Monthly Archives: December 2006

The Obligatory 2007 Predictions Post

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It’s New Years Day and there should be better things to do, but Mashable tagged me when publishing his 2007 predictions, and so I thought I’d brain dump my generalised no specific trends slash market telepathy meets ironic turns of phrase post. Then Move on. Obviously I don’t want to make it too bluefreeway or too specific, so if anything actualizes I can claim it.

The themes are obvious but also self-selecting to your own skillset/competence/angle. Google Leadership (Defend/extend search leadership by owning meta-search verticals; To attack TV advertising budgets thru GooTube; Offer freemium small business spend on Microsoft software and essential utilities such as CRM), Web 2.0 Consolidation (shutdowns, rollups, followon rounds for winners, IPO’s), Video/Social Media Monetisation (pre-rolls, TVC teasers online, MySpace content integration sponsorships) and Enterprise aka B2B 3.0. (ASP 2.0 : Jotspot on muscle specific steroids.)

Disclosure : This does not constitute investment advice and given the speed by which YouTube created value (and it may well evaporate as quickly once copyrighted material is removed, although I do think the comprehensiveness of their index, community and mashups means it isn’t a Napster like blow for them, esp as they have studios and brands using them as a marketing channel, it’s just YouTube is now part of the establishment, in a good way) : Anyway, these trends are no different to my brother picking horses every Saturday.


10 TRENDS TO BE INDEXED, AGGREGATED AND FILTERED FOR 2007 BY THE ECHO-CHAMBER.

1. Enterprise 2.0 will get eaten by google. Writely, Jotspot and consumer/sme apps Docs, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Notes were just the start. Google will go from small productivity apps to medium sized - Watch out Salesforce and other webbased enterprise CRM. Nick Carr had a good riff here. Good news for those Enterprise 2.0 mash-up collaborative apps pushed by Early Stage VC that sounded kooky 12 months ago, but make more sense every day. Hello not to Microsoft’s Fiji and Vienna.

2. Exploding Web TV pushes copyrighted content underground. Hopefully Bit Torrent made newbie easy with automagic RSS subscription will make up for lack of free Pro video content on the portals. Suffice to say there will be at least 2 acquisitions in the sub $50m space for pre or early stage revenue companies in the adsense for video advertising algorithm space. (more if they have a widget and are making videocasters money) Oh and google will buy spotrunner so it can bundle offline TV buying.

3. Dave Winer Will Keep Blogging. Come on, the chance of Dave stopping blogging is as likely as Mike Arrington spending 2 months at his parents and not krunchn, or the google aftermarket collapsing. (let’s hope that adsense cashflow keeps working, ok disregard what I said about google there - we’ve all seen multiples and valuations collapse before so I’m not going to taint the well - Henry Blodget is confident, so am I, I think :) Also, if Dave doesn’t blog, how are we going to get our lasagna tips ?

4. Search is a flat market for Google. The irony being now more than ever it needs to reinvest in search : And 2007, arms race and all, is the one year when a new simple web search tool might arise that gets us excited. It’s name won’t end with ‘ia tho. Suffice to say vertical search players in classifieds (vast), travel (kayak, mob’mo), jobs (indeed, s-hired, jbstr), video/image (pixsy), shopping, real estate (zillow) and so on, will continue to prosper.com + zopa.com too while I’m here, which isn’t really search, but Ebay should buy one of these “Ebay for lending” companies like Flickr should have done a YouTube of Flickr, before YouTube did a flickr of video and sold for $1.6B vs $35M.

5. Widget Foreplays are Bought by The Wily Ol’ Fox Interactive. Stating the obvious but the best of MySpace plugins, will be banned and bought. Mashable will have covered them, and there will be an expensive conference in which the companies bought will be present. (there will be an increasing schism between conference and unconferences; suits and geeks etc. Robert Scoble will work for the governator, but PodTech will be drawn into some type of conflict…)

6. Apple’s Reverse Psychology will come Full Circle in 2007. Apple haven’t released a kewl product in almost 2 years (well the macbook was kewl till it became shutdown/heat/repair hell) - since I bought my first generation Imac 20″ and Shuffle. (ok I really want the 24″ already) That’s because they’ve been working on all this interactive TV and mobile O/S stuff which isn’t web 2.0/open source ship early and often. If we thought we’d bought too many MacBook Blacks and 17″ Pros with Random Shutdown Syndrome (come on : time for a redesign already : MacBookPros look soo boring - it’s a powerbook g4 looking laptop already) - All that aside, for Apple gluttons, and newbies like me, 2007 will be a year of crazy new products. Not saying I believe there will be a 50″ iMac, or that the iPhone will rock helio but I can dream and I’m not buying anything fruity till I hear what Steve says at his next keynote. (he needs to make up for his last few boring addresses and the $84M options thing) There will be alot more Chumpy type things too.

