‘web 2.0’ category

Doing at least one Green Thing a month

Posted by Simon DJ at 11:09 am

Green Thing is a community that makes it easy and enjoyable to be a bit greener. Every month you’ll get a different Green Thing to do. All you have to do is do it. October’s Green Thing is “Walk Once”.

They say once, but this green stuff can be addictive. One night last week, I walked to the pub and back when I had planned to drive and not drink. Because I walked, I had two pints.

Now I’m walking every night.

Posted in Non Zopa, General, P2P, web 2.0, Community News | 1 Comment »

Regulators should view money the way consumers want to use it

Posted by Simon DJ at 1:51 pm

Simon Gleeson of Clifford Chance has written a very concerning overview of the shortcomings in the Financial Services Authority’s review of how the retail financial services that it regulates are distributed to consumers.

He suggests that the proposed three tiers of advice, coupled with EU-driven changes to the test of what is appropriate, will increase the cost of products, leaving the “mass market” with only the Sunday newspapers to help them invest. Which means they won’t.

To be fair, the FSA says it has an open mind on the proposals, and the initial consultation doesn’t end until December.

The most troubling aspect of the review is that it proceeds from the perspective of whom and what the FSA regulates, and not in terms of how consumers want to use money. For example, there are no representatives of the consumer credit industry on the panel tasked with reviewing ‘consumer access to financial services’. As consumers, we don’t think about who is regulating the different ways we use our money. We just expect it to be able to use it as we wish, without complex, artificial or costly barriers being placed in our way.

There is already very little focus on providing more usable, transparent and cost-effective financial services from the consumer’s standpoint, because that would seriously impact bank profitability that is already under pressure. For example, according to Uswitch, figures for RBS Group, as at March 2007, showed that retail profits rose 1.5% (about 25% of group profits) against a rise of 14% in retail write-offs (69% of all write-offs).

Witness also how UK banks have actually gone to court to defend fees that consumers and regulators have long complained are too high; and their grudging agreement to speed up electronic payments, only in the face of competition inquiries.

Of course, over the past decade consumers have seized upon usable Internet technology to disrupt traditional supplier-determined experiences in travel, music, retailing, betting/bookmaking, games, telephony, TV and so on. Social lending and micro-finance are established elements of this rapidly evolving trend, which will surely reshape banking, insurance, asset management and pensions in due course - provided that regulation does not get in the way.

For a further catalyst, look no further than the current credit crisis. The inability of banks to understand who owes what to whom so that they can confidently lend to each other again is illustrative of how badly transparency is lacking. The savers’ run on Northern Rock shows that consumer feel it too, and are prepared to act when they consider that someone is less than transparent about what is being done with their money.

So it is now more critical than ever that the FSA views the financial services market not from the perspective of the institutions and products that it regulates, but in terms of how consumers want to use their money transparently and cost-effectively, and what is needed to help them do just that.

Posted in Non Zopa, General, Lenders, Legalese, Press, P2P, web 2.0, blogs, Finance | No Comments »

Another Gong

Posted by Simon DJ at 3:01 pm

I was fortunate to be able to join Tim Parlett last night to collect another award for Zopa’s you-beaut, patent-pending, multiple-Consumer-Credit-Act-document-electronic-signing-widget.

This time it was Financial Services Technology Project of the Year at the CNET Networks UK Business Technology Awards 2007. And it was interesting to note that we were the only retail application nominated amidst various financial markets projects. In fact, Credit Suisse were nominated twice in the same category. Clearly the UK consumer is in dire need of a little more financial services innovation!

