) and multimedia goodies such as playing the games on my wide screen television make this handset an unbelievably useful and fun device.

Other great features are the performance for syncing, it used to take ages to sync a Nokia phone, but this one syncs faster than you realise, so much so, that I've set it to auto sync via Bluetooth whenever it's near my laptop.

The 3G connectivity means that surfing and emailing through the PC or N800 are now a joy on the move as well as in the office.

The connectivity in general and especially the Wifi works extremely well. The phone seems to instantly detect wireless networks, at least three or four times faster than Windows and allows easy switching between the wifi and 3G connections allowing you to save on your bandwidth bill.

What is clear though is that some of the functionality is in effect 'back-up' to dedicated devices. I'd always prefer to take photos with a dedicated digital camera although the camera works very well in good light (although it is slow). The MP3 player is great for convenience but doesn't compare with a 30GB+ iPod.

The GPS (Maps) application is great and the ability to drill down into street level in villages in Hungary (where my wife is from and currently visiting) is something I've never found before in a GPS device, but I would still use my Nuvi though to navigate around most of Europe since it does a great job and has a bigger screen.

This is also the first Nokia which is 'standard' in that it has standard headphone jack and USB connectors. It means it actually starts to feel like a tiny computer rather than simply a phone. If you compare the performance of this device with PCs it comes on top in all kinds of scenarios.
The multi-tasking nature of the N95 is also great. It allows you to flick through songs using the dedicated keys, whilst reading a travel guide and plotting your route to the next destination, all to be gently interrupted by an incoming call with a 3D ring tone which zooms from one side to the other.

There's no device that comes close to this phone as an all-round handy device which really works. It certainly means I'll be carrying a lot fewer devices on a day-to-day basis

Do Office 2007 but Don't Touch Vista (yet)

2007-01-31T06:32:00.000Z

I had a Leeroy Jenkins moment earlier this week when I decided to install Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista on my main business laptop. On the one hand there was a mildly legitimate reason for doing so which is to make sure that Affino works well on Vista; there's also the desire to be up to speed with the latest technology and to see if there's anything we can learn from Microsoft's mammoth development effort. But the reality is that these things could have been learned and experienced from the Vista / Office 2007 research machine sitting a few meters from me.

The thing that sent me off on what's been a 36 hour upgrade adventure (no change) was that Office 2007 was exceptionally easy to install and worked brilliantly from the outset. Right now I can't say anything but good things about Office. The upgrade was very slick, the new styling is great and after a settling down period everything seems to work, even remote secure syncing of Outlook which was giving me proxy errors to begin with. The bottom line is Office 2007 is a great product. I'll give you more feedback once I've worked on a few proposals, white papers and presentations and had more benefit of experience.

Hasta la Vista Baby. My experience with Office 2007 clouded my judgement and set me on an upgrade frenzy. I had to upgrade to Vista and experience the whole new Microsoft world. I believed that since I had a powerful laptop that the upgrade would be smooth and that things would work nicely. I'd also read about how great Vista was at providing all the drivers needed (I now realise that that particular magazine article must have been a marketing piece).

The first thing is that upgrading to Vista takes hours and a dozen re-starts before it settles down and reduces the number of warnings coming up every time you boot your machine. Get ready to click on a million warning boxes, especially if you also trial One Care. I'm still waiting on basic things to work such as my speakers, microphone, bluetooth, video camera and biometric scanner. Luckily more fundamental parts of my system are now working including the DVD and battery. I actually had an error message on installing Vista to say that my battery wasn't compatible with my laptop, amazing. I solved that by running my laptop without the battery for a few hours before plugging it back in again.

Upgrading to Vista can also be a lot more expensive than at first sight. I've had to buy the latest versions of three programs which simply weren't compatible with Vista (and update a dozen others). One of them, Acronis True Image, I didn't want to buy, but I couldn't uninstall it after the upgrade without having the blue screen of death, so now I'm the proud owner of the latest version. My advise is uninstall it before any Vista upgrade, or better yet don't upgrade yet.

