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Web 2.0 Summit: Mindmelding The World Through The Web

I was fortunate enough to attend the first Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco two years ago and got a lot out of the event. I’m very excited by this year’s event, since it has a much grander vision of bringing together a wider sampling of people who are focused on improving the world via the web or web-style innovation.

In an excellent interview that explores the thinking behind the theme for the summit, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly discuss how the fabric of the Web 2.0 ecosystem is being enriched by a wider focus amongst industry pundits.

I see this as a very healthy and important trend that can lift our collective gaze and avoid industry myopia. I also see it as a fantastic opportunity to apply the Web 2.0 innovation style of rapid iteration to a whole range of previously intractable global issues.

Let me give you an example: we currently live in nationalistic silos imposed by governments delimited by geographical boundaries, yet we operate globally. This is a completely impractical anachronism. By applying Web 2.0 thinking, I am sure we can arrive at a solution that breaks down these artificial barriers. Why can I not have one global passport linked to my DNA or simcard, or both. Why do I need a social security number in the United States and a new driver’s licence for every state in the nation?

I look forward to continuing the conversation to game change the world through Web 2.0 thinking.

It’s Not Next, Its The Now Web

The Deal tells us that the web trend towards immediacy is accelerating:

Twitter, Friendfeed, Discuss, Seesmic — real time social media.

[via Loic Le Meur on Friendfeed]

Google Chrome-Plates The Internet

The blogosphere is all abuzz over Google’s new browser – Chrome, which has been released today.

Usually I’m critical when a company launches a product for PC-only first, but in this case it plays to Google’s full frontal assault on Microsoft.

While you wait for the Mac version, check out this video about life at Google:

Google Gets Customer Satisfaction, E-Business Benefits

Google’s customer satisfaction rating in 2008 has leapt 10% on the back of its transition from a search engine to a full service portal, according to a report from the University of Michigan.

The annual e-business report measures the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) and Google achieved 86 on the 100-point scale, one of the top ratings for any service company.

Not surprisingly, though, MSN and Yahoo lagged with an unchanged rating and a 3% fall respectively.

You can download the report here.

Elgg 1.0: Roll Your Own Social Network Releases

UK-based Curverider has released version 1.0 of their flagship open source social networking engine, Elgg.

There are two versions to the release – a full version that includes a number of pre-installed socnet features (bookmarks, blogs, messageboard, status etc) and a core version that allows anyone to build their own social network on top of it (think ‘layers in an onion’).

Version 1.0 comes after three years evolution of the codebase since Elgg was initially released in 2004 as vers. 0.1.

The guys at Curverider have emphasised design as a key factor in the build and they have also focused on user control as a key element. Co-founder and CTO, Ben Werdmuller, explains their thinking as follows:

Over the next few years, the explosion in niche social networks, and otherwise socially-enabled websites, will lead to new technologies that will allow you to federate your connections all over the Internet. This presents new opportunities for exciting new applications, but also opens new opportunities for your data to be abused. Therefore, you need to control exactly what is released, and to whom. That’s the core principle in Elgg.

Google Insights: Search Trends Revealed

Google recently released its Insights product, which Andrew Chen describes as an insanely useful product. If you are a trendfollower or coolhunter then this is absolutely true.

Be warned though, as with many things in life, you get out what you put in – read Eric Schonfeld’s take on inputting “twitter” rather than “twitter.com” for a true representation of the microblogging tool’s US coverage.

App Stats Get More Useful On Facebook

Facebook, the Palo Alto-based social network, has released a new suite of Insights into application usage.

Rodney Rumford sums up why this is important for app developers:

For the first time i really feel like i have insights in to users behaviors and how a specific app compares to the average app on facebook across multiple criteria and data sets.

This will ultimately help app owners gain insights into how people use thier applications and areas where they can tune the application. While the insights are great; it merely means there is more data to sift through and analyze. This is a good thing if your mission is to align with the new focus of facebook on useful versus viral apps.

Pingg Party Hots Up With Twitter

New York-based invitation creation and management site, pingg, has expanded its invitation distribution platform to now include Twitter.

Pingg has developed what they call surroundSend technology, which allows a party host to send their custom invitations via email, SMS, print (they will print, stamp and mail for you), the web, social networks and Twitter.

I’m looking forward to giving this service a whirl in Palo Alto soon!

VentureWrap: Friendster, SpaceX Raise $20M Funding

One of the earlier social networking pioneers, Friendster, has continued its Asian-led comeback with a $20 million infusion from IDG Ventures and previous investors [Benchmark, DAG Ventures, Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins].

In addition to the cash Friendster has secured Richard Kimber, formerly Google’s South Asian Regional MD, as CEO.

Also raising $20 million is SpaceX, the Elon Musk-led space transporteer. The round was provided by Founders Fund. Musk is a former South African and founder of Paypal and Tesla. The recent test of their Falcon 1 rocket hit a snag with stage separation lock. This led to the craft not achieving orbit. Elon has unequivocally stated that they are still on track – the message from this funding round backs him up.

Founders Fund are having a busy time of it lately. One of their other portfolio companies, Facebook, is apparently contemplating empowering staff to sell off a portion of their vested stock. This accords with the philisophy of letting founders cash out along the journey, which has been a key Founders Fund differentiator – extending it to all employees is an interesting move.

Incidentally LinkedIn is also reportedly [via VentureBeat] contemplating this route.

Innovation Bay: Mike Cannon-Brookes Shares His Atlassian Adventures

Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO and a Co-Founder of Atlassian, spoke at an Innovation Bay breakfast session last week. You can listen to his entire talk here.

Atlassian is 6.5 years old. They have 12,500 enterprise customers in 105 countries and did about $35.5m in sales last year and are aiming to hit $60m this year. In total they have 200 staff spread between Sydney, San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur and Poland. They are opening an office in Amsterdam in August.

A few nuggets:

• They didn’t know what product they were going to sell when they started the company. They had in mind the type of business they wanted to run, they knew the sector (sell enterprise software) and they knew a little bit about how they wanted to sell, but they didn’t have any idea what software they were going to sell. They started with about 3 or 4 different unique prototypes that they built. One of these took off a little more than the others, so they focused on that and it is now their leading product – Jira, which has 9,500 of their 12,500 customers.
• They knew they wanted to build an enterprise software company, but as encapsulated in their mission statement: a different kind of enterprise software company. This is not a contrarian stance, rather they like to evaluate everything they do and not simply follow what other businesses do unless it makes sense. “A little commonsense goes a long way as an entrepreneur.”
• All of their products have been built because they fundamentally needed them and because they felt there was a large enough market that wasn’t being addressed. They have yet to build or buy anything they don’t actually use as a company.
• Starting a second product was the smartest thing they did as it stopped them being a single product, single feature company. Today they have seven unique brands/products, developed by 12 different software teams – some of the products are sold in different ways. “Being a single trick pony as a business is very, very dangerous”.
• As an online business they have found that the speed with which they are able to respond to customers makes a marked difference in their propensity to buy software. Their goal is to be able to respond within four hours to every single query they get from anywhere in the world — this ties into their strategy of opening a key European office in August as it give them the ability to respond around the clock.