Tag: Google Talk

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Another Social Economy

Welcome to Google Local Shopping

This year, 46% of retail sales will be influenced by the web – but more than 90% of total retail transactions will occur in-store, from small neighborhood boutiques to national chains *. No matter where our users are shopping, we want to help them find your products.

— Google Product Search

Google Product Search
Google Product Search

OMG this is amazing. I’m now competing with Google!

Just when I was killing myself with how to market AnotherSocialEconomy, I find this beta service from Google. Do you know what that means? Yes, Google already has all the eyeballs in the universe and yes, they could blow me out of the water at will.

But what that also means is that I no longer have to worry about finding my target audience. You see AnotherSocialEconomy brings retailers’ available supply to consumers’ demand. Pretty vague, eh? Try finding a good mix of AdWords keywords for a local buying network like that. It’s nuts. More importantly, it’s hugely expensive. Most importantly, customer cost of acquisition is astronomical.

With Google out there now, all I have to do is set my Google Alerts and other social media listening tools to “Google Local Shopping” and “Google Product Search”.  I could follow their Buzz  in the wake of their Wave & target my pitches.

For Starters

Not being a Merchant, I highly doubt I’ll ever manage to infiltrate their beta service. No matter. There’s plenty of others out there willing to share their experiences and opinions, such as, Google Local Shopping Tells Customers You Have It In Stock, Google’s Local Shopping Feature Now Open to Small Businesses and Google Local Shopping: cool new tool | OregonLive.com.

And that’s just cherry-picking. Plenty for me to research & plenty for me to post comments on.

Details… details… details…

As Lisa Barone says about Google Local Shopping:

It does seem like a small amount of work to get listed; however, anything you can do to make your products more available and searchable is a good thing.

AnotherSocialEconomy’s barrier for adoption is an email account and optionally, a modern browser with an Internet connection. That’s it! No multiple Merchant Accounts. As a matter of fact, registered Retail Sales Associates could also use their Twitter account / text messaging (SMS), Jabber Instant Messaging (IM) – like Google Talk, as well as, an Androida app. Basically, anyone with a smartphone is literally in business. There’s no XML data feeds to set up. No inventories to maintain.

Just details? Maybe, but the feedback I’ve gotten so far is that small/medium businesses (SMB) are living on smaller and smaller margins.  So the fewer details, the less investment in the service, the greater the return on investment. And vice versa.

AnotherSocialEconomy is not free

Consumers pay a token fee for requesting goods/services – Demand. And Retailers pay a token fee, as well, for proposing their Supply. Why? Well for starters, we hope to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. Less noise going to the Retailers, means higher quality sales leads. Higher quality sales leads means higher quality Proposals going back to the Consumers. Higher quality Proposals, results in greater probability of closing sales.

But wait there’s more…

Ok, so AnotherSocialEconomy isn’t free. But it is another social economy. That means that it shares with its community members through its the Influencer, Reseller and Referrer programs.

Stay tuned

Be sure to come back & visit as I ride in the wake of Google’s Local Shopping wave trying my best to compare our competing services. Please feel free to share your own experiences, opinions and comparative thoughts.

Categories
Another Social Economy

The Twouble with Twetailer

Golden Rule of Branding:

  1. Choose a name that is your URL
  2. Don’t choose anything that paints you in a corner. With the word “tweet” in it, it’s painted into a corner.

— Mark Suster, referring to TweetUp at 6:11 into This Week in Venture Capital #2 with Mark Suster.

In the beginning

There was something familiar about Twitter back in December 2008 when I posted My Five Ws of Twitter in less than 10 minutes (video included). It wasn’t necessarily the short messages – like text messaging (SMS), even though those were its roots. It wasn’t so much the chat-like short messages either. It was something I recognized as an IBM MQ Series feature call Message Persistence – basically meaning, the messages are saved on some hard disk on some server somewhere on the network. So what? So as opposed to email, text messages, or, chat messages that are 1) unless they’re spam, are sent to a select group of people, and 2) can be deleted, Twitter messages are potentially in the public domain, persisted (save to some disk) and searchable.

The original idea behind Twetailer was to expand on those persisted tweets, as if they were MQ Series persisted messages and use them as a poor-mans’ communication channel. And just like MQ Series with its ability to have operating system agnostic clients communicating to the MQ Series server, there were already a whack of Twitter client applications out there like TweetDeck, Twhirl, Seesmic, etc. That way Twetailer could focus on the transaction engine and let its users choose their favorite client app. We even had free text messaging (SMS), courtesy of Twitter.