My advise for Vista for businesses is simple, wait for the Service Pack. For consumers it's more a case of wait three to six months for the hardware companies to bring out the drivers you're going to need and check your software for Vista compatibility. Microsoft has a useful application which advises you on elements which might have problems (and you can take that to mean that they probably will) but you should do additional research by going to the manufacturers' forums and see what other users are saying.

Blogger wins eBusiness Blog Service race against TypePad

2007-01-20T23:32:00.000Z

Well this battle was won quite quickly by Blogger. I had anticipated running a blog on TypePad and Blogger for anything up to a year, but TypePad was simply taking up too much time.

In comparative setup times, it took me at least three times as long to get advanced functionality set up on TypePad as it took on Blogger. The key problem was actually something that should have been a strength for TypePad but which turned out to be a real pain, namely using Widgets.

It's safe to say that you can't run a successful blog today without using widgets and TypePad is a leader in providing Widget integration. Things started going wrong though when many of the automated widget installs simply failed. I then decided to go the harder route and switch to Advanced Templating. This meant that I could do almost everything I'd wanted in terms of widget integration but it took a lot of coding effort and multi-step setup routines to do so.

I then found that switching to Advanced Templating means that many of the easy to set up features I liked in the initial setup, doing things like setting up feeds, became complex. It meant switching between advanced and simple modes and doing different tasks in each of them. It also didn't work reliably as I was loosing elements.

The big issue for me came when I decided to change the look and feel of the site as I was decided to have a lighter touch and more entertaining approach to by blog. I realised then that I would have to switch to a different layout and lose all the work I'd done on the Widget setups, something I really didn't fancy doing.

I'd already gone through the process of changing my Blogger look and feel and it had meant some re-working. I must have found half a dozen Blogger bugs, but that doesn't come close to the dozens of bugs I kept on hitting in TypePad.

An issue which although it wasn't important, certainly would arise with casual bloggers is the fact that you have to pay with TypePad. You also have to go straight to the most expensive option which promises multiple blogs. I was annoyed when I discovered these multiple blogs had to have the same prefix. With Blogger you can chose your prefix at will (as long as it is available) and set up any number of blogs free.

There are a couple of key differences which might mean users may still want to use the TypePad blogs. Primarily it's a look and feel thing. TypePad simply offers more flexibility. It also allows a greater number of content types and layout combinations. I'm sure that overall it is far more flexible than blogger and you don't have to have the Blogging Service's brand sitting across the top of your page.

The reasons Blogger comes top for me are:

It's efficient
It's easy to learn
It has fewer bugs than competing offerings
It's on Google, great for easy Google service integration
It works well with most Widgets
It's free (not a big reason but nice)
It's fast (consistently faster than TypePad)
It integrates well with Picasa

10 Steps to Setting Up an eBusiness Promotion Blog

2007-01-19T20:12:00.000Z

Nowadays it's hard to imagine an ePromotions strategy which doesn't include blogging as one of the pillars. Blogs have established themselves gradually as a means of corporate promotion and are now becoming a leading element for companies who want to build up brand awareness and loyalty.

There are a number of steps that you have to go through in building up your blog or blogs and for that you need to make a number of key decisions along the way. It is always possible to change your strategy along the way, but you might lose a lot of the benefit gained already, certainly in terms of search engine presence.

The most important element is to have a consistency between your brand, the style of blog, the people who are blogging on your behalf and the topics that are blogged on.

10 Key Steps

1) Why and What?

Why are you blogging, what is the purpose of your blog? If these aren't clear then it's unlikely your blog will succeed or even last very long.

You need to have a clear purpose and agenda and you should be very upfront about it so that your potential readers know instantly whether or not they want to sign up for it.

Is it going to be a personal blog, a straight forward corporate blog or something in between?

