SiliconGlen, Scotland. Tartan Tech Talk.

Two days ago I posted that Scotland's answer to Dragons Den had ceased trading.

I came across this note I posted to the First Tuesday Scotland network on 9th June 2003, over 5 years ago.

It seems not much has changed in that time to support the Scottish Entrepreneur, indeed with this week's announcement things are only getting worse. Sorry to sound so pessimistic but I tell it as it is.

In message <BPEDJNPNLJEFMFCOBAMOIEDDDOAA.gordon@firsttuesday
scotland.com>, Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp <gordon@firsttuesdayscotland.com>wrote:
>
>For about 6 years I have disagreed with the direction of Scottish Enterprise
>as a whole and that is why I left the organisation to set up this network.
>Economies are driven by confidence and positivity, demand and the
>availability of disposable income. Regardless of the expertise of the man at
>the top and the people throughout the organisation SE can only do the
>bidding of the Scottish Parliament and this is where it goes wrong - it suffers
>from public sector thinking - good people hamstrung by red tape and politics.
>
I replied:

The public sector mentality is about as far removed as you can get from the
rapidly moving and flexible environment of being an entrepreneur.

Scottish Enterprise may be headed by a competent individual, but this is little
better than having a competent train driver. If the network operator can't work
the points, you end up permanently on a slow line or a dead end siding.

There needs to be a total change of mindset in the executive and at UK level
before anything serious begins to change.

How about assessing businesses on the quality of the idea, the opportunity it
addresses and the likelihood of success rather than engaging in little more
than a box ticking exercise, or claiming to provide a service for info which can
be easily obtained on line, or assessing businesses based on the number of
birthdays the founder has had?

Scotland is famous for its inventors - people who have changed the world and
been huge successes. What support is there for these people from Scottish
Enterprise? What help in filing for a patent would there be for today's John
Logie Bairds or Alexander Graham Bells or more widely James Dyson or
Trevor Bayliss both of whom had huge obstacles in getting products to
market.

What help would there be in helping the lone entrepreneur with a brilliant idea
if they have little or no resources of their own to do it? Such people would of
course be precluded from the "Proof of concept" funding because this is tied
to working in a research establishment.

Furthermore there is a huge contradiction when it comes down to help for the
entrepreneur. Businesses are supposed to be flexible, geared up for parents
with flexible working needs, geared up for people wanting to work part time,
geared up for distance working etc with all these directives and laws being
passed. So you tick all the boxes for things the executive is saying they want
to promote: "I'm wanting to start up, what help is there for time-poor, cash-
poor parents wanting to work part time in the business while they get going
and keep down a day job and I want to work from home to save money". What
help is there specifically for parents or anyone in these categories? None. The
"Who wants to be an entrepreneur" competition has become "Who wonders
where it went" and The John Logie Baird awards have vanished like the dot in
the middle of the inventor's TV screen. Meantime in the real world where
businesses in 2006 will be prosecuted for ageism in recruitment, we have the
exact opposite going on in the world of the entrepreneur where you can't get
certain awards (e.g. PSYBT) based on whether your partner has had more
than 30 birthdays (even though the main applicant qualifies). Are these to be
made illegal post 2006?

Why does the very nature of how SE lends its funding and help and what help
there is, go almost 100% against what businesses themselves are expected
to do when they employ people? Does no-one do joined up thinking anymore?

Craig

Labels: Business, Scotland, Viewpoint

Buy and sell anything online using Twitter for free.

I thought this was worth a try. Twitter has taken off because it is short, simple, easy to use and readily accessible from a number of different platforms. It's so easy to post a short tweet when that's all you want to say rather than a long blog article. It's more immediate and like SMS is particularly useful when you have a short message or series of short messages to put out quickly. Microblogging is taking off, even the Prime Minister uses it. Having received a twitter message from a government minister earlier today, it seems to be an effective way to reach people.

