TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

On the Road Again

Off for summer vacation - back by July 11! In the meantime, I hope everyone has a great Canada Day, July Long, or whatever, and a nice couple of weeks.

This blog is going to be pretty quiet ’till the 11th - I don’t have any expectation of internet access in the backcountry trails and campgrounds we’ll be frequenting, and I’m not even bringing a laptop on this trip - so if I don’t reply to your comment or respond to your email, don’t take it personally -I’ll be on it as soon as I’m back!

Happy trails,
–R

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Pownce Borrowing from Pidgin?

Digg-founder Kevin Roses’s new IM/whatever service is called “Pownce.” Wonder where the name came front? Try IM/presence tool Pidgin (which isn’t new) which lets you “pounce” on friends who come online. Found Pidgin via the blog of Shankar Ganesh who highlights its presence features.

instant+messaging, pidgin pownce

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

SideJobTrader - Find those people that are great to know

There’s a bunch of people that - if you know them - can save you bales of time, money, and hassle. These are electricians, mechanics, roofers, painters, etc. - basically all of the trades that cost an arm and a leg through a contractor, but that can be paid with cash and a case of beer if you know the right people.

SideJobTrader aims to create a marketplace for making these connection - giving trades people an after-hours way to utilize their skills and make extra money, and consumers a way to get jobs done on an informal, less-expensive basis.

A noted in the SideJobTrader press release, this can be an ethical grey area - i.e.: if you take your car into the shop for work, and the mechanic offers to the work for half price at home on the weekend, its pretty tempting to take the offer - even though nominally you and the mechanic are ripping off the garage that’s brokered your relationship.

Releationship Brokering

Which perhaps provides the paradigm shift that underlies SideJobTrader: In many cases (small jobs), the value added by garages, contractors, dealers, etc. is a brokerage function - connecting consumers to tradespeople, and providing the work venue. SideJobTrader provides a means to disrupt and make that connection directly - a tried and tested “remove the middle-man” strategy. Where it can get sketchy is in bigger, more complicated jobs - in which case you’re paying that contractor not just for the connection to tradespeople, but for the management thereof, supply procurement, warranty, etc. - a different type of transaction entirely.

So - the moral of the story - perhaps - is that services exist on a spectrum of complexity and cost, and the decision on where in that spectrum to land is now in the hands of consumers.

Fresh Launch

At the moment, SideJobTrader seems to have the expected new launch sparseness - there aren’t many tradespeople in there yet. Given that tradespeople generally aren’t internet-centric and deskbound in their work, recruiting them into the service may be more of a challenge.

As you’ll see in the screencaps below, SideJobTrader is also working with a very utilitarian design. Perhaps because the initial focus of the site is on building a stable of tradespeople, there’s litte consumer-focus yet - search, for example, is not prominently featured on the homepage.

Craigslist, Credibility, Business Model

SideJobTrader faces an uphill battle in adoption: they’re not the first to offer a way to find informal workers. Craigslist and online classifieds spring immediately to mind.

More importantly, however is the notion of trust. How does the average person make one of these informal connections? Through a word-of-mouth recommendation from a friend. That recommendation conveys credibility - a metric which is currently missing from SideJobTrader.

Also working against SideJobTrader is the site’s business model: charging tradespeople to be listed. SideJobTrader charges $7/month, with slight discounts for longer periods, up to a maximum of 90 days. While charging may keep out spam, it will also keep out tradespeople who have many other free options (craigslist, for example) to choose from. Charging tradespeople seems directly contrary to the sites goals as it will actively work against SideJobTrader achieving any critical mass.

To me, SideJobTrader seems like a natural fit for an ad-supported business model anyway.

Summary

As a fresh start, SideJobTrader offers a compelling proposition - saving money and bypassing the traditional way of getting certain things done is appealing. The site’s current state shows that it has maturing to do from functionality (feedback loop, please), design, and business model (IMHO) standpoint. Maturation is an expected part of a new venture, however, and I’ll be following SideJobTrader as it evolves.

craigslist, sidejobtrader trades

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Web 3.0: Using GPS, Google, Satellites to Track Falcons from Chile to the Arctic

A friend sent me this story today from the Falcon Research Group: they’re using solar powered, GPS locator bands to track migrating Peregrine Falcons. The bands report in by satellite every 10 days - that location is automatically publicized with a nice Google Map on each bird’s tracking page.

Its a very Web 3.0 application - using several satellites, the interenet, people, digital photography, and a bunch of different technologies to tell these bird’s stories.

You can follow this particular project on the FRG blog (each bird has a Blogger label - here’s #7, for example, and here’s Houdini) - spread the word!

falcons, gps peregrine

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Gumiyo & Edgeio: Is there a market for mobile classifieds?

Gumiyo lets you post classifieds from your mobile/cell. Edgeio - Michael Arrington’s hyped “edge aggregating” classifieds site started as a blog-listing aggregator, but now appears to be an awkward mix everything-aggregator in the style of Oodle and traditional classified site in the style of Craiglist.

Anyway, a recent press release announced that these two companies are going to be working together. It doesn’t really say how, other than to suggest that Edgeio listings will be browseable on cellphones, and that browsers will be able to contact sellers with text messages or “web-activated telephony” - which I assume is a fancy way of saying “clicking a link to dial a call.”

The question I’d like to ask is: how many people want to search classifieds from their cell phone? What use case does this support? I suppose I could go to a car dealership, find a car that I like, and comparison shop vs. classified listings… that scenario seems to be a reach though. Gumiyo’s tagline is the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless “connecting buyers and sellers” - the question is, what’s the marginal benefit to connecting them in realtime? eBay and Craigslist have done a good business connecting them asynchronously because that supports observed behaviour - i.e.: people generally like to shop & research from home where all of their resources are at their fingertips, and then go and transact. I don’t imagine Gumiyo/Edgeio’s mobile browsing will enjoy the same level of success.

