This week Tamiz made wave with an appeal against Google, which he was trying to sue over defamatory comments about him made on Blogger posting. In a case that goes back to 2011, Tamiz had argued that Google was effectively the publisher of a series of comments calling him, falsely, a thief and a drug dealer, and should have deleted them as soon as they were made aware of them. Google did delete the comments, but only after a five week gap.

Tamiz is familiar with online controversy: one reason he was a lightning rod for angry comments in the first place was because, he stepped down as a local election candidate in 2011 after calling Margate’s women “sluts” on Facebook. And so, when he did not originally win his case — the first judge ruling that Google was not the publisher of the comments — he appealed to a higher court. There Google’s inaction was found to be troubling, though it did not actually overturn the libel ruling itself.

As the Financial Times reported:

Although Lord Justice Richards and Lord Justice Sullivan agreed with the original ruling that Google was not the primary or secondary publisher of the content it hosted, they said it was “at least arguable that some point after notification Google became liable for continued publication of the material”.

The Lords Justice likened the situation to a 1930s court case in which a golf club was held responsible for defamatory material left on its noticeboard because it failed to remove it after it was notified.

Cue the shrill sound of the press screeching into action. “Blogger.com libel case opens door for internet giant being required to monitor users’ posts”, squealed the Daily Mail with barely contained delight. Except, as it outlines in the story, the headline is essentially trolling — Tamiz was denied his libel claim and asked to pay 50 percent of Google’s legal costs: likely to be a tidy sum. And it’s a stretch to suggest, as much commentary does, that this is another step towards internet regulation — asking a company to respond to notices of illegal content may not be popular (just see the DMCA) but it is reasonable to expect them to comply with local jurisdiction.

Still, Tamiz — and the kerfuffle around his case — does show the amount of energy being expended around online libel in Britain right now.

Defamation laws in the U.K. are notoriously harsh, in large part because they lean in favor of the plaintiff and put the burden of proof on the defendant: it’s a case of “prove your comments were true” rather than “prove their comments were false”.

And the precedent for defamation in online publishing stretches back 15 years, to the case of Godfrey v Demon Internet Service, in which a physics lecturer sued an ISP over comments made in a Usenet group it hosted: the ISP settled the case, because a pre-trial ruling intimated that it was potentially culpable since, despite knowledge of the situation, refused to act for 10 days. Although the award was small — just £15,000 in 1997, the equivalent of around $33,000 today — it has laid the groundwork in Britain.

It’s one major reason many media companies employ battalions of comment moderators, and carefully police the comment threads on their own stories.

But remember, we are all media companies now. And that means that we are all open to the same set of rules. There have also been plenty of high-profile cases on Twitter and Facebook against individual users, but so far there has not been much success in taking on platform providers themselves. Just last week a judge in Northern Ireland ruled that while anonymous comments made on Facebook were defamatory, Facebook itself was not liable.

Still, with Godfrey in the background and more and more cases coming along, you can understand why people see Tamiz’s case as another push at a brick in the wall between platforms and publishing.

Yes, everyone’s a media company now: and eventually that will go for Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest as much as it does you and me.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

It doesn’t matter whether it’s physical payment services like Payleven or iZettle, or virtual processors like Paymill or GoCardless. Digital money is where a huge amount of energy and investment is going right now. And it’s big money too: just before Christmas the Russian search giant Yandex sold its payment service to Sberbank for $60 million.

Why is it happening now?

It’s no surprise that financial technology is loved by investors, manys of whom harbor a quantlike obsession with money manipulation. Many feel like payments are safe ground: after all, internet companies have a notoriously louche relationship with profit, but if money is your product then you’ve already solved part of the problem of monetization. That’s no doubt a big reason that the Samwer brothers started up both Payleven and Paymill to attack the payments stack from two different directions.

But I suspect the cultural mood is important too. We’re living through tough times: the economies of the West undone by their own hubris, the Euro rocking on its heels. Retreating to money management is appealing for investors, but the sense of risk means it’s also more appealing to a certain sort of entrepreneur right now.

Take London’s fast-moving financial sector: it’s helping the shakeup of banking through refugees starting businesses, like Transferwise and GoCardless. As the UK’s Independent noted last year, many young bankers are turning to the startup world instead of staying suited up.

Young graduates have eschewed their pin-striped destiny in the Square Mile in favour of the alternative working lifestyle of the internet start-up – but are building dynamic companies based on their specialist knowledge of business.

[MarketInvoice's] Charles Delingpole, 29, set up the company after leaving his job as a mergers and acquisitions specialist at the investment bank JP Morgan. His partners are Anil Stocker, 28, who formerly worked at the collapsed Lehman Brothers, and Ilya Kondrashov, 26, who was at Goldman Sachs.

