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2007 Web Predictions from read and write

December 19, 2006 / 50 comments

Written by Richard MacManus, Ebrahim Ezzy, Emre Sokullu, Alex Iskold and Rudy De Waele. Also John Milan wanted to contribute, but unfortunately got caught up in the Seattle storm – so best wishes to John and all our Seattle readers.

In our previous post we reviewed the Web trends of 2006, noting trends such as the hyper-growth of social networks, the push of RSS into the mainstream, consumerization of the enterprise, and the continued rise of the read/write Web.

In this post we look forward to 2007 and ruminate on what trends will be important over the coming year.

RSS, Structured Data

- RSS will go mainstream in a big way next year – not only integrated into Microsoft’s new Vista OS, but also fully integrated into Yahoo Mail when it comes out of beta (the Ajax version). Plus we expect some of Google’s RSS experiments to come into play more in 2007 – especially Google Base, which uses an RSS variant called GData. In addition to all this, new and interesting (if not overly innovative) services will be built on top of RSS – e.g. the Techmeme RSS Ad-delivery.

- Related to the above, structured data will be a big trend next year – see our post on Google’s structured data play from September this year. What will be particularly interesting to watch is how microformats, the Web community’s open standards for structured data, will fare. At this point, it looks like Google is forging ahead with its own structured data standards – and largely ignoring microformats. Although both Microsoft and Yahoo have shown some support for microformats, is it enough to stop Google?

- Widgets exploded in 2006 but will continue rising in 2007 thanks to blogs and social networks like MySpace. MyBlogLog is an example of what we’ll see more of, but also look out for more e-commerce and multimedia widgets.

Enterprise

- Web Office continues to ramp up. Especially watch Google and Microsoft battle it out in this domain. The smaller startups (Zoho, Zimbra, ThinkFree et al) will continue to innovate and there may even be acquisitions by the big Internet companies.

- The consumerization of the enterprise trend will start to infiltrate corporate IT, in the form of web-based office apps and more collaborative systems. Virtual solutions (teams and offices) that deliver high productivity at lesser expenses, will be hugely popular – for example SKY-click. Corporate blogs will continue to proliferate, although there may be more controversy to come in this area (think sensitive information leaked on corporate blogs).

Web Development

- Rich Internet Apps will be a major force in 2007 (a continuation of the Hybrid web/desktop apps theme we focused on this year). In particular watch out for Adobe’s Apollo platform, but you can be sure that Microsoft will also be very active in this domain with its Windows Presentation Foundation. Also in the mix will be Laszlo with its open source OpenLaszlo platform. The general trend going on here is that platforms that leverage both the desktop and the Web will be compelling next year, in terms of offering rich functionality that usually can’t be found on purely browser-based apps.

- On the other hand, Google in particular will continue to push the boundaries of browser-based apps. Ajax is known to have its limitations, so some people have been wondering what will be next after Ajax? But also 2007 may be the year that rich web apps using vector graphics (VML/SVG)+AJAX make an impact.

- Semantic Web products will come of age in 2007. Make no mistake (to use presidential language), the Semantic web is coming – particularly with the work of companies like RadarNetworks and Metaweb. We think companies like that will come up with the plumbing to help generate RDF based on HTML.

- Amazon Web Services were a surprise hit in 2006 – and expect more big things from Amazon next year, to fill in the stack and to provide the foundation for a Web/Amazon WebServices-based OS. We also think there will be moves toward an Amazon-like web services stack from other players, particularly Google. For example Google may want to catch up with Amazon’s S3 – EC2 services. And where Google goes, you can expect Microsoft to go too.

Search and Online Advertising

- Expect some shakeups in the online advertising market next year. AdSense will have some competition, in the form of MSN AdCenter and Yahoo’s advertising platform.

- Also due to ongoing issues with (CPC/PPC) online advertising, there’s a real need for a better, more robust online ad model – perhaps something more than CPA. So watch out for developments in 2007 along those lines.

