Editors note: Alex is running a half day workshop on “kick ass online marketing techniques” at the Future of Web Apps Miami on February 24th. Find out more.

In this installment of “5 questions for…” we ask Alex Hunter his thoughts on branding, the UK and European startup scene and ways of engaging with your customers in real life. He rounds off the interview with 3 online marketing techniques you can’t afford to ignore.

You have spoken before about the importance of branding for online companies. For many branding appears to be an afterthought. Where in the development process do you think it should be addressed?

Simple answer: ASAP. The sooner you lay down your core values and then feed that into your brand development, the better. Why? Because your values will define who you are and more importantly who you will be, now and in 10 years when I’m looking at you on the cover of BusinessWeek.

Set them early, set them well. And remember, that exercise cannot be successfully performed by one member of the team – it has to be tackled by as many members of the team as possible to effectively incorporate and reflect the DNA of the business.

Some of the hottest web startups in 2009 have clearly thought long and hard about their brand right out of the gate – it’s not just a tick/check in the box anymore, it’s a fundamental requirement for success.

Is the mantra “build it and they will come” still valid in 2010?

No. In fact, I don’t think it ever was. There’s been this (annoying) mentality of “If I build a good app or service, no matter how ugly it is, people will come.” They will not because they’ll never hear about it.

Furthermore, there are competitive apps to almost everything, and if there isn’t one today, there will be one tomorrow, and they will have looked at what you’ve done, they will have learned from your mistakes, they will have considered their brand and marketing, they will have started a Twitter account, they will have started a blog, they will have promoted it physically and they will have promoted it digitally, they will have thought about the presence, the UI, etc.

I think that hiding under a bushel (intentionally or not), and expecting it to develop on its own is a huge, huge mistake. Kevin Rose gave a great talk at FOWA London 2009 about taking your site from 1 to 1 million users and covered some great practical ways to build a userbase and get people talking about your app – I strongly recommend checking it out.

There’s been a lot of articles written about how important it is to be in Silicon Valley to succeed in the web app industry, and a lot of rebuttals. As someone who helps web businesses on both sides of the pond how important is the Valley to the web industry?

Ahh, interesting question. I’ll be honest, when I first moved back to England after an 8 year stint in the Bay Area, I was quite a snob about Silicon Valley being the only place where, by and large, web companies needed to be based to be successful. Now, having immersed myself in the UK web and startup culture, I don’t believe that at all.

The European, especially UK, web and startup scene is strong and I am VERY bullish about it. So much so that most of the companies I work with at an angel/advisory level are in the UK. I think the success of Seedcamp and other startup funding events based in the UK are a really good example of how this trend is playing out.

Now, all that said, I don’t think there’s any need to be isolationist about this. UK companies can absolutely learn from what Silicon Valley companies are doing but the same goes for US companies looking to the UK, Europe and beyond for inspiration and expertise. After all, Last.fm, Bebo, MOO, Qype, Spotify, etc are all UK/European companies who are arguably leaders in their space.

And south-east Asia is so far ahead of the rest of the world on things like mobile and micropayments, it’s not even funny. I’m super excited about the UK startup scene and I’m always keen to meet with young companies so please get in touch! ahunter(at)haebc.com.

In your last Think Vitamin article you talked about the importance of engaging with your community/customers offline. How would you recommend cash strapped startups do this?

I really think that bridging the gap between online and offline is one of the best ways to build loyalty. You’re connecting your users not only with their fellow users (and brand advocates) but also the people that created and curated the app/product/brand/community that they, as a user, have invested their time (and possibly money) in.

And the beautiful thing about this is it’s scalable – you don’t have to be as big as Digg or Yelp to do this. One of the easiest ways to do this, and kudos to Carsonified for having done this in the past, is to simply have a meetup at a local bar or pub. There’s no need to buy everyone a drink (although admittedly throwing a couple hundred quid/bucks behind the bar helps). A simple tweet and/or Facebook event notification saying “Hey some of the team are going to be at Pub x next Monday, it’d be awesome to hang out with you guys!” is all it takes.

