Does this mean I'm now a cover model?

Backbone Magazine has just published a great overview of the cleantech sector in Canada that contains quotes from a number of notable people in the space including Kirk Washington (Yaletown Venture Partners), Victoria Smith (BC Hydro), Rick Whittaker (Sustainable Development Technology Canada), Raul Pacheco-Vega (UBC), Helen Goodland (Lighthouse Sustainable Building Centre) and me. Thanks to the Globe team and Lisa Manfield the author for a great article. You can either jump to the article, to the table of contents of this issue, or to a list of all of the issues.

I’m quite excited about the work that Boyd Cohen and his wife Elizabeth Obendiente and the team are doing and happy to see that they’re getting the coverage they deserve. They have a great article written about them on Care2.com’s site. You can read the article here. In it you can learn all about how they are helping Latin Americans build cleaner community-centered kilns that help clean up the air, prevent health issues, and also return funds to the village from the sale of the carbon credits. It’s slow but necessary work.

(click to go to the page with the animation, then hit PLAY)

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/04/07/walmarts-40-year-growth-curve-fantastic-animation-looks-like-viral-infection-writ-large/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/28/adam-werbach-to-youth-you-were-born-to-save-the-planet-you-get-to-clean-up-the-mess-get-on-it/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/28/adam-werbach-to-youth-you-were-born-to-save-the-planet-you-get-to-clean-up-the-mess-get-on-it/#comments Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:49:28 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/?p=1011 Aside from the continuing use of the annoying “save the planet” meme (the planet will be fine – it’s really “save the humans from an ugly step-down crash”) this is a great talk that Adam Werbach just gave recently tothe Teens Turning Green conference. Adam is the Global CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi, author of “Strategy for Sustainability”, and the former President of the Sierra Club.

I’ve excerpted the beginning below. Click here for the full speech transcript over on Care2.com.

You were born to save the planet.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and it has all been leading up to you.  4.4 million years ago an ancestor we now call ARDI roamed the land of Ethiopia, and her life was leading up to you.  The last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, thawed, leaving the redwood forests to our North, and all of this was leading up to you.  The Earth needs you right now.

Your generation was born to save the planet.

Have you ever wondered when things started going wrong?  Our ecological systems are in decline, one-third of fish species stand at the verge of collapse, the glaciers of the Himalayas, which provide drinking water to over a billion people, are rapidly melting, the chemicals we’re putting in us, on us and around us are forming complex endocrine disrupting compounds that are in every one of our bodies.  Every mother who is breastfeeding in America today is probably passing a man-made chemical to their child.   There’s something fundamentally wrong when mothers need to worry about chemicals that they’re passing to their children.

We’re born with better sense than that. You learn basic rules in kindergarten. Don’t break your friend’s toys.  Share. Wait in line. Don’t hurt anybody. Robert Fulghum wrote a little book called All I Needed to Know I learned in Kindergarten.   But then we grow up.  We forget all of that.  The plague of Middle School is visited upon us.  We get focused on soccer practice.  And bands.  And ballet.  And sex. And STAR tests.  And SATs. And college.

I actually want to write a sequel to Fulghum’s book.  We could call it:  All I Need to Forget I learned in Middle School.

Whenever it started, the bad news seems to keep on coming.

Ten months ago the last wild jaguar in the United States was killed.  The last one. They called it Macho B.  Biologists had been seeing Macho B for years. The Arizona Department of Game and Fish killed it accidentally in a bungled attempt to save it, because the Federal Government had refused to give the jaguar Endangered Species Protection.

This is happening in your lifetimes.  This isn’t something you need to wait for a Kens Burns Documentary to hear about, the crash in biodiversity in our last wild places is happening now.

Click here to read the rest.

Kevin Kelly tells the epic story of technology from the birth of the universe until now.

Then Bill Gates asks for his one big wish for humanity’s technological development: an energy miracle to help the poorest 2 billion people on the planet thrive.

I just heard today that you’re gone. Sorry to hear that mate. I enjoyed working out with you at Crossfit Vancouver. We called you “Nutts” for short because you were a big dumb-ass, always clowning around, but you always worked your ass off too.  We were sad to see you go but knew you had to go find something important to do with your life.

I like the official photo. You cleaned up nice. I noticed that you managed to sneak in that sly grin of yours even on an official pic.

