Have you heard the story of the Hungarian farmer who electrocuted himself with a homemade stun gun while trying to kill a pig? Or the chap who strapped a rocket engine to his car and crashed into a mountainside?

Actually, the second one is an urban myth, as Wendy Northcutt will tell you. She’s behind the Darwin Awards website, which celebrates individuals who have removed themselves from the human gene pool (generally by dying) in extraordinarily idiotic ways.

This internet phenomenon has spawned a string of books and even a movie. As part of our series of interviews for this blog, I caught up with Wendy to talk about the awards.

The beginning

The Darwin Awards started on Wendy’s personal website, back in 1996: “I put some things on my website - I was working in a laboratory in Stanford, doing this on the side. It started as a joke, but I had a section called ‘pet porn’.”

“I’d taken pictures of my father wrestling with his dog on the floor,” she explains. “The dog slipped his tongue into my dad’s mouth - I took a picture of it accidentally. So there’s my dad, French kissing his dog.”

“People,” she continues, “thought it really was porn, so it became very popular. I was so embarrassed when I realised it was getting all of these hits that I took it down.”

Another section of her site contained some of the first Darwin Awards stories. She discovered these after her cousin mentioned the rocket car story to her. With the pet porn gone, these became the most popular pages on the site.

Wendy clearly considers herself a possible Darwin candidate. “I am going to take myself out in some stupid way,” she reckons, ”and I love hearing stories about other people who are just as stupid.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Starting an online business is easier than ever before. Webspace is cheap, and there are lots of tools to help you get going. Unfortunately, it doesn’t follow that success is always simple too.

We spoke to Giles Andrews, Chief Financial Officer and UK Managing Director of Zopa, a social lending website which connects people who want to borrow money with people who want to lend it.

We asked what advice he’d give to someone starting up a new business, and what he thinks the next online trends will be.

Inspiration

When I suggest that Zopa’s a new concept, Giles disagrees: “People have been lending and borrowing amongst communities for years.” He maintains that all they’ve done is take the concept and put it online. Read the rest of this entry »

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Web analytics. Sounds dull, but it can show you exactly what people are doing on your website. It helps you make improvements - if you’re running a business, it can even boost your bottom line.

However, it is a subject that can be difficult to get to grips with. So we asked Brian Clifton, Google’s Head of Analytics for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to explain things.

What is web analytics?

“A lot of people are mystified by what web analytics is,” says Brian. “It sounds like a complicated term, and that’s a bit off-putting.”

“Web analytics is a tool for measuring the success - or not - of your website. It’s like a thermometer, where you’re measuring the health of your website or online business.”

In essence, web analytics lets you understand how people use your website. It’s particularly important if you run a company; as Brian says, “it can translate directly into money for a business.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Last month’s interview with Chris Anderson is one of the most popular posts we’ve ever put on this blog, and it attracted a bit of comment in the blogosphere.

If you missed it, Chris Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of Wired and the guy who came up with The Long Tail theory. His latest big idea is about the ‘freemium model’ - essentially, how you can make money by giving things away. He explained it all in the interview.

A few reactions from around the web:

• Over at Bad Language, Matthew Stibbe reflects on his own personal experiences of being given the chance to make some money directly from his blog:

“…a reputable US media firm offered me a good sum of money to advertise on Bad Language. I turned it down. Mainly because I think advertising would make the site look awful.”

• Chris Garrett talks about how ‘free’ works for him. He explains that giving stuff away actually enhances his reputation, thus enabling him to charge people:

“So many times people have queried the strategy, they do not understand that I get to charge because of all the stuff I give away.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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Richard Moross is the 30-year-old entrepreneur behind MOO, a British company which sells MiniCards (tiny, custom-printed calling cards), stickers, postcards and greeting cards.

I spoke to him about both the business and the internet to find out what advice he’d give to budding online entrepreneurs.

Inspiration

The idea for MOO came to Richard when he was thinking about how the way we connect with each other has changed.

“In the past”, he says “a card would be for a business identity. We created a market for a personal card.”

Many businesses begin in similar ways. Rather than coming up with a revolutionary idea, they take an existing product and look at it from a new angle.