Remember to use what you know about your userbase, through analytics and profile data, to identify geographic clusters of users so you’re hosting your events in the best possible locations.

You will be running a half day workshop about “kick ass online marketing techniques” at the Future of Web Apps Miami. Without giving too much away what do you think are the three most important online marketing techniques that web site/app owners can’t ignore?

1. Allow users to quickly and easily to promote what you do into their existing social graphs. Use Facebook Connect, use the Twitter APIs, and allow users to post their activity on your app into those platforms. This is hugely powerful because the message is so much more relevant coming from the user to their friends as opposed to coming (unsolicited) from you directly to the user’s friends.
2. Leverage what you know about your users, from profile data, analytics data, etc to provide them with a relevant and tailored experience. Listen to what they want and give it to them. This can be content or product driven (e.g. promoting products based on a user’s past purchase history) but either way, do it and watch your conversion levels go through the roof.
3. Lastly and probably most importantly, get involved in the conversation that’s going on around your brand. People are talking about you, whether you like it or not – find out what they’re saying, respond, and engage. And not just your PR or Customer Service teams, but the people that actually create the product, write the code, manage the DB, etc. Real names, real people.

Last year at The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) London we invited Paul Boag, host of Boagworld and author of the Website Owners Manual, along to conduct a series of interviews with speakers from the event. Over the next few weeks we will be publishing some of these here on the blog.

First up is Kevin Rose. Following on from his FOWA keynote “9 Ways to Take Your Site from One to One Million Users” Paul and his co-host Paul Stanton asked Kevin a few questions on community, user testing and advisory roles.

This interview lasts for 19 minutes.

Read the full transcript by Simon Hamp.

I’m interviewing three amazing folks for our FOWA Bytes Series, in the run up to FOWA London on October 1st and 2nd.

First off, I’ll be interviewing Gary Vaynerchuk live tonight (Wednesday August 5th). Please comment below, with the questions you’d like me to ask Gary.

The interview is at the following times …

• 11am San Francisco
• 12 noon Denver
• 2pm NYC
• 7pm London
• 9pm Tel Aviv
• 11pm Bangalore
• 2am (Thurs Aug 6th) Shanghai
• 4am (Thurs Aug 6th) Sydney

To join the chat, just go to tinychat.com/carsonified.

In case you haven’t heard of Gary (who’s speaking at FOWA on October 2nd), here’s a bit more about him:

Gary has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family’s local wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine. As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”

Garys book, Crush It!: Turn Your Passion into Profit in a Digital World is available to pre order. We know it’s going to be awesome :)

What are Your Questions for Gary?

Please let me know what you’d like to ask Gary. I’ll pick some of the best questions and ask him live tonight.

In this interview we ask Daniel Burka, lead designer at digg.com, the following questions:

1. What is the design process at digg?
2. Are you influenced by graphic design or interaction design?
3. What are five quick wins to overhaul your user interface?
4. And more …

Editor’s Note: Daniel is teaching “Design Secrets of digg.com’s User Interface” at his 1-day workshop.

How did you get involved with the web?

I luckily stumbled into web design when I was in high school in the late 1990s. A few friends and I were messing about with HTML and early versions of Photoshop, then discovered we could make decent money during the summer holiday doing web projects sponsored by the Canadian government.

We built several sites for museums and learned a lot about developing user interfaces and dynamically generated websites. We segued those experiences into forming a company called silverorange in 1999 where we honed our skills doing a variety of client work from e-commerce sites to enterprise level CMS development to intranets.

How did your project with Mozilla come about?

This is really a classic open-source story. Steven Garrity, silverorange’s creative director, wrote an open letter to Mozilla critiquing the branding of their browser (called Firebird at the time) and offering suggestions.

