FOWA London 2008

Last Friday I was extremely fortunate to attend the Future of Web Apps conference in London, hosted by Carsonified. Very many thanks to Ryan Carson and his superb team for putting on the event, but also to all those that attended and made the experience so memorable.

I was there to listen to and learn from the best in the industry. I’m trying to prepare a research proposal for my postgraduate dissertation (MSc International Business Management), so this was the prime opportunity to build a small rolodex of willing contacts who would be prepared to respond to some questions in a couple of months time. In short, I went to work, but I had a surprising amount of fun and gained much more than I expected.

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Here is an overview of the university sessions:

Inuda talk from Jon Markwell (Founder)

They’re a 5 man team of Ruby on Rails programmers. In a long weekend off, they hacked together HowSociable – a tool to rate a brand name’s presence on social networks and the blogosphere by giving the Coca Cola brand’s online presence the score of 1000 and then using this as a benchmark.

It was a story of how important word of mouth is to get a product out. This wasn’t marketed in any way, and wasn’t even announced except in a note on a wiki. The tool is useful and stood the test of time. Users have started to email feedback and feature requests, offering to pay for the service.

Ways they plan to monetise – premium account with black box so popularity can be recorded over time, page ads perhaps.

Myspace talk from Chris Thorpe (Developer Platform Evangelist)

Sustainable communities and how they are looking to change apps on the API so that they’re profitable over a longer period of time. Myspace are looking to get rid of apps that have a 2 minute shelf life and that never get used after their first use and viral marketing. To do this, they’re launching an app development competition – £10k up for grabs to put their app to work.

This talk was important from a strategic HRM perspective – they’re making workers and outside coders hungry to write apps for them with rivalry and competition.

Marketing was also a big issue because the current system of small, cheap and nasty virally marketed apps has been recognised as not sustainable, not profitable, and actually pushing away end users from the service. The marketing isn’t appealing enough, and users have developed immunities to these style apps.

The competition, then, looks to address and manage these two business problems – spurring coders into fresh ideas on marketable apps.

Microsoft talk from Bindi Karia (VC/Emerging Business Lead)

“Start-up and stay up with Microsoft”

Microsoft take a different approach to Google and prefer to partner with startups than acquire them. Team provides contacts, technologies, licenses, business consultancy and advice, and sometimes cash.

Partnering offers more opportunities for business later on, adding more b2b as well as end users of a product. Partnering also ensures that products are made under Microsoft supervision yet with the fresh eyes staying outside of the company’s influence: allows workers to do what they are best at, innovation goes further.

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There was a lot to take in from the stalls being run by various SaaS and PaaS providers, startups and others. I had a great time in both the Sun and Microsoft lounges, especially the demo of the Microsoft Surface, which you can see a video or two of on my Qik account. I took the following notes from the stalls around the expo floor:

BookingBug.com is a startup looking to sell their service to small businesses such as plumbers, electricians and so forth. They aim to be a classifieds but with an inbuilt calendar system so that when the business logs in, they can see customer requests for service, and choose to accept that booking. Helps small businesses to manage their time, and customers to see when the business is available for service. Good idea, but how likely are they to get businesses signed up?

Swirrl.com is a wiki service being bootstrapped. They’ve been live for a couple of weeks. 2 man team, very friendly. I was unable to see the difference between this and other wiki services like WetPaint, but I know nothing about programming and real technical workings, so perhaps there’s more to this than meets the eye. Very straight forward freemium business model with 3 levels of paying packages. I can see small and medium enterprises using this as a work and collaboration solution, but due to the quantity of similar wiki services mass or larger scale adoption not happening. I’m sure they’ve thought through the technical side of scaling it, but where’s the unique selling feature that would make everyone jump and grab at it? I definitely do want to give this a try though.

Adknowledge is an ad solutions company, looking to take on Google and Yahoo! with their pay per click system for advertisers. As well as trying to appeal to advertisers, they offer ad solutions up to publishers. They have funding from Technology Crossover Ventures, and can’t really go wrong with their ad business, it just seems that there’s a lot of competition in this arena already. I’d like to talk to them a lot more about monetising through ads and how the model can grow.

AbilityNet provide services for disabled people to enhance their interaction with technology. They’re a not-for-profit charity, backed by Microsoft and others.

Salesforce.com were demonstrating force.com platform as a service which is an incredibly powerful system. Looking around their stall, they demonstrated their services for other businesses, providing sales, crm, marketing, channel management, analytics, customisation, integration, and an app exchange market place. The marketplace was what impressed me the most, a place to trade in apps, it looked so simple and functional. The guys were extremely helpful with answering my questions and I’ll definitely be getting in touch with them at a later stage.

