Written on May 4, 2008 – 1:29 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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It’s Sunday afternoon, why wouldn’t I cover another Twitter application? Especially since this one actually seems pretty useful. It’s called Bkkeepr and helps you to keep track of the books you read. Although statistics show that the number of people reading books is falling drastically, web professionals generally like to read a book or two. This blog even has a monthly Booklist 2.0 series by Martin Kloos.
Tracking the books you read has always been a popular activity. Amazon has some tools for it and Blippr partly revolves around updating your digital bookshelf. First of all, you probably like to show off a bit with your amazing list of classical masterpieces. Moreover, your book collection says something about you.
So it’s good news that somebody has created a simple way of tracking the books you’ve read. For now, it’s in some sort of stealth beta but after a while, it’s just a matter of sending the ISBN number to @bkkeepr. Also, you can post status updates about the page number you’ve reached and ‘bookmark’ your favorite parts in the book. So long for dog ears…
Bkkeepr is a project of booktwo.org. A blog by James Bridle that exists to “report, catalogue, investigate, stimulate and debate the future of literature”.
Oh and for the showing off part? Bkkeepr offers a widget too…
Written on April 16, 2008 – 8:00 am Martin Kloos, Business consultant
Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month we’re discussing Mobile Advertising by Chetan Sharma, Wikipatterns by Stewart Mader, and Programming Amazon Web Services by James Murty.
Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market
If we only had to identify one trend people on the Next Web 2008 were talking about the most it was probably about the oppertunities of the mobile (social networking) market. So if you want to take full advantage of this rising market, “Mobile Advertising: Supercharge Your Brand in the Exploding Wireless Market” written by Chetan Sharma is the book for you to read. What’s interesting is that this book not only describes the history of the mobile market and the enormous opportunity the mobile market offers, it also provides a blueprint for you to exploit this opportunity. Want to take a sneak peek into the first parts of the book? You can find the preface and first chapter of the book on the website MobileAdvertisingBook.com.
“If you believe the future is wireless, then this book is a guide to that future. Simple, fact-filled, and astute.” -Om Malik, GigaOM
Wikipatterns
As a business consultant, I’m always looking for ways to improve my skills on making use of the new tools and concepts the so-called Enterprise 2.0 wave has to offer us. And I guess I found in Wikipatterns, written by Stewart Mader, a handy guide to help people make the most out of Wiki software, or collaboration tools in general. What particularly appealed to me was the practical approach of the book. It offers many useful tips on implementing wikis, from a simple pilot to large scale adoption. It also describes many interesting case studies of wiki adoption in various enterprises. Written near the end of 2007, but still relevant today. Not for techies, but for the end users who are planning (or working on) wiki adoption within their organization.
Programming Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2, SQS, FPS, and SimpleDB
I’m not a programmer, but one thing I realized during The Next Web Conference is that íf you are planning to built a global start-up, you should built it on cloud-computing technology. Or do you really really want to waste your venture capitalist’s money?* It looks like Amazon has just the right platform for you to do so (or perhaps you are planing on building on Google App Engine). Programming Amazon Web Services written by James Murty seems to be just about right to get you started with building your small to medium-sized platform on Amazon’s AWS. Nothing more, nothing less but invaluable if you want to realize a scalable platform that pleases our VC’s.
* anyone counted how much this phrase was used during the conference :-)
Written on April 8, 2008 – 8:29 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Dutch music service SellABand received 3,5 million euros to make growth possible. The round was led by Prime Technology Ventures, also a Dutch company.
Johan Vosmeijer, CEO Sellaband
On SellABand, any beginning band can upload their music to the website. People who like their tunes and foresee a successful future for them, can become a ‘believer’ by investing 10 dollars. As soon as the band counts 5000 believers - and thus gained 50.000 dollars - SellABand steps up and helps the talented folks to record an album with a studio and expert producer. They started their quest for promoting talent 1,5 year ago and already released cd’s for eighteen bands from eleven different countries.
Johan Vosmeijer, CEO Sellaband: “Music fans turn out be really interested in our concept. It’s not the record labels who decide which bands will get an album, thus the fans have the power. We’re really glad that we teamed up with Prime Technology Ventures. They have experience with helping growing Internet companies to become international market leaders. Partly thanks to this investment we can aim for world’s largest music market: the United States.
Sake Bosch from Prime Technology Ventures says that Prime Technology Ventures believes in SellABand’s concept”. “This investment makes sense, since the music industry is heavenly influenced by the Internet nowadays.”
