There is a great meme circulating about how the VC industry needs to adapt to a world with massively lower barriers to entry.
Paul Graham - from YCombinator - who is leading this change more than anybody has the definitive post. Its worth a careful read. Fred Wilson, from a more traditional but still very innovative VC (Union Square Ventures) agrees with the general trend and is well positioned to play by the emerging new rules.
There is a wonderfully entertaining rant by Dave McCLure about how VCs had better get with the program or else. He hits a very serious point about standardisation of deal terms and online closing process being essential. Here is another clearly heartfelt post that would probably be echoed by a lot of entrepreneurs.
We've heard from a couple of reliable sources that social network Bebo is about to announce a developer platform very soon. Apparently it will be a "platform API". The source of these rumors is a Bebo investor, so we think it's on the mark. Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world and is above MySpace and Facebook in some parts of the world (e.g. it is number 1 in the UK).
Earlier this week we heard that MySpace will launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks. And of course the instigator of large scale social networking platforms, Facebook, announced their "open platform" in May 2007. Although it turned out to be not quite so open, the Facebook platform has been probably the year's biggest Web success story to date.
So the social network 'platform wars' will be well and truly on, once MySpace and now Bebo launch their developer platforms! Watch this space for more on the Bebo news...
Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, announced a partnership with IBM and nearly 30 other companies today to work on creating a layer of interoperability across all online virtual worlds. This layer, the plans for which are being discussed publicly for the first time at today's Virtual Worlds Expo in San Jose, would allow users to port identities and other assets from one virtual world to another.
It's a logical next step for the medium of virtual worlds and one that could cause their number and size to grow substantially. It could also lead to bitter, if sometimes humorous, conflict between users identified primarily with different sites. Nick Carr warned this morning that the move will likely lead attacks on peaceful Second Life residents by ogres from World of Warcraft.
Is the move towards interoperability a meaningful announcement and what kind of future could it lead to? I asked three industry experts for their opinion this morning.
Take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of that's white. You have 15 seconds, go. Done? Good, now take 15 seconds and write down everything that is or could be in your refrigerator that's white. Finished? Raise your hand if had better luck with the second list.
Dan Heath, who co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die with his brother Chip, started his talk at BIF-3 this afternoon by asking the audience to complete the exercise I described above. A good number (perhaps nearly half) of audience members were able to name more white things the second time around. But that's an odd outcome, said Heath, because there are more white things that exist in the universe than in your refrigerator. The constraint, however, helped focus your thinking and made the task of identifying objects easier because of the stricter perameters.
There is some controversy floating around the blogosphere about the nature of the next web.
We got a clear signal from
Tim O'Reilly that there is no need to continue the versioning fad and call it "Web 3.0," but still, people disagree about what's coming next. To me, what is
coming is not a single thing, but a web that is characterized by several major themes.
Among the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention (Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, the information in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us.
A critical piece of the next web evolution is the introduction of structured information. This concept is so basic to us as humans, that we completely overlook the fact that it is quite foreign to computers. When a person looks at a book on Amazon, she sees a book, with the author, ISBN number, publisher and the publication date. To a computer that page on Amazon is nothing more than a bunch of HTML. Increasingly, information on the web is becoming more and more structured. This process is happening via several major movements:
I'm at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, Rhode Island this morning. The BIF-3 event reminds me of the TED conference, in that it brings together great minds from across a multitude of disciplines to tell stories and have a converation about innovation. In fact, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman is here and will be speaking later today.
The BIF-3 is structured so that in between blocks of short presentations by "storytellers," conference goers can get up and mingle and have a conversation about what they just heard. The first of the day's four sessions concluded with an interesting chat between 37Signals founder and CEO Jason Fried and Wall Street Journal technology columnist and blogger Walt Mossberg.
Mossberg began by saying they weren't going to be talking about technology, but it quickly became clear that he meant they weren't going to talk about technology from a technical standpoint. Instead, Mossberg focused on what Fried knows best: what makes technology good. Anyone who has read anything from 37Signals can guess Fried's answer: simplicity.
The folks at Mozilla posted last night to a company blog about the new plans they have to make a mobile browser a first-class consideration, a core platform, when working on the forthcoming Mozilla2. The new mobile browser is probably still a year away. I sure wish we didn't have to wait too long, but hopefully it will be worth it.
MySpace is set to launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks, according to sources speaking to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. If what Arrington is reporting is true (and it almost always is) then things are really changing at the industry leading social network. By this time next year you'll be getting spam from MySpace applications and be running to shut off your account altogether. If you feel embarrassed perusing the Facebook apps directory ("yes mom, these are my peers, this is the new frontier - let's send some 'booze mail!'"), you'll feel nauseas when you see the MySpace apps directory.
It was just one year ago last month that News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told company investors that "if you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application...almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace." Chernin's statement was a hostile one, said in the context of the company blocking access to some third party widgets and shutting off outbound links that were key to viral spread of all widgets, for purported security purposes.
The company aimed instead to drive users towards its own photo, video and audio services. Those services are remarkably good compared to the 3rd party alternatives, and yet the debate raged on.
Tech bloggers, and TechCrunch in particular, kept a running tally of third party developers whose companies were shut down by threats from MySpace.
Online retail giant Amazon.com launched a newly redesigned version of its homepage today recently. The redesign mostly focuses on the top and sidebar navigation -- actual product content pages are more or less the same. Amazon said the redesign was about "shopping, searching, saving, and buying." Really, that equates to better organization and an easier time getting around their large list of product categories. The redesigned Amazon also sports a softer color palette, some new large buttons, and a few more rounded edges -- perhaps taking a cue from the so-called web 2.0 design aesthetic that has permeated the web the past couple of years.
The most noticeable difference about Amazon's navigation is the consolidation of the category tree. Gone is the "See All Product Categories" hover menu, as is the overwhelming left hand side bar "Browse" menu that displayed all of Amazon's categories (41 at my last count -- though it could be more). In their place is a new "Show All Departments" menu that opens along the left side of the page and displays Amazon's category tree broken into 11 top-level departments.
In a cross-country deal that will make big waves in the video blogging market, San Francisco's CastFire, the up and coming video publishing tool/ad network, will announce tonight a large deal to distribute and provide services for New York's high profile Next New Networks.
NNN was founded by former MTV exec Herb Scannell and animation mogul Fred Seibert (MTV's first creative director), has raised $8m in venture funding and publishes popular series JetSet and Talking Points Memo TV, among others. NNN has to date had a paltry video player and has not been able to monetize its content effectively - so it's no surprise that it's taken on another layer of services with another company. All the networks in NNN are reported to see a total of about 30 million unique visitors per month, but in the video world all metrics are in flux. For a look into NNN's vision of the future of internet TV, check out Shelly Palmer's excellent audio interview with Fred Siebert last month.
CastFire will add NNN to a roster that includes everyone from video blogging pioneers Rocketboom, to comedians Ask a Ninja, the new Boing Boing TV and a number of NFL football teams.
