Startup Diaries

We Live in Exciting Times

It's exciting time to be in the web community or just to be a web consumer. Three years ago when the Web 2.0 era started to pick up, we got a glimpse to the potential of the web in how it can change our lives.

But in the last months, we really start to see how all the different pieces and technologies are coming together to finally create a connected user experience. Products like Hulu Desktop, Twitter, Google Wave, Facebook Connect and the iPhone combined with now more mature technologies such as HTML 5 and Ajax adre finally bringing us the consumers the ultimate user experience.

The foundations of such experience are: Desktop like UI, seamless integration between services and real time communication.
This year we finally saw the mobile promise gets realized with great web experience on the iPhone and now Android.
We finally saw the borders between TV and web video completely blend.
We finally start to see the concepts of federated identity and data portability come into place.
All these things together won't solve the world hunger or bring world wide peace, but they will change the way we live our daily lives and communicate with other people.

It is a very exciting time to live in.

CM Summit Summery and What We Know About Advertising

Federated Media CM summit just concluded (and thanks John for inviting me to speak) and I thought it will be a good time to try and summarize the event.
First of all I got to say that the level of the event was very high. Starting from the quality of the speakers, the people who attended and even the fact that the Internet was working with full speed from the first minute, a rare thing around conferences.
The only thing that I was disappointed a little about was that John didn't ask David Rosenblatt from Google some harder questions (or maybe it's just me who like to see Google grilled a little).

But what did I learn from the summit?
I saw and heard many interesting things, but above them all was what Deb Schultz said in her presentation: We all have no idea what the hell are we doing.
Marketers still don't understand what do we want from them, and how to really use all of our new tools and sites to get what they need. On the other side, we probably need to do much better job at communicating our messages and adapting them to what marketers actually asking us for.
Geeks and Marketers need to learn to work together from day one.
The agencies and the people in them need to adopt much faster to this changing world, and we need to work with them from the first day we start to develop our products.
And maybe above all is that we need to listen more to the users. It's not just about delivering a better ROI for the advertiser but also delivering better experience to the end user.

The Power of the New Media

Today there was one of my old time favorite movies on TV - Pump Up The Volume. It was great watching it again after so many years.
It's interesting to wonder how this 1990 movie would have looked like today, in the era of the Internet, blogs, podcasts anc vidcasts.

One of the strongest messages of the movie is that we need to speak our mind freely, to let our voice heard. As I look on the Internet and the revolution it brought to our lives, I can't think about exactly the same thing.
The promise of the web is not just of giving us an easier way to shop for stuff, hear music or get in touch with our friends.
The real promise of the web is the ability of our voice (and picture) to reach millions op people around the world in the speed of light.

But should we just get this amazing power as granted? I believe not.
Such power should come with great responsibility.
Should we use it just for uploading funny videos, images from our trips and music we like?
Should our MySpace/Facebook pages should be used just for self promotion?
For the first time in history each one of us really has the power to affect things. For the price of a meal in McDonald we can communicate our opinions across the globe. We can make people notice the stuff in the world that should change. We can really make a difference.

The real question today is not how to make people aware of things, but more of how to make people care about it.
How can we harness this amazing social networks phenomena to make our world a little better.

I'm not sure what is the answer to that. But I'm sure she is out there, waiting to be found.

Technorati Tags: Media, social networks, podcasts

Connected Innovators

I'm sitting right now in the connected innovators showcase of the supernova conference. The showcase features 20 companies chosen by Techcrunch to demo and talk about their new products.

While listening to some great products, I just have to wonder why there are just two hours dedicated for this kind of showcase from a full 3 day conference.
I mean, lets face it, most of the sessions in most of the conferences are quite boring. You keep hearing the same things that you already know again and again.
In the last hour I learned (and enjoyed) much more than I had in the all supernova and Web 2 Expo conference all together.
I would like to see a conference where the people on stage will actually be the young and unknown faces that work on the still unknown startups. Than, maybe we will finally hear and learn something new.

Technorati Tags: supernova2007, startups, innovation

The New Journalism

One of the amazing things in being here in supernova is the background noise in the rooms - the noise of constant laptop keyboard clicked.
It seems that almost everyone here is blogging/twittering/vodcasting at the same time. You can really feel how the media landscape of our world has changed just by looking around you.
It will take at least a day for major newspaper or old media companies to report what is happening here. But less than a minute someone here will say something on stage it will already appear in the blogs.

Technorati Tags: supernova2007

Will Voice Rule the Web?

I'm sitting in the first session of Supernova Challenge Day. The discussion is about the new semantic web.
Nova Spovack from Radar Network just talked about the fact that in the future voice will be the main way to access the web.

This is a very important thing to think about. When you ream the reviews Powerset gets today, you see that Google actually still gets better results a lot of the time. But when you think of voice, the ability to actually parse the meaning of a sentence becomes much more important, as people won't search by simply saying words, but by saying complete sentences.

If Powerset will be able to actually understand meaning, they will be bale to be the future gate for the Internet.

Technorati Tags: supernova2007

Building a Community

Iv' e ran into an old article/interview with Catrina Fake and Meg Hourihan the founders of Flickr and Blogger. This is a short article that I really liked because it talks about how both projects were never meant to actually see daylight.

