Next in my series
on top Web apps in international markets is Russia. To remind you of the previous
countries profiled: Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea and United Kingdom.
Other country profiles coming soon include Spain, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand (if I
can rustle up enough web apps from the NZ2.0 mailing list!), Latvia, China (I still need
more contacts for this) and Ireland (also needs more data). Do contact me if you can give me information about
web 2.0 in your country.
My thanks to Alexander Dodonov and Anton Antich for all the information about Russian web apps.
Alexander says that Web 2.0 became popular in Russia only recently and there hasn't been much development so far - many projects are in alpha and their business model is not clear (hmmm, doesn't sound that different to the Valley!). Russian users use foreign web 2.0 services a lot, such as gmail.com, netvibes, del.icio.us. And livejournal.com is the most popular blog service for Russians - there are thousands of Russian communites on LJ.
Anton too says that web2.0 is at its infancy in Russia and that a lot of web apps are inspired by their western counterparts. He said there are 2 key things for a project to be successful in Russia:
1) It has to be fully localized.
2) It has to work with local payment systems, which are very different than in the US or UK - "that's something many of the english language startups don't get and that's why they are not going to be successful here, unless they change". Anton thinks this leaves a lot of proven and empty niches in Russia.
Last night I published the first part of my interview with two senior Sun Microsystems engineers, Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview was to celebrate the 15th birthday of the Web this week.
Several commenters on the Slashdot thread about my post said they'd prefer to get the whole context, rather than just my write-up of it. So here now is the full interview as a podcast [37 minutes, 17MB]. The audio quality is not great at the start (due to a bad telephone connection), but it gets better after a couple of minutes. Note that this is instead of me doing a separate write-up of Part 2.
Some of the subjects discussed in the full interview podcast are:
Some key quotes not featured in Part 1:
Hope you enjoy the podcast. I plan to interview more Web industry luminaries over the next few months.
To
celebrate the 15th
anniversary of the World Wide Web, today I interviewed two distinguished people from
Sun Microsystems - Tim Bray (Director of
Web Technologies) and Radia
Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). Sun of course was one of the key Web companies from
the 90's and is still going strong today, under the leadership of Jonathan Schwartz. I discussed with Tim and
Radia the past 15 years of the Web and also looked ahead to its future. We also talked about things like P2P and its place on the Web (see below).
UPDATE: The full interview is now available as a podcast.
Both have been in the computing business a long time and have had very influential careers. Tim Bray co-invented XML 1.0 and was Tim Berners-Lee's appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004 - amongst other accomplishments. Radia Perlman, who has a PhD from MIT in computer science, specializes in network and security protocols. In 1983 (according to a Sun timeline of the Web) she invented the spanning tree algorithm and is also sometimes referred to as the "Mother of the Internet". So these are two incredibly smart Web technologists - and to be honest I was a bit nervous about speaking to them! Note that this interview will be published across 2 posts.
I started out by asking when Tim and Radia first got interested in the Web - was there an 'aha' moment?
Tim said
that in the early 90's he was working for a company called Open Text Systems, which was
at that point a vendor of full-text search software. He had noticed the Web around that
time and played around with early browsers. Then in early '94 he was at a conference and
one of the speakers said that search was going to be a big application on the Web. "It
was so painfully obvious," Tim said, "that this was a good combination to work on - that
I was hooked. So I've basically been earning my living worrying about the Web and working
with the Web ever since then."
For Radia it was more a gradual process over the years. She mentioned using email and transferring files across networks in the pre-Web days - "you could do the equivalent of Instant Messenger back then".
Written by Steve O'Hear and edited by Richard MacManus. This is a two-part series in which Steve will explore how Web technologies are being used in education. In Part 2 he will profile Elgg, social network software for education, and interview its founders.
Much has
been written on Read/WriteWeb (and elsewhere) about
the effect that web technologies are having on commerce, media, and business in general.
