Showing posts with label Web 2.0. Show all posts

Showing posts with label Web 2.0. Show all posts

Book Review: Web 2.0 : A Strategy Guide

I guess it would be unfair ton critique a book on Web2.0 written in early 2007. However, it is an interesting exercise on looking at some predictions, some assumptions and some ideas just to figure out where they were right and where they failed.

In all fairness to this book by Amy Shuen, it tries hard to be useful. It has a lot of examples, attempts to analyze Web 2.0 business strategies and even tries to help the reader put together a business plan.

Unfortunately the final product looks more like a huge term paper or thesis from my last Master Program at MIT. It features numerous case studies and tries to fit Web 2.0 into analytical and business models from popular business and academic thinkers.

One of the authors quoted is also one of my favorite teachers from MIT, Eric von Hipple. von Hipple spoke of democratizating innovation and Lead users long before the term Web 2.0 was invented. Innovation with products,he said is not limited to the entity that creates the product but all other stakeholders who interact with the product: its users, resellers, etc.

Other models included in the book are Porter's forces, Gladwell's theory of Mavens, connectors and salepersons, Rogers' adoption curve and Chris Anderson's Long Tail.

The book uses more than its share of buzzwords: Prosumers, Mashups, Freemium, to name a few. It speaks of Salesforce.com that makes CRM easily available for those who cannot by traditional CRM software suites like Oracle. Today, Saleforce.com is more a warning than an example.

Web 2.0 speaks in detail about the business models of companies like Flickr, Linkend and Facebook. In. My problem here is much like as those who critique Web 2.0? Where is the bottom line?

Web 2.0's success stories are few a far between. Google is the biggest of these. Netflix is another, as it can be considered the Blockbuster killer. Amazon's zshops is another great success story.

All in all, one may read this book and evaluate its theories in the light of happenings in the present. While some models have their merits, unfortunately many serve as warnings.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), John Battell

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), John Battell
John Batell is a take-no-prisoners interviewer. Seen here is the interview with Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook, the world's youngest billionaire. He asks a few tough questions on the 15 Billion Microsoft handed to Facebook. Mark is a tough kid to scare. He speaks of Facebook's two revenue channels, brand direct and online advertising. He says that revenue is in the 100s of millions.

Batelle continues to question him on the Microsoft deal. Mark Zuckerberg mentions that the Microsoft deal is a smaller part of the revenue. He does mention that they are working of late on search and that Microsoft is a good partner for Facebook.

Is Balmer happy with the price, Batelle asks and Mark evades the question.He goes on to say that Facebook will not go public for a few years and feels no pressure to justify the 15 B.

Facebook has more than 700 employees says Mark. They continue to hire great technical people and expanding the sales force, he adds.

Facebook Connect has been announced for a while and now the closed Beta is going to be opened says Mark.

Bartelle then asks Zukerberg about facebook being a walled garden that is not jumping on the Open Source bandwagon. There is a transition from closed to open system and Facebook was one of the first to provide a development API, counters Mark.

Microsoft's claim to fame was its opening up its software to several hardwares says Mark. Facebook is now faced with the challenge of getting people to share their information online.

There is no way for Facebook to serve all the ways people share information concedes Mark. Over time people will have websites and use the Facebook platform to make it more decentralized, says Mark.

Facebook and connect are evolutions, says Mark. As poeple add applications, a new ecosystem has evolved. Now the model is more feed based, he claims. One example is the election conversations in the system..

John Battelle , Jerry Yang (Yahoo! Inc.)

John Battelle , Jerry Yang (Yahoo! Inc.)
This interview of Jerry Yang by John Battelle is important for many reasons. The two that come to mind are that this event served as a precursor to the end of Yang's tenure as CEO of Yahoo and the fact the 'Jerry Yanging' actually became and expression.

It is surprising that Yang refers to the year as being 'extraordinary' for Yahoo. I would have used different words but then, that's just me. Battelle is a 'take-no-prisoners' interviewer who asks Yang all the questions.

