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A Search Engine? Now That’s Novel

Published by Ben Kepes on October 23, 2008 in Business, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, New business and Strategy. 4 Comments

Interesting to spot the New Zealand business interview with new search engine entrant Searchii. Searchii is a new search engine whose stunning point of difference is…. that it comes from New Zealand.

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Now I take my hat off to any entrepreneur who begins a new venture - it’s hard work and it take a lot of passion. But unfortunately these guys, while possessing passion in spades, seem to have put their sense to the side.

Let’s see here - they’re up against an incumbent that absolutely is as close to being a monopoly player as one can be in a situation where competitors exist. Google is king of search, they’re the default place to go to AND you can do New Zealand specific searches via Google if you want to.

In the interview they were keen to point out that at least part of their strategy involves the expectation that New Zealanders will use a Kiwi based search engine for their searching needs - sorry but it doesn’t work that way. Google works because they have billions upon billions of crawled pages, they have humongous amounts of processing power, they have geographical spread and they have massive market share - which one of those attributes does Searchii hope to overcome?

Anyone remember a few months ago when Cuil was launched - $33million in funding, some of the smartest ex-Google minds and a story that told of doing a Google but better. And where are people searching today? The same place they were before Cuil launched - at Google.

Guys - if you have the smarts to build a search engine that works, you should also have the smarts to take some heartfelt advice - don’t do it - competing on search is a bad road to go down.

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Building Online Communities

Published by Ben Kepes on October 22, 2008 in Business, Design, New Zealand, New business, SocialMedia, Society and Strategy. 2 Comments

The latest issues of Start-Up magazine is out and it includes a feature article I wrote about building online communities. It’s a subject close to my heart and one which I’m currently involved in with a (slightly) stealth project.

The article can be seen here. In it I look at three interesting case studies for both the right way, and the wrong way to build successful online communities.

Suffice it to say we’ll be eating our own dogfood with our community - watch this space!

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Building Successful Online Communities

Published by Ben Kepes on October 22, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, SocialMedia, Strategy and Web x.0. 2 Comments

Mauricio sent me this information and it looks like some fantastic sessions for anyone who has an interest in building online communities that people love (and let’s face it - any online business is, by definition, a community).

Details are;

How to create, develop and evolve a social media presence to increase collaboration, drive awareness and improve customer loyalty

Social networking and online communities have received significant attention in the past 12 months, as services such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn attract and connect communities of people. For organisations wanting to truly bring their marketing and customer service strategies into the 21st century, creating and fostering an online community can be the most powerful –not to mention the most cost effective – marketing tool available.

For marketers and communicators social media is proving effective at reinforcing an organisation’s brand, understanding and capturing customer feedback, and creating and sharing information across communities of interest. Organisations can take advantage of similar technologies to create their own custom community experiences.

Recognising the importance of this trend, Intergen has invited Andreas Stjernström from Swedish enterprise software company EPiServer to New Zealand. He will highlight the reasons why developing a community is important, and give real world examples of organisations that have successfully created and maximised the benefits of online communities.

Intended as an introduction to online community development, these free events are targeted at:

- Organisations that are currently creating or are looking to create or sponsor an online community.

- Agencies who want to offer your customers options for taking advantage of social media.

- Marketers and communicators who are looking for new mediums to communicate your organisation’s value proposition.

Events are scheduled on the following dates:

Wellington Wednesday 5 November, Level 7, 126 Lambton Quay – 4.30pm-6pm

Christchurch Thursday 6 November, Level 2, 158 Hereford Street, 8am – 9.30am

Auckland Friday 7 November, Level 2, 15 Huron Street, Takapuna – 12.30pm – 2pm

To register for these free events, email events@intergen.co.nz.

I’m a starter for the Christchurch session - I’d advise anyone looking to leverage the power of the people to check one of the sessions out.

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Why Not e-dollars?

Published by Ben Kepes on October 21, 2008 in Business, Economic Development, Efficiency and My businesses. 6 Comments

Awhile ago I was involved with a start up that was trying to create a barter driven system for online transactions, leveraging the power of the community rating, meritocracy and subversion of traditional currencies to both lubricate commerce and cut out a number of the middle men" who add drag to commerce,

The start up never really got off the ground - our timing was a little off, the potential investors and partners weren’t too interested and our bandwidth got compressed to a ping where it had to be relegated to the back burner. I still firmly believe in the concept however and so was stoked to read this post over on Aardvark Daily asking whether the time was in fact right for a cyber-dollar, a cross border standard currency, to be introduced.

I have to say a resounding YES. The current economic situation, coupled with the vagaries of our banking and financial system - make the return of barter, but with a web-enabled meritocratic twist, a complete no-brainer. It might be just about time to dust off that presentation from a year ago or so.

What does the community think - a return to barter? Or not?

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