Mark Evans

It’s a GeoSocial!

If you have a burning desire - or just a healthy interest - to talk about GPS, geotagging and location-based services, check out the inaugural GeoSocial in Toronto on November 6.

Hosted by PlanetEye (the one-stop travel planning service where I’m gainfully employed), GeoSocial is an informal gathering over after-work food and refreshments to talk about what’s happening with the geo-space. From what I’ve seen and heard, there’s a lot happening within the Toronto tech community so we’re hoping to see a lot of people come out.

Here are the details:

When: November 6, 6:30 p.m.

Where: The Charlotte Room, 19 Charlotte Street, Toronto

You can find more details on the PlanetEye blog. We’ve also got a Facebook group that you can join.

Technorati Tags: location-based services, GPS, planeteye

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Five Questions with….Homezilla

In Canada, there is sadly no Zillow.

How come? It’s because the Canadian Real Estate Association has a stranglehold on real estate listings in Canada. MLS/CREA has gone after several upstart start-ups who have tried to finagle their way into the market, including Housing 123.

Nevertheless, Homezilla is hoping to establish a foothold in the online real estate market by doing everything except provide information about real estate properties - at least for now. Instead, Homezilla aims to give home owners and potential home owners in-depth information about neighbourhoods (schools, stores, parks, etc.).

I had the chance recently to ask Homezilla founder Sandy Ward about the Toronto-based company’s plans.

Q: Can you provide some background about Homezilla’s founders?

I am the sole founder of HomeZilla. While I don’t have a background in real estate, over a decade of Internet development experience has taught me the importance of making information available.

Q: So, why create Homezilla? What need/problem is it hoping to fill?

Every time someone looks to buy a house they ask questions like: where is the closest school? Are there a lot of kids around here? How far to a coffee shot? Until now, this information wasn’t easy to find. HomeZilla’s goal is help home buyers save time and be more confident in their home buying decision by providing all of this information in an easy-to-use format. Consumers want more information before they make a purchase; HomeZilla is offering new data to help home buyers.

The market also seemed open to new companies. Canada’s real estate market has been slow to use new Web technology to help home buyers. We saw this
as a huge opportunity to connect and help a large, and realtively, untapped audience.

Q: Whose the target audience? How do you engage people who already own homes?

Our main target audience is the home buyers. Home sellers and real estate agents make up the rest of our total audience. For the next 6 months, HomeZilla will focus on helping consumers in the home buying process. We still have a lot of work to make the home buying process faster. While the focus is on homebuyers, real estate agents will also use HomeZilla to save time when they are researching a new listing.

Q: Several companies have tried to compete against MLS using mash-ups? Do you see Homezilla eventually becoming a house listing service as well?

Without a doubt, at some point in 2009 we will need to have listings to compete with other up and coming real estate sites. Our advantage will come from a combination of our HomeZilla Analytics and our mandate to make the home buying process faster and easier.

HomeZilla Analytics is a set of reports on how and what home buyers are searching on HomeZilla. These statistics can be produced for a province, city, neighbourhood, or even a specific street. The HomeZilla Analytics will be a boost to helping provide context to a listing.

Q: What’s the business model?

The business model is made up of three parts. First, advertising needs to be part of our revenue. Because we have a small, but hard to reach audience, we will charge a high CPM but all the ads on HomeZilla have the ability to be hyper-targeted down to a neighbourhood level.

The other two major pieces of our business model relate to data. HomeZilla has collected unique data from all across Canada; that has value. Also, our HomeZilla Analytics gives unique insights into what is valued by people looking for a house in a certain community. We are already talking with companies in two different industries for the rights to purchase/use our data.

Technorati Tags: canada, homezilla, real estate

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Buckle Down but Keep Innovating

With the global economy in flux, there’s no way online start-ups can escape unscathed. Companies are going to be more focused on operating costs, generating revenue and making their financing last as long as possible.

That said, it would be a shame if the tougher times means that innovation within the online landscape starts to decline. For all the hype about Web 2.0, the far more interesting element has been the flurry of cool, useful, interesting and/or valuable tools developed. If you want to do something online, there’s a service that will meet your needs.

