Minxymoggy's

Times are tough. The credit crunch has sucker punched a great many businesses and individuals. An obvious early symptom was the withdrawal of any worthwhile interest rates on UK savings accounts. As I write this, moneysupermarket.com is showing the best available savings account rate as a paltry 3%. Just 5 years ago I was getting 6% interest on my current account.

And so off go the investors, taking with them for company a bunch of cheesed off savers who are disillusioned with the safety of UK banks and unincentivised by the meagre returns for the risk of inflation making them poorer by leaving the cash with the banks. First up comes a natural pile in to equities. The UK FTSE has many well managed and funded companies which throw off vast cash flows and can reward investors with dividend payments higher than bank interest. The risk is of course that company valuations – and with it your investment – may go up as well as down and there’s also no guarantee of dividends always being paid as RBS, Lloyds and BP shareholders currently know all too well. With economic conditions continuing to constrict, cash flow may become tighter for many businesses.

Where else can investors turn? Sovereign debt has become unpopular on two counts. UK gilts are paying low returns whilst overseas debt has been hit by the collapse of Greece and the certainty that it will default in the future, possibly bringing contagion elsewhere in the region and across the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain).

Commodities are an interesting asset class for the trader yet much less interest to others since they generate no cash flow and pay no dividends whilst held. So an interesting alternative to the other alternatives is a UK founded company, Zopa, which works as a peer-to-peer lending system. A what? That’s right, a way to lend money to others as if you were your own bank. Zopa handles the credit checking, the gathering of money and will even chase up unpaid loans on your behalf.

But there’s no way I’d lend some stranger off of the internet a grand, I hear you wail! I’m glad you said that. Zopa agree! Their system works to mitigate risk. How? Let’s say you’ve £100 lying around your handbag, dying to be invested. Zopa will receive that money and issue it to borrowers in £10 chunks. So you’ll end up with 10 loans to 10 borrowers each of £10. A borrower who wants to loan, say £3,000 will be matched up with 300 lenders. This way if there ever were a default, the loss for each of the 300 lenders is only slight compared to if one lender serviced the entire finance requirement.

So how are you compensated for the risk? First off Zopa allows you to set your rate at which you’re prepared to loan. In fact the name isn’t taken from the Greek God of Mega-Wonga as it first might sound. Zopa stands for the Zone Of Potential Agreement. Simply put a Zopa is the range at which lending is going on in the market. A quick scan of Moneysupermarket.com’s loan rates shows the high street Zopa as I write to be between 7.7% and 11.9%. Now let’s put that into context. Those rates will apply if you’re:

a) credit worthy

b) borrowing a substantial ammount

c) paying it back over a predefined length of time, often 60 months (5 years)

On Zopa, just like a bank you set your choices as to who you want to lend to and at what rate. So let’s say a business owner with no debt from Chelsea approaches you. He’s looking for £15,000 to expand his empire and already has good cash flow. You may decide that to lend to him, you’ll accept a lower rate, let’s say 7%. He’s rewarded for working with you and you’re rewarded for lending your spare cash to others who are looking to get credit.

On the other hand, you may decide that his son, because he’s young, just finished Uni and without a credit history is a much greater risk. You may therefore decide that to lend to the Youth market, you’ll want rates closer to 13% in order to offset the risk that he may decide to spend his cash down the pub rather than repaying you your dues.

Whatever you decide, it’s your choice. You choose your rates and which credit sectors you are happy to lend to. Obviously the lower your rates the sooner your cash will be lent out and earning interest; holding out for higher rates will take a while to find matches. You can also choose to examine each individuals’ story or go for a auto-loaning to prospect who meet your pre-set criteria.

I chose to put £100 into Zopa to loan out last year. I set up criteria using auto-loan to the upper end of credit worthiness – the A* and A rated borrowers. My lowest rate was 7.1% and my highest 9.8%. My first loans went out in September and it wasn’t until October everything was out there. So it’s been about 10 months.

Of course Zopa take a fee for their service. It takes 1% p/a off of your returns or less depending on how quick you were to join. They also say allow for losses accrued by bad debt, something which I’ll spill the beans on in a moment – typical Zopa bad debt rates by sector can be seen here. Even allowing for 3% off of yield, we’re still looking at an asset class that’s typically returning higher than a UK FTSE High Dividend ETF and is in the range of most higher yielding equities – after deductions for losses are factored in. It compares reasonably with corporate bonds and is double to triple a typical savings account. Whilst it’s not going to turn you into an overnight millionaire, if you are looking for a place to park cash whilst the market turbulence subsides, it bears consideration.

Bad debt. It cracked the financial system and killed Lehman Brothers. Could it kill you on Zopa?

One of the funniest things is that since lending on Zopa, I’ve not had a single bad debt. In fact the reverse. I’ve had savvy, credit worthy types borrow money to close out other unfavourable loans from the high street, to do home improvements or to make other investments in properties and businesses. One of the borrower-friendly features of Zopa is that there are no “get out charges”. If someone wants to overpay their borrowings by a little or the lot they can. And that’s exactly what happened on my loan book.

