isabel wang

It's Wiki Week: Jotspot Acquired by Google Just as SocialText integrates with SharePoint

Dion at Ajaxian writes that "the future isn't with emailing Word attachments". Nor will it stop at  online document sharing. Following the release of Google Docs & Spreadsheets earlier this month, Google announced today that it's acquired JotSpot , a wiki company launched in 2004 by Excite.com co-founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer. JotSpot's website suggests that its wiki be integrated with Google Docs, Google Apps for Your Domain and Google Groups to form one big productivity and collaboration suite.

Joe Kraus' "we've joined Google" post appeared on Google's official blog less than 24 hours after SocialText's press release on SocialPoint went out. SocialPoint = SocialText's wiki running on SharePoint. CEO Ross Mayfield says the integration will help sell more seats of both products.

ZDNet's Dan Farber says  Microsoft is making nice, calling SocialPoint a best-of-breed Enterprise 2.0 application. And David Berlind writes that

To match Google, [Microsoft] may have to figure out how to acquire or bring into the Microsoft-fold something that's culturally incompatible with Microsoft's primary mode of operation.  "Acquiring" open source and taking it "closed" is very difficult to do. Moving forward, my sense is that Google, Yahoo and others will force Microsoft to not only consider the acquisition of open source-oriented companies and as a result, but also to leave them as open-source oriented properties. In other words, expect Microsoft to be more of an open source company down the road.

If you read this side by side with point #2 on Ross' SocialPoint post, doesn't it sound like there might be some potential for, um, closer collaboration? Especially now that Ross has "changed his attitude towards the convicted monopolist" and written about the mutual profit motive?

I believe that our Open Source solutions cooperating with Microsoft may grow the Open Source community as a whole.  Most people won't see this in Microsoft's best interest.  I do.  Some people won't see this in Open Source's best interest.  I do.

By the way, back in May, TechCrunch speculated on a possible deal between Yahoo! and JotSpot. Now that Google's done that deal, might Atlassian be an option? Susan Scrupski writes that Confluence has over 100,000 users and possibly $15 million in annual revenue. On the other hand, maybe Atlassian's customer base (which includes half of the Fortune 100) is too enterprise-oriented for Yahoo! And as Don from Ajaxian says, JIRA would be a better match with code.google.com.

Socializing without the Wall of Technology?

Last week LeeAnn Prescott reported on her Hitwise Blog that during the 4 weeks ending October 21, more than half of Second Life's visitors were over 35.  Earlier this month comScore said  that 51.6% of MySpace's August visitors came from the same age group. I was also surprised by Quantcast's stats on GoDaddy's site traffic; 76% (!) of its audience is 35+.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post ended a recent article with the following quote from Evan Hansen, a high school sophomore:

Over time, people are going to get sick of talking to people on the computer," he said. "I just think people will want to spend more time with each other -- without the wall of technology.

The question is, do older folks than he really want to spend more time with each other? Some time ago I read a New York Times article on the "gift of cancellation". Many interviewees admitted to being secretly glad when friends and business associates back out of plans; it gave them unexpected and much appreciated blocks of free time.

So maybe that's the Internet's appeal among grown-ups. The wall of technology makes it possible to simultaneously enjoy interactivity and me-time? (George Zachary, a VC who invests in "who we are and who we're becoming" calls it "connected aloneness". I like that.)

Lords of Logistics

A friend forwarded me these photos. He say this one is "downright proto-philosophical".

My favorite is this one

They remind me of start-up life; you try to carry a lot of weight with very little resources.

"I'd Like to Sink That Son of a Bitch"

On April 26, 1956, the SS Ideal-X sailed from Newark, New Jersey to Houston, Texas. It carried Malcolm McLean's first batch of standard shipping containers.

At the time, freight ships were typically loaded and unloaded by hand at a cost of $5.86 per ton. With McLean's containers, goods could now be moved between ships and trucks for just $0.16 per ton. When asked what he thought of this new development, Freddy Marshall, a labor union official, was understandably unenthusiastic.