But there’s another big reason that Europe is turning to financial startups right now: inaction from the power players in the US.

Fast-growing names like Square and Stripe are making waves in the American market, but for their own reasons have not yet stretched out across the Atlantic. Some — Braintree for example — have made the leap, but in the meantime many of those sprouting up are clones of, copies of or at the very least “inspired by” their American cousins. They’ve spotted an opportunity that the innovators can’t move into (even it means they have to go into battle with each other instead.

The waiting game

Square’s Jack Dorsey may already have European politicians on speed dial, thanks in part to Twitter’s influence, but there is an argument that it is wise for the US companies to hold fire, rather than rush headlong into European expansion.

Services that require people to change behaviors require a lot of effort, and a lot of capital: and changing the minds of a whole continent is a tough thing to do. Square, for example, could wait for European copycats to fight among themselves, open the doors for them, and then move in to take the market — either by purchasing the winner (if they are strong) or crushing them (if they are not).

And in the end that may be the smart thing to do, because money is one of the most socially complex and awkward of all the things Europeans squabble about. Attitudes to money vary so wildly, it’s impossible to see a single player winning easily. Of course, you’ve got those inside the Eurozone and those outside, but that’s just one small part of the matrix. In Britain and France, for example, paying by card is the norm; in Germany and Russia, for various reasons, cash remains king. Oh, and then you’ve got those trying to turn NFC into a thing (it’s not a thing).

Whatever Europe’s financial startups choose to do, becoming the one service to rule them all will be hard. The continent’s approach to money is a mess in more ways than one. A vibrant, exciting, mess with a ton of opportunities, yes — but still a mess all the same.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s tactical retreat on privacy
• Flash analysis: lessons from Solyndra’s fall
• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past

Let me say that again: a door-to-door salesman.

I think that’s a first, for me at least. While lots of internet services market heavily — television ads, radio spots, billboards, leaflets and print — I have never come across this sort of feet-on-the-street approach before. Trying to prevent customer churn is one thing, but this just has the ring of desperation about it… and comes as another piece of anecdotal evidence that suggests Lovefilm’s feeling incredible pressure from Netflix.

When Netflix launched in the UK and Ireland a year ago, it was a clear who would be in its sights. Reed Hastings and his team may say they are targeting the bigger pay-TV services, such as Rupert Murdoch’s Sky, but their first hurdle was undoubtedly trying to surpass the Amazon-owned rival.

Lovefilm has been competing where it can, particularly in trying to head Netflix off at the pass by signing exclusive content deals with Universal, Fox, and others. But it’s also trying extremely hard to defend itself by stopping customers from fleeing: when I tried to unsubscribe a while back I realized it was one of those irritating services that forces you to phone up to cancel (a surefire sign that I will never go back).

And you can’t blame them: it would take a brave gambler to bet against the American company right now.

Netflix is storming on almost all fronts, from its acclaimed original programming, to its balance sheet: Wall Street loves it again, as it finally recovers from the farcical series of events it inflicted upon itself in 2011.

And that is having an impact on its rivals.

Former Lovefilm boss Adam Valkin told me last year how the company had feared Netflix since 2004. And though Netflix still has some way to go — it’s still unclear whether Netflix is making inroads against its real targets, the broadcasters, and claims almost dubiously high membership numbers across the British Isles — it definitely has some crucial competitors, at least, running scared.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines

The Nieman Journalism Lab called it a “movement”, which seems quite a grand term for two sites announcing similar but different things on the same day, but both Politico and TechCrunch are opting to move their commenting systems away from Facebook. At the very same time, waves were being created in the UK as the newly-relaunched Manchester Evening News shifted to a commenting system that required users to have a Facebook account. At the heart of all this is the old canard — would forcing users to comment with something closer to their real identity reduce instances of trolling?

It seems to me that what Politico and TechCrunch have in common is a stubborn belief that the quality of debate underneath their articles would improve if only they could find the right commenting platform.

At Politico, Dylan Byers is putting his faith in technology:

“Disqus gives you the ability to up-vote and down-vote comments and thread responses. By default, high quality comments will filter to the top, and poor quality ones will not show up on the page.”

A view immediately debunked in the first comment left on the piece, where Adrian Lowe pointed out:

“That’s if people actually vote for them. And if people are trolling in voting, then low quality comments will be seen at the top. So, ‘by default’ high quality comments will not necessarily rise to the top.”

You only have to look at the green and red arrows on the MailOnline site to see how sometimes it is the scum that rises, not the cream.