Several borrowers took sums to achieve a purpose and then paid it back rapidly, generally within a couple of months. So whilst my return rate is factored in over the 36 month term that I prefer to lend on, these people were only paying the interest for the month or two whilst my money was in their possession. After that the cash was in my pocket, waiting to get back out there into the market and earn some interest.

It does seem that on the whole Zopa attracts a more financially aware type and certainly the management are. They’ve founded and run businesses including Virgin Money and American Express and they’re backed by investors who funded eBay, Figleaves, Betfair and Lovefilm. I know one member from the city who told me he’d made several thousand loans via Zopa and still hasn’t encountered default. Perhaps it’s the case that the money aware types that use it are more careful to use than abuse credit?

Whatever you think about Zopa, they’ve put a lot of time into explaining what goes on on the site and into building a sense of community around the platform. Individuals are known by usernames and you can see who your money is leant to and what they wanted it for. For those with the inclination to get more involved there are discussion board and member’s stories as well as the option of personally selecting and questioning those you would consider lending to before you lend to them.

I find the idea that it’s way of helping everyone to win except the fats cats appealing and my experience with Zopa after 10 months has been positive. I’ve made more than I would have if I’d left the money in the bank and having it loaned to another is great way of stopping yourself from dipping into savings since you can’t spend it if you don’t have it! Once loaned to another, you need to wait for it to be returned before you can transfer it out of your account. It also makes me feel good about myself that my cash can be used to help others get where they want in life and that I’m running my own bank – however tiny it is!

You can get started on Zopa from as little as £20 although I would encourage you to start with £100 since it allows you to spread your risk better. Play with the system until you feel comfortable it’s set up the way you want to lend; it’s very easy to use. And put it in the context of your broader investing strategy. If you only currently have savings, it seems like an interesting way to increase your returns. If you’re equities heavy, it’s a nice way to have some portfolio coverage that’s not going to sway rapidly with the FTSE. In fact it could be seen as a play on the popularity of stocks like Provident Financial (PFG) or International Personal Finance (IPF). Using Zopa is a way of you receiving comparable returns without the exposure to city fats!

If I remember I’ll make an update in October that lets you know how well a full year on Zopa went. If you want to check it out for yourself, please do so here.

It’s 2pm and I’m absolutely exhausted. Not from late night partying. Oh-no. Last night I did something far more thrilling. I had one of my live websites professionally hacked.

These days it’s a sad fact that the internet has spawned a new generation of criminal. The Internet Superhighwayman doesn’t seek your money or your life. More likely it’s your money or your identity. It’s important that businesses operate best practices to prevent this as we place our data in their hands daily. I wanted to find out how one of my own operations would fare so I enlisted security experts, McAfee. At 12.30am Saturday morning they unleashed a broadside of hacking attempts live over the internet against one of my ecommerce properties, www.make-me-beautiful.co.uk.

To say that it was thrilling is a little of an understatement. This was a live attack on a live site. Whilst just after midnight Friday is normally twighlight hours for sales, McAfee were not just going to try script kid basics. They were going to do everything. There was to be a full range of sniffs, hacks, exploits and vulnerabilities tested whilst at the same time a full Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack was carried out. I was honestly worried that my server might be reduced to melted plastic box by the morning. Whilst I have Aware Monitoring constantly checking all my servers for downtime or instability, the thought of getting an SMS through and then having to get the server back up whilst a DDoS waged on against it wasn’t filling me with joy. Most likely the senior support engineers would be sleeping (or drinking!) and there might be a gaping hole where my site once was come the morning.

Here’s my Twitter stream to give you an idea of what happened. Here’s the kick off after the port and network scans were completed:

• Running Denial of Service followed by multi hack simulation on my own server. Hey it’s good to do these things before someone else does!
• 12 minutes into the self-DDoS attack and the server has nicely sidelined it! The hack attempts carrying on but doing sweet FA
• McAfee have thrown tons of mad variables at the server in an attempt to see if there is a way in!
• I can see all these crazy URL parameters being thrown at my server from McAfee’s IP ranges. C’mon server you can do it! Pass the test!

A bit premature. Things soon started to heat up:

• 41 concurrent hack attempts…
• 59 concurrent hack attempts…
• Jeez 107 concurrent hack attempts, server still fine and I can browse my site like it is an everyday afternoon
• Panicing now! McAfee hacker testers have set up duff accounts on my site. Paranoid that now they’re inside it’s game over
• Wow, 160 concurrent requests and still no sign of server toppling. Never seen so many concurrents on this server even at Xmas
• Yup, the McAfee tester who registered on my site is trying to hack it from within. Feels nasty but it’s gotta be tested
• I know McAfee are simulating hacking my site for my own good but I do feel totally violated by it! How dreadful must u feel if it were real?
• 241 connections *hides head in hands*

Volume alone wasn’t enough, although were are now half an hour into the attack. Soon there were waves of visitors behaving very strangely:

• I think they’re trying to blast the server with massive URL params stuffed with all sorts from random strings to other URLs
• Lots of trying to invoke parameters that don’t exist
• Oh. The “password forgotten” feature gets it next
• On one hand it looks like it’s quietening down as there’s less massive URLs with fake passwords stuck on the end being requested
• On the other hand the visitors online count is now north of 350 so there’s more going on as the attack goes to a new phase
• *bites edge of desk* feeling tense! Oh yeah!