Congratulations to all the other winners, including Balderton stable-mate Betfair (Retail & Leisure Technology Project of the Year) and the nice folks from Bebo, with whom it was a nice surprise to be seated. Not content with taking our UK Internet Innovation of the Year award from last year, they then beat us to the comfy seats in the bar at the top of the hotel. Talk about world domination. Not sure where they rushed off to next, but their seats were ominously empty by the time we left…

Posted in New stuff, General, Brand, Technology, Legalese, Press, P2P, web 2.0, Community News, awards, Finance | No Comments »

In search of lost Zopa

Posted by Ed at 7:34 pm

Imagine, if you will, that you’d never heard of Zopa. A horrible though, I know. But fear not: chances are we would be brought back together by the wonders that are Internet search engines. Zopa has managed to gain a foothold on the prestigious “first page of Google results” for quite a few queries:

• “lend money” 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th and 9th
• “borrow money” 1st (just above the UK government)
• “lending” - 1st and 2nd
• “social lending” - 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, …
• “p2p loans” - 1st and 2nd!
• “lend my money” - 1st and 2nd
• “great returns” - 1st and 2nd
• “borrowing” - 4th (just below Wikipedia)
• “safe and simple borrowing” - 1st and 2nd
• “peace of mind loan” - 1st
• “how is APR calculated” - 6th (behind BBC)
• “no banks” - 1st and 9th

…not to mention:

• “zopa” - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, …

And I’m sure there are plenty more interesting ones out there to find.

And this is quite surprising to us. We did take search into account when we last redesigned the site, but we didn’t try to game Google, or do anything aggressive.

All we actually did was: use clean HTML, have clear human-readable URLs, feed Google & Yahoo sitemaps, and make sure to use the right metadata for each page. This is all basic stuff that makes your site easy to parse. It was actually mostly done to help the blind rather than Google.

We archived this using a small in-house templating system that assembles each page from content files.

Use Clean HTML

HTML is designed so that the code only marks out the semantics of the page.


⟨ol⟩ ⟨-Start an ordered list
  ⟨li⟩Item One⟨/li⟩
  ⟨li⟩Item Two⟨/li⟩
⟨/ol⟩


The user’s browser then adds the numbering and indentation to that list. The designer can add external rules through a system called CSS, but the browser decides for itself how to best fit the content to the user’s device. Clean HTML will work well on mobile phones, speech readers, and dozen of devices the original author never planned for.

Dirty HTML looks like this.

⟨br /⟩⟨br /⟩
⟨font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="0"⟩
©2003-2007 MySpace. All Rights Reserved.
⟨/font⟩
⟨script type="text/javascript"⟩
⟨/script⟩
⟨img src="http://nb.myspace.com/isf.gif" /⟩


This one doesn’t actually matter too much with search engines as they’re scanning for text. It does matter a lot for selling to older people with poor eyesight, there’s more business there than you might think.

Clean URLs

If you look your address bar as you move around our site, you’ll see links like http://www.zopa.com/zopaweb/public/lending/what-people-are-saying.html These ‘pretty’ URLs are easier to remember and type. They’re also used by search engines to work out what a page is likely to be about.

Sitemaps

Both Google and Yahoo have online tools that let you submit content directly to them. This is a great way to make use that your legal small print, and other important but seldom linked to content, gets indexed properly. The easiest way is to catalogue the URLs on your site into a single XML file and point Google at it. Yahoo does exactly the same thing, but with a different format. For more details see . You can also submit RSS news feeds to Google which leads to much faster indexing, as the spider can just pull one file to read all the new content.

Metadata

HTML defines specific areas where you can tell a search engine directly what your page is. The ones we use are the title and keywords. Out templating system lets us set these directly on each page to make sure they’re indexed under the right words.

But the main reason Zopa ranks so highly is you. Over the years, Zopa has accumulated 646 natural links from blogs, newspapers, homepages, Italian comedians… you name it! These links represent the trust and interest of the internet.

(And they’ve probably helped us jump over a dozen other sites that were splurging £££ on link farms and consultants!)

Posted in General, Press, web 2.0, blogs | 3 Comments »

Law 2.0? : New Speech, New Property, New Identity

Posted by Simon DJ at 11:32 am

“A two-day “blue skies” intensive legal investigation into the world of web 2.0, where lawyers from the UK, US, Europe and Australia can meet entrepeneurs, social scientists and computer scientists working in the same domain.”

A Society for Computers and Law event, hosted by Herbert Smith in London on 17/18 September.

