Great Things

Google Talk + Sidebar

I wrote a post recently about how great Skype is and the future of communications. It has been a bad ten days for Skype. First, Google Talk. Really not as good as Skype but so convenient and the voice quality rocks. I noted in my post that the last thing I needed was another userid. Google took my gmail address and created a simple IM platform that lets me IM and talk to my friends. There are removing userids from my life - thank you Sergey and Larry. All that for a price of a broadband connection. I am guessing they will get to 1MM downloads in a week. Then Microsoft buys Teleo and that suddenly means that all Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all have dance partners other than Skype in the P2P VOIP game! Oops. Should have sold while the getting was good.

Then came Google Sidebar. Not perfect but innovative. Love the photo slideshow. Love the scratch pad. It is so simple but having a to do list on my scatchpad is not something MSFT has delivered in 10 Windows releases. I mean how badly is Microsoft sweating today. Probably not too badly given they own the OS and the applications and have $40B in cash but they have continually been out innovated by Google for five years. Further, the pace of Google innovation seems to be increasing. Guarantee that the email between high level folks at MS is not pretty this week.

I still love Skype but Google Talk is my new toy.

Filters

I spent some time emailing with a friend, Charlie Scott, about an investment I am considering. Charlie introduced me to a simple but powerful concept: filtering. Lets set the context for a second. I try not to follow the "how many blogs a minute are created" hype but suffice it to say, there are lots of them. Add that to the explosion of digital content that is happening as more individuals, businesses, institutions and governments come on line and the result is that it is hard to consume the content you want to consume in an efficient manner. Google has solved the problem on a large scale and has made a great business doing it. But it seems to me there is an opportunity to beat Google by building better filters on very specific niches.

Charlie has started a clever travel company called Trufflepig. Like its' namesake, the company roots around to find its' customers the right hotel in Morocco, the special guide to the Vatican or the unique dining experience in Jakarta. Essentially, Charlie has an opinion and a voice on all things travel that I respect. I will take his advice and now he is getting me to pay for his word-of-mouth. Why would I pay for word-of-mouth? Because it will save me time, money and make my trips better. Sounds like a no-brainer.

But Charlie's is a single voice. What about a curated filter? Dorrian Porter, who I owe an attribution to on my local search post, posits that there is a future for english majors as editors of the blogosphere. By selecting the posts that are relevant to a topic, by filtering them, they can deliver value to readers. My Yahoo and other RSS readers do a fine job at delivering headlines from my favorite blogs but they do a less than stellar job at suggesting other content like that might be important for me to read. Further, as Dorrian points out, people read blogs for subject matter expertise, not for their favorite radio station.

So what about the filter search engine? Delicious does it with a popularity contest. Whomever has the most bookmarks wins. But it merely delivers interesting website gems that might be of interest of to me. It doesn't drill to the next level of what part of the website is really interesting. I think the hard part is finding word-of-mouth from people like me, whose advice I can trust. Charlie is great but I happen to know him. How do I find others like him on the web? Popularity is a proxy for that but only on a large scale. I think there is a business opportunity for someone who can deliver relevant filters based on who is consuming it and who is doing the filtering. Software + editorial is the answer.

ING Direct - a new level of service

I got the most wonderful email from ING Direct two days ago. The subject line really says it all: "Your savings rate went up." The email goes on to say that "This increase applies to all Orange Savings Account Customers, no matter what your balance is or how long you've been saving with us." All of this wouldn't be that interesting except that the ING Direct savings rate is now 3.30% compounded daily. Lets compare this to the savings rate at Bank of America where I have my checking account and a savings account with about $10 in it. Oh my, BofA is offering .5% on my savings. Memo to Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis - why are you are you screwing your customer so badly? Answer: because we can and we make so, so much money doing it. The problem with this answer is that every smart person I know in my generation uses ING Direct. Soon the generation below us will be using ING Direct. Soon there won't be any customers who are too lazy to move their savings account to ING. I guess what BofA will do then is to raise their savings rate to something comparable to the competition and hope that their customers will forget the treatment they received over the years. Doubtful! I will certainly remember.

