Community News

Fred Wilson writes:

With the collapse of newspaper classifieds and their movement online, there is a real possibility that local community papers will not survive in their current incarnation. I wrote a bit about this in my whither newspapers post from last month.

So if the local newspaper folds, where will people go to get their information? I suspect its going to be something like 101 or Backfence. A low cost community driven news and information service. Think about it? Would you rather have some guy getting paid to write restaurant reviews or would you rather read the best bloggers in town's reviews of them with user supplied ratings ala Zagat? Would you rather get the local paper's view of the new high school cost overruns or hear everyone in town's opinions and be able to debate them?

Some will say the Citysearch and other local web services are already doing this. I don't think so. Citysearch and most of the local web is about listings. There isn't any community and there isn't any news. So they don't offer a replacement experience for the local newspaper and that is what is going to be needed in many communities around the country.

This is not going to happen overnight. It requires a behavior change that is pretty fundamental. And it requires a revenue stream. For that we have Google local and Yahoo! local to hope for. They are almost certainly going to take their contextual ad networks local and if they don't, others will. I think the revenue piece of this puzzle will solve itself fairly early in the development of this market.

This is what we should do with PIN-News.

Spyware and Adware

The new issue of Release 1.0 deals with Spyware and Adware. Esther Dyson writes:

This issue of Release 1.0 covers spyware - a serious Net-hygiene problem that is replacing spam as the scourge of the year - and its counterpart, adware. The mechanism to address it is similar: an accountable Net of consumer awareness, authentication mechanisms and branding of ads and their sources, and legislation to define the rules even if it is primarily the market that will enforce them. We believe that these mechanisms are beginning to work: The increasing visibility of the problems is accompanied by the increased transparency (and accountability) that will lead to a healthier market and a healthier Net. But this transition is a reminder of just how messy peer-to-peer regulation can be.

There are many similarities between spam and spyware. In each sphere, there's a range of behavior, from direct mail to spam and phishing, and from adware to spyware and malware - and disagreements on which is which, depending in part on individual preferences. With proper disclosure and technology mechanisms just now coming into play, most individuals will be able to choose what they want. We limn these developments below and then profile four leading players in the space.

Also in each sphere, there's an important baby in the bathwater. In the case of e-mail and spam, the baby is the e-mail infrastructure that supports one-to-one (and occasionally -to-many) communication and a profusion of powerful capabilities and applications dependent on mail, to say nothing of individuals' freedom of speech. In the case of adware and spyware, the baby comprises a useful mechanism (advertising) for supporting various kinds of free content and software, along with behavioral profiling that lets a user get content relevant to (and occasionally competing with) what he is looking at and lets advertisers target their ads both to get higher returns and to avoid annoying consumers for whom the ads aren't relevant. This second group of benefits may not have quite the ring of individuals' freedom of speech, but at its best it includes the notion of individual empowerment and is a fundamental part of the efficient economy promised by the Net.

Fred Wilson adds: "We need rules, tools, and systems to determine who is doing it right and who is not. Putting software on my machine that I don't know about, can't get rid of, that impacts the performance of my computer is bad. That must be stopped and it will be stopped. Amazon watching what I purchase and using that data to make additional purchase recommendations is good and must be allowed to continue. It's what happens in between those two extremes that is the essence of the debate. "

Usability Needs in Future

[via Smart Mobs] The Edu-Blogger writes:

It’s becoming pretty obvious that the major dilemma of our decade is not having access to enough information, but being able to handle all of the information available. More and more we’re going to need technologies designed to help us find what we want and need instantly (and not without hoping that what we want is in the first 20 results of a possible million). We also need technologies that help us find things we don’t know we want, but would be glad to have if we knew about. Here I am not talking about commercial products—although businesses have jumped onto this idea more quickly than other services—I am talking about finding the article I didn’t know existed, but which would be just the thing I’m looking for, or being alerted to the weather in a town I plan to drive through next week.

The newest innovation I see is a phone that is actually easy to use for anything other than calling people. We have the technology to make phones be computers, complete with all our media, hard drives, anything you want! We can stick 40 gigabytes on something as small as a phone, so the potential is huge to make one device that does everything you need—including call people (I know we have palm pilots that can call people, but they’re not very popular). Why don’t we have this yet? Because phone number pads are the most unusable thing on the planet for anything except calling people. Someone’s going to get smart and design a really usable phone/mobile device that will become as popular as the iPod is now. Speaking of iPod, why not throw a scroll wheel on a phone—that would be a start!

Mobile Search

The Pondering Primate writes about an opportunity for Google:

I know mobile search advertising will be much bigger than PC advertising, so that leads to this question.

How much will Google make when they sell keywords for mobile search and how will they do it?

Will Google start a keyword division solely for mobile search?

How much more will Google make when advertisers know that search results will be determined on location not keyword algorithms? A LOT

There are 3 reasons mobile search will generate more revenues than PC search.