Gumiyo’s cellular posting, however, is a different story. Posting stuff on ebay or wherever is a PITA - out comes the digicam, take some pictures, dump them to my PC, crop and resize, upload to whatever classifieds site I’m using, etc. Gumiyo - see below - makes this a one step, all mobile process that looks to save a tonne of work (for posting simple items, anyway).

IMHO, Gumiyo would be doing the world a favour if they built hooks into eBay to allow Gumiyo posting to an auction - fast, streamlined, and easy.

classifieds, craigslist, ebay, edgeio, gumiyo sales

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Link Roundup for Wednesday, June 27, 2007

1. SpringWise on Craigslist Meets YouTube at RealPeopleRealStuff - will video classifieds take off for anything other than houses? Speaking of which, why aren’t their video classifieds for houses?
2. Janet Johnson discusses Michael O’Connor-Clark discussing lack of portability of social network profiles. Interesting stuff - perhaps an extension of APML is in order…
3. Janet Johnson double header - turning information into insight. Great discussion on capitalizing on the mounds of data that enterprise-class organizations furiously work to accumulate.
4. Markus Weichselbaum (The Broth) writes on Web 3.0 and posits that it will be a blurring of lines between what we already know from the 2.0 world.
5. Pownce - which I didn’t have time to write on - is covered in depth by DeepJiveInterests (underwhelmed), Frantic Industries (its IM with better multi-person chatting), ValleyWag (underwhelmed), CenterNetworks (actually tried it, loved it), and ParisLemon (acquisition bait?).

Note: the only person that actually tried Pownce was the only one that liked it.

techfold

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Pownce: GMail Evolved

I’m running out the door to a hair cut, but I wanted to share my thought: Pownce looks like an evolved version of GMail that completely blurs the boundaries between email and IM.

pownce

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Bad Advertising: TrailFire and Compete.com

I’ve run across two leaderboard banners over the last few days that are so bad as to justify a post.

1. Trailfire.com

Trailfire is apparently some sort of discovery service like StumbleUpon that requires a browser plugin. I didn’t find that out from the banner though. All that does is create vague associations with fire departments (hydrant and dalmation) and urine (the dalmation is about to pee). So - it looks like trailfire is inviting user to leave a trail of pee all over the web. Or something. Who knows? This banner communicates nothing good, doesn’t have enough interest to drive a mystery-click, and creates bad brand associations.

2. Compete.com

Ok. Can this banner be any more annoying and visually alienating? Blending statistics (the tail), marketing buzz (the long tail), prurient frat-boy innuendo (getting some tail tonite?), and awful, awful 1996 cliched nerd-imagery, this ad does everything it can to sabotage Compete’s messaging: that Compete offers a lot of deep statistics.

Banner Basics

I’m not a designer or a communications person - but there’s still a few basic guidelines that I use to inform design descisions for communication of any format:

1. Familiarity: Is my service new, or do people know about it? If its new, people have no idea what it is, and there’s no brand-equity, which means that I need to communicate my core value proposition in the ad. Trailfire missed the boat on this one.
2. Action Orientation & Goals: What are my campaign’s goals? How will I measure success - signups? Traffic? With that in mind what does my messaging need to accomplish? Make sure your communication is not an FYI, but something with a call to action - that drives recall and awareness. Compete dropped the ball here.
3. Key Message: Beyond communicating my core value proposition (if req’d) or action-oriented messages, what overall branding messages am I trying to convey? How does everything in the ad directly contribute to communicating that messaging?
4. Consistency: Is my imagery and messaging consistent with that on my site? Is it consistent with other ad units? Is it consistent within any given ad unit? For instance, how does Compete’s sneering nerd reinforce their messaging about superiour breadth and depth of data?

In a nutshell: Common sense. Put yourself in the position of someone seeing an ad somewhere and ask yourself how it would be percieved.

The Mystery-Click

Just a final aside: you can disregard all of the above if you’re going for “the Mystery-Click.” That’s an enigmatic message or image so interesting or compelling that the very absence of messaging is enough to drive a click-through - to solve the mystery. Off the top of my head I can’t even think of a well executed/successful mystery click campaign. But I’m sure they exist.

banners, compete trailfire

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Link Roundup for Tuesday, June 26, 2007

1. The Wired Jester: 5 ways to get through writer’s block.
2. Rob Hyndman: Lawyer ranking service Avvo gets sued — by lawyers.
3. Gino Cosme: Get ready for Christmas ‘07.
4. WebWorkerDaily: Three location-based social networks you should check out.

speedlinking

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Corrected: DNHour.com - Digg for Domain Name News

DNHour.com is a community driven news site for the SEO domain name industry. IMHO this is a great vertical to target - the domain industry (and somewhat-related SEO industry) has a very high noise-to-signal ratio, and a good community (and algorithm) would go a long way to sorting some of the wheat from the chaff. Though its currently a little sparse on the community interaction side, its brand new, and I’m willing to give it a chance. I’m adding the DNHour feed to my reader. [found via Press Release]

From the press release:

DNHour.com is founded by a Malaysian-based domainer and serial entrepreneur, Koay Al Vin. After missing out on some big domain name purchases, he decided to keep in the know by tediously scouring domain forums and listing sites for what is available. He founded DNHour.com to ease the process and today, all domainers can help each other by sharing those important news and events at DNHour.com.

Other Coverage:

Net Monetization says get into DNHour early.

CORRECTION: Koay Al Vin contacted me to indicate that the site is focused specifically on Domain Name news & finds - not SEO as I assumed. Thanks for the correction!

digg, dnhour, domain+names, domaining, domains, marketing, optimization, search, sem seo

Share This

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!