2) Who?

Who is writing the blog? Is it a solo effort, a team or even an extended community undertaking. You need to have the committed resources in place if you're going to make any impact.

3) What Name?

You need to decide who you're targeting the blog at, and the tone in which you're going to be doing so. You then need to pick the main theme of the blog and identify the related themes and key words.

You then need to pick the right name or potential names. Do a search on GoDaddy and find what domains are available that best match your name. You might also want to do a trademark search to ensure that no one has trademarked the name. Once you've decided on it, register it quickly and if appropriate register related names.

As a rule it's not worth trying to buy a domain that is already owned.

4) Select Blogging Platform

You need to decide what platform you're going to blog on. There are three main categories:

CMS or eBusiness publishing solution with Blogging capability, e.g. Affino from Emojo
Blogging Software, e.g. MovableType from Six Apart
Blogging Service, e.g. Blogger from Google

If you already have a content management solution integrated into your website then that may give you the best weighting, however for promotional blogs it is frequently good practice to blog on one of the blogging networks which gives you access to all kinds of promotional features at little or no cost.

5) Look and Feel

You need to select / design the look and feel which best matches your blog's editorial direction. Most blogging solutions offer dozens of variations in how your blog can look and you can easily extend these or tailor them to your own requirement.

If it is an official blog you might want to stick with your default corporate style.

6) Blogging Widgets / Auto Engage

To effectively promote your blog it's essential to use the right widgets, see 'Top 5 Blog Widgets' article.

7) Googlify your Blog

You'll need to Googlify, and Yahoo! and MSN your blog. Google offers some great tools that add value to your blog, these include: AdSense, AdWords, Analytics, Co-op and Webmaster Tools.

8) Blognet and Prime Brand

Many companies run a host of inter-related blogs. You can have a policy with strict editorial guidelines for your staff (and PR's), or you can allow them more freedom in their blogs and bring them into the blog network.

In most cases it's worth putting the bulk of your blog promotion efforts into the lead blog brand and then allowing the related brands to benefit from the search engine ranking of the lead blog and the interrelation of the peripheral blogs.

9) Bait and Hook

Getting exposure for your blogs is all about writing content which your customers, prospective customers and the wider industry you're in will find interesting. The process of growing the market awareness for you blog is often called Linkbaiting and means you must write topical or even controversial articles on your subject. In effect content which engages with users.

There are a number of great resources covering Linkbaiting including the Performancing blog.

10) Publishing Schedule

Possibly the single most important factor in the success of your corporate promotions blog is the consistency of your publishing schedule. It means you need to keep it current and aim to have some content at least once each week. If you find you can't keep the blog contemporary you're much better off setting it up as a simple re-direct to your main site.

The Long Haul

Long term the most important elements for success are consistency and topicality. This means blogging on a consistent theme which matches your business goals and always having relevant content when topical events happen in your space.

GoDaddy wins DNS Race between NetNames and Hostway

2007-01-19T18:32:00.000Z

I did an earlier post comparing the service and value for money I would get from two competing DNS providers, namely Hostway and NetNames. It was a short sharp lesson in finding out that all things are not equal in DNS service provision.

The first thing is that price does not equal service. NetNames has one of the most impersonal experiences of any site I've ever used. There's a real lack of humanity in how things are presented and you feel as though you're being processed by some kind of machine. In any case you spend around ten times as much money for service compared to the other two DNS providers for a mediocre solution. That said I could do what I needed to do so far.

The big deal when it comes to DNS hosting for blogs is CName. It's been a while since I had to set up a DNS so everything was fresh this time round. What I discovered is that Hostway doesn't support CName management in it's DNS offering. You have to buy into it's Hosting offering to be able to amend a CName record. To be honest that feels like a con and leaves me feeling somewhat conned by their service. It meant that all the domains I had set up on Hostway for my blogs were usesless since the blogs are set up on Blogger (Google) and TypePad (Six Apart).

