KILTR, the Scottish professional networking start-up, secured its third round of funding, valued at over £320k, bringing the company’s total funding total close to £1m in less than ten months. Based in Glasgow, it has attracted backing from a group of investors including Par Equity, Barwell PLC and the Scottish Investment Bank.
 
The site also confirmed its 10,000th beta user at the weekend with Social Media Week board member and director of twintangliblse, Tim Wright, opting to use the network to coordinate Glasgow’s activities during World Social Media Week later this month.
 
KILTR, CEO Brian Hughes is pleased with the progress the company has made over the last 12 months. "The Scottish identity is something of a global phenomenon in that no matter where you go in the world, you will meet someone who has an affinity with the country."

"With almost seven times as many people with Scottish heritage living outside of Scotland as there is living in Scotland, the focus for KILTR is to capitalise on these existing shared values and harness the power of social networking technology to support the growth of Scottish business, on an international scale.”
 
KILTR is one of a growing number of niche networking sites which industry commentators herald as the ‘next-gen’ of social networking. Certainly carrying a similar name approach is Bantr for real football fans, but presumably across the entire range of football enthusiasts. KILTR has opted to attract a membership base largely consisting of senior business representatives with C-level and managerial executives, founders and owners comprising 65% of the total number of KILTR members.
 
The site has established a strategic marketing partnership with airport operator BAA Glasgow. (Does that signify that the more profitable Edinburgh airport is going to be the one to be sold?) It also confirms its first major sponsor, an international private aviation company JetLogic. Both hope to harness the network to boost their profile among international Scots.
 
Stewart Fraser, KILTR’s CTO says: “Unlike mass populated platforms like Twitter and Facebook, niche networks have a more targeted membership, which cultivates an online environment more suitable for building connections as users already share common interests.

Niche networks are said to offer better value for businesses and entrepreneurs as they allow for a more targeted approach and users can build practical connections in a shorter period of time.”
 
KILTR celebrates its first birthday this year. It's owners have set themselves to  secure 20,000 founding members by  the birthday –  a goal, reported to be well within their grasp.

REINTRODUCING SOCIAL FUN
Where KILTR is unashamedly pushing business, it is like many social sites much more about work than play.

The successful archetype being LinkedIn, unashamedly declares it has over 120m professionals  who use the site to exchange information ideas and opportunities, staying informed about contacts and industry, finding people and know-how to achieve goals and control their professional identities online.

Case in point, civil servants banned from using Facebook, can use Twitter and LinkedIn for work , reports E-weekEurope  providing it is for work reasons.

The government’s decision came after a report that staff at the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) can access certain social networking websites from their office computers, for work reasons. Employment Minister (right) Chris Grayling saying “The department recognises social media is a valuable tool for engaging with jobseekers and partners,”

The US founder of a new social site, Canv.as, is now offering users "a place to share and play with images" and its been built with a commitment to spontaneous creativity.

Chris Poole (left)  reports Technology Review is the 23-year-old founder of 4chan, the largest famous and infamous image board on the web, behind a number of pranks including the Rickrolling Internet memes.

Poole hopes with Canv.as to bring a counter-cultural perspective to a site that he hopes will gain a mainstream audience, and make a profit. And he also wants to remind people that socialising is about having fun.

"The idea of play was very important to us," he says. 

A Canv.as user is greeted with a wall of images, pretty,  funny, or political and can either manipulate these using lightweight image-editing software built into the site, or upload a new image for anyone to play with. 



Users vote on different images giving them virtual stickers, and adding comments and join groups devoted to specific types of content.  The process resists control of the results of any contribution and does not forcing users to post under real names, or even post under a consistent identity.

"Identity is not black and white," Poole comments. "It's a rainbow. There's a whole spectrum of possibilities."



Users choose whether to post content using their profile, or anonymously giving them the opportunity to gauge responses without reputation risk and to claim results 'after the fact' attaching a name if an effort has been well-received.

Poole believing this encourages people to participate. "People have been conditioned to be afraid of the response that they will get. [In Canv.as], you're rewarded for your success as opposed to being punished for your failures." 