However, rather than considering Twitter as the SMS equivalent of blogging, what about using the Twitter API via sites such as tweetscan to scan the entire twittersphere for anything of interest? Twitter needn't just replace blogging - the free posting to a large audience via Tweetscan and others could rival other free advertising platforms such as Craigslist (ugh) and Gumtree (also ugh), both owned in part by Ebay. It needn't stop there - if enough people set up twitter wanted feeds you could list for free on Twitter rather than paying to list on Ebay.

Paying for such a service is a problem with no feedback mechanism but it's no worse than currently exists with Craigslist and Gumtree.

However, let me suggest a format. This is based loosely on the XML content I receive in RSS feeds for jobs etc and seems to work well enough for that.

You have 140 characters. I suggest the "tweet trade format" as follows (illustrated by examples)

<WANT|BUY|SELL|LIST>:<ITEM NAME> :<PRICE> <Tiny:ITEM URL> <CITY/LOCALITY/COUNTRY> <EXPIRY>

• Want: Wanting to use a service (e.g. a plumber sought)


• Buy: Wanting to buy a physical product (e.g. a PC)


• Sell: Wanting to sell a physical product (e.g. a PC)


• List: Listing offering a service (e.g. I am a plumber, I am listing a job on offer, etc)

Supposing you have a mobile phone for sale in Mt View California. The listing would look like this:
SELL: Nokia E61 (Used) :$50 http://tinyurl.com/siliconglen Mountain View/CA/US 2008-07-20

Maybe you want to buy a house?
BUY: House 4 bed :$500000 http://www.example.com/moredetailshere Sunnyvale/CA/US 2008-08-31
The price here being the maximum

Supposing you have a job listing, this is a service listing so comes under the LIST category. Contract Project Manager in London, UK for £500 per day.

e.g. LIST: Contract Project Manager Agile PRINCE2 :£500pd http://tinyurl.com/siliconglen London/UK 2008-07-20

The "where" would end with the 2 letter ISO country code (ISO3166). If the item is relevant to a global audience then WW could be used (world-wide) as in WWW (world-wide web).

e.g. WANT: Domain for Web2.0 startup :$10000 http://www.example.com/contactme 2008-08-21
The price here being the maximum price willing to be paid.

Dates would be in international ISO8601 format. That way Americans and Europeans will have the same format and we don't get confused over 04/07/2008 being the 4th of July or the 7th of April.

The URL could of course point to a page on your own site, your blog, a listing on Ebay, a listing on Craigslist or Gumtree or for an item wanted, you could give more detail about what is you want by linking to a similar item on Ebay, Amazon, whatever. It could also link to an openID page for people to contact you, mine is https://getopenid.com/siliconglen

If you think this is a great idea, drop me an email - I'm compiling a mailing list of interested parties who think being able to list products and services on the internet and sell them /effectively/ for as much as it costs to list a webpage in Google (ie nothing) is the way to go and I'm keen to build up a userbase to convince prospective investors that this will take off. It has a long way to go past twitter listings, this is just an early toe in the water.

If anyone wants to build a tool to build up the listing in the standard format via a webform, then drop me a line.

Then with these listings, you can search for them simply using http://www.tweetscan.com or use Tweetscan to sign up for email alerts when something matches what you are looking for (just like eBay favourite search notifications). You can also use tweetscan to search up a search and associated RSS feed for it.

I can see this format evolving over time, but that seems enough for a starter. Comments welcome.

Labels: Computing, Innovation, Search

Letter to Computing:

Following the recent string of data losses by HM Government, no-one seems to have taken on board the institutionalised data leaks which HM Government practices as part of its statutory liability and the implication for openly publishing tens of thousands of names, addresses and dates of birth free of charge on the Internet for any ID thief to easily pick up on and make use of.

If this was the general public there would be a national scandal, as there was with the HMRC data loss. If the general public had their names, addresses and dates of birth openly accessible online with no restrictions on who could access them, no payment required and no traceability on who had downloaded them then heads would roll.

