First Author*

GroupSpaces, an Oxford-based Web company which provides online tools for real-world groups has recently arrived back from Silicon Valley after being selected to attend WebMission 2008, a week-long trade mission for the UK’s twenty most promising Web companies

Founded by two Oxford students GroupSpaces.com arose from frustration at the multitude of different websites which clubs and societies at Oxford University were using to organise themselves online. GroupSpaces CEO David Langer said: ‘As a former president of two University societies I became increasingly annoyed with the mash-up of disconnected tools groups were using to manage themselves online – mailing lists on Yahoo! Groups, spreadsheets in Excel, events on Facebook, ancient websites – people were spending a disproportionate amount of time organising their groups across multiple platforms. There was a clear need to connect everything up and that’s what inspired us to create GroupSpaces.’

Chief Technical Officer Andrew Young, Vice President of Oxford Entrepreneurs and an experienced Web developer, added: ‘We both thought there must be a better way for groups to communicate with and manage their members’.

Young explained the unique solution provided by the Company: ‘GroupSpaces has created a free web-based service that solves all the problems of group managers with a combination of powerful, easy-to-use tools and an integrated portal. The online toolset is designed to fit in with each groups’ existing conventions, helping to establish efficient, robust procedures and facilitating collaboration between group members, managers and the wider world. Most groups have a common set of needs - communication channels, membership and database management, website provision and event organisation and promotion – GroupSpaces is designed to help with all of these.’

The team developed their initial ideas with the help of the Saïd Business School’s entrepreneurship activities including the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s flagship Building a Business course for science and technology entrepreneurship, and the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event where valuable contacts were made.

During Web Mission week in April this year they were able to take advantage of these contacts to set up meetings with some of the top Silicon Valley start-ups, from whom they received useful feedback. In addition, David and Andrew were invited for sessions with some leading venture capitalists in Silicon Valley including a meeting with Oxford alum Michael Mortiz at Sequoia Capital where they were able to share the wisdom of the man who invested in and sat on the boards of Google and Yahoo!

In January 2008, GroupSpaces completed a 6-figure round of investment funding from a syndicate of experienced Angel Investors including London-based Avonmore Development - which made them the youngest Oxford University entrepreneurs to receive venture funding.

A pilot of GroupSpaces is currently in operation with 40,000 users and the product is being developed with the benefit of their live feedback. As well as large societies such as The Oxford Union, Oxford Entrepreneurs and Imperial Entrepreneurs, many of the Junior Common Rooms at Oxford Colleges are adopting GroupSpaces’ mailing list facilities. Oxford University Careers Service also benefits from the service. Former Director, Terry Dray said: ‘The innovative website offered by GroupSpaces has helped even more students to find out about our events and services. They are bridging the gap between university societies and graduate recruiters in a revolutionary manner.’

Adam O’Boyle, Sabbatical Officer for The Oxford Hub, an umbrella organisation for all the charities in Oxford, commented: ‘GroupSpaces have created all, and more, that we could have wanted for us and our member charities. Our students can now get on with actually running their groups.’

With more than 6,000 unique visits to the website every month, GroupSpaces has secured advertising contracts with over 50 blue-chip clients including IBM, BP, McKinsey & Company, Bain Capital, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and JPMorgan.

GroupSpaces is currently focused on rolling its online tools out to the 25,000 UK-based university clubs and societies, and will also be commencing a pilot with local groups outside the student market over the summer months.

US-based Nexo Systems estimates there to be over 100 million groups in the US alone, and GroupSpaces’ mission is to become the essential provider of online tools for real-world groups.

For further details about GroupSpaces visit www.groupspaces.com

This week’s Der Spiegel Magazine features an interview with one of Netscape’s founders, Marc Andreessen.

In the interview, Andreessen discusses why he does not fear a Microsoft-Yahoo merger, why he enjoys not being part of a public company and why the unpredictable nature of the internet and its associated start-up companies excite him. Andreessen commented that because internet applications fundamentally only require a bit of code, which anyone can write, that the ‘next big thing’ is always just around the corner. In regards to classical journalism and the media, for example, Andreessen believes that internet-based media sources such as digg.com will take over from stalwarts such as the New York Times, whose internet site still comprises only 10% of revenue. Finally, Andreessen commented on his love of starting from scratch in the environment of Silicon Valley, and his hopes for his fledgling social networking site, Ning.

