A Canadian company is incorporating the community aspects of Web 2.0 applications to foster new start-ups.
Cambrian House, which calls itself a commercial "crowdsourcing" software company, lets people offer up ideas for new products and companies. If its members like the ideas, the Web site will help market them--sort of like an online, participatory greenhouse.
Since launching in February, Cambrian House has grown to more than 7,000 members, and more than 3,200 ideas have been submitted to the community. Cambrian House announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week the launch of its latest product--Robinhood Fund. It's a charity Web site where people pay $5 to make a wish, and the wishes with the most votes get money from the fund every week. One man who wished "to get my girlfriend back" received $200 to help pay to transfer to her university. A woman got $200 to send her mother to a spa, and another woman got $200 to help pay her vet bills.
The Web site also recently held a special IdeaWarz tournament. The winner was FundableFilms. FundableFilms founder Andy Doan, a producer of sci-fi podcasts, wants to create an online community where members can network on ideas and funding for films. For winning, he will receive both a Web site and an online marketing plan to determine market interest. If it is taken to market successfully, FundableFilms will receive royalties, as will others who participate in creating the Web site.
Because the voting results were close, Cambrian House said it would also market test the IdeaWarz runner-up's idea, "Spoil my Spouse." I can only imagine what type of reality show gimmick that involves.
After three days, the Web 2.0 Conference has wound down. CNET News.com reporters covered the show in depth. These are the latest stories from the Web 2.0 frontier:
Google says speed is king
Search executive Marissa Mayer says instant video posting made YouTube a winner.
Microsoft shoots for 3D multi-photo viewer
Combining a browser plug-in with hosted Web services, Photosyth creates a 3D navigation through stitched-together photos.
Images: Microsoft's 3D photo album
Yahoo to embed instant messaging in e-mail
Live chat for Yahoo Mail users in a couple months will be as easy as opening an e-mail message, company says.
Images: Live chats in Yahoo Mail
Ozzie: Vista, Office must adapt to Web era
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie says with Office 2007 and Vista done, company is at an "interesting juncture."
Bezos: Amazon Web Services will be 'meaningful business'
Amazon CEO defends the retailer's foray into hosted computing services at Web 2.0 Summit.
AOL says portals are passe
AOL CEO Jonathan Miller says the portal aims to evolve into something more useful to Web surfers, which is why it bought Relegance.
Ning brings social networking to the masses
Co-founders take the stage at Web 2.0 Summit to show off new service that lets people build socializing sites.
Intel unveils 'Web 2.0' software suite
Chipmaker teams with SpikeSource and others to launch a package of apps for blogs, wikis and social networking.
For the full Web 2.0 report, including videos, see the News.com roundup page.
If a panel of regular people at an Internet event is to be believed, teens really do spend hours a day on MySpace and YouTube, and Microsoft needs to advertise its search more.
In what was probably the most interesting session at the Web 2.0 Summit here, Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy brought nine people, including teens, college students and mothers, onto the stage on Thursday and asked questions about their Internet usage.
Not surprisingly, the teens reported that their favorite activities online are social networking, watching viral videos and sending instant messages.
One teenager said he and his friends watch videos on the front page of YouTube every day. "You can do that for like two or three hours a day," he said. He said he also uses AOL's instant messaging program -- "I leave it on all day."
The same teen described receiving new messages from friends on MySpace as being "like Christmas morning and you go downstairs and all the presents are under the tree."
One mother said she recently got a MySpace account because one of her sons told her she would be "hip" if she did. But then she said she learned that "my 14-year-old son is 17 (years old) on MySpace."
One of the college students said she downloads video from other users at her school through a peer-to-peer sharing program. "I download it, not legally I guess," she said, shrugging.
Another teenager said she uses Yahoo for playing online games "because it's the only thing that my school doesn't block out."
Asked their opinions on the different search engines, one woman said she likes Ask.com because she can type in a question instead of having to use keywords. Another woman said Google was her preferred search engine "if for no other reason than habit." And several people said they didn't know that Microsoft had a search engine. "I still haven't seen their search engine," one teen quipped.
Yahoo was described by one woman as being a "trusted name" that has "been around for a long time." Another woman said she used to use Yahoo Mail but then switched to Gmail.
From the Web 2.0 Conference (a bit late, sorry about that):
The blog search service Sphere is adding a feature called Sphere It. This is a widget that Web publishers (bloggers and "traditional" Web content sites, too) can put on their sites to automatically find blog posts related to their stories. It's easier to show than to explain. Click this:
Sphere It
Sphere also has a bookmarklet version of Sphere It that you can use on any site you visit.
