The Weekly Wrap

By Mark Evans in Main Page 4 Comments

A weekly wrap of the week that was on MET:

Highlights:

- The week started with an unveiling of sorts as my brother, Sean, and I talked about how we had been writing and trying to attract an audience to another blog, Four Reasons Why. Truth be told, it difficult to gain a following on the blogosphere unless you’re producing great content, you’re focused on a particular niche, and/or you’re lucky enough to catch the wind in your sails.

- The mesh meetup was a great success with more than 100 people coming out on a Monday night to socialize. It just goes to show again that as much as tech people love to e-mail, IM, Twitter, etc., there’s a huge appetite to get together in person. meshU starting to gain momentum as more people recognize the strong line-up of speakers.

- My friend and co-mesh gang member, Stuart MacDonald, launched his new online cruising start-up, Tripharbour.com. mesh@sea only a matter of time!

- Is the iPhone finally coming to Canada? The Toronto Star reports Rogers could be coming out in May/June as part of a campaign focusing on touch screen phones. Truth be told, I’ll believe it when I see it given it’s been a year since the iPhone was launched. Canada is a digital peasant!

Most popular posts:

- Who’s Going to Say the “P” Word, looking at how aggregation services such as Friendfeed are really social networking portals. Yes, portals are back.

- Talking to Disqus: A Q&A with Disqus co-founder Daniel Ha

- Communications 101: How to Communicate Better: A post written in April 2007 that for some strange reason keeps attracting traffic, probably because it’s the number one result on Google if you search for “how to communicate”. I got to figure out a way to monetize this baby! Hello, Skype?

New Theme

- As a Canadian, I really liked the red and white theme done by Headset Options but it was time for a change. The new theme is called “Statement” by Jai Nischal Verma (aka BlogohBlog), a WordPress blogger and really good designer. Next WP project: giving the header some sizzle.

Mystery of the week

- a sudden 20% drop in Feedburner subscribers after steady growth over the past three months. Maybe many people are doing some RSS spring cleaning!

Here, Beta, Beta

- Betas in the “must check out pile”: Evernote, Fav.or,it, Presdo, Toluu. Betas checked out but given a quick pass: The Filter (not intuitive, couldn’t see the benefits), Alert Thingy (bad interface, not user-friendly, the hype is killing it).

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Open for Business: Tripharbor

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 3 Comments

Picture 2-36
The entrepreneurial adventures of my friend, Stuart MacDonald, have taken a really exciting turn with the much-anticipated launch of Tripharbor.com (Tripharbour for all of us Canadians!)

Known for months as “Project X” while being developed, Tripharbor is a place where can research and book cruises, as well as connect with other cruising aficionados – and there are a growing number of them out there. Stuart was kind enough to give a bunch of us a sneak peek last week, and Tripharbor is really impressive!

Here’s how Tripharbor describes itself:

We want Tripharbor to be the sort of place where people can get all the information they could ever need to learn about and plan really great cruises. Where they can meet other cruise vacationers and join a community of cruise fans, get the skinny on the various cruise lines and destinations, share opinions, and generally make the cruise planning experience just about a million times better.

My only cruising experience was taking the Queen Elizabeth II from France to New York when I was 12-years-old but from what I can tell, cruising has changed dramatically and it’s a fast-growing market appealing a wide variety of demographics and interests.

I’m not sure I can convince the-one-who-rules (aka my lovely, sweet and kind wife) to actually take a cruise but I’m stoked about Tripharbor. I’m excited Stuart is doing something entrepreneurial that he’s passionate about, and I’m excited to see a Canadian start-up launch with bold ambitions to really disrupt how an industry operates.

Go, Tripharbor, Go!

P.S. Stuart, when can we expect the initial mesh cruise?

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Yahoo Wants its Groove Back

By Mark Evans in M&A 2 Comments

Yahoo is a fascinating story these days.

On one hand, it’s the subject of a hostile takeover bid from Microsoft that may or may not happen depending on which way the wind is blowing, each company’s most recent financial performance (Yahoo – okay; Microsoft – great), how Jerry Yang and/or Steve Ballmer feel when they get of bed in the morning, etc.

In the meantime, Yahoo is furiously working to give itself a corporate makeover. All of a sudden, it’s unveiled a new social strategy where it will become a friendly and open platform – in addition to offering content and services to millions of consumers.

It’s an ambitious strategy and the bold moves that everyone was expected from Yang when he took over as CEO, and promised dramatic changes in 100 days.

From here, there are two questions:

1. Is it too late?

Why now as opposed to a year ago when the idea of a Microsoft takeover was mere speculation. What has prompted Yahoo to get bullish strategically and embrace some of the key trends (openness, portability, etc.).

2. Does it matter?

One of Yahoo’s biggest problems is it allowed itself to get stale. Whether it was complacency and bad management decisions, Yahoo became a super tanker unable to move quickly strategically, rather than a flexible online player able to take advantage of key trends. Yahoo tried to address this situation by acquiring some interesting start-ups but then essentially ignored the start-ups it had brought into the fold.

In the process, Yahoo lost serious ground to competitors. A few examples: Yahoo Search is a distant second behind Google; Yahoo Mail is having a hard time competing against GMail and Live.com/Hotmail, and Yahoo is having such a difficult time in the ad business, it’s turning to Google for help. From a personal perspective, I rarely use Yahoo services with the exception of Yahoo Finance, del.icio.us and Flickr.

What’s interesting about Yahoo, however, is it has some terrific online properties that aren’t doing as well as they should. Whether it’s Yahoo staying independent or Microsoft taking over, the key question is whether Yahoo can get its groove back.

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Who’s Going to Say the “P” Word?

