Hey Rupert, what’s your name?

Rupert.

Right. Can you tell us more about you?

As part of the Ziki team I am working as community manager for the English speaking web. My main task is to make Ziki’s innovative features known by the biggest number of people possible and we think that there are still a lot of potentially interested users who have not heard about our services. Ziki was first launched in English before coming out in French and our high growth rates show us that our members appreciate and recommend Ziki more and more each day .

Can I add that you were born in Austria, and that we became good friends in graduate school, @ HEC Paris? So that I cut off arguments of people who’re going to ask for interviews after this blog post. I don’t interview people in general, however I’m ready to podcast developers – entrepreneurs though. Enough said, can I add that we knew each other pretty well before?

Well, you just did.

Thanks Rup. Let’s now get straight to the point: what the heck is Ziki?

Ziki’s main goal is to make our members more visible on the web. To do this, we offer a sophisticated cocktail of sevices to our members which’s ingredients are social networking, people search and feed aggregation. Ziki’s open network and our own unique tagging algorithm will help you to find and get in contact with other members having the same interests as you.

Ziki is also a free way to search for comprehensive information about a person based on published information available on the Web. Our search results will be represented by relevancy and grouped by personal profiles so that when you follow a link you’ll find a personal summary of the researched person if there’s one available.

Ziki also offers a lot of complementary features that help you manage your own online identity. It allows you to concentrate your whole web identity on only one page and, thus, improve your communication about yourself. You may import nearly all your feeds such as posts, photos, videos, comments or your favorite websites to your personal Ziki in order to create some sort of virtual ID card. Ziki is also an OpenID provider

Allright, I think I’m getting it. Pretty nice Internet Software concept. Where is the Ziki idea coming from?

An estimated 30 percent of Internet research relates to people searches. “To Google someone” has become a part of everyday language for most Americans, and with the explosion of social networks and publication platforms (blogs, photo sharing sites, video sharing sites, etc), Internet users have scattered across the Web a mine of personal information. Since this information is searched on a regular basis, there is a need to organize and present it in a structured way. That is what made Olivier Ruffin and Patrick Chassany launch Ziki in April 2006. Today Ziki counts more than 20.000 active members and is available in both English and French.

Man, what you’re telling me is truly, sincerely pretty cool. But you know, I remember having once subscribed to Ziki. I was just curious and then never went back to it again. From what you’re telling me, I guess Ziki has changed a lot. So what’s your pitch to make of me an addicted user of Ziki. In other words, why should one start to use Ziki?

Leaving aside Ziki’s great design and the nice usability of our site, there are a lot of reasons to use Ziki :

Like many internet users you are likely to have signed up to a number of other sites that you visit regularly. Ziki allows you to consolidate all these sites on one and only place. And instead of subscribing to a new feed each time your contact subscribes to a new web service, you may subscribe directly to your contact’s Ziki in order to keep yourself up to date.

Our new internal search engine is a powerful tool that will make you benefit from your networks collective intelligence. Ziki offers you the unique opportunity to become registered for free within Google, Yahoo! and MSN which will make your name appear on the top of the result list whenever anyone searches for your name on these engines.

Bloggers may better understand their audience and increase its size with Ziki. One week ago we launched a new special feature which even allows them to monetize their posts directly on our site by entering their Google Adsense Code.

Finally, companies may find Ziki’s offer attractive as we give them the opportunity to create a personal website as well as a people search tool able to find potential business partners, customers or employees.

Allright, that is convincing. But isn’t the virtual identity market crowded? Who are your competitors?

As Ziki’s services are extremely diversified in order to achieve our target – which is increasing our users’ online visibility – we have a certain number of competitors depending on the market you place us. On the people search market, you can name Spock or Spokeo, concerning online visibility management and feed aggregation and sharing, Naymz is offering also free search engine placement for “Empowering Reputable Professionals”.

To sum it up, Ziki’s approach is unique as we try to combine the highest value services of all these different markets.

What’s Ziki’s competitive advantage vs. this quality competition?

Ziki has developed its own algorithm to collect and organize information relative to a person – starting with information available on the Internet.

The site allows its users to create an official webpage for free (a ziki), on which all personal and relevant information – from a bio and resume to multimedia files and blog posts – can be stored. These official profiles can be tagged and searched through Ziki and other search engines.

Ziki members are guaranteed to appear in the first position of Google, Yahoo & MSN search results when their name is searched, given that Ziki buys sponsored links. Ziki community members can therefore create, manage and optimize their online presence while controlling their image. Through Ziki, members can tag/favorite community members, allowing them to create their own social, personal or professional networks.

How is Ziki financed?

Ziki is entirely financed by private funds.

Seasoned entrepreneur business angels? wealthy private individuals? the founders?

You go and figure out. But it seems you’re getting the picture.

Which technology do you use to make Ziki run?

Ziki is programmed in Ruby on Rails. Olivier, our CTO, has developed all the features you can find on our site today.

How many people in the team?

Beside its founders, Patrick and Olivier, Ziki is composed of a team of about 10 members managed by Jean-Francois Ruiz, who is also blogging on webdeux.info. We are permanently adding new features to Ziki, which we communicate through our blog, and we try to keep in close contact with our members in order to understand perfectly what they are looking for and be as reactive as possible while responding to their needs.

Man, this is great. We need a marketer as a blogger on Tech IT Easy. When are you joining us?

