Octavianworld

Future Forward "What's Next In Tech": "DARC" Days Ahead

Thursday evening I attended Future Forwards' "What's Next In Tech: Exploring The Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond" at the BU School Of Management.  The second of the evening's two panels (moderated with usual aplomb by Scott Kirsner) included Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan.  Brian described the criteria Hubspot uses as part of its hiring process using the acronym "DARC":

• Digital natives -- active presences in a number of places on the Web
• Analytic -- not just comfortable with, but passionate about data and the tools to play with them 
• Reach -- their digital presences have a large number of friends and followers that potentially help Hubspot's viral marketing efforts 
• Content creators -- their digital contributions provide signs of intelligent life 

Very useful and memorable.  Also, echoed the "Show, don't tell" philosophy we had at ArsDigita a decade ago.

Brian noted the emergence of Boston as a center of digital marketing thought leadership, citing (among others) local heroes David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan, and Paul Gillin, and mentioning firms like Communispace and Crimson Hexagon (where my friend Ms. Perry Hewitt was the first CMO before leaving a few weeks ago to lead online communications for Harvard University).

So what did the panelists think would be the opportunities to track going forward (generally, and in Massachusetts in particular)?  My notes (please correct any inaccuracies and ommissions):

• Tim Healy, (CEO Enernoc and our former landlord in Contact Networks' early days -- thanks Tim!) -- Water
• Brian -- (seconding Michael Greeley) -- Connected Healthcare
• Ellen Rubin -- Business Intelligence (naturally, I agree) 
• Helen Greiner -- Cloud Computing 
• Mike Dornbrook  -- Smart Grids (After my recent MITX judging experience I think there's lots of possibilities here too!)
• Neal Sequeira (GC VC who backed video at network Scanscout, another piece of the ArsDigita diaspora) -- The "real-time web" (here's what I think that could mean)
• Michael Greeley -- robotics specifically, "connected healthcare" via the intersection of robotics and healthcare digitization/ informatics more generally 
• Bijan Sabet -- Education (specifically mentioned using online games to teach, citing 8D World as an example)

Pet peeve of the evening: student entrepreneurs who complain that VCs don't do enough to reach out to student entrepreneurs.  Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy if they keep at it, no?  "Capture-it-in-a-bottle" moment of the evening: Scott Kirsner disarming said student as "cranky".

The Future Of Paid Content

Some are trying to put the "free content" genie back into the bottle and return to a pay model of some sort.  

This will be tough.  One problem is that (most, though not all) publishers have taught us to expect a lot for "free".  Another is that the world is awash in content, so if you're a publisher, hiding yours behind a pay wall just makes room for someone else to try to have his (ad-supported) day in the sun.  Snobs contend, "Water everywhere, but only a few drops (ours) worth drinking."   Maybe, but with production and communication costs low, and lots of people out there, there are enough exceptions to disprove the rule.  Regardless, focusing on these issues misses the point about where the value for the average reader is today.  The future of paid content lies not in the content itself, but in serving two adjacent needs:  filtering what's relevant, and helping audiences to use it productively.

Let's look at filtering first, and let's take Twitter as an example.  At north of 20 million users, and even with a churn rate fluctuating around 50%, you can't ignore it (and recent research suggests business people are paying attention).  The challenge is finding useful tweeters. (Digerati friends please help -- is that what one who tweets is called?  Or, is it "tweeps", or "tweeple", or some such?)  There are some early stage services probing at this: besides Twitter Search (formerly Summize / monetized via... TBD) and its upcoming "Discovery Engine", there's Hashtags (search by / subscribe to... wait for it... hashtags; monetized via tip jar),  Microplaza (tweets from people you follow; monetized via subsidy from parent co, which is an enterprise-focused collaboration platform ASP), Tweetmeme (Digg for Twitter; monetized via sponsorships), Wefollow (like the Yellow Pages of Twitter), plus a half a dozen more I've heard of and tried and doubtless dozens I haven't (see here for more).  (Michael Yoon and I are working on one, stay tuned.)   Is some refined, scalable version of one or more of these systems worth $2-3 bucks a month to some reasonable sub-segment of the Web-using public?  Related memo to Google: it would be worth $2-3 month to me to have Google suggest good posts from my blogroll (I use Google Reader) based on parsing my emails, which it currently does to serve me ads in Gmail.

Second, and perhaps potentially far more lucrative, are services to help audiences do stuff with content.  Be an affiliate for schools that sell courses related to the content, for example.  Last time I checked, the market for education, particularly online / just-in-time education, was growing at a healthy clip.  More simply, offer lectures by content authors / editors and sell tickets to these events, or be an affiliate for others who do that with your content. 

