When I was living in Paris, just before coming to Hong Kong, I went to listen to a talk by the French entrepreneur Yann Mauchamp.
In that meeting I met Alexis Godais. Alexis is one of the founders of La Cartoonerie, a site that enables novice users to create their own cartoon on the Web. Alexis and other 2 co-founders had the idea in 2002 after finishing their studies. LaCartoonerie is perfectly understood under the scope of Web 2.0. Even though similar ideas have been circulating for many years even before 2002, Web 2.0 has only started to popularize not long time ago. I consider LaCartoonerie very visionary in 2002.
Alexis and his associates had been working in the evenings and during the weekends for 4 years and at that time they were looking for money to create a start-up with a viable business model.
The day after that talk, I went to a conference organized by Microsoft in Paris with Steve Ballmer and many important French entrepreneurs such as Pierre Chappaz, who talked about Wikio. In this Microsoft event, I also met Alexis and we discussed about his project.
Shortly afterwards I left France for Hong Kong. But today, one year and a half later, I read an article in Techcrunch.fr saying that LaCartoonerie has raised a total of 500 000 Euros from Club Invest 77 (a business angel network), Hédéra Scientipole Capital and from other angels.
He may not remember me but I remember him. I admire his straight-forward motivation in his eyes and wish Alexis and his co-founders a lot of luck in the future
When I was in Beijing some days I could really not stop thinking about business ideas. One day walking on the street I had the following idea:
Context:
Everyday there are so many new web 2.0 applications. Every time you see something that seems interesting you need to create a new account just to test it and it is very annoying and time consuming.
Idea:
Create a web site where you can share and get anonymous accounts to test different web applications.
There may be two approaches:
The user can really get a login and a password for the applications. So they can use them whenever they want.
The user will never get a login and password. The web page should automatically log into the applications with a the right credentials (auto-login) but not allowing the user know which are these credentials to prevent him from using these credentials afterwards.
Risks:
Since accounts should be anonymous, some users may make bad use of them. The most extrema case would be cyber-terrorism.
You just need to see which kind of comments people write on You Tube. The following video is a parody that explains what would happen in a business meeting if we made You Tube-like comments .
As you know, I have been in on "Learning Holidays" in Beijing to improve my Mandarin skills (because here in HK they speak Cantonese) and "The man over there" has been in South East Asia.
This is probably going to be the last long holiday if we finally start our company as we are planning to do.
In Beijing we have had very limited access to the Internet and the "Man over there" has been lost in the jungle for one month. So we were not able to communicate a lot.
Today we are both back home (I am in HK, the man over there is in Bilbao - Spain) and in 2 hours 18 minutes we are going to have our first Skype meeting after holidays. We have plenty of things on the agenda and we will post about the ideas exchanges on the meeting soon.
The solution, as I discussed in a previous post, would be a password management system, where you can keep the list of passwords you currently use.
Requirements
These are some of the requirements of such system:
The system should not have an extra password.Clipperz.com and Passpack.com make the user create a new password when they are trying to simplify password management. Quite a paradox!
The system should be completely on line. There are many offline solutions (robotform, handypassword). The fact of being offline provides more trust to the user but it is less practical to use.
The system should be able to automatically fill in the login forms with the right data. This is already done by most above mentioned applications
The sytem has too be easy to use.
All commuincations must be secure
It should be impossible for the administrators of the system to decipher the passwords stored by the users. This one is a difficult point
The system should work, even if the user changes his Gmail account password. This one is also a difficult point.
The system should be able to recover information if the user forget his Gmail key
The last three requirements are the most difficult ones to achieve: privacy (from the system administrator), independency from changes in the Gmail password and recovery.
I have been thinking about it and think that some of these three last requirements may be incompatible with each other from an implementation point of view. So it is necessary to find a suitable balance among them.
In the previous post I discussed about on of the big issues in Internet: having too many passwords to remember. Today I would like to talk about another big issue: privacy and anonymity.
Web 2.0 change the world and one of the changes is that anybody can be on the web. Just some years ago I was terribly happy every time I found my name on Google. Now, it makes me shiver.
