Running a Virtual Business - One Year On

It's been a year since I co-founded Comrz, somewhat from the ashes of my previous venture Emojo. A lot has happened in that time, most of it great. The key decisions we made at the outset have all worked out well and we're looking to build on the new ways of working and not look back.

Below are some of the key Virtual Company premises we built the business on, and the pros and cons over the past year.

No Office / Location Independence

This was a key decision, and so far, so great. We still have no office, and have no intention of getting one. Not all the team is with us since some members felt they needed to work in an office environment, however most team members stuck with Comrz and have benefited greatly by having location independence.

One member of the team has moved back to India for a year, another has been working in Slovakia for the past few weeks, another is happily working from the Cote-d'Azure. Those left in the UK no longer have long commutes, they can work from home or from local venues, or great business clubs such as the Like Minds Club or One Alfred Place.

The down-side has yet to come, which will happen when we have to grow the team, I'm sure we'll need to develop some innovative teaching / learning tools to get people on board as effectively as possible. That said, we have outsourced very effectively (see below) with minimum effort for some pretty complex financial / payroll / HR stuff.

The best thing is that we now only meet up for fun, parties and entertainment. Every couple of weeks, those members of the team who are able to make it to London get together and go out. That's the only time we meet in person, but because we talk together so frequently each day it's worked out pretty well so far.

Outsourcing the Infrastructure

Right from the outset we decided to not run any of our own equipment and did a lot of research as to the best cloud providers. We chose Amazon and Yotta, and they've both been great. Neither has been without it's hiccoughs, and we had to do a lot of development to make our Affino platform work reliably on the cloud, but the benefits have been immense in terms of cost, reliability, reduced stress, reduced workload and cost compared to running our own infrastructure.

One of the best aspects of running off the cloud is that we can increase our capacity on-demand and provide massively scalable sites. It also means that peaking sites, e.g. event-based / news-based can have temporary increases in capacity without having to invest in year-round increases in server capacity.

Outsourcing

The first thing we did when starting Comrz was to outsource key book-keeping, payroll and financial related functions. We now also outsource elements such as design and in-effect a fair amount of development. This has gone extremely well.

Not only has the quality and value of the services been excellent, but in dealing with seasoned pros, we have benefited greatly from solid advice and efficient service. It means that outsourcing is now our Number One approach when it comes to increasing capacity or delivering new services.

Working and Communicating Online

Skype, Google Apps, Google Talk, Twitter, Tweet Deck, Google News Reader, DimDim and Affino have been the keys to great communication within the company. The latest generation of mobile tech including Apple's iPhones and various Google / HTC / Android devices have kept us in close contact whatever our location.

Great mobile services including the latest generation of 3G dongles, MiFi devices and now Android 2.2 have meant that we don't even need to have broadband to be working and communicating effectively online. Phenomenal when staying abroad or working in un-connected locations.

We've made a lot of improvements to our own Affino platform over the year with massively improved forums, which have driven over 30,000 conversations in the past year. Team Time our Team Time In/Out board with logs all the work-time and tasks has been key to managing both the full-time team members and external contractors. We're also rolled out great enhancements to our blogs, status updates and integration with Facebook and Twitter which really optimise our public comms.

The Downside (Not Much)

We've yet to experience these in any significant way. There's obviously disruption for team members when they work from home from their family and friends, but in terms of productivity it's fair to say that the team has been incredibly productive on the whole, with no loss of productivity at all when compared with the office environment.

We've also not suffered from being virtual in terms of our status. Our customers buy into what we're doing and our approach, and increasingly it is how they also operate and see Comrz as being leaders in the field.

Not having an office and all associated infrastructure, insurance, security / maintenance headaches, equipment et al has greatly freed up management time and allows us to stay focused on the things that matter like building a great product, supporting our customers to the max and growing the business.

The Future

The future for Comrz, and the world in general, will involve many more collaborations, working with partners and customers in innovative ways and always striving to be, and work with the best in the market.

We're liking the way the tech world is going with more integration, services being opened through APIs, everything migrating to the cloud and seamless global comms which makes working on different continents seem as close as working in the office next door.

Taking Control of your Inbox

I had the chance to change the way I manage my emails with my latest venture (Comrz). The truth is that it was quite frustrating at my previous venture (Emojo) in that every morning I had 300 fresh emails in, and would get a further one or two hundred messages each day. Clearly taking any time off made for many days of catchup when I returned.

