Launched property for sale and to rent listings
New company property blog
1000+ followers on Twitter
Cool new property widgets which you should definitely take advantage of if you run your own property or local site or blog.

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House prices is an area I look at a lot and there are at least 5 of these sites out there in the UK, buying the sold house prices England and Wales Land Registry data for a small fee, publishing to get traffic through SEO, then sending out the odd email newsletter to boost traffic to their AdSense pages. However, in this case it looks like UK House Prices site Zoopla is set to take much of their property price search business away by adding value to the data, through their property valuation algorithm, free house price estimates and other richer content.

Another related SEO property data catalogue you find everywhere is that for estate agents. There are around 15,000 estate agents in the UK, and so everyone from email4property to Zoopla to Rightmove to TouchLocal can generate agent SEO traffic - and even sell advertising or leads - by publishing a list of their contact details.

Other sectors where I see a lot of these AdSense entrepreneurs doing a great trade are business listings sites and directories, health sites like free calorie counters, and sports sites. Then there are those who take some initial database and add user-generated content and reviews - anything from classifieds to parenting to the thousands of niche forums out there.

It seems what you need is a free or near-free database source with real search traffic and lots of SEO-friendly information. I wonder what other databases there are out there worth re-publishing.

I also wonder what sectors out there are doing "dumb" re-publishing like in house prices, where there is room for another Zoopla-style play that adds value.

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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

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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.

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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

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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?

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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.

Yahoo
Flickr
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London
community
Awards
Web2.0

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This would be a fascinating development in the context of my last post on Google Talk and pay per call.

It could bring eBay into even more direct competition with Google and Yahoo as a forum for small business advertisers too. A lot of people are talking about customer service benefits for eBay - there's also a huge P2P network,a micropayments play and a pay per call ad network play. eBay is in the business of attracting massive consumer audiences, enabling transactions and charging businesses for access to them - so is Skype, PayPal, shopping.com and incidentally so is Google. eBay didn't buy Google 5 years ago when it could have; perhaps they will not repeat the mistake.

Google
Skype
eBay
VoIP
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Yes, Google wants to compete with the hype that is Skype. Yes, it is making a direct competitive play with MSN, Yahoo and AOL's millions of installed instant messenging customers. And in both segments, it's coming from behind. Yes, it can sell ads on Google talk. But this is all "me too".

Voice over IP is the future. In fact, it's pretty much here now. The problem is, there's not much cash in these consumer-to-consumer calls: worldwide prices are falling anyway, and while the pure-plays can beat British Telecom on cost structure, at the end of the day it's a commodity product. Although it would be kind of cool / scary to be able to Google search your phone calls ;-)

The first really interesting implication for me is around open networks - Google is using XMPP, an open source, XML-based protocol which could in theory open up the various instant messenging networks to each other, something that Yahoo/MSN/AOL have resisted. Whether it will succeed in getting these opened remains to be seen.

The second is around advertising and in particular pay-per-call. The reason that Google and Overture exist as businesses is performance-based, pay-per click online advertising. I pay you to deliver a customer to my site. But still 90% of businesses would pay more for a phone call than a click. As an estate agent, car dealer or plumber, do I really care about clicks? Calls are much more valuable, and I'll pay more for them. Although it's early days and the business models are still evolving, start-ups like Ingenio and eStara are proving this. Try a search for "mortgage california" on AOLsearch and look at the Ernest Loans ad that comes up from Ingenio to see what I mean.

Google or Skype's voice network and millions of voice users, could be a huge strategic asset in pay-per-call for the next wave of online advertising, integrating web and voice.

Yahoo has announced that it has just started trialling eStara's pay-per-call solution on Yahoo cars UK and soon on Kelkoo too. This one slipped by with little notice, but is almost as significant in showing how the next leap in advertising's getting closer.

Is Google becoming evil? Maybe. Are they scatterbraining into lots of random industry areas without any strategic sense? In this case, probably not.

Google
Skype
Yahoo
Ingenio
eStara
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But the net starts to break this down. Witness the rumblings about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or US elections. Witness the breadth of "news media" replacement perspectives on the London bombings reported in blogs and through passers-by taking pictures on their mobile phones.

In this vein, I was struck how some of what Noam Chomsky had to say on propaganda and the limits of freedom of expression in the west could apply to the (past, present and) future of the net, while reading some of his old essays on the plane while on vacation. This stuff was written in 1970, much of it in response to the Cold War, but is just as true today:

"We have, perhaps, reached a point in history when it is possible to think seriously about a society in which freely constituted social bonds replace the fetters of autocratic institutions ...

Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid-twentieth century. It is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of a competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense.

An autocratic state is no acceptable substitute; nor can the militarized state capitalism evolving in the United States or the bureaucratized, centralized welfare state be accepted as the goal of human existence ...

Modern science and technology can relieve people of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it."
Language and Freedom, 1970

You have to remember that I was in rainy Iceland, denied pretty much all access to the net and therefore forced to read a real book for a change: very productive! Maybe this should happen more often.

A philosophical grounding for web 2.0? Viva the revolution (or is it the evolution)!

Chomsky
web2.0
web 2.0
eBay
Napster
Zopa

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A few weeks back, it was reported that rightmove had hired Scott Forbes, former European MD of Cendant, as Chairman to help them get ready to list.

The valuation being bandied about is £150 Million. Pretty steep for a company with only around £9M in 2004 turnover and £3M in earnings, although some have been muttering things about £10M in earnings this year.

