Business Archives - Page 55 of 72

AntiSpam Software Maker the Worst Spammer

Posted on May 23, 2006 ·

(Updated)
Panda Software offers “protection against viruses, spyware, hackers, spam and other Internet threats“.

I find it ironic to receive on average two spam emails per day from the spam-protection company (it’s just the average, on 5/17 I received 5!). Or is it some twisted logic that says eventually I surrender and buy their product, then, and only then I can stop their spam? C’mon guys, I am used to receiving spam from others, but not at this rate… Let’s suppose I am in the market for antivirus software, and let’s suppose yours the best, I would still not buy it after the way you treated me!.

What kind of idiot does it take to think that making customers hate them will drive them to buy their products?

Update (5/23): Apparently I am not the only one. There is a whole thread on Panda Spam at the PC Pitstop:

“I responded to their Unsubscribe address, but it didn’t help at all. I

went to Panda’s site and wrote to a few of their support and sales

email addresses, explaining the situation and asking to be removed from

all of their marketing lists. No response, and the emails keep on

coming.
I set up my spam filters to stop them, but they still

keep coming almost daily! (Using K-9 with Pocomail) How do they do

that? I guess that they are, after all, experts in the spam department

and would know how to circumvent such filters. But why would they?”

Update (5/23): After all the bad experience a pleasant surprise: Carolina, PR Manager at Panda emailed me in perhaps less than an hour, apologized and promised to fix it. Kudos for paying attention and being so prompt. Of course, ideally, it would not take PR’s intervention to fix this … and again, what happens to all the other people complaining on the PC Pitstop? Carolina, again, thanks for helping me, but the real nice solution would be to revise your spam and opt-out policy. If you do, I’ll write about it.

Update (5/25): Well, whatever Carolina did, had no effect, I am still receiving Panda Spam. To her credit, she responded to my email in less than a minute: “I’ll contact the marketing again. I will walk over there

myself.” Thanks, Carolina. Just so you know, I took out a little insurance: set up a filter that forwards all Panda-mail to you, deleting the original copy. Don’t worry, you won’t get a lot of spam – if you can stop it, that is.

Update (6/2): Panda is unstoppable. It no longer bothers me, since I have it auto-forwarded to Carolina. She is clearly motivated to stop it, but apparenly can’t – I can still see the forwarded copies in my trash folder. Perhaps she gave up, too, and created an auto-delete filter.

SPAM from Panda Soft

Tags: Panda, Pandasoftware, spam, antispam, antivirus, zoliblog

Filed Under: Marketing / PR, Software ·

Startup Names Have Changed…

Posted on May 23, 2006 ·

Here’s the list of ‘Connected Innovators‘ picked for SuperNova 2006. (hat tip: Alexander Muse)

Can you pick the odd one out? Click for clue.

Tags: supernova, supernova2006, startups, web 2.0, startupnames, humor, zoliblog

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Humor, Startups ·

How SAP Ended up Promoting NetSuite

Posted on May 22, 2006 ·

NetSuite, the provider of perhaps the best hosted integrated software solution for the SMB market tried to rain on SAP’s parade during SAPPHIRE 06 in Orlando. They planned to host a cocktail party in a hotel suite right across the Convention Center. The party’s theme was “SAP for the rest of us” and the email invitation posed a question/answer: “Who will become the SAP for the midmarket? (It Ain’t SAP),” Cute.

Of course SAP got p***ed and enforced it’s contractual right to cancel competitive events in any of the SAPPHIRE venues. SAP’s Spokesman Bill Wohl called NetSuite’s move “guerilla marketing“.

Now, what’s wrong with Guerilla Marketing? It’s fun … if you have humor to appreciate it. Last week SAP didn’t. The result? NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson laughed off the “loss” and will hold a web-conference instead. This being a juicy story of course it got picked up in the media and quite a few blogs – the media blitz lasted a few days, then will start again around the web-conference … so basically SAP’s decision to kill the party provided NetSuite with a fair amount of publicity – exactly what it needs as it ramps up for its IPO planned later this year. Zach should send a thank-you note to SAP.