You know the story: you make something "funny" on the web when you are young. Then, your pictures, words, videos spread on the blogosphere. And years later when you go to a job interview they ask you about all that "fun". Read, for example, what happened to Miss New Jersey.
Nowadays Google is probably the biggest spy on Earth: you just need to type somebody's name on Google to know more about him than his wife. Some new Google services like Street View, are taking espionage to a new dimension.
Currently on the web there are two extreme trends between protecting your privacy or exhibiting your privacy:
1) Protecting your privacy
Today I read on Enrique Dans' blog (Spanish) that the search engine Ask.com has decided (press release) o go for the privacy rights of the users: Ask.com will launch AskEraser, a new feature which enable the user to decide which information about them should be accessible through the search engine and which one no.
If this new service is welcome, other players in the sector, including Google, may have to change their privacy policy.
Some start-ups are going an step forward on something that rather then espionage we can describe as exhibitionism: sharing or even publishing on the Internet, your web history in real time. Some examples are: cluztr, chatsum or me.dium.com
Today's Internet still has some problems. One of them is that there are too many passwords to remember.
You know the story: a new web site interests you but you have to spend some minutes creating a new account and, what is more, you will have to remember a new login and password
Being a bit simplistic, I would say that there may be two ways of resolving this problem:
1) The password manager
A password manager organizes your login names and passwords for different sites and is intelligent enough to provide the right credentials to each site.
The user has to store all his passwords online. You have to convince the user that you are trustworthy enough. The user may be reluctant to afford the risk of being impersonated. Another problem is that this method does not eliminate the need of having to spend some minutes creating a new account in each site.
This approach is much more ambitious. Basically the idea consists in creating a third party "login & password" provider and convince web companies to take you as a reference for user authentication and accept your login names in their web sites. This means one single login & password for every site that supports it.
The tough part of this is that you really have to convince other web companies to modify their sites to support your universal login. Another problem is that you not only have to provide the login service but, what is more, trust services
The players:
Microsoft tried to do this with Passport years ago and many websites including eBay tried it out. But it didn't work out.
Typekey from SixAppart is a similar system there still isn't widespread adoption.
OpenID is by far the winner of the game: early in 2007, OpenID convinced Digg to adopt their authentication system. Microsoft and AOL announced their support, as well.
One of the reasons of this success may be that, unlike Microsoft Passport and Typekey, OpenID, for better or for worse, is a decentralized system.
Titanic part 1: The love boat post was an exercise of analysis, but it was certainly a bit naïve or at least incomplete. There, I devised something like a magic marketing recipe based on The Democratic Web and the Undemocratic Mobile concepts, discussing about viral marketing.
As a reaction to the post, Andres Ribera from Hipoqihcommented something that I found very true. I quote:
"There are no magic recipes, no case of success is the same to another. I don't know whether hipoqih will succeed, but if so I don't think it will resemble other success stories"
And on viral marketing, he added:
"Viral marketing existed before the Web 2.0 and in other places outside the social networks. Things that have expanded virally include google search engine, windows OS, the eMule software –P2P networks-, mobile phones…
What we really need to develop is a useful product, something we would like to use. If you use it and you like it, you will recommend it, and that is precisely what we are looking for, that recommendation."
Bottom line: The idea of Democratic Web + Putting a feet in the door of Undemocratic Mobile might be a good one, we'll have to try it out and see what happens, but not forgetting the good old fashioned mouth to ear whispering.
Mouth to mouth might be useful as well, you never know.
PS Note: I have named this post 'The Love Boat' because when I finished writing it, I felt good, like if things from then on would be piece of cake. In a matter of hours, as you will find out in my next post, my eyes were brutally opened to some of the harsh realities of entreprenurial life.
Giving some thought to the marketing model we want to pursue, I think there are two main aspects to it. The Web (democratic) one, and The Mobile GPS (non democratic):
- The Mobile GPS:
This is not available to many people, it is not democratic. Marketing wise, it's more of an investment for the future (near future?), because right now not many people –in relative terms- have got GPS and internet enabled gadgets. The bottom line is that Mobile GPS users are more "Early Adopters", meaning they are kind of geeky people who understand computers and who are not afraid or don't mind tinkering and playing around to make things work in their gadgets, even if the services provided by a certain website are difficult to configure.
