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.

If you look at the introduction of iTV as a set-top box connected to your TV set, you might notice a few features missing: no DVR –like or TV tuner capabilities. In my view, this is not a technical oversight, in my view but is part of Apple’s strategy to become the center of the media universe and expand the control they have acquired over the music industry to the video one.

The marketing

iTV is no different that Microsoft’s offering of the Windows XP Media Center extender but Apple seems to have a knack for making their products look like innovation when they are just fast followers.

First, there’s the name. While I doubt the final name will be iTV (due to the fact that there is already a TV network in the UK by that name and the fact that it’s a name that has been used as a standard for interactive TV), I suspect that Apple will come up with a similar sounding name, one that wil evoke a certain amount of coolness and connectedness. It will not be as jargonny as media extender. Apple is very good at marketing and it is clear that they now have their eyes set on the living room. As a result, the new name will evoke something that works as a natural in the living room.

Programming

People who have been tracking Apple’s effort in the space closely know that the company is now offering TV shows in a downloadable format either on a per episode or on a per-season basis. With today’s announcement, Apple is extending this model into the sport arena, with a partnership with the National Football League to offer season passes similar to the ones offered on DirectTV. This represents an interesting move into the sports arena and I suspect that announcements will eventually come for similar deals with other sports leagues. This is an interesting move in that it puts Apple clearly in a strong position as to TV programming and ensure that it gets a portion of revenue that could have gone to traditional broadcasters. What we may start witnessing here is Apple’s attempt to redefine television as a model where TV shows are sold by the show or by the season and not as part of a traditional channel offering or with advertising sponsorship.

This is an interesting gambit that flies in the face of existing business models for media distribution and it may impact traditional local broadcasters and TV networks. If Apple manages to disaggregate the content from a channel offering, the value of individual channels could eventually drop. Why watch ABC, CBS, NBC, or Fox when you can program your own channel. This is almost a natural progression in the media landscape changes that started with the introduction of DVRs at the beginning of this century.

Furthermore, if Apple is successful in its move, it may end up converting traditional cable companies into simple pipe providers, which would undermine the ambitions of players like Tim-Warner, News Corp., and Comcast in the integrated walled garden space. By moving content of IP based network, Apple would succeed and wrestling control of the channel distribution from those providers and force them to distribute their content over its store, picking up a fee for every show that is distributed.

… and then there’s Madison Avenue. Right now, a substantial portion of the revenue for television comes from models based on advertising. If Apple manages to convince a substantial portion of the public that buying a show from them is a better allocation of their entertainment dollars than subscribing to advertising-supported cable, we could see a major portion of advertising revenue evaporate. This would force TV station to focus more on live type of events, maybe even driving the broadcast networks away from a traditional mix and towards a more focused model, either centered around sports (which doesn’t necessarily work as a download as more people still want to see games live), news (with ample “from-the-field” type of coverage) and entertainment shows like “American Idol” where a low level of interactivity (“call this number to vote for your favorite star”) is tied to the programming, ensuring a required “live” showing. Sitcoms and TV dramas, as programmed type of entertainment, might be nearing the end of the advertising supported model. If you look at it in historic terms, this is part of a trend that was started by some of the pay channels like HBO and Showtime when they started producing original TV series. Because the series were more “edgy” and turned out to be quite good from a creative standpoint, people didn’t mind paying an extra $10 a month to watch them. Eventually, those series became available on DVD and found new audiences in that way. Apple took it to its logical conclusion by breaking them down to episode level, which allow you to get a taste, and season pass, which mirrors the DVD model but ensures that Apple gets a portion of the revenue.

Movies

And then there’s today’s announcement regarding movies. The movie downloads, while expensive, represent an interesting move into the video-on-demand arena. I suspect that, as time goes on, the price of downloads will drop and that Apple will extend their FairPlay DRM to establish a 24 hour or X number of plays model for a lower price. Because Apple has insisted on being able to release the movies in their store at the first time as they are released on DVD, it gives Apple a slight edge over the pay-per-view or cable TV model. Traditionally, Hollywood has distributed movies in theater first, then a few months later on DVD,then a few month later on pay-per-view, and finally on TV, traditionally on pay channels first and then broadcast ones last. Apple has managed to insert itself in the closest position to the theater release. Granted the price is high (in a lot of cases, equivalent to the price of a DVD with none of the added value and production cost) but I don’t think that Apple is looking at the DVD market right now.

They are trying to beat out the pay-per-view market for now so the release window is more important. If they successfully implement this strategy (and here again, the partnership with Disney makes sense as Pixar makes content that kids will want to see again and again in a variety of form, possibly getting parents to agree to purchase the movies online instead of DVD because they may be portable from one Apple device to another one), Apple will start impacting another revenue for traditional cable providers. As they do so, they might see more people buying movies, which will give them more power in dealing with the movie studios, which will result in their dropping the price first to $10 a movie and eventually to somewhere between $5 and $10 for a 24 hour or single play rental.

