DotSUB – a cool video site connecting the world

I like cool fundamental technology. I haven’t written about many video sites and tools that incrementally add features or segments for different demographics or tv streaming as you see it all around you.

Could not resist the temptation to write about DotSUB, allows users to build a wikipedia like content around a single video by translating in into all world languages, helping disabled people and access in all cultures.

Technically, its smart to store all translations in a SQL database and offer clean UI to speak to the world in the language personalized for the user. very cool!

Off to space with Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos’s new company Blue Origin is building a spaceship in Internet mode, incremental with lot of startup energy.

Nov 13, 2006, they launched and landed Goddard – a first development vehicle in the New Shepard program, a vertical take-off, vertical-landing vehicle designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space.

It went up 300ft and came down smoothly. Awesome! (video here)

Its funny to see the Amazon plug for S3, Simple Storage Service to store and access info from anywhere to leverage their hosted infrastructure for picture storage. Sure hosted pics online is just scratching the surface of S3.

Amazon can sell lot of Blue Origin merchandize for sure. I’d love to buy a cool toy version of Goddard that I can control by remote for a take-off and landing

Monetizing the Consumer Web

I love the consumer web, I think there are real problems to be solved for consumers, but lot of good ideas stopped short of becoming businesses or got washed away with the net bust in 2001.

I am happy to see the energy of new entrepreneurs, many new and young, with no history or rather baggage of the past, which is the beauty of the startup world.

Even climbing on the shoulders of fallen giants gives a better vantage point over standing alone. So, heres my take on lessons learnt from the past about consumer web monetizing that startups today need to build upon.

1. Consumers are spoilt, they like stuff on the web for free. More important, consumers have become skeptics to understand that nothing is really free. They read about stories of young college graduates drop-out and build companies which they sell for millions (atleast on paper) within 2 years. Sure, there are that band of entrepreneurs who startup to exit, not exactly to build a viable business. This impacts consumer behavior on the web when they look at any new startup.

2. I find new consumer companies follow one of three paths today:
a) Its about building a community, with no idea about monetization. Some dream to get ad revenue eventually.
b) It has a core product for free with added features available for a monthly subscription usally in the order of $10 to $40.
c) Mostly content sites offer free previews and offer the content as a DVD or download, for a purchase from an online store anywhere from $1.99 to $10

I met Simon Clay Michael of Isabont, the career management site for consumers y’day at Boston Startup Meetup Dinner. He is very passionate about helping the job seeker manage job search across different sources of jobs with a CRM like system.

Isabont offers a free service with advanced features available for a monthly subscription and has a following of people who have paid a subscription fee. This was a viable model in web 1.0, but I am seriously convinced it does not make economic sense today. But Isabont has compelling value to its consumers which can be monetized by getting revenues from some other party interested in the same consumers.

Sites that offer everything for free, when offering a really cool product or a compelling value to a specific segment draws a decent community. When you see a site offers value for a fee, the American consumer who is trained everyday to shop for value, tends to shop for comparables and only a small percentage of users very passionate to the site’s ideals signup. Even then there is no loyalty for long, so it cannot grow into an economically viable business.

Agreed, today the cost of hosting such a site is very minimum, software is virtually free, so many consumer sites claim to breakeven fast. They do not include the opportunity cost of their people’s times.

I believe that the last phase of the web brought ephoria with everyone who was getting online and finding the beauty of the web believing that everyone else was online and would change behaviour to buy all products and services online. It scares me to see such a ephoria back with social networking sites started by young founders who believe the whole world is like them.

The businesses who has solid fundamental values with capital to sustain them during the recession survived. Sadly, many of them morphed out of consumer play into new products to survive.

Main street America, and all the S&P 500 was built one brick at a time, bringing one customer at a time. They survived past the Internet crash, they did close down their over optimistic Internet ventures.

I’d categorize the successful businesses of the web into:

1.Ecommerce (like Amazson), where the net access added clear value over going to stores, with the added ingenuity of Amazon to tempt the user with clean merchandising of all kinds of wares past the initial books they started. Lets not forget the New York Times full page Ads Amazon spent to build brand and ean eyeballs. That era is over, but they’ve planted ecommerce success on the web.

2. Auctions (like Ebay), essentially ecommerce of smaller scale, among people selling their own wares. There are a whole sleuth of players offering exchange of products on the web. Ebay behaved like a clear merchant and said,I am the middleman, I take my cut and hence they are here to stay.

