Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Weblogs/Blogging (Page 18 of 22)

The Takeaways of Demo 2006

February 19, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Demoviewfromroom_1 Okay, here’s the 30th and last post in my “DEMO 2006” category (many also tagged in other categories, as listed on the right) since I began publishing pre-conference. So, who could have done more posts than this — maybe CNet? Then again, quantity isn’t everything… 🙂 But I was honored to be on a list with many of the great bloggers covering the event — especially since it was my first conference as a blogger (though not as a reporter, for which the number is probably 40 or more).

Just for the heck of it, I’m including a few photos of the surroundings at Demo, which I took with my cell phone cam — showing things I was too busy to do, like golf, pool, hot tub. But I didn’t care — didn’t have time to. [Besides, I had my beach time and a surf session in San Clemente the day before I got there.]

This post is essentially my recap on the themes or takeaways I got from this great happening….this blockbuster celebration of tech and entrepreneurship. Net-net: I wouldn’t have missed it for the world! Demohotelpool_1 It was non-stop buzz, business models, and blabbing about everything imaginable relating to today’s souped-up economy for technology startups (especially Internet-related ones)…a giant energy-drink slurpee lasting three days. And the people — wow! I know I met many who’ll be valuable contacts and friends for years to come. Plus I learned about some cool new services that’ll help me in my crazy, tech-challenged world…just as I know they’ll help you.

So here, as best as I can break down something this intensely information-packed, are the themes I got from DEMO 2006. (Note time didn’t allow me to post about every single one of the companies I mention here; but I’ve included links to all their sites if you wish to read more.)

• User-generated content and sharing is exploding. To say that consumer-generated content is a major trend in this age of “new media” and social networking I don’t think will surprise you. If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know it was the major theme of the conference. [And there would be a sub-theme you got out of reading those, too: revenue-sharing with content creators.] Demopool_1 Companies in point who presented at Demo that are taking advantage of this trend in various ways include: Vizrea, TagWorld, SmileBox, Zingee, LocaModa, Sharpcast, Tiny Pictures, GarageBand.com, Yahoo! Photos (of course), Multiverse Network, and Gravee….and I posted about every one of ’em.

• Search goes wider, search goes deeper. Meaning more data types as relates the former, and, no surprise, going vertical for the latter. Presenting companies that fit into this theme included Krugle, Riya, AOL via its acquisition of Truveo (online sometime this spring), Nexidia, Gravee, BiggerBoat, Kaboodle, Raw Sugar, and Kosmix….several of which I posted about.

• E-commerce can still get better and easier. As big as it is (one example: BestBuy.com, a site on whose launch team I served, is now selling more than a billion bucks a year), we’re hardly done with e-commerce improvements. And that notion is sure to be welcomed by today’s increasingly savvy, instant-gratification online buyers. Companies worth a look here include Transparansee, Pay By Touch, and PayWi (which lets you buy from your cell phone). I was also impressed with CNet Channel’s intelligent cross-sell technology. This is a tool for e-tailers that with save a huge amount of hassle, automating what’s been a very time-intensive and hit-or-miss process for online store managers.

• Now that phone service is free or really cheap, what more can we do with it? Skype thundered into this space in a huge way — and thank God people now have a decent moniker they can attach to the concept instead of “VOIP”! And the category will only get huger, as we all know. Watch out for upstarts that are gonna ride this trend with more innovations — such as being able to make Skype calls from your cell phone: EQO Communications…and getting a whole rich set of features for your VOIP residential service: My People.

• Small business needs big help with information technology. It’s a huge market, but what will appeal to them and how do you reach them? Two companies that are giving it a try are Interprise, which has a free online ERP/CRM solution for the little guys….and Sprout Systems, which is developing online solutions for companies with 10 employees or fewer, coming out of the chute first (now seeking Series A) with an email management system. [I wish both luck. Raise the big bucks, or get a deep-pocketed gorilla to buy you.]

• P2P is not going away – and more apps are on the way. If you think peer-to-peer technology had its day, think again. Just because it got a bad name for a while doesn’t mean it won’t change the world. At least three of the presenting companies at Demo are using the technology to buiild their dream: Zingee, a flat-out content sharing play, as I posted about previously…Vsee, which is using the technology to improve desktop video conferencing…and Tiny Pictures, which says it has P2P technology to enable you to share your cell phone pix quickly and easily.

