Techcrunch has a good post on why Panama is important, not only to Yahoo!, but to the rest of us. I agree fully with Michael on this is very important to get more competition in the space. For monetizing traffic for big publishers, we competed with Google AdSense at what is now Ligatus and did so very well, based on different methods and a slightly different idea. Now with Ormigo we are actually banking on a different methodology again, also simply exploiting the multitude of networks that are out there. If you are working on a clicks based system, you need to be huge to compete and I am gladly letting that be handled by the likes of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. But still, with this system, a lot of advertisers are left out in the cold, and I don’t think Google’s move to give companies a free web site to advertise on AdWords, will be a real change in this. There are just a lot of people out there who shouldn’t have to care about AdWords, conversion, optimization, multivariant testing, and the like.
All in all, this will be a good year for Yahoo! on the search/clicks marketing front and while I am not sure choosing ad rank based on CTR and Click Price increases the click price itself, it sure as hell increases the CPM, which is what sites really care about. The problem comes in with those networks going for the agencies and the big companies, and then the big publishers suddenly don’t want to play that game anymore, because the would rather talk to those companies directly, and get a lot more money out of them. It will be an interesting 2007. Let’s all have fun.
Monthly Archives: December 2006
Panama to the Rescue
Second Life User Numbers
This was already a small controversy at Le Web 3, though many might have overheard the question posed the the guy from Linden Labs on stage. The thing is that Second Life is saying they have 2 million users and it seems more likely that they have something like 10-20.000. Clay Shirky did a very insightful post on this called A story too good to check. Really worth a read for all those claiming that Second Life will change the world. I still think there is a possibility that this will be amazingly huge, but it will likely take years. I actually had an idea several years ago with friends of starting an online world for educating kids, which I still think is a great idea. I mean allowing kids to learn in an evolving online world (“This is a cow, it makes muhhhh and eats …”), in a secure environment, adapting to their abilities, would be wonderful. I am not sure yet that things like SL are really what some call Web 3.0, believing more in automated agents as the next big trend, but we will see how this game plays out in the next few years.
The Problem with AJAX and Page View Centric Measurement
We love to compare things. That’s why IVW Online is so important in Germany, and others world wide. IVW has started out as the company that measures circulation of news papers in Germany and IVW Online is doing the same thing for Web Sites. The idea is that everyone has a standard tracking pixel on their site and this measures page impressions. I never thought this would be very brilliant as a page impression is not a page impression. Forum traffic is totally different from search traffic or high quality editorial content. IVW Online recently worked with AGOF to give us a unique user count, which took a long time to set as a standard as it is very hard to agree on what a unique user is on a web site.
Why is that hard? Because you can use cookies but not everyone uses cookies and those that do might be three people at the same PC. Those that don’t mostly are not trackable and especially stuff like proxies makes it even more problematic. But they agreed on something that they call true, which is as good as anything else. It just needs to be the same statistic.
Now the problem becomes even worse because of AJAX. Matt Cutts from Google has a great post on it. The thing is that moderate use of AJAX is a good thing, but if you are IVW tracked, it might be a bad thing because suddenly you seem small. I can leave Google Finance open all day and see the share prices move around, only doing one page impression for the site. Thankfully this is something where AGOF can help, but I still presume that lots of sites out there opt out of using AJAX as their traffic will seem to decline, like it did for Yahoo!, who moved their mail system to a new version using AJAX. This is a good move and I hope the start-ups out there go the same direction.
Another good post on the problem of measuring a sites importance is the one by VentureBeat on the new funding of Digg. Comscore for example doesn’t count RSS traffic, another problem for sites having high traction.
Merry Christmas to All
That’s that actually, just have a great time with family, friends and loved ones or whomever you want to be with. Back to doing just that for me now. 
Hashcash installed to counter spam
Akismet currently holds 34000 comment spams and several thousand are added each day, partly moving the server up to loads far over 50 and making everything unresponsive. Hence, I needed another solution and found Hashcash, a wordpress plugin that arguably works better than Captcha. So what does it do? Here is what they say on the site:
Every four hours, your blog picks a random large number (close to 32 bits). Whenever a visitor visits your permalink pages, an ajax call is made which retrieves some javascript. This javascript first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve the secret value, which it sets in the form. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.
Sounds good and I hope it will work. Let’s see what happens. As long as I am not at 3000 comment spams a day, I am happy.
