Today we are live blogging from The Next Web conference:
The big shift in the formation of a new web is the shift from math-powerhouse (Google) to a people-centered application. This trend will have a large push by the crappy quality of mass-audience-broadband, like you experience on conferences or in US urban areas. People-networks will drive the shift to the next web faster than the implementation of better infrastructures by Telco’s. This people focus will take the web out of its Artifical-experience it has been so far.
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by Bob Garfield (Isbn-13: 9780984065103)
What happens when the old world order collapses and the Brave New World is unprepared to replace it as an ad medium, as a news source, as a political soapbox, a channel for new episodes of Lost? Welcome to The Chaos Scenario. It's here, and Bob Garfield saw it coming. In his roles as Advertising Age editor-at-large and as co-host of NPR's On the Media, Bob Garfield long ago connected dots that many in media and marketing refused even to acknowledge. In this fascinating, terrifying, instructive and...
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Saul Klein (VP, Marketing at Skype)
A new ecosysteem is converging into a gigantic powerplay: Brands (Prada vs Ikea), Hardware (HP, Oracle), Entrepreneurs (web 2.0), Applications (Googles), Media (Newscorp), but also the big universities (MIT). Talent will be the key asset/ bottlekneck in this play, ‘campus’ are the magnets attracting the talent.
He also alks about the question why Europe is lagging behind in successful and big internet startups as compared to the US (Microsoft, E-bay, Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, etc.)
While in Europe all the ingredients are there to become as successful as in the US:
- there are loads of successful entertainment (Pop Idol Harry Potter, etc.)
- there are more science and college graduates than in the US
- venture capital is there
- successful entrepreneurs that are willing to invest
- decent examples that are successful: (Skype,Kelkoo, Latminute)
- new potential webleaders (Joost, Habbo, Spreadshirt, etc.)
- biggest broadband penetration
- online advertising is very advanced
So, reallyt, there is no reason why we are lagging behind. So go out there, think big, take some risks and realize that failure is ok as well, as long as you learn from it.
for me microsoft is sort of the inventor of the ‘campus’ (see microserfs by douglas coupland for a then contempory fictive story)
but where did the campus originate? is it an institute like xerox palo alto? or is it the university campus, wether or not distributed through an urban area (amsterdam, london)?
why do we see this ‘revival’ or recognition of the ‘campus’? or is this a sign of a people centric industrialism? or is this industrial creativity?
how can we compare a campus (thousands of people) with a distributed talent pool creating linux?
Campus originated in Greek-era, can be coupled to a company or a university… I guess it means a hotspot for communities of practice-, passion and purpose. I guess that Open-source communities or sites like slashdot or sourceforge can be compared to a campus BUT often very focussed to the job and ‘job’-related… less paying tennis ect.
Interesting to see where coding is hot. Check out this top 10 regions from the TopCoder.com community… did you expect these names?
i miss finland!
and i can’t see the logic in this. perhaps it’s that topcoder.com is not representative of the total ‘coder society’. who sees the logic in this list?
As you know I’m less a fan of logic than you
I just wanted to show it as a confrontation that we talk globalization with US in the center. This image shows that a topcoder can come from anywhere… and than I really mean anywhere… even Estonia.
A short summary of what I take away from the morning sessions:
As an entrepreneur start leveraging to peers! In stead of being a lonely Don Quichot or prey for a Google bid: SO CREATE NODAL NETWORK!
Will this result in Google and Yahoo fighting over certain entrepreneural conglomares?
After crash, talent was cheap to get, opportunities looked endless and every market was a new white space.
Talent is the bottlekneck and got extremely expensive due to competition by Google-campus like compagnies and web 2.0 possibilities for talent to start own company. In the meantime all ‘white spaces’ (new markets) havce become overcrowded which might lead to consolidation and extreme-nichification. This will result in the end of a focus on disruptive growth patterns, the key will be more in mashing up existing components into new rugged application/ service with ‘just’ incremental value creation.
