Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media: Web 2.0 Archives

AJAX, AJAX, AJAX...it's on everyone's lips and so is Zimbra

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher.com

AJAX is the word this month. Maybe for a few months. It's both a technology and a real product. AJAX is about creating a new generation of online/web based applications that are independent of virtually anything.

AJAX is not about client software versus server software--the point is that AJAX software doesn't care about the platform. And AJAX will be one of the key technologies that powers the (near) future ubiquitous wireless/wired web.

AJAX represents a unique class of applications that carry their own processing, independent of the client system. AJAX applications represent the second key technology of Internet 2.0 (the first is RSS.)

The concept represented by AJAX is neither something you download to your PC, client software, or that you keep on the web such as Hotmail--it is both and neither. In the same way that RSS is a product of Internet 2.0--it is part email part web page but neither.

It is when we encounter such near perfect paradoxes that we know that these are technologies that deserve closer attention, imho.

AJAX has begun to catch the attention of the venture capital community, and their investments are starting to drive up the value of new deals. And some companies are building a lot of buzz.

One of the darlings of the AJAX sector is Zimbra. I met Satish Dharmaraj CEO of Zimbra, a few weeks ago.

I was impressed with his energy and mentioned the meeting here on SVW. Now, I keep bumping into people who mention Zimbra and it is all very positive stuff.

Zimbra is creating an AJAX Microsoft Outlook, and it's a good execution of this familiar user interface.

Zimbra is smart, because it is leveraging first mover advantage. I know that phrase sounds 1999, but this time, in Internet 2.0, that phrase means something.

Also, VCs are throwing money into AJAX companies which is driving up valuations, and that threatens to spoil the overall market. And there will soon be thousands of developers creating AJAX applications, so first/fast mover is important. Zimbra looks to be ahead of the game so far, but how far ahead is difficult to judge.

Selling into the enterprise is a tough sell--it is a very conservative market. And the coming marketing din of AJAX startups is going to make it difficult to be heard.

It is those AJAX startups that already have some name recognition, some products, especially a user community--not to mention revenues--that stand the best chance of surviving.

Those that can be the first movers will own the fat part of the long tail, and the fat part is the best part.

[BTW, since when did one half of the bell distribution become the long tail?! If the internet enables 6 people to share an interest in an obscure cult TV show, then they are probably already doing it... No?]

Thumbs up for Netvibes

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

Everyone complains that they have too many feeds to deal with. It's too easy to subscribe, too hard to keep up. I was just about at the point where I never checked the rss feeds, just looking at the major websites. Last night, I came across Netvibes, based in Paris and London, which last week picked up an additional $15 million in seed funding, with Index Ventures and Accel leading,

I look at a lot of Web 2.0 thingies and a lot of them leave me cold, but I'm a big fan of Netvibes after half an hour of building my home page with it. It shows you just where Ajax is leading us ... to online apps that are just as responsive and intuitive as desktop apps. Netvibes comes with plenty of good mainstream feeds that are easy to load in - you click and drag to where you want them on your page. Clicking on a headline brings up a fantastic interface element - pop-up box with recent headlines from that feed, detail on the link you clicked on and any associated art.

Adding feeds directly is not so much fun (you have to paste in an XML url or load an OPML). But, it's super W2 friendly, with modules for everything from Gmail to Flickr to delicious to digg. You can track ebay auctions, track product prices with Kelkoo, load in your online calendar events.

But the real distinguisher is the Netvibes ecosystem, built on a simple API so third parties can add modules that work with Netvibes. There are close to 300 modules right now.

Reporting the investment news, TechCrunch notes:

"NetVibes toughest challenges are starting now. They have enough traction in a young market to begin to monetize traffic - they just have to find the right way to do it without alienating users. NetVibes will also have to become mainstream which implies dedicated marketing efforts and relevant distribution deals to reach untapped, non-early-adopter audiences."

Posted by Richard Koman on August 21, 2006 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Are these the top Web 2.0 companies?

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

In today's Chronicle, Dan Fost and Ellen Lee offer snapshots of what they think are the Web 2.0 startups on the move. What strikes most is that most of these apps leave me cold.

The one that perked my interest was popURLs, a competitor to NetVibes, which I looked at here. I guess I'm just a shut-in but I don't see myself spending a lot of time sharing music with friends online or watching their photos go by.

