A debate on Swedish search engines... on Twitter!

Two weeks back I wrote about the pressure on the 'old guys' on the Swedish residential search engine market. And the temperature is climbing....  with just 9 days to the release of the new version of the largest service, Hemnet, the debate is sparkling among the contenders... on Twitter!

Read the entire Twitter thread here.

The starting point was that Per Johnler (CEO Fastighetsbyrån, one of the largest brokerage firms in Sweden, and Chairman of Hemnet) wrote at @PerJohnler that "Interesting with all the new residential sites. It's great with choices..." (my translation).

A post that two of the founders at Booli  (a start-up in residential search), Peo Nilsson (CEO) and Anders Kyhlstedt (Marketing Manager) was quick to take action on since the statement is 'quite' different from the 'normal' reaction among brokers. According to Peo also were different from the chat those gentlemen had when Booli was introduced and Per demanded that all listings from Fastighetsbyrån should be removed from Booli. Which Booli refused. 

Per himself hasn't responded to the question from the Booli team. However, Fastighetsbyråns Johan Vesterberg (Press Officer) took the role as spokesperson for Fastighetsbyrån (Not Hemnet).

The discussion then moved to the comments area of a blog post by Rudolf at Disruptive, which highlighted the Twitter episode.

The debate could be summarized to:

  • Booli push hard for their offering of a market channel for all brokers and 'their' listings
  • FastighetsByrån hasn't finalized their strategy on how to handle all the new online channels

My reflections
1) The market for residential search engines on the Swedish market has changed a lot the last two years and I convinced it will change even more the upcoming two years. How will be the winners? I bet for the ones who are most eager to adapt to the new market.

2) It will be very interesting indeed to see the Hemnet's new version (due in 9 days) and if their strategy will change with a new CEO and Chairman. 

3) I believe Rudolf at Disruptive has a great point in comparing with the music industry. In the long run, you can't protect yourself against change. You've to adapt. It hurts, but the alternative isn't better.

Read more
A great post about Booli (in English) is found at ArticStartup.
More about the Twitter conversion is found at tdh.se and Disruptive (both in Swedish).
On Twitter at @PerJohnler, @BooliPeo, @BooliAnders and @JohanVesterberg  

 

A cloud conference in Stockholm

On the 2nd of June a cloud conference will take place in Stockholm.

"The cloud is a major technology shift that creates new business and technology ecosystems, Gartner group sees Cloud Computing as one of the key success factors for the CIO in the coming years. The event will highlight topics ranging from defining cloud computing to where is the payoff? The agenda will include keynotes from top independent analysts, end users experiences and showcases of real cloud computing solutions."

 

The speakers include:

Simone Brunozzi   (blog & LinkedIn)
Web Services Evangelist Europe   
Amazon Web Services 

Jesper Ritsmer Stormholt  (LinkedIn)
Head of Sales Nordic   
Google Inc.

Andy Mullholland  (LinkedIn and blog (co-author))
Global CTO     
Capgemini

Johan Zetterström  (LinkedIn)
Regional Vice President Nordics  
Salesforce.com

Organizer of the event is Conductive AB.

Hemnet & Bovision are feeling the pressure from the upcoming residential portals

Maybe it's true, what Lars Kilander, former CEO of Mäklarsamfundet (the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents), said, it is too complicated for many that there are more than one (read Hemnet) residential portal. However, the competition is for sure pushing the service level offered to the buyers and sellers.

The tipping point
For many years the only two portals on the market was Hemnet (owned by the two largest broker federation and two newspapers) and Bovision (back then part of Capitex). Then in 2008 things started to happend. Booli, Bospindeln (two Swedish start ups) and Boliga (Danish portal) entered the market and offered a much more intuitive search engines. Read more here.

Reaction I  -  Bovision goes from listing to search engine
Bovison, since 2006 owned by the Finnish media group Alma Media, made a major strategic move in April by adding listings collected as a search engine (not just paid listings by the brokers). Bosvion also started to blog. The goal is to be the largest portal, which is quite away to go, since they today has one 10th of the traffic compared to Hemnet. Read articles at Dagens Media and InternetWorld. 

Reaction II  -  Hemnet goes 2.0
Hemnet is the largest real estate portal in Sweden but also dumbed by many as the most underdeveloped site in the area (compared to the possibilities). However, changes are on the way and they are making no secret that the reason behind it; the pressure from the new players. The new CEO Carl-Henrik Borg (his Twitter) is quoted saying "... it is great if our engineers are challenged by the new services..." (my translation). The new version is to be launched on the 1st on June. Read more at DN, InternetWorld,  PropertyPortal (in english).   

