Startup Diaries

The Open Business Concept

Fred Wilson wrote this week about the need for an open social network, one where the users have complete control on their information.
Sean Ammirati wrote about the possible creation of an open ad network. An ad network where publishers get the all cake of the advertising budget (instead of the Google and rest of the ad networks way where they take a big cut of the advertising money).

It all brings me back to an old vision I had when I started my company NuConomy.
Back in the early days of 2006 when I just started to roll the idea in my head I thought about what was back then an absurd idea - do rev share with the end users. I thought about businesses like YouTube where millions of people are producing and uploading every day (basically doing all the work) and in the end Google (back then it was still YouTube) takes all the money.
It sounded very unfair in my head. I had a vision of a web where the people who produce the content gets not just the glory but also the money. I decided to develop a system that can measure the end user contribution to the business in order to decide how big his cut of the cake should be (I got to admit that today running incentives programs is just a feature in our system. The platform itself changed its focus to next gen analytics).

In my head I even envisioned totally new structure of business. Something I called "The Open Business" (taken from the concept of open source).
Imagine a business that his owned by its employees and ran completely by its employees. Everyone share of the business is decided by their direct contribution to the business.

Lets take for example the idea for an open social network.
You take an open source platform and start a new social network with a business model around advertising. Each user who joins the network gets a status of a virtual employee of the network and a shareholder of the company. How many shares does he gets? Depends on his exact contribution to the business.
Users that has more friends, upload and write more high rated content, invite more friends and drive more page views or clicks on ads gets bigger cut of the revenues every month.
It's that simple. In the open business the users are the shareholders. They are the employees. They not just own their information, they own the business itself.

I also gave a lot of thoughts about how this concept of open business can help drive the open source community.
Think of an ad based open source project, where all the developers that contributed to it gets a cut of its revenues. How you decide how much each developer will get? By their exact contribution the project. You can measure stuff like number of created/solved bugs, number of developed features, rating of features, spent hours, etc.
I know that most people who participate in open source are doing this for the community and not for profit, but can the open business be an open enough model that the community can actually embrace?

Technorati Tags: open business, open source, rev share, business, ad network

Google Gears is Old Story

I don't get all the buzz around Google Gears.
yes, offline web application are really cool, but in order to do it Google makes you download and install an executable. Hello? Anyone heard the name ActiveX?
If you have to install something, making an application to work offline is simply not such an exciting thing (and they still don't do it right. I keep getting JavaScript errors in web sites since I installed the Gears app).

Technorati Tags: Google Gears, Google, RIA

Design of a home page - The Yahoo way

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise has an interesting post about how the redesign of the home page of Yahoo UK, has changed what Yahoo properties users are tending to surf to.

This is a must read for anyone who is in the process of designing a home page. It gives you some insights about what parts of the page users are actually look into, and how to diver traffic to sections in your site.

On Microformats and the future of the web

The web development community has been talking continuously on a new initiative from Microsoft called "Live Clipboard".

For all of us who aren't a web developer I will try to be as non technical as possible.

The idea behind Live Clipboard is simply to take the concept of the PC desktop clipboard and copy it to the web.

Why the hell do we need this?

Think of your desktop applications experience. It seems natural for us that we can mark some text in IE, copy it and paste it into Word. We also expect the ability to copy a table from a Word document and paste it into Excel, getting all the data into the right cells.

But can we do the same things on the web?

Sure we can copy text from one text box to another, but how about copying a contact from gmail into our yahoo mail account?

What if I want to copy my favorite music songs list from my My Space profile to Windows media player, so it will automatically start playing it?

No. Until today we couldn't do any of those things. The initiative of Live Clipboard should make those scenarios and much more a reality.

But... In order to make Live clipboard work, we need another new buzz word to become a convention - microformats.

In a lecture I delivered numerous times I preached the crowed that we in the technology field are not inventing anything. We simply learning what the business world has done for years already.

Of course it's an exaggeration, but the point I was trying to make is that, in order to predict the future we should simply look on the past.

The "real" world has learned many years ago the importance of standards. This is why you can buy a screw and know that it will fit your new Ikea closet and also your old grandfather shelves.

This is why you can go to a store and buy a pair of Jeans size 34.

This is why we can drive everywhere around the world, knowing when to stop and when to go.

But in technology, standards are a relatively new concept. Until recently we basically had one world wide standard for exchanging information - XML. Every application developed in the last years know how to consume and publish information in the form of XML. But XML simply tells us how to read information, not how to understand it.

In order to be able to copy and paste a contact from one mail application to another, we need a well agreed format for representing a contact. What fields can we expect to see. At what order.

That is exactly the purpose of microformats. To globally decide how common pieces of data should look like. If we all agree how a play list should look like, it will be easy to copy paste it between players and web sites.

This notion of business standards (compared to technological standards) is the foundation for the next wave of web applications.

So if we all agree that microformats are the future, why we don't see it everywhere?

Well... simply put, we all want to decide on how a specific microformat will look like. Microsoft want to make a calendar item look like how they think is best. But same goes to IBM, Yahoo, Google and the rest of the big boys. And if any of you never attempted to do a large integration project, let me tell you - it's hard and takes a lot of time.

Microformats are the future, and all of us in the developers community should support and help them shape our world.