The great news is that the tools available today mean that I now rarely spend more than ten minutes in the morning filtering out all the non-urgent, non-essential stuff and am able to deal instantly with all the urgent issues without any clutter.

There are three key tools that I use to make this happen:

• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Twitter / TweetDeck

The first thing I did was not transfer most of my email subscriptions over to my new account. In fact I cancelled 90% of them. What I did instead was either subscribe to the same people / organisations through Google Reader and Twitter where possible, and in some instances where this was not an option I simply dropped out.

Having all the news feeds come in through Twitter and Google Reader means that I catch most of the info at the same speed, but stuff that I miss or gets dated doesn't clutter up my inbox. If my Google Reader has too much of a backlog I simply mark everything as read, same with TweetDeck.

It is noticeable that I don't use as many news sources as previously on the the same subjects, but I have broadened my subscriptions to include a broader range of news stories. It's fair to say that I consume 99% of my news through Twitter and Google Reader.

It's taken a fair bit of tweeking and effort to adjust to Gmail for my corporate email. Given that I've been using Outlook for the previous decade. It's clear that once you get used to them that Tags are the way to go. Superb. Being able to tag an invoice with Finance and Accounts Payable at the same time is very useful. I then simply un-tick the Accounts Payable option when the payment has been made.

Running a small company means that I need to keep a close eye on things. It means I have Five inboxes and around thirty tags that I use. It's a great feature in Gmail that it can present five inboxes on the same screen.

My Inboxes are:

• Inbox - i.e. fresh stuff as well as urgent stuff
• Starred - important (but not urgent)
• Active Opportunities - the latest correspondence on all the deals we're working on
• Accounts Payable - moneys to pay
• Accounts Receivable - moneys coming in

To make everything more streamlined I have set up lots of rules for automatically tagging incoming emails, e.g. support forum posts are all tagged with Support; any correspondence with financial people is always tagged Finance. It means I simply archive my emails after I've read them, since they're already automatically tagged.

The fact that Gmail, TweetDeck and Google Reader work everywhere, and on all devices, means that it's always possible to stay on top with minimal effort.

The Art of the Re-Start (UK)

I'm still in the middle of starting up my new venture Comrz and closing down my previous company Emojo (I was the majority share holder) so things are a bit raw (and un-finished) but here are some key lessons I've learnt from the process so far.

1) If you're in pain, seriously look at your options

I spent way too long trying to 'save' Emojo, and in retrospect it made my life far harder than it should have been and made me personally much more out-of-pocket.

There are great options in the UK now for struggling companies to do a structured turn-around if you have a business which is viable under all the mess which surrounds it, which may-or-may-not have arisen because of the recession.

If the company is basically sound, and you still have some finances in place, but are collecting bad debts (like we were) and in turn becoming a credit risk (ditto), then the Pre-pack insolvency is a great option. You will need funds, and should contact an insolvency practitioner at the earliest opportunity. Essentially you can buy back your company as a going concern, but with all your debts wiped. This needs to be done in a highly structured manner, and clearly can't be fraudulent, but for a well run company which has been brought down by the economy it's a great option.

The other alternative is a liquidation. You can still buy back all of the company's assets, but have to start from scratch as far as the brand and marketing efforts are concerned. This may be no bad thing if your plight became a headline, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of re-invention. It creates much more of a clear slate, but obviously means a lot more graft required to re-establish yourself. In the end, this was the option I went for. I was able to buy up all the assets of my previous company, including the IP assets, and have now re-sold some of them to my new company to clear up my overdraft.

Looking back, I should have done this a year ago, but was too mentally tied in to my previous venture to look at the big picture. Had I done so I would have been at least hundreds of thousands of pounds better off ... c'est la vie.

2) Aim for a quick turn-around and continuity

We've done everything we could to get things turned around and launched with the new company, and two months after we closed down the previous one, the new one is up and running, and most of our customers have had seamless continuity of dialogue, support and service. We did execute on this very rapidly, and what it has done is give our customers a solid platform (at least for them to be comfortable whilst re-thinking their options) and it's given us the start-up capital we required without seeking any finance.

My recommendation is always going to be to do whatever it takes to avoid taking money from others. Signing up customers quickly to your new venture is a big priority in minimising any external funding requirement.