And with so many Web 2.0 offerings, how would you ever get all the people you care about to standardize on one solution? That said, I will try to spend some time with these and other W2 sites in coming days and offer some better perspective. Here's the Chron's top picks (and my comments):

StumbleUpon - rate and recommend websites as you stumble around the Net. How is it better than delicious?
Meebo - check all your instant messages without having to run four different clients. Useful, but not exciting.
imeem - Social networking. Lucaso says its built-in IM makes it great.
Slide - set photos from any website to slide by your screen all the time.
Dabble - Kind of delicious/Digg for online video, it makes sense.
Pandora - This is what Cory Doctorow was talking about eight years ago or so. Collaborative filtering to make an online radio station you really want to listen to. Problem back then was Cory was talking about P2P downloading of MP3s. A non-starter.
Eyespot - Online video editing.
Songbird - Play music from many sources
Twitter - Text message to groups of people's cellphones. No doubt handy for deploying smartmobs.
Revver - Online video site

Posted by Richard Koman on August 28, 2006 7:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A plethora of Web 2.0 = Way too many Swiss-army-knife-collaborative-platform-technologies

Every Web 2.0 company is offering a variant on the Swiss-army-knife-of-collaborative/social-media-technologies. Each one offers pretty much all the same things: sharing, blogging, sharing anything, any and many types of communications, collaborative apps--and mashing together whatever services you need online. And the ones that don't, have plans to add such features.

Yesterday, my colleague Richard Koman took a look at the Web 2.0 companies picked out by the San Francisco Chronicle. Other mainstream publications are doing similar things.

IMHO, this is a "Web 2.Uh Oh" trend because it leads nowhere; this is not the Northwest passage to the next boom. (This is so one-point-five ... :-)

I've been saying this for more than a year, but now with so many of these things coming out of alpha for the fall season, it is a good time to draw attention to how dead-end most of these ventures are.

For instance, what would it take for a GOOG or a YHOO or a MSFT to reverse engineer any one of the Web 2.0 companies? About a week to launch the alpha and a month to launch the beta-- plus they have the scale already built-in to monetize the heck out of them from day 14...

How many video hosting and editing sites are there? North of 200... How many similar sites are there that fall into any Web 2.0 category? Somebody will do the math...

I don't need to know the exact number to know that there are far too many of them. These types of companies only succeed if they become de facto platforms for large enough communities.

Communities are not created by press release, they are not announced, they are grown. With so many community-creator-platforms out there, we will have some large communities created on some of the technology platforms--but that will be for a small fraction of the total number of ambitious ventures.

Ask me (not email) and I'll tell you where the real action will be, where the next boom will be :-)

Posted by Tom Foremski on August 29, 2006 2:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

SVW chat: IBM's CTO of Emerging Technologies talks about Web 2.0 and trust

David Boloker CTO of Emerging Technologies at IBM came into town to speak at Ajax World. I caught up with him Wednesday morning and we talked about Ajax and Web 2.0, and a new early alpha initiative IBM calls QEDwiki that can provide the framework for integrating information and applications within enterprises:

David Boloker is very interested in Ajax and very interested in making sure that there aren't dozens of nuances of Ajax. He and Scott Dietzen, CTO at Zimbra, one of the earliest Ajax apps companies, founded the Open Ajax Alliance.

"Every Ajax toolset was following its own nuance of Ajax and the problem was that each toolset wanted to 'own' the whole page. This created many conflicts and made it difficult to pull together different components," said Mr Boloker. "We did not want to create a standards body but to create agreement on some basic things such as naming JavaScript objects."

Is an Ajax application the same as a Web 2.0 application? "No, a Web 2.0 application has to include the social dimension, how it implements tagging, for example, and sharing, and all the other community oriented aspects that are important," said Mr Boloker.

For IBM, Ajax and Web 2.0 represent new generations of applications that use the web as a platform. And they have characteristics that enable users to create their own "my web" experience by mashing/pulling together Ajax components from many different sources.

A key to that approach is to be able to provide the framework that enables that type of integration. And that is the OpenAjax Hub an open source project.

But with everyone having access to this framework, where is the value-add? Mr Boloker says it will be in two places. One is in the value of the data or content. The databases of content will have value to organizations and users, such as Reuters feeds, or databases of chemical data for example.

The second place will be in the Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) layer which is all about services. And IBM is a services oriented company.