He asks Yang if it was an ego issue for Yang in rejecting Microsoft's offer of $33 per share for Yahoo. Yang goes on to say that they did go back to Microsoft with the latter's offer but this time Microsoft walked away. Yang realizes that he may be blamed for this supposed blunder, possibly forever.

Yang says that despite this debacle, he respects Balmer and that none of it is personal.

Batelle next questions Yang on the Google deal which also went south. Monetizing assets at yahoo via Google were estimated at a 100s of millions. Yang said that as they were meeting with the Dept of Justice to convince them that this deal was good for the market. It would benefit users and advertisers said Yang. Google walked away from the deal.

He goes on to say that Yahoo search engine was still good. He point out that the government did not, in this case, look into Yahoo's History.

Batelle asks Yang about Yang's comeback as CEO after making money and whether he was the right guy? Yang stepped back in 2007. He was a joint CEO with David Filo.

Yang says that he does not take his position lightly. There has been a lot of change and he is proud of what Yahoo has become, a great platform company. He has no regrets, he says.

The vision for Yahoo: Yang says that Yahoo is a consumer brand that allows people to get what they want in the Internet in the way only Yahoo can. He says that people are returning to Yahoo, despite all the criticism. Yahoo is the consumer starting point.

Yahoo OS now allows 3rd parties build apps. It also allows social network applications. He speaks of the ad revenue model wherein an advertiser can monitor their sales on many websites through the Yahoo platform.

Is Yahoo going to buy again? Yes says Yang. It is an important part of growing talent and working with the start up community. He makes no comment on buying AOL.

When asked about the search competition with Google and the fact that Google is spending a lot more on research than Yahoo, Yang says its a question of how well capitalized they are in the search market. He goes on to say that Yahoo is well capitalized. He believes that Search is innovation based rather than capital based. Yahoo is not in maps like google and Microsoft is, which is capital based.

Yahoo is also in the cloud computing arena. It takes a certain amount of capital to compete in both search and display. They may be the only company to build data centers in this economy.

For Entrepreneurs:
Yahoo came out of a similar economic environment. He says that he would not have done things differently. Think Long term in this environment where share holders want things short term.

Yahoo is still changing the game, says Yang.

James Boyle at Zeitgeist 2008

James Boyle at Zeitgeist 2008
In this talk on intellectual property, Duke University professor, Boyle talks about two themes. He says that we are bad at looking at distributed creativity but very good about the dangers of openness. We have biasses not just about IP but about our business plans, our methods of social organization, our culture and our politics.

He also says than in the last couple of decades, people have become the subjects of copyright law as never before. We never had to be in the position of risking with copyright law. The combination of these two themes has powerful implications.

Behavioral economists discovered that people do not act rationally. They said, however, that there are patterns to our thinking. We are risk averse. Most people buy warranties on consumer items. We are aware that the odds of using it are low, but we want to eliminate uncertainty.

He challenges the audience that if we have the choice of two networks, given they do not know what we do now. One totally open and another totally secure. He argues that all of us would have been tempted not to pick the first network.

The other example is of Wikipedia. No one could have predicted this as a viable business as well. We systematically pick closed propitiatory systems. the IP on networks is not intuitive. We have a bias in our thinking.

People of the past were not subjects of copyright law. It could not be easily viloated by individuals. Today we cannot live without copying or distributing information. We 'press' copy law triggers.

The fact is many people do make illicit copies. We have not focussed on the flip side. We have handed the tools of creation of 1.3 billion authors, filmakers and creators. These are subjects of copyright law. They may not have the same motivations as big movie makers or organizations but they too wish to create.

Boyle is the chairman of the Creative Commons. Many who create copyrighted works wish to share them. What can we do with such content- copy, modify or share it?

Creative commons offers simple choices and makes it human readable. We can use google or yahoo to find content based on what is allowed. They come together as we:
1. Are very good at figuring out the dangers.
2. Run the risk of loosing out the benefits.