Things I love about ING Direct:
- very high savings rate
- seemless money transfers to my checking account (ok it takes three days)
- their colours - something about that orange and blue says "I'm bold, I'm changing the world."
- their goofy marketing - distinctive, memorable, to the point

I am customer for life.

Local search - the next great innovation space

John Battelle has a great post today on the newest revision of Yahoo Local. The stream of innovation that is happening at the intersection of mapping and local search is so fun to watch as a consumer. The marriage of user-generated content tied to an accurate database of people, businesses and places accessed through a map interface is beginning to be useful and will be so powerful in the future. Coming from the mapping side of the house you have Amazon(via A9) and Google leading the innovation train.  Microsoft's Virtual Earth is playing catchup as always but they will have the benefit of Windows distribution. As an aside, how stupid did the people at Mapquest feel the day that Google Maps came out. Five years of zero innovation deserves to get a CEO and Chief Product person fired.

So what does it all look like 36 months from now? A kick ass map view, with the toggle to satelite(thank you Google). Ok, we have that now. What about a picture of each address in the entire world - taken from street level instead of satelite? We are getting there with A9's block views but this is still rudimentary. How about opening this up to the user to take a picture of their house, their business or their favorite restaurant. Ok, we will have problems with people uploading stupid photos but in the end quality will prevail. Now what else do we need. Information about each address. What is there? If it is a business, lets store the following information: name, address, phone number, website, category. So now I know that Lark, my favorite Seattle restaurant, is located at 926 12th Ave, Seattle, 98122 and their phone number is (206) 323-5275. Lark doesn't have a website that I could find (??) but as a consumer I want a menu, I want links to professional restaurant reviews and then I want links to user-generated content on what the meals there have been like in the past two weeks. Customers should be able to comment on their favorite and least favorite businesses. How useful would all this information when choosing a new neighbourhood or visiting a new city?

What about information on individual houses or addresses in the neighborhood? Ignoring privacy and security for one second here, lets think about what data could be stored about a residential address. Who lives there? A link to their blog and Flickr photostream. Is the house up for sale? What did it sell for last time, what are the taxes, and what is the nearest school. What is the phone number or the best way to reach the people who leave at that address. You could comment on your neighbour's garden or the van with no wheels in the front yard.

Very exciting times to be involved in this space. Of course, it took Google to show us how useful a map of the neighbourhood could be. Final question to ponder, is there room for the startup to succeed in the space or will Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon own it? I still think there is room for the start up as no one has even begun to get to critical mass in user-generated content. I came across a neat little company that might just backdoor its way into this space if they manage to get critical mass going. Take a look at Backfence.

Storytelling - need a great product

The arrival of the first kid leads to a massive explosion in the production of digital content - specifically photos and video. The problem becomes organizing this content, telling compelling stories and then sharing your stories. Part of the problem is having the discipline to throw out the trash (the fuzzy photos and the video of your foot) but the real effort is finding software that makes it easy to do the storytelling and sharing. Perhaps Apple has solved all this with I-Life (I-Photo, I-Movie, I-Tunes, etc.) but my life in the Wintel world is so, so painful. Flickr + broadband is a small first step in solving the photo problem but it can get much better. The video situation is just painful. Digital video footage gets recorded to tapes and memory sticks that cannot even be read by my PC. I am reasonably technical and it is difficult to get this to a file that I can view using Windows Media Player. This is before we have even begun to discuss editing, adding music or text to the video.

I want a site, call it mylifestory.com, where I can store, organize and share my memories, my life. It will be easy to tag and search by people and by place. The service will suggest milestones that I should generate content around (1st birthday, first day at school, etc.) and make it easy to share the content with the people who will find it relevant. How great would it be to see this site describing your mother's life or your grandfather's life? Why doesn't Flickr enable an RSS feed to my photo stream so new photos of my daughter land on my Dad's desktop the morning they are uploaded.

Whoever solves this is going to deliver enormous value to the consumer. I think I need to buy that Powerbook and make the switch.