Yet this is the exact practice which goes on at Companies House if you are a company director, something that increasing numbers of people are doing to find work as contractors in a shrinking employment market. Whilst it may be a statutory duty to gather such information and whilst it may be perfectly valid to have such information to validate people's IDs in the same way the same information is used to apply for credit cards, I can see no compelling reason why the entire database needs to be dumped uncontrolled for anyone on the web to access unrestricted. We need to move to a model where such private and confidential data is treated the same way irrespective of whether it is a private individual's data on the HMRC computer or a Company Director's data at Company's House - it's the same data after all. The forthcoming changes in the Companies Act only allow the address to be withheld, so even after these changes the director's full name and date of birth will be public and can still easily be tied up with historic electoral registers before the edited versions were introduced. Simply publishing the age is also not enough since the data of birth can be deduced by querying the site once per day for a year, a task easily automated.

You reported on 3rd July, front page, that one person had accessed the name, address and phone number of another businesses' details on-line at the PAYE site. The scale of openly publishing the private details of the directors of 2 million limited companies in the UK is surely much more significant.

Company Directors are not immune from ID theft, yet the government does nothing to protect the ID of over 2 million company directors. Why not?

Labels: Business, Computing, Politics, Viewpoint

If I said that I know of a way in which Yahoo could dramatically improve its search capability, take on Google in areas that Google is currently completely hopeless and become the market leader in a global area of search far more valuable than searching for mere web pages, do you think someone from Yahoo would look up my LinkedIn profile to see that with my background I might know what I'm talking about, pick up the phone and invite me down to London to 125 Shaftesbury Avenue London WC2H 8AD for an informal chat with the view to hiring me on a contract basis to implement this?

Google's obviously not too far away at 76 Buckingham Palace Road London, SW1W 9TQ so if there's no call then it's a short tube ride away to both Google and just round the corner Microsoft at 100 Victoria Street London SW1E 5JL if Yahoo aren't interested in turning themselves around.

Worth a try eh? Might even be as far ahead of its time as a touch screen browser and personalised news in April 1990.


Craig (craig at siliconglen.com)

Labels: Innovation, Search

THE Scottish networking firm that ran Dragons' Den-style events for technology entrepreneurs has been forced to close after struggling with mounting debts.

In what will be seen as a significant blow to the Scottish technology sector, Connect Scotland has ceased trading and has had to lay off all seven staff.

read the full article.

Ironic that the company set up to assist Scots companies find finance has itself run out of money. If the people running Connect, some of the leading lights of Scottish IT can't find money for that venture, it certainly doesn't bode well for budding entrepreneurs trying to find startup cash.

However, down south the Angels Den continues to do well.

Something like that is certainly needed in Scotland.

Craig

Labels: Business, Scotland

A six-month inquiry into Scottish tourism has concluded that VisitScotland's "current business model is patently flawed and obsolete" and consumer website requires an entirely new focus.

The Scottish Parliament's 'Economy, Energy and Tourism Report' took as its starting point the issue of whether Scotland can deliver its previously announced target of increasing tourism revenues by 50% by 2015, using 2005 as the base.

"Tourism is increasingly about technology," the report said. 'It is the booking medium and the favoured information channel. It is immediate, comparative and unforgiving."

Specifically, the committee felt that visitscotland.com would operate more effectively as an information portal.

"We want to see a move towards a top-quality, national, web-based portal that provides all the necessary information and advice on Scotland.

"This website should then contain a full listing of quality-assured businesses with a link to a means of contact (electronic if possible).

read the full article covering this. If you want to see the full report it is available on the Scottish parliament website.

You could see this coming when the site was panned in 2007

You can read my own comments on the site here.


In the beginning, there was a non-internet database system which STB used and was abandoned.

Then there was the website hosted by EC1

Then there was the website built by Realise

not to mention the 1996 implementation which in 1996 was ahead of Ossian in 2000.

