As of tomorrow I’ll be focusing the weekly coworking meet on local startups, making a time for them to get together and work in the same space, meet each other, maybe collaborate, or help each other out.

So if you’re a startup, or you’ve got something you want to try and build, come along and say hi.

We meet upstairs at Cafe Delice (map) at 10am every Friday and tend to go on most of the day (but starting early is best!). We’re a small but very welcoming group, with varying levels of experience, and are all at different stages in the lives of our projects.

Signup on Upcoming.org.

There’s also a mailing list for chat between meets, once you’ve been along you’ll get an invite to join that too :)

Ewan from Mobile Industry Review found me in a corner with a beer at Swedish Beers and got me to talk for about 15 minutes.. most of which was rather sensitive, but this bit got published..

MIR Show – Week 45 – Mobile Operators & Google from Mobile Industry Review on Vimeo.

Google isn’t that interested in providing every service itself, as long as it gets to sit between the remaining ones. They will happily let other people do the really hard parts, usually involving hardware. Android is a good example of this, Voice is another, Chrome OS is the next. Everyone else gets to compete, while Google sits in the middle.

It doesn’t even want to build it’s own social network. Why? because there’s the internet. So again it builds tools in-between the parts everyone else has made, tools such as OpenSocial.

Whether or not this turns out to be a good thing?.. Well the future isn’t that far away..

Me too.

Well, I’ve never let it get so far that I’ve actually been scammed, because I’m able to read quickly when it’s happening. That is because I’m so familiar with it. Which means, for me at least, that it happens too much.

I hold eBay responsible for this.

In this post I’m going to list a few things I think they can do, and try to explain why it’s their fault.

The most recent scam was on this item (220367080109, 220362598452), and, if I remember correctly, this was one of those attempts when the successful bidder (if you can call them that) paid well over the odds (alarm bell no. 1), even paying me more of a shipping fee than I requested (alarm bell no. 2).

They then messaged me through eBay to tell me that actually they wanted the item delivered to a different address (alarm bell no. 3), and that the money was in escrow at PayPal (alarm bell no. 4) and that the money would be released when I emailed them a shipping number (alarm bell no. 5).

Now in a normal eBay transaction there should be no alarm bells at all. Well maybe no.1 is acceptable as a nice surprise or a bidder that was feeling generous (which would be silly, wouldn’t it.).

I responded very frankly saying something like, “fuck off” or “I hate you”, and then attempted to inform eBay of what had happened to try to prevent getting charged the fees for this sale.

(Now I do understand that they’re under no obligation to not charge me for this. They, after all, are not the ones who tried to scam me.)

The process of informing them of an attempted scam is not simple. In fact, there is no option in the process to identify a scam as the reason for an issue. Only options like, “no payment” or “user is no-longer a member of eBay”.

This is already getting complicated, isn’t it.

It’s complicated more if you re-list that item on eBay, because that actually means the item hasn’t been sold yet, and therefore I can’t have been scammed on it now could I!?! Thus the process isn’t available. If I’ve got that wrong, I’m sorry, but that’s because it’s so damn complicated.

A complicated system can be an advantage to people who are willing to invest the time to work out where it can be gamed. There’s a saying in law that comes to mind: the difference between the letter of the law, and the intent of the law. Which basically means, just because something isn’t technically illegal, that doesn’t mean it’s not, or that it wasn’t intended to be covered by a law.

I believe that eBay uses this to their advantage. They appear to have a system in place to account for bad behaviour, but actually that system is so complex that bad behaviour still happens because it’s such hard work for a user who’s been taken advantage of, to do anything about it. At the most that means a user has unwittingly sent an item that they’ll never see the money for.. and at the least that means eBay will make it’s fees regardless, because users can’t work out how to make sure they’re not charged.

To me, that appears to be by design. eBay, that is not a good way to run a business. Profiteering through obscurity may have worked in the past, even recently, but it won’t stand for long.

