DISQUS

Thanks for the comments guys. It is clear that the notion of "friends" is far too simplistic and we need better tools to manage it.

It is actually MSFT who I have seen demonstrate the best understanding of this issue. Shame they can't build a product we want to use.

Good point Phil. It will be quite a lot of hassle. I guess Tesco could have costed extras for the photos, floor plans, and property listings which would be easy for them in volume but painful for us as individuals.

The other stuff needs to be done yourself. I'm never sure how much effort the estate agent is putting in though.

Thanks for the comments guys.

Dom - the £50-200 that Tesco charge is MUCH less than 1% on an average house of say £250k. There is considerable money to be made and saved here.

Search Engine Cardiff - estate agents will either not react at all or they will learn to use the web better in order to maintain their position in the market. Either way the consumer wins - either by Tesco winning or estate agents upping their game.

This is a good point Alan. Mobile operators and handset vendors will both fear commoditisation if the systems go open which makes it hard to see a common OS emerging in the short to medium term.

Couldn't agree more. Every business needs a website.

That is a great question Farhan. My first instinct is that we will see some very big companies created but that they will get bought out before they get to the scale of Google. I say that because the opportunity in mobile is obvious to everyone so it is unlikely that people will make the mistake of allowing a competitor like Google to emerge.

That kind of assumes nothing will come out of left field though, and that is a dangerouse assumption. There is enough that is new and different about mobile that something truly revolutionary is possible.

Dave - audio has it's place, no doubt about it. My only point was that the hype got ahead of that.

All of which leaves it as quite niche alan

Thanks Alan. Wikinomics is definitely on the ra ra side. You've got to find a way to believe though, right?

Well put Erik. You are bang on that audio is better for all things emotional and not just music.

Thanks for the comments guys.

A couple of big analogies here! FB coming out somewhere between ebay and Google... Both arguments makes sense, I guess it a question of how far they go.

Re the S3 point - that is the answer on everyone's lips for the scalability problem. Andreessen makes the point that it can be expensive. I don't really know.

Raphael - good link - two thoughts - 1. this shows the power of distribution, and 2. I wonder if the 6m might come back down again almost as fast as it went up - and how many servers that would leave them with

Good idea James. Just done it.

Alan - with Sequoia investing I guess they are going for scale, not an early exit. Nothing else would move the needle for those guys.

You make an interesting point at the end though - until I read your post I would have thought that the top 10,000 searches was more than 25% of searches. Jason will need more coverage than that if he is to convince people to make Mahalo their first port of call.

That Alan, as you imply, is the million dollar question. The answer so far is that they will use human editors, and use the Mahalo Greenhouse idea to build a huge network of people to help.

A key point is that they are not trying to index the whole web. I suspect they will ignore any site that looks for half a second like it might be spam, and they will lose some decent sites that way. Time will tell whether they can make the balance work in a way that is compelling for the likes of you and me.

It is a bit different to Wikipedia because you can only edit their index if you are on their payroll.

Thanks guys.

I guess it isn't really an either/or situation, but it is likely to be heavily tilted in one direction or another and having this sort of perspective helps in assessing the likely success of technologies and companies.

And 5% of mobile apps being useful on a daily basis is a big step forward. For sure this is yet to go mass market, but if geeks are at 5% this year they will be more next and the hoardes will follow soon after.

Thanks guys.

Simon - couldn't agree with you more, comms are definitely the most important app and they are where Facebook is strong. That is only one aspect of the web though. I am also wondering now how it will all scale - status updates on all my friends might be too much. A bit like the twitter problem.

Raphael - the question for companies such as U-Lik and Last.fm is the extent to which they start to live totally inside apps like Facebook. Do you think?

Over-hyping doesn't help anyone, but at the same time we have a duty as directors and investors to build value in our companies and marketing is an important part of that.

With regard to Zeus - we have been very open that the early years of the investment didn't go as we hoped. The last three years have been a different story though and the new management team have done a great job in turning the company around and making it something we can all be proud of. If you don't want to take my word for it have a look at the customer list or some of the PR.

Thanks guys.

Joao - the answer to your question depends in part on how mature the business is, but in general for the top couple of key hires the CEO usually asks for our thoughts and I think most of us like to be involved.

Thanks Paul. In trying to keep this post simple I lost a lot of the subtleties of my argument, which is to say, I think there is still a place for shows like Lost and that they will make great money for their studios. This will become harder though, and the AVERAGE production cost will decrease. The cost reductions will (hopefully) be more about less special effects than lower quality, but we will see....

HI Azeem - interesting data. I guess all I'm saying is that we target returns that would put us in the top 16% of US funds. Euro venture returns haven't been good up to this point (in fact last year rolling one year returns were better than in the US for the first time) so benchmarking against them wouldn't set the bar high enough.

Thanks guys, and good to hear from you mspoke.

There are lots of these smaller plays out there making the market happen.

Thanks for the comment Bret. We learn more out of disagreement than agreement.

I read your post, and I'm afraid we still disagree. You are right that big business has jumped on SL because of all the mainstream press it is getting, but that doesn't mean they won't find a use for it. I'm not expecting anything to happen quickly, but I'm convinced that SL (or something similar) will emerge as a platform on which other things are built.

Thanks Joff. Great podcast, and you are right to mention CafePress - my European focus got the better of me in this respect!

Re the story of how Moo ended up with big name VC backers - that is all about having big ambition and a big market to go for. Richard certainly has that and Robin and Saul at TAG (the first investors) will have encouraged him in this respect.

Heh heh. I think there probably was 200 people there, and I wish some more people would do those start-ups. To do this well you need to change the current ad model on it's head though - advertising becomes centred round the user instead of centred around sites. So it is a big change, and unfortunately half measures won't work.

Thanks Neil. I suspect not many people use the MP3 players in their phones because of the reasons you mention. As you say, though, they seem to be getting their act together, with SonyEricsson in particular doing a good job.