Here’s what I think SAP should have done: let it happen, and set up their own counter-party. Had it been allowed to proceed it would have been a noon-event. Not that NetSuite is a negligible company, in fact they have an excellent product. Some say Salesforce.com is just a glorified contact manager relative to NetSuite, and I tend to agree. (I put my money where my mouth is: in my last corporate job I became a NetSuite customer, after careful comparison to Salesforce). That said, NetSuite is targeting strictly the SMB market, in fact more the “S” than the “M”, while SAP despite all their SMB initiatives is still largely the Enterprise Company – SMB is just not their sweet spot. SAP had their own SMB people in Orlando (I interviewed Gadi Shamia, SVP for SMB Solutions, and intend to write about it soon) – they should have set up their own party right next to NetSuite, and present SAP’s vision for that market segment. In fact they could have embraced the NetSuite event (steal their show) and make up SAP logo’d signs pointing to both events.

The impact of the NetSuite party, especially in an environment where most participants are already biased towards SAP would have been minimal. In fact NetSuite had more to gain from the cancellation and the resulting media blitz then actually proceeding with the party … so much so, that I wonder if NetSuite intentionally leaked the news to SAP – a brilliant PR coup, if you ask me.

Intacct raises $7 million; promises guerrilla campaign against SAP/Oracle

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Marketing / PR, SaaS, SMB / SME · Tagged: emergencecapital, guerillamarketing, hummerwinblad, intacct, marketing, midmarket, netsuite, pr, salesforce.com, sap, SAPPHIRE06, smallbusiness, smb, sme, zachnelson, zoliblog

SAP’s Vision on the Changing Role of CIO’s

Posted on May 21, 2006 ·

(Updated)
SAP is not a technology company, it’s the world’s leading business process company – says Shai Agassi, President of SAP’s Product and Technology Group.

Niel Robertson, one of the SAPPHIRE bloggers (or the Brotherhood as we’re often referred to) thinks through the consequences in an excellent article, The New Corporate World Order. It’s a very deep, thoughtful post, simply too good to summarize, please just read it. I was trying to find where I heard Shai express similar thoughts, and I realized it wasn’t at SAPPHIRE 2006, but at Software 2006, just a few weeks earlier. Here’s the relevant slide:

The entire presentation, titled Business Process Co-Innovation; “Enterprise 3.0” is available in PDF format here.

Update (5/23): Niel’s original posts created quite a debate, so he reposted the comments here. Wow, comments take over.. this is the real conversation!

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM · Tagged: bpel, bpm, businessprocess, chiefprocessofficer, cio, cpio, cpo, sap, SAPPHIRE06, shaiagassi, software2006, workflow, zoliblog

Open Source Hotel Rooms

Posted on May 19, 2006 ·

I’ve just checked out of my hotel at SAPPHIRE 06 and am shocked looking at the bill:

You can click to view the original Zoho Sheet.

Since I am still in a “software state of mind” (and btw, will return to SAPPHIRE posts soon), I can’t help but draw the analogy to the software industry: Support and Maintenance charges in the Enterprise Software business are in the 20-25% range. There is an ongoing debate about the viability of Open Source as a business model but several companies are experimenting with giving away the product and focus on additional revenue sources, i.e. support, maintenance, training ..etc.

Since the hotel industry is up to 18% in surcharges, why not make a dramatic move, “opensource” the rooms and make their numbers on all these other (bogus) fees? (OK, before I get ripped apart, yes, I do realize running hotel rooms has actual material costs vs. downloading software, and that the Open Source model is a bit more complex … in other word, my analogy is far from perfect, but hey, it’s Friday afternoon, I am waiting for my plane and can have a little fun, can’t I?)

I see a lot more potential surcharges (on top of the free rooms), like: clean hotel fee, airconditioning surcharge, towel fees at the pool, hot water fee in the bathroom, warm water fee at the pool, low-noise airconditioning surcharge, no-cigarette-smell fee in the nonsmoking rooms, Broadband fee (yes, I know they already have it, but this would be extra for connection that actually works vs. trickles), private room fee (that is when you don’t get the keys to a room already occupied like it happened to me), fast or medium service surcharges at the restaurant..etc. Of course when you can’t sleep at night because the damn airconditioning is so noisy, or when your nonsmoking room smells.. .etc, you don’t have to pay. This could become the feedback / QA mechanism for the hotel industry, a’la the Open Source community support / QA in software.

