I travelled to Botswana this week for work and all through the last couple of weeks in the run up to the trip, I received tons of emails and documents relating to the trip, which I filed away but was too busy to read. None of it needed immediate attention but I knew I had to read it all at some point before the trip.  I figured that in the worst case scenario I would just have to print it all off and read it during the flight to Botswana.

The day of my trip came and of course there I was rushing to do what seemed like a million and one things all at once. Now my life is not usually this chaotic but this was an especially ill-timed trip. My last minute print-all approach suddenly seemed like a very bad idea. I did manage to print off the most important messages and documents but I would have given anything for a tool that:

• Enabled me to search for everything related to my trip
• Automatically compiled a dossier from such content, eliminating any duplicates, for example by detecting a single, whole email conversation and discarding the separate, individual emails that made up the conversation.
• Allowed me to add and remove items from the auto-generated dossier
• Enabled me to print off my finished dossier in a nice format

Now the first of the features above is already provided by Google’s and Microsoft’s Desktop Search tools. If someone were to create a plug-in for one or both of these tools that would execute the rest of the above, I reckon that they would soon get acquired by one of these giant companies, looking to beat the other to the punch.

By the way, if you think the idea of an auto-generated dossier such as this is far-fetched, check out what TripIt is doing. You basically send them your travel-purchase email - you know, the ones that the travel companies send you to confirm your booking etc. TripIt then sends you a detailed, auto-generated travel plan that includes your itinerary, weather and destination information, maps etc. It is a little different to what I am talking about but it shows the power of software. 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee - often referred to as the founder of the World Wide Web – recently posted about what he has labelled “The Graph” – the next level of what was initially the Internet (a network of computers) and later the World Wide Web.
As I understand it, Sir Tim envisions a world where, we have access on a variety of devices to relevant information aggregated from various documents (today’s websites), but without needing to directly access those documents. To illustrate, he uses the following example:

… when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.

The problem that I see with this picture of WWW nirvana, a.k.a the Graph is that whilst there is still a place for websites, it does not appear to support the means by which an ever increasing number of websites make money – i.e. advertising. If a user is going to have access to content from my website without having to visit it, what’s in it for me? You might suggest that I could charge a fee for the content, but in this age where content consumers demand and get almost everything for free, this is not always a viable option.

So as long as advertising-only revenue models persist and until the Web (or Graph) community can figure out an alternative way for content providers to monetise their content, I fear that content providers will continue to resist this so called open access to their content.

For a good summary and discussion of Tim Berners-Lee’s post on “The Graph”, see this post on Read/WriteWeb.

I read reports here and here last week of two facial recognition startups - Mugr and Eyealike. The consensus in the blogosphere seemed to be that the demo applications put out by both companies were frivolous. Here is an idea for an application that may be just as frivolous but that could potentially do very well on a platform like Facebook, or perhaps even across several networking sites using Open Social.

The Facebook app could be named My Look Alikes or similar and would behave as follows:

1. User installs app.
2. App runs through FB public profile photos of people that are of the same gender as the user and returns a list of people that look like the user. Given the large number of FB members, this may prove too demanding for the app. Therefore, it may be a good idea to run through a subset at a time - limited by number (e.g. 50,000) or network, or geographic location.
3. User rates each suggested Look Alike based on whether he or she agrees with the suggestion of resemblance.
4. User invites friends to rate their Look Alikes.
5. User has option to subscribe to a RSS-style feed of Look Alikes as new profiles get created on Facebook.
6. User gets a “View/Suggest Look Alike” button under his or her profile photo. When clicked by other FB members, such members will be able to view the user’s Look Alikes or suggest one or more of their friends as a look alike of the user. So if I am a user of the app, anyone (user of the app or not) seeing my profile photo would be able tell me about a friend of theirs that they think I look like. These human-suggested look alikes would be listed alongside the app-suggested ones on my “My Look Alikes” canvas page and I would be able to rate them also, and invite friends to do the same.

I am not entirely sure how the app would make money though, except perhaps for the now popular approach of promoting other applications for a fee. So there you go Mugr and Eyealike - a facebook app that you could develop if you were looking for one.

How about this for a business idea that captures users’ intent and therefore enables highly targeted advertising? A web application that allows a user to broadcast a brief RFI (Request For Information) to all or selected companies in one or more categories, as well as to their customers. Besides advertising, additional revenue would come from premium services to companies, e.g. being featured in their category.

So for example, I recently needed to know which Wiki software platforms included a specific feature that I wanted and had to post the question to a number of forums, Q&A sites and individual Wiki software providers to find out. With RFIblast, I could simply have posted the question, selected a number of Wiki software providers and had them - or their existing customers - respond. RFIblast would have known that I was looking for a Wiki product and served me relevant ads.