3) Use the chance of a fresh start

The great thing about starting again is that you have the opportunity for a fresh start, to leave many of your headaches behind and to go with your gut instincts in a way that were previously complicated with contracts and commitments.

Use the opportunity before you get cluttered again.

4) The world has changed since you started your previous venture

It really has. The way the web has come of age in the past year means that companies can be run completely differently today than the could have been even six months ago. Look around, do serious hands-on trials with all the new tech and services and go for it.

5) Outsourcing is much better now than before

I can't recommend outsourcing highly enough. You have to be comfortable with it; have good procedures in place; and most importantly have an excellent communications setup and good skills for it to work. When it does work you'll find yourself slashing your costs, not just by 10% but up to 90%, no wonder India and China are doing so well. The Internet has really transformed the ability to communicate over distance and work together in a distributed virtual enterprise.

Since my new venture is a smaller scale, we're working with the 'generic out-sourcers' such as Google and Amazon, and small companies and individuals. It's fair to say that 70% of what we previously owned and did in-house has now been outsourced. It allows us to focus on our core skills, whilst reducing commitments and greatly improving our bottom line.

6) Distributed working is now a reality

It really is possible to work in a distributed setup, with no office, and using the new setup of professionaly business clubs such as One Alfred Place, and the myriad of cafes, hotels and other business clubs which are available. More often than not you're going to be more effective at meeting up virtually than physically. All comms can now run through an individual's PC and mobile devices and the emergence of personal Wi-Fi (MiFi) means you can carry your own network with you.

At the start of the new venture we met up for all our project meetings, now they're all done through Skype and take 30 minutes versus 3 hours of lost productivity (per person) previously. Now we just get together for key meeting, client engagements, and to party.

7) Revisiting the Ideal

When I was thinking and soul-searching about the new venture, I spent a lot of time thinking about all the things that had not worked out, or gone the way I envisaged with my previous venture.

There were a lot of ideas that I had which simply weren't possible the last time round (10 years ago). In so many ways Comrz is the company I wanted to found 10 years ago but was prevented from achieving by real-world constraints. Luckily this time around almost everything has just fallen into place nicely, and after initial (inevitable) gremlins, things are looking pretty good.

8) Learn from your mistakes

It can be painful to review your mistakes (it certainly is for me) but it's essential if you're not going to re-live them.

Have a low annoyance threshold, if something feels wrong with the new setup, nail it straight away, don't take any bullshit. It will only get worse.

9) Love many trust few

The best advise my mother gave me. Keep things simple with the new venture, you'll need to, if only to get through all the corporate paperwork you have to deal with.

Outsource wherever possible, on short-term contracts in case you need to evolve things quickly. Only tie things down once things become settled and always keep things simple (until you've got the scale to have a legal and HR team).

Do whatever you can yourself (and save on the salaries and man management time required). Having fewer staff has a downside in that you need to have great self-management skills, but it will save you big bucks and lots of headaches.

10) Some things take waaaaaaay longer than you would expect

It took two months for me to get all the banking and payment services set up for the new venture, which is precisely six weeks longer than I had anticipated. This can cause chaos when it comes to receiving moneys and making payments. Luckily I was prepared, but I never expected it to take so long.

The other problem is that when starting up you have to be very controlled when it comes to prioritising. It does mean that you'll be doing some essential tasks months after you've started, but so be it.

Wrap Up

My last venture was the first one to actually fail, and as such I've had to learn a whole new set of skills. The best thing was finding a good insolvency practitioner who was able to advise me on what steps to take. Just remember though that they're in it for the money so always research your options further online and seek a second opinion.

This is a great time to be starting up in terms of what is possible, not a great economic environment, but at least your money goes a great deal further than previously and the technology enablers are now pretty much all there.

The key thing with a re-start is that you have to keep things simple, so use the opportunity to either out-source or stop doing anything which was not profitable previously.

UK Start-up Tech Autumn 2009

It was a long summer and things have moved on dramatically as far as tech is concerned. My own career has gone through a couple of back flips with the odd somersault thrown in for good measure. My project for the past ten years: Emojo hit the wall as the funding dried up from most of our start-up clients and prospects.