This left me with finding a third alternative. Luckily I remembered GoDaddy (it's those ads) and did some research before I spent any more money. Sure enough both Blogger and TypePad recommended GoDaddy as a possible provider and had instructions for setting up the CName host.

The GoDaddy experience itself is enlightening. The trick is to ignore all the bright lights :o) The basic DNS is all you need. I think if you bought every extra they offer on the way to the checkout a $7 solution becomes $5,000. Once you've bought the domain they have the fastest activation of any of the providers and the most effective user interface (again ignore the bright lights).

So in the race between Hostway and NetNames the winner is GoDaddy.

By the way another (quite shocking) revelation for me, at least in terms of customer service is that I can't transfer my Hostway domains for two months so making a mistake in selecting your DNS provider is very costly in time even if it isn't in a financial sense.

The other thing to note is that It took Emojo's techie all of one minute to set up a CName entry from when I asked him to do it so the process is quite straight forward.

eBusiness Blogging Services - First Impressions

2007-01-19T18:05:00.000Z

I've spent the last 24 hours looking into where's best to blog online from a professional perspective. There are four main providers I've looked at, rather than focusing on industry specific sites at this stage. The providers are: Google (Blogger), Yahoo (360), MSN (Live Spaces) and Six Apart (See below).

On the surface Yahoo and MSN exclude themselves from the business blogging side since their blogging services are much more social networking based than business orientated. Six Apart has numerous offerings including: Vox, LiveJournal, TypePad and Movable Type. Three of these are immediately excluded from this exercise since two of them are consumer oriented (Vox and LiveJournal) with Vox being a My Space Lite with bells on offering and LiveJournal being more of a Networking offering, and with Movable Type being a software offering rather than a service.

CNet have done a Blogging Service Review where they come to a similar conclusion and basically talking up TypePad versus Blogger.

In any event I ended up with a shortlist of two. TypePad from Six Apart and Blogger from Google. Blogger was the easiest to set up and being free was the less challenging of the two. I immediately set up Google Adwords and Google Analytics with it and used Picasa to upload images (after some trial and errors with PNGs). The truth is that as a rapid deployment solution for setting up a business blog it's hard to beat. It also worked the first time with almost everything that was tried.

TypePad almost didn't happen since it has a 'Free' month's trial but requires you enter in a credit card number to get anywhere. I also found that I had to buy into the top level Pro service to do things I considered basic such as posting in Google Analytics tracking codes. The TypePad experience is rather challenging. The results are good but the route to getting there is littered with failures and having to do a lot of code editing which rather surprised me.

I went a long way through rolling out my TypePad blog on the browser level before I got stuck by the Google Analyst problem and at that stage I had to convert my site to an Advanced Template site which broke a number of elements I'd already set up. For users wanting a smooth experience then Blogger is the hands down winner.

I'm fortunate to have had ten year's development experience when it came to TypePad because it meant that everything was relatively easy to grasp, although the process or rolling out elements was somewhat frustrating.

When it comes to the eventual result the fact is that TypePad introduced a number of concepts that I would never have gotten by only rolling out Blogger. It introduced Widgets; integration with 3rd party services such as Technorati and FeedBurner. It also gave more freedom in layout (on the surface) although Blogger can be coded to the n'th degree if that's your desire.
I've taken the decision to use mainly Google tools on the Blogger blog and competing tools on the TypePad blog to see if the general market is better than Google, but in some cases I will be using tools across both if they stand above the competitors.

The jury is still out as to which solution is the best in the medium term, but that will largely be settled by Google Analyst.

The Domain Race - NetNames v Hostway

2007-01-19T17:57:00.000Z

In my parallel Blogs setup I'm also evaluating two domain registrars. Netnames for my Blogger Blog and Hostway for my TypePad blog. So far Hostway's winning hands down. I registered three (good) domains for less than one (not very good domain) on Net Names.

