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There is a large group of people who think that the future of the web is in mobile. Mobile applications, mobile websites, mobile gadgets and mobile technologies. Although I agree that mobile is an interesting market I’m just not that excited by it. Sure, everything will become mobile. But everything will also become bigger, faster and more interactive.
There are some opportunities there but as far as I can tell this is just a natural extension or next step for the web and not a whole new phenomena that changes everything. In a way the iPhone is a nice illustration for this. It has a ‘normal’ web browser and there is no need to enhance (or dumb down) your website to make it look good on this device. And sure, location based information is cool. But how cool is it exactly? The examples (”find a restaurant near you!!!”) are often dull and not very scalable (how often do YOU actually need to find a restaurant near you?).
Still, a lot of people are going to make a lot of money with new mobile applications and I’m sure that right now I just miss the imagination to see where this is all leading us to. I wouldn’t be the first:
‘In the 1980s, McKinsey & Co forecast a world maket of 900,000 phones by the year 2000. Today, 900,000 handsets are sold every three days’.
Here is a nice video that illustrates the evolution of mobile phones since 1985. Besides the cute images there are also some great quotes, like the one above, in there:
Oh, who can tell me (without looking it up in the IMDB!) what the first movie was that featured a mobile phone?
The people from Level 3 travel all over the world to events and conferences, put down a Red Couch and interview people about the future of the web. They try to find out what people would do if there was no web at all, what they miss in the current web and how it affects their lives.
Here is a list of all people they interviewed this year:
Corly Bedacht (triprtv), Minne Belger (Cellspace), Simone Burmmelhuis (iens.nl), Gary Cige (Zilok), Sam Desimpel (Introniche), Vladimir Oane Dragos Ilinca (Ubervu), Patrick de Laive (The Next Web), Nick Hallstead (Favorit), Steven Jongeneel (Symbaloo), Jan-Joost Kraal (ebuddy), Martin Källström Twingly), Marco Menato Wauw), Edgar Neo (bvit), Martlin Pannevis (Nulaz), Gil Penchina (wikia), Solofo Rafeno (Beezbox), Marc Rougier (Goojet), Arjen Schat (The Next Web), Dr. Christian Schmidkonz (andunite.com), Andrew Scott (Rummble), Bryan Thatcher (Empressr), Joe Trainor (Level 3 Communications), Reinout te Brake (The Spill Group), Louise Verschuren (wuzzon), Dr, Werner Vogels (Amazon.com), Mathijs van Abbe (Mobypicture.com) and me: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten (The Next Web).
Intermediads is a new service just launched in closed beta. It was developed by…, us.
When we started this blog and sold the first few 125×125 buttons we immediately started wondering how to provide more value to our advertisers. We noticed how difficult it was for advertisers to tell their stories and pitch their companies in such a small area.
As you can imagine that small rectangle gives both readers and advertisers very little information. Right now the ‘click or don’t click’ decision is a very black and white situation. As a visitor you either click or you don’t and if you do you take a gamble with your time. What we wanted to do is provide more information to visitors before they click without making the ads bigger.
What we came up with is largely inspired by Flickr. As you can see in this screenshot, when you hover over a user favicon at Flickr a small gray border appears. If you then click on the border a small layer comes up with a few options.
This is exactly what we built with Intermediads. If you hover over the 125×125 ads in the sidebar here you will see a gray border with a small triangle appear. If you click the triangle you will see a screenshot, description and some other interesting data about the advertiser.
Our guess is that this service will both increase clickthroughs and provide higher quality traffic for advertisers. Users will be better educated about what the advertisers have to offer. What it comes down to is that we offer advertisers something between a view and a clickthrough. You could call it a ‘Half A Click’. We now monitor every normal ‘Clickthrough’, ‘Hover’, ‘Half A Click’ and every click to every link in the information layer. This educates both the advertiser and the visitor.
The service is currently in closed beta and running on a few selected high traffic blogs. We want to test our assumptions and see how the Intermediads layer improves clickthroughs. In about a month or so we will open the service up for other blogs. If you are interested in using the service (it works WITH your current Ad service) fill out the form at the Intermediads site.
