Ecommerce Blog

Christos Cotsakos, former CEO of E*TRADE, the online brokerage firm that revolutionized stock trading in Web 1.0, will unveil his Web 2.0 company called MOLI tomorrow at DEMO. And surprise, surprise — it’s a social network! Yet Cotsakos is undetered by what is an arguably overcrowded space: In a briefing with GigaOM last week, he explained what distinguishes MOLI (the name stands for “money and living”) from others with market-leader advantages (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) — and why he believes users will gravitate to MOLI anyway.

“People say the market has already formed,” he said, “but the market never forms. It only forms and reforms. There is still room for a handful of unique brands in this space.” Cotsakos, who founded MOLI in 2003, has had plenty of time to refine the company’s business model to ensure it might be one of them. And although odds are usually stacked against late entrants, MOLI does offer some compelling features.

For starters, users can finally manage diverse personal profiles via one user identity and a single, customized home page. (Currently, you might have more than one profile on Facebook — one for work colleagues, say, and another for college friends — but you can’t manage both from one login.) If MOLI flies, consumers might see an advantage in no longer having to maintain their professional profile on LinkedIn, their music fan club on MySpace and their political-interest profile on LiveJournal.

MOLI sets no limit on your number of profiles, which are free with your first URL (additional URLs cost $1.99.) Cotsakos’ home page (seen left) hosts 13 profiles, among them one for the Greek-American association to which he belongs, another for the Japanese tea ceremony he’s studying, and a third dedicated to the 101st Army Airborne unit he fought with in the Vietnam War (where his income appears suspiciously low). Some of his profiles are public, others private, and some are actually “hidden” (MOLI’s highest security level). Users get to decide what they want to share, and to what to degree.

MOLI will also be a first social network to target small businesses. There are 25 million of these in the U.S. alone, so it’s ripe territory, and MOLI has a killer feature: MOLI-hosted web stores. For just $3.99 a month, users can build retail sites that are linked to their profiles. Think of it as a personalized eBay page, but where your prospects for revenue are higher because you’re already connected to an audience that has self-selected for its interest in what you’ve got to sell.

Say you own a custom-publishing business, but moonlight as an artist. You could have two MOLI profiles: one for your company, another for your life as an illustrator, and two MOLI stores: one to sell your drawings, another to hawk your company’s books. Simply choose billing by Google Checkout, or PayPal, and manage them from one place.

Of all of MOLI’s features, I am most impressed with CoVibe Live, MOLI’s live data analytics wiki, which finally lets users profile the traffic across their pages. CoVibe Live is beautifully designed: data floats across the frame in pastel-colored bubbles so whimsical, clicking on them feels like a reflex. Do so, and a fever chart of information pops up, such as the days or hours when your goods sell best, and whether they sell to men or women (the data is generic, not personalized).

Utilitarian, it is. But the real innovation here is that CoVibe Live will curb that nagging consumer dread over Big Web Brother amassing reams of data on us, simply by placing in consumers’ hands the financial benefits of collecting such data in the first place. Know when your books sell best, and you can market accordingly. (MOLI has filed patents on CoVibe Live.)

MOLI may be too focused on marketing, however. One of the few features I don’t care for is that MOLI will blend professional with user-generated content. This was described as a love pat to ad buyers, who crave the “safe harbor” of “quality, so they know what will be surrounding their ads,” as MOLI President Judy Balint put it. (You can pay $2.49 a month to make your experience ad-free.)

MOLI has a rich, and clearly expensive web design. Instead of the spare UIs that we’ve all grown so used to, the dashboard looks more like an enterprise software app gone hip. It may be too much. You can streamline your dashboard, of course, by limiting your features, but then you’d be muting the very purpose of MOLI.

MOLI has cost plenty. Cotsakos seeded the company with $20 million of his personal funds, plus $6 million from private investors. Today the West Palm Beach, Fla.-based company, which has 56 employees, including engineers in Ireland, Singapore, Germany, India and the UK, is announcing its second funding round: $29.6 million from another group of private investors including Home Depot founders Bernard Marcus and Kenneth G. Langone. The money will be used to grow the company internationally. Competing against Facebook, MOLI will need it.

“We’re not building a startup,” says Cotsakos. “We’re building a franchise and a large-scale sustainable brand.”

Microsoft at its Mix’n’Match conference in Redmond, Wash. earlier this month gave the developer faithful an early look at a new technology called Feedsync, which combines subscription models like RSS with data synchronization. The result of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s in-house think tank, Feedsync works by combining the subscription model of web feeds with data that can be used to update things like calendars or contact information.

