Bambi Francisco

Better than the Office

This is the best-edited video on this site! In fact, it's the best corporate satire I've seen anywhere. (That said, I don't believe many corporate satires are actually produced.) Thank you uShip team for making your corporate culture come alive! Obviously, this is a mocumentary, but it's clear that Matt and his team know how to have fun, and poke good-natured fun at themselves. Who wouldn't want to be part of a culture that knows how to NOT take life so seriously. As for the acting - not bad for a bunch of non-actors. Matt was convincing as a mildly unbalanced, delusional, hopeless 40-year-old virgin. Mickey earns marks for being an erratic and contemptible dweeb. But I must say that Jay was hilarious too. He captures the essence of a math geek - they do dream about numbers all day long. And, who was the guy screaming about the phone in the jello! That was a nice touch. Now, besides the female intern - who provided all the relevant information about uShip - all other females took a supporting role, so to speak. What's up with that? Otherwise, excellent production, and very interesting company concept.

Zimbio inspired by Wikipedia

I like the idea and I like the two founders, at least in the video introduction. But there are many companies trying to apply the Wikipedia model across the long tail of topics, Wikipedia notwithstanding. Moreover, Wikipedia founder and wiki-evangelist Jimmy Wales is trying to apply the Wikipedia model across topics through his new venture called Wikia. Read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch for my take. Google is also trying to dig into topics with the help of the audience through its Co-op service. And, others -- including search startups - are trying to help people put together the ultimate reference page for any topic with the contribution of everyone on the Web. I call these topical pages - online brochures. Don't get me wrong. Brochures are valuable. I pick them up, or some sort of flyer, all the time when I travel to various places. It's just unclear which of these sites will attract the 1% of active creators to help build out these online brochures. As I said in one of my columns, regarding Plum (read Bambi.blogs.com for that column), most people grow tired of creating, or they'll need far more incentive to create. They'll start projects without finishing, resulting in half-baked Web pages and would-be news sites that ultimately are nothing more than one-off snapshots in time. Like the many cardboard folders I've created and then shoved in my desk or into storage boxes. At some point, they lose their value, and we end up with a bunch of useless Web pages or dead blogs just taking up space and clogging up searches. But, hey, each is an individual user's media portal, and users can do -- or fail utterly to do -- whatever they want. Now, I tested out Zimbio. I added my blog as a resource in its "Tour de France" page. It was pretty simple to add. In fact, the site works pretty smoothly. But many sites do. As I've written in the past regarding news sites that require audience participation, it's not the features of the site but the people in the joint that matter. Interestingly enough, when I signed up to Zimbio, I received my personal dashboard page where I can organize my collections. I'm seeing a lot of these personal dashboards these days. What that says to me is that there will be a lot of personal dashboards sprinkled across the Web with very little activity on them. In like vein, there will be a lot of half-baked topical pages created by many people across a number of services that want to wiki-rize (made-up word) the Web.

Plusmo

This is a mobile service that pushes online content to your mobile phones. It’s another service trying to capitalize on the pervasiveness of mobile phones. More than 72% of U.S. homes have mobile phones. That’s higher than the 70% of homes that have Internet access from computers. There are about 219.4 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., according to CTIA. And, wireless phones now make up 33% of home-phone minutes, vs. 25% in 2004, according to The Kelsey Group.) Additionally, 15% of U.S. wireless users accessed the Web in 2005 vs. 6% in 2004. And, some 30% of wireless subscribers have data services. Clearly, the mobile phone is expanding its usefulness. Great big market! But it’s still a great big problem to get any service. That’s because the problem with many mobile services is that they’re not compatible with all phones, or they’re not so easy to download. For instance, I tried to download Plusmo onto my Palm Treo 650. I couldn’t download it onto my Palm Treo 650 because the Plusmo file wasn’t compatible and I needed an expansion card (SD or MMC), which I didn’t have. That said, downloading onto my Blackberry Pearl was easy enough. It took about 10 minutes to download. As for the Plusmo service, it wasn’t bad. I like the fact that I could find cheap gas prices, based on the zip code I typed in. I liked the Starbucks locator too. Too bad Plusmo doesn’t have an In-N-Out Burger locator. That’s always handy on that long ride to Tahoe and back. It seems the channels that are available, such as Google News, TechCrunch, GigaOm, ValleyWag, to name a few (goes to show you who Plusmo execs are talking to) also have limited content. I added the Google News channel and I only received three news stories. All this said, I think the idea is a neat one. I like visuals as the gateway to news or a movie. It's one reason I have the Slide (photo-sharing site) version of Google.

