Looking Back

In the ensuing 6 years, I’ve been going over and over what went wrong and discovered more lessons along the way: the market conditions were wrong, we were young and arrogant, and, for the most part, we didn’t really understand the magnitude of what we were trying to accomplish: to remind people, our goal was to launch a website in 16 countries (15 EU countries + the US) on day one, localizing our site for each of them. At the time (1999), no one had accomplished that broad a coverage (nor had anyone even tried to).

So it seemed a little crazy but, then again, crazy people had built Netscape, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon in the previous few years. So crazy seemed not only possible but it seemed to be the key to success on the Internet. The problems we encountered fell in a number of areas: currency exchanges, tax issues, language localization, integration with many fulfillment partners and a front-end experience that called for broadband connections. We basically wanted to build eCommerce 2.0 long before there was a web 2.0.

Looking Forward

So fast-forward to now. Broadband uptake is nearing 50% in many of the target countries and the number of users has grown tremendously, governments have learned about internet ecommerce and now have specific rules relating to it. And integration across many system is what web services and mash-ups are all about. Do I smell progress? So let’s revisit my old post (which later was published in Business 2.0) points and look at them through the 2006 lens.

The Currency Problem

Back then, the 16 countries we targeted meant 16 different currencies.

Today, with the rise of the Euro as a unifying currency, the same 16 countries only have 4 different currencies (the UK still being stuck on the pound sterling and Denmark keeping its currency a national one pegged to the Euro. The US and the Euro are the other two currencies covered.) This greatly reduces the complexity of pricing models across Europe and makes the overall cost of managing the catalog much lower.

Back then, we actually had to build our own currency tracker, with people inputing the exchange rates daily into the system to keep everything aligned.

Today, you can get access to currency exchanges via web services (just off the top of my head, I can think of Reuters and CBS Marketwatch providing this type of data), therefore automating what was once a manual task and, once again, reducing administration costs for the catalog.

Tax Issues

Back then, there was no consistency in the way taxes were assessed on goods sold online. The financial people at Boo.com version 1 spent a lot of time with a big 5 accountant group and a lot of local government to lobby for normalization of rules around taxes on cross-border business.

Today, because all of those governments understand the value of internet commerce and because many have worked in conjunctions with each other (through the G8 and the EU) to normalize rules surrounding taxation of goods sold on the Internet the problem is easier to solve.

Back then, we had to build our own systems to track all the vagaries of the different tax systems. It wasn’t a build vs. buy decision because there were no packages offered on the market to deal with this.

Today, you can buy software packages that has all the taxation rules built in so that problem is no longer one you need to build for. You can just buy the technology and let the vendor worry about the changes in taxation laws.

Language Localization

When we set out to build Boo.com, a strong component was the idea of offering the online store in the local language of the user. Boo.com was actually the first store to offer as high a level of customization by market and we had to make a number of changes to the e-commerce software package to make it into a globalized platform. Remember that, at the time, e-commerce was primarily the domain of US and UK companies so selling in a language other than English was rare. E-commerce sites which sold goods in non-English markets were generally customized on a one off basis but no one, prior to Boo.com, had attempted to have a single back-end system run multiple countries.

Today, more vendors are selling solutions which can be customized across a variety of western languages. The solutions are not yet perfect but, for the most part, they work (there are still a number of issues when it comes to localization across 2-byte languages, especially when it comes to site with mixed languages.) Back then, we also had to develop a content management system that could handle translation workflows and management of content in multiple languages. It wasn’t pretty but it worked and it required a lot of internal translation to happen. Each product had description, sizes, etc… available in multiple languages. That part was actually a fairly large management of content nightmare. Today, modern content management system can handle more complex workflows (allowing to track when translations are completed) and even can provide hooks to farm-out translation of the content to external parties. This substantially reduces the cost of a multi-country offering.

Integration with fulfillment partners

Back then, a fair number of people at Boo.com were experts in EDI (or electronic data infrastructure) because EDI bridges were the only way to integrate into our fulfillment partners. Web services didn’t exist so we had batch jobs triggering every hour to the warehouses at DeutchePost and UPS so they could pick, pack and ship the orders. This was expensive and probably the area where we lost the most money on a single transaction.

Today, services like fulfillment by Amazon provide the same service at a substantially lower cost and with less integration headaches as web services are making it easy to integrate their services into an e-commerce operation. That saving alone could justify the existence of Boo.com 2.0 (actually, it would be 3.0 as FashionMall tried to resurrect Boo.com once already).

Front-end

No discussion of Boo.com can be full unless we talk about its front-end.

The Broadband Penetration Problem 

Many people laughed at the attempt we made at creating a more user friendly interface to e-commerce. Back then, a more interactive experience meant using Flash. It was the only way to get a lot of parts moving together. Things like Zoom-In/Zoom-out or Rotate type of effects were hard to accomplish with DHTML and much easier to do so with Flash. Since XML didn’t exist, we didn’t have AJAX. Since we didn’t have AJAX, we went with Flash. Since we went with Flash, the assets were large. Since the assets were large and the average user was connecting via a 56k modem, the site looked slow.

The idea was that every click should feel snappy, a model now common with AJAX-based applications but we failed in one assumption, which is that broadband penetration would move at a faster rate. Our expectation were that 1Megabit lines (much slower than what one now gets via cable or DSL) would be readily available within a year. That was a very flawed assumption and we had not planned any contingency for any slower a deployment.

Selling clothes requires details

Another interesting challenge was that we were trying to sell clothes online. Evaluating a DVD, CD, or book online is easy. However, clothing is different: when people shop for clothes, they like to feel the fabric, look at the details in the fabric. That experience was hard to reproduce online. Back then, what we set out to do, in order to help mimic some of the experience was to have highly detailed pictures of the goods. 

Every product was shot multiple times at a stunning 5 megapixels per picture (the highest possible resolution at the time). This meant picture files that were about 1–2 Mb per file, something that seems small in the era of Flickr and YouTube but was massive in the era of 56k modems. The advantage of such detailed pictures was that you could zoom in to a level higher than what you could do in a store (part of our attempt to compensate for the fact that you couldn’t touch the merchandise). Today, such level of detail is standard among most of the online clothing manufacturers and with more broadband lines, it’s no big deal.

Another innovation we introduced was the presentation of products in 3D. You could basically rotate every product in our inventory any way you wanted. This, at a time when QuickTimeVR was not on the marketplace. This meant getting our photography partners to come up with completely new approaches to taking product shots, sometimes requiring as many as 15–20 shots per product in order to get everything right. Those pictures were then taken into Flash and adjusted so that you could rotate the product and zoom in and out of it, a feat that now seems pretty standard, using QuickTimeVR.

All that photography work didn’t come cheap, especially when you consider that this was done across 5,000 products and that all the assets were then stored on our servers (Hard Drive space was nowhere near as cheap as it is now). 

Modeling

Another innovation was the introduction of virtual models you could use to try the clothes on. Today, Sears offers a lower quality version of what we were offering back then (their model still requires a reload of the full page to turn it.) Because all the products had 3D equivalent, modeling them was relatively easy and we decided to throw it in as an extra feature that helped enhance the user experience. Once again, because of the processing and bandwidth required to make that happen, the idea was ahead of its time. 

Miss Boo

So we now all know that chatty avatars on web sites are not a good idea. The concept behind Miss Boo was to help make the experience similar to that of a store, with a sales assistant (Miss Boo), helping you out. Our long term goal was to have Miss Boo attached on the back-end to a real person so we could have integrated IM while you were shopping (that plan never came to fruition as the company had other concerns after launch). In the process, though, we’ve learned that avatars are generally despised and probably helped many sites avoid them.

