is it all about the money?

russell beattie has a column on the economics behind web 2.0 — WTF 2.0. while i disagree i found it an interesting read.

“But I still maintain that you have to think about the business model and the customers from the very beginning, incorporating them into your application and design otherwise you end up with a very different product or service than one that will allow you to create a lasting business. If you want to “think” in Web 2.0, you should be thinking not just, “how can I make this cool ajaxy social web service thing”, but “how can I make MONEY off this cool ajaxy social web service thing.””

this is the quote at the very end that made me really think about what he was writing. i can see his point, coming from a vc or business point of view. but when i think of web 2.0 right now i think of 1994 to 1996 not 1999 to 2001. i think web 2.0 is in its infancy, we are seeing a lot of experimentation, proof of concept. an interesting factoid i read recently was about flickr and how it dwarfs in number of users compared to yahoo’s photo service. which to me shows that web 2.0 is in the absolute early adopter stage. the main reason for this is not that the economics haven’t been figured out yet, but the technology and usability hasn’t been figured out yet. once that is done (give it another year or two) we will see some companies appear that will figure out a business model to charge for web 2.0 services and to a much larger degree we will see existing businesses and web businesses adopt web 2.0 technologies to enhance their current offerings.

for this it is important to see web 2.0 as an extension of the current web, an evolution, rather than a revolution. web 2.0 is about making the net easier to use, not creating a new net.

in the early stages of a tech evolution business models don’t have to be right, because the technology has to be right first, plus early adopters today as well as ten years ago are way more forgiving than the mass market will be.

finally a business phone that is a phone

motorola announced the v195, a phone which is supposed to be a business phone. and i agree, it has everything that should make it a business phone. first, it doesn’t have a camera, something a lot of corporate IT and security people have been not too happy about for some time. and instead it has a crazily long battery life (up to 21 days of standby), bluetooth, and quad-band.

rolling out a phone like this is great, the only problem is that it is designed and made for IT buyers and not phone users, and unfortunately most mobile phone buyers are still mobile phone users, and not really IT shops. they tend to focus on PCs, servers, and PDAs. so what motorola has to do now is to convince companies that they need to buy phones for their users, rather than having users buy their own phones. this might be easy for the government for which it is going to be great not to have to worry about mobile phone cameras, but corporate america will be harder to convince, since they are not so much used to pay for these phones in the first place.

but then maybe security will be a driver to have standardized phones across their user base, for that to happen though mobile threats have to become real first.

washington post thinking internet

the washington post has been interesting to follow over the years. at least what they are doing on the internet. i still prefer the new york times over the post but the post’s internet strategy is way more advanced. first of all the free content, and also the strange policy by the times to have people pay for articles that are older than a certain date, making it kind of stupid to link to a times article.

but more recently the post really embraced the blogging community by adding the technorati boxes to articles, making it easy to see who is blogging a certain post article. this was really a stroke of genius to a certain degree. because this increases the attention the post is getting in the blog space. and the blog space after all is way more about linking to other sites than creating its own content. so the post is driving attention and brand awareness across the blog world.

blogs are one interesting development on the web (and one that is certainly getting a lot of attention beyond the net), but i mentioned before the internet and blogs are about links, and making sure that others find you. blogs are great because here are users who tell others (mostly like minded users) that they found a link they liked (boingboing is a great example). this is were social bookmarking sites come in, sites like del.icio.us . they share bookmarks across users. and now the post has added a del.icio.us box right under the technorati box, making it just a simple click to add a post article to your del.icio.us list, and by doing so sharing the post article with the rest of the del.icio.us crowd and directly increasing the attention the article gets across the net.

the only question is … what is the times doing?

a new light on the port story

i didn’t really care about the whole port story, in a way i felt this is just globalization and why care about it if it is an arab company. but today i read that the government of the united arab emirates (the very institution that will run US ports) is censoring BoingBoing. The reason UAE gives in the site is that boingboing is “inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates”. now part of US policy is to bring democracy (and what comes with it — like freedom of speech) to the world, if they really want to do this then they can now make a statement and show they really care, because why should i as a tax payer pay money to a government that is not respecting freedom of speech?

old media fucks up again — this time unthankful nbc

looks like some old media companies still have not gotten the internet. and in the case of nbc is this really amazing. they get this huge gift-basket from youtube.com in the form of their saturday night live skid “Lazy Sunday: The Chronicles of Narnia” becoming not only an overnight success on the internet, but a global news story. not only did the skid story make it into tons of american newspapers, it even showed up on europe, with the german magazine der spiegel reporting on it.

so in the beginning they even did the right thing … give it out for free in good quality. that is what they did, users were able to download it for free via the itunes store. but then the slow demise of nbc began. once they started selling snl shows online, the free version of the skit disappeared and you could only get it now for $1.99.