These "Early Adopters" are also people who are more willing to pay for a service, in the same sense are they were the first to trust the internet for their online shopping with their credit cards. They could be ready to pay for a service that would give them info about where their friends are by sending MMS for example. Here could be the business via direct payments.
However, I don't think this market has potential for explosive growth. Even if GPS mobile devices get more and more common, the inherent difficulty of installing stuff in mobiles, the lack of use of the internet in mobiles, etc may prevent this.
I live with people who opened my eyes on this issue. People to whom I tried to teach how to check the mail in a computer while they kept asking things like "Should I left click or right click here", "Is it single click or double click over there" or "what is a link?". I know these are extreme examples, but this leads me to the second aspects to the marketing model:
- The Web: The Web is within reach of everybody. The Web is much more democratic than a mobile with GPS and a big screen. Any person having access to a computer with an internet connection may get to use any web application just by opening the browser. And this is great.
I think the most viral of the viral marketing is to be found in the web. Not from a GPS mobile user to another, because that is not that contagious.
Why would we want viral marketing? Two things: 1.- To get more people to know our product, and 2.- Indirect cash flow for publicity (google Adsense revenues?). If more and more users get to know the product, the easier it becomes from a user to leap from Web to Mobile GPS, from indirect revenues to direct cash flow.
In my view the most contagious environment are social networks like Myspace and Facebook - I refuse to link them again!!-, where someone may see your widget with a service in your site, and with a single click (only one!!) on the classic button "Add to my personal page", you get infected.
For something to be really contagious in the Web, two things are most important: It should be easy to get infected and People should want to get infected.
And for knowing if people will want to get infected, I try to think of things I would like to use and that would make my life easier. Because in the end we get back to the holy grail of entrepeneurship: do something good, because people like good things.
In the next chapter, extra scary reflections on all this, and a list of players in the arena of geolocalisation, web 2.0, find-your-friends, find-stuff, use-google-maps and other ultra-interesting things. Stay tuned. Eat tuna.
Yet-another-note: That virus pic up there represents a little bastard, the HIV.
Building blocks is a concept that has been around for a while, but I did hear it out loud for the first time in the Google Developer Day 2007.
They were talking about the idea of building web applications based on certain blocks. An example: mashups based on google maps like frappr.
Building complex applications is easier than ever before due to the use of there building blocks and their APIs. Facebook has seen this model, and now they are opening their API so everyone can create applications that run in their environment.
I see two trends here:
One trend is to build stuff out of the blocks, like say, mix twitter with google maps and you get twittervision.
The other trend is to spread your services out of your main website. Instead of having everything centralised so users have to come in to get the good stuff, you allow bits of it to live out there in widgets/gadgets in neighbourhoods like netvibesor in igoogle, Facebook,myspace and even in blogs.
The good thing about this is that people do not have to go to your website in order to get to know you. They may hate you and your website, and your website, but if in a friend"s community page they see some block they like (oh that lovely pink mini-calendar for special candy moments!!), they will click on it and get it instantly, thus spreading the word, and so the viral marketing begins.
Wow, that easy? The key of course is to have a good product. I strongly believe as a user that if the thing looks bad, I won"t click on it, and if I click and I am disappointed, another click later it will be history and I'll never look back. No matter how big your marketing budget is, it won"t save you there. You can trick people into clicking once, but you have to win their hearts and minds to stay.
And with these healthy reflections another post goes by, and the story continues. Next post will be on 'early adopters' and other wild creatures. Remember to listen to your mother, and do not spit in public never ever ever!
As you know, I have been in on "Learning Holidays" in Beijing to improve my Mandarin skills (because here in HK they speak Cantonese) and "The man over there" has been in South East Asia.
Imagine you were able to log into all your applications using your Gmail login and password?
In the previous post I discussed about on of the big issues in Internet: having too many passwords to remember. Today I would like to talk about another big issue: privacy and anonymity.
Today's Internet still has some problems. One of them is that there are too many passwords to remember.
This approach is much more ambitious. Basically the idea consists in creating a third party "login & password" provider and convince web companies to take you as a reference for user authentication and accept your login names in their web sites. This means one single login & password for every site that supports it. 