Flixster - MySpace for movies

This is yet another social network, but the difference is that the content or focus is around movies. Flixster is building upon the popular features that have helped Netflix rent more movies. Those features include the ability to see or make recommendations and see which movies are the most popular among friends or in the Netflix community. Netflix said that some 60% of the movies rented come from recommendations. Clearly, recommendations help people discover new movies to rent. Unlike Netflix, however, on Flixster, you don’t get the great service of receiving movies in the mail. Of course, you don’t have to pay $10 a month either. To that end, Flixster can be a nice complement to the many movie-download services emerging, such as Amazon’s unBox. So, let me share my experience on Flixster. First off, I have to say that this service (more than others) is set up in such a way that it’s easy to invite friends – a form of grass-roots marketing that can have exponential affects on growth. It’s no wonder that in 10 months, Flixster has signed up 5 million registered users who collectively have posted 190 million movie recommendations written. That’s pretty fast. But a lot of that has to do with the way Flixster is set up. One of the smart ways Flixster is making the grass-roots marketing far easier for us is by integrating our address books immediately upon signing up. After I signed up with my gmail account, Flixster displayed my gmail email list and an automated email invite that, with one click, could go to all of my friends (and other random emails) in my email list. Smart move. With one click, I could have invited the 135 emails recorded in my gmail account. The only problem is that the automated invite said: “Hi, I just took a movie quiz at Flixster.com.  If you come take it too we can see if we like the same movies.” Since I didn’t just take a movie quiz, I didn’t think it was honest of me to send this email. Besides, it did feel a bit like I was spamming. The one thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t easily choose which email accounts I wanted to send an email to. Rather, I had to check off each box (next to an email account) that I didn’t want to send an email to. This was rather annoying, and ultimately a turn-off. Another way Flixster is making the invite process easier is by integrating with News Corp’s MySpace. With 115 million members worldwide, it’s a smart integration. At one point in the sign-up process, Flixster asked if I wanted to send a bulletin on my MySpace account inviting my MySpace friends.

The social network features are great. There’s even a feature that lets you upload videos and images related to a particular movie. There is also, of course, the requisite “profile” page. (I think I must have two dozen profile pages by now.)  The site also seems to have some pretty useful reviews and recommendations. But I’m not sure I’d create a social network just around movies. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of movies – having seen three in the movie theaters just in the last week -- but I wouldn’t build a social life around my movie preferences. That said, I did click onto the tab that said “Meet people like me.” The No. 1 person that showed up was a 13-year-old girl.

NextCat - social network for entertainment

Niche site for fathers

The Web is going to vertical niche sites! To that end, this is a great idea! If DadLabs can deliver authentic, original, and substantive conent about fatherhood, then it can rise above the clutter of male-focused sites generating content seemingly for brainless fratboys. If DadLabs can create compelling content, it'll get its share of the elusive, but highly attractive 25-45 male demographic. For a brief time, I co-hosted segments for Spike TV, the Viacom-owned cable channel targeting males 18 to 34 years old. There were many experiments in content, but ultimately the executive producer was let go. It wasn't because Spike failed in attracting an audience, but rather because Spike attracted a female audience. Who would have thought? Spike also launched a series on dads. It's unclear how much viewership the show ultimately attracted. Men, we know, like financial news - that's the demographic I attract on MarketWatch -- and they like sports, and women. That said, a niche channel on fatherhood is probably the type of on-demand content that works well for the Web. And, if DadLabs.com can create a nice little community around parenting for dads, I'm sure the marketers will come.

