Huge week for mobile IM. Israel based Followap, provider of Vodafone, was sold to Neustar for $140M. Montreal based OZ, Followap’s rival and provider of Cingular and T-Mobile, has racked an impressive $34M en route to massive expansion. Comverse is also a player of course, being the provider of Verizon Wireless’ mobile IM, but Comverse has other issues to deal with right now.

On the other side of the equation, Yahoo and Nokia have announced a partnership for the purpose of embedding Yahoo IM & Email into Nokia’s mass market series 40 platform. This will make Yahoo! email and mobile IM available for pretty much every GSM operator in the world. Big news. Too bad Yahoo is a distant 3rd when it comes to IM, but none the less it’s a significant move.

Quite hectic? yes. Chaotic mess? not exactly. What we do have is another stage of a titanic positioning war going on about business that has not yet matured.

Operators have their own vision of mobile IM, one that is very different then the one large internet players have in mind and that’s the sorcerer’s stone. Mobile operators, like Vodafone, would like to see their mobile subscribers receive all their communication services from the operators. For that to happen, some fundamental assets must come alive within the operator’s network. The subscriber’s mobile address book is such a key asset. SMS is already the mobile IM killer app, but the address book is still static, meaning that presence information is not incorporated. If Vodafone could add that, then your mobile address book would become a defacto IM launchpad. Moreover, operators are better positioned to provide mapping and other location based services that can eventually generate high premiums on top of the presence infrastructure. If operators had their way, there would be no need to use MSN Messenger on a mobile phone. Ever.

On the other side the IM players like MSN and AOL have a huge advantage and that is the people’s support. Users already associate themselves with the IM networks and they are not going to switch identities anytime soon. If you asked users for what THEY want, they would tell you that they want the exact same Internet experience on their mobile phone. I have an MSN account already and I use a mobile phone from Orange - does anyone really see me voluntarily becoming aner@orange instead of aner@msn? This is why operators end up going down the presence route. It is a much better strategy then head banging.

So who’s winning the mobile IM battle? Is there real business behind all the smoke?

So far the market has been split geographically. Internet centric North America has been heavily leaning towards the Internet IM players which have easily won the first round. You can find MSN, AOL and Yahoo clients on every US operator today, most of them enabled by OZ. Mobile centric Europe is more complicated, thorough and slow. Vodafone tried to launch it’s own mobile IM community, failed miserably, and sent the rest of the European operators to a 5 year halt. However, the recent maturity of IMS as well as progress with interoperability (a strategic GSMA effort which Followap, being the global provider for vodafone, wisely jumped on top of) has put operators back in the race again. If operators can really pull presence off the shelf, make it work and most importantly make it interoperable, they may have a shot at keeping MSN and Yahoo out of their space.

The sad truth is that both sides could have had this battle long won by now if not for strategic mistakes. The Internet IM players original sin was lack of interoperability. Operators cannot go through deployment cycles of 3 different IM products and that’s what AOL, MSN and Yahoo stupidly tried to put them through. Their second mistake was their reluctance to partner with mobile enablers. MSN, AOL and Yahoo thought they had mobile all figured out. Of course they didn’t. By the time they realized they don’t have a clue 3 years and half of the enablers where gone.  Operators on the other hand simply could not make a decision on going for an application. They issued RFP after RFP, stumbling upon business models, billing models, client vs. no client, presence vs. non-presence all and all ending up without a single successful deployment.

So is there business involved? I personally see both applications - live address book and mobile IM - will co-exist side by side, with a clear edge towards the existing Internet IM networks. I don’t really see mobile IM becoming a killer app. SMS does the job very well and presence has too much of a load with privacy and reliability issues. There are two main reason I see an edge for MSN, AOL and Yahoo. One is the fact existing IM addicts are already on their networks. The other, more important one, is the fact they provide a comprehensive list of services including email, search, commerce and entertainment. This creates new business and is not an improvement of an existing business. That’s also why the Nokia deal is valuable - it pushes Internet as an off the shelf product to mobile devices and makes operators decision cycles shorter and more focused, and that by itself is very good news.  

As for the long term vision for Presence… I don’t know. it’s like world peace. Makes a lot of sense but for some reason is very hard to get accompished.

      

Well, at least much ado about little.

A lot of expected hoopla all over the web today. Techrcunch, Om Malik and Pete Cashmore all report an earlier than expected “Lite” (in other words, censored) launch of YouTube on Verizon’s vCast (vTube?). The service could launch as early as next month (!). Woo-hoo!

Ok… and? Is there a real need and is this the right answer?

Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm lists the better and less hyped mobile video services that are already available. And this is a key point - if we put the hot brands aside, what do we have here? If commercial content is censored and explicit content is blocked, How meaningful is a random collection of bloopers on your mobile? because “Lite” means that’s pretty much the offer.