Good luck where ever you are Andy. I know your crew in the military and your family and your crossfit family will miss you.

The CBC article is below:

CBC News – British Columbia – Military procession to honour B.C. soldier killed in Afghanistan.

What’s surprising and saddening to me is that, at least according to the Guardian article, this has gotten much much worse since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

While much of Europe (and Canada) allows same sex marriage and the United States struggles with the issue, there are countries like Iraq where gay men dare not express themselves for fear of abuse, torture, and death.

As William Gibson is attributed to saying, “The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.” Here is to the future getting here a lot sooner for many other countries.

Part 1
Part 2

I have been thinking about this a lot as I’m currently living in Canada, but working with two clients in the U.S. For the most part, because so many teams are distributed, including their client’s teams, there is no “there” to go to, even if I did want to fly somewhere. The only way to have a “there” is if we all meet in the middle somewhere. So I might as well live in the country side surrounded by fresh air, mountains, stream, squirrels, and birds or go live in Costa Rica for a month as be in an office park in Silicon Valley. I have to say…I’m all for this.

This April 24, 2009, I’m fortunate to be working with Dealmaker Media who will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. In one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big media customers who are buying cloud services to let you see for yourself what the cloud REALLY MEANS…

What is Cloud Computing?

We have a very simple but broad definition of cloud computing:

Applications, services, platforms, or infrastructure that are highly abstracted or virtualized, web service enabled, able to be automatically provisioned, and generally charged on a pay-as-you-go model.

As the market evolves, we predict that there will be a number of clouds from a variety of vendors with a range of performance characteristics. They will vary by location, security, pricing models, supported “stacks”, degree of regulatory compliance, location, service level agreements, and many other dimensions.

Benefits of cloud computing

The key benefits of cloud computing are that it allows organizations to:

• shift up-front capital expenditures to ongoing operational costs which can allow businesses to provision more quickly or scale faster than if they had to deploy capital;
• provision infrastructure more quickly than by their traditional infrastructure purchasing and provisioning model;
• dynamically match computing capacity to demand more accurately, which means less wasted resources in low-traffic times, and less downtime during high-traffic times;
• test ideas with a lower threshold by deploying test environments in the cloud and then shutting them down when not in use;
• scale up to computing capacities that would have been impossible to achieve in any other way cost-effectively;
• decrease the time-to-value of new IT projects because of the faster provisioning and lower costs.

In short, it allows organizations to do more, faster, with less resources. In some cases, it allows organizations to do things they could never have dreamed of doing before. 

Current Issues with Cloud Computing

It is still early days for this next generation of computing. There are many issues to work through including: security; performance; vendor lock-in; cloud interoperability;  stack selectivity (only certain clouds will support certain technology stacks); cross-cloud portability, administration, and management; regulatory compliance (current clouds do not comply with many regulatory frameworks such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, data protection regulation or others), and even common metering and billing models.

We believe that this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to identify and fill those gaps by picking components of the stack and bringing them forward into this new era and we’re hand-picking the best ones to tell their story on April 24!

Early Bird Tickets are going fast. Register to be the first to meet and do deals with these innovators.

Does anybody still doubt that internet video is here to stay? I don’t.

The crowd seemed to really love the Clintons. I’m waiting to see how they react to George W.

The CNN talking heads are referring to the fact that the White House was built partially by slaves which is very interesting. I’m noting that they’re not showing scenes of the audience watching. I wonder if theyw ere booing or if they were more respectful than that.

Watching Obama arrive. I wonder how nervous he gets at these things now? He always seems so cool. It’s great to see people excited. It’s crazy to see the amount of hope that is on his shoulders

CNN says that there are over 2M people attending the inauguration. That’s pretty amazing.

The Christian invocation is a bit bizarre in front of millions of people who span a number of religions.

I wonder if the singular tie between God and America will ever be broken. I’m watching the Facebook comments and laughed at the one that said, “why does the preacher keep talking about the fact that Obama is black – God already knows that.” Interestingly most of the comments on this session are sort of negative. Lots of negativism about Rick Warren. I have never heard of him so not sure what that’s all about.

The contrast between the military music for all the white leaders that walked through the arch and Aretha singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” is enormous. It is like they had to blend the two cultures in one ceremony. Good for Aretha. She probably never thought she would see this day in her life.