The service could serve as a lead generation tool for businesses and a product research tool for potential buyers. 

To prevent spamming, all responses would need to be in-site and standard anti-spam measures would be needed e.g. captchas and user-moderation. Also, member companies could be given a choice as to whether they want to receive questions by email or just subscribe to an RSS feed.

To prevent silly questions (and answers), a rating system would be required and companies could opt to only receive questions (from members) that have not been rated down.

In this post I outline a few features that I hoped Open Social was about but quickly learnt it wasn’t. When I first read the name of Google’s recent social networking play ‘Open Social’, I immediately made a connection with Open ID, expecting to read that it was finally a way to have one base of profile data and friends across multiple social networking sites. Instead I read somewhat disappointingly that Open Social is, albeit usefully, only a way for developers to build applications that work across multiple social networking sites. So what exactly would I have liked Open Social to be?

Well, the key issues for users in encountering so many social networks on the Internet are having to join so many of them; entering similar data each time; maintaining several user ids etc. To understand these issues, let’s imagine that you like the hit TV series CSI and come across a social network for it. In spite of your love for the series, would you really consider it worth your while to yet again enter profile data about your contact details and interests? Would it not be much better to:

1. Find that the CSI social network supports Open ID and therefore, you don’t need a new one for it
2. Find that the CSI social network supports Open Social, and have that mean that you can simply click on an Open Social link and have relevant and/or selected profile data made available to the CSI social network
3. Be able to see which of your friends from other networks (websites) are also on the CSI network and connect with them
4. Be able to notify friends from other websites that you have joined the CSI network and perhaps to be able to search for and invite those who have mentioned CSI in their ‘open profiles’?

The last point above leads nicely into my next, which is that in a sense Open Social may have missed a trick with the definition of their Containers and Apps. According to Marc Andreessen of Ning - an Open Social partner - a  Container is a social network that supports Open Social and Apps are applications built by the likes of iLike, RockYou and Flixter on these networks. In my opinion, Open Social should itself be thought of as a container and the social networks as applications that sit within it. That way, just like you get when a friend installs an application in Facebook, you could amongst other things get an Open Social notification when a friend joins a new social network. Applications by iLike etc could then become sub-apps within the social networks.

I feel that I must stress that I don’t mean to trivialise Open Social in its current form at all, but as Josh Cantone of Read/WriteWeb put it, people join networks because of friends, not because of applications. He also adds quite rightly that social networks exist for users and not for developers. Perhaps Open Social will evolve into some semblance of what I have outlined above but for now, one has to ask what is in it for the user. So for now, like Scoble, I will be sticking with Facebook.

There are plenty of write-ups on how to assess the viability of your business idea but here is my fairly simple take on it. Can you write a simple vision statement for your idea in the following format: “Our vision is to be the most useful X for individuals/companies who Y”, where X is your product/service category and Y is your target customer description?

This seems a simple question but itself begs a couple of other questions:

• Does your product have a particular target customer type and can you describe this customer type simply?
• Do you understand what would be the most useful product for your target customer type, will your product/service make the grade and do you have the knowledge, resources and commitment to do what is necessary to help your product/service into the most useful thing for your customers.

Now let’s apply our vision format to a few well known businesses/products to get some examples:

• Google Search: The most useful website for people searching for information on the Internet.
• Ebay/Amazon: The most useful website for people looking to buy/sell stuff online.
• Volvo: The safest cars for safety-conscious car buyers (just to demonstrate a variation) 

One last thing, as a startup, you should aim for ideas where it is relatively easy and cheap to reach your target customers for marketing purposes. So if a website exists already where your target customers hang out, that is great - because it means you can hang out there too and tell them about your product or if it came to it advertise there.

So if you are interested in building a really big business, test your idea first by attempting to answer the questions above. If you struggle to answer them, it may well be a sign that your idea will not turn out to be as big a business as you would like. As always, wishing you all the best with your business ideas.

It is no secret that Facebook needs to find a way to monetise and that Yahoo needs to close the gap on Google. My proposal for a Yahoo and Facebook partnership that might address both problems is as follows:

• Yahoo to provide an in-Facebook web search facility with an agreed ad-revenue split between the two. You are probably wondering, why would people search in Facebook instead of on Google or Yahoo directly as they currently do? Well read on.
• Offer the ability to quickly turn an in-Facebook search query into an “in-Facebook, Yahoo Answers question” - a question that you can choose to publish for all your friends to see; send to specific friends on Facebook and/or send to anyone who has registered an interest in answering questions on the relevant subject. What’s in it for people who answer the questions? Read on.
• Enable people to rate answers and based on such ratings, allocate points. I think Yahoo Answers does this already but in addition, give the points some value in Facebook, such as linking them to some sort of Facebook currency that can be used to purchase or access premium stuff in Facebook.