In true open-source fashion, a guy from Mozilla emailed Steven and suggested that he volunteer and get involved in making a solution. Out of that exchange, the Mozilla Visual Identity Team was formed, including Steven, Jon Hicks, and several others including myself. We worked together to build the Firefox brand and a consistent brand identity for Mozilla. It’s fairly mind-blowing to see something that we all came up with (and which I drew an initial marker-board sketch for) show up all over the world in so many different ways.

After the success of that project, we were tasked with improving the web experience for Mozilla.org. I took the lead on developing the interface. We basically overhauled the structure and visual appearance of the site and future evolutions of the .org site and later the .com site have extended that work.

What was it like working with Mozilla?

As you can imagine, Mozilla’s a fantastic client. They’re super passionate, smart people who believe in their mission to improve the web.

Mozilla also has an incredibly passionate developer and user base. This was back in 2004 and it was my first high-level experience working on a site where the community claims a lot of ownership. The Mozilla audience was certainly not shy about giving their advice while we were working on the site and it was a trial by fire I wasn’t quite prepared for.

I had poured my heart into redesigning the site and I naively expected a politely positive response. Instead, the community responded with a barrage of criticism and suggestions. Particularly after working on Digg for four years, the response of the Mozilla audience seems obvious, but at the time I didn’t fully appreciate the critique within the criticism. Despite my frayed nerves and bruised ego, we learned a lot from that feedback and launched a site enabled millions of people to come and download the browser we’ve all come to love.

What stage were Silverorange at when you left? How many people worked there?

Silverorange is still doing fantastic work. Five of the founding partners remain and I’m inactive partner, so it’s a durable company. There are currently thirteen people plus me as part of the company.

What was the attraction to working for Digg? Was it a hard decision to leave Silver Orange?

My work on Digg began as a contract project at silverorange, so the transition from silverorange to Digg was fairly gradual. I remember talking to Kevin at the outset of the project and it was some guy we didn’t know with a little bit of money and really interesting idea. We agreed to do something like one week of work to see how it went.

That went well, so we started working on Digg for one week per month, which became two weeks per month, which became a full-time gig and I moved down to San Francisco to work on it. After seven years at silverorange, it was a welcome opportunity to transition my focus to something somewhat different while keeping my connections and friendships at silverorange.

What is the design process at Digg?

Ideas come from all over the company, but Kevin Rose does primarily drive the focus of product development at Digg. Generally we bounce an idea around with a small group of people, whiteboard it, make visual comps, then sketch it out in markup.

We really use a wide range of prototyping methods. When we get to serious prototyping, we ideally have a small mixed-group together to scope and build any new feature or an iteration on an existing product. Also, each person in our small team of designers is a generalist, so we can all be involved in developing sketches, visuals, or code.

Are you more influenced by graphic design or interaction design?

I’ve really got a foot in both worlds. I’m primarily concerned with interaction design, but I’m also heavily interested in graphic design. Joshua Porter posted a fantastic quote from the furniture-making Shakers that echoes my design philosophy: “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.”

What’s your main goal when creating user interfaces?

My main goal is to develop an interface that’s a joy to use. That means that it’s intuitive, fast, accessible, attractive, and often fun is a factor as well.

What are five quick wins to overhaul your interface?

Oh wow, that’s a loaded question. I don’t want to arbitrarily come up with five, so here are four off the top of my head.

1. Listen to your users
2. Ask people about your interface
3. Watch people interacting with your site. You’ll learn a ton.
4. Remove half of what you currently have – subtraction is iteration too. Instant improvement.

Editor’s Note: Daniel is teaching “Design Secrets of digg.com’s User Interface” at his 1-day workshop.

[Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk]

We recently sat down with Ryan Singer, lead designer at 37signals, to ask him several questions that are on web designer’s minds. He talks about copywriting, being a project manager, frontend development skills, handcoding and where to find inspiration. Here’s a transcription of the interview …

What websites do you usually go to for design news, inspirational, or tutorials?

