Social apps that are growing (or not)

I wrote a blog post over at the Tripbirds blog about social apps and their growth in the last two months. Check out the image or read the entire post here.

Håkan Juholt talks innovation

Reading an interview in today's issue of Ny Teknik, with Håkan Juholt, the leader of the social democrats in Sweden. On the question on how to make Sweden a leading technology country, Håkan says:

"We need close cooperation between the state and companies. Where would Ericsson have been without Televerket?" (Televerket = the old telephone monopoly in Sweden.) 

Oh, golly.

I wonder if it's just good old companies like Ericsson that should work closely with the state. What about Spotify? And Tripbirds, maybe we can work closely with the state, too. That would be great for innovation. right?

It's worth noting that Ericsson has the same stock price today as it did in november 1995. Not counting inflation. During the same period the stock index has gone up more than 300%.

I don't mean to bash Ericsson. But maybe closer ties between Ericsson and the state isn't the way forward if we want to be an innovative country in the years to come.

In Håkan's defense he says he'd like to shut down a state-owned venture capital fund, with three billion sek in capital, that the center-right ruling coalition set up in 2009 to invest money in the automotive industry. The reason? "It was a fiasco, and it hasn't worked". Sounds reasonable. Håkan's solution? A new state fund investing in other industries. Hmm...

As an alternative solution to politicians of all colors: Stay out of the market, and let entrepreneurs take care of innovation. But do all you can to make the market machinery work. Like fixing this. Get it?

Thanks.

UPDATE 29/11 2011: 6 days later, the tax authorites removed the double taxation on apps. Way to go!

Compare the popularity of social sites

Yesterday I wrote a blogpost over at the Tripbirds blog about how you can get an overview of what social sites are most popular in different areas.

When I check out which apps are most popular among my friends, I can see that Foursquare and Gowalla have about the same number of signups.

But  when you compare the number of monthly users you'll see that Foursquare is about 25 times as popular as Gowalla. Read the full blog post here.

Some nuggets from 24HBC

24 Hour Business Camp is over for this time. If you missed the pitch presentations you can see them here.  Each team got one minute to present their project.

Some cool projects include:

• Silar.se. Clean and ambient real time data visualization. As the "jury's choice" these guys got 25.000 sek as a surprise contribution. I hope they use them all to further develop the product, and that ASAP. We really need a cool dashboard at Tripbirds. We're ready to pay for it too.
• Startupjobb.se. A way for people to find work at the coolest startups in Sweden.
• Addjective.com. Describe your friends on Facebook with a one (?) word. Looking forward to seeing it in action.
• Jaglovar.se Simple site to tell people what you promise to do.
• Riksdagsrösten.se See how swedish politicians vote on different issues. And vote yourself.
• Squashtoppen.se A way for squash clubs to keep track of their club ranking. Simple, but probably with large potential. The system can also easily be applied to tennis, chess, bowling etc. Built on Bootstrap - nice!
• Snolooken.se Gives fashion bloggers an picture widget that let's visitors buy clothes similar to them in the picture. 
• Socialdekal.se Business owners in the real world get a big sticker that visitors use to like their business (or check in, please!) on Facebook. Using both QR-codes, and NFC. Huge potential market. Connects the real world with the internet. Developed by Popdevelop.

There are many more great projects, so please check out the complete list. Many tired web developers in Sweden yesterday. Good work everybody!

One hour left of 24HBC!

One hour left of 24 Hour Business Camp. The developers are quite exhausted, but still fighting with the last pieces of code.

Make sure to tune in for the pitch marathon session at 11.45 at http://24hbc.se/live

Each team gets one minute to present what they've built in the last 24 hours.

24HBC at 18.00

Panorama from the main hall, Fuji. Looks best in full screen.

Let the hacking begin

We're are now at Hasseludden Yasuragi, getting ready for the 24 hours of hacking to begin. We've been treated to sushi and some great food, and most of us have marinated in the hot springs for some hours already. If you haven't visited Hasseludden yourself, you can check out Fuji, the big hall where the hacking takes place, below. Looks best in full screen.



You can follow the live reporting from 24 Hour Business Camp at http://www.24hbc.se/live/. It will be in Swedish for most of the time, though. The hacking begins at 12.00 today, and the presentations of the projects begin 12.00 tomorrow.

24 Hour Business Camp III. Get ready!

Tomorrow at 17.30 the boat for 24 Hour Business Camp leaves from Strandvägen in Stockholm. Once again - for the third time! - it will take us out to Hasseludden Yasuragi outside Stockholm. You can read the full program here.

One thing that I think is super-great about this year's camp is that Joakim Jardenberg and Björn Falkevik will be broadcasting live from Hasseludden, at a number of occasions. So if you're not there yourself, you can still be with us in spirit. The one thing you really shouldn't miss is live presentation of the finished projects - it starts at 11.45 on tuesday. (24hbc.se will keep you in the loop.)

Since the official organizer of 24HBC this year is the Internet Infrastructure Foundation in Sweden, .SE, I think that we don't have to worry about the the quality of the internet connection at Hasseludden. But you never know ;)

Really look forward to meeting all the participants, organizers and sponsors tomorrow. If you're a participant you can read some of my previous blog posts. Practical advice, and what to bring:

• Några praktiska tips
• Min packning inför förra campet

Though the only thing you really need to bring this year is probably a toothbrush and your laptop. See you soon!

Reviews. Who do you trust?

Today at the office, we had a discussion about the distribution of grades on review websites.

You see, common knowledge is that the distribution of reviews take the shape of the letter U. That means: many people give negative reviews, many people give positive reviews, and less people give reviews in between. That's the distribution you usually see when you go to places like the App Store. Lots of 1:s and 5:s. Some people love your app, some people hate it. You've probably seen the pattern yourself.

However, I felt this agreed-upon knowledge would be false when it comes to social recommendation sites, such as Tripbirds. Somehow, I just felt people on a social recommendation sites would behave differently.

To get some data to support my case I made a quick analysis of all the reviews from my Swedish restaurant review site, Restaurangkartan. 13.000 reviews on a scale of one to five stars. And then - a very interesting pattern emerged.

The dark red line is people who just gave one review. That's the people who stop by the site once, write a review, and then never return. For these people, there was a clear U-shape distribution.

Then I looked at people who gave more than one review. That's when things got interesting. Quickly, a very super-clear pattern emerged. There's a straight correlation between the number of reviews someone's written and the distribution of those reviews.

As a matter of fact for people who write many reviews, the distribution is inverted. The shape looks not like a U, but rather like an A.

The more reviews people write, the less likely those reviews are to be either 1:s or 5:s.

So what's the conclusion? Well, it's about trust. On my restaurant site, when someone has written more than 10 reviews... that's when I start trusting them. If someone has written fewer, chances are that they are not really trustworthy. The worst example is when you will find restaurant owners reviewing their own places, and writing bad reviews for their competitors. That's actually quite common. But there are also many other reasons why you can't really trust people with few reviews.

The real power of social recommendations is trust. You might not always agree with your friends but at least you can trust their intentions. This is actually the reason I wanted to leave the "web 2.0" and "crowdsourcing" mentality behind, and focus on social. It's much more powerful. That's why I'm so excited about Tripbirds.

And let's hope the U-shape distribution was just a historical parenthesis on the web. :)

Tripbirds field day

We are now 7 people working on Tripbirds. Read the interviews with Philip and Robert. More interviews coming soon. :)