- 2007 will be about Search 2.0 and the rise of the vertical search engines. However don’t expect Google to lay down and do nothing – they will counter the verticals. Google Code and Health are two early examples of Google’s response. Also note that Google is moving towards being a more meaning-based search engine. For instance, when you enter a company name in Google, the first result not only returns the homepage of the company but also some semantic meaning extracted from the website. And the right bar of SearchMash (Google’s test search site) shows that Google is planning more features.

Microsoft vs Google

- Microsoft’s Windows Live services will gain real momentum next year, thanks to Vista and also Live services going out of beta and usurping their MSN counterparts (e.g. Windows Live Mail taking over Hotmail).

- WebOS /GoogleOS: To counter the Vista and Windows Live threat, Google may come out with some form of GoogleOS. This is contentious, but one theory is that if Vista’s default services (Live.com) can put pressure on Google, then we may see a Google optimized Linux .

- In line with this, Open Source Desktops will continue to gain momentum in ‘07. Red Hat and Novell will bring out new versions. Linux Desktops are getting more fun with 3D effects and KDE4 (Plasma) and AIGLX – Xgl and Beryl – Compiz technologies. But can they compete with new Vista and expected web operating systems?

Browsers

- Browser War II. In 2007 expect the competition between IE7 and FireFox (plus Flock, Opera and Maxthon) to be intense. Perhaps we’ll even see a G-Browser? Stranger things have happened…. or will Google continue to utilize Firefox as its cover? The latter is more likely, as Google does not want to seem too distracted with operating systems and browsers; this would be a bad signal for the NASDAQ investors.

- Speaking of browsers, 2007 will see an increase in WebKits. Adobe’s Apollo will be WebKit based, enabling developers to ensure Safari compatibility as well as other browsers. We also think the Konqueror browser of Linux/KDE will drop its KHTML engine in favor of WebKit. So expect Safari compatibility to rise sharply in 2007.

Multimedia

- Internet-based TV will ramp up in 2007, thanks to products like Brightcove and whatever Google does with YouTube/Google Video. Also we’ll see more of Interactive TV (iTV etc). On this theme, the Venice Project (from the founders of Skype) promises free TV all around the world.

- Mass adoption of IPTV technology in 2007 and Bittorrent will be an important part of the online video landscape too.

- P2P: With Azureus and BitTorrent, P2P got approximately $30M funding for 2007. So 2007 will undoubtedly be a good year for P2P. It will get more accessible and we’ll probably see web based P2P interfaces. Bittorrent has already become a major part of most connected software. For instance, DemocracyPlayer – an IPTV client similar to Venice Project – had an embedded bittorrent client. Bittorrent will probably continue to be embedded in many new apps in ‘07.

- Virtual worlds: SecondLife will become an important platform for marketing, promotion, and of course social networking – as people and businesses figure out different uses for it. Also we think SecondLife will continue its expansion worldwide. Currently you can find Habbo and SecondLife cards in most supermarkets (Wallgreens, CVS) in the US, so this trend should continue in other parts of the world. In short, virtual worlds will become an integral part of the real world in 2007.

- Virtual Money: Paypal showed the way, and we’re seeing more of it now – SecondLife LindeX, Microsoft points etc.

Consumer Apps

- The online real estate market will grow rapidly in ‘07.

- The search for disruptive business models will continue! In other words, free consumer web apps still need to find a business model.

- While social networks dominated 2006, we wonder if the amount of time an average user spends online will start to negatively impact on their social lives in 2007 and lead to a downturn. Could social networks prove to be anti-social? At the same time, social networks will probably also become more open – and data portability will start to occur, although MySpace will hold out. See also widgets above.

International Web

- International Web will finally start to get its due in mainstream media (or maybe this is wishful thinking). China in particular is a hot market right now, but as Keith Teare observed on R/WW recently, it is still early days and the revenues are not big at this point.