The site also dismisses the advertising revenue model behind social sites, opting for the Zynga model, which sells small virtual items to people playing its games. Poole feels Canv.as could make its money by charging users for cool stickers, extra features, or advanced tools for groups. Interesting to know if he  will also follow Zynga into an immersive move.

ZYNGA GOES FOR IMMERSIVE
Already dominating Facebook "social games" with Farmville and Mafia Wars, Zynga's new Adventure World is much more ambitious and with a new immersive type of social game.

Five major environments, including a jungle and inside a volcano, some 35 maps to explorerer through, puzzles to solve, and inevitably enemies to battle on the way to acquiring precious objects, Adventure World is played full-screen, immersing the player in the game world.

Before that however, be prepared to hand over your name, profile pictures, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends and any other information shared with everyone. This empowers Zynga to add players to their emai listsl, post status messages, notes, photos and videos to the player's Wall and publish scores, achievements and other activity to their Facebook.

Adventure World calls for players to strategise about what to do in the game itself and which Facebook friends to invite along and launches a PC video game concept with a large, complex virtual world, hoping to attract new players, keep them engaged for longer as the critical key to increasing its profits reports Technology Review.

Zynga's money model has been a winner by selling virtual items for players to use in its games. Zynga showed $91m net income last year on $597m revenue and a five-fold increase in revenue from the year before.

CARING AND OFTEN COUNTING SOCIALISERS

A totally different form of crowdsourcing, social networking is also emerging globally. At Inaturalist.org a host of projects allow people to pool their observations with other on iNat.

Lots are local projects as Pepperwood vital signs, monarch butterfies through the Sierra Nevada mountains or elsewhere, but  two encompass amphibians [712 of 6830 species and counting] and reptiles [306 of 9,413 species and counting]. BioBlits highlights a New York Times piece  by the ineluctable Carl Zimmer on how many species there are on this planet. One study says 8.7m. Scientists argue that almost surely underestimates some lesser-known classes of life.

Only some 1.25m species have been described in the 253 years since Linnaeus devised the method we use to name them. If there are roughly 8.7m species, nearly 90% of the species on Earth have not yet been discovered or described.

"The 8.7m doesn’t include species of bacteria, which may number in the millions. It is the bare truth to say that no matter how much we think we know about life on Earth, we know almost nothing," concludes Zimmer's elegiac piece.

ONE ID TO RULE THEM ALL
While socialisers debate which of the varying sites are going to work best for them, many are struggling to remember the scores of passwords demanded by different websites.

It's either reset the account, dig around to find stored log-in information or just use the same password for all, a security risk to multi account hijacking.

As identity becomes critical online, with users signing up for ever more websites and services, the OpenID Foundation (that includes the majors  of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo) this coming week are to launch the Account Chooser as the latest effort to resolve the ID headache.

It'd be so nice if they could pass some approach and guidelines onto on-line banks too!!

Instead of having to create yet another account, Account Chooser (demo site) lets you choose one account eg. Gmail or Facebook log-ins,  then use that to log in to many other sites something Facebook and Twitter have exercised for some time.

Eric Sachs, a Google project manager and OpenID Foundation board member, developed the technology and Google is backing the project by hosting the code.

Previously, users had to create an OpenID account, then manually link it with all other accounts, which meant working out which sites would accept the consolidated account as verification.



The code behind Account Chooser is under an open source license (it can be reused and modified without charge) and Web developers can implement it more easily, offering users a free choice of identity provider to use with the system.

Account Chooser reports Technology Review will also support a variety of standards used for identity verification, such as OAuth, SAML, and OpenIDConnect.



Mozilla, the Firefox web browser, has a developed its own approach with its BrowserID. After verifying that a user owns an e-mail address, BrowserID downloads a browser add-on that can be used to identify the user to sites that support the system.

It is claimed this is more secure than Account Chooser as information goes through the user's browser,  that "limits the flow of information to what is strictly necessary to let users log in." 



But both approaches will need to be widely adopted by website owners and companies to reach out to a broad user audience. Sachs is hoping that Account Chooser's connection with Google (hosting the opensourced code through Google Identity Toolkit) will persuade other companies to join in.

Full participant list besides Google, includes companies from Microsoft to Wordpress, and ranges from the big to small startups.