broadstuff

It would appear that the time people spend online is not just being transferred from consuming other media - it looks like we are also passing on our social and sexual intercourse time....according to a survey of US adults by JWT. From Yahoo News (from Reuters):

More than a quarter of respondents -- or 28 percent -- admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online.

It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.

Cell phones won out over television in a question asking which device people couldn't go without but the Internet trumped all, regarded as the most necessary.

"It is taking away from offline activities, among them having sex, socializing face-to-face, watching TV and reading newspapers and magazines. It cuts into that share," said Mack.

"I don't suppose their partners are too pleased about it."

I'd better just IM my partner to find out.....

Anyway, the report goes on to define those of us who (shock horror) use internet technology even on the move as "Digitivity Denizens", and we see our mobiles as an "extension of ourselves....."

hmmmm....let the double entendres begin

We were a late draftee onto the Chinwag Web TV Takeover session last night, the other speakers were:

CHAIR: Colin Donald - Futurescape

Cosmo Lush - Head Of Product Development, 4OD

Paul Pod - Co-Founder, Tapeitofftheinternet (TIOTI)

Alexander Cameron - Managing Director, Digital TX Limited

Raghav Gupta - VP, International Partnerships, Brightcove (blog)

(Links to their websites via the Chinwag link above)

One of the things I discussed was the massive experimentation going on in the space, and how it was still in its early "Darwinian Evolution" phase. I didn't really have time to develop this theme, so here - in glorious Powerpoint-O-Colour - is the Broadstuff Do it Yourself Start a Web TV Company Business Plan Selecta business guide:

Just pick one from each column, and hey presto you have a Web TV Bizniss model !





There are some caveats though:

(1) If you select "User Copied Content" you get sued the minute you make money

(2) Everybody claims a Social Network play - Next.....

(3) If you run over Broadband, the Provider may want to charge you.

(4) If you use the "Set To Box" play increase your customer lock in by 100%, and add a truck roll and set top box subsidy per user to the business case

(5) If you use the "PC TV" play, be aware that few TV manufacturers build TV's with a VGA input. A good example of industry collaboration

(6) If you play over mobile deduct 6 years of your life to deal with the total lack of end to end standards

On the point of Business Models - one of my colleagues last night felt that these were irrelevant, what counted was making money.

I cannot recommend this approach highly enough

As noted in the paidContent post on the event, there was quite a debate around point (3) above last night - in fact there is quite a debate going on around Point (3) around the whole industry.

From yesterday the whole global 'Nethead startup scene focusses on the parade of the TechCrunch 40 - forty startups chosen by a panel of luminaries as "the best" startups on the globe (or of those that applied anyway)....and the drumroll call is for.....:

Paul Boutin, who outed them first using the nefarious practice of walking past the event and seeing them written on a banner before they were published on-line. Who said old Media was dead

Here they are courtesy of Don Dodge (go to Don's page if a link to the company is desired)

Search and Discovery

Powerset - semantic NLP search
Cognitive Code - AI for Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Cast.tv - video search
Faroo - distributed P2P search
Viewdle - video indexing/search

Mobile and Communications

Cubic Telecom - Wi-Fi for cell phones - sort of like Skype
Yap - voice UI for SMS, texting, and web apps
Trutap - cell phone UI to connect social networking sites
Ceedo - virtualization for mobility
Loudtalks - like an Internet walkie-talkie

Community and Collaboration

Story Blender - online video collaboration
TripIt - organize your travel
Flock - social web browser
MusicShake - User created music
8020Everywhere - community created travel magazine

Crowd Sourcing

Cake Financial - personal investing social network
DocStoc - File sharing for business, legal, and technical documents
TeachThePeople - social network for sharing educational documents
CrowdSpirit - crowdsourcing for electronic products
Ponoko - Community to buy, sell, and share product designs

Productivity and Web Applications

Xobni - an organizer for email, inbox spelled backwards
Orgoo - all your email, IM, video, and SMS organized in one place
App2You - User built application framework with process and workflow built in
Mint Software - web based personal finance tools
Kerpoof - fun web apps for children. Like Club Penguin.

Revenue Models and Analytics

Spottt - a free banner ad exchange
Clickable - manage ad campaigns across all networks
GotStatus - stats and analytics service for any system or service
PubMatic - For web publishers to manage their ad inventory
ZocDoc- dentist and doctor appointment management

Rich Media and Mash Ups

Xtr3D - Extreme reality, human interface to computers
BroadClip - Scans Internet radio for music you want on your phone, iPod, Zune
mEgo - a site to share all your personal photos, notes, social network stuff
Wixi - All your media stored in one place
BeFunky - Funky avatars and ways to express yourself

Entertainment

FlowPlay - social entertainment platform for social games
Areae - Links to deep content organized by topic
WooMe - Online speed dating
Zivity - A site for glamour shots of beautiful women
DemoPit WildCard - one company from the 100 in the demo area will be invited to present to the full conference.

