美国财长汉克•保尔森最近表示，有报道称中国计划降低美元资产在其外汇储备中的比重，对此，他并不担忧。但债券投资者们也许应该对此感到担忧。

中联国际投资有限公司CEO王吉舟：中国股市去年大涨，但在今年1月31日到2月2日，中国股市大跌，三个交易日总市值蒸发近万亿人民币……

Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus

MySpace has some hard decisions to make, as last year they entered into an advertising relationship with Google and now they find themselves unable to make similar deals with other companies. An alliance between MySpace and Google last year, where Google became the sole provider of text ads on MySpace, guaranteed News Corp"s media darling $900 million in shared ad revenue over the course of three years. The deal, made six months ago, has not been finalized but it has already taken effect. A Google search bar and ads are already present on the site and MySpace is receiving payments from those. 

But now MySpace is looking to partner with eBay, to allow MySpace users to sell items using eBay"s PayPal. And like a jealous lover, Google is protesting. The Wall St Journal is reporting (full article behind paywall) that MySpace"s dalliance with eBay is holding up finalization of the ad revenue deal between MySpace and Google. You can imagine the Google ultimatum: it"s either him or me! :-)

The issues each company faces:

• MySpace wants to empower their user base and become more of a centralized hub, by allowing "peer commerce" with eBay"s PayPal mechanisms.
• eBay is facing negative backlash from investors, who are looking not only for growth, but to stay ahead of competition from Google"s new payment system Checkout. 
• Google has a hard time sharing ad space. They certainly don"t want to share MySpace with eBay, when they"re trying to steal market share with Google Checkout.

So what we have here is three companies trying to grow revenue through partnering with other industry powerhouses. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that while Google and eBay say they have entered into their own advertising partnership, the general concern is that each company is competing for the attention of MySpace users and so neither maximizes their revenue on MySpace.

Then there is Google Checkout, a direct competitor to eBay"s Paypal. That can only make the relationship between eBay and Google (and now MySpace) that much more strained. It"s a classic case of what happens when companies take the easier road to growth, which is partnerships, but then one of the partners gets big enough to want to do everything on their own.

The Solution

Well, for MySpace, the solution is easy. Use Google Checkout instead of PayPal. It will become widespread enough to not have to worry about brand recognition (or lack thereof).

But this love triangle speaks to a larger issue at hand - can Google continue on their path to media monopoly? They"ve effectively used their search method of gathering data to impede on nearly every kind of business imaginable. Some stick, like Gmail and Checkout. Others the average person has never heard of, like Orkut and Froogle. But Google"s power tactic is reminiscent of Wal-Mart"s industry dominance, because they increasingly leave little room for partnerships between other companies. In this case, eBay may end up being the jilted party.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

Last week there was a post on TechCrunch entitled Flixter is growing like weed, which described how a trendy new startup called Flixter has seen phenomenal growth over the last few months. Flixter is a social network based around movies. Why is it so popular? In this post we analyze Flixter"s features and determine the reasons for its success so far. We end by looking more generally at the rise of specialized social networks.

Overview

Flixster proudly states its user base in the homepage - the current figure is almost 9 million users. And we know these users are active, because on average each user has rated more than 30 movies. Another interesting data point: the recent hit movie Dream Girls has been rated by 4,600 Flixter users. The same movie has been rated 5,000 times on the popular ticketing site Fandango and only 300 times on AOL Movies. 

Flixter features

Probably the number one reason that Flixter is so appealing is its broad feature set. Movie lovers get movies, actors, photos, news, reviews, ratings, previews, quizzes, showtimes - and of course social networking. Flixter is really a one-stop shop for all your movie needs. The features are slick and a lot of thought has been put into them. At first glance, it also seems to have the same chaotic feel that MySpace has. But a closer look reveals structure and an ambition for completeness.

At the very heart of Flixter are the movie profiles. The sheer amount of information about a movie crammed into one page is mind boggling. Yet the movie profiles, just like the other pages, are not overwhelming. The movie cover, ratings, reviews and similar movies occupy the top portion of the movie profile. The photos of the actors, as well as photos from the movie and the preview, are listed below. For American users, if you enter your zip code in your profile, you will get a section with the movie showtimes in your area. You can also see all the fans of the movie and, of course, read the reviews.

But wait, there"s more features!

For each movie you can read relevant news. This is a subset of the main news tab, which displays links to news about the movie, actors, director, etc. 

Another interesting feature is that each movie can have many skins. The skins are created by Flixter users and are available to be applied to the movie by other users. This is a fun and playful way for users to express their attitudes towards a movie. 

The next major tab in Flixter is "Actors". Each actor has a page that packs an impressive amount of information, including bio, pictures, clips, news, filmography and of course fans.

The Movies and Actors tabs are followed by News, Personal Profile, Friends, Browse Users and Fun Stuff tabs. Each of these are interesting and useful. Personally, I found the never ending quiz addictive (there was a warning that it is!). Another interesting aspect was that the users themselves can make up quiz questions. 

The final noteworthy feature is matching people based on movie preferences. It is fairly obvious to do, but Flixter does it well - by giving you an option to meet people who generally like similar movies, or who share the same favorite movie or actor.

Is Flixter an accident or pattern?

From analyzing Flixter"s features, we see that it has excelled in building a niche social network for movies. Given the stunning success of MySpace, one can"t help but wonder whether MySpace will do what Flixter does - or even can Flixter become another MySpace? These are not easy questions to answer. To approach them, let"s revisit the ingredients that made MySpace so popular.

Firstly, MySpace gave everyone a simple address online: http://www.myspace.com/johndoe. Instead of complex URLs, people could just head over to MySpace.com slash user name. Then there is that fairly loose structure of profiles, that overall creates an impression of total havoc on the site - but crucially it also allows users to express their creativity. Then there is music. Profiles of musicians played a critical role in the rise of MySpace. 

What Flixter has that MySpace does not is structure and a really great understanding of the semantics of movies. Put simply, MySpace right now does not have the infrastructure to do for movies what Flixter does. MySpace has basic Film pages, but they are not even close in quality to Flixter. Of course MySpace could develop it, but it would be at odds with what MySpace is today. So right now, it seems difficult to see MySpace evolving to include a range of specialized networks like movies.

What about the other way around, can Flixter reach the size of MySpace? It"s unlikely, given that only a fraction of people who hang out on MySpace would be so in love with movies to bother to join Flixter. Movies are a big trend, but it is not even half as big as music:

But even if Flixter is not going to be as big as MySpace, it can get pretty big as the largest social network centered on movies. The fact is that Flixter is delivering a value a level above a generic social network - and that value is market specialization. And as Jawad Shuaib discussed in his great post on Read/WriteWeb earlier this week, specialization and niche are now the keys to startup survival.

The rise of specialized social networks

Flixter is far from being alone. LibraryThing is a social community focused on Books, which (among other great things) has a fantastic book recommendation system based on tagging - the technique that we discussed in this post about Amazon. Last.fm is a much talked about social network centered on Music. And actually, LinkedIn is not a general social network, it is a social network for business networking. Other examples of specialized networks include Jawad"s Shuzak for geeks and the recently launched Change.org (R/WW write-up here).

Conclusion

Looking at the landscape of today"s social networks, we see a dominant generic network - MySpace. While the battle for the #1 spot is not completely over (right Facebook?), at least for now MySpace is the king. However, MySpace and other generic networks right now are not focused on including specialized categories like movies and books. This creates a gap and an opportunity for site like Flixter, that focuses heavily on creating the best experience around a particular social category. 

So a few years from now, perhaps we will still see a few top generic social networks and many specialized ones. Of course only time will tell. What do you think will happen?

对于那些刚刚开设股票交易账户的数百万中国人而言，一个相当紧迫的问题是：中国股市是否步入新一轮萧条，还是在进行必要的回调？

Written by Jay Fortner and edited by Richard MacManus

The New York Times has an interesting report about companies that offer customized video advertising, such as Spot Runner and Visible World. Marketers are excited about this technology, because it means they can utilize demographics to deliver targeted advertising across several platforms - including television and the Internet. It"s also less expense than traditional TV advertising and in some cases means they can route around traditional ad agencies, by creating the ads themselves using the tools offered by services like Spot Runner and Visible World.

So what does this all mean for the advertising world, the media industry and the ever expanding Internet?

What Spot Runner and Visible World do

Not only is it becoming far cheaper to produce video ads, it is also becoming cheaper to distribute and customize them. This effectively is making videos easily stored and re-used, much like digital photos and music have become in recent years. It removes a large chunk of production costs, as marketers no longer have to film the commercial themselves - Spot Runner allows you to mash-up an ad from their ad library. It also allows the creator of the content to reap the rewards for each customer that chooses their ad.

Spot Runner

With the technology offered by Spot Runner and Visible World, a commercial can be edited with voiceovers and text. Other imaging can be also added, or existing imaging modified. This all allows for minimal human interaction (with video production companies etc), fast changes, and remote control over an entire ad campaign. It means that a commercial can easily have many different versions and be distributed to specific demographics, depending on graphical location, gender, and other variables.