Rightmove is owned by a bunch of the entrenched estate agency chains: Countrywide owns 30 per cent of Rightmove. HBOS, the banking group that owns the Halifax mortgage lender, and Connells, part-owned by the Skipton Building Society, also own 30 per cent stakes. The remaining 10 per cent is held by Royal & Sun Alliance.

Rightmove is worth more than Countrywide, in fact, Countrywide's 30% stake may be worth more than the rest of its business. This is the future of estate agency, the crown jewels. So why sell? Maybe the partners can't get along. Maybe they're hungry for short-term cash. Maybe they believe the business is worth more without them. Maybe they don't have much confidence in the future.

Rightmove has bet around £15M of investment in Home Information Packs, which the government's been trying to bring in to get buyers and sellers to agree things more quickly with less costs. But there's a lot of objections to these, and it's by no means sure they'll happen or that Rightmove are the people to facilitate. There are plenty of companies already looking at HIPs - try a Google search if you don't believe me.

Rightmove is "number one", with around 70% of all properties for sale listed on their site. But if you look at their web traffic, site speed / usability and local regions, the picture is not so rosy. Rentals is by no means their sole domain, their site is very poorly optimised for Search Engines, while Findaproperty is becoming the default site in the important London market. Vertical search aggregators like Wheresmyproperty and local classifieds like Gumtree could be a nasty threat.

It's a competitive business, and their ability to get thousands of agents, many of which are owned by their parents, to pay a mere £130 per month each to list all their properties (compared to the thousands being spent on local newspapers) is a nice start but they are by no means sure winners in this space nor immune to price competition.

Watch out for a fun IPO, though, it's nice to see British dotcoms in fashion again!

rightmove
ipo
classifieds
estate agents

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Founded in 2004 by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, Indeed crawls listings from job sites as well as classifieds and returns the results in a Google-style simple search; you then click through from the listings to the original site. They've raised $5M from The New York Times Company, Union Square Ventures and Allen & Company. Where's the return gonna come from? Pay-per-click or even the advent of the pay-per-CV model!?

Fascinating insight into the investment and where it came from in VC Fred Wilson's blog here

NYT has spotted an opportunity to capture back some of the ground lost to online job sites like Monster. If was monster and hotjobs, careerbuilder I'd be worried indeed.

indeed.com
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Meetroduction looks like a pretty teensy Chicago start-up, founded in Oct 2004 by 2 guys with some cool tech. It describes itself as "a gathering of visionaries, programmers and status-quo-upsetters who have their collective eyes on the next generation (and the next, and the next) of communications software" See more here.

If true, this would be Google's first foray into instant messenging, but they've been rumoured to be heading that way for a while, and the mind goboggles at the theoretical applications if you connect this with maps, blogger, my Google etc etc

I'm not so sure whether IM and social networking are yet core to Google's strategy. AOL, MSN and Yahoo do IM pretty well. del.icio.us and friendster amongst thousands of others (and blogs) do social networking pretty well. But Meet sounds like a funky application and Google has the traffic and reputation to make it happen if they focus on it.

meetroduction
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It turns out that his brother runs a UK real estate search site called wheresmyproperty.com. He spiders all the real estate content out there, tags it and aggregates it in once place. So instead of searching say findaproperty, primelocation and rightmove, you can get it all in one place, then click through for more details.

This is a big trend. In the US, indeed.com is doing this amazingly well in jobs, as well as simplyhired who just raised another VC round. Using RSS and spidering, people are aggregating content from lots of providers. Not only is all the info in one place, the tagging process can improve the speed of search and the attributes available; I find it easier to search monster's listings through indeed than i do on monster itself.

Oodle.com is another US example, but pulling together several verticals in a local model (an aggregated gumtree or craigslist).

With the right tagging, the right search experience for your vertical and the right search engine optimisation to get masses of traffic, these sites could well become destinations in their own right.

Although the wave has started with sites like wheresmyproperty in real estate and clickajob in jobs, this market's still wide open in the UK.

The big questions ahead are:

1) Is this spidering and feed aggregation currently / in future open to legal challenge, for example under copyright law?
2) Can / will the Monsters of the world stop their content from being syndicated / aggregated (or do they need the traffic too much)?
3) How does it all get monetised and how does the revenue get shared?

What d'ya think?

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Have you seen this fun Google-font add-on? You can make "Google" say whatever you want in the google font at Logogle...

Doing the rounds from some Asian blogs to Europe and US, this just shows how hot Google is right now. Simple interface, monster advertising model and revenue growth. Google Earth's hot too.

Everyone's scared of Froogle, payments, maps, classifieds, browser etc etc. They've stolen top talent from all over Silicon Valley. An amazing young innovative company, but they will hit bumps soon. Times will change methinks.

Google

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Here I'll share a few of my moochings on the future of the net, community, why cats always land on their feet and whatever else seems cool.

I've worked on various consumer / community websites for the last 6 years or so, including moneybags.co.uk (now defunct) and eBay.co.uk. I now help run a local community classifieds site called gumtree. Many Londoners may know it already, if you don't check it out and tell your friends. You can find all sorts of useful and weird stuff on there.

I like to edit the wikipedia every now and then, and have a few favourite blogs like Tony Gentile's Buzzhit and the Internet Stock Blog. Hoping to find a few more future-moochers in the UK so tell me if you spot some.

I'm a Londoner by heart and soul and am back there now though have lived in variously Manchester, Bath, Cambridge, Sydney, Chicago, Redhill over the last 10 years and loved em all.

gumtree
London
community

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