I’d have to say probably my favorite place right now for inspiration is ffffound.com. It’s not really web design exactly but it’s a lot of really cool imagery, a lot of cool colors, shapes and stuff like that.

As far as design news, I don’t know if there’s anything so interesting out there that I’m really watching for, but there’s new great design in all directions, coming from all different places all the time. Things like poster design, new typography ideas, etc.

Is there a particular web designer that you’re looking up to right now?

You know, I’m seeing more and more good design actually all the time. However, I can’t say that I have a favorite right now.

Generally I’m seeing just a lot of cool stuff and stylistically, style continues to advance. But the copy and the clarity isn’t necessarily getting better. I’m not seeing very many sites where I think, “Wow this was really well thought out and well written. I still don’t see a lot of that.

Why is there a lack of copywriting skills among web designers?

Nobody seems to be talking about it. Where are all the blog posts about how to make really super-clear content?

The thing that’s really easy to look at and copy are pixels, color combinations and type. I think it’s really hard to look at a website as a writing project because as a designer, we have all these magic tricks we can do with our CSS and our HTML and everything and we kind of have to put that in the back and make that take a back seat to, “do I really have anything to say here?”

Last week I posted to our blog about Jacob Neilsen’s site, praising the the Alertbox articles. Each one is completely crafted as a piece of writing. Something to be read and understood and digested. I love the way certain points are bolded and the way the whole thing is structured is really well thought out. I think it’s a really inspiring example of great copy.

If you’re a designer who doesn’t do any writing, you’re going to hit a brick wall in your career at some point.

What books can designers read to get better at copywriting?

One of my favorite books is by a guy, William Zinsser, it’s called, On Writing Well. That was an inspiration for me and I remember reading that and feeling like it really helped me a lot.

What’s the one skill that new designers focus on?

You gotta start handcoding! It’s the number one basic craft of web design, if you don’t handcode then you’re not going to be able to move into doing web app interfaces, which is really what I’m doing now.

You’re not going to able to work on applications or collaborate on code or make apps, websites that really have a lot of behavior unless you get into handcoding, so I think that’s like the barebones thing that for sure everybody should be doing.

What software do you use for coding?

I happen to use Vim, which is a little bit of a nerdy tool, but a lot of my coworkers use Textmate and love it. A lot of people say that BBedit is great and I also hear that Coda is really nice. There are all kinds of options out there.

As a designer, do you need to understand frontend development?

The more you understand about frontend development, the better designer you’ll be. If you are really familiar with handcoding and you understand basic HTML markup and you know how CSS selectors work then you’re really well prepared, for example, to use the fact that jQuery and Prototype both have a way to refer to pieces of your mark-up using CSS selectors even though your not using CSS.

If you’re designing web app user interfaces, then I think it’s important to get into understanding how an MVC framework works like Rails or Django. If you can understand how your templates fit in to the view, as the “V” in MVC then that’s a huge leap. You can really start doing work with programmers and you can have ideas and you can make them into reality instead of just making designs and handing them off to somebody and hoping that someone else can plug them in.

How do you learn about MVC?

It depends on your situation. If you’re a designer and you work with programmers already (who are friendly) then just ask them questions. They can really get you started on the right path. Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions – they’ll appreciate the fact that you’re trying to learn.

If you are a little more programming minded and you’re on your own, there’s all kinds of stuff you could read, a basic primer on Rails would help a lot.

Getting into programming in general is quite useful. Before I did web design I setup Access databases and Filemaker databases and stuff like that. Jason Fried did the same thing actually – he started with Filemaker databases, and I think that basic understanding about how does a database work, just what are the pieces and trying to visualize, how could I display that or how could I manipulate that data, is a really good kind of foundation level.

What is a typical day in the life of Ryan Singer?

