Impromptu Speech Topics: 2010

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Affiliate Making Money

Europe’s had a bumper year for interesting startup ideas. The Next Web’s Hermione Way and I put our heads together to come up with this list of ten small tech companies from across the continent that have excited us in 2010.

Brainient

London-based Brainient makes it easy to add interactive elements to existing web video. A ‘Magic Script’ lets publishers add a few lines of code into a website’s Body HTML, enabling pre-roll ads, overlays or any other type of Brainient layers on any embedded video in the page.

The company launched its developer tools at The Next Web Conference in April this year and announced the first of a fresh wave of commercial partnerships, allowing video site SeeSaw to transplant Hulu’s “Choose your own ads” format to the UK for the first time.

Tastebuds

If music be the food of love, the Tastebuds is on to a good thing. This Last.fm-powered dating site that we profiled earlier this year matches you with others who share your taste in music.

It’s a simple idea that the site carries off incredibly well and as a niche dating idea we love it. Music taste can often say a lot about a person’s outlook on life and if nothing else, it’s an excellent conversation starter. The service may be a little too reliant on Last.fm from a business point of view, but as a concept it’s beautifully realised.

Skimlinks

Affiliate links are a major revenue stream for some online publishers. Taking all the effort out of this type of marketing, Skimlinks gets rid of the long URLs that often put users off clicking links. The fact that the publisher is getting a cut from sales of the product they’re linking to is completely invisible, as a Skimlinks URL looks just like a normal non-affiliate link.

It’s a model that has won Skimlinks major worldwide publishing clients. This year the London-based startup launched Skimkit, a product that makes it easy for writers to add affiliate links to their articles, even suggesting items that might be suitable to link to.

Shutl

As satisfying as it is to conveniently order shopping online from home, the wait to get it delivered can sometimes make a trip to a bricks-and-mortar store seem like a better option. Shutl aims to improve on next-day delivery by offering products to your door as soon as 90 minutes after you place your order.

The service works by aggregating capacity across local courier companies into a single web-service that retailers can use to speed up deliveries. A GPS tracking facility in partnership with Bing Maps allows shoppers to track their deliveries in real-time via the Shutl website. The UK startup is currently trialling its service with certain Argos stores in the London area.

Paper.li

It was hard to ignore Swiss startup Paper.li this year. The “Twitter newspaper” startup saw rapid viral growth thanks to the automated tweets it sent out each time a user’s daily newspaper was published.

This annoyed some Twitter users, who found their reply stream filled with announcements that they featured in their followers’ Paper.li publications each day. Still, the service is still growing at a reported 1000 papers per day, with plans to expand beyond Twitter and Facebook and offer users the chance to make money from their newspapers in 2011.

Nuji

When we covered Nuji‘s launch earlier this month, we described it as “Instagram meets Instapaper” for shopping. This social network sees you sharing things you like, be they items in shops or objects you spot online, as a way of demonstrating your taste. A mobile app lets you scan barcodes while you’re out shopping, making adding items to your profile easy.

As it builds a network of tastemakers, Nuji plans to monetize by offering relevant shopping deals to users based on their interests.

Flattr

This Swedish startup from Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde offers publishers an “online tipjar” that can easily monetize any Web page.

After adding money to their Flattr account, users click the ‘Flattr’ button on pages that they like around the Web. At the end of the month, the money in their account is divvied up to the publishers of the content the user ‘Flattr-ed’. Thus far the service’s most high profile signup has been Wikileaks, which added the button to its Afghanistan war logs page as a way of accepting donations. The service remains one of the few income sources that hasn’t been closed off to the controversial whistleblowing website in recent weeks.

Moshi Monsters

Moshi Monsters from London’s Mind Candy became an online phenomenon for children this year. Youngsters can adopt a pet monster, and solve puzzles to earn virtual currency that can be spent on items to help kit out their monsters’ world with food, furniture treats and the like.

The virtual world has seen real-world spinoffs galore. A deal with Penguin Books was followed by toys, mobile apps and video games in what is set to be a highly profitable year.

