Written on April 4, 2008 – 2:32 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
So I hope Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbeUpon, uses Slideshare since he has just summed up all the hot topics of the web in thirty minutes. It was hard to keep track with. No kidding! All the important questions the web community struggles with, were discussed by Camp. This would have been a really interesting presentation for a less tech-savvy crowd, but most people in the audience probably didn’t hear anything new. Although it was interesting to see an overview of the emerging Web 3.0.
So after a short summary of the history of search - from directories, to algorithm, to social networks and social media - and types of search - page, query, image, visual, video, people, product and music - Camp shared some thoughts on the future:
- social search is on a roll
- collaborative annotation becomes more important: use tags!
- taming the wisdom of the crowds: expertise is more important than popularity.
- trust becomes more important than authority. You want to know the people who recommend stuff to you.
- search will adapt to the device you’re using.
Camp also described the personalization trend. “One-size-fits-all is history”, he said. Google made some first steps with Google Personalized. So the audience wants recommendations, and one way to get those is by asking input from your users - as Wikia Search does. Another way is helping your users create the best query possible by suggesting search terms and sources.
The third option is social search: what are your friends searching for? Which sites do they like? Before Camp climbed the stage we saw andUNITE, and they seem to focus on this social searching by matching your search terms with those of your friends.
The fourth way to get a personal recommendation is collaborative searching, so if you look at the example of andUNITE, the service would then compare your search terms with people you don’t know, but do have similar interests. Thus human intelligence is combined with an algorithm.
I think it’s a pity Camp didn’t talk a bit more about discovery, since that’s what his service is all about: exploring random cool sites. I’m sure he’s a visionary guy, so I hope that the next time he’ll share more of his views on discovery instead of just summing up the latest developments.
I hope you like that post!
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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 April 4, 2008 – 1:04 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.
Guido van Nispen, managing director of the Veronica Holding, moderated the third round and as you might know, he’s pretty good at it. Do you know the Las Vegas effect? It means that you can’t tell whether it’s day or night. Well, that’s what happens if Van Nispen puts up a show.
Bemba
The guys from Bemba want to make social bookmarking easy for the larger audience. I know the guys pretty well and have interviewed them when they launched open beta version of Bemba. CEO Arne Peters: “People like to share websites and videos with their friends, but it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle. And while funsurfing the web is gaining popularity, people find it difficult discover entertaining new content. Bemba provides the easiest way to share web content with friends, on any social network or (micro)blog. This way we make the web more fun.” They’ve already integrated automatic updates with Twitter and social network Hyves and announced today that they will launch a Facebook app next week.
Backbase
Backbase is an Ajax company that wants to transform the browser in a rich user experience by offering Ajax frameworks. They started off the presentation by checking out how tech-savvy the audience of the Next Web conference is by asking questions like: “Who has used WordPerfect and DOS?”. Turned out that a real techy crowd gathered here since almost everybody passed the geek test. That came in handy for this pitch, since it was pretty technical. They’re doing a good job though, as they’ve sold 3 million copies in 80+ countries.
andUNITE
The German guys from andUNITE have a really good idea: they want to match people by their search terms. Co-founder Bernd Storm van‘s Gravesande told The Next Web Blog: “Christian Schmidkonz and me were both frustrated with the boring and lonely process of web search. We thought that it would be always more useful to be able to ask someone who knows something about a problem or question instead of browsing though pages and pages of more or less interesting search result links. We thought that the value of a search term must be much higher than just being used for retrieving links from a database.” Of course this arouses some doubts about privacy. Well, don’t worry about that, since you can also remain anonymous. But are you sure you want to hide your identity? Since the guys not only promise you interesting search results, they also stated that you might find ‘a warm body besides cold links.’
Twingly
Twingly is hot! Everybody is writing about them, Holland’s largest newspaper started using it and they’re even allowed to pitch at the Next Web! You wouldn’t tell though, since the guy whose presenting doesn’t really act excited. So what’s Twingly about? They offer spam free social blog search and want to connect mainstream media with bloggers. Good job! I really think it’s important that tech blogosphere goes mainstream in Holland and other parts of Europe. With their multilingual support and the success with which they seem to reach the large newspapers they could well represent the next generation in blog search. Give the beta version a try by using the code thenextweb.
Ubervu
So are you on ten thousand services as well? Ubervu now offers you a way to manage all the content you create. The founder said they’re a bit like Dataportability since they let platforms connect by using their APIs. They’ve deliberately chosen the provocative part in their name - ‘Uber’. I don’t know if that’s a smart move. It worked for Joy Division, but they were a punk band. Ubervu is a service that aims at a larger crowd, and the mainstream public doesn’t like controversies.
