Bronte Media

For those who thought (and think) we are in a bubble of web 2.0 startups, here is a deep irony for you: Kiko, a supposed ‘dead’ web 2.0 company, returned more money to its investors than it took in.

People grossly misuse the term bubble. First of all it relates to financial markets not anything else. For over-attention that’s called hype not a bubble.

We don’t even need examples of Kiko to show that there is no bubble. That’s because so little money goes into web ventures taht there is no chance of even being a bubble. In the Kiko example they took in $50k and still had money in the bank when they put the project on eBay. Y Combinator, the brilliant idea of Paul Graham and others to give kids $6k a piece and three months to see if they can come up with something useful, prudently gives young entrepreneurs a chance. Just because the media go gaga over the firms to arise from it (which on the whole is a net positive for the companies), says nothing about a bubble.

I completely agree with Charlie that there will never be a widely used online calendar, including gmail, because there is just not a significant enough need. But giving $50k to the Kiko team to build a product to try and beat the overwhelming odds against it is fine too. If anything the site is a resume for the three people who worked on it.

UDPATE 9/14: Patrick from OnBoard just let me know that Reply isn’t using their Home Valuation tool but rather have another. Sorry about that.

While news of Reply.com’s relaunch went largely under the radar and was executed in a less than stellar manner (i.e. site crashed and was half-baked at launch), no one really focused on what the site has essentially become: a replica of zillow.

Reply.com is one of the smarter and savviest lead generation firms around, primarily around auto and real estate but with a little mortgage thrown in too.

Being a lead generation firm, you can put the forms and point the huge media buys toward them in a relatively unnoticed corner of the site and use the public site as another mechanism into the same forms.

The relaunch is essentially a branded version of OnBoard’s Home Valuation tool involves a custom home valuation tool they have built themselves or one other than OnBoard’s Home Valuation Estimator. OnBoard, which is a back end data provider to large real estate sites like Coldwell Banker and small sites that will be big ones like Homethinking :), is providing neighborhood and community info.

I expect the larger brokerages will follow suit, and soon consumers will be used to the Zillow-like interface of home valuation, even if increasingly they aren’t on Zillow nor even having Zillow crunch the numbers for the end result.

The valuations are fairly similar. Here is Zillow on a home in San Francisco on 16th Street. Here is Reply.com/Onboard.

Does that mean Zillow will be screwed? Not at all. If the search world told us anything a better user experience wins out with exactly the same data/technology. Yahoo was running Google’s search index for years. AOL still does. They both continue to lose market share. But competition will intensify.

Note to comScore: Maybe time to check into that MySpace data and think twice before giving it to one of the nation’s largest business publications. From an excellent Fortune piece on MySpace:

“No question, the MySpace user base is changing. Some 87% of users today are 18 or older; 52% are 35 or older, according to comScore”

More than half of MySpace’s users are over 35 years old? yeeaahhh.

Yahoo has a fantastic site that previews the Fall’s TV series with the premiere episode, pilots, photos and other such things. But no interactivity.

No comments, no ratings, no You-tube-ness.

This is perhaps the nation’s biggest petrie dish. Let people comment, spread the word and interact. Change your scheduling around it. Trash the focus groups and spend the money empowering people to spread the word.

Or even just kick off Paris Hilton from the front page of YouTube and post the stuff there…

Interesting article in the Journal today about Microsoft suing small direct navigation firms a.k.a cybersquatters.

At the moment it’s just the kids rather than firms like Marchex and Internet REIT but presumably they are doing some house cleaning now or negotiating in a more graceful way with Microsoft.

The terrible irony is that MSN’s AdCenter team are probably in talks with the direct navigation firms for advertising deals.

Hockey sticks might make powerpoint candy and analyzing online behavior and opinion might offer a glimpse of marketing nirvana but just ask Howard Dean about drawing conclusions from mis-sampled ‘Internet buzz’.