"The focus for us is on the business professional, not the IT department. All you need to do is operate a mouse and know how to drag and drop."

That's the basis for IBM's alpha project called QEDwiki (Quickly and Easily Done wiki), which is being tested by 20 large corporations. This is IBM's version of what Jotspot, SocialText, and others are offering, a way to enable business people to mashup sources, feeds and applications, by what I call drag and drop share or not (DADSON), depending on user access rights.

But mashing up feeds and data means trust in the source. I pointed out that Google News recently was carrying a news headline that had been hacked, it carried an anti-US anti-Israel message. In that case, Google had not verified the content, it was corrupted, and that corrupted trust in Google.

In the brave new world of web applications and mashups, verifying that content comes from where it says it does will be absolutely critical. But how will that be done?

Mr Boloker said that feeds could be signed with security certificates but he also acknowledged that even Microsoft has had problems with security certificates.

Trust will come from long standing relations, contracts, and also using security technologies, said Mr Boloker. "It will come from your relationships with your vendors and an established history of trust. You will assign different levels of trust to a feed. And trust will be offered as yet another service."

- - -

Additional resources and links:

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Posted by Tom Foremski on October 5, 2006 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SVW CEO chat: Sharpcast has Web 2.0 ambitions way beyond photo sharing

Gabu Thomas

Wednesday, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gibu Thomas, the CEO of Sharpcast, an online photo sharing site (or is it . . ?). He's a sharp guy with a good grasp of where the Web 2.0 trend is heading.

At first, and even second glance, Sharpcast might seem like an online photo sharing site but it is potentially more than that. It could become a web services integration platform/framework that could transform consumer PC applications into sturdy and lucrative consumer online services.

"The photo sharing application is a demonstration of what our technology can do," said Mr Thomas. "Our goal is to work with application developers, ISPs, mobile carriers, and offer them a way to turn applications into web services and generate revenues."

Sharpcast has developed a "Sharpcast server" similar to a Microsoft Exchange server but more web savvy and scalable. A key element of the technology is its syncing capabilities because Sharpcast's philosophy is that consumer applications should be available to a user even in the absence of an Internet connection.

"It shouldn't matter if you are connected or not, you still have access to your data, " said Mr Thomas. I whole heartedly agree (please see: Walkabout Wiki)

For example, users of Sharpcast's photo application can editor photos and tag them even if they are offline. And they can access their photos from any Internet connected PC, and through a mobile device such as a Palm Treo.

Intelligent syncing is a very important element of Sharpcast's technology, especially since several people could be editing the same photo.

The same approach can be applied to documents and collaborative editing, and also to other applications. That's where Sharpcast would love to introduce its platform/framework for other developers to use.

It's clear that other developers will require the same capabilities for their web services, and so why reinvent the wheel? Why not use the Sharpcast server and get into your markets that much faster?

"We've been working on this technology for three years and yes, others could try and do it themselves, but it is not easy. We are on our third version of our server technology," said Mr Thomas.

SVW's take: Sharpcast's challenge is in its brand management: it is currently seen as an online photo sharing service yet it wants to be an infrastructure software vendor--two different markets and two separate businesses. Reaching the consumer market is very expensive and online business models are still developing. Marketing to the the enterprise market isn't cheap either--but at least there are established business models here.

Also, other online services companies have been developing their own Web 2.0 platforms/frameworks so that they can power their own web services. What's to stop them from selling licenses to their technologies to others, in the same way Sharpcast is selling the technology that powers its photosharing site?

There will likely will be many dozens of potential competitors offering similar infrastructure software to that of Sharpcast. I don't know if Sharpcast has superior technology to that of others, but the rising noise level will make it harder and more expensive, to be heard. Still, an early start does wonders for grabbing mind space, and Zimbra, the Ajax apps company is a great example.

Interestingly, I met with Mr Thomas just an hour after I had interviewed IBM's Chief Technology Officer on Emerging Technologies. And we spoke at length on this very subject, creating a common platform for Web 2.0 applications.

Please see:

SVW chat: IBM's CTO of Emerging Technologies talks about Web 2.0 and trust Oct 4 - 2006

AJAX, AJAX, AJAX...it's on everyone's lips and so is Zimbra Oct 17 - 2005

I want a portable wiki -- a WalkAbout Wiki (with TagAbout GPS technology...) July 6 - 2005

Posted by Tom Foremski on October 5, 2006 12:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rumor Mill: Google to buy YouTube for $1.6bn?

