Report from our research on social lending in Poland is now publicly available.

You can download it from Gemius webpage:

English version of the report

Polish version of the report

The research was an idea I had after February Bootstrap meeting devoted to social lending. Initially I thought of writing a simple article, but then decided that it would be cool to have some original primary data. So I asked Gemius (leading Internet research agency in Poland) to participate, and then involved Accenture as well.

Below a couple of comments and slides from the report. (read more…)

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I came upon this, in an article by Andrew Sullivan:

The playwright Richard Foreman, cited by Carr, eulogised a culture he once felt at home in thus: “I come from a tradition of western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality - a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

“[Now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self - evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.”

The article adds to the discussion about how the web is changing the way we think. With ever shorter attention spans, are we losing the ability to think deeply?

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Jeff Nolan wrote:

I wrote recently about VC loss of attraction in Web 2.0 and the thing that was frightening about that thought was the inability to answer the basic question “what’s next?”. The Valley thrives on the new new thing (possibly one of the most poignantly titled books ever) and with every turn of a generation there is an awkward moment where we’re just figuring out where we’ve been but have yet to see where we are going? right now is that moment.

(…) I’m still left with the uncomfortable question of what’s next? When Facebook doesn’t deliver world peace, and FriendFeed fails to be better than sliced bread, what will we do?

I suddenly realized that I missed the exact moment when web 2.0 ceased to be the new thing.

Ideas for the new thing: web 3.0 (too obvious), enterprise software (Jeff doesn’t like it, I also doesn’t like it much because it is difficult to scale), AI (as in the last 50 years), gene tech, …other ideas?

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1) Joseph Weizenbaum, who created psychiatrist simulator called Eliza, dies at 85. WSJ article quotes him saying (link by Valleywag):

The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay, there are people, most unfortunately, crawling all over it, and maybe they find a bit of aluminum, or perhaps something they call sell. But mainly it’s garbage.

2) Friendfeed, basically an RSS aggregator of person’s online activity with added functionality of comments, becomes the latest Internet hit. Scoble loves it, Duncan Riley at Techcrunch covered it and but didn’t see much point, louisgray replied to him with a blog post titled Duncan Riley Misses the Point of FriendFeed, which gained this comment by Ontario Emperor which i.a. explained why it is so useful to add another layer of commenting possibility to the “artifacts” that we produce:

(…) sometimes it’s not appropriate to comment at the original artifact. For example, one day I tweeted

“@commuter ont i10 eb jammed at euclid. 2 rt lanes clsd @ 4th. vineyard archibald offramps clsd.”

Then I subsequently added a metacomment via FriendFeed:

“i was 10 minutes late for maundy thursday rehearsal. my fault.”

The metacomment wouldn’t have made sense as just another tweet, but it made perfect sense as a metacomment overlaid over the previous artifact.

3) Ability of events in reality to generate “artifacts” is virtual reality is growing fast. These first artifacts can attract reactions, which themselves gain status of artifacts and are reprocessed (aggregated, commented on) further.

4) It reminds me of financial markets, which started with rather simple “artifacts” for real things (e.g. currencies), then built so many virtual layers on top of them, that in the end few people can understand the further chains of abstraction.

5) If financial markets were indication, the social sphere can be expected to generate amazing volume given its original “real” base, at the same time becoming unpredictable and impossible to understand for the majority of people.

6) How can social sphere be understood to be “unpredictable”..? In a way illustrated by recent Sarah Lacy interview and the twitter-enabled audience?

Technorati : friendfeed

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Keynote interview with Zuckerberg is embarrassing to watch sometimes, but feel free to take a look yourself here (fragment).

There is plenty of commentary of course, about Sarah Lacy putting herself in the spotlight instead of her rather more interesting guest, not knowing her audience, and failing to get a clue even afterwards, but more interesting for me are comments related to twitter.

Bill Thompson:

And yet I was there in another way, listening to and even interacting with some of my friends in the audience, picking up on the vibe in the room and even tuning in later as Sarah Lacy loudly defended herself.

I was there because I was plugged into Twitter, the instant messaging service that lets users send short text messages to anyone who cares to tune in, online or on their mobile phone.

Steve O’Hear:

I think another factor in the keynote’s downfall was the use of Twitter as a so-called ‘back channel’. With keynote attendees able to share live commentary instantly, a negative response can spread like wildfire in a profound way that is very different to what’s possible without such connectivity.

Mark Evans:

What’s particularly fascinating is how quickly the criticism and vitriol started to flow as the interview started to go pear-shaped. While Twitter emerged out of nowhere last year at SXSW as a tool to tell people what was happening, Twitter’s took centre stage again this year to blare out anti-Lacy pronouncements in real-time.

Participants are able to turn event into a discussion forum in real time. Both exciting and scary (when you imagine yourself running the event).

Technorati : SXSW, Twitter, Zuckerberg

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Google Sites is a wiki service derived from Jotspot, which Google acquired some time ago. It really does feel that Sites fill a gap in Google Apps. Now they combine knowledge organization tool in a shape of this wiki, online office tools, email and a calendar.

Such combination seems promising for my numerous side projects and I wanted to give it a try, even though, as far as wiki goes, I had good experience with Wikispaces before.

On a positive side, Google Sites does have a feeling of simplicity that I will always appreciate. Even though, it is surprising that it misses some seemingly no-brainer functionalities at the moment, like closer integration with Google Docs.