Don Dodge is also reviewing them 10 at a time (start here), and TechCrunch over here. As always there is lots of breathless commentary in the blogosphere (after all, where would we be without hype in the Hype Cycle) but Umair Haque is underwhelmed, pointing to this article suggesting that Web 2.0 is a spent force (or at least the cash has largely been spent).

Not had a lot of time to go through them here at Broadstuff (though some of them seem extremely new - not so much start-ups as dream-ups) but the New Search, Communications and Personal Finance ones look interesting.

Postscript - Mint won...first post past my reader was from Jemima Kiss. Great for Mint and PF startups (another one recently won at SeedCamp) but we must admit to being a bit confused - we thought the event was about new startups, turns out that Mint is already funded (and by some of the TC40 voters apparently).

Couldn't resist this post, purportedly an English translation of the Chinese instructions for a Cisco Ethernet switch. Fourth dot down on the left hand column, last 3 lines on the right...






Clearly a Web Service of the Belle de Jour kind?

We are talking at the Mobile Web 2.0 conference today (Mobile TV seminar) and on Wednesday (panels on Standards and on Next Things).

The Mobile Web TV session is part of a more detailed workshop session on trends in the Mobile Web 2.0 world.

Our talk was on Mobile Web 2.0, how it may pan out, and who will make (any) money. In essence our views are that:

Mobile TV today is a small market and cannot afford the current friction in its supply chain
- High cost of doing business along chain from storage standards to on-phone rendering
- Limited takeup outside of S E Asian models (clear supply chain based or regulated standards)

Operator behaviour in EU, N America not helpful for growth
- Changing, but slowly and in fits and starts (AT&T/iPhone is a game change)
- Lack of recognition of risk of other avenues (Threats from outside parties)

However, the market potential is large
- Very tempting for new players with fresh approaches - Google, Apple etc
(Apple already took mobile music away from the operators)
- Colliding business models - Telco asset+subscription vs media advertising based
- “Getting advertising right” - until a customer centric model is found, Ad movement onto Mobile Web will underperform

Also presenting (and a quick synopsis) were:

Ken Blakeslee (Webmobility Ventures) - talking about Web Centric services, and the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 based on moving power to the user.

Alan Moore (SMLXL) - focus on the way we will use communities online - a good run through of a lot of the memes in the space, but with a good undertone of heavy thinking - anyone who quotes Carlota Perez is clearly doing their homework.

Sam Sethi (Blognation) - about Web 3.0 and Web 4.0. In Sam's view Web 3.0 is an Intelligent web, but which will possibly use its extra knowledge of you and your context not to serve you better but to flog more advertising to you.

(There was quite a strong audience reaction to this thesis, I can see that the putative punters are not going to take privacy pilfering lying down)

Tony Fish (AMF Ventures and co author of Mobile Web 2.0) summed up, also talked about his concept of the 4 screens of life (Cinema, TV, PC, Mobile) and how what we call "content" is increasing - the metadata, the context etc all become part of the content. He also took us through some of the thinking in the book

Interesting day...if anyone is at the conference on Wednesday look us up.

Richard Beddard over at the iii Blog has covered the ins and outs of the dbacle (runs on a bank in Britain for the first time in a generation).

But there is an underlying story also going on - thousands of people have been unable to get onto the website to move their money, ostensibly because of the huge amount of traffic that hit it.

Two lessons here:

(i) For Web Services to be taken seriously for important applications they need to be able to - provably - scale quickly and reliably. This needs assets like an Amazon cloud arrangement.

(ii) Not suggesting this is the case here, but it is clear that in difficult times, WebService owners could be tempted - and able - to deny their users/customers access. Web Service players need to be able to reassure customers this will not occur.

Postscript - Tom Ilube of Garlik writes about what it would feel like to be in such a situation over here

That was the most favoured rumour at the 21st C Global Summit this week...however, I have had sure fire tips before that turned out to be wrong (see here).

Anyway, Apple is announcing something big on Tuesday - we shall see. Mike Butcher has a post on it here

Now where was that post about how to get my Orange SIM into one...ah...here it is

Postscript - It is indeed O2.

"We picked the best one, the most popular carrier, it's O2. We've since lowered the price of the US phone of the 8GB phone, and in the UK the price of the iPhone is £269 including VAT."

2G though...wonder when a 3G one will come out (allegedly 3G chips sap battery life too much right now). In the launch it was implied that for now WiFi is the way to go. Could be a permanent short term fix.....