Google is in the final stages of talks to buy YouTube for about $1.6 billion, according to inside sources. The deal was first reported by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch as "completely unsubstantiated rumor" but moments ago The Wall Street Journal confirmed that the talks are real.

The Journal's Kevin Delaney reports:

Google Inc. is in talks to acquire popular video-sharing site YouTube Inc. for roughly $1.6 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. The discussions are still at a sensitive stage and could well break off, this person says.

Arrington said early this morning that:

A quick phone call to a VC confirmed that the rumor is circulating (he also confirmed the price), but that is far from confirmation that this deal is happening. I’m digging for more but the source on this one is very good.
We know that YouTube has had informal talks with a number of companies about acquisition in the $1.5 - $2 billion range. And I suspect Google won’t be daunted by the prospect of dealing with a ton of pissed off copyright holders.
Based on experience with these sort of rumors, I’d put this at 40% likely to be at least partially true.

Such a deal would be "damn cheap," Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, told the Journal. "YouTube's brand identity is no less than Google's and is no less than Coke's.''

While YouTube is the brand name in user-created video services, Google Video is one of dozens of also-rans. As the conventional wisdom is that video will be very, very big very soon - and Google has of course the content-based advertising market wrapped up, such a move sounds sensible. But it's definitely a sea change for Google, which is in the habit of buying lots of very small, beneath-the-radar companies, not brand-name companies.

For YouTube's founders, who have been moving to monetize their golden goose as quickly as possible - unfortunately with deals to promote Paris Hilton and reality TV - the big pay-off must look a lot more attractive than negotiating the copyright abuse waters and the long road to profits.

Update:

From Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore Networks

TRAFFIC DATA

Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Media Metrix
Total Unique Visitors (000)

Select Sites Aug-06
---------------- ------
Yahoo! Video      21,141
MySpace Videos 19,406
YouTube        19,089
MSN Video                   15,414
Google Video Search    11,891

STREAMING VIDEO DATA
Select Video Properties
July 2006
Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore Video Metrix

Select Unique U.S. Streams Initiated
Properties            Streamers (000) by U.S. Users (MM)
---------- --------------- ------------------
Total Internet (U.S.) 106,534 7,182
Yahoo! Sites         37,934 812
MySpace          37,422 1,459
YouTube           30,538 649
Microsoft Sites         16,227 156
Google Sites           7,520           60

Select Share of
Properties Streams Initiated
---------- -----------------
Total Internet (U.S.) 100.0%

Yahoo! Sites      11.3%
MySpace      20.3%
YouTube       9.0%
Microsoft Sites           2.2%
Google Sites     0.8%

Tom Foremski: Interestingly, CNET's News.com still has nothing on this story more than 8 hours after the news broke.

Posted by Richard Koman on October 6, 2006 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scoop: Browster acquisition in works - News Corp likely buyer

My sources tell me that Browster, based in San Francisco, will soon announce that it has been acquired. The buyer is understood to be News Corp, which owns MySpace. The financial terms are not known at this time.

Browster's technology works with the Microsoft and Firefox browsers and downloads the page behind links. When a user moves the mouse cursor over the links, the web page instantly pops up.

The company recently created a new version that has been customized for MySpace (PDF). It was this move that caught the attention of News Corp. With the MySpace Browster, News Corp. can help keep users on the MySpace site. Plus, downloading MySpace pages in the background will enable News Corp. to show a higher traffic count, which will strengthen ad revenue.

. . .

Please see SVW:

Browster—a nifty search utility or a new way to "frame" third party web sites?

Browster helps you sift through search results by adding instant page previews. But there could be some ugly side effects, such as a backlash from content owners and a massive increase in bandwidth use.

Posted by Tom Foremski on November 14, 2006 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Zolved: Harvesting the community wisdom of geeks about gizmos

This is a great idea: Zolved.com is growing a community of people and answers to common consumer tech problems. As we get more and more digital gadgets and objects, making them work right, and work collaboratively with all our other gadgets gets to be very challenging.

Quite often people abandon digital gadgets because they are too difficult to learn to operate. This could do a lot to help sell digital products.

Also, Zolved offers a killer feature, it lets you remotely take control of your parent's PC, for example, to help solve problems.

