Schmidt starts off by announcing a presentation feature for Docs & Spreadsheets. John Battelle points out that this completes the Office suite, so he asks is it now a competitor to MS? Schmidt says no, because it doesn't have the same or all of MS Office's functionality. He says Google D&S is a collaborative, web 2.0 framework - very different to MS Office according to Schmidt. He talks about the transition to a web-based computing framework, which their product is a good example of (for R/WW readers, aka the Web Office!). John persists - nevertheless it is a competitor to MS, he says (to crowd applause). Schmidt persists with his line of not answering that question, saying that D&S will enable people to use productivity products on the web, which he says they will use for different reasons - such as sharing and collaborative features. Schmidt calls this a web 2.0 shift in thinking for productivity.
The talk shifts to DoubleClick. John says that DC was in the past seen by Google as the type of advertising (banners etc) that was oppositie to Google (CPC text links). So what's changed? Schmidt says that Google has since decided to offer a full scale set of advertising - not just text ads. So they acquired YouTube, started doing TV and radio advertising, and more. Now Google is looking to offer a single way to do all types of advertising. Since 2004, he says DC has become more targeted and offers better support tools (for publishers etc). So he says combining this with Google's technology will make "the math work" for them, in terms of the $3B price they paid for it. He finishes by saying that Google's technology does the best job of targeting, so if you marry that with DC's people and tools, that's how they came up with the $3B price tag.
Bill Tancer from Hitwise and Dafe Sifry from Technorati are on stage now, discussing data about the participatory web. The first slide from Bill shows a 668% growth in web 2.0 over the last year, based on the top participatory sites combined (in US), like Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. The next chart is similar, showing just visits to Wikipedia. It outnumbers visits to 1.0 encyclopedia website Encarta over 3400 to 1. The photo category is showing particularly big growth, in terms of web 2.0 sites over web 1.0 sites (flickr vs ofoto for example).
Next Bill looks at participators vs viewers. Some 'visits to media upload' ratios: 0.16% for YouTube, 0.2% Flickr, 4.59% Wikipedia (entry edits). Dave Sifry notes that the creation percentage - I guess I'd call it the read/write ratio! - is certainly a lot lower than the old 80/20 rule. Bill drills down into the participatory figures, which shows for Wikipedia that older users are much more likely to be participatory (35-55) whereas the younger users are the viewers. However for YouTube it is the 25-54 yr olds that upload videos - however note that Hitwise doesn't track <18. The gender breakdown shows that 76% of users are male on YouTube, but a 60/40 male/female split for wikipedia.
Bill shows stats that show that YouTube went from zero to dominant market leader in just 6 weeks! It passed Yahoo and Google video search in 3 and 6 weeks respectively. Also during the 6 week early adopter phase, there were key segments over-represented: 'money and brains', 'young digerati', and 'bohemian mix'. Bill then showed some great stats about up and coming companies Hitwise has identified. Yelp is one of those poised to gain traction, along with stumbleupon and veoh. WeeWorld, Imeem and Pixo were also mentioned.
While I've been doing the conference equivalent of a headless chicken (running about, trying to remember who I'm supposed to meet next and where), the following bits of news have come out:
Mike Arrington announced his new conference with Jason Calacanis, Techcrunch20. The format is twenty new startups from around the world will announce and demo their products over a two day period - and they don't pay for this privilege. The conference is set for September 17-18, 2007 in San Francisco. The companies will be selected by a panel of 20 experts.
Two of the best personalized start page products, Netvibes and Pageflakes, have both launched new features. Netvibes Universe lets you create a Netvibes page featuring your favorite content and widgets. This seems to be the beginning of mainstreaming the service, because already more than a hundred 'branded' universes have been created, for leading brands like CBS and popular music artists. More details here. Pageflakes has also released a lot of great new features recently, under the code name Flurry. Check out their blog for more details. R/WW will be checking out both Netvibes and Pageflakes new features in an upcoming post(s), once the Expo flurry has subsided.
So far the Web 2.0 Expo has been very focused on explaining web 2.0 concepts to developers and designers, so it's different from previous web 2.0 conferences. I briefly met someone last night from a Canadian startup, who told me that 7 of his company had made their way to expo to find out about web 2.0. He wasn't familiar with the web 2.0 world previously, so he said the Expo has been very useful and practical. This is also the sense I got from the panel I moderated yesterday, that it is a practical conference that is more focused on showing the world how web 2.0 technologies can be used. More on this trend in later posts today and tomorrow.
I'm off to the keynotes. If the Internet access is better than yesterday, then I'll report more soon.