Anish Kapoor (CEO and Founder) from yuuguu demonstrated his cross platform remote assistance technology. Has an installed client for the desktop that launches the request, and then a web portal viewing for the support. Features integration with Google Talk, so the request can take place through your buddy list. This can be sold to consumers and businesses, although I came away confused as to who was the main focus. With services out there like LogMeIn and remote assistance built into Windows Live Messenger, will this take off?

Cmypitch.com is a way for startups to record themselves pitching their company, be rated and advised by other startups on their pitch, and then viewed by potential investors. I take this to be a way of removing the nerve racking experience of pitching that would take place in an office, and maybe saving some time and money for both sides. It’s more than that though: they are another social network, but with a business and video podcasting spin. I assume that businesses will have to pay to be listed in the directory, else there seems to be no way for the site to make money. Nice idea, and I hope it gets adopted by companies to make them more transparent to the community.

Veedow.com is all about “shopping without searching”. I was told to think of StumbleUpon clashed with Amazon. My answer to which is why not partner with StumbleUpon? I assume this will monetise by transaction percentage, and probably ads too.

Skimbit lets you research and compile your research into one page and then share this page with others, a little like delicious bookmarking, but aimed more at collaboration. It’s a nice idea, but I felt it filled a very small niche in the market, and that there are a bunch of other ways I could put together a similar result. I do think that there’s a ton of directions this product offering could be taken. At the moment it reminds me of instapaper, which I used for about 5 minutes and then realised that I saved a lot of time just leaving articles sat in my Google Reader and it was one less page to visit. Skim-in-a-box is great because it lets you put their service into full swing through your own site, a white label service. This and ads on their main site would seem to be monetising sorted.

Empressr is a competitor to SlideRocket. I didn’t get to chat to anyone from their team, so I was just left to guess about it from posters and leaflets.

GoodBarry is a webhost that make running your ebusiness a lot simpler. They have made the complete package of services and tools so that a business can be run through a backend web portal. The demo was impressive, and I’m sure they will attract a lot of customers who are looking to set up an online business but lack time and tech knowledge to do so. The interface was exceptionally clean and very quick to learn your way around. I really liked the live feed of usage, that’s a neat feature. As standard it lets you keep on top of every element to your business and produces stats on everything from page hits to revenue.

Fav.or.it is a blog aggregator, that to me seemed like cheating: it’s like turning your rss feed reader into a blog. You can import content through certain tags, feeds etc and add commentary, or just leave it to gather and publish all that info. What I like is that commenting through the interface actually posts the comment back to the original site that the article came from. Revenue comes from ads by Google, and they’re proudly powered by Sun who had brought a surf machine and internet cafe to the expo for everyone to enjoy.

These are the stalls I got to see, the people I got to speak to, and the interesting leaflets I picked up. Time flew, and as everyone began to pack up, the focus turned to the live taping of Diggnation. Congratulations to Alex and Heather on getting engaged! I had such fun watching this, meeting new people and drinking Google Beers. Marketing genius – provide free beer and people will love your brand. A couple of rounds at Fox bar run by Digg and Facebook finished a thoroughly enjoyable and productive day. Many thanks again to all those that made it happen!

Ways of screaming, “LOOK AT ME!”

What do the following companies have in common? Ebay, Facebook, Myspace and Microsoft (please suggest others in comments).

Answer – they’ve all launched an ‘open’ platform for developers in the hope of stimulating or rejuvenating their core business. It seems that in the web world, once a company hits a certain size/maturity level that throttles and chokes the development of new ideas, the trend is to throw out an element to the developer space in the hope that something better will come from it. But is that always necessarily the case? They could just sell stuff.

Let’s compare that notion to Amazon who launched S3 and their suite of web services with an immediate openness so that it would be embraced from the word ‘go’ by developers as a strong yet flexible tool. Granted it’s in a different arena, but is there something to be said here about having an open strategy from the beginning of a business’ operations?

As well as opening up another chunk of their site, Ebay have partnered with a Vietnamese startup. This type of behaviour is not new from Ebay who, quite sensibly, have in the past collaborated or acquired national/local level auction sites in Asia to gain the specialisation of language and culture. One wonders if they’d adapt their structure in the future to take the trading down to a much more local level in Craigslist style, or if they’d look to go social by pushing their own messaging systems and allow greater in-site sharing on top of their current activities loading Ebay widgets into every other social network on the web.

When putting my face on the Zuckspace, my concerns lie primarily in what the media and authorities tell me about privacy, and then my experience as a consumer begins to become tiresome with the constant nagging of a thousand different invitations to join up to some virally marketed application with zero useful functionality. Imagine a parallel world where from day 1, Mark had opened doors on thefacebook to the developer community and attracted business through being 100% public about changes to services, rather than the ‘by-the-way we added this’ approach. Myspace wouldn’t have stood a chance, and maybe we’d have a half decent set of apps that are useful for our daily routines. It sickens me how much VC money goes into widgets and such, with no real revenue coming back out.