We may regress to the old world where we are limited from accesseing creativity. Indeed we have democratized creativity.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons)

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Lawrence Lessig (Creative Commons)

The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection act of 2005 has no consumer protection.
The effect of this act is that Credit Card obligations cannot be escaped.
President Clinton was for it.
Hillary first called it the 'Awful Bill', opposed it. When she became a senator, she voted for it twice.(She got paid $140K by the credit card companies.)
Lessig believes her and we should too, he says.
Going back to 1785, when America was believed to be a failure. Independence had become a dependence. America sought non-dependent individuals.
They failed. In the 19th century, Congress was a cesspool of corruption.
Daniel Webster openly asked for 'the usual retainers'.
Bribery was not even a crime till 1853.
People went to congress to make money.
In the 20th century, Mr. Stevens was found guilty of accepting bribes.
The real problem is not people going to Washington to make money.
The real problem is using money to secure tenure at Washington.
This is a constant attention to money for reeelection.
They get a 100% return rate to come back to congress.
The 2nd job of raising money becomes the 1st job.
The return for a lobbyist is investing in Washington folks greater than investing in technology.
The cost is that money destroys trust. 88% of voters believe that money buys trust.
9% believe that Congress is doing a good job.
Even those who did not support Obama are hopeful.
We must allow ourselves to revel in this ideal but the Presidency is not at the core of this cancer.
We need a more fundamental change.
We need a change in congress.
Go to www.change-congress.com

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Saul Griffith (Makani Power/Squid Labs) , High Order Bit

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Saul Griffith (Makani Power/Squid Labs) , High Order Bit

We talks these days about energy independence, the need to get off foreign oil and are familiar with the term Carbon footprint.
We needto know our role in this and make energy choices that are in tune with these grandiose visions.
Wattzon.com is a site which has internet tools like wikis using social networking to help people make the right energy choice.
Griffith was curious about how much energy he used in daily life.
We aggregate all our activities to get this number.
One of the biggest uses in Griffith's life was a return trip to Sydney. His cars, cooking and taking showers the A/C he uses at work.
Some of it is energy the government uses on our behalf like creating roads,etc.
Others are laptops, bicycles,etc.
America uses a tenth of the total energy, Canada a little more. The US average is 11.4 Kilo watts The global average is 2200 watts.
The world uses 18 terra watts of power. When it comes to CO2 production, US is #1, Russia is #2 and China is #3.
We can only burn 3 terra watts of fossil fuels in 25 years time.
We need 11.5 terra watts of new energy. This is a scary concept.
We have 85000 terra watts Solar power, huge amount of wind and some in geothermal.
We must measure in watts and not in carbon.
To conserve the power we use we could use tools for this.
The wattson website is in public alpha.
We can choose the number of flights we take and the flight company we use.
We can choose our foods and personalize our diets. Being vegan reduces the power we use.
Other choices are commuting.
.The US government uses more energy than all individuals in the world combined.
We could ask:What is my life power in terms of light bulbs, wind turbines, pints of oil, etc.
So we could use this website to lessen the energy we use.

Short Web 2.0 Clips

Web 2.0 Definition Revisited

While others have defined Web 2.0 as the 'Wisdom of Crowds','The long tail', social networks, peer collaboration, You Tube and Flickr,etc, here is yet another short clip where it is defined by the newer technologies it incorporates: Ajax, flash, mashups, SOA and web services. Andy Gutmans also describes it as bringing apps from the dektop to the browser.

Mashup Camp Silicon Valley 2008 - WSO2

WSO2 has created the first Mashup server with open source. Jonanthan Marsh, WSO2's director of technologies talks to InformationWeek's Fritz Nelson on this server.This server can incorporate web services, mash up several types of data and display them on a web page or as data to programs or as email. It is freely downloadable, installable and usable by both individuals and by teams of an enterprise. It can easily host web services. WSO2 can provide paid support. The advantage is speed of development.