Most people I know do not just transform their Internet experience to their mobile phone. It takes a totally different approach - one much more focused, one that is easy to use and most importantly one that offers real value content. I am not sure YouTube is the ultimate source for that type of content. Then again perhaps the folks at GoogleTube have a trick or two at hand waiting to be pulled.

As an interesting side note, It will be interesting to see if people use vTube to upload video clips to the web. If so, this will be an interesting case study for real life MMS.

Let’s wait and see.

      

When I first Techerd (“TechCrunch read”…I techerd..u techer…did you techer?…) about Like.com launch a few weeks ago I was really intrigued. The service, powered by Riya, was described as “.. the first true visual search engine, where the contents of photos are used to search and retrieve similar items”.

Now this is not a post about investigative journalism. I happen to be intrigued as this coincided with my bi-annual search for my next watch. Sometimes this is just a fantasy search and sometimes real - a fact only other watch freaks will identify with. In any case, the search was on. The borders of this search were wide – off and online. From regular stores, through ebay, amazon and onto any place I could find something new and original to satisfy “DA’crave” (this time - large dial, vintage looking dive watches). So here comes like.com and provides me with an opportunity to genuinely test innovative search technology when all I have in my mind is a fixation for large dial, vintage dive watches. Go figure. But if you think of a Like.com real life scenario, this is a great way to start.

What you need when you search Like.com are visual anchors, in my case the likes are Vintage Omega or Panerai. All I can say is that the search was magical. The first big difference I noticed, and this is where innovative technology provides exciting results, is the fact I found watches and brands I would never have found otherwise. A kind of lateral journey that takes you to places you never visited, thus providing the true added value of internet search.

You start with the original visual anchor and get a ‘should be improved interface’. You then point to point to visual features that generate further search results. As a sidenote, Like.com can definitely invest more in usability. It starts easy and gets complicated – too many tuning dials and radio buttons to select from. Imagine searching in Google but always seeing the advanced search fields. Overkill. Keep a clean interface, provide the main visual search tool and hide the rest. But since it is an alpha, I let go. When come the gamma …I won’t (why doesn’t anyone launch a gamma?? :/ ).

Without that simplifying mass market appeal will be low and Like.com will be positioned as a high end search engine – and that’s too bad because it’s not. For most people on the planet (homo sapiens at least) visual search is as natural if not more natural then contextual.

Bottom line - Like.com is a clear winner. As a user I expect to use it more and more and let other people know about it because its very useful. In the context of the ‘industry’ I expect some interesting things to come. I see Google or Yahoo munching this small company up before their niche market hits the masses. Good luck and thanks for the ride.

      

No.

Or more precisely: Definite “No!” if you’re a web start up. Simple ”No!” if you’re YouTube or Skype. Selectively if you’re Verizon Wireless. Yes if you’re Nokia.

For web start ups it’s a dead end, and not one I see opening anytime soon. 

The industry has been debating the mobile clients forever. Java for Mobile (J2ME) was supposed to make it easy ages ago - portable across devices, universal, safe. Ya right.

So did downloading servers, OTA (over the air delivery) standards, new APIS, self installers… We are almost 10 years and gazillions of dollars later and progress has been marginal at best. People download ringtones and sometimes games, they don’t download true mobile applications.

There are two major huge problems that prevent 3rd party mobile clients from reaching mass market users. The first and major problem is behavioral. People just don’t download software to their mobile phone. They may download stuff that doesn’t look like software, but not software in the true sense. What is it that makes people download ringtones, sometimes games, but not mobile Skype or Google Maps or MSN IM? Good question.

My experience shows that people see IM, Skype and Maps as features, and that they still expect communication features to come “with the phone”.  In most cases they can’t really tell whether the feature was provided by the carrier or by the phone manufacturer. They certainly don’t care. Then there is the scary factor. Downloading a mobile application is an action performed in uncharted territory for most people. It involves hacking the phone, installing something in a very unfamiliar environment, going through all sorts of warning messages, messing up with the most important accessory they have and risking a lot of rollback time. Nah-uh!

Oliver Starr from Mobile Crunch has summarized it beautifully:

“I had the opportunity to look at a substantial number of companies planning on operating in the mobile space… In short I’ve spent an awful lot of time directly engaged in the mobile sector and most of that time focused on mobile applications.

I can tell you honestly that I would never simply come out and bash a company based upon a show of hands – even one from a technology conference like Under the Radar. However, what you don’t know is that I have been posing the same question; “By a show of hands, how many people here have downloaded something to their mobile handset that was neither a ring tone nor a wall paper?” Every time I’ve spoken at an event for the last two years. That is to say that I’ve asked thousands of people this same question across dozens of events over a period of years.