The Ecosystem

As I mentioned earlier, there is no DVR or traditional TV tuner built into the device. I believe that this was not due to a technical limitation but rather as part of a wider play to create an eco-system around the new device. Much like Apple initially allowed other companies to develop components that played well with the iPod, I believe they are trying to get a new ecosystem built around the new device. This will allow them to gage innovation in the space and identify which opportunities may be best for future integration or as components to add to the system. The initial connection will probably happen over the USB 2.0 connection on the device (which portends more connectivity options. Integration could also happen through some network type of interface connecting either wirelessly via the 802.11 connection (and notice here that they did not specify which flavor of 802.11 they were using) or the Ethernet connection.

This also could represent another revenue play for them as they license out a “made for iTV” (or whatever the final name is) certification model that would allow them to receive a portion of revenue on every device that plugs into the new box. This is a strategy that has worked well for them in the iPod arena and could be reproduced around the TV screen.

Why announce early?

Most surprising in today’s news was the fact that Apple pre-announced this product. There can be one or two reasons around this.

The first one could be that the announcement was added in the last few days because Apple was looking to announce more partnerships with movie studios but failed to get the contract signed in time to make the announcement (rumors have been that negotiations between the company and the movie industry have been tense, as studio heads want to avoid a repeat of what happened to the music industry and also fear ostracizing existing players in the DVD distribution world while Apple insists on making movies available through its store on the same day as DVD release). If you look closely, all the movies released in this launch are produced by Disney, which had little choice in the negotiations since its largest shareholder is Steve Jobs (as a result of the Pixar acquisition.)

Another possibility is that this is a pre-emptive move to stunt the arrival of Microsoft’s Zune product line. Microsoft has made it clear that Zune is part of an integrated device strategy that will allow them to take on the iPod. Considering that Microsoft already has multiple ways to get into the living room (Xbox, Media Extender, Windows Media PC edition), Apple may be worried about ceeding ground in that space and is working on a pre-emptive strike, announcing a product that will deliver everything the public want before Microsoft can make their announcement. The irony, if that’s the reason behind Apple’s announcement today, is that this is a typical Microsoft play: leverage a position of power in one market to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt in another one, therefore stunting the potential growth of new competitors as the public waits for your offering (Om Malik seems to agree with me on this). By doing so, Apple may also be buying itself more time to force stronger negotiating positions with the movie studios.

Let the Living Room Start

So the war is on with a number of different strategies: Cable providers are trying to leverage the power of their set top boxes to protect their de-facto monopoly in the living room.Sony is trying to leverage the power of its PlayStation franchise to get people to adopt its BlueRay technology and use the PS3 as the new center of the media world. Microsoft is taking a throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks approach, offering up multiple products ranging from set-top boxes to media center to Xbox to Zune. Apple is trying to take the approach it took with the iPod: late to the party but providing better design, a better marketing message, and an interface that has less feature but is easier to use.

All and all, it’s hard to figure out who will win out this one but I think that, so far, Apple may be taking the right approach and could extend its dominance in the audio space to a whole new arena.

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

Overall Numbers

The overall population, according to MMOG Charts, is currently about 12 million people strong. What is interesting, however, is the growth rate: looking at the linked chart, one can see the population doubling at an increasing rate: it took 24 months to get from 6 million to 12 but it took 48 months to go from 3 to 6. This accelerating rate of growth is an interesting one. Assuming that few other factors change, one could envision a 24 million people strong population within the next 12 months or, on a more conservative basis, within the next 18 months. Considering the upsurge in stories about the phenomenon in the mainstream press, growth will, at least, continue at the same pace over the next year. A recent estimate shows that SecondLife is growing at a rate of 22 percent a month though a more conservative estimate shows a growth rate of 15 percent. Any which way you play it, this is a fairly high growth rate.

Age

The videogame industry has evolved and every year, the average age of videogame consumer is increasing. At the current time, the entertainment software association estimates the average videogamer age to be 31. They also say that the average gamer has played for about 12 years, which would mean that they started at 18–19 year old.

Based on that data point, one could assume that the virtual world phenomenon would slant young. However, research by Nick Yee of Stanford University points to an average age of 26 years old for those users, with only 25 percent of the overall population being teenagers. While Yee’s numbers are for the category of virtual worlds as a whole, more granular data is available for certain worlds. In September 2005, IGN entertainment reported that the average age of players in their survey was 27, which seems to be echoed by 2004 research at the University of Nottingham Trent (UK) which puts the average age of players at 27.9 years old. Also of interest, a recent post on Nature’s weblog points out that the average age for people in SecondLife at 33, which slants older than even the general gaming category. This seems to bolster the claims that those environments are not games but real virtual environments.

Education

In “Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier”, Edward Castranova, of the University of Indiana at Bloomington, points out that 35.6 percent of the people he surveyed in those environments had a 4-year college degree or more. Yee’s study showed that 33 percent of the people he surveyed were students. However, he also showed that, for the non-student population, 44.8 percent of the population had at least a college degree. This number in and off themselves are meaningless but, when compared to the US Census data, they are amazing: according to the 2004 census, 28 percent of the overall US population had graduated from college. What this shows is that this phenomenon is primarily driven by more educated people than the average.