Hence the name Twetailer, which is short for Twitter Retailer.

Sounds like a plan, eh?

But Dom Derrien was concerned about relying on Twitter for these persisted messages, so, we decided to persist our own. Still true to our Twitter inspiration, we built a transaction engine that runs in 140 characters, or, less. As a Consumer, your initial request looks like:

d twetailer wii console locale:1235 us range:25 mi expires:2010-12-23

and subsequent requests could look like:

d twetailer rent twilight dvd

since we already knew your previous preference for location and default the expiry date to one month in the future.

Oh, by the way, Dom was right! To date, Twitter does not persist searchable messages beyond a few days, at best!

Too cryptic

While everyone we yakked to about the concept Where Demand comes to meet Supply loved it, they either didn’t tweet, or, thought the messages were too cryptic.

How to paint yourself out of a corner

Twitter is still a force to be reckoned with. But so is email and so is the web and so is text messaging and so is Facebook and so is Google Talk and so is iChat and so is Android and so is iPhone and so is yada yada yada. Cryptic, shmyptic!!! Our  Twitter-inspired transaction engine has an open application programming interface (API) allowing us, or, you to build more client apps than ever before. Nonetheless, we have to heed the outside-in advice of  those we respect.  So we’re keeping http://twetailer.com as our project name but moving forward with http://AnotherSocialEconomy.com.

Thanks Jason, Mark & ThisWeekIn

A big thanks to Mark Suster, Jason Calacanis and the rest of the crew at ThisWeekIn for helping us paint our way out the corner. I’m pleased to say we have gone from the single Twitter Stream to multi-stream and from Twetailer to AnotherSocialEconomy.

Thoughts

Has anyone out there been faced with a similar situation? Did you stick with your ‘program”, or, re-positioned yourself?

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edu Social Software

What To Do When Your Kids Are More Connected Than You Are and Your First Social Safety Net

How to turn an unknown social network of yours into your kids safety net and maybe even help you start connecting too.

Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

— Bill Gates

Geniuses at Work: Bill Gates watches his friend and future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen typing on a teletype terminal at the Lakeside School in Seattle in 1968. Gates was 13 when he entered the exclusive prep school, which was around the time this photo was taken.
Geniuses at Work: Gates watches his friend and future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen typing on a teletype terminal at the Lakeside School in Seattle in 1968. Gates was 13 when he entered the exclusive prep school, which was around the time this photo was taken.

Background

I have two start-up projects underway. The first, Twetailer was inspired by one of those “OMG! Wouldn’t it be great if you could just yada yada yada?” moments. The second, http://edu.cyn.in, was not. No edu, was created out of my 11-year old daughter Sara’s frustration with her school’s computer curriculum. Complaints like: “Why do I care if something is bold?”, or, “Insert a column? When am I ever going to need that when I grow up?”. Yikes! Wouldn’t it be great if Sara could actually use technology for something she cared about?

You can’t always get what you want

– Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones

But Sara also shared the frustration she felt when some of her friends – who are on Facebook, kept urging others to join up, even though they know the minimun age is 14. Similarly for those with MSN, or, gmail accounts. And while I love seeing kids adopt technology, there are valid reasons why these services have age requirements. So, as a parent, what do you do? Do you stick to the rules & tell them to wait until they’re old enough? Do you let them waste their effortless ability to embrace these social technologies and stick to making things bold & inserting colums?

But if you try sometimes, you get what you need

– Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones

So again, as a parent, how do we monitor our kids’ activities on the Net? Google it. Here’s Dr. Phil.com – Advice – Monitor Your Child’s Cell Phone and Internet Activity. There are lots of sites offering all kinds of advice. But mostly all of them assume one thing – that you are as tech savy as your kids. And let’s face it, kids have a lot more time & friends to show them how than most parents do.

But what if you were able to trust another parent to monitor your kid’s activities for you? Like when you let your little one go on a playdate to a friend’s house, or, they’re invited to the movies. If you trust the friend’s parents then you let them go.

Perhaps your first digital social safety net

edu started out to be a way for Sara & her Grade 6 classmates to socialize in a secured and monitored Internet playground. A place where they could experience the power of blogs, wikis, discussions, audio, video, image sharing, etc. while learning the new minimun skills sets required in today’s digital and globally distributed workplace. Pretty soon, edu will be made available for the rest of her school and any other school interested under the following conditions:

  1. The student has to be attending an educational institution registered with edu
  2. There must be at least one parent/guardian, teacher/faculty member monitoring that student’s grade.