It is usable without Java programming. One can use javascript to create applications.
You can copy, redistribute and even resell the server. The SOA architecture platform allows access to apache and rolls up web service, messaging, configuration and integration of webservices.
The webservice bus enables transform, route and audit messages as web services. The mashup server augments this offering by allowing easy scripting to bring these services online and allow user interaction with these services like emailing, download and display of services, etc. and display on a browser.

Here is the project home page.

Gary Vee is the Web 2.0 Antony Robbins

The more I watch Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of the Wine Library TV, and one of the leading evangelists of Web 2.0, the more impressed I get. This guy is barely in his 30s and is living the American dream. He has been criticized by many for being obnoxiously loud, crass and unconventional.

If I were to give this guy advice(like he needs it) I would tell him not to change a thing, except his line of work. Thats right, Gary wine a'int for you. You should be a motivational speaker. Yes, I mean it.

I've seen all his talks and he has all the goods.

1. He is caring about people. Gary is known to personally talk to all those who come to him with questions. Despite all his swearing, his messsage is very simple. Care for others and reach out.

2. He preaches tolerance in his own way. I loved this presentation where he is honest about his own shortcomings and says that he is respectful of all, including his critics.

3. He is unbelievably insightful. In this presentation I loved the way he breaks down Howard Stern's prepostous views of My Space and Facebook, never at any point discrediting Stern's success, but clearly explaining where the shock jock was wrong.

4. His public speaking skills are outstanding. Despite all that is said about his style, his public speaking abilities are outstanding. He is a natural at introducing pauses between sentences, adding voice variation and stressing on the important points to add additional impact.

5. He is passionate and his sincerity comes through in every one of his presentations, both on Wine library and on his blog. This is a perfect example of someone epitomizing the Antony Robbins 'Live with Passion Mantra'.

6. He embodies the American dream and thus has built credibility. In the movie 'War of the Roses', Danny DeVito made the memorable quote: 'When someone who earns $500 an hour gives you advice, you better listen'. This is great advice to all his critics. Gary took his parent's wine business with his gift in savoring wine, turned it into a multi million dollar business.

7. His How-to Messages in achieving an objective are crystal clear. Never before have I seen any speaker deliver a detailed message in explaining how to present an idea as well as Gary can.

Check out this presentation where he explains how to build a show on baseball cards.

8. He has convictions and a strong opinion on the world. Whether one agrees with him or not, one has to admit that it is only those with strong convictions that ultimately succeed. Watch this outdoor presentation where Gary delivers a speech on the current state of the economy and how one may capitalize from it, by what he calls the 'Hussle'. (Warning: He swears a lot in this presentation.)

9. The man is a genius on branding. There is no question about this one as is obvious in all his presentations.

Move over Tony Robbins, here comes Gary Vee.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Kevin Kelly (Wired)

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Kevin Kelly (Wired)

It was 6257 days from the time Tim Bernes Lee made to the first web page.
There was not enough days then to do all we have achieved today.
It was supposed to be like TV but ended up unlike TV in every way.
The first version was about connected computers and linking data.
There was sharing and concern about sharing.
We shared documents and concern for copyrighting docs.
We got over that.
We had document and page sharing. Then we had links.
We now have the next phase of linking data.
The information within the page(database) to other data. This is more finer grained linking.
The semantic web will be aware of data. Like 'knowing' that a word in a document is a 'City' etc.
We will unstructure the data units to basic units and then restructure them.
We will unstructure the elements from language, and put it in a format machines can understand and then restructuring.
We now can share data with less apprehension.
Objects we manufacture will have a sliver of intelligence in it and becomes part of the web.
Probes in our bodies, manufacture items,etc will then become a 'database of things', shared and restructured.
This is what we can expect in the next 6500 days of the web.
It is not going to be the web, only better. It will be different from the web as we know it today.
We have many screens now looking at the same one machine, with transistors, CPUs.
The web is an OS and we will move it onto the OS.
The web will own all that is produced. Everything else will not count. The web will be a black hole.
Data will be processed and structured.
Like the network of network of networks, we have the media of media, all observing the same laws. One screen shows us TV, data, video, audio.
There is a global sense to this machine, like the global Financial market.
We are continuing toward the database and sharing.
All work is moving into the cloud.
The information is moving into a database, the 'heart' of the engine.
How far can we go with sharing, hive mind, social media,etc. We are pushing these boundaries.
Life in this cloud is always 'On' and extreme dependence. We will feel amputated when we are Off. It will make us smarter. The consequences of being off will be more apparent.
The web will be an extension of ourselves. Where do we start and end?
The social web gives us a new meaning and a new understanding of the value of the collective.
The legal conflicts will not stop either.
We have to get better at believing the impossible as the impossible has happened now.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley)