As well as playing with URL parameters, the hackers soon started to shake the doorway to the server by getting up close and nasty with every place two communication was available

• No! Not the shopping cart!
• Phew!
• They’re trying to hack the site search function. The forms on my site are getting some serious action tonight
• That URL is so long I couldn’t even tweet it. Things stuffed into every field of the search variables
• I recognise that one! That’s an SQL injection! Dirty!

By now we’re getting closing up on hour in and every time I thought McAfee were about to go home they just started turning up the heat!

• I have over 400 requests coming in, but at least 350 are from one of McAfee’s IPs.
• I do like the way McAfee’s hackers have registered themselves as being from Afghanistan. Nothing like a touch of realism to a simulation!
• I need a drink
• 46 minutes of DDoS simulation. Credit to the webhosts; we’re still alive and looking good =)
• Pretty sure that after 50 mins all the port and network scans are done and it’s just the web application layer vulnerabilities being tested
• Even though it’s a simulated hack, I feel relief they’ve logged out
• You would not believe how many disclaimers and Ts & Cs I had to accept to let McAfee hack my site
• Starting to feel confident again. I think we’ve made it through the worst of it
• I feel like the scene in the matrix where they get swamped with squidies…
• Oh man, seconds away, round 2… McAfee hackers don’t give up easy
• This is beyond thorough. This is nasty. Thank god we ran this at this god forsaken hour
• Below 400 concurrents on the site now. I hope this means I can go to be[d] soon!
• Oh FFS 484 hack attempts including another logged in one. C’mon guys give up I wanna sleep!

To their credit, McAfee weren’t playing. They were completely serious and didn’t let up for one moment.

• This hack simulation goes on for too long. The excitement is passed and I’m not enjoying waiting to see if they do crash the server #tired

Shortly after I tweeted that my daily offer from Groupon arrived – proof that it was now no longer being up late, it had switched to being early…

Bizarrely enough a customer then got on my website and started chatting to me. At 2am! And in the middle of a simulated DDoS attack! I’m pleased to say that both the Olark live customer service and the website overall suffered absolutely no impairment to speed whatsoever – the customer had no idea that she was in the middle of our digital wargame.

By the time I’d finished with her lengthy chat enquiry, it was somewhere near 2.30am.

• Have gone past point of caring. Too yawny. Will sleep with mobile by me. If it goes I know it’s @awaremonitoring telling me they crashed it

I’m pleased to say that not a single SMS alert came in from Aware Monitoring which meant that the server held it’s own throughout the simulated hack.

For years I’ve complained about Fasthosts. I use their reseller package as I have numerous sites, so I bunch them on reseller packages with 3 different providers. Fasthosts being one. Their interface is very slick however there are technical limitations behind the scenes, like the php register_globals and sendmail being disabled. This makes it awkward to use  a lot of Open Source software and much of what I have hosted with them has been recoded to fit. Certain newer technologies I’m in favour of like Magento Commerce are unsupported and despite being a reseller account there are extra charges for every MySQL database beyond the fourth. These are all niggly things that wind up developers and entrepreneurs as it constrains agility.

However on the security stakes, last night Fasthosts shone. There was no perceivable performance degradation even at the height of the DDoS. I’m pretty certain that there are software shields at network level that cut off much of it, rather than allowing it to come down to server level.

Equally, Aware Monitoring are performance geeks! If one of my sites stops responding for just 30 seconds I get an SMS telling me within moments. Last night there was nothing. I have had performance issues with Fasthosts before, most notably when the server starts to offer patchy service, with intermittent faults. I typically then get repeated SMS from Aware Monitoring and when I call support there’s nothing to see. This is common when another site on a shared server is spit roasting the server’s processor and is most often found as I understand if you’re unfortunate enough to be co-hosting with a busy forum or chat room.  Unlike Twitter they don’t have a pretty failwhale to let you know they’re crashing. But last night, not even an intermittent fault.

I’m very happy to say that my site passed the testing by McAfee Site Secure without fault although it did bring to light some best practices we could use on other sites. McAfee will continue to check my site daily for a year and their tests include vulnerabilities for identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams. In addition to using Google’s Webmaster Tools, it’s a valuable service that site owners can deploy to build a better and safer internet without having to spend a year studying Apache server’s workings and then arguing with their webhost over why certain variables can’t be set.

We will shortly be deploying McAfee’s dynamic Trust Seal on the site which gives users the latest security test information for our site. It looks something like this although this one is just an image I’m using here and not an actual check of minxymoggy.com:

McAfee Secure logo example

On a live Trust Mark the date is updated automatically to reflect the last scan date. It’s also linked to McAfee’s site where users can see security information about the URL they’re viewing.

I take making the internet safe for my customers a priority. Just as I wouldn’t let criminals gather in my pub, we shouldn’t create places that attract them online.

Something that had long been bugging me was whether I was giving good enough Customer Service in my ecommerce retail businesses. Not just good customer service but customer service so good it forges a connection with a customer and makes them bond with the business. Is it possible?