In any case, across all the conferences I’ve spoken at and all the audiences I’ve queried the MOST I’ve ever had answer in the affirmative was at the Under the Radar Conference recently and even then the total was under five percent of the attendees.”

I personally trust first hand show of hands very much. It is definitely an indication.

The other major problem is technical. Deploying a mobile client across a wide variety of mobile phones is one via Dolorosa. It’s usually hard to get it working properly on one. But then there are hundreds of different devices out there. This makes it not easy even for players of the magnitude of Skype, YouTube and Google. Even they don’t just do it. Om Malik picked up a WSJ piece on Skype’s Chief Executive Officer Niklas Zennstrom dealing with this very issue. When they discuss the mobile future of Skype, Niklas admits that it’s simply too damn difficult:

“When we begun developing the mobile phone version we didn’t realize the number of technical obstacles. It is challenging and is taking much longer than expected,”

Om then goes on and lists the technical problems Skype face which are very generic. In a nutshell, most Mobile applications require CPU that halts the phone, consume bandwidth that is still too scarce and if that’s not enough they go on and kill the batteries. Again, I couldn’t agree more.

Some players are capable of deploying mobile clients. Verizon, for example, is deploying millions of clients using it’s GetItNow platform. This doesn’t mean web service providers should do this at home. The key is a captive user base and a narrow range of problems, a combination only few Tier 1 carriers can claim. Verizon’s user base is one asset even Google is jealous of - captive access to 50 million paying subscribers. Verizon then narrowed the domain by selecting a single application platform (BREW) that is mature enough to be a true ecosystem. Finally, they built a marketing program that actually works.

Moreover. With a huge user base, porting investments per device make sense. Still, even Verizon preloads strategic applications to the phone before the point of sale, because as friendly and as robust the catalog can be, most people still find downloading an application too challenging.

How many players do you know who can pull that off? Not many. So what do you do as a start up?

You stand the best chance if your service does not require any installation or manipulation of the mobile device. If your value can be delivered via SMS, WAP, Streaming or any other mechanism the phone is naturally provisioned to do, you’re far better off. If a client is an absolute must then you should (again agreeing with Oliver Pratt) give it for free and get it on a carrier’s deck. YouTube is going to find out they can’t go anywhere without Verizon. MSN and AOL found that out long ago. Skype already outsources the problem to niche providers such as iSkoot and EQO - players that are focused on mobile enablement and that only. To them it makes sense and the giants, assuming they are smart enough and with reasonable egos, will leave it to them.

Most web services, however, will either stay on the mobile web or die trying to distribute a mobile client.

      

Many people mistakenly think YouTube is only about bloopers. YouTube is also the best music video station in the world right now. Much better than middle-aging MTV.

Check out YouTube’s results for:

Snoop Doggy Dogg - Drop it Like it Hot

Beck - Cellphone’s Dead

Justin Timberlake - Sexy Back

Pearl Jam - Jeremy

The fact you can find every music video you can think of is cool but anticipated. It’s what you can find IN ADDITION that makes it so exciting.  Acapella versions, live versions, professional and amateur covers, interviews, bloopers, related videos… WOW.

The problem with YouTube as the new MTV is not copyright issues. I am sure Justin Timberlake is happy with the exposure on YouTube just like Eddy Vedder is or the current indie rising star.

The problem with YouTube is still with the poor quality of video streaming. The basic watching experience still sucks. Simply put. Internet technology has not caught up yet with the social habits.

      

“We have to think out of the box”. Duh! What does that mean exactly?

I haven’t been able to compile the real stats, but I can safely say that in In the overwhelming majority of real life scenarios there is no creativity in the end result. More often ”Thinking out of the box” actually translates to “Digging deeply into the box”. Playing around with service delivery models, for example, is thinking well inside the box. Changing a model is usually a result of lagging sales. Lagging sales, again by the rule of thumb, are attributed to a bad product more often than to a bad organization. When you have a bad product your problem is not with it being sold as software vs. served as a service. Your problem is with the fact you have a bad product. Still, companies change their delivery models much more frequently than they change their basic proposition.

The other big chunk can be classified as “All over the place”. There are a few recurring patterns of mistaking “All over the place” for “Thinking out of the box”. We all know them. Relaunching the website every week is one classy symptom. You know how it goes. Someone thought of a new product “out of the box”, discussed it with the VP of Sales who liked it, they walked by the CEO near the vending machine and together figured they already have the technology, so why not launch it and see if it gets traction. Since they all “think out of the box”, they just put a product page on the website and sent a memo to all sales reps informing them of the new product. Re-orging every quarter is a same version of that syndrom. By Geography, by business unit, by product. Different mix but usually a similar result.

