30 days of Sustainability is once again happening in Vancouver. This year it runs from April 22 - May 21, 2007. I highly recommend that people go check out the temporary site and sign up for updates. The full site will launch sometime in the next few weeks.
(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.)
This posting has links to all of the Web 2.0 Summit 2006 blog posts that I wrote:
Here are my summary thoughts on the 3 day Web 2.0 Summit 2006 in SF, CA
There were some overall themes that seemed to prevail in the sessions I attended and I'm going to try to capture them here in no particular sequence. It's one thing to have sat in all the sessions or to review all of the notes but another to reflect on all that was said and see what can be summarized from it all.
Web 2.0 is real. In fact, it's even more important than when Microsoft had their epiphany about the internet ten years ago.
We're at the beginning of the ramp for things like social media and mobile;
This year, we grew users 10-15%, usage 20-30%, and monetization 30+% and that looks like it will continue;
video has surpassed text everywhere all the time;
Internet Advertising is still under-represented so ad spend will shift from 8% of the total spend to about 15% of the total spend and will make this transition very quickly.
It's now possible to build an entirely virtual company by outsourcing every single component of it;
Application development speed continues to leap ahead radically;
find and go towards the large white spaces;
there is lots of capital out there; ideas and good teams are the limiters; there's no excuse for not raising money right now;
web services and mashups are going to explode;
find passionate users, let them drive your products and your business;
In fact, let them help you BUILD your product if possible;
Build your products so that people either love them or hate them; don't aim for the zone of mediocrity.
LOVE your users;
To keep good people, ensure they're passionate about what they're doing, give them the ability to somewhat drive their (and your) success and innovation; engage them in decisions;
Realize that you can build things now collaboratively across the web in ways that were not possible before;
Do something bold that changes the game:
Goldcorp gave up their sacred data and $500K to make $3.4B in revenues
Bob Parsons cancelled the GoDaddy.com IPO because the analysts were too annoying;
Amazon wants to start running your businesses because frankly, they can do it better, cheaper, and faster than you can by a factor of 100x.
the better your product, the less you have to use traditional marketing;
focus on niches;
we're at the beginning of the curve on immersive environments and they will play a larger and larger part in our economy;
help people make money on top of your platform;
Watch the cashflow (daily!); it's more important than profits (for a smaller company);
Making money is better (and way more important) than finding investors
Adapt quickly
Create passionate users who will help you create your business
Listen to yourself; listen to your customers; don't listen to analysts; never listen to the doubters.
measure what counts but remember that "not everything that counts can
be measured, nor does everything that can be measured count." (be
careful what you measure);
operational excellence can be a a defensible long-term strategy, and significant point of differentiation; (Microsoft, Amazon, Fedex)
Profit or size?
Most people: make it profitable right off the bat; then build with revenue as fast as possible;
Bezos: go for size!
On finding the next opportunity:
Calcanis/Dmitry: stay focused on your original business!
Bezos: Always keep exploring down dark tunnels for new business opportunities!
there was a lot of contradiction regarding how companies should or should not start small. I think it shows that there is no right answer. There will be a plethora of small companies and others will choose to get the funding to get big fast as we did in Bubble 1.0;
Overall, the three days were very worthwhile. I met some fantastic people and am looking forward to attending the Web 2.0 Expo in April 2007 that will focus much more heavily on the tactical details of Web 2.0 deployment.
THIS is the reason you don't allow overly broad stupid legislation like the Patriot Acts I and II and the most recent Military Commission Act to pass. They are always unintended uses that far exceed the original intent of the law. In this case, a couple in their mid-forties were being overtly sexual on a Southwest Airlines flight and have been charged under the Patriot Act (which was designed as a tool to charge terrorists.)
What a joke. Why are Americans putting up with this? WAKE UP. Unbelievable.
I mean, don't get me wrong. They should have been hauled off the plane if he was threatening the staff, but charge them with mischief, not under the fracking terrorism act.
Craig Ferguson had a funny episode on this story: "When the other passengers saw these goings-on, they were surprised and thought....'What, entertainment on a Southwest Airlines flight?'" Funny. But not.
Carlotta Perez, historian, talks about all revolutions: excitement, bubble, bubble burst, actual deployment cycle. We're now heading into the real period of the web finally.
This is the biggest change to company structures, competition, and the way companies create value that has happened in the past hundred years!
My company has done large $500M syndicated research projects to understand this stuff.
I have been studying web 2.0 for six years now.
Web 1.0: HTML; standard for presentation
Web 2.0: web services; multimedia, geospatial, mobility, integration, "the thing"; it is becoming a platform for application building in its own right but is not a presentation layer.
The act of putting stuff on the web is "programming" the machine.
Enterprise 2.0 is about the economics of collaboration:
Why do firms exist? Transaction costs; the cost of coordination to bring it all together to solve a problem. Otherwise, everything would be built by individuals. It's cheaper to do things in the corporation than as a single person.
We moved from industrial age corporations to the extended enterprise, to the business webs (think of the IT global supply chain web) and moving to "mass collaboration" - this is MUCH more than crowd-sourcing or social networking. Social networking is becoming a new form of production. Self-organization What used to take millenia or centuries can now happen in years, months, or overnight.
BMW's X3 is built by Magna, a globally distributed group of manufacturers, not by BMW. This is about changing how BMW makes cars.
Goldcorp: published his proprietary geo-data on the web and held a competition for $500K to see who could find gold on the property they owned. For $500K investment, he found $3.4B worth of gold. His market cap went up to $10B. He had all sorts of crazy responses from geologists, mathematicians, etc. and got crazy solutions.
