Warren Seen

amazon.com knows where I live (mostly, I’ve only had one order that got returned to them as undeliverable). So why, oh why, can they not display, at LEAST, an approximate local currency price for the books I’m looking at? I’ll take the disclaimer that it’s a guide only, etc, just please, save me from flipping between the books I want and an FX converter to figure out how much it’s really going to cost me.

Footnote: I wonder how much amazon is eating into Au brick+mortar bookstores? I never bother with my local bookstore for 90% of what interests me, it takes them longer and costs me more to order the books I want in from their warehouse or whatever. Maybe 10 years ago people were willing to put up with this situation, but not when they can find a better service online in another country.

Well, looks like its time to eat my words from last night about “international” startups… and so soon!

Within the space of a couple of hours, Om Malik has posted about Kleiner Perkins investing in Cleartrip.com, an Indian travel portal, and Mike Arrington at TechCrunch posts (by way of Scobleizer) a Swiss startup, cocomment.com.

Actually, on second thoughts, this does go some way to underscoring my point. From what I can gather, Cleartrip.com’s raison de etre is to provide an Indian version of Orbitz or Expedia.

Orbitz is still clearly US centric (and the flight recommendations bizarre, it just suggested to fly from Melbourne to Launceston, I could fly Melbourne, AU -> Auckland, NZ -> Syndey, AU -> Launceston, AU. This is amusing as there are at least 8 flights a day here from Melbourne, usually a 50 minute flight.)

Expedia on the other hand appears to have lauched an Australian version of their site recently. I say appears and recently because the first I knew of it was when I loaded the main site.

Anyway, my point is that if Orbitz was to clean up its act, get some people on the ground locally to sanity check their system, there is no reason that they shouldn’t be able to hit the market that cleartrip.com is aiming at.

After all, it makes sense to have a network of interlinked travel sites that would allow you to seamlessly book your international trip, so the next time you visit Launceston from Melbourne, you don’t get sent via New Zealand!

It will happen sooner or later, but until it does, I think VCs should get used to hearing the elevator pitch that starts with “It’s an Indian version of…” or “It’s an Australian take on…” or “Imagine Google News, but in Swahili!”

Recycling existing sites and services for your locality is not innovation. It makes business sense in the short term (maybe, I really don’t want to see pets.com.au though ;-)), but you aren’t innovating, unless you’re doing it better

… isn’t that what they say in the real estate industry? Picking up on last night’s (slightly derailed) train of thought, I’m going to talk a bit more about locality in the web 2.0 context.

I mentioned in a previous comment that I don’t think US-based web 2.0 startups are sensitive to the local/global dichotomy. And why should they be? There’s more than enough of a market for most NewCo’s in the States, without all of the fuss that comes along with expanding across borders. So a US slant on things is almost a default.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Ok, so maybe it’s not the case that there’s anything wrong, but it’s certainly a sub-optimal situation for the rest of the English speaking world. If you don’t think that’s the case, I encourage you to name me a popular 2.0 startup from Ireland, or Singapore, or even Canada, off the top of your head that has its own slant.

Now I’m not saying these things don’t exist, but clearly the mindshare is not the same as a Flickr, or del.icio.us, or Reddit, etc. Why not? Clearly, talented people exist in these countries too.

And now we come to my point - for each of these examples, the technology is perfectly capable and does not need replicating by a startup in another country.

BUT…

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to filter these, based on a user’s location? Location is something we all share, something that communities are built on in the real world, and also in the electronic world.

More crucially, locality is the one piece of metadata which can be used to describe anyone on the face of the planet (and indeed those who are not on the face of the planet).

Sure, you could go and tag everything with your location, but i don’t really think that’s appropriate, what you really need to be doing is tagging yourself, not the photo/link/story you are submitting. My wife and I spent our honeymoon in Egypt, it would make no sense for me to tag photos of the great pyramids with “Launceston/Tasmania/Australia” would it?

So who does locality right? One example is Google News. Compare the subtleties between http://news.google.com and http://news.google.com.au and http://news.google.co.in, all of this done transparently to the end user. This is all well and good, but I have to say that I don’t think even Google has got this right yet. No matter how many times they try to force it into my eyeballs, as an Aussie, I really don’t care who’s playing in the SuperBowl, any more than I care who’s playing in the final of the Kazakhstani Goat Polo championships. Needs. More. Relevance.

So I guess the take home message is this: if you want a global audience, you have to let them interact locally too. Don’t just glob everyone together into “cyberspace” - that’s just soooo web 1.0 and what’s more, it takes on a distinctly American flavour, when some of us are hungering for some home cookin’ of our own.
If you’re not willing to do that, then don’t be surprised to see competitors with better support for multiple locations overtaking you in the near future. There are twice as many Europeans as there are Americans, and support for Euro languages is mostly a snap.

I also have this nagging feeling that multibyte character support may be helpful in the near future too… but that’s internationalisation, not localisation, and the subject of another post entirely…