Since then, Umair has become the Director of the Havas Media Lab at Harvard, and I just came across a recent presentation of his that is a must see.

http://www.daytona.se/sessions/vol2/umair

Basically, this global crisis we are witnessing is not just a financial crisis – it’s an “interaction crisis”. The principles that have been driving capitalism through the 20th century have ultimately maxed out, and Umair proposes 5 new principles that will guide the 21st century – that *must* guide 21st century capitalism lest mankind dig it’s own grave.

I’ll share these 5 principles here more for my own notes, but you should really watch the presentation – it really just skims the top of changes to come. (20th century capitalist principle → 21st century principle):

• Exploitation → Renewal
• War → Peace
• Domination → Equity
• Value → Meaning
• Command → Democracy

And the tag-lines for these principles:

“tomorrow is today”
“people, not product”
“connections, not transactions”
“creativity, not productivity”
“outcomes, not incomes”

最近話題のCode Igniterにご興味を持っている方へ、来週のオープンソースカンファレンスでCodeIgniterのセミナーが行われます。是非参加を！

CodeIgniter is a wonderfully light yet robust and easily extendable PHP framework that has helped me develop miistation.com, kirakirajin.com (now defunct), and 2kurabe.com quickly and efficiently.

CodeIgniter は軽くて、しかもセキュアーにエクステンシブルなPHPフレームワークであり、これを使ってmiistation.com, kirakirajin.com (キラキラ人、現在終了）、そして 2kurabe.com 等を立ち上げました。

Key speakers for Day 2 included Last.fm CEO Felix Miller, Shinsei Bank Group CIO Dhananjaya (Jay) Dvivedi, Magnatune and BookMooch CEO John Buckman, and Linden Labs CTO Cory Ondrejka.� Each presentation was moderated by uber-networker and Japan web-tech pioneer Joi Ito.

Session 1

Cory’s talk on Second Life was an interesting peek into what we can expect with virtual worlds going forward.� Second Life is not just for computer geeks anymore, as there is now a thriving economy with legitimate businesses popping up daily.� The collaborative platform Second Life has created is interesting in that on the web, most creation is sequential (post –> comment –> post –> comment), whereas on SL it’s very much simultaneous.� Some updated stats on the service:

• users are spending from $0 to $40,000 a month!
• currently simulating a space 3x the size of Manhattan
• 3 terraflops of physical simulation
• SL in August: 200k residents, 420k distinct items sold, 12m p2p transactions, US$12m in internal economy, US$1.75m exchanged, 10k profitable residents
• genders are well balanced (almost 50/50 m/f), with an age range of 13-80yr olds and a median age in the mid-30s.

How is all this economy possible?� Turns out there’s a lot of auction activity going on ala eBay with whatever excess in actual or Linden dollars players may have.� Charity events are also popular – the American Cancer Society recently raised $43k hosting an “online-run” – avatars running in circles :)� Dozens of universities also have land on Second Life.

Session 3

Felix Miller’s discussion on Last.fm wasn’t anything new for those who’ve been using the service.� It was good to hear the train of events which ultimately led to the idea though.� There are now 65 million tracks in the database, creating magnitudes of networking and promotion opportunities.� The Last.fm team recognized that there is already value in knowing what music is played (or isn’t, for that matter), and helps the next step in extrapolating that value.� Big props to Felix and the last.fm team though for getting up and running in Japan – they partnered with Excite and have been going strong for the past two months.� I hope Felix gets a chance to share his Japan Entry challenges in the near future.� Oh, and he shared a cute new phrase in that regard – the Kanji Curtain.

Session 4

John Buckman’s talk on “Consumer Internet Businesses” was interesting as he shared some thoughts on what it takes to build successful internet businesses this day in age.� Covering first his credentials as a serial entrepreneur:

• 1997 – 2006: Lyris Technologies, an e-mail marketing platform which he sold
• 2003 – present: Magnatune, the first and still only fully-online record label, which is also an example of profitable company harnessing the Creative Commons
• 2006 (started five weeks ago): BookMooch – a community for exchanging used books, with already 10k users

he continued with factors one should think about in building a novel web-service going forward, such as how to make money from CC Licenses, how to never need a PR agency, and how to create sharing, non-capital markets and ways to exchange w/o physical currency.