Then there was the website hosted by Scotland On Line

Then there was the "IT Project", subsequently called Ossian. Technically advanced it offered facilities in 2001 that were peer reviewed at JavaOne in California in 2000 to critical acclaim. It was the technology platform that could have formed the basis of a software product to sell worldwide (Like the Tiscover one which VisitScotland eventually bought!) In 2001, flexible pricing was built but legal issues due to PPP prevented it from being deployed as it was something none of the PPP partners had available as an off the shelf product.

Then in 2002 came PPP, which you can read about here. Despite emerging from an exhaustive open tendering process, the underlying technology which was chosen was supplied by Touchvision. Their software was woefully underperformant, resulting in major performance problems via all the booking channels during the summer.

Then in 2006 we got version 8 of the VisitScotland project, this time supplied by Tiscover. This being the version panned by the Scottish Parliament in the report above and on the Scotsman site.

Having worked for visitscotland and visitscotland.com I know there are talented people there. I delivered e-commerce for VisitScotland in 2001 and left in 2006. My next job was project managing a rather more successful site, tesco.com. There are talented web design companies not only in Edinburgh but throughout Scotland. Amazon, with a research and development base in Scotland has the world's leading e-commerce platform and powers Marks and Spencer's site.

With so much technical and design talent within an hour's drive of visitscotland, why does it take 8 iterations of a website, millions of pounds and development going overseas only to end up with a national website that has been panned by the parliament?

Sure you expect software to evolve over time, but at no time in the history of the project has it ever had a CTO or CIO that actually understood search technology well enough to build a world leading platform that could meet the needs of Scottish tourism (and by the way maybe sell it to other tourist boards as well).

I had the laughable experience of using the latest iteration last weekend when I was looking for self catering accommodation on a Saturday night to start the following morning. Despite typing in Sunday as the start date of the booking, the site kept advising me to contact the contact centre even though the contact centre didn't open until the day after my booking started.

As someone who typically spends 200 nights a year in hotels, I use Tripadvisor and Priceline to handle my bookings, they may have their problems but they are simpler and easier to use. Another travel company (based 10 mins from VisitScotland's HQ) is Skyscanner, they can give me pricing info on flights around the dates I want to fly thereby allowing me to choose the cheapest days to fly on. A small startup with a few employees offering a search that 8 iterations, millions of pounds and decades of man years later, VisitScotland still can't offer.

One day you might even get an accommodation search engine for Scotland that lets you search and book online for a family including children. Still some way off for the "patently flawed" visitscotland.com.

Craig

Labels: Scotland, Viewpoint

I have already blogged about Bank of Self Catering - oddly the only part
of Scottish accommodation where you have to send a large portion of your
booking costs up front to book it and then the balance well before you
show up - unlike serviced accommodation which is a small amount to book
it and then usually the balance when you leave. This is despite
self-catering being in high demand and easily resellable. On top of
banking my cash for months, they then take credit card charges as well
(at least they did when I worked at VisitScotland), something serviced
accommodation didn't do.

I think Bank of Self Catering Ltd are calling too many shots here. What
I want is to put down a deposit to book the place (equivalent to the
likely profit they make from the booking) and then pay the balance by
credit card the week I turn up. No credit card charges either.

However this bank of self catering Ltd pales into insignificance next to
the standard of accommodation offered. I have stayed in decent hotels in
the middle of London that cost a similar amount than Scottish shoddy
self catering, yet offer so much more. Like clean sheets, new
mattresses, breakfast thrown in. You can use a mobile phone, free
broadband, room cleaned daily.

Self catering is so much more basic, yet still costs as much.

I write this from one such place. There is dirt round the fridge door.
The mattress smells. The duvet cover is dirty. There was no mention on
the schedule of there being no freezer. There was no mention on the
schedule of there being no shower. Only one bedroom has heating. The
kitchen smells. There is no change of linen available. In a weird set of
priorities there is a Sky box, but no freezer (excepting the one with a
'broken' sign on it).

Frankly I stayed in better as a student. At least the halls of residence
had a shower and extra pillows. Fortuntalely I have two phones, because
there's minimal coverage on Orange, pretty fundamental if you're
somewhere remote and this is your only line of communication. Having
rooms with "use at your own risk" on the door is not great either.