Here is Ratan Tipirneni, Founder and CEO to explain more about his company:

Zolved.com harnesses the knowledge of thousands of consumers who have successfully solved technical problems and directs proven solutions from the knowing to those consumers who need to know. The power of many individuals is put in service to the needs of one, along with targeted content obtained through vertical searching of industry manufacturers and experts.

Zolved.com technical experts then filter the content. The result is the best match between a problem and speedy solution.

If community-based assistance can’t resolve an issue, Zolved.com visitors can receive an answer by stating their problem and receiving an answer from Zolved.com's extended team of worldwide technical experts, or “gurus,” both within the company and the community at large.

Answers can be immediately available and, if not, a guru will often research the problem and respond with an answer once found.
Local Technical Resources

Zolved.com recognizes that not every problem can be solved remotely online. For those problems, it provides an extensive list of more than 25,000 local technical resources across the United States that a consumer can easily find, including map access, and contact directly for assistance.

Tired of driving to your parent’s home to solve their latest PC problem? Resolve it from your own home using free remote control technology available from Zolved.com.

Take control of your parents’ computer and take care of the issue without taking your car out of the garage.

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 14, 2007 4:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

SwitchPlanet launch: Trade stuff you have for stuff you want

Chris Samarin just launched SwitchPlanet.com as a private beta and would love to get some feedback on the site. He is also able to sign up some private beta testers (csamarin(at)gmail.com.)

Chris explains:

Basic concept...recycle the things you have and no longer need to get the stuff you want all for free(no sign up fees, no transaction fees, no monthly fees, etc.). Because it's free we give members the option to make a donation that goes into our SwitchFund that gets distributed among charities and non-profits. Members can also create profiles and socialize and all that great stuff.

I'm a one man shop, with a dev team, but no funding or marketing "guru" to help get the word out.

A quick look into the future…I'm looking to add SMS member verification (similar to how Gmail works when you sign up) before we come out of private beta and then start rolling out new features like friends and groups as well as branch out into the UK and into other switch-able items like books, tools or whatever else the members ask for during the open beta period.

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 14, 2007 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An anthropologist explains Web 2.0 in pictures

Excellent video describing Web 2.0. It's probably the best definition I've seen. (Hattip Chris Dichtel.) By Michael Wesch Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

It is not surprising that an anthropologist put this together. It must be boom times for that profession, I would think!!! After all, they study social networks full time.

Posted by Tom Foremski on February 23, 2007 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

2.27.07 Ning: Both a platform and easy-to-use site tool

Judging from Ning.com's response time this morning - which is to say, no response - I'd say Marc Andreessen's social networking company either has a bright future because so many people are interested or a dim one because their servers are so unprepared for news-day stress. So we must trust in reviewers who got a look at it last night.

Michael Arrington must be relieved because he so hates to dis Web2 apps and just a ~~month~~ year ago he was forced to call it DOA. But amazing things have happened:

Ning relaunches tonight with new functionality and an interface that allows even the most novice of web users to create their own highly customized social network in moments. ... I’m now willing to offer a full mea culpa. The new Ning is an impressive and useful service.

Om says the new service is focused, simple and streamlined.

Today’s social networking services are fantastic, but they are very similar in approach to AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy in the early nineties. They have a fixed and rigid view of what people can do,” says Marc Andreessen, co-founder and CTO of Ning.
The analogy is apropos, for there are some of us who believe that the social networks are getting rapidly commoditized, and becoming what amounts to being a feature. That is not necessarily a bad thing – since it means the focus is squarely on the vibrancy of community.

In the TechCrunch comments, a user named Drama 2.0 raised this issue:

I consider Ning to be the Ezboard of social networks. For those who are unfamiliar with Ezboard, it’s a service which enables anybody to set up a free message board. I have seen some of Ezboard’s most popular communities migrate away to their own platform because the ownership, full control and flexibility needed is just not available in a solution like this and once you get big enough, it doesn’t make any sense to outsource your fate.

Andreessen replied that Ning is in fact a platform of APIs that allow every aspect of a site and its tools to be fully programmable, with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, PHP or web services.

