Future Moocher - UK Web 2.0 & Internet Trends

I wrote a long post about Rightmove's IPO back in August. It now looks like with the crazy bubble in UK classifieds it may fetch as much as £400M in a spring offering. That will make struggling owners like Countrywide very happy - in fact their stake in Rightmove could be as much as 20% of their current market cap.

This bubble has seen the UK media companies, scared witless of online eating their lunch, buying up the likes of findaproperty and primelocation for some very generous valuations over the last 18 months. But at £400M (at least 50x 2006 earnings), Rightmove is probably too steep for them.

Rightmove is a clear number one - as Alexa shows - but how much of this is due to expensive TV campaigns and its closed relationship with its estate agent owners?

It will be great - if they do make it to IPO without a scared media baron diving in - to have another UK internet stock. Although not a very sexy one.

PS 2 years on - check out Zoopla for House prices and UK property value estimates

Google Pack looks like a very useful software bundle. It also looks like one step nearer a complete desktop solution, which if I was Bill Gates would make me very fidgety indeed. Adobe, RealNetworks, Norton, Lavasoft - also a list of the few viable software companies Microsoft never gobbled up, sidling up to Google.

This, along with the My Google stealth programme, forcing me to merge my different Google accounts and tenaciously remembering my postcode / zipcode, smells like another step in the Google Gets Evil plan. Google hasn't been so good at integrating all its different cool products and ideas, or at giving each user a single view of all their Google options. That's changing, fast. Google is packing.

Brandchannel.com just released their most influential brands of 2005. No surprise: Google top (GGE ). Apple second. But Skype third is more surprising and pretty cool if you own stock in eBay like me ;-) Clearly this was voted for by cool, slightly-but-not-too tekky media and advertising folk. But it's still thought-provoking.

You can see the full rankings here

Interesting how branding ain't that global; that BBC is a big brand (government owned after all); Nokia still top in Europe despite a shaky year; Firefox is top ten; and craigslist and Wholefoods (used to be my local in Evanston) continuing to make waves in the US. Bono is also a global brand apparently, sounds like a brand of dog food to me

Great post by Adam Mills in The Web Review listing 2005 Acquisitions by Google, eBay, Yahoo, IAC, AOL, NewsCorp etc in the web 2.0 space, including Urchin, Flickr, Blo.gs, Gumtree etc

Urchin looks like a real bargain for Google at $30M, they have decimated the competition and really added to their webmaster suite of services by making it free and calling it Google Analytics! Smart move, although demand has overwhelmed them I think and it could be another step in the GGE campaign (Google Gets Evil).

Other transactions worth looking at in 2005 from a UK perspective include old line media company purchases of classifieds sites like smartnewhomes, primelocation, findaproperty in real estate and also in jobs. These guys are one step behind though.

Anyone got any interesting info on the "undisclosed" transaction amounts?

Just a big ad for Yahoo or an interesting independent assessment of the best of UK web 2.0 in 2005? If this is the best innovation our Venture Capital, blogging and entrepreneurial community can deliver, it may be time to quit now!

I found out this week that Gumtree had been nominated for best Community site in these awards. My first task then is to ask you to please vote for Gumtree as the People's Choice.

Plug over. Now some observations on the state of the UK web from the other Community nominations:

Can Do Exchange - freecycle meets keen.com. "Service" exchanges and marketplaces have been tried for the last 10 years, everyone thinks they're a great idea and yet they never work big time. Not much traction for this one yet either.
Londonist - part of Gothamist, a "worldwide" network of city blog sites, trying to become the blogger version of the Metro I guess. Interesting global-local twist, but I didn't find it sticky.
Flickr - hardly fair for Yahoo to nominate their own global photo-sharing community web2.0 tagging phenomenon as the UK's best community site. It is damned good though.
Treasure My Text - The next killer storage application? A huge base to expand into mobile services? Or the world's most rambling collection of horribly misspelt haikus?

The other categories - entertainment, celebrity, tv and travel etc don't pique my interest so much. They're OK for an idle Friday afternoon I suppose but hardly original. Just a couple of favourites that buck the trend:

Future Me - Utility to send yourself/others email in the future. Maybe to make your boss think you're working when on holiday?
Live Plasma - Mind maps of music, movies and stuff you like, so you can find more like it. Integrate this with MySpace or similar music communities and you are getting into truly coooooolll-land.

Come on UK bloggers, VCs and webtrepreneurs - I wanna see us leading the US next year, not presenting this miserable cluster of half-innovation.

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