Another symptom is dramatic changes to the pricing model. Offering your product for free works if you’re Skype. You need to be on to something so fundamental, that offering it for free is both compelling and makes sense in the overall picture. It is extremely rare. It also requires a real, solid premium opportunity. In most cases, though, it’s just evidence your product is not good enough (sorry, not demanded enough).

It’s not that companies shouldn’t entertain new ideas at all times. It’s not like companies shouldn’t look for new business and business model at all times. Good companies must do that and indeed do that every day. It’s all a question of whether good and responsible judgment is present. Truly creative people know the right moment for going really out of the box vs. the moments when they have to stick to a good, even if sometimes painful, course that got them so far.  

The lucky few that truly do think out of the box make our lives interesting. Nisan Gabbay of StartUp Review gets it and knows how to write about it. In his recent entry he covers Xfire, a company that went from pure gaming to Instant Messaging as supportive technology to gaming. Xfire was sold for $102M in cash this May and when you read Nisan’s review you realize it is no fluke. These folks blended creativity with execution and made it happen.

I have a special sentiment to IM. I worked for two different IM companies in the past. It is clear to me that IM can generate a lot of money but also that it needs to add value to an application and not center around it’s stand alone value. By an application I don’t mean another communication service such as voice or video. For that we already have MSN or Skype. I mean a service where IM is a helpful supportive channel such as gaming or other community driven services. It’s good to see evidence of how IM can be a cash cow if only used creatively.

      

“Dead Man Walking”? Perhaps. Jerry McGuire? Hell, no way. 

Like many of you I too read the “Peanut butter memo” by Brad Garlinghouse of Yahoo. I expected one hell of a memo. One that draws a corridor standing ovation. An inspiring moment that would carry a sequel to “Jerry McGuire” (I strongly recommend reading the original Jerry McGuire memo as well as a magnificent post at the Valleybag).

I was really unimpressed. We used to call these people MOO (pronounced “MOOOOO”) which also stands for “Masters Of the Obvious”. Yes, Yahoo is middle-aging and needs a few changes and wins. Great news Brad. We appreciate your concern. It’s nice to see you care.

The style is also not that great. The sequence is too structured. The arguments are kind of generalized with too little detail or imagination. The frequent proclamations of love for Yahoo, the “let’s all rally behind this great company!” chants all look just a bit dramatized under the context.

I won’t go into deeper analysis of Yahoo’s real status. Dan Blank offers a nice starting point for those who wish to learn some more. My point is different. I think Brad pulled a cheap shot that will only backfire.

From a Senior Vice President at Yahoo I expect a little bit more than bitching about general lack of focus. I expect much more than moaning about unfair compensation structures. I expect more than an overly simplistic laundry list of mistakes / overlaps everyone is well aware of. Oh, and I definitely expect more than sending a memo to the CEO only to leak it by the back channels.

What do I expect? Suggesting focus and strategy for example. How can Yahoo compete with Google and MySpace? How can Yahoo compete with the smaller media and social sites? How can Yahoo be relevant in 5 years in a world of rapidly increasing diversity? Should Yahoo expand it’s services to the user or focus on increasing value from the existing reach? How?

What is the technical roadmap? Should Yahoo develop new technology? Acquire new technology? Aquire new services? which ones? how? 

What is Yahoo’s media strategy? How do they play commercial vs. user generated content and services? What is the Marketing strategy? Branding strategy?

What is the competitive strategy vs. Google? MSN? AOL? MySpace? Should Yahoo simply copy Google for a while in areas where it’s a clear number two such as search? Should Yahoo sell it’s messaging network in which it is not nearly a market leader? Should Yahoo invest in personal portals at all? Should Yahoo follow through on building a Mobile brand or is it a waste of time?

What’s the e-commerce strategy? What products should Yahoo monetize in 2010? What’s the global vs. local strategy? How does Yahoo increase it’s $’s per user? How does Yahoo catch up with Ad-sense?

How should Yahoo be re-organized? what’s the theme? products? markets? services? what kind of compensation plan do you feel will help recruit stars? What kind of review process would clean up the company of more parasite? What is the criteria for outsourcing? 

You’re a SVP at a mogul for crying out loud, not a junior employee. Many people would “kill” for your job. You are getting paid to lead the company past the problems you specified, not to list them. Nobody asked you to write a Jerry McGuire type of memo but if you did, make it worth the collective reading time. Terry Semel could be doing a shitty job, I can’t really know, but if you’re point is a point about Terry Semel sticking to his chair you should be looking in the mirror.    