How the technology is being used

This simplified process of targeted advertising is ideal for small companies that want to appear big, and for big companies that want to appear small. In that sense, the world becomes a little flatter. Small businesses can operate within their budget to get a professional ad; while large companies can tailor their ads to appeal to consumers across the board, varying the product they sell or the spin their ad takes.

The format of these commercials makes them easily spread via television, or the internet - and I"m sure mobile devices aren"t too far behind in becoming another mainstream platform for distribution.

A Ford commercial from Visible World

The Long Tail of Video Commercials

Services offered by companies such as Spot Runner and Visible World cater to a broad base of marketers, and create a platform for creativity and replicated data. The ability to operate over the Web makes editorial accessibility an afterthought and increases the number of niche markets an advertiser can display their product for. The media world has departed from so many traditional models; and the Internet has enabled the majority of those changes. Now the world of video marketing is following suit, catering to the long tail of social networks and specific demographics - fragmenting themselves in the same manner.

Essentially this allows marketers to take advantage of targeted marketing in ways they"ve always dreamed of.

Implications

What"s the larger picture here? And what does it really mean for marketers to not only gain increased access to demographic data, but to use it for more and more targeted advertising?

Privacy issues are and will continue to be raised regarding the use of targeted marketing. Much of our activity on the web, and even with our television"s remote control, gives companies data to feed their advertising strategies. Also the advertising job market will shift in reaction to the oncoming automation options, which are becoming more available to marketers.

The Internet and mobile devices will become extremely important for the future of this type of advertising. It will also become integrated within the widening Internet video culture, and probably closely associated with user-generated content. This means consumers may have a larger role in the distribution of these commercials; perhaps customizing ads to be played along with their own videos, even becoming the most powerful channel by which these commercials are distributed.

What are your thoughts on customized video ads -- are we in the midst of a sea change in video advertising, enabled by Web services like Spot Runner and Visible World?

Written by Sramana Mitra. Note: this is an excerpt from a report written by Sramana Mitra, an entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley.

Worried your kid is spending too much time in front of the computer? Blame it on websites like CartoonNetwork.com, Disney.go.com, ArchieComics.com and NickJr.com, which are attracting kids with a host of interactive games and shows. The percentage of children having access to Internet increased to a phenomenal 93% in 2006 in contrast to 56% in late 2003.

With the websites becoming more user-friendly and interactive, Internet is grabbing pre-teen eyeballs at a rapid pace, placing television and radio in the back burner. 67% of teens are avid users of the Internet. The graph below gives details of Internet usage of tweens. Tweens and young teens aged between 8 and 14 on an average spend 1.5 to 2 hours daily surfing the Internet and make up 60% of the Internet users, aged less than 18.

The graph below shows the expected growth in Internet usage among the pre-teens. 

Popular Pre-teen Sites and Trends

Internet usage pattern of pre-teens is different and it changes dramatically as they grow up. Kids are attracted to websites dealing with race cars, music, education, comedy, sports, news and movie stars and sites like MTV.com, Nascar.com, Hollywood.com, Comedycentral.com and Sportsline.com are popular among them. Apart from the children’s websites, the pre-teens are also influenced by the surfing of their parents and elders.

Research shows that after school hours, around 3 pm - 4 pm in the evening, 89% of the children are drowned in their computers. The pre-teens are mainly attracted to websites like NeoPets.com, ArchieComics.com, NickJr.com and CartoonNetwork.com where they can watch and interact with cartoon characters, play computer games, vehicle racing, board games, puzzles, play sets, action figures, participate in online quizzes, drawing and win prizes and watch television episodes that are missed out during school hours.

Below is a list of the popular websites among the pre-teens and their Alexa rankings: 

According to a research conducted by Media Metrix, “kids prefer websites which are popular amongst older users like Yahoo.com, AOL.com, Wikipedia.com, Geocities.com and Google.com. They visit a wide range of websites, from education to entertainment to news, which clearly shows that there is an opportunity for those trying to reach out to the young audience.”

Popular sites visited by the kids include music sites [55%], e-card sites [25%], animal sites [35%], sites on books [20%], sites on TV channels/films and cartoons [25%], sites on mobile phones [19%].

Below is a list of the online activities of the pre-teens by eMarketer.

The full report on Pre-Teens is on Sramana Mitra"s website. Sramana Mitra is an Entrepreneur, Founder CEO of 3 companies, Strategy Consultant to 50+ companies, and Author of a popular technology business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

My wife and I were in the bookstore the other day and we were discussing the difference between shopping online versus shopping in the real world. We were not focused on ability to easily compare prices or instantly get to different stores, which makes online shopping superior. Instead, we focused on the basic qualitative experience - e.g. holding a book and flipping through its pages. We both felt that there is something special about this physical experience, that cannot be replaced with Ajax or PDF.

At least not for us people who first learned physics and then went digital. But we also agreed that with the race to squeeze everything into a computer, it won"t be too long before we get a generation of people who might not crave the physical experience of buying a book as we do. In the meantime, today we see a lot of taking things and concepts familiar to us in our physical world -- and bringing them online. So in this fun Friday post, we look at some of these attempts and try to decipher what works and what does not.

Nine Online - interactive social media magazine

[Disclaimer: The latest edition of Nine Online magazine briefly mentions Adaptive Blue and socialmeter, web properties of Alex Iskold.]

Our first stop is recently the launched Nine Online magazine from Novologic. This small publication focuses on helping PR professionals understand the new social media. The site is implemented in Flash and combines traditional magazine elements with innovative digital solutions that make it stand out. It actually looks like a magazine, due to its shape and the ability to flip through the pages. Typically, I would dismiss this kind of thing as fluff, but the way its implemented here makes it appealing and clickable.

Nine online offers an interesting blend of static and interactive content. The articles look like what you"d find in a typical magazine, but in addition they are spliced with interactive videos and online quizzes. The fact that the implementation uses elements of the physical world was nice, but what was mostly impressive is the natural and intuitive embedding of the interactive elements - only possible in the digital world.

[Editor"s Note: in a similar vein, check out Avantoure. We profiled this interactive magazine back in December]

e-paper - bringing digital to physics

Way before Nine Online added a real-world feel to its digital magazine, researchers explored doing the opposite - bringing the digital feel to one of our most beloved objects, paper. Electronic Paper or e-paper was developed way back in 1970 at Xerox-Parc.

According to Wikipedia, the predicted future applications include e-paper books - capable of storing digital versions of many books, with only one book displayed on the pages at any one time. When this happens, we will flip through a digital book and also interact with it as we interact with web pages today, using gestures. That brings us to another contender in the race to blend physics and digital - the iPhone.

iPhone - bringing physics to digital

By now there are very few skeptics left who do not believe that Apple can reinvent the wheel. They have done it with iPod and it seems like they are doing it again with iPhone. Most of us have not yet had the chance to try their patent-pending multi-touch technology on iPhone, but if the click-wheel on iPod any indication, Apple has invented a truly new way of interacting with digital information.

Apple promises to redefine our digital experience, by making digital objects look, feel and behave like their physical cousins. This is not just a promise of a slick UI and a fun toy, it is a promise of a phone and digital companion that saves time - because it will be as intuitive as things are in the real world.

Conclusion

Attempting to merge and reconcile our experiences in the physical and digital worlds is no trivial matter. Many technologies are aiming to create a blend that delivers a consistent, simple, yet rich, user experience. Since objects in the real world obey the laws of physics and objects in the digital world obey, well, at best the laws of good design, the laws for hybrids are not yet settled. 

The key to success is to ensure that the mix of physical and digital does not confuse the user. When playing with Nine Online, I was never surprised by what happened when I clicked on things. Surely many of you experienced the same with iPod - it behaves as you expect it. Inventing new ways of remixing, while keeping users happy, is what these new technologies are all about. 

What are your favorite digital and physical remixes?

An interesting tidbit came out of the recent Foo Camp New Zealand (which unfortunately I wasn"t able to attend). Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla, who is based in NZ but drives the rendering engine of Mozilla/FireFox, spoke about how Firefox 3 will deliver support for offline applications. This is significant because you"ll be able to use your web apps - like Gmail, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Calendar, etc - in the browser even when offline. I deliberately mentioned all Google web apps there, because of course this plays right into Google"s hands.

Although Mozilla is an open source organization, some of its top workers are employed by Google. So it"s a very cozy relationship. We"ve discussed before how Firefox 3 as information broker suits Google very nicely, because the Mountain View company has a number of best of breed web apps - and if it"s not building them, it"s acquiring them (YouTube, JotSpot, Writely, etc).

Rod Drury also pointed out in his post how this makes Firefox attractive as the browser platform of choice for SaaS providers (Software as a Service). For example salesforce.com.

I don"t even need to say which bigco all of this strikes at the most (cough, Microsoft!). With both Google and (maybe) the big SaaS companies buddying up with Mozilla, it makes it even more compelling to run office apps online in the Firefox browser. So it is potentially a double whammy blow to Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer.