Ugh, it’s pretty busy lately. We are a small team and we try to do a lot with a few people. We actually just brought on a new designer, so we’re up to three designers now which is going to help. I spend a fair amount of time designing UI for new features. We always design the interface first, before building anything.

So part of my day is actually designing new features, another part of my day, because I’m also working as a product manager here, is to figure out what we should be doing next and who’s going to be doing it.

Also I love, I just love, getting into Rails and making things work too, so I do a fair bit of programming everyday. As much as I can plug stuff in, I do it.

Do you think being a product manager has helped you become a better designer?

No, not at all. I think that it’s the opposite actually. When you’re wearing your ‘Manager Hat’ you start to create a barrier between you and the designers and developers that are actually implementing the app.

It’s really harmful to the product because anytime you have a separation from the one whose coming up with the ideas and the ones who are doing the work, it’s a bad thing.

As a designer, is it important to be interested in the business side of things?

No. Either you’re interested in the business side or you’re not. However, if you have an understanding of what compels people to make buying decisions and how marketing works, you can feed it into your design work.

Okay, well with that, I think that our time is up, thanks so much for your time.

Yeah sure thing, thanks for chatting.

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Photo Credit: DHH

In this 11-minute interview we ask Kevin Rose, founder of digg and WeFollow five questions about web entrepreneurship. In case you don’t have time to watch the interview, we’ve summarized Kevin’s answers below.

Feel free to share your answers to these questions in the comments below. We’d love to hear your perspective.

What advice can you give new web entrepreneurs?

1. A great way to gain traction and get coverage for a new web app is approach a well known person and offer them something valuable in return for trying out your service.Example: Tumblr asked Gary Vaynerchuk if he would use their service if they gave him a spot on their home page.
2. Have your 30-second pitch perfected so when you get a chance to meet an influential blogger or member of the press, you can communicate the purpose of your app succinctly.
3. Attend conferences and throw little parties around the conference. Do it on the cheap and just get people mentioning your app like: “Hey, I’m heading to the YourAmazingApp party. Are you going?” This is much easier because of Twitter as news of small ‘lighting-parties’ can spread quickly.

You’ve managed to raise your profile in the industry. How did you do this?

At digg we didn’t focus on getting press coverage. We just focussed on making an amazing product and believing people would talk about it if it was truly great.

When we started getting press enquiries, we focused on telling a bigger ‘human-interest’ story to the publications, which were much more likely to get front-page coverage, instead of a simple mention in a small column.

The lesson is this: figure out what makes your app interesting as a news story.

Should start-ups create a videocast like you’ve done with diggnation?

Absolutely. Every company needs a spokesperson who is willing to be the public face of the company and participate in the community.

As the diggnation podcast started to grow, digg fans began to make it their goal to get a story mentioned in the podcast. This increased the prestige of the site and also fan loyalty.

How do you balance marketing with working on the product?

That’s an interesting question. Earlier today I was running off to another interview and Daniel Burka (the lead designer at digg) showed me a couple designs as I was walking out of the door. I didn’t have time to properly sit down to discuss them and Daniel said “Kevin, can we please just get you in the office a bit more to discuss these kind of things?”

It’s a tough problem and I still battle with it at digg. I’m not sure I’ve gotten the balance 100% right yet.

What do you want to be remembered for when you die?

I want to be remembered for being a part of the web revolution that really changed the way that humans consume media and news.

I’m also hoping to launch my own tea range and be known as a connoisseur :)

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Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/thomashawk

The video interview

At the Future of Web Design in London, Ryan Carson grabbed Paul Boag for a quick chat. We covered the “demise of the website”, important tips for web designers and how to sell your design skills.