TechCrunch’s attitude to their below-the-line contributors was made clear by the image they chose to accompany their announcement: “I miss you asshole”

They seem to be ascribing the behavior of their users to the platform they employ, not to the way they are goaded into commenting by the articles they write. As my ex-colleague Meg Pickard says:

“If you write a provocative article, you can expect people to be provoked.”

The Manchester Evening News move is in the opposite direction, hoping that a shift to using Facebook identity will improve the commenting experience on the site. There’s no doubt that restricting people to only using Facebook identities will exclude some users, but David Higgerson wrote an eloquent personal blog post about the shift: “Much ado about Facebook”.

“Most of the people who have complained…seem to come from a starting point that news websites should allow free-for-all comments on all stories, and that the ‘community’ can say what it likes under any name it likes. I don’t see it like that.”

My own experience with using the Facebook comments plug-in under news content was within the Guardian Facebook app.

I had rather hoped that by opening two commenting threads underneath each article — one on Facebook, and one on the Guardian site — we’d be able to prove once and for all whether one or other led to better interaction. In the end, it appeared that actually the tone set early on in a comment thread looked like it influenced comments much more than anything intrinsic about the format or identity system used.

There’s no doubt that software design and features do influence community behaviors, but not as much as decent community management and personal engagement from journalists does. In 2011 my friend Mary Hamilton wrote a very thorough blog post looking at the responsibility of news organizations to not just provide a commenting space, but to also participate and join in that space:

“If you don’t set examples of good behavior, or reward [commenters], or empower the regular visitors to police their community by telling them the rules, your community will make its own rules, and chances are you won’t like them.”

She described switching tech platforms in search of an answer to bad community problems as akin to “laying Astroturf over an unkempt, unmaintained garden because you don’t like the color of the wildflowers.”

She also said:

“The news industry can’t simply automate away its duty to respond to users. Small publishers and bloggers for the most part understand this, and — more crucially — so do our users. These are human beings at the other end of the internet, talking in our spaces, and we need to start treating them that way.”

Still, the golden rule of newspaper website comment systems is “Don’t be a dick” — and no technology choice can enforce that.

This was first posted at Martin’s personal blog, Currybet.

Martin is principal consultant at Emblem, which provides user experience design and training services. He was previously UX Lead at The Guardian, which included working directly with Facebook on the news organization’s Facebook app. Martin also currently provides some design and consultancy services to Trinity Mirror, publisher of the Manchester Evening News.

Guardian News and Media Ltd., the parent company of the Guardian newspaper, is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

There’s an obvious reason they’re concentrating their energies, too. Technology companies are incredibly powerful, which draws a lot of attention, and a lot of anger in many cases. Unfriendly administrations can be powerful enemies: from Microsoft’s drawn-out conflict with European officials — effectively running for 20 years — to the vast fines levied on companies like Intel who break competition rules, conflict with governments can be costly and distracting. So what better way to try and smooth the path than try to head off that conflict earlier in the process?

But lobbying is furtive, and tends to happen behind closed doors: only dragged into the open when big issues emerge, such as the recent furore over American tech companies paying little or no tax in the U.K.. The European Commission does run a transparency register that companies are meant to report for, but the truth is that many — including, for example, Apple — have not signed up. Shouldn’t the extent of lobbying be more visible?

What follows is a short overview to some of the power players working to influence Brussels, or other governments in Europe, on behalf of the world’s big internet and hi-tech companies. It’s not meant to be comprehensive — there are lots of companies missing, and lots of individuals not named. But consider it more of a starting place: If you know more lobbyists, and their roles, then please leave them in the comments. Eventually, maybe, we can produce a map of their activities.

Google

Google has one of the most complex European lobbying operations among Internet companies. It operates a significant team in Brussels, but also has staff in most other major European capitals — including Berlin, where it opened a new office housing seven lobbyists. Their job? To try and influence the German government over issues like privacy and copyright, where it is far stricter than most other nations.

Key players:

Antoine Aubert, head of Google’s Brussels policy team, is listed in the transparency register as the liaison between EU and Mountain View. He is a policy wonk who previously spent three years working for the Commission itself.

Simon Hampton, the company’s director of public policy in Europe, is a former AOL and Time Warner policy chief. He took up the role with Google four years ago, which he describes on his LinkedIn profile like this: “His team of 45 evangelise the economic and social potential of the Internet, and work on the regulatory agenda to help Europe tap the full opportunities of the Internet.” The transparency register claims seven people working at European level.