Tagging

Because we wanted the experience to be a more communal one, we had a way for users to tag clothing (well, we didn’t call them tags, we called them “LaBOOls” (labels, with a Boo in the middle, get it?) in the great tradition of badly named things on our site). However, because there was no AJAX or other way to quickly get the data back and forth, it required a reload of the whole page after each tag was applied. The feature was quickly killed in order to gain speed but I can’t think of any other site that had tagging on products at the time (if I’m wrong, please rectify me in the comments).

Chatty Tone

The BooZine (Boo Magazine) was our attempt to create a more friendly, open tone when dealing with users. We didn’t want to be just a store, we wanted to engage the users. When our forums (remember, this is before blogs were popular) started filling up with vitriolic comments, we were forced to shut them down, closing a channel of communication for users to us. It was a real shame but I think our attempt can be mirrored in the way most web 2.0 companies now have a blog that they use to receive feedback from users.

A more mature market

Back then, few people were buying stuff online. Even fewer were buying clothes online and an even smaller number than that was buying hip clothing. Considering all the challenges Boo.com was trying to address, its target market was just too small to make it a successful business.

Today, blogs like CoolHunting, HypeBeast or MocoLoco show that there is a market for the types of goods Boo was trying to sell. That, in itself, could be a good reason for Boo.com to come back: The market they were addressing is finally there. However, it may also be a reason for it to not comeback: the market they were addressing now has competitors in it.

Was Boo.com the first Web 2.0 company?

I have to admit that I’ve been feeling a certain level of uneasiness about Web 2.0: to me, there didn’t seem to be much there that I had not seen before: web services (yup, done since 2000), user generated content (tried it in a limited fashion with with the “labools” and forums), more transparency (tried that with forums in the past), chatty tone (attempted at Boo). What I failed to realize is that where we failed was in the way we implemented things. But looking back now, the reason it didn’t feel new was that much of that experimentation was on our site only, not part of a more widespread phenomenon.

Another thing that got me thinking along the way of Boo.com as a Web 2.0 company was the excellent post on Pixel Acres about the visual design of web 2.0. Let me explain, picking points from the article:

Integral to Web 2.0 is harnessing the input of website visitors. Users can generate content for a web service, promote it in a “viral” peer-to-peer fashion, and improve it’s data quality through their opinions and preferences.

Users of Boo could create their model, share it with friends (following the UGC model, I guess). So the input component was there, as was the sharing one.

Most Web 2.0 sites come across as friendly, approachable and small-scale, using subtle design decisions to gain our trust.

Every decision about the front end was to make it appear friendly, chatty and hide as much of the complexity as possible (that’s why so many people thought what we were doing was easy but badly implemented).

Bright, cheerful colors dominate Web 2.0 sites… Bold primary colors suggest a playful, fun attitude and also help to draw attention to important page elements.

One word: orange. The boo.com site had cheerful colors all over the place (sometimes so cheerful that I worried it would be seen as a toy)

Rounded Everything: The friendliness of rounded corners is in keeping with the comfortable, informal tone of many web 2.0 sites… In a great FontShop article analysing the logos of Web 2.0, it was clear that rounded typefaces are all the rage. This smooth approach to type lends a modern playfulness to a company’s visual identity.

Yup, Boo.com was round, very round, even the logo and the fonts. From a visual standpoint, it was much closer to today’s web 2.0 site than the ones it lived among.

Most Web 2.0 sites devote prime real estate to the message that they offer a free service.

Well, we kept pushing our “Free” boozine (Boo Magazine) and looked at it as a way to hook people into coming back again and again to the site.

You won’t find any stock photography of smiling support staff on a Web 2.0 site — that’s a tactic favored by small companies trying to mimic large corporations. Simple icons and screenshots are the order of the day when it comes to imagery on Web 2.0 sites. 3D and beveled icons can lend elegance and polish to a page design that is otherwise fairly stark.

Boo.com was 100% stock photography free. It was all icons and cartoons.

A good Web 2.0 app ought to be lightweight and easy for users to grasp, and clever visual design and copywriting can help remove barriers to entry. Smart use of layout, color, type and copy can go a long way towards easing the pain.

Well, we failed on the lightweight end of things but the design was to be as airy as possible.

As far as Web 2.0 is concerned, bigger is definitely better. Bigger text, that is. Large text is easy on the eye, and coupled with snappy copywriting makes information easy to absorb. And now that accessibility is cool, it’s possible to be a hotshot web designer and use enormous type.

… and back then, people said we didn’t make good use of the real estate because the fonts on our screens were too big. However, note that accessibility was inexistant at Boo.com

The layout of Web 2.0 sites might be described as minimal. With a focus on legibility and ease of use, good use is made of white space. White space allows important information to stand apart, provides rest for the eye, and imparts a sense of calm and order. Generous leading also makes text copy easier for the eye to follow. Some Web 2.0 layouts are so minimal that they verge on boring, but designed well, an uncluttered page can be incredibly tasteful.

Yes, we had a lot of whitespace.

Friendly, informal copywriting allows a more personal relationship with website visitors.

People complained that our content was too informal, actually. I guess taste has changed in the following years.

So, from a visual standpoint, we may have established some of the rules that are now considered good visual rules for Web 2.0 companies. Of course, feature wise, we didn’t have RSS (it had not achieved the level of popularity it now has) and worked largely as a walled garden (all interaction happened on our site) but Boo.com was probably sitting closer to a Web 2.0 sensibility than most companies that existed at the time.

Conclusion

Based on past history, the complexity that existed back then has largely disappeared, making it possible for Boo.com to exist in the web 2.0 world. The market has also evolved to the point where many of the innovations first introduced by Boo.com are now considered mainstream and where many of its barriers to entry seem to have disappeared. This means that Boo.com could have a chance at surviving this round. However, one would have to be careful about overspending on advertising (a crime that Boo.com was responsible of, with its massive multi-country ad budget). A question that remains on the viability of the brand is whether the errors of the past have damaged the brand to a point where it would not be able to come back. It is probably the most dangerous factor in the rebirth of Boo.com and, if the negative press of the past overshadows the re-emergence of this company, it could be a fatal flaw that could ultimately make this a bad idea.

I wish much luck to the parties involved in the relaunch. Hopefully, they won’t suffer from the same arrogance we suffered from in the first iteration of the company and will be able to build a strong business around this brand.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Why the Boo.comeback makes sense. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Size of the market

When talking about virtual worlds, I am focusing on the new space created by the gaming industry that allows to create online avatars and interact with other players in a fully immersive environment. From an economic standpoint, estimates range from around 100 millions to a high of US$1.5 billion a year. These are not insignificant numbers and they point to an emerging phenomenon and potentially the rise a new industry, with its own set of marketplaces, gathers, owners, creators, and marketers.

Marketplaces

To understand virtual worlds marketplace, one must first understand what si going on in those virtual worlds. When a player sets up an account, he’s given a basic set of skills. As he or she progresses and interacts with the virtual world and its denizens, the player gains more and more skills and goods. However, this type of interaction requires time. Some people have figured that, because time is money, the amount of time spend in a virtual world could be converted into real hard currency. Thus was born the concept of Real Money Trading (aka RMT), whereas players go to specialized sites and buy virtual goods with real financial currency.

The action initially started on auction sites like Ebay, where characters or other virtual goods range in price from a few cents to several thousands of dollars. Because the trades were largely unregulated, some companies, like Sony, decided to set up their own exchange while others (Internet Game Exchange, Massive Online Gaming Sales, Tek Gaming Supplies, Swag Vault, and Gamers’ Loot) have created specialized marketplaces to cater to this new phenomenon. This, in turns has led to the rise of two new classes of activities: informational ones that provide analysis on the financial going ons in those worlds and arbitration, whereas companies use people in the developing world to build up assets they resell to people in the developed world. Let’s go deeper in those areas.