1. there will be more internet traffic with the phone that the PC soon
2. click fraud won’t be an issue
3. website owners will pay MUCH MORE for keywords when they have “control” of them.

HERE’S GOOGLE’S NEXT BILLION DOLLAR APPLICATION

Would Google be able to command more dollars if advertisers knew their site would come up based on location versus guessing the “correct” keywords? YES.

Will Google create a few billion dollar revenue streams from this? YES
Here’s how they do it.

Google unveils a Mobile Words division and mobile search takes off. All generic words are available for sale, except trademarks and brand names. That is another problem that can be resolved with Google’s Mobile Words. They sell, not auction/bid for keywords for a mobile search.

Remember mobile search is really navigation.

How can Google re-sell the same keywords again?

The search for “pizza” on a PC versus “pizza” on a cell phone is completely different. It also is done from a completely different device, and Google can determine this. Google can tell from the server info that a search query was coming from a cell phone.

Zero Click Applications

Alex Bosworth writes about Backpack:

Backpack is basically a list/time management tool. The interesting thing is the zero click interface proposed.

Often you will get an email, or write an email to yourself with an important date to remember or a list of things to do.

If you are sufficiently organized, you might take the trouble to spin up a time/list management tool and enter in the list of items you need to keep track of, or set up your reminders in your datebook app.

But why can't your email just understand the list of items you want to keep track of, and automatically add them to your list? Why can't your email (this goes back to my recent post about interop calendars) just automatically mark down on your calendar a time and date referenced in an email?

This is a zero-click interface, and this is what Backpack is trying to get close to. You can just forward your emails with appointments to backpack, and it will automatically set up your datebook with those appointments. The same with todolists, and you can also SMS backpack.

TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Market Opportunity

For long, SMEs in Emerging Markets (SMEEMs) have been the ignored market – caught between the consumers and large enterprises. While companies like Dell and Microsoft can provide the basic hardware and software infrastructure for SMEEMs, there is no equivalent of an SAP or Yahoo for SMEEMs for their business software needs, even as companies like Salesforce.com and NetSuite target the SMEs in the developed markets. This is the ASP market opportunity. In a country like India alone, there are an estimated 4 million SMEEMs employing about 40 million employees who need to process information. Of these, just over a tenth have access to computing. So, if the market exists, why haven’t companies rushed in? To understand the answer, one needs to first consider the two other segments – consumers and large enterprises.

Consumers are the mass-market – targeted by the likes of Microsoft on the one hand, and Yahoo on the other. Microsoft’s strength comes from its Windows and Office franchise. Desktops have been the way most computing has been done for the past two decades. The Internet added the additional dimension of services delivered centrally from a browser, which has become a window to the world. In the past decade, consumer email has already migrated to the Web for most people. For much of this period, the distinction between the desktop and web platforms has been maintained.

Of late, this is starting to get blurred as the likes of Google and Yahoo seek to extend the services they offer. Google’s Desktop Search which also integrates results from the Web is one such example. In addition, various portals and websites have become part of our lives, starting with the search engines. We rely on these sites almost as much as we do on our own memory! From storing wish lists to buying items from storefronts and auctions to participating in online communities, the Web’s influence on our life has grown. In a sense, portals like Yahoo, Amazon and eBay were the very early “application services providers.” We just didn’t call them ASPs! In fact, as consumers, there’s almost nothing we cannot do online. A “thin client” with a browser would suffice for most people as long as there is a broadband connection – which is increasingly starting to happen.

Software for large enterprises has been, for long, the domain of companies like IBM, SAP, Oracle, Computer Associates and Microsoft. In the enterprise software world, SAP and Oracle are slugging it out for leadership in a maturing market. Most of the large enterprises buy infrastructure software and business applications for use within the firewall on their own networks. Deal sizes are large, and enterprise application integration is an important requirement to stitch together various software packages.

Sandwiched in between are the SMEs. For long, they’ve managed with a limited set of applications. A spreadsheet doubles as a sales- and customer-tracker. Email is used for all kinds of workflow. Even though many companies have tried to target SMEs, only a few have succeeded. A fragmented market (SMEs are everywhere), channels who are little more than courier companies, customers with limited IT infrastructure and understanding of what IT can do have all combined to limit the penetration of IT in SMEs, especially those in the emerging markets – the SMEEMs. In short, the market is ready for a disruptive innovation. And this is where ASPs come in. The needs of SMEEMs form what Joe Kraus has termed as “the long tail of software.”

Tomorrow: SMEEM Needs

Related Entries:  [All]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Looking Ahead [June 3, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Problems [June 2, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Seller’s View [June 1, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: The Buyer’s View [May 31, 2005]
TECH TALK: The Coming Age of ASPs: Technology Building Blocks (Part 4) [May 30, 2005]