... [A]ctually we are shooting for something very different than EZBoard. We’re building a full platform — completely programmable in every respect. More like an online operating system than anything else, actually — just focused on powering social networks.
When you look at it like we do, the “build your own social network for anything” version we’re releasing tonight — while killer for ordinary people, we hope! — is just one program (written in PHP and Javascript, calling the Ning web services API’s) that can run on the platform.
The platform is providing, via those web services API’s, all of the key functionality — friends, messaging, user authentication, content management, search, tagging, video, photos, mobile uploading, etc.
The point being:
* We can build on that platform — and we can add features on it very rapidly from here on out.
* Anyone can customize any aspect of what we have built, by diving into the PHP and Javascript — although we also provide many ways for ordinary people to do customization via point and click, and also provide easy access into the HTML and CSS for people who prefer that.
* Anyone can build any new application using our core services — that application can either run in the Ning environment (our embedded PHP runtime) or outside and just use our web services API’s.
The result, we hope, is that if you are an ordinary user, Ning looks like “build your own social network for anything” with point and click, easy as can be. If you also want to customize it with HTML and CSS, you can do that. And then if you’re comfortable with code, you can go wild and do anything you want in the PHP and Javascript or via web services.

Finally, here's a demo video from The Ning Blog.

Posted by Richard Koman on February 27, 2007 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Exclusive: Former Top Yahoo exec leads MixerCast out of stealth mode

Jen Cooper says she knows how to deal with content licensing, "That's what I used to do at Yahoo, and it's an advantage that we have at MixerCast."

MixerCast is coming out of private beta on Monday April 16--with a library of premium video, music and photography licensed from major content owners. It is all available to users to mashup and broadcast anyway they choose--all royalty-free.

Ms Cooper spent five years at Yahoo as executive director of business development with a "focus on digital video and content acquisition." Now she is using that experience to obtain licenses for content from top content owners such as ABC and National Geographic.

Many-Media-Casts

MixerCast users can combine the licensed content with any other media, to create a type of online "many-media micro-broadcast channel."

MixerCast users use online tools and templates to bring in Flickr or Photobucket photos, videos, TV news segments, TV advertisements, and add their own content, YouTube videos, and even a live webcam stream.

It can be shared with just a few friends or published to anyone on the Internet. It is part TV show, part-slideshow, part PowerPoint.

When Mashups Go Bad

But won't the MSM content owners, advertisers, etc, be worried about people mixing up their brands, their content, in unusual and inappropriate ways?

"People will do that anyway, there is no way to stop that. It is far better to let people have access to your content because that's what produces hypersyndication," says Ms. Cooper.

Hypersyndication

Hypersyndication is a concept that Ms Cooper says is a key feature of MixerCast: it is the viral distribution of content through many users generating their own content mashups.

The idea is to give users access to lots of content, royalty-free, to remix as they choose. The reward is dramatically broader distribution--hypersyndication of content.

Attach an advertising link to videos or other content, and you get wider advertising reach. It's potentially a virtuous cycle and worth exploring as a possible new business model for content producers.

And the remixers of that content, the MixerCast users, can benefit too, potentially sharing in the distribution revenues.

So far, Ms Cooper has negotiated licensing deals that include the following companies:

MixerCast offers one-click publishing of user's mixercasts to self-publishing sites such as:

It's MySpace

I asked Ms Cooper about the possibility that MySpace.com might cut off outside services--this was before Wednesday's MySpace ban on Photobucket videos. She didn't expect a problem because there are many other places to publish content, and MixerCast is better able to partner with online companies.

Two Top Flash Experts

Ms Cooper is keen to point out that MixerCast has two of the top experts in Adobe Flash--out of only seven worldwide. Adobe's aggressive push to create a leading web development platform around Flash could enable MixerCast to gain an edge over competitors.

Foremski's Take

There are many Web 2.0 companies emerging that provide some, even many of the features of MixerCast. The potential advantage, and its distinction, is that the company has a library of legal premium content that is "mashupable" and likely to evade Viacom/YouTube type problems.

It remains to be seen If content owners will be able to stomach some of the less appealing mashups that will inevitably arise, and recognize the rewards of MixerCast's hypersyndication services.

...

Please see:

MySpace Is Blocking Photobucket Videos

MySpace has decided to block Photobucket videos and remixes from the popular social networking site. The decision affects any video hosted through Photobucket whether it’s in a user’s profile, blog or comments section on MySpace.
This isn’t the first time MySpace has flipped the switch on Photobucket content. Back in January of this year Photobucket users were similarly blocked, though MySpace later claimed it was just trying to filter for security issues and restored the videos.
Compiler - Wired News

Photobucket is the most popular picture site online - Mar. 28, 2007)

Posted by Tom Foremski on April 12, 2007 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yoono: A Standout in the Web 2.0 Crowd

One of the most impressive of the companies in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 show this week is Yoono, a French 10-person startup.