Incidentally, early this week we"ll be exploring another exciting offline web apps technology. One gets the feeling that offline capabilities is the next big frontier for web apps - and it"s especially important for Google in their battle with Microsoft.

p.s. since the stormtrooper on toilet pic was popular, here"s another great (kind of relevant) stormtrooper pic I found on Flickr:

A stormtrooper holding a "Flickr is offline" card - from 1978seymour

Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus

There are now so many companies vying to be the next YouTube, it"s easy to lose track of them all. So let"s take a look at the entire online video industry and categorize the major players. Our thanks to Ali Dagli of Savvian, for providing us a lot of the useful data listed here. 

In this post we"ve summarized the latest video industry innovations under the following categories:

• Video Sharing
• Intermediaries
• Video Search
• Video eCommerce
• Video Editing & Creation
• Rich Media Advertising
• P2P (Peer To Peer)
• Video Streaming
• Vlogosphere

Video Sharing

Video sharing - and particularly YouTube - have been the poster boys of the online video industry so far. Video sharing sites allow you to upload your videos and share them with others. But even if you are not a content producer, you can watch others movies. So this is a very consumer-oriented industry that has been popularized via blog-based viral marketing.

• YouTube - Like other Sequoia Capital investments Yahoo and Google, YouTube outperformed its competitors and has become a clear winner in video sharing. And Google didn"t skip this opportunity in the online video space, as it took advantage of YouTube"s legal hassles and snapped up the market leader for the relatively small sum(!) of $1.65B. Even though Google already had its own video sharing site, Google Video, this acquisition showed Google"s ambitions in the online video space.
• Yahoo Video remains well behind Google Video and YouTube. Also Yahoo Video does not support as many video formats as the others do. For example, you cannot upload your videos directly from your mobile, because this format is not supported yet. Yahoo is trying to increase Yahoo Video usage by making it a part of their other well established properties. For instance, you can see Yahoo Video stories on their homepage.
• SoapBox is Microsoft"s answer to the latest developments in the video sharing industry. It is in invitation only beta status for now, but will probably go live very soon. It is expected to be a crucial part of Microsoft"s new Live.com initiative, although the site is currently under the MSN domain.
• Grouper was snapped up by Sony for $60M and is expected to be integrated with Sony"s future digital cameras.
• PhotoBucket - a crucial component of most social networking sites and the number one photo sharing site, did not miss the big opportunity in online video space and has a video component too.
• Webshots - like PhotoBucket, photo sharing site Webshots (a CNET property) has also caught the online video wave.
• Ning - Netscape founder Marc Andreesen"s latest venture recently turned its focus onto video features and in some sense became a player in the online video sharing space as well.
• iFilm was acquired by Viacom, the owner of MTV Networks, in October 2005. The site claims to get more than 10 million visitors per month.
• MetaCafe - Israel based company is estimated to be the second biggest player in this space after YouTube. The company does not limit itself to its home country and has big international ambitions. It was recently rumoured to be acquired by Yahoo for $200M. The company is backed by top tier VC companies like Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. MetaCafe does not have a time limitation like YouTube, and offers a rich desktop client for easy uploading. Their unique revenue sharing program was a great innovation in this space.
• DailyMotion - The number one video sharing site in France is also a key player in the global arena. Allows 150MB of video upload and has a larger default video size.
• GoFish - Publicly traded company is worth $126M as of this writing. Its popularity is well below others though.
• Dave.tv - The site wants you to program your own channel with your favourite movies, music and clips, then broadcast it from your web page, blog or MySpace. This is a well thought through viral marketing tactic, but the site"s traffic seems low at this time.

Some of the upcomers in video sharing are: Vimeo, VideoJug, Kewego, China"s Yoqoo, Revver,Veoh, iBloks, VidiLife, Blip.TV, VodPod, Fliqz.

Image from Go2Web20.net

Intermediaries

Do you think you can legally host your commercial videos on YouTube or MetaCafe? The short answer is no. For professional use, you"ll need to contact intermediary companies to do this job for you. Their main duty is to connect publishers, video creators and advertisers.

• BrightCove connects video creators with web publishers. This is a huge company that raised ~ $60M from investors including New York Times in their latest round of financing. Their syndication marketplace consists of 1319 channels as of this writing.
• NBBC - powered by NBC, connects businesses that create video with businesses that want video, in other words a video marketplace. Note: the logo can mislead you and take you to a porn site; onbbc.com. Be careful, and I humbly recommend that NBBC switch to another logo!
• VideoEgg - Connecticut based company empowers the video publishing of big consumers like TED events, Bebo, Hi5 and America Online. Raised $12M in Series C from August Capital and Josh Kopelman"s First Round Capital.
• Roo.TV is yet another big player in the video intermediaries field. They are traded in NASDAQ (RGRP) and their market value is $90M as of this writing. Some of their partners are Pioneer, Verizon, Warner Bros.
• Maven Networks partners include 20^th Century, The Weather Channel, TimeOut New York, Walt Disney, Nike, and Sony Pictures. Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners invested $10M in this company in 2004.
• NarrowStep is traded in OTC and currently has a market valuation of $41M. Partners include Land Rover.

Other players include thePlatform and The FeedRoom, which empowers top companies like HP, Wal-Mart, Sun, USA Today.

Video Search

• Google Video - after the acquisition of YouTube, Google now focuses its Google Video property on video search. This is a smart strategy, because the Google brand largely means search. YouTube was already the number one video sharing site and Google Video has exclusive access to all YouTube and Google Video data - which makes Google Video search much superior to others.
• AOL Video Search is a successful video search service from AOL. AOL had this capability after acquiring the successful startup Truveo in early 2006.
• blinkx differs itself from the crowd with its innovative interface, which shows a preview of videos in the search results. They also get satisfactory results from a variety of sites.
• Pixsy is a successful, independent video search startup. It returned satisfactory results in our test queries.
• Mamma - the site claims to provide lots of search options, but their focus is video. In our tests it was satisfactory.
• ClipBlast claims to have the largest online video collection, but the results don"t back this up.
• TV Eyes is different, because it crawls not video sharing sites like YouTube - but real TV channels.

Video eCommerce

Video eCommerce sites allow you to legally stream the latest cinema movies and TV shows from your computer.

• Guba was one of the first to enter this market, being founded in 1998. They are not only a video eCommerce site, but have free offerings and also a video sharing component. But video sharing on Guba is very small compared to video eCommerce. One of Guba"s co-founders left the company after the YouTube acquisition and said in an interview that YouTube won the big prize - and there will be no more big prizes in the industry!
• Amazon Unbox can be easily described as the iTunes of videos. Unbox allows you to preview and buy a wide selection of TV shows and movies for very low prices, starting from $1.99. The videos can be watched via an exclusive client app from Amazon.
• MovieFlix offers videos in Real format. They offer 2 membership programs: free and premium. Besides the freely accessible videos, you can pay a monthly fee of $7.99 and access their 4000 titles - the quality is arguable though.
• Vongo - if you are not a US resident, don"t even try visiting their site. Well, you can use proxy servers, but Vongo has strict access restrictions - not only limited by browser and OS types, but also your location. The service works in USA only and they are known for their TV spots. The service requires you to install a client, then you pay $9.99 per month to get access to an unlimited number of movies.
• MovieBeam is yet another video sharing site. It is pay per watch based and the prices start from $1.99.

This is another crowded market. Other players include MovieLink, CinemaNow, MarketBeam and the video eCommerce offerings of bigcos like Apple, Real and WalMart. Also, the Venice Project (Joost) from the Skype founders is targeting this market. Check out a recent Techcrunch comparison to review some of companies mentioned under this category.

Video Creation & Editing

You have videos, but how do you edit them? Are you willing to stick with desktop apps and pay hundreds of dollars in license fees? The Web is the answer again. The following sites are generally known to be good companions to video sharing sites.

• JumpCut - this video editing site was acquired by Yahoo right after it got to its public beta status. It is expected to be embedded into Yahoo Video. This will bring a clear editing advantage to Yahoo over the others. Yahoo is currently far behind Google in the video space overall, so they should hurry up and integrate JumpCut!
• EyeSpot - was invested in by Michael Robertson of mp3.com and Yahoo"s JumpCut acquisition increases our expectations for this company to get bought by Google. The mix system would also be handy for MySpace"s core user group, musicians who shoot their clip and then remix it to publish on their MySpace page. So News Corp is another potential acquirer.
• Lycos Mix - no, Lycos is not dead. Lycos Mix, along with Lycos Cinema, is designed to take Lycos to the next level in the online video space.
• Dabble - It"s not exactly video editing, but playlist making with other videos fetched from video sharing sites.
• Mojiti - China based company was covered recently by Read/WriteWeb. It allows you to add notations to your videos. Mojiti is also a video sharing site targeting the Chinese market.

Other players include, but not limited to, MovieMasher, MotionBox, Canopus and Avid.

Rich Media Advertising

Another hot area is rich media advertising. This is the field that will pump blood (=money) to all other services. Rich Media Advertising can consist of advanced computer science techniques like voice recognition (speech to text) and visual object recognition. We will just list the names, as most of them are very early stage. 