but today they did the unimaginable, they asked youtube to remove the skit from youtube … SNL cult hit yanked from video-sharing site.
this is just amazing. i don’t know who makes the decisions at nbc but this must be one of the stupidest decisions i have seen in a long time. what is going to be the impact of leaving the skit online vs. asking youtube to take it off. just as an aside last week the last time i was on youtube it was still one of the most popular videos. the only impact this has is a negative one for nbc, but they don’t seem to care.

are the cartoons an insult to islam or the behavior of muslims in response to the cartoons?

the economist’s cover story cartoon wars is completely correct in stating that freedom of speech is a key to a liberal and free democratic society, and that the leaders of some western nations (mostly the US and britain) were wrong in trying to influence and blame the press.

but where i disagree with the economist view is in the interpretation of those cartoons. the economist says “And they offend because they can be read as equating Islam with terrorism: one cartoon has Muhammad with a bomb for his headgear.” and in the full article (part of the premium web section and print version) they say that “several of the images were frankly insulting, particularly those that pictured the muslim prophet as a terrorist.”

i do not agree with the assertion that these cartoons are insulting to islam, at least by no means as insulting as those real life terrorists who kill innocent people in the name of the prophet and all those muslims that are standing by saying nothing when these things happen.

that particular cartoon would have been an insult if the last five years hadn’t happened, they would have been insulting if 9/11 wouldn’t have happened, if madrid didn’t happen, if dancing muslims in the streets of cairo and across the muslim world in response to 9/11 wouldn’t have happened, if liberal muslims and the leaders of the muslim world would have made every effort at every time to condemn violence against civilians and innocent in the name of islam — but none of this happened. and that is why those cartoons are not an insult but a mirror that merely reflects how the muslim masses portray islam.

now this portrayal might not be the way they think of islam, but by being quite and voiceless they support the indirectly action of the few.

international herald tribune gets it again

i have started to read the international herald tribune more often now. it has most of the good stories from the nyt and a lot of other stories. but what amazes me most about the site and is one of the reasons i keep coming back is the site itself. i already wrote about it in the past, but their ajax based page view is amazing, you see three columns on one screen and then if you go to the next three columns of the story you click next page and without reloading you see the next. pretty cool.

but while browsing through the site just now and reading up on the olympic coverage i came across something else … the photos of the olympics come from flickr and are integrated in the site.
Photos From Turin and it is not just a list of 10 or so pictures, no it comes ready with a tag cloud. now that is real forward thinking new media from an traditional media company.

mobile internet will not be browser based

eweek has a story about how the mobile internet is not taking off and that mobile browsers are still not offering enough capabilities to view content, resulting in Mobile Browsers Still [being] Closed for Business.

it is interesting that 99% of the article is about browsers and doesn’t dig deeper into the solution after quoting pat smith from vettro ” you can leverage a lot more technology in a client application than you could ever do on the device Web browsers available today, and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.” he is completely right. the mobile internet doesn’t want a mobile browser it wants fast and direct access to information and services. think of a ajax based widget that is stored on your phone and that updates automatically.

while mobile carriers are certainly not supporting this model (and by doing so crippling the mobile internet market) most of the mobile agencies are not much better — focusing too much on browser based / portal solutions.

google really getting a free lunch?

slashdot has this story on verizon and other telcos trying to move to a system in which they can make more money from the internet: Verizon Threatens Google’s ‘Free Lunch’. the piece quote a washington post article

“”The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”"

now this idea is just plain stupid. verizon should ask itself why people use the internet? because of the great infrastructure? or because of the content that is available through it. without content verizon has nothing, just a bunch of fiber and copper cables criss-crossing the globe, but thanks to content companies, and thanks to services like google users are willing to pay $15 a month to have access to the internet.

the big danger of this stupidity coming from the telcos is that they are able to actually do quite a lot of harm to the internet if they succeed in with their ideas, most importantly resulting with a lot of smaller content companies going out of business, less content diversity, and much less service innovation. plus with non-american isps keeping today’s pricing structure it could be a big blow to america’s internet dominance.

mohammed cartoons

the reaction of the muslim world towards the danish mohammed cartoons is ridiculous. riots across the middle east, burning flags, embassies set on fire, death threats, and now an economic embargo by iran. how much more ridiculous can the get? i wonder if any of those running around like crazy in the middle east have actually seen those cartoons?

ok they depict mohammed that is true, but they raise important questions on the role of islam in todays world and instead of taking them to inflect on themselves those rioters prove the cartoonist right to a certain degree.

it wasn’t the most sensitive thing to do to draw up a mohammed cartoon, but then christians complained about movies and music videos depicting jesus not always the way they thought was the right way, but that didn’t end up in riots and chaos. muslims have burned flags of all kinds of nations for years, have drawn up “cartoon” depictions of other races or people and that didn’t end up in riots.

i don’t know who is in charge in the middle east, but whoever is has to come to their senses and tell the people on the streets that they have to grow up and accept that they are part of a global community and there are rules in which people get along with each other.