Collaborative search is a great 2.0 conceptual execution. Use the wisdom of the crowd to give more useful search results, prioritized by humans of similar attributes as the searcher. StumbleUpon poorly named but well intentioned player in this space. I gave it a whirl as a potential source of traffic for this site. Sign up was easy, nice site, good colors, lots of kitchy preloaded avatar images. What’s this? Download a toolbar? Something that goes all the way across my screen and contains your logo and writes things to my registry.

Edit: The Firefox Extension implementation of StumbleUpon with hotkey on/off is totally cool and no screen real estate is harmed so I am going to play around with it and see.
Alt+F4. See ya.

Prosper and Zopa have been making the rounds recently on the VC trail. Each one has closed about $20 Million in their latest institutional kitties. These are interesting businesses as they are the first real 2.0 executions in the finance vertical.

The finance space is one that is difficult to line up with 2.0 value sets because of the shared ownership aspects and the inherent aversion to transparency that anything financial seems to generate. The impact of handing over the creation rights and distribution to a media product is alot different than your retirement nest egg or college tuition. Institutions give you protection and austerity, right?

An interesting analogue would be to take a look at what is happening in bank branches these days. All those high teller counters, vaults and other cues of safe keeping are giving way to concierges, associates who chat with clients over coffee tables. The retail experience for banking is becoming a more collegial one as the assymetry between the banker and the banked is becoming less and less.

Another interesting trend to look at would be the spectacular emergence of online banking, the direct model in industry parlance. This allows banks to take deposits from people outside of their area of trade. Places where they have no branches at all. Which completely upends the previous model of banks as bastions of reliability and safe keeping. The direct model is really an extension of what was happening already with regional banks getting swallowed up by giant institutions. No longer do you need the First or Second Bank of Your Home Town or State. Live in New York? Bank with Washington Mutual. How about Bank of Internet?

So now Prosper and Zopa bring forth a model that actually just eliminates the bank all together. Technically linking those with funds to those with a need for credit. Great idea and it capitalizes perfectly with the new generation bank customers who love the collegial bank advisor and direct banking using supermarket ATMs to deposit funds or out-of-state bank with a cool brand.

Given all these counter-indicative trends, the shift in the consumer banking industry has been on going for some time now and the P2P and online only models are the shift that will take what was a corporate monotolith only policy and push it down into the shallow end of the Chris Anderson’s long tail curve. We should see a few more Prospers and Zopas launch as these two get some operating time under their belts and increase their volume of outstandings.

Well here it is:  http://www.nycdad.com

 Enjoy.  And click a link, download firefox or something.

This week there has been a middling stir regarding Dell’s public blog. Largely any kind of de-shrouding of the corporate enigma is received with some automatic appreciation. Dell’s effort was also met with the requisite criticism from the uber-bloggers who feel Dell was half-hearted in their attempt and did not meet expectations. While I agree the “Direct Conversation” with Dell seems a bit sanitized and mediated at first glance, it is an enormous step for any hierarchical corporation to fully open up publicly and interactively.

The comments seem fairly direct and unfiltered on the site which seems like a reasonable start. Around the blogosphere, Dell is getting the whip for not immediately, pro-actively bringing up important issues (exploding computers, 14 hour hold times, new pricing strategy…Bueller?). Alright so the blog does actually suck. For now. This is v.1 and as we in the 2.0 world where companies share decisioning and address consumers directly: continuous feedback, improvements, perpetual beta, and other 2.0 jargon should be applied. In fact Dell did the smart thing in their latest post by addressing the criticism of some biz-blog heavies.

The fact that Dell has a feedback platform is a phenomenal move considering the now medieval looking companies that it beat up on the way to the top. (Compaq Presario anyone?)

Also, working in a mega corporate, I can tell you the decision to greenlight a blog that is even slightly cloudy and occasionally trustworthy is like a pox on the PR department and the multitude of agencies that rely on being able to produce volumes of mediocre marketing because the message is always the same. Imagine that, now they will have to actually read and hear what people are saying about the product and produce communication that explains what the consumer wants to know.

I for one welcome Dell to the discussion. Take your time jumping in, trust me there is alot to talk about.

So now that the blogerati have settled down on Google Checkout’s launch frenzy, let me take a moment to comment on how they are going to finagle the banks out of being the de facto merchant processors of the web. Banks today don’t do the long tail. Even the ones that purport to be “affinity” focuses such as the former-MBNA portfolios are false advertising on the customization front. Our friends at Google on the other hand do the long tail very well. Adsense is the perfect long tail network and their democratic advertising through ad words drives 50% to 100% of the traffic to their small and medium business clients. Now throw in Google Checkout and you have a closed loop from segment identification to closing the sale. Fine nothing new here right? Well if Google Checkout is works well and Ad Words continues to do its thing, Google will likely never charge any of their advertisers for the transaction.

It is wins all around: business owners who advertise get free credit/debit processing on their site via a trusted consumer name like Google. Google gets transaction data to sophisticate its advertising model. Consumers get smart and legitimate way to buy things from sites that are not called Amazon.com. Now let’s watch them collapse Froogle (holy branding snafu) into the Google Base strategy and you have a complete and open business platform minus banks.