- OLPC: One Laptop Per Child will create good buzz and may increase the adoption of thin-client like computers (internet and web apps dependent) and Linux for the mainstream. See also Web Office above, which may find its true niche in non-traditional markets which can’t afford Microsoft Office.

- Broadband continues to grow: For example Fiber Connections in France. There will be similar baby steps towards faster internet all around the world. After all, the broadband revolution created web 2.0, Google and web apps. So it’s worth following this trend!

Mobile

- VoIP space will really hot up. Skype and a bunch of new competitors will compete and potentially disrupt the telecoms industry.

- Mobile Web may be the big story of 2007 – certainly in China, Korea and Japan; but perhaps even the US and other ‘behind the times’ places like New Zealand and Australia. Related to this is that online/offline mobile technologies like Smartpox may become more popular in the West (they already are in Asia).

- Mobile will be a bigger development and advertising platform in ‘07 (jajah mobile etc).

- Also watch for an emerging Webphone market – for example Apple’s rumored iPhone and a GooglePhone.

Courtesy of mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele, here are 10 specific trends for mobile Web in ‘07:

1. Flat fees will become more affordable bit by bit.
2. Thus, more user-generated content will become available to the phone; opening the way for mobile users to start using new web/mobile 2.0 services on their phones, such as podcasting, RSS feeds, more user-generated content to upload and use.
3. Big Media Youth Networks going mobile – MySpace, YouTube, MTV and many more players will resolutely go mobile; allowing users to upload pictures, videos and create/consume content straight from their mobile phones. And to share with friends (including mobile forwarding functionality).
4. Mobile search – the big players will start positioning seriously in the mobile market (watch out for deals with carriers/operators and device manufacturers)
5. Mobile ads – the market is growing at a rapid pace (just watch AdMob’s ad views ticker box daily)
6. QR codes will start to enter retail markets.
7. Mobile image recognition will pop up in mixed marketing campaigns.
8. Cell Phone memory card swapping – to exchange music/video files.
9. Multiple network download hotspots become available in urban zones – enabling ‘on the spot’ mobile download and internet access possibilities via wi-fi/wimax/bluetooth/nfc/etc…. (all build in or available immediately)
10. Rise of ’smart client’ solutions, for convergence of content and application functionality on mobile devices in general.

Summary

Whew! There are a lot of predictions in this post, but of course we’ve probably just scratched the surface. We’d love to hear your own Web predictions for 2007. What have we missed? Please leave a comment and/or participate in our poll.

Global Global

“The Internet outside the US is bigger than the inside and that trend is only accelerating. Google, eBay and Yahoo all know this and the fact that YouTube is already over 65% international in less than two years from launch shows that the US in no longer an island.

Against many important measures — broadband penetration, % online advertising spend and mobile phone adoption — the US is no longer the world’s most important market. This is not for one minute to say that the US shouldn’t part a major part of every ambitious startup’s plans but if for example you want to be in the market with the largest share of online advertising as part of the marketing mix, you want to be in the UK.”

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)

Written by Sramana Mitra

I have written a few pieces already addressing the disjointed nature of the web, whereby, you go one place for content, another for community, and a third for commerce, the most notable of these is the popular, 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula.

Let’s quickly recap the terminology:

3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search

This, I submit, is the formula for the future: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Web 2.0 has been a nichy phenomenon with hundred and thousands of microcap efforts addressing one of the Cs, lately, Community being the most popular force, producing companies like MySpace, Facebook, Piczo, Xanga, and Flixster.

In Web 1.0, Commerce had been the driving force, that produced companies like Netflix, BlueNile, Amazon, and eBAY. It had also resulted in the Dotcom meltdown.

The same period that is seeing the surge of Web 2.0, has also seen a great deal of investment in Vertical Search, like Sidestep for Travel.

Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context. More recently, Netvibes has raised a lot of buzz, but also lacks the same organizing principle: Context.

In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.

Continue reading “Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)” »

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web 3.0 © 2006 Nova Spivack.