I think that although the price is important, and there's a massive difference in the price, we're talking hundreds of percent, it all depends on the service delivery and service fees. Neither of the initial costs added up to a hill of beans so it's not a big deal at this stage. What surprised me is that both talk about a process that takes 2 to 3 days to complete. I don't remember it taking so long in past, but then again I used to own an ISP then and we were a registrar so things happened much faster.

The services themselves were both easy to use with NetNames offering a Trademark lookup, and Hostway offering a quicker domain registration process. I stopped using NetNames a number of years ago but old habits die hard and I'd forgotten that I didn't use them anymore, until I compared the price with Hostway.

I'll keep you posted over the next couple of weeks with the developments as all the assignments should have happened by then and I'll have a clearer idea about service levels and costs. I'll also annouce the winner in this particular race.

Top 5 Blog Widgets

2007-01-15T15:39:00.000Z

One of the greatest developments for blogging over the last year has been the introduction widgets here are five of the best.

Having just gone through the process of setting up my blog (after a couple of years in the wilderness) the conclusion has to be that blogs no longer work effectively without a few widgets to provide essential promotional, community and display widgets.

There are a number of Widget libraries online now but a lot of vendors are competing by having their own widget libraries as well. The company which appears to have done the most for Blog Widgets is TypePad, but the fact that it's a big challenge to use these widgets in Advanced Template mode highlights that there's still a way to go before widgets become truly plug and play.

Most of the major players need to evolve their Widget strategies over 2007 as these will increasingly become the way that content is going to be distibuted including news headlines, videos, images and, communications (such as Skype) and community participation.

The Top 5 Blog Widgets

1) Snap Image Preview

This is a great inclusion. It's not really a widget but the image previews generated are priceless in allowing users a sneek peek at pages without having to wait and see what's on them.

2) FeedBurner Chicklet Chooser

FeedBurner has to be the main means of diagnosing the performance of your blog. The Chicklet generates subscription buttons that connect with the FeedBurner analytics.

3) FeedBurner Email Subscription

Add easy to use email subscriptions to your blog. It's as simple as that. This is an essential add-on to keep up to date with the latest developments if you don't have continuous access to a feed reader.

4) Google Co-op Search

Set up a custom search spanning a number of sites. This community enabled search allows you to configure search results at will and even include AdSense results. You can set up a search just for your local blog, your blog network or any combination of sites.

5) Technorati Searchlet

The Technorati Searchlet is great for searching within the content of your blog with the addition of highlighting your Technorati profile and seeing all the linked in blogs.

There's no doubt that Widgets are going to be even bigger in 2007 and that a whole industry will be set up to service them. Their impact on everything from community sites to content distribution is going to be amazing and may cause a number of user metrics to be altered. At the very least blogs will never be the same.

Entering the Blogosphere

2007-01-15T02:13:00.000Z

I've been putting off entering the Blogoshpere for a while now since I'm fully aware of the level of dedication required to maintain a blog, let alone a number of blogs such as a personal / friend based one and separate business related blogs.

What I wasn't aware of was all the additional effort that is required these days in establishing your blog. The last time I blogged seriously, only Syndic8 had any traction when it came to finding a centralised Blogspace. Now I've had to do things like set up my personal Technorati Profile and get to know FeedBurner and Ping-o-Matic as well as tools such as Google Blog Search and Google Reader.

A great development are the enhancements to FireFox and Internet Explorer which make reading and tracking feeds a breeze right in the browser.

What has been really inspiring has been the range of widgets available to blogs, ranging from the new Google Co-op Search which allows me to roll out a unified search for all my sites through to the Technorati Blog Search and FeedBurner email notification widget.

What I'm looking forward to at this stage but will only get to appreciate are the statistics which are now available via both Google Analytics and FeedBurner. These are powerful analytic engines which should provide real insight into how the Blogs evolve and how they're performing.