We’re open long hours and we work our backsides off to make sure everything is done efficiently. We jump hurdles to make our customers’ life easy. We have phone numbers in our major markets, so no matter where a customer is, if they want to call us on their mobile phone, they’re only paying local rates. And yet still, the thought persisted – what if they need to get up and move away from their computer in order to get the phone? Wouldn’t that break the mood? Would it be like shopping in Harvey Nicholls only to have to leave the store and walk away from all you wanted to purchase just because you wanted to ask the staff a question about something? Unacceptable.

I therefore set out to find a way of offering live customer service on my websites. I did have somethings in mind:

1. I didn’t want to have to install ‘yet another’ I’m client. I had MSN Messenger with the MSN Plus upgrade and Skype installed on my desktop as do all of us in my office. I figured it’d be neat if the system were compatible in some way
2. I’d like it to run off several websites as customers deserve consistently good customer service no matter which part of our network property they are on
3. Scalability would be nice. Free would probably trump that since I had no immediate way of guaging volumes other than guestimating based on the number of phone and email enquiries we currently receive

At first glance it seemed a tall order. In the past I’d set up chat rooms using ChatBlazer’s software amongst other things, yet that was a different type of thing since users were connected to a database of profiles – it was a closed chat room in essence.

I shouted out to some friends. Steve Kennedy gave me a great tip in the form of XMPP/Jabber. It’s a technology that allows you to build great chat systems, and in fact is the basis of Google Talk and identi.ca.

I was then told by Alex Kalsey about Olark. Olark is an XMPP chat widget. It’s pay-for but has a 15 day free trial or a 100% free version that restricts you to 20 chats each month.

Setting up is easy. You register, cut and paste a javascript into your footer and then choose how you want to receive your messages. There are several choices like BeeJiveIM but I went for Google Talk. Why? It’s also free. I sense a trend emerging here!

Wait a second, I thought. Don’t I have Google Talk on my Blackberry? I took a quick check and low and behold, there it was.

Hey… You mean? No… Surely not…

Oh yes. You’re right. It does.

Linking Google Talk to my Olark meant that now, someone could visit my sites and I could see them on my Blackberry’s Google Talk app! Even cooler was that if they opened the “Live Customer Service” widget and started a dialogue, I could chat back to them from virtually wherever, whenever. Suddenly I felt empowered to take long baths after all!

The Olark/Google Talk Live Customer Service widget on Make Me Beautiful.co.uk

It’s really cool that customers can interact with us live without leaving their seat. It’s even cooler that we can send messages back in real time from a phone. We upgraded to paid Olark within a day and have facilities for many chats a month and several operators, rather than just the CEO’s Blackberry. And yet for the time being I’m putting myself in the firing line and taking most of the messages. Why?

Apart from the fact that we’re a small start up with limited man power right now, I’ve found out some hugely interesting things by doing this. I’ll share a few of the insights:

1 – Customers want you to fulfill them. By this I mean that if customers trust you, they’d rather you supplied them everything they want than go elsewhere. To this end, every single chat I’ve had has been a customer asking for a product they wanted us to sell. Here is an example:

Customer: Hi, do you have any black pearls?

Minxymoggy: Yes we do. Did you see the ones at http://fs.hn/48?

– Customer clicks link –

Customer: No, I don’t like them!

Minxymoggy: OK, what would they need to look like?

Customer: I want a single black pearl. It’s for my wedding. It’s a few months off but I need that colour

Minxymoggy: OK, did you see the Chocolate Mauve 3D pearls at http://fs.hn/49?

– Customer clicks link –

Customer: That’s the design I want only it needs to be black, not chocolate

Minxymoggy: We don’t have any right now but our A/W10 collection does have more black pearls in it. It launches in a month or so. You could follow us on Twitter or Facebook if you want to hear when lines launch

Customer: Thanks thats fabulous, I’ll do that

That’s the typical sort of conversation I’ve been having with my customers. Only one chat has been different; a returning customer who forgot her login and was happy to be assisted. The rest only make contact if they can’t find what they want and actually want you to have it! What a brilliant way of hearing what my customers want! Through the conversations I’ve had we’ve come to realsie that we’ve not offered enough choices in certain colour schemes. We can now address that.

2 – Customers want to see that a site is alive. We’ve not had that many chats in all fairness. However at the same time we have noticed an increase in orders and nothing else has changed. July is typically a slower month since people go away, spend time in the sun, trall the high streets, watch the World Cup and so forth. Traffic is roughly what it was last month. No new products have launched nor are there any offers on so the only factor we can pin the increase on is better customer service – being seen to be stood there at the counter if anyone needs us.

If you want to check out the chat you’re free to take a look at it on The Minxy’s Jewellery news blog but obviously do visit Olark.com and chat to them if you want to implement live customer service yourself.

Ultimately I’m sharing this to help anyone else who is also passionate about making a difference to customer relationships through technology. Yes, some people are on Twitter or Facebook, but my belief is that an anonymous live chat will pay a dividend in customer relationship that far outweighs implementation and staffing costs over time. I’ll give an update in the future as to how we’ve found it.