The opportunities are tremendous, and we should not stop at the hotel industry. Open Source the World!

Filed Under: Business, Humor, Open Source · Tagged: business model, Enterprise Software, hotels, Humor, Open Source, resort, Software industry, surcharges, zoho sheet

SAP’s New On-Demand SRM Offering through Acquisition of Frictionless Commerce

Posted on May 17, 2006 ·

Quick news from the press conference at SAPPHIRE 2006: Shai Agassi has just announced the all-cash acquistion of Frictionless Commerce, a leading Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) software provider. As a result of the acquistion, On-Demand SRM will be the second SaaS offering by SAP, following the recent introduction of On-Demand CRM. Second, but certainly not last, as Leo Apotheker clarified during the Press Conference, over time all SAP’s offering will be made available in the “hybrid” model.

Update: See initial analysis by AMR Research.

Filed Under: Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, SaaS, Software · Tagged: crm, frictionlesscommerce, Ondemand, SaaS, sap, SAPPHIRE06, sapphire2006, SRM, zoliblog

TiEcon 2006: Software Luminaries Panel : The Software Richter Scale: 1, 3 or 7?

Posted on May 16, 2006 ·

Liveblogging the Software Luminaries Panel at TiEcon 2006. (Note: I am obviously publishing this, as well as other TiEcon posts after the Conference, but will only do very basic editing, and some linking, essentially posting my original notes. I’ve also deviated from the role of passive note-taker here, as this is a subject where I am somewhat competent, and can’t help but insert my own comments here and there – you will see those in italics. I invite Panelist, participants to feel free and correct / add to my notes in the form of blog comments. Thanks).

There were parallel sessions run with industry luminaries in ballrooms next to each other. Moderator M.R. Rangaswami opened on the humorous side: the audience picked the right session, as he peeked into the next room where the Semiconductor luminaries session would take place, and saw a sign there saying “semi-luminaries” 🙂 M.R. is Co-Founder of the Sand Hill Group and host of the recent Software 2006 conference (an annual event). .

As introduction he uses his Software 2006 slides about Software’s quiet revolution. Three major realities:

Changes represented by SaaS , Open Source, while CIO’s indicate increased spending on software.
Real business is in the Enterprise (but consumer technologies find their way into the Enterprise)
Thriving ecosystem critical

Panelist(s)

Larry Augustin , Angel Investor, Founder VA Linux, SourceForge …etc.
Amit Chatterjee , VP Strategy SAP
Mark Gorenberg , Partner Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Jason Maynard , Research Analyst Credit Suisse
Zach Nelson , President and CEO Netsuite
Sanjay Parthasarathy , Corporate Vice President Microsoft Corp. (Chief Evangelist of Microsoft Church)

Starting with a few canned questions for warmup, then taking audience questions.

Question: Will there be a billion-dollar software company in SaaS?

Jason: Yes, Salesforce, NetSuite to begin with.. Client-server, on-premise screwed customers, overpromised, underdelivered. SaaS will be huge, it has barely scratched the surface so far.

Mark: Agrees. Hummer Winblad did 12 pure-play SaaS investments. SaaS is most disruptive. Siebel was the uncontested market leader and the appearence of Salersforce.com killed it. (I can’t help but insert my own opinion here: Sure, Salesforce squeezed Siebel from the bottom up, but two other factor were just as significant in their demise: the “overpromise, underdeliver” syndrome, i.e. customer dissatisfaction after expensive and lengthy projects; and the fact that SAP that already owns the Enterprise market significantly improved their own CRM offering, and the integrated approach offers a better value proposition to their customers then the standalone Siebel CRM-only solution).

Sanjay: We’ve already seen billion-dollar SaaS companies: eBay and Google, just not in Enterprise.