Here are the major takeaway points from the interview:

1. We’re approaching the “demise of the website”. Your website is no longer your only route to your customers. You should be publishing your content and entering conversations in as many channels as possible including: AudioBoo, Twitter, FaceBook and FriendFeed.
2. Biggest tip for web designers: Learn how to “sell yourself”. This means you need to be comfortable selling your skills and ideas to potential customers. A large part of this is healthy self-promotion.
3. It’s important to never fool your customers, even if the end-game is honorable. A great example is IE6update.com. It essentially uses JavaScript to trick users into upgrading from IE6 to the latest version of Internet Explorer. In general that’s a great thing, but tricking people to do it is deceitful. This lesson applies to sales and marketing – never try to fool people – they’ll always find you out.

If selling yourself and healthy self-promotion are key to being a successful web designer, what’s the best way to do it? Please give us your thoughts in the comments.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/kurafire

During FOWD London, I grabbed Jim Coudal and asked him a few questions, including “Where are you finding inspiration right now?”, “How do you make time for creativity?” and “What’s the best career tip you can give web designers?”.

We’ve also released the MP3 of his talk at the conference (video coming shortly).

Couple quick points:

1. If someone would be willing to transcribe the interview, I’d be happy to link you up here. Thanks!
2. Apologies for the low quality of the video. I used a Disgo (which I’m promptly going to throw out).
3. We normally use Vimeo, but it had problems encoding the video. Therefore we’re using ugly YouTube. Blech.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/gruber

Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski are the creators of moo.com, the web app that uses Flickr to help you print cool stuff. This interview was recorded at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, February 2007.

Moo has of course recently launched its fantastic stickers – hinted at here. Richard and Stef also discuss the origins of Moo, working with investors and why they chose London as their base.

Find out more information about the next Future of Web Apps.

Oops! You may experience some synching issues – we apologise for this

Vitamin: How do we refer to you guys?

Richard Moross: We’re a printing business – an old school printing business. We’re very print 1.0.

V: Unlike a lot of companies who talk at web events, you actually produce a physical product. How did that come about, and why are you still a tech firm?

RM: I think we have to be. We may be making a 300 year old product with a 500 year old business model, but we have to make it for an audience that’s interested in it today. And to be able to do that in a large way, we need to be online. So I have a design background so it’s my interest in making it look good, but then we need experts like Stef to translate how you turn that into a store, turn that into an experience online so that anyone can buy it from any country in the world. So we have to be a tech company, to be global, to be interesting, to be accessible to people.

Stef Magdalinski: I think the main thing is using the community, using our own community and other people’s communities. The fact that the final bit is print is incidental, we’re more building a way that people can express their creativity.

V: Does that mean we’ll see other products and new areas coming from MOO?

SM: Very, very much so.

RM: I think so. We’re only ever going to do anything if there’s a demand for it, and right at the very, very beginning when we launched minicards, Flickr users were saying from day one ‘Are you going to do a business card shape? Are you going to do posters? Are you going to stickers?’. I think we said ‘Yes! Yes! All of those, definitely’. I think it’s a question of what are we going to do first. We want to put as much love into the next product as we put into minicards. It’s a question of how quickly can we do that, how we prioritize which things we’re going to do – but you’re certainly going to be seeing a lot more products in the near, near future.

V: A lot of your customers probably don’t realize where you’re based, they don’t realise you’re a UK company, you’re some guys on the internet. Was that a specific decision?

SF: It was quite a conscious decision. Most companies like us are based in Silicon Valley and we wanted to be based in London, but we wanted to ship globally. We’re on the internet, and it doesn’t really matter where we’re physically based. We happen to be in London. It’s actually turned out that there’s been some good operational reasons for us to be based in London, with the Royal Mail and so forth, but we could be anywhere.

RM: We’re in Clerkenwell, which is the literal and spiritual home of print. It’s home to the oldest printing business on the planet, it’s fantastic. We wanted to be somewhere with some significance; Silicon Valley’s not known for its printing.

SF: I still have a plan for Rio at some point!

V: What came first? Did you start off looking at Flickr and how you could use it for your business?