My favorite creative approach to segmenting audience needs and monetizing accordingly comes from the musician Jill Sobule, whose http://jillsnextrecord.com/ (scroll down to "A Message From Jill") does a nice job of unpacking all the reasons why folks engage with her music, and then pricing related offers accordingly.  Folks wonder about Myspace's future, what with the Google deal expiring soon and all.  I wonder:  does Jill's approach suggest one path might be to leapfrog Eventful and function as an uber-agent for the bands making their homes on Myspace?  

Facebook's New TOS: What About Syndicated Content?

Al Essa wonders how you can retain some control over your Facebook content given its new TOS.  

I license my posts here under the Creative Commons 3.0 license.  I syndicate these posts automatically to my Facebook profile through Facebook Notes.  

Which governs Facebook's rights to my syndicated content, CC3 or Facebook's TOS?

Qik+Twitter+Summize+(Spinvision): We Have Met Big Brother, And He Is Us

Imagine if you could sit above the world, at whatever altitude you wish,  and see anything through anyone and everyone's eyes, in real time, filtering these streams to let through only those things you're actually interested in. 

Today, we have real-time video streaming (now -- though not always practically -- in 3G) via folks with Nokia N95's and Qik.  Qik lets people know you are streaming via Twitter, and you can filter these "tweets" with Summize (which I wrote about yesterday)  You can also get your Qik streams onto YouTube automatically.  Spinvision, a brother to Twittervision and Flickrvision, lets you see videos as they are uploaded to YouTube -- superimposed on a map of the Earth.

Now let's roll ahead 12-18 months.  N95's won't be the only devices with high quality camera/ video capture and GPS capabilities -- so, many more people will have this capability.  3G will be more widely available and adopted.  Twitter and Summize will be features of much larger players' services, so they too will move from the fringe to the mainstream as more people inevitable discover the utility of microblogging for different purposes, and the utility of filtering all that microblogging (and microvlogging).   Presumably, you'll be able to stream simultaneously on Qik and YouTube.   Google's just announced the availability of Google Earth running in a browser (though strangely, they didn't keep in sync with the release of Firefox 3.0), so we'll be able to  make our mashups even more dynamic and accessible.  Throw in a little facial recognition to boot, while you're at it.

What does all this add up to? A crowd-sourced, global/hyper-local, digital video, roll-your-own-channel, keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer news network. 

What does that make you?

Postscript:

Imagine if rather than turning over a videotape to the authorities, she had streamed this.  Or if Zimbabwe, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq, or New Orleans for that matter, were live and unedited, 24/7, from a thousand sources each.   How will that change us?

Summize: Making Twitter More Useful

A friend pointed me to Summize today.  Summize allows you to search Twitter's feed by keyword.  Even better, it allows you the option of subscribing to a feed for your search.  In principle, "microblogging" via services like Twitter provide more immediate news coverage than publishing to blogs or traditional news outlets.  What I don't know is how long the lag time between an item's appearance on Twitter and its appearance in your feed reader would be.  But I suspect it's a lot shorter than the alternatives.   So, I suspect what Summize has done will be very good for both of them, and that other media will rush to aggregate or copy Summize's service.  Hope their server hamsters are well fed, or that they're renting Amazon's. (BTW, it appears Summize has narrowed the scope of its service.)

Picked Up On MITX Exchange

Octavianworld is now a featured blog on MITX Exchange.  (Thanks to MITX for the privilege, and especially to Dean Whitney for all his hard work building that site.)  I'm honored to be there, in good company, and hope to put back even a little of the lots I've learned through MITX people and events.

Upcoming Enterprise 2.0 Panel: "What Blogging Brings To Business"

I'm joining Jessica Lipnack, Bill Ives, Patti Anklam, and Doug Cornelius on the "What Blogging Brings To Business" Panel at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston on June 10.

An Unevenly Distributed Future: MITX Internet Video Panel

Last night I went to a great MITX panel discussion at MIT on Internet video.  Scott Kirsner moderated a great and diverse group representing the media, CDNs, VC, and agency worlds.  Scott organized the discussion into three buckets:  how are users interactions with web video changing; how is the production side of the business evolving to enable new things; and, the "monetization" of all this.  Here are my notes, and a few ideas:

Just When I Thought I Was Getting Clever

Since publishing your email address on the web invites spam, I recently used a free external service to add an "email me" form to this blog (see link at left).  The service uses captcha, the system that asks you to prove that you're human when you register for something online by copying a set of squiggly letters and/or numbers into a form.  I was feeling very smug about this until I read my former ArsDigita colleague Carsten Clasohm's post on how some spammers now get around this.

Octavianworld up 1000%, Self-Esteem Soars

In a narcissistic moment of weakness, I trolled through my stats to find that a Blogshares industry moderator had looked at one of my recent posts, and discovered that "Single Girl Theory" has taken a position in Octavianworld and driven my price up significantly:

 

via

http://blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.octavianworld.org%2Foctavianworld%2F

Thanks Single Girl Theory, I'm flattered and I'll try to be worthy of your confidence.