Employment and salaries

Of course, this higher level of education has some effect on the employment profile of denizens of those worlds. Castranova’s paper highlighted that 53.4 percent of his respondents were employed, with hourly salary averaging $20.74. Assuming 2,000 work hours a year, this translates into a $41,480 yearly salary. By comparison, for 2002, the last reported year, the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported an average US yearly salary of $36,214. Assuming a similar 2.5 percent yearly increase over the next two years, this would translate into $38,047.34. What this means is that virtual worlds denizens tend to be more affluent than the average American citizen.

Engagement

While the demographic data is interesting, the engagement metric is the one I’m most excited about. Nick Yee estimated that Everquest players spent 22.9 hours per week in that world and that people spend 21.9 hours per week across the category as a whole. Similarly, Ed Castranova found that Denizens in Norrath, a World a Warcraft server, spent an average of 29 hours there a week. When taken together, those statistics point to a level of engagement that is on par with television in the United States, which presents new opportunities for marketers.

Conclusion

The demographics profile of virtual worlds shows users who are young but more educated and more affluent than the general public. The trends in user numbers show a hockey-stick growth pattern that will look familiar to any early adopter of technology, highlighting that this is a nascent industry about to go mainstream. Because the levels of engagements for those users are very high, I expect stories in the mainstream media to soon come out talking about addiction to those worlds (in a fashion similar to the stories that came out about internet addiction, blogging addiction, etc…) which will validate the staying power of those worlds.

From a business standpoint, I’d recommend to my readers that they take a serious look at how they can expand their business in this arena. In my view, what we are seeing here is the emergence of a new way to engage with the Internet.

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

Before we dive in, I’d like to provide a word of caution to my more conservative readers. The following piece will be a lot more critical of the Bush administration than I usually am on this site. As the piece unfold, you will realize why I consider what is probably the defining event of my generation to be a list of missteps, miscues, and missed opportunities.

We will never forget

It’s hard to believe, now four years later that the nation swore that it would never forget what happened on that day. Beyond New York and Washington DC, however, it seems that people have moved on. I was even told to do so, during a conversation with people outside of the strike zones. It’s easy for people who only witnessed the matter on television to do so; It’s a little harder for people who witnessed it first hand; It’s even more difficult for those who lost friends in it; And I cannot even start to imagine how difficult it would be for those who lost family members in it. Some of us have not forgotten and it is our burden to bring it back, at least once a year, dredge up the dust and see how well we are doing in our recovery.

Since then, we’ve seen the largest reorganization of government, with an intent to prepare it for a major crisis, and its first test with the disaster in New Orleans; we’ve seen two wars, one with the intent to bring culprits to justice, the other with unclear objectives; we’ve seen the first steps of a reconstruction that may or may not be going slower than expected; and we’ve seen government work on financial appropriations that seemed to go anywhere but on the areas that need it.

… and so, we pick up the pieces and do the evaluation, and the assessment is, when faced with core facts, sadly inappropriate for an event in which over 2,000 people lost their lives. Let’s dig in on the details…

Disaster preparedness

As a result of the 9/11 disaster, the U.S. government reorganized itself to be more prepared for when future disasters struck. A new department, named the Department of Homeland Security was tasked with the responsibility of coordinating any effort relating to disasters, man-made or other, happening on U.S. soil.

The first major test came not from a man-made event but from hurricane Katrina and its aftermath and, if the event of the last couple of weeks are showcasing how successful or unsuccessful the department of homeland security was at protecting the homeland, I feel a little less secure now than I did on the morning of September 11th, 2001.

I will leave it to others to dig into whether the levies were under disrepair due to poor money allocation but it is without a doubt that the scenario of one of those levies breaking and flooding all of New Orleans was one that DHS should have prepared for. As opposed to the morning on September 11th, 2001, this last disaster was one where the general public was aware that it was coming. In fact, in the days leading up to the hurricane, breathless reports on most of the 24-hour TV news network talked about how the levies in New Orleans were a potential risk if the hurricane were to hit the city. Worries about a potential flood were so high, the government asked for a massive evacuation of New Orleans prior to the hurricane, and yet it did not provide buses or other modes of transportations to help those who did not have transportation get out of the area.

Katrina did not hit New Orleans head on (that distinction went to Gulfport, Mississippi, which is now what one could only call a former city, the destruction of the area being so complete that it is difficult to imagine a city once existed there) and yet, it was seriously damaged. Katrina was known of several days in advance, and yet government trucks with supplies did not roll into the city until a few days after the disaster. Images of people stranded in the Superdome made their way to the airwaves, and yet the head of FEMA and DHS did not seem to know there were people there until four days later.

If this is the kind of response the U.S. government now has to disasters, please give us back the pre-9/11 response scenario. At least, on that day, police and fire officers were there within minutes, FEMA was there within hours, and people were helped within a day or so.

Some will say that the response was different because this was an “act of God” but one could warrant that the only distinction that exists between an act of God and an act of man is that God gave us warning. Had a terrorist group decided to blow up one or more of those levies in New Orleans, I believe the response would not have been any better.

