Knowknot Consultancy

Hotfrog

Hotfrog is the fastest growing online directory of small to medium businesses in the world. Launched in April 2005 in Australia, hotfrog has now spread to 36 countries, operates in 14 languages, features 41 million companies – and is growing by around 100,000 business per month. and gets 79 million page views per month.

Hotfrog isn’t your usual run-of-the-mill business directory like Yellow Pages. For one thing, it’s totally free for businesses and users. Businesses enter their own data themselves, and categorise or tag themselves in their own words (called a ‘folksonomy’ instead of a ‘taxonomy’), so it’s extremely flexible, accurate and has the largest possible global footprint as it doesn’t rely on a team of sales people and taxonomists to enter and classify business data. It only takes a few minutes for a business to create their entry and they can also include stuff like press releases and images to their Hotfrog entry.

Phil came up with the original idea for Hotfrog, pitched it to Reed Business Information (his employer at the time) and got buy-in from the company. Since its launch in 2005, Phil has either led or had direct strategic input into the core product, and is now the Strategy Director for hotfrog globally. Hotfrog is outpacing or taking a good market share from very entrenched brands in many countries.

(see Google website trends graphs AU, UK)

One of the many contributions that Phil has made since hotfrog’s launch was the development of a folksonomy administration toolset that has helped grow the tag list and significantly improve the usability of hotfrog.

And 2010 is looking like a bumper year for hotfrog, with some exciting new product ideas being launched to further help small businesses do business online.

Nospuds

NoSpuds is an online directory of events and activities at a local level. It was conceived after Phil spent several fruitless months trying to find drawing classes in his local area only to realise just as he was moving house that there was an art school just around the corner from him. The idea first came to him in 2004, and NoSpuds went live in Australia in March 200. Phil hopes to launch it internationally this year.

NoSpuds is a grassroots movement helping people find interesting things to do, whether that be an art class, cooking course, basketball tournament, community action group meeting, theatre performance, music gig or something as simple as a walking group.

NoSpuds is free and always will be. The goal is to help sprout local communities – currently there are very few sites that help small community groups market what they do and grow. Some of the people already using Nospuds to promote their activities include tourist information organisations in rural NSW, community colleges, local councils, community theatre groups and commercial course providers.

You can see a video intro to NoSpuds.

Hopout

While working with Hotfrog, Phil noticed that many small businesses and start-ups didn’t have their own websites, and that the quality of many of the small business sites that did exist was poor. Many of these small businesses pay good money to have a website built that doesn’t even meet baseline requirements for search engine optimisation (SEO), lead generation, standards, branding and legal issues.

Many existing online enterprises design to help small businesses build their own website simply give businesses a blank page, and the tools to drag and drop elements to create their site. This can be quite daunting for businesses, and creates a high barrier to entry.

Hopout is a website-building tool for small business that makes it easy for them to build their own, effective website. Businesses don’t need to understand SEO, legal, standards, web design, etc – all they need to know about is their business and its products and services. Hopout works by asking questions of the business owner and using that structured data build a website for them.

Phil conceived, pitched, specified, and lead the project.  It is now launched in Australia hopout.com.au in beta release.

Others

Over the last 10 years Phil has been involved in the redevelopment or launch of many websites for Reed Business Information (Australia). He was responsible for standardising back-end systems and processes to enable print content to be reused on the web and also integrated directory listings with editorial and press release content to improve lead generation. These concepts and business ideas now underly $20m of web based advertising revenue for RBI Australia.

Examples include ferret.com.au, infolink.com.au