It meant doing a complete re-think as to what to do with my career, and where to go. In the end I've started a new venture Comrz, which is a Social Commerce consultancy, working with companies to build profitable communities. It's given me the chance to have complete re-think of the tech I use, and I've made some big changes over the last few months.

Email, Chat and Document Sharing - Google Apps Comes of Age

Google Apps has dramatically improved over the past year. Possibly the biggest change to my way of working has been the shift to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange. When starting up the new venture it came down to a straight choice between hosted Exchange and Google Apps. In the end Google Apps won out because Gmail works brilliantly with email on all our devices, and Google Docs provides a great online platform for live editing of the documents. The tight integration with Google Talk means that it is now a must-have component of our setup. The fact that Google provides Apps for free for up to 50 users and allows you to use your own domain made it a simple choice in the end since I didn't have a 100% feeling about any of the hosted Exchange options.

Voice and Teleconferencing - Skype

It's clear that Skype wasn't the cash cow eBay hoped it would be, but it's reliability, good quality audio (even in low bandwidth), great chat and most importantly incredibly intuitive conferencing options make this the key voice comms platform for us. It's still leagues ahead of Google Talk, and probably the reason Google invested in building up Google Voice. The ability to pull together a quick teleconference with the key players on a project is a key productivity cornerstone.

Cloud Hosting - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

What a brilliant solution. I had heard about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for years, and when it came to setting up our new venture, 'not' having to run the servers was a key criteria. This comes from having to do so with my previous four ventures and finding it a never ending drag. We trialled many offerings (no names mentioned) but needless to say pretty much none of them worked for us (or even came close). The one which did was Amazon. The recent changes to their tariffs have made their offering dramatically more price competitive as well. This is a great platform for basic virtual servers, applications and storage.

High End Hosting - ACC Yotta

Great as Amazon is, it is also seriously limited in what it can offer at the high end (e.g. only one IP Address per server, unbelievable). When looking around, it was clear that we needed to work with a real high-end hosting innovator as well and we found one in Yotta. The shift to running all our operations off the cloud has been very complex, with hundreds of updates required in our core solutions and changes in the way we work. Yotta have been great at providing valuable feedback, and have also enabled us to embrace all the latest hosting tech to improve the performance of our high-end hosting solutions.

VOIP - Talking Platforms

Our telco setup was easily sorted. We have been through years of working with one unreliable VOIP provider followed by another, until we started to work with Talking Platforms. What a great outfit. They sorted us out quickly, provide an extremely reliable service, and supported us on all our various VOIP devices (Snom handsets and X-Lite PC soft phone). Now I have the three comms Icons sitting next to each other on my Windows 7 toolbar, and can communicate with ease wherever I am.

OS and Office Suite - Microsoft BizSpark

What a programme. Microsoft BizSpark is essential for any startup (i.e. free Microsoft software). I think it is a great move for Microsoft, since otherwise I can see companies wholesale trying to go with free competitors even though they are inferior. It also buys Microsoft time to get it's online offerings in place. That said this is a real productivity boon and a great cost-saver for us and we love Microsoft for it. Especially with Windows 7 and Office 2007 which are just superb. Why can't Adobe do something like this. I love their tech, and it is a cornerstone of our company, but it sure is expensive for a startup.

Mobile Tech - Apple iPhone, Android, 3 Mi Fi, Kensington Ultra Portable Battery Pack

I'll do a bigger post on this later (see earlier posts), but the fact is that I've done a 180 degree turn on this over the past few months. Android has come such a long way over the past six months, and the 'Donut' / 1.6 release running on my Dev Phone One (G1 for developers), coupled with it's tight Google integration is now my main mobile work device. My primary phone is now without doubt the iPhone. The push integration with Google Apps is just the icing on the cake, what a package.

The other new tech is really enabling, and solves key frustrations for and online Entrepreneur. The first is the Three Mi Fi solution which allows me to have my own personal Wi-Fi setup wherever I am. What a great solution which 'just works' if only all tech was as easy as this. The other great enabler for all my power hungry devices, which just don't get through the day, is the Kensington Ultra Portable Battery (currently out of stock on Kensington's own online store).

PC / Laptop Hardware - Dell

I've been with Dell for a few years now, and whilst I really don't like the way every add-on is over-priced, the core hardware is reasonably priced, works well and comes with the great Dell service, which I'm happy to pay a premium for. I used to be a Sony guy for years, but they really need to solve their 'crapware' mentality for me to take them seriously again. They're great at taking good hardware, loading it with terrible software, and turning the resulting user experience into a dog.

