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Small Loans, Big Bucks: The World of Social Lending [2]
2007-06-09 01:47:44
In an increasing number of countries across the world, social lending is being hailed as an alternative to ‘traditional’ bank small business and personal loans. These services connect individual lenders with individual borrowers, creating a peer-to-peer loan service that is streamlined, efficient, legally formatted, profitable, and most importantly, helpful. Social lending sites provide an opportunity for financial assistance or gain to those who would otherwise not have the opportunity. An Overview of Services Zopa was the first social lending site to launch, serving the United Kingdom since 2005 and now planning on extending its services to the U.S. Zopa’s basic model of lenders bidding different amounts & rates to borrowers, based on credit rating, has been adopted by the services that have followed. Zopa’s own inspiration comes from the “local micro-lending schemes that operate in Asia and Latin America. Families, neighbours or friends will lend amo
Read more: Lending , Loans , Small , World

Occasional Links: Valleywag Bashing, Mobile Marketing Shirts, and Search Safety
2007-06-04 12:21:52
Valleywag will write anything – In this hilarious interview of Jason Calcanis, he explains how Valleywag’s absolute lack of journalism ethics can be used to provide free marketing or a smokescreen for your new product launch. Oh, and by the way, he’s launching Mahalo. It’s obviously pretty one-sided, but you can’t argue with the results he received. Like my shirt? Text me for more info. – From Mashable’s web 2.0 firehose I found this intriguing company combining t-shirt sales, marketing, and mobile Internet. Reactee does t-shirt marketing by printing your company’s logo/slogan, a text keyword, and a number to text it(via SMS) to. When someone sees the shirt and texts the keyword, they get a message you’ve set in advance, and can change at anytime. This seems like a great way to generate buzz on the street(literally) about your product, and to take advantage of customer evangelism. State of Search Safety : May 2007 – McAfee&
Read more: Marketing , Mobile , Shirts

Occasional Links: Newspapers, Wikis, and Nations
2007-06-03 23:34:02
The Future of Newspapers: 10 Obvious Things – Ryan Sholin and I are clearly on the same page. His list tells newspapers who they need to stop blaming and what they need to start doing to get to a profitable future. Now I wish someone would write a list explaining to bloggers why newspapers have a future. Hmmm.. maybe I should do that? Wikis … in plain english – In this excellent video explanation, CommonCraft explains what wikis are in a way that anyone(not just any techie) can understand. It’s a follow-up to their even better video, RSS in Plain English, which as of May 28th was viewed over 80,000 times. More consultants need to be educating their customers so they understand why expert knowledge is needed, instead of consultants keeping customers in the dark in an attempt to have job security. comScore measures recent Internet usage across Europe – According to comScore, there are more monthly unique users in Europe than there are in all of the U.S. T
Read more: Nations

More Signal, Less Noise: The Power of RSS Mashups [1]
2007-06-02 13:31:13
First, an Overview of Services Yahoo! Pipes (Beta) When Yahoo! Pipes launched, there was much buzz in the blogosphere about a new, powerful tool that let users express ultimate control over how they used their feeds. Tim O’Reilly called it “a milestone in the history of the internet”. And yet, since then, there have been few public proclamations of the power of Pipes. It’s an extremely flexible tool, one with great potential. But it suffers from two key flaws: It’s technically intimidating, too much so for a layman. It may be “drag and drop”, but remember that even the most basic aspect of Pipes, the sources(in the form of RSS, XML, or other syndicated data), have not yet been adopted by the mainstream. Even older terms like “Operators” and the various functions they contain, are technical jargon to non-programmers. Pipes is completely invisible in its implementation, ironically much like the actual hardware it takes its nam
Read more: Mashups , Noise

Occasional Links: Me.dium Funding, Photos, Studies, and Patents [1]
2007-06-11 22:09:56
Me.dium gets new funding, should use it to start over – I tried Me.dium twice when it was in beta, and both times ended up uninstalling it. There simply wasn’t enough value to it. Part of this was that there weren’t enough people using it(as of now, 20,000 registered users, according to co-founder David Mandell), and there was no easy way of finding where everyone was. The other part is that I don’t think Me.dium is the best solution for any of the problems they’re trying to solve: “You and your friend are trying to accomplish a common task”. How does a browser plugin that lets me a) see where my friend is, and b) chat, accomplish this any better than an IM conversation where we send each other links? It’s simpler, most IM clients support logging so our collaboration is saved, and it keeps me from being distracted by the unimportant sites a friend browses until he messages me with an important one. “You are trying to do someth
Read more: Funding , Patents , Studies