The keynote speeches kicked off at the Expo this afternoon. Tim O'Reilly started out by describing the latest thinking about Web 2.0. Dan Farber nicely summarized it in this post, quoting O'Reilly as saying: "It's about building the global computing network and harnessing all the collective intelligence of all the people who are connected….We are talking about persistent computing in which we are becoming part of a great machine". O'Reilly's other theme was that we ain't seen nothing yet on the Web - saying "we are at the visicalc stage", in a comparison with the PC era.
This theme of a global computing network continued when Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos came on stage to talk about Amazon's latest business venture - a giant web services platform. Bezos said that S3 now has 5 billion objects stored in it. What's more, it had 920 million S3 requests on its peak day, and 16,607 requests in its peak second. Obviously we're talking about a very well scaled system here. The term Bezos used to describe it is "web-scale computing".
Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
The Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco officially kicked off yesterday, with some workshops. The first impression I got when I walked into the conference venue was how large the event is - a perception confirmed when I bumped into Anil Dash later that day, who remarked that it was the biggest Web conference he'd been to since the late nineties. The event is being held in the spacious Moscone West Center and there is no shortage of attendees to fill up the spaces.
This morning I moderated a panel called The New Hybrid Designer, with Kelly Goto, Chris Messina and Jeremy Keith (unfortunately Emily Chang was sick and couldn't make it).
From left to right: Jeremy, me, Kelly, Chris (who took the photo)
Today at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft and Adobe have gone tit for tat with product launches that directly target one another. Our previous post covered Adobe's launch of a new Internet video solution, that competes with Microsoft's Windows Media Player. And Microsoft has fired right back, unveiling Microsoft Silverlight - a re-branding of their WPF/E technology (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere). In its announcement, Microsoft describes Silverlight as a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. So basically it is Microsoft's equivalent to Adobe's Flash.
Also, as is usual when Microsoft launches a new media product these days, they have brought on board a number of high profile partners. In this case they include Akamai Technologies Inc., Brightcove Inc., Eyeblaster Inc., Limelight Networks, Major League Baseball and Netflix Inc.
Today Adobe announced the launch of the Adobe Media Player, a desktop app that enables consumers to view high quality video whether they are online or offline. It is also designed for content owners to distribute, track and monetize their video. Built on their Apollo framework, the Adobe Media Player is cross-platform and based on open standards. The Adobe Media Player leverages other Adobe tools such as the Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, Adobe Flash Media Server 2, and the Adobe Media Encoder. For the end user, the video player can be used to create media channels via RSS, as well as for video downloads and streaming. Adobe is previewing the player at the National Association of Broadcasters trade show today and it will be available in the Fall of 2007.
Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that due to recent travel and the start of the Web 2.0 Expo, this week's Wrapup is later and shorter than usual.
The big news this week came right at the very end of the week - just after 5pm PST on Friday to be exact, when Google announced it will aquire DoubleClick For $3.1 Billion. In other news, Salesforce.com announced a new Web 2.0 Enterprise product called ContentExchange.
Read/WriteWeb's Define Web 3.0 Contest got some outstanding answers - some humorous, but a number of impressive serious definitions too. Whatever you think of adding version numbers to the Web, many of the definitions we received are great pointers towards the next trends in Web technology.
In a move predicted by R/WW's Sean Ammirati and The New York Times a week or so ago, one of the big Internet companies has acquired online advertising system DoubleClick. And the buyer is none other than Web 2.0's big spender, Google! According to the press release just out:
"The acquisition will combine DoubleClick's expertise in ad management technology for media buyers and sellers with Google's leading advertising platform and publisher monetization services.
The combination of Google and DoubleClick will offer superior tools for targeting, serving and analyzing online ads of all types, significantly benefiting customers and consumers..."
This is a huge deal - because for DoubleClick, Google is paying nearly twice the amount it paid for YouTube late last year ($1.65B in that case).
The deal appears to have been hastened by DoubleClick's announcement earlier this month that it plans to launch an exchange for online advertisements. Sean analyzed this development on 4 April, noting that it may lead to more profitable monetization of online ads. As if Google isn't profitable enough already in that department! One thing's for sure, this is a blow to Microsoft - whose AdCenter product was designed as a direct competitor to Google's Adsense/AdWords. But now Google has - yet again - trumped the competition (Microsoft and Yahoo) by taking its online advertising technology into new territory.
In
observance of Friday the 13th, I've put together a 'Revenge of the Weird
Search Engines' poll. Check them out and vote for your favorite!
2) UFO Crawler
3) Ujiko
5) Tin Finger
7) Time Search
10) Quotiki