Of course, many of these services are free and many of them don’t have a business model or, at best, a shaky business model. Nevertheless, the fact they’re available reflects an amazing period of enthusiasm, creativity and entrepreneurship.

For all the excitement about the dot-com boom, the last few years have been far more interesting. The rise of user-generated content, social media, social networking and video has pushed the Web deep into the mainstream, and changed the economic landscape for many industries, particularly the media.

As we head into more difficult waters, my hope is innovation and the creation of new online services remains vibrant. With development and distribution costs low, the landscape for new services should hopefully remain fertile. Entrepreneurs may have to buckle down but there is no reason why they should disappear.

As a bonus - and an illustration - of just how much of a “candy store” it’s been over the last few years - here’s a short list of cool online services that I’ve discovered recently.

Filtrbox: A media monitoring service (free and premium) that works based on keywords that you provide. It reminds me of Google Alerts but more structured.

Scribblar: online collaboration tools, including a digital whiteboard.

Addictomatic: a meta-search engine to to find the “latest buzz” on any topics.

Social Mention: a search engine for social media (blogs, micro-blogs, comments, video, etc.)

Cli.gs: a new URL shortening tool. A nice feature is the ability to track your URLs have been used.

Pingg: a user-friendly online invitation service with just the right amount of bells and whistles.

Snipshot: an online photo-editing tool with free and premium features.

ReportingOn: a service that helps journalists (and bloggers) find sources for a particular topic, story, or source.

PressFlip: a way to find the news

Matt: For anyone with multiple Twitter accounts, Matt makes it easy to post from one place.

PrintWhatYouLike: At a time when everyone is trying to be more green, PWYL is a tool that makes it easy to only print the part of a Web site you want.

Update: The Next Web has some pragmatic thoughts about all the sky-is-falling chatter about online startups.

Rather than it being doom and gloom, Ayelet Noff says “it is my belief that the current situation will only do us good and allow those startups that have a unique offering to survive while flushing out those startups that were doomed to failure from the beginning.”

Technorati Tags: startups, web 2.0

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Is the Sky Really Falling?

There’s a lot of the end-of-Web 2.0 bandwagon-jumping happening in the wake of Sequoia holding a meeting earlier this week with its portfolio CEOs, and Seesmic announcing yesterday it will lay off seven of its employees, or one third of its staff.

Yes, the global economic landscape is volatile and there are dark clouds of uncertainly looming but everyone seems to be jumping to conclusions without offering much perspective. TechCrunch, which has built an empire profiling Web 2.0 startups, calls Seemsic’s move the start of the “UnParty”. (TC is an investor in Seesmic.)

First, it makes complete sense for Sequoia to gather its CEOs to give them a lay of the land. As a major investor with a vested interest in their success, giving them an overview of what’s happening and suggestions for how to survive tough times is a sensible move. As well, the opportunity for their CEOs to get together to network and compare notes can only be a good thing.

As for Seesmic, it’s restructuring is being seen as a harbinger of things to come. While many online companies will have no choice but to tighten their belts to reduce burn, Seesmic’s staff reduction arguably has everything to do with the slow pick up of video comments.

Everyone talks about having conversations within social media but it’s happening using text, not video, which has not resonated with many consumers.

Seesmic is struggling because it’s product isn’t solving a problem or meeting a growing need. With $6-million of financing completed in June, Seesmic is betting is can ride out the economic storm and, more important, survive long enough for video comments to gain traction - if, in fact, that ever happens.

Update: The chatter about what’s happening within the tech world continues to rage on. Fred Wilson adds some solid perspective, while Michael Arrington addresses some of the “criticism” aimed at the VCs getting pragmatic about what’s going on.

Technorati Tags: seesmic, sequoia, social mention

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Is Moving to Canada That Bad?

In the wake of Sequoia’s “RIP: Good Times” meeting earlier this week in which warned its start-ups to batten down the hatches, one of the CEOs attending the meeting was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying:

“I didn’t come away thinking that the sky is falling or that I have to move to Canada, just that these guys are taking this seriously.”

Given how the U.S. financial system is imploding while Canadian banks are seen as among the world’s soundest, moving to Canada isn’t such a bad thing.