This another copy from Jeff I wanted to share with some people who I know have great stories hence putting it here. Do speak directly with Jeff using the link provided if you can assist:

After spending the past year working on the #140conf events and exploring the on-going effects of the emerging real-time Internet on both business and on people, I decided the next thing to do was to write a book about the social revolution we are experiencing and provide a platform for some of the amazing people who are involved in this social revolution to get discovered outside their areas of direct influence.

I want to do this right. However, I don’t have any editor or publisher (yet) but I woke up the other morning with the feeling that I had to write the book and the time to start writing was NOW.

So here goes…

—-

A social revolution was born in 1969 as an unintended consequence of the launch of ARPANET.

It took the advent of the broadbandmobile Internet for the social revolution to become visible, disruptive and help shape the ways we connect.

Along the way, 500 years post-Columbus, the world once again became flat in a Thomas Friedman-esque (I think that you don’t need the hyphen when you add “esque” to a word.) kind of way and the real-time Internet was born. In this new flat world access to information has become democratized.

Now, almost halfway into 2010 I believe we are in the very beginning stages of a global social revolution, which will redefine, maybe forever, the way we do business.

The transition will be slower than some might expect, but as companies discover the benefits of listening to what their customers are saying using social communications, individual customers are discovering the innate power they have (but don’t always know) by simply speaking up, sharing their knowledge and often times serving as unpaid, but passionate, brand ambassadors.

The balance of power is shifting. A new era in buyer/seller relationships is being defined. And unlike other revolutions, this isn’t so much about the power of “we the people” but rather “me the people.”

For the first time in a long time, our individual voices matter and each of us can effect change. When we work together, the mashing together of multiple “me’s” does empower a stronger and more powerful “we the people.” The point is that each of us matter in our own right and at any given moment, any of us can and maybe will stand up and effect change.

This shift is having dramatic effects in many other parts of the business, social, environmental, political and other ecosystems. In the last year, we’ve heard peoples’ voices in Iran, Haiti, China and most recently, those affected by a volcano and an oil spill.

Since the launch of #140conf, I have met some amazing people, some of whom have discovered their own voice in the advent of the real-time webacross the U.S., parts of Europe and Israel. I’ve personally listened to these people as they have effected positive change in many places around the world.

I’ve had famous celebrities, the homeless, musicians, writers, journalists, an ex-convict, educational and religious leaders share center stage of the Kodak Theater, the 92nd Street Y, the Austin Convention Center, an off-Broadway theater, the 02 and many other venues as they shared their passion and stories. At the #140Conf NY, we had more than 100,000 viewers track us on UStream.

After flying approximately a hundred thousand miles (and maybe more) in doing my research, I want to create a new stage that will reach an even broader base. I’m working on new book, “The Connected Me,” which will explore this on-going social revolution. It is my goal to use this book to highlight the people who have discovered their voice and who are continuing to use the advent of this social revolution to effect change. Whether this person is changing business, raising awareness for a social cause or simply making the world a better place, I would like to learn about this person and give them center stage in this new book.

My goal is to curate on-going lists (or to curate an on-going list) of people to vet as candidates to be included in the book. While I already have a number of people in mind, I hope to be able to crowdsource the discovery of new people from around the world, who I otherwise would have never had a chance to meet.

So I am looking for your help in identifying characters who you feel should be profiled and given a voice in the book. Whether this person is yourself, a friend or someone you only heard of, I would greatly appreciate your assistance in helping me map some of the connected “me”s around all of us.

Please use this form: http://140conf.wufoo.com/forms/nomination-the-connected-me/ to nominate a connected “me” to be profiled.

Thanks for your time.

Best regards, Jeff

One of my pet project du jour’s at the moment are URL shorteners. As Twitter continues to become more important both as a blogging platform, a real time communication medium, a social network and as a source for real time search SEO, the need for URL shorteners have never been greater. Sure, in the past there was often a problem like long links being split into two lines and rendered unusable by email software. Yet there are two real driving forces for my engagement with URL shorteners:

First is the obvious – because of Twitter’s need for 140 character or less messages.

Second is the less obvious – because we live on a shared web more than ever and that trend will continue. On your site you own your brand. You can structure the content, craft the image and architect the domain. How can you keep your brand identity intact whilst moving off of your site, into the vast shared web? How can you track your brand’s movement around that third party space? You need a system that allows the continuation of brand.

A basic URL shortener isn’t a long job to set up. It simply needs the ability to write 301 htaccess commands. Beyond that there’s a lot you can do with tracking links and I may explain some more of my thoughts on that at another point. For now, all I’ll say is that the guys from Bit.ly were kind enough to present to me what they’ve been up to and I can assure you it was stolen from Area 51/Roswell. Pure alien technology, it’s that out of this world.