The Good of Le Web 3
Ok, from time to time the trashing is going a bit far, so I thought I’d highlight some of the good sides of the event, which for me still outweigh the bad sides. First of all, there were by far enough power plugs for laptops in the conference room itself, which was amazing. The event location was very good all in all and this time, I have to say that for dealing with 1000 people, food was very good indeed. Both of those were large complaints of the last events and they have been fixed.
The total group of people that was there was a very good mix, and in light of the basic idea having come from an un-conference, the networking was very good. And this is actually a large part of what an un-conference is about for me. There were also some real highlights in the talks like Hans or the second life panel. That there was a start-up room was great, and we got two VC contacts through that. The party was also good and and in total I had a great time!
As I said before, the biggest problem, and where all the else originate, of the event, is that it has outgrown the un-conference part and that makes it a hard to manage cross-bread. Thanks for the event Loic, keep your head up and decide on where you want to go with it.
(P.S. it is going to far anyway, with now Sam Sethi from Techcrunch UK being fired over it.)
Understanding Bloggers
I remember that when chatting with François Bayrou at le web 3, Loic appologized as he had previously thought that Mr. Bayrou would only be coming to such events for the press, but he now understood that he came for the bloggers. And I have to agree, that Mr. Bayrou was the guy that came to le web 3 for a conversation on stage and with the audience. Mr. Nikolas Sarkozy however, who is the candidate that Loic is supporting in this years elections, and while I do not want to talk about political opinions, Mr. Sarkozy has clearly not understood the bloggers! So if understanding what blogging changes is something that influences Loic’s decision, then I would say that Sarkozy is out of the race. Mr. Bayrou was clearly more in tune with the audience.
And beyond that, just read David Weinbergers summary of the monologue of Mr. Sarkozy. As David says, he is contradicting himself every step of the way. I love this bit.
Let us make the new Internet continent the continent of new liberties, that includes rather than excludes. Let us make the Internet continent of the transmission of knowledge, and not the transmission of lies. The continent of sharing of cultures, not of the leveling of values. [Wow. Does he know he's contradicting himself sentence after sentence?]
Wow. All very strange.  Â
Back from le web 3
I’m back, after little sleep and lots of exciting conversations. Except one or two very bad experiences, which I will go into later later, it was one of the best conferences I have been to. This is probably only due to the people that have been there, and not for the talks, even though there were some good ones. Being part of the blogging echo chamber, I cannot expect for all the talks to be something new though.
But let’s start at the beginning. I arrived Sunday afternoon and while the trip was planned with Henning he had to call in sick and was sweating in bed under fever while I was overlooking the Seine from my room.
Having planned to go to the pre-conference dinner I left the hotel for a quick stroll to the Eifel tower, which you see in my previous post, and joined a great group of people in the Entrepot in Paris. We even had music.
Next to the usual people I had a great chat with Jacob Share of Share select Media who organized us the space to hold the meeting and was constantly apologizing because we couldn’t order food a la carte, but only from a menu. No sweat Jacob, I had already eaten anyway. 
I also Tom Neumann from Liquid Air Lab, who are doing Spodradio among others. I really have to check out that mobile podcasting client. They have some great things planned for the company and I am sure some interesting times ahead, especially with the backing they have. An intense talk was with Ewan Spence, who does All About Symbian and The Podcast Network as well as a system of virtual role playing cards for Second Life. Yes, virtual cards. He was part of a pannel on Tuesday and I have to admit, that the pannel, which was one of the best, opened my eyes a little bit more to the power of virtual worlds for socializing. I had already understood that there are little better prototyping environments than second life for a virtual card game. If you have have a chance to speak to Ewan, do so. Full steam ahead.
Next Ingmar arrived and we headed back to the hotel, where we met Mario Sixtus, who prepared us for the fact that Le Web 3 was no longer a small conference (which we knew) but a full blown conference with press rooms and a media agency. This actually was a bit weird from time to time, because for example, there were a few comedians running around the event that didn’t fit at all, and they even interrupted Loic’s opening remarks.
One of the clear highlight, for anyone you talked to, was Hans Rosling. He IS positively amazing. You understand the power of globalization, the power of statistics, and the power of visualization. On top of that, he is just, again, very intense. He grabs you and pulls you into his world. What this video of his talk at Ted this year. It is especially interesting to see the reason behind the change in demographics, like clean water changing life expectancy dramatically, and reflecting on the situation in “third world” countries by thinking what the conditions were in e.g. Germany when your grand grand parents were born and then taking a look at a country today with a similar life expectancy today.
