Portfolio

Sunday, April 22, 2007

moveme starts buzzing ...


MoveMe has attracted a lot of media attention recently. This morning's page 3 of the business section of the Sunday Times is just the start of what we are expecting to be some great coverage for the service.
MoveMe has developed a simple to use but comprehensive planning tool for managing house/flat moves.
With databases and prepared letters covering everything from parking permits, utilities, removal companies, credit cards and the dozens of other chores one has to do - this site is a real godsend to people moving home. The testimonials coming in from the users of the site attest to the fact that MoveMe is a really useful web service.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

Spotplex - a better Digg?


We at TAG are betting it is. We've made our 4th US investment with our participation in a seed round of Doyon Kim's Spotplex.

The others are: Daylife, Edgeio and Spotrunner.

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count.
In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.
Bloggers can track and analyze their blog traffic with a simple Spotplex code or widget. Not just how many people visit the blog, they can even find which articles people read most and how many people read them. Whenever an article of the blog is read, it will show up at Spotplex in real-time and get noticed by Spotplex users.

Techcrunch broke the Spotplex story 6 weeks ago and other commentators like Dave Parker at Daily Internet News seem to like the approach that the company has taken which avoids the probelms that Digg has had in relation to 'gaming' site popularity ratings.
To overcome the problem of the posts from large blogs dominating the popularity stakes in the early months, Spotplex have introduced a neat 'relative measure' as well as an absolute.

With Blogging showing no signs of slowing down [BBC have an interesting article on the subject], Spotplex is aiming at a huge market.

Technorati is now tracking more than 60 million blogs, of which it believes around 55% are 'active' - updated at least every three months....and Chinese is now the third most popular language in blogosphere.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Astley Clarke - Luxury Brand of Tomorrow!














The champagne corks were popping down in Notting Hill when Astley Clarke was named one of the luxury 'Brands of Tomorrow'.

Walpole (the British luxury brands association) put together a panel consisting of John Ayton, Chairman of Links of London, Annoushka Ducas, Creative Director of Links, Sarah Elton, former MD of Smythsons, Lucia Van Der Post -luxury commentator and Demetra Pinsent, strategist at McKinsey to create The Walpole Brands of Tomorrow Programme.

This was announced in The Sunday Times this weekend past.

Congratulations to Becca Clarke and team on yet another accolade. The last of which was being named 'on-line shop of the month' by Marie Claire.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Koodos starts taking shape ...


Miriam and her team have really started to get Koodos on the fashion map. Getting the top luxury brands onto Koodos was always going to be a challenge but in the last 3 weeks some really big names have joined and they are now getting loads of inbound enquiries.
Featured on Koodos right now are Gucci, Prada, Chloe etc and great British brands such as Amanda Wakely, Georgine Gooman and the like.

The new Koodos Blog will help provide a point of view on fashion too.

Interestingly, the biggest issue from the consumer's perspective appears to be: "Are these brands genuine?" I guess the prices challenge the idea that they are the real thing and unfortunately conterfeiting in this market is rife.

Koodos has also introduced the notion of the 'private sale' to the UK. Already very popular as a retail format in France, Koodos is pioneering it in the UK.

Look out for some great promotions over the coming week and a site makeover, following early learnings will also be coming soon.