Mike Schorah

You've got to love the fast-paced way in which business models around us change and keep us on our toes. Google+ has gained a reputed 10m users in its first week and it shows signs of creative sales and marketing at work in a really, really clever way. Users are invited, encouraged, to place their contacts into 'circles' to make it easier to share content selectively with different groups. What a great idea, and very convenient. Even better, Google promises that your contacts won't know which 'bucket' you place them in; but, of course, Google will and here lies some of their cleverness. You see, Google's algorithms can begin to build up an ever richer picture about the people you know and interact with, nuanced by the detail of all the circles that they're placed in. It's not just your descriptive label for the circle that Google can use; they can do detailed analysis of the circle's characteristics from their knowledge of the other membe...

A quick note from the orthodontic waiting room to reference a super article by "The Guardian" today about the ownership of our digital identity. bit.ly/ohIpSb Part of the business model for online services is to get users to create ever more content, under Terms of Use that frequently pass ownership to the service provider. Even without that, moving content away is a nightmare of complexity that essentially locks users into a walled garden. Expect users to discover the value in their data and demand better service terms as a result.

your data: gain control It's all very well for Facebook's CEO Zuckerberg to allege that privacy is dead . But it shouldn't be. Britons have become increasingly outraged by the unfolding scandal of national newspaper journalists hacking into phone records, medical, bank and legal files to source their stories. It's already caused one national newspaper title, the News of the World , to close and other media sources are under investigation... The latest shock is a quote from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown ,  "If I, with all the protection and all the defences and all the security that a chancellor of the exchequer or a prime minister has, is so vulnerable to unscrupulous tactics, unlawful tactics, to methods that have been used in the way that we've found - what about the ordinary citizen?" Google's Eric Schmidt essentially argue that, "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" And we could respond, as renow...

your data: gain control I often remember back to when the kids were small and we'd reward them with a single sweet for staying dry overnight; or give them a sticker on a chart... Now, there's a flurry of suggestions that we can and should do the same in the business world: give people 'points' to encourage them to do what you want them to do. And the points don't even have to be worth anything tangible for them to work. (The sweet we gave our kids was no big deal; the sticker on the chart even less. The important thing was that they were recognised, rewarded, celebrated.) Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken  makes the point so well; and TechDirt has an amusing prediction by Jesse Schell that more of life will get rewarded with points - even for brushing teeth, because toothpaste companies, toothbrush manufacturers and dental health plan providers have a vested financial interest in encouraging us to do it; and the technology makes it easy to monitor and ...

your data: gain control It's obvious really, but Google couldn't be so profitable and Facebook couldn't have such an astonishing valuation unless they had the actual or potential to make more money than it costs to provide their services for 'free.' They each, like most Internet companies, make money out of selling your data to companies that want to sell you stuff and they continue to innovate and change the world of advertising, destabilising many traditional advertising channels as a result. Google and Facebook are each in a little trouble, but they're so big and successful it's hard to see right now. On 24 June Google announced the phased withdrawal of Google Health, a way of storing patient health data in the cloud; and Google PowerMeter which aimed to give more accurate energy consumption information to users. Google, of course, has the slogan "Don't be evil" but people trust it less after several well-publicised controversies, in...

There's some bold wisdom in the Nike slogan. The other day I wrote about the temptation to keep honing and polishing a product before releasing it to the market. But it's important to take the plunge and start to get market feedback... Well, I've taken my own medicine and am pleased that Starfish has launched in the UK and beyond. It's kind of fun to see the number of users increasing, and more plot points on the map as users create content. And we are already gaining valuable feedback: I hadn't expected 10% of the first twenty users to forget their password on the first day! So we rapidly built and deployed a 'Forgot password' mechanism that we'd hoped to keep for later while we got on with more exciting functions. Trouble is, there's no point in having the exciting stuff if people can't get back in to use it so we had to re-prioritize. An important lesson about getting the basics right. Meanwhile, we were  able to release something exci...

The bottom  line is: as soon as possible! Jeremy and Barry are, by their own admission, a little high on the Obsessive-Compulsive scale: maybe it's Jeremy's Disney training, but he likes to be pixel-perfect in his graphics; and Barry won't settle for 'good-enough' - he'll test and polish until the code he writes just works every time, and he hates leaving program functions part-built. And me? It's taken years to learn not to keep proof-reading to  make what I write flawless, even to the extent of ensuring I haven't accidentally hit the space bar twice between words! I'd never have begun a sentence, "And..." - much less a paragraph. Temperamentally, we'd all stay locked in our proverbial garden shed, honing and polishing a perfect product. And yet, the lesson for entrepreneurs is to bring a product to market as soon as you possibly can. Why? You minimize the investment and development effort before you start to get real-world marke...