In Sara’s case, I monitored her grade. Did that mean all the other parents trusted me (and edu with their children’s related activities? Not necesarly. It turns out, most didn’t have a choice. Over the course of the project, I spoke with a few parents and they simply felt they didn’t have the skill sets to monitor. Even after informing them its just a matter of reading their email, they still felt uncomfortable with this “type of stuff”, but looked forward to watching how their kids used it.

Do the math

So in essence, condition #2 above, became those parents’ new social safety net. All they needed was one adult out of twenty students, to feel comfortable enough to watch over their child in their new digital playground. Is this any different than letting your child go to the movies, or, a school field trip with a parent like that?

My parents always told me: “All we want is for you to have more opportunities than we did growing up.” And they certainly succeeded. As a parent in today’s digital world, it would be a shame not to continue the tradition. edu gives those who aren’t as connected as their kids the opportunity to do just that.

Reflection

What are your thoughts abouts giving your kids access to things like Facebook, MSN, Friendfeed, MySpace, Twitter, Google Talk, AIM, Bebo, buzzup, Delicious, digg, Gmail, Mister Wong, Reddit, Stumbleupon, twine, WordPress and Yahoo? Do you have the skills to monitor their activities across all these sites? What percent of parents do you think can? Where do you fit in this Study: Ages of social network users | Royal Pingdom?

photo credit

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edu

Update on pitching social software to Sara’s elementary school

Sara’s teacher – Mr. N. was kind enough to schedule 90 minutes last Friday afternoon for me to pitch social software to her Grade 6 class.

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

— Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke

Harmless Audio Plug

The Plan

My original intent was to play a couple of music videos I mashed-up to see how familiar the students already were with services like Facebook & MSN. Unfortunately, as I plugged the external speakers into my 6 year-old Dell laptop, something went pop & then all we heard was nothing but snap & crackle.

I should have known better than try to resolve the situation. Mr. N. jumped right in with a little discussion on the pros & cons of things like Facebook & MSN. But as Sara gave me her “Daddy…?” look, I figured it was time to move on and demo the mini-site I set up the night before.

Moving on

I started off logged into the site with Sara’s credentials & displayed the day’s Calendar Event. I toured the bullet items and the Video Gallery – like YouTube, I wanted to show. I clicked on Sara’s Profile page to draw the analogy to Facebook. I showed them the Image Gallery with a few pictures Sara took at their last 3-day field trip & mentioned Flickr. I showed them Status messages & Discussions – sort of like MSN, GTalk, Twitter, Facebook, myspace, gmail, hotmail, etc. Then there was the shared Bookmarks like delicious and digg.

In the end, I never needed the videos. For the most part, the kids were very much tuned into the virtues of social software. If anything, they just didn’t know that that’s what it was called.

Hmmm

For myself, I learned that more than half the kids were already on Facebook & avid MSN users. In fact, the Facebook users were also well aware of the fact they are “ineligible” to register but lied about their birthdays as a work around. MSN doesn’t challenge anyone on registration but it’s buried somewhere in the Terms & Conditions that a “Child” must have the permission of a parent, or, guardian – which seemed to bother some of the kids on MSN.

For those, not registered with Facebook, many were very quick to say they didn’t want to lie about their age – Sara included. In addition, I also found out that some felt the peer pressure to be on Facebook.

A simple analogy

So that’s what we offered the Grade 6 class. All the social software capabilities they want in the privacy and safety of their own school. I pointed out that at recess time, the school doesn’t send them out to the public parks to play. They go out to their gated schoolyard where there’s school staff to monitor them. And on some occasions, they get together with other schools to play soccer, or, football. So this was going to be exactly along the same thinking – just virtual.

The Project

While I wasn’t able to play any videos for the kids, I did cover the material the old fashioned way. I explained to them the deal in the making – described in my previous post The Start-Up Chronicles: Chapter 2. Who, Part 4, under “Who’s in for a little extra-curricular activity?”.

In the end, both Mr. N. & I concluded that there is certainly a desire and need for us to bring social software into the school. In the fact the interest level seemed so high, that Mr. N. offered to integrate the social software activity into his curriculum and even dedicate Friday afternoons for me to mentor the kids – given enough parents grant their permission.

Up next

Permission Slip and all the parents/guardians have been directed here to permit, or, not permit their child to participate in the social software activity.

[form 2 “Social Software In Schools Permission Form”]

 

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