Benefits I'd get in a hotel such as broadband? forget it - I can't even
plug a video recorder into the TV to record programmes when we're out.

All this for a 350 advance payment months ago and another 350 advance
payment weeks ago, it's simply not good enough.

I stay in hotels about 200 nights a year and the sort of tired and dirty
accommodation you get in self catering places would not be accepted in
the serviced accommodation business. You get more thrown in and your
don't have to pay 100% well in advance. You usually also get decor that
is somewhat contemporary rather than decor and wiring that looks like
it's just escaped from the 1950s.

There are exceptions, however, we stayed in Self Catering Accommodation
in Armadale on the Isle of Skye:

http://www.clandonald.com/index.php/page/self-catering/ which was
excellent and we returned several times. They promised to be a home from
home and delivered on the promise, unlike so much of the rest of the
Scottish self catering market.

Get your act together otherwise we, and the rest of the visitors you
expect to get will go elsewhere.

The ideal self catering search would offer
Which mobile networks are available from the property
Can you leave payment until the week before.
Are credit cards accepted without penalties
Is there a working fridge
Is there a working freezer
is there a working washing machine
Is there a working tumble drier
Proper pictures of every room
A link to a location map (unlike visitscotland.com which only offers
this for some listings, rather useless to the visitor unfamiliar with
placenames and locations)
I'm sure I could go on. The search options for self-catering are pretty
woeful online, even worse than Serviced Accommodation

http://www.siliconglen.com/news/2006/12/search-for-accommodation-in-london.html.

When is the accommodation business going to get its act together?

Craig

--
Craig Cockburn ("coburn"). Director, Siliconglen.com Ltd
Web project manager and Internet specialist. CITP. C.Eng
http://www.siliconglen.com/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/siliconglen

The future looks bright for those who struggle to remember their password as they log in to a particular website thanks to a rare tie-up between Microsoft and Google.

On Friday, the duo set aside their rivalry to join Oracle, Equifax and PayPal to become the founding members of the aptly-named Information Card Foundation.

With support from other A-list internet players, the non-profit group will push virtual replacements of physical ID cards, like a driving licence, towards the mainstream.

Unlike cards in their wallets, consumers would be able to amend the details on their on-screen cards though; like the offline world, would have multiple cards.

Central to this is the e-wallet, which would let users choose an icon for the card they want for a specific website, bypassing the need to type and remember any password.

As the wallet is online, consumers could select their ‘i-cards’ from anywhere in the world, with enhanced security and interoperability with major sites as standard, the ICF hopes.

“Rather than logging into web sites with usernames and passwords, Information Cards let people ‘click-in’ using a secure digital identity that carries only the specific information needed to enable a transaction,” said Charles Andres, its executive director.

Read the full article here.

Thank goodness for that, I was writing about this multiple login username nonsense back in 2003. Why does it take the IT industry so long to solve these problems?

Craig

Labels: Computing, Security

Follow the link and see in real time what people are doing on this site.

Following the news today that Internet overhaul wins approval, perhaps now is the time to move ahead with a campaign for a top level domain for Scotland.

Labels: Computing, Scotland

A BBC news review shows the corporation has been failing to satisfactorily report Scottish issues, according to the Scottish Broadcasting Commission.

A report by the BBC Trust said the BBC was failing to meet its core purpose of helping inform democracy.

Research found that 45% of people in Scotland believed BBC news reports were often not relevant to where they lived.

How is this news? I told you the same info in 1996 and again in 2000

Dear BBC, please pay attention.

Here's the article from 2000, too good to not republish here!


Is a bolt from the blue our only hope?
By Colin Campbell in the January 2000 "Scots Independent"
http://www.freescotland.com/si.html

Just suppose that a millennium meteorite landed on the Greenwich dome and caused and electronic storm so powerful that London, as a centre of communications, was completely paralysed.