Here’s some things eBay should do:

Community
There isn’t one currently, and actually, the idea that there should be one isn’t correct. There should be many. I should have community in Ebay. This would encourage peer based review and accountability.

Less anonymity
I have no idea who people are, what they’ve done, where they are, who are their friends, or what they’re like. A simple profile page would make a step in the right direction. Let’s add some personality to eBay!

Better rating and historic analysis
This one is tough, largely because of the of demographic of typical eBay users. I’m not saying they’re identical to YouTube commenters, but they’re in the same league.

Look to services like GetSatisfaction and it’s mood smileys:

or Facebook “like” links on everything:

..or lastFM for tuning ones musical interests.. all provide ambient methods of conveying an emotion about and action or object. This small granular data will all add up and provide some user information that can be visualised and contextualised.

Create a beneficial reason to not keep creating new accounts
Give value back for a long active history, like lower fees, more visibility, or some other bribe. This would have many benefits, the main one being that it would then be easier to identify users who have been around a while, who’ve built up a history and reputation. Users would spot noobs or spammers easier.

Better templating for the selling of items
Create some familiarity for users that help them to see quickly the important parts of an item’s auction page, and thus make judgments easier. There’s a lot of noise on eBay, making items easier to scan visually will speed up browsing and highlight points of note better. This is actually done pretty well by third party services, such as iPhone clients.

Sometimes (in fact I would argue, most times) limiting what a user can do can actually make the experience better, it allows a user to focus on what’s important to them. Most users don’t want to be fussed with writing html for their item page, and in fact, the ability to do that is one of the tools scammers use to sell items such as the packaging of a macbook for as much as the macbook itself. eBay is almost encouraging this to happen currently.

Longer auctions
This would reduce the number of auctions that have a flurry of bids in the last few minutes, helping a seller to manage the sale and research the bidders. It would also stabilise pricing and allow for trends to be analysed realistically.

Item alerts / saved seaches
Let eBay do the browsing for me, and allow me to tune what I’m interested in. eBay will also learn more about a user based on this. Yes this can be gamed too, but it might encourage more competition as well.

Restrictions on who can bid
This is almost already in place, but what about limiting who can bid to two degrees of separation away based on your friends network. Again, social accountability.

Allow me to communicate with eBay
Put a phone number on the website, and make it easy to find. Seriously. There is still nothing like actually being able to talk, with sounds coming out of your mouth, to convey an issue, and to resolve a problem.

Take some ownership
Good customer service is about helping a customer. When I finally got a response to my communications about the problems I was having, I was basically told to click on a link and fill out a form. The person who wrote that email, if it was actually a person, is in a position to fix my problem right there and then. But instead they moved the responsibility on to me. Frankly, my time is worth more than the fees I’ll recover, thus eBay profits, and I will be less inclined to use eBay again.

In conclusion…

eBay doesn’t make me comfortable. It doesn’t make me want to give them money, rather, I resent it. Currently I advise caution to people that ask me about eBay.. but every user should be an ambassador, expressing their amazing experiences and smooth interactions.

The reality of what eBay sells on TV is prying on the ignorance of the masses. But it should be accounting for that, and helping them to get something good out of it, rather than coming away feeling confused, abused, and alienated.

Those of you that know me, know that I have strong feelings about this, and if you didn’t know that, you know me well enough to know that I would do :)

I’m going to lay this out simply, with no opinion, and let you come to your own conclusions.

iTunes will now let you encode at “iTunes Plus quality” – great.
I have several hundred CDs- all paid for.
I encoded them, with iTunes, in 2001 – it took *ages*.
They’re encoded at 128kbs – not the best, you can hear the clipping.
Can I convert them to “iTunes Plus Quality”? – well no. How do I prove I own them?
What’s the fucking point? – totally.

I bought that shit. The first time around. And excuse my language, but I’m just having my face rubbed in it. Well look, it’s two thousand and fucking nine, this should be a non-issue.

