Post from PopOut!
Friday, October 5th, 2007Note: We really wanted to blog live from the event but it seems network troubles once again plagued the event. So here’s backdated post to make up! =)
19.30hrs
We spent the first half hour after coming here trying to get Wifi working.
Oops we missed Bezurk’s talk as we were busy trying to get connected. Sorry Ross!
20.00hrs
Quaffs presenting now. The presenter Eric started off with some wacky exercises that didn’t quite mean anything to me. But well, can’t fault him for being different. The idea centers around what they call Objects of Desire (OoD). They have a rewards system using (guess what) Q.dollars that allows users to ‘realize’ their objects of desire.
The service is (surprise!) still in beta. They have apparently had over 13,000 unique visitors this year. They’re launching a new version 2.0 which apparently has over 30 new features.
Quaffs seems to be a mix of everything. Their ‘blogging’ system looks suspiciously like Tumblr allowing users to post content categorized as text, picture and video. They have a rating system which reminds me comment rating systems in digg and later on, Youtube. Generally, I felt that their social network seemed to be a clone-mashup of digg-meets-Pownce-meets-tumblr.
He’s doing a live demo now, showing his profile. That’s a lot of green. Ahah, he has problems with the internet connection too. Ok, looks like he got it working now. No wait, it’s not. The much-touted AJAX-edit-in-place function seems to have jammed. His position has now changed from “CEO” to “saving…”. Well, he’s logged out, and that worked. So it’s probably not the connection then. He’s asking for love and support to put them on the map. And that was pretty much it.
Question time: How many users? He made a joke no one understood. Now figures, 3700+ users in about 3 months. He wants to compare Quaffs to Friendster and MySpace,a bold claim he admits. 30 new registrations every day. Compliments about UI, a question about who designed it. The team currently consists of 7 people. Not exactly an answer, but the creative director is ‘just 21 years old’.
20.20hrs
ZopIM is next. Julian Low will talk. Question about how to pronounce the name. “Zop-eem” or “Zop-Eye-Em”. Explanation of the service. Mission - to empower average users to chat with visitors. Additional features:
- Visitor ranking
- Preset messages
- Conduct surveys
- Aggregate sales leads. Not very sure how this should work, but he mentioned using ZopIM on a classifieds page.
Demonstration of ZopIM now. We’ve seen this before when we met the ZopIM guys at the E27 Garag3 so it’s not entirely new. He’s also showing the administration back end. Wait, he calls it a desktop page. It looks very much like a Microsoft app though. It’s probably the blue 
Ha, he said the connection is pretty bad too! Something to note, TDM. If you’re going to organize events like this, please please get good internet connection. Well, for the speakers at least And live blogging can only help your event. Oh, and tables for laptops go very well with live blogging to =)
Another point: chats persist throughout the session, regardless of which page the visitor is on. This bit is cool, you can probably use this to guide your customer through your entire site like this I’m guessing.
ZopIM makes things simpler, he says. No popups compared to most other chat solutions.
“Cool Stuff” is the title of the next slide:
- Page Persistency
- Customer Profiling
- CRM Tools
Current status: Private Beta.
And that’s it. Q&A time now.
Can multiple agents talk to a customer? Yes. But that might confuse the user. ZopIM escapes from this hairy trap by having each request routed to the proper customer service representative at the back end, minimising the risk of confused users wandering off the site and off into the ether.
Any plans to charge for the user? For one user, no, he says. We want to make this easy and common. Way to go ZopIM, I say. Cater to the common man and the corporates will come.
20.35hrs
Next speaker: Recruit.net
The first slide: “Job search sucks!”
The motivation for the service: There were too many choices he says.
Stats: More companies in the US accept only online job applications than in Asia. What this means? It’s going to suck even more here he says. Hmm, I wonder why can’t companies just move their processes online then.
Anyways, recruit.net: ‘one simple search engine for job search needs’. Shows many slides where different companies post job openings.
So, now he says what this is. Recruit.net crawls corporate websites, newspapers etc… and presents job openings from all these sources. A vertical search engine that focuses exclusively on jobs he says.
I wonder how they cope with the fact that most companies require job seekers to register on their websites beforethey can apply though.
Anyways, they have localized websites for different regions.
Vertical search: a term which is really getting overused I think. He says it gives them the advantage of knowing their audience.
Integration with social networks like LinkedIn.