      

Still under the influence of the 2006 Usability Day, I want to make a case in point about the importance of usability and how it effects us throughout our life. Last week my car broke down and it got temporarily replaced with a Mazda. Below you can see two photos of the car’s dashboard - during the day and night.

As you can notice, the Mazda designers thought an all red panel would make it look really cool. If the color luminescent blue is taken by the Germans then “lets use red”. The result may look nice (if you are into red) but from a usability standpoint - pure hell!. In my case, new car & unfamiliar buttons, this was impossible:

1. I want to turn the volume up - its the round red button

2. I want to manually change channel - its the round red button

3. I want to turn up the heat - its the round red button. I want to turn up the heat just a tad- turn towards the red light …no indication when to stop (button rotates forever), Turn heat heat down - turn towards the red light…you get the point.

4. I want change to preset station - its the red button again. Which one? Guess and find out.

5. Change to CD - that’s right…. its the red button

Wherever you look, whatever you want to do, RED RED RED….all cluttered nice and cosy like one big happy family.

The problem which made it worse is the fact that I wear glasses for night driving. This means that anything I look at below the ‘frame line’ I see fuzzy - unless of course I tilt my head down, which you don’t want to do while driving.

Here is a short run of what I would expect:

1. Make use of conventional graphics / icons and make them big enough to comprehend with a quick glance

2. Use different colors to indicate different functions (the classic blue to red to indicate moving from cold to hot air)

3. BIG FONT!

4. Make some kind of hierarchy decision - highlight what is important and don’t give every bottom the same level of visibility. After all, I change channels WAY MORE than set the clock –> why is the time setting button the closest to me?

Cars, websites or other digital applications…its all the same - hierarchy, core and context, create flows, think of the real life scenarios…make it simple, let users test…let users test….

What perplexes me is that a huge car manufacturer like Mazda can produce such a result. Didn’t they give anyone other then themselves a chance to test night driving?? I bet my money that I’m not unique and that more than 5 out of 10 people would say the same.

Bottom line - Mazda’s red dash is a usability RED hell.

      

Universal Music Group is now suing MySpace for “tens of millions of dollars” for copyrights infringements by MySpace users. This is a defining moment for copyright laws in an area covered in a previous post in Degardener.

Prediction? Settlement. Universal can’t stop MySpace and MySpace can’t effectively monitor 130 million users. Since it’s all resulting from not having reached a similar agreement to the one with YouTube, let’s hope it will end quickly. MySpace will introduce another meaningless tool that will not really solve anything. More importantly, they will agree to respond better to Universal and will somehow figure out a way to pay. More lawyers will make a living from interpreting the DMCA and life will go on.

However, UMG is playing with fire.  This can potentially introduce a dangerous halt to the digital media industry. One draconian ruling and the whole websphere will work under a going concern. While this industry is seeking for a sustainable equilibrium, I don’t think the legal tools are the right one. The law can’t chase technology, making judges and lawyers de-facto business negotiators and even legislators. I certainly hope UMG can find it in their heart not to be penny wise and pound foolish.

      

I paid a visit to my old friends at Commtouch this week. I worked for Commtouch for a few years and I follow their progress since. Commtouch is a unique example of a Company that managed to work a great turn around following the bubble burst. They transitioned years of large scale hosted email experience to a unique state of the art spam filtering and virus outbreak detection technology which enables them to be way ahead of the pack in speed and accuracy of detection. They have now put together profitability, positive cash flow and consistent growth. 

Anyway, the complexity of spam development has led me to yet another idea I will never get to - human spam filtering. Imagine how great it would be to simply filter people. A few things I would greatly appreciated getting filtered or blocked are:

1. Filtering mothers in law directly to the voice mail, especially if it’s the 3rd time and above they call during a 24 hour span. Prior detection of an anticipated call can be sold for a high premium.

2. TV Commercials - there must be a way to stop those and filter those. I can’t stand Yogurt commercials for example. Does anyone really believe that a yogurt drink is the key to siempre vida?

3. TV and radio commentators - I hear so many opinions every day! Many about subjects I don’t care about from people I don’t want to hear from. At least not often.

4. Cab drivers. Silence…please!

5. My neighbors. Silence…please!

Anyway, you get the point. Solve one of the five and you’re exit bound. 