As the name suggests, the problem Feedsync solves is a simple but vexing one: keeping things synchronized. Instead of emailing my friends to tell them my new address, for example, with Feedsync I simply update my feed and everyone that subscribes to it instantly gets my contact information updated.

To use Feedsync, the publisher defines the current cache state (my current address, for example) as an “initial” feed. All changes to that data are provided as “update” feeds. Subscribers grab the initial feed, then focus on the update feed for subsequent changes.

Consumer Internet is changing its communication models

Technologies like Feedsync are another sign that the consumer Internet is moving from a traditional “request-and-response” model, in which users visit pages, to one in which data exchanges follow a wide range of patterns. In doing so, the public Internet is following in the footsteps of enterprise IT.

In the early nineties, corporate IT used a client-server computing model. In many ways, the web browser became the consumer version of client-server. Similarly, enterprises have relied on publish-and-subscribe models to move data around. Vendors like Tibco, as well as frameworks like the Java Messaging Service, let one application subscribe to a data source (such as a stock ticker).

But JMS and other message-oriented-middleware (MOM) frameworks deliver messages from point to point reliably. To do this, they deal with each subscriber directly. Feedsync is more focused on the problem of synchronizing distributed data caches, and based on the idea of the subscriber polling the publisher.

Feedsync’s limitations

Feedsync has its limitations. As Java architect Jonathan Ginter points out, it lacks the ability for the data publisher to know whether a subscriber has received all of its updates — a hallmark of enterprise-class publish-and-subscribe models. So in Feedsync, delivery failure is the subscriber’s problem.

Also, the spec allows publishers to discard updates, so subscribers have to notice they’ve lost sync and then re-process the entire feed, which may be time-consuming and involve a lot of data transfer. Consequently, the current Feedsync specification is probably best suited to lightweight, occasional updates.

But Ginter likes the fact that it is based on open protocols, unlike other cache synchronization solutions such as Coherence.

Broad adoption of synchronization and subscription

There have been some ill-fated attempts to deliver consumer subscription applications already (Pointcast, I’m looking at you). But it was only with the adoption of RSS that consumer-grade subscription found its stride. Today, RSS feeds are broadly available on most sites, and soon protocols such as COMET, driven by companies like Kaazing, will take subscription to the next level by letting servers update clients in real time.

Feedsync builds on the ubiquity of subscriptions and adds to it synchronization. It bundles structured data, security and permissions into a feed that subscribers can use to stay in synch with a data publisher.

Most consumers have already seen structured data of this kind. Consider a calendar invite — those files ending in .ics, based on the iCalendar standard. You can open a calendar invite in a variety of applications, from Outlook to iCal to Google Calendar, and the application automatically creates (or updates) an event.

One of the biggest challenges with synchronization is the resolution of conflicts. When several disconnected people change a calendar event independently, for instance, then reconnect, chaos can ensue. Companies like Puma have made their name producing synchronization software, and anyone who’s ever pressed the Hotsync button on a Palm knows the frequency with which conflicts can arise.

Feedsync offers a combination of subscriptions to let consumers of data keep track of information they care about, and synchronization to cleanly update that information while resolving, rather than creating, conflicts. That alone makes it worth a look (its specification is available under a creative commons license at www.feedsync.org). But Feedsync also has protocols to handle the merging of changes, identifying collisions, and deleting data that may help it to survive where other approaches have stumbled.

A new building block for social networks

Beyond all of this technology, Feedsync is also a volley in the social network space, which gives it the potential to be far more disruptive.

When thinking about the fundamentals that make Facebook successful, many people focus on the social networking giant’s Social Graph — the map of user relationships it tracks. But Facebook has another trick that’s nearly as important: status updates.

By keeping track of what your friends are up to, Facebook stays novel and keeps its users engaged. It’s a feat that many of its competitors are racing to emulate, including Google with its OpenSocial feeds. Essentially, you subscribe to your friends.

With Feedsync, you can not only subscribe to your friends, you can also synchronize data (such as calendars, contacts, events, and so on) automatically. So instead of status updates that just inform, information stays up to date.

By adding synchronization to the idea of subscription, Microsoft has upped the ante for how consumers keep synchronized with the people in their social graph.

Alistair Croll, Coradiant co-founder and VP of product management who blogs about online user performance and networking.