But outside of the 'edublogosphere', there's been little coverage of the impact it is
having on education. Teachers are starting to explore the potential of blogs,
media-sharing services and other social software - which, although not designed
specifically for e-learning, can be used to empower students and create exciting new
learning opportunities.
As I wrote in The Guardian last year:
"Like the web itself, the early promise of e-learning - that of empowerment - has not been fully realized. The experience of e-learning for many has been no more than a hand-out published online, coupled with a simple multiple-choice quiz. Hardly inspiring, let alone empowering. But by using these new web services, e-learning has the potential to become far more personal, social and flexible."
The traditional approach to e-learning has been to employ the use of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), software that is often cumbersome and expensive - and which tends to be structured around courses, timetables, and testing. That is an approach that is too often driven by the needs of the institution rather than the individual learner. In contrast, e-learning 2.0 (as coined by Stephen Downes) takes a 'small pieces, loosely joined' approach that combines the use of discrete but complementary tools and web services - such as blogs, wikis, and other social software - to support the creation of ad-hoc learning communities.
While
I've been busy profiling
international "web 2.0" startups and products, Techcrunch has put together a video
documentary that explores web 2.0 in Silicon Valley. This seems to be aimed at
mainstream business people, telling them what this web 2.0 thing is all about - and
positioning the Techcrunch brand at the center of it. Definitely a good strategy (as
always) from Mike.
It is funny however to see Mike back on the web 2.0 bandwagon, after both he and I swore off the term earlier this year. Mike says web 2.0 is about removing friction from web apps and his interview subjects all chime in with their varying interpretations. One of them hit the nail on the head when he said that web 2.0 is a marketing term. That is how I think of it these days too - it's a catch-all phrase for the current era of the Web.
But really, all the definitions are valid - and indeed the way the video is edited plays on this (lots of quick cuts from definition to definition, which only goes to show how amorphous - but exciting - this web 2.0 thingy is). It's kind of like if Jon Stewart of The Daily Show profiled Web 2.0, this is the kind of video he'd make. By which I mean there's a nice line of self-referential humor going on in the video. So that's a compliment :-)
Of course this reinvigoration of the web 2.0 term is only going to rile up the snark blogs, but that goes with the territory. I learned that the hard way last year. I think that'll be water off a duck's back for Mike - he seems to deal with it much better than me.
Mike brings up an interesting topic during the video, Ajax vs Flash. As he said, both enable a great user experience. I see (via Slashdot) that Adobe is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Flash - News.com has an article looking at the company's plans for the future of Flash. This goes to show how many varying - in some ways contrasting - technologies are caught up in the web 20 hype. One of the mistakes all of us made last year when everyone tried to define Web 2.0, is that it was in many ways definition by exclusion - Ajax is web20 and Flash is not, etc. Obviously that's a silly way of thinking of it, so I'm pleased that Flash and similar desktop technologies are now in the hype mix.
Anyway, these days my own blog Read/WriteWeb is focused on Next Generation Web technologies - which goes way beyond web 2.0 ;-)
The Animas Weblog has written a couple of interesting posts in response to Ebrahim Ezzy's Search 2.0 posts, featured on Read/WriteWeb recently (part 1 and part 2). In the first post, Animas frames his argument as a David vs Goliath struggle (the search 2.0 startups being, of course, David).
However in the Gospel according to Animas, sadly David gets smashed by Goliath:
"With few exceptions, I’m not convinced that any of the Search 2.0 companies have any technology that creates a meaningful barrier to competition from traditional engines."
In the follow-up post, Animas looks at the search 2.0 things that Google is doing "under the hood". Animas first argues that "Google’s ability to improve their search relevance in response to personalized usage data is pretty staggering." He/she (the name of the Animas blogger is unknown) then lists out the ways in which Google could already be improving their search relevance:
Also mentioned is Google’s Personalized Search. Animas notes, however, that social networking is something Google needs to improve (a point also made recently in a CNET article entitled Google's antisocial downside).
Animas' conclusion is that "Google is one step away from doing all of the things that the Search 2.0 companies in Ezzy’s writeup can do."