RM: The business started off completely differently. It started with the idea that business cards are a huge phenomenon; they’re 300 years old in idea, they’re the single most successful networking tool of all time -bar none. They’re still around today. You don’t need batteries, you don’t need wi-fi to make them work, you don’t need Bluetooth and they’re still around. They’re here because they work and they’re simple, but there’s never really been a consumer proposition for them. I looked at this and thought this is completely ridiculous; people today have more ways of communicating with each other. I’ve got 10 different instant messenger accounts, email accounts, websites and things I communicate with. And yet most kids don’t have business cards, most young people don’t, even people who are employed lots of people don’t. So we wanted a personal version of the business card and it seemed like there was demand there.

The Flickr part came about 18 months in, I think we launched our business around the same time as Flickr was getting going – we started around 2004.

V: You’re still a young business, but what are the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

SM: In terms of technical challenges, supporting all the languages and character sets that people wanted to print on the cards.

RM: We underestimated the global thing a little bit.

SM: And how complex that can be. When we launched we could support western European character sets and we’d never tried a Chinese character set.

RM: He doesn’t mean on the web, he means in print as well. We were optimised for web languages, for UTF-8 Unicode, but when it came to printing it – printing Hebrew, or Chinese or Japanese or Georgian

SM: Gave our printer a heart attack.

RM: The thing we were worried about was scalability, initially not necessarily technical scalability, but operational scalability. But again, the machines that produce the cards can go incredibly fast. We can print around 3 million cards a day, we don’t get 3 million orders a day, yet, I think next week we’re planning on that kind of volume. But that was the thing we were initially worried about, but it wasn’t really a problem. It was unprecedented how many countries would be interested. I think we’ve shipped in about 107 countries so far and I don’t know how many languages we’ve printed in, but it’s certainly more than five or six.

V: You’ve been entrepreneurs in the past too. Are there any tips you can pass on?

SM: This is my third startup, my third funded startup. I would say the difference this time round is actually having really good investors who are interested. It’s true, I’ve done this before and last time we weren’t well looked after, there were conflicts and difficulties. This time round when you get good support, I think it makes all the difference to a starting business.

RM: My piece of advice is don’t work with animals or kids and you’ll been fine. And that is a metaphor, I think.

This interview was recorded at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, February 2007.

Watch the video!

Last.fm developers Matt Ogle and Anil Bawa Cavia talk to journalist Bobbie Johnson for Vitamin

Vitamin: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the problems that Last.fm has faced? What can people learn from them?

MO: Early on our biggest hurdles were technical. We had a product called AudioScrobbler that let people send information about what music they were listening to to our servers and wed use it to recommend new music, build up a musical profile and do things like that. The popularity of the service had us spending a good year or two figuring out how to scale it up and how to match the growth that we were getting. Wed been open from the start and that really fostered a community around the product, but as time went by we were getting hundreds of song submissions every second and a lot of our challenges were technical we had to learn how to scale that up to meet demand, so keeping our users happy and feeling like they were part of the project when inevitably we had server downtime and growing pains.

ABC: Later on we had to face issues about scaling the company up internally, about team communication and so on, and we came up with our own processes there. The real lesson we learned is to customise your tools. There are no off-the-self solutions for scaling a company, you have to find your own solutions or customise them.

We also faced challenges in how we design the product: when suddenly its huge and everyone wants a piece of you, you have a lot of affiliate deals to think about. We learned to put our users first, focussing on user feature design and on the product at all times; keeping our APIs open, promote ourselves as a platform and letting people run with it and do what they want to it; atomising aspects of our service and letting people run with those, freeing them up and making aspects of the service syndicable these were other lessons that we learned.

V: Last.fm took funding early in its lifespan and it is in a hugely competitive space. How do you try to remain independent and unique?