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley)

The recession has been a long time coming. The root of the problem was that 10-15 years ago there was a mandate to increase home ownerships.
In 2005 savings went negative.
It was easy to get credit and homes were going up in value.
Foreign ownership of US treasuries is up twofold at 60%.
The national debt is 3 times the GDP.
Consumer spending was down 3% sequentially. October was worse than Sept and Sept was worse than August. GDP growth had a downward bias.
The stock market is a leading indicator of things to come. The Chinese market is down 71%, The Russian market is down 61% and Asian market is down about 50%.
The ones hurt most are financials, consumer discretionary and telecom services.
Tech spending and ad spending are tied to GDP growth.
If GDP stays the same, we still cannot predict with available data how the internet will do.
Online ad spending was down 27 % from 2000 to 2002. We do not see that decline now.
We had flat tech spending in 2002.
We see a faster deceleration in the 3rd and 4th quarters.
When things were bad in 2002, eyeballs grew, innovation grew and revenue followed.
On the digital consumer growth there is rapid growth in social networks and VoIP but this means much lower CPMs.
Youtube, Facebook, Skype, Paypal have all grown.
Youtube has become the #2 search engine.
If Skype were a carrier, it would be the biggest.
Ad supply is greater than demand leading to lower CPMs
Mobile innovation has been huge and this means wealth will be created and destroyed.
64% of Austrian broadband subscribers use cellular modems.
People want wireless access everywhere.
When Google launched G1, Motorola announced that it was creating an Android. Apple announced that you do not need an NDA for its SDK.
With innovation in Google and Apple, the US will be a mobile marketplace leader in 10 years.
3G will be at 22% subscribers. This will make mobile internet more interesting.
Emerging markets see a lot of growth.
Top 10 emerging markets(China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Russia) will surpass top 10 developed markets in 2008.
Companies with cogent business models will survive and thrive.
People will look for more value on the internet. Some companies will survive.
Amazon recommendation engine has done very well and will gain more.
Search will be even more important.
CPMs are under a little more pressure because of targetability
We have 1.3 Billion users on the internet and thus there are lots of opportunities to monetize.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: John Battelle,Tim O'Reilly

Web 2.0 Summit 08: John Battelle (Federated Media Publishing), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)
Tim O'Reilly and Batelle use Obama's theme of 'Yes we can' in using technology to solve complex problems. Many people dismiss Web 2.0 as advertising driven startups.

If you paid attention, it was about the network as a platform. This platform gave new potential to look at problems in new ways, harness data and the potential of users.

Cloud computing, mobile apps are becoming part of the ecosystem, new opportunities, reinventing Government and the power grid.
If there is no silver-lining in the down turn, we will remove the clutter.
When Google can on the scene, most people had dismissed search.
We are at those inflection points again.

The rest of the presentation is about the speakers in the summit.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar), High Order Bit

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Jesse Robbins (O'Reilly Radar), High Order Bit

Jesse Robbins is a firefighter and EMT and a CEO of a tech startup.
Web 2.0 tools are transforming humanitarian aid.
We can now make a difference and improve our product.
Problems are hard. When we are faced with them we are faced with inexperience and being excited or knowledgeable and scared.
The geek community says that it can save everyone with technology.
The emergency management community responds that it will never work and that the geeks will kill everyone.
Sometimes, it is the exact reverse.
This makes innovation a challenge.
There is a way: Adhoc innovation.
When a disaster happens, a champion must push her cause in the community.