3. Media (Google)/Content (Google, AOL, CNET etc) play, after they have gained eyeballs, from building brand, purchasing eyeballs from otehr players all are vying for the ad budget of a set of companies.

My advice to the new consumer web companies is to accept the reality of businesses who have built their loyal customer base and go up the food chain and find companies who can use your site technology as a co-branded hosted play to add value to the same base of consumers you are targeting. This is a win-win because you get to stitch your company into the web ecosystem, get the eye-balls and generate a recurring revenue stream while the other company gets to generate more revenue and built loyalty from the same base of users.

Digitizing daily lives by US government cities online

I had to pay a parking ticket to the City of Boston , for a 5 minutes delay in getting to my car.(oh i hate it)

http://www.cityofboston.gov gave me a fantastic experience. I love sites that segment their content to different audiences without calling out those people. Online Services are clearly on the left,from my point of you, not by their different departments as they list it internally. Its an easy pull down menu for all payments, which led to the “Office of the Parking Clerk”.

Parking Clerks Online Services is a whole different web application, but seamlessly integrated into the site. I typed my violation and could pay right away. Only caveat was that it showed that I could print my receipt and on clicking it timed out without giving me even 30 seconds. Still a wonderful user-experience for such a lousy job of paying parking tickets.

I decided to check out other US city gov sites. Heres my analysis:

I love the clean access and load of content layout of India government, with all state and local access information in one place at http://india.gov.in Why isn’t there one for all US states and cities?

I found http://www.statelocalgov.net/ leads to all states and several departments. Still I found the site dry and not easy to reach the cities. Looks like a commercial site and not a government site, so I find it hard to believe the authencity of its content.

Heres my list of US city sites with my comments on them:
San Francisco http://www.sfgov.org Trying to find parking was easy but it looped after a point.

Boston http://www.cityofboston.gov Clean easr of use, everything automated online.

Chicago http://www.chicagoinfo.gov/ Just a link of all departments, not easy to find services.

Houston http://www.houstontx.gov/ I love the “I want to” tab, that talks to the consumers and leads them to different services, nicely automated online.

Tucson http://www.tucsonaz.gov/ Simple site, neatly organized for different user segments. Intersting to note :report Graffiti online automated to report graffiti on your property!

New York http://www.nyc.gov/ Confusing Portal full of news. Interesting is the link “things to do”. Shows the personality of the city.

Philadelphia http://www.phila.gov/ Lot of news, but a clean left section saying “Help Me”, “Find Me”, “Get a” shows they care to help the consumer right away. Neat!

Milwaukee http://www.city.milwaukee.gov/ Proper URL, nice site and a clean “I want to” section. Good!

Fairfax http://www.fairfaxva.gov/ Confusing at first, but once you got residents section, its a lot of useful services.

Gloucester http://www.glos-city.gov.uk/ Colorful site, Online payments leads to very clean to use system for all sortf of payments Counsil tax, fines, and even a house rent which I wonder who pays to the city.

Seattle http://www.seattle.gov/ Clean URL, Fouused on services to users, neat search using Google to provide search of the site!

Los Angeles http://www.lacity.orgClearly reflects a city with its own personality. Uses a lot of new media and has blogs for city councils and lapd. The blogs for LA Animal Services and LA Recreation and Parksare great example of city services hosted on free Google blogger sites.

Tempe, AZ www.tempe.gov/ Colorful site, with a clear “I want to”section leading to services. Interesting stats on how many people have boarded a bus in Tempe

San Jose http://www.sanjoseca.gov/ LOTS of information, not easy to navitage but its all there. A separate Customer Service web application offers segmentation of services to users.

Burlington, MA http://www.burlington.org/ Easy URL to remember. Lots of information organized by different departments. “Who do I talk to About ..108 Subjects” is very unique and should be adopted by every city. They could have a list of services like “I want to” that may cities have. I could not find information about who to contact regarding recycling plastics from a city home. One minor comment would be to offer a lighter background to make black letters readable.

JobCasts – Monster.com Beware!

I love the Internet because there are so many people empowered by it and you can across new people and ideas everyday that it never ceases to amaze me.

We all know about Podcasts, thanks to ipods and phones carrying mp3s. Its everywhere in all areas covering news and providing entertainment. Then came video blogs where we see people and hear their stories,and stay on if its entertaining.