Google and AdBrite are the major players. aQuantive (a $2B company traded at NASDAQ), KlipMart, PostRoller, eyeWonder, eyeBlaster, DoubleClick, adInterax (acquired by Yahoo! last year), padaddies, pointroll are other players.

P2P

Peer to peer is taking an important place in video sharing. Video sharing requires large bandwidth, which is why the burn rate of these sites is very high and only the VC backed ones survive. P2P is an answer to this problem, by spreading the bandwidth weight to clients using this system. There have been some recent large investments in companies working in this field.

• BitTorrent - Creators of the popular open source P2P file sharing protocol do not own the protocol itself, but own one of the most popular clients and a search site. They recently got $20M funding from top tier firms like Accel Partners and acquired another popular bittorrent client µTorrent.
• Azureus - Creators of the Java based popular open source bittorrent client, Azureus is now entering the web space with Zudeo. They recently closed a $12M Series B investment from RedPoint Ventures and BV Capital.
• Kontiki is a VeriSign company.

Video Streaming

So who do you think serves you all these videos? Video hosting is not an easy job!

• Akamai is known as the world leader and serves big customers including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. The company is traded on NASDAQ and has a market cap of $9B.
• Limelight is the site that powers YouTube, MySpace, iFilm and many others. They are growing fast and their last investment round was $130M, led by Goldman Sachs.
• VitalStream was bought by Internap in 2006 for $217M.

Others include Savvis and RawFlow

Vlog-o-sphere

Blogs and photologs have already taken over many peoples lives - being an excellent way to share, communicate and self-express. And now with the commodization of digital cameras, comes the vlogs - a.k.a. video blogs.. They are either for fun or self expression, but a big industry can blossom here - there are a lot of opportunities. Tomorrows vlogs, for example, are candidates to replace your favourite daily TV shows. And popular vlogs don"t just attract ads, but they also hold the potential to sign partnership deals with video sharing sites. Examples:

• Ask A Ninja - this surprise hit recently become a member of Federated Media, John Battelle"s directory of popular blogs.
• Rocketboom is the best example of how far vlogs can go. This vlog is dedicated to reporting the latest developments in internet culture, in an original and entertaining way. It looks so professional that you may not able to differentiate it from TV shows you watch.

Conclusion

The list is certainly not complete. And this categorization is subject to change, for example with upcoming stealth mode startups. The innovation and opportunities in the online video industry are endless. Please help us take this list to the next level, by noting other companies you know of in the comments.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus. In this post Alex tests out and explores the emergent world of Yahoo! Pipes. He sees some interesting parallels with Relational Databases in the 90"s, concluding that with pipes, the Web essentially becomes a giant database that can be queried and remixed in any number of ways.

One of the central concepts in Complex Systems is Emergence. It is this automagical process through which elements of a system give rise to a higher order system. Emergence is how physics becomes chemistry and chemistry becomes biology. It is how web 1.0 evolved into web 2.0, and how that, in turn, will become the next web.

While the exact mechanics of emergence is complicated and far from being completely understood, scientists know that a new system emerges as a combination of its elements and their interactions. In other words, complex systems are really networks - where elements interact with each other and give rise to a new system.

Perhaps today we are witnessing one of the most vivid examples of emergence - the remixing of the world wide web. The parts of the new web have crystallized - blogs, photos, video, audio, maps, RSS, social network profiles and even plain old HTML pages have formed an impressive network, that now can be mined and remixed. Mashups are really nothing new, the web has been a programmable oyster for at least a few years now. 

What is new though is the recent systematic thinking about the web as a database. A few companies, including Dapper, have been working on the problem. But with the recent launch of Yahoo! pipes, we are beginning to see the real power of remixing.

Ye Olde Relational Databases

The Web is just a vast database of information. Everyday, we interact with it without thinking about that too much. We simply take our best query tool, usually called Google, and fire away. Yet decades before the web made its way into our lives, a different kind of database revolutionized our lives. The Relational Database qualifies as one of our best computer science inventions. Lesser known to the non-techie crowd, it nowadays quietly stores terabytes of information behind most familiar ecommerce and corporate sites.

Microsoft Access Circa 1997

But Relational Databases are remarkably simple. They are collections of tables (structured data) that can be joined (mixed) together via keys to produce a new set of results. For example, the table of sales can be joined with the table of employees to produce a report of who sold what. By combining the tables in various ways, programmers are able to bring seemingly hidden information into the spotlight (think emergence). For example, by combining the sales information with employee records and their geographical locations, one can determine the best sales people in each country.

Another thing that Relational Databases are famous for is visual query and UI tools. Because databases are so simple, and the data is well structured, people have created GUI builders like Visual Basic or Power Builder to automate the UI for fetching and exploring the data. We got so good and so perfect at mapping the databases to the UI, that it"s become quite a boring thing to do since about 1997. 

Well, now Yahoo! is making this whole business cool again, by changing the rules of the game - the Web is now the new database.

Yahoo! Pipes - Applying Old Wisdom to the Web

Yahoo! Pipes Circa 2007

Yahoo! Pipes is a remarkable offering that was announced last week. It is the first GUI builder for the biggest database in the world, the Web iself. When compared to Visual Basic and Power Builder, Yahoo! Pipes comes out as more inventive and no less rigorous that its predecessors. It empowers developers to remix the building blocks of the web in a whole new way. And it does it with remarkable simplicity.

In Yahoo! Pipes, what used to be a table in the relational database is now: a web page, an RSS feed, etc. The current list of sources includes: Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Local, Fetch (RSS feeds), Google Base and Flickr. Each source can be searched or queried using either pre-defined or user-defined parameters. For example, there can be a search of all french restaurants in Chicago via Yahoo! Local. The data source and the searches can be mixed together (think emergence), using a reach set of operators. Among them is the iterator (which lets the user loop through the results), a counter and many other functions that facilitate cleaning, manipulating and recombining the information.

By bringing together many sources and operators, the user can build sophisticated queries that fetch interesting, non-obvious information from the web. For example, one can build a pipe that extracts the listings of all French restaurants in Chicago, along with their Flickr photos. Since the underlying data is virtually limitless and the set of operators is quite powerful, the number of interesting possible pipes is vast. And for this reason, unlike its predecessor the Relational Database, Yahoo pipes will never get boring.

Evolving Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! pipes are cool, but they have ways to evolve. The biggest issue is that, unlike in Relational Databases, the data is neither structured nor clean. For example, how can we ensure that Flickr pictures of restaurants in Chicago will be the right ones? We really cannot. The same problem will exist in all pipes, simply because the underlying data online is not as precise and polished as data usually is in a Relational Database. What are the consequences of this? Well, users currently forgive some imprecision in tags on Flickr and del.icio.us, yet they expect near perfect answers from Google. So having precise instruments to clean the data in the pipes would go a long way.

Another, very different, axis for the evolution of the pipes is to make them usable by a less technical crowd. As it stands right now, like Relational Databases, the pipes require a techie brain to be used efficiently. Yet, it seems like there is a possibility, particularly from the user interface and operator simplification point of view, to make this tool usable by moms and pops. But even if not, judging again from the Relational Database, getting wide adoption in the technical community would be just fine.

Conclusion

So what is the catch - why did Yahoo do it? The answer is the same old: search and ads. The majority of the current data sources are from Yahoo! and so that means Yahoo! will get the ad revenue when the pipes are run. So empowering thousands of enthusiastic techies to remix the web using Yahoo"s data is a great idea.

Will this work? Will developers start using pipes? At the time of this writing there are over 5,000 pipes, which is an impressive number given that the application is not even a week old. But we should check in a month or so to see how things unfold. Certainly the key to its success will be polishing the UI and adding new operators and data sources. Since Yahoo! is known for its good design and focus on the user experience, it is likely that we will see the pipes improving in that regard over time. 

Please give the pipes a try if you have not done so yet, and let us know what you think is going to happen to it over time.

Written by Sramana Mitra

I have written a few pieces already addressing the disjointed nature of the web, whereby, you go one place for content, another for community, and a third for commerce, the most notable of these is the popular, 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula.

Let’s quickly recap the terminology:

3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search

This, I submit, is the formula for the future: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Web 2.0 has been a nichy phenomenon with hundred and thousands of microcap efforts addressing one of the Cs, lately, Community being the most popular force, producing companies like MySpace, Facebook, Piczo, Xanga, and Flixster.

In Web 1.0, Commerce had been the driving force, that produced companies like Netflix, BlueNile, Amazon, and eBAY. It had also resulted in the Dotcom meltdown.

The same period that is seeing the surge of Web 2.0, has also seen a great deal of investment in Vertical Search, like Sidestep for Travel.

Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context. More recently, Netvibes has raised a lot of buzz, but also lacks the same organizing principle: Context.

In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.

Imagine

- I am a petite woman, dark skinned, dark haired, brown eyed. I have a distinct personal style, and only certain designers resonate with it (Context).
- I want my personal SAKS Fifth Avenue which carries clothes by those designers, in my size (Commerce).
- I want my personal Vogue, which covers articles about that Style, those Designers, and other emerging ones like them (Content).
- I want to exchange notes with others of my size-shape-style-psychographic and discover what else looks good. I also want the recommendation system tell me what they’re buying (Community).
- There’s also some basic principles of what looks good based on skin tone, body shape, hair color, eye color … I want the search engine to be able to filter and match based on an algorithm that builds in this knowledge base (Personalization, Vertical Search).

