The Limits Of Social In...

This is a guest post by Monty Munford . Last week I found myself in a sports bar in London’s West End. I was standing next to a couple being interviewed by Middle Eastern TV news channel Al-Jazeera who were giving their (inane, alas) views on a football match between two teams from Liverpool. This experience was far removed from the one I’d had two hours previously when in the neighbouring cinema I had attended the UK première of “The Price of Kings: Yasser Arafat”, a film about the life of the Palestinian leader. This juxtaposition is typical of a ‘proper’ night out in London, the new melting pot of Europe, but it had happened not because of any random connection or because I liked football. The invitation for the première was down to my alleged influence on social media and had come from PeerIndex and its new PeerPerks marketing service. Social capital indices such as PeerIndex and its U.S. rival Klout are big news nowadays and investors are very interested in how their algorithms work. PeerIndex recently received $3 million in funding from a group of angel and private equity investors to continue doing exactly this… and earlier this year Klout was alleged to have raised another $30 million in Series C funding. But not everybody is convinced, and there have been recent examples that have discredited the algorithmic value system these indices use, one such example being @big_ben_clock on Twitter. At the time of writing this account had more than 174,000 followers, most of whom do so ‘ironically’. That’s because the only messages it tweets involve using the word ‘BONG’ a number of times, thus mimicking the peals of the Big Ben London landmark. But rather more damagingly for the reputation of a company that is supposed to judge reputation, its current ‘highly influential’ Klout score of 69 is risible, seemingly only to apply to the high number of followers it has. Moreover, until recently @big_ben_clock was deemed by Klout to be influential on London, England and… drugs. Klout had confused the knelling of bells with the devices that stoners and potheads use to addle their growing brains. Not wacky baccy, but wacky social measurement. Sue Llewellyn is a social strategist who worked as a ‘newshound’ for the BBC and is trained as a social psychologist. “I know influence is a very difficult, if not impossible, thing to quantify and I’m not convinced anyone’s cracked that nut yet. So far I think it’s still a game. The business of measuring influence with algorithms is in start-up mode, there’s definitely great potential but still a long way to go. The only algorithm I count is the human one and nobody’s behaviour or influence can be summed up by a simple number.. yet”, she says. Last year Peer Index sent me a ‘Perks’ card telling me I had been ‘selected as one of 100 PeerIndex Opinion Leaders out of the 38.6 million most active Twitter users we index’. Not unlike other tech writers and ‘influencers’ that I could mention, I did get excited about that but once the ego had deflated I realised it was just a nifty piece of vanity marketing with a system that was still in beta. PeerIndex publicly listed this PeerPerks service to the great unwashed, non-influential people last month, around the same time that Klout launched a similar service. Such approaches are reminiscent of the way Hollywood always seems to release films on the same subject at the same time, a strategy that has an eye on the competition when it should have its eye on the customer. Consequently I received my invitation and I accepted the chance to see the Arafat film with alarming alacrity. It was something I would have wished to see, it was something I didn’t know was on and there was no other way I would have been likely to be invited… I had been correctly marketed to. Azeem Azhar, CEO of PeerIndex naturally believes that his ranking algorithm is better than Klout because it focuses on people’s authority within specific topics. “We are in the midst of a new trend in marketing that targets and caters to the ‘citizen influencer’. With PeerPerks, we’re applying it at a grand scale by allowing marketers to dialogue with engaged users who are interested in products before the general public receive them. “PeerPerks is targeted at people who want to benefit from the effort they’ve put into building a social profile, but who don’t necessarily care about the mechanics of social influence in detail”, he says. He might be right. I was rewarded for being social and consequently the experience was rewarding, even if the consequent football match in the Sports Bar wasn’t. There will be hits and misses in the months to come, but I have a feeling this type of status marketing is here to stay. However, what is more interesting to me is what will happen to my Klout and PeerIndex ‘score’ when this article is published. Very interesting indeed, it could go either way. Meantime, in case you were wondering, big_ben_clock on Peer Index has a ranking of 34, has an influence over only 5 people, and despite being patently interested in Bongs, Peer Index has “not been able to identify any topics for Big Ben.” They really ought to try harder…

Aframe Goes After Avid ...