Information Sites

There is now a nascent information industry surrounding the costs of goods in virtual worlds. For example, Eyes on Mogs is a shopping search engine for virtual goods. All the attributes of other search engines are part of it, including comparison shopping, comparisons of the different vendors, pricing, delivery date, and buy it now info. GameUSD tracks the financial value of virtual currencies over time, providing price trends across not only the provider but also the alternative marketplaces. MMOfx claims to track “over 18,000 price quotes daily” and provide information on the fluctuation of virtual currencies.

Arbitration

Another type of economic activity to have arisen out of the marketplace phenomenon is the arbitration of virtual work. As the primary pursuit in these worlds is the acquisition of wealth, status or levels, an emerging market has arisen to give people with real money a chance to bypass the time investment required to acquire those things. For example, Chinese workers get paid between $75 and $250 a month to work in World Of Warcraft, in 12 hours shifts, “killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods. Affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese to play the early rounds for them.” Similarly, Romanian players can make a living wage (the ABC News story I linked to says that $200 is a good wage for Romania) on the same kind of activity.

Edward Castranova, the leading economist on the subject of money in virtual worlds has been quoted as saying that “They’re exploiting the wage difference between the U.S. and China for unskilled labor.” What is basically happening here is that these companies have found a niche on the global marketplace to accumulate goods at a low cost and resell them at a premium. This type of arbitrage has been the way a lot of developing markets have revolutionized industries, from the export of manufacturing capabilities in the 20th century to the export of some service jobs nowadays. It’s a natural phenomenon and shows that those marketplaces are starting to develop a high level of maturity, which should be noticed by a lot more people.

Virtual Goods Ownership

Beyond the buying and selling of virtual goods in virtual marketplaces, there is also an emerging trend in the real estate business, which can be broken down into three main groups: real-estate owners, creators and integrators, and marketers.

Second Life is a virtual world more focused on the social aspect of virtual environments than on the goal oriented aspect of missions and war-craft. Fortune Magazine reported last year about the interesting case of Anshe Chung, a character created by a German woman who has accumulated more than US$200,000 in virtual land holdings in Second Life. She rents the property out to other people, after having developed the property. Similarly, the BBC reports that a 23-year-old spent £13,770 in Project Entropia and recouped his investment in under a year. In fact, the land rush has been so strong that Second Life has build a model around land use fees, generating a nice chunk of income in the process.

While visiting this world, I’ve talked to people who had few problems paying $75 per month to Linden Labs for those fees. This is pretty incredible when you think that all they are buying is portion of disk space on a server. In a way, the real estate market presented by those virtual worlds can be seen as a hosting fee in a 3D environment and could represent a high growth market (in a future entry, I will look at the opportunities in the Virtual Spaces in more details).

The Integration Model

Another nascent portion of this new industry is the integration game. As with any new technology, developing and managing something in a virtual world is an endeavor that requires specialized skills. New companies like The electric sheep company and Space Think Dream have emerged as developers/integrators, offering their services to other companies. Their main business is to use the skills they’ve acquired to help existing companies experiment in these new worlds. This is, in a way, similar to the type of work that was done by early web design agencies, treating virtual worlds as a new interface either to existing systems or to create a new value proposition.

Other companies have emerged with the sole purpose of selling digital goods in those worlds. SLexchange is a virtual market where people can buy and sell such goods. Similarly, the Electric Sheep company has created SLBoutique as a competitor to SLexchange. What is interesting here is that there is a whole ecosystem building around Second Life, allowing other companies to prosper based on this new platform. This is similar to what has happened with Ebay and allows us to better understand SecondLife as a platform for e-commerce rather than just a game, a fact that Philip Rosedale, CEO of LindenLab and the power behind Second Life, likes to emphasize. This explains why the company has received investments from people like amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie. Those people understand that this a new emerging platform and could see potentially high return on their investment.

Bridging the gap

The development of virtual worlds as a new platform is starting to take shape. Companies and organizations like American Apparel, the BBC, Major League Baseball, NASA, The American Cancer Society, Amazon.com and Wells Fargo are starting to experiment in that space. Increasingly, virtual worlds are becoming not only a new way to market but also a new integration point for e-commerce.

Some of the virtual worlds (Project Entropia, for example) have even gone as far as issuing ATM cards that allow denizens of those worlds to take virtual money and trade it for real money that they can use for regular economic activity.

Conclusion

With large amounts of real currency already moving through virtual worlds, we are looking at a major new economic phenomenon that parallels the initial development of the commercial web and the rise of software as platform in the last few years.

With a new ecosystem forming around some of the virtual worlds, there is a fair amount of incentive for a lot of people to see this phenomenon succeed. SecondLife will probably be an early winner in this race, largely due to how quickly it has managed to get other companies to rely on it. A few more established companies are also early in staking ground in this new space and will probably reap rich rewards for their efforts, expanding their brand into those virtual spaces.

While it may appear that this is largely a subculture of gaming, the phenomenon is much more widespread. In my next entry, I will go through the demographic profile of denizens of those virtual spaces, showcasing a rich and varied texture to this phenomenon.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Economic Activity in Virtual Worlds. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

For my readers who are not familiar with the concept, a podcast is essentially an audio file that is distributed via a syndication feed like RSS. Mosts podcasts are encoded in MP3 format and, for the most part, podcasts have been the equivalent of audio blogs. The initial concept behind them came in a dinner at Katz’s deli in New York (fall of 2000) when Adam Curry and I urged Dave Winer, who was then the only person keeping RSS on life support, to provide a way with RSS to distribute data other than text. Adam had written an article talking about the last yard issue in terms of delivering content in the home (realize this is before BitTorrent was popular.) From there, Dave added the enclosure item to the format and things were quiet for a long time. Last summer, Adam introduced iPodder, a program that simplified the creation of what he called podcast, with the idea that they would be distributed to the iPod. Since then, the idea has gone from being the domain of a few geeks to becoming a mainstream effort.

Today’s announcement about the creation of KYOU shows that the idea is now going mainstream and I expect podcasting to make the cover of many business magazines in the months to come, replacing blogs as the new new thing. While the station is small, it’s an interesting experiment in using consumer generated data to create new programming. In a way, this is the next evolution in media, going from tightly programmed shows (Sitcoms, TV dramas, etc…) to shows leaving room for more individual reactions (“reality” TV shows) to programming with no varnish whatsoever.

The one thing that fascinates me about this progress is the elapsed time between introduction and mainstream adoption for such technology. The web browser took half a decade before being adopted by the mainstream; E-commerce went from geek street to main street in a couple of years; but podcasting has gone from zero to hero in under a year. I was recently surprised when I heard podcasts being casually mentioned on my local radio station. With today’s announcement, this is the second time I’m surprised by the rapid adoption for this new technology.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Podcast Acceleration. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Strong Growth

France had been a leader in terms of establishing an information society but was starting to get trapped by its legacy Minitel tool. The Minitel was introduced in France in the late 70s as essentially a precursor to the web. The service allowed users to read online versions of magazines and newspapers, shop in online catalogs, chat, play games, and have access to every government office. In the early 80s, Minitel penetration became so high that the government-owned phone company decided to drop printing of phone books and move that service to the Minitel.

Fast forward to the late 90s. France is still on the Minitel and the Internet has gotten wide acceptance in the United States. At that point, Internet penetration in France is sluggish as few people see any value in it. As a result, the French government issued an ambitious plan to move France onto the Internet. As is the case for every major government project, little happened for several years.