Trend: My Web, My World, My Life
EXPERIENCE 3.0 Enriched environments
- higher quality end interaction (richness) using HD TV
- a new interactivity paradigm (living inside a virtual sphere)
- Extreme automation (sensors/ robotica).
IDENTITY 3.0 Multi-personal instantiation modality
- Blurring online offline and virtual
- A bunch of me’s withg me in the middle
- Extreme personalization across me’s
one remark i have is about ‘disruptive growth patterns’. perhaps a mashup can trigger a disruption we have not seen before?! i don’t think a mashup is by definition incremental in value creation, perhaps what we have seen so far is. but if mashingup becomes readily available the creativity is unbounded, imho.
I agree… I meant growth in revenues.
Jeff Clavier, mananging partner SoftTech VC, is talking about the new connectedness and investing around the world. He started investing in Web 2.0 companies since 2004 and has made this his main focus.
Investing in 2004 compared to 2007
In 2004 there was cheap and available talent around. The opportunities were tremendous. Around that time the next generation of services and markets was being created. These new services were based on global broadband leverage.
In 2007 it became very tight and expensive to hire good people. There are numerous “white spaces” that have created an overcrowded market.
So the question is what is out there that can be mashed up to deliver incremental value.
RIght now there are still large offline inefficiencies that can be overcome that create opportunities for successful investments. For instance: the advertising market is moving more and more online, creating monetization opportunities there.
The trend seems to be to move to new platforms instead of the portals of the past: Clavier calls this development ‘deportalization’.
New connectedness:
Clavier sees future success in the creation of new experiences. These experiences will become richer in quality and interaction. Gaming will become the new interaction paradigm. Increasingly individuals will want to share those experiences in multiple ways.
The online and offline world will blur in the coming years, leading to the creation of multiple “me’s” by individuals. But these “me’s” will all be created around a central identity. Personalization will reach a point of total freakiness (my web, my world, my life), that will work across the multiple me’s.
Automation will be pushed to the edge with robots, sensors and fulfilment. This will develop more and more towards entertainment applications.
The best opportunities to invest in this environment is still in Silicon Valley.
Deborah Schultz has been the marketing director of Six Apart. Currently she is spreading the gospel on blogging, social media and community marketing. Her presentation is about marketing communicating in the relationship economy.
Relationships
Her central argument is based on the fact that we, human beings are inherently social animals. In the past the world was much more simple. But today it is all about relationships. Whether those are complex, light and diverse. The technologies that are being developed will have to be increasingly based on the need of people to connect and interconnect. Therefor the technologies shoudl be aimed to interconnect as well.
The question is, whether these virtual relationship are real? In Deborah’s opinio they absolutely are, because they give back as much as the take in her real life.
Business wise transactions are nothing more then the by-products of relationships, The market is developing towards an emergent and decentralized model as opposed to the mass market that we came from.
What are relationships? They are hard and messy. For instaande, online you can see it with spam. Relationships are build on trust, feedback, accountability. They are like a ‘bricolage’: use something in a different way that is was meant to be used.
In order for an online relationship to work, you not only have to network, you have to be out there in the universe. And it has to be personal: not an FAQ, but build up the relationship with your audience through people.
Weaving
The problem is that most organization are transaction driven instead of relationship driven. Companies should therefor by organic and dynamic. We, as consumers, want to weave networks together within networks and compagnies should be focussed on creating the possibility for that. When you work this way, cool stuff can happen.
