52 Bicycles

Attended the most recent WebInno gathering tonight. Got me thinking about how many of these services want to connect users across other services, and the tension among integration, business development, and the desire to be a cosmopolitan solution for their customers.

For example, Guild Cafe - presented by Jon Radoff, is a myspace knockoff for players of MMORPGs. Interesting reinforcement of community aspect. He talked about offering a service and netwokr that was (though he did not use these words) gamer-centric, rather than game-centric. Offering services that would be most interesting to avid gamers who wanted to share experiences with their friends, and also looking at the matchmaking aspect, getting to meet people of similar psychographic (and that word he did use) disposition to meet up and do whatever they do on the site. He gave violence as one example -finding fellow “player-killers.” He emphasized working across multiple games, and even discussion of upcoming games as a content item on people’s profile pages.

From an economic point of view, he talked about referral fees for people introducing their friends over the service to various new games. Finder’s fee. And of course advertising blah blah blah that you hear from social networking sites, since they are creating inventory and driving traffic.

But when the benefit is driving users to the subscription service (the game itself), I have to wonder whether this is a play that would be a lot more valuable to a specific game company, perhaps with a portfolio of games, than it is to the average advertiser. And the game companies have the additional advantage of leveraging the content from the game - especially the content specific to the particular user’s experience - to add value to the user, diminishing the “user 1″ problem, and maybe making it easier for the user to promote the service his/her self. It will be interesting to see if a “neutral” service like this can compete when/if the game companies (Sony, EA, MSFT - am I missing anyone?) get around to that kind of integration with a service they offer.

MyPunchbowl, presented by  Matt Douglas, is a new party planning site that is about connectivity, but seems to have made its bed with iParty, a major party supply company. Truth is, this seems more interesting to me as the answer to their inevitable Evite question than the somewhat mushy answer he gave about being a better mousetrap. By integrating with the vendor on an affiliate basis, they have a stronger revenue stream, get exposure from this location to which people already travel for party planning, and can provide a level of service to their customers, integrating supplies (for which one pays) with the free services. Interesting stuff, neat strategic move for iParty (though I am sure they have other irons in the Internets), and an obvious endgame.

Goombah, built in Portland, ME, and presented by Diane Sammer, is a music recommendation tool. Client-side software required, it reads your iTunes database and certain other sites to match against its database of people you know, people like you, and its algorithms generate recommendations, as well as the provenance of those recommendations. This is well-covered territory, but the business model is so straightforward - affiliate sales of the music friends or “similar tastes” have on their playlists - that it really seems a matter of crunching down costs and getting some slice of the market to have a profit machine. From a cross-service point of view, they are definitely mainly about iTunes, but Ms. Sammer made clear that she was looking to be compatible with multiple services, which in turn increases the number of potential affiliate sales.

Among the “side dish” tabletop displays, Trustplus, a reputation management system, is also betting that it can go across classified advertisement services with its browser plugin to overlay trust ratings and help re-anonymize and re-manage communications. This seems dicier - just don’t see how they are going to make money, and the barrier to adoption (a browser download) is much higher, leading to ”user 1″ problems. But was impressed with the guys who seem cognizant of the issues, even as they were coy with their plans to address them.  

These services have different approaches to the question of being cosmopolitan - of being neutral in relation to other services, or being aligned with one or another. Definitely a theme with which I walked away, and an open question, that I am sure depends on a number of factors. Figuring out which way to go with this will probably be one of the more important decisions of a new service or system that depends on integration for either its technological or busines model.

On a demographic note, the gathering gets larger every time, though the number of actual entrepreneurs seems to be plateauing - saw a number of college kids, a number of moneymen, some academics, and a creeping influx of service providers. We will see where that goes.

Credit again to Mr. Beisel and Masthead for putting this together - and, one assumes, footing the bill!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 2:34 am and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This