HOLY COW
He acted globally; he shared his private data; he changed the game.
Mass collaboration:
Question: Could you create something other than an operating system with open source? Answer from Linus Torvalds: I don't think there's anything you couldn't create.
Red Hat: Linux; Spike source; open source applications are all good examples.
Zopa.com: peer lending is mass collaboration where people help other people build their businesses.
Cambrian House lets a group of people come up with innovative ideas, grade those ideas, narrow the list to the best ideas, build those ideas, and then Cambrian House sells that widget for you and you as the contributor or team, profit from it. Click here to see how it works. [WOW. Bizarre concept. I wonder...how good will it be at manufacturing. Or selling/distribution?]
The Chinese motorcycle industry is an open source ecosystem
Ideagoras: cooperative markets innovating in business (see chart below)
Second Life: the REAL story is not that their currency is pegged to the USD but the product is entirely created by its customers (pro-sumer)
So you could pro-sume clothing, mindstorm robots,
Biotechs and pharmas could have owned gene patents but they collaborated instead.
Mashups ecosystems will be collaboratively built on a massive scale
IntelliOne: calculate the location of any cell phone over time (like watching traffic)
Boeing - the Dreamliner has no spec. Companies collaborate together, build chunks of the plane and those chunks are snapped together like LEGO. [I don't buy that statement. You can't build a wing or a fuselage or a nav system or anything else without a specification / blueprint, particularly not if the parts are going to fit together like LEGO. It will be interesting to see how Tapscott covers this in his book.]
Enterprise 2.0 is causing a crisis of leadership! It is the single largest change in corporate structure and operation in the past century.
Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / Mary Meeker gives Morgan Stanley's "State of the Internet, Part 3" talk - "The World's Information is Getting Organized and Monetized"
The Top 5 companies are worth 46% more now than they were worth in the Year 2000: The Top 5 Global Internet Market Leaders have gone from $2B market value (pre 2000) to $178B (peak in 2000) to $32B (trough in 2002) and all the way back up to $259B (Nov 2006), which is 46% higher than their last peak.
It's tough to succeed: ~2% of technology companies have created ~100% of net wealth; on average, 2 companies have 1000% gains per year
Users / Usage — Yahoo! has base of 418MM+ unique monthly visitors (+19% Y/Y growth)
Customer Acquisition — Google now has 500,000 - 1M advertisers and they're making them more money all the time through more effective targeting and metrics.
Commerce / Payments — PayPal has 123MM accounts, (+41% Y/Y, CQ3); Shopping.com has 40MM+ products in 325+ categories
Advertising — 8% of total US advertising online in 2006E growing to estimated 13%+ within 5 years - Google + Yahoo! = key drivers + beneficiaries
Significant targeting / conversion improvements (related to technology improvements + data leverage) — could bolster annual global revenue per unique user of $9 for Google (+42% Y/Y) and $10 for Yahoo! (+29% Y/Y) 2-3x in next 5 years
Personalization — Recommendation engines improve monetization – examples include Amazon.com + Yahoo! Music
Recommendations systems getting better.
[As pointed out in The Long Tail, as you address more niches, you get more noise (stuff you don't want) and the way to sift through that noise is with filters such as recommendation systems. As the volume of potential purchases, songs, websites, etc. increase, the way to find what you want is through better filtering and recommendation systems.
Communications/Telephony: Skype would rank #3 in the world for telecom providers (behind China Mobile and Vodafone). It may still have the title of "fastest product ramp in history". Skype carries approximately 7% of all global cross-border calls and that should double in the next year or two.
Video: It is estimated that approximately 60% of internet traffic may be Peer to peer filesharing of "unmonetized" video (read that as it could be illegal or it could be legal but just not have an economic transaction attached to it.)
"Local" is getting to be important: Buying your software from Russia or China might be okay, but if you want to buy bagels, you need to find the bagel shop near your house. Google and eBay local classifieds continue to expand.
Communities are exploding: Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, CyWorld are all exploding. Blogs continue to double every 7 months (now at about 57M blogs)
[I like Matt Mullenwegg's quote on Technorati (the blog search engine): "There are over 50 million blogs. SOME of them have to be good!"]
[See further down for the interview with Hyun-Oh Yoo from CyWorld - they're awesome!]
Social media is at the very beginning of the curve
[Digg, Reddit, NowPublic, and many more sites are springing up to take advantage of people's energy and desire to be involved in reporting the news (and fact-checking on the major news sites.]
Mobile continues to ramp up quickly. The shocking statistics from the presentation included American Idol receiving 63M votes (via mobiles + internet) in the final 4 hour round.
[I'm not sure which is more shocking. That 63M people were watching that ridiculous show or that 63M people were able to vote using a system that didn't crash. I think they're equally unbelievable.]
[I'm also intrigued by this voting thing on phones. We're starting to see some interesting uses of phones that fit the form factor: GPS-enabled mapping, instant messaging, voting.]
[For another interesting company to look at in this area, a friend of mine, John Merrells, has launched Embrace Mobile, which will specialize in very focused mobile applications that can be run over SMS.
User Generated Content based sites have moved into the top 15 global websites (based on number of unique visitors per month). Wikipedia, MySpace, and YouTube drove those numbers.
[That means that the principle "users can (and will) generate more content at the edge than you can at the center."]
[Some other interesting notes are that the growth rates of Wikipedia (110% y/y), Myspace (303% y/y) and YouTube (2662% y/y) mean that by next year, they will likely dominate the list.]
[Another interesting side note is that the only other site on the list with a relatively high growth rate is Apple at 38% y/y. I would think that bodes well for their continued success selling hardware and music.]
