Name

MySpace Music

What do they do?

MySpace Music has existed for a few years now, however has only been a portal for artist profiles. No real money there. The new MySpace Music offers streamable music for free, monetized with advertising. They have joined up with all of the major music labels and have given them equity in the property, so they have incentive to ensure this is a success. This means legal, free music for everyone inside of the US. It also means the artists themselves are going to be promoting this from their own profiles. Users can also download DRM free music from the website, but this is a pay model powered by Amazon.

What are they like?

MySpace music competes with paid streaming services like Napster and ad-supported streaming sites like iMeem. They also compete with pay per download services like Apple’s iTunes and eMusic. As MySpace Music is a free service, it is also competing with illegal p2p networks where much of America’s youth gets its free music from. MySpace Music is basically competing with every single music service in the world, and that includes brick and mortar stores like Wal-Mart.

What else should they do?

MySpace Music has the kids who they are targeting, but they don’t have their iPods. Users need to be able to add the music to the iPods for free to really compete with everyone. The problem? Once the users leave their computers, the revenue is gone. Advertisers have their ads all over the site, not the ipod. Perhaps allowing very DRM ridden MP3s with audio ads at the beginning that are 5 or 10 seconds in length? I would be able to put up with that. It is obvious that the music industry is slowly moving towards an ad supported business rather than direct sales, so surely this would be a natural step. If the user doesn’t want it, they are free to purchase it. The next step is also to expand this service to other countries like the UK, Canada and other major markets, but I’m sure this is in the works.

How they can fail

MySpace is not so hot these days. It is declining in market share slowly while rival Facebook is rising, so as the kids leave MySpace, incentive to hit MySpace music moves with them.

Final word

Solid business model, solid backers, solid service. I just don’t see how this one can go bad. MySpace was always going to do something like this and destroy the competition.

Name

AirBed & Breakfast

What do they do?

AirBed & Breakfast gives you an alternative to booking an expensive hotel room. Users can post spare rooms/beds for rent and other users can book them.

What are they like?

There are a few virtually non-existent players in this space which I am not going to mention, but as a whole this niche has no clear market leader. There is of course the enormous Couch Surfing, which isn’t quite the same, as it is a community where you let people stay at your place for free and in turn you can stay somewhere for free - it’s not about the money more about the community.

What else should they do?

There are surprisingly a decent amount of users on the website already, and each offering is categorized well based on space, expected bed time (so the service isn’t matching party ‘6am and stumbling through the door drunk’ with a 70 year old host) and prices are clearly defined. I like it a lot, and I was able to find what I was after very easily. Some of the pages open in a new window which is annoying, and please, ditch that logo - it’s horrible and looks like one of those web 2.0 logo generators created it. Full props to the website name though - I love it.

How they can fail

Obviously this is an extremely niche market (which I would never be a part of) but there is certainly a demand for it. It is important that they are focusing on events where hotel prices tend to skyrocket or book out completely (like they are with the Democratic National Convention), and AirBed & Breakfast certainly has plenty room to prosper. They need to continue doing this to stay successful, because, when you are the last resort, suddenly there are people in your niche that weren’t in there before.

Final word

Nice product, works very well and has a good potential to create some steam. As for it being successful, I am not so sure. Low maintenance costs can keep this site alive for a small amount of capital, so they can sure try for a long time.

Name

TicketStumbler

What do they do?

TicketStumbler is a comparison search interface for buying sporting event tickets across many different online retailers.

What are they like?

They compete with every other ticketing retailer, like Stubhub and Ticketmaster, however they do have the leg up in that they are showing the results for all of them in one screen, where you can just pick the cheapest one.

What else should they do?

While price comparison is always a good thing, finding the cheapest ticket to a sporting event isn’t necessarily the most important thing. The main thing is where the seat is. There aren’t any seating maps on TicketStumbler, they only tell you what area the seat is in. This pretty much turns me straight off the service. I have only ever bought sports tickets from Stubhub, and for me, the map with mousover prices was the most important thing, period.

How they can fail

They are in a very competitive market with a not so solid product. I will give it a go next time I buy sports tickets, but I am 99% sure that without a nice big seating map showing me where that seat is, I will be moving to the next place, quickly. Secondly, some of the retailers I have not heard of. I probably wouldn’t order from them without knowing anything about them and I’m not so sure other people would either. Perhaps highlighting some kind of accreditation for the third party online ticket retailers? This will give buyers some confidence.

Final word

Good concept, the price comparison works very well, and I am seeing some very cheap prices. Great business model, taking a cut from every ticket sale made. I’m afraid that I just don’t see TicketStumbler succeeding.

