As Dilbert knows, everything is a platform today. The trouble is, some very smart people are trying to figure out the definition of what makes a platform. Although a lot of the discussion has been technical, perhaps the best definition of a successful platform is that it makes real money for their ‚Äúcommunity‚Ä?.
According to a 2005 survey, close to sixty percent of Americans reported that they dreamed of starting their own business - both to increase their income and their independence. That is an awful lot of people that have no ambition to build the new, new thing; but who do want to put food on the table without having to work for “da man”. Call it a lifestyle business or a “Mom & Pop”, the difference is only about lifestage.
This is a critical social and economic issue today. Family farms still exist, but in the world of agribusiness this is definitely a hardscrabble life. Wall Mart is steamrolling all over the traditional Mom & Pop retail shop. This leaves a huge hunger for Franchises, but many have been exposed as rather cynical exploitation - with lots of money upfront and all the cream to the franchise owner. We need more real money-making opportunities for the small scale entrepreneur and self-employed free agent, particularly in smaller towns and rural communities.
MatchMine, a Massachusetts company building a cross-platform media recommendation engine, announced this morning that they have received a $10 million investment from The Kraft Group. The company released an early product called MyMovieMatch in July, but in the bizarre DEMO dance of "now you see us now you don't," the product has gone back under wraps before it launches next week. Hopefully there will be more disclosed than there has been so far. You can sign up for a beta account now on the company's site. See RIA expert Ryan Stewart's review of the original product for background from this summer.
According to coverage today in Boston.com (via PaidContent), MatchMine starts by asking for demographic information about a user and asking us to rate a variety of sample media. A desktop application the company calls a "gumball machine", probably built in Adobe's AIR if MyMovieMatch is any indication, then lets users flip through recommended media items and learns from their ratings of each. The company aims to let users port their media preference profiles, called their MatchKeys, to a variety of sites around the web.
On the latest edition of our podcast show, Read/WriteTalk, Sean Ammirati sat down with Salim Ismail, the head of Yahoo’s Brickhouse. In this role, Salim is exposed to hundreds of proposals from Yahoo employees each month for products to be developed. One of the most interesting trends these days is "e-commerce 2.0" and Sean asked Salim: "what’s Yahoo’ s role in eCommerce 2.0?" Salim responded:
"If you look at the walled garden of content today, whether its eBay or Monster.com or Overture, etc. They basically create and get a lot of value from the ownership of the data. As we get to the UGC (user-generated content) world where users own their own data, what happens to a Monster.com if anybody can publish a job announcement off the website? It then gets syndicated and anybody can aggregate that. The value that they believe in ownership of the data will disappear and where you will get value as a service to layer on top of them.
Massively multiplayer online games are big business. Blizzard's World of Warcraft, for example, has over 6 million users paying up to $15/month to log into the game (though an oversimplification, it is probably safe to assume that they're pulling down in the tens of millions of dollars per month from subscription fees). But running a successful online game is not an easy and can be a very costly endeavor. Scaling a system to support that many users can require a grid of hundreds or thousands of machines, a very fat pipe, and expertise in managing large, distributed systems.
Web application providers are often faced with a similar problem: how to scale their app when it gets popular. In September of last year, Richard MacManus reviewed a new company called 3Tera - whose AppLogic utility computing suite helps web app and software-as-a-service providers to scale their applications. 3Tera's powerful management solution makes it easy for developers to build, deploy, and monitor virtual server farms across their grid of thousands of commodity servers.
Earlier this week we wrote about the classic approach to the semantic web and the difficulties with that approach. While the original vision of the layer
on top of the current web, which annotates information in a way that is "understandable" by computers, is compelling; there are technical, scientific and business issues that have been difficult to address.
One of the technical difficulties that we outlined was the bottom-up nature of the classic semantic web approach. Specifically, each web site needs to annotate information in RDF, OWL, etc. in order for computers to be able to "understand" it.
As things stand today, there is little reason for web site owners to do that. The tools that would leverage the annotated information do not exist and there has not been any clearly articulated business and consumer value. Which means that there is no incentive for the sites to invest money into being compatible with the semantic web of the future.
Blog software vendor Six Apart this afternoon posted a long rumination, with video, on the "social graph" and how vendors should relate to it. The social graph is the network of your networks, all your accounts and friends across multiple online social networks and other sites you participate on.
The company is clearly full of great ideas that unfortunately get a maddeningly geeky explanation today on the Six Apart blog. There's an experimental product alluded to as well, but that's not being released right now.
The whole manifesto-lengthed blog post is worth a read, but he best part is the statement of the following principles.
That's really nice to read from a software vendor. I wish decision makers at Google said things like that. Someday the social graph and all of our Attention Data are going to be brought together and those are some great statements to serve as a policy foundation.
This week Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! for a staggering $350M. It seems like only yesterday that Zimbra was the buzz of the 2005 Web Conference. But in two years, Zimbra has grown from a small 'cool features' startup to a company worth $350M. But why did Yahoo buy a Web Office collaboration suite? Last time I checked, Yahoo was a consumer-focused Internet company - not an enterprise or business one. How can Zimbra be used by Yahoo's target audience, or integrated within Yahoo's current product line-up? This post tries to answer those questions.
A little history about Zimbra - it is an email and collaboration suite that uses Ajax and mashups on the front-end to achieve a slick new form of collaborative email and calendering. When it was unveiled in October 2005, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite was described as an "open source messaging server and client " and it aimed to "fundamentally change the way people interact with e-mail". Some people said it was an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. In 2005 they were big dreams - and it certainly captured the imagination of the Web 2.0 Conference attendees and bloggers.
Online humor site CollegeHumor has signed with one of the leading talent agencies in Hollywood, the United Talent Agency. UTA is known in the entertainment industry as one of the largest talent reps, with major stars like Harrison Ford, Ben Stiller, Johnny Depp, and the Olsen Twins on their client list.
UTA also has a reputation of striking out onto the Internet to find talent and represent "lonelygirl15" Jessica Rose, one of the Internet's most well-known stars. We reported in July that UTA had teamed up with SpotRunner to create 60Frames Entertainment, an online media production company, and they run UTA Online, a division that specializes in finding talent via web video.
Google hunters ferreted out a new feature late last night called Google Shared Stuff. The project is obviously far from ready to ship - but it's too late to squabble about that now! I've got high hopes for social bookmarking in general but this particular project may not be worth your time to check out just yet. To save you the time I've kicked the tires and offer below some of the best and worst things about Google Shared Items so far. In the end I've got some thoughts about what Google could do with this service to make it the best social bookmarking service available.
There are a number of things that Google has done well already. It's hard not to compare this product to Del.icio.us in particular, the Yahoo! acquired product that most people would agree currently dominates the social bookmarking world.
Watch out Tumblr, here comes Soup. Soup is an easy to use tumble blogging application that includes two killer features: social networking (kinda) and outside activity streams. It's sort of a cross between Tumblr, Pownce, and a social activity aggregator. [Ed: I had to look up "tumble blogging". Wikipedia defines a "tumblelog" as "a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging." So now I know...]
At its core, Soup is a microblogging app, and a pretty easy to use one. Their tumble blog set up supports text, link, quote, image, and video posts. Sign up is a snap (you can actually begin posting to your tumble blog before creating an account), and like Tumblr, Soup blogs can be mapped to an outside domain.
