We went to Cluj this weekend to present uberVU at GeekMeet. The very interesting location (a photo cafe), the dozens of interesting and very skilled geeks and the interesting set of presentations meant we were going to present at a top event with high expectations.

What was supposed to be a short presentation turned into a live demo of uberVU. We demoed the app for 5 minutes and then we had a short discussion around the product. We were very happy about that, as people seemed pretty interested and hit us with some tough questions.

DataPortability issues, traffic stealing, or keeping context around a conversation are themes that reappear again and again during our presentations and we’re happy that uberVU is a conversation starter about these important issues.

What’s best about this is the fact that people are starting to get why what we’re doing is important and how it’s related to the way conversations will take place online in the near future.

All in all, GeekMeet was a great event for us and we’re looking forward to going there again.

Most people see the distributed web as a chaotic and uncontrollable space. We see it as a big opportunity. And it is not just us. Bellow is an article by Daniel Waterhouse (sector partner at 3i Venture Capital).

One of the enduring and real elements of the web 2.0 discussion is the new way in which online businesses are reaching their audiences. This has spawned some buzzwords, such as ‘open APIs’ and ‘widgets’, and has added a layer of complexity into building an online business. Those who succeed in harnessing these techniques command a competitive advantage. As an investor I am always looking for teams which react fast to changing market dynamics - effectively utilising the distributed web is one such test of reaction speeds. But what does this all mean?

In the first iteration of the web, it was enough to publish your web site and try to drive people to it, to use your service and buy your goods. Perhaps you closed a few deals to get other sites to carry a version of your service and you certainly spent some money on advertising. All of these channels to get people to your site cost money - unless you stumbled upon the ingredients of word-of-mouth marketing which a few notable sites (e.g. Google) did.

In the past few years, however, several high-profile examples of new ways to get your user in front of your product have emerged, including open APIs and widgets. APIs are application programming interfaces that allow people to interact with your product/service/data/technology.

Opening up part of it to people outside of your organisation may sound like a recipe for losing control. However, when done successfully it can be very powerful. The best example of where this works well is Google Maps. Littered across the web now are Google Maps embedded in other web sites. The site owner has not made a deal with Google but has just utilised the open API it provides. In return, Google receives free marketing for its product on thousands of web sites (and will most likely start embedding adverts into the maps at some point and make money from this free distribution).

Widgetising your product involves allowing the mainstream internet user to embed your product into their personal page (blog, MySpace page, etc). YouTube is a great example - on every page is an ‘embed’ code which users can insert into their pages. YouTube gained huge traction early on via users viewing videos on MySpace pages which contained YouTube embeds. Several other large businesses have been built in this way, where the user interacts with their product on a blog or MySpace page.

This new form of distribution is very cheap and can be incredibly powerful. The downside is the inevitable loss of control and also dependence on the policies of the likes of MySpace which have been known to ban certain embeds. Using these channels effectively will become a core competence of many online businesses, especially as audiences fragment to more niche locations in the ever expanding world wide web. The companies that exploit this most effectively will be successful and we at 3i look forward to talking with them in the future.

The article was published in MicroScope magazine.

Let’s face it, nobody posts content to just one site anymore. You probably have a blog, a social network profile, you post videos on YouTube and you keep your pictures organized with Flickr. The people you want to touch, your audience, don’t come to your site anymore. They hang around in communities, so you have to get to them.

That’s why you probably post videos to YouTube, then embed them on your site. You don’t post them on your site or host them there. The simple fact that your videos are on YouTube gives you access to a great publishing platform and to a great potential audience. Here’s the problem we have with this approach.Just because the content is now distributed on a variety of sites, platforms, widgets and so on, that means your attention in handling conversations also has to be distributed.

You just got back from a cool trip and you want to blog about it. You upload the pics to Picasa or Flickr, Post some cool trip videos to YouTube.
Then you embed some of them in a blog post. Now everybody knows about the crazy fun you had on the trip. But if you want to see people’s reactions to your post, to your pics and videos, you have to visit Flickr and YouTube over and over again. Although the pictures, the videos and the blog post are connected by one main meaningful theme, you can’t see them all in one place. And you can’t see the way they are related.

This means that, just to keep track of the conversations you start, your attention is all over the place. That’s not very fun, you waste a lot of time and it’s hard to keep track with what’s being said. We believe that, since you are the creator of your content, you should be able to manage it properly. It’s your digital life, and in a sense, you’re now spending as much time managing it as you spend living it. As more and more ways to create, publish and remix appear, you’ll need a good way to manage all you create more and more.

Welcome to the future, where bits and pieces of your digital self are scattered all over the place. Don’t let them get lost, they are parts of you.