What DEMO 2006 was NOT about. The biggest thing was it wasn’t about gadgets, as the event was known to have been for so many years. Today, the technology world — whether it’s consumer or enterprise — is much more about services. Gadgets are only a means to enable a service, for the user to do something valuable he or she needs to get done. I sit here hard-pressed to name game-changing gadgets presented at the event…. Okay, there was MooBella, the customized, Linux-based ice cream vending machine, and Pleo, the new robotic toy from the inventor of Furby. Yeah, they were cool, but so what? I’m not in the food business or the toy business, and I don’t think most of you are either. The producers threw those in just for shock value and dramatic effect. [And, trust me, Demo’s producers know how to get publicity. They also know how to get buzz, which is why they had so had so many bloggers there. If you want to know what I mean, read this great new post from Guy Kawasaki on how to get buzz these days.] Two gadgets of note I just remembered were the iGuitar — very cool, but you gotta be a musician, which I’m not anymore (surfing took over)…though it’s a big market space ($3 billion) they’re playing in. And the Chili™ from ZinkKat was the other one. But don’t try to find a photo of the device on their web site — it hasn’t been updated since before DEMO! [Hello?] The Chili is the “first wearable cell phone/MP3 player/Podcast and web stream receiver, all on one,” says the company, which is aiming it (of course) at teenagers, for use in the home. [Too bad the voice interface, which is how you operate the thing, sounded so bad. Here’s a clue: no matter how cool your gadget looks, if the interface isn’t right, you have some…uh, work to do?]

And one more thing to take away from DEMO. We’re all learning a lot about blogging, folks. Me included. [And there’s nothing like throwing yourself into it headlong to learn from the inside.] Demosilhouette But I was fascinated by how blog-savvy so many of the companies are that launched at DEMO — and I learned a lot from them. They get the blogging model, the power of the blogging community. They spent just as much time talking up the bloggers as they did the traditional press. Blogging is even changing the model of how some tech companies launch — read: without traditional PR. My fellow blogger and conference reporter Shel Israel did a great post on this topic (just prior to Demo), and this is about the third time I’ve linked to it — it’s that major. Just another example of how the growing online community is changing the game. And Guy Kawasaki’s post, cited above, just adds to that message.

Hope you liked my DEMO coverage. Please drop me a line if you did — or better yet, post a comment.
Cheers…over and out.

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[Written at Bloomington, MN, on the coldest weekend
of the winter so far…ah, sweet memories of Phoenix.]

OK, Two More Content-Sharing Plays…That’s It!

February 18, 2006 / / 1 Comment

Then I’m done — I promise. After all, Demo ended nine days ago, and here I am still writing about it. There was just sooo much good stuff there, people — what can I say?. Thanks for working with me on this. Would you believe I’m up to almost 30 posts on it now? After this, I think I have just one more left in me: a recap of the themes of the event as I see them. But, first, the two final content-sharing companies I wanted to talk about: Zingee and LocaModa. [And please note the last are not necessarily the least.]

Zingee uses peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to make your hard drive a hosting device, letting you share content — files and folders — really easily, with your friends, with groups, or the whole world. “You just drag the files or folders to a name,” said D.K. Kim, CEO. “And everything shared gets a unique URL, which can be searched. It’s simple and free.” Essentially, Zingeelogo Zingee creates web links to all the files on your computer that you want it to. And you securely control exactly what is shared and who you share it with. There are no file size restrictionss, and viewers do not need to register or install anything. D.K. Kim has a background with Citibank and HP, and also was cofounder and CEO of financial services portal Quicken.com Austral-Asia, which had an IPO in 1999 on Australian Stock Exchange. Zingee is based in Singapore but also has people in Australia, including Sydney-based Zingeemicksurf_1 Mick Liubinskas, who is the company’s CMO. Mick, a surfer (that’s him in the photo), has sales and marketing experience with IBM, Virgin, and several IT startups. More recently, he headed global marketing and business development for Kazaa. I asked him about that experience: “I was hired as the first marketing person and grew the team to about ten and grew downloads to 300 million — the most downloads in history. Most of it was viral but we worked hard on media and partner marketing.”

I also asked Mick about his thoughts on the state of P2P technology: “I really see it as the next platform, one that builds on the Internet. We’ll only know how big it is in 2015 — ‘P2P 2.0’. The net guys are still getting used to working with it…Developers of applications for the Internet need to learn how to harness and use it. Web 2.0 is really a precursor to P2P 2.0, which will be web apps using P2P — not all of them but more than half…Most will be impacted by P2P, we just don’t know how yet. Once the apps start coming, then everything else follows — net admin, devices, etc. Look at headsets following Skype.”