Inn at Langley - great meal

Pam and I spent an evening at the Inn at Langley last fall. The hotel was fine but the meal ranked as our favourite of 2004. I am usually not a big fan of the elaborate prix fixe meal because it is typically too long and too pretentious but this was an exception. The chef, Scott Costello, did a great job of presenting some of the best ingredients in the world, those of the Pacific Northwest, in a simple yet very creative way. I specifically remember the dismay that I felt when I saw pork bellies and duck breast of the menu. These are two items that I would never order but that were particularly delicious on that Saturday evening. The duck is the best I have ever had, not the least bit slimy or gamey. Simple and delicious. Thanks for a great meal Scott. If you are ever in the Seattle area, the trip to Langley is definitely worth it for dinner.

Skype and the future of communications - great product

I was introduced to Skype about eight months ago and loved it immediately. It's consumer proposition is pretty simple: talk to people anywhere in the world for free. All you need to make a conversation work is a broadband connection and a download for each person. It is easy to say that long distance bills are going to zero but once you try Skype, you really do realize that long distance bills are going to zero. The quality is nearly as good as your landline and way, way better than wireless.  If you feel that audio isn't enough, buy a webcam and use MSN IM with it and presto, you have free video conferencing from your home. The only problem I have with Skype is that my computer is not as portable as my phone. In other words, I can't walk around the house while I make and receive my Skype calls. But pretty soon some clever company will build a home or wireless phone that can jump on my wireless network and accept and make Skype calls.

The problem I have with Skype is that it just added another user ID to my life. Allow me to list the ways that people can contact me: work email, Hotmail, Gmail, work phone, home phone, mobile phone, text message, Skype, and MSN IM. Unified messaging is the holy grail in the enterprise space but it also needs to make its way into the consumer space.

"At its most basic level, unified messaging involves storing e-mail and voice-mail messages in a single mailbox, from which they can be accessed through any client--mobile phone, laptop, personal digital assistant--available to the user at a particular time."

I don't want the most basic level. I want the right messages and communications to reach me at the right time. What I want is one user ID where people can reach me, one inbox to check, and one set of calls to return; all of this needs to be accessible from whatever device I am using. I should be able to set the status of that User ID to accept phone calls from Mom but not phone calls from boss, and vice versa. Sometimes I want IM interaction and sometimes I don't. The messages that sit in the inbox should be intelligently categorized by who sent them to me. So what company is going to solve this problem? A company with a massive customer base? A company with market leading products in email and/or voice?

Microsoft thinks about the problem and has the Exchange + IM assets to build on. But ultimately they have yet to build it into their messaging operating system and they are terrible at delivering innovation. RIM is actually doing something about the problem by selling an amazing device that brings together voice and email in a usable format. Google? I am guessing that one of the sharp developers at Google is working on a unified messaging solution with the 20% of their time that they get for their own projects.  But is Google a credible place to host all of your communication needs? They just got in the email space, are just starting to dabble in IM, and have no real telephony expertise. Further, they are about search and not communications.

I don't know the answer but I do know that this is something that will be solved twenty years from now. I look forward to the day when you can reach me by telling your device to contact Jamie McDonald. Depending on who you are, you will either get me where I am or deliver a message to my inbox.

Great travel content

Sadly, there isn't much that I can link to here. I believe that the next great travel company will help customers figure out where they want to go and what they want to do when they get there. Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity are great travel retailers and have solved the problem of finding the right flight or right hotel when the consumer has figured out the destination. But they don't do a good job at helping the traveler find the place that is right for them or giving advice, personalized to the traveler, on what to do when they get there.

The question, for people in the travel business, is how to make money on content. TripAdvisor is an interesting model. The site is terribly ugly but they have aggregrated a huge amount of user-generated content that creates enormous value when you are trying to figure out which hotel to choose in a destination. Being able to read 20 reviews on a hotel from people who have stayed there in the last month is tremendously valuable. They make money by selling advertising to travel distributors in the spaces around that content. I wonder whether there might be a subscription business that can be built on travel content. Right now, I think the answer is no because consumers haven't been trained to pay for content on the web.

The likely story is that some entrepreneur will do something interesting in the space and be acquired by one of the big three online travel agencies (OLTAs) before they have a chance to figure out how to make money. The key thing for the OLTAs in the next five years is differentiation. They are all facing declining margins and increased marketing costs (see the Expedia earnings release today for more on this story) and the only way out of the box is differentiation that is long-term and sustainable. Content is the first place they will look for a solution to this problem.