Annette Kroeber-Riel, European policy counsel, heads up the German lobbying effort, which has built a network of operations, including think tanks and a research institute. Her background includes VeriSign and Jamba! (the company behind Crazy Frog, which was notorious Samwer brothers).

Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel based in Paris, is a long-time hand at the company who works on international policy efforts around data and privacy. Largely operating behind the scenes, Fleischer’s profile was raised when he was one of those named, tried and convicted in an Italian court over a YouTube video of a boy being bullied. (The ruling was overturned just before Christmas.)

Sarah Hunter, head of UK public policy, was a senior policy adviser to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Facebook

Facebook’s rocket-like trajectory in the last few years has rapidly increased its interaction with governments — rarely positive — and it is staffing up its lobbying efforts to reflect that. It seems keen to pick those with inside knowledge of the system gained from active political positions, rather than from the academic or bureaucratic side like most of its peers.

Key players:
Erika Mann, managing director of public policy (pictured) has helped build Facebook’s Belgian lobbying engine since joining in 2011, but knows Europe very well: the German was a Member of the European Parliament for 15 years.

Richard Allan, the director of policy in Europe, also has political ties. He spent eight years as a Member of Parliament in Britain (and then acted as campaign manager for Nick Clegg, the current Deputy Prime Minister) and sits in the House of Lords after being made a Baron in 2010. Before moving to Facebook in 2009, he worked as a lobbyist for Cisco.

Apple

Apple is one of those companies which has no presence in the transparency register, but clearly has a lobbying operation in Brussels. Steve Jobs himself was known to join meetings with European officials, and EC documents show he took part to get regulatory approval of Europe-wide pricing for iTunes. Still, its lobby effort does seem underpowered compared to rivals like Google.

Key players:

Claire Thwaites, director of Apple’s EMEIA government affairs previously helped lead Vodafone lobbying in Brussels and Washington.

Jaymeen Patel, senior government affairs manager (pictured), is another telecoms veteran, with five years at Telefonica.

Amazon

Amazon is one of a number of American technology companies that is lobbying Brussels in order to weaken restrictions on data collection. It is not listed in the joint transparency register. And yet it does have a Brussels presence to help try and secure itself a good deal across the single market.

Key players:

Andrew Cecil (pictured) has been Amazon’s director of public policy in Brussels since 2009, after he jumped from the same role at Yahoo!. Became temporarily notorious for refusing to answer a range of questions when when giving evidence to British MPs over Amazon’s tax avoidance strategies.

Saskia Horsch, the company’s senior public policy manager, previously worked for the European Casino Association.

Microsoft

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has put a vast amount of effort into Europe over the years. according to the transparency register, it currently has 17 lobbyists working in Brussels, spending at least €4.5 million ($6 million) last year — though experts suggest that few companies accurately report their true lobbying spend.

At a national level, it operates governmental lobbying of various kinds — such as warning the British government over the adoption of open standards. And it has also funneled some of its lobbying effort through Burston Marsteller, the PR consultancy: opposing the purchase of DoubleClick by Google in 2007, for example.

John Vassallo, a former Maltese ambassador to Europe, has been vice president of EU Affairs for more than four years. He also worked in a similar position for General Electric.

Stephen Collins, the head of EU policy, recently gave evidence to British parliament over plans for a new communications bill.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Learning to sell

As a finance guy who became a general manager, I’ve always been driven by strategy, product and marketing, and never valued sales. Sales was something I looked down on — a commodity role staffed by poorly qualified “liars for hire”, something you didn’t need if you had good product and marketing, or a necessary evil to get the word out.

As a founder, I sell every day, to investors, to staff, to the government, but also to customers, so that we can earn the revenue to pay the bills. And you know what? I’m not great at it, but I’ve started to like it. There’s the feedback you get from talking to clients that helps mould the product strategy, the thrill of the chase, and the buzz of making a sale or hearing that one of our job board customers is so satisfied that they want to double their spend with us. That’s real validation of all your hard work.

Yay, now I don’t have a boss

My first day working full-time on Adzuna, I felt a great sense of freedom. No more boss, no more targets, we could do what we wanted and take the business anywhere. It was a naïve excitement.
The reality of course is that everyone has a boss — even venture capitalists have their Limited Partners — and as a founder I find that position has been divvied up between my conscience and those I am responsible to. Mine are my investors (angels and VCs) whose money I took on a promise; my co-founder, who foolishly decided I was the right person to go into business with; my employees, whose livelihoods and future careers depend on our success; and my family, who tolerate my crazy desire to stop being a responsible breadwinner and play at being Richard Branson.

