I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the Web 2.0 label that seems to get applied to everything these days. It’s probably one of the most overused and misapplied marketing labels I’ve ever come across in my experience in the software industry. At least during the dot-com boom you knew what people were talking about – using the web to sell stuff to people¹.

What is the accepted definition of Web 2.0 anyway²? In a very real sense it’s a term that was coined by Tim O’Reilly to sell convention space. As he said in this article recently:

Web 2.0 started out as the name of a conference! And that name had a very specific purpose: to signify that the web was roaring back after the dot com bust! The 2.0 bit wasn’t about the technology, but about the resurgence of interest in the web.

And yet people insist on talking about being “Web 2.0″ and having “Web 2.0″ elements whether it’s some kind of social networking³ thingy, using a bit of AJAX for a more interactive browser experience or just having a fancy reflective logo and a nice colour scheme. I’m reminded of an old boss of mine who, back in the very early ‘90s, wanted to know if our product was “client-server”. He couldn’t define what he meant by that but it was obvious that he wanted to go out to customers and impress them with the fact that we supported the latest industry buzzwords⁴. The same is true with Web 2.0. People have heard of it so they feel that have be doing it… whatever “it” is.

The worst part about all of this is that the “2.0″ part of Web 2.0 is now being applied to other things like publishing, charity and something called Lunch 2.0 which I guess is some kind of networking thing⁵. Hell even movies are getting in on the act with Die Hard 4.0⁶ aping the theme. Does that mean there’s going to be a Die Hard 4.1? What’s that? The directors cut?⁷

Yesterday I saw one that really took the biscuit:  Firestorm 2.0

Now I know that this is referring to a collection of “social networking” sites where “user generated content” is being used to track the fires currently devastating parts of California but really! Stop 2.0! Enough Already 2.0!

There’s a lot of really cool stuff going on right now, some of which has changed the way we’ll use the web forever but the more I see this kind of thing the more I definitely think we’re in a bubble. It may be different to the dot-com one but it’s a bubble nonetheless and that is bringing the marketing bandwagon jumpers out of the woodwork. It gets worse when some people are now trying to define Web 3.0, sometimes in terms of their own product much to people’s dismay.

We may very well need a label to describe the period were going through in terms of the changes in how the Internet in general and the web in particular are being used. The name “Web 2.0″ may fill that role but can we stop using a non-specific inexact term in a very specific way?

– Fintan 1.0

There’s something about my personal makeup that results in me feeling very stupid when I get something wrong. And it turns out that I did just that with yesterday’s posting about EI and Auctomatic.

Both Damien Mulley and Patrick Collison were good enough to comment on my post and correct me. You can read the comments but this is what Patrick had to say:

What Damien says is right; EI never actually turned us down. We got sick of the effort required to get anywhere with EI, and also realized that the deals they offered to those they funded are very poor. YC are a far better deal.

EI didn’t pass on Auctomatic – it was the other way around. I based my comment on something I read in a sunday paper a few months ago but after a recent clean-out of the house¹ I wasn’t able to find it while writing the post last night.

So my apologies to all concerned but I think the substance of what I wrote, partly based on experience, still holds true and EI seem to be doing a poor job of fostering young talented Irish tech entrepeneurs.

– Fintan

Niall Larkin blogged the other day about Paul Graham (he of Viaweb and Y Combinator fame) and his somewhat contentious remarks that if you’re serious about your startup you should move to Silicon Valley. You can read Paul Graham’s original post here and his follow-up here but essentially his point was that investors on the west coast of the U.S. are much more aggressive and less risk-averse than their east-coast counterparts. You’re more likely to get funded early if you go west young (wo)man!

There were some interesting comments on Niall’s post¹ not least of which was one about the barrier to entry for startups being a lot lower these days, especially if you’re in a web business, thereby reducing the need for early stage funding. Despite this being true, you will still eventually need an injection of cash at some stage if you really want to grow the business. My comment stated that in my limited experience it is really hard to get any kind of serious funding here unless you are independently wealthy yourself, know someone who is or don’t need the money in the first place².

Anyone who hasn’t had experience of them would think that Enterprise Ireland are probably a good bet to get funding. However if you think that then the story of the Collison brothers who started Auctomatic and then tried to get funding from EI is eye-opening. It’s a really great idea and, like most great ideas, really simple. Sure they were young, inexperienced and just out of school with no corporate background but they were smart. Here’s a brief snippet of Patrick Collison’s bio from the Auctomatic website:

When he was just 15 he wrote his own programming language which won him Irish Young Scientist of the Year and runner up European Young Scientist of the Year. [..] Patrick gained admission to MIT aged just 17 but decided to move on so he can could [sic] dedicate himself to redefining selling online.