North America is becoming less dominant on the internet: NA will go from 36% of users in 2000 to 20% of the internet in 2007.
Broadband penetration has finally hit the 25-30% "sweet spot"
[Who defined this as the sweet spot?]
[Does this mean that this is a tipping point that enables new services to be built upon it?]
[In case Americans feel smug about this, their broadband penetration should be compared to Korea which is at 60-70%]
Global Mobile 2.5G/3G penetration has hit the 30-35% "sweet spot"
[Again, what does that mean? They didn't really explain that.]
Global Internet Thesis: We have had 10-15% user growth this year; 20-30% usage growth (time/pages/etc.); and an increase of 30%+ in monetization.
Online text/music/video - paths to monetization:
Text:
Newsgroups (usenet) turned into Yahoo Directory which led to $$$
[I don't understand that transition. I don't get how Usenet converted to Yahoo Directory...]
Directories turned into Search (Overture, Google, etc.)
[That transition makes sense - the indexes and directories were HUUUGE.]
Music:
Peer to peer (Napster and Bit Torrent) gave way to For-pay (Apple & others)
[The slide doesn't say this but Meeker basically suggested that video would take a similar path. So that would look like:
YouTube (no monetization) to _______?
[I have noticed that people will both tag and transcribe the contents of videos on YouTube which means that you can quickly find what you are looking for amongst a sea of millions of videos. Transcription + tagging + search + ads = monetization. I agree that this will happen VERY quickly.]
[There was always this assumption that moving all of the world's video to the web would probably not happen because of the incredible amount of work required to transcribe the scripts and tag the media appropriately. I see now that this is not only possible but indeed likely. Humans have a built-in need to organize and categorize and they are proving it on sites all across the web. Just give people the tools to do it and it will happen!]
Slide 15: US Internet Advertising has mostly been driven by text. Rich media advertising has not grown at nearly the same rate. Morgan Stanley predicts that rich media will be the next avenue for US internet advertising spend growth.
[Another interesting note on that slide is that the number of internet users in the US went from 141 to 205M between 2001 and 2006. And the number of households went from 51M to 73M in the same time span. The maybe-not-surprising-but-still-good-to-know part is that the spending per household has also gone up at the same time. Summary: More people are getting online and they're spending more when they get there. So the pie is growing in both dimensions.]
Slide 16: 67% of Global Internet Users use search [that seems low...]. Search is the top customer acquisition tool for online retailers. Search engine marketing was responsible for 36% of customer acquisition, and 29% from organic traffic [what was their definition of that?] Everything else was a distant second, third, fourth place.
What's the take-away? Search rules. Therefore, your company must have a dynamic website (not a static HTML site) and you must blog. NOW. Blogging is the single best way to increase GoogleRank. Period. Search is also the cheapest customer acquisition channel. I have referred to this before but Dr. Paul Kedrosky showed the following customer acquisition costs in his Vancouver Enterprise Forum Oct 2005 Web 2.0 presentation: Direct sales: $22,000/customer; Indirect Sales: $5,000/customer; Direct Mail: $70/customer; E-mail: $60/customer; Online banner ads: $50/customer; Yellow Pages: $20/customer; SEARCH: $8.50/customer. He did not articulate which industry or sector this was from but even if the numbers change, the ratios are the most interesting part and the lesson is the same.
Slide 17: Internet ad spend is increasing.
[I have heard numbers that say it represents 8% of all ad spend and that will increase to 13% by 2010. Source ???]
Slide 18: eBay has outstripped classifieds 9:1 but the newspapers still make all the money - a correction is inevitable: eBay listings have gone from zero to 921M listings in 8 years while classified listings have gone from 141M listings down to 111M listings. The weird part is that the newspapers have maintained a relatively solid revenue base! eBay listings to newspaper listings have gone from 1:35 to 9:1....but the revenue at the newspaper end is still 25x higher than the eBay revenues... Is this a massive correction waiting to happen?
[I don't get this one. I wonder about their sources. Did the newspapers increase their classifieds charges to compensate for the losses? If they dropped by nearly 25% in terms of their listings but their revenue went up 20%, then they would have had to increase their charges by something like 50%?!!?]
[The other thing that surprises me is that there is much talk of how the eBay and Craigslists have "disrupted" and "decimated" the classified industry (Yes, even I have used those phrases), but the newspapers seem to be holding their own in terms of revenues. I wonder if this is a delayed reaction and what we will see is a radical collapse of that revenue base in the next couple of years - a sort of tipping point delayed reaction?]
Slide 19: Rapid peer to peer (video) growth is stressing the internet and is undermonetized: Morgan Stanley included a very cool chart (that for some reason ends in 2004) showing the mix of content types: changing over time and how video has come to dominate the stream.
Slides 20: Video is most of the P2P traffic - no surprises there.
Slides 21/22: Some very dense data points on the momentum of online video - again, just evolutionary steps along the curve. Well okay, there is a minor acquisition for $1.65B!
Slide 23: Online video is getting tagged/searchable/findable.
[The slide talks about the fact that much of the content is now tagged/findable/searchable. This is because of the earlier comment I made about how people are doing the categorizing/tagging/transcribing on a massive scale. Kevin Kelly wrote:
“No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences—and they knew a lot—confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment…. What a shock, then, to witness the near instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing every two seconds….These user created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from? The audience."