A good weaver should have the following skills: good listener, connector, critic, partial geek, detective, catalyst, diplomat, juggler, approachable, intuitive, inquisitive, driven by relationships
If you want to be able to weave as a company should take these things into account: be tuned, real, jump in, get transparent, find your communities online and offline, be a catalyst, know when to let it go, be human, create opportunities to socialize, the love you give is equal to the love you get, listen, rinse and repeat
crm was (or is) one of the biggest promises of the last decades. the premise of this story is, i think, exaclty the same as the sales pitch for a decent crm system. so what is the difference?
i like the weaving metaphor. but isn’t the same as saying the company should appear to be ‘human’ in it’s contact?
and i disagree with the ‘oh the world is so complex these days’
building a relationship might even be simpler because it’s much easier to make mistakes if you don’t see each other anymore. in physical villages without much mobility the consequences of f@cking up were much more visible and felt. what i do agree is that it’s harder to maintain (and build) a relationship through media we are not familiar with. but it’s also difficult to build a relationship when you have to communicate in a language you don’t master too well. the younger people are fluent with these technologies (i think they will not even call it a technology.)
Deborah did actually say that as a company you should be human in your contact. So yes, that’s exactly what it is
I’m not sure if you can say whether or not it is more difficult or not to build a relationship in these days. It is different
Looking at younger generations, they see it different. We still try to see the ‘virtual’ as a metaphor for something in real life. But why should we do that? Can’t it be that digital or virtual relationships are something that can’t be compared?
Taoan Bhat talked abut the personalized web. In his words the next web is about people and it should be built around that. So the focus should be shifting away from devices being central to people being the focus.
While I’m sitting in the overprice conference I’m wondering why I do have to pay at all. This event is like many others at this moment consisting of 5 key-note speakers who don’t talk vision but talk company. In between a dozen pitching start-ups… tupperware like commercial talks… Why not make this conference for free than? Even worse… those companies were not just selected by a group of experts or so (event-programming) - but they are mostly paid for (read: sponsors).
And what’s even more frightening is that the presentations of these sponsors seem to get longer and longer, whereas the time of the keynote speakers gets shorter…
Maybe we should suggest them paying us to listen to them.
In any case, there is some value in it. As you are surrounded a full day, with some talks, that make you think about current things/theories/etc. Not that it’s new that your listening to, but the radio kind of talk atmosphere does trigger new thoughts of your own. However, you will have the same effect from the Skype-feed I guess.
Always nice to hear that the whole world is driving towards connectedness… how the net is shifting from luxury to commodity to necessity… but meanwhile it is still impossible to keep the network aty this event up & running for over an hour. I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way… just a reality check.
Tariq Krim is founder and CEO of Netvibes, a disruptive start-up company helping users to manage their digital life.
Internet is an over choice environment. And where time in that overloaded world is a strategic choice, the attention you give to something is a personal choice. So how do you choose? For more and more people that starts with Google.
Krim’s company is about ‘you’. It doesn’t have any advertising and it’s 100% user control and created. The community does actually provide the content that people can gather around. They try to reinvent the relationship between users, data and the network. Their vision about the next web is that the widgetized web is a natural evolution of the internet.
If you look at the development of the web you can distinguish three distinct phases. Firstly the web freed the data. Then it freed the application by which the data became the application. The application has become a commodity. Now we enter the last phase in which the user will be freed. In that phase the new operating system is becoming the web, creating endless choices for its users.
Those choices will become a reality through the use of widgets. The widgets let you create a personalized experience, the web page is just a transistion. It will lead to the end of the browser as well. Like Tariq sees a deportalization in which the web is being broken into the small pieces.
Dick Hardt is CEO of Sxip Identity en is an advocate of Identity 2.0, the user-centric approach to digital identity on the web. He is giving basically the same talk as can be found here.
These are his predictions that will come from Identity 2.0:
- minimal passwords
- rich portable profiles
- portable credantials
- agency delegation
- new types of reputation services (blogoshpere, wikipages, etc.)
- identity services (disposable email, one email address)
In fact his 2.0 approach is ‘just’ meaning the digital version of identity (which is pretty complex by itself =)… unfortunately he is not going into subjects like WHAT IS A NEW IDENTITY? or MULTIPLE IDENTITIES? or difference between getting (by the WE) or making (by the ME) a identity… t He just tips the problem of the fact that the CIRCLE OF TRUST does not scale!