      

Like most Israeli conferences the W.U.D started late. Over the past 10 years, I participated in who knows how many venues and I can’t recall ONE that started, proceeded or ended on time. Anyone in Israel care to rebuttal? Is it unique to this area?Anyway - I am not here to complain. Far from it. The World Usability Day (Israeli Venue) was well organized and educational. One of my colleagues, Amnon Dekel who is the VP User Experience at TriPlay (the company I co-founded) gave a very insightful lecture on the usability of smart phones. Does smart = usable? Good question – u can check out my own experiences in a previous post. Anyway a few worthy notes from the conference:Some great sentence which makes you understand the company is in “usability trouble”: + when the CEO/VP MARKETING etc. says “As a user…” he talks sh#@. We are never the users, we never were, we never will be. For consumer/mass market online services, we (the software development / start-up / u name it) are the most biased group of freaks who represent no one but ourselves. + “Internal testing shows….” – shows what??? That QA liked it?, the engineer who worked on the damn thing for 6 months understands how it works?. Don’t fall into that trap. If you want to know what people think - ask real people.

+ During registration the audience was handed out with 3 color papers – Red, Green and Yellow. These came in handy during an interactive panel discussion in which the audience voiced their opinion using the Green-Red-Yellow papers. Green for AGREE/GOOD; Red for Don’t AGREE/NOT GOOD and yellow being the undecided. We used it to ‘group comment’ on anything from Skype’s user interface to the interface of ticket machines in train stations. Guess what, it works! This is a great way to have large crowds participate without causing a big mess while gaining instant feedback.

+ Usability people (in general) are tormented by the fact that in most companies, the engineers call the shots. Usability people are used to being called in to clean up the mess before launch or after a dreadful release. Otherwise they are usually no more influential then Director level and are way over powered by CIO’s, CTO’s, VP R&D etc. While this is (mostly) true I say stop whining. Its up to us (usability experts…or as in my case, usability advocate) to stir up more mess and punch some sense into the ‘masses’. If we are such usability experts, I’m sure we can find an effective way.

+ Using images such as the below is a great way to drive the ‘usability argument’ home. Look at the two pictures below and think which store you would rather buy your next PC from and have a better experience doing it (leading to up-sale, second time purchase etc.). If its so obvious in retail, why don’t people think the same about online services?

+ Why do social networks work? – who are the idiots that write blogs , contribute to Wikipedia, etc. Why do they do it? what drives them? And most importantly how can we know it’s just not going to all of a sudden…stop? This is an extremely interesting and important subject to understand. Anyone dealing with the web 2.0 / social media world should get a basic grasp of the social participation phenomenon – Prof. Shizaf Refaeli’s gave a speech about his recent research. Check out the “publications” section on his home page - http://sheizaf.rafaeli.net/

+ My own 2 cents - Launching is a very important part of your usability study – you will never gain complete insight before. Thinking that academic, endless usability “due process” will result in flawless delivery is a misconception. Running fast, making mistakes and fixing them is better. If you want to know how to do it – you MUST read Getting Real by 37Signals. Its available for free reading at https://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php That’s it for now. More notes would make this post unusable. I will make a quick update once UPA Israel post the day’s presentations online.

      

As I told you I started writing for Sportingo, the indie sports media desk. Sportingo has launched it’s first author challenge and I put my efforts in. The challenge is open for new participants, by the way, so do feel encouraged. The task this time is to write about one of the two following subjects:

Compare your most and least favorite games
or
What unites and/or divides sports fans?
I chose to blend the two in Baseball, the great sporting institution.

The prizes, if you wonder, are:

1st Prize: “The Art of sports - The Best of Reuters Sports Photography” (Hardcover)

2nd Prize: “FIFA 07″ football video game

3rd Prize: DVD feature film – with a twist on sports, of course.
Help me win - every vote counts!

      

2 posts caught my attention this morning.

Michael Eisenberg admits that the current web 2.0 scene reminds him of childhood memories which I personally very much relate to. Back in the 70s and 80s Hollywood blockbusters used to arrive in Israel 6 months late, for no apparent reason. Michael compares the new web 2.0 companies to that late arrival. I’m not sure newcomers to the space are late by definition, but in reality most of them are.

In his (very good!) Startup Review blog, Nisan Gabbay brings the inspiring story of HOTorNOT, a web 2.0 match making and personal rating service. Hot or Not launched with no VC money and with no marketing budget. They managed to put together a modest community of half a million or so active users. More importantly though, they now make between $5M-$10M a year. They key was real originality, the right mix of premium and free services and loyalty to the community. So much for the old “it takes $20M-$50M to build an end user play” cliche. Then again, Nisan tells it better.

Enjoy.

      

Any Web 2.0 rookie knows this problem, especially ones that build social networks. How much content sharing can we hide under the term “User Generated Content”? What happens if commercial content gets shared on your social network? Are you breaking the law? Can you get caught? what happens if you do? How do you sleep at night? And how the hell do you get your investors comfortable?

A classy case of analysis-paralysis. Where does commercial stop and user generated begin? What is the real value of user generated content and how, if at all, can commercial digital content be protected?