Smart guy eh?

EI turned them down.

Fair enough. They must have seen something they didn’t like.

Having been turned down by EI, the Collison brothers approached Y Combinator. By co-incidence Y Combinator were also talking to two guys in the UK who had a similar idea. They brought them together, brought them to the west coast and they have now raised something in the region of $400k in funding from multiple sources³. The product is looking good and has potential to make some serious money. Oops… looks like EI missed the boat on that one!

It strikes me that if Enterprise Ireland is supposed to be encouraging Irish businesses it should be prepared to take a risk with relatively small amounts of money⁴ to encourage just these types of startups. Age or lack of a corporate background should never be an issue. I’m not necessarily suggesting it was in this case but if it was it was very shortsighted. If this post, part of a recent debate on the age profile of tech entrepreneurs, is anything to go by, basing funding decisions on age and experience of the founders could easily make EI look a bit like the record company that turned down The Beatles because guitar bands were out.

According to this posting by Damien Mulley today it seems that EI are going one step further though and they are now more than happy to give money to a VC firm that is investing it in UK-based companies.

It seems that despite their name Enterprise Ireland are interested in neither.

– Fintan

Picture by jamestee Some rights reserved.

I didn’t get a chance to follow up on my previous posting about the kerfuffle caused by the Monster spamming incident a few weeks ago. Monster came back with an apology that defused the situation quite quickly. Apparently they were the actions of a “new hire” who didn’t understand Monster’s policies.

Of course, the whole thing would never had happened had their immediate reaction been an apology rather than adopting a confrontational attitude¹. Companies and organisations need to learn that consumers and individuals who feel they have been wronged have access to an outlet that can reach a much wider audience than the letters page of the local newspaper and is cheaper than their solicitor. It’s called the Internet and with the way people are interacting across it these days all it takes is a small bit of interest for a story to get out of control.

Unfortunately it’s usually the very act of coming back with a bad response to a complaint that makes the stories go public in the first place. Some companies then decide to throw fuel on the fire by hitting people with threats of legal action and cease-and-desist letters in a vain attempt to stop the bad publicity spreading. Next thing you know the story’s on Digg and Slashdot.

With this in mind I was amused to pick up this story from Slashdot (original link here) last week. It seems that some legal firms in the States are trying to prevent this kind of reaction to cease-and-desist letters by threatening to sue people for breach of copyright if they publish the cease-and-desist letters!

When will these idiots ever learn…?

– Fintan

Picture by adarshr Some rights reserved.

The Irish blogosphere¹ has been abuzz for the last couple of days with the latest example of how potentially powerful bloggers have become in Ireland, how careful – and informed – companies have to be to avoid running into serious PR trouble and how they should really learn to react in a positive way when they get into trouble.

It all pretty much kicked off with this post by Michele Neylon about the response he got from Monster when he complained about being spammed by them. Things got worse when some character called “Pedro” started slinging muck about on the comments to the post only to be found out as coming in from a Monster.com IP address. Not as bizarrely funny as the whole Sky Handling Partners incident but on the same track.

Things get more fun as Tom Raftery blogs about it and then gets threatened with legal action unless he finds a patsy. Damien Mulley joins in and then submits the story to Digg. Now the whole thing is going to be hitting the press tomorrow apparently².

Unfortunately this appears to be a case of someone with a poor understanding of technology, or at least how to use it. In my experience sales and marketing staff and recruiters³ are usually the least technically savvy people I’ve ever come across in the tech industry. It seems that when you put these two together and have a marketing person in a recruitment firm you end up with a recipe for disaster.

The sad fact is that this person is bearing the brunt of it personally. Hell hath no fury like a bunch of angry bloggers and if at least some of those bloggers happen to be professional journalists you are heading for some seriously bad PR. Having said that it looks like this individual brought all upon himself by first assuming that he could use IT@Cork’s membership list⁴ to mass-mail people and then trying to cover up with bluster and threats.

First rule when you’re in a hole is to stop digging. Attempting to “recall” the email won’t work – you’re just trying to pull a Homer⁵ – and threatening legal action is a bit like poking a wasps nest with a stick⁶.

In future, try a mea culpa and apologise. You’ll find it’ll defuse the situation very quickly.

– Fintan

BarCamp Dublin took place yesterday. It was my first BarCamp but certainly won’t be my last. It was a lot of fun and there was a great turnout. The venue in the Digital Exchange building, part of the Digital Hub in Dublin, was a good one but there were persistent internet connectivity problems throughout the day. The upside of that though was that there didn’t seem to be too many people spending all their time on Twitter¹ :-).