How will you convince consumers about the quality of your security? “Trust is earned. You have to let people try it at a low level and grow. Plus you need to partner with trustworthy companies. Half hard tech work, half perception.”

What stuff does Zingee do that no one else does? “The secret sauce is we turn any web-enabled device into a web server that’s really simple to run. We open the content on devices to the web.”

I also asked Mick to comment on the presence of P2P technology at Demo, and what that may mean as far as its spread or adoption: “There was less P2P there than I expected. [Three companies as I counted.] Most are still doing straight web. P2P doesn’t always create value, but it can change the value equation…I lived and breathed P2P at Kazaa. There are only about 20 people in the world who really know what life was like there… Lots of work yet to do in P2P, but I’m excited about it.”

LocaModa extends the web to the street. Interconnecting mobile phone, web, and narrowcast technologies, LocaModa has two applications. The first is called StreetSurfer™ — which lets you find real-estate listings from your cell phone. Big brokerages such as GMAC are aleady starting to use it, said Stephen Randall, CEO and cofounder. “Any cell phone becomes a remote control.” Locamodalogo A newer offering is Wiffiti™, which the company calls the first in-location blogging network — “facilitating freedom of expression on the street.” Randall said it’s about “web and phones converging, to the ‘Web Outside’.” It combines social networking with blogging for venues like bars, clubs, and restaurants. Wiffiti™ encourages people to interact with content or entertainment on large-format, Internet-connected screens via their mobile phones. The company says there are “massive untapped markets beyond the couch and the desk.” Out-of-home media is going digital in locations ranging from retailers to street corners, they say. What’s really unique about LocaModa’s proprietary interactive networks is that it “helps consumers in the moment to opt-in and connect to brands.” Consumers can use their mobile phone like a remote control to surf or communicate with large screens in storefront windows, cafes, bars, or city streets. The company “converts passive out-of-home networks into interactive marketing networks.” This was definitely one of the most different, unique applications of technology and Web 2.0 social networking at Demo 2006.

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Yet EVEN MORE Content-Sharing Plays at Demo

February 18, 2006 / / 0 Comments

TagWorld, said CEO Fred Krueger at breakfast during the Demo conference, is “a MySpace killer.” Big boast. [But with Fred’s background he can do that.] Nonetheless, we’re talking here about killing a business that sold for $580 million (to News Corp.,) and now has 36 million visitors a month. All that aside, TagWorld makes a strong case, will be reaching a million signups at its site soon (after just turning it on three months ago), and has some oh-so-smart money now behind it. See Draper Fisher Jurvetson Funds TagWorld — a deal that went right down to the wire the night before Demo. [What intrigue, huh? Maybe Tim didn’t want Fred getting too chummy with the other VCs hovering around all the hot companies in Phoenix? Tim wasn’t at the conference himself, though I met an associate, Emily Melton.]

Just what is TagWorld? Well, it isn’t just a site, folks. “It’s an online ecosystem,” said Krueger — one that absolutely oozes with tools to support and enable the social web, he told us in his pitch. The big thing it now brings to the game, announced at Demo, is social commerce. “A 14-year-old can build a store in two minutes or less,” he said.

Tagworld I conducted a little followup Q&A by email with TagWorld yesterday, and here’s what Fred told me when I asked why his site is better than MySpace: “Because we offer 1 gig of free space to load video, music, photos, blogs, and now we’ve enabled TagWorld members to conduct commerce … the only social network to offer an integrated e-commerce solution. And, unlike other social websites, we provide our users with the ability to create dynamic, multi-page websites without needing an in-depth understanding of html and other web tools. Our drag & drop and one-click features make the social web more accessible to a broader audience.”

Why did Tim Draper choose to invest in your firm? “Tim has made a career out of finding companies that not only want to change their industry but affect the way that people communicate and conduct business,” said Krueger. “Our goals extend far beyond our niche. We’re passionate about our product and truly believe TagWorld will significantly impact the world as a whole, not just the social web. DFJ shares that vision.”

Care to say anything about the revenue model? “We plan to focus on revenue in the summer and spend the majority of our time (now) on publishing tools and user experience,” said CEO Krueger. “Our revenue plan will include several different approaches and hopefully provide us with enough flexibility so we can offer an alternative to placing ads on consumer’s pages. We want to be the place you move all of your online content to, so we will work hard to preserve that relationship.”

