anders.tyckr.com

I just came across these players in the mobile social networking sphere which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Nic at The Equity kicker linked to above has a good list on some of the issues that these players face and what they will need to succeed:

• Vastly superior functionality - and they are looking strong here - the web players don’t seem to be working hard to leverage the phone’s uniqueness - e.g. address book
• Easy to implement and use - getting over the java download issue - maybe that problem is disappearing, or they will have to use WAP (my understanding is that Flirtomatic are now pushing their WAP service ahead of the java app)
• Zero marginal cost distribution - each new user costs virtually nothing to acquire. Essential when monetisation per user is uncertain. This is what has made the web players work well and has been difficult so far on mobile. I think mobile to mobile virality and sign up could be very powerful, although my instinct is text and mobile web rather than bluetooth.
• Minimal dependence on the operators, in the early days at least. Once there is scale the operators will rush to get on the bandwagon, but you will almost certainly need to find a way to get to that point without them.
• A co-existence strategy for the web based social networks

Without knowing much on the exact technology challenges that are there, I think that the one that will make a seamless integration between the social network usage through a mobile web browser and the contacts in the address book will have a very strong position. Zyb has come a long way, but not quite seamless yet. Ultimately these players should be the key to solving the problem of people owning their own social graphs.

Some people think that the next step of social networking is going to be mobile social networking. I don't necessarily agree and here is why.

Social networking is basically your social graph. The power is in the social graph, but not the graph it self, rather what you can do with it. Facebook really just showed a little bit what could be done. And that was in a walled garden environment. What really needs to happen, and what the DataPortability workgroup (or at least I hope) are working for, is that people get control of their own social graphs. My network is mine to own, and I don't want to spend another month or two adding all my friends from scratch!

The next thing that is going to happen with social networks is that your portable social graph should be a plugin to new services on the internet. Think Facebook Beacon, but instead of e-commerce sites publishing information about your friends latest buys in your facebook feed, you would rather get recommendations by friends in your social graph, when visiting e-commerce websites.

One of the most important things to recognize here is that the Social Graph is not the only graph that could be of interest being portable. For instance, another graph is that one you have on Last.fm. why should it be their right to own my music listening history. That's my music graph! Or make a list of all movies you have seen, rate them, and interconnect all movies with similar genres, actors, settings, themes, music etc etc... and you have yourself your movie graph. Now if you would be able to apply it to a music store for instance, you could get a list of all Soundtracks that you might be interested in. Services that will allow users to input their graphs will succeed in the future.

The problems the DataPortability workgroup are facing is how and where people should host/own their graphs. Well going back to the mobile social networking. What would be a better place to store your graphs than on your mobile phone? Your social graph is already there through your address book. The rest of your graphs should be easy to collect somehow.

Any takers?

Last week something odd happened. Or how often would you say that two of your friends start the same business idea - separately - without them knowing about each other. One was started in Sweden, and the other in San Fransisco. I think we have ourself a match.

The two companies are Tuurf.com and Zkout.com. I don't know any details of the business ideas, but I do know that both are operating in the mobile social networks market. They are not alone, and reports keep coming in that the mobile social network market is going to be huge.

What is really interesting here is that the two companies have taken two completely different approaches to creating their businesses - one silicon valley style, and one European style. During Seedcamp we discussed that European startups are usually to humble in their approaches to solving a problem. That Europeans do not aim big enough, and on the other hand, US startups go super big with sometimes very crazy ideas. But crazy ideas are only crazy and funny if they are done with bad timing.

Tuurf has not yet taken any funding, and that is not because they can't but due to strategy. Zkout has on the other hand taken an angel round and are hiring at least 10 people from what I've heard. Tuurf does not yet have any full time employees and it is treated as a project as the founders all have other jobs or are still in school.

So what is the best strategy in this situation. Either you go full speed and work in the market and closely follow all developments in user trends, burn though a lot of cash fast to try and get an early piece out of a growing market? Or do you watch this market grow from a distance, and try and get a trend line on the direction of the market without following all ups and downs, and let others do the dirty work of breaking in the market?