It just past noon ET. Bush is officially out. Obama is officially in. John Williams, Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero and Anthony McGill are still playing “Air and Simple Gifts”.

I’m happy to be visiting the US right now. I was here the night he won. I’m here for the inauguration.

I am unbelievably impressed by his ability to speak publicly and powerfully and truthfully. And he seems to be doing it without looking at notes. How long did it take to memorize this?

He seems to be echoing a bit of the Apple “Here’s To the Crazy Ones” commercial.

On the subject of security vs. ideals, I like that he has specifically called out Bush by saying we do not believe in the false conflict between security and ideals. But he also seems to always take at least one hard-ass line about enemies and terrorists.

Great to hear him discuss Muslim and Christian and many other religions and even the “non-believers.”. To the Muslims, “Know that you will be judged on what you build, not what you destroy.” That’s a great line. I’m glad to see him openly inviting them back to the table en masse.

One of the attendees to the CNN/Facebook just wrote “my company just blocked cnn.com..’bandwidth exceeded’…what kind of crap? this is a global IT company.” Ha. I bet that is going to happen all over today. I’d love to see the post-day reviews of how everybody’s infrastructure stayed alive (or didn’t). And it would be awesome to see the number of global video minutes delivered. It has to be a new record today.

Another great line from the fellow following the poet. “He has come to a high position in a low moment.”

Overall, great inauguration speech. Back to work!

Image via Wikipedia

Wow. I went to see MILK tonight at the Castro Theatre on Castro Street in San Francisco tonight. What an incredibly well done and powerful movie. It tells the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States.

It was incredible to be at ground zero for this story, in the same Castro Theatre that you see in the movie, to walk out the door to walk up the street where these events took place and where 30,000-40,000 people marched in silent vigil the night that Harvey Milk and George Moscone were murdered.

Given that it is Thanksgiving, I choose to use today to give thanks to those who have come before me in the gay community who have fought and struggled and been beaten and disrespected and who continued to hold their heads high, claim their place in the world, and say, “we will not be quiet and we will not go along to get along.”

Here we are thirty years later and the instead of Anita Bryant trying to take away civil rights, we now have the Church of the Latter Day Saints spending money and influencing voting to take away marriage rights from gays. Milk fought Prop 6. We just lost Prop 8. The names will change, and the battles will continue because as Martin Luther King said: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

So for Thanksgiving today, I’m going to say thanks to those people who have fought and who continue to fight. I’m going to thank all the people who came before me who have made it easy for those who came later to be truly themselves in the world.  I came out in the 1990′s. It was very easy for me because of the struggles of those people in the past. I know that my life would have been very different had I been born a few years earlier and I owe you all a debt of gratitude I can never repay. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

If you have any interest in learning from a sales master as he combines his sales knowledge, his business mentoring, and his interests in both technology and off-shoring, I recommend you subscribe. It should be interesting and fun to watch as it progresses.

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]


The Global Plant Floor, by Don Tapscott, author of the new book Wikinomics

• Just now publishing “wikinomics” – a new book about how mass collaboration changes everything
• Available for pre-order now:
• First chapter is available here
  

• 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.
• The California school board wants to open source and wikify all of their textbooks
• 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.

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley: The State of the Internet Part 3

• Overview of State of the internet can be summarized in this sentence: “The World’s Information is Getting Organized and Monetized”
• Powerpoint can be found here
• Highlights:
• 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. ]
• Additional useful links:
• State of the Internet Presentation from Web 2.0, November 2006
• US Internet Advertising Outlook, 2006-2010E , October 2006
• Global Technology / Internet Trends, April 2006
• Emerging Technology Trends, October 2005

• 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 side with Matthew Ingram who wrote "Is it just me, or is Intel desperate?"]
    • 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.]
• Session 4: Launchpad
  • In The Chair – Allows people to learn how to play music by “playing along with the band” and making it more like a videogame. http://www.inthechair.com/web2beta
  • 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.
  • Conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google:
    
    • 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 24×7. 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.]
      • [Good links on this include: Eric Von Hippel's Democratization of Innovation (pdf download at his site , Amazon link )
    • 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.)
• Session 7 / High Order Bit: Ben Trott, Six Apart
  
  • Talking about Vox
  • “open data is as important as open source”
  • 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.