However, the combination of government support for a new Internet initiative and the rise of global services finally started a revolution in French online services. According to several people I talked to in Paris and in the south of France, the effects of the Internet were not really felt until about a year ago, when a sudden usage explosion started. From 1999 to 2001, the number of Internet users in France tripled and it is expected to double this year to about 30 million. As more and more services are now moving away from the Minitel and onto the Internet (as I was told by an American living in France, the Minitel is now fairly useless as most everything has moved onto the Internet.)

Combined with growth in other European countries, this represents a market of almost 150 million users in Europe.

Broadband

While most Internet users in Europe still use narrowband, a few people are starting to make the move to broadband. However, prohibitive costs for DSL mean that most broadband users in France are accessing the net via cable. A DSL line can cost over 100 euros whereas a cable modem connection can be had for as little as 15 euros, with averages of 30–45 euros per months for a 500Kbps connection. The big advantage of such connections in Europe is that local phone is metered whereas broadband is not. As a result, heavy Internet users are finding that it is less expensive to get a broadband cable connection than it is to use a modem and phone line.

The Euro

For the first time in history, 12 countries have simultaneously gotten rid of their currencies and moved to create a single monetary block: the Euro is here and it has wide implications on global E-commerce.

No more Austrian schillings, Belgian, Luxembourg or French francs, Finnish markka, German Marks, Greek drachma, Irish punts, Italian lira, Dutch guilders, Portuguese escudos, or Spanish pesetas. No more complexity in trying to convert those from one to the other when doing electronic transactions. Now, the Euro is the currency for this whole zone (dubbed the Eurozone) and it represents a very large market, larger, in fact, than the American market in terms of customers.

One the biggest challenges in dealing with the European market was the lack of standardization when it comes to laws, shipping, currency, and language. With the Euro, a large portion of that problem can be taken care of as members of the Eurozone start moving towards developing a similar set of economic policies.

Essentially, the Euro takes away the barrier of multiple currency transactions that held back some users from shopping online and some vendors from launching e-commerce sites.

A couple of years ago, I alerted our readers to the fact that Europe was quietly rising as a new giant in the global E-commerce arena. With the rise of the Euro, this message is becoming more important. Now that a market of almost 150 million people has been created, the US is no longer the only place where E-commerce can work and as such, it is important for people in the US to start looking at technological developments in Europe. In the long run, a number of European companies will probably become some of the larger players in the online space.

Wireless connectivity

While everyone in the U.S. is starting to pay attention to WiFi, the wireless computing revolution has not yet taken hold in Europe. On the one hand, cell phones keep getting smaller and offering more features (Multimedia messaging is started to take hold among European digerati), there seems to be some lag in the adoption of wireless computing offering. A few underground efforts are getting organized, in a fashion similar to that seen in the USA a couple of years ago.

Conclusion

The Internet space in France seems to now follow a curve similar to the one experienced in the United States in the late 1990s. However, the lack of venture capital and the fact that, much like the United States, France is suffering from an economic slowdown, have tampered the explosion. While acceptance for everything Internet is growing, the adoption of networked technology is following a course that is different from that of the US and UK. While there will be strong growth in the Internet field in France over the next year, expect that revolution to be relatively quiet, compared to what was experienced in other countries.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet in France 2002: An overview. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Hybrid World Lives!

Many of you may remember the February 10th issue about Hybrid Computing. While talking with Birger Steen, CEO of Scandinavia Online, I discovered that the concept is not that far off the market. It is his contention that WAP-enabled phones are largely a pain in the back when it comes to interface. Having to key in every letter on the small phone keyboard is far from the easiest thing in the world. As a result, Scandinavia Online has developed a set of services that allows users of their portal jump on their site and configure their WAP view on the web. From his point of view, this is the best service he can offer now to wireless users.

The point was reiterated by a few people around the conference that told me that going to the web to configure a cell phone was the best way to deal with the small screen interface problem encountered by most WAP phones. Anne Rasmussen, of WAPportal.net demonstrated how their company plans to offer a similar service in a hosted fashion for corporate sites and others. The word around Scandinavia is that if you want to find the best way to configure a WAP phone, you have to go to the web via a computer to do so.

M-Commerce Huge … but not for Etailers

Another significant trend is the rise of M-commerce. In Finland, and to a lesser extent Denmark, Norway and Sweden, people can already use their WAP phones to buy from vending machines. The vending machine has a telephone number on it. You dial that number and a credit is added to the machine, to be billed on your phone bill. With the introduction of security in the new WAP standards, a few people were talking about how in the future the question “will it be cash, check, credit card, or phone?” may not sound silly.

What they envision is that WAP phones could become the new credit card.

A recent survey found that in Scandinavian countries, 82% of the people would go back to get their cell phone if they forgot it before leaving home, while only 64% would do the same thing if they forgot their wallet. The basic concept is one that may be foreign to those of us who live in the United States and revolves largely around the fact that GSM phones are equipped with a small identification chip called a SIM card. You can take the chip out of one phone and put it in another and you don’t have to worry about changing phone number or contact info.

Because of the emergence of such a way to do billing, some of the speakers at the conference predicted that the long run path for mobile phone operators would be to merge with financial institutions as their services will increasingly resemble those of credit card companies.

However, few people were optimistic about the prospects of etailers when it comes to mobile phones. “When I’m in a store buying something, I’m not going to go up on the web to check if it’s available at a web store,” told me one attendant. “I want to get it now and not wait a few days for it to show up in the mail.”

As a result, the promise of m-commerce is good for software vendors (who will sell packages that allow operators to set themselves up as currency clearinghouse) and mobile phone operators (who could become the next big financial force) but unfortunately, current etailers will not fare as well.

Content is King… in a Wireless Republic

The promise of advertising supported content on wireless phone has been hailed by some as a new way to support content sites. Unfortunately, few content providers will survive in the wireless space as demand for those services does not seem to meet expectations. Talking with people from the Scandinavian arm of large American companies who have tried to go the wireless route as a distribution channel, I discovered that there was not much demand for those services. “Sure, people do check the price of their stock on the phones but they still call our voice line to place their order,” said one executive from an online trading company.

As a general rule, the demand for content seems to be limited to a few areas: entertainment (bars, clubs, and restaurants locators), financial (stock prices) and sport-related (latest scores). However, many of the people involved in those areas told me that they were still looking for a proper business model. The locators are looking at a coupon-like scheme, whereas bars can offer a special coupon and people can go to a bar and show the phone coupon to get a rebate on drinks (“It appears that beer is the hot wireless app” quipped one panelist). Financial services and sports services are currently looking at possible subscription based models or at deals with operators whereas they would share a portion of the revenue they are generating for the operators.

CN U RD THS

On the other hand, communication in the hot wireless app. SMS has clearly become the hot app when it comes to wireless service across Scandinavia and across Europe. Because operators are charging lower rates for data services than they are for voice traffic, short messaging has become the quickest way for people to get in touch. A new lingo is starting to pop up around SMS as people are trying to economize the number of keystroke they type (SMS messages are limited to 160 characters). As a result, the headline for this section would translate from CN U RD THS to Can you read this?

Convergence in the Making

I also talked to a bartender who told me that the previous night a woman was in the bar looking for some of her friends and asked him if he could change the TV channel to a particular teletext page (in a lot of European countries, TV channel use the extra bandwidth to carry data. As a result, while watching the BBCyou could switch to the BBC teletext channel and read the latest news, etc… on there). The channel this woman was using allowed her to converse with several of her friends in a TV-based chat room by using her phone and an SMS gateway. True convergence in my book but the problem here is where revenues for an online operator are. Unfortunately, the only operators who will make money on this will be the phone operators who are racking up extra data minutes of usages.