I now worry more than I did in the days prior to 9/11 and it is not because I fear terrorist more (having lived in France in the 80s, the age of terrorism is one I grew up in) but it is because I fear that our preparedness to a major disaster, whether it is a terrorist one or an act of God, is worse today than it was on the morning of 9/11. If a terror group where to attack the subway tunnels in New York city (let’s assume they’d blow up a bomb in one of the underwater tunnels, combining the horrors of 9/11 with those of Katrina), or if a major earthquake were to struck California (Los Angeles or San Francisco in particular), I fear that the U.S. government in un-ready in accomplishing the first duty of any government: protecting its people.

The Hunt for Bin Laden

If the government is not ready in dealing with a crisis after the fact, let’s look at what it is doing to deal with the people that are responsible, when a crisis is man-made. After 9/11, we were promised that those who were responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center would be brought to justice. The main culprit, we were told, was a man by the name of Osama Bin Laden, who heads a group called Al Caeda. Based in Afghanistan, the group is a coalition of several terrorist groups around the world and has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be responsible for the horrific act in New York.

Four years later, Osama Bin Laden is still free, supposedly somewhere in either Afghanistan or Pakistan, based on what I’ve read of expert accounts in several newspapers. And four years later, Al Caeda’s capabilities do not seem to have diminished much. In fact, they seem to be on a new roll: recently, they claimed responsibilities for bombing in Madrid, Spain, and London, UK.

The U.S. did accomplish the toppling of the Taliban, which was the Afghan government hosting terrorists. However, it seems that the new government is having problem trying to regain control of the country. Some areas in Afghanistan are ruled by warlords, some of whom have aligned themselves with the Taliban, and democratically elected leaders are murdered on a regular bases by forces friendly to or associated with the Taliban. In other words, Afghanistan is a country that is teetering on the edge of a civil war, with a few American troops left behind (a substantial portion of the US troops on the ground were relocated to Iraq after that conflict started) attempting to keep the whole country from imploding.

Meanwhile, Bin Laden is taking advantage of the confusion and the rough terrain (the south of the country is very mountainous, making it difficult to do a successful man-hunt) to hide and continue directing global terror efforts via frequently leaked audio or videotapes bringing encouragement to his supporters. His demonization may have been forgotten in the United States but it has not been forgotten by US-opponents who are now seeing him as a rallying point, thus strengthening his power globally, and increasing the ranks of Al Caeda. As a hunt, it has been a major failure and as a fight against terrorism, it has been a disaster.

War in Iraq

So instead of trying to locate Bin Laden, the U.S. leadership has been trying to shift the fighting ground, first by talking up a presumed link between Iraq and the terrorists that struck the world trade center (several government investigations later, the existence of such link has been refuted time and time again by commissions appointed by the same president who has led the administration’s effort at creating the link in the first place.) That supposed link and the subsequent inference by members of the Bush administration that we had to invade Iraq before we ended up seeing “a mushroom cloud over an American city” led to a conflict that lowered the reputation of the United States around the world (a day after the WTC was destroyed, French president Jacques Chirac declared “Today, we are all Americans” a couple of years later, France has become one of the biggest opponents to the Iraqi conflict.)

While the U.S. administration was building up its case to invade Iraq, millions of people in the US and abroad made the counter-case: that, while Saddam Hussein was a horrible individual, he was a despot under control, weighted down by years of U.N. sanctions and that what would follow his removal would be potential anarchy in a country that controls almost 20 percent of the world’s oil reserve. The case was also made that an invasion of Iraq would be costly in terms of invaders’ blood and that it would probably help strengthen, not weaken, terrorists as it gave them something to point to the evilness of the west.

Sadly, the invasion of Iraq went through, with the United States and United Kingdom leading the charge, and few others following. The first days looked very good as the forces met with very little resistance, making it into Baghdad within days, capturing Hussein within months and looking as if all the nay-sayers had been wrong…

… but time has told another story. While the initial success of the invasion of Iraq could have been cause for praise, the following years have been a long descent into hell with many of the worst predictions made by opponents of the invasion turning from conjecture to truth. At the current time, American troops have suffered over 2,000 casualties with more coming every day; tension between Sunnis, Kurds, and Shiites are increasing to the point where the country may soon be facing civil war… and Al Caeda has been using the invasion as not only a recruiting tool (claiming that the imperialism of the west is the reason for their fight, a big of circular logic on its own as it was not the reason they gave for 9/11) but also as a training ground in urban warfare for their future recruits.

Much as the cold-war Afghani proxy fight between Russians and Americans had been a training ground for the Bin Laden generation of terrorists, Iraq is turning out a new generation not only of insurgents but also of future carriers of atrocities.