For example in the case of BookMooch, a book-sharing service, sending a book gives you one point since the only the sender pays (for international mailings, you get 3 points for sending 1 book).� So how does BookMooch make money?� Well, it turns out BookMooch relies on a passive payment system – people spend hours creating their book lists in the hopes of getting books for free.� But users are impatient, and eventually decide they want to buy the book on Amazon, giving BookMooch 6.5% of the sale through the Amazon Associates program.� BookMooch’s ability to make this entire process seamless and easy to use is one of its great values.

Magnatune has proven profitable for a number of different reasons, including leveraging consumer anger at the music industry where there’s limited musical diversity and poor quality, high CD prices, angry musicians speaking out against being ripped-off, and our favorite: DRM.� What’s interesting about Magnatune is the market it is targeting: turns out the licensing industry, at $12B, is twice as big in sales as in the consumer music industry, and it’s the licensing industry which Magnatune is disrupting.

Final Thoughts

Having just attended the Future of Web Apps workshop in San Francisco a few weeks earlier, I was curious to see how it would differ from this one and I have to say, I was unfortunately unimpressed with the image and audience.� The content was great, but there was way too much formality — 3-4 suited staff members by the door hawkishly checking your badge (not to mention the 10 other black-suited staff people just standing around looking for something to do), being forced to leave the venue after each session so that they could check your badge again for the next one, and tablecloth on all the tables – that struck me as a bit much.� I would rather the organizers save the money and reduce the entrance fee.� The swag bag was nice, but I didn’t quite understand the whole “clean water” promotion they were doing.� I was almost expecting Al Gore to show up.

Technorati Tags: conference, japan, web2.0

What’s Next For Web Apps: Building the Next Flickr

The second day started off with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch zipping through a host of up-and-coming as well as going-down-in-flames startups, and discussing their strengths and weaknesses. He started off his presentation with a catchy anecdote – that PlentyOfFish generates $300,000 a month just through Google AdSense – to keep the audience on the edge of their seats and noting every word that escaped his mouth.

He was a pretty quick so it was a bit tough to write everything down – besides, I was there to listen more than take notes :) – but here’s what I could grab from his slides:

Attributes of Winners:

• passion
• doing something extraordinary (Purple Cow)
• Removing Serious Fiction (1-800-FREE411)
• Great Founder Dynamics
• Never Raised Big Money, or raised it after they won
• Prefect revenue model not required

Attributes of Losers:

• Poor Founder / Team Choices
• Lifestyle / Ego of entrepreneurs
• Raised too much money
• Over business-planned
• Forgot about scaling (Friendster)

What Server Platform?

• PHP
• RubyOnRails
• Java (serious apps)
• .Net/ActiveX (no firefox)
• Adobe Apollo, brings flash/ajax apps to desktop w/o browser
• Desktop hybrid
• Flash (growing)
• XUL/XAML (interesting)

Market Saturation, Avoid:

• social networking
• social bookmarks
• video
• photos
• blogging/podcasting platforms
• portals/homepages
• feed readers

Big Potential:

• platforms
• desktop apps
• office efficiency
• cloud storage (Microsoft, Google)
• identity
• developer tools
• market destruction (FREE411 has 3% of $8bil market)
• enterprise (consumers had VoIP, blogs, IM, online storage, etc. before corporations did)

During the short Q&A, I managed to grab these snippets:

• email space still interesting (Yahoo! allows POP-in)
• oDesk better than eLance
• ads are annoying; what’ll happen in the future?