I particularly loved what Catrina said about the early days of trying to build the Flickr Community:

The Flickr team spent a lot of time greeting every user that came to the site, offering them help on how to get engaged with the rest of the community. Through this, they discovered that online community-building is just like being the host of the party - if guests come to a party, and they don't know anyone, and no one shows up to take their coats and introduce them around, they'll leave

This is exactly what I've been saying for some time. In the end of the day, the people behind social networks are the same people that goes to bars and clubs hoping to meet other cool people. The Internet just give them a different way to do their socializing.
This has profound effect on the future of social networks. I still believe that we will see two new themes in this world:

• Localization - Yes, it's very cool that I can meet with people from all around the world and discover new cultures via the net. But in the end of the day, most of us still want friends that we can meet, see and touch. Social networks that will succeed in bringing local communities together with thrive.
• Private parties - Most social networks were built behind the notion of trying to bring together as much people as possible, but I think this will change over time, and we will start see communities goes back to the old Facebook model of closed communities.
  Think of the life line of a new bar in your city. In the first week just the people who were invited knows about it and comes. Than, if they enjoy it, the start telling about it to their friends, and they start to show up.
  If it started with the right crowed, the bar now hosts the "cool" people, so everyone starts to hear about it and want to also come there. After a few months, everyone is going there. Suddenly your crowed is mixed with all ages and kinds. The original crowed feels it's not special any more, so they start to look for the next thing. After a year the bar closes down.
  The bars that actually survive the second year are the ones that were able to keep a closed loyal community. A bar that when you will go to, you will know exactly what kind of people you will see there.
  People prefer to go to a invitation only party than a open to all, no selection, all ages parties.
  So why not doing the same also in social networks?

Encarta AI

One of the more cool features Microsoft ever released is the Encarta Instant Answers.
What it is?
Basically it is a Messenger you add to your contact list, and than you simply start asking him questions.

For example, I'm planning a dinner tonight, and I got some recipe from a cooking site. All the ingredients in this recipes are in ounces, so instead of opening Google, do a search, go to a web site and look for some conversion calculator I simply asked Encarta - "how many grams is 8 ounces?"
And the answer was -

Eight ounces are 226.796185 grams.
(8 oz = 226.796185 g)

What do you need more?

This is one of the more cool user interfaces I've seen. It brings me to think that IM is still heavily under utilized. You can take this concept to so many other places, I wonder how we didn't hear on any major start up that went to this direction.

What will be the future? Combine this capability with the amazing new speech technology in the new Exchange Speech Services and you got a winner!

By the way - if you want to use this service, simply add [email protected] to your Messenger contact list.

The Online Calendar Wars

IN his latest post Michael Arrington wrote about the great traffic Google Calendar gets compared to Yahoo and Microsoft similar services.

I just can't understand Microsoft.

I use MS Outlook 2007 as the main mail and calendar application. No doubt that it is one (if not the) best applications in this category.
I don't use Google calendar because it can't synch well with my Outlook.

There are millions of other Outlook and Outlook Express users around the world. All Microsoft needs to do is to open a web site where all those users can view and share and synch their Outlook calendars.
Add some integration with other Live services and events start ups and you have a winner!

They even already have most of the technology as part of Outlook Web Access that comes with Exchange. So my question is - Microsoft, what are you waiting for???

First Incentives Platform for Web Based Businesses

Last week we revealed our first public beta of our platform - NuConomy Studio.

NuConomy Studio is probably the first ever developed incentives platform for the web. We worked very hard to develop an innovative solution, that specifically answer some of the most urgent problems of the new Web 2.0 era.

You can find a lot of information in our company web site or in our company blog (including the official press release), but I'll try to explain it a little in my own word here:

Our vision is that in today world, in the end of the day, its talent that wins. The web sites that will attract the most talented people, will be the ones to triumph.
We also believe that talented people should be rewarded for their contribution. The situation where people are contributing more and more hours to web sites, and those web sites keeps all the advertising money for themselves can't go on. The Internet opened a huge opportunity for talented people to show their talent, and they should also be able to earn and live from it.

But how do you do it? How do you know what users should be rewarded and how much?

Until today, it was very hard to answer this question.
Let's look at the web sites that already operate a revenue sharing program (like Reever.com for example).
Basically, all those web sites ask the user for his Google Ads ID and Password, and 50% of the time they will show advertisements with the user ID. This mean that if someone will click on a banner when you user ID is used, you will get the money.
Although in first look this system sound great, it has a few inherent problems. Probably the most obvious one is that users are not rewarded on their contribution.
Let's take for example a case where a blogger at blogger.com would have exposed some huge scandal in the Bush administration. This blogger post will result in millions op people going to blogger.com. But how many of them will actually click on advertisers links? Statistically, technology blogs create much more clicks than political blogs.
So in this case, another blogger that will write a review on the latest Dell laptop has a chance to get a higher revenue share from blogger.com.

Is this how it suppose to work?
Does the user that wrote about the Dell laptop is the one we really want to reward and make sure he stays with our brand?
Of course not.
The problem is that we don't measure users contribution. The current revenue sharing programs are simply don't base on performance.

So to wrap it up, by using NuConomy incentives platform, you will gain the following advantages over current way of operating revenue sharing programs:

• Operate incentives programs based on exact users contribution to the business (performance based)
• Give users incentives to promote your all brand and not just their personal page and content
• Measure users by long term commitment, making it more profitable to be loyal and not go to one of your competitors
• Use and combine any advertising network you want and not just Google Ads
• Users do not need to have a Google Ads user ID

 

I would love to hear your opinion about this. Are we right in our approach? Do you have any suggestions how to make it better?

In order to make all of this work correctly we used some innovative approach to web analytics, and how we measure users contribution. In my next post I will talk about this in further details.