I paid for the content, not the file.

Let me repeat that with emotional emphasis.. and this should drive home several things.

I *paid* for the *content*.

I really want to reward creativity. That means paying artists for their awesome music, and their time spent sharing it with me.

There is nothing in place to reward *me* for paying them. This may sound stupid.. but this is a huge issue. You (record labels/industry at large) have this all wrong. We are not criminals, but you’re encouraging me to steal from you by not letting me have the things I’ve already paid for.

So.. fuck you. Fuck your business models. I hope you just go away.

Artists… we love you (on the whole). Love us back by enabling us to *pay* for your content.

And don’t think that you TV and film producers and distributers are any fucking different. There’s a reason I openly admit to downloading Battlestar Galactica. It’s because I *really* like it! But it’s aired a week later in the UK, which is basically inviting me to download it on a Saturday morning from the US (including Sci-Fi channel overlays, I don’t care if they’re there.. just like I don’t care if there are messages about the Oscars on films I download.). I like it that fucking much, a few days matters!

We want your content. Your content is good.

But enable us to reward your creatives appropriately. Seriously.

You’re not helping your industries, which we like, by clawing on to the behaviour that, let’s face it, fucked you into the position you’re in now.

When I was a chef several years ago, I learned so much (ask me next time we bump into each other). How to cook was only part of it. Long story short, I eventually realised that I’d stopped caring about the food, and that it had become just a job. As soon as you realise that, you can no-longer do the job the same way. You need to give a shit. You need to be part of what you’re doing, and it will be part of you too. So I gave it up. Luckily I soon started to work at Comic Relief.. and during my time in the kitchen I started Loose Connection too.

The reason I started working in the kitchen in the first place was because I wasn’t enjoying the web any more, and I got out of that for the same reason!

Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot from the experiences of all those paths, and am happy to be back in the web/digital industry. I have focus, purpose, experience and (almost most importantly) community.

Now watch this, he says it better than me.

So, the points to remember: (and this is not exclusive to building things online)

• love it, or stop
• live it, you’ll be working *all the time*
• don’t just listen, take part
• be prepared to fail for your love, don’t compromise your ideals (that’s the hippy bit apparently)
• do something you’re actually into, it’ll show if you’re not, and you’ll lose interest
• and more… you can work it out

And go find him on Twitter, he’s worth listening in on.

For some more technical stuff about building things online, here’s my list of what it takes to build the perfect webapp.

Update: Oh I forgot, remember to be happy. That’s the foundation for being successful. In both life and business.

“dude, do you know anyone from X who knows about Y?”

“I need a person to work on A, do you know anyone who lives near B?”

“I’ve got an idea that X would love, can you hook me up?”

“Are you friends with A? It’d be great to meet him lol”

You get the idea.

So I’m trying to be more.. in want of a better word.. calculating. I’m putting a lot more consideration into who I connect to who, how that reflects on me, and ultimately whether it will work out.

I’ve spent the last few years surrounding myself by better people. People better than me, mostly, but people that excel in what they do. These are the people that I recommend to others or that I want to work with myself. I’m careful when adding people to LinkedIn too. Considering what the consequences of giving access to my network are. I should trust these people before giving them direct contact, without me, to my valuable list of colleagues. Don’t be offended if I don’t add you, or don’t accept your invitation. It’s just that I’m trying to preserve the quality of contact, reducing the noise. This is what I’d want, so I’m giving this to them.

What this has made me think is that there (obviously) must be a better way for me to manage this. Maybe Highrise or something similar. I need social contacts, where each contact is not just an object in my list, but is controlled by them, including access controls that allows them to choose to be available to others in my network or not. Currently my LinkedIn list is both a list for my access *and* my contacts.