He does talk about the shift towards idenity management 2.0. NOT management for the receiver end of the communication/ transaction (to check if you is you or CRM you), but management for the identity keeper (read: individual) via a identity broker or agent (SXIP), Kewl thought, model, tech… but lacking the social change of how SOCIETY. COMMUNITY, IDENTITY and PERSONALITY are changing.
So to be short… SXIP provides 2.0 tech for identity 1.0. Is there a real identity 2.0 or will Sxip enable the evolution of your identity (the multiple me’s we talkes about before). Their service will contribute to:
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Interesting to comment is that the attendees (mostly Europeans) fear mis-uasge somehow, sometime while Americans reply… if a company misuses your data you just don’t buy their product anymore (self-governance)… are Americans naive/ not interested in privacy or are Europeans to sensetive about databases containing private (identity related-data).
In a sense he does see that people want to be able to have multiple identities, because he sets the individual in the middle. That makes it possible to have several layers around you for different purposes. His example: you don’t have to worry about the porn you have ordered….
True about the layers… that is the amount of privacy you want to share… let’s say the difference between a contact and a friend (segmentation: Matters of operation (commodity) - Matters of perception (luxuries) - Matters of the soul (Intangibles) . So layered identity is one (for some people you take your clothes of and for some you don’t =)) but does he truly support Multilple persona’s… eg can I be sometimes a guy and sometimes not?!
My take aways of this afternoon…
We will shift from macro-shouting (TV) to micro-shouting (Blog) and from mass (open-access?) to narrow (closed-access?). Is this the inclusive vs exclusive debate?
Narrow is here identified as a collection of 1:1 relations, where a transaction is just defined as a by-product of such a relation. Will the relations be the new medium? Relation still needs to be defined in a range between contact till friendhsip. And note that relationships are difficult since they are based on many qualitative aspect like trust, respect etc. How do you virtualize those asepcts? If this is taken one step further it starts hitting into a meme called gift-economy based upon involuntary loyalty. So such a relationship based economy would probably based on the LILO-concept (LOVE IN is LOVE OUT).
The focus should me on COLLECTION. A collection of many me’s and many relations which seamlessly are weaved together (Weaving through mixed media is the new buzz). Interesting to think of wether the value is within the dentist (read: individuals) or what is in between them (read: relations). Same for posts. Is the post the asset or the story in between (thread, trackback etc.).
Weaving will mean a further integrator of applicatieons (API’s) and start thinking of Single-sign-on, seamless access, trusted parties, identity mgt etc. This is where it really gets to be 2.0 for me… realizing that TECH CHANGES AND PEOPLE DON’T… do the tech focus shift from making things POSSIBLE to making things EASY and USEFULL.
While half of the speakers think it is al going to be about WE, the other half thinks it is all about ME. The Next web as a Me web is NOT about on-demand but it is about personalization, PREDICTIVE is the meme here. A shift from ON-DEMAND to PRE-DEMAND.
But their it starts connecting… predictiveness is only possible using the group-intelligence. So WE enables me being ME?! But how is this impacting the Web? Will Web than be around the metaphore of PAGES or will it be Widgettized into small nucleus-apps transforming the web into an Operation System? Will the current web (1.0) be deportalised, broken into a web of small independent pieces of ‘living’ information chunks. Pff…. plenty to think about especially if you connect that to the SKOR speech of last night by McKenzie Wark who claims information is medium-indepentent (can be on ANY medium), but meanwhile medium-dependent (always needs at least A medium).
Who won in the next web awards? there is no post information about what happened at the awards! could you tell me who won in the BETA/STEALTH category? thanks
Rizal
These are the winners:
Entertainment: YouTube
Company: Yahoo!
Social: LinkedIn
Search: WikiPedia
Disruptors: OpenID
Web Celeb: Tariq Krim
Beta & Stealth: Joost
Populizr: TechCrunch
Check out a video report about it here.