Robert Scoble is not impressed, saying it doesn't find relevant articles. I've seen mixed results on other Sphere-using sites, such as TechCrunch and MarketWatch. Occasionally, the tool comes up empty or returns tangential results. But when it works right, and finds stories on the same topic as the one you are reading, it can really help you understand the larger context of the topic. Our compatriots at ZDNet Blogs are also using Sphere It.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Related reading links like these add a lot to the online experience, but they're hard for writers to create. Not only is it time-consuming to find good links, it's impossible to keep up with all the new stories and blog posts as they are published. This tool releases writers from running around after related links, and it should make it much easier for people to follow evolving opinions on topics they care about. Sphere also gives bloggers credibility on mainstream sites, such as MaketWatch, which is a good thing for blogs overall.
I expect that I'll click Sphere It buttons when I see them on stories I am very interested in. Would you make a habit of clicking Sphere It buttons, or are you already up to your eyeballs in content? In other words, should we add this feature to the Webware blog?
(Credit:
Yahoo)
I've been agitating with e-mail vendors for years to integrate instant messaging. After all, why should e-mail and IM be two completely different applications, on two different networks, with two different address books? Both applications are forms of person-to-person text communication. They belong together.
It took a few years of kvetching and waiting, but the major online e-mail providers have started to integrate the two experiences. Google lets you kick off a chat from its Gmail interface, for example. But that's nothing like what Yahoo is showing off today at the Web 2.0 Conference: The first real integration of IM and e-mail.
In the new version of the Yahoo Mail beta, which will roll out "in a few months," you can start to compose an e-mail just as you always would, but if the recipient of your e-mail is online (on Yahoo IM, MSN IM, or on Yahoo Mail), you'll be able to exchange your e-mail composition window for a chat window. Or, of the recipient comes online while you are writing an e-mail, you'll get an alert, and will be able to invite them to chat. When you do, the e-mail you've been writing will get copied into the chat window. Likewise, if you're chatting and they drop offline, the transcript will get copied into the window as it changes from chat to e-mail.
This integration should make it very easy to maneuver between the two communication types, and it will also help people new to IM to get with the program. It doesn't require a downloaded IM client; directly from the Yahoo E-mail web page, you'll be able to chat with anyone.
The demo we saw last night was run by Ethan Diamond, one of the creators of the OddPost e-mail platform that Yahoo acquired. We weren't able to try the new version ourselves, but it did appear that the transition between chatting and e-mail was clear and simple. The next step, I suppose, will be adding audio and video messaging to the platform.
Demo fatigue set in early yesterday here at Webware HQ. After watching 13 five-minute demos back-to-back in the Launchpad session at the Web 2.0 Conference (or Summit, depending) with no break except for a brief stretch when one presenter's machine needed to reboot, it became hard to focus. But we've condensed the best and worst of the Launchpad session into a five-minute video. Plus: An exclusive peek inside the Web 2.0 Conference schwag bag!
In addition to our Web 2.0 Conference blog posts, News.com has a full rundown of news from the show, with even more video.
SAN FRANCISCO--Adobe is seeking to balance openness with commercial interests as it tries to "push the envelope" of what's possible on the Web, said company CEO Bruce Chizen on Wednesday.
Chizen spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit here where he defended the company's
Images on the Web are routinely created with Adobe's Photoshop or Illustrator and documents are presented with its Acrobat Reader. But that wasn't enough for Chizen, one of the chief architects behind the Macromedia deal.
"The challenge for Adobe was that we were a peripheral player on the Web," Chizen said. "We weren't the heart and soul."
Two weeks ago, the company hosted its Max customer conference where it outlined some of its points of integration between the two companies products, including
Chizen said that Adobe intends to work more in open source, although he said that it does poses a challenge for the company. Adobe on Tuesday announced that it will provide the
"You'll see us participate more (in open source). We're going to have to walk this fine line between open standards and open source," he said.
"Where we want to make money, it's hard to be completely open source because we do need to continue to generate revenue," he said.
O'Reilly noted that Microsoft is increasingly seeking to steal away customers from Adobe, notably Web designers and graphics designers.
When asked how he felt being in Microsoft's cross hairs, Chizen said he's "flattered" but that it's "scary."
"I'm thrilled that Google is there. They act like a heat shield" by distracting Microsoft competitively, he said.
O'Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0, asserted that Adobe has a quasi-competitive relationship with the Web. For example, developers are choosing to use the AJAX Web development technique to accomplish some of the things people traditionally do with Flash.