I’ve created a number of URL shortening services myself. Here are the URL shortener services I set up:

• fng.sh – This was my first and it’s for a Feng Shui consultant. Initially I made it on top of awe.sm’s infrastructure although I’ve subsequently changed that
• fs.hn – This URL shortener was conceived for my fashion related sites although I am allowing other fashion media/retailers/tech/bloggers to use it too.
• refr.sh – My URL shortener for refreshing content. Think ethical, eco-friendly, health, social change, social enterprises, charitable and other good causes. Again, although started with my own sites in mind, I’m not averse to others using it
• nxtw.mn – I’ve set this up for TheNextWomen.com since I feel stimulating women to think more about how technology entrepreneurship could be a path they’d like to walk is important both to women, the growth of technology and society as a whole

There is another step in my process here. All technologies in their infancy are slightly limited. However their nature is to grow and develop fast. Scott and the guys at bit.ly have done incredible things, Jonathan at awe.sm is working on their set up and Richard at is.gd is now in the trusty hands of Kate and co at Memset which should ensure he gets to keep working on it. Whilst bit.ly dominate the URL shortening field and I’ve no intentions of competing with them, I’m certain that these technologies will develop and become more important as time goes by. I’m therefore claiming a certain amount of land to satisfy my own interests while the prices are cheap!

Things I think will happen:

• URL shorteners will tie in with canonical URLs for SEO
• Real time marketing outreach will be enabled using the personal level tracking through social networks that a URL shortener gives – ie a link shortener can show who is tweeting about your brand and you could connect to them
• URL shorteners will give an insight into user behaviour that Google Analytics, WebTrends and the like are currently unable to do since URL shorteners can track through the shared web whilst Google Analytics can only record on-site activity

Yeah… the more I think about it, the more I think I might start a few more URL shorteners!

The following email was sent by Jeff Pulver, Casting Director of #140conf. Follow the instructions in it to contact Jeff directly if you have an interesting idea to table:

As the 140 Characters Conference Casting Director, I am putting out call for Characters/Speakers/Sponsors for the Fall 2010 Season.

Whether you recognize it or not or are apart of the social revolution of our times or want to know more or be a part of it or want to be a sponsor – I would like to personally invite you join us at one of our gatherings – 140conf is a fluid ever evolving growing living being – it has a life of its own and has become a gathering place, a crossroads to the future of “we” the future.

Since the June 2009 launch of the 140 Characters Conference, #140conf has provided a platform for people to share their perspectives on the effects of the emerging real-time internet on both business and on people. To date, #140conf has taken place in New York City (twice), Los Angeles, London and Tel Aviv and special editions of #140conf took place at MWC in Barcelona and at SXSW in Austin, TX. Next month, I’ll be producing a special event in Washington on June 17.

In September 2010, I will be bringing a one day #140conf to Boston, and in October #140conf will be returning to as a two day event in Los Angeles and as a one day event in London. I am now looking for people who are interested in sharing their voices and perspectives at the upcoming events in: Boston, Los Angeles and London.

When I started working on the first #140conf, the original intent was to produce an event that explored the effects of twitter on: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising and Politics. What #140conf has turned into is an event which explores the effects of the emerging real-time internet on both business and “we” the people. It turns out, the emerging real-time internet continues to effect an ever growing number of industries. In 2010 some of the topics covered at the #140conf include: Education, Music, Charity, Fashion, Politics, Finance, Journalism, Marketing, Television, Emergency Communications, Media, Celebrity, Entertainment, Advertising, Love & Romance, Location Based Services, Radio, Comedy, Legacy, Humanity, Comic Books, Privacy, Book Authors and a lot more.

The people who I curate to speak at #140conf are people of passion; people who have something to share about the effects of the emerging real-time internet on something they have been or will be effected by. I look for speakers interested in sharing their voice and vision. While you may have noticed some high profile people such as Wyclef Jean, Ivanka Trump or Donny Deutsch speak, I’ve also had an ex-convict, an 8th grade class and the homeless on the same stage.

What I don’t offer is a chance for people to directly promote products or Services, but a chance to promote a cause, to share an observation and a stage for some people to be discovered. I use the metaphor of my title as Casting Director with intent, for I am strong believer that #140conf can be a powerful new medium to reach millions of people via the social web and traditional media coverage which we are also attracting.

To get a better feeling of what to expect from the #140conf experience, please visit: http://nyc.140conf.com/schedule and watch any number of the videos from the recent conference.

In addition to the scheduled conferences, there are also monthly gatherings held in NYC and elsewhere where we discuss the real-time internet. I am looking for speakers for these events as well. Pleasesee: http://meetup.com/140conf for a schedule of upcoming #140conf meetups.

If you are interested in speaking on the #140conf stage, please visit: http://140.vg/speakat140 and share the details about your preferredtalk.

Feel free to recommend others who you are friendly with who I should consider reaching out to. Individual talks at #140conf run about 10 minutes and panel discussions are set for 15 / 20 minutes.

Companies interested in promoting themselves, their brands, their products and services are encouraged to become one of the #140conf event sponsors. The New York event was broadcast on Ustream and attracted over 100,000 viewers. Please email: jeff —  at — 140conf  – dot– com for more information.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards, Jeff

p.s. Please read http://bit.ly/cbFG0q and you will understand why I felt flying cross-country for the 3 hr #140conf LA Meetup on Monday night was so worth while

Thanks to Mike Butcher and Coadec, I wrote my MP prior to the Digital Britain Bill being passed. I just thought I’d be open for everyone to see the response I got back from Mr Stephen Hammond MP.