[I would add to that a corollary. Aside from blogging, another confounding aspect of the web is who is transcribing, tagging, and categorizing these millions of pieces of music and video? Again, the audience. The media companies need to stop suing their customers and begin taking advantage of this rabid, passionate, and FREE workforce. A great question to ask yourself is: How can my company take advantage of my most passionate users in such a way that they benefit, their fellow customers benefit, and our company benefits?]
Slide 24: The time people spend on the internet is outstripping the number of pages they are viewing - is this again evidence that video is dominating their time?
Slide 25/26: Yahoo is doing this stuff well. (user generated content + social network + video blog + good ad placement / monetization)
Slide 27: Rise of the pro-amateur videocaster. In three years, what % of video will be: amateur, pro, semi-pro? We don't have a clue.
Slide 28: Some reference to more good examples of advertising embedded in viral video clips.
[This slide asks the question: "do users want 30 second pre-rolls?" Let me answer that for Morgan Stanley. Of course not. Users don't want commercials, they don't want billboards, and they don't want stupid commercials in front of the movie they just paid $12 to see. I absolutely loved the quote from Jim Buckmaster, CTO and lead programmer for Craigslist) on Day 3, when commenting on how many people keep telling Craigslist that "they will make more money - maybe tens of millions of dollars" by adding text ads to their site. He headpanned: "so far, we don't have users asking for them - and since we do what users want that means we haven't added them." That was a hilarious and fantastic answer.]
[There has been a common theme over the course of the last few days and it centers around: "how much do you optimize your business for revenue or profit generation and at what point do the users tip over from 'this service loves me' to 'this service is trying to just make money off of me' and start to leave in droves? Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy.com commented on how analysts kept telling him he had to fire a bunch of his support staff. But that generic principle (lower your overhead costs and costs of servicing the customer) in that case were inappropriate when his entire value proposition is: "the cheapest domain names on the internet with great human tech support."]
[I can't find it any more (maybe in Michael Gerber's e-Myth Revisited?) but there is a great tale about this little meat shop in Italy that has a thriving business. The owner wants to expand, so he brings in a manager. The first thing that the manager does is cut off the most expensive suppliers and replace them with cheaper ones. Revenue dips a bit but profits go up. Then he looks at the customer demands and stops bringing in the meat that only a few customers want. Again, revenue dips, but net profits go up. Next, he gets rid of the oldest meat-cutter in the shop who costs too much money and hires a young kid who is half the price. Revenue dips once more as people stop coming back to see their friend the old butcher. But predictably the profit goes up. Finally the new manager decides to cut back the store hours to only the most profitable hours of the day. At this point, things break and the revenue drops off a cliff. One by one, the cuts decreased revenue but increased profit. Until the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back" and the customers almost all stop going to the little meat shop at the same time. "They used to have a friendly butcher, great hours, incredible variety, and good quality - but that's all gone" they lament. The owner of the shop fires the manager but it's too late and he goes bankrupt. This little tale was echoing through my head throughout this conference for some reason.]
Of course, the predictable thing happens.
Slide 30: Apple has sold $16B worth of iPods and music/videos in only three years.
[I tried graphing this but without the interim quarters to fill in a curve, the graph was meaningless. Nothing in 2003 and $16B in 2006. Doing a trendline on that was also useless. It would be interesting to go back and get the interim data from their annual reports and graph it out.]
[Interesting side note, many people don't know this but Steve Jobs has said repeatedly that they make no actual profit and in fact often lose a little bit of money on the $1.8B worth of music and videos. Their business model is based on using that to drive iPod sales (where they make 25-30% margins) and also to take advantage of the "halo effect" of having a Windows PC owner like their iPod so much that they convert to a Mac computer for their next purchase. This is good to remember the next time somebody says, "We want to be the iTunes of _______". Soooooo....you want to lose a bit on every sale....but make it up in volume? Then you better have a backup plan for that business model.]
[Another interesting note is that having been a Mac geek since the days of the Apple II+, I have had a long history with this company and have ridden up and down their success curves many times over the years. Let nobody ever forget that in its darkest hour, when Jobs came back on board, the company was in chaos, it was something like 11 days away from bankruptcy, and Jobs stated firmly and emphatically, "We are going to innovate our way out of this recession". He (and they) stuck to their promise, poured more money into more tightly focused innovative projects and they are now finally savouring the success that they won. I think about that dark time when the world contemplated having Windows as the only OS and Apple as a footnote in computer history, and like to tell that story to people who say things like "We just need to build something as cool as the iPod." Great idea. I hope you have the stick-to-it-iveness to suffer the long cold dark winter of innovation and that your will and commitment (and spare cash) carries you through until the spring when your innovations blossom.) I'm so happy that Apple is riding high these days. They paid for the success they are now enjoying.
Slide 31: "Inventory monetization should still have significant upside"
[Seems to say in plain english: "There should still be lots of ad revenue in them thar hills." They are basing this on the fact that Google makes $12.28/unique visitor, while most sites make a lot less than that. That is a great benchmark number!!]
Slide 32: Only 13% of Top 15 Online Retailers are Internet Pure-plays - what about the media? Meeker commented that the big-box retailers that had brick and mortar operations dominated the "online retailer" category, which seemed surprising. There is the question then...will social media turn regular media upside down and dominate it or will big media be able to hold their ground and dominate the media category in the same way as the brick and mortar retailers had been able.
Slide 33: Google + Yahoo = ~58% of US online ad revenue.
[WOW - I knew it was concentrated, just not THAT concentrated. What that leaves out is what are the big Google/Yahoo customers that are actually the display medium for those ads? In other words, aside from MySpace, what sites are resulting in that massive spend? I have heard that MySpace, Wikipedia, and some other sites like that that have a huge number of pages work well. Even though with a zillion pages, you begin to wonder if anybody ever sees most of them? Another thing I have heard is that apparently building public wikis with lots of pages is another way to generate large ad revenue.]