Now, imagine the same for a short, fat man, who doesn’t really have a sense of what to wear. And he doesn’t have a wife or a girl-friend. Before Web 3.0, he could go to the personal shopper at Nordstrom.

With Web 3.0, the internet will be his Personal Shopper.

Sramana Mitra is an Entrepreneur, Founder CEO of 3 companies, Strategy Consultant to 50+ companies, and Author of a popular technology business blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy.

Written by Jitendra Gupta of Karmaweb and edited by Richard MacManus

Bill Gates of Microsoft just announced a deal with Jan Rain, VeriSign and Sxip to develop integration between Microsoft CardSpace and the open source project, OpenID. This is an interesting deal between the software giant in Redmond and a popular open source project, which deservers a closer look. For those already familiar with OpenID and Microsoft, jump directly to the takeaway section. For others, the next two sections will provide you with a quick introduction to two new technologies that will likely have a significant impact on the future of Internet.

What is OpenID

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is aimed at solving the problem of Web single sign-on. How does the problem of web single sign-on affect you? Well, if you struggle with keeping track of different usernames and passwords at different websites where you have an account, OpenID can help you. With OpenID you will be assigned a standard username (typically a URL or an i-name, similar to an email address) that you can use on all sites that support OpenID. 

To get started using an OpenID, get one at myopenid. Once you have an OpenID, you can use it at a number of sites. For example, try your new OpenID at Zoomr.

Microsoft CardSpace

Windows CardSpace is an authentication product, embedded in Vista (also available for XP via a service pack), which puts the power of managing multiple identities in the hands of the user - via an easy to use UI and an underlying technology that supports a number of web and enterprise authentication standards. It is an authentication technology because it uses cryptography and a tight integration with the Windows platform, to securely deliver various verifiable claims for the user. The UI of Microsoft CardSpace tries to mimic - online for digital identities - the use of business cards, credit cards and membership cards.

CardSpace

Key takeaways

1. The announcement

For a high profile Bill Gates announcement, the follow up plan seems pretty skimpy on the details of work to be done. All it seems to commit Microsoft to doing is to help out the open source community, as most of the work needed here will be done on the OpenID side of things. Microsoft, for its part, seems to be committing to “support OpenID in future Identity server products” - which doesn’t really mean much.

2. What’s in it for OpenID

The OpenID specification is simple and light, which accounts for its recent popularity. As such, the OpenID 2.0 specification does not specify any authentication or multiple identity management capabilities. 

This deal provides the OpenID community with another authentication vendor that makes enterprise adoption a possibility. 

Also, one of the downsides with the flexibility provided by OpenID, is that it opens up the user to some potential phishing attacks. The most worrisome scenario here is when an evil site posing as a service provider, redirects users to a fake site to enter their OpenID password. With the user entered password, the evil party can pose as the user at any number of sites that use OpenID. See more details on this issue at Kim Cameron’s blog. This is a pretty big security threat that the OpenID community has been grappling with for some time. They have developed some interesting solutions, like browser plug-ins and customized login pages at OpenID provider sites - to make it hard for evil parties to pose as a real site - but a reliable solution has not emerged. Microsoft CardSpace with its vast reach (it is integrated with Microsoft Vista and is also available for XP via a patch) provides a reliable and effective way for users to authenticate with the OpenID provider, without needing a password that can be phished. The CardSpace based authentication is based on Windows client generated tokens that cannot be fabricated or reused. So this integration with Microsoft CardSpace ensures that the OpenID community can eliminate a major barrier to even wider adoption.

3. What’s in it for Microsoft

Microsoft CardSpace is a well thought out technology that addresses the needs of both enterprise and individual users, by putting the power of managing multiple identities in the hands of users. The integration with OpenID enables Microsoft to get some early customers and potential buzz, in addition to a lot of good PR and some community cred.

4. Web vs Desktop debate revisited

Another angle to evaluate here is the old desktop vs Web OS debate. Microsoft CardSpace is tied to a Windows desktop, whereas OpenID enables users to have more portable web based identities. By tying Microsoft CardSpace with OpenID, Microsoft is trying to participate in the emerging WebOS [Ed: or "Web as OS" is perhaps a better term for it]. 

And by using a desktop based solution, the open source OpenID community is at least temporarily accepting the benefits of a desktop based solution - to solve the chronic phishing and authentication problems pervasive in the Web OS.

5. How will it look 18 months down the line?

At the heart of it, Microsoft CardSpace could provide the same functionality as OpenID. In fact, some of the Microsoft literature even talks about the issues with managing multiple usernames and passwords; and how CardSpace can alleviate these issues. So potentially one of the calculations for Microsoft could be that once users start using CardSpace to log into their OpenID provider, they might decide that they like it better then OpenID. 

On the other hand, the open source community will probably start looking at better ways to address the authentication issues of OpenID, via some combination of browser improvements and a central authority for establishing trust. In fact, OpenID integration is already a priority for Firefox 3.

Overall, this high profile announcement marks the importance of single sign on identity technology to the future of the Internet. Let’s see how things evolve in the next few months in this exciting arena.

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

Understanding your audience is the key to success in any business - including blogging. Lately the Read/WriteWeb authors have been discussing what it is that keeps readers coming back here. Our recent poll indicated that most of you come back to this blog for Analysis and Reviews. We are thrilled to hear this, because we focus a lot on those two things.

But the poll results got us wondering about which posts in particular are the most popular? And we"re not talking about simple page views - we want to know what content you actually liked. In the web 1.0 world, understanding what people liked was a voodoo science. Luckily, in these days of blogs and social software, there are fairly definitive ways of measuring what people like. Comments on posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, Technorati links and of course Diggs, are all entries into the fascinating world of social popularity. So we decided to put our investigative hat on and do a deep dive on Read/WriteWeb popular posts.

Read/WriteWeb comments

The obvious place to look for popular posts is in the Read/WriteWeb archives. We looked for the most commented-on posts. Below are the posts that had at least 50 comments:

• Netscape Community Backlash (201 comments)
• Top 100 alternative Search Engines (104 comments)
• GoogleOS - what to expect (102 comments)
• Social Bookmarking Faceoff (74 comments)
• Online video industry index (61 comments)
• Search 2.0 - What is next (59 comments)
• Top Web Apps in India (58 comments)
• RSS Ripoff Merchants (55 comments)
• 2007 Web Predictions (50 comments)

Note: We close off comments on posts after about a month, in order to prevent spam.

Not surprisingly, readers of Read/WriteWeb are most passionate about Search. This is a topic close to the blog"s core focus - because of Google vs. Yahoo!, Google vs. Microsoft, Google vs. the World and most importantly because this is where Web business is centered nowadays. The other posts on the list also reflect this blog"s character. Comprehensive product surveys, profiles of top applications in different countries, and predictive analysis are definitely topics we spend a lot of time on. The Netscape post btw just outright hit a nerve!

Yet just like the poll, how many comments a post gets is just part of the picture. To find out more about what people like about Read/WriteWeb, we need to analyze external links to posts.

Read/WriteWeb on del.icio.us

del.icio.us has become a social phenomenon, but it is now turning into a gem of hidden information. We have written before about the possibility of using del.icio.us as a recommendation engine. Today, we will look how to use it to distill the popular posts from your blog - and to understand how people perceive those posts.

You would think this would be an easy thing to do, but unfortunately it is not - because del.icio.us does not yet allow search by URL prefix. So you cannot just search for posts that start with http://www.readwriteweb.com. Instead, we had to use a trick. We searched for readwriteweb and then sifted through the posts to determine the ones that belong to this blog. As it turns out, 34 posts from R/WW were saved by at least 100 people (note: given that it was a manual process to get that data, it"s possible we missed a couple). We saved these popular posts for you under a new rwwpopular account. 

Here are the top R/WW posts in del.icio.us, bookmarked by at least 500 people:

• List of Web 2.0 lists (872 people)
• 2007 Web Predictions (744 people)
• E-learning (530 people)
• Search 2.0 vs. Traditional Search (509 people)
• Social Bookmarking Faceoff (506 people)

The pattern on del.icio.us is less obvious, but things become more clear once we realize that del.icio.us and comments on a blog reflect different kinds of actions. Comments reflect passions, bookmarks serve as references - so there is little overlap between them. More importantly, comments (like posts) are short lived. Unfortunately in our day and age, news and even analysis has a life span of a few hours. Once a post is off the front page of a blog, it is less discoverable and typically is not commented on anymore.

The bookmarks of del.icio.us, however, have a longer lifespan. After the first person bookmarks a post, it starts traveling through the del.icio.us network, acquiring more and more links, and growing stronger. What popular bookmarks indicate is a combination of time and usefulness. All of these posts are roughly 6 months old. It is likely that in another 6 months a new batch of R/WW posts will cross the 500 threshold on del.icio.us. This is just how references and networks evolve.