This is a second milestone for SellABand in five months. Last December they partnered up with Amazon. Read the interview I had with Creative Director Pim Betist here.
Written on April 4, 2008 – 2:07 pm Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Werner Vogel is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com and focuses on technology innovation within the company. As “the oldest guy in the slate” at the Next Web Vogel takes a few steps back and looks at the larger patterns in the media world instead of presenting a visionary view.
Media have changed significantly in the past 10 years and there are dramatic shifts in how media production and consumption:
The tools to create content have become low cost
The internet as distribution medium has really taken off
We have many new devices and media has been transfered onto old devices such as phones
New business models
The world of media has changed from a few corporations that push information to you as a consumer who decides what to consume. You can pull in information at any moment you like without being controlled by a few mega corporations. The general trend is a shift from push to pull. This is not only visible online and in media production but also in many school systems where you are no longer offered 50 courses but instead you get offered 400 courses of which you have to pick 50. Education reflects the larger trend of connecting and pulling in information.
Why is this shift happening and what are the consequences of this shift from push to pull models? It causes a great amount of uncertainty and raises questions such as “will people actually watch my video?” We currently live in an era with an abundance of products and a great amount of competition. Consumers are incredibly powerful and know exactly what they want. As a startup the world has become very uncertain because with an abundance of products and picky consumers you don’t know if you’re going to succeed or not.
The main drivers of uncertainty are:
abundance
fierce competition
focus on learning
increasing consumer power
Resources are a very important part of an idea but the word “resources” has almost become a dirty word in the current era because you no longer know if you can support them. This requires a shift in the way we think about resources: you must be able to acquire resources on demand. Get them when you need them and release them when you don’t need them anymore. This lowers the costs because you only pay for those resources you need and only when you need them. This means there are no longer expensive servers sitting in the back of the room without getting used.
Running a complex infrastructure is a highly specialized job and takes a lot of money and trained manpower. As a startup you shouldn’t invest in becoming a world class infrastructure provider. Instead you should focus on managing pulled-in infrastructure(s) so you can focus on innovation instead of infrastructure. In the current era we can push and pull services and you should use them to our advantage in order to innovate.
Amazon is structured as a service-oriented model that provides cloud services based on this new model. Vogel wonders if any of the startups present at the Next Web are using any cloud services? Most startups don’t because they want to use their own stuff for a 100% but Vogel thinks they are fooling themselves because you cannot run a 100% reliable service by yourself. Vogel admits that even Amazon fails sometimes even though they are experts in providing these services. However, by providing services for startups they allow them to innovate and focus at what they are good at and focus on the idea.
This raises the question if this is not simply a marketeer’s (read: Amazon’s) dream. Why is not the whole world building applications with Amazon? What happens if startups heavily rely on their services? A very relevant question with the recent hiccups at S3. Vogel assures worried startups that they always have backups and that they are always aiming for the 100%. Vogel shares with us that “everything fails all the time. We lose whole datacenters! Those things happen.” However, Vogel assures us that as a customer never notice anything: “let us worry about those things, not you as a startup. Focus on your ideas.”
Written on March 26, 2008 – 10:23 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You probably know the Amazon Mechanical Turk. It’s a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes up for the inabilities of computer programs. You can buy some human intelligence for prices of a few cents. Oh, and human intelligence might sound good, but most of the tasks are repetitive and boring. Combine that with the low prices and you understand why some critics call the Mechanical Turk a ‘virtual sweatshop‘.
Let’s face it, new working technologies and labor systems often arouse negative feelings. We don’t like things to change. News about outsourcing journalistic work frightens us since it doesn’t match with our beliefs about the profession of journalism.
Artist Aaron Koblin finds his inspiration in trends and changes in this information age. According to his website, the San Francisco- based artist ‘playfully turns lots of data into lots of information’ in order to raise questions.
On Wired I’ve noticed a video about his latest project The Sheep Market. He asked the ‘providers’ of The Mechanical Turk to ‘draw a sheep facing to the left’ for 2 dollar cents. He received 10,000 sheeps and combined them into one art piece. From far away, it looks like a some sort of bar code, but when you come closer you notice the small drawings: data turns into info.
Written on February 8, 2008 – 3:18 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
When online marketing expert David Sadigh from IC Agency asked the LIFT08 audience who used the Internet in 1995, he was surprised by the huge response. “In 1995 it used to be a tool for geeks”. The situation has obviously changed, since the Internet is a mass medium now. “Even dogs are about to go online” Sadigh joked (no response this time). That makes it interesting for sales, he said. But the striking thing about the Internet is that the content is the same for everyone, yet we’re all unique and have our own wishes.