Microsoft at its Mix’n’Match conference in Redmond, Wash. earlier this month gave the developer faithful an early look at a new technology called Feedsync, which combines subscription models like RSS with data synchronization. The result of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie’s in-house think tank, Feedsync works by combining the subscription model of web feeds with data that can be used to update things like calendars or contact information.

As the name suggests, the problem Feedsync solves is a simple but vexing one: keeping things synchronized. Instead of emailing my friends to tell them my new address, for example, with Feedsync I simply update my feed and everyone that subscribes to it instantly gets my contact information updated.

To use Feedsync, the publisher defines the current cache state (my current address, for example) as an “initial” feed. All changes to that data are provided as “update” feeds. Subscribers grab the initial feed, then focus on the update feed for subsequent changes.

Consumer Internet is changing its communication models

Technologies like Feedsync are another sign that the consumer Internet is moving from a traditional “request-and-response” model, in which users visit pages, to one in which data exchanges follow a wide range of patterns. In doing so, the public Internet is following in the footsteps of enterprise IT.

In the early nineties, corporate IT used a client-server computing model. In many ways, the web browser became the consumer version of client-server. Similarly, enterprises have relied on publish-and-subscribe models to move data around. Vendors like Tibco, as well as frameworks like the Java Messaging Service, let one application subscribe to a data source (such as a stock ticker).

But JMS and other message-oriented-middleware (MOM) frameworks deliver messages from point to point reliably. To do this, they deal with each subscriber directly. Feedsync is more focused on the problem of synchronizing distributed data caches, and based on the idea of the subscriber polling the publisher.

Feedsync’s limitations

Feedsync has its limitations. As Java architect Jonathan Ginter points out, it lacks the ability for the data publisher to know whether a subscriber has received all of its updates — a hallmark of enterprise-class publish-and-subscribe models. So in Feedsync, delivery failure is the subscriber’s problem.

Also, the spec allows publishers to discard updates, so subscribers have to notice they’ve lost sync and then re-process the entire feed, which may be time-consuming and involve a lot of data transfer. Consequently, the current Feedsync specification is probably best suited to lightweight, occasional updates.

But Ginter likes the fact that it is based on open protocols, unlike other cache synchronization solutions such as Coherence.

Broad adoption of synchronization and subscription

There have been some ill-fated attempts to deliver consumer subscription applications already (Pointcast, I’m looking at you). But it was only with the adoption of RSS that consumer-grade subscription found its stride. Today, RSS feeds are broadly available on most sites, and soon protocols such as COMET, driven by companies like Kaazing, will take subscription to the next level by letting servers update clients in real time.

Feedsync builds on the ubiquity of subscriptions and adds to it synchronization. It bundles structured data, security and permissions into a feed that subscribers can use to stay in synch with a data publisher.

Most consumers have already seen structured data of this kind. Consider a calendar invite — those files ending in .ics, based on the iCalendar standard. You can open a calendar invite in a variety of applications, from Outlook to iCal to Google Calendar, and the application automatically creates (or updates) an event.

One of the biggest challenges with synchronization is the resolution of conflicts. When several disconnected people change a calendar event independently, for instance, then reconnect, chaos can ensue. Companies like Puma have made their name producing synchronization software, and anyone who’s ever pressed the Hotsync button on a Palm knows the frequency with which conflicts can arise.

Feedsync offers a combination of subscriptions to let consumers of data keep track of information they care about, and synchronization to cleanly update that information while resolving, rather than creating, conflicts. That alone makes it worth a look (its specification is available under a creative commons license at www.feedsync.org). But Feedsync also has protocols to handle the merging of changes, identifying collisions, and deleting data that may help it to survive where other approaches have stumbled.

A new building block for social networks

Beyond all of this technology, Feedsync is also a volley in the social network space, which gives it the potential to be far more disruptive.

When thinking about the fundamentals that make Facebook successful, many people focus on the social networking giant’s Social Graph — the map of user relationships it tracks. But Facebook has another trick that’s nearly as important: status updates.

By keeping track of what your friends are up to, Facebook stays novel and keeps its users engaged. It’s a feat that many of its competitors are racing to emulate, including Google with its OpenSocial feeds. Essentially, you subscribe to your friends.

With Feedsync, you can not only subscribe to your friends, you can also synchronize data (such as calendars, contacts, events, and so on) automatically. So instead of status updates that just inform, information stays up to date.

By adding synchronization to the idea of subscription, Microsoft has upped the ante for how consumers keep synchronized with the people in their social graph.

Alistair Croll, Coradiant co-founder and VP of product management who blogs about online user performance and networking.