Yoono combines many features of many Web 2.0 companies. It is a browser toolbar that is part StumbleUpon.com, it is part web clipping service, it is part Eurekster, and it is part many other web services combined into one.

The Yoono toolbar learns about its user, and offers related sites, and identifies "Yoosers" who share similar interests, allowing social networks to be formed around anything.

This week it launches Yoono Memo, which offers users a way to research anything on the Web. Users can combine many forms of media from anywhere it can be found, add text, etc, and then publish to just friends, or to the entire Internet.

Yoono Memo is an excellent tool to quickly pull together research notes about a topic. And what makes it really interesting is that those collections of notes can be published as web pages which means it is an excellent web publishing tool too.

Unlike other “highlighter” tools that are out there,
Memo is a rich media applet that becomes the
all-in-one resource for whatever the application –
accessible from any PC, and also friends can access
updates via RSS. They reside in the Yoono toolbar.

It's ability to collect and republish images, video, text, along with new content in a variety of ways is intriguing in terms of the types of web pages that can be created. And combining Yoono Memo with Yoono's web site recommendation service takes the company into a new space and distinguishes it from other Web 2.0 startups.

I recently spoke with Pascal Josselin, CEO of Yoono. Mr Josselin says that the service already has 600K users. "We are signing up 3,000 people per day, half of them in the US," he says. And that is with no marketing dollars, just word of mouth and recommendations from such groups as Mozilla.

The company has received $7m in funding from European VCs and the software has been developed in France, with plans to open US offices. "We're adding developers and salespeople in the US," says Mr Josselin.

The Yoono Memo service can integrate Amazon.com products, along with affiliate ID information. People can put together specialist stores very easily. And future capabilities will integrate other online stores, says Mr Josselin.

Foremski's Take: Yoono Memo extends Yoono as a unique service--at least unique for now. It is a logical extension of the trend to mashup many different consumer Web 2.0 services into one, and its "yoosers" can mashup (nearly) anything they find on the Web--and publish it back out to the Web.

Yoono offers an intriguing web publishing tool and I'd certainly like to try it out for some future projects. It also signals a future Web where content, in many forms, and in many snippets, will be reused and republished in novel ways.

These types of technologies will accelerate debates over content ownership and reuse. And it will usher in new types of services such as validation services for some content, so that the source of content can be validated. Validation is also where content owners can assert their copyrights, should they choose too.

Posted by Tom Foremski on April 16, 2007 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Web 2.0 BackStories...

A mashup report about of my week in the eye of the Web 2.0 hurricane, (actually, more like a zephyr, a light wind, but quite interesting ... :-)

The Moscone Echo Chamber

When I walked in to the cavernous Moscone West expo building on Monday, I quickly ran into lots of familiar faces.

Robert Scoble from PodTech.net was running around with a Justin.tv type baseball hat camera and microphone. He'd been at it all day, it was now late afternoon. "It's exhausting, I feel I have to be interesting all the time," he told me.

(Robert, like others at the show, were using Ustream.tv to broadcast live.)

Lots of other top blogerati, such as Chris Pirillo, Steve Gillmor, Dave Winer, Jeremiah Owyang, Dan Farber, John Dvorak were hanging out on the third floor of the Moscone West building--which, BTW is a wonderful space, bright with lots of daylight, and tons of space.

And everyone was walking around with a video camera, either on their head or on a tripod, including me (tripod), because of my deal with PodTech.net.

I carry a video camera these days but I've just started using one and I'm still getting used to it. I kicked myself that I didn't use it to video our leading blogerati, running around video interviewing each other. It happened during a lull in the afternoon when there weren't too many other people around because a keynote session was in progress.

Justine.TV

I ran into Renee Blodgett of Blodgett Communications, and Brian Solis and Adriana Gascoigne from FutureWorks PR agency PR. Brian told me that Justin Kan was taking a one day break from Justin.TV. Another video blogger--Justine had volunteered.

Brian pointed out that Justine is much prettier than Justin, and so there is an opportunity for someone else with a head-cam to follow Justine.TV around as she interviews people. It's smart thinking, you could potentially steal most of the Justin.TV audience...