Posted in Legalese, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Cross-border retail and consumer credit in the EU - please facilitate, don’t regulate

Posted by Simon DJ at 5:33 pm

The European Commission’s plans to regulate in order to create cross-border retail and consumer credit markets in the EU are, ironically, only likely to constrain innovation and growth. Facilitating the resolution of the real obstacles bottom-up by market participants would be more helpful.

The European Commission recently announced its decision to propose new EU consumer rules in an attempt to create cross-border retail markets in the EU. The member of the European Commission responsible for consumer policy, Mrs Meglena Kuneva, said:

“I am convinced that consumer policy is uniquely well-placed to help the EU rise to the twin… challenges of growth and jobs and reconnecting with its citizens…

The Commission’s vision is to demonstrate by 2013 to all EU citizens that they can shop from anywhere in the EU, from a corner shop to a website, with confidence and equal protection. And we will also show to all retailers that they can sell anywhere on the basis of a single, simple set of rules.

We are a long way from those goals now…”

A long way indeed.

A 2005 study by the European Consumer Network on cross border complaints pointed to problems with delivery (46%) and defects or lack of conformity with description (25%) as the two main problems.

Furthermore, Eurobarometer discovered in October 2006 that while 27% of EU citizens shopped online in 2006, only 6% made a cross border purchase online. It also found that consumer perception is focused on more practical concerns: “… it is harder to resolve problems such as complaints, returns, price reductions, guarantees etc” (71%); “there is a greater risk of falling victim to a scam or fraud” (68%); “there is a greater chance of having delivery problems with goods or services” (66%); “there are more problems returning a product they bought at a distance within the “cooling-off” period” (65%). From a business standpoint, “the biggest perceived obstacle to cross-border trade is the insecurity of transactions (61%)… potential problems with resolving complaints (57%)… difficulties in ensuring after-sales service (55%) and extra delivery costs.” A further 43% of respondents cited language differences as an obstacle to cross-border trade. Such issues may point to problems with enforcement of existing laws and contracts, but not to any fresh regulatory opportunities.

Similarly, a May 2007 study by Civic Consulting reveals that efforts to construct a single European market for consumer credit by introducing a new consumer credit directive are flawed. According to the consumer organisations and national banking associations who were polled, “the main [non-regulatory] barriers hindering selling of consumer credit products in other EU Member States are different language and culture; consumers’ preference for national lenders; credit risk for lenders – no access to creditworthiness information; problems related to tax, employment practices etc.; difficulties to penetrate local market; different consumer demand in different Member States; lack of consumer confidence in a brand; differing stages of development of consumer credit; and lack of adequate marketing strategies.” The study concluded that “a single market for consumer credit cannot be expected to be created by harmonisation of legislation alone, and this is a long term rather than a short or medium term perspective.” As such, “the supply side of the market… does not expect increased demand and therefore economic growth from the proposal.”

In short, the European Commission is proposing a regulatory solution for problems that have no regulatory solution. And worse, for those of us who do share an ambition to create cross-border markets, is that, ironically, regulation in this area is likely to stifle innovation and constrain growth rather than promote it. As has been observed by Marsden et al. (2006) in connection with the reform of the TV Without Frontiers Directive, prescriptive regulation tends to cause markets “to develop towards more closed and concentrated structures”. This is because larger participants can afford compliance costs, lobbying efforts and have the bargaining strength to shift liability onto suppliers and consumers in a way that smaller market participants cannot – “hence, incumbents and regulated actors have incentives to drive up regulatory costs in other parts of the value chain”. Complex regulatory regimes may also either avert venture capital investment from attempted innovation in the regulated activity or ensure that it “will only flow to those companies considered to have the ability to ‘play a good game’ with the regulators”.

If the European Commission must play a role in creating cross-border retail markets, then it should help foster solutions to the real obstacles, bottom-up amongst market participants, not pose new ones.