Some day probably. I would really like to. However, I’ve been very busy recently, taking care of the English speaking Ziki community, especially on a Ziki blog here. I prefer to stay focused and avoid blogging everywhere. The development of our web application in the Anglo Saxon world is instrumental to Ziki’s future success and growth globally. My job is strategic and the adventure worth it.

Indeed, staying close to one’s users is one of the keys to success in consumer web and should be your top priority. Thanks for your time Rupert and good luck with the development of the Ziki community in English speaking countries.

People, there’s one crucial question I haven’t asked Rupert. And you have to tell me. In your opinion, how is Ziki going to make money? What’s Ziki’s underlying business model?

Let’s call it the brainstorming of the day.

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Yesterday, as I was reading an article on portfolio management in my issue of HBR, important news (to some) was announced: Palm has cancelled the release of the Foleo—it’s ultra-mobile laptop solution. I can’t speak for all, but as a fairly mobile person and a writer, I find the idea of ultra-portable devices with good keyboards (!) very alluring, and don’t care so much about performance and app-support. On a side-note, I am currently looking at the Dana Wireless as a similar solution.

The Foleo has of course been met with much scepticism by the (consumer-)media; it’s not quite a laptop and not quite a mobile phone. It was announced around the hype of the iPhone. Palm’s own line of mobiles and handhelds are not meeting the bar for innovation. And there was this whole discussion around the $100-laptop, which was not very well-perceived either (though still more favourable than the Foleo). We are in very turbulent times as far as the mobile platform is concerned, and perhaps it was simply a bad time to launch. It probably also didn’t help that the iPhone outsold every smartphone on the US-market in July and is about to launch in Europe (I won’t go into last night’s shocking announcement of a $200 price-drop!).

Porfolio-management, as outlined in the HBR-issue, works on three horizons, which develop in parallel. The first is the day-to-day management of products; you think in quarters and focus on current competitive factors. The third is the innovative activities of a firm, much lab-development, nothing in commercial income. The second brings it all together. HBR calls this phase the “equivalence of adolescence” in business. Innovations are put in a commercial path and are expected to become self-sufficient product-lines, hopefully sooner than later.

Of course this is not easy. You have to manage horizon 1, make sure that cash-flow happens. And you have to manage horizon 3, make sure that there are innovations in the future. However, what if these two don’t connect? Horizon 1 staff is busy fighting off the competition, and also more motivated by the instant gratification from the market. And horizon 3 is all excited about their lab-work, their Foleo if you will, but can not present a viable business-model for it. So you bring the Foleo into the second horizon, and dedicate staff to launching it. But at the same time the pressure on horizon 1, the market, is increasing. Customers are demanding better Treo’s and the competition is fierce. And on horizon 3, the innovation-platform is far from stable either, as the technology is changing rapidly. And horizon 2 gets neglected, staff perhaps diverted to horizon 1 to help manage the day-to-day, and to horizon 3, to develop new tech. Etc. etc.

I imagine that this is a plausible scenario for Palm’s current fiasco. The question is of course how to do this better? Many companies don’t actually manage this process very well, and that is how disruptive innovation can gain a foothold into a market. An example is VOIP. AT&T had internet-telephony on it’s third horizon for a while, but never actually managed to bring it to horizon 2, until it was too late and competitors like Skype and soon Ooma, (which I’m very excited about) launched.

Some solutions mentioned in the article are:

• Insulate businesses, not products: by turning your horizon 2 product-lines into a complete enterprise, with dedicated management, sales staff, and technology support, you prevent individual leakages to horizon 1. Another way of looking at this is corporate venturing; creating a spin-off dedicated to commercially viable innovations and spinning them back in when they are ready for prime-time.
• Use acquisitions to bridge the periods that there are no horizon 2 products and the horizon 3 “labs” still need time: as Jeremy oulined in his last post, this clearly works for Oracle. By doing this, you again ensure a culture of dedicating resources to long-term growth, not only the short-term.
• Recognise that your portfolio 2 products may be niche for a while: The Foleo is clearly a niche-product, but can grow into a magnificent platform over time. But expecting it to immediately gain mass can be fatal to the limited capabilities of portfolio 2 “start-ups.”
• Dedicate talented leaders to horizon 2: New business developers are a class apart, entrepreneurs with a corporate mindset. Parent-companies can be quite generous with funding, but stingy with putting the right man or woman in charge.
• Blocking resource-migration between horizons: I think this should be carefully evaluated and there will be many adaptions on a per-project basis until this process works well. Nevertheless you cannot expect a horizon 2 product to succeed, if you’re constantly pulling resources away from it to deal with horizon 1 & 3 concerns.

Clearly this represents an interesting paradigm for any company to view their life-cycle in. One implication is that executing well on all three levels can decrease the sole dependance on market-share, which many (large) companies are pushing for, but which also makes them lax in their drive to innovate, and which is also no longer as legally acceptable as it once was.

It is hard to say what exactly happened with Palm’s Foleo. Was it a case of scientific over-excitement, which does not guarantee commercial viability? Was it a result of competitive pressures? Or are there more exciting technologies on the horizon? From their blog-post, they make it appear like the latter is the reason, but of course we’ll never know the entire truth.

I imagine the Foleo II has been pushed back to horizon 3, and hope that they can find synergies between their diverse product-lines. Like Apple is now pushing OSX down to its mobile line-up, Palm should do the same. But of course they need to have a good operating system in the first place to do so, and a somewhat stable hardware-platform to build upon. All in all, I feel a little sorry for Palm but am still rooting for it to succeed, as it is a sympathetic company and more competition hopefully leads to better products all-round.

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