How have you gotten the buzz to get 750,000 signed up so far? And what can we look forward to in your marketing bag of tricks? “By the time you publish, we’ll hopefully have grown to over 800,000. We’ve done some advertising, but most of the buzz is from word-of-mouth,” said Krueger. “We also just launched a national billboard promotion where new TagWorld members can go to www.tagworld.com/billboard to sign up and design a site for a chance to have their TagWorld URL featured on a billboard in their own hometown. Our first winner’s billboard went up this week in North Carolina, and another will go up next week in Pennsylvania. We’ll have five going up on March 15th in LA, and will continue to put up billboards anytime, anywhere throughout the promotion, which is ongoing. Some top TagWorld members will receive personalized t-shirts featuring their TagWorld URLs. We’re running banners for other top TagWorld members, too, which link directly to their site.” But that’s not all folks…Krueger continued: “We’re also concentrating heavily on building our music and video components. We have over 2000 artists using TagWorld to increase their fan base. It’s a great viral marketing tool for bands and other interest groups as members can go to a band or other site and add tunes and videos to their own players.”

Tagworldbooth Okay, so you see these guys are serious. But back to the idea of killing off the 800-pound-gorilla competition. Could MySpace really be so fat and happy as to be vulnerable? They sure have challenges going forward regarding parents and other, uh…older folks…getting worked up (rightfully) about safety issues for its mostly underaged users. (A major article in yesterday’s WSJ, page B1, was entitled “News Corp. Goal: Make MySpace Safer for Teens”.) But anyone thinking this web 2.0 behemoth is standing still would do well to read this Red Herring article just out about Helio partnering with MySpace. The gorilla, it seems, still thinks it knows how to grow its big, fat business.

(Inset photo: Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, left, and his assistant get the pitch from TagWorld’s Evan Rifkin, while CEO Fred Krueger looks on at right.)

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[Written early Saturday morning in Bloomington, MN…where I’m staying inside as temps outside hover around minus 15.]

Full Disclosure: My Blog Coverage

February 10, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Did you see this article yesterday in the Wall Steet Journal’s Marketplace section: “How Tech Start-Ups Tap Blogs as Cheerleaders”? It’s worth a read. [I’d give you the link, but it requires a paid subscription.] After reading this, and in the spirit of good, common-sense ethical practice, I’m declaring here and now that I am not paid by any of the companies mentioned in my “Demo 2006” conference coverage. Nor am I for any of the other companies I have mentioned to date in my blog. [And, if I ever do mention a company with which I have a consultant/client relationship or advisory board relationship, I will disclose that within the blog post.]

I know bloggers Dan Gillmor and David Weinberger (mentioned in the article), and they are both highly ethical individuals who enjoy a great level of deserved trust. So, it only makes sense they would disclose their respective relationships with Spanish Internet startup FON Technology early on in their postings about them, as the WSJ article states. It’s good to have them taking a leadership position on this very important issue.

I’m afraid the topic of how bloggers can “monetize” what they do (if you’ll excuse my use of that awful word) is one that won’t be going away anytime soon. Traditional journalism pays awfully, except for an elite few; but blogging is a whole lot worse. So, it will be interesting to see what kind of a compensation model emerges for this growing medium, beyond Google AdSense Ads, Amazon commissions, and other nickel-and-dime stuff (see the “Tip Jar” feature I added at the bottom of my sidebar to the right!). Again, these only make a difference for an elite few that get monthly traffic in the hundreds of thousand or millions. The vast majority of independent bloggers rely on consulting or freelance project work to survive, and in most cases are going to be doing that in whatever industry, sector, or topic area they blog about. (Unless maybe it’s a totally personal/hobbie/avocational kind of a blog.) No question, then, that disclosure by bloggers is an issue that cannot be ignored.

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Who’s Blogging Demo 2006?

February 9, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a list of some of the Demo 2006 bloggers, those who wrote about it or blogged from the event (at least a partial list). Great company to be in. I was so busy covering the fire-hose of content that was Demo, keeping up with its very tight agenda, and trying to blog on-site that I only had an opportunity to chat with three of the folks on this list in person: Shel, Amy, and Renee. Heck, I only got to the press room once, when I checked in — but it was really out of the main traffic flow. And the last thing I needed was more paper press kits to haul around. I wonder how many press folk were filing their stories from the press room? With ubiquitous Wi-Fi, I saw reporters like Dan Farber working online all over the place.

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