7. Private Equity Distressed Rollups and Premium IPO’s Hit. Facebook is not worth $8B and will be sold for less than YouTube, but it won’t get much more than Linkedin. Companies will prepare bankers to do pseudo-IPO’s, pay a few mill to start the process, then flip to Yahoo.

8. International gets big. Disclosure I dont live in the United States. Google will make almost half their revenue in 2007 from non US markets. Wendy Deng joined her first board which wasnt a TV station or newspaper, but instead - MySpace China. (and btw will Malone reinvent DirecTV as a newscorp offline triple or quad play killa ?) Russia, India, China, Europe, Australia for the lifestyle, kangaroos, and irony. The market I love next which I’ll be spending time in for 2007 is the UK - All those big newspapers and a multi-billion pound paid search market, and low localised web 2.0 offers ! (even if my last visit there I couldn’t have been worse) It’s a different world out here ppls and local matters when it comes to most commerce, content and community :)

9. Wireless blog/vod/podcasting continues to rock. Nokia and Apple battle it out. Twitter becomes many times bigger than odeo. Soon phone calls will become audio podcasts. Auto-uploaded photos with account holder approval on material to become standard. Lots of little glue sync’g companies with specific purposes will do well here. Being able to real time blog, photo/video-upload and share media is going to be kick-ass for consumers as the major players from industries are not going to want to give up their marketshare.

10. Newspapers start providing moderated blogs. Disclosure I’m increasingly involved in helping publishers created structured user generated content communities. Copyright and defamation loom large (esp outside US) and pre-algorithmic and people moderation will become increasingly normal and some smart coders will figure out how The Guardian and even MySpace dont need to employ (as many) teams of people to moderate weird ass potentially legally damaging content. (and making the lawyers happy) Every newspaper that adopts RSS and provides blogs to their readers to participate in the news of the day is a good and simple thing if you ask me !

Addendum 1 : But if Duncan Riley is right and indie blog growth is flat at a strategy level anyway, mainstream blog growth will come from established media + mastheads - Major newspapers need to move on from being stuck in “blog comments” and give their readers their own blog, and then aggregate and filter everyone’s postings. Same comments apply to podcasting I increasingly outside my TPN + K+TG podcast favourites listen to local morning pro’s podcasts not niche)

Addendum 2 : At the MSM-Blogs macro-level (The New Publishing World of Amateurs and Pros Working Together) enablers like automattic will continue to do well as no one got fired for buying the IBM of blogging. Newspapers are far from dead, as private equity knows. What is the real difference/arbitrage between newspapers (or TV stations) having high value face to face advertising relationships and google having low value self-service internet advertising ones anyway ? :) Yes, it’s the growth rate I know but expect more advertising rollups which combine on and offline revenues and aim to get a blended multiple much higher than the print/offline one, esp on the interactive agency side. (already happened here with the emitch merger)

Oh and I almost forgot : Web 3.0″ - or the Implicit Web as Fred is calling it. Or to be more MIT friendly, the “Dynamics of Information”, “Intelligence Amplification” or “TAR” - to use 3 Feld’isms I like. (which Brad wrote about over 1 year ago which I guess is why he’s the ultra-success 50 marathons in 50 states by 50 years dude - like (some watch) Buffett sometimes u just watch the playaz as well as the trendz and the companies:)

So what is Web 3.0 (mock sardonic grin etc but given this is semantic web who cares about semantics - it’s just names for perceptions of new market iterations that create customer, technical and financial opportunity and a way to explain to external’folk) : Basically when one of your BFF’s or acquaintances changes a job and you get an email from Linkedin saying “Profile Changes of Your Contacts” - there will be awhole lot of activity from Big Brother startups monitoring, mining, aggregating and comparing your every click with everyone else in this social media cosmos. And you will let them, until you don’t receive enough valued insight or recommendations back. Fun, until it hurts.

2007 Pathway to Prophet

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liama beach
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Just as VC’s with small but high per square IP investments want to see their brethren being the flyers not die’rs, so too as an entrepreneur you want to see that business model you wrote at the start of 2005, start pushing on the pathway to profit, not atrophy in 2007. I’ve always considered a business that could generate healthy profit by Year 3 a key attribute.

That’s why any consumer only play (esp if horizontal) is always going to be challenging to pay all technology, labour and marketing/sales costs while also generating a dividend for the owners and management. Locally for example, it took the now profitable seeks, carsales, ninemsn’s etc quite a few years to become profitable. Building brand, Building audience, Building revenue costs.

The nature of a business model, in that the unique way that profit is generated is also going to be interesting to watch. Will it just be CPM and CPC ? What new subscription and lead models will evolve ?

Of course there is going to many who focus on monetising social media and online video, but I’m especially interested in the enterprise side of the equation and how big business will implement the best of the technologies from 2005 + 2006.

A VC :
On the other hand, 2007 is going to be the “show me” year for many of the web investments made in 2005 and 2006. And I think some companies are going to come up fairly empty on their initial business plans. That should help to keep everyone focused on the reality that not every good idea turns into a good business and hopefully it will bring some rationality to what is clearly an overheated market right now.”