I think openness is something that business analysts should start to use to gauge the level of maturity or desperation of a company. Perhaps in some instances it’s just something of a gimmick in which case the company in question should be exposed as a surfer of the trend wave. Opening a developer platform or a part of your product is a huge move, and any company taking steps down that path should learn to walk before they start to run. I look forward to a time when VCs and angels see in potential investments the strength of an idea that embraces community, social and open concepts in a sensible and straight-forward blend. As the last couple of years have seen the web turn social, it is certain that the immediate future holds for someone the opportunity to make a big win by finding the perfect business model and in my opinion that will find its roots in the beekeeper open source example.

Openness for the purpose of having some hope to clutch on to as your firm levels off isn’t something anyone should push for, so instead we should ask these maturing companies to get smart and openly talk to each other. The future lies in good communication and the portability of services. EA Maxis have released their new game Spore which is the perfect example for what I’m trying to illustrate – there’s a real market out there for products that make sharing information simple and that blur the boundaries between our online and offline experience. The ability to make YouTube videos of game play and add them in-game is incredible, and I hope that GameVee take note of where games like Spore are going, and try to get some good partnerships in motion with game makers.

The directions that companies in the general tech but especially web2.0 fields need to be looking at are vertical (online and offline – helped already by Google Gears and Yahoo! Browser Plus), horizontal (desktop, laptop, giant plasma screen, UMPC or cell/mobile/smart phone – lets have a seamless experience wherever) and everything else in between which I’m naming ‘diagonally’ for want of a better word (integrating and cooperating with services provided by others that could make for sensible partnering and sharing). We’re all still waiting on total perfection in the ‘horizontal’ direction: I’m talking about mobile browsing and the recognised unfulfilled potential.

The latest developer craze is surely all about Apple’s shiny new iPhone (or not). VC activity is bound to go off the scale as startups show the world how you really make use of a platform. I’m praying that mobile platforms generally, whether Android or LiMo or iPhone, find productive and helpful apps housed, and that they don’t spin out of control like social network platforms have all seemed to. I’d love to be able to take ‘digital nomad’ really mobile… or rather, on my mobile. Currently that project is, for me, simply limited to getting all my operations inside a browser.

Firefox 3 has been officially released today, and hopefully now that’s out of the way Mozilla can take a step back and analyse their next moves on mobile platforms. Being a browser maker, they certainly sit in a favourable position, one in which they could stand to soak up an even greater number of users should they adapt products for ‘touchy’ devices.

Unsurprisingly RIM’s Blackberry line up contains a touch phone, and the phrase ‘line up’ is the exact reason that they’re going to keep making money despite just how great the new iPhone might be – there’s so much more choice for consumers. Besides, let’s not forget the business users that swear by them and their hardcore functionality.

Now that Windows 7 is in motion and we have days of staring at our grubby finger prints to look forward to, I think it’s high time that Windows Mobile caught up with Apple’s shiny software. I make no apology for using the word ’shiny’ twice next to ‘Apple’ – I’m no Mac Fanboy, I just think they deserve credit for making flashy (even though, laughably, Adobe Flash STILL isn’t on the iPhone) gizmos that everyone else can copy and make more practical. Microsoft need to push and push their speed at rolling out products and services because I don’t think it’ll be long now before their competitors gain enough market share and publicity to make everyone locked into their brand able to see the shiny stuff and lust after it.

Talking about the Big 3 (and AOL) is unavoidable in this blog post, and I’m not sorry about that. I’ve been avidly following this drama for months and have watched Microsoft’s obsession with joining the online advertising business grow. I strongly agree with Henry Blodget’s latest comment that this isn’t what Microsoft needs, it should focus on corporate business and make its core products so strong that they keep hold of their oligopoly.

I ca(h)n’t take this (bad pun? I don’t care) obnoxious muscling in on affairs and trying to force a sale just as much as I can’t believe how resilient (perhaps arrogant) Jerry has proven to be. He’s frozen the hiring, offered up a package to his quitting employees, and signed the deal with Google. Most incredible of all is just how severed any ties are with Microsoft and how badly this is reflecting on stock, as raised by NYT’s Joe Nocera. So what’s next?

I was so convinced at one stage that Microhoo would happen, and now it hasn’t I’m keeping my lips sealed. Others have not, and think that whilst Yahoo! would do well from acquiring AOL, it’s not going to happen because Microsoft will continually inject an offer that’s higher than Jerry’s, both out of spite for that poison pill and to feed the ad obsession.