I had thought about writing an overview of each of the sessions I went to but there was just so much good stuff talked about that this post would have been far too long. Suffice to say that among the highlights was Conor Halpin’s talk about pricing models for SaaS, illustrated by his use of a straightjacket. He recommended a mixed model of subscription and per-usage charges. Darren Barefoot from Capulet had a session on social media marketing with some great tips on how to increase the audience for blogs and how to use bloggers for marketing products. Eoghan McCabe’s talk on web usability generated a great deal of audience discussion, surprisingly around a specific case: the way online banking sites ask for a customer’s PIN. Later Paul Campbell (pictured left), a member of the Ruby Ireland user group and along with Eoghan part of the new Patchwork team, gave a typically enthusiastic introduction to Rails, pulling off his first ever presentation really well.

After lunch there was a panel discussion on some general Web 2.0 issues with Tom Raftery, Sean O’Sullivan from Rococosoft who had earlier talked about Voice 2.0, Darren Barefoot and tech journalist Karlin Lillington. Among the questions the panel covered were how to make money from web 2.0 (advertising and a premium rate model like Flickr) and getting more readers for your blog (quality is more important than frequency; sincerity and originality is vital). There was also an interesting discussion on the recent death threats made to Kathy Sierra and the subsequent O’Reilly code of conduct kerfuffle. Darren Barefoot made an interesting observation about how the barrier of entry to fame has been lowered. The long tail effect is probably coming into play – it’s possible to become famous among a smaller niche group. Notoriety in any form tends to bring undesirable attention and that’s something that bloggers need to be aware of.

The final session I went to was a bit rushed unfortunately because previous sessions had overrun. There were also very few people at it which was a pity because Krishna De had some interesting things to say about using blogging to build buzz about your business. I look forward to being able to hear her speak again under better circumstances.

Afterwards it was down to the Lord Edward in Christchurch for a few free pints courtesy of Diageo. Overall the event was excellently organised, well supported by the various sponsors and attended by a group of interesting, passionate individuals. Hopefully next time internet connectivity will be sorted out.

– Fintan

Picture by CraigOppy Some rights reserved.

Something I’ve been meaning to comment on for quite a while now has been some of what I experienced a few months ago while hunting for a new job¹.

One of the thing that really got to me was the number of times I was asked to rate my various skills out of 10. At first I didn’t really have a problem with it but more and more I came to realise that rating yourself out of 10 just doesn’t make sense. It’s a completely subjective analysis of skills and does nothing to give a correct idea of your ability. What’s worse is that you’re are being asked to rate yourself on a scale that has been decided by someone else in advance without your knowledge. Here’s a quick case study.

Asked to rate my Java development skills out of 10, I gave myself an 8. This was based on what I felt was my ability related to people and code I had worked with and, more importantly, what I felt were my general OOD design skills. Relatively speaking I felt I was quite strong and rated myself in the top 10 to 20%. What I didn’t realise was that my interviewer took it to mean that I had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Java API and could, quite literally, write any code asked of me on a piece of paper without reference to Javadocs which is what he proceeded to do. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. Worst. Interview. Ever.²

I think the reality is that it’s impossible to rate yourself on any scale unless you are given some idea of what you’re rating yourself against. I also believe that a good developer can learn pretty much any language they need to use; it’s basic software design skills that are far more important and are much harder to rate out of 10. Being asked to rate yourself out of 10 is at best the sign of someone who just doesn’t understand the domain and at worst the sign of someone who is too lazy to read through a CV and talk to you to get an informed opinion of your ability. Quite apart from anything few people if any will rate themselves down³ so it becomes a fairly meaningless metric anyway.

The only way to be sure that someone knows their Visitors from their Acceptors is to ask them. If you want to know how much someone knows about Java ask them what the Object contract for hashCode() and equals() is. If it’s C++ ask them about virtual destructors and the risks of using auto_ptr. Ask them what books they’ve read and what blogs they read regularly. Get an idea of how they work not what they think of themselves. I’ve been on both sides of the interviewing table and so far I think I’ve done pretty well. Not wanting to bang my drum but *bang* *bang* so far I don’t think I’ve been responsible for recommending a hire who didn’t work out. And I never once asked them to rate their skills out of 10.

– Fintan

Having been pointed to it by this entry in Guy Kawasaki’s blog, I recently read Hugh MacLeod’s manifesto “How To Be Creative” on ChangeThis¹. It really is quite simply the best thing I’ve ever read on creativity. This honest and realistic appraisal of not only how to be creative but what it means to us personally, applies as equally to business as it does to writing or painting or whatever². Along with some down-to-earth advice from a former colleague, reading it has helped finally inspire me to just go ahead and dive into a couple of projects I’ve been researching and contemplating for a while.