McLean received a patent for his container invention; he handed it over to the OSI, royalty free. He later sold his company to RJ Reynolds for $530 million (that's ~$3 billion in 2006 dollars). He was named Man of the Century by the International Maritime Hall of Fame.

I learned about McLean from this Project Blackbox video (well worth watching) on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog. Sun, apparently, sees McLean as a role model.

The New York Times reports that it now costs Equinix $600 to $800 per square foot to build a new data center, up from $450 to $500 five years ago. But with a Blackbox, hardware equipment that would normally occupy 10,000 square feet of space ($6 - $8 million construction cost) could be housed for just $500K.

Ok, so the cost savings would only be 12-14x, compared with 36.6x from McLean's containers. But time, increasingly,  is money, and Sun promises the Blackbox takes just a day to set up.

And with Ken Brill of the Uptime Institute predicting in this Computerworld interview (which I read about on Rich Miller's Data Center Knowledge blog) that power prices may push facilities costs beyond 5%, 10% or even higher proportions of IT budgets, Blackbox owners enjoy the flexibility of being able to relocate data centers based on utility access.

And last but not least, ZDNet's Phil Windley points out that mobile data centers offer a quick way to build your own content distribution network. In addition:

Net neutrality is, perhaps, a more interesting problem. Mobil data centers serve as a trump card that large content providers can play if they are threatened with increased costs for "enhanced" (i.e. not intentionally damaged) service. I don't think this can counter every threat, but dropping mobile data centers in strategic locations can route around particularly obnoxious networks.

Schwartz writes on his blog that Blackboxes aren't for everyone; just like the Internet when it began. I thought he was joking, but after watching the video I'm not so sure any more.

The Logic Behind Web 2.0 Valuations: I Think I Get It Now

Skype COO Sten Tamkivi tells Shel Israel that his company's future growth will be fueled by non-telephony  revenue streams. He says VoIP start-ups such as Rebtel and Jajah are "positioned to follow" and don't represent a real threat. Instead, Skype's biggest challenge comes from the fact that pay-by-the-minute phone calls are obsolete.

MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco makes a similar point about search. Dotcom-era search engines monetized their traffic through display ads, which generated 34x more revenue ($3.8 billion) than paid search ($109 million) back in 2000. Then Google came along and narrowed what Bambi calls the audience/revenue gap. Much of Google's $7.3 billion revenue this year has come from search. Bambi says social networks and video sharing sites currently face the same gap.

Social networks are estimated to attract $280 million in ad dollars this year, according to eMarketer. Online video-sharing sites are estimated to attract about $385 million. EMarketer estimates that $15.9 billion will be spent in online advertisements in the U.S. this year. That means social networks and video-sharing sites only attract about 1.8% to 2.5% of total online ad spending.

But the gap won't last; someone will find a better way to monetize this audience. Even Microsoft's Steve Ballmer agrees. He recently told BusinessWeek:

Take Facebook. If you knew for sure that you were going to have the kind of minutes of eyeball time on the percentage of college students that Facebook has today, for the next 15 years, it's an easy billion-dollar check to write, even though it doesn't have a business model that establishes it.

In other words, in this Economy of Abundance, there's more to long term profitability than extracting immediate revenue from a narrowly defined product set - which will inevitably be supplanted by new technologies and business models. Instead, the key to success is to first build a user base, then close the audience/revenue by shaping products (such Adwords) around consumption patterns (such as search).

Eco-Friendly Web Apps?

A couple of weekends ago, Patrick, Sophy and I went to the DC Green Festival, where we met someone from the Winslow Management Company. Winslow operates a green mutual fund (NASDAQ: WGGFX) which makes environmentally responsible investments in industries ranging from energy to healthcare, and Internet software to  building materials. I asked why Internet software is considered eco-friendly, given the amount of power data centers consume (Ryan McIntyre has a great post on this). The rep stammered that when people use web apps, they save paper. Um, right.

But - a few days later, I met Jason Lemkin from EchoSign, whose e-signatures app really does save paper. In addition, EchoSign has an informal referral program through which the company plants trees on behalf of customers who help bring in new signups.