Stupeflix

France’s Stupeflix offers a browser-based online video suite and this year launched a service to automate the creation of videos, for example, in the online retail sector where a video of a pair of trainers created from a bunch of photos might be more appealing to potential customers than static photos.

Stupeflix also offers an API to automate the processing and generation of video content for third parties.

Screach

Screach aims to make all sorts of screens interactive by way of a mobile app and a highly customisable development platform. TV shows could use it to allow real-time interaction from viewers, bars could use it to run quiz events with instant on-phone rewards for winners and it’s already being used to enhance a museum exhibit in the UK.

At present there’s little to try out Screach’s mobile app on, but that should change next year when the UK start-up is set to announce commercial partnerships.

Hi, I’m Tris and I write books.

And I’m pretty excited about the coming age of ebooks and the potential of Google Editions. According to the WSJ, Google Editions could be coming to the U.S. soon and other countries soon after. TNW is right on top of the news about this, but I wanted to take the author’s privilege and wax poetic about what this might mean for writers and authors.

First, you need to know that I don’t write fiction, I write for Pearson Technology Group (Que, Sam’s, and many others). I write books on blogging, WordPress, and social media. My publisher is betting big on ebooks and how ebooks will make the books I write more interactive, in depth, and up to date than ever before. I gather from another WSJ article on ebooks that fiction writers are none-to-pleased with ebooks and how they are making less money since the dawn of “e”. Myself, well, let’s say Pearson is more forward thinking about how ebooks and authors and publishers are good for each other. In the world of tech writing, being able to be lighter and faster is much, much better than waiting.

Case in point, my latest book Using WordPress. There are three entire chapters (not to mention additional audio and video commentary) that we were able to keep electronically, though they couldn’t make it into the paper book. If it wasn’t for the electronic versions, you wouldn’t have that. Unfortunately, my publisher isn’t perfect. If you buy the book electronically, you still have to go to the publishers site to get the additional chapters.

But I digress.

Google Editions.

Several things excite me about Google getting into publishing. First is that they aren’t going to be tied to a physical ereader. They are starting off from the perspective of distributing content. Which is how it should be. But that independence might come at a price: adoption. I have an iPad, as you know, and I buy and read most of my books through Toronto-based Kobo. I’ve liked the Kobo reader from the start, it had a better reading experience from the get go (not to mention pulling the DRM from the books I bought so I could load them into iBooks wasn’t fun). However Kobo is affiliated with a couple of existing bookstores (up here it’s Chapters-Indigo), will I be able to read Google ebooks that I buy with the Kobo reader that has the rest of my books? Will I be able to read them in iBooks? Big question there about whether or not Google Editions will take off. I might be able to add another reader to my iPad, but Kindle, Nook, and Kobo Reader owners can’t.

According to reports, I sounds like I’ll be able to offer affiliate links for readers to buy my (and other) books through Google Editions, just like Amazon. This could be something that will help Google gain traction early on. We know that Adsense is a pretty successful venture for Google. We know it works and can be pretty good for earning money on a site. I don’t see any reason why Google Editions will be any different.

So, we have a potentially more independent book seller, not tied to a physical reader, who will also let me earn money by recommending books. I’m good with this so far.

But will Google Editions help independent publishers and authors? Will it help niche writers expand their audiences? I’m going to work off a couple ideas here to say: yes on both. First, if a publisher wants to push more electronic books, the production costs are certainly less with digital editions than “dead-tree” versions. So being able to take more risks on authors who they might otherwise pass on, is a win for us scriveners. On the distribution front, until now, Amazon ruled the roost for self-published ebooks. While details aren’t available right now, I would suspect that Google would love to poke Amazon with a sharp stick and offer ebook publishing services as well. That gives publishers and authors another outlet, that means competition. That sounds good to me.

Here is the bottom line. I’ve always seen ebooks as a boon for authors and publishers who can adapt to them. I’m not saying paper books are going anywhere (though for me they keep going in drawers), I’m saying that ebooks allow authors to offer books to a large audience while keeping costs low with lower print runs. If the ebook sells better than the paper one, well don’t print as many of the paper ones.