DEBill Letter from Stephen Hammond MP

Stephen has written me in the past on several matters, mainly business and environment. I’m glad he takes the time to provide an answer. It might cost him less if he emailed rather than used nice paper and envelopes as I know from the flurry of Conservative Campaign emails I’ve had, he has my digital contact details. That to me sums up the DEBill debacle. The jewel in the nation’s economy is our fast growing tech sector. And yet rules about it’s future are being written and decided by those who aren’t even using a fraction of it’s potential.

Let’s hope that the devil will be in the details when they start to go through them and that greater debate is tabled to see this addressed.

Recently activist organisation Greenpeace mounted a social media campaign to pressure consumer goods giant, Nestle into using only sustainably produced palm oil. Nestle handled the campaign with a spectacularly low degree of social media skill and in direct result are now in a situation where there is increasing public hostility towards their operation, most notably on Nestle’s Facebook Pages.

Nestle Campaign Logo by Greenpeace

Nestle went on to get such a hammering not only by consumers angry with their policies and activists targeting their supply chain, the marketing media soon caught wind of Nestle’s difficulties (such as trying to tell Facebook users they were on a Nestle run forum and that Nestle would enforce it’s rules on those posting on their wall – see the Nestle #fail details and screenshots here). Consequently they gained even more bad attention. Nestle then asked Google to remove a video from YouTube which in true “Do no evil” style, Google did which resulted in a flurry of users reposting the video to YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing networks. There is a full gory, visual Nestle #fail presentation here.

Nestle’s share price started to take a dent, especially when trading opened on the 19th (the Facebook fiasco got heated on the 18th):

Nestle Share Price

At the same time shares in sustainable palm oil producer, New Britain Palm Oil, who are a major player in the Sustainable Palm Oil Roundtable, have risen. I won’t exaggerate and say it was all from this; NBPO had risen strongly in announcement to earlier moves the company had made regarding sustainable production and it seems that this campaign helped rather than made their momentum (Greenpeace kicked off on the 17th March). However NBPO have climbed a happy 20 points in one week and 60 in the month since they announced a sharp drop in profits on the 24th Feb. Clearly, this since run is not based on actual profits, it must be based on other factors.

New Britain Palm Oil Share Price

Is this the first time a social media campaign has altered the stock market? After all, what we are seeing here is not news per se; we’d expect a story like Steve Jobs’ bad health to dent the share price of Apple, a crew strike to hit BA or an infrastructure hack to rattle Google. However what we are seeing here is opinion, mass consumer opinion, aggregated and mounting up. The fact that a huge corporation uses cheap ingredients, many of which are of dubious origin ethically, is not news. If sufficient opinion can be vented through social media channels, what are the implications for share prices, stock traders, arbitrage services and brand marketers?

Jeff Pulver, the founder of #140conf, recently emailed me an insight he had whilst at the SxSW conference. It certainly makes interesting reading with lots of visionary tantilisation so I’ve reproduced it in full here unedited:

SXSW 2010: The days twitter became less relevant

Jeff Pulver / http://jeffpulver.com

At South By Southwest 2010 (SXSW), a strange thing happened on the way to Austin. A community of twitter faithful shifted from sharing everything about everything on only twitter (and maybe Facebook) and changed their habits to rely on learning about what was happening and where things were happening by using foursquare and Gowalla instead. I’m sure there were other products and platforms being used including Loopt and GySPii but foursquare and Gowalla were the dominant platforms.

Friends of friends not attending SXSW may have (greatly) appreciated the reduction of what might otherwise appear as “noise” on twitter about specific happenings at SXSW. However, the unintended consequence of not using twitter at SXSW meant SXSW spent little time as a trending topic which in turn may have lowered the buzz and the impact being a trending topic can have.

In the year since SXSW 2009, a number of my friends became passionate and dependent on using Foursquare and/or Gowalla as the platform to share where they are and what is happening around them. At SXSW, this was taken to a new level. It turns out that if you are spending time around your friends and you have a chance to speak to them almost at will, there is something to be said about only sharing your location information and then having the ability to make decisions of what to do (or where not to go) based on this information.

There were times where I could feel the ebbs and the flows of the people move as different people checked into various locations. While most of this was felt locally in the place I was in, it also became apparent on the platforms when hundreds of people would rush to check in to a location. There were also times when it felt like I was chasing ghosts; These were the times I would go to a spot because a friend had checked into that spot only to discover they were no longer there.

Personally I thought foursquare’s introduction of trending places was a good one and a foreshadowing of future features. I look forward to seeing more derivative information shared in the future. I believe it will be the information shared from the 1st and 2nd derivatives of the core information that will keep people using location based services.

Based on an unscientific poll of a just a few people I spoke to during the breaks, at lunch and my flight home, a typical comment shared was: “I haven’t been on twitter for 2 days. Not sure when I was on last on Facebook. Instead I just look on Foursquare for what is happening and where it is happening.” These words were shared by many of the people I spoke with.