Slide 34: Google and Yahoo share approximately 30% of their revenue with their partners
[I have been looking at a lot of network related theory and really trying to get a handle on viral spread - what counts, what makes it real, and how fast can something spread? The simplest answer for long-term sustainable network build out seems to be: PAY PEOPLE. Let them make money. eBay now has something like 500,000 people making a living on their site!]
Slide 35-37: Watch where the global younger generation goes. This means ringtones, net access on the mobile phone, social networks, video, web applications, in-game advertising (which is becoming a huge business), community ranking, user generated content, instant messaging, tagging/categorizing, blogs, peer to peer filesharing, social media, and personalization/recommendation engines.
[That's a simple concept and a pretty darned good list of hot areas. It's also "where the puck is" (you Canadians will get that reference), rather than "where the puck will be" since most of their analysis is based on what is at the fast part of the curve NOW. Which means the window may be rapidly closing on all or some of those areas. Of course, my time sense is a bit out of whack and I often think something is over before it is, so I have to be careful of my built-in time drift. Still, the point is the same. Starting a video site NOW probably makes no sense. Starting a social media site might still make sense. Starting a company that lets OTHER people start social networks (because they're all late to the party) like Ning is doing....that might make sense. ]
Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:
[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]
Net Neutrality debate: Vinton Cerf, father of the internet vs. Robert Pepper, ex-FCC and now Cisco
Bob:
this is a falsely premised debate setting up tyranny on the one hand (heavy-handed regulation) vs.chaos (no regulation)
As an FCC policy guy, I have fought heavy regulation for ten years. If you invite the govt in to fix the problem, it will get in there and be much more far-reaching than you intended.
Cerf:
The architecture of the internet (separation of layers) has been responsible for success of the internet
Power is at the edge (you can grab an application and install it without central control.)
But with the current broadband monopoly/duopoly and their inherent desire to be anti competitive, we want to pre-empt them from being anti-competitive.
Bob:
There was some legislation that would have given the FCC teeth to do much of this but that legislation died
Cerf:
We didn't back that legislation because we hadn't seen FCC enforcement work properly in the past.
we wanted common-carriage rights but you didn't want that.
Bob:
This is more complex than you think.
Cerf:
"That's theorem 207. EVERYTHING is more complex than we think." [Funny theorem...but I'm not sure that I have the theorem number correct.]
The internet is a layered structure. We need to factor that into the law.
Bob:
Cerf and I agree in end-to-end principles, punishing anti-competitive behaviours, and universal access.
We just disagree on how to get there. You want regulation. We want case law developed over time.
Cerf:
Case law takes too long to develop. We want to lay it out up front so that we know what is right, what is wrong, and what are the bad behaviours that will get published.
the big lie is that the application service providers (google etc.) were getting a free ride.
Cerf: Bob and I both want to crush the anti-competitive behaviours so that we protect the innovation on the web. We just differ in our thoughts on how best to get there.
[At the end of the day, this debate appears to be more based on: what is the best regulatory mechanism to fulfill one's desired ends? There is something to be said about understanding these things and taking the more complicated route (case law?) vs. the easy route that might have more complicated spill-over effects? There have been many cases where the "simple" legislated answer ended up having all sorts of complex effects that could not have been predicted in advance. Case law does tend to be more iterative.]
Day 1 Notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA
Session 1: Enterprise 2.0
Mayfield had talked about SLATES
- (search, linking, authoring, tagging, extensions, and signals)
finally being possible on Socialtext's new platform that they have
formed with Six Apart, and a bunch of other companies called the Intel Suite.
I get the concept of the suite. That makes sense. And some of the components are good. Newsgator is rich and fully-featured for example. And Six Apart has Movable Type which is a good solid blogging platform. But Socialtext? (see previous wiki review here).
I like Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) but their product is
unuseable by most normal people I have tested it on. They should have
gone with Jotspot or Confluence for this suite but perhaps Joe was already too far down the path with the Google acquisition.
And Intel states that they are not making any money on this venture.
Did they back these companies? Is this a ploy to drive up the
valuations of the partner companies? I don't get it.
Michael McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks,
an online billing system: we are able to do benchmarking of people's
companies without them even knowing it; then we connect them to those
top-tier companies on our system so that they can share information on
best practices.
[I like what Freshbooks is doing -
they're building a very tightly focused little application and they do
things like make it easy for people to use SNAIL MAIL to mail their
invoices out to those people who can't receive them by email. THAT'S
brilliant. Bridging the high tech and the low-tech is something that
companies often forget to do. But it's good for business.]
Look at Etelos; rapid application development environment.
[I went to a session with Danny Hoyle from Etelos later and am not sure
I get their concept. They have built their own high-level language that
allows power users to build their own applications (which assumes they
want to do that), but also allows people to download applications from
Etelos and host them on one of their partner ISPs. I just don't know
what problem they are solving and for whom?]
Kedrosky:
people are lazy and have work to do; they won't change behaviours;
extract data from their existing actions so that you can serve them
better without them even knowing about it.
[Session was kind of thin and not very focussed.]
Session 2: SMB session:
SMB is something like 2-24 million companies; >100 employees; 50% of European workforce (IDC); highly fragmented;
ESD Survey 2005 said that 80% are looking to expand their web site, and connect it to their backoffice applications
50% of small businesses aren't even online!