The Third-Generation Web is Coming

by	Nova Spivack

Web 3.0, expected to debut in 2007, will be more connected, open, and intelligent, with semantic Web technologies, distributed databases, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, and autonomous agents.

Published on KurzweilAI.net December 17, 2006.

The Web is entering a new phase of evolution. There has been much debate recently about what to call this new phase. Some would prefer to not name it all, while others suggest continuing to call it “Web 2.0.” However, this new phase of evolution has quite a different focus from what Web 2.0 has come to mean.

John Markoff of the New York Times recently suggested naming this third-generation of the Web, “Web 3.0.” This suggestion has led to quite a bit of debate within the industry. Those who are attached to the Web 2.0 moniker have reacted by claiming that such a term is not warranted while others have responded positively to the term, noting that there is indeed a characteristic difference between the coming new stage of the Web and what Web 2.0 has come to represent.

The term Web 2.0 was never clearly defined and even today if one asks ten people what it means one will likely get ten different definitions. However, most people in the Web industry would agree that Web 2.0 focuses on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, folksonomies, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking, and media sharing. While the innovations and practices of Web 2.0 will continue to develop, they are not the final step in the evolution of the Web.

In fact, there is a lot more in store for the Web. We are starting to witness the convergence of several growing technology trends that are outside the scope of what Web 2.0 has come to mean. These trends have been gestating for a decade and will soon reach a tipping point. At this juncture the third-generation of the Web will start.

More intelligent Web

The threshold to the third-generation Web will be crossed in 2007. At this juncture the focus of innovation will start shift back from front-end improvements towards back-end infrastructure level upgrades to the Web. This cycle will continue for five to ten years, and will result in making the Web more connected, more open, and more intelligent. It will transform the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

Because the focus of the third-generation Web is quite different from that of Web 2.0, this new generation of the Web probably does deserve its own name. In keeping with the naming convention established by labeling the second generation of the Web as Web 2.0, I agree with John Markoff that this third-generation of the Web could be called Web 3.0.

A more precise timeline and definition might go as follows:

Web 1.0. Web 1.0 was the first generation of the Web. During this phase the focus was primarily on building the Web, making it accessible, and commercializing it for the first time. Key areas of interest centered on protocols such as HTTP, open standard markup languages such as HTML and XML, Internet access through ISPs, the first Web browsers, Web development platforms and tools, Web-centric software languages such as Java and Javascript, the creation of Web sites, the commercialization of the Web and Web business models, and the growth of key portals on the Web.

Web 2.0. According to the Wikipedia, “Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004¹, refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.” I would also add to this definition another trend that has been a major factor in Web 2.0—the emergence of the mobile Internet and mobile devices (including camera phones) as a major new platform driving the adoption and growth of the Web, particularly outside of the United States.

Web 3.0. Using the same pattern as the above Wikipedia definition, Web 3.0 could be defined as: “Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.”

Web 3.0 Expanded Definition. I propose expanding the above definition of Web 3.0 to be a bit more inclusive. There are actually several major technology trends that are about to reach a new level of maturity at the same time. The simultaneous maturity of these trends is mutually reinforcing, and collectively they will drive the third-generation Web. From this broader perspective, Web 3.0 might be defined as a third-generation of the Web enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends:

Ubiquitous Connectivity

• Broadband adoption
• Mobile Internet access
• Mobile devices

Network Computing

• Software-as-a-service business models
• Web services interoperability
• Distributed computing (P2P, grid computing, hosted “cloud computing” server farms such as Amazon S3)

Open Technologies

• Open APIs and protocols
• Open data formats
• Open-source software platforms
• Open data (Creative Commons, Open Data License, etc.)

Open Identity

• Open identity (OpenID)
• Open reputation
• Portable identity and personal data (for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another)

The Intelligent Web

• Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores such as triplestores, tuplestores and associative databases)
• Distributed databases—or what I call “The World Wide Database” (wide-area distributed database interoperability enabled by Semantic Web technologies)
• Intelligent applications (natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents)

© 2006 Nova Spivack.