The new argument coming from the administration is that it is better to take the fight to the terrorist than it is to have them to it to us. This argument, which is how Saudi Arabia has managed to be an exporter of terror by removing its more extreme elements to foreign places like Afghanistan, is starting to show wear and tear. In the case of Saudi Arabia, they have recently seen attacks against foreigners in their own country. In the case of the West, London and Madrid stand as painful reminder that the fight is not just located in Iraq but is metastizing into a cancer that infiltrates every society. It may not have happened in the United States since 9/11 (and thank god for that) but I fear that it is only a question of time before they strike again.

As a tool in the war on terror (a term recently replaced by “struggle against violent extremists” or SAVE, an acronym which makes me feel a bit uncomfortable), the Iraqi conflict has been a disaster and one can only hope that the situation will not get any worse than it is now.

Financial Appropriation

Considering the different failures at the federal level, one hopes that more is happening at the local level and that the federal government has been doing a good job at providing cities and states with what they need to defend themselves against terrorist attacks.

From a New York standpoint, things haven’t been particularly rosy. New York City may have been the primary target on September 11th, 2001; the New York area may have a population of 20 millions people (8 millions in the city ), representing roughly 10 percent of the US population but Congress decided to use a different formula to calculate financial appropriations of counter-terrorist funds. As a result, places like Montana or Wyoming find themselves with per capita appropriations that are several multiple larger than the per capita appropriations the New York area (or for that matter, any other major Metropolitan area) does.

But the real irony is that the city ends up giving the federal government more of that money than any other area. In other words, if there were no federal allocation of money for terrorism, New York City would find itself with more money to fight terrorism than it is under the present case.

And, considering the recent disaster in New Orleans, there is another sad fact to take into account: when the Department of Homeland Security was created, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was folded into it. As more allocations were made to fighting terrorists, some of the money was taken from dealing with other issues. Some of the money that was taken away was money to deal with ensuring that some of the infrastructure was kept in good shape. As hurricanes and earthquakes took a back sit to fighting terrorists, repairing levees in order for them to be able to survive during a natural disaster became less important. The images of the last couple of weeks are a painful reminder of the cost of such calculation.

Reconstruction Confusion

Four years later, there is, however, one bit of good news: at ground zero, a new building is rising… but not the one you’d expect. World Trade Center 7, which burned down a few hours after the hours collapsed, is rising anew above ground zero. It represents a beacon of hope for all New Yorkers who went through that horrible day.

Sadly, the rest of reconstruction at ground zero has been pretty horrible, with petty fights breaking out between the different individuals and agencies involved in said reconstruction. The result is that, four years after the towers went down, there is still a large hole not only in our hearts but also in the New York grounds. Inspired architecture was promised, then dismissed as concerns about security took hold. Instead, we may soon see what may either be the most beautiful bunker or one of the most awful towers to grace the New York City skyline. As a symbol of rebirth, it will be one brought force by fear and anxiety, not by the optimism and hopefulness that once were the hallmark of this country.

… and four years after our world changed, that is a damn shame.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 9–11 at 4. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before the convention

For New Yorkers, the Republican effort started becoming visible weeks ago, as police tightened up the area. Living only a few blocks from Madison Square Garden, where conventioneers gathered, I started to realize with some level of concern that this convention had the potential of being a major annoyance. Rumors were flying high of the potential of some public transportation being shut down and, in the absence of actual information from the city (since none of the plans beyond street closures were revealed until the last minute), most New Yorkers made do with rumors.

Feeling that I needed to take a break and figuring that this might be a good time to skip town, I started planning on taking time off from work for convention week several months in advance. It then hit me that the mass hysteria stirred up by some of the more extreme newspaper (The NY Post, for example) was just media people playing around with facts that had little grounding in reality. Besides, having been through town on 9/11 and then again during last year’s blackout, I figured that New Yorkers had the guts and resolve to face any challenge. Combined with the lure of being close to a hot story, this left me with the decision to stick around.

The next question became how to best experience this. Of course, I knew that I had little chance to get into the convention itself but its perimeter seemed to offer a million interesting stories. With hundreds of thousands of protesters at the ready, it seemed to me that a potentially huge story could be developing outside the convention center, directly on the streets of Manhattan.

The First Amendment

One of the reason I love living in the United States is its constitution and attached bill of rights. Go read it, if you haven’t already. It’s quite a combo and of course, coming out of journalism, I fell deeply enamored with the first amendment and its protection of the press. However, re-reading it recently, I became more keenly aware of its other parts:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

These considerations, in an age of increasing uncertainty in the balance of civil liberties versus security, have led me to be a contributor to the American Civil Liberties Union, a group that works hard to ensure that the government lives by this promise.

As a contributor, I get to receive the newsletter for the local New York chapter and had recently learned from it that there would be a storefront established during the Republican convention as part of a wider campaign to protect the rights of protesters. This seemed like a great fit for me and I walked in there on the Saturday prior to the convention, asking if they needed volunteers. They did and I signed up to start on the following Monday, the first day of the convention.

Protesting

I am not a radical leftist. Nor am I on the right. The best way I could possibly describe myself on the political spectrum would probably be extreme centrist. I believe almost religiously in the genius of capitalism. That belief is only trumped by my belief in what I would call “Capital D Democracy”: A government of the people, by the people and for the people. Coming from Europe, I may have a different view from most Americans when it comes to social issues. I strongly believe that anyone should have access to free health care and free high grade education. Because those sit at the core of my political belief, and because I grew up politically through the Bush father administration, followed by the Clinton administration, I would probably qualify as a fairly conservative (small d) democrat in the United States.