And we’ve got better beer, more hockey, less crime and more places to buy a donut per capita than anywhere else in the world.

Technorati Tags: canada, sequoia, web 2.0

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Blog ‘Til You Drop

During a job interview several years ago, a newspaper editor asked me about my challenges as a reporter. I responded that I was really focused on writing well as opposed to simply writing fast.

I went to explain that I had always been able to pump out stories (aka quantity) but that it was also important to spend the time to provide insight (aka quality) and perspective. In today’s fast-moving world, this approach is even more important for newspapers scrambling to stay viable.

I’m often reminded of this conversation when reading some of leading tech blogs (GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, CenterNetworks), and looking at the number of post they churn out every day. The volume is impressive and, often, overwhelming.

While I’m by no means criticizing the quality of these blogs, I am interested in how the writers who work for these blogs operate. In an industry where being first has become important, there must be tremendous pressure to produce. I suspect some posts are written in a mad frenzy at any time of the day or night.

It reminds me of my short tenure with Bloomberg News where being first - even by seconds - over the competition (Dow Jones, Reuters) was paramount. One of the ways Bloomberg helped make this happen was something it called the four-paragraph lede in which you just had to insert the company’s name, a short description of what happened, a quote and the stock price before hitting “submit”.

It was formulaic and completely uncreative but it produced what Bloomberg wanted from its army of typists around the world.

I wonder if any of the writers hammering out multiple blog posts ever feel like they’re on an assembly line? At some point, do the posts blur into each other when you may not have as much time as you’d like to write them?

Don’t get me wrong, I think blogging for living is a wonderful thing if you love to write. The variety, being part of the action, and working from home - or the local Starbucks - is not a bad way to make a living.

But it can also be a grind because, after all, these kind of blogs are businesses, and the belief is the more posts you write, the more traffic you get.

More: MG Siegler, who blogs full-time for Venture Beat, has some thoughts on blogging for a living. For more insight into the world of pro-blogging, check out ReadWriteWeb, which asked 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants to disclose how much they get paid, by the post, by the hour or by the month, etc. Apparently, the going rate for a blog post is $25 which explains why pro-bloggers are pumping out so many posts.

Technorati Tags: blogs

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Five Questions with…QikCom

It wasn’t that long ago that micro-blogging within companies didn’t exist. Today, there are a growing number of players looking to become the Twitter of the Enterprise. The list includes Yammer, Present.ly and a new entrant, QikCom.

QikCom aims to be more than a micro-blogging platform by providing users with a wide variety of add-on applications. Right now, its TabStore features three tools: Competition (a way to track competitors), a To-Do list, and frequent numbers for loyalty programs. The company will open its API for developers to create more applications.

To learn more about QikCom, I threw five questions at founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden:

Q: Who’s behind QikCom and what was the reason/motivation to start the company?

We’re a small group of guys from the Austin tech scene passionate about making great products. In early 2008, we started to realize that the enterprise market could use a secure micro-messaging service, but we didn’t want to stop there so we also conceptualized what is now our TabStore, a marketplace filled with many other great business apps/tabs. Soon after, we quit our day jobs and made QikCom a reality.

Our goal is to dramatically improve enterprise productivity by providing the best business applications in the cloud, starting with the lowest layer (messaging) and then building up an ecosystem of rich business applications that can easily be installed from the TabStore.

Q: Micro-blogging has become a fast-growing communications tool. Why hasn’t it become a corporate staple yet?

Traditionally, IT departments have been hesitant to use cloud applications. I see that trend changing in the next few years and “cloudsourcing” will become more popular, especially if IT budgets decrease.

Q: There’s a growing number of players going after the corporate micro-blogging market such as Yammer and Present.ly? Why shouldn’t you be worried that Twitter is going to turn its attention to the market?

Twitter has been a great success in the personal space, and now it seems they are focusing heavily on International growth and monetizing their existing user base. While they may enter the enterprise space in the long-term, I don’t see an immediate threat from them in the short-term.

Q: Is QikCom looking to differentiate with the TabStore? How do you see it evolving?