MO: I think it comes back to users and listening to them. Were lucky now that we have quite a considerable user community around the product and we let that drive our development and take our feature requests from them. Usually if someone else is doing a better job our users let us know on the forums. We think we can stay lean and small enough to remain nimble, and despite taking on funding weve tried not to lose the start-up hunger and to really keep that spirit alive. I think that will help us stay competitive even though a lot of big players are now muscling into the territory.

ABC: I think in the last twelve months the competition has really heated up. I think what we do very well is focus on socialisation better than most in the market. We socialised our products and have done from the start – so the process of building the product is a social process and thats how you stay ahead of the curve really.

MO: Our users will always be the ones to tell us whats happening in music. We also find that the best way to grow is to ensure that adding more people to the mix makes the experience better for everyone. So as long as we still have a site where the best way to have a great time is to bring all your friends along, we feel like thats a safe growth plan.

V: Are you looking to move into other kinds of content? Could your formula be applied to other kinds of information?

MO: Were quite lucky, were all music lovers but it also works quite well as a unit of attention data. A pop song is three or four minutes long, has an artist and it has a title. You listen to music while you do other things in your life; that makes it an excellent candidate for the kind of service we offer. Videos a bit different; you dont generally watch a movie again and again, so it does change things. But having said that, its an exciting space and I think other companies with other kinds of attention records will emerge.

ABC: Yeah, I think in terms of attention theres a lot of opportunities. Youll see more and more companies capturing attention in more comprehensive ways, because it really becomes the core of your service, and that applies in other areas and not just our market. And socialisation is obviously a huge trend…

V: You call Last.fm myware, not spyware but youre in a unique position though, because although not everyone wants their data tracked they are often quite happy for it to happen with music. Are there problems people will have in that area?

MO: We definitely do need to be aware of privacy considerations, and thats something well be developing a lot this year. You might not want everybody to know what youve been listening to at this precise moment so thats something were thinking about. Privacy these days can be fairly fine-grained you can give people options. With the myware idea it only works if people feel confident that youre safeguarding their data and not using it in ways they dont feel comfortable with. And also providing ways to get it back out again; so people give you their data, you enhance it, they get it back out on the other end and can do other things with it.

ABC: I think youll find that data ownership is something well do a lot with in the future and so youll see a lot on that front from us. Hopefully we can set the trend or the standard for users to really own their own attention data.

V: So is attention data really the building block of hundreds of future web apps?

ABC: Yeah, lets take AdSense for example broad, contextual advertising: thats a step in the direction of concrete attention data. So theres a general trend towards what people actually pay attention to and how can we enhance their experience with related services. Youre seeing this in Google Reader right now; it measures how many articles youve glanced at while youve been in their interface, one by one, based on your scrolling. Theres more attention being paid to these aspects of software by people who are building software in all markets.

MO: As the web keeps exploding and so many Web 2.0 sites are all about user-generated content, its the classic problem when theres more content than ever, how do you filter it, how do you make it relevant and contextual. Attention data is a great solution to that, especially since it says dont change your behaviour, keep doing what youre already doing and well make your experience better. Which is a really great way to do user experience.

V: Outside of your company, where do you think there are interesting things going on? Where else would you like to work?!

ABC: I think most developers in the country will tell you that they want to work on OpenID in some form, because identity on the web is a massive issue how to create interoperable systems that work across social networks is really interesting to me. So, how you can build on Open ID and then attention and trust systems across the board, that applies to most software developers in the world. You could offer me any job you like but Im still staying!

MO: Its hard to think about leaving last.fm once youve been doing it for a while, because theres still so much yet to be done. Especially with the current state of the music industry with regards to digital music none of us are very happy with the status quo and we all believe we can help change that. One thing Ive been interested in lately is the rise of apps such as Twitter, which basically take one single function, do it really well and then try to open it up and syndicate it as much as possible. Youve seen that a lot in individual features on more comprehensive websites. But to me its inspiring to see a single website product like that succeed. I think that means a lot of ideas can have more chance to live on their own in that way then become a useful part of a whole.