ConfNetwork
Hey! This is our own start-up! My partners at The Next Web co-developed this service with 80beans. Confnetwork is here to help you with networking on conferences - hard to guess, right? - since that is the most important of a conference. 70 percent of The Next Web visitors signed up with service and I’ve received tons of messages through the network. So I guess people like it. Read a post by Patrick about Confnetwork here.
Written on April 4, 2008 – 10:42 am
David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom
Written on April 3, 2008 – 4:59 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Nova Spivack is a web visionary, entrepreneur and the founder of semantic web application Twine. It is a service that aims to “tie it all together” in order to make sense of the web. The semantic web is a popular buzz word used for giving meaning to the web. Moderator Erick Schonfeld is not alone in wishing there was a better word for making the web meaningful for computers than semantic web, or web 3.0.
Nova Spivack presents the audience with two options: an in depth understanding of the semantic web and/or a Twine tutorial. The general preference is a general overview of what the semantic web is and why it is useful.
The social graph concerns itself with about connecting people while the semantic web is about connecting things. Not just connecting things but connecting everything. This makes the social graph just a small piece of the semantic web which revolves around connecting more kinds of things together. The connections will improve search and advertising.
After the Web 2.0 hype we are currently entering the Web 3.0 decade where the connections between people and information are evolving. This is not simply about coining a new number but it is a fundamental upgrade to the infrastructure of the web with a focus on the backend. In the fourth phase of the web we have smarter interfaces that provide smarter user experience based on a richer dataset.
Semantic search not only understands the meaning of items but also the connections between them. Semantic search aims to get past the barrier of keyword search which has reached its current limit. Because it is not getting any better we need to move on to semantic technologies.
The semantic web is not so much about “semantics” as it is set of open standards defined at W3C. The semantic web approach builds on open standard meta data which is in line with previous presentations that supported the open data approach. The idea is that everyone profits from everyone’s metadata. The semantic web is a compromise in making the data smarter and the software smarter. It is the best of both worlds.
Spivack presents the semantic web as a higher resolution web because every piece of data contains more information. Not only are there links between data, the type of link is also defined, giving more meaning to the link. The web is a database.
The general dream of the semantic web is to have all human knowledge in a machine-readable fashion. The semantic web does not try to replace humans but have machines do the “dumb” things we spend too much of our time on. We should help the machines do a better job with the stupid things so we can use our time for intelligent things. In order to do so we need to move the “intelligence out of applications, into the data” by framing the semantic web as an open database layer for the web. This also provides us with a better name for the semantic web: the data web.
The growth of the semantic web lies in the current implementation and in the future. Twine is a starting point in the mainstream understanding and adoption of the semantic web. Spivack’s guess is that the semantic web will become mainstream around 2010 and with implementations by major companies such as Google and Microsoft (Adobe and Yahoo already use several semantic web standards.)
The key point lies in making data open and the semantic web provides open standards. This is where the semantic web meets current initiatives such as DataPortability.org which will be presenting tomorrow. it isn’t easy a startup contribute to a semantic web because the tools are not there yet but there are already some open standards such as FOAF (friend of a friend) and an upcoming Twine API will also make it easier. Nova Spivack continues the general trend of the open standards promotion here at the Next Web.
Questions
Schonfeld: Will the semantic web enable new business models?
Spivack: The semantic web does not introduce new business models but it will make current models better. The same opportunities will exist but they will be more optimized and more open and provide better value for users. On top of that it will open up the playfield for new players in each of the categories such as search and advertising.
Schonfeld: Iis there anything inherently in the semantic web to open up standards?
Spivack: The semantic web makes your data more portable and more able to leave a service and will focus more on value creation. Open standards are the foundation of a less evil web.
UPDATE: Enjoy Nova Spivack’s slides on Making Sense of the Semantic Web:
Written on April 3, 2008 – 4:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Next Web is about the future of the web, so it is obvious that startups play a significant role during the Conference. 24 startups will do a 5 minute presentation on main stage. During breaks all attendees and press can visit the startups at their booth in the Company Arena (same area as where the coffee and lunch is). This way startups can present themselves in the best way and get the most traction out of the conference.
Barend van den Brande from Big Bang Ventures moderated the second round. These start-ups got a chance to pitch:
Netlog
One of the fastest growing European social networks. I’ve written some stories about them, my favorite one is about their Turkish adventure. The guys from Netlog said they’re doing ‘pretty well’. Talking about understatements. They have more than 30 million users, 4 billion page views, 15 languages and 20 nationalities. Moreover, they’ve been awarded several times - the Red Herring European 100 for example. In the near future they’ll work on hypertargeted advertising, cross language support, open social integration, group pages and social entertainment.