Smaller, Faster, Cheaper

The good news, from a user’s point of view, though, is that those services are coming in a smaller package. A lot of the phones I saw over there would put our American phones to shame. On average, European phones are now weighing about 2.78 ounces (79 g.), a form factor of 3.9 X 1.75 X .6 inches (101.5 X 44.5 X 17 mm.), and a battery life that allows for either 150 hours of standby time or 4 hours of talk time. Of course, they come equipped with voice recognition (so you can have the number dial based on a name you give to it), predictive text input (a new set of tools for SMS which allows the phone to predict what word you’re going to type based on your input), and are WAP ready. The most interesting thing is that they usually are priced under $200 which makes me feel that we’re overpaying in the US.

The future is now?

The new thing around that space, though, is not a smaller phone or a better way to do e-commerce but a new set of services around higher speeds of access. The first step in that direction is GPRS, which offers about 20kb per second and has been rolled out around Europe. This is seen as a way to distribute such services as music and better news on the phones. However, the real discussion is centering on UMTS which promises wireless throughputs of 2Mb per second or more. Portions of the UMTS spectrum have already been allocated in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Finland, with the rest of Europe moving quickly on allocating this space. UMTS proponents envision the use of wireless video conferencing and a better Internet experience to result from this new development.

Euro Fighting

One of the big challenge in terms of doing business in Europe is location. Because most of the European countries are too small to create an actual market for digital services, European operators usually have to provides sites in multiple languages, and support multiple currencies. As a result, European etailers tend to be in favor of the Euro, which would make their lives a little easier. However, as the currency is slowly deflating in the currency market, opposition to the Euro is growing across Europe. On September 26, Denmark is holding a vote on whether to join the Eurozone or not and this election is seen across Europe as a big test for the Euro’s power.

The reason it the Danish election is so important in Europe is that if the Danish vote fails, England’s upcoming vote will probably do so too. As a result, there is a lot of concern across Europe about this election. Many etailers I met in Copenhagen told me that they were trying to organize themselves to push for adoption and work across borders when it comes to those election. Danes I talked to told me that British conservative politicians (who are opposed to joining the Eurozone) had been lobbying in Denmark. This is a race that etailers both in Europe and the United States should pay attention to as it will most probably dictate the viability of the Euro as a currency and, if the Euro succeeds, could mean less headaches to all of us.

Going beyond Economic matters, support or lack thereof could mean either an acceleration or a slowdown for eEurope, a new initiative by the European Union to become a force in the information age by normalizing rules related to e-commerce across the difference members of the EU and offering incentives to companies that want to bring net services to the EU marketplace. Among the initiative supported under eEurope are net access in public schools and public centers, lower access costs for businesses and individuals, agreement on common specifications for a smart card infrastructure, financial support for emerging tech companies and a number of social support and government services becoming available to all via the Internet.

All and all, what eEurope would mean is that countries would work in the EU government to set up rules about the Internet. I do not need to tell anyone reading this that it would be better for those of us in the industry as we would not have to lobby several governments in order to get the proper support for our industry.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title From Scandinavia With Love. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At the same time, the World Wide Web Consortium has introduced the P3P, a new standard to facilitate the distribution of a web site’s privacy policy.

Implementing P3P, users could choose to visit only Web sites that promise not to track their movements or to collect personal information. Or they could decide to go to Web sites that collect personal information, like their name and address, but only if that company promises not to share that information with anyone else. The browser will take care of notifying them of each site’s policy and let them decide whether they want to opt in or out. With Microsoft and Netscape being involved in those efforts, expect the next iteration of web browsers to be P3P-compliant.

The CDT has endorsed P3P as a step in the right direction. While it stops short of saying that it is the be all end all of privacy, the CDT praised P3P as an “important opportunity to make progress in building greater privacy protections in the Web experience of the average user.”

The CDT warns, however, that P3P will not insure that companies follow privacy policy nor will it ensure data safety in countries where no data privacy law has been enabled. More critics have said that P3P was not the appropriate answer because it created a default where companies could grab any data and users had to opt out of that gathering. This, to certain consumer privacy advocates, is bad because they believe that most people will not bother with opting out (studies on opting out of any kind of data gathering have shown few people polled bothered to do so, thus giving more control to corporations). In other words, while concerns around the issue are high, most people don’t want to have to deal with it and calls for increased protection are starting to pop up on Main Street as well as in congress.

The Federal Trade Commission, which up until recently had a laissez-faire attitude towards such data gathering has now recommended that Congress enact legislation to ensure a minimum level of privacy protection for online consumers, establishing basic standards of practice for the collection of information online. The recommendation includes four basic areas of protection:

• Notice: Web sites would be required to post a privacy notice telling consumers what data they gather, how they collect it, how they plan to use it and who has access to it.
• Choice: users should have the right to decide how their information would be used beyond a transaction.
• Access: Web sites would be forced to give consumer a chance to access the information that has been gathered about them and make modifications including deletions and corrections.
• Security: Web sites would be required to take steps to protect the privacy of users in order to ensure that data would not leak out unknowingly to other sources.

These suggestions mirror the 1998 European Directive on Data Protection, which was enacted to control the use of personal information gathered on European citizens. It has already been put into law by eight of the fifteen European Union countries. Originally, the European directive does not allow American companies to gather any data on European consumers because there is a lack of protection for personal data in the United States. However, discussions between the European Union and the US department of commerce are currently under way to allow American companies some protection. Passage of the FTC recommendation into law would insure compliance and alignment between European law and American law, which would facilitate global e-commerce.

However, there are a number of issues to look at. The FTC suggestions came as the result of a recent study the commission did, which showed that only 20% of the sites they surveyed did not fail in at least one of those four areas.

I would recommend to the readers of this newsletter that they examine their own internal policy on data gathering in order to comply with such rule. I may not be a rabid consumer data privacy advocate but I believe that these rules make sense for several reasons. Our business, as Internet builders and managers, is to ensure the highest level of customer services on our web site. Data protection is a new area of customer service that we need to concern ourselves with (the FTC is a political organization and I’m sure that they have some internal pollster telling them that consumers want to see their data protected). Web sites who pioneer data protection and develop strong rules internally will benefit greatly as consumers will feel more comfortable in their dealings with them. Beyond that, data protection is one of the fundamental pillars on which expansion into foreign markets lies. When I was working at Boo.com, one of the things that we worked on diligently was compliance with the many European data laws. As a result, we ended up following the European Directive on data gathering relatively quickly (however, I was surprised to see that Boo had allegedly sold its customers list to FashionMall as part of its divestiture, leaving a huge question mark on the legality of the matter).

As a quick reference point, here are a few questions that web site operators should ask themselves:

• Do we have a privacy policy and is it posted?
• Does it provide information on every piece of data we collect? (for example, a number of privacy policies do not cover use of cookies, server logs, or emails send to an address on the site)
• Do we give consumers a chance to opt-out of that data gathering? If not, can we? If so, do we provide the necessary tools to do so (web-forms or email address)?
• Do we give users a chance to correct personal information we have gathered about them and select whether they want us to use it in the future? Do we cover every scenario under which that personal information will be used?
• Have we audited our site to make sure that the information is stored securely?

Let me address each of those points in more details.

Privacy policies

: the first thing in drafting a privacy policy is to involve the lawyers (I know that may sound stupid but I know of a couple of corporate web sites where that job was left up to the webmaster). While the lawyers are involved, however, a good privacy policy should be easy to understand so skip a lot of the legalese and explain your policy in plain English (think of it as a marketing piece: the message you are sending here is “we understand your concerns about privacy and here is how we are answering them”).