Social Apps - TweetDeck, and iPhone Apps

I'm sure others will come to mind, but right now I've removed pretty much all my social apps from the PC / Mac with the exception of TweetDeck. Their execution across the board from the desktop to the iPhone is simply superb. I must have 50 odd iPhone social apps, so that will have to be a separate post, but I am using the Facebook app, Layar and Nimbuzz fairly regularly now alongside TweetDeck.

Entertainment - Spotify, iPlayer and iTunes

I always like to be legal for all my software and media, given that I've spent years running software related ventures, so finding services that make it easy to be legal is a big deal for me. You always need to chill out, and Spotify Premium is now my go-to service for music, it really makes my Android phone a great music device (when used with a good Bluetooth headset). The fact that it now works on all my machines (PC and Mac) and mobile devices (iPhone and DP1) means that I don't have to use anything else. The offline mode really is the killer feature.

For light entertainment and news the BBC iPlayer is superb, and I'm still an iTunes user, although no longer for tunes, but instead I find myself downloading the odd movie, Podcast and TV series.

Web Platform - Affino from Comrz

It's been a lot of work to completely start from scratch with a web presence, but I've been having great fun with Affino from Comrz (my new venture). We've been refining the user experience greatly over the past few months and it's become pretty slick now. It's a great Social Commerce platform, designed to run modern integrated commercial sites, and the fact that we've been able to roll out our entire online presence on just one platform is such a productivity boon. The fact that it is super scalable now on the cloud is even better.

Office - One Alfred Place (plus lots of home offices)

One thing I absolutely did not want to do when starting up this company was have an office (we'll see how well that goes). A key criteria with the new venture is that we can work with the best people wherever they are, and I wanted to force things so that we wouldn't build any kind of centralised base, and instead keep everything light and cloud based.

Our strategy was to find the best business clubs wherever more than one of us was based (currently just London) so we could meet up and meet customers and prospects. After a fair amount of research (and also based on my experience of having meetings in London over the past 15 years) we settled on One Alfred Place which has the slogan 'A better way to do business'. So far it's been great (just looking forward to the network being upgraded). It's a highly professional environment, with great networking events and great working spaces.

Wrap Up

I've always believed that the enabling technologies we're seeing will result in smaller, more distributed companies. The problem traditionally was that the technologies which were available to start-ups were inferior to those available to the Fortune 500 and the FTSE 100 and therefore left them at a great disadvantage. That really is no longer the case. It's hard to see how we can imrove on the tech we can enjoy right from the outset as we scale up.

Now we just need to get the financial system sorted in the same way to cater for start-ups. Given the way it's virtually disintegrated in the UK over the past 12 months (and never was very good before) there's a lot of scope for a 'killer app' here.

Broken Businesses - how Best of Breed solutions lead to Failed Online Businesses

After having met thousands of entrepreneurs, CTOs, CEOs, marketing and sales directors over the years, not one has felt that they've been making the most of their online business(es). Frequently their companies have multiple websites serving up multiple different content and community streams as well as multiple disparate ecommerce sites selling everything from books to videos, DVDs, clothing, events, networking, memberships and subscriptions. Few feel that they are making a decent return on their investment (if any).

There are numerous reasons for this, some strategic, some staff related. A lot though is down to the limitations of their infrastructure. There are four possible approaches when rolling out an eBusiness: bespoke, open source, best-of-breed solutions or an integrated eBusiness suite.

A term which crops up continuously when companies are launching a new CMS, newsletter, ecommerce, social networking solution is 'best of breed'. The fact is, if you run your online business using a mixture of solutions then you will seriously reduce your revenue generation and online customer service. You will also guarantee less effective SEO (search engine optimisation) and fewer cross-selling and promotions opportunities.

The argument put forward by niche vendors (and this includes the market leaders) is that Best of Breed Solutions (BOBS) will maximize the effectiveness of each aspect of your online business and as a result you will have a higher level of customer engagement and sales. You will be able to use their APIs to pull all the information and services together and create an uber presence, or at least be standards compliant.