The emotional rollercoaster

I worked damned hard at eBay, Gumtree and Zoopla: don’t doubt that for a second. I worked at evenings and weekends, I had sleepless nights, I freaked out when the servers went down or we had a DDOS attack. As MD or COO, I felt complete ownership of my role and the success of the business.
But even after all that, the position of actually being a founder changed things. You take things more personally, you worry more, you try even harder, and it’s more of an emotional experience. It’s like having kids. When a new product feature that makes job hunting better goes live, I feel proud and elated; when a big partnership deal falls through I fall briefly into a black pit. And like being a parent, it’s really hard to explain to people who’ve never done it.
Switching off is harder. I find that I have to trick myself through exercise or an activity so absorbing that I have to stop working through the next seven things on my to-do list in my head. Skiing and running seem to do the job.

Trusting your gut feel

The big companies I worked for, and even the startups, suffered a bit from analysis paralysis. The employment relationship, processes like assessments, pay rises, targets and quarterly earnings, and just the sheer energy required to co-ordinate hundreds of people make it hard for big companies to move quickly. They also tend to overvalue analysis and consensus decision-making.
A new startup can bypass a huge proportion of that lost energy. Some of that comes from taking more risk, some from an ability to change direction quickly, some from entrepreneurial spirit. But a chunk also comes from founders just trusting their gut feel when there is no data. When you are spending someone else’s money or working for someone else’s company you feel like you need to analyze and justify decisions, but as a founder it’s easier to just go for it. If the Prime Minister’s office wants to use your economic data in his iPad app, you just say “hell yeah”.
Of course, if you’re successful and your business scales, some of those corporate processes start to creep back in — and they need to. But still, the crazy founder as ultimate decision-arbiter can help cut through the chatter, just as they do at Facebook or Amazon.

Making a dent in the world

Most people are content to be part of the flow of the world: to fit in, to meet their boss’s expectations and get a bonus at the end of the year, to make a bit of money so they can enjoy spending time with their friends and the beauty of the world as it is.
Entrepreneurs want to make a dent in the world. They want to change it. That takes enormous energy, vision, powers of persuasion and persistence in a world full of people who are afraid of change. But it is a beautiful thing when it happens. At eBay, Gumtree and Zoopla I was lucky enough join businesses early enough in their evolution that most people I spoke to hadn’t heard of them, and asked me skeptical questions about why they were needed or useful. In a handful of years, they each became household names and those conversations with friends or acquaintances completely changed.
At Adzuna, we believe that classifieds search is broken, that we can make it better for billions of people from our tiny office in South West London, and that in the process we can move a whole industry along with us. For all the thrills and spills, I love what we do and there’s no other job in the world I would trade it in for.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content

Their approach to internet startups — taking an idea that’s already been proven somewhere else (usually the US) and building out a copycat focused on Europe or emerging markets — either tends to draw admiration or disgust.

The swell of reactions to the rumor died down pretty quickly, but the background chatter is still there. And what I realized that when I looked back over people’s thoughts, that I hadn’t seen a clear-eyed overview of what it would actually mean if Rocket — or some of its properties at least — did hit the stock market.

That’s partly because everyone who comments on the Samwers comes from one of the two camps. Either they are emotionally invested in the idea of the brothers as tough operators who turn a profit (Venture Village quoted local investors happy about the possible influx of money). Or they have disdain for the kind of success the Samwers represent deep in their bones (Sarah Lacey, who has been a vocal critic of the Samwer brothers and their methods, said that “real entrepreneurs will never respect the Samwer Brothers”).

But if the question is “what would Rocket going public really mean”, in the end, neither position really does the question justice. So here’s a list of pros and cons I drew up.

It’s an exit, and any exit is good

The world is pretty economically distressed right now, and even inside the technology bubble — which took a while to feel the pain — things are tough. That makes any public offering a good thing, because it helps the effort to rebuild. And it wouldn’t just be hot air, either: Rocket has some powerful brands in its portfolio. Fashion retailer Zalando, which started off as a copy of Zappos, is growing fast with strong revenues north of $600 million.

It’s good news for Berlin, and for Europe

Berlin’s reputation as a home for interesting internet companies has been building over the last few years, and this move would certainly draw even more attention to it. More broadly, Europe could do with a win too. These have been bleak years for the continent, where most people still talk about Skype — first sold eight years ago — as one of the big successes. Of course, this kind of backslapping doesn’t come without drawbacks — success will inevitably draw more hangers-on, more poseurs, more wannabes, of which Berlin already has many. But it’s a welcome fillip for those who are still at the coalface, and could bring them more attention and assistance.