I do not believe this is the case of one community moving to a new platform just because it is new and cool. I believe the shift was intentional and was a means to an end. And it wasn’t about the games or the badges but rather it was the tool used by people to figure out the: who, what, where things were happening. I also believe the shift was a transient one. Moments after returning from SXSW, I found myself and friends had switched back to using twitter once again as our default communication platform.

One cottage industry that could have taken off at SXSW would have been “safe & secure” smart phone recharge stations at the various parties. Turns out at SXSW, the duration for the battery life for many of our devices was less than the amount of time we ended up being awake. By the end of each evening, we were not only tired but our phones had no energy left either.

What does any of this this really mean? I am still not entirely sure. But I do believe SXSW 2010 will be known as the time Foursquare came of age and the place where at least one community’s dependence on twitter had shifted and their use of twitter changed, albeit slightly. This is a topic on my mind as I continue to work on April’s #140conf NYC event and something I will be covering in detail tonight at the monthly #140conf NYC Meetup

Best regards, Jeff

p.s. While at SXSW, David Spark caught up with me and captured one of my real-time web rants. You might enjoy listening to this.

When Microsoft rebranded it’s search offering from Live to Bing - the decision engine, it already knew it had a tall act to follow. Google’s empire isn’t build just on it’s web search engine; it’s nowdays a slickly integrated suite of products cataloguing pages, images, video, news, people and places amongst other things. So when Stefan Weitz of Microsoft Seattle came to town, it was natural that a whole heap of queries would be thrown up. What would the results be?

A private party held in Covent Garden, Bing Brings it to Town naturally attracted a number of senior players together with a raft of start ups, agencies and other eco-systems co-factors. It seems there’s a lot of interest in Bing Maps and the race to local.

“We can’t do everything ourselves” said Marie Thirlwall of Bing UK. “We build those data stores by partnering” she explained in reference to my questions regarding the local directory listings. Thompson currently are a data partner with Bing yet with interest in local heating up, especially in light of the mobile/geolocation boom there were other interests in the room.

Rummble API

Andrew Scott, founder of mobile app, Rummble.com gave an excellent impromtu demo of how they’ve expanded to incorporate FourSquare style check ins whilst maintaining their focus on discovery and reviews. Rummble allows users to rate any physical place they visit from their mobile, as well as discover new places they may like based on their friends reviews. They can let their friends know where they are and the system is now being integrated into other real time services like Twitter, with Rummble Twitter now in Alpha. Perhaps more exciting for the entrepreneurial amongst you, Rummble have made a decision to offer free access to their API. This allows third party websites and developers to create geolocational services that work with their existing communities. With the freedom of not having to build an entire service from ground up, the eagle eyed will spot the oil well there. In an age of land grab, you just might want to consider rummbling your turf before someone else does.

If that wasn’t enough opportunity to get you thinking of location based communities, the local presence continued with Caroline Lavelle, director of Akesios Search Analytics. Akesios have been developing their offering for a decade now and offer a ready to go white label business directory solution with built in monetisation opportunities. Caroline tells me that far from having been destroyed by Google’s anti-link buying stance, there is still a strong and buoyant market for vertical directories and those serving niche communities and her company offer a range of services to take existing print publishers into the digital arena successfully. So how can visitors be monetised?

One technique was explained to me by the Rohini Contractor of Hitwise UK. Collaboration with ISPs allows for anonymous cache based profiling of traffic, allowing businesses to target consumers with relevant advertising without the need for older, potentially intrusive technologies like browser cookies. There’s more details on how Hitwise provide this data here.

So here in one room we’ve all the brains needed to build directories, populate it with user driven reviews and build in targeted advertising based on location. Why hasn’t Bing used it’s decision engine to create some critical mass?

“We know we’ve got some work to do,” confessed Stefan who was remarkably frank and under no illusion about Bing’s market standing. Yet at the same time his expression was full of optimism.

I queried Stefan a little on the Microsoft/Twitter tie up and whether he felt that real time search had the potential to be the game changer Microsoft needed. Stefan was very aware that although both major search engines now have access to the Twitter API, we’re now in an arms race scenario to see who can first start using that data intelligently and providing more than just a carousel of real time tweets. He couldn’t let lose as to whether acquisitions of real time search engines like Topsy were on the cards yet also stated that there definitely was the possibility of buying in innovation.

“One thing I’m very proud of,” continued Stefan, “is Bing Maps. I think it’s a great product that’s really shaping up strongly.”

Once again I was reminded of the Holy Trinity of digital convergence – local, mobile and social. Although Windows Mobile may have come off of the latest handsets by Palm, it still remains a great piece of software for those needing tight integration with Microsoft Office and a future release could doubtless stitch together a far more wide reaching variety of Microsoft services. Bing is already under the hood of the Windows Mobile 7 release.

It seems that whilst the search is on for the winning formula to change consumer behaviour, Microsoft are returning an ever better result set and Google’s increasing corporate reputation as ‘just another Goliath’ means that the Microsoft bashing of yesteryear is diminishing. Clearly, there’s quite some party left to be had in search. Here’s to you Stefan, Bindi and Marie at Microsoft, the more players we have in this party, the more fun for everyone. Looking forwards to the next installment from Bing!