Over the past couple of years, I must say that I’ve drifted a little further into that camp, as a direct result of what I’ve experienced and what I read. As everyone knows, September 11th was a horrible day, when many of us lost friends in the Twin Towers. Looking back at that time, I still feel that the Bush administration did a great job by going into Afghanistan to dislocate the Taliban, which had been a long-time supporter of Al-Qaeda. I know that it must have been hard to do so, as no president really wants to put soldiers in harm’s way. The Afghani mission was an important one and one that still needs more support than it gets.

However, as many New Yorkers, I felt blindsided when the administration decided to start making the case for going into Iraq. I had read a fair amount about Iraq and the middle east region in general. As far as I could tell from all the newspapers and magazine reports I was reading, Sadam Hussein was a megalomaniac who would do anything to hold on to power. After being rebuffed from Kuwait by an international coalition led by Bush pere, he had focused inland, using chemical weapons against the Kurds in order to avoid having them overthrow him. For the following decade, the United Stations enforced sanctions that contained him while looking for more information about what types of weapons he had. He kept stonewalling them on two major issues: chemical and nuclear weapons. I personally believe that this was a tactical moved aimed at dealing with internal Iraqi issues: By stonewalling the UN, he ensured that questions would be raised as to how many of those weapons he could have. If word that he held chemical weapons came back into Iraq, along with the remembrance of what he did to Kurds, people would be afraid to attempt an uprising. Similarly, if word was spread that he had a nuclear program, Iran might stay more quiet.

In fall 2002, then CIA-director Tenet testified before Congress about the Iraqi thread. His belief at the time (or at least what he told senators) was that involving ourselves in Iraq would only increase the terrorist threat. Having lived through 9/11, the words increase and threat were not the ones I wanted to hear. At the time, reports from the United States and Europe also pointed out that there was no credible reports of evidence linking Iraq and Al-Qaeda. This was all public information available in late 2002 (I do read a lot on the Internet, not only by using RSS feeds but also visiting the web sites of several news sources in the United States, United Kingdom, and France). This led me to believe that the Iraqi threat was being overstated. However, trying to keep an open mind, I listen to arguments from the administration and, for every point they would make, there would be tens of rebuttal points coming from European publications.

I started to feel that people living in the US were being bamboozled so I started listening more closely to the people advocating peace. I did not agree with all of them (I believe war is sometimes necessary) but I did agree with them that this threatened conflict (at the time, the war had not started) was one that was unnecessary. I joined demonstrations, I met smart people there. Over time, I became more acquainted with the issues surrounding them. While I disagreed with the most extremist elements, I believed in their rights to free speech.

Last year on February 15, a huge march was impeded by the police, which would not let people get to the proper location of the rally and where policemen would provide misleading information to people who were trying to legally join the march. The tactics prompted an ACLU lawsuit which resulted in orders by the court for the police to alter their practices. Knowing this, I still approached the largest protest set for August 29th with a little apprehension.

It turned out that I didn’t need to. The police worked hard to keep the peace while respecting the rights of protester. Countless times, I saw police officers doing their job as they should, ensuring that things would work out and that protesters could stay safe. With half a million people taking to the streets of Manhattan and a police contingent that numbered in the thousands, it turned out to be a really great event and made me feel better about the week that was to come up. All the tension that had existed prior to the protests starting seemed to dissipate and free speech was respected, just as the founding fathers would have it.

With protesters as far as the eyes could see (45 blocks of solidly packed people were taken over by the protest), my wife and I joined the 1000 coffins group, which honored the memory of fallen American soldiers in Iraq, all the while making a powerful statement on the impact of this war on our troops.

At the end of the protest route, I had the chance to witness a crowd of hundreds of people folding American flags in a way that was both respectful and legal.

The New York Observer

On Monday, after some basic training on what to do and what to watch for, I made my first foray in the field. The police presence was strong at every event but, for the most parts, things would run OK during daylight. Once night fell, however, it seemed that the police turned into Mr. Hyde, arresting peaceful protesters rather quickly and working in an intimidating fashion otherwise. Many of the clashes I personally witnessed were at night, probably as much the result of exhaustion (I don’t know how long the police shifts were but it seems that nerves were more frayed towards the end of the day, leading me to conclude that some of the officers may have been tired).

Much of what a legal observer does is very similar to what a journalist does. Largely, the job of a journalist in the field is to sit around the location of an event and talk to people, hoping to get some juicy bit. Often, it’s just sitting around waiting for something to happen. In the case of legal monitors, the situation is similar; you sit (or stand) around, checking whether fencing is locked or not, and eventually post yourself in a location where it is likely that something would happen. You then idle around that location until something happens, and then start taking notes, observing whether policemen are doing their job properly and calling in to the main office if infractions are very serious and could lead to further trouble. Your job is, however, not as a participant but an observer.