All of that said, writing the blogs is certainly an aid to a more thorough approach to many of the casual research tasks that I've been undertaking and are forcing an evaluation of how blogs are going to develop over the coming years.

The biggest split, I believe, will be between the internal blogs which are aimed at keeping a company buzzing and the public facing blogs which are typically individual led or are aimed at generating revenue for a product or via ad sales. This will see radically different solutions evolve to cater for the two markets.

In Emojo we're working on corporate and community based blogging solutions which are primarily directed internally and are there to generate the community buzz and act as a knowledge base for the community / organisation.

The big challenge in that space are to allow different departments to share information; to enforce security; promote regional cohesion and act as a catalyst for new ideas throughout the organisation. The fun part is going to be to see how the closed community blogs evolve versus the open ones.

The Google Economy

2007-01-14T09:31:00.000Z

I'm mightily impressed with what I'm internally referencing as the Google Economy. It's a whole existence of smart sites and apps which are very well conceived and which hang brilliantly together.

I have recently started using the Google Desktop Search again with the Deskbar active most of the time as I have a nice widescreen laptop. I was amazed to see that a gadget ' Web Clips' had picked up my latest blog postings since I never really used it much and certainly didn't configure it.

What it does is simply pick up the RSS / Atom feeds of the pages you're on and automatically pulls in the latest content. Since I enabled the feeds on both my personal (on Yahoo) and professional blogs (on Blogger and emojo.com) they were instantly picked up on.

What's also interesting is the stronger business slant that I'm finding on the Google tools versus the other vendors I've tried so far. Yahoo in particular seems to have gone for a whole suite of personal tools which have a highly Yahoo centric slant on them and don't (at least on the surface) offer anything like the ability to develop a professional online presense in the way the Google tools do. The other thing that stands out is how easily I've been able to do thing with Google which are in reality quite challenging when considered individually.

I've yet to start working with the MSN tools to the same degree and am also going to experiment with the Six Apart related tools to fnd out what they have to offer. Right now a number of SEO tasks are in a standby position as I wait to hear back from organisations. Once they're through the next leap will start to take place as I can start to promote my blogs and create a more integrated mind space online.

Affino Net TV

2007-01-14T02:18:00.000Z

Here's an experiment. I'm using Picasa with Blogger for the first time to see how easy it is to post pictures to the blog. The one on the right is the current version of our Net TV solution in Affino which allows Broadcasters to stream their videos and channels online and surround their broadcast with powerful community and eCommerce tools.

It has a built in Ad server and can connect easily with solutions such as Google AdWords to monetise the media content instantly. The platform also includes advanced capabilities such as Pay-per-view and Video on Demand.

Version 3 which is being rolled our in January / February is a great leap forward in that it allows companies to easily manage sixteen media formats online and automatically generates the appropriate broadcast / viewing / download interface for each of the formats. This includes video formats such as Flash Video, QuickTime and Windows Media; document formats such as Word Doc and PDFs and even handles elements such as CAD drawings and excel spreadsheets.

The beauty of the solution is that you can also syndicate your content using Podcasting with no additional effort and can offer paid for download and rental services at the click of a button.

Selling media is as simple as a) Upload it, b) Make it into a catalogue item and put a price on it; which shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes.

We developed our own Flash Video player using Flex (what a great technology that is). It means that we're one step away from the YouTube experience with Affino and that's coming real soon. Flash Video is an amazing concept and is what allowed video sharing to take off. It's so easy to distribute and is far more efficient on the current web infrastructure than the streaming alternatives. Now all we need is to have it working Live in the way that Windows Media works so well.

We'll be launching some cool customer sites on Affino Net TV over the coming months and already have a great example in X-treme Video which showcases the Video catalogue feature of Affino. It means you can embed any media in your catalogue, including Videos and these can be made available to download in PC / iPod / PSP / 3G formats either as trailers or as the full video.