Read/WriteWeb on Digg

Of course no popularity contest would be complete these days without checking out Digg. This social news site has become a huge source of endorsement and traffic for bloggers. Many R/WW posts have made it to the digg front page, since Digg users have an appreciation and passion for technology. So naturally, we went looking for what stories were especially popular. 

Unlike with del.icio.us, it is really easy to find this information on Digg. Here is the query, using advanced search. Here then are the R/WW posts with at least 1000 diggs (which is a lot on digg):

• GoogleOS - what to expect (1405 diggs)
• Calacanis offers to "buy out" digg users (1307 diggs)
• Last.fm launches new features (1210 diggs)
• Firefox 3 plans and IE8 speculation (1161 diggs)
• Digg CEO responds to Netscape challenge (1089 diggs)

We noted that the posts that did well on Digg are somewhat different from the ones that got a lot of comments and picked up more links on del.icio.us. The full query results told us that while Digg users love posts about search, they also love the posts about browsers. In particular the Firefox vs. IE battle is dear to their hearts. And of course, digg users love posts about Digg - especially when it"s about Digg kicking competitor Netscape"s butt!

Conclusion

Using social information to measure user information is an effective way for bloggers to understand what their readers like. It is also possible to use the methods we"ve outlined here to measure the popularity and effectiveness of pages on a corporate web site. 

Another useful thing to do is to dive deeper into del.icio.us and digg tags and comments. These pages contain a wealth of insightful information about how your audience perceives your content.

While doing the research for this post, we compiled a list of over 50 of the most popular posts on Read/WriteWeb. We are thinking about making this available to you as a permanent tab. Please let us know what you think about this idea, as well as the techniques that we"ve discussed.

Image credit: www.eyeassociates.com

Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. This is David"s account of the first day of the FOWA conference in London. Photos in this post are by donkeyontheedge (I hope he doesn"t mind me using them).

The Future Of Web Apps 2007 kicked off in London today with a host of speakers from various startups, bigcos, media outlets and associated businesses. Hosted by Ryan Carson of Carson Systems, the event is covering what various successful web companies are currently doing, why they are successful, and where they are headed. 

Mike Arrington: The Future of Start-Ups and Web Companies

With a lack of Wifi access, most speakers have had a very attentive audience. First up on the podium this morning was Michael Arrington from TechCrunch. Arrington first apologized for the closure of TechCrunch UK. He hopes the site will be up and running again soon (and talking to him after the show, he hinted that he had found a new blogger to take over this role). He dealt with a few big issues that web companies are facing today. Firstly, bubble 2.0 - are we in a bubble? He pointed out that last year in the US, TechCrunch covered $600 million of VC money that had been invested into new startups; while on the other hand, for example, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. So that deal alone was bigger than the total invested in startups that year. His point was that the money being put in by investors is a lot less that the money being put in by existing companies. Instead of being in a bubble, we have not yet seen the peak of what"s happening in this new web 2.0 era. He said there are still a lot more big applications, as important as Digg, Flickr, YouTube etc, waiting to come online. He also felt that the new Adobe platform Apollo is going to be big news and will help bridge the gap between the web and desktop. Adobe is a sponsor of this event and were on hand in the reception area, showing off some slick looking applications written in Apollo. However they shied away from questions regarding the ever-changing launch date.

Community Building

Next up was Edwin Aoki, a chief architect with AOL, who went through the importance of building user trust in your products, and protecting their privacy and personal identities. This seemed like more of a confidence-building exercise for AOL, given their data leak last year. He also pointed out that email is still the biggest destination on the web, and not community sites such as MySpace. 

Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency followed on that theme of community building and its importance for any startup who wants to build up a large user/customer base. She talked about the importance of company founders and developers alike continuing to have a role in customer support, in order to build confidence with your user base.

Commoditizing the web 

Simon Wardly from Fotango gave a colourful and humorous talk about the importance of commoditizing the web, finishing with a pitch for his own product Zimki - which launched last year. Zimki is part Ning, part Amazon EC2. It"s a Javascript-based platform where developers can contribute application functionality to an already large collection of Zimki modules, and then build applications from them. Zimki will host your application and you pay for storage and computing power. It seems quite reasonably priced and they are going open source it this year. But most developers I have talked to here said that as with Ning, if they are building a big application, they are much more comfortable building it themselves - and are not interested in building on these types of platforms. Time will tell if Zimki can remove the need for coders from the process of building online applications.

Ben Holmes: Getting VC Money

Best of the day up to this point was Ben Holmes from Index Ventures, who gave a fascinating and honest talk about the process involved in startups getting VC money. According to Ben, the thing that VC"s are looking for, more so than people with good ideas, are people who are passionate about their ideas and can sell them. They also look for people who have excellent development teams who can execute their ideas. Index Ventures have invested in the past in Skype, Betfair, Last.fm and more recently in Netvibes. Their portfolio of past investments makes for good reading. According to Ben, when looking for VC money, the average startup can expect to have to swallow the following hard requirements:

1.) You will have to give up an average of between 20% to 35% of your ownership

2.) VC representation on your board

3.) Liquidation option for worst case scenario

4.) Participation rights

5.) Reverse Vesting (If you leave your company earlier than an agreed time your 65% to 80% ownership can be cut significantly)

6.) Certain control, and veto rights

7.) option pool

One thing that might be a big issue for a lot of startup founders is that a lot of VCs will not let you sell until such a point that they feel that you have peaked in terms of your company performance. So if you get an offer one year later of a few million, that might make you a rich happy retiree, they are probably going to make you hold out a lot longer and for a lot more money. The pre-requisites for getting VC funding are simple: you need to have a unique product or concept; you need to have an excellent development team; and your idea needs to have a large potential market. It was interesting to note that Ben also gave a list of reasons why you should not get VC funding:

1.) You will probably miss out on the option of any small exit opportunity, which in a lot of cases could be very lucrative personally;

2.) You will be bound to a minimum of 3+ years of hard work building your idea up;

3.) You will lose the opportunity to run a lifestyle business.

In the end, if you have a great product then you need to focus on your business and not on fundraising. You need to build up the PR of your company and get your name out there. VC"s spend most of their time looking around for new companies to invest in, so if you get your name out there and people like your product, then the VC"s will come to you - guaranteed. If you decide to take VC investment, its important to find a group that is interested in your product, do not have any competing products on their books, and are willing to help you with recruitment, business development, and exit strategies, and not just funding you.

Last.fm, Thinkfree, Google Sketchup

Matthew Ogle and Anil-Bawa-Cavia from Last.fm gave an overview of their company history, from its humble origins on a rooftop patio somewhere in London to their more comfortable offices of today. They claim that 15 million tracks are listed every day on the site, with a total of 6 billion items listed from day one. This is a huge amount of data and they talked about how they scaled their systems to cope with this.

Tj Kang from Thinkfree was next on, promoting their online office suite - which is free to use and I have been told is quite good. They also have an API for bloggers and website owners to convert their Microsoft Office files to a MSO free format, by passing their documents through the Thinkfree API and getting a flash or HTML document on the other end, that is delivered to the web user.

Jason Chuck from Google went through some of the features of Google Sketchup and showed some nice examples of user generated content.

Werner Vogels: Emergent Design

Werner Vogels, Vice President and CTO of Amazon, talked about emergent design and becoming more flexible with how your service or application will serve its users in the future. He placed a lot of importance on knowing your required resources; when you need them; being able to use them when you need to; and not pay for them when you"re not using them. All of this of course ties in nicely with Amazons S3 storage and EC2 cloud computing products. He gave the example of Smugmug.com, who were spending $40,000/month on hosting, but after switching to S3 saved almost $500,000 dollars in the first 7 months.

Quotation Books, Soocial.com

Quotation Books is a new site that is launching in the coming weeks. From what I gather, it"s a search engine for quotes. You can place a quote widget on your site, and..... well if you like quotes, I guess you will like this site.

Soocial.com is a new site (not launched yet) that brings together all of your contacts on your blackberry, mobile phone, laptop, and PC. With a Soocial account, when you add a new contact to your list from, lets say an email, that same contact or .vcf info will be added to the contact list on your phone and all of your other devices. Their goal is to remove all of the syncing problems involved in managing contact lists across multiple devices.

Kevin Rose, Digg

The last speaker of the day was Kevin Rose from Digg. He gave an interesting insight into the history of the company and what goes on behind the scenes. He talked about enabling Digg users who regularly digg the same stories and are nearby geographically, to hook up and become friends. He also wants Digg to start showing you stories based on what you have digged in the past.

Kevin announced plans for a Digg API that you can use to create a Digg swarm, that tracks Digg data relating to your own website - which you can then use for your own purposes. He also announced support for OpenID on Digg in the near future (add that to Microsoft"s and AOL"s support for OpenID!).

Conclusion, Day 1 of FOWA

In the end there was nothing new announced here today, it was more of a big discussion about current products and current news.

Whether or not startups should focus on a business plan or not, was debated again and again. Mike Arrington said yes; Tara Hunt said no; Ben Holmes said yes, but not too much.