Great piece on POP2.0 from Ted Friedman

Pop Culture 2.0?

It’s the end of an era. Two of the most influential figures in American pop culture were fired this week: Tom Freston and Robert Christgau. Freston, who was head of Viacom’s cable networks, was one of the key executives behind the rise of MTV. Christgau is the self-proclaimed “Dean of American Rock Critics,” the writer who redefined the rock canon away from the populism of the mainstream music press, and toward what he sometimes called “semipopular music.”

Freston got canned after the MTV Music Video Awards continued their ratings freefall this year, while MTV’s web offerrings got their clocks cleaned by “Web 2.0″ social networking juggernauts MySpace and YouTube. Christgau got axed after the Village Voice was sold to an alternaweekly chain desperately trying to compete with craigslist’s free classified ads.

The old frameworks for making sense of pop culture are starting to collapse. Pop’s presumed market of scarcity – only a handful of songs can make it to heavy rotation, only a handful of artists can become stars – is being overwhelmed by an information explosion. On MySpace, thousands of local band listings sit side by side with Paris Hilton promotions – and Paris needs the locals more than they need her. No one indie band has the reach of a pop star, but it’s the community they’ve built that brings eyeballs to Paris’s page. Meanwhile, viewers are tuning out TV channels and becoming their own programmers on YouTube.

The demassification of American popular culture continues. Every year, the big networks lose ground to cable, while the big cable channels lose ground to the profusion of newer digital channels. The big record labels’ sales shrink, while the global jukebox becomes available on all-you-can-download subscription services like Rhapsody. Radio listeners abandon terrestrial’s shrunken playlists for Sirius and XM. “The Long Tail” grows ever longer.

Which explains not only Freston’s departure, but perhaps Christgau’s, too. When the mainstream dissolves, how do we define the margins? If there’s no longer such a thing as pop, how can there still be punk?

Christgau himself was never an indie snob – he’s always had the open-earedness to praise a big star like Garth Brooks if he thought the music earned it. And I’m sure he’ll land on his feet – some smart publication should grab him for some instant hipster credibility. Freston, I’m not so sure about, although I’m confident his parachute was much more golden than Christgau’s. But the real question is what comes next.

Pop Culture 2.0 no longer needs a lowest common denominator. Traditional media companies are always out to score a blockbuster, because it’s so much more efficient to sell one product to one million customers, rather than a thousnd products to a thousand customers each. But to MySpace, it’s all the same. They make their money off ads, and a million pageviews is a million pageviews, no matter how they’re sliced up. In fact, better they be a thousand different pages with a thousand viewers each – all the more room for growth. Finally, the economics are on the side of cultural diversity.

That doesn’t mean they’ll stay that way. I’m sure that Fox, which bought MySpace, would love to see it simply replace MTV as pop’s top tastemaker. But I doubt we’ll ever again see the kind of teen monoculture I lived through in the 1980s. There’s just too much cool stuff out there to listen to. Christgau’s the one who taught me that. And now everybody’s figuring it out.

 

Gary’s TV nice piece on the evolution of tv

Gary Carter’s Speech, Part 3

This is the last part of the keynote address on the future of television delivered by Gary Carter of FreemantleMedia at the National Association of Television Program Executives in Las Vegas in January 2007. (See part 1 and background, and part 2.) All emphasis mine.

“If you’ll excuse some simplification, it seems to me that we can divide the history of television, as medium and as form, into three generations: mine, my mother’s, and my son’s.

For my mother, when television arrived in the fifties, it was a technology without history. It appeared as revolutionary, although in fact, like most technology it was evolutionary. Its technology was mysterious, new, perhaps related to film, and the form of programmes derived from other technologies and traditions — the movies, the theatre, the radio. Television was a window on the world, a Modernist project which explained the world to its audience — the world as it ‘really was’. This was the era of television as social instrument, the era of the rise of the public broadcaster. The voice of television was the voice of the social establishment. Famous people as represented on television were famous because of their achievements, because of what they had done. Television came at you, it was a ‘push’ technology, in current terms, and in fact, it moved down — it came from a position of power and moved down to the people. It is in this period that the means of reception — the screen, the set — begins to be domesticated, it drifts from the shop window into the living room.

