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It’s rare for me to plug events on the blog here at SmallBizPod, but I’m speaking at one of them and pleased to be part of the blogger relations activity for the other.

What’s more I reckon both events will appeal to the startups and small business owners amongst you.

The first is Small Business 2.0, a one day conference for anyone who wants to get more from the web for their business, whether you’re a home worker, ebay trader or owner/manager of a small business.  It takes place in London on Saturday 11 October and if you’re quick I’ve got 10 tickets to give away.  Email me and it’ll cost you nowt.

The other conference is a must attend event, if you’re planning or running a web-based startup or want a deeper insight into current and future trends on the web from a social, business or technology perspective. It’s the original conference and expo for all things 2.0 and it’s taking place in Berlin, which is a great city I last visited in 1991.

The Web 2.0 Expo takes place on 21-23 October and promises to be one of the web events of the year in Europe.  I’m hoping to be there and it would be great to meet up with any of you guys who can make it.

I’ll post about some of the sessions I reckon will be a must visit for you business savvy web entrepreneurs a little later.

In the meantime SmallBizPod readers or listeners can get 35% off when you register for the conference using the code webeu08gr10. (You will need to sign up for a user on the website. During the registration you can enter the code and see the discount applied).

Had a demonstration session from Adobe the other day. It was making its Connect Pro strut itself with a whole bunch of us from Freeform Dynamics. Very impressive it was too.

What is it? Another web conferencing service. Or you can buy it for in-house installation. We were using the hosted service. It uses the idea of meeting rooms to which different groups of people belong and in which various resources are shared.

You can share your whole computer screen or, if you have two, choose which to share. Or you can share a window or an application. Control can be passed back and forth between participants, depending on their authority level. They can be Hosts, Presenters or Participants. A chat window allows you to type little messages to each other IM-style. You can also hold your hand up to attract the host’s attention.

You can also share a variety of documents - PowerPoint, JPEG, Flash and Flash Video, MP3 and Zip. Mostly people use PowerPoint. Connect crushes large files to a fraction of their original size when saving them to the room. This makes for rapid playback, especially useful for complex graphics or video.

Whiteboarding is possible - this is a markup system using highlighters and drawing tools. If you want to make a permanent copy of the markup, you have to print it to an Acrobat (pdf) file or to paper. Shame you can’t just save it. Oh well.

Colour depth can be varied. Some people are happy with 256 colours, others want millions. For radiological scans, for example, the highest possible resolution would be required. It would, of course take longer to transmit.

When you return to a room, it’s exactly as you left it, a bit like a real room. Unless, of course, someone with the necessary authority has been in and changed it. But you’d never get the equivalent of a cleaner walking in and throwing precious files in the bin.

Adobe has 3000 customers using the service and they’re racking up something like 47 million minutes a month at the moment. Although it can use the computer for voice communications (VoIP), our session was run over the telephone, using local call numbers. This was apparently to keep the call quality up. VoIP tends to be used when the sessions are less interactive, more one way, as in a broadcast webinar. (You may remember that Citrix Online had some pretty decent VoIP in its GoToMeeting service, so it’s not impossible.)

You might want to take a look at this page to see the options available. I tried to get some sense out of Adobe on pricing. It was late in the afternoon for the local office and, despite having various people running around, I was unable to come up with any numbers.

Let’s hope they add something in the comments below before too long.

Launching an online property portal in the UK right now is either insane or an inspired move to challenge the incumbents when a plunging market could create opportunities.

Mad or masterly, that’s exactly what PropertyIndex.com, founded by internet dating tycoon, Darren Richards, has done this week by creating a UK version of a year old site that originally targetted the overseas property market exclusively.

The new site faces some stiff and well established competition in the form of rightmove.co.uk, findaproperty.com, propertyfinder.com and primelocation.com, the big four in a crowded category.

Nevertheless, PropertyIndex.com believes its results based payment model provides an alternative approach that will appeal to estate agents as the market slows to a crawl and they look to cut costs associated with monthly subscription sites.  Agents listing with PropertyIndex.com pay £10 per qualified lead.

Lee Bramzell, managing director, says that it was always in the business plan to launch in the UK:

So we’ve proved our pay per results model for overseas property, cut our teeth, learned about the market and are now bringing those learnings back to the UK.

In one year the site has over 150,000 international properties listed.  As of beta launch this week the new site appears to include around 5,000 properties for sale or rent in the UK, although Lee claims nearly 2,000 UK estate agents have already signed up.

Funding for this particular startup hasn’t been a problem. Founder Darren Richards sold DatingDirect.com, one of the UK’s most popular dating sites, last year for £27.7 million.  Many of the 45 strong team including Lee Bramzell were involved in some way with that venture.