Yes, the TabStore is how we’re different from our competition. We plan to give away micro-messaging and admin features for FREE and only charge customers for additional business apps in the TabStore. We see the TabStore evolving into a marketplace for many different types of cool business apps. We built and pre-installed a few examples including ToDo List Management and Competition Monitoring just to give our early customers an idea of what’s possible with the TabStore moving forward.

Q: What’s the business model?

- Free for employees to use
- Free for admins to secure and claim the network
- Additional subscription-based business apps/tabs available via the TabStore

Technorati Tags: qikcom, twitter

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You Can Check Out Any Time You Like But…

I’m a beta junkie.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve probably signed up for a few hundred new online services just to check them out. The vast majority have received a nibble or two while a select few are in regular rotation.

For the ones quickly added to “been there, tried that” heap, the problem is while it’s easy to get in, it’s pretty much impossible to get out.

Have you ever tried to delete an account you created? You can’t do it. You can edit your profile to “erase” your personal and contact info but you can’t delete your account.

As a result, there are bits and bytes of you scattered around the Web - even within services that you haven’t used in months or years.

I guess the idea is it’s so difficult for Web startups to attract you, the last thing they want to do is make it easy for you to walk away. After all, there just may come a day when you’ll come back so they want your account to be ready even if it has to be dusted off.

So, in many ways, the beta landscape is lot like the Eagles’ Hotel California where:

You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!

Technorati Tags: beta, web 2.0

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The Tech Party May be Over But….

The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has officially declared that the tech party is over, which means “investors and entrepreneurs may be entering a chilly period when making money from new ideas becomes that much harder”.

The reality, however, that’s okay. While attracting money to finance new ideas is going to be more challenging, the technology world will continue to move forward with new, innovative products. Just because there’s economic volatility and uncertainty doesn’t mean everything will come to a grinding halt.

When times get more difficult, one thing that does happen is the froth disappears. It forces people to really focus on creating new, useful and innovative products and services that can establish a foothold even when there’s economic turbulence.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, it’s that it set the stage for the wonderful world of Web 2.0. Rather than kill innovation and great ideas because the IPO and VC markets evaporated, entrepreneurs hunkered down and focused on creating interesting and useful services. Some examples include MySpace, Facebook and Google Wordpress.

With tough market conditions, tech entrepreneurs are going to be more creative, more resourceful and learn to do more with less. Since it will become more challenging to make an idea into a business, only the best ideas will float to the surface. The upside is they will have to deal with far less competition to establish a foothold.

The other thing to remember is it’s far less expensive to start and operate online business today than it was six or seven years ago. It means good ideas won’t be killed simply because there’s no way to finance them.

The bottom line is good ideas and innovative products and services will continue to thrive. There may not be enough activity to fuel the TechCrunch editorial machine but there will be enough activity to make things interesting.

For more, check out Dan Kimerling’s pep talk in TechCrunch. As well, Jeremy Toeman has a good post on staying positive. And here’s some very wise words from Hank Williams, who suggests the problem facing the tech industry is “not running out of money. The problem is not doing something that is worth any money.”. Well said, Hank.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0

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What Ever Happened to Evite?

During the dot-com boom, Evite was “it” when it came to online invitations. Everyone seemed to use it to the point where Evite was synonymous with organizing events on the Web. Then, Evite was acquired by IAC/Ticketmaster in early 2001, and subsequently disappeared into the bowels of Barry Diller’s online empire.
I hadn’t thought about Evite - or, for that matter, used it - until getting an e-mail today from MyPunchBowl.com, a relatively new online invitation service trying very hard to be establish a foothold.

By coincidence, the Wall St. Journal has a story looking at how and why Diller has decided to break up IAC. How comes? Diller believes IAC is “overly complex and unmanageable. What I’ve learned over the years is that focus and singular purpose is the best approach for businesses. How can you function across 12 different businesses from financial services to dating?”

I wonder what that means for Evite? I suspect it will find a new home. Hopefully, the new buyer will inject some mojo into Evite, which has been puttering along for the last few years. That said, Evite is still a popular service even if it doesn’t get much attention.

More: For anyone looking for a user-friendly invitation service, check out Pingg.com - run by two Canadian brothers.

Technorati Tags: evite, mypunchbowl

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