Here are 4 choice slides from his Mike’s deck:
     

 
The State, Future & Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities

Ted Rheingold of Dogster and Catster

I had no idea what to expect from this presentation, but it proved to be one of the most interesting. Dogster recently secured $1 million in funding – which the NYT thinks indicates we’re in a bubble but on the contrary, I think we’re witnessing an understanding from investors of the potentials in targeting the niche.

Ted was an animated presenter full of amusing quotes and a clear passion for his company – a passion without which none of his websites would have grown. He shared a collage of websites that exude a similar aura, including ClubMom, Babysites, Teachade, Vampirefreaks, StuffOnMyCat, and the one which got a ton of laughs – CatsThatLookLikeHitler. Some of these are just “digital doritos” (his words, but I love that phrase!) and many may gawk at such communities, figuring the appeal to be miniscule – and perhaps proportional to the number of people on the internet, they are. But as any seasoned entrepreneur will be quick to point out to a skeptic who says a 1% or 2% ownership in a deal is worthless, if the whole is huge, then even a tiny share can mean a lot. Figure there are 1 billion people on the internet. If even just 0.01% of them are interested in your niche hobby, you’ve got a potential 100,000 viewers. Another choice quote from Ted:

Dogster and Catster pages are like personalizing a high school locker

To gauge the appeal of a site, forum activity is a pretty good indicator. Also note what terminology sites use to appeal to their visitors. In the case of Vampirefreaks, there are no “groups”, but “cults”. And it’s not a “shopping cart,” it’s a “coffin.”

 
14 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Building a Web App

Ryan Carson, one of the producers of this conference, got up and spoke about “14 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Building a Web App.” At least Ryan’s presentation should be online soon, so let me just list the points:

1. Work with people in the same time zone.
2. One user database – if you have multiple apps consider this.
3. One e-commerce system – if you have multiple apps consider this as well.
4. Don’t have your back end guy do front end stuff and vice versa.
5. Obsess about the copy on your site – communicate clear messages through the text on your website.
6. Work with a top notch hardware partner.
7. Don’t cut corners.
8. Measure, measure, measure more – how well you app is doing, how are people using it and all other statistics including; web visitors, sign ups, logins, active users, paying users and staying users.
9. You’re not done when you launch.
10. Tea-spoons – stay on top of the little things and make sure they are getting done.
11. Quick tips – provide contact details and logos for the press, use monthly CSV files for invoices, add an about us page and make contact easy.
12. Add tons of stuff to your FAQs.
13. Be nice to nasty customers.
14. Tips from the pros – here he gives tips from other pros in the industry.

 
Designing The Next Generation of Web Apps

The final presentation worth sharing a little about was by Google UI guru Jeff Veen. Referencing key economic tipping points in history such as Henry Ford’s assembly line, the industrial revolution with huge investments followed by the depression but lasting change, and the Netherlands tulip frenzy of the 1700s where at one point people were paying as much as 1 years’ salary for a single bulb, Veen believes we’ve seen the huge investment and bust phases which has created the fundamental change in this business, and we’re now entering the correction and lasting change phases.

The impact of “Web 2.0″ has predominantly been on design, and hence a benefit for the users. “Design” of course refers not just to the visual (typography, color, etc.), but interactivity and information architecture. There is a strong element of giving up control – historically designers had full control but now we’re seeing this control being passed on to the users. Veen encourages:

Use visual design competency to build trust with users, empowering them to control their data … and ultimately to control their experience.

Trust your users and make them your peer. Ah. There’s also a shift in thought from “page-based design” on the web to “application design” on the web, and from an “I am the designer” mindset to a “let’s collaborate” mentality. These can be realized through Interaction Design, where new techniques such as AJAX allow greater fluidity in experience. There are four key components to this fluidity: discoverability, recoverability, context, and feedback. Discoverability is making finding stuff easy – such as Panic Goods’ elegant shopping cart interface. Recoverability says that actions should be without cost – catch errors before they happen, such as not making users click through in order to discover a username has been taken or a password is incorrect. Context means to visualize the process flow for the user, providing real-time feedback. And Feedback refers to showing how the system will respond immediately – in the past a button was presented, clicked, and the next page tells them what happened. Check out MeasureMap for an example of good feedback.
The third and final component of this design evolution has to do with Information Architecture. Blending editorial content with participation creates an experience in and of itself, while at a high level tagging creates an experience just through the data.

