Moo makes a splash on YouTube

In typical Moo fashion, the unusual has happened. Last week a video promoting their Easter Egg hunt showed up as one of the top viewed videos on YouTube - over 1.7m views so far.



This is no vanilla brand -- but rather something humorous, loved and truly viral.

Nice one guys :)

Beauty of One Box Search

Google has made one-box searching a pleasure for the web. If the query is pretty simple and you want to find a web site rather than data, then the results, by and large are pretty good.

But you're in real trouble when you try more complex queries like "flights from London to Cape Town from May 1-12" or "property in Tribeca with 3 bedrooms". The results on Google are useless.


Traditionally vertical search engines have been better than Google at getting the right results but they have been unable to deliver a service in an such simple way with "one-box search".

Recently, Mobimissimo (an Index investment) in travel and DotHomes (a TAG investment, which used to be called Extate) in property have started to break this mould.

Although category coverage is very important in vertical search, this is relatively easy to do compared to general areas like the web, images or video as the sources of information are generally well known and fairly limited. Of course, there are major challenges in structuring data and keeping it fresh but coverage is only one piece of the jigsaw - search was never won by index size alone.

Both Mobimissimo and DotHomes offer similar or more coverage than their better known rivals such as Kayak or Trulia. But what is probably most interesting about Mobimissimo and DotHomes is that they allow queries and deliver results in an interface that is much more natural and intuitive to use -- the fabled "one-box".

To find flights on Kayak from London to Cape Town will mean you have to engage with at least 4 boxes;








with Mobissimo its one-box and when you get your results you can easily change currency, see local weather, photos from Flickr and even your Dopplr contacts.










Meanwhile in real estate, if you type "Tribeca 3 beds" into Trulia you get no results - in fact an error page;








but on DotHomes you not get results, you also get the requisite map and of course the ability to further filter results -- one box, natural language queries and immediately.









Of course it doesn't help that the prices are still sky high but at least you can find what you were looking for :)

These are some early examples of what hopefully will be a more general trend in search. Its not easy to do, but when done right a simple and natural query interface can produce a great user experience which will surely drive transaction volume significantly in critical and high-value verticals. Google did this with web search and I think the innovators in vertical search will make similar UI leaps.

If you have any other great examples, I'd love to hear about them.

Kindo's day in the sun

Its easy to throw stones at Alexa - and we all have - but sometimes whatever the reason, its nice to have a day in the sun.

This has been a great few weeks for Kindo. Last week they announced seed funding from the technology founders of Skype, me and Robin at TAG and Stefan Glaenzer from Last.fm. Now this week Kindo has sneaked past Geni and Verwandt on Alexa.


So congratulations to Gareth, Nils, Andrew, Demian and all the rest of the really hardworking and dedicated team.

Social networks have fundamentally shifted people's online behavior. There are over a billion people online now and the web is truly global and multi-lingual - it is no longer more than 25% American or English.

When you look at the diversity of social network successes, there are global players (MySpace & Facebook) but also very significant regional (Netlog, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Skyrock) and local players (Nasza-klasa and vKontakte). What's amazing of course is that none of these sites really existed more than 3 years ago and now they are the commonest ways for people to spend their time online. In almost every market, networks and search rule and portals are dying or dead.

The most common and fastest-growing online behavior today is to build, understand and communicate through your networks.

We have networks for our friends - our social networks. We have networks for our colleagues (LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo etc) - our professional networks. Increasingly we will have networks for families - not just sites about my ancestry (family past) but about my living family (family present).

Kindo has only been in the market since late October 2007 but it has made a very fast start.

Recognizing, rather than paying lip-service to the global nature of the web is a lesson we learned at Skype and have seen again at OpenAds. Kindo its already in 14 languages and not just with translations but blogs and a genuine local flavor.

Families can be way too serious and people seem to be really responding to Kindo's sense of fun and the authenticity and sense of fun of a global brand with local sensibility.


The market for family networks is very much just at the beginning, there is a very long way to go as these services reach maturity - but sometimes it nice to have a day in the sun.

It's a big day for Open Source

What a great day for open source. Sun announced their $1bn acquisition of MySQL and OpenAds announced that they had raised an additional $15.5m to further develop their free ad serving solutions for publishers.

When Index first invested in MySQL in June 2003, open source was a promising but by no means proven part of the mainstream Internet. Now less than 5 years later we are now living in a world where open source technologies and the LAMP stack are fundamental to the infrastructure and development priorities of any enterprise or fast-growing business.

OpenAds has been a major beneficiary of this same trend. Quietly developing over the years into a online advertising powerhouse, its software now serves billions of ad impressions at over 30,000 publishers in 140 countries and 20 languages across the web. We announced our investment in the business in June 2007 and have been thrilled at the progress made since then in both team and product development.

The $15bn database market is huge and fundamental. It also represents the technical underpinnings of the Internet as Jonathan Schwarz said today of MySQL it is "the root stock from which an enormous portion of the web economy springs".

But the global online advertising is forecast to be worth $65bn in 2010 and as several influential commentators are beginning to realize that puts OpenAds in a very interesting position. With a new hosted service making their software even more accessible to publishers, if you weren't before - watch this space.

The Business of APIs Event on Oct 15th

If you're in the Bay Area next Monday Oct 15th you should try go along to the Business of APIs event.

There is an all-star roster of speakers who are living in the trenches of building great API programs and the enabling technology and services to support them, s0 if you want to understand how to leverage web services to increase your reach this is a great place to start.

Announcing the Dopplr 100

Dopplr has just opened up its invitation-only social network to business travellers from 100 leading companies and international organizations.

The Dopplr 100 is a great way of slowly opening up the service to a frequent travelers from some of the world's coolest brands who have already been active users of the service and now want to spread the word to their colleagues.

Check out the list and see if you're on it -- if not and you're a frequent traveller, please send me an email and I'll give you an invite :)

TAG recently invested in Dopplr alongside some great fellow travellers.

TAG joins Mashery Series A

There is a great post today covering Mashery's latest funding round by Marshall at Read/WriteWeb.

Mashery takes a lot of the pain away from company's who want to offer access to their web services API. Customers can really focus on their API and not worry about having to manage the plumbing headaches of access controls, metering, metrics, preformance scaleablity and developer tools.

This is a serious pain point in a world of mashups and APIs. Some of Mashery's current customers include Trulia, Compete and Zoominfo.

TAG is really excited to be a small investor in Mashery's latest round of financing and join Oren and Scott's great team and some excellent existing investors to help develop their presence in Europe.

Stardolls starts to showcase DKNY and Sephora

Stardoll has just announced a relationship with some of LVMH's best-known fashion brands, who will be developing a presence within the Stardoll environment.

The business has taken an incredible journey from its early days in 2004 as a hobby site for Liisa, a Finnish grandmother, who developed the earliest versions of the service with her son.

This is a major step forward for the business, which has grown remarkably to having over 10m members and is one of the most popular destinations on the web for 8-17 girls to hang out and have fun.