And just now I came across this Rackspace UK press release on Webhosting.info. Earlier this month, Rackspace began offering carbon neutral web hosting in partnership with the International Tree Foundation. Customers now have the option to offset carbon emissions produced by their web apps by planting one tree per server. The International Tree Foundation has even set aside land in Pembrokeshire, just for Rackspace customers.

So maybe that guy from Winslow had a point after all. Web apps can be eco-friendly. Or at least carbon neutral :)

Imposed versus Emergent Collaboration

Richard McManus writes that "Enterprise 2.0 means blogs and wikis in the enterprise". And SocialText's Ross Mayfield says it's "free form social software adapted for enterprises". These seem to be narrower definitions than what Andrew McAfee had in mind when he coined the term ("When I use 'Enterprise 2.0' as an adjective, I mean 'supporting of emergent collaboration'.")?

According to Rod Boothby, "if IT builds an AJAX application that must be used by end users to account for their time, there is nothing emergent about that system. Therefore it isn't Enterprise 2.0." But what if the CIO asked IT to implement wikis and blogs as official means of internal communication? If employees are expected - or required - to participate, wouldn't the  resulting collaboration be not-quite-emergent?

In my mind, EchoSign or Koral or Freshbooks (even though it's not intended for an enterprise audience) might be better examples than wikis/blogs of emergent collaboration. They aggregate collective knowledge in the background without requiring each individual's active participation.

When multiple members of a sales team use EchoSign to send out contracts, nobody needs to post time-to-execution stats on a public space; the information is just there. Likewise, with Koral, users are automatically notified when they open outdated versions of recently updated documents.  And Zoli Erdos writes that FreshBooks' presentation at the Office 2.0 Conference let the cat out of the bag on "*the* business model enabled by SaaS". FreshBooks gives companies the ability to benchmark their invoice/payment history against aggregated stats from other users within the same industry - without performing any extra work.

Don't these seem like more "emergent" solutions than rarely updated blogs and sparsely populated wikis to which officially designated participants can't find time outside of their accustomed workflow to contribute - despite the CIO-imposed responsibilities?

Forget what the research says. What do you think??

I was chatting with an acquaintance who is getting ready to speak at a conference. He'll be covering all the usual hot topics: SaaS, Web 2.0, mobile web access, etc - in the context of how they affect the web hosting landscape. I was surprised when he asked if I know of any research he could use to back up his claim that these are significant trends.

Research? What research?? First of all, of course they're significant trends. What is there to back up? More importantly, many people in his audience will have traveled thousands of miles to attend his session. Why would they want to hear him recite Garter and IDC reports? They could buy those online and read them at home!

As a conference speaker, his responsibility (I think) is to share what *he* thinks are important developments - and lead a discussion on how best to adapt to (or profit from) a changing marketplace.

Speaking of speaking at conferences, David Snead and I have a panel on how to be on the web hosting upside at ISPCON. We're getting together tomorrow to make the slides, which probably won't include any analyst research.

Office 2.0 Is Not Just About Collaboration

Office 2.0 is not defined by "social software", and its primary value proposition isn't collaboration. That's what I realized halfway through the Blitz Demos (David Terrar has a great synopsis of the presentations) at last week's Office 2.0 Conference (check out Brian Solis' collection of Office 2.0 definitions.)

What really differentiates Office 2.0 from 1.0 is... accountability, it seems. Michael McDerment talked about how Freshbooks' aggregated billing stats help users benchmark their performance against other companies within the same industry.  Mark Suster said that Koral's  document ID system keeps track of how often shared slide decks and spreadsheets are downloaded - and whether out-of-date versions are being used. Christopher Peri showed how Vyew can filter comments and changes by specific contributors. And John Creason highlighted Smartsheet's ability to prompt task owners for project updates on a recurring basis.

Earlier during the show, Jason Lemkin mentioned that EchoSign's  e-signature service lets sales managers monitor pending contracts across their teams. And of course, oDesk