Occasional Links: Me.dium Funding, Photos, Studies, and Patents [1]
2007-06-11 22:09:56
Me.dium gets new funding, should use it to start over – I tried Me.dium twice when it was in beta, and both times ended up uninstalling it. There simply wasn’t enough value to it. Part of this was that there weren’t enough people using it(as of now, 20,000 registered users, according to co-founder David Mandell), and there was no easy way of finding where everyone was. The other part is that I don’t think Me.dium is the best solution for any of the problems they’re trying to solve: “You and your friend are trying to accomplish a common task”. How does a browser plugin that lets me a) see where my friend is, and b) chat, accomplish this any better than an IM conversation where we send each other links? It’s simpler, most IM clients support logging so our collaboration is saved, and it keeps me from being distracted by the unimportant sites a friend browses until he messages me with an important one. “You are trying to do someth
Read more: Funding , Patents , Studies

Small Loans, Big Bucks: The World of Social Lending [5]
2007-06-09 01:47:44
In an increasing number of countries across the world, social lending is being hailed as an alternative to ‘traditional’ bank small business and personal loans. These services connect individual lenders with individual borrowers, creating a peer-to-peer loan service that is streamlined, efficient, legally formatted, profitable, and most importantly, helpful. Social lending sites provide an opportunity for financial assistance or gain to those who would otherwise not have the opportunity. An Overview of Services Zopa was the first social lending site to launch, serving the United Kingdom since 2005 and now planning on extending its services to the U.S. Zopa’s basic model of lenders bidding different amounts & rates to borrowers, based on credit rating, has been adopted by the services that have followed. Zopa’s own inspiration comes from the “local micro-lending schemes that operate in Asia and Latin America. Families, neighbours or friends will lend amo
Read more: Lending , Loans , Small , World

Occasional Links: Better Know a Genius - Bill Gates, Susan Decker, and John Chambers.
2007-06-30 18:40:08
‘Companies’ do not exist. There are legal documents, there are buildings, and most importantly, there are people. Those who are trying to predict the fortunes of corporations should not be working with the impressions a slogan and logo give them, but instead be paying attention to who is making the decisions behind the logo, and the people that influence them. While I’m finishing up one of the best articles I’ve written so far(make sure you’re subscribed to receive it!), I hope you’ll take the time to learn more about three people who have already accomplished great things: Gates .htm">Bill Gates , Susan Decker , and John Chambers . “ “Pound for pound, he’s the most controversial figure in IT.” – Newsweek provides us with a range of perspectives on Bill Gates from people who have known him personally. For people who want to learn more about Microsoft’s upcoming strategies, studying Gates is probably not the most effective use of time,


Social Strategist and Follow-ups
2007-07-04 17:38:24
Today is Independence Day in the U.S., and since it’s still too early for me to try and out-do Monday’s entry about web platforms, this entry is mainly site business and past entry updates(still worth reading for some brief, interesting news). Site News You may have noticed the redesign I did a couple of weeks ago, it’s just an initial effort to make things look a bit better. I’m planning on doubling the width of the sidebar, thus making the entries area narrower, which I think will make the text look a little more readable, and give me room to add a few more useful sidebar sections. I’m not a designer by nature, so if you have suggestions or advice, please comment. After all, the design is for you, not me. I’ve updated the Official Yahoo! Blogs and Official Google Blogs feeds. These feeds each combine all of the inidividual feeds of various Yahoo! and Google blogs, so that instead of subscribing to 20 or 35 feeds, you just have to subscribe to
Read more: Social

Quick! Distraction! [2]
2007-07-07 18:15:29
I’m crafting a visualization and brief post for Monday, in the meantime I present you with an amusing distraction and a challenge. From i can has cheezburger?, the best LOLcat ever. Your challenge: Identify which web company/service the cat is, and which one the mouse is.
Read more: Quick

Convergence Essential for the Mobile Web
2007-07-10 05:30:34
I’ve long been a fan of AOL Instant Messenger over it’s Yahoo!, Microsoft, and more recently, Google, counterparts. Most non-techie users have a preference for an IM network based on one factor only: it’s what most of their friends use. The feature sets of most IM products are comparable, and though the user interfaces have different advantages and disadvantages, none are so bad as to make users reject them en masse. Even a lack of feature’s can be overcome through third-party plug-ins. I use middle_man for AIM, and before that, DeadAIM. But as broadband internet has become more widely available, and thus usage of extra bandwidth-consuming programs like instant messaging tools has become more prevalent, the chances of all members of an individual’s social circle all using the same IM network has greatly declined. On modern PCs, it’s trivial to run two IM programs at once, even three. But for people who don’t want to manage contacts over multi
Read more: Convergence , Essential , Mobile

Quick! Distraction! [2]
2007-07-07 18:15:29
I’m crafting a visualization and brief post for Monday, in the meantime I present you with an amusing distraction and a challenge. From i can has cheezburger?, the best LOLcat ever. Your challenge: Identify which web company/service the cat is, and which one the mouse is.
Read more: Quick