Here is another Mischievous Monday Morning post with two golden oldies for your amusement. The first is an old but classic geek cake with a birthday message for a Indian geek coded in XML:
And this is Sergey Brin from Google in his pre-IPO days. It was made during a fraternity party where all the guys was dressed up as girls. As far as we know there are no more sightings of Sergey cross-dressing. These kind of photos make you wonder if they will find similar photos of you and me when we become famous one day…
Since the iPhone was announced Blackberry users suddenly felt less special. Weren’t THEY the ones that were always connected, always on and always in sync? Flashing a Blackberry Curve or Pearl just didn’t make an impression anymore. But there was just no way we could switch from our trusted Blackberrys and get used to that innovative onscreen keyboard that the iPhone made such headlines with. As a RIM executive said
“I could just never get the feel for it because, well, there is nothing to feel.”
Fortunately you can now get a preview of Research in Motions iPhone killer. Will it kill the iPhone? Definitely not. But it will get us Blackberry users back some self esteem:
Viewzi is a new player in the search engine world. They launched in closed beta at the end of april and have distributed about 50,000 invites so far. Fighting Google just on strength is virtually impossible. So, as most self appointed ‘Google Killers’ Viewzi focuses on displaying their search results more intelligently. First they try to guess what kind of information you are looking for. Is is a term, an image, a person or maybe audio of video content. Then they get a bunch of results from other specialized search engines like Google but also Flickr and Amazon.
Once they have gotten these results they present them in a ‘View’ that is optimized for the kind of content you are looking for. You can easily switch between different ‘Views’ and websites and images are previewed and preloaded so you don’t have to go back and forth between sites trying to find out which result is the right one.
I was skeptical when I looked at their front page. It just looked too black, image rich and bloated. But I decided to check out their video and than made all the difference. The implementation of what they call ‘Views’ is very well done and the idea of browsing through filtered content in their result pages actually sounds cool.
Google, and most other websites, aim to make the search experience as efficient as possible. You search, get results and click away to a destination site somewhere off the Google domain. Viewzi attempts to make the Search experience more than that. If they manage to deliver you will stick around browsing content on their site similar to how you browse through music in iTunes. browsing through beautiful results could be an joyful experience instead of a waste of time.
UPDATE: I have asked for few invitations. If you want one leave a comment and I will send you
When the iPod was becoming popular a few years ago and other manufacturers started to realize they were missing out on a huge opportunity there were frequent (daily!) reports of the next ‘iPod Killer’. Eager to find out what innovations were being made we checked them all out. Generally it didn’t take more than a few seconds to realize that the moniker ‘iPod killer’ was born more out of wishful thinking than true product innovation. The Zune, and countless other iPod rippoffs, came and went. But as we know now, nothing could kill or replace the iPod.
Then came the iPhone. And yes, again there are several companies announcing their own ‘iPhone killer’. Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, is secretly (but not TOO secretly) working on something they call their iPhone Killer. The Verizon Voyager is another example of a phone branded as the iPhone killer. But one look is enough to know it isn’t. And HTC was rumored to be working on their own ‘iPhone killer’.
Yesterday HTC unveiled their HTC Diamond. And I must admit: it looks pretty cool.
You might even say that the interface looks slightly cooler and more futuristic than what the iPhone currently offers. The interface is completely dynamic and fluid. Screens blend into each other with great effects. The weather screen doesn’t just display a static image of the sun or a few clouds but actual moving images of clouds or even a thunderstorm.
I’m not claiming that this will be an iPhone killer but I can image a lot of Windows users who don’t want to switch to Apple products being very happy with this gadget. Check it out yourself:
It might take a while before we can welcome Pope Benedict to Facebook and Twitter but in July he will text message thousands of young Catholics on their mobile phones during World Youth Day in Sydney. The catholic church hopes that going digital will help them connect better with younger people.
The Pope will personally send daily short messages to the estimated 225,000 youngsters attending the event. Next to texting they will also erect digital prayer walls at event sites.
The church will set up a Catholic social networking Web site that will compete with Facebook. So much for adopting existing technologies.
The technology will be provided by Australian telecoms firm Telstra. They plan to connect 8,000 volunteers, 2,000 clergy, 3,000 media and an anticipated 225,000 pilgrims to more than 700 locations around Sydney.
The Catholic church is the biggest in Australia with about 5 million members. Lets hope they all sign-up for GodBook, Godtube and Praytter.
Written on May 17, 2008 – 7:25 pm
There is a large group of people who think that the future of the web is in mobile. Mobile applications, mobile websites, mobile gadgets and mobile technologies. Although I agree that mobile is an interesting market I’m just not that excited by it. Sure, everything will become mobile. But everything will also become bigger, faster and more interactive.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