Pop quiz! How much is spent on making Television shows in the US annually? It’s $300 billion or there-abouts. That’s a lot of video. Petabytes of data and more. Next question! How are all those shows edited and produced? Well, it’s almost all put though big-ass editing suites and in-office servers from the likes of Avid. Lastly, how many tech startups have gone after this TV market? No, I’m not taking about Brightcove and your little video podcast. I mean one that goes after Avid and that TV industry. Answer: None. Why? It’s just very, very tough. But now one has. Aframe , the SaaS/cloud video production platform which has been bubbling under in Europe since 2010, has today raised a new $7 million Series A round of funding led by Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures, with participation by existing investor, Northstar Ventures. This is a large Series A in European terms, but one which also sees Aframe launching into North America with operations in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Yes, folks, these guys are taking on the television production world with all guns blazing, already working with companies such as the BBC and MTV. Eden have a track record of taking UK companies to the US. They brought in Matrix Partners to invest in Huddle in the US, for instance. The Series A round brings the total investment in the company to $10 million, including previous seed and angel investments from former executives at Endemol, Vodaphone and AMV BBDO, among others. Aframe also named Mark Overington, part of the founding team at Avid Technology and its former head of marketing, as president of Aframe North America. It’s no small thing that a founder of Avid has become Aframe’s US CEO. Overington grew the company from an idea to $500 million in revenues. If Avid wash’t worried before, it probably needs to be now. Aframe was co-founded by CEO David Peto, a former founder of a London post production facility. “Loads of people think we are like Brightcove, but we’re not. Our main competitors are companies like Avid ($800m turnover) – desktop/software/server farms installed into offices. We’re doing it out of the cloud for $99 a month,” he told me. But Aframe isn’t just some startup working on Amazon S3. It’s built its own private cloud platform. That means large broadcast-quality video – including uncompressed raw footage – can be uploaded, transcoded, images and shots logged/tagged virtually in real time, saving huge amounts of time in production. What Salesforce, Dropbox and Huddle have done Aframe wants to do in video production. “If you imagine what Soundcloud has down for Pro music, we’re doing that for video,” says Peto. TV production is the last industry to be SAAS-ified and clouded. Files are 50-100GB or to 500GB or more. There are 20 different camera formats, 5 different edit systems. Production teams can be producing content all over the place, and the only reason the cloud hasn’t arrived to this industry is because it’s very complicated where large video is concerned. People who know video don’t understand the Cloud and people in the Cloud don’t understand TV, says Peto. “There are lots of small outfits looking at this but we’ve built our own cloud which goes against the thinking [Amazon S3 is the startup favourite]. But when you’re handling the original copies of a major new BBC series, that just doesn’t fly.” Aframe can be used as as a free personal account, with professional accounts available starting at $99 a month per user, or an enterprise account at $249 a month per user.

Kindle Touch To Debut I...

For all the benefits that come with living in Europe — sharing a unified currency, easy access to medical care — getting timely access to Amazon’s popular line of Kindle e-readers isn’t one of them. Amazon begun rolling out their WiFi-only Kindles in a few new markets this past December and followed up by shipping their Kindle Touch to new markets as well. At long last though, digital bibliophiles in the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy will soon get their chance to curl up with the online retailer’s touch-friendly e-reader — starting on April 27, the Kindle Touch will officially launch in each of the countries’ respective Amazon stores. If you were perhaps hoping for an explanation for the delay, I’d advise you not to hold your breath. The BBC posed that same question to Amazon European Vice President of Kindle Jorrit Van der Meulen, who offered no insight into what caused the five month delay between the Kindle Touch’s U.S. release and its debut in Europe. Devin laid out a few credible possibilities when the news first broke, but the official rationale is still under wraps for now. Whether or not the Kindle Touch will actually sell is another question — the WiFi-only Kindle Touch will cost users £109/€129, while the tricked-out 3G model will retail for £169/€189. Meanwhile the bog-standard non-touch Kindle has been readily available in all those markets since December, and its €99 price tag has endeared it to many a thoughtful shopper over the holidays. Amazon also faces competition from players like Sony and Kobo, whose own touchscreen e-readers have been on the market for quite some time. While a total of two modern Kindles (three if you count the 3G model) are definitely better than none, there’s still no word on whether or not Amazon’s wallet-friendly Kindle Fire tablet is slated to take a similar trip across the pond. Here’s hoping it makes the transition soon, though considering Amazon’s track record, European Fire fans should probably settle in for a long wait.

BBC’s iPlayer The Lates...

Another big content partner for Microsoft and its Xbox Live Platform, and another win for those in favor of all TV eventually going over-the-top rather than through a pay-TV provider: the BBC has now made its popular catch-up/on-demand TV and radio service, iPlayer, accessible via the Xbox console, free of charge. Although we’ve seen the BBC make some moves to offer iPlayer in international markets as a paid service, for now it is only available in the UK. The BBC says it is the first broadcaster to join up with Xbox 360 to make its content free: other content providers have become part of the “Gold” service that requires an extra fee. The deal announced today also marks another first for the BBC: as with other services that run on the Xbox, when you use it in connection with a Kinect, you can navigate the iPlayer with voice and gesture controls. The BBC says that this will make iPlayer accessible to “millions” of new users on TVs: that, too, is an important milestone, because the service has always been accessible online via PCs, but going to other platforms like mobile and traditional old TV has been a longer road for the broadcaster. As the BBC continues with its public service goal of making the iPlayer as accessible as possible (that was a controversial point when it first launched in December 2007: because a PC with broadband was the primary way to view it), it continues to focus on building out more TV deals. That’s because despite the huge rise in tablets, smartphones and broadband usage among consumers, TV, the BBC says, remains one of the most popular ways to consume BBC content. In 2011, it had 433 million requests for content from TV devices in 2011, which works out to one in every four programs viewed being on TVs rather than mobiles, tablets or PCs. The BBC projects that with the addition of more services like the one announced today, by 2015, over half of all requests will be via TVs. Although the BBC has been on cable-TV provider Virgin Media’s set-top-box since 2008, it was only last year that it became available on BT’s pay-TV service BT Vision. But it has yet to go live on the UK’s biggest pay-TV provider, Sky, partly owned by News Corp. The BBC says it will have that live “later this year.” In all, it is now on over 450 platforms and devices, it says, including FreeSat, Freeview, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and “hundreds” of mobile phones, tablets, and internet-connected TVs. For its part, the Xbox 360, which was the best-selling console in the UK last year, already offers a range of other live and on-demand content, including a selection of channels from Sky, as well as Channel 4, Channel 5, Netflix, LOVEFiLM, Blinkbox, MSN and YouTube. We have reached out to ask the BBC whether it plans to add the iPlayer to the Xbox outside the UK and will update the post as we learn more.

Index’s Saul Klein, Aft...

For the last year or so, Index Ventures’ Saul Klein has been living in Israel, not soaking up the hot sun (well, maybe a little of that) but the local startup scene — the “Silicon Valley for the rest of the world,” as he calls it. Now he is gearing up to move back to London, and at the same he is taking part in a new initiative to continue building those bridges: the UK Israel Tech Council. The group, associated with a new UK-Israel Technologies Hub based at the UK Embassy in the country, sounds like the kind of high-level effort that sits fairly far above the workings of startup life: some 35 “top business leaders and officials from both countries to develop an ambitious strategy for creating the UK/Israel tech partnership,” the group says. They include the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould; non-executive chairman of the UK-Israel Technologies Hub Haim Shani; Yossi Vardi; and senior executives from Virgin Media, Google, Alcatel Lucent, Amadeus Capital, NICE Systems, Pitango Venture Capital and Index, among others. But at the same time, it is a signal of how some significant efforts are being invested to tap further into the evolving startup culture in the country, and to make sure there is mindshare at all levels concerning that. Klein says that in his 17 or so months in Israel, he came to see just how much the Israel startup scene has evolved– whereas once it was squarely focused on “hard technology”: security, enterprise, semiconductors and the like. “Israel has not developed a reputation for consumer or Internet companies,” he says. That, however, is changing — although some of the companies coming out — Soluto to remotely manage other people’s IT problems, or eToro offering a real-time “social” trading platform — are still drawing on the strengths of the hard technology know-how that put Israel on the tech startup map in the first place. (Soluto was a Disrupt winner in years past and Index invests in it; other Israeli startups in Index’s portfolio include MyHeritage and online shopping portal Abe’s Market.) Klein calls Israel a “startup nation,” more so than anywhere else he has been. “At the moment there is more venture capital invested per capita in Israel than anywhere else, including Silicon Valley,” he says. “It has more patents, and a higher percentage of GDP spent on R&D than anywhere else in the world.” He also says that Israel alone launches more companies annually than the rest of Europe combined. Going to Israel was a natural move for Index, Klein says. The company, which was founded some 20 years ago in Geneva, “is used to having to go where the entrepreneurs are. It’s not like Sand Hill Road here.” And he says the creation of organizations like this new council are an important part of staying in the game: “We’ve been missing out on the opportunity in terms of the connection between the UK, Europe and Israel,” he says. “When those Israeli startups are looking to hire talent, or get funding, or find customers, they go to the Valley. When they stop in London, it’s just to change planes.” Naomi Krieger, the director of the UK Israel Technologies Hub, says that they have already run one event in the last couple of weeks to get the ball rolling: A number of UK-based executives from the likes of the BBC, Ogilvy, BBH and Samsung were taken around to meet Israeli startups working in new media. “The UK is strong on producing content but Israel is strong on coming up with innovative and new ways of getting that content to consumers,” she says. “Those executives came away with five or six business opportunities each they plan to follow up on.” In addition to the digital sector, the other three areas that the council will focus its efforts are life sciences, cleantech, and — here’s a curve ball — the Israeli Arabic Internet industry. The last of these, she says, takes into account that there are already a number of Arabic media organizations in London, and that there is a lot of potential tapping into what Arabic-speaking Israelis are working to create. A new chapter in tech diplomacy, perhaps.