Name

Rofo

What do they do?

Rofo offers free commercial real estate listings aimed directly at small businesses who need a small amount of floorspace.

What are they like?

I can’t think of a successful rest estate website geared at small office space only, so they compete directly with the big boys who deal in all kinds of commercial real estate, like Cityfeet and LoopNet. They even compete with huge real estate firms like Remax who don’t deal exclusively in commercial real estate, however have a big enough business in this area to make the Rofo founders’ mouths water.

What else should they do?

They are confined to San Fransisco for now, but have plans to expand as they develop their backend and listings which is smart. They need to appeal more to the real estate industry, promoting their free services to building owners, who might just be swayed by Rofo’s free listings to not even bother with the broker or the huge fees that the competition demands to list their ads. On the flip side, Rofo should be hard targeting industry publications aimed at entrepreneurs and small business owners. Entrepreneurs firstly, so that when it is time to get that tiny office space now that they have employee number 5, Rofo is already the place they know to look.

How they can fail

In service listing industries, it’s all about the marketing. There are plenty of third rate websites which get all of the marketshare (think most of the big players in jobs, dating, real estate). If no-one knows you are there, it doesn’t matter what you have to offer.

Final word

Solid site in a good niche that isn’t ever going to go away. Focus on San Fransisco only for a while and spread out from there. Once you get that one city covered well and your name is out there, it is going to be much easier to expand quickly.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but there hasn’t been anything fantastic to write about, and I don’t want to be writing about average at best services.

As you may or may not have noticed, we have a great new theme which has four ad spots to the right of the screen. Launching Today only has a handful of posts, so if you want the spot for free, link me to your startup’s website with a link to your 125×125 ad image, and I will add you, free of charge.

Just post in the comments, it’s not first in, I will probably pick the services I like best, and possibly throw several onto a rotation

Name

HotelMapSearch.com

What do they do?

HotelMapSearch.com is a mashup of hotel prices, locations and other basic travel information over Google Maps. This basically means you can search New York City, and you see a map of the area with the hotels marked by average price. This allows you to very easily identify the cheapest hotels that are close to where you want do be. You can also mark attractions, airports and other services on the map to easily find out where you should be staying.

What are they like?

HotelMapSearch.com competes with the general travel websites like Expedia, Travelocity and even community websites like Tripadvisor.

What else should they do?

They are a very simple utility which is focused one one thing so they shouldn’t really be doing much else to clutter the service up. They are doing their thing very, very well. The site is a little slow at the moment, however that could just be the launch killing the server as it’s not the maps that are slow, it’s the other data loading.

How they can fail

HotelMapSearch.com need to ensure their database of hotel prices are up to date, and they should be displaying current average prices, rather than overall average prices. I am not a fan of using a Wikipedia iframe to show information about an attraction, but this area isn’t their true focus so spending a lot of time and resources adding this information could be better spent in other areas. They should also work on getting the process of finding the hotel and booking it as simple as possible.

Final word

I love it. I will absolutely be using this website next time I go away. This is exactly what I wanted to see when I was overseas, but wasn’t aware of anything like this. Tripadvisor should snap this company up quickly and integrate their Hotel ratings into it.

Name

Cuil

What do they do?

Cuil is a search engine which, according to them, index more pages in a cheaper and more efficient way than Google.

What are they like?

Cuil are obviously all or nothing here. They are a search engine with the hopes of toppling the market leader. Expensive to build and run, with a very high prize at stake. They compete with every search engine in the world.

What else should they do?

I am going to ignore the fact that they completely botched their launch day as the server couldn’t handle many search queries. The ones that worked just aren’t very good. Very competitive terms like ‘travel’ or ‘debt’ yield some very strange niche results which I wouldn’t want to be be in my first results page. It’s all good and fine if they are different, as they are here to do a better job than Google, but at this stage they are far from it. Forget about indexing more pages. Forget about the fancy marketing team. Just work on that algorithm. I keep spelling Cuil incorrectly as I write this post. You have 30 million in VC - spend a little on a phonetically better domain name. Hiring a great legal team and looking into Google’s anti-trust problems could certainly some results too.

How they can fail

Two reasons. They fail to make a better search engine or they fail to get the public’s attention that they have built a better one. Which of these it will be is the question. The founders and those who funded them know that they probably won’t do it. But as I mentioned earlier, pulling this feat off will make them one of the largest corporations in the world. As time has told us, every major company falls at some time. GM, AOL, and every search engine before Google came along. It is interesting to note that Cuil are presenting search results in a magazine style across the page, which I personally like much more than the linear result that the bigger players offer. But this is one surefire difference to what the rest are offering.

