Warren Seen

I’ve just added my del.icio.us bookmarks to my Feedburner feed, and I’ll be adding a sidebar del.icio.us component in the next day or so, so you can keep up with what I’m keeping up with online

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…

Prompted by last nights thoughts on web 2.0 and in particular the fun google maps mashup that is the Web 2.0 Innovation map, I got to thinking why the whole mashup thing just hasn’t happened here.

It occurred to me in the shower this morning (that’s enough detail thank you very much) that the situation is all Sensis/whereis.com’s fault.

Why? In short, their API policy sucks. No free and open API at all from what I can see.

Unfortunately it seems that no one else has street level coverage to quite the extent that whereis does. Of course, the fact that whereis keeps telling me it can’t find my street number (67) and instead suggests the number 23 down the street does not exactly instill confidence in their back end.

So what of the big two? Microsoft’s Live Local and Google Maps? Well unsurprisingly, neither have very detailed maps of Tasmania, and the satellite photography is identical. Want to see Launceston, the city I live in? Good luck with that. At least Google maps can find Launceston though - local.live.com can’t seem to, even though it’s right there on the map in front of me. *sigh*

So useful Australian geo-mashups are out of the question until there is a decent, freely available mapping API that Aussie web 2.0 developers can harness.

Footnote: freaky confluence of thought

There are times when this whole internet thing just doesn’t cut it. Times when paradoxically, the closer it brings you to something, the further away you feel. What am I talking about? I’m talking about The Valley.

“Ha!” I can hear already the snorts of derision from regular inhabitants of the stretch of 101 that leads from Menlo Park to San Jose. Bear with me for a second before you launch into a tirade about vast expanses of grey concrete, exorbitant housing costs and nightmare commutes and I’ll explain myself properly.

Yes, I have visited the valley briefly, in the summer of 2004. Even then, there was a sense of optimism and purpose about the place.

I certainly don’t envy any of those negative aspects of life there - hey, I work from home, my commute is about 30 seconds from the kitchen to my office, as long as I don’t trip over any cats.

What I do envy is proximity. The concentration of talent in such a small geographical area is just crazy.

Take a look at the web 2.0 Innovation Map and tell me it’s not the case. Sure, there are plenty of startups located elsewhere, but not in the same concentration as in the valley. Not to mention access to VCs and a suite of deep pocketed companies the built to flip set can pimp themselves to.

Now even me, who is 99% coder, and about 1% entrepreneur, I know that it’s all about the networking baby… and the networking possibilities in that kind of situation are much greater than me sitting here in a timezone which is +17 hours from the West Coast.

I mean, if Marc Andreessen walked into my local coffee shop, I’d fall over. Hell, I’d fall over if anyone else in my local coffee place even knew what Netscape WAS. At least they know how to make a decent coffee.

But it’s not even about the “big names” that you might bump into… it’s simply about critical mass. Cool stuff like BarCamp or SuperHappyDevHouse is a total non-starter in a sleepy city (of 100,000) where you can count the number of companies doing software development on two hands and still have digits to spare. It’s like living in a vacuum, which possibly explains the loud sucking noise I hear.

So what’s a boy with a big idea to do?Living vicariously through blogs and Flickr photostreams only gets you so far. Moving is not an option, and somehow I think an 18 hour commute won’t work

Clearly, the way forward is to treat this as a constraint and move on. Better still, capitalise on locality, a la Ben Barren and gnoos…

“Making it” locally has its own challenges though, Nik Cubrilovic at OmniDrive has discovered something I learnt back in 2003 with my last employer, Australian venture capital is harder to get and just generally lacking in any kind of upside to make it worthwhile when the barriers to US entry are so low.

On the other hand, a “build to flip” operation doesn’t seem viable, what are the real odds of getting plucked from the other side of the world - particularly if you weren’t the same team that created Kazaa?

Maybe it’s ok to be a big fish swimming in the small pond, if you’re still big enough to make it in a bigger pond?

Global… Local. Global, Local. Global/Local.

Hmm…