As I'm all for the "go big, or don't go at all" kind of mentality my first thought would be to go for the more aggressive Zkout. But then again, I think this market is still a bit too immature for even early adopters to use these types of services. So, if Zkout are to come out a winner in this fight, their pockets better be deep, or they will run out of cash before the market is ready.

On the flipside, Tuurf might miss out on some key trends by not being focused enough, and might not have the manpower to scale up in time when the market is ready. Going too slow might be a problem, and is probably as hard to fix as going too fast.

I'm not that passionate about the mobile market, so for me I might not even be an early adopter for these types of products. But looking at this match in terms of business strategy, I would not want to miss a minute of the action to come.

Today the developers worked hard, and have been for a long time now, to release the Chamomile version of the site.

The first-page is completely redone, and the search results are much better organized and with better information about the restaurants.

I really like the interface of the first page though. Just type in a location and press enter or drag the map to the place you want to look at. Then if you want to, refine your search in step 2 and press enter. The map refreshes to see if you'll find any restaurants. In step 3 you say how big your party is and when you want to go and voilla... you get a nice page with results.

And you can save that search if you want to... just click the "link to this search" button and get the url to save or share with your friends.

Tomasz, my fellow co-founder and CTO, represents Tablefinder at The Internet Marketing Conference in Stockholm November 29-30th. He will be on a panel about Taking a Business from 0–100 km/h in No Time with other Swedish internetentrepreneurs like Jonas Hombert from JayCut.

Read more at: http://www.webanalysts.info/

One of the TechCrunch40 companies, .dockstoc, just launched and I got an opportunity to take a first look. What they provide is something I have been looking for for a very long time. Bye bye to all companies trying to charge for their "professional" document templates.

I havn't played around much with it, but just the first look when I logged in was brilliant - all of the documents I have been looking for in one place, for free (for now anyways):

I strongly recommend anyone who is doing any sorts of business planning to take a look at the site.

Here is a screencast of some of the stuff you can do.

Last week I was at Catapult in London - a conference about launching your business in the US - and it was a very good networking experience.

Talking about networking, social networking, which of course is very hot these days, it is starting to turn into something so much more than just playing around on the internet. On one of the panels at the conference a panelist said that

"Social networking is turning into Business networking"

And I couldn't agree more. Not only online, but social networking IRL is one of the best ways to do business.

We would not be where we are today without doing serious business networking. I think that how it is done is one of the main differences when comparing European entrepreneurs to US ditto. In Sweden when people do business networking it is almost always about making money or connections to people that will help you make money. What I have experienced these last few trips to London, but also going to conferences with great entrepreneurs is that, there, the focus of business networking is helping each other.

People are much more happy to help you and give you advice, rather than focusing on how they can make money off of you. This difference might seem marginal, but is an essential detail in the "new" Business networking that is starting to occur. I guess one could say that the sharing trends of social networking and open source are finally coming to business networking. By helping each other I believe we are creating a collective wisdom of business.

So, I believe that by surrounding yourself with great entrepreneurs that are willing to share their knowledge is a key to success in doing business in the future. But it is important that you are as willing to help them, as you are eager to get advice. With this said, I'm happy to give advice, for free, to anyone who would want some.

YUIBlog at Yahoo have a nice video on Joseph Smarr from Plaxo talking about javascript best practices. I have been saying for a long time that it is not always good to code javascript in a strictly OO fashion, but instead use namespaces for protection. In some places it is good, but the mindset with javascript should be that "How can I solve this with the fewest lines of code" and not "How can I solve this the most 'beautiful' way".

Don't get me wrong, I really like beautiful solutions, but just not when they are done with 100 lines of code to be OO, when it could be done with 10 lines.

Joseph Smarr has some other good points where he argues in a similar fashion as Yoda, "You must unlearn what you have learned", meaning that regular coding best practices sometimes does not apply to javascript.

//Anders