But my generation — the generation which came of age in the early eighties — we grew up with television. Entirely domesticated, it had moved into our space, and appeared in bedrooms, in kitchens, even in toilets. It had a history of its own, it had a culture of its own to which we could refer, it had already codified its own conventions. And in this generation, fame began to share airtime with celebrity — those people who were famous because of the amount of media exposure they gained.

And since television programmes started to provide exposure, in an unholy alliance with the dark arts of marketing, it was possible to become famous for being on television, or in the media. We were the first generation who had grown up as the subject of audio-visual media — the Super 8 movies, the early videotape, which our parents used to film those important events in our lives. We grew up then, with an understanding of the conventions of television, and with the domestic version of the technology filming us at home, and as the subject of the camera’s gaze. This we could characterise as the beginnings of the post-Modern phase, the development of a medium which was a mirror, not a window, one with its own dubious heroes — porn stars, politicians, their mistresses, their rent boys, retired gameshow hosts, and ‘ordinary’ people. As Andy Warhol said, In the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes. This was the era of television as reflective and creative of different worlds — and it was the period of the rise of the commercial broadcaster. Television came at you from different directions, not just ‘down’ — but it also started to come from you — in programmes like Fox’s COPS and AMERICA’S FUNNIEST HOME VIDEOS, where, for the first time, the material was generated by the subjects of the camera’s gaze.

But for the generation represented by my son, the world is very different. Television — or rather, the moving image with sound — has become totally personalised, and in all aspects: subject, production and distribution.

The digital project means that media represent no reality, where the image multiplies indefinitely, perfectly, and represents only itself, and no reality at all. Or rather, a reality in which the image is the only reality.

A reality in which 98% of photographs in the average glossy magazine are digitally altered, in which 98% of Hollywood movies — even those without special effects — are digitally altered; in which newsreaders and gameshow contestants appear in environments that don’t exist. A separate pseudoworld. Now it is possible to define celebrity as utterly divorced from achievement at all — as someone who ‘is recognised my more people than they themselves can recognise’.

This generation has a different understanding of media and technology — for a start, it has grown up with games in which the individual audience member can affect the outcome directly. It has grown up with an in-depth understanding of genre derived from television history, with an in-depth understanding of technology — a technology which is now of broadcast quality, with domestic editing sets which rival those used in what we like to call an industry, and now –crucially — the audience has distribution. This is the world of digital television, digital networks, digital everything. Power, in this environment, is certainly not a push, but it’s probably not, in fact, a pull: it is distributed equally, in all parts of the system, acting in all directions simultaneously. In fact, power is a peer-to-peer distributed network. The audience, having been first the recipient of the camera’s gaze, and then its subject, took control first of the means of production, and now, finally, of the means of distribution.

Media has become totally personalised, in all its aspects. It has moved into ‘my space’. The artist formerly known as the audience has become — to use MacLuhan’s prediction from the early ’70s — the prosumer. To quote Andy Warhol just before his death: “My prediction from the Sixties finally came true. In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”

I believe that we are living through a profound moment in the evolution of technology, and therefore of our species. We should be careful that when we mourn the so-called death of television we are only mourning our own loss of power as a media elite. I know that sounds rather dramatic at the end of a long day in a seminar, but I believe it nonetheless. We are not living through the death of television, for the simple reason that this is not about television. Technological development is a story, which runs through human history, and which shapes it and is shaped by it, and part of that story is the rise and rise of that which we call the media. This is about us, in a very deep and profound way, and it’s about the way in which we as a species are driven by creativity. Obviously, I realise that I sound alternatively naive and pretentious when I say this, but these concerns of ours — is television dying, what’s the next big thing, will people want to watch television on a mobile phone, who will want to pay for it — these are not the questions which are important, culturally or historically. The important ones are: now that we have it, what will we do with it? As it grows, who will control it? And finally, what will we become?