It’s important to note that still only 8% of Internet users author a blog.

Monitoring blogs and message boards is usually the primary methodology of agencies interested in measuring buzz but that’s mainly because it’s technically possible to do so, rather than the best way.

I’ve long believed the search queries of the major engines is a much more reliable indicator of intent, as practically everyone who has an Internet connection uses them. Yahoo and, if I remember correctly, Altavista, used to ride a gravy train of press mentions on the back of them. Recently launched Google trends, a black box graph with no disclosed y-axis shows generally that interest in Snakes on a plane fell off pretty precipitously in about June. The shock that it did so poorly on its opening weekend is no doubt a contributor to the recent up-tick.

Does the Internet suck as a predictor of success? I don’t think so. Blogs themselves do. But other behavior, like search data to size the scope, combined with blogs and Myspace and message boards to judge the opinion don’t suck. Indeed movies, where the demographics skew heavily to 18-34 year olds, probably have the lowest margin of error among categories. Lowest obviously being very relative.

One thought in my mind was with the buzz building a crescendo, why wasn’t the movie released on this wave of euphoria? Why wait another 3 months in this ADD-soaked world? An analog to the print-media-world-will-never-again-break-a-story phenomena?

Either way Mr Card, your street cred is shot

The biggest reason I decided to start Homethinking was that there were simply too many real estate agents out there. Not that they should be replaced or that there was no need for them but that it was hard to choose a good one because of all the noise out there. As home prices went up so did the number of agents. Everybody knows someone in real estate simply because nearly everybody is in real estate these days.

And especially so in the more expensive markets. Sandy, one of our marketing interns, put together an analysis of just how bad it has become on our company blog. She analyzed the list of CNN’s 25 most expensive places to live. In Miami (which weirdly isn’t on their list) for instance, there is one real estate agent for every seventeen people who live there.

In these pockets the market is nearly tending toward one to one marketing. Quite literally. A scenario of one realtor for every one person who makes decisions about engaging a real estate agent. Unless the percentage commission structure changes, which is very unlikely in the near term, the trend will continue.

I also have a favor to ask you. After a story I wrote up about Google Maps got voted up on reddit to position 50 and gave about 1200 unique readers to the story in one day, I am fascinated by social news sites.

So, if you would, can you please vote (now while you are reading this post) for the analysis on Digg here, Netscape here and Reddit here? Thanks!

I remember first reading John Hagel’s book Net Worth when it came out in 1999. To say I was inspired was an understatement. It’s one of the best books I have read on the topic, or probably more correclty - like a good consultant should - it framed and named existing concepts into an easily digestable form.

Chris Yeh recently commented on the book’s relevance in today’s world. MySpace and its hoardes of ankle biting competitors. Social Search. Social news. They are all revisions on less-feature rich and over-capitalized firms of the late nineties.

I don’t think that Hagel was before his time at all. I just think his concepts were washed out by the noise of greed and information assymetry between entrepreneurs and early investors, and later stage and public investors about the relative worth of community. The latter just got too excited too early.

I actually read Net Worth a year or so ago again and got even more out of the book - so if you rushed through it the first time in 99, maybe it’s time to pick up a copy again?

A big shout out to my mate Ross whose baby of the past few years has become a fully fledged company first and then more recently venture funded. The title of the Alarm Clock posting announcing the funding suggests the company is in stealth, although with it being an open source project with an active development and user community and everything available to see on the Internet, what isn’t to know about the company that is not publicly available?

I am one of those people who can’t stop looking at what other people are reading on the subway. A few days ago on the 6 train, coming home from the office, tuned out on my ipod, a cookie-cutter (light blue shirt, fitted khakis) young banker (the ones that tap away on their blackberry even while the subway is in motion - we know you’re playing blockout mate) was flipping through a memorandum and a stack of reports on R.R. Donnelley. And now this. Perhaps the Bloomberg reporters should ride the 6 more often.