My biggest problem whenever I’ve sat down to work on a project of my own is a) the fact that I’m a procrastinator of the highest order and b) I find my ideas dry up pretty fast, especially when I’ve more important things to do like browse Wikipedia. I also tend have very narrow creative windows. For example, I woke up early this morning with the basic shape of this post buzzing in my head and had to get up and start working on it before I lost it. Generally when I sit down to write or work on a technical project I find that rather than my mind filling the blank page, the blank page fills my mind. One of my current writing projects has been on the boiler for over a year now and while I have been actively researching it during that time I’ve done precious little writing. Meanwhile another project (a psuedo-business idea) is still little more than a crude diagram on a piece of paper stuck to the wall above my desk with some electrical insulation tape. My excuse for that is that I’m still learning Ruby on Rails.

So where am I going with this? Myself and Rachael were in Kilkenny last weekend and while browsing around a bookshop I picked up a copy of “No Plot? No Problem” by Chris Baty, one of the founders of the NaNoWriMo competition. NaNoWriMo is the National Novel Writing Month and is a high-intensity, 31-day competition to produce a 50,000 word novel. I’d heard of it before but I’d never really taken too much notice of it³. It was only when I read Baty’s book, a sort of rough-guide to the NaNoWriMo, that I realised what it was really all about. Essentially it’s about getting the job done by setting yourself a deadline and allowing you to hit that deadine by putting away all of the excuses and blockers. The only thing that is important in the end result is that you have 50,000 words. Quality is not important, that can come with the next draft if you decide you want to go ahead with it, so instead of constantly revising the one page you’ve written you simply plough ahead and write the whole lot. You can make it readable later.

Although Baty’s book has a couple of holes and contradicts itself in a few places (and also has a some ideas that go against the really great ideas in MacLeod’s manifesto)⁴, the basic idea of NaNoWriMo is still brilliantly simple – set yourself a deadline and get something out there. Worry about making it perfect later. This concept applies to both the novel in my head (and in a pile of research books beside my desk) and the psuedo-business idea in the crude diagram on my wall. It’s a lesson I should have learned from my years with a startup company⁵ but it’s certainly one that I’m going to put into action in the coming months. You never know, I might even have written a 50,000 word novel by the end of November :-)

– Fintan

I managed to blag myself into a market research focus group last night¹ and it was kind of interesting. I’m not sure if I can say who it was for. I signed something at the end and while they didn’t say that it was an NDA, it could very well have been. Anyway, the crux of it was that it was for a provider of services, let’s call them company X, and they were trying to get a feel for some new pricing strategies.

Now, I will be honest that my primary motivation for being there was down to footnote 1 below and I was definitely the odd-one out. I work for a small company, one that wouldn’t be a high-value customer of company X. Other people in the focus group would probably qualify as medium to high value customers and were directly involved in the relationship between their own companies and X.

Company X were testing our reaction to new pricing strategies that they presumably hope will win them some new business but, and I think this was more important, help them retain their existing customers. The problem I had was that most of the strategies they were suggesting would only be useful to high-value users of their services. There was nothing to attract, or certainly retain, the little guy like us. In fact the strategies were basically useless to us and we wouldn’t have benefitted from them at all. As for the big guys in the focus group, most of them were big enough to have negotiating power with their account managers and some were already getting the kind of discounts that the pricing plans offered. As a little guy we don’t have that kind of negotiating power.

So I think X was missing something fundamental here. Looking after your customer is key to keeping them but if you’re focusing on customer retention then you have to give people a reason to stay with you not just when they’re a big, high value customer but also when they’re a little guy like us.

Take airline miles as a concrete example. People who fly regularly and are clocking up a lot of miles will tend to stick with the same airline. It makes sense. They have to fly with someone but at least this way they get something extra out of it other than DVT. For people who fly infrequently, air miles make no sense especially given that they have a habit of expiring after a few years. So if you only fly a couple of times a year you’re going to pick the airline with the cheapest fares. Who cares if the service is a bit crappy, you only have to put up with it for a couple of hours a year.

While the comparison doesn’t strictly hold true for company X, there is the risk that if they are basing their retention plan on loyalty points system or something similar, they have to recognise that they’re excluding customers who don’t use their services that often. Their customers, in turn, won’t feel much brand loyalty and will be more likely to move to competitors.
So, the moral of the story is that if you want true brand loyalty then companies should make a better effort to include the little guy. Besides you never know, one day they may become one of the big guys and they won’t forget being looked after.

– Fintan [listening to David Kitt]