It shows the global market matters

All of the biggest internet companies are American — Google, Amazon, Facebook — and many of them are preoccupied with their home market, particularly if there’s an e-commerce or physical element to what they do. That’s understandable, but it does leave other markets waiting. Square’s a great example: it plans a global rollout soon, but the market wanted more, and so a wealth of copycats and rivals has built up. Underpinning Rocket’s success with an IPO could help reiterate the idea that you should think global.

It’s a paean to execution

You probably know the truism that floats around in the tech industry: ideas are ten a penny; execution is what matters. In fact, most people who say it don’t actually believe it, prizing the beauty of “innovation” just as highly. But strip all the blabbering away, and you can’t find a better example of execution than Rocket, where a ruthless dedication to success and speed is ingrained into each team.

It’s a big test for the Samwers

The Samwers haven’t really been this route before. Whether it’s the entirety of Rocket that goes public, or just one or two brands within it, this is unchartered territory for the trio. By and large they like to stick with what they know: take an idea, build, raise money, profit, start again. Going to the public markets with your business is a tough road that brings a lot of new challenges — and even when you look strong, you may struggle. We’ve already seen consumer internet IPOs struggle: Facebook stock is down 22 percent from its IPO.

Two other things to think about. First, remember that most of the financials behind Rocket’s businesses are obscured: we don’t know how well they’d stack up if opened up to shareholder scrutiny (although they’re pretty brutal with underperforming properties). Second, what evidence we have from the Samwers’ involvement in public companies is not great so far: Marc Samwer took over the international business at Groupon after it bought their clone, Citydeal, but left last spring amid turmoil at the company.

Most of the money won’t come back

Unlike startups which are built from scratch by their founders, who then often put money back into their local ecosystems as angels, the vast majority of the equity in Rocket companies is owned by the Samwers and their investors. The people who run Rocket startups are more like employees than founders, and as a result they won’t leave with as much cash as they would have done otherwise. It will also be interesting to see whether Rocket goes to New York or stays in Europe: some big Russian tech companies have chosen to IPO in London, but it seems likely that Rocket would pick the Nasdaq. That means it’s the American investment market that gets the deal.

And let’s remember, the investors who fuel Rocket’s empire aren’t likely to push all their profit back into the ecosystem either. Leonard Blavatnik of Access Industries has backed a few big companies — such as Deezer, the Spotify competitor — but has a very diverse portfolio, including oil companies, media businesses and chemicals. Swedish bank Kinnevik, meanwhile, seems to mainly get involved in funding Russian and German copycats.

There are some investors who are spreading the love: German media investment firm Holtzbrinck and Nordic venture business Sunstone are recent Samwer backers, for example. But it seems unlikely that either the biggest investors or the Samwer brothers themselves, who prefer to crush their rivals rather than buy them, will push too much of their cash back into.

It will encourage copycatting

Whatever you think about copycats, the fact is that there are smart, value-generating ways to build on the ideas of others — and then there are cheap, pointless imitations. Sometimes the Samwers achieve the former: when they bring, they deliver something that people want. What the Samwers’ critics misunderstand is that they are providing a service to people who do not have access to the original, often when the “parent” company shows no intention of expanding. It’s not as if large American internet companies have a divine right to the custom of the rest of the world, whenever they feel like it.

You could argue that they have single-handedly dragged Germany’s internet market out of the late 1990s by being aggressive and lifting ideas from elsewhere.

But sometimes they try to win with code lifted from rival sites who are already moving into the markets that Rocket is trying to brute force its way into (see Bamarang, its rip of Fab). They have also encouraged less capable entrepreneurs and investors to believe the copycat model is a way to surefire success. Just witness the clone wars springing up in difficult, exciting new markets like Russia or Turkey or Brazil or South East Asia. A Rocket IPO could give birth to a generation of poor imitations of American products that don’t understand where their value really lies.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• GigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watch
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang

One key characteristic of founders is the great urge to get things done — and this urge is a key component of success. However, there’s also a tendency to simply blast through everything on the agenda so that you can move faster, which is not always a good idea. There are lucky moments where startups stumble upon something that is suddenly loved and used, but most startups do not have the luxury to shoot from the hip to try and hit the target: they need to know where to aim.

To find out what you should work on with highest priority, you need to paint a larger picture and define your own position within that.

Momentum is an indicator of success, not speed

At Seedcamp, we see hundreds of startups at our events each year, and we usually invest in a couple each month. All these companies are selected from a much larger range of applicants, and they’re already among the best early-stage teams. We look at various characteristics when we make our decisions, but momentum of any kind is often a very solid indicator of success.