The sad truth is that nobody knows. In the meantime it’s all up to self rationalization and the size of your juevos. But let’s try to tackle this too for a minute.

The pure form of user generated content is what it is - new content generated by the users that share it. New songs, video clips, pictures, poems, blog entries, stories, you name it, as long as it’s new and as long as the owner voluntarily shared it. This is perhaps the pure form, but the one that represents a small portion of what the industry refers to as UGC. Very few sites stick to UGC only. eSnips is perhaps a good example of such a service, check out DJ and Remixing on eSnips and get a world full of user generated content. 

Then there is user manipulated content which is the widest grey area. User manipulated content is really commercial content generated by others, but after some editing which masks it as user generated. YouTube hosts tons of user-edited-commercial-content. Check out LeBron James on YouTube and MetaCafe and see what I mean. Even the headline for this post is a manipulation on original text by Douglas Adams.

Following that we have “Bloopers”. Content that comes from all different sources and that will never be commercialized, either due to “long-tail-hood” or simply due to inability to track. Such content is spread all over the Internet and will probably forever be classified as user generated.

Finally we have abused commercial content. Content that was DRM stripped and then distributed for free. The poor fate of Napster and Kazaa make it slightly more difficult to launch such services, but millions of SoulSeek and eMule users know it ain’t THAT difficult. With all the hype about iTunes, most teenagers still do not pay for their Britney Spears or Prison Break.  

Social networks face a big problem when it comes to content sharing. The first one is that no matter what they do, content sharing services can easily be abused. It is really, really, easy to strip commercial content of DRM (assuming it was technically protected in the first place). The second, and perhaps more significant problem, is that most users look for commercial content before they pay attention to the pure user generated one.

And how do we treat the grey area of user manipulated content - THE driver behind YouTube? Is that considered stolen? Do the original content “owners” have a problem with such manipulation? and how the hell can it be monitored? Fortunately for us armies of lawyers are about to clarify that for us… NOT!

Are you confused by now? Try reading the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA, download a copy here). It will confuse you even more.

So what should you do? The rule of thumb is probably to mix it up well, do your best and respond to the environment. MySpace and MyStrands offer a good mix. You can find a lot of commercial content hidden there, granted, but you can also find a lot of Indie, real, user generated music. YouTube is taking off stolen content by request and is in the process of signing media deals. MetaCafe is using algorithm and people in an attempt to keep the network clean. Effective? Somewhat. Keeps them same? Most probably.

So where is it all going? The legal system cannot keep track with technology. Any lawyer will tell you that. The “Internet Police” cannot keep up with enforcement, so in the short term it’s probably about blockbusters and titans. In the longer term, however, the simple truth is that digital media cannot be protected. Bad news? Not necessarily. In my humble opinion it will only redistribute wealth and benefit the artist.

      

I’m straight. Heterosexual. I love woman. Always did. I am also a proud Jewish patriot. Always have been.

But I will be in Jerusalem this Friday to march in the Gay Parade.

It didn’t seem like that much of a big deal to me a few months ago. The Gay community is so liberated in Israel anyway, why cause such a fuss? Or so I thought.

The recent upheaval of violence, threats, supreme court appeals and intimidation of law officers proved me sooo wrong. Members of the parliament have gone silent. The police have gone scared and pushed to cancel the parade on the account of ”not being able to protect the marchers”. WOW! Reminds me of sick, dark ages in the history of some countries. Those who push to ban have very short memory.

It’s sad how Muslims and Jews can fight over a tiny piece of land so furiously and then suddenly hug each other when it comes to hating yet another group. I don’t think it’s evil, just ignorant. Which is exactly what public protests are for.

In a free country people have the right to express themselves, provided they don’t hurt others (and “hurting others’ feelings” does not count as hurting others!). They deserve the full protection of the law and the full support of other freedom valuers. freedom cannot be taken for granted. It’s very fragile, and I intend to fight for freedom in my countries’ capital. Make no mistake, if it were the other way around, I would have marched alongside orthodox Jews and Muslims, have no doubt.

How is that related to social gardens? Well, Web 2.0 is all about “power to the people”, “freedom of expression”, “democracy of content”, etc. is it not?

The virtual world is very much connected to the real one. I’ll be there to show support.

      

Sorry guys, I don’t get what the fuss is about.

Google released a Mobile, Java based client for Gmail. Since Google can sell a fart-smelling-perfume these days the whole industry immediately started raving. So I downloaded it too. Cool app - yes. The best thing since sliced bread - hell no.

Google chose a low common denominator in order to comply with as many phones as possible. They indeed comply with an unprecedented list of phones. From a user experience perspective it’s a very well designed app. Very “Internet like” Gmail experience. So far so good.