Veen notes that there’s a bit of “amateurization” going on in design, but this is helping facilitate an architecture of participation. As Clay Shirky notes:

Weblogs fix the inefficiencies traditional publishers are paid to overcome, and in a world where publishing is that efficient, it is no longer an activity worth paying for.

The next step is turning the users into experts themselves. Keep an eye on FlySpy, FareCast, and TripHub as examples of this.

Jeff’s slides

Check out my Flickr set on the event and surrounding activities.

Other blogs covering the event:

• CenterNetworks
• GroupThink
• Mark Seremet
• Dennis Eusebio p1, p2

As part of my reconneissance trip to the Bay Area over the past two weeks, I attended the Future of Web Apps workshop hosted by Carson Systems at the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts Theater, just across the street from the Presidio where George Lucas consolidated his ILM empire last year. The sold-out two-day event played host to a who’s who list from the web services frontier, and it was great to finally see the personalities behind the headlining ideas and websites. I think it was Michael Arrington of TechCrunch who curiously noted at the top of the second day that “Web2.0″ was not mentioned even once during the entire first day (and as far as I can recall, at all throughout the entire conference). The presentations were professional and to the point, spanned a healthy range from being inspirational to intellectual, and clearly showed why most if not all of the cool internet services and application ideas come from this concentrated area of California and not, for example, from the orthopraxical culture (*caugh* Japan *caugh*) across the ocean.

So let me share some highlights. There’s a lot from each presentation that I will be leaving out for brevity’s sake, but here are the take-aways that were of personal interest. Be sure to check out the list of other blogs covering the event – you’ll find the list at the end of the Day 2 post. If a presenter has their slides online, you’ll find a link to it at the end of each snippet as well.

 
Emerging Age of Who

Dick Hardt of Sxip started off the two-day workshop with a brief discussion on the “Emerging Age of Who”. Numerous web-services require our login information and it’s starting to be annoying having to enter the same information every time. Microsoft Passport tried to alleviate this issue, but few liked the idea of a single entity – let alone Microsoft – maintaining so much personal information.

In light of this, Dick believes we’re entering a personal information era he calls “Identity 2.0” and likes to categorize solutions to problems into three segments: vitamins – which everyone should take but are tough to sell; painkillers – which are easy to sell; and viagra – which gives people an ability they didn’t have before (or regain it, as the case may be :). Dick proposes InfoCard as part of a solution to the growing identity verification issue. InfoCard provides a user centric, single account, click-through registration process which, if done right, is a painkiller for the people and a vitamin for service providers like Google (it may not profit them directly, but the potential ubiquity and decentralized image keeps Google in positive light ala Passport). OpenID was another service he discussed.

The most interesting aspect to this identity verification was perhaps the realization that there’s another element to credibility that gets built over time as we use certain services extensibly – the element of reputation. The ability to transfer our “karma” or reputation from other sights such as eBay, Amazon, or Slashdot could help propel adoption of any user-centric ID platform.

 
Digg

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, was next and shared his rags-to-riches story behind this now 1 million+ user-submitted/voted content service. Kevin started with just $2,000 and a project spec. He hired a developer through eLance at $10/hr, opted for open source technologies such as LAMP, stuck with a basic utilitarian design, and had it all hosted for just $99/mo. In launching, he targeted a core audience of passionate users, which allowed him to initially focus on limited functionality (and not be distracted with feature gloat). The user base was highlighted extensively – the podcast diggnation an example of this.