I know a whole bunch of podcasters and video bloggers who are trying segment the Internet to cater casts to a variety of segment of users and to get sponsors and make money.

The latest is a “JobCast”. I think its cool. Its a video from FinancialAidnetwork.com looking for a candidate for their Director of Marketing. Making it a video blog like Cast and posting on Utube makes it like a TV ad, but more personal, as though you ran into Chris and he just told you about the job locally. The biggest element that needs to be communicated in hiring is the people and passion of the company, which is lost in all other mediums of hiring.

Yahoo hotjobs and Monster.com lookout! Theres an opportunity to marry the buzz of podcasts and community to find more people for jobs, brining real money to the job sites.

IT enabling commonman for real

This is old news – etickets!

I have been involved in the transition of businesses to adopt technology, particularly the web for the past 14 years. So, grand visions are a great start, but the practical aspect of getting buyins and making it happen is a wonderful ride by itself.

So, when airlines started etickets, it seems easy and cool for us net-savvy folks.

I have been traveling in India and London this summer and the paperless ease of etickets is amazing at not just the technology, but the clean way of execution and adoption by people.

Of course, my international air tickets were etickets, with built in security asking me to update a web site with my personal data for confirmation. I flew 8 planes inside India, all new private airlines buzzing with entreprenurial energy and competing in making the customer happy. Everyone of them was paperless.

Now you have to understand the landscape of India to appreciate etickets there. India is technologically advanced with Internet kiosks in many street corners. With 70% villages in the country, they have adopted Internet even for their public exam results allowing students to check the net and not look in papers for results.

But I didn’t have access to print my paperless ticket confirmation from many kiosks. I need this to show to enter the airport! So they have setup a booth for each airlines outside the departure entrance for us people without the confirmation copy to get a copy from them by showing our ID. Ah! that doesn’t make it paperless, does it? So, one of the airlines uses SMS which is very ubiquitious in India (I could not understand the prelevance of SMS in India, while sitting in US). They sent me a SMS of an eticket confirmation number which is easy to remember or to scribble on a piece of paper to take it to the airline counter.

Thats what excites me, a seaminly simple use of a combination of technologies, but crafted for the particular geography of customers!

What topped it for me is traveling by Indian railways. They are famous for their volume of traffic. They had etickets too! They have used technology so well, that its effects are experienced and you can neither see the technology nor any expected change of behaviour anywhere. Reminds me of Prof.Venkatraman’s “IT Enables Business Transformation” from early 90s.

In Indian railways they have several classes – First class, II class AC, II class non-AC. Earlier, when each class was not filled, those seats were left vacant. Now they offer those seats for free upgrades to randomly selected passengers of the next lower class, all done by computers behind the scenes. This allows people to taste the next higher price-range class and become potential customers of that class in future travel. Classic cannibalization of a segment to upgrade them to a higher price segment!

Then finally on my way home, I visited London. I love the London tube. They are yet to implement paperless tickets. We spent lot of time in lines (oh they call it queues) to buy the combination of ticket that worked for us – real human interaction! Well, as a tourist, I appreciated that interaction, but etickets would have saved my much time.

BarCamp Boston – the future of conferences

A good conference is one that lingers on with us after we are back to our routine lives.

I attended BarCamp Boston weekend June 9th and partof 10th.

I went with the curiosity to experience an unconference, full of excitement about what to expect, how can anything be organized in real-time with all variables changing, and everyone is a participant …

Entering the Maynard buildings of Monster Worldwide headquarters was nostalgic, bringin back memories of DEC and the several hundreds of DEC startups in the early days of the web.

Everything was in order, thanks to the smiling faces of the Monster staff walking in their bright orange T-shirts. There were directions everywhere, free parking, all communication clear, even for last minute attendees like me on the BarCamp Boston Wiki and the mailing list.

We got our badges and were ushered into a lively cafeteria of about 130 people. We were given a stack of large size sticky notepads where we could writeup a topic we want to present and stick on a wall showing the available rooms and time slots. We could put a sticky on a nearny section about topics we would like to hear if any expert in that topic is willing to share.

Only one topic was pre-organized by Ryan Sarver, on “Raising Venture Capital for Web 2.0 Companies”. I’ll write about this panel specifically later.

I presented a topic “Concept to Business – Technology Commercialization” at 11am. Thanks to Chris Penn of Financial Aid Podcast for the podcast of this talk. I enjoyed the audience and followups and was amazed at the number of entrepreneurs who attended BarCamp.