Webnode
Webnode is an easy tool for creating complex websites. Just like fav.or.it they’re focusing on the ‘normal people’. Like the founder himself said: “Of course you guys can create a web site, but what about your mother?”. Well, mothers all over the world will now be able to create a web site with the easy drag and drop technology of Webnode. It’s also easy to integrate widgets from Google, Paypal, and many others. This start-up might be THE new way for people to express themselves, since you have more freedom than on networks like Myspace and Netlog.
Lookery
Lookery wants to be the answer for all the monetization questions. It’s an ad network for social networks and provides demographic marketing services. They’re working to fix the the basic economic problem that social networks face: great user profiling but unpredictable ad inventory. It helps that the founder is the very successful and experienced Internet entrepreneur Scott Rafer. I could tell a bit more here, but I prefer to refer by an article written by a guy who sits 10 meters away from me: mr. Mike Butcher from TechCrunch.
Zilok
Did you know that the average drill is only used for 12 minutes during its lifetime? Well, the guys from Zilok sure did since they’ve created a business around it. According to them, renting is expected to become a major way of consumption. So they offer a way to rent anything in his neighborhood in a few minutes. Revolutionary! The Next eBay! But what about trust? Zilok has thought about that as well! When closing a renting deal, Zilok offers an auto-generated contract, id card verification and an insurance system. After reading all this, you won’t be surprised to hear that Zilok won the Plugg European start-up rally.
Radionomy
Yves Baudechon started his presentation by stating that his company might revolutionize radio like YouTube revolutionized video. You can’t say he’s insecure. His plans sound good though, not necessarily revolutionary, but good enough to get me a excited bit. Radionomy makes it possible to set up a personal radio station for free. They offer a vast amount of jingles and other radio-related stuff in other to create a ‘real media’ experience. So Radionomy wants to be more than just a service that allows you to share music tracks. Yet who will listen to the shows? I mean, nobody is waiting for another thousand amateur radio shows. And although 33 million Americans listen to webradio every week and Radionomy has a strong sense of a community, I doubt whether radio makers might find a crowd that is large enough to satisfy them.
Wakoopa
So when you were searching for software in the early days, you had to go to a store. And you know the deal about stores, they suck and their personnel is generally disinterested and rude (at least in Holland they are). But now there’s Wakoopa. They just ask their users one question: “What do you use?”. As TechCrunch said, they’re sort of the Last.fm for desktop applications. So far, they’ve tracked 150 million hours of software usage, collected details from 100,000 programs and have 25,000 users. I like their ambitions, as they want to track web applications and give the users recommendations. If you want to know more about these guys, read the interview I had with co-founder Robert Gaal (Who, by the way, is an office pal).
Written on April 3, 2008 – 3:38 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Leah Culver is a co-founder and lead developer of Pownce, a social messaging application that combines micro-blogging and social networking. She is notable for her laser-etched MacBook Pro with Web2.0 company logos. By selling advertisement space on top of her laptop she was able to afford to replace her ancient Mac with a shiny new MacBook. Unfortunately Leah did not bring her MacBook on stage as the Next Web uses its own set-up.
Leah Culver planned to talk about OAth but a short survey in Amsterdam learned that it might not be a topic the Next Web audience is interested in. Instead, she talked about starting a startup in five steps. This general focus did not provide the audience with exciting news about Pownce or any well-preserved secrets for startup companies but Culver did give us an interesting view of the coming into existence of Pownce.
Step 1: Idea
Pownce has often been compared to Twitter but Pownce has different functionalities than Twitter. Aside from sending short messages Pownce focuses on file sharing. Pownce is a communication platform and file sharing system build on Adobe Air. Founders and friends Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen wanted to build a communication channel where they could easily send files because “e-mail is failing us and IM sucks.”
Pownce is centered around sending “stuff” meaning music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. In contrast to social networking sites that focus on users Pownce focuses on content. At this point Culver encourages the whole audience check out Pownce and sign up even if that means taking down the somewhat unstable wifi here at the conference.
Step 2: Build
Leah presents us with the tool that every startup wishes for, the magical unicorn that can just build things for you.
If you are short on magical unicorns you can build your idea yourself or get a friend to do it. An important step in translating your idea to an actual site is choosing a technology. Leah herself is a Python developer you should pick a technology that you either enjoy or are good at or your developer is interested in. Pownce is build on Django simply because it is an “awesome” technology.
Step 3: Community
Get your friends to use your service and provide them with free t-shirts to promote it.
