The World According To Rags

Mint: Good Idea But Not Very Useful Right Now

Mint, along with Wesabe, is a new breed of site that tries to attack personal finance via 'Web 2.0' technologies.  Mint's concept is that you can have the activities of your various bank and credit card accounts
aggregated in one place to make it easier to track your cash flow, purchasing, etc.  They will also alert you to unusual spending in certain categories based on your history and suggest deals or discounts where they think you could save money.  They don't store your credentials on their servers so they claim that it is secure.

The trouble is, it tends to be a poor labeler of my transactions.  For instance, I recently got an alert saying that I had unusual activity on my "internet" purchases.  Turns out it was counting transactions for Eurostar and Brussels Airlines in them, which should be categorized as Travel.  Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I'm guessing they would do better for US transactions since they'd have a critical mass of users helping categorize these.  But that doesn't do me much good.

They did recently announce a beta program to enable users to view brokerage activity as well, which might make it more useful.  I'm not quite ready to cancel my account but so far Mint is not very useful.

Football Frenzy

I recently wrote about how fun it is to follow professional football in the UK.  Last Sunday was the culmination of the Premier League season.  Every team played at the same time and there was lots as stake including the title (between Manchester United & Chelsea), Uefa Cup places and relegation. Relegation was the most exciting for me.  Fulham finished off a near miraculous escape from relegation by beating Portsmouth away.  This is the scene at the end of the game, after Fulham stay up for another season.  Yes, we are celebrating the team having placed 17th out of 20!

Reuters Frees Content With New API

Reuters just announced the availability of an API for bloggers and others to be able to access their news content.  This is a smart move, especially for a distributor of 'commodity' content where the name of the game is wide distribution (as long as it can be monetized).  I'm sure this will be the way forward for more such content owners.

Congrats To Threadless & Tom Ryan

My friend Tom Ryan just announced that he's joining Threadless as their new CEO.  Threadless has a great model where users generate the designs that end up on the shirts they sell.  And it's growing very nicely based on what Silicon Alley Insider reports. 

Great role for Tom and Threadless are lucky to have found a seasoned entrepreneur who is also a great guy.  Congrats to both!

Xobni - Great Tool To Manage Your Outlook Email

I've been using Xobni for the past couple of months.  Xobni ('inbox' spelled backwards) is a plugin for Outlook.  The theory is that email is the ultimate social network.  Once you've installed it, it goes through your outlook history, indexes key words and conversations you've had with your contacts and makes all of this pretty easy to navigate.  For instance you can type in the name of a contact and easily pull up their contact info, find past conversations and see what attachments you've sent to them.  There are also bells and whistles like seeing how popular a contact is with respect to your email activity and even the time of day that you get emails from someone (to optimize your response times).  They finally took it out of beta today and I would recommend it to anyone looking to make Outlook more productive.  My only wish is that they would index archived .pst files as well as your current one.  There have been rumors that Microsoft was going to buy Xobni.  I'm surprised it would have taken them this long.

Hulu On YouTube

Hulu has created a channel on YouTube, which has thrown some people into a titter.  I think it's smart web marketing.  Tease YouTube's audience with some clips and lure them back.   It's also consistent with the 'frenemy' ethos of the Web. 

A Mini Med Holiday

Just got back from a mini-holiday where some friends and I went on a sailing trip starting in Malta and ending in Siracusa in Sicily.  Here's what I learned:

• Malta is a beautiful place that oozes history.  It's where the famous Knights of St. John were based.  They defended the island against the Turks during the siege of 1565 and founded Valetta, the capital afterwards.

• It was a British colony through 1964.  The British influence can be seen from the postboxes to the fact that they drive on the left hand side of the road. 
• Surprisingly for a place just 50 miles from Italy, the food in Malta left much to be desired.  We think this may also have been part of the British influence. 
• I am not a sailor.  I got seasick the night that we sailed to Sicily.  Our captain commented that had he gone to bed that night, he'd have slept until about noon.  But it was really cool to drive the boat during our little day sail!
• The food in Sicily was great.  We had some great meals including perhaps the best pasta I've ever had -- casarecce with mushrooms, shrimp and almonds -- an unlikely combo but it was magical.
• Ortygia is the ancient part of Siracusa and has these narrow, atmospheric streets with balconies on top.  Very cool.

• There were no touts, guides or hustlers in either place.  What a relief!

Congrats Maria, Etsy & Union Square Ventures

Fred just announced Etsy's new COO, Maria Thomas, a friend of mine.  I met Maria at NPR where she headed up their online efforts.  She is a dynamo and I have no doubt she'll take Etsy to the next level.  Way to go Fred & Etsy and good luck Maria!

Mobile Web Dead?? Not So Fast...

Russell Beattie of Mowser decided to throw in the towel after concluding that the Mobile Web is dead.  Justin Siegel of Mocospace (a mobile social network whose Advisory Board I'm on), begs to differ.  Obviously we're biased, but tt's a good read.  Some choice passages:

• Still, I’m surprised by how jaded his view of the mobile Internet is given the early success of many companies he’s familiar with such as Admob, Getjar, MyWaves, Radar, yours truly (MocoSpace).  Each of these sites are  generating 10’s of millions, and in MocoSpace’s case over 1 billion page views per month off of a unique audience in the low millions. Those numbers may not stack up well to the Web…yet, but the trend certainly appears to be our friend.
• People will expect, and they will get different content, formats, features, etc. for different devices.  Unless you expect the wired Web to stop improving and taking advantage of the horsepower that desktops and flatpanels deliver, I don’t get how someone could ever think there will be a unified Internet experience across such a range of capabilities. In my opinion, the bottom line is that people are and will continue to develop new sites, services, applications, etc. specifically for mobile devices, and they will be different than those browsed on machines with 5-10x larger screens and orders of magnitude more power and bandwith.  Just as Walmart had to build a website as a distinct experience from its bricks and mortar experience, it will build a mobile site.
• For Russell and all fellow entrepreneurs, I end with one of my favorite quotes from Theodore Roosevelt:

  • It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

 

Size of Social Network "Industry"

I was having a drink with a well known digital media executive this evening and the topic turned to, what else, social networks.  The question was how big of an industry is social networking?  I'm talking about the 'pure' social networks such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged, LinkedIn, etc.  What would the aggregate revenues be of these sites?  Our guess was low single digit billions of dollars a year, if that, with the top few generating most of the revenues.