Other feature decisions included creating tools for self-expression while staying away from “me too”s such as tags. Simple and rewarding one-click processes (digg, bury, #1) also proved important. I would say the most interesting comment was his initial desire not to destroy the garbage, such as trolling comments and negative postings – in Kevin’s words, “users just love to say they hate things,” and not policing these turned out to be a good move.

Digg is also making good use of the vast amounts of user submission and click-through data – check out labs.digg.com for a variety of ways to view real-time visualizations of the back-end. The cool flash visualizations are courtesy of Stamen Design.

Speaking of back-end, scalability quickly became an issue and Kevin recommended reading “Inside LiveJournal’s Backend” for anyone encountering scalability issues. Rather than relying on system administrators or self-proclaimed web-developers, hiring experienced DBAs was one of the best decisions he’s made.

It’s interesting to compare the Digg top 10 vs. say YouTube’s top 10. Because digging content essentially means one is endorsing it, the user/content association keeps questionable content off Digg’s lists.

Back to Digg’s early days, Kevin and the eLance developer were the only two working on the site for the first 4 months. Only after receiving $50k from a friend did Kevin hire his second partner, followed by a CEO, 3 full time PHP, and finally expand the operations group.

 
5 Minutes of Fame

There was an intermission where a few groups had a chance to promote and demonstrate their newest offerings. I would say the most interesting was from Adobe, who demoed their Apollo platform – a way to compartmentalize interactive web-content into a stand-alone application. You have to see it to understand the benefits really. Check it out.

 
10 Things You Didn’t Know About RSS

Steve Olechowski of Feedburner shared some observations from running his feed aggregator service. I’ll just list the interesting ones:

• 10-15% of podcast feeds are video
• he found no correlation between feed subscriptions and click-through rates
• more text in a feed = more traffic!
• podcasts, having reached the mass/consumer level (thanks to the iPod), are more evenly distributed across categories than are text feeds
• RSS has become bigger than blogs
• people, and companies, must realize the RSS audience is different from the HTML/page readers. Therefore marketing and advertising strategies should be approached differently

(At this point thanks to my jetlag, I passed out during Carl Sjogreen’s presentation on building-up Google Calendar – doh! Be sure to read the other blogs if you’re interested.)

 
User Driven Content – Is It Working?

Mike Davidson of Newsvine shared some bits on whether all this freely submitted content was leading anywhere. For those of you thinking of starting your own niche service focused on user driven content should take note of a few aspects which are not working, notably:

• building services which require user-generated content to get to square one
• trying to buy communities, such as TagWorld has essentially done
• building social networks for the sake of social networks. SNs should not be the core of your service.

That said, what is working?

• letting users do as they please ala MySpace and Mixi (Mixi is my addition; nobody at the workshop seemed to know what Mixi is. Sad. I have a brief post coming up on this observation.)
• following the Dunbar principle, which states that the ideal size for a group is under 150.

As would be expected in a topic like this, there were a number of open-ended questions, such as the uncertainties in the future of rights and policies, and what legitimate ways there were to compensate people for their contributions. However, “little media” is clearly starting to standup on its own, and user-generated/contributed news vs the established news networks is showing some parallels to the OSS vs Microsoft challenge.

Oops, gotta run – “Quicktime in the Music Industry” is now starting :)

• Gates hates Google
• Jobs hates HP, Dell, Gateway
• Fiorina hates Dell (and pities Sun)
• Rollins hates HP (and R&D)
• Ellison hates Gates

When asked why it was so hard for the music guys to make good technology decisions, he [Jobs] said that they were getting bad advice. Why? Because, according to Jobs, just as no top tier A&R professional would go work at a technology company, only a “3rd rate” technologist would go work at a label.

…

Since Rollins seemed in a feisty mood, Mossberg decided to get his quick take on a few of his other competitors. Here’s what he had to say in a nutshell: IBM: a software and services company, no longer a legitimate hardware company; Sony: losing edge by focusing on proprietary rather than standards based designs; Gateway: no longer a real competitor; Apple: great but nichey.