Yes, not everyone will be able to take advantage of this and Google Editions might wind up like Google Wave and Buzz, but I think that in the last few months we’ve seen more interest in epublishing not less and I think this interest is going to turn into success for Google.

If they don’t blow it.

But hey, what do I know. I’m just Tris, and I just write books.

News - Queen Elizabeth Welcomes First Great-Grandchild! - Moms ...

Peter Phillips' wife Autumn gave birth to a baby girl Wednesday.

HP wins $2.5 billion contract with NASA | Business Tech - CNET News

Beating out Lockheed Martin, HP will sell $2.5 billion worth of products and service to the space agency. Read this blog post by Lance Whitney on Business Tech.

Larry Kramer: This Is Why Fox News Continues To Roll

People are getting lazy about forming their own opinions.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Money Making Schemes

This year, more than 600 taxi drivers were implicated in a giant taxi scam in which drivers overcharged passengers more than $1.1 million by flipping switches on their meters that kicked in higher rates. In the wake of the scandal, the Taxi and Limousine Company scrambled to portray the incident as a series of isolated incidents and mistakes by a select number of drivers. But according to one of those taxi scammers, these were no Lee Harvey Oswalds: it really was all a giant evil conspiracy!

According to driver Joseph Kastner, a group of drivers would meet together at cabby conferences in garages around the city and plot their nefarious schemes. "I met a series of drivers who decided to rob the public. They were actually having meetings at my old garage," Kastner, 49, told the TLC during a Sept. 30 administrative court hearing. Kastner is one of those accused drivers; he is charged with allegedly cheated 3,925 passengers out of $7,756, the sixth highest amount for an individual driver. Kastner claims that he wanted to become a whistleblower, alleging that the scams were much bigger than let on previously, and that he had stuff on the TLC as well, but no one took his offer: "I tried to tell them over and over again at the hearing. They didn't listen to a word I said. They just don't want to hear it," he told the Post.

So is Kastner trying to escape his fate by alleging a citywide conspiracy, making up stories to look better, or is there really an underground network of thieving taxi drivers plotting to steal unwitting customer's money? TLC obviously didn't take his claims seriously, but the Post sides with Kastner, saying that other cabbies and industry insiders confirm his story, and bad hacks pull other stunts such as charging drivers to put on the heat, pressing the "extra" button on tolls and bridges, and posing as livery drivers at airports and charging more than double the flat fee of $45 to Manhattan. Whether or not the conspiracy is as widespread as Kastner would have you believe, the best thing you can do is consult the Passenger Bill of Rights, and always be vigilant of extra charges of any kind.

Pension funds will be prevented from investing in risky assets, including stocks, by the Pensions Regulator under plans to stop weaker companies with large pension shortfalls from making huge bets.

David Norgrove, chairman of the regulator, will outline his concerns that some schemes are taking risks that could leave a bigger hole in the industry funded Pension Protection Fund in a speech to funds on Tuesday.

“We have to ensure that they are not putting all their money on the 2:30 at Newmarket and if it doesn’t work out, they will fall back on the PPF,” he said. “To some extent, we have seen some behaviour like that.”

Some schemes were so underfunded their only hope of recovery lay in big bets. The regulator was also concerned about standards of governance, particularly for smaller schemes.

“We come across a fair degree of criminality at the smaller end of schemes,” said Mr Norgrove, whose six-year tenure at the regulator, created in 2004, is drawing to an end.

Investment curbs would affect a few weak companies initially but as schemes close to new members and to future accruals trustees will need to insure that the investment strategy takes as few risks as possible. “Eventually it will move up the scale,” he said. Companies will need to be well funded and have few, or no, investment risks.

Under those circumstances, defined benefit schemes might cease to be significant investors in equities and property.

Mr Norgrove said that despite cash injections from employers, defined benefit schemes today are not much better funded. “Contributions have had to run to keep up with rising longevity, falling discount rates and shortfalls in investment returns,” he said. “We clearly can’t have a situation where we move from recovery plan to recovery plan.”