Opting out or correcting data

: Most web sites keep the consumer data in a separate database or set of database tables. As part of good netizen behavior, companies should create a user name and password for every user who decides to give them data. Among some of the tools you would provide to that user are: a form where the data they have submitted is listed and where they can make corrections. Furthermore, a second page should be offered to allow users to opt out of different marketing options (for example, a user could choose to opt into receiving snail mail special offers but not email ones). However, as part of these opt-out options, you should add some value to your data. If a consumer is willing to give you their snail mail address for marketing purpose, you could offer them certain special discounts on products. This could include discounts within your own store as well as on other web sites (example: imagine your online electronics store wants to share data about users who have recently bought a stereo system with a web site that offers music CDs for sale. As a way to entice customers to agree to your selling their name to another web site, they could receive a discount on CDs on that other web site).

Data audit

: The recent news about hotmail passing email addresses in the URL field showed that user data can sometimes leak out without your planning on it. Instead of passing such precise identifier, user a customer ID in the URL field. That ID remains unknown to outside web sites but allows you to personalize the user’s experience. A check of all the personalization features on your site should reveal such problems. Fix them before the news goes out. I had noticed the email address in a URL problem with Hotmail and sent them an email about three weeks ago but never heard back from them. Last week, I read about it on the front page of Cnet’s News.com. I’m not sure of whether my email went to the wrong person at Hotmail or to a mailbox that did not get read much but my feeling about seeing this pop up on the front page of a leading tech news site made me feel that data handling at Hotmail was sloppy at best.

Either way you handle it, the data privacy debate will not stop. You can choose to bury your head in the sand but ultimately, it will have to be dealt with. Why not lead the charge and ensure that you are in compliance before you are forced to do so?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Privacy Police Strikes. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What I came to realize is that what works for a computer does not necessarily work in a wireless environment. The main issue is input and output. A wireless Palm is great to get information but somewhat difficult to use to send out email (typing in graffiti being the biggest challenge so far) and WAP works well to get little bits and pieces of information but is limited to a set number of characters (depending on which version of WAP you’re using, you will get an allocation of between 1500 and 2000 characters). As a result, sending out something like this newsletter over WAP does not seem to make sense.

However, a new breed of services is now popping up and it could be the next big thing: connecting to the Internet by just dialing into a phone number. In order to test this out, I checked out several services: Tellme Networks, which launched last month to a barrage of publicity, and Quack, which has been quieter but is also launched. Other contender for the space (and all of those are launching “soon”) are Internet Speech, BeVocal, and 888TelSurf.

Tellme Networks

Mike McCue is no stranger to bleeding edge technology. I met Mike back in 1995, when he was running a company called Paper Software. Paper did VRML browser, at a time when VRML was not only cool but also seen as the potential future of the net. Netscape acquired his company and Mike ended up as VP of technology there. While there, he looked at the future of the Internet.

However, as many other Netscapees, Mike ended up leaving Netscape and founded a new company: Tellme Networks.

Their goal: to make the web as easily accessible as using a phone. Pulling talent from both sides of the browser war (Netscape and Microsoft), Tellme was a very secretive operations until a couple of months ago, when it announced its offering: a phone service that gives you access to news, weather, sports, stocks, movies and restaurant info.

An interesting concept but how well did it hold up? Would I be stuck in one of those horrible menus (press 1 to access news, press 2 to access stocks…) or would it be better, I wondered as I registered for the service. To my surprise, it worked very well.

There are a number of interesting features in this service. First of all is the text to speech engine, which is one of the best ones I’ve heard so far. It takes bits of information and relays them in a clear and understandable way, which I found quite amazing. The voice recognition algorithm also held up very well, clearly understanding what I was saying (for those of you who’ve heard me speak, you know I have a fairly strong French accent, which makes this all the more amazing).

But what about the selection? Well it is, in one word, adequate. Not great but not bad either. I was able to get stock quotes (an interesting feature allows you to use the touchpad to spell out a stock symbol if the service does not recognize the name of the company you gave it), grab the latest news from CNN (the only general news provider tellme offers), pick up the weather in New York, check out a movie schedule, get some restaurant info and be connected to the restaurant for reservations. Also interesting was the phonebooth, a feature that allows you to make 2 minutes phone calls anywhere in the US for free (brought to you by AT&T). All and all, I was impressed enough to save the number into my cell phone memory.

Quack

Quack offers basically the same things as tellme (with the exception of the phone booth) but requires you to set up personalization largely through the web. As a result, the service may seem a little kludgier. On the plus side, however, the voice recognition algorithm gets some points. For example, I requested stock price on Internet.com on both services. Tellme was unable to find Internet.com and asked me to enter in the stock symbol using the keypad. Quack immediately recognized the stock, gave me its symbol and, while playing ads, went on to retrieve the information. What was disappointing, however, was that their text to speech engine is not as advanced as tellme’s. The voice on the other end of the line was unmistakingly a computer when it came to particular bits of information (weather reports, stock quotes) compared to the syntax used by tellme.

Another plus for Quack is their caller-ID system: The service also recognized that my call was coming from New York and immediately gave me the weather report for that city (I had to request New York on tellme’s service).

All and all, I found very little difference between the two services, with the possible exception of Quack carrying traffic reports (which tellme did not offer when I tried it). However, since I am one of those New Yorkers without a car, traffic reports held little value for me. If I were outside of New York, I am sure that this service could be a godsend.

Looking at the future: the other contenders

Internetspeech and bevocal seem to be aimed at the same market. They both plan to offer similar services. InternetSpeech seems to go a step farther by trying to capture an audience that will be able to say a URL and get what’s on that page read to them. This could be interesting but can get kludgey as the example on their site shows. Going to Yahoo means that their service will read the links but also shows that it doesn’t know how to stop on a particular link.

However, a somewhat more promising concept is that of 888Telsurf, which plans to not only offer information but also access to an online calendar and address book as well as over the phone reading of emails. Advertising revenues will finance their service, like the others. Unfortunately, none of those services are available now nor do they have announced launch dates.

Where is it all going?

Obviously, those services do not plan to stand still. Each of them is trying to establish a beachfront as the new “portal” to the Internet. I personally believe that a lot of those will end up either being acquired or striking significant relationships with the current group of already existing portals. Ultimately, all of them will have to follow the lead of 888telsurf by offering email, address book and calendars as part of their standard package.

While they are all squarely aimed at the consumer market, I think that at least one of them will break away and start offering the technology as a software offering, allowing corporations to set up private intranets with dial in interfaces. For example, one could be able to call into the main office to get part numbers on something they are selling, or check the latest sales statistics for a particular region.

Another potential use for the technology developed here is in the Ecommerce arena. Why not use that technology to offer a call-in service for ordering. Wanna get that new book from Amazon.com? Why not call 1–800-AMAZON (or whatever their number will be) and order it via phone. This could go over the scare hurdle that some people still have about online commerce.Or at least, it will give it a new dimension.

The other thing that could help those offerings become more popular would be the integration of comparative shopping features. I can see myself in a store, looking at prices on a particular item I want to buy, then pulling out my phone to check if someone will offer the same item for less.

Either way they play it, I think that this group of companies will present the first serious challenge to WAP, unless more content providers start offering WAP-enabled content (at current time, the selection is fairly weak).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Challenging WAP?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

I’ve been looking at the press coverage and it seems that some of the coverage does not work out. For starters, Boo.com’s failure is not an example of why B2C E-commerce will fail, it’s an example of why Boo failed itself. Nor is it a failure of E-commerce in Europe.

Now that the company is buried, I’d like to take a look at what went right and what went wrong with the company and go into more details as to what we should learn from that failure. I will try to summarize what I learned over the 6 months I spent there but I may be off a little here and there since it’s been a while since I’ve left the company.