Amit: SaaS by itself is not a business model… for larger organizations hybrid models work better …with increasing process complexity and integration requirements there is a need for a mix of on-demand and on-premise solutions.

Question specifically to Zach: Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO, owns over 50% of NetSuite, which is expected to pull off a billion-dollar IPO this year) stated that SaaS is only for SMB’s not for large corporations. Is that so?

Zach: He is generally trying to avoid speaking for Larry. (They clearly have an interesting relationship, Larry has to be somewhat anti-SaaS, and Zach can’t really get into a public debate with his absolute majority owner. It seems to me that Larry is betting on two horses at the same time) Nobody will switch software because they want to, or because SaaS ismore fashionable. First and foremost customers have a functionality challenge, which the software company has to meet.. Functionality is the primary consideration, and the delivery model supports it.

Sanjay: We shouldn’t be talking about software as a service, it’s actually software + service.

Mark: A number of companies are selling to both small and large organizations. What’s exciting is that this is the very first time when medium sized companies can get the same functionality as the large guys! ( I tend to think the same is true for small businesses, in fact that may be an even more radical change, and it’s a mistake that analysts often only think of the midsize market when they speak SMB )

Jason: Disagrees with SAP’s Amit on the notion of need for hybrid. Software needs to become a utility. There is no room for innovation in most corporate IT budgets, 80% of which is spent on running the infrastructure. Let go of thee server! I know it’s hard …it’s your baby … you may get visitation rights at your SaaS provider:-) (huge laughter at audience)

MR makes a comment/question on recent high-profile outages in the industry, largely at salesforce.com but elsewhere, too.

Zach: Not all delivery models are created equal. Sforce runs on “big iron”, (find article here) while Netsuite opted for a grid-like system based on cheap boxes. When a salesforce.com server goes down, it effects the majority of customers, when NetSuite loses a box, a maximum of 50 customers are effected. This setup also helps rolling out new versions smoothly, in a phased fashion, while Salesforce.com has to do it in “big bang” style. Zach predicts Salesforce moving to a grid-like environment soon.

Larry: It’s about ease of adoption. Software has become a lot easier to create, it’s acquisition is a painful process, and that’s the part that SaaS improves.

Sanjay: Service orientation helps picking best-of-breed solutions, mix and mach. The current trend of consolidation in the industry is actually contrary to it.

Amit: SOA is critical, some services in the cloud, others in the enterprise.

Zach: Picking composite applications to mix and match is difficult, especially as business processes get more complex.. Composite transactional applications are a fantasy – far to difficult to synchronize. Example: Microsoft CRM and Great Plains are hard to synchronize, even though MS owns the code for both. Integrated transactional systems are unbeatable – that’s why SAP owns the Enterprise.

Question: Consolidation, Oracle acquisitions .. getting bigger and bigger – is there room left for innovation?

Larry: Oracle is buying since it’s not doing a great job of innovation itself. Startups have the benefit of new distribution mechanisms, SaaS, Open Source, user base helps them.

Amit: Lot of room for innovation by partners id they participate in verticals. He “only” has 6000 developers, cant cover the whole world.(audience laughter) Larry interrupts: I’d like that problem, I have 12. With 6000 how can you NOT cover the world? (even bigger laughter). Amit: Citibank has more developers then SAP.

Question about data privacy, Security.

Zach: Especially for small, midsized businesses NetSuite’s security is better than running on local server next to coffee machine.

Larry: Security is still a huge unsolved issue.

Sanjay: The real data challenge is mashing structured and unstructured data. 80% of corprate data is unstructured without business processes: xml is the glue.

Larry: Html amplified the problem of huge amount of unstructured data, the future will be to move to have data in xml and html is just the presentation.

Question: Are there profitable SaaS companies?. Sforce is barely profitable.

Mark: Salesforce.com is barely profitable, .Rigthnow is making decent profit, employees (?_) is largely profitable.

Jason: Many are profitable, SaaS lowers the cost of distribution – there is price elasticity in the market. SaaS also helps reducing R&D, support costs – salesforce only needs to support one version, SAP, Oracle multiple ones.