I have yet to meet anyone who has gone down the best-of-breed route who actually has an integrated eBusiness. The practical hurdles to achieving integration with so many solutions are immense: how many technologies are being used; what version are they on; are the APIs complementary; what are the release cycles like (some fast others slow); can the applications share user sessions; can they bundle online services, access and media with traditional goods in single transactions; are there embeddable components for elements such as shopping carts?

Open source solutions tend to have all the above problems and have some additions of their own. The fragmented nature of OSS (open source software) means that as more business elements are rolled out online the level of complexity grows exponentially. It is quite easy to manage two or three OSS solutions in parallel for your eBusiness, but in practice often achieving basic cross-selling and promotions can require a dozen additional plugins to the already significant number of solutions being used. OSS also has random elements thrown in, including: product forks (i.e. split into two competing solutions); sudden 'professional' versions and pricing (where things were free before suddenly have a big cost attached); and commercial limitations where you can't use the solution for commercial gain or are forced to share your IP.

Many companies try to grapple with this problem by building their own solutions, typically by cobbling together open source elements with their own proprietary code. For most ventures this is a dead-end which fails to keep up with the market realities. Companies are often worried that they have to own the code (i.e. their own IP) which runs their online business. This makes no sense, and rarely adds value, in fact in most cases it destroys it. The problem is not always apparent with the first generation of their eBusiness presence, but by the time they're working on the second or third it is all too real. The costs mount up, the sites look dated, the customer experience is diminished and less than what it might be.

There is no way that in ten years time anyone will consider building their online businesses on such a dysfunctional setup. In the same way that the office productivity suite superceded the stand-alone spreadsheets and word processors, so will a new generation of eBusiness Suites replace the current hodge-podge of solutions.

Where is Everybody? Social changes mean companies are losing control of their Brands, Communities and Staff

I've been thinking about this subject a lot recently, and posted some initial thoughts on the Internet World 2009 site.

The social land-grab is seeing many companies loosing control of their brands and communities as these enter the social spaces such as Facebook and Linkedin Groups, Ning communities and the Twitter sphere. A quick search on many brands will bring up high rankings for these domains and user generated communities, meaning that these are the places people will go to evaluate the brands.

It also means that the millions of dollars companies are investing in promoting their websites via search engines is becoming an increasingly speculative process.

Is it Irreversible?

What is amazing is that most companies don’t seem to be doing anything to reverse this wholesale move of customer relationships from the traditional direct channels through to 3rd party communications spaces. Companies are losing out in particular to their own staff are ad-hock setting up social spaces around the target markets for their companies, and where the ownership lies with the individual and not the company they work for.

The web is a beautiful thing in that it allows for greatly improved self-service and 24/7/365 service times. What it also does is reduce the level of intimacy between companies and their clients. Most organisations have invested heavily in improving their online revenue generation and servicing, however little has been done to improve loyalty or engage better with their communities.

Where’s the Loyalty

A simple scenario is a person who regularly buys airline tickets. A decade ago a regular buyer might have gone to the airline’s booking office, met their regular customer service representative and been advised on the best ticket / package to get. A few years ago the person might simply have phoned up, had the advice, and paid by credit card, they would still have experienced personal service and a human touch. Now the person does everything faster and more easily online, without any human interaction. The problem with this is that it means that there is much less to bind the person to the organisation on a personal level. People now simply look for the best price / availability fit and typically go with that. Customer service ’on the ground’ might help, but Ryanair has proven that it doesn’t affect buying decisions as much as it should.

Companies must engage to rebuild loyalty, and that involves being ’out there’ in the social spaces and virtual cross roads. It involves helping their community and being responsive to issues as they are raised. It also means that companies should do something about providing the community services required by the customers. You can’t force the creation of a community, but you can facilitate it and help it to develop and re-build lost contact.

Who's Making Money from your Community?

One of the great things about being on the eBusiness frontline is that I get to meet some great people. One person we've recently started working with is a top musician and DJ who has two million followers on MySpace, his videos have been seen hundreds of millions of times on YouTube and he's yet to see a penny of revenue from either site.

To make matters worse, he's now in the situation where the site owners are selling his back-catalogue through a 3rd party on via his profile page, and are in effect promoting material that he gets minimal royalties for at the expense of his more recent materials.

The fact is that if you don't have ownership of the platform which the community is running on then you have minimal ability to generate revenues from the community. Not only that but you run the risk of 3rd parties and even competitors taking ownership of your community or changing the terms of your engagement at any stage.