Posted in Legalese, P2P, web 2.0 | No Comments »

In the UK, online business is personal

Posted by Simon DJ at 11:21 am

References to “business” (and “SME’s”) are actually references to individual people, so business is highly personalised. Taking the UK as an example, in 2005 there were 4.3 million businesses in the UK, 3.2 million (74%) of which were owner operated, employed no staff and generated an estimated annual turnover of about £190 billion. Only 6000 UK businesses, or 0.1%, had more than 250 employees. http://www.sbs.gov.uk/sbsgov/action/newsDetail?type=NEWSITEM&itemId=7000033961&atom_id=PR000001 .

By March 2006, 15.36 million UK households (60%) had Internet access; over 11 m UK homes and small businesses had broadband; 40% of adults, and 70% of 16-24 yr olds, with internet access had used social networking sites (defined as any site that enables entry of personal online profiles). http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/cm06/main.pdf

FYI, the UK’s population was estimated at 60.2 million people in mid-2005, approximately 80% of whom were over the age of 16: www.statistics.gov.uk

Posted in web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Mixing it up in Vegas (baby)

Posted by Dave at 9:43 am

Zopa has been working with Microsoft for a few months now - looking at ways in which we can use some of their new Windows Live services to provide useful tools for our members. As a result of this, they were kind enough to invite me over to Las Vegas the other week to take part in the Mix 07 conference they were hosting.

They describe Mix as being “A 72 hour conversation” - and with a great mix of developers, designers and the odd business person (like me) it was a great few days - with some very interesting Keynote speakers and content.

Zopa’s little moment of fame came when I talked about Zopa and demoed a new service we’re hoping to roll out very shortly (We’ve done our bit - Microsoft need to finish theirs!) - you can see the video below.

The idea is to use your Windows Live contact list (or your Hotmail, or MSN Messenger contacts - they’re all the same thing) in the Zopa ‘Tell a friend’ scheme - so you don’t have to type in everyones email addresses again and again. To do this, we’re using a new service from Microsoft that allows third parties like Zopa to access and amend users contacts (With their permission of course) - and we’re one of the first companies in the world to be doing this.

I also talk a little in the video about future plans for creating ‘friends and family’ networks within Zopa - using additional Microsoft services that they’re planning on releasing over the next 12 months - but the ‘Tell a friend’ piece should be live very soon.

I’d be interested to hear what you think about the new tool - and also what else you think we could be doing with Microsoft.

Posted in New stuff, Technology, web 2.0, mix07 | 5 Comments »

Free Garlik credit report

Posted by Chris at 11:00 am

We’ve been watching the progress of Garlik over the past year or so with some interest. Garlik (set up by some ‘ex Eggies’) is responsible for DataPatrol, an online service that seeks to put the customer back in control of their personal data online – and we think it’s quite good.

Have a read of what they have to say for themselves – and sign-up for the FREE trial offer including a free credit report.

(They’ve also agreed to pay Zopa a small amount for each member that signs up – so what are you waiting for?)

How much is your identity worth to you?

In the last ten years, technology has changed our lives. People shop, date, bank and communicate online, but the same technological advancements have created fertile ground for criminals, who are taking advantage of the digital world to commit a range of crimes.

ID thieves are currently fleecing more than 100,000 Britons each year. And with the average person’s identity worth up to £85,000 to ID hackers this is a growing business. In fact, by 2010 over 200,000 Brits could be impacted annually.

DataPatrol – a new form of protection

DataPatrol is the world’s first service designed to counter this new type of threat to privacy, and is being launched to enable consumers to determine their vulnerability and take action to reduce their risk. DataPatrol uses revolutionary technology to monitor personal information about an individual on the web, and on key public records. It then provides a report and an intelligent assessment of how vulnerable the individual is to ID theft to provide early threat detection.

Test drive DataPatrol for free

As a special offer, you can test drive DataPatrol for free – including your free credit report. Visit www.garlik.com.

Posted in Non Zopa, web 2.0 | 3 Comments »

Wobble 2.0?

Posted by Dave at 6:45 pm

A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be invited to pontificate in front of a crowd of techie types on the subject of whether or not we’re in another dot com bubble.