Boo was the first company to launch from the ground up in multiple countries from day one. This represented a set of challenges that were previously unadressed, ranging from technology challenges to more traditional issues in generating a global brand. While I was working for Boo, I was in charge of developing the back-end fulfillment system, a platform that allowed us to handle multiple currencies, multiple languages, on the fly tax calculation, and integration with multiple fulfillment partners. Let me go into more details on what this means.

Multiple currencies

If you want to trade globally, you can’t only offer US dollars. As a result, you need to figure out a way to handle multiple currencies ranging from dollars to pounds to liras to francs, to deutshmarks, to kroners, etc… If you are planning on doing this well, you have to peg your prices to a particular value. However, you have to realize that prices are not the same in every country and what may seem expensive in the US can be seen as cheap in other countries. This is where you have to make a decision as to whether you want to set a fixed price in the local currency or set a more dynamic price that is affected by currency exchanges and other fluctuations. It’s a fascinating problem in and of itself but it’s one that we discovered to be a big pain to deal with.

In the end, Boo built a system which allowed us to set a different price for each country or set a single price for all countries and have that price be translated in the proper currency based on a set exchange rate. It was a bit of a kludge but it worked and, to this day, I haven’t seen an Ecommerce shop with a similar system.

LESSON:

When dealing across multiple countries, decide early on how you want to set up your pricing scheme, it will save you headaches down the road.

Multiple languages

First of all, forget translation software packages. They are still relatively immature and there is (at this point anyway) little hope that they will mature much beyond their current point in the near future. If you’ve taken any linguistics course, you know that grammatical rules can hardly be standardized for several languages. For example, something as simple as a verb can become a whole new set of problems. In English, there is a relatively small set of basic rules. The verb “to want” breaks down into “I want, you want, he wants, we want, you want, they want”. Notice that there are only two basic variations here. In French, the same verb “vouloir” breaks down as follows: “Je veux, tu veux, il veut, nous voulons, vous voulez, ils veulent.” In this case, there are 5 different variations. In spanish, it’s six… and so on. Take that problem and try to automate it and you are building a system that is bound to fail. The way we worked around it at Boo was to create a system where the copy was translated by hand by people who were fluent in the language.

Unfortunately, another problem cropped up: British English and American English are EXTREMELY different. Considering that the assumption was that one version of each language was sufficient, problems cropped up and some of the perfectly normal British english stuff ended up being very offensive in the US. THAT was a major problem.

LESSON:

One language per country can be a dangerous road, check with the locals before making anything available to the general public.

On the fly tax calculation

This one almost killed me. In the US, it’s relatively easy to deal with taxation. For the most part, the only taxes you have to pay are for states in which you have a physical presence. Where it gets tricky is when your servers are located in one area and your offices are in another. Technically, that is two locations.

In the case of Boo, it got worse. For example, a sale to France was taxed three ways. Why? Quite simply because the company had offices in Paris, its servers were located in London, UK and its distribution center was in Cologne, Germany. However, the interesting part of the problem was that we were making a sale but not delivering a good in the UK, delivering a good but not making a sale in Germany, and making a sale and delivering a good in France. This was just one example. Multiply that by the number of countries the company was doing business in and it soon got VERY complicated. Add to that the fact that certain goods were coming from China or Taiwan and the picture got so clouded that we had to bring in tax attorneys to help us on the details.

LESSON:

Hard to believe, but accountants and tax attorneys should be part of your development cycle if you are developing global Ecommerce apps.

Integration with multiple fulfillment partners

The main issue here was dealing with different file formats for DeutschePost (the European fulfillment company) and UPS (the company that did fulfillment for the US). What we ended up doing was create an EDI link to those guys (DeutschePost was not web-enabled yet) and create a set of filters for each of them. A simple answer to a simple problem but this little answer cost about 150 man months of work as the content had to be migrated from the old (untagged) setup to the new one. Because the original database was originally set up wrong, we had to totally reorganize the schema and refit the content into it.

LESSON:

Plan early, think of all that can go wrong, and then plan it again. Usually, spending more time on specs saves you from many headaches down the road.

Where’s the plan?

When I joined the company in August, the launch was behind schedule by three months and we had ten weeks to the Christmas season. The first thing I asked to see what the project plan. It didn’t exist. People were working on bits and pieces of the project without communicating with other people they were affecting. Within a week, we put together a MS-project chart and things started to move properly.

LESSON:

An e-commerce project without a development plan will always be “this close” to launch but will never launch.

Front end is technology

One of the biggest failures at Boo was to assume that the front end was not a technology issue. Up through launch and beyond, the front end team was first reporting to business development and then to marketing. This was a capital mistake that I kept fighting over. A web site front-end is interface design, it’s not a marketing exercise. It should include people who are versed in this and not just people who know about pretty colors. Ultimately, I think this was one of the big failure factor in the company.

LESSON:

No matter how good your backend systems are, the users will only remember your front end. Fail there and you will fail, period.

There are many other reasons for which Boo failed (I’d rather not go into them but I can say that the press is on the mark on a lot of their accusations) but ultimately, there were a lot of really smart and really good people there who worked very hard to put together what, to my mind, was an amazing back-end operation. Lack of communications to and from the top was definitely a problem as well as a lack of understanding of Internet time (the redesign of the site I heard about on the day after launch has not yet happened and probably never will now). In the end, though, Boo’s failure was not that unexpected to anyone who had worked for or with the company. Boo.com did not fail as an Ecommerce company, it failed as a company, period. The thing that took it down were not Ecommerce related as much as they were just plain business. Yes, I’m a bit saddened by the fact the company went downhill but I already knew this was going to be the outcome back in January when I left.

Ultimately, Boo is a typical example of a lesson that many VCs are pushing these days: Management makes or break a company.

Let’s hope we all take that lesson, remember it, and let Boo stand as old mistakes we will never make either again (for those of us who made them) or at all (for those who haven’t).

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Boo.com Goes Bust. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

AOL started moving further on its AOL Anywhere Strategy by announcing partnerships to deliver its Instant Messenger services on the Bell South and Sprint PCS network and to equip Neopoint, Nokia, and Motorola devices with the necessary software to do this too.

Microsoft announced partnerships with Nextel and Airtouch to deliver MSN to their networks. This follows recent announcements by Microsoft that its technology would be integrated in Sony and Quallcom wireless devices.

Meanwhile, Palm Computing announced a deal with Sun Microsystems to make Sun’s iPlanet service available to Palm VII users.

But with all the hype, one has to wonder whether wireless is truly here and what hurdles it has to overcome. From this issue on, I will take a quick look at some of the issues facing wireless web implementors these days, adding wireless as a new category of coverage. We will start with the formats.

WAP, WML, HDML, PQA???

It seems the wireless space in adept at developing a new set of standards. While this world is just burgeoning, a number of implementations have already surfaced.

WAP

: As defined by the WAP Forum, WAP is the Wireless Application Protocol. Think of it essentially as HTTP for the wireless crowd. Backed by the W3C, the IETF, and the ECMA, as well as most large wireless industry players, WAP has become the de facto standard for wireless delivery. However, some companies (NTT comes to mind) have tried presenting alternatives to WAP and have so far been relatively unsuccessful. However, I doubt that WAP will go very far as it limits the number of characters that can be sent to about 1600. For stock quotes or weather reports, it’s a great think but beyond that, I doubt that anyone will use it for Ecommerce or content.

WML

: WML stands for Wireless Markup Language and is an XML based subset of HTML. However, a war as broken out in that space, with phone.com (one of the early pioneers in the wireless space) striking out on its own and developing a competing standard called HDML.