[I like this space but think that the route to success would be through the Kiyosakis / Abrahams of the world]
[This also explains the Microsoft Live approach of giving businesses
web sites which I hadn't really understood until now. I had figured
that anybody who wanted a site already had one but apparently that's
not the case.]
these small businesses only make changes when they're in extreme pain.
if most small businesses don't know what web stuff is, then what
communication channels could be used to reach them? You need to go look
at small business publications.
[there's a big gap between this conference set of attendees and a
standard small business conference list of attendees. The people in
this room are all bleeding edge early adopters. NONE of the laggards in
SMB are here.]
Adobe has seen a HUGE increase in "create PDF online".
There is one company that has 100,000 POS systems. Etelos connected
them to the web. So that vendor's customers were now "using the web",
but not "having a presence on the web" - two different things.
Etelos guy Danny Kolke: they go get 50 restaurants and then rapidly
develop an application that allows them to do email marketing, contact
management, etc. and so they can rapidly
develop a horizontal app that is equally applicable to all 50 restaurants.
[But that could have been done before for Access or Filemaker or
FoxPro...is THAT the value add of Etelos? That with the push to move
online, they will be able to aggregate potential buyers of a solution
so that they can cost-share development? Still not getting it.]
Instructables:
awesome website concept that ties into passionate users. Have 30,000
users already on the site. [Cool site. Passionate entrepreneur.]
Klostu: These guys have Boardtracker
(a search engine for Forums). The boardscape is HUGE and very active.
300 million members generating 50 Billion posts. But the boards are all
islands and you can't communicate with people on other boards. Klostu
is a way of connecting all boards to each other. Post on as many boards
as you want and people can track your activities across the boardscape.
Search across all forums. Keep track of all conversations across
boards. Klostu allows you to bring your 2.0 services into the boards
(bring your flickr account) to the boardscape. 300M people, 3B
discussions.
Sharpcast: The coolest feature in Project Hummingbird was a multiple file type sync tool that allowed you to write a Word file on your PC,
save it to OD, open it on the web using Zimbra's editing tool, make
more changes, save it again, then open it on the Mac. Perfectly fluid
online/offline/multi-device experience. Nice.
Stikkit:
smart sticky notes that you type into and it interprets what you want
and dumps the data into your regular applications. Not currently
connected to any other applications though. Still early stage. Tried to
be "smart, not clever"
Turn:
AWESOME. these guys have taken massive complexity (what
type/size/shape/content of ad do I place where when and why?) and made
it possible for publishers and advertisers to maximize their revenues.
They have a bidding network for cost-per-action, no risk, and automatic
process improvement (revenue maximization.)
Sphere =
"find blogs and similar content to this article" - connects traditional
media to other bloggers. Embeds a button at the end of normal news
stories that gives choices such as "find blogs writing about this story"
OmniDrive:
storage aggregator. it allows you to have local copies of all of your
data stored in every single location. It looks like a local drive on
your PC and on your Mac but any file that is saved into it is
automatically synced in the background to the other machines and also
up to the website where the files are all available as well.
Adify: (larry@adify.com) build a network of niche sites underneath you and then flow ads through that network.
sportsyndicator: this guy went from zero to a huge network in a month - he works for himself.
adify is a way to consolidate fragmented tiny niches
matchbin = aggregating small newspapers
ready to rare = aggregating comic advertisers
washingtonpost.com is aggregating 1500 bloggers and then running ads through that network using the Adify back-end.
"Let 1000 networks bloom"
[**there is something very important here but I'm not sure what to
connect it to. It's something to do with Pena's insistence on "bringing
order to chaos" and "consolidation of fragmented industries and
domains."]
oDesk:
a tool to find developers and manage those relationships. (online HR
talent database + mgmt tool + payment engine). [I heard a couple of
people nearby who were using the system and who were happy with it.]
Venyo:
a universal reputation tool that works across all systems (Vindex - the
global trust index by Venyo). They partnered with every web 2.0 (sort
of the thin edge of the wedge of the Sxip or People Aggregator
approach.)
[but reputation points are contextual -
there are two degrees. The reputation of the ranker and the reputation
they assign to the target. It doesn't seem to address that at all.]
Timebridge:
Outlook tool-bar; easy to put proposed meetings into Outlook; proposed
times are saved as tentative spots on the TimeBridge server; If I
delete one of the proposed times from Outlook, it's deleted as an
option on the TB server; For other non-outlook users, they get the web
client list of optional times and he can specify availability to the
server. When I go back to my calendar, all of the proposed times are
now gone, leaving only the remaining confirmed appt.
[This is an AWESOME little application, well-designed and well-executed!]
Session 5: Keynote
HARNESSING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: (look up the "Top sites on the
internet -2005" Craigslist at #7 with 18 employees. Great slide on how
they disrupted the $15B classifieds industry...with 18 employees. Oh,
now they have **21** employees. ;-)
A PLATFORM BEATS AN APPLICATION EVERY SINGLE TIME. Quote from Debra
_____, VP of Operations, Windows Live, "Being on someone's platform"
will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.
Google has hundreds of thousands of servers. Skype has 12 servers for 5 million users.
QUESTION: At what point does Google tip over and get more enemies?
ANSWER: we stay focused on making sure that we keep the users' best
interests at heart. Most big enterprises stop caring about interests
and begin to work for themselves first and their customers second.
[This supports my general dislike of companies that employ disrepectful
practices with their customers like putting in switching barriers and creating lock-in.]
PORTABILITY OF DATA: Audience QUESTION: We want "portabiity" of
people's data. Like the ability for people to carry their search data
with them to Yahoo. ANSWER: "We want this to happen because we see that
as a safety valve on bad business practices on our part."