But actually, this was pretty much Ebrahim's conclusion too. At the end of Part 2 of Ebrahim's article was this statement:
"While the intelligence required to conduct social search still resides in people, the key to harnessing it lies in the network. TSEs have greater opportunities for traction, with their substantial user bases - a key ingredient of any social network."
Personally where I diverge from the Animas view is that I think the small search 2.0 startups have every chance of discovering something that Google (or Yahoo or MSN or Ask) haven't yet discovered. Just because Google has the technology and resources to improve their search relevance, doesn't necessarily mean they will.
Also, how do we know that what Google has under the hood is the equal of what one or two of the new generation of search 2.0 companies have under their hoods?
I asked Ebrahim what he thought about the Animas posts. His reply was that we've yet to see the PERFECT search 2.0 application. Ebrahim expects to see that by the end of the year. Of course, I imagine he's talking about his own search 2.0 startup Qube!
But the point is: don't count out David just yet ;-)
Engadget is providing superb
coverage of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference, currently in progress in San
Francisco. I'll zero in on the bit that interested me the most - one of my hobby horses,
widgets (mini web apps).
At the conference Apple said there are currently 2500 widgets in Dashboard. They announced two enhancements to that today.
Firstly Dashcode, which is a visual editor for HTML and CSS - enabling you to modify templates to produce widgets ("we have templates for RSS, podcasts, images, whatever you're looking for.").
The second new feature is Web Clip (same name as Google's Gmail RSS feature). Apple's Web Clip enables you to "turn any part of a Web page into a Widget".
The summary: "With Dashcode, we have a way for developers to more easily create widgets and with Web Clip, we can turn any piece of any Web page into a Widget."
Sounds excellent and shows once again that Apple is right on top of the user experience, as both of these features make it easy to create relatively complex mini web apps for your desktop. Om Malik thinks the web-connected widgets (and what isn't web connected these days!) will be "a bandwidth-using application", but the reality is that's where widgets are headed. Both desktop and Web - and in the near future connected to a whole host of Internet devices too. e.g. TV, music players, even the proverbial future fridge. I can't wait till that sort of widget connectivity becomes more common.
Photo via Engadget
The latest Technorati State of the Blogosphere report shows that 39% of all blog postings are in english. Japanese is the second-most popular language, at 31% and China third with 12%. Here's Technorati's pie graph for June '06:
Dave Sifry notes that there are some significant underreporting issues, especially in Korean and in French. For example the largest Korean blog and hompy services (like Cyworld or Planet Weblog) are not being indexed by Technorati. I'm also wondering why Chinese language is only 12%, when it was at 25% in Nov 05 according to Technorati. There's another note in a previous report that many Japanese blog posts may be coming from mobile phones, hence their high percentage.
In general there could be any number of holes in Technorati's analysis, but it's the best stats we've got so far on international blogging.
The one trend I'm sure of is that english is just one part of the blogosphere - and of web apps and sites in general. This is why I'm enjoying doing my series on International Web 2.0 markets, as it gives us some context on what is happening in the real world. Silicon Valley is where the fun action is at, but there's a whole world happening outside of it!
Continuing
my series on international Web apps, today I'll be covering the top products in the
United Kingdom market. In case you missed it, over the past week or so I've reviewed Germany, Holland, Poland and Korea. This week
I've got more great non-Silicon Valley startups for you!
The information for today's post about the UK market is courtesy of Colin Donald of new media consultancy Futurescape. They run a wiki called JigsawUK, which tracks and supports UK-based startups.
I asked Colin to tell me about the UK market. He said firstly that the UK has a "unique Internet environment" and that cloning Silicon Valley apps is more difficult in the UK:
"It’s more challenging to start up a pure Web 2.0 application in the face of direct US competition, without the language barrier that enables someone in Poland to clone US apps and sites."
Colin reckons this makes UK entrepreneurs look for radical and disruptive solutions. He said that sites/apps that are heavily localised or aim for a niche demographic, are more defensible against US incomers (applies to both B2C and B2B).