In conclusion, yes I probably know someone who can help you, and yes I’ll absolutely try and help you find them. But remember that this is a two way transaction that I’m in the middle of and I need to consider both sides. This is in no way a warning not to ask me, it’s more of a disclaimer :)

• They have deals with the record labels already
• They have a mechanism to transfer to a phone (iTunes)
• They have a very large userbase
• Profit on ringtones is higher than singles (and you could probably sell them for more)

The iTunes transfer may be the key to this working. It’s certainly a lot cheaper to operate as it bypasses the mobile phone operators.

So what’s missing? Well the Apple phone of course!

Just a prediction…

My friend Adam pointed me at this web based bug tracker:
http://www.tailshq.com/

And Ryan of DropSend is working on his new app, a marketing tool for newsletter owners:
http://www.heyamigo.net/

I’d sign up for both if you’re in the business of making or using webapps…

A couple of web widget.. erm, things.. have appeared. (are they webapps?). They essentially let you build, share and sell, small plugins (although i’m sure they’d hate me calling them that!) to sit on people’s websites..

WidgetBox, the web widget marketplace (placing itself as the big boy on the block)
http://www.widgetbox.com/

And then Jay has this going on:
http://www.snipperoo.com

Then sign up for mine too :)

This is my first app, completely independently. being built by myself and Nick.
http://www.pingbase.com/

update://

The day after i posted this i got an Odeo voicemail from Dan, the Tails developer…

But what if you’re selling Smart cars?

PingBase is a more efficient, modern and affordable car. A car designed for not only the driver but it’s environment and the cohabitants of that environment.

All these monitoring services certainly do their job, although I’ve not used them all, so what’s wrong with them?

1. The Price
   They are prohibitively expensive. usually charging around $10/month per domain or URL you want to monitor.
2. The Free Trial
   You might get a month for free or maybe longer but for a much lower level of service.
3. Access to data
   Few provide an API or even RSS, although around half offer multiple person notification lists of some sort.
4. They’re not designed for everyone
   Most are designed for web developers or large corporations, they ignore the needs of the majority of websites and their owners.

I think that last point may be the most important. Everybody and their fathers brothers have a website and they all need to know the uptime, or downtime of their sites. A persons blog is a very important thing. Some livelihoods are made from blogs as well as reputations built from them.

If your blog is down, you need to know! But you shouldn’t have to pay more than it costs you to have the website for that knowledge.

Enter PingBase, a modern website monitor built for you, your friends, your company or your rabbit.

If you want to monitor your blog, PingBase will do that, for free, forever. If you want more, then you can upgrade to the first level which will allow you to monitor 10 URLs for $15/month with the added bonus of receiving SMS (text messages) as well as email when your site goes down.

There is an FAQ that should answer more of your questions, and you can sign up to know when it’s launched from any page on the site.

I’m really excited to get this up and running, I’ve been looking forward to announcing it.. I know it’ll be a useful addition to many peoples online lives.

I realised quite early on what we were doing providing free wifi in brighton. people in brighton got very used to it and we started getting phone calls from them when they were out of town, “why isn’t it free? i thought it free in bars and cafes?”…

Andy’s right people have to come expect it for free.

The way we sold it to venues in brighton was to convince them that it was a value add to their customers. they give away free wifi, and they sell more coffee. coffee that the person was gonna buy anyway somewhere else. this way the customer isn’t spending any more but they chose your venue instead.

So yeah, of course the same rule could apply to airlines, just as hotels realised about 2 years ago (not many though).

Now, expand that. why don’t the councils get in on the act. give it away to the public as effectively a value add for paying your taxes. Of course some are. But not on a proper scale and not really thinking through all the implications.

Ubiquitous free wifi effects local business, your own local network, the local and national telcos, the list goes on. Most councils don’t want to become ISPs. They are also under pressure not to screw over people like BT by undercutting them.

Free Wifi is still quite a way off. but not for technical reason, more for political or simply not understanding the marketplace properly. Mostly people don’t see it as a marketplace.