And just suppose that the BBC decided it was best to move lock, stock and barrel to Scotland to reorganise its operations under a new Scottish based regime. What would our UK audiences make of having their schedules turned on their heads?

In Scotland, there would be a massive increase in all forms of broadcasting activity and connected industries; and Scottish viewers and listeners would be spoilt for choice with four or five indigenous television and radio stations with which to choose their fare.

In England, the story would be very different. Audiences there would have to get accustomed to merely nominal English output; and to news, analysis and current affairs programmes, being dubbed with the tag "BBC England" when broadcast south of the border. But the real draught would be felt on the radio scene. England's "home service" - Radio Four, would be lost to Scotland - together with their own light, classical and pop channels. In their place they would have one single "national regional" Radio England (probably produced from Manchester when London was disabled). Worse is to come.

Radio England would be set to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the cultural spread. Its morning flagship would be hosted by a comedian and interspersed with reports of England's national weather and national traffic problems. There would be lengthy sports bulletins every half-hour and sport would completely take over the station at week-ends under the slogan "We are the only people who dare to broadcast sport all day long up to the limit that the law allows". The evenings would be dominated by an eclectic mix of pop, rock, funk and jazz music with a strong North American influence. Those listeners not courageous to have switched to the other five Scottish based channels would be greeted with such programmes as the "English Connection" and on Saturday nights "Anglo Saxon connections" with musical contributions from equatorial Africa, the Red Army choir and the Amazon basin. On Sundays they will be spared any religious observance. At every pause between programmes there will be banal and repetitive programme trailers. Their impact will be enhanced by an in house sense of humour redolent of a Primary One pantomime skit. Meantime, back on the tellies, sports reporting will carry detailed Scottish results first followed by a brief "round up" of English ones. Whole selections may be altered to cover shinty cup finals.

The English would soon learn that to complain, with any persistence, to the BBC about any of the contents of their national regional TV or Radio England would result in their being placed on a black list of those deemed unworthy of further communication.

There would be one concession for English viewers. A select panel, chosen by the broadcasters themselves would form the "Broadcasting Council for England". This would at least lend the appearance of some form of consultation with the public over what they require; but, of course, it would have no executive remit - and it would be subject to being over-ruled in such fundamental areas as news provision and political coverage.

It was the English who put up the stiffest fight against Margaret Thatcher's fatal poll tax, although Scotland had tholed it for a full year first. Perhaps if our southern neighbours were to be given a dose of Scotland's broadcasting regime, they might show us how best to dispose of that too. But do we really have to wait for a bolt from the blue to obtain broadcasting in Scotland fit for embarking on the third millennium?

[article ends]

(You missed off a few points - CC)

1. England would be told about going back to work on January 3, the Scottish return to work even though England goes back a day early. On the Scottish August holiday, England would receive children's programmes even though their children are not on holiday. During the summer, the schedules would observe the Scottish summer holiday and articles about "back to school" would be broadcast before English schools have even broken up.

2. Any article about England, particularly ones about high technology would be prefixed with a tired old cliché, an attempt at a joke and some faint Anglo Saxon tune drifting through the mist with battle cries in the background before opening the article with "You wouldn't think that this remote part of England could be hi-tech, but ..."

3. Any article about London would be prefixed with "And now from our England correspondent down in London, what's the weather like down there".

4. In celebration of England's main cultural icons a combined national event would be instigated on St George's day (also the day Shakespeare was born on and died on). To reflect the cultural significance which England has had worldwide, this event will be covered worldwide with English descendants around the globe joining in the fun. This event would be broadcast from Edinburgh with particular emphasis on a new building by the shore in Leith. The main events would of course all take place in Edinburgh as it is the capital (naturally enough). We would go "around the regions" to see how English people in Scotland were commemorating this event and during this regional interlude would receive token input from London, Manchester, Birmingham and in the bard's birthplace there would be traditional morris dancing to anglo-saxon instruments in a small back room.