Momentum is usually the result of a founding team understanding exactly what they are trying to achieve, and moving the right levers to make that happen. And it’s important to understand that momentum is not about moving the fastest. It’s about moving in the right direction to achieve your goals.
Finding out what that focus should be on at any time requires a deep understanding of a set of different factors: the market situation, your positioning, and the key product components that come out of it.

Understand the market and rationalize your position

Knowing the larger marketplace and your competitive situation is necessary to know how to position yourself. Founders are often engrossed with the idea for a product from a perspective of possibilities, rather than opportunities. But just because something is possible, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea.

If the team knows their market in detail and can define why their product or service is stands out from the competition, then they also know which niche in the market is still open — or attainable. They’ll be able to identify where value is being left on the table, or where unhappy customers are fed up with the current status quo. That’s a clear opportunity.

Next comes the definition of the feature set that make up the minimum viable product. It’s not just an exercise about getting anything out of the door, but rather the result of a deep understanding of the most essential part of the whole experience. Successful minimum viable products are addictive and solve one problem immediately. They also often remain at the core of the company’s offering and define their existence.

Don’t forget your customers

The previous steps can never exist in a vacuum – talking to customers is just as important as theorizing and understanding the underlying concept. Failing to balance both leads to either constant reshuffling of priorities, or a product that nobody wants to use.

Understanding these three components enables the team to focus their time and effort on the few necessary actions to achieve momentum. All else is secondary.

In the end, the biggest constraint in a startup is time — so working on the right things is crucial to be as fast as possible. Momentum in these focus areas can then easily be tracked and improved, leading to a virtuous cycle.

Many startups that fail to rationalize their position and raison d’être make rash decisions that are not grounded in an understanding of the bigger picture. Because of the scarcity of time and other resources, this robs the team of what little buffer they have to get it right, and sets them up for failure. The same goes for momentum: if the limited resources of a startup are spread out to solve too many problems at once, none of them will see any measurable progress.

The urgency fueled by the limited resources in early days is one of the reasons founders tend to move too fast without taking aim. However, startups that have identified the right focal points early on can often point to indicators of momentum and use them to their advantage.

Don’t shoot from the hip – aim and focus, so you gain momentum early. The rest will come.

Philipp Moehring is a principal at Seedcamp, Europe’s leading micro-seed investment fund and mentoring program, where he manages portfolio relations, applications, and the mentor program.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Google and the Ghost of Silicon Valley Past
• Crowdfunding’s rapid growth and future opportunity
• Web startups: How to guard against security breaches

The site, which lets people share their favorite music track-by-track, has proven an underground hit online less than a year after launching publicly: more than 100,000 users have signed up, sharing over 900,000 songs. But the London-based service was started as a pet project inside music data company The Echo Nest — and it’s now exploring what happens next.

“Up until this point we’ve been incubated by The EchoNest, but now we’re looking at options for spinning out in our own right,” creator Matthew Ogle told me.

It’s been an unusual course for This Is My Jam so far — in fact, Ogle says that the site “wasn’t supposed to happen for a whole bunch of reasons”. Chief among them? The fact he’d decided to move out of the online music industry after leaving his role as head of web product at Last.fm back in 2010.

“Despite swearing off online music forever, in less than a year I’d been convinced by the awesome folks at The Echo Nest that we could do some cool stuff together,” he says. “They didn’t hire me to make Jam, they hired me in a dual role to be their man in Europe — evangelizing at hackdays, talking to developers — and also to be a kind of internal product skunkworks, prototyping stuff based on new APIs and using that to spark new direction that The Echo Nest could be going with their data.”

But when it turned out that Jam, an idea he’d been throwing for a while, had more going for it than the other skunkworks proposals, Ogle’s focus switched and the parent company funded development. Jam now has four full-time staff, as Ogle brought on former Last.fm refugee Hannah Donovan, and engineers Ralph Cowling and Andreas Jansson.

The failure of frictionless

The site is one of my favorite services to have launched in the last year or two, and it’s one I’ve found myself going back to more often than I expected. Posting your favorite tracks and browsing the tracks of others turns the site into a curious mixture of status update and radio station. It’s a great tool for telling people about the music you like — lots of people use it to showcase their mood, for example. But it’s also a treasure trove of music, allowing you to dig around in the tastes of others. Because it’s almost exclusively focused on what people are listening to now, it has a real-time quality to it… yet the conscious decision that goes into making your choice means that the end result is more personal than Pandora but way more curated than Spotify’s frictionless sharing.

In fact, says Ogle, the failure of frictionless sharing to provide anything more than a fleeting dip into a raging river of data left an interesting gap for Jam to fill.

