The New Truvo

The site is live in Belgium -for now-, and we will soon launch Portugal and Ireland.

It allows user to leave comments, reviews, ratings and pictures about places in Belgium. The database cover almost 800,000 ‘places’, and we got about 5,000 good quality reviews in the first weeks.

As searching and surfing habits are changing, Truvo is our attempt to satisfy such changing habits and youngish demographic that feels more comfortable in searching, contributing and sharing than just searching or looking up.

Truvo belongs to the same product domain that players like Yelp and Qype are occupying, and that -fresh off the press- also AT&T is rushing into (possibly later this year?).

From my point of view, the biggest difference between a yellow pages site and a site like Truvo is in content control and ownership.

While in yellow the site owner controls (but doesn’t necessarily owns) the content, in a site like Truvo (or Yelp, or Qype), the site owner owns the content (contributors usually give up IP), but doesn’t control it - the user does-. Therefore the balance shifts toward the user, whereas in sites like yellow pages there is a general tendency to cater more for the advertiser needs.

This creates quite a dilemma from a monetization standpoint: if you control the content (like in yellow), then you have a ‘credible threat’ in front of a prospect not to publish its site, it therefore follows that you can ask for some consideration for inclusion into the site. When you don’t control the content, such threat doesn’t exist, as any user can add content about a place, or even a place itself (and therefore a business). The advertiser can therefore add itself to the index, and the implicit ‘no-censorship’ commitment from the publisher toward the user cannot be broken by taking the listing offline without undermining the user proposition and the nature of the site itself. At the end of the day, an advertiser is also a user.

It means that different products need to be used and developed to monetize the usage in a local search and community property versus a commercial look up property. I will stop here though, I don’t want to bother you with the details

A mobile application overlay on camera contextual information alllowing you to know more about reality, and to integrate what’s available online with what’s in front of you in the real world. Just imagine walking down the streets to see available houses for rent matching your search criterias? Or looking up relevant content when visiting a new place, like information about monuments etc etc.

Imagine also the possibility to stick company logos on top of building and locations. Imagine the numerous possibilities for advertisinment, but also the risk to negatively impact the user experience if you overload him.

Cool stuff indeed.

Check layar.eu.

Search is estimate at 1.5bn euros and it is known for very high monetization rates. It means the remaining 750mn euros of ad spend is display. As search doesn’t make up 70+% of the pageviews, but does make up 70%+ of revenues, and as social networks count for 25% of the total page-views and revenues, it goes without saying that the rest of the page-views are monetized at a much lower rate than on adnetworks (i.e. they make 10% of revenues for 50%+ of page views, which would be 1/5 of monetization than social network). Back of the envelope calculation, but directionally correct.

It would be interesting, if confirmed.

In the Global Entertainment and Media market, PWC expects at though 2010, a falt/consolidation phase in 2011, and return to growth in 2012.

Worth a look and a bit of thinking about whether the market is cheap or not.

S&P Earnings

Just in case you wondered… This is my current asset allocation (excluding real estate and debt) in this current troubled times. Just a tiny increase in gold - buying gifts for my wife ;-))):

Cash or equivalent:            88%

Equity (EM):                     7%

Gold:                               5%

Currency-wise:

USD:                                 50%

Euro:                                 34%

UK Pound:                         16%

Thinking to dump dollars. With so much printing going on there, it’s probaby wise to swap some of them for hard currencies like Euros.

This is quite a paradigm shit and can disrupt the current media setup massively. With 200MB broadband you can really enjoy streamed HD, on demand HD content, interactive 3D gaming etc etc. Also, remote personal content depository becomes a no brainer. It’s a step closer to cloud computing. How will TV broadcaster react? Will they split their delivery/platform capabilities from the content production ones to make sure they are agile enough to grab the emerging opportunities? Will they adapt quickly enough to the emerging delivery framework? Media convergency is a step closer.

Virgin 200mb broadband looks cool

Virgin launches 200Mb broadband customer pilot scheme in Kent (Telegraph)

Virgin Media has started a customer pilot scheme of 50 to100 households in Ashford, Kent, to test a 200Mb broadband internet supply.

Neil Berkett, chief executive officer at Virgin Media, said: “The 200Mb pilot will give us further insight into how true ‘wideband’ services might be used by customers”. Photo: Martin Argles

This is four times faster than the 50Mb Virgin currently supplies homes with and is believed to be the fastest implementation of this type of technology in the world, running quicker than services offered in Japan and the US, which currently reach 160Mb and 101Mb respectively.

The company has been running laboratory trials for several weeks and has now moved into the public testing phase, starting in Ashford. The pilot is expected to last at least six to 12 months.

Super-fast broadband pilot scheme gets £100m boostA Virgin spokesperson would not disclose when the service would be available to the general public. They said: “It’s a pilot at this stage and we cannot commit to a date for a full commercial launch.”

Throughout the pilot, the company will be testing applications consumers may be using regularly in the future, such as streaming High Definition video and playing 3D computer games.

200 Mb is faster than most routers can deliver successfully so many of the issues Virgin expects to come across will be related to receiving hardware, rather than the speed of supply. Consumers will need to optimise their computers to gain the full benefits of higher speed……

advertising trend

Some more of adspending from the media these days.

This time focused on big advertisement spenders and industries in US, 2008 vs 2007 comparison, brought us by TNS Media Intelligence of WPP.

Snippets:

1. Q408 vs Q407 -9.2% total US advertising spend
2. 2008 vs 2007 -4.1%
3. auto industry -15% spend in 2008, down to 12.8bn$
4. Procter (US largest advertiser) cut 7% to 3.2bn$ (wow!)
5. finance industry: steady at -0.3%, down to 9.6bn$  (surprise!)