He noted that talent is hard to come by for UK 2.0 startups - with competition from "well-paid IT jobs in The City", online marketing, Yahoo and Google UK, and even working for Silicon Valley.
The BBC
is also a looming presence in the British market, with its large public funding and even bigger plans (n.b.
some prominent ex-BBC techies have been sniping
about this recently). On the other hand, a lot of Web action has been by major media
companies - especially newspapers pre-empting 2.0 threats to their online readership
(e.g. Guardian).
In terms of startup activity, Colin said that British entrepreneurs with experience from the last bubble "have only got involved in 2.0 start-ups in the last 12 months" - and many of those are just about to launch. As for young British 2.0 entrepreneurs, Peter Cooper and Peter Nixey are good examples (click the links for their stories).
Also there are interesting crossovers in the UK between Internet and mobile. To track this trend, check out Londoner Ajit Jaokar's blog on mobile 2.0.
The top UK web apps are after the jump...
In my search
for innovative web and Internet applications, I noted the buzz around new P2P company Skyrider at the end of last week. While it's hard to
say whether Skyrider is truly innovative, seeing as they don't actually have a product on
the market yet (it's due "in the fall"), they are making interesting noises about
commercializing P2P.
In particular Skyrider states in its press release that "P2P has the potential to be the dominant network architecture of this century" - which of course Skyrider is poised to take advantage of. This is echoed by Tim O'Reilly on his blog, in which he likens Skyrider's potential to that of Google:
"Just as Google crystallized a new vision of how to monetize the web, leading to the explosion of innovation that we now call Web 2.0, Skyrider is building technologies that could bring a rich new commercial ecosystem to P2P."
Those are big claims, especially as the dominant network architecture currently is the client-server model of the Web (i.e. one to many). P2P is about many-to-many distribution and has so far been most useful for distributing music and other large multimedia files. And when it comes to video and audio, I don't think many would argue that P2P is more efficient than a client-server model - as long as it's managed well.
Perhaps Skyrider will be the platform to bring P2P to the fore again, but there are others in the game too - like Red Swoosh (TechCrunch review here), AllPeers (the Firefox plug-in), Enfra (a Korean app founded by Hyung Yong Jun, the guy behind Cyworld - hat-tip Danny for the info), open source Dijjer, and let's not forget the BitTorrent network.
Opera has also integrated BitTorrent into its browser and there are rumors it'll be integrated into Apple's new Leopard OS too (hat-tip Steve O'Hear).
Note that there is a difference between a P2P network (like BitTorrent) and a P2P client (like KaZaA). I can't claim to fully understand this market, but Zeropaid.com has more info if you're interested:
"P2P clients like Grokster, KaZaA, Linewire, Morpheus and eDonkey do not make a P2P network; they only allow the user to connect to an existing network by using common protocols. There are a large number of P2P networks out there: Gnutella, Gnutella 2, Ares, FastTrack, eDonkey2000, BitTorrent and even Freenet. Clients are applications used to connect to those networks. [...]"
An example of a
P2P success story in the '2.0' era of the Web is Skype
(Tim referenced them in his post). Developed by the same people who created KaZaA, the music-sharing P2P network that recently went
'legit', Skype calls itself "the first P2P telephony network". They claim P2P has
enabled them to raise call completion rates and call quality "to levels exceeding that of
POTS (“Plain Old Telephony System”)".
I have no doubt that P2P networks will be vitally important in our increasingly networked world of media. Early P2P pioneers like Napster and KaZaA have now 'gone clean', after years of overbearing pressure from the music industry. Likewise the movie and tv industry has been keeping a close eye on video-sharing websites. But beyond all that fear and loathing by media companies, there is a largely untapped market for media search and distribution via the Internet.
So are we at a turning point on the Web, where P2P comes into serious play again? I think we are and this will be one area of innovation to look out for. Contact me if you know of a current innovative P2P technology doing big things on the Web.