[I LOVE this idea. It fits with
my concept that by building in a mechanism that lets your customers
walk away from you, you create self-correcting structure - that will
keep you honest and customer-respecting. Since structure drives
behaviour, if you use standard enterprise "lock-in" you can then screw
your customers, knowing that they have nowhere else to go anyway.]
It's a mistake to "bet against the internet". It rolls over industries that hide/protect/lock down information.
SAAS IS GOOD FOR USERS AND DEVELOPERS: If your software is in a data
center, it MUST work 24x7. That drives more reliability by all coders
building those apps. In the old days, they would ship software, users
would install it, and it would break down in data centers all over the
place but not at the same time. When it's all in a data center, it
means that when it breaks, you have 10,000 angry customers yelling at
you to fix it NOW. This drives an entirely different level of rigor in
your software design and coding. It also means that the users are now
focused on doing their work - not on fixing theirsoftware. So moving to
SaaS is good for your developers and good for your users.
TIPPING POINT OF SAAS: It's "fundamentally better to keep your money in
a bank than in your pocket. It's (now) fundamentally better to run apps
centrally than on the desktop. This is the beginning of a very
important period."
[This is a GREAT quote - I will remember the moment I heard that.]
20% RULE: 70/10/20: It continues to scale well. We're going to keep
going with this model. 70% is their core work; 10% is (?) and 20% is
projects of their own choosing. This model works very well for us.
INNOVATION: Innovation classification: We have a ton of people making
suggestions, so we have a system in place to manage that explosion of
innovation.
[I think that every single
company should have an innovation pipeline process internally that
allows all employees to submit innovation ideas (remembering that
innovation can take place in any aspect of the business from product
design to development to production to support/service, to operations,
to finance, and to business models, marketing, pricing, and selling.]
PARTNERING: We realized we didn't know how to work with partners. Now
we have decided to begin working with them to make money for both of
us. Working towards a more mature model there finally.
OFFLINE ADVERTISING:
We're moving into newsaper and traditional advertising so that we can
make those markets more efficient and to to enable people to do
cross-media spend planning. We're bridging the two worlds and making it
possible to work across offline and online in one cohesive way.
PEOPLE: Question: How do you keep the smartest people? Answer: People
don't work for money. We have group-based consensus decision making. We
did our strategy for next year by asking 29 questions to teams
distributed across the entire
company and letting them figure out answers to those questions....
"what are the limits of technoogy?" "how do we deal with running out of
power?", etc. Ask your very smart people the questions!!!
[Awesome. Every company could
emulate this. Even if 90% of the material that comes back from your
people isn't used, surely there would be some incredibly valuable input
on the market, the economic landscape, disruptive forces to watch out
for and potential offerings.]
SCALE: QUESTION: Will another YouTube develop? ANSWER: Of course. All
network effect companies have to create a product with a huge set of
trade-offs and priorities and some will end up at one end of the power
law distribution, others will end up at the other end. That's just
basic economics.
Session 6: High Order Bits: Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
$300M/yr next year; $500M ancillary economic market surrounding it.
HOLY COW!!!
The four pillars of gaming: strategy, achievement, narrative, community.
Each person has a different balance of what they're interested in.
Here is the paper that John Seely Brown and Douglas wrote about multi-player games.
[This "movement" is stunning. This game takes 100 hours just to do some
basic stuff. Then hundreds of hours to get to an "endgame" (like a
quest) where people can work together to achieve a goal (like finding
and slaying a dragon together.)
[This is tying together some very deep-rooted human drives - sharing,
learning, teaching, self-development, coaching/mentoring, creating,
building community, creative instinct, building economies, establishing
reputations, building identity, and many more.]
The distinction between real and immersive is over
Here is a clip of South park playing World of Warcraft
that is pretty funny (if you don't like South Park and don't know
anything about World of Warcraft, the humour will be lost on you.)
it should be easy for people to get their data in and out of your service.
Vox is a place to aggregate people's identit, pulling from google, youtube, amazon.com, yahoo, etc.
GData, + OpenSearch + Media RSS = Open Media Profile (a new service that allows people to access all media at any service.)
[Vox is an example of what Boris Mann and I were calling the
"me-sphere" - the place that aggregates all of my stuff from all of the
other sites into one larger identity.]
It can pull your existing blog items from your existing services.
[I
checked out the site afterwards - not sure I "get it". You can only
have private, familiy, and public. No ad-hoc groups. Most people would
live in ad-hoc groups. It has obviously been designed to aim at the
family crowd but it will be interesting to see if they get any take-up
there. And the no ad-hoc groups settings simply makes their pool of
potential users smaller without adding anything of value to the ones
that sign up.]
Session 8/ Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., NY Times, and Barry Diller, News Corp:
Question: Is Google friend or foe? Diller: You can work together on the
one hand and then go into a room and beat the hell out of each other
and that's okay. That's the way of the world.
Question: what if Google dominates your industry and
you become just inventory supply for Google? Diller: the media industry
has been 6-7 companies switching positions over time. Who cares who is
leading?
Question: Where is the growth? Diller: advertising
properties for sure, but there are other properties that are growing
faster.
Question: Where are you going to get content? Diller:
The time has come (finally) to begin CREATING content sometime in the
next couple of years. I'm not talking 2 minute shorts, and not feature
films but something in the middle. You can create something in the
middle.
Question: what do you want to say about politicians?
Diller: Net neutrality is a joke. Who's on the other side?? It would be
insane to let the net fragmentation people win. It's a magic box - the
first time in history that we can push a button and publish something
across the world. Why would we screw that up?