It will be interesting in deed to see how those upgrades will make the services even better.

spotify invites - 7 to go... (update! 0 to go.)

Update: the invites are gone 

Are you ready to get Spotified?
I've few (so much sought-after) invites to give away to my readers.

Actually, 7 to go... 
Leave a nice comment to this post (and I got your mail, not displayed).
Do not send me an email or use the contact form, just leave a comment. 

 

Haven't heard about the service?
This is what Guardian is saying about the service...

"Welcome to nirvana
Imagine iTunes, but free. Chris Salmon finds the stream of his dreams.

This could well be the year when the wider public decides that online streaming is the best way to consume music. After all, why spend time and money on CDs or downloads, when you can instantly stream that same music for free via your computer or, increasingly, your mobile phone? And if one service is going to provide that tipping point, it's Spotify.com"  The Guardian 16th January 2009

And of course, at the wikipedia.

 

 

Two 'cloud' events in Stockholm

The SIME organization is creating two events worth visiting.

SIME & SUN Breakfast
A seminar on the 7th of may on the topic 'the cloud'.
Read more here.

SIME Conference  11-12th November
The premier event for the media/web community in Sweden.
If you're never been to one, you have to go. The host, Ola Halvarsson, for sure know how to put together a show! And he's been 'in the cloud' for too many years than to count.  Read this excellent sum up (Swedish) of the dot-com crash in 2001. 

 

"Everything is amazing, nobody is happy..."

Sitting on a SJ X2000 train down to my home town Karlskrona happy surfing the clouds. 

Got me thinking about the fact that it is quite popular in Sweden to complain about the Internet connection that is provided on board the trains. Which remembered me about this video...

Absolute hilarious!

Quickly get used to something
It often amazes me that people are complaining about the speed to something on the web when the alternative takes days.

By the way, the customer is always right, and I'm doing my out most to meet their demands. And yes, I admire Google for the ability to create light speed services.

But sometimes it wouldn't hurt to lean back and be amazed.

 

Information portal at property companies

Attended a few days ago a seminar at Hypergene's office in Stockholm about the use of their business intelligence solution among property companies. (They have 20 property companies as their customers.)

Below is a screen from one of their installations at a large property owner. When the user log in to the portal a unique set of information is displayed for that particular user.

In this example it is the start page for a property manager with through the dashboard directly is displayed how he is doing compared to budget. Impressive and user-friendly!

 
           Jonas Leisvik from Hypergene is presenting their product. 

The product
Hypergene EOS is a 'complete product complete product for advanced and user-customized presentation of information'.  It starts with importing data from, for example, property management systems, financial software and energy systems. Then displaying it a user friendly way. Making it possible to drill down to the lowest level of information for example see an unique invoice.

During the entire presentation it was stressed how user-friendly the solution was. And trust me it is. According to a research by University of Cork (see the graph below) it scores higher than other major BI solution out there.

The evolution is clear.
The specialised software is only used by a handful of people (for example the property management system) and then the waste majority of the users are using a web-based portal where the most important data and the simplest functions are built in.

See it yourself?
Hypergene are running another set of ½-day sessions in the beginning of April in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö. Find out more here.

 

MIPIM - A great place for networking

Spent last week in Cannes (France) attending my 8th MIPIM event (with some 20 000 others). Once again it has struck me how brilliant this event is to grow ones international network (and meeting up with the 1000+ Swedes that are there).

Growing a network
Even though the fair has no IT perspective at all. I guess that less then 1% of the boots are IT related, but included RCA, Yardi, Qube, Reidin, HBS Research among others.

However, there are quite a few additional IT entrepreneurs around to meet up with clients. I'm happy to have been able to meet up with quite a few of them. Thank you all for great conversations!

Two types of people
This year at the MIPIM there really were two types of people; the ones discussing how little people there were at the fair, and those telling me that they were able to meet the right people.

Without any question the number of visitors were down from record year 2008 at 30 000, but there was still loads of potential customers. Quite a few of the exhibitors I was talking to were happy to being able to meet the right people, not just running demos.

Best new solution 
On the last day of the fair I visited the stand of HBS Research and one of the three founders Blaise Heurteux gave me a demo of their SaaS solution named LaPlace de I'Immobilier. Great stuff. A pure SaaS solution with a well thought user interface. Their service is created from data acquired from 20 different public records in France.

More reflections from MIPIM
Read more about the event at Steve Felix blogg, CREopoint, TheLawyer and Twitter (?).

See you next year.