HDML

: HDML, or Handheld Markup Device Language, phone.com proposal for a new markup language. At the current time, the W3C has worked with phone.com and other markup language partners in an attempt to resolve the incompatibilities between the two offerings. With the cachet of WML increasing over the past year, phone.com has started supporting both format but offers HDML has a language with new tags that allow it to extend WML applications. Because it was an early player in the field, phone.com has taken a lead and could be the Microsoft or Netscape of that space. As a result, the extensions they are providing can’t be ignored.

HTML 4.0 mobile

: Last year, with the introduction of HTML 4.0, the W3C made some recommendations in terms of supporting HTML for wireless devices. Throwing further confusing in the wireless space, the W3C decided that HTML 4.0 and its successors might be the way to go, throwing more oil on the wireless fire. While no recommendation has been made yet on an actual standard and in spite of the W3C’s claim that it is working to resolve disputes with the W3C, expect some serious in-fighting between the different groups as they try to position themselves in the next hot web application space.

PQA (Palm Web Clippings)

: A couple of years ago, I pointed out that the Palm OS could be a potential Java competitor in the non-PC devices space. As could be expected, Palm went out and introduced the Palm VII, a wireless device with connections to the web. What was surprising, however, is that instead of going out and supporting either WML, HDML, or even HTML, they decided to introduce their own format to distribute web content: PQA or the Palm Query Application language. PQA is a paired-down HTML version that allows you to distribute content on the wireless Palm platform. Since services like OmniSky plan to offer wireless access to Palm devices other than the Palm VII, and since Palm already has an established footprint in the PDA space, expect PQA applications to pop up left and right.

A lot of format but what do I implement for?

At the current time, it seems there are no clear winners in the space however it seems clear that WAP has a strong lead in the delivery space for small bits of data. But WAP will not be the way to do Ecommerce or content as a clear character limitation makes it fairly useless for this. On the markup front, I’d strongly recommend looking at WML as it has received support from some of the larger players (Microsoft and Sun, among others) and seems to be the basic level of functionality. However, you should also look very seriously at the PQA format because of Palm’s extremely large footprint in the PDA space.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Wireless: A confusing Landscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

What is Boo.com ?

Boo.com is aiming to build a global e-commerce platform that will allow to trade in multiple language and multiple countries. Based out of London, Boo.com will initially sell wares in the United States and in Europe.

For those of you who may be interested, the ad campaign is starting this month with print ad already being available in Details, GQ, ESPN magazine, Vogue, and Elle (those are the only ones I’ve heard about so far but I’m sure there’s more)

What will you do there?

As senior adviser to the CEO (a consulting gig for now), I will be helping the company build its backend infrastructure. On a day to day basis, it means I will run a team that will build a world-class E-commerce system (I hope). Once we have built the system, I will most probably start focusing on internal applications and general strategy (I figure that will be in about a couple of years as building the infrastructure will most assuredly be a long term project).

Does that mean you think Net Quotient has no future?

NOT AT ALL. Since I started here, I’ve seen the company change hands, helped it being split up and acquired, and helped transform it from a do-anything-to-pay-the-bills (hasn’t that been the case with every startup that bootstrapped?) shop to a stable project implementor. I would recommend it to anyone who’s looking for professional Internet systems integration work to be done and will probably use it myself in the future.

If you like Net Quotient so much, why the move?

If someone had come to you with a job that pulls not only from your Internet experience but also from other background stuff (like my knowledge of European culture), would you turn it down? If you could get a chance to build a multi-country, multi-currencies system, something that hasn’t been done before, would you do it?

In my case, those were the main issues. I have to admit that it is tough leaving Net Quotient behind but this opportunity ended up being too good to pass up. I’ll get to spend time in Europe, and I’ll get my hands back into back-end coding, which I really enjoy.

The company’s based in London. Does that mean you’re moving?

Nope. While I initially will be spending a lot of time in London, I will be working out of our New York office. Eventually, I’ll be back in NYC full-time only going to London a week every months.

So when is this official?

I am leaving Net Quotient on August 13th and will start at Boo.com on the 16th of August.

Q: So where do we reach you now?

You can always use my personal email address or check my web site for most recent contact info. I will have my new work contact info on there as soon as possible.

Q: Anything else?

Yes, as I customarily do when I leave a company, I’d like to recognize a few people that have definitely made my leaving Net Quotient a very difficult task. I have made some very close friends here and I hope I will remain so with them for many years to come.

First of all, I would like to thank Jonathan Wallace, Net Quotient’s president. I’ve learned a lot from Jonathan in my stay here, most of which is how to temperate myself. For those of you who’ve met me face to face in the past, you might remember an overly agitated kid who was going in a billion directions at once. Jonathan helped me focus more and for that, I will be forever thankful. Furthermore, he’s a big movie buff and we spent countless hours chatting about the latest flick.

Jon Davis, NQ’s big man in New York, is another friend I will regret no longer working with. He often was there as a cheerleader when, exhausted by hours of work, I would flinch and worry that I was doing it all wrong.

Harry Kapsales, one of our systems architects, was a close smoking and then non-smoking partner. Together, we manage to kick that nasty habit and became good friends along the way, trading jokes and views on the industry.

The rest of NQ’s management We went through two acquisitions together and, as is the case in such crazy times, ended up bonding in the process. From Chett Rubenstein (New York sales) who brought me up on all the latest sales theories, to Andy Galewsky (the Austin boss) and his Texan one-liners, I want to make sure that, if we’re ever in a war, I’ve got the whole management team of NQ in my foxhole!

The rest of the NQ New York office. There’s a little tradition here that we all go out at lunchtime to grab food, and bring it back to the office where we talk about news, movies, music, etc… as well as joke around (interestingly enough, the talk of sports is fairly limited). This combined with the office happy hour on Thursdays made for a very fun atmosphere and I will miss them all.

Anyway, I’ll miss working with those guys but considering how small our industry is, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before our paths cross again.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Tristan Goes to Boo.com. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The concept is fairly simple when when you think about it: Creating groups to get volume discounts on products. A single product was up for sale (3Com’s Palm V, which they offered for $350 to the first 50 buyers to come in) but the concept makes sense. If you’ve ever been into a Price Club or Costco store, you’ll understand it fairly quickly: the more people agree to buy the product at its current price, the lower the price gets. The buyer is guaranteed to get the product they want at the price they entered in OR LOWER.

Think Ebay in reverse… Imagine being able to go out and say “I’m willing to pay $2000 for this computer,” put in your order, wait a couple of days, and see that price drop to $1500. You net the saving, Accompany gets a transaction fee and everyone is happy.

As we all know by now, Amazon.com figured out that consumers wanted to be able to have an easy shopping experience online; Ebay figured out that people were willing to pay more for scarce good.

Accompany will most probably be remembered as the first company that went out and said “let’s get volume discounts.” Now, I’m not sure that they will be successful in the long run (their business model is based on a lot of people paying them commission fees on those sales) but I believe that the business model is one that will stick around and one that could revolutionize the way people buy products online.

This volume discount approach might also represent an interesting move in the buyer/seller relationship, moving the power directly into the buyer’s hands. Large corporations are usually wined and dined by big computer manufacturers, for example. Imagine now that this online volume buys model takes off and is coupled with something like a shopping bot and you have a veritable revolution in the shopping space, where complete disintermediation of everyone including the Amazon.com’s of this world is a possibility.

Why go to Amazon.com or Barnes and Nobles, when you can be part of a group of people that goes directly to the publisher and gets a huge discount as a result? What is the value add that a bookstore like Amazon provides?

Those are only a few of the questions Accompany’s new business model are raising.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Volume, Volume, Volume. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.