Being self-funded with a team that has a wealth of online business and marketing experience puts PropertyIndex.com in an enviable position.  Perhaps its weakness in the current market is also what it sees as its USP - the results based model.

This approach puts the onus on volume of qualified leads in order to generate any income, when other sites will have the advantage of up front cash.  This at a time when buyers are finding it hard to find banks to lend them money to buy.

The most recent Comscore figures for UK property portals show year-on-year traffic down by nearly 20% in August.  As Lee admits:

We can’t magic more transactions into the market, but can try to help agents generate leads in a more sustainable way.

He also hints that he hopes to leverage the collaborative nature of the web and create a whole raft of affiliate partners.

In essence PropertyIndex.com may create a kind of property version of adwords that lets even the smallest personal websites make money from generating leads for local estate agents.

But scaling up the UK properties on the site will be a first priority over the coming months.  Right now a casual search shows plenty of areas with few if any properties listed.

Search also seems less intuitive and simple to use than what’s available on the other relative newcomer and rising star of the online property market nestoria.co.uk.

Nestoria appears to have a similar business model, but automates its aggregation avoiding having to do deals with individual estate agents.

Still, with a strong team, a war chest and no VCs looking for an early exit, you wouldn’t want to bet against Lee and his team riding out a property slump in good shape and stealing market share from the big beasts like Rightmove along the way.

As the economy of the USA churns through uncertainty, as businesses along our gulf coast are impacted by hurricanes, and as our quadrennial election season tortures us with partisan politics, I want to ask you, what’s your attitude towards failure?

Businesses will fail today due to the economy, due to disaster, due to health issues, due to mistakes, and due to a myriad of other reasons. The question is, what will those business owners do? In the USA, the odds are high that the entrepreneur in question will be back to start another business in the future. It has to do with our attitude towards failure.

I’m a big fan of failure. Why would anyone be a fan of failure? Because failure is a necessary part of learning, of activity, of business. If you are not experiencing any failures, you probably aren’t moving.

Barry Moltz wrote a whole book on failure, called Bounce! He points out that the American attitude towards business failure is perhaps the most tolerant in the world. That’s not much solace in the face of a big failure, as even Moltz admits.

But if you can’t accept the possibility of failing, you’ll never move forward.

Small business owner Rex Hammock said this back in 2000:

Even smart businesses managed by smart individuals and smart investors die. Businesses start and die every day. They always have. They always will. I am old enough - and have been fortunate enough - to have succeeded significantly and failed miserably and frankly, the failures have done more for me than the successes.

Be warned. This blog post is being done by voice. I’m using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. According to the blurb, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is faster and more accurate than ever.

Well, the words certainly appear quicker. About 50% quicker. It’s also more accurate. A great thing if you can’t spell is that it spells words correctly. It also needs barely any training.

The new version allows you to format text as well as deleting and copying it.

You can use Dragon with just about any program but it does work rather well with Word and Firefox for example. In Firefox you can jump to a hyperlink by just saying part of its name. You can also control Windows itself and other programs with voice commands.

I have to say that, so far, this has been slower than typing but then I am a touch typist. I have also had to make corrections, albeit verbally. For example, ‘but then’ came out as ‘Batman’. It also offered irritating spaces after apostrophes. (I found out later that single quote commands are better.)

Okay, I give up. I resorted to using the keyboard to remove those pesky spaces. Actually I’m still speaking but I’m about to revert to typing.

It’s a strange thing but, even though I said I was going to type, I carried on talking. DNS really is pretty good until you want to do something weird.

For straightforward text entry, it makes few mistakes. And, when it does, you just say the bit it got wrong - my most recent one was ‘typing’, it kept putting it in as ‘type in’. But all I had to say was “select type in” and it threw up a few alternatives. Number one was ‘typing, so I just said “choose one” and the correction was made.

Of course, I had to be near enough to the screen to see when things were going wrong. But, equally, I could have been in a comfortable chair on the other side of the room, assuming I had a wireless headset. I could have tackled any mistakes later.

Some people don’t like typing, some have disabilities which prevent them using their fingers. Either way, Dragon Naturally Speaking, gives them a way of achieving something that was previously difficult or impossible. I spoke to a couple of people recently, one of whom works with Thalidomide victims, the other with people who have spinal injuries. Both reported how previously frustrated individuals had found DNS a great way of participating more fully in life.

This isn’t the prime use of this technology, but it is interesting to see that it can be liberating for people of all abilities. Except, maybe, touch typists.

Retail prices start at £89.99.