Labels: Scotland, Viewpoint

I am a certified PRINCE2 Practitioner if anyone knows of any current jobs (pref contracts) on the go just now in the UK.

Alternatively, if you want commission for referring me, you can do so via Zubka

See also the PRINCE2 group on LinkedIn.

Craig

Labels: PRINCE2

Government CIO, John Suffolk, demands Green best practice for IT.

That being the case, why is it that all the government jobs I go for, not one has suggested that the interview is held via webcam (which I could do from my house) or even via hi-def video link (which you think I ought to be able to do from a government office in Edinburgh for an interview in London.

Come to think of it, why have none of the dot.com companies I've interviewed for suggested this either? OK to be a trendy dot com Web2.0 company using people on the Internet from all over the world to make your company a success, but still stuck in the mindset that employees all need to be in the same room?

Is it acceptable to have a day trip in a plane to physically attend an interview when the technology is adequate to see what I look like?

Besides the environmental impact, it would save me approx £200 in costs. I'm sure if the government were paying these costs for a permanent position, the tax payer would save in terms of reduced government costs and the environment would also benefit.

So why does noone seem to want to offer video interviews? Surely this is an easy first step to Green IT as the technology has already been around for years.

Craig

Labels: Computing, Green, Viewpoint

In a recent evaluation of some social networking sites, we find that many sites are valued in the $20-$25 per user range for a one off purchase.

On that basis, and the traffic from this site based on unique users, that's me back to being a dot com (dollar) millionaire again then. However, finding a buyer is another matter.

Seriously though, I am rather surprised at the economic model at work here.

1. Clever programmers write some website software. If you're in the UK you're unlikely to get stock options for this.

2. Said website goes onto become hugely successful, clever programmers don't usually get to become millionaires based on this (bebo being one of the few UK exceptions).

3. Said website is then based on active users, who contribute content. This content then drives further user activity fostering a community some of which has commercial value in the form of advertising. Millions of users contributing content = crowdsourcing. Users build up the site "for free" rather than the pre Web 2.0 days of a company having to pay a 3rd party to do it.

We've moved from the Web1.0 days when you needed to pay content editors to have good content on your site (about.com) to Web2.0 when with a decent site site owners get this content for free. So what's next? I would suggest the next economic revolution on the net is that rather than taking the users for a free ride, they should be paid back in shares based on a proportion of the advertising revenue that their content generates. Then when the company is sold, they get cash for those shares and a reward for having built the site up rather than nothing in the way of a financial thank-you for making the site a success.

There's no such thing as a free lunch and personally I am rather surprised at the hundreds of hours people spend on social networking sites, building up value in those sites for a tiny number of shareholders who walk away with 9 figure payouts and the users who created that wealth getting nothing in return.

Crowdsourcing isn't that new, Adam Smith wrote in 1776 in the founding work of economics the wealth of nations that "the division of labour is the source of economic growth". So what about a fair day's wage for a fair day's work in 2008 then? Profit sharing plans for employees are nothing new in the US although still something of a novelty in the UK, is it such a stretch to extend this concept of profit sharing out to crowdsourced content creators?

People aren't slaves. They shouldn't expect to work for nothing. If the contributors to these sites simply downed tools and said "no more contributions until I get paid for them", the Internet would perhaps turn into a different place with more money being distributed out to the original content creators and less of it being sucked into the middle and the search engines that serve up advertising.

Who do you think is more worthy of being paid?

Is this the new economy?

Craig (posting to his own site).

Labels: Business, Crowdsourcing, Viewpoint

Please visit this link.

Craig

Labels: PRINCE2

Unsurprisingly estate agents are feeling the pain of the credit crunch, with 150 closing a week and monthly sales down from 14 to 7 properties on average. This is despite Scottish house prices continuing to rise.

The problem here is twofold. First of all with agencies closing, there is fewer competition for consumers and secondly the remaining competition will no doubt carry on with the same absurd practices which led their competitors to go bust on the hope that it won't happen to them.