Occasionally, you cross the line into a more active role, at the request of one of the two actors (protesters or cops) asking you to step in. For example, I was asked by a cop if I could work as a liaison to help relay an inquiry to the leader of a protest group. After putting the top officer in charge on the scene with the lead organizer in touch with each other, I watched the interaction to ensure that the police was not trying to abuse its power. The discussion between the two people was tense but cordial and an agreement was quickly struck, leading to an eventual change of location for the protester so they would not block regular pedestrian traffic and a pull-back from the police force so they would not seem as intimidating to protesters. This was an example of the two groups working together properly.

While police and protesters danced around each others, with legal monitors and observers like myself checking the scene out, other people seemed intent on disturbing this tight choreography. At ground zero, a woman looked at my ACLU T-shirt and exclaimed “the ACLU, those free speech Nazis” (emphasis is mine).

However, at times, there were failures. I witnessed such a failure at ground zero on Tuesday when police worked with a group called the War Resisters League decided to start a march from ground zero to Madison Square Garden. The police worked out what seemed like an agreement to let protesters go through their march without a permit and then, a few minutes later, changed its mind and arrested a number of people. The Jekyll and Hyde nature of such incident can be considered fairly worrisome and a true threat to democracy.

Republicans in the Square, Dancers in Elephant country

Fortunately, the real spirit of democracy could also be felt this week and it came for a bi-partisan effort to work together. On Tuesday night, a group of about half a dozen Republicans skipped their attendance at the convention and headed down to Union Square, where many of the protesters were gathering. A dizzying array of discussions ensued as people from the complete political spectrum engage in debate for most of the evening. Groups gathered to listen in, sometimes throwing extra discussion points into the flow. Conversations covered such a wide range of issues such as the recent success/failure of the war in Iraq, the economy, educational reform, job programs, environmental issues, general foreign policy, etc… Kudos to those republicans for having the guts to enter their enemies’ territory and be willing to engage into longer discussion on policy matters. If such thing were happening more frequently, we would be better off as a country.

Sadly, however, the current tenor of the political dialogue seem to be far from such matters. When discussion surrounding candidates are limited to “George Bush is a baby-killer” or “John Kerry is a flip-flopper”, the system needs fixing and it is incumbent on everyone to get involved in creating that fix. There are approximately two months between now and the US presidential election so I would urge all my readers in the United States to do the following: find someone you disagree with politically, and agree to go out to lunch at least once a week to discuss political matters. Similarly, put pressure on politicians to discuss issues of substance. Whether John Kerry should have received two or three purple hearts in Vietnam, or whether George Bush did not tend to his national guards duties during the same era will have little relevance on the future of the country. What does, however, is how they see the future of the country. There are substantial differences in how the different candidates view the world. Dig in, get informed, and go out and get other people to do the same. It’s part of the homework required to make a democracy work.

And remember that it can all be fun. While there is some homework, there are occasional recesses and sometimes some out and out silliness. John Perry Barlow put together some Dance Flash Mobs which were quite a blast to follow. Imagine a basic street crowd. People are walking around, traffic is busy. All of sudden, someone turns on a boom box. Three quarters of the crowd start swerving, slowly; building, building, and then, all of the sudden, it’s a street party, with 15 to 20 people out in the street, dancing their hearts out. One has to admit that it is a very effective form of protest. A sudden derivation from the norm by a large group of “normal looking” people can create quite a disconnect. If you’re a New Yorker, you find such variations generally amusing, part of the great thing about living in the city. Based on my observation at one of the event, that may not be the case if you’re from out of town. They’re is something a little crazy that feel a little threatening. Your reality gets shaken for a moment, you pause, not sure of how to react and by the time you realize what happened, the crowd has moved on.

Protest Tech

Of course, I couldn’t resist going a whole post without sticking in some thoughts on technology. For the most part, technology at these events was more interesting because of its pervasiveness, rather than any single technologies being of interest. I’ve learned that the police did use some cameras with head mounted displays for monitoring but I do see any. What I did see, however, was heavy use of technologies like text-messaging and push-to-talk telephones to coordinate protest efforts. It’s interesting to me that those are now part of the protester’s arsenal as they provide with quick ways to deploy small to medium sized groups across a grid. When flash mobs happened last year as a summer diversion, I did not imagine the potential they could have in the political world. Witnessing events this week, I’ve come to realize that flash mobs can have a tremendous power in reshaping political dialogue by quickly creating and disbanding protest groups. This will probably be a challenge for law enforcement officials wanting to control such thing as they might have difficulties to locate such events in the future. One could consider those to be essentially guerrilla tactics empowered by technology and they can represent of fairly powerful component of new protests.

The other bit of surprise, to me, was to importance blogs have taken for some people. At one of the events, I was chatting with one of the observers, waiting for a group of conspiracy theorist (yes, their theories are protected by the first amendment too) to wrap up their protest so I could move on to something more interesting. Some guy seemed to be getting a lot of media so I asked the observer if he knew what the deal was with that guy. “He’s a major star. You should check out his website at…” I don’t remember the guys name but did check out his site. Basically, it was a badly designed conspiracy theory site run by a guy who seems to have his own online streaming show. When upper middle class people (the observer is actually a lawyer for a big firm) look at people as big stars because they have a website and a radio stream, you know the Internet has become pretty pervasive.