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 12 Comments

It has been interesting to watch aggregation become a hot trend among the digerati as new players such as Friendfriend strive to provide people with ways to more easily manage all of their social networking activities.

In simple terms, it’s based on the concept of one-stop shopping. Why visit a number of different places (blogs, del.icio.us, RSS readers, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) if you can go to a single place to do and get it all. The digerati love the concept because their online lives are becoming more complex and difficult to manage as they add more tools into the daily mix.

For all the talk about aggregation, the word that is not being mentioned (or even whispered!) is “portal”. Think about it, what Friendfeed, Twhirl, etc. are really creating are social networking portals.

Of course, no one wants to say “portal” because it’s a dirty word associated with the dot-com boom of the late-1990s. Back then, portals (Yahoo, AOL, etc.) were all the rage because it was thought people would spend all their time on a single Web site if it offered everything they could possibly want. For some people, portals worked but many people strayed away from the one-stop shopping concept for a variety of reasons, including the fact there was not enough customization.

This led to the emergence of Portal 2.0 with personalized portals such as Pageflakes, Netvibes and iGoogle. Although far from perfect, these players gave people the ability to build their own portal pages using a variety of sources. Of these players, Netvibes (which I plan to play around with again) continues to show the most potential, especially since the recent launch of its Ginger upgrade.

We are now in the middle of Portal 3.0 where customization moves from content, RSS feeds, etc. to social networking services. There is a race happening to see who can become the social networking portal. Friendfeed has the most momentum while Twhirl and others are scrambling to keep pace.

In theory, social networking portals make sense so people can monitor their digital lives but the question is whether enough people will use multiple social networks to justify using a social networking portal. As Facebook users, for example, migrate to Twitter, do they really want a service to monitor Facebook and Twitter, or simple a Twitter service?

In any event, the portal is back whether you want to admit it or not.

Update: Speaking of Twitter, TechCrunch suggests that “a flip or flop proposition” given it has no discernible business plan yet, and appears to be running out of money.

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Twitter’s Business Model: Japanese Style

By Mark Evans in Web 2.0 2 Comments Tags: , ,

A couple comments on the launch of a Japanese version of Twitter – complete with advertisements.

1. This is clearly the future of Twitter. Anyone who takes a look at Twitter Japan’s interface has everything they need to know on what Twitter’s non-Japanese future will be, or, at least, should be.

Twitter has reached the point from a critical mass perspective where it’s time to finally turn its strategic sights from getting big to getting business. Twitter is the king of the 140-character messaging space, which gives it the power to make the rules. Look at last weekend’s technical troubles. Instead of Twitter getting pounded, bloggers were literally crying because they couldn’t Twitter. That’s clout!

Twitter can now use its stature to implement a business model(s) with little or no fear that a lot of users are going to flee to rivals such as Pownce and Jaiku. Twitter can roll new versions of the service with advertising a la Twitter Japan, or premium versions without advertising. It can also strike deals with API users to do revenue-sharing.

2. Unless something dramatic happens, Pownce’s prospects of challenging Twitter have evaporated. If Twitter can start to generate revenue instead of just being terribly popular, the 140-character messaging game will be over with Pownce, et al left in the dust.

Truth be told, it would be a shame because Pownce has a lot going for it. But as someone mentioned to me earlier this week, users go where the users are – which is why Twitter has so much traction. Mike Arrington probably summed up in a post yesterday about Twitter’s elite status.

There are many competitors out there, and some of them are better than Twitter. But since everyone is already using Twitter, and the rate of growth is increasing, going to those competitors makes no sense.

As Twitter’s business starts to unfold, it will be interesting to see how it stickhandles the introduction of advertising into the service. No doubt, some people will be upset/disappointed but most of these people will squawk for awhile before pounding out some more 140-character messages.

Update: Privacy has reared its head in the Twitter-Sphere amid reports that someone’s direct messages appeared within the public Twitter stream. It’s just another example about how people forget that private stuff on the Web isn’t guarantee to stay private. If you really want to have a private conversation, use some old technology called a telephone.

Can the Green Movement Save E-Billing?

By Mark Evans in Web-based Services 5 Comments

In theory, e-billing has a lot to offer the consumer: less mail and paper arriving in the your mailbox, the convenience of having all of your bills arrive reliably, and the ability to quickly and easily pay your bills online.

For companies adopting e-billing, the biggest benefit are clearly lower costs. Rather than spend $1 or so generating a paper bill and then putting it in the mail, they can create and send e-bills for pennies.

The reality, however, is e-billing has yet to catch fire with 95% of households still getting a paper bill each month. Why? Because the benefits for companies sending bills outweigh the benefits for people receiving bills. If you’re a consumer, what’s the real incentive for embracing e-billing? Do you get a small break on your bills – say 1% – if you receive it electronically? No. So, where’s the carrot for giving up paper for bits and bytes each billing cycle?

Nevertheless, bill senders continue to pound away on consumers about the wonders of e-billing. Roger, for example, is running a radio campaign in which some guy talks about how e-billing has “changed his life” because he longer has a stack of paper bills on his kitchen table every month. Frankly, it’s a pitch that may resonate with some people but it’s still struggling to hit home with the mainstream consumer.

There is hope, however, for e-billing: the environment/green movement. If bills can be sent electronically rather than using paper then fewer trees need to be chopped down. Given how enthusiastically consumers are biting on everything green these days, saving the environmentally could be the salvation for e-billing.

Of course, sending bills online does involve energy to power all those computers and servers so it’s not like e-billing has no carbon footprint. But if I were an e-biller, I’d be painting myself green all over in a major way while counting the savings as consumers sign on because they want to do something good for Mother Earth.

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