This is a moment in time in which we can all help to answer these questions, and that’s why it’s an exciting and important moment. It’s exciting and important because it will require us to do the thing which ultimately defines us as people: it requires us to dream, and to create the products of our dreams, and to fill the flickering screens around us with those dreams. “

(c) Gary Carter 2006.

A great little history

 This is a brilliant video that has been viewed over 1.2 million times and get this, it was put together by an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at the Kansas State University.

brand relationship

A few Flickr users are apparently up in arms about being forced to switch their user ids and passwords over to Yahoo (they acquired Flickr early in 2005). Messages are flowing onto forums chastising the brand for letting them down and selling out to the big guy. Users fear that their names are just going to end up on a giant marketing database as Yahoo looks to maximize its every asset, in its desperate quest to play catch up with Google. From Flickr’s perspective, the move makes logical sense; it will enable greater efficiencies and provide a better service for its users. However, money as usual, is at the root of everything. The early users of Flickr probably feel resentful that the company got rich because of them, they adopted it, helped it grow and feel they deserve to be treated as early stage emotional shareholders or perhaps even more. The Flickr case shows that something’s shifting in the relationship between consumers and brands. At the heart of all this are unclear ground rules. Brands emerged as symbols of trust, proof of quality for products or services, nothing more. The same thing in Flickr’s case, people chose it because it did a better job than anyone else out there. People jumped onto it, liked it and told their friends, for the social connectivity that recommendation brought. The more they used it and the more they reaped the benefits, the more they built an affinity for the brand and became to think of it as their own. This is where the trouble begins. Flickr just wanted to do a good job and presented itself as a nice, friendly human organization, but were its users reading more into the relationship than Flickr ever intended? Were they being lead on? When Yahoo acquired them, Flickr made the following announcement. “Don’t forget to breathe. It’s not the end, it’s the beginning! As the wise woman who taught us The One True Way of Flickr Massage says, the only thing permanent is change. But we’re going to stay true to our vision and to the people who made us what we are — that’s you, the Flickr pioneers. Thanks for making the first year of Flickr so wonderful.” It’s possible to interpret this statement in many different ways depending on what you believe, staying true to the vision, means. Flickr, like other members of the new power brand generation; Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, were built out of great product experiences and an understanding of the importance of community. These brands never set out from the beginning to create a new type of contract between themselves and their consumers; they just wanted to share a better way of doing things. They never made any promises other than to deliver great product experiences and in a traditional sense, they over-delivered, because they gave their services away. The problem started when they became rich because of their users. YouTube is feeling guilty and now wants to share revenue with creators. This move will have a big ripple effect. Community-based brands of the future, the ones that rely on user-generated content and the ones that demand more involvement for the consumer, will need to develop a new type of brand “contract” and make it clear from the get-go. Here are 2 for starters 1. The Pure Community Model Centered on maintaining the purity of the experience with a “contract” that implies the community governs everything the brand does. The brand listens every single step of the way and only does what the community wants it to do- the Craigslist model. 2. Revenue Share Model Offering different types of incentive streams for users: from early stage stock for initial subscribers, membership points for community to contributions, to revenue share for the most viewed or desired content. When the user truly becomes the shareholder, the consumer will truly own the brand and the implications will be monumental for all concerned.

demo demo

Top 10 Picks From DEMO 2007

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

DEMO 2007 has just wrapped up from Palm Desert CA. The companies that demonstrated their products covered a wide spectrum: Web apps, social networking, hardware, media, wireless, security, enterprise software and other technologies. It was an action-packed two days of presentations, so in this post we pick out our 10 favorites (listed in alphabetical order). Note that each logo is linked to their home page and the name is linked to the DEMO page.