Marc Andreessen was 22 when he developed the first widely used browser for the World Wide Web. Until that point, the Web had been considered a text desert that could only be navigated by the initiated. For the first time, Andreessen’s Netscape Navigator allowed users to “surf” the colorful pages of the Internet with little trouble. It marked the start of the Dot.com revolution. The American is considered to be one of the most important pioneers of the modern Internet. Netscape’s initial public offering in 1995 was a surprise success, but the company’s downhill descent began soon after. A long and bloody browser war caused Netscape to lose market share and value on the stock exchange. In 1998, AOL acquired the company for over $4 billion. One year later, Andreessen started an IT service provider company that Hewlett- Packard would buy in 2007 for $1.6 billion. In 2004, he founded Ning with business partner Gina Bianchini. The company provides a platform for social networks and already includes over 170,000 networks — illustrious and diverse groups that run the gamut from firefighters to penguin fans to diabetes patients.

Researchers will be interested to learn of two new science-focused collaboration tools, 2collab and Scirus Topic Pages. These were announced recently by Elsevier, the science, technology and medicine publisher, which had a hand in their development.

Both sites are intended to help librarians and researchers better utilize the wide range of information resources available in the online world.

2collab is a classic example of “Web 2.0″. It works like a social bookmarking site where you can store and organize internet resources – such as blogs, websites and research articles - and share them with private or public groups.

Members of groups can evaluate these resources (by rating bookmarks, tagging and adding comments), or add their own bookmarks. Users could be research groups, colleagues, friends or students, who want to share, collaborate or network.

It’s free to browse public groups and bookmarks, which presumably will enhance the site’s usefulness for networking. But users must register their email address in order to access the full functionality – such as creating groups, adding comments, and adding bookmarks.

Scirus Topic Pages is a topic-centered communication and collaboration platform for scientists. Like 2collab, it’s a free service.

The main feature is a Wiki-like application allowing selected experts to provide an authoritative summary of their specialist area, including definitive reference lists of key published papers, citations, Web sources and other supplementary materials.

Alongside this is a search engine seeking to provide the latest and most relevant journal and web results for each topic.

Search engines provide researchers with an ever-expanding range of options for finding articles and evaluating the quality of papers. Here we look at some of the new ways of identifying relevant research, representing the links between papers, and saving and sharing search results.

Back in February, the First Author article Virtual Public Networks discussed how virtual networks, such as Second Life, could be used for collaboration and visualization in science. And this raised a question - with ever improving performance, is Second Life now a viable medium for virtual poster sessions and conferences?

A few months later, we’ve had opportunity to go back and look at how Second Life (SL) is actually being used.

As might be expected, examples of educational use far outnumber examples of research collaboration. There are hundreds of science exhibits, including a Gene Island and several planetaria. And there are some great attempts at innovation in distance learning - for example quizzes where students can meet each other and discuss the science while they solve the problems.

Cynics still have cause to argue that because it takes time for new users to orient themselves in the virtual world, SL will struggle to break out of the student demographic. But small groups are already taking the plunge, and as Linden Lab’s John Lester says, “Second Life is no more a game than the Web is a game. It’s a platform.”

Voice enabling technology is still at the development stage, but ultimately could surely bring in a wider community of users. The potential is clear for scientists wanting to “meet” other scientists without spending money on flights and conference hotels, and without the coldness of some online forums.

But why not judge the quality of the platform for yourself? Below are a few links we suggest as a good starting point for those new to SL:

• Google Calendar of upcoming science-related events in SL.
• Second Nature [SL registration required] is a virtual island, set up as a speculative venture by Nature. Here you will find helpful lists of events, plus multimedia presentations discussing the advantages of SL as a collaborative medium.
• Second Nature’s most recent event was a talk by Dr Phil Holliger about ancient DNA. You can read the transcript, slides and discussion on Joanna Scott’s blog for Nature.
  
• SciFoo Lives On is an online continuation of the SciFoo conference, meeting weekly in SL. Here you can find notes and transcripts from past sessions, and details of upcoming sessions.
• An interesting recent SciFoo session, Communicating Science with Video, discussed the emergence of sites such as JoVE, Bioscreencast, SciVee and SciTalks. The event was live blogged by ScienceRoll.

