Vinny Lingham's Blog

Mark Gibbs gave SynthaSite a very flattering review over the weekend in NetworkWorld.

He was really the first writer to pick up on the fact that SynthaSite is actually somewhat of a Mashup platform, if nothing else. We’re striving to create an environment where average people can mashup up widgets and create their own sites.

The biggest problems with many of the mashup offerings out there (and yes, some have gone bankrupt already), is that it’s too complex for the average user. Users don’t have a clue what a mashup is, and most don’t know what a widget is either – but they mostly understand the concept of putting stuff onto webpage.

Widget companies such as Slide & RockYou, really offer users a great way to create their own widgets, but nowhere to really publish them – that’s where platforms such as SynthaSite, Wordpress & Blogger come in – users want their own “home on the web”.

The Web 2.0 conference last week was great – although, as many people pointed out, Silicon Valley tends to get way too far ahead of the average user – and it often takes many years to drive user adoption for new and especially complicated technologies.

I’m hoping that with SynthaSite, we can bring mashups and widgets to the mass market – and make it dead simple to create their own websites.

Update: Kara Swisher details exactly what I’m talking about. The average people out there don’t actually have a clue of the “hottest trends”. They want simple and clean services.

Today I woke up in my new apartment in San Francisco… Yes, that’s right – I am finally living & working in San Francisco – something I’ve wanted to do my whole life!

Firstly, my apologies to all my readers for the low level of posts the past few months. The reason I’ve been so quiet lately on my blog, is simply because there was a lot going on in my personal life over the past six months, and I didn’t want to make any public statements on what I was doing, until everything fell into place – and it finally has. The chain on events that has made this possible was almost unbelievable and even a year ago when I first started talking about a move – it was more a positive thought than a reality. Just shows that you need to be positive and believe in yourself and to get things done – you need to set goals in order to achieve them.

I finally sold my house in Cape Town on Friday (amazing timing as it was on the market for four months), had my US work Visa approved on Thursday and received it on Saturday morning. I managed to pack up my home on Saturday & Sunday and boarded a flight on Sunday night to head out to San Francisco – leaving my poor wife to tidy up the loose ends back home (sorry sweetheart!) while I set things up in San Fran for us.

I also had to get here pretty quickly, in order to be here for the Web 2.0 conference this week, where SynthaSite Inc is exhibiting and I’ll be manning the booth on Thursday & Friday.

It’s also great to escape the Cape Town winter weather that’s creeping up on us over the past week. I woke up to a beautiful, crisp San Francisco morning – went to the gym downstairs and took a jog to the local grocer to buy milk, orange juice and the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. This is going to be some adventure…

I’m thrilled that I have the chance to be a CEO of a venture capital backed Internet startup in Silicon Valley – this is truly a dream come true for me…

I was recently profiled in a great new Indian lifestyle magazine, called Sutra. Sutra is available in the UK, India & South Africa and focuses primarily on highlighting the latest in Indian culture globally and it has been launched with great reviews.

My sincere thanks to Terrence Kommal and his team for the privilege of being featured in their latest issue.

Download a PDF of the article here.

I just got word today that Google will be releasing a Pay Per Search service for it’s end users. This service will be available to end users that are not interesting in seeing the ads, powered by Google Adwords. Users will be allowed to purchase credits using Google Checkout, and can opt to pay (estimated at 1c) for each search query that they run through Google.

This is a great idea for users who don’t want to be bombarded with ads, however the problem for PPC marketers, is that if Google starts to see a lot of users opting to pay for searches, our PPC traffic from the campaigns will drop – resulting in far more traffic that will end up through natural search. Yet again, the constant battle between paid and natural search is heating up!

It’s actually been a full year since I announced that Google was looking at reverting to CPM from CPC. The argument was that Google was looking to boost revenues on low Clickthrough Rate search terms – perhaps Pay Per Search is a better way of achieving this? Only time will tell!