The topics ranged a wide variety and the ones I attended were – 30 Perl modules in 15 minutes, Building Scalable Web Services”, JSON, Guerrilla Marketing and Your Podcast , Creating Content Networks with Chris Brogan (I loved this one), Bootstrapping, Amazon Web Services and microformats.

I am writing about Bootstrapping , Ray Deck’s talk in my Startup Advisor Blog (http://coolastory.blogspot.com), it was great.

Amazon Web Services was a talk about using Amazon APIs and mashups. It was out of this world.

Some 12+ people camped for the night. The Monster Lab folks provided an enterprenerial backdrop to it all, which made it more amazing and wishing it could continue more days.
We’ll be back for BarCamp at Monster next year, I guess.

Excitement of unconferences – see you at Barcamp

I have spoken about various Internet topics in conferences since Internet World in 95 in Boston including several brand name conferences and recently speak at select conferences in select topics after checking out the quality of audiences.

So, when I heard about unconferences , I was not surprised that smart people want to create something distruptive to challenge the quality of conferences which mostly start with some speakers slotted by sponsoring companies followed by some good and bad speakers, many pitching their products, out of which some are arresting speakers and many pushing powerpoints insensitive to the intelligence of the audience.

I am writing about it here as I am excited that unconferences are possible because of the current state of digital space coupled with (call it web 2.0 or not) the maturing of online communities.

I was part of Boston Computer Society, a 30 yr old body in 95 and started their Web Group. This was my blessing to get me to experience the fervor of geeky grassroot communities in America and the power of what they can achieve. We spun-off as Web-Net Group after BCS closed with monthly meetings at MIT Sloan and so many volunteer driven group activities and online sites.

Apart from the concept that all participants are speakers and the community rates and allows presentation purely on merit, what excites me about unconferences is that they are spontaneeous with an entrepreneurial spirit which helped the web take off in the 90s.

The falling costs of hosting, open source softwares, wikis as registration tools all make it all the more easy for unconferences to flourish and produce quality interactions, learnings and seed new ideas for more innovation.

I’ll write more after attending this weekends’ barcamp Boston. Whats cool about barcamp is that its evolved into another participatory self-regulated community with its own offsprings organized worldwide.

Photo Fulfillment for community

I just found qoop, a photo fulfillment site that has partnered with webshots (cnet), photobucket and flickrand allows users to print pictures from these sites into a mini photo book or poster of 1000s of pictures, all at a very nominal fee.

This is a small step towards my dream of digital scrapbooks, but its a sensible monetizing move in that direction. Qoop has the core competency in photo books fulfillment and the photo sites have done well in partnering in what I guess must be a revenue share deal.

The best part of what I like about qoop is that that market to social networks and college crowd, focusing on the community aspect of photo sharing which is an obvious revenue opportunity for photo sites.

I’ve been waiting for yahoo photos or shutterfly to offer this community aspect of sharing with some ecommerce options.

While Flickrs is integrated with Qoop, just wondering why Yahoo photos is not part of the qoop partnership. Didn’t Yahoo Photos relaunch their AJAX version of their site saying they had more photo users ever at Demo 2006

Start with community and get local search

Web 2.0 is all focused on communities and it can’t be more apt for any hosted solution than local search.

Listen to “The Architecture of Participation” by Paul Levine, GM of Yahoo Local. Its focused on the marriage of search and local people looking for stuff.

Local communities in the offline world are all around us in the school clubs, alumni groups, PTAs, bars, networking events groups of all kinds, all different segments of population, with one thing in common – hudling of people seeking a common connection to find information about local referals to solve a specific problem NOW!

I think Yahoo groups is the largest collection of active online groups.

I think the solution to local search is not a typical search solution – search content and find information, focusing on better search algorithms and UIs around it. I think its one of bringing offline communities into the online world with little or no change in behavior to solve the problem they are looking for information, validated by their trusted network NOW!

The trusted community aspect is what made all the tagging community sites famous and built a community of people around them – friendster, delicious, kaboodle …

It a low hanging fruit waiting for the larger portals and hosted players to marry this community into their existing group solutions and focus on the community and their needs which in turn should provide the local search solution as the end product.

They should not start with a local search product and find marketing to reach the community who will use it. Isn’t our first wave of web 1.0 lession about personalization and customization?