We all know that nothing demonstrates intent online better than search and that this is why search is the best platform for serving ads and generating revenue from Internet advertising. We also know that Facebook is struggling to monetise because although it knows a lot about its members, it has precious few applications or functionality that demonstrate intent. As Andrew Chen so excellently put it recently, “don’t confuse Interest with Intent… interest in a topic is different than having intent. Having “skiing” on your profile is completely different than searching for “ski tickets.” The latter means you’re ready to buy, whereas the former simply means that you sometimes buy.” Robert Scoble also made a similar point in a recent post about Facebook.

With such a partnership as I have outlined above, Facebook would have found a way for its members to express intent, whilst Yahoo on the other hand might stand a decent chance of converting a sizable portion of Facebookers from Google to Yahoo Search.

Update: So it’s Microsoft and not Yahoo (nor Google) that has partnered with Facebook. No reason why the above search/answers partnership still can’t be done by MSFT and Facebook - it just means that rather than leveraging Yahoo Answers, FB would have to develop its own Answers app and integrate it with a MSFT-powered web search. Perhaps a 3rd-party app developer can even do the answers bit and reap a potentially very big reward.

Every now and then I come across something that makes me think nothing is impossible in life. Below are five of such things that I have come across lately:

• 3-D printers that ‘print’ (more like create) real life objects and the fact that they will soon be cheap enough to have in our homes. Business 2.0 describes Bill Gross’ “Desktop Factory” as:

“a device that takes a drawing from a graphics program and, rather than producing a piece of paper, outputs a physical object. It actually grows an object out of plastic. This is unbelievable. You can go from concept visualization to having a physical part in your hand in an hour.”

An article on FOX News adds that: “… prices for 3-D printing machines have been falling rapidly, reaching $20,000, and the day is foreseeable when they will fall below $1,000 and become home appliances, says Phil Anderson of the School of Theoretical and Applied Science at Ramapo College in New Jersey.”

• Software that writes itself, which according to Business 2.0 is being piloted under the brand name Intentional, by Charles Simonyi - an ex-Microsoft top tech guy. It remains to be seen whether this will take off but I wouldn’t bet against this chap, who is said to be one of the main brains behind Microsoft’s Office suite.
• Mobile Complete runs a remote facility of hundreds of mobile phones that enables mobile phone application developers to test their apps on a variety of handset models. As I understand it, the developers can then access these handsets remotely such that every key-press on their keyboard is registered on the handsets. I guess this may not seem all that incredible if you know the relevant technologies well, but I find it mighty impressive. This brief POD Tech video explains it well.
• This short video compilation on Muhammad Ali. What can I add - the man’s the greatest.
• Paul Potts singing opera on the Britain’s Got Talent show. Just check out the judges faces as Paul gets going.

I find it an increasingly worrying trend to find more and more startups openly admitting that they don’t know how they will make money yet but expect to figure it out later. Perhaps even more worrying is that these startups are getting funded. Notable examples recently include:

• Geni - as admitted by CEO David Sacks on the GigaOM Show.
• Clipmarks (which recently got acquired by Forbes) - as admitted by CEO Eric Goldstein.
• Twitter - as admitted by funding VC

The argument tends to be that you can focus on acquiring and retaining customers first, then worry about making money later. This may sound like sound logic to some but I would expect investors to run a mile when there is no clear path to revenue in a product. I am no VC but even I know that your product is only a product and not a business until you start making money from it, or at least until you know how you will make money. It all kind of goes back to my recent reminder that a high user count is not the goal of business - making money is.

We all know that the P2P loans startup Lending Club grew remarkably quickly because it launched on the Facebook platform but given that it now runs on its own site, I am wondering what Facebook gained from hosting and more or less incubating Lending Club.

I ask because unlike many of the applications on Facebook, Lending Club is not exactly an engaging or fun application that contributes to time spent by users on Facebook. From what I can tell you either choose to borrow or lend and once you have set up your loan, there is no reason to frequently revisit the application. In fact I see now that when you choose to lend or borrow from within Facebook, it just takes you straight to the LC website. I am not sure how it worked before (if you know, please share).

So anyway I am wondering how much of symbiotic relationship there is between FB and LC. Does/did LC pay FB a commission on each transaction? It also makes me wonder if the recently announced fbFund (Facebook Fund) would fund Lending Club today if the latter were just launching.

What do you think?