“I couldn’t quite believe that in 2011 that social song sharing wasn’t just a solved problem,” he explains. “One thing that we talked about at last.fm a lot — you know that amazing moment in real life when someone grabs you and say ‘you have to hear this song, check it out’ and they put the headphones in your ears or put a record on. Anyone who cares about music even a little bit has had that moment.”

“We’re in this golden age of social media, we’re always connected to all of our friends at all times, and there’s big data around music — Spotify and Facebook have basically taken scrobbling to the mainstream — [so] there should be more ways than ever for me to go ‘I want to hear some new tunes, what are my friends listening to?’ and get good stuff… not just whatever they happened to accidentally listen to on Spotify. Conversely there was no way for me to share a song that people would still see five hours later. Everything was being forced in real-time.”

Curation/exploration

Donovan, who heads up the site’s design, points out that isn’t just vanity that drives — the performative aspect of social media where you are showing off your taste to others — but a sort of shared curation where users collaborate to uncover interesting tracks, point to classics or dig up forgotten material.

“This was actually really cool when we discovered this happening, because there’s no other music service on the internet where it’s OK to have old stuff mixed in too,” she says. “Either everything is organized around the music data thing — singles live inside albums that live inside artists — or it’s promotional in some respect, in which case they’re always pushing the latest album or the latest single that just came out.”

“On top of that I think there’s something around our culture today that’s driven by newness, and how things on the internet always have to be the latest and the newest. I heard somebody say when you’re curating something, you don’t necessarily want just the latest or the newest, you want to dig up old things that were really great and put them back in context alongside newer things, or mixed in with other stuff. That’s the job of the curator and that’s what makes it really enjoyable for the user or the observer.”

“We thought about curation a lot when we were starting Jam. The overall effect is that our users became the curators of this music, and we wound up with this lovely space where you could get Prince and Fleetwood Mac right next to the latest trendy pop band.”

That is, in turn, helping the product develop further forward. Coming very soon are some new additions to the site’s Explore pages, which will offer up some new ways for users to browse the site. Explore categories will include “Breaking” (songs that have been jammed for the first time recently, and subsequently shared), “Rare” (songs that have been jammed only once), and another one that lists just the first jams of newly-registered users. Although it could act as a way for users to introduce themselves to the service, the first jams could also become a sort of Greatest Hits package.

“A lot of people sign up and start with their favorite song of all time,” says Ogle.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Defining the next era of social music
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment

Of course, if you’re faced with a plethora of potential speakers all with equal skill sets and experience, organizers have a responsibility to represent equally and fairly.

However, the tech industry still has a heavy skew towards white men, and ensuring that you’ve got a decent mix of genders, ethnicities and ages will soon mean that you’re box ticking rather than finding the truest talent representation. Personally, I want to absorb as much information as possible from those that inspire me, something which is not based on what they look like or whether I can relate to them on a personal basis.

It goes without saying that conferences are businesses: they need to sell tickets and make money. Without revenue they wouldn’t exist, and the industry would be a worse place for it. I’m personally grateful for anything that allows me to meet like-minded individuals, regardless of race and gender, that help provide the glue to keep our community together.

The need to sell tickets also has an impact on the lineup; while it’s great to hear from new talent and the lessons that they’re learning along the way, the reality is that it’s the “superstar” names that will often help sell conference tickets, and that’s what leads to the reappearance of the same names on the circuit. Many of them are young white men. But they’re also, by and large, talented.

I can’t help but think it’s about time that we put race, gender and age aside and instead focused on talent. I believe that if you’re truly good at what you do and you want it enough, you’ll be noticed. Naive? Maybe. However, I do believe that if you belong to an industry minority, and if you’re truly amazing at what you do, it is in fact easier to get yourself noticed.

Of course, I would encourage every conference organizer to actively look to diversify their lineup. I’d encourage them to provide opportunities for a mixture of people to speak, gain experience and in turn become great speakers. I’d also encourage a greater range of individuals to start their own companies, become awesome at what they do and in turn shift the skew.

I just think that it’s important that we don’t end up with a situation where speakers are being put on stage simply because of the way that they look or which toilet they use. For those that complain that they’re unfairly discriminated against, when was the last time you submitted a speaker application? It’s up to all of us to try and rectify the situation: the industry won’t be radically changed by conference organizers alone, we each have a responsibility.

Mel Kirk is the managing director of The Physical Network, the UK’s largest network of influential 14-28 year olds promoting festivals and brands.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Facebook’s tactical retreat on privacy
• Will Standardizing the Cloud Cause Clarity or Confusion?