Jesse explain how he acted as this champion during Katrina. The I90 bridge which was destroyed was still shown to exist in Googlemaps as it is not real time. Red cross did not get this.
Mikel Maron a Google Maps expert worked with Yahoo and Google to update the maps and have better maps for everyone.

The anti pattern is that when a disaster occurs and an adhoc adaptation is needed, if there is no champion then there is no iterative improvement.
The search for missing people is not a repeatable process. Many false positives during such searches are misleading.
The Internet SAR is championing this cause and hopes to learn from these mistakes
There are many disasters and many non-profits are desperately seeking solutions.
These are the same issues as the enterprise and need Web 2.0 technologies.
Find such non-profits where you can use your skills.
Try to assess their needs.
Serve those who serve others.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Bob Sutor (IBM), High Order Bit

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Bob Sutor (IBM), High Order Bit

The world is smaller and flatter, but is it smarter?
The news reveals that we are now at an 'inflection point'. Are we going to decline or are we going to keep growing?
We need big changes now, particularly around the IT industry around the world.
It will take partnerships.
The system itself has to be smart and intelligent.
We have powerful technologies, instrumentation and 'nerves' in our system and processing power.
The good news is that with RFIDs we are moving towards 30 Billion tags in 3 years. In 2011 we will have 1 billion connected devices. In 2010 we will have 1 Billion transistors for each human.
The IBM Roadrunner broke the Peta Flop barrier (1 thousand trillion calculations per second.
The question is what do we do with all this?
The amount of connectivity and processing power far exceeds the good things we are doing with them.
Are we putting them to good use?
There is risk in home mortgages, insurance, investments etc. We try to spread the risk around but we should be understanding, tracking and managing the risk.
Are we using power optimally? We are loosing some power while sending it to every device
Traffic: In the US traffic congestion costs 78 Billion annually including both gasoline and productivity.
Supply Chains: 40 Billion is lost on inefficient supply chains.
We have a convergence between the concrete infrastructure and the IT infrastructure.
This means from full potential to being intelligent.
Some progress was made in Stockholm in making transportation better.
Similar projects are in the works in England and Singapore.
In Germany, RFID is used to keep track of meat in supermarkets and prevent the spread of mad cow disease.
We have complicated systems to be more efficient.
Rivers like the Hudson are monitored with sensors to check pollution.
Solar power has to be attacked from 3 directions:

Try to maginfy solar power without melting equipment
Solar cells: 100 times thinner and can be almost painted on laptops

The world needs big bets: Public/private partnerships
Good time politically for these changes
New types of collaborative, cooperative leaders
We must deal with privacy and security at the same time.
Use open source and standards.

IBM is operating in startup stealth mode. It will continue to make the planet smarter, says Sutor.

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices), High O

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices), High O
Rebecca lived in Hong Kong and visited the Bay area only recently. She says that the view of the world from Sillicon Valley is different. One perspective is that we have democracies and a bunch on autocracies and dictatorships.

The view from other parts of the world is not so clear cut. The question is if we are moving somewhere to the middle.
China in particular is moving from the Mao model to the Murdock model. Does this equal democratization?
The Chinese government is advocating large media conglomerates.
With Ethan Zuckerman, Rebbecca help co found the website Global Voices a non profit website that help curate blogs from everywhere except North America and Western Europe.
The World wide web was supposed to bring more awareness but in reality American Bloggers were talking about other countries less than the mainstream media.
This was their way of finding out what other bloggers around the world were saying.
Besides the lack of attention, the other problem that these bloggers had were censorship. Blogspot was banned in Pakistan .
It was not enough just to encourage bloggers but to advocate their free speech.
China has the great firewall.
Many bloggers are thrown in jail. Some arrests are happening with the help of companies.
In one instance Yahoo helped arrest a blogger by providing the blogger account to the Chinese authorities. This has provoked an outcry from International human rights groups.
Google too helped China by not providing gmail in localized Chinese servers. However, they also have a censured version of their search engine.
However, Google said that it was less censoring than the local Chinese search engine.
A Chinese blog hosting service, partly funded by Google about Tianmen mothers displays a message asking to wait for approval when controversial words are used and never get approval.
The censorship in China happens mostly from companies that are afraid that they will loose their business license.
Companies are caught in the middle between governments and users.
This also happens in the US.
The Global network initiative.org where big players like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have signed on is based on standards that companies must set on freedom of expression and privacy.
It seeks to strike a balance for companies to keep markets but allow self expression.
Companies must seek creative solutions for such problems.
They must assess human rights before rolling out new products and advocate decision making before launches.
It also seeks for governance accountability and transparency to benchmark companies to live upto principals.
This will help investors and users make decisions on companies.
This brings up questions like:

Are we over-relying on Web 2.0 giants?
Do we need alternatives to gmail, Skype,etc?
Can companies be benevolent dictators?
Do we need more open-source, peer to peer alternatives?

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Kevin Rose (Digg), High Order Bit

Web 2.0 Summit 08: Kevin Rose (Digg), High Order Bit

Digg was launched with Facebook, Delicious and Wikipedia and had one thing in common with all of them: It was launched before Web 2.0.
They had the first mover advantage for 6-8 months, with little competition and a lot of press coverage.
However, they had a lot of early adopters. It is hard to launch these companies when there is a lot of activities.When you invite friends, over and over again, they are not going to be interested.
As there is a downturn now, a lot of companies will disappear. Investing will decline.
This is a great time to start sometime new.
Digg was launched with next to nothing.
Kevin had his day job four months into Digg with a few thousand developers and a few developers.
He hired one from Nova Scotia at a 1/3 of the US cost of a developer.
He did not have a PR organization. He acted as PR in the early days.Most projects are hidden in the about me page.
He recommends Gary V's videos on PR.
Using Podcasts is a cheap marketing strategy. Make yourself known.
Many blogs are focussed on themselves. Talk about the whole industry and that has a chance of getting on Digg.
Pounce is 5-6 servers, inexpensively rented. Some of them are S3 and can deal with terrabytes.
Email communication is dead now.
Using Twitter is more efficient.
This is the Web 2.5 time when funding for consumer internet companies is going away and this can be an opportunity for many of us.

A conversation on Customer Service

Customer Service is the new marketing

This is a very insightful conversation on customer service.

Customers have a greater voice than ever before , thanks to the Internet.
This is frightening and a great opportunity for companies.
Customers could either act as evangelists or destroy your reputation online.
The companies that dedicate more resources to customer service are better off. (Apple, Nordstorm)
The old rule was customer avoidance: Closing customer tickets, shorter the call the better, etc.
The biggest challenge is for companies to be open and transparent.
Today transactions are a give and take, a back and forth.
Apologise for your mistakes and reach out to fix the problem.

Chris Anderson on YouTube

Chris Anderson Explains the Long Tail

We are fortunate to live in these times and to be able to look at our culture from our databases., says Anderson. He goes on to explain his long tail theory with the 80/20. There are infrequent events that have high impact. These are low frequency, high amplitude events like earthquakes.

Another example is of most of the population being concentrated in cities. This 80/20 rule is true in human economies, human affairs and nature itself.

If plotted on the linear curve it would show a large concentration on the left. If we plot if log-log we would get a sloping line.

In the box office, the #1 film made a lot of money. then there are many over time that did not fare successfully. The vast majority do not make it to megaplexes as there are not enough screens for them. This means that our belief about Hollywood taste is shaped by the distribution channel. These bottlenecks distort the market and our perception.

In our era, we have Internet distribution channels that do not have much of the bottlenecks like storage area or shelf space. We now have access to the latent market, which we could not reach with traditional distribution.

Rhapsody carries niches from this domain in music. These are tracks that Walmart does not carry. Rhapsody carries far more inventory than Walmart. The same difference is seen between Netflix and Blockbuster and between Amazon on Borders.