Today in the Guardian Technology section, correspondant Oliver Burkeman hosted a fascinating interview with Dan Tapscott, one author of the recent book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Tapscott claimed that we have barely begun to imagine how the internet will change the way we live and work, and explained how everything from gold mining to motorcycle manufacturing is being transformed - and why huge companies as we know them may simply cease to exist.

An excerpt from the article, and perfect example of how Tapscott perceives the effect of Wikinomics on large corporations:
Don Tapscott, therefore, finds himself in the odd position of arguing that social networking and citizen journalism, far from being pioneering, are really rather old hat. (”Social networking - that’s so 2006,” he sighs.) From a wikinomics perspective, the true power of the internet isn’t in harnessing the freely given wisdom of the crowd: it’s in giving more people the opportunity to become the professionals who do things for money. “This is not the crowd versus the individual genius,” he says. “If anything, it’s a new distribution channel for the individual genius.”

One of the best examples of this is InnoCentive, a web forum with a community of 1.5m scientific experts from around the world - full-time scientists, spare-time scientists, retirees and students. When a major multinational firm such as Procter & Gamble needs to develop a new cleaning product, it sometimes posts its requirements on InnoCentive, rather than relying on in-house researchers. Crucially, it offers a payment for a successful solution. “If they’re looking for a new molecule to take red wine off a shirt - well, you do the math,” Tapscott says. “They have 9,000 scientists inside their company boundaries, and 1.5m outside their boundaries. And sure enough, there’s a retired chemist in London, or a grad student in Taipei, who comes up with a molecule, and they get paid.” This is the real economy - people getting paid for making or doing stuff that other people want. And it’s easy to see how the next step might be to do away with the large firm entirely, as in the case of the Chinese motorbikes.

We covered some of the potential uses for social networking sites and virtual worlds in our article Virtual Private Networks. Some interesting potential uses for the medical profession are suggested in Science Roll. A good overview of the Royal Institution’s Science in Virtual Worlds is posted in Nascent and there is a list of suggestions for scientific activities in Second Life - including the creation of a virtual ecosystem called Terminus - on Nature Network London.

According to the Guardian, the social networking site Facebook is to open up its pages to third-party developers, who will be able to create applications that will run on users’ pages. The company says it has 65 partners in the development, including Amazon and Microsoft, offering 85 different applications including embeddable video.

The move is being seen as the antithesis of the policy at MySpace, the largest social networking site, which has occasionally reined in the use of outside “widgets” or designs on its pages, and blocked the hosting of pictures from Photobucket, the most popular photo-sharing site - earning it the ire of some of users who found that restrictive.

But crucially the opening of the interface could turn Facebook into an online platform that will attract developers, and hence more users, to the site which is growing at 3%, or about 100,000 users, every week, with half of the registered users returning every day.

Microsoft has already said it will integrate its PopFly web application, which lets people mix and mash together data from other online sites and applications, into Facebook, while iLike.com, a social music service, has developed a widget that can be incorporated into a Facebook page that shows what friends are listening to.

Three forthcoming events at the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education explore Web 2.0 as a business model. The sessions will focus on mobile social networking and user generated content. Registration is open now.

Mobile Social Networking - the Financial Saviour of the Mobile Sector (3 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK) Designed for those involved in the management and technical aspects of the mobile sector, this course will give an overview of the mobile social software, focus on the youth sector, and conclude with a discussion of the future of mobile applications in the context of social networking.

User Generated Content and Web 2.0 - A Strategic Viewpoint for Decision Makers (5 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
Designed for decision makers, this intensive one-day course offers an opportunity to learn more about the threats and opportunities arising from user generated content.

Mobile Web 2.0 and IMS : User Generated Content (from a telecoms / infrastructure perspective) (6 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
Designed for operators, people working in standardisation as well as software architects, this intensive one-day course will have a dual perspective. It will approach Web 2.0 from the user perspective and also from the IMS standpoint. It will cover the basics of IMS and will then discuss how IMS would apply in a user generated content / Web 2.0 world.

These events were also noted by Tim O’Reilly. We discussed the emergence of the mobile web in our article, ‘Mobilising Scholars‘, first published last year. For more information about mobile Web 2.0, the Open Gardens blog provides regular updates and has a page of Ajax FAQ.

Originally appearing in early 2006, this article turned out to be prophetic in predicting the rise of  online software after the acquisition of Writerly by Google and its transformation  into Google documents and spreadsheets.

Writing on the Web (2.0)?