Social Strategist and Follow-ups [1]
2007-07-04 17:38:24
Today is Independence Day in the U.S., and since it’s still too early for me to try and out-do Monday’s entry about web platforms, this entry is mainly site business and past entry updates(still worth reading for some brief, interesting news). Site News You may have noticed the redesign I did a couple of weeks ago, it’s just an initial effort to make things look a bit better. I’m planning on doubling the width of the sidebar, thus making the entries area narrower, which I think will make the text look a little more readable, and give me room to add a few more useful sidebar sections. I’m not a designer by nature, so if you have suggestions or advice, please comment. After all, the design is for you, not me. I’ve updated the Official Yahoo! Blogs and Official Google Blogs feeds. These feeds each combine all of the inidividual feeds of various Yahoo! and Google blogs, so that instead of subscribing to 20 or 35 feeds, you just have to subscribe to
Read more: Social

Occasional Links: Publishing, IM, and Flickr on the Rise
2007-07-13 12:53:15
Publishers’ push for online innovation – From the Press Gazette, an interesting article about how publishing companies are creating skunkworks-like environments(à la Yahoo!‘s Brickhouse), agile development philosophies, and dedicated teams tasked specifically to bringing traditional publishing into the digital age, in innovative ways. [via Times emit Enterprise instant messaging on the rise – CRM Today reports on a Gartner prediction of enterprise IM becoming the “de facto tool for voice, video and text chat” by 2011, with “95 percent of workers in leading global organisations using it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013.” It’s interesting to note that even the Gartner prediction emphasizes that IM will be complementary to e-mail rather than a replacement for it. More on IM when I get back to Boston later next week. Flickr is now the #2 photo site – Hitwise Intelligence shows that after the c
Read more: Publishing

Returned and Ready
2007-07-20 00:50:25
I’m back from vacation, and busier than ever catching up on everything I missed while away. Between work, feeds, e-mails, and other writing, it’s a wonder I have any time to be thinking about what to post. But this weekend will give me plenty of opportunity to create a worthwhile read, and by Monday I’ll have it finished, with hopefully a few lesser commentaries as I’m catching up over the weekend. Amazingly enough, according to my Feedburner stats I’ve actually gained subscribers while away(maybe I should shut up more often?), so thanks to everyone reading, and especially to those who have been leaving comments and sending e-mails. If you haven’t heard back from me yet, expect to soon. In the meantime, here’s an interesting number: 620,000,000,000. That’s the number of SMS text messages sent during the first quarter of 2007. The revenue derived from that is quite impressive, but less impressive is the amount of revenue made from no


Taking Podcasts Beyond Cassette Tapes
2007-07-23 00:14:33
The future is here, and it’s boring as hell. Web sites used to be pages of text, linked to other pages of text. Then they added images, and that was cool. Before you knew it, we had web sites that weren’t ‘static’ but ‘dynamic’. Changing, exciting, multimedia. Then the multimedia split into audio and video that were content pieces in their own right, ‘new media’ if you will, like a podcast. But if you cut through the hype, a podcast is no more dynamic than those first web pages full of text. Even worse, really, because they’re not linked to anything. It’s a piece of audio that I can play on my home device, in my car, or while walking around with my portable player. Essentially, a cassette tape (a tiny, digital cassette tape). It doesn’t have any divisions, so you can’t do much more than basic fast-forwarding or rewinding. It has some basic labeling, but not much, and it barely has cover art. Is this really the be
Read more: Cassette , Podcasts , Taking , Tapes

Click.tv + WebEx?
2007-07-30 09:20:26
Mike Arrington says Cisco may have acquired Click .tv, a “video annotation and deep tagging service”. I hope that rumor is true, because some exciting ideas crossed my mind that I think Cisco could implement if it took Click.tv’s technology and applied it to WebEx vido conferencing. When GMail was first announced, one of the most revolutionary ideas it brought to the mainstream was the idea of never having to delete an e-mail again. That, combined with GMail’s tagging ‘label’ing features and fantastic search capabilities, has made it possible for the average user to store every e-mail they’ve ever received, still have easy access to it years later, and(with a little foresight and planning with labels) have it sorted into meaningful contexts. For business-people and office users, those benefits are even greater. Imagine what it would be like to have that kind of organization and context applied to business video conferences. It would mean tha


Micro-labor: Business Model of the Future? [1]
2007-08-14 09:14:34
Updated below, 8/15/07 Advertising won’t pay the bills for every web service forever. And there are many concerns that because customers are so used to everything being free, they’ll balk at subscription models. I think I’ve come up with what I think is a new business model for web services, in which users essentially earn paid account status. On the same principle as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (possibly even integrating that service into yours), customers complete basic human insight tasks (“Is this a picture of a cat, or a picture of a dog?”) that assist you, your partners, or Mechanical Turk submitters in solving problems that need mass input. Instead of your customer earning money from completing those tasks, that money goes straight to you, and the customers ‘Progress/Power/Cool Bar/Meter/Gauge’ is ‘charged/filled/increased’ as they do more, until it reaches 100%, at which point they’ve earned a paid account for t
Read more: Business , Future , labor

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