Jam across the globe with eJamming.
The eJamming web site and desktop software allows musicians to play in sync over the internet. The intricacies of channeling music, let alone synchronizing it, over the web are well known. eJamming’s secret sauce allows musicians across the globe to connect and seamlessly play together as if they were in the same rehearsal room. eJamming seems to be a great addition to our virtually connected lives. If we can work from home, why not jam from home as well?

Discover and enjoy the world of cinema with Jaman.
Less than 1% of the movies made in the world are available to the US public. Jaman is about to change that by delivering these movies straight to Windows and Mac Desktops with innovative, better-than-DVD quality software. On top of getting us these unique movies, Jaman software creates instant social networks by placing an interactive control bar to the right of the movie window. The controls allow you to turn on commentary from the other users, and rate or review the movie. Interacting with other users while watching a movie could be distracting, but Jaman seems to nail down the problem with the great user interface.

Design your dream home with MyDesignIn.
Social networking has gone vertical in recent times and this app is an interesting twist. MyDesignIn allows users to collect home design ideas and artifacts online using browser buttons. The users then can apply collected information and images to the blueprints of their house and get design advice from their friends and family. The site needs to grow and evolve more, but the concept seems interesting and getting help with home design is useful.

Create and share photo timelines with Our Story.
Just when we thought there is nothing left to do in the online photo and media sharing market, Our Story proves us wrong. They take the simple idea that media exists in time, and come up with an end-to-end photo organizer, storage and sharing experience. The photos are organized around events and timelines, and they can be shared and contributed to by multiple users via site or email. They’ve got printing of albums built in too. Flickr has certainly brought us the social photo revolution, but it is up to the companies like Our Story to iterate and refine the vision around one of the most basic usages of photo – recording the events of our lives.

Protect your blog IP with Sentinel.
We live during exciting times, when self-expression on-line and particularly blogging is on the rise. Protecting the copyright of our blogs is as important as protecting the copyright in print. Sentinel monitors the web and pin-points blog plagiarism. This service gives content creators the ability to see who is doing what with their content.

Syndicate all your media with SplashCast.
Splashcast allows users to remix photos, video and audio to create personalized channels. These channels are then available to play in any SplashCast player installed on a web site, blog or social network profile. Since you can choose what channels to play on your own SplashCast player, in essence, you can create your own web TV station.

Experience embedded 3D with Total Immersion.
Total Immersion’s software enables the real-time integration of interactive 3D graphics into live video flows. In is quite impressive and certainly is the most fun DEMO video that I watched. The effects of embedding colorful 3D graphics into real-time video are quite stunning, and Total Immersion appears to completely master this field. Applications range from media/entertainment to toys. My description does not do this technology justice, you have to see it!

Annotate the Web with TrailFire.
TrailFire is an annotation technology that allows any user to attach notes to web pages. By naming the notes with the same name, this software allows users to create trails. Each trail represents an individual or collective navigation path, centered around a topic. TrailFire is implemented as a combination of browser extension and web site. All existing trails are available on trailfire.com and can be browsed by topic and searched. There have been a few implementations of social “sticky notes”, but this one is taking the concept to a whole new level.

Rule and pirate WiFi like a pro with Whisher.
When was the last time 128-bit encryption stopped piracy? Certainly not when it comes to WiFi. Spanish company Whisher helps you to navigate the entire WiFi network, without worrying about what network you are connected to. They do this by allowing you to connect to the computers of users that already connected to the secure networks. Sounds weird? Absolutely! But are we loving this? No doubt.

Find people and companies with ZoomInfo.
ZoomInfo offers a vertical semantic search engine, focused on companies and people. It is an impressive technology that turns the web into a database of corporate and personal information; and organizes it in an intelligent way. Whether you’d like to research companies in a competitive space, or you’d like to learn more about the career of a particular person, ZoomInfo offers you great resources and tools.

Summary

So those were our top 10 picks from DEMO 07. What were your favorites from the sho