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After the great success of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster there have been a rash of niche social networks springing up to cater for just about every type of person. There are simply too many to list, literally thousands, if not tens of thousands.

The latest spin is this one, Vois, which is targetted at 30 - 50 year olds.

Reports note that over half of users of social network sites are over 35 years old, so Vois hits them squarly and provides a way for businesses/advertisers to connect with these consumers.

Reuters is launching a new social networking service called Reuters InterActive. This “MySpace for grown-ups” is expected to focus on financial services as discussed in Richard Wray’s Guardian piece here.

Naturally I’m excited about the imminent release of the new izimi, and I wanted to share some sneaky preview screenshots with you all for feedback. The forthcoming version includes things like private sharing, single-click sharing of multiple files at once (all things that people have mentioned to us in the past), and a much sexier look and feel (though I guess you’ll all be the judge of that - feedback is MOST welcome).

Izimi desktop - this is where you manage all your shared files, galleries, adverts, etc.

Izimi website - izimi web, user profile - this is where your friends can view your profile and all your public shared content.

Its due on July 1, so not long now.
izimi website - www.izimi.com

It was a pleasure to be invited to the recent North West New Tech Meetup hosted by KPMG in Manchester last week. Credit for the event goes to Manoj Ranaweera, who has an excellent write up on his blog here.

I was fortunate enough to join Freeserve founder Ajaz Ahmed on the panel to present and take questions, which was quite a privilege since he just about started the whole .com boom in the UK when he launched and subsequently sold Freeserve for £1.6bn less than three years later.

Ajaz is a great testament to determination and pursuit of a clear vision, if you want to hear the whole Freeserve story, including how it reached a £9bn valuation with just 16 people, see here.

I spoke about how we got izimi off the ground and especially how we took izimi to the US bloggers, media, and tech startup shows to build an early beta user base, and about some of the challenges of doing that.

I had many interesting discussions, both during the panel Q&A and also before and after the event, including those with Manoj Ranaweera(entrepreneur and EIPP consultant), Ciaran Murray and Neil Kay-Jones (Totalamber), Anish Kapoor (yuuguu), Stewart Townsend (Sun), Steve Livingston (KPMG), Stephen Morrisey (Innovation Squared), Gang Lu (Netvibes), and David Hawdale (Hawdale Associates), and Ajaz Ahmed (ex of Freeserve and other projects)

I should apologize to others whom I spoke with but neglected to exchange cards, I hope to meet you next time and do so.

It’s hard to point out the highlights, it was such a good event, but a few things do stick in mind:

Finally, thanks to Steve Livingstone for pointing me towards Wagamama’s afterwards for food and drinks!

(header photo courtesy of Manoj Ranaweera)

At izimi we’re just experimenting with embedded streaming videos. We’ll be adding some features to help you optimise and convert videos to formats that natively stream in all browsers.

Here’s our first experiment, this vid is shared on, and streamed from, our CEO’s home computer on a regular home broadband line.

Just got back from Seattle and San Francisco where we were hooking up with some partners and media people. One of the memorable nights was presenting our 60 second slot at SF New Tech Meetup on Wednesday. We decided we’d try and be a little more creative than just talking for 60 seconds, so we hired local rapper/freestyler “Tommy” to rap about izimi.

There are some photos on Flickr here, here, and here.

We also took a home vid of it, and I’ll post that in a few days.

Here are the latest additions to my bookshelf.

The Innovator’s Solution - Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Raynor
The Harvard Business Review on Innovation - The Harvard Business Review

See other books On My Bookshelf.

I’ve never quite got my head round Twitter, it has always seemed like a product without a need. That said, there are plenty of people raving about it.

Part of the problem is that once you get involved you just get hammered with tons of innane messages from your twitter buddies telling you stuff like “just walking the dog”, “just going to work”, … Man, as if i wasnt already in information overload.

But, the interesting thought I just had is that perhaps Twitter isnt a consumer app at all, perhaps it is meant for business. There are plenty of examples of businesses that work in rapid-time, where groups of people want to be updated on ’stuff’ in real time.

One example may be financial markets, where it could prove to be a disruptive technology to the for-fee messaging services starting to be used in the financial markets… There must be plenty of other uses too, that take it out of the realms of ‘inane-interest’ into the ‘extremely-valuable’.