Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

For those of you who don’t know, Wubud is my latest startup - which has attracted attention recently from some early adopters and bloggers. I was going to provide an update anyway, so this post isn’t in response to TechCrunch or any other blog. It’s a result of people asking for an update on Twitter.

It’s late. No. It’s very late. But all with good reason - I’m happy with our decision to hold off on ‘going ugly early’ for the sake of getting something out there.

Why we haven’t launched yet

We decided to outsource the entire development of our mobile application (not the design) to a company based in Hong Kong. For numerous reasons, it didn’t work out. In mid 2009 we had an application that worked well on a Nokia N95, but when we had the code reviewed by independent experts we realized it wasn’t easily portable to all other devices. It’s important to have our application work on more than 80% of all devices to help with mass adoption, so this reason alone was good enough to scrap everything and start from scratch. Some of our competitors have compelling iPhone applications, but that’s a small segment of the overall potential market.

We now have a team working hard on building a scalable product that is easily ported to all devices and it’s easily internationalized/localized to help with mass adoption globally. Localising a product is more than changing the language – it’s about providing local benefits and content.

As more location based social networks came to the market over the past 12 months, we continued to learn from what they do well, what they don’t do well and what they don’t do at all. Thanks to new companies coming to market, our knowledge about the benefits people look for has improved and as a result, we recently modified some of the product design and integrated more benefits.

Am I happy that we’re late to the game? Absolutely YES! We’re better placed than ever before as it’s still very early to market with location based services and the market continues to be educated by our competitors and other providers in this space. We’d rather be good second-movers than a failed pioneer.

When can you get your hands on Wubud?

I say this with bated breath, but we hope to have an alpha version by the end of January 2010. We’ll invite a small number of users to help us identify improvements so we can improve it further for our beta release (hopefully in February 2010).

What is go ugly early?

Go ugly early is a term used to describe an early product launch, even though it’s not designed exactly how you would like. The idea is to get ‘something’ out to the market in order to solicit early feedback, following up with small iterations to further improve the product based on customer feedback.

We’ve decided to go fashionably late - so fingers crossed…

It’s always a blast to hook up with Loren Feldman. Love the guy. In case you didn’t notice, we had a late night before this interview was shot - hence the delayed reactions.

I’ll post a comprehensive post about my entire trip to San Francisco soon.

I’m delighted to announce that Paul Birch has just invested £150k (approx. $280k) in Wubud.

Paul is Co-founder, Bebo - sold to AOL for $850M. Founder, Cominded and Co-founder, Birthday Alarms; a social network with 50 million subscribers. So, he knows a thing or two about social networks.

Read more on the Wubud blog.

TechCrunch covered the story here.

Check it out. http://blog.wubud.com/

Hello - Paul Carr here, live in Terminal 5 of London’s trendy Heathrow Airport with a special guest post to thank Wubud for kindly agreeing to be drinks sponsor for Smack My Pitch Up.

What?

Smack My Pitch Up - the only tech pitch event happening in San Francisco this Tuesday. The idea is simple… you have 50 seconds to pitch your very worst tech business idea. The word ideas, best presented win exciting (crappy) prizes. A grand prize of $50 is on offer to the very worst best.

More details can be found at The Long Fail.

See you on Tuesday. And, remember, as long as Wubud are paying, drink early, drink often.

I heard news of this from one of my Google contacts this morning - Google has just released an API to enable geolocation for mobile and desktop web sites. Lastminute (http://m.lastminute.com) is amongst the first to launch a useful location-aware site - it locates you without the need for GPS and then displays restaurants in your local area

What’s surprising is that the API is only useful if you have a Windows mobile or desktop browser. Watch this space for more device support soon though.

This will be extremely useful for social networks.

Check out the official Google blog for more information.

TechCrunch has published a good post about the difficulties of taking a social network from one country to another without thinking about their cultural differences. I agree with their position. Too many companies assume that their software (in this case, social networks) will work in other countries in the same way it does back home. However, they fail to realise the cultural and religious differences that borders impose.