For a start-up it's particularly dangerous since ownership of a Facebook or LinkedIn community has minimal value, even though it might be the largest grouping in existence.

The fact is that many social media sites strictly forbid the selling of communites or accounts in their terms and conditions. This in turn puts a major question mark on the long-term return on investment in building up communities on these sites.

Are Individuals Benefiting at the Expense of Companies?

Yes.

A simple scenario is two senior sales professionals. One builds up his sales contacts and monitors everything through the company controlled CRM, uses the company telephone and computer and then one day loses his job through no fault of his / her own. That person, unless they’ve been very careful, and possibly working against the terms of their contract, will have a very hard time to piece together their professional profile, contacts, relationships and status.

The second sales person builds up their client acquisition network through Linked-In (or similar), sets up numerous interest groups, syncs everything with Plaxo, does status updates via numerous Twitter accounts, and manages much of their activity through their own personal iPhone or Blackberry. You now have someone who can move seamlessly between companies, often with the considerable ownership of the customer relationship in a way that was previously not possible.

But that needn’t be a bad thing if companies are able to leverage their ’enabled employees’ and social networks.

The fact is that the process of loyalty switching from brands to individuals is going to speed up. The tools and networks which were previously only available to companies, often exclusively large companies, are now in the hands of individuals, and no longer in the hands of those employing them.

What can Companies do to Regain Ownership of their Communities

The first thing companies need to do is to take ownership of the platform that they're developing their communities on. These need to be self-contained and managed around their brand, or as independent brands sponsored by the company. It's worth noting that my company Emojo makes such a platform (Affino) so there is a certain bias here.

A good community site requires great moderation, good infrastructure, good media, good content, effective promotion and much more. It should have the infrastructure in place to allow for the growth of a social marketplace where community members can do business.

The Social Networks and Social Media Hubs should then be used as feeder sites for these commercial community hubs.

Commercial Communities require Constant Engagement

A constant evolution is required to respond to the needs of the community. It typically takes one to two years to evolve a site to the level where the community has settled down and the tools broadly meet their requirements. In practice these requirements vary extensively from one community to another and a lot of granularity is required to get the mix right. For example one community might want powerful media management whilst the another might prefer minimal (but fast) image uploads and nothing more.

Community members quickly become disengaged once the community moderators and leaders become inactive so continuity, recognition and rewards are all important. This means companies must invest in building up in-house community teams if they are going to succeed online.

Companies which get this right will be the brand and thought leaders of tomorrow. Those who don't will see a gradual diminishing of their brand and will be sidelined from their communities over time.

The Current State of Personal Internet Devices

Recap

For those who are not familiar with me, I've used almost every mobile platform there is, and gone through four or five handsets each year for the past decade. I also spend most of my time designing applications so care a lot about getting the most out of my mobile experience. This post is purely based on my personal experience, but may be interesting if you want to get the most out of the personal internet.

What a difference a year makes. It's interesting to see Firefox demo it's mobile browser (currently known as Fennec), on a Nokia 810. I have the same device in my collection and a year ago it was my main PID (Personal Internet Device). Now the only thing I do with it is to check out if there are any useful updates, which there aren't since Nokia has discontinued support for the device, in effect, less than a year after it was released. The main reason for this is that the new Maemo OS which drives the N810 will only support the new generation of chips. The reasoning for the decision must have been quite simple for Nokia: the old generation is much too slow.

The iPhone is in the Lead, Can it Extend it?

The fact is that the personal internet experience must be fast to be engaging. The latency of the network means paradoxically that the devices themselves and the applications running on them need to be even faster. The current winner is hands-down the iPhone 3G. It's an absolute no-brainer that Apple should bring out a larger device, with a keyboard, running a variant of the iPhone OSX. In fact this does look like it's about to happen, and I for one will be queueing for it if it does. Apple is also solving most of the actual phone issues with the OS3 generation coming out this summer which will enable essentials such as Bluetooth, copy / paste and more effective SMS / MMS messaging.