When I received a quote from some local estate agents, I was alarmed that the rates they quoted of 0.75% and 1% of the sale price were at the lower end of the national average which according to this article is about 2%. Using the national average house price of £218,112 and the figures above, here's an estate agent income calculator:

1. Average house price = £218,112
2. Average estate agent commission = 2% = £4,362 commission
3. Average monthly sales = 7. Therefore average monthly income = £30,535

4 Estate agents per office average, average salary £50,000. Total wages bill approx £18,000. This means approx £12,000 per month profit to cover phone calls, office hire and so on.

Certainly in my case, advertising and other extras such as placement on websites, noticeboards and so on was paid for on top.

So what did I get for my 1% deduction on the sale price, according to the bill? "Professional charges including preparation of draft schedule, validated and printed, insertion of photo in local offices, placement on rightmove website and dealing with enquiries".

For that they get 1% of the sale price, and sole selling rights which mean:

"If missives for the sale of the property are concluded during the period in which the company has sole selling rights then the charges are payable even if the buyer was found by myself".

So basically the current estate agent model means that even if I find a buyer, they get to charge 1% of the sale price. Personally I think this is an undue benefit to the agent and as such possibly unfair (and therefore illegal and unenforceable) however the point here is that it's a huge commission when you consider the actual effort to achieve it. To sell a property for 400K for instance, there isn't a lot of actual effort the agent needs to do besides place adverts in papers and on websites and for that they get £4K+, something that I could employ a full time consultant for a week and still have spare change, yet the estate agent sits back for the calls and gets the money even if I find the buyer. Surely something wrong here.

This is essentially why so many agents are now going bust, and why so many went bust in the previous housing downturn in England in the early 90s. They are dependent on a very small number of very high profit margin sales and so they are extremely vulnerable to market fluctuations and in a quiet period, their profits can dry up very quickly indeed.

The solution naturally is to pay estate agents a proper fee. I would quite happily pay £100 to write a schedule and take photos. I would also, maybe, pay to advertise on websites although I think that the age of having to do so will pass in the next 5 years as more free listing sites emerge. I also don't mind paying to advertise in local papers if necessary or on a per viewing basis if the agent shows the house for sale. However, I object to paying £4K just for them answering the phone when I could do it myself.

So all in it should be perfectly possible to sell a house whatever its market value for a few hundred pounds + whatever extra marketing I want to pay for. The days of taking 1%, 2% of the sale price should be a thing of the past.

This of course means that estate agents have even less money coming in which means that they have to deal with a much wider customer base. Fair enough, I think that there are probably too many estate agents and if the numbers stay at their post-crash lows then this would be a good thing. By having more customers and a lower margin on each, they would overall make more money due to scale and also would be more immune to market fluctuations

e.g. selling 100 properties a month over a much wider customer base and making £500 on each means that the agent makes £50,000 per month rather than £30,000 and having the customers spread over a wider area means they are less vulnerable to local downturns. Incidentally £500 is the min fee that my agent charged, so clearly it is feasible at this level.

Am I the only one who thinks its time for a shake up in how house sales are charged?

Craig

Labels: Business, Viewpoint

This picture sums up my attitude towards forced advertising and anti-skip menus on legitimate DVDS

Labels: Funny, Viewpoint

SOARING oil prices would give an independent Scotland a £4.4 billion budget surplus, making it one of Europe's richest countries, according to a new study.

The surplus would allow Alex Salmond to maintain existing levels of public spending, while cutting corporation tax from 28% to 12.5%, reducing income tax by 5p in the pound and still having £2 billion every year to invest in a Norwegian-style oil fund to safeguard Scotland against a future decline in North Sea oil revenue.

The study, based on Treasury oil revenue forecasts and official spending figures, has calculated that, without money from the taxation of oil and gas, an independent Scotland would have an underlying deficit of £7.8billion. But when £12.2billion of oil and gas revenues are included, Scotland would have a surplus of more than £4billion.

See the link for more info

Labels: Business, Politics, Scotland