Zach: When he joined NetSuite their sales model was direct. Now with success ecosystem develops. Typically start with direct, build customer base, then ecosystem develops.

MR‘s comment/question: Software 2006 had a panel: Open Source: money machine or money pit?

Larry: Open Source is a young model, there can not be a lot of profitable companies yet, Red Hat beng an outstanding example. On $10M in R&D Salesforce.com spends 100M in Sales & Marketing.. It’s cheaper to create software then sell it > Open Source helps eliminating the huge sales costs.

Jason concurs, sales is 80% of cost. Enterprise Software companies don’t make a lot of profit on software sales, their profit comes from maintenance. Smart Open Source companies jump out of this expensive sales cycle and focus on support only. They will increase botttom line while reducing top line.

Larry: There is also a culture change: people did not understand software, they had to be educated and had to pay for that education. Now everyone is computerized, carries a PDA, cellphone ..etc. This means the education need is reduced, good opportunity for Open Source’s pull model.

Question: SAP , MSFT will you be giving away your products free?

Sanjay: Fuzzy answer on giving away software and promoting distribution.

Amit: Support, explore Open Source, but not fully embrace. SAP does not have the distribution channel that MS has. SAP needs to build ecosystem.

Question: Will MS look into buying SAP? Tried. Jason: pragmatic approach: it won’t happen, if for no other reason, the fight with the EU..

Question: What Open Source opp’s exist?

Mark: Recently made two investments into companies that develop applications for the lamp stack. Issue: IP ownership, integration. Sales issue: agree with the Open Source effect on lead generation, but how to close sales? What happens when you move to markets that people don’t understand?

Question: any Open Source companies to go public?

Jason: Potentially MySQL. Markets pay 10-times sales, 30-times cashflow. Fewer, but better , more sustainable companies.

Question (more a remark) on SAP’s new compensation plan. Hasso Plattner recently announced he is aiming at doubling the market, if they achieve that, the top 100 execs will make 100’s of millions. Is that a realistic objective?

Amit: The announcement certainly helps: -) but the true driver for growth is product innovation.

MR askes the panelists for their final remark

Mark: We’re in the greatest disruptive times. Hummer Winblad invested more in the past few years than in the previous 17..

Sanjay: Software industry does not spend enough time with users.

Larry: Fantastic time to be a software entrepreneur. Small team , little $, reach to market – not possible 10 years ago

Zach: It’s a great time to start a software company, when you do it, remember you need a great application to run the business. (audience laughter; good plug for NetSuite …possibly the last one before going into pre-IPO silent period?)

Amit: Customers matter. SAP needs to focus more on the ecosystem.

Jason: MS announced spending additional $2B on emerging areas. Look at areas they are spending… go in those “white spaces”, since they are good in seeing the opportunities, but can’t exploit them properly.

Tags: tiecon, tiecon2006, conference, entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, venturecapital, vcfunding, startups, forum, paneldiscussion, netsuite, salesforce.com, SAP, Oracle, Siebel, software2006, CRM, ERP, enterprisesoftware, SaaS, opensource, SMB, SME, Microsoft, zoliblog

Filed Under: Bay Area, Business, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Open Source, SaaS, SMB / SME, Software, Startups, Technology ·

TiEcon 2006: Web 2.0 – Why Now?

Posted on May 16, 2006 ·

Liveblogging Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington‘s Web 2.0 – Why Now? panel at TiEcon 2006. (note: I am obviously publishing this, as well as other TiEcon posts after the Conference, but will only do very basic editing, and some linking, essentially posting my original notes. My added comments appear in italics)

Panelists:

Manish Chandra: Founder, CEO Kaboodle, 5 jobs so far, started at Intel, then 4 startups
Emily Melton: Associate, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Left DFJ in 2002, re-joined 2005
Kevin Rose, Founder, Digg. Prior to that Hosted national TV program, TechTV
Tony Conrad, Founder, CEO Sphere, also Investor
Jeff Nolan, SAP , Apollo Group,the “Attack Oracle” team (he actually has this on his business card), until recently with SAP Ventures, top blogger.