Nokia Goes All Out

The reality is though that the iPhone is not currently a very good phone, short battery life, poor reception, poor Bluetooth etc. which means that a second phone is a must. My current 'Phone' handset is the Nokia 5800 and it's something of a mixed-bag to own one of these devices. The last week though has seen the experience improve a great deal. The negatives, for me, start with the terrible look and feel: cheap plastic and rubber, ugly screen and icons, lack of kinetic scrolling and an adherence to old, worse, user interface elements in the name of keeping things consistent with older devices.

Nokia, forget about backward thinking and look forward. The iPhone user interface is superb, and the metaphors it's introduced such as kinetic scrolling are not going to be complex for people to understand, especially when compared to the painfully slow metaphors currently used for scrolling in the 5800. The other basic problem is that the screen is too small. It makes things too fiddly, and in turn slows things down considerably. The final basic is that the 'home screen' is well short of what it should be in terms of giving you rapid access to key applications (actions). Instead we're faced with a tripple interface approach through the Media Bar, Home Screen and Application menu which just slows you down.

What's changed in the last week for my Nokia experience is three-fold: New OS, an upgrade from the previous 1.1 to 2.0 release. There's nothing obviously new in that, but it does seem a bit faster, and more importantly i can now download BBC iPlayer videos to watch when travelling. The second thing is that the 5800 now has a great Twitter client called Gravity. What makes it quite exciting is that this is the best mobile twitter client I have used on any device. It's interface does everything that Nokia's don't. What makes the experience even better, is that unlike the iPhone, the client can run in the background.

The third aspect which has me excited about my personal internet future from the Nokia side is the announcement that thousands of vendors have signed up for the Ovi Application Store. The store should allow Java, native apps (including Python) and Widgets to be sold / distributed directly through to the device, much as the iPhone App store does. This will greatly reduce the cost of rolling out applications to the Nokias, which in turn should mean lots of great apps, and a greatly improved experience.

Nokia really is pulling out all the stops for the N97 in a way that it never has before for any device. It's going to be the device which either sees Nokia regain it's leadership crown, or the end of an era. What's more I believe Nokia knows this and is doing everything it can to make it work out in the same way that the N95 was the clear leader when it was launched.

Android Still Sucks

For me the most over hyped player is the Android platform. Without the iPhone I would consider the G1 a complete breakthrough device, the problem is that the iPhone exists. I've blogged earlier on just how disastrous I think the G1 is, and the recent Cupcake upgrade hasn't really changed anything for me. The problem is that it isn't as good as the iPhone as a PID and it's applications are light-years behind, and it also is a bad phone, in fact it is rubbish. All the mock-ups I'm seeing of next generation devices don't seem to add anything either, and the new generation of apps all seem to be second-rate iPhone app copies. In practice it is now sharing the same role as the Nokia N810 (bag & desk but not pocket).

Blackberry Must Lead in More than Email

I'm not a big mobile email person, since 90% of my email requires more than a simple yes / no. If I was I sould no doubt have swapped my Nokia 5800 for a Blackberry Bold. Blackberry is announcing an endless rush of firmware updates and new (but very similar) devices. It's leadership in email is for me the main thing going for it, but is something that it will need to build on quickly if it's not to be eclipsed. The Storm suffers from too many poor UI decisions to warrant much of a lookin.

Palm Pre, The Dark Horse?

The Palm Pre does look like it could be a great device, but I don't see myself buying it. Why, because it doesn't have a full landscape QWERTY keyboard (as opposed to mini vertical one). The notifications screen, already on Android and coming to the iPhone 3OS is the hot feature for me, but the key will be how many 3rd party apps are developed, which means that I'm unlikely to buy this handset for some time.

The Others

The most notable absentees are probably Microsoft, Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson and LG. My problem with all of these is that they don't seem to have the right mix of handsets and ecosystems. The HTC HD handsets seem to be leading when it comest to Microsoft devices, and Microsoft has made a fair amount of headway with it's own ecosystem developments, but it seems to have stalled when it comes to developing the user interface of its mobile paltform.

Samsung and LG are probably too wedded to Korea to make much headway, in particular with services. Samsung is quite agressive at partnering, but that won't be enough to become the future leader. Sony looks like a 'dead-man-walking', whilst Motorola just looks dead.

What I Expect to be Using

The next gen devices I'm expecting to be using later this year are the Nokia N97 and the next gen iPhone, but time will tell. The dark horses are the update to the Nokia N810 (although I'm feeling a little burned with this product line) and the Pre if it turns out to be a great phone as well as PID.