The event was the inaugural Chinwag Live and was held in the basement of the Slug and Lettuce in deepest Soho.

Rather alarmingly, the event was recorded, and you can download the podcasts that resulted from iTunes, or directly from Chinwag themselves.

You can get the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle here (80 minutes), listen just to me ramble on here (12 minutes), or just the Q&A session here (33 minutes). The Q&A was the bit where we had to think on our feet a little - that of course is my excuse for any stupid things I may have said

There was quite a lot of coverage on the (in the?) blogosphere, you can read a few pieces here, here, here and there, and the consensus seemed to be that there wasn’t in fact another bubble - and that we’re all being much more sensible this time around.

We’ll see.

In the meantime, here’s a picture of yours truly holding forth…

…and you can see the whole set here.

Posted in web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Top websites of 2006

Posted by Dave at 5:46 pm

Well - everyone else seems to be making lists at this time of year, and I’m not one to let a perfectly good bandwagon go past un jumped upon, so….

I just wanted to bring a few websites together that we’ve enjoyed using this year that are nothing whatsoever to do with Zopa - just fun, interesting or useful sites.

For music fans, check out Pandora and Last.fm - 2 different approaches to the problem of finding new music, and both very cool.

For the Londoner, a couple of essential sites for navigating around the big smoke. Firstly, the Transport for London Journey Planner - an incredibly detailed way of getting from A to B. Secondly, if you’re interested in getting about, and saving the world, check out WalkIt who will tell you exactly how much carbon you’re saving by walking to the pub instead of taking a cab!

For anyone trying hard to get organised, BackPack (for individuals) and Basecamp (for teams) are two fantastic products both from 37 Signals, who are also responsible for the very cool Camp Fire.

A theme of 2006 has been ‘user generated content’, and one of the standard bearers continues to be Threadless - where an ongoing design competition produces some of the coolest t-shirts on the planet. In a similar vein is a company called Spreadshirt where anyone can create a shop (Including Zopa!) and create a range of branded products - go on, buy a Zopa mug!

Finally, for anyone trying to keep up to date in this crazy web 2.0 world, there are only 2 places worth reading. TechCrunch is a blog edited by Michael Arrington that has become the must read guide to everything new in Silicon Valley and beyond. Meanwhile, Techmeme has taken a different approach - an automatically updated page that brings together countless news sources to present a continually updated guide to the web world.

Phew.

That’s enough for now - hope you find something useful in there and have a wonderful Christmas and New Year.

The Zopa blog will be back in January!

Cheers

Dave

Posted in Non Zopa, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

A Little Charity in Venice

Posted by ThomasB at 11:39 am

As well as working at Zopa, I’ve been lucky enough to be a beta tester for another start-up: The Venice Project. An attempt by the people behind Skype to get on-demand TV onto the internet.

I am auctioning an invite to The Venice Project beta. I had the idea after being emailed by many random [and, I’m sure, wonderful] people when I left a comment on a site called GigaOm.

The auction is intended to make money for Amnesty International who will receive 70% of the money. I only expect to reach a $200 sales price, but even $140 should help. Whatever happens, it’s a cute experiment in turning hype into cash

(The Venice Project has no relationship with Zopa. I just know someone, who knows someone, etc.)

Posted in Non Zopa, P2P, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Zopa = Top UK Web 2.0 App

Posted by Dave at 4:35 pm

While the arguements rage about what exactly is meant by Web 2.0, Richard MacManus over at Read / Write Web has kindly listed Zopa as Top UK Web 2.0 App - we are there, but you have to go right to the end to see us (Downside of having a name beginning with ‘Z’ I guess.)

The original source for the article comes from JigsawUK - a web site that tracks UK startups, so thanks to Colin Donald there as well.

It’s interesting that we’re in the category of ‘Second time around entrepreneurs’ - I guess that’s because of Richard’s previous experience at Egg, but James and myself were definitely start up virgins when we left Egg to create Zopa

Posted in Sales and marketing, web 2.0, blogs | 4 Comments »