Mike: For warmup, let’s talk about the individual companies. Kaboodle is basically bookmarking, social shopping. Statistics show that 80% of all Internet activity is research, not transactions. Kaboodle does not close deals, trying to make money on research side. How did Manish come to the idea?

Manish: Was remodeling home, a lot of pain to find stuff – hence the idea (do all consumer sites really start based on personal experience, or are these just sellable stories?)

Emily: Since she is a VC, will talk about a portfolio company that she’s a Board Member of: Tagworld. Mike: That’s a little startup that’s going up against MySpace and others – how can it have any chances? (The little guy vs. big guy issue came up in the morning session as well) and Emily’s reaction is similar: people want to have presence on the web, relationships ..etc – Tagworld provides tools.

Mike: Huge fan of Digg:. 50% of TechCrunch’s traffic comes from digg. TechCrunch has significant traffic on its own, but when one of his articles gets digged, the combined traffic typically brings startup sites down. Kevin: It started as an experiment giving power back to community. Coolness is not determined by editors like it is on Slashdot, but by member votes – “diggs”. It’s also a social application, digging an item also bookmarks it to your name, you can share, set up friends…etc.

Tony: Sphere, the new blog search engine. Previously he invested in Oddpost, (acquired by Yahoo, fastest return of all his investments), that’s when idea started. He saw when celebrity bloggers like John Battelle and Dave Viner blogged about them, their traffic spiked: that was his “aha” moment re. blog-power. Blog search engines typically bring posts in reverse chronological order… trying to dig up interesting stuff using a more intelligent algorithm.

Jeff didn’t get to talk about his company (SAP), since it’s not exactly a startup or a Web 2.0 🙂 However, previously as VC he backed several startups and in his current role (or outside that role?) he is SAP’s internal Web 2.0 evangelist.

After the warmup round Mike moved on to audience questions.

Question to Mike on criteria for picking what gets covered in TechCrunch. –

Mike: anything new, exciting Web 2.0-related. What is Web 2.0? He has a user-focused definition. Web 2.0 is about conversation. In the years after the crash the Internet did not “go away”, innovation continued behind the scenes. Joe Kraus’s famous quote about how cheap it is to build a company (new cheap tools).

Kevin: Spent $99 on a shared server, used Open Source stuff … total pre-launch cost for Digg was less than $1K.

Jeff: LAMP stack important. Php, Python powerful. Tension between what developers built and what users want resolves itself in the increasing number of mashups.

Emily: There is a major mindset-change. everyone has access to computers, pdas, cellphones .etc. Even the kids have web presence. It’s become a lot easier to self-publish and even build applications.

Question: Is Web 2.0 real or a bomb waiting to go off?

Mike: There is real innovation. Web services, mashups.

Jeff: Web 2.0 is not really new, it’s the realization of everything that’s been happening for 5 years. Barrier of entry for startups is low.

Manish: Closed platforms are out of fashion , the trend to opening up leads to mashups. Power goes back to the individual. People create new shopping pages of their liking on Kaboodle. This is like walking into a store and rearranging the shelves the way we want it.

Tony: Brings up the example of the Chicago Crime Scenes mashup. Nice application, hugely popular, even useful, but likely not a business. Business opportunities are for those that open up their API. The Blog space brings about businesses (e.g Technorati) with significant core IP, but most mashups are just nice presentation layers without core IP.

Question: How to market? Importance of early adopters?

Mike: refers to the Same 50K people meme – echo chamber. TechCrunch readers themselves often re-blog his posts. They are all early adopters, which is demonstrated by the browser stats: 65% use FireFox.

Emily: VC’s also check out TechCrunched applications – then forget them, don’t come back (I have positive personal experience on this, when VC’s who earlier heard about SQLFusion came back with renews interest after the Open Source Fusion beta. So it does not hurt to to get on VC’s “keep an eye on” list). Emily: Simply quoting high registration numbers is not compelling to her – repeat user base is.

Manish: Blogs can create good initial exposure, then incresingly use SEO, SEM… early days 6-7% was organic search (google, yahoo), now it is 20%. Real viral effect occurs when people start marketing your product.