Here is the ubiquitous chronicler of our times, Scott Beale of LaughingSquid with some photos: Laughing Squid » iJustine Takes Over Justin.tv For A Day.

Om My God!

The bouncer at the Netvibes party Monday evening clearly doesn't read blogs or know much about anything because he bounced GigaOm towards the back of the line. Om was not pleased and went home.

One witness was David Lenehan, lead developer for Polldaddy, an Irish based online polling company. "I was near the front of the queue and a taxi pulls up and Om Malik steps out. He walks straight past me and heads for the front entrance of the club."

"The bouncer stops him, Om says something to him, and then the bouncer starts pointing to the back of the line. I bet Netvibes won't be happy about that."

Fergus Burns, from Nooked, said he saw the same thing. Om started walking towards the end of the line, which snaked around the corner of the block, but then changed direction, hailed a cab and was gone.

It's a shame, because if Om had walked around the corner to the end of the line, that's where I was with Steve Gillmor, Gabe Rivera from Techmeme, Matthew Greeley from Brightidea.com, and others.

We were happily entertaining ourselves while we waited to get in, and it would have been good to catch up with Om. We did eventually get inside.

Posted by Tom Foremski on April 20, 2007 3:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Troubling Signs...

The first sign of the dotcom dotbomb was when I saw a billboard with "your ad here." There were gasps in the office when I told my colleagues.

The other day I was at Matt Greeley's Second Friday when I met with an entrepreneur of what Matt calls: "Socially aware clothing."

It's a T-Shirt that text messages, he told me. What do you mean, a T-Shirt that text messages?? I got to talk with the inventor and it is a T-Shirt that has an SMS address printed on it and if you are curious you can send a message to a stranger.

The T-shirts can be used by all sorts of people such as DJs in nightclubs I was told. I asked the inventor if the inks were UV reactive, no, but the rest of the shirt was, because it is cotton and has starch in it...

I generally dress up a bit when going to clubs, doesn't that renegade the T-shirt-with-a-text-message concept to sports bars and frat parties? I was told that in America things are different, people wear T-shirts to clubs all the time. (I don't think so.)

"I only need five percent of the market to be profitable," I was told and I've heard that line before. "Our templates for our T-Shirt designs are copyrighted," when I asked what was the secret sauce.

I said that you could put the same message on a business card, it doesn't have to be a T-shirt. I seems that that idea had already been nabbed by someone else.

Check out Reacted

Posted by Tom Foremski on June 10, 2007 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

Former Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski and team reporting on the business of technology and media . Silicon Valley is becoming a Tech Media Valley.

Web 2.0 Archives

October 17, 2005

AJAX, AJAX, AJAX...it's on everyone's lips and so is Zimbra

August 21, 2006

Thumbs up for Netvibes

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

August 28, 2006

Are these the top Web 2.0 companies?

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher

August 29, 2006

A plethora of Web 2.0 = Way too many Swiss-army-knife-collaborative-platform-technologies

October 5, 2006

SVW chat: IBM's CTO of Emerging Technologies talks about Web 2.0 and trust

SVW CEO chat: Sharpcast has Web 2.0 ambitions way beyond photo sharing

AJAX, AJAX, AJAX...it's on everyone's lips and so is Zimbra Oct 17 - 2005

October 6, 2006

Rumor Mill: Google to buy YouTube for $1.6bn?

November 14, 2006

Scoop: Browster acquisition in works - News Corp likely buyer

Browster—a nifty search utility or a new way to "frame" third party web sites?

February 14, 2007

Zolved: Harvesting the community wisdom of geeks about gizmos

SwitchPlanet launch: Trade stuff you have for stuff you want

February 23, 2007

An anthropologist explains Web 2.0 in pictures

February 27, 2007

2.27.07 Ning: Both a platform and easy-to-use site tool

April 12, 2007

Exclusive: Former Top Yahoo exec leads MixerCast out of stealth mode

MySpace Is Blocking Photobucket Videos

April 16, 2007

Yoono: A Standout in the Web 2.0 Crowd

April 20, 2007

Web 2.0 BackStories...

June 10, 2007

Troubling Signs...

June 11, 2007

Fabrik's Innovative Web 2.0 Business Model: Media Storage in the Cloud or on Your Desk