But.

The application does not support push. In other words, I need to open it and check for new email, I don’t get alerts. No Blackberry here. Strike one.

Then there is the battery issue. I started the application on my E61 in the morning and by the time I got home I had zero battery left. I have no idea why, I guess it overuses the Internet connection for some reason (which is strange, given the fact I don’t get updates). Swung on and missed, Strike 2.

Finally, I do have 3 other email accounts but Google is too greedy and won’t let me access them. My POP email client on my Nokia E61 let’s me access as many accounts as I wish. Strike 3.

Bu-Bye. I’m sticking with my less sexy but very effective client.

      

A friend of mine has launched this neat site.

He’s already getting diggs left and right.

I am warning you though - it ain’t easy and it’s quite addictive!

Have fun!

      

Chad Hurley stirred a lot of waves in the OgivlyOne Digital Media Summit last week. His statement about YouTube “having something for mobile devices” in 2007 was way overblown, including the expected coverage by Techrunch, MobileCrunch, Red Herring and CNET. 

While Marshal Kirpatrick as well as other writers claim it’s hard to believe YouTube and Google will miss out on 2007, I differ. Well, sort of. I do believe YouTube will “have something for mobile devices in 2007″, but I do not believe they will have something MEANINGFUL for mobile devices within that time frame.

Why? Two main reasons.

Google and YouTube have a merger to complete. With all due respect to Chad Hurley, he has other issues to deal with now. The DMCA riddle is not nearly solved yet, Chad should spend a lot of time prepping for the inevitable journey in the legal labyrinth. Then there is  a hell of complicated business environment to figure out and execute on. After all, now there is a price tag to justify, not just romance. So who will really finance user generated content? How? What is the real CPM? Will the users really like it? what will competitors do? All these are strategic and real, near term, challenges Google and YouTube face before they can really address the mobile market. The of course there are corporate politics, huge pressure to grow and expand, press, analysts….and these will take more than 14 months.

Then there is the mobile market. YouTube can easily create a mobile interface. Granted. They can also write a mobile client or two and get additional coverage by the blogosphere. Big deal. But in order to establish real mobile presence they need to work through operators. They need to forge business deals with competing operators, align with interests of the mobile food chain, pick strategic partners, integrate their products and test them on a variety of devices, forge a few media and billing partnerships and deliver a usable product users really like.

Network operators have not figured out what to do with Google and YouTube just yet. They need to feel comfortable and protect their core value and they move rather slowly. They also happen to own the keys to mass market distribution, at least as far 2007 is concerned. And if Chad Hurley thinks he can deliver a mobile product in 14 months he should think again. He won’t.

Now I do think YouTube will go mobile, just like I know Google will continue down that path. I just think it will take much longer time and will require a smarter, more complicated strategy. What I am confident of, however, is that it presents a good opportunity for middle-ware players and service providers who can bring the two worlds, internet and mobile, together.

      

“Too bad that all the people who know how to run this country are busy driving taxis and cutting hair.”- George Burns

Millions of addicts play fantasy sports all over the world, yours truly included. We trade, follow and manage virtual teams as we desperately try to compensate for frustrating mistakes that are made by the managers of our favs. I, for example, truly believe that I can manage the Knicks much better the Isiah. On the other hand, who can’t???

bp InTech was founded by Tal Ben-Simon and Tomer Pascal with an ambition to take Fantasy Sports to the next level. It has now raised a seed investment from Lightspeed & Gemini Israel. LGilab is a joint venture between Lightseed and Gemini Israel dedicated to seed investments in very early stage Internet Israeli start-ups. LGiLab is managed by Ouriel Ohayon, also responsible for Techcrunch France, with Dan Ciporin (Chairman and former CEO of shopping.com) as chairman.

I remember hearing about the lab for the first time quite some time ago from my friend Danny Cohen, who’s put a lot of energy in grassroots realization of the Israeli Internet potential. I was naturally very pleased to hear from Ouriel about their first public investment being announced today. If I was pleased at first, the company itself got me really excited.

Yahoo, ESPN and CBS offer the current leading Fantasy Sports arenas in the US. Tal Ben Simon promises something completely different. While most current sites offer a rather static trading arena, ‘playSPEX’ will offer a quantum leap experience in all levels - user interaction, community stickiness, fun and business potential. It utilizes most up to date technologies and enables users to play, argue, discuss and share content, thus formulating a very active sports center.

The service is not launched yet but having spoken with Tal and knowing the investors I am sure there is a solid advantage and business model involved. I personally would definitely welcome developments in that space. The ‘playSPEX’ corporate site and Founders’ blogs will launch over the next few days. I will keep you updated and encourage you to stay tuned!