ValleyWag: more money, less sex

Nick Denton, the founder of the popular Gawker blog, and Silicon Valley gossip site -- ValleyWag -- will begin writing for ValleyWag beginning Monday. The founder says that the 22-year-old writer, who Denton hired to write for ValleyWag since it launched in February, has stepped down from his post. He wouldn't comment on whether the writer was showed the door. Let's jus say that Denton is happy to take on this role of reporter, a position he's not been in for eight years. He's looking forward to changing the perception of ValleyWag, as a gossip site about "sex" in the Valley, to a site reaching a broader audience with less interest about trivial scandals and far more interested in the financial impact Silicon Valley has on the world. Denton is looking to bring more "money" gossip into the mix.

Read the rest of the story on my MarketWatch blog.

Mobile social networks

If you want to see where your kids will be spending their time in the future, take a look at Gemini Mobile’s platform that lets carriers offer their subscribers a social networking community on their phones. Essentially, the service is a mobile community – a MySpace on the go, but for more virtual reality. The platform is called eXplo, and it powers SoftBank Mobile’s S! Town. S! Town is pretty neat. A subscriber can have an avatar that walks around this virtual world. In the demo I was given, Michael Tao, Gemini Mobile’s CTO, had a black anime as his avatar. His avatar strolled through S!Town’s virtual town center, which was quite deserted, given that it was 4 am in the morning in Japan, where this service is available. At first, it seemed pretty silly and useless to be walking around this deserted town. But then Michael bumped into several females (or at least one might think they were female because their avatars were female). Michael tried to befriend them, while at the same time clicking onto a user profile to find out more about this person. All members have profiles that can be made public to the community. All community members can roam around this virtual town and meet other members. Watching this interaction was a bit frightening, especially when Michael could – with just a click of a button -- find out more about the person whom he was interacting with. When I was a little girl, I played tea with some dolls around a mini table. My future little girl will likely be playing tea on her mobile phone with (hopefully) other little girls. So, what's the business model? Consumers don't pay for the service. Rather they can buy content in the town. There are also advertisements on billboards in the virtual town. In 2007, the service is expected to be deployed with U.S. and European carriers.

Tumri's network merchandising

Tumri wants to help retailers spread their products across a number of Web sites. Essentially, it's a bit like Google's Adsense, whereby any publisher can be the distributor of Google's ads. It's like Edgeio's model of letting publishers be distributors of Edgeio's classified lists. Tumri is a smart idea if it can help retailers find their target market for a specific ad across the fragmented Web. Getting a specific product, say carbon fiber bicycles, distributed across the right sites with the target audience is a tall order. Additionally, Google's advertising Adword clients can create ads for specific products as well and be distributed across Google's Adsense network. After all, merchants are advertisers. Going after the merchant market is essentially the same as going for the advertising market. Look what happened to eBay's merchants. They too are Google advertisers. That said, I like the idea. Additinoally, the cost for merchant is based on performance. To that end, they'll only pay per click. Tumri will probably have to deal with clcik-fraud issues, but for starters, it's a fair way to go for merchants., unless they push for a click-per-action or click-per-purchase model. The trick for Tumri (and Edgeio) is to increase the relevance on the ads for each site. I plan on becoming a Tumri distributor. I'll let you know what I think of the experience over time.

Web 2.0

It's Web 2.0 week at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. About 1,000 people were allowed to attend, after more than 6,000 requested an invitation. Attendance was up 25% from last year's gathering of 800 people. The number of sponsors doubled to 37 from 15 last year, and 14 in 2004, the year Web 2.0 debuted. The ad figures are confidential. All I got from Ben Stricker was that the conference producers have seen a "significant increase in advertising." Stricker is PR director at CMP Technology, the co-producer with O'Reilly Media of the Web 2.0 Summit. For more on the event, Read my MarketWatch blog