Final word

No risk no reward. So many have tried and failed miserably to take this space from Google. Maybe Cuil can be the one to do it. Even a dent in the space would be nice.

Name

12seconds.tv

What do they do?

12seconds.tv lets their users post a short video message to their friends, using either a webcam or a cell phone.

What are they like?

They are basically Twitter for video. They compete with Seesmic who do video discussions and services like Qik which are in the cell phone-to-web game.

What else should they do?

12seconds need to build a software application for cell phones which will download friend’s videos on request, so users can have video discussions on the go or just reply to someone else’s 12 seconds.

How they can fail

Most cell phones are not particularly good for self made videos, as the phone needs to be turned backwards and held in front of the face, which makes for an out of focus, wobbly video. You may have seen some of the videos on Qik - very shaky and kind of irritating to watch.

Final word

I like the idea. A lot. 12 seconds is very short but long enough to get your point across. It’s a real shame that the iPhone can’t record video as this would be a great way to build up users in the early adoption crowd.

Name

Pixily

What do they do?

Pixily wants you to send them your paper documents such as contracts, bills and etc. They will scan them, make their text searchable and add them to your account where you can access them to view, print, download or email them. Their aim is to back all of your documents up and make them easy for you t find and manage.

What are they like?

A regular scanner. You could always do this yourself. Many programs are very good at identfying lettering on text documents making them searchable. There also plenty of direct competitors like Digital Documents LLC, but there is still no true market leader and plenty of room to grow as the majority of businesses do not use these practices.

What else should they do?

The #1 thing here is not only getting the brand out there, but the concept itself out there as well. I doubt that most businesses are even familiar with this idea. They have the right packages and a free basic account which is enticing. They need to bombard trade shows and industry magazines with advertising, to get them out there to key decision makers in an organization.

How they can fail

I would hope that the envelopes they provide you with are registered and trackable, as corporate documents don’t want to be lost in the mail. Having a courier pick them up from the client’s office would sure be a good feature, but would increase costs significantly. Maybe for a deluxe plan for huge companies this would be a great idea. Having the courier’s car or truck plastered with the company logo and details driving around New York City would sure target the right people.

Final word

Very attractive plans that even I am considering ($5 a month for a small plan) is very inticing. If they can market this well, they will have great success. I believe that the business model is rock solid and will be a must have in a more and more paperless society.

Name

Knol

What does it do?

Google warned us a few months ago that this will be launching a reference based website, and here it is. Knol is your basic run of the mill socially written reference website, however authors are responsible for their content. Unlike Wikipedia, one author writes the article, on a topic that they have an authority on. A medical doctor will write an article on medicine and be responsible for it - unlike Wikipedia where a 13 year old anonymous kid can edit the article based on some other article he read somewhere else. Other users can rate Knol articles as a form of quality control. Other users can edit or modify a page, but the original author must approve the changes.

What are they like?

Obviously there is Wikipedia, however I feel that this takes on the New York Times’ About.com - a collection of articles that are written by people in the know. This is very much a direct competitor to them and they should be a little concerned. The similarity is in that About.com pays their writers, and Google Knol lets authors add their own adsense code to their articles for a revenue share. Google has the ability to build a great community of fact checkers to build even more authority on articles, however the company haven’t ever been particularly good at building community websites. I would always trust the About.com article over a Knol one. There are also the smaller About.com competitors such as Suite101 and the rest.

What else should they do?

Google has more than enough users, so they should build up a decent amount of articles quickly. They just need to focus on the quality control through the community, so Knol can be viewed as the definitely correct version of Wikipedia. Try and get educators using it, because we all know that they dislike Wikipedia.

How they can fail

Everyone loves Wikipedia. Why write articles for Google? Wikipedia works pretty well and more people don’t care too much about authority. The site is also open to Squidoo type spam problems which would kill it. Can they control the spam? They sure can’t stop the blogspot spam. Knol is succeptable to people writing average at best articles and slapping their adsense code onto it. If they do that for 1000 articles they should have no trouble getting a decent amount of revenue - after all, it’s google so any article will get decent traffic. Google need to turn off articles that are below a certain rating, but that also can bring problems like sabotage. This is also the part where I have to mention that Knol is the worst name I can think of for a service like this.

Final word

I don’t see this taking off. Google have too many of these copycat websites which have all failed miserably with the exception of Gmail. There is no need for this website like there was a need for better web based email. Wikipedia and About.com work just fine.