Tony: Despite the criticism, the early adopter crowd makes sense, after all we’re in tech businesses, of course we attract the geek crowd… like if you’re in the sailing business, you go after sailing enthusiasts.

Mike: Asking Panel for example of successful marketing that gets beyond early adopters.

Tony: Flickr is definitely way beyond the early adopter crowd. Mike: Flickr is geeky, overall it has a lot less users than Yahoo photos (even though Yahoo acquired Flicker, they are treated as two separate domains for now), or even Easyshare by Kodak.

Short debate between Tony , Jeff, Mike on the role /importance of early adopters. Tony : blogging needs to get into topics that attract the mainstream, be it the Chicago Cubs, christianity .. whatever.

Manish: Skype forced adoption by uncles & aunts in Chicago, Ohio …etc. since it has a very attractive value proposition compared to expensive telephone services.

Jeff: many companies are building features ONLY for the early adopters – they will not transition to mass market, will not become businesses, just features.

Kevin: Digg has 9 million page views, 1 million unique users a day, with $0 spent on marketing. He still thinks they are early adopters, the site hasn’t hit mainstream yet.

Tony : Sphere received 1 million pageviews in the first week, from 136K unique users.

Jeff: Blogs are key in early adoption: Even if you’re not a techie you will search on a car, a new TV ….etc, you’ll get blog entries mixed with other search results (My personal experience confirms this, blogs even penetrated news at “elite” positions).

Tony: Bloggers have huge influence. Rob Hof is here in the audience, he is the Silicon Valley bureau chief for Business Week and also writes a personal blog. Jeff: Matt Marshall is here, too – I don’t read the Merc anymore, but SiliconBeat.

Manish: Print media still has bigger effect. He suggests Web 2.0 companies should look at both print media and blogs for marketing.

Mike: The New York Times is crap. .

Question: Can open API’s can bite you in the ass? (pardon my French, I’m just quoting here) Giving away your best stuff, people won’t come back to your site – i.e. Google or Craigslist if the mashup is better.

Manish : Open API’s bring huge adoption. Get users first then figure out how to make money.

Mike: At the same time ate least you can’t have negative margin – this could be Youtube’s problem. There are essentially three types of business models:

advertising revenues
fees
no revenues at all

Tony: There were debates in the early days about email as a business, since it’s supposed to be free. But would Yahoo exists without email?

Jeff on network effect: Flickr, del.icio.us are used in a lot of other applications..

Question: Is the barrier of entry different between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

Mike: It’s become easy to to recreate applications. I could hire offshore programmers and recreate Digg cheaply (especially considering Kevin’s own statement that it cost less then $1K to launch). This is where the network effect and being first to market becomes important. We need to understand how network effect and first to market are related. Tony has the 8th or 9nth search engine (Sphere), Emily’s Tagworld is also a “latecomer” yet they have a chance to make it, they are not dependent on the network efffect of the huge existing user base, and they have new IP. Digg is a different story, it’s not core IP, it’s all about the huge network effect.

Kevin: There are too many copycats doing he same things…like online notepads… Disagreeing with Mike, does not see value in being a me-too, startup should do new things.

Out of time, (session got cut short due to security for the Schwarzenegger keynote) Mike asked all panelists to name their favorite Web 2.0 companies (except their own). The list:

Flickr, Myspcae, Digg, Digg Spy, (yes it is part of Digg, but Emily made the point of specifically listing Spy) TechCrunch, Youtube, Akismet, WordPress, Del.ici.us, Riya, Skype.

If you were a panelist /participant in the discussion and I misinterpreted you, please feel free to correct / expand on your ideas in the form of comments. Thanks.

Tags: tiecon, tiecon2006, conference, entrepreneurship, technology, innovation, startups, marketing, forum, paneldiscussion, techcrunch, kaboodle, digg, sphere, web2.0, tagworld, oddpost, opensource, mashups, flickr, networkeffect, blogs, blogging, zoliblog

Filed Under: Bay Area, Blogging, Business, Marketing / PR, Open Source, Software, Startups, Technology ·