Rye NYE : "a crowd of about 500 people turned on officers, some hurling bottles and plastic chairs"

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erin mcnaught
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

My hunch it seems about Rye going off last night was true, I dont know if that means I should or shouldn’t have gone :) Anyway, getting caffeine into the body after a nice long sleep. It’s always good to be fresh on NYDay.

News :A fight first broke out involving 50 revellers in the car park at Rye pier, south of Melbourne, about 11.50pm (AEDT), police said. But as police intervened and arrested a man, a crowd of about 500 people turned on officers, some hurling bottles and plastic chairs, a spokesman said.”

Happy NYE.

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happy nye
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Well, it’s that time of the day, make that year, 2007 ! My night’s been um waaay quite as my NYE was supposed to be day 4 of the mcg cricket but english didnt make it that far.

But I did log in to my gmail on the stroke of midnight (u never know:) and the blog father of Australasia, Mr Founding CTO of ninemsn the Blog Father himself, the Fuzzy funkn Frankee Arrigo - Chief Evangelist and fig eater of all things vNext, had given me a flickr pro account. And he has the NYE Sydney fireworks on his blog already !

Oh, the small beauties of life. Nice. Night folks, hope u kranked the night out and in all likelihood are just starting. Especially if you are on another continent or a earlier time zone like Adelaide or Mountain View ! Rock on 07. Or watch the Saddam video care of Mashable, of course blogs beat mainstream media to coverage.

But just remember what Father Bob, the 72 year old Catholic priest with a blog says : “If we kill Saddam, one of ourselves by the way, we may “feel” better, but will we “be” better?

NYE Googols

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giugiaro mustang
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Google’s blog writers have their googols on and are crunching some NYE numbers - No matter what you say 128 product upgrades and 24 new products is pretty schweet, even if they weren’t all or nearly adsense or pagerank (after all adsense doesnt discriminate where it places ads :)

Google Blog : “This post marks the 294th time this year you’re reading a post from us — nearly 100 times more often than in 2005. In the last 12 months, we unveiled 24 new products here. We wrote up 128 product upgrades, new features and how-to-use-it items. We told you about 7 acquisitions. We blogged about policies or issues 23 times, on subjects including Google in China, how Book Search works, click fraud, and Net Neutrality. Google.org yielded 7 posts, and 29 times we said various services are available in many countries and languages. Then there was a pug, Google’s custom It’s It, our compelling matchmaking service, and a nearly-cosmic Stardate.”

New Years Eve : 57 Blogs to Read but Nothing to Watch.

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MK+NR WasteOff
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Sushi. crumpets and 4 pounds of daily M+M’s consumed at the East Coast Mini-Me Googleplex. NYT :The power geniuses are more straight-laced than some of their predecessors in Silicon Alley. During New York’s original dot-com boom, the entrepreneur Josh Harris of Pseudo.com was known for decadent parties in his loft offices that featured live sex shows. DoubleClick was the host of a legendary Willy Wonka-themed party for 2,000 with bartenders as orange Oompa Loompas.”

It’s New Years Eve here, 530pm and no plan here at all for tonite. Triple J is on, and may venture down for a walk to Point Leo beach, with a spread of family food for xmas. Just got back from Rye and was tempted to participate in the mayhem down there that could ensue (last year there was riot police post Cronulla race outbreak concerns) Certainly nothing like my twenties :)

I’m certainly looking forward bigtime to 2007. 2005 + 2006 were hard, but probably pivotal. 2007 will be dropping the clutch time and nitro‘ing the horsepower to the other side, whatever is there.

Dave Hughesy Hughes gettn Hitchd

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black pimpn
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

It’s a busy time of the year to be leaning on your company lawyers and accountants, but so be it. Internet Stock Blog on Digg recent raising and benefits of investor complexity (yes i know there is a downside too:) : “The fact that the company did not need to go outside proves one thing (again): if you are an entrepreneur, try to have two investors.”

And congrats to Dave Hughesy Hughes and his Lankan Luv’ Holly who get married tomorrow eve on New Years Eve at Flemington Race Course. I wonder if Hughesy will be made to give up myspace post nuptials ? : “But i want other people to have a good time. thats why i spent up big on my own bucks night, fifty blokes at the mens gallery in melbourne this saturday night just gone. I’ve never had so many text messages congratulating me on a nights entertainment. Probably shouldn’t have read them out to holly though, she cracked it, i’d miss read the situation, i thought she would be happy i’d made so many other people happy.”

Paris gets $1m. Saddam Gets Noose.

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saddam dead
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Here’s me thinking Paris will only get $500k-$700k for visiting Australia, but its more like $1M US plus expenses. Oh, and Saddam is dead. Let’s pray for safety around the world - I have friends going to Bali which has a high terror alert. Stay away from Western Nightclubs, or Paris Hilton signings.

BBC : “Criminal Saddam was hanged to death,” state-run Iraqiya television announced, as patriotic music and images of national monuments were broadcast.”