Social networks have become integrative elements of modern American youth culture over the last years, shaping social patterns and changing the ways that people communicate. When taken abroad, these services have to deal with a large number of cross-cultural peculiarities by their very nature.

Societal and cultural gaps are particularly evident in the case of Japan. Market entry in this country with a “What works in the US must also work over there”-attitude is going awry for both Facebook and MySpace. It’s not a stereotype that communication tends to be nonverbal in Japan. The society generally puts more emphasis on the community rather than on the individual. Also, security plays a major role in many aspects of Japanese life.

I’d like to emphasise that it’s not just about translation. It’s about internationalistaion and localisation (I’m now hooked on Wikipedia thanks to Orit). Luckily, this is something I learned early on at AOL during the launch of numerous territories in the mid 90’s. AOL, for all it’s silly mistakes in recent years, did after all, encourage mass adoption of the Web across many countries including the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia. It took a while, but the US did manage to see the light, thanks to the strong teams/personalisties in the UK and Germany in particular.

This topic isn’t restricted to social networks by the way, it applies to any product or service. My advice is to partner with companies already in a similar space. If that isn’t possible, the recruitment of local staff to manage and controle the launch is imperative.

Read TechCrunch’s post for more insight.

This is one of the reasons Wubud is being developed in Hong Kong.

Sign up to Wubud.

We setup an account for Wubud on Twitter a few months ago to raise some awareness for the company and promised to give away a Mac Air in a prize draw as soon as the account reached 5,000 followers. Numbers increased each time we talked about Wubud but they stagnated as soon as we stopped. So, in light of this and to ensure we give away the lovely kit on this side of the next millennium, we’ve decided to solicit your opinion.

Should we change the rules so that the Air is given away when my personal Twitter account reaches 5,000 followers, or, don’t change anything and continue the competition on the basis of Wubud followers?

By changing to my personal account you no longer subscribe to a product, which I personally don’t particularly like anyway. It will also mean the Air is likely to be given away more quickly as I have just over 1,300 followers. On the down side to changing, it might annoy those who signed up to Wubud and who couldn’t care less about my personal ramblings outside of that particular product.

[Update: if the majority go with the 'change', we'll add everyone who's following Wubud into the prize draw to guarantee that their name is in at least once for their effort]

What do you think? We promise to go with the majority and the final outcome will be announced on the 21st of July 2008.

Feel free to leave your general opinion about product vs person twitter accounts.

I’ve just published a post on the BIMA blog to announce a call for entries. For the first time ever, ‘Best blog’ and ‘Best Network Application’ are on the list.

Here’s a little more information

Social Media - Awesome Little Bit of Wickedness Award

A piece of work within the category that either has a detail to be revered and highlighted for all its gloriousness, or its just that damn good that you don’t want to put a finger on it…It’s just wicked. This could be an uncategorised piece of UGC, a wondrous widget that sits within a social space or just the most incredible piece of social media that’s incredibly wicked!!!

Social Media - Best Blog Award (Personal or Corporate)

A blog within the category that is innovative, informative and entertaining. Open and honest a compelling read that inspires and engages visitors to return to day after day. Whether the content is incredible personal and poignant or just good fun, this is blog is championed by a loyal audience who share this site with friends and contacts both online and off.

Social Media - Best Network Application

A piece of work, within the category, that has been adopted by a broad audience. An audience that recognise the benefits that this innovative application brings to their day-to-day lives. Whether it is just about connecting people or staying in touch it will make everyday online tasks ‘easy’ and ‘convenient’ whilst generating huge page impressions!

Social Media - Viral Campaign

The online destination, site, video clip, tool, application or experience that everyone is talking about and visiting, that taps into popular culture. Cutting edge, this experience is so compelling, emotional, edgy, mysterious and exciting that the advertisers work is done for them when an online audience begin to share it with friends and colleagues and it goes on to join a pantheon.

Enter for an Award