Everyone is pushing Adobe Apollo, there is lots of talk about attention data, and everyone we heard speaking today talked about the importance of building community for your users and shaping your application based on their feedback.

No mention of mobile technologies, semantic web, or web OS. Maybe I"m getting a bit ahead of myself, but those things are the future of web apps after all! More news tomorrow...

Ed: Big ups to David Lenehan for this thorough report. Looking forward to his report on Day 2 of the Future Of Web Apps conference.

Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO and edited by Richard MacManus

Last week I saw the following ad in Radio Shack for the Kronus 55 Piece Home Repair Tool Set:

Molded case (1) 
Bits (20) 
Bit holder (2) 
Claw hammer (1) 
Level (1) 
Pliers (1) 
Wire stripper (1) 
Long nose pliers (1) 
Utility knife (1) 
Wrench (1) 
Hex keys (sae & metric) (18) 
Hex key holder (1) 
Tape measure (1) 
Ratchet (1) 
Screwdrivers (4)

All for just $29.99!

As I was reaching for my credit card, the thought occurred to me: why not offer a 55 Piece Mobile Search Tool Kit... and not for $29.99, but for free!

The Mobile Search field is going to be "huge", but right now it"s growing in fits and starts. So for the early adopters amongst us, a tool kit will come in handy. Here then is my 55 piece tool kit for mobile search:

With this tool kit in hand, you"ll be ready to tackle whatever mobile project comes along. It"s almost impossible to fit all of these nifty features into any of the hundreds of mobile devices in use right now, so don"t be caught without your 55 piece kit!

As usual, we encourage you to tell us about any mobile search application that we missed - here in the comments of Read/WriteWeb.

Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. This is David"s account of the second and final day of the Future Of Web Apps 2007 conference in London.

Adobe

Today started with Mark Anders, Adobe"s senior principal scientist. Mark previously had worked on the Microsoft .NET project from it inception until 2003. He gave a good technical demonstration of Flex and then created an application on the fly, to search for photos on Flickr. He also showed off an online photo editing site called picnik, which was built with Flex. 

In other Adobe news, Actionscript 3 - which ships with the Flash 9 plugin - has some impressive improvements and now runs at up to 10 times faster than AS 2.0 in some circumstances. Going forward Adobe"s Tamarin (a.k.a. JavaScript 2), which was donated last year to the Mozilla project of the same name, will now be shipped with FireFox 4 - which is 2 versions away.

The future of the web browser

Chris Wilson from Microsoft, who has worked on Internet Expolorer from version 3 up, was here to talk about the future of the web browser. He looked back at the days when Outlook Web Access was one of the most advanced web apps around and was using AJAX before it was even called AJAX. He talked about the rebirth of the semantic web movement with RSS, microformats, and tagging. He ultimately talked at length about IE 7 and the importance of security, standards support and more. 

Pic: Li==703

I am a web developer and I spend most of my time trying to work within browser limitations. But I don"t buy the idea that IE 7 is a progressive browser. It has taken about 6 years for them to release a new version - and there is nothing revolutionary about it. They fixed all of the IE 6 bugs and added a list of modern features, that we had already seen in FireFox. Yes IE 7 is at last a good stable browser from Microsoft, which has addressed the security issues that had plagued IE 5 and 6, along with the problems with lack of standards compliance, but I don"t think they deserve a pat on the back for that. 

Chris Wilson also addressed an issue that is for some people the holy grail in terms of developing products for IE - having multiple versions of IE running on one machine. In short he said that this just would not be possible now or in the future. It just can"t be done, so no joy there. Not really a lot of information on the future of the browser in the end, but looking forward the wpf/e browser plugin is coming soon as a possible competitor for flash - and by the looks of it, it might just cause a few shock waves.

Lunchtime Panel Discussion

Pic: Larsz

The following people were involved in the panel:

• Mike Butcher (Chair) - Vecosys.com
• Tariq Krim - NetVibes
• Chris Messina - Citizen Agency
• Dave Nicholson - Zopa
• Colin Donald - Futurescape
• Richard Moross - Moo
• Max Jenning - eMomentum

The lunchtime discussion was based on the topic: "European start-up culture - playing catch up to the US". It was a fairly brief and humorous discussion between the audience and the panel members about this hot topic. The thoughts of the panel included Ryan Carson voicing the need for some kind of bigco sponsored incubation centers, with access to lawyers and business advisors to help foster new businesses. Mike Arrington bluntly stated that people here need to stop talking about doing it and just do it. Mike Butcher felt that the UK and Ireland has a very talented pool of creative people in this industry, but there are structural and cultural barriers to over come. 

The rest of the panel talked about the problems with access to seed capital and the fact that there have been some very successful companies in Europe, such as Skype, who should be an inspiration to local startups here. There were some good questions from the audience, but there was just not enough time to discuss this topic. George Bush was dragged into it, Arrington called for the BBC to be dissolved and Tariq Krim was accused of using his position to chat up girls in Silicon Valley! A good show though overall.

The Mobile Web

At last some talk of the mobile world came in the form of Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone. The first thing he did was to find out, by way of the raising of audience hands, who used their mobile to access the web regularly. This showed that most people in the room here use a mobile device to access the web on a regular basis, and that most had even done so in the past 24 hours. A very interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time, is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web access, than there are computer and laptops with web access. These numbers are confirmation of just how big this space really is. In the UK vodafone data shows that the biggest destinations for web users are Hotmail, BBC News and then Google. He talked at length about the need for more adoption of standards by mobile developers. Vodafone has a best practices list that they advise everyone to follow:

- Design for one web
- Rely on web standards
- Stay away from known hazards
- Be cautious of device limitations
- Optimize navigation
- Check graphics and colors
- Keep it small
- Use the network sparingly
- Help and guide user input
- Think of users on the move

He also stressed the importance of thematic consistency for your content, across mobile and more traditional browsers, to ensure a comfortable user experience. For more info on best practices, check out: http://www.w3.org/2005/MWI /BPWG/techs/

NetVibes Announcement

Tariq Krim from Netvibes made a quick announcement about their new universal widget API.  You will now be able to develop a widget for Netvibes and it will work across a whole host of other platforms, such as google desktop etc. You can see a preview of it here next week: http://eco.netvibes.com/uwa. He also mentioned that they are going to support OpenID in the near future.

NYTimes.com

Khoi Vinh, design director for the New York Times, said that "the future is going to be awesome!" He talked about the problems they had in coming to terms with using the web as an effective outlet for their content, and interestingly how they tried to use the same templates in terms of content and layout where ever possible, both in the print and online versions. They understood that it was important to open up a dialogue with their readers, obviously learning from the power of the blogosphere in communicating with their readers in this way. 

NYTimes has some cool new community applications to enhance the user experience. MyTimes is a sort of start page app that you can use to pick and choose the kind of content from their site that you want to see. TimesFile is a bookmarking system for creating your own archive of stories you like. Integrating one click sharing with digg, newsvine etc. has helped to generate more and more readers. 

Vinh also talked about the problems that many sites have to deal with in displaying "counter-quality sources" - such as high def video and quality photographs from a digital SLR, right down to YouTube quality video and images taken on camera phones etc.

Opining on OpenID

Simon Willision was here to help promote the OpenID standard, and he talked very passionately about it. He also talked extremely fast, so please excuse me if I have noted anything incorrectly here. With a number of high profile sites recently announcing support for OpenID, such as AOL and Digg, it is a topic that is really beginning to come out of the shadows and into the realm of wide spread adoption. [Ed: see Read/WriteWeb"s current poll for more on this topic] 

Simon started by addressing the all important question of: "what problem does it solve?" Well its simple, if it takes off - all of us will just have one ID and password to log in and out of all of our accounts. Keeping track of all your account information is a nightmare, if you have a very bad memory like I have. I"m not going to go into too much detail about how OpenID works, but what sets it apart from similar systems is that it goes a long way to solving one big stumbling block people have with this concept - would you trust one company with managing your identity? With OpenID anyone can manage your identity, it"s up to you to choose that provider. Once you do choose a provider, which at the moment could be live journal for example, all you have to do is log into that OpenID account once and then you can go to any site that supports OpenID, enter your ID and password, and your details will be confirmed against your provider. That"s it, one login for all of your sites. 

One great concept of OpenID is that you can create multiple personas on the one ID. You create a persona that you want to submit to a particular site, and another one that you want to submit to a different type of site. So I might choose to make up a fake name to use on my AOL account and not hand over very much address information, while at the same time I might choose to give far more accurate data over to my Digg account, through a different persona attached to my OpenID.

In Simon"s own words, the things that "suck" about OpenID are various issues surrounding phishing and security, but I"m sure most of these can be overcome. One interesting benefit of OpenID is that when a user comments on a blog, he/she can be added to a whitelist as a trusted user. When a user or bot enters spam into a blog comment, they can be added to a blacklist. These lists can then be shared amongst bloggers through various yet to be invented systems, which would help identify the good users from the bad. I think it"s very clear from this simple example, that the idea of rating users based on their behavior, and this then being shared between applications, would help streamline a lot of avenues on the web. One downside I see with a third party holding your info, is that they will be able to track your activity across the web with very little effort - but you do get to choose your own provider that you trust and so you are not locked into any particular one. But the stakes are higher with OpenID, if it"s adopted, because any security breach of the data would be disastrous. Get someone"s OpenID details and you get access to all of their sites.