Audience question: NYTimes isn't capitalizing on
citizen journalism the way that BBC or others are doing? Why not?
Answer: We're continuing to go that direction but have had to balance
against the fact that we have our name on that post once it's posted.
Audience question: I'm building a social media
network. How do I keep building value? Diller: Don't sell it to private
equity for god's sake. Equity is built by holding on. You may have to
sell a bit of it. If you want to build equity, hold onto it if you want
to create equity value. If I was buying you, I would have a different
story but you're asking me for advice here in this session and that's
my real advice.
What were the highlights of the day? Here are some of the most interesting things that come to mind in no particular order:
I met Rich Levandov, General Partner at Masthead Venture Partners and got to hear all about Chumby,
the coolest little device I have heard of in a long while. It is a
small touch screen device that has wi-fi built in and that can display
flash widgets, exchange and display photos from your friends, and which
could have a ton of uses. BRILLIANT! I wish the team all the best. This
has so many applications, their biggest challenge will be staying focused!
Watching Eric Schmidt speak was a real treat. He was sharp, incisive,
didn't go for the fake bait that was offered up by John Battelle, and
answered the questions in a very forthright manner. I particularly
liked his comments on the recent Department of Justice
subpoena issue. Battelle questioned him on how Google would comply (or
not) with the Patriot Act and unfortunately Schmidt said, "We would
comply with the law" which means that even though the law is too
far-reaching and draconian, they would have to follow it. (That
atrocious piece of legal police state infrastructure says that
companies that are required to provide information under the act are
not allowed to tell the public that they are being forced to give up
their data.)
Barry Diller was entertaining and seemed like he "gets it".
Sulzberger looked like he was trying to convey the message, "Hey, we're
really part of the cool kids - can we hang out?" and came across really
lame.
My other overwhelming impression of the day was that the spectrum of
understanding of web 2.0 is still very broad. I would describe it as a
standard power law diagram. A few people who know a LOT, some people in
the middle who know some, and the rest of the universe that knows very
little and the tail goes a LOOOOONNNGG way out. Consider that 50% of U.S. businesses are not even on the web yet. We'll be having "Blogging 101" conversations for YEARS.
That's about it. Interesting day, but I suspect that tomorrow will be the meat of the event.
President Bush has signed into law the complete destruction of Writ of Habeus Corpus - the U.S. govt can now put legally put anybody in jail and hold them there indefinitely. 200 years of Constitutional protection gone.
This is without a doubt the best business movie of the
year for its content. And it is probably one of my favourite movies of
the year for its film quality as well. This movie is BRILLIANT.
It is the true story of a men's brogue shoe factory in
Northamptonshire, England that in order to survive, stopped making men's brogues, the market for which had been swamped by cheap Eastern European
knock-offs, and found their "niche market" - kinky boots for drag
queens and transvestites.
It is: a story of commtment; advice on how to be open and flexible to
changes in your business environment; a treatise on finding
opportunities in the strangest of places; a tale about how to be true
to oneself; a lesson on respecting others even if they are different than you; and finally a lesson on leadership.
The other thing that I love about this movie is that it has a strong story, a lot of heart, it used fantastic venues (a one hundred year old factory), and it employed a bunch of the shoe factory employees in the movie. The writing was great, the scenes that were awkward and tense were intentionally written that way and it was not played up for laughs. There are a lot of moments in the film that you really want to end because they're uncomfortable. But that's the magic. Those uncomfortable moments are there in life!
Go rent this movie. And if you are a business school leader, show this to your class. Here are some great lessons that I found. Which ones will you find?
A company is a collection of individuals who have committed their
time and energy to the enterprise. Respect them and respect their
commitment. Show them your loyalty - they deserve it.
If disaster strikes and you have to lay people off, don't make excuses. Do it quickly and cleanly. It will suck and that's life.
Before you lay them off though, ask them for their ideas. They
are close to the work. They will surprise you and may even save the
company.
Look at your business environment for big changes. When they
come, change your business, change your product, change your service.
Adapt or die.
Look for new opportunities every where you go. Do this by finding
somebody who is in pain from an unfulfilled need. Don't try to create a
market - find one that is underserved or not at all served.
If you and your life partner don't want the same things, you'll never
really reconcile it. You're better to move on and live out your lives
apart.
Also, if your life partner can't support your 100% commitment to
your business, your partnership will fail. It's hard enough to run a
business. It's impossible to do it when your partner isn't there to
support you, or worse, is acting against your effort.
Work with your customer to build rapid prototypes and get rapid
feedback. If they tell you it's wrong, then go back and do it again.
Forget your old business so that you can learn your new business.
The old assumptions and beliefs and goals are probably not true. (In
this case, the factory went from selling "life-long comfort" to selling
"Two and a half feet of tubular delicious SEX!")
You can push your people hard but only if they know that it's for them and not for you.
Sometimes the tide of attitude can shift away from you or towards
you on the suggestion of just one person in your team who holds a lot
of sway. Earn that person's respect and you have earned the respect of
the group.
Aim high. Choose big hairy scary goals that are way beyond your
comfort zone. (I disagree with the "S.M.A.R.T." goals approach in life.)
You can run from your childhood but you can't hide. You don't
need to "deal with it" all first, unless it's getting in the way of
your life. In which case, go figure it out and then get on with things.
Life, relationships, business, sex, gender, psychology - they're
all messy and uncomfortable. And that's the way they're supposed to be.
Find something you want to do. Pursue it with all your heart. And share that adventure with people you care about.
My view on the interesting things happening at the intersection of business, technology, society, and the environment.
30 Days of Sustainability 2007 is coming!