"We don't view that as competition," Chizen said. "Google Finance uses Flash because Flash can do something that you just can't do with AJAX. We want to pick up what people are already doing and take it up one notch."
MySpace, the wildly popular social network, is considering letting its millions of members transport their profile data to other sites or social networks by introducing so-called APIs, or application protocol interfaces, according to Ross Levinsohn, president of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive, owner of the site.
"It's a great idea. It's something we've been looking at and considering," Levinsohn said Wednesday during the Web 2.0 Summit, in response to a question from an audience member .
Such a move would come on the heels of MySpace rival Facebook opening a developers' site so that people could transport Facebook data or build new applications around profiles, photos or events.
Levinsohn, who brokered News Corp.'s $580 million buyout of MySpace last year, also talked about Google's recent acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion. News Corp. apparently had been interested in buying the video-sharing site before the deal went down, according to Levinsohn. And immediately afterward, Fox Interactive met with Google-YouTube to ease into a new relationship, considering that MySpace had secured a $900 million multiyear deal with Google to supply search technology and advertising on the social network. (Levinsohn said Google began powering search and ads on MySpace on Monday in beta form.)
"On the Web, partners are competitors. You have to manage these things," he said.
Since News Corp. bought MySpace, the company has been investing tens of millions of dollars into the infrastructure of the social network, as well as combining it with other Fox Interactive properties, such as IGN, Levinsohn said. And despite no acquisitions in the last five months, Levinsohn said that Fox Interactive is always looking at new companies to buy. He said he met with several upstarts at the Web 2.0 conference Wednesday morning.
Indeed, what's hot online and in Internet technology is a constant moving target.
"MySpace is a fantastic property today and if we don't pay 100 percent attention to it, it's a risk," he said.
Don't accuse Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle of elitism.
In organizing the Web 2.0 Summit (previously known as Web 2.0 Conference), they created an event showcasing technologies inherently associated with open access and empowered community. But they made it an invite-only event, limiting the number of attendees and press to keep it "intimate," as one insider explained on Tuesday, the opening day of the three-day San Francisco event. The organizers are obviously hip to the economics of scarcity under which making it hard to get in only increases the allure.
The event, put on by publisher O'Reilly Media and CMP Technology and hosted by John Battelle, blogger and founder of the dot-com magazine phenom The Industry Standard, turned away about 5,000 wanna-be attendees, Battelle said in opening remarks. About 1,000 people were at the sold-out show, an O'Reilly representative said.
The invite-only policy angered some, who unleashed their fury in blog postings.
But now, show organizers have solved the problem. They announced on Tuesday that they have created a new, bigger event--dubbed Web 2.0 Conference--that will be held at San Francisco's Moscone convention center in April. That way they appease the masses clamoring for some of the action and boost their coffers without having to change the original event.
You can't have two events with the same name, so they have changed the name of the smaller event to "Web 2.0 Summit," which harkens back to the exclusive "Internet Summit" Battelle organized while at The Industry Standard. Let's hope this summit is around longer than that one was.
SAN FRANCISCO--Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is convinced that the company's nascent hosted computing service will yield dividends for the retail giant in time.
Bezos spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit on Wednesday where the publisher and conference host queried him on Amazon's Web Services business.
Financial analysts have voiced some concern about the level of technology spending that Amazon is doing and whether its foray into hosted computing services is a distraction from its online commerce business.
Bezos was unapologetic about investing in Amazon Web Services--a collection of 10 hosted services which give software developers access to Amazon data and computing services, such as storage and processing power.
"Why we're doing this is because we're good at is and we think it can be a meaningful, financially attractive business one day," he said.
Amazon has spent 11 years and $2 billion building up its network of data centers. Opening up that infrastructure to outside developers is an effort to financially gain from that investment and expertise.
"The basic idea is that there are certain pieces of heavy-lifting infrastructure where we can take all that fixed cost and resell it to people by the drink as a variable cost," Bezos said. Amazon's Web crawling services Alexa and A9 search engine fall into that category as well, he said.
Bezos said people at Amazon are somewhat surprised at the level of excitement developers have shown in Amazon Web Services, such as its recently introduced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
His theory on why this is so appealing is because it allows small companies to spend most of their time developing their business, rather than occupying themselves with the "undifferentiated muck" of buying servers, setting up bandwidth contracts and the like.
"People are excited because they see a future where they will be able to go from an idea to seeing a successful product" in less time, Bezos said.
People now spend 70 percent of their time on the nitty-gritty technical details of procuring Web servers. In an ideal world, the opposite percentage would work, where entrepreneurs spend 70 percent of the time on differentiated work rather than the muck, he said.