But the other key advantage of Google products is traditionally their responsiveness. On this account Google Sites is, so far, a disappointment. It’s not just slow, it simply hangs the browser at times (I’m using Firefox). I mean the whole thing goes “not responding”.

ZDnet blogger Dennis Howlett posted similar remarks, even though his focus was on gadgets.

That’s it for my first impressions. I’m curious about opinion of my project collaborator. I’m really optimistic about future of such offerings for teams, anyway.

PS. speaking of performance, now Google blog returns 502 server error, heh.

Technorati : google apps, google sites, wiki

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I don’t know why, but corporate email in Russia and Ukraine apparently leaves a lot to desire and lots of people are using gmail as semi-official secondary email.

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Internet Standard published interview with CEO of Inteliwise, a Polish company which deals with AI technologies in search. On market since 2005.

The company plans to debut on NewConnect, a Polish stock exchange for high-tech companies.

I don’t have time to investigate it’s products at the moment, but the Company seems to understand what is most important for the AI:

A decent front-end.

Other thoughts: looks like an interesting company to watch (or even invest in).

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Between burger and an ice cream in Hard Rock Cafe I jotted down notes from today’s bootstrap. I needed them in electronic form anyway. I wrote down stuff which seemed useful for me, so it’s not guaranteed to be complete.

This time it was in an unusual for boostrap form of a panel. Meeting took 3 hours, but I found it very interesting. Technical people might beg to differ, though, as tax/legal discussion was really exhaustive (exhausting).

I made some comments below in the notes, but here I can also share my “first impression” of the P2P lenders present. It is really first impression because I didn’t bother to check them myself, so some doubts below might be result of this.

• Finansowo - approach to start as simple as possible, no collections or support in executing transactions between peers. The biggest risk is that some things that they ignore seem critical (collections).

• Monetto (blog)- most advanced approach, ensured partners from the beginning, including bank (mBank) and collectors. The biggest risk is that they start with a very complicated machine that no-one will use.

• Kokos - midway between the two, with the advantage that it is already up and running.

On a first glance I like Finansowo and Monetto, because they follow clear-cut concepts of simplicity and exhaustiveness, while Kokos was less clear, at least as much can be judged from the presentation, and also takes cautious approach regarding some legal challenges (e.g. possibility to grant anonymity and stick to electronic contract form).

(read more…)

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Strange, but sometimes things that are expected to happen, actually do happen. Microsoft announced a hostile bid for Yahoo.

I so like the bid to succeed. That’s because I feel strongly about the result of this take-over and I would love to verify my hypothesis.

My hypothesis is that the market shares of the two do not sum up. MSFT will lose focus and instead get entangled in restructuring of Yahoo!. Users will get the combination of the two worst, in my personal view, experiences - Google will be able to differentiate even more strongly through simplicity and focus, playing contrast to the new behemoth with combined dna of committee-driven software factory and a portal.

Or maybe the above will be proven wrong and Google will at last get a worthy competitor.

(Even though falling price of MSFT stock indicates that I’m not alone in my opinion of the contrary.)

In any case, this merger going ahead will be decisive, this way or another, for both Google and Microsoft.

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Today I visited Bootstrap meeting for the first time, so now I feel obliged to write a post about it. Even better to write it before Albert does.

In fact, I thought I would be horse riding at the time of the meeting. But you have to live by your principles, and one of my principles is, don’t ride horses in a shitty weather. The weather was awful all day.

The place

Chlodna 25. Nice place! Never been there either. It’s a cafe and there is also a room downstairs, where the presentations took place. And there are lots of board games available that you can play.

I arrived exactly at 12, took a chair from above because there was already no free places in the basement and ordered an apple pie (12 was early enough for me to miss breakfast), and the presentation started. (read more…)

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Wow, my company still surprises me sometimes.

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Now it’s getting difficult, because though I set up as second blog for “visioneering” stuff, some topics just feel like being posted on both of them.

One is Fellowforce, a site in which you can solve a challenge posted by a company and get rewarded if your idea wins.

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I start to get some clue on how Plaxo can be useful. Interestingly, many of my friends are already in, but I’m yet to hear from any of them on any usage for it.

The cool thing that Plaxo can do is gather rss feeds from a number of sites that you may be already using. Say, you publish your pictures on flickr, share favorite articles in Google Reader (this was actually new to me, more below), update your profile on myspace, etc. All these sites publish feed with updates, which Plaxo can import and aggregate.

Result? Your friends can track your activity across all sites in one place - Plaxo.

Now, two problems with this idea and my friends .

First, they usually have no idea what is “feed”.

Second, they barely use any of the sites other than Linkedin (which doesn’t have a public feed, btw), and maybe some Polish sites (like Goldenline), which also have no feed.

There is little to aggregate in their case.

But I start to like the overall idea of Plaxo (and there maybe more to it which I didn’t bother to find out yet). I added this blog’s feed and it gets aggregated pretty well.

Also I accidentally discovered “shared items” functionality in Google Reader while trying to figure Plaxo. When I “share” the item that I like you can see it on this page. Nice, I will try to share some interesting stuff from time to time.

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Found this post accidentally: Blog Tip: Do NOT Put Adsense on Your Blog.

Its point is that Adsense brings so little revenue on a blog, that it is not worth bother to use it.

Quotes numbers which give 0.02% CTR (mine is 0.13%), and 0.06$ eCPM (mine is 0.$19). Hey I’m not so bad - relatively:)

Still it’s clear that ad performance on non-targeted blogs is very low.

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