Raising the cash

It didn’t take long to get things rolling. Richard left his job and started looking for funds to get his idea off the ground. He says it was only “two to three months from leaving my job to having money in the bank”. The cash came from business angels – individuals who invest their own cash in startups.

Raising money this way isn’t always easy, and he puts his quick success down to a combination of ideas and drive: “Angels are good at finding people with ideas who’ll work their arses off to make things happen.”

If you’re in the same position, do what Richard did and find people who can help: “I played it by the book. I garnered as much information as I could from people I respected, from people who knew what they were talking about.”66666666666666666
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If you’ve ever used a computer, you’ll have almost certainly come into contact with Microsoft software. Love them or hate them, there aren’t many companies which have had such a big effect on the way we work.

So when we were looking to interview people in the world of technology, tracking down someone from Microsoft was a priority.

Bill Gates was a little busy, so we snagged William Coleman instead, who works at the company as a Web Platform Architect Evangelist as part of their Hosting Program.

The Australian’s job is to help hosting companies - like 123-reg - understand how Microsoft’s hosting software works and how they can best use it. Ultimately, the customers of those hosting companies should benefit.

Round the corner

Microsoft prides itself on being an innovative company, so one of the first things I asked William was what exciting things we should expect to see from them in the future.

He reckons that one of the coolest things coming out of the business is surface computing.

This is essentially a computer that uses a tabletop as its display. There’s no mouse or keyboard - you do everything by touching the table. These videos of it in action do a good job of demonstrating the concept.

William sums it up: “Surface computing - that’s really sexy.”

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Chris Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of Wired and was named in the Time 100, the news magazine’s list of the 100 people whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world.

He’s best known for coming up with The Long Tail - the theory that our economy is shifting from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products towards a huge number of niches in the ‘tail’.

I managed to track Chris down for the first in a series of interviews with industry experts. I asked him about his latest idea: the concept of ‘free’, social networks and where he thinks the internet might be headed next.

Here’s what he had to say.

Can you explain the idea of ‘free’?

“The internet has enabled lots of businesses and business models to go digital. And one of the economic advantages of digital is that the marginal costs of manufacturing and distribution are zero, or close to it. This means that you can now experiment with giving away one thing to sell something else.

“It’s no surprise that virtually all businesses on the internet are based on ‘free’ in one way or another.

“It can be just advertising-supported - where you give away one product to sell attention to advertisers. Or it can be an inversion of the traditional sample model. Rather than giving away 1% of the products as samples to sell 99%, you give away 99% of the product as free samples to sell 1%. This is what’s called the ‘freemium’ model.”

Which websites are leading the way in exploiting this idea?

“Well obviously Google is built entirely on ‘free’. Every product Google releases is free, or at least comes in a free version, and they monetise this almost entirely with advertising. What’s interesting is that there is no limit so far as to what Google will include as one of their products.

“It started with search and then software and services of various sorts and now they’re rolling out telephony and communications. They’re a sort of tsunami of ‘free’, which disrupts every industry it touches.”

But someone always has to pay somewhere, don’t they?

“‘Free’ doesn’t mean that no money is made. It just means that there’s the flexibility to make a product available free to an end user as long as a third party is paying.

“Sometimes there really is a third party, like in the case of an advertiser, and sometimes it’s a cross-subsidy by which a small number of premium users subsidise a large number of free users.”

Does this devalue things?

“In the media business we’ve always been free. Radio’s free-to-air, TV’s free-to-air, most websites are free. Does it devalue them? I don’t know.

“I think that if you consider attention to be a real measure of value, then free sites are not devalued. The fact that you give them your time is the ultimate gift in digital economics. Just simply being part of someone’s routine, being something that people choose to spend time with is a measure of value.”

When something is ‘free’, do people just end up paying for it in other ways? Perhaps they exchange something for it, like their personal data.

“Typically you’re paying with your time and regard. If you link to something, you’re paying by giving some of your own reputation to that site. If you’re spending time with it, you’re exchanging some of your scarce attention for that free product.

“Sometimes you do pay directly. Advertising, ultimately, is paid for by consumers in the form of higher prices for the products being advertised. It’s just not a direct shelling out of cash for products as in the traditional economy.”

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