Because the content is not adapted to their needs, 98 percent of the visitors leave commercial sites without buying. Yet business pump in 35.5 billion dollars in online marketing on a yearly basis to attract visitors to their site. “Imagine if you had a store where everybody walks in but nobody is buying anything - you would definitely fire the person whose running the shop. Then why do we accept this on the Internet?”
As you might have guessed, Sadigh had the answer to this shocking question. ‘Internet isn’t really born yet”, he said, it’s a new medium, sort of like a 2 or 3 month old fetus”. So because of its new character, we’re not yet focusing on things like customer experience. Well, actually we just started, since Sadigh confronted us with this phenomenon. He urges companies to decode the visitors’ intentions and personalize content according to the decoding. Just like Amazon already did in the early years with the personalized recommendations. It’s just that Sadigh wants us to take it to another level.
How can we do that? What can we personalize? Some suggestions made by Sadigh:
Intentional targeting, display a specific product related info related to an engine search on that specific model. When somebody searches for family vacations in Italy, you don’t show just a classic Italian picture but go for the family-eating-at-a-big-table photo.
Geographic targeting
Event targeting, like showing product info related to a current TV campaign.
Behavorial targeting, when people buy something on your site, they’re probably there for the third time. So keep track of their surfing behavior and adjust the product related info to that
To be honest with you, I find the numbers Sadigh mentioned shocking, but his suggestions don’t sound revolutionary to me. Maybe he sees them merely as a way to prepare companies for the REAL personalization, or the techniques needed aren’t available yet. To give it a positive twist at the end: things can just get better.
In 1998 I got my first always-on Internet connection via my cable provider. The move from dial-up to cable was huge. Speed was an important factor but the fact that I could access the internet at any time had an even bigger impact.
After the shift from dial-up to always-on came mobile. Mobile hasn’t caught on as we hoped it would. And it turns out it might look different than we thought. No ordering pizza on a black & white WML generated iMode site. The future of mobile internet looks different. It looks like the iPhone and more important: the Amazon Kindle.
The interesting thing about the Kindle isn’t so much the fact that it has a Wireless Connection built it. It is the fact that this Wireless Connection is free and comes bundled with the device. The seperation between gadget and mobile connection is gone. The Kindle comes with Ubiquitous Internet.
2008 will see more evidence of the Ubiquitous Internet. SanDisk launched a new USB stick today called the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium Plus. This storage device, which SanDisk believes is the first of its kind, will automatically save all data stored on it to Amazon’s S3 storage service via a synchronization service called BeInSync. The device is cheap but comes with a $29.99 a year subscription to the BeInSync online back-up service.
The interesting thing about the Cruzer and Kindle is that they simply provide you with a service and you don’t have to think about this data being on of offline. It is simply there for you and available everywhere.
There have been indications that Google is working on an offline client for their Google Docs Application suite. The interesting thing about an offline client would not just be to work offline instead of online but again to remove the distinction between the two. With a client installed at your computer your documents would simply be everywhere, and always available, forever.
The question is if Ubiquitous Internet will dramatically change business models and enable new companies. Obviously BeInSync will do well and so will Amazon. But what start-ups can we envision taking advantage of an always-on economy?
Written on May 4, 2008 – 1:29 pm
Tracking the books you read has always been a popular activity. Amazon has some tools for it and Blippr partly revolves around updating your digital bookshelf. First of all, you probably like to show off a bit with your amazing list of classical masterpieces. Moreover, your book collection says something about you. 
Written on April 16, 2008 – 8:00 am
If we only had to identify one trend people on 
As a business consultant, I’m always looking for ways to improve my skills on making use of the new tools and concepts the so-called Enterprise 2.0 wave has to offer us. And I guess I found in Wikipatterns, written by 
I’m not a programmer, but one thing I realized during 
Written on April 4, 2008 – 3:41 pm
Written on April 4, 2008 – 2:07 pm
Written on January 3, 2008 – 10:37 am
After the shift from dial-up to always-on came mobile. Mobile hasn’t caught on as we hoped it would. And it turns out it might look different than we thought. No ordering pizza on a black & white WML generated iMode site. The future of mobile internet looks different. It looks like the iPhone and more important: the 
2008 will see more evidence of the Ubiquitous Internet. SanDisk launched a new USB stick today called the 
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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. (