Step 4: Feedback
Get feedback from your friends and testing community and respond to feedback. A part of the feedback Pownce received while developing is the request to support embedded content. Culver just spend a week adding for more sites to embed content. If Pownce does not support your platform, send Leah Culver a message and they may incorporate it.
Step 5: Make developer friends
Culver is friends with developers from Twitter and Jaiku. While the three companies are often considered to be competitors they are also friends who share code.
So where do you find developer friends? Barcamps are a great place to meet new people and the developer community.
Questions:
Erick Schonfeld: Is the current application what you originally conceived, or is it different and why?
Leah Culver: Developing often feels like you are doing something that has already been done before. While working on friending feature of Pownce I wondered how many people have done this before? After launching Pownce the major changes were made into the embedding of photos and videos and releasing an API (which they actually forgot until people started asking for it.)
Erick Schonfeld: Why is Pownce better?
Leah Culver: Better than what? Compared to email?
Erick Schonfeld: There are a dozen ways to send files, what distinguishes Pownce from the rest?
Leah Culver: We encourage to have the conversations around files too. We built a better communication tool for sending stuff because we have plenty of sites where we dump our stuff but where do we share?
Patrick de Laive: Why should we move to San Franscisco as the Walhalla of startups?
Leah Culver: I mainly moved to San Fransisco for the weather but the early adapter sphere and barcamps add to a good networking sphere.
Gabe McIntyre: How the heck did you come up with Pownce?
Leah Culver: Kevin was in charge of naming and he came up with the name just two weeks before the launch. It was one of our four options that was still available as a domain name.
Written on April 3, 2008 – 1:33 pm
Anne Helmond, hard bloggin' scientist
Khris Loux is CEO and co-founder of JS-Kit, a start-up company that provides widgets to easily add interactivity to your site:
Our simple, modular and fully customizable web-services, also known as “widgets”, are fast becoming the building blocks of rich, interactive online experiences for leading-edge web sites. These solutions are self-service, elegant, powerful, and easily deployed by HTML neophytes, experts and everyone in between.
Widgets are often referred to as the “bling bling” of Web 2.0 but JS-Kit takes the next step in widget development by providing customizable services which complement and build on each other. Loux’s talk titled “Web 3.0 or Web 3D?, The Decentralization, Disaggregation and Democratization of the Web” deals with the new dimension that widgets add to the web.
JS-kit provides simple lightweight web applications, widgets, that add rich interactive features to any site or blog. This is done by simply copying and pasting a piece of code in order to experience an Amazon class service. By lowering the technical and financial bar they allow smaller companies to compete with major services. JS-Kit addresses the long tail of business so a startup does not need to spend precious money on programmers to add customer interactivity to their site. In fact, their services are so light-weight that even big companies such as Yahoo use them on some parts of their site. Yahoo developers said they chose to use the JS-Kit widgets because they are so easy to use.
The next phase on the web
If Web 1.0 was about publishers teaching the truth and Web 2.0 revolved around bloggers balancing out the web then Web 3.0 is about publishers joining the conversation and consumers becoming part of the business. The structure of the web is changing and Web 3.0 concerns itself with connecting cross-points. Loux compares the evolution of the web with the human brain which is amazingly good at connecting distributed information.
Loux presents a somewhat utopian vision where search is replaced with a process where “everything that you needed would be right there.” SEO is a treadmill because we are all playing the same game and everyone is getting better at it. We need to skip SEO and advertising and instead take the true value of the product and spread it out. Widgets allow you to spread information out and bind relevant information.
Trust
Companies need to bridge the credibility gap by making the potential buyer be aware of the status of the transaction before it is actually made. Widgets allow customers to rate products or even rate the company. Where would you rather buy your products? With a company which has been rated reliable or with a company whose status is unknown? By making the whole process is more transparent both companies and buyers win. Trust, user ratings, transparency and user interaction are important factors in the direction the web is currently taking.
Open standards
Ownership is also an important issue on the distributed web as you should have a right to you own content. Social networks trap your content in their sites and you do not get paid for it. The value of their site is their idea filled with your content but where is the download button, where is the “I want to leave now and take all my stuff” button? Loux notes that it is hard to get the legal community involved in these questions. In the long term we need a Creative Commons style licensing to have a balanced relationship with these sites. In order to prevent stifled innovation we need open standards.
As a consumer we should demand OpenID access and be able to take our data out. Loux states that we should challenge the big companies and blog about open standards. Especially start-ups should embrace open standards because they are in the long tail of business. According to Loux startups can change the currently closed social network environment by adopting open standards. Startups are the new generation based on open standards. Startups can avoid the closed business cycle by taking up the power and empower the community.
Startups in the long tail hold the power to embrace open standards and challenge the big companies.
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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. (