He also had great views on opening all university lectures when those are paid by taxes, and some other great things. Whenever you have the chance to see him talk, go go go!
Next up for me was a presentation of Ormigo in the start-up room, which took a mere 6 or 7 minutes I think and resulted in silence in the room. Thankfully one of the judges asked some, good, questions. Right when I went back to my seat, I got the first business card of a VC that wanted to chat in the next few days, and on wednesday the exact same judge that asked the questions came back to me, asking for my card to be able to have a chat because he was interested as well. Now those were productive 7 minutes
The day ended with a great dinner, at a wonderful parisian restaurant, organized by Andrew Carlton from Treonauts, where we had some very good discussions about goals in life, technology, design, advertising, blogging, and who would have guessed, Hans Rosling. The woman sitting almost opposite of me (sorry, but I never asked for your card, even though I should have, to good a conversation) actually rode with him in the train it seems and Hans said that she seems to be similarly crazy as he is and hence they would get along wonderfully, which they did.
Then we headed for the party and after a long time in the queue to give up my coat, I had a good, but short time there. Having a meeting at 8:30 ment that I wanted to be in bed not too late. Sadly, it took me 1 hour to get my coat back, among others because the ticketnumber wasn’t on the coat anymore. Then it took a long time to get a cab, and I ended up needing 2 hours from deciding to leave the party to being in bed. Ah well… 4 and a half hours of sleep are plenty.
My head was rumbling anyway because I had so many good talks with people during the entire day. They are too numerous to list here really, but suffice to say that the crowd that was there, made the event worth while. What would be good for next time though, would be if you could kind of put some device in your pocket that would vibrate if you were near somebody you wanted to meet, because half of the time you don’t recognize them.
After a very good meeting on tuesday morning I arrived at the conference around 12 and was greeted with people on stage I had no clue whatsoever who they were. This actually was François Bayrou, one of the presidential candidates in france who had shown up on short notice. Before that, right at the start, Simon Perez had actually been there, whom I will have to watch on video. I was told he was great, and had good interaction with the crowd.
While the appearance of François Bayrou was unexpected, he seemed to be not taking himself to serious, and actually talked in english a lot of the time, or even translated the french of Loic himself. It was actually fun seeing the entire gang on stage switch heavily between two languages. I am happy to see though that france has a politician that can come into a dangerous crowd like this and open up for questions. But … at the same time, he had nothing to do there, because it was not a place to do a political rally. Thankfully he didn’t seem to take it as such but more as a place to see if his ideas resonate.
That directly brings me to the worst part of the conference though, which has to be talked about. Loic was very happy that the presidential candidate that he is backing was also bound to appear around 2pm but you noticed already that the crowd was getting a bit agitated about it. I admit, I wouldn’t have mind to see one or two more panels instead of hearing politicians in France talk. A political panel, sure, but … back on key. The bad thing about Nikolas Sarkozy coming was that first of all, the entire hall was closed off and searched with dogs, police was everywhere, and so was security. Guess who the security is in this picture from his talk.
The first row of people was cleared, and a special line was drawn in front of the crowd which was removed shortly before his arrival, to make believe that they are open. Amazing. The entire place was suddenly packed with media, cameras everywhere. Then Nikolas Sarkozy and introduced by Loic, went to stage, to the podium and started talking in french.
Sure, there were translators available, but it’s an international conference and you don’t do it in french. DLD isn’t in German either. There was even a stenographer present, fun to watch by the way
The thing that freaked me out most though is that the guy talked for 15 minutes, obviously trying to attract the interest of the more than 60 VCs in the room (that had probably already left), said thank you, and left. Just left. No questions whatsoever. I can understand french, so it’s ok, and I sat next to Richard Wilkinson and Bruno de Penanster who thankfully gave me a bit of background info, which was good, but you don’t have somebody go on stage for a conference which is all about interaction with the audience and not have the answer questions. François Bayrou did it too! It worked! That’s a 100% nogo. The blogosphere is on fire about this at the moment.
Le Web is actually at a cross road now. It was a bigger un-conference with les blogs 1, and now is a full blown conference. You either go with the un-conference character, which it no longer was, sorry Loic, or you really open it up to speeches. Speeches won’t work, more diversity might, but only if there is somehow an option to connect with the people on stage. And seriously, for real diversity, DLD will eat your lunch. But that’s actually not something you want to go to I think.
To finish off, a great talk was the one about Second Life, which I already talked about with Ewan fighting WHO with paper swords to make a point at the beginning. Then I WHO? talk about Blyk, a mobile provider that is free and financed via ads, launching mid next year. It’s a start-up to be watched.