Pensions agency head weighs risk and reward

As David Norgrove, the first chairman of the UK Pension Regulator comes to the end of his term, Britain’s retirement landscape is radically altered from its condition when he first arrived in 2005.

Nearly 60 per cent of defined benefit schemes are closed to new members – up from 44 per cent when he first began counting them in 2006 – and 21 per cent are closed to future benefit accrual, up from 12 per cent at that time. And Britain is about to embark on a universal system of near-compulsory pension provision where every employer will need to offer workers a chance to contribute to a savings pot for retirement where none existed just a few years ago.

Moreover, about 150,000 people had lost all or part of their pension when the legislation that set up the regulator was passed in 2004. Almost none have lost their benefits since.

But some things have not changed, Mr Norgrove notes in remarks prepared for an address to the National Association of Pension Funds on Tuesday.

“Schemes are only marginally better funded then when the scheme specific funding regime was introduced five years ago. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the economic conditions have largely counteracted the gains that schemes had started to make before the downturn,” said Mr Norgrove, who steps down at the end of this month.

Thus, in his parting shot, Mr Norgrove is hinting at the imminent death of one of the sacred cows of defined benefit pensions; that investment in risk assets – equities, property, commodities or hedge funds – can reduce overall risk and make defined benefit retirement promises affordable.

Indeed, he goes so far ... as to say that woefully underfunded schemes of companies with weak balance sheets should have their investments in risky assets limited. Schemes such as these “can only hope to meet their promises by taking very high levels of investment risk with significant potential to go wrong”.

The regulator, he said, must make sure that those deficits get no bigger than they already are. And that means cutting investment risk. But as schemes close to new members, and increasingly, to future accrual by existing members, employers have little vested interest in the welfare of the scheme. Increasingly, he said, these will be run by elderly member-nominated trustees and these, too, will have to curtail investment risk. And trustees will need to be aggressive in pursuing contributions.

Although Mr Norgrove did not say so specifically, the landscape he describes is one where pension fund investment no longer props up stock markets.

In his parting remarks, Mr Norgrove also took aim at two of the most sensitive issues for industry. First, he reiterated the regulator’s view that trustees must carefully monitor offers from employers to scheme members for “enhanced transfer values”, which are very often a bad deal for members. Pensions advisers have been fighting back hard to make it easier for employers to reduce retirement obligations by offering ETVs.

The regulator, he said, believes there are a handful of instances where accepting one might be beneficial – where the member cannot expect to live too long or has no dependents who will benefit from defined benefit pensions, for example. Also, if the offer is significantly superior to insurance cover provided by the PPF, a transfer might make sense.

Second, Mr Norgrove made it clear that defined contribution benefits, which are emerging as the dominant retirement savings scheme, need work. A new consultation on structure will be aired next year, he said.

But for now, he said, the myriad small schemes which dominate DC pension provision are not likely to serve the interests of savers well.

“What we don’t want is another 50,000 DC schemes,” he said. “They don’t have the scale for the governance and they don’t have the scale to keep the charges down.”

Is Mr. Norgrove right to limit risky bets by small underfunded pension
plans? I think so. Taking risky bets to make up for losses might sound
perfectly fine, but it could easily backfire, especially if we head into
a protracted period of debt deflation.

A colleague of mine
remarked that in the last ten years, JGBs outperformed the S&P 500.
And yet 10-years ago everyone was screaming about how low Japanese bond
yields were and many hedge funds were actively shorting JGBs. They all
got slaughtered, and more will get slaughtered shorting Japanese bonds,
even now.

But isn't the Fed giving money away to banks so they
can trade risk assets all around the world? Shouldn't pension funds also
be allowed to take huge bets? That all depends on the internal
expertise of the pension fund managers, on their risk management
process, and most importantly, on their governance.

I'm not
saying to go all in government bonds just in case debt deflation hits,
but it's simply foolhardy to think that investing more in alternatives
will help shore up these pension funds. All this to say that sometimes
it's worth bucking the trend and playing it safe. I know hedge funds,
commodities, real estate and private equity sound sexy, but the truth
is it's a lot sexier to limit your downside risk, especially if you're a
small underfunded pension plan paying out benefits.