The low sellers were not significant in earlier markets and are beginning to count toward sales online. We are moving toward a trend where half the market is sold via the old model and the other half through the new distribution models.

Talks on Creativity

Continuing on the theme of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's creativity and Zen, here are a couple more online talks on creativity.

Tim Brown:The powerful link between creativity and play

In this talk on TED, Tim Brown, the CEO of Ideo the design consulting firm shares his ideas on creativity. One of the descriptions of the Zen state is to become a child again. This is what Brown challenges us to do. This humorous and insightful speech, shows us how we can tap into our talents:
1. By making our workspace more nurturing of our creative talents. Among some of the examples, Brown shares are the Swiss office of Google that has a slide.

2. Children are creative, as they are not afraid to restrict their talents. As we grow up, we forget this innate doorway to creativity. We tend to edit and restrict our 'flow'.

3. Playing and seriousness go hand in hand.

4. There is a time to play and a time to stop playing as there is with kids.

Watch the rest of this presentation for some fun exercises that Brown gives his audience.

Lewis Pinault, LEGO Senior Director and General Manager, LEGO Serious Play for Business and Mark Hansen, Senior Director, LEGO Digital Play Studio

This speech by Pinault and Hansen combines ideas on creativity with the wisdom of crowds. Lego blocks have a vibrant history and have been used as playtools for kids, and as modelling and simulation tools by engineers. Engineers have constructed lifesize models of Dinosaurs, retinal scanners,etc. It is the user community that has used Lego blocks to build things unanticipated by the company.

Lego managed to tap into this user base and help them cobuild some of their kits. They then followed up by bringing users and have them build user kits by themselves. Further Lego then decided to give users the tools to create, license and publish their creations.

Now Lego supports new businesses and partners to create emergences and simply let it happen. Audiences spread across the globe can now collaborate digitally on models and share ideas on 3D models.

The executives feel that the younger generations could use lego to simulate new models and solve future problems. I loved this talk.

James Surowiecki on TED

James Surowiecki: The moment when social media became the news
Surowiecki, the author of the Wisdom of crowds uses blog entries and amateur video coverage from the South Asian Tsunami of 2005 to illustrate his point. Blogs, he says could be classified as 'Before' and 'After' the Tsunami. Never before have we had this sort of 'current' and up to date information on an event as we did in the aftermath of the Tsunami.

He then poses the following questions:
What do blogs tell us about the motivation for people to do things?
What do they tell us about accessing a collective, previously untapped collective intelligence?
What are the disadvantages to blogs?

Most people blog and put together images, audio,links for free. There is no financial payoffs.
People have found a way to work with each other for free.
We need to expand out idea of what it means to be rational.
We need to change our idea on Payoffs.
The notion of voluntary coordination is powerful
Under the right circumstances, groups can be intelligent.
They can be sometimes smarter than the smartest person in the group.
Google uses this information to sort out the sites with the necessary information.
The Blogosphere offers collected distributed information.
The 'dark' side is that when we follow others we can fall in love with the decentralized model to the point of loosing our own independent ideas.
Groups are smart only as long as its members are individual thinkers.
Networks make it hard to maintain your individuality.

Zeitgeist08 -3

Jennifer Corriero, Executive Director, TakingITGlobal
This is another person, mature, well beyond her age. Can young people help solve the pressing global issues today?

50% of the world's population is less than 25 years of age.
The web can be used to connect people across divides: Socio economic, age, geographic, etc.
TakingItGlobal has 200,000 users.
Young people can express their vision of the future.
They can contribute to the blogs, etc
TakingItGlobal is launched in 12 languages and 8 UN partnerships.
How do you harness the potential of youth today?
Tapscott in Wikinomics refers to TakingITGlobal as one of the best examples for Ngeneration people to tap into technology.
74% of members feel that they are making a difference in the world.
55% of members feel more informed because of TakingItGlobal.
50% felt that TakingItGlobal enabled them to make a change.

Her anecdotes on contributions from some of the members are extremely awe inspiring.

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