All in all, thanks for the conference, thanks for having me, and I am sorry about the negative backlash, but it is (even more sadly) deserved.
Damn Fast
I just had a great pre-event meeting for le web 3, and am at the same time a bit sad that the network at novotel costs money, but it is god damn fast.
I just uploaded several pictures to Flickr in a matter of seconds. Very cool.
Looking forward to meeting some more great people tomorrow at the event!
See you there.
mediatech 2.006 – Media and More
Last thurday I was at mediatech 2.006 organised by Library House in London. Library House is an english company that helps investors get better information about “hypergrowth” companies in the media space. Young companies can also get better and aggregated information about investors. Starting 2007, they will also cover Europe and not only the UK, as they do now. The event was co-sponsored by Intel Capital and Microsoft and was to give attendees better insight into the world of communication, media and technology. All that was obviously interesting for us at Ormigo, as we are also moving in the media landscape, and I was happy enough to be invited for a steep discount. Thanks goes to Valeria from alarm:clock euro for that one.
The event took place in the IMAX Theatre next to the waterloo station and I have to admit, it is impressive if you see the presentation on a 20×26 meter screen. Ok, on a “small part of the screen” and split in half for video and presentation.
  Library House had invited some interesting speakers. Sadly I didn’t make it to the opening at 9 am, even though I got up at 4 here in Cologne. The way into the city is just too long. I opted to not spend the night(s) to be back in cologne fully working and had to shed a small tear when I paid for the 17 hour parking ticket at the airport. 17 hours … for maybe 7 hours at the conference. Grrr… But back on subject.
I missed Bob Young, Lulu.com Founder and CEO and Co-Founder of Red Hat. I really like the basic idea behind Lulu.com and the transforming power of the books landscape that comes with it. So I would have liked to see him. But when I arrived, things were still going strong. After a presentation of Ian Valentine, (ex-)Director of SKY, about the future of television from somebody who knows what he is talking about, came Russel Buckley, Managing Director ad Admod. Admob is a kind of banner ad network for the mobile space, and they are currently handling 400 million ad impressions per month and rising fast! In a later personal talk, I learned a bit more about their first investment round with Sequoia Capital and I have to admit, if the mobile space is similar to the general fixed line internet, which it is, then they have some good growth ahead of them. Of course the markets will converge eventually, but that will take several years. I am still happy to know that one of our developers, , Timo, has already developed mobile applications. Could become important.
Gupritpal Singh from Microsoft wasn’t really exciting I have to say but it is frightening to see what kind of platform MS is building. They are again showing that they are focussing on developers to build solutions and will work very hard to give them the tools to build cool apps. Think billing, storage, community, social networking, security, computing power, … all via an API. Everything you could think of. Of course you can mix and match from different providers, like maps from Google, storage from Amazon, … but with distribution around all MS devices, one could think of investing in MS again.
Gupritpal then showed a nice slide with how MS products will engage the user from 7 am to 11 pm (mobile phone, office pc, media center, xbox, …). When the next talk about venture capital started, Ajay Chowdhury swiftly said that all entrepreneurs focusing on tools for 11pm to 7am should come talk to him as he sees a real chance to compete against MS in those times.
Otherwise, the Gorilla in the room was clearly Google.
The above picture shows the start of the discussion about investments and it was nice to see that Yahoo! and Google are getting along (the two standing gentlemen on the left). All in all the talk was very good and it came out, again, that reach is key. Once you have it, you CAN monetize it. In that sense we didn’t really fit with Ormigo because we are more on the monetization side than the reach side, even though it’s a bit more complicated than that. We are in line with Google though in that our goal is to democratize the internet and help everyone to play.
Then there were several start-ups present, of course, from seed to growth phase. Some I would like to highlight:
- Aggregator, who build nice TV channels on the basis of aggregation of different sources.
- Mediagraft, who allow you to download free, DRM-free music, financed through ads within the MP3. I am unsure if it will work … but the team rocks, so if somebody can make it then they can.
- Bebo … insane. 18 Months old, 28 Millions Users, 4 Billion Ad Impressions.
- miniweb is the new start-up by Ian Valentine and tries to enable advertisement in an age of time-shifting and VOD.
There were obviously a lot more, and but the ones above were a bit interesting for Ormigo. As such, thank you to Library House for the Invitation and I am looking forward to see you expand to Europe. I am looking forward to the next event.