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

Bye Bye Boo!

You may have heard the rumors so let me confirm my departure from Boo after less than six months. The call was as to whether I wanted to work exclusively out of the UK or stay in the US. When presented with such a scenario, I decided that I would be better off working in the US only and, as a result, have left Boo. It wasn’t an easy decision as I enjoyed working with the folks at Boo but didn’t feel that it would be right for me to move to the UK for a couple of reasons: first of all, I like New York a lot more than I do London. This is a purely personal judgment call but after having spent several months in London, I know that it’s not a city I want to live in. Second, I have spent a lot of time establishing a ground base in the US. As many of you know, I’m French and have bumped around the world for quite a few years before finally settling down in New York. Since I did not intend to uproot myself again, there was not much choice. And last but not least, I think Boo has challenges to address that top management is unwilling to address. So I left.

Now you’re probably wondering what I’m up to next, so here goes…

A new company: Moveable Media

In late 1999, an idea started brewing in my mind about the potential to form a B2B and E-commerce consulting company around new concepts that pulls from my experience. While I can’t give more details right now, let me just say that I’m starting my own company. It’s called Moveable Media and will be very different from the current offerings out there on the Internet.

However, the business plan is quite strong and I already have had discussions with parties interested in backing me financially. As a result, I am now making the jump that so many have made before and starting my own company, which will launch its first offering this year (in 2000).

While the company is still in its embryonic state, I am looking to fill a few positions, including that of CTO so if you know anyone that might be interested in joining a dynamic, New York based start up headed by an Internet veteran (yes, folks, I have now officially landed that title, having been in the industry for 7 years), send them my way.

Many of the people I consulted about this have been asking me why it took me so long to make the jump back into entrepreneurdom. Well, the reason is really quite simple: I needed to get some experience. Having worked around C-level people for the better part of the last decade, I now feel that I’ve learned enough to build a reasonably successful company.

The TNL.net newsletter

You may have noticed a small change of direction in terms of the TNL.net newsletter. Instead of just covering new applications, I’ve recently sent out dispatches on industry events such as the AOL-Time Warner merger and the Transmeta announcement. In a way, this is more of a return to my analytical roots. As a result, I will send out more analytical pieces along with the regular offering of cool new technologies I uncover.

You may also have noticed that the frequency of this newsletter seems to have increased a little, with this already being the third dispatch this year (whereas last year saw about a dispatch a month). This is part of my effort to offer you something more current and I will try to make sure that you get better updates in general. So enjoy it and feel free to tell me whether I’m right or wrong in my approach with this. After all, it’s all about learning.

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

Much like new developments in wireless platforms (mobile phones and other devices) and interactive television are now moving at a faster pace abroad than they are in the US, E-commerce is bound to become a non-US lead field if American companies don’t watch out. The reason is quite simple: legacy systems and lack of identification of variances that exist outside of the US.

Let’s take a simple example: selling in multiple countries. Because no country in Europe is sufficient to create a strong market for a particular retailer, Europeans Etailers are keeping an eye out on issues like multiple currencies and multiple language management. In the US, it’s dollars and English. In Europe, it’s pounds, deutchmarks, kroners, etc… and English, French, German, etc… That somewhat simple difference means approaching the development of systems with a different view. From the get-go, Europeans are kicking off their systems with an eye towards supra-national sales. That means being able to deal with custom taxes, rates of conversions, and multiple languages from the start.

Those are but a few of the issues they are accustomed to deal with but not the only ones. In the UK, for example, the interactive TV platforms have been rolled out and web and email access from your cell phone is more of the rule than the exception. As a result, European Etailers are developing their web based systems with an eye to other platforms. Most American systems are stuck into legacyware that ties their platform specifically to the web and will eventually have to be trashed in order to take advantage of the new platforms.

That said, American companies have a definite advantage in knowing the web VERY well. That advantage turns to disadvantage though, when they are asked to do things differently. We are now an industry that is getting more ingrained into its own frame of mind (well, this is the way other web shops do it so why should we change it). However, because non-US markets got into the game late, they had the advantage of being able to deal with more mature tools and try to go beyond anything that’s been done before. For example, I talked about Accompany.com back a few months ago, and saw it as a major development in the way people buy (Aggregation of customers for reverse auction). That message apparently also sunk in with some people in the European market and there is now a healthy competition among vendors in this market. However, in the US, it seems that by and large, this area of Ecommerce is widely ignored.

What will we do if that landscape is dominated by non-US players?

It’s now high time for American Etailers to wake up and realize that the global market is as important as the American one. After all, we’ve all been talking about one of the advantages of the Internet being that it is a global market. Let’s remember that fact and start acting as global companies instead of US-only ones. Otherwise, European companies will most likely eat our lunches.

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