There are 2 types of people in the world.....those that pay twice the amount for a few seconds of a song on a mobile - aka a ringtone - and those that don't

The behaviour of ringtone buyers is totally inexplicable to those others - the New York Times is the latest to throw up its hands in exasperation (the US is only really getting into this now? - its been a European phenomenon for years).

We did some analysis of the research on this phenomenon awhile back, and really there are 2 possible answers to "why".

The first is that its a "context based" experience - a ringtone is not seen as music, but as a way to personalise your mobile, and make it part of "you" - and that carries a higher "acceptable price" tag. This is the "official" answer that most of the research orbits around, one way or another. There is a part of this body of work that worries me, in that what gets glossed over is that most ringtone buyers are kids and PAYG phone owners, and that lends some credence to....

The second - and less socially acceptable answer - that there is a more vulnerable (and clearly fairly large) segment of any population who are part of the "one born every minute" demographic and who are (yet again) being fleeced. This is the unofficial and empirical answer, based on hundreds of years of the successful existence of hucksters, fraudsters, con-men, astrologers and other varieties of snake oil salesmen.

Clearly there is a huge market opportunity for personalised snake oil.......

At the very least it persuaded me that the "Rational Economic Decision Maker" so beloved of NeoClassical economics was a bankrupt concept.

But, for those who scoff at the abject stupidity of ringtone buyers, beware - next time you quaff your Starbucks coffee think carefully about the impact of context on commodity pricing....

Postscript - wasn't clear on our end conclusion after the analysis done - in essence there has always been a market for "highly priced context based experiences" - they tend to be faddish in nature, (as Ringtones in fact are - the market is now in decline in Europe), mainly afflict the youth, and afterwards everyone seems to be a little bemused as to what they ever saw in it.

The CCIA has come up with the report that shows the Fair Use laws (ie taking small pieces of Other People's IP and incorporating it in your own work) accounts for 1/6th of the US economy.

Nick Carr rightly takes the calcs to task, but (unusually for him) imho misses the wood for the trees in that even if the number is too high, it has to be a heck of a lot lower for the overall point not to stand, and that (to quote the report):

“Much of the unprecedented economic growth of the past ten years can actually be credited to the doctrine of fair use, as the Internet itself depends on the ability to use content in a limited and nonlicensed manner. To stay on the edge of innovation and productivity, we must keep fair use as one of the cornerstones for creativity, innovation and, as today’s study indicates, an engine for growth for our country”

This dark secret is that basically nicking bits of other people's IP is how the US got a lot of its technology, techniques (and trademarks) from Europe in the 19th (and even 20th) century, what China (and many other growing economies) are up to today, and pretty much how all new industries have grown - including Web x.0. (This is a nice little piece on the matter, including problems with overstrong copyright, patent and IP law - for e.g, the steps the US had to take to prevent over-zealous patent law from killing the World War 1 US aircraft industry.)

Amazon is trying to turn the art of internet startups into a science.

At an open event at Stanford yesterday, a couple hundred or so entrepreneurs, VCs, and developers talked about how Amazon Web Services — cheap and elastic storage, computing, message queuing, and payments — could change, or is already changing, their businesses.

“We’re now at a point that business plans really don’t matter,” said VC Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “It’s an iterative process of quickly getting your ideas into the hands of others.”

Komisar, who is writing a book on the topic, admitted that cheap and testable company building makes his job a lot harder, and in some cases irrelevant. “Before — there was a black art,” he said. “We don’t need gurus, we have a market.”

There is a very interesting implication, ie that the setup and transaction costs of new business startups have dropped so low that innovation is now basically a pure Darwinian activity - given a new evolutionary niche (from a technology shock to the ecosystem, say) then entrepreneurialism - like nature - abhors a gap and a darwinian evolution starts up.

What does this have to say about entrepreneurs - in essence the implication is they are no longer unique individuals, but random agents in an evolutionary landscape. Not so much heroic visionaries as blind watchmakers

Can this really be?

In actuality this seems to apply mainly to consumer "presentation layer" services - the digital equivalent of shopkeeping really, so Amazon is merely providing malls for people to populate shops in rather than making everyone build their own shop. Lower cost of entry but fewer opportunities for differentiation.

However a lot of the B2B startups, and infrastructure layer startups (ones where the Amazon grid is not appropriate) are in a different place, a large amount of the differentiation is in the actual architecture.

But for those commoditised "presentation layer" companies, can the individual entrepreneur actually influence anything or is it more a random walk?

The answer is - theoretically - that there is less you have to do to execute well, so the more random aspect (luck, if you like) increases in importance. However, we would also hypothesize that this implies that those fewer parts of execution that are at tipping point moments are more critical to get right.