Summary

The Future of Web Apps conference came to a close today. They are hosting a day of workshops tomorrow, which should be very informative. I talked with conference organizer Ryan Carson for a while today and he said that the next FOWA was going to take place in the US in September; and again in London this time next year. If you are near one in the future, I would definitely advise you to go along. It is good value for money and is small enough that you get to meet a lot of the people speaking, to talk with them further on a one to one basis. As with any conference like this, there are also ample opportunities to network. I for one have enjoyed the past few days.

Ed: Thanks so much to David for summarizing the two days for those of us who couldn"t attend.

Photo credits: donkeyontheedge [1, 2] and carl_gaywood

Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus

Music makes us happy. So happy in fact that we shake, smile and fork off billions of dollars every year on it. So it is not an accident that music is one of the most popular forms of media online.

Because the music market is large, there is an opportunity for innovation. We have recently seen a lot of new services such as Last.fm and Pandora jumping into the music market to compete with iTunes and more traditional music sites. In this post, we will discuss another newcomer - a mashup between a desktop music player and a web browser called SongBird.

SongBird at a glance

SongBird is really just that - a mixture of a music player and the web browser. Built on top of the open-source Mozilla code base, this desktop application lets you manage your local music collection, search for new music online as well as instantly play any music on blogs and web sites.

You maybe thinking: So what? Why mix a music player and a web browser? We already have great applications that play music and let us browse the web. While this is true, we think there are good reasons to mash them up, particularly for music and perhaps for other things as well. The thing is: SongBird really understands music, understands the web and understands what people want to do with music on the web.

For example, the SongBird left pane contains a folder called Music Blogs, which comes with a few preset blogs. When you select a blog, the content loads in the central area, just like in the web browser. But in additon, SongBird displays a pane on the bottom that lists all tracks found on the current page. Below the pane, there are controls to play the selected song, add it to your playlist or library, download it or subscribe to the songs on this blog.

So SongBird is bringing semantics, or understanding of music, to the context of the blog. With the regular browser you would just see the page, but the music-aware browser is able to create much richer and much more meaningful experience. Even the common Subscribe action takes on a different meaning - you are asking to subscribe to new songs that appear on this page.

It is becoming more clear that the web is turning into a gigantic database. We explained this trend in our recent post about Yahoo! pipes. SongBird is another good example of this growing trend, because it treats the web as a music database. As shown in the picture on the left, SongBird replaces the standard search engines with the set of ones specific for music, making the music searches quicker and more relevant.

Do desktop/web blends make sense?

SongBird solves a problem of bringing together our local music libraries and vast amounts of music online. This clearly makes sense for music, but what about other sectors. In general, does it make sense to have desktop applications that interact with the web? Now, just like a year ago, I think that the answer is yes.

The main reason is that contextual, semantical, specific applications can always deliver additional value to the end user. The browser cannot have features that satisfy everyone"s specific needs, and this implies the opportunity for a specialized application. Put it differently, specialized applications give the users another, more fine grained view of the same information that the web browser presents in a rather generic way. And that we know is a big business, because the nineties was the decade of Visual Basic on our desktops doing just that - showing different views of the same data.

However, there are challenges. While having more intelligence in the application about the data always makes sense, in the case of building web-aware desktop applications there are challenges. First, the web consists of links and people expect to be able to click. What value can SongBird add if the user navigates from a music blog to CNN? Probably none. Worse, because it has a music specific UI, it now takes up real estate on the screen - which just distracts the user.

Conclusion

Despite the challenges, we are likely to see more desktop applications tapping into the web. The amount and quality of the data is just too good to pass up. But these applications need not to be browsers. In fact, iTunes, has been basically doing this successfully for many years now. Its first secret: a complete UI that presents a meaningful view of your music data. The second secret is that links are handled within the application, so the users never have to switch around.

Coming back to SongBird, it seems that it has the potential to become popular. As it matures, it is likely to create truly a unique view and experience of online music. There are enough music fans out there to appreciate this sort of thing. What do you think about SongBird and other desktop applications that interact with online information?

Feedburner has released an interesting new report on web-based RSS Readers, prompted by the recent introduction of Google Reader into its stats (incidentally, for some reason R/WW only increased by around 20% after Google Reader was added to Feedburner; whereas most other tech sites increased by 40+%).

RSS Analytics plagued by unreliable stats

Feedburner is putting a lot of effort into enhancing the way it measures RSS feeds. I was talking to someone the other day about how RSS analytics is still very much a nascent industry - i.e. it"s even more difficult to get reliable feed reader stats than it is to get reliable webpage stats (and I"ve written before about how easy it is to manipulate both). Feedburner itself points out one of my particular bugbears at the moment - how being a default feed in an RSS Reader like Netvibes or Pageflakes artificially increases your RSS subscriber number (in some cases by a large amount). R/WW has benefited from this behavior too, as we are a default feed in the bundles that Rojo provides. But alas, we"re not a default feed on the other popular RSS Readers and startpages :-( Anyway, all of these things mean that a blog"s RSS subscriber number should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

Feedburner focuses on Audience Engagement

Despite all these issues with RSS analytics, Feedburner is leading the way in feed management for consumers and in this new report they discuss some new measurements - focused on how people are reading feeds and interacting (i.e. clicking or "viewing") with them. They call this "Audience engagement" and it seems to be a priority now for Feedburner, in order to counter the issues with straight subscriber counts (e.g. the default feed issue discussed above). For the record, I think this new focus on audience engagement makes perfect sense for Feedburner - as it will help move RSS analytics forward and remove some of the stigma attached to it, due to the current unreliability over RSS subscriber counts.

Feedburner has an aggregate db of 604,533 feeds and from that, they"ve come up with the following chart of audience engagement by "views", for web-based RSS Readers:

It shows that Google Reader is now the number 1 web-based RSS Reader with 59%, well ahead of former king Bloglines (which has been cruising along with no major re-designs, living off its reputation, for too long now). Netvibes has shown amazing growth over the past year and is now in an enviable position amongst the start pages. Newsgator is probably more of a niche enterprise and high end consumer play these days, which may suit it just fine. In reality, it"s a battle between Google and Bloglines (owned by Ask.com) for web-based RSS Readership.

Note that MyYahoo, one of the top 3 RSS Readers overall in Feedburner, does not figure in "views", as it only displays content summaries - so users need to click through to the site to view the full content. This is reflected in Feedburner"s graph of audience engagement by clicks:

A similar thing could be said about Netvibes and the other start pages, where users generally click through to view content. Interestingly, both of these charts suggest that Netvibes is 3 times larger than live.com, Microsoft"s start page. Although I"m sure even Microsoft would admit that at this stage, Netvibes is a much more sophisticated product. Microsoft (and Google) both probably figure they have plenty of time to catch up, as start pages are still a niche early adopter thing. In fact, there"s a very good chance Netvibes or Pageflakes will be acquired by one of the big 3 (Google, MS, Yahoo) by end of this year. My money"s on Yahoo acquiring Netvibes.

Pheedo"s Stats

Pheedo has also come out with some stats for web-based RSS Readers. Their chart for market share indicates that Newsgator Online leads in subscriber numbers (in Pheedo):

Note however that Pheedo"s stats for Spring 2006 (PDF) showed that Bloglines was leading with 30% share then, against just 10% for Newsgator:

So what has changed since Spring 2006, to make Newsgator Online the leader amongst Pheedo publishers? I think that needs more explanation, if anyone from Pheedo is reading this.

Summary

It"s clear that Google, Yahoo, Ask.com (Bloglines) are leading the way with web-based RSS Readers. Google and Yahoo have different approaches for now and Microsoft isn"t bothered with a general web-based Reader - they will focus on email (Outlook), the browser (IE) and start page (live.com). Netvibes is showing impressive numbers and so must now be a prime acquisition target for one of the big 3 - and my guess is that Yahoo needs a strong "start page" type technology moreso than the other two, who are doing it themselves (live.com and Google Personalized Homepage).

Disclaimer: I am an advisor to Nooked, which is an RSS marketing company.

Written by David Lenehan of Polldaddy and edited by Richard MacManus. David also covered the Future of Web Apps event [1, 2] in London this week. Photos from Route79, via Flickr.

I went down to the Mashup event in London tonight, which was organized by Vecosys and eTribes. The topic of conversation for the night was: "What"s next, Web3.0? - The coming semantic web". The panel consisted of Paul Walsh from Segala, Mark Birbeck from X-Port Ltd, Tony Fish, and Sam Sethi - who took the role of chair for the night. Sam started by talking about where the semantic web movement was at the moment and the emergence of Microformats. He showed us some examples of sites that are using formats like HCard and HCalendar. For those of you who are not familiar with Microfomats, a good example is a site called worldcupkickoff.com. They used the HCalender format to help users bookmark the dates of games in the World Cup, in their own calendar applications. Microformats are only s