Under the covers

I attended the first day of the Innovation and Growth Forum today and it was interesting to contrast the style of both the event and the presenters with the Always On event I went to in NY recently. The events are slightly different with the AO event being pitched squarely at the media business and I+G covering a much wider range of industries. But both are a mix of entrepreneurs, VC's and industry luminaries getting together to raise money/share ideas/sell products/network with each other.

The overall styles were pretty different, there was no "Bloggers Bullpen" in the Hilton Park Lane which I was quite disappointed about and the polo shirts, sports jackets and chinos were swapped for dark suits and ties. The formats were different too, the US event was fast and punchy, 6 minute slots to sell your story/idea/company. The UK event was much more level headed, more English, with civilised panel discussions and 35 minute vendor showcases running in parallel with the main event.

I was trying to work out the if this difference was was a result of the structure of the event or a US/UK cultural thing when the keynote speaker, Dr Mike Lynch (pictured) from Autonomy hit the nail on the head. He recounted a story about a "Dragons Den" type session he had attended earlier in the year. Two groups of tech students, one from MIT and one from Cambridge had to pitch their technology business ideas to a panel. The US team pitched with a great marketing story but very little substance to their product offering, the UK team gave a very convincing pitch around their product but in a very dry, detailed way.

At the end of the pitches, the moderator asked the panel who they would back with their money. Mike observed that the best way to do that would be to put the two teams together to create a team that was product focused and had the ability to sell that to the market. You have to have a great product and great marketing to stand any chance of competing. He was very concerned that UK tech start-ups lack the marketing skills to build great companies despite having excellent technology. This merger of tech and marketing is interesting as the one area that is leading the field in this area is media which I think explains why the AO event was so much more exciting.

Other industries involved in tech start-ups would do well to look to the media business to see how this marriage could work for them. Like all marriages, it's not perfect and it's still quite early days even for media. But the massive boom in on-line advertising and the Web 2.0 revolution have conspired to make it the most likely place to find inspiration.

Following on from my previous post, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at retail sites over the last few weeks and it struck me that they have the ultimate overwhelming choice problem.

What’s really interesting is how poor most of them are when it comes to filtering the products they sell in a way that is meaningful to the user. Even the market leaders are way behind the price comparison engines like shopping.com and pricegrabber. There is a lot we can learn from these guys who live and die by getting the user to an affiliate as fast as possible.

In retail that means making an on-line sale, in publishing it could mean downloading a whitepaper, watching a video or reading a review. So what does it take to create great filters? The answer is simple, anything the user will recognise is a great filter. Here are my top 5

1. Brands - some users will buy brands way above all other criteria
2. Price - likewise some users will buy based on price rather than quality
3. Editorial recommendation - the trusted third party
4. User recommendations/ratings - 62% of people trust their peers more than anybody else
5. Automated recommendations - “users who bought this, also bought that”

Obvious common sense stuff, so why aren’t more retailers/publishers doing this? Two reasons, firstly, you can’t do comparisons if your data is dirty and most big databases of content or products are very messy. Secondly, tying user opinions/ratings to that content is not always straightforward. Integration between E-Commerce systems and Content Management Systems is usually pretty light resulting in disconnected data.

What the price comparison engines have invested in is great data tools so that their databases are as clean as possible. This lets them create all manner of filters , safe in the knowledge that the results will be right. It’s time for the rest of the on-line world to take that on board as the volumes of content increase exponentially otherwise overwhelming confusion will reign.

The team at ZDNet have recently made some changes to the way the links are constructed which means that your blog posts are now indexable by Technorati. It's a bit fiddly to set up but worthwhile as it drives extra traffic to your blog and improves your visibility in the blogosphere. Here's How: -

1. If you are not already a member, register at Technorati

2. Follow the instructions on the site to claim your blog

3. Cut and paste your Technorati profile code into the end of your next blog post. It should look like mine in my previous post

4. Go back to Technorati and "Ping" the blog to have it indexed.

There are a couple of limitations at the moment: -

1. It will only index the articles that appear on the main blog page so it won't go back and index older content.

2. There isn't an automatic ping so you'll have to go to Technorati and manually ping each time you make a posting.

Apart from that, it seems to work perfectly. It sometimes takes up to 30 minutes or more for the content to appear in the Technorati index so be patient.

Happy blogging!