This conference is annoying if for just one reason.Everyone seems to mention AJAX as if it will, on its own, make your service stop sucking. Grr, phrases like “we use AJAX, if you’re familiar with Web2.0″ make me cringe. And it’s happened a few times now. Honestly, if “we use AJAX” is the main selling points for web services here, we have a long long way to go.
My mom uses AJAX and that doesn’t make her a superstar entrepreneur.
Interesting feature here — recruit.net provides the ability to visualize how demand for skills or certifications over time. Job seekers will then know what the demand is in the market.
Content syndication on your websites. Hmm, I wonder how job openings will fit in blogs though.
How to they make money. “Adnet”. Oops, I read it as Adsense ;). Pay per click model. He asked who’s familiar with this model,and only 1 guy answered. Ah, you can bid for keywords too. Maybe it is Adsense. It looks just like it too.
I wonder what’ll happen if Google tried something in this field though. Google Jobs anyone? Post recruitment ads on your competitors site!
Question about Adnet. They do not have auctions like Google or Yahoo, but they’re looking at that.
Difference from SimplyHired: they cover only the US, recruit.net aims to be more than that.
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One thing I noticed there aren’t many laptops here. Where oh where are my fellow live bloggers? And wireless doesn’t work. Ok, I had to complain about that again.
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20.55hrs
BookJetty next.
Founder Herry says,
It’s a way to keep track of books. Motivation for the service: Book reading can be an expensive hobby. So I go to the library. But if they don’t have the book, I go buy it at amazon.com. Problem: Alt+Tab between amazon.com and Singapore National Library is troublesome and bad for your keyboard. So why put both under 1 roof and call it BookJetty.
Size of team: One. Applause from the audience. People really seem to like him.
He uses Twitter for the SMS feature.
Quote of the day
“When twitter released their API, I saw an SMS gateway! So it all depends on Twitter now.”
Excellent. This is hacking at its best. An “appropriate application of ingenuity” as defined by The Jargon File
21:15hrs
Gen Kanai from Mozilla. Director of Marketing and Partner Relations of Mozilla Japan
Show of hands who uses or has heard of Firefox? Almost everyone. Good stuff. Talks a bit about the origin of Netscape, I guess it’s just me, but I just love hearing about the first browser wars. That’s some good stuff.
Firefox numbers: 100+million users, 2500+ extensions, 43 languages and growing, 16% worldwide market share (that’s impressive,but I was expecting more though). I guess I just hang around more Firefox users. Number of employees: just 100. Strongest uptake in Europe, weakest in Asia.
“Europeans really like opensource and Mozilla.”
Yay Europe!
Fastest response time for every vendor on the slide being shown. I have read about unpatched issues in Firefox too though. But hey, I’m an Opera fanboy.
What’s next in Firefox 3?
Offline features: Store/access data offline.
Wonder how this compares to the Google Gears?
Built in malware protection too. Now Firefox will flash a big red warning if it thinks the site is bad.
Quick Demonstration of Songbird. He describes it as an open source version of iTunes.
Next up: Miro (previously Democracy Player). Video aggregator. Miro let’s you pull in videos from all over the web, mainly from video RSS feeds. It’s video search function also let’s you search across a few main video streaming services like YouTube, Google Video and DailyMotion.
Quick demo of what’s being built in future versions of Firefox. Alpha version of FF3. Demo of SVG video. Applause!
No plugins required for open source video codecs like Theora. He hopes it’ll make it into Opera too.
Check out the feature page from Mozilla.
Gen comments about different products and services that were demo’ed at PopOut! today:
Aspect of commerce in each service is very interesting. The presentation he enjoyed the most was BookJetty. Herry, the founder had an itch and he did something to ’scratch that itch’.
I quite like the idea too. Startups that start out to scratch an itch and solve a problem. Social networks were cool, but we’re reaching saturation point. We don’t need another. Give us something that we can actually use.
End of speech.
Questions:
Mozilla revenues. Most recent is 2005. $60million in 2005. Primarily through search engine partnerships, both global and localized.
Gen’s motivation to work for Mozilla? The chance to work on a project that affects over a 100 million users worldwide. Giving choice to users. Plugins and open standards.
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We’ve come to the end of PopOut! ‘07 now. Ups to the TDM team for bringing this together in just one short month. Like the large, spacey room really. A pity that the network connection was non-existent though, that would’ve made quite a bit of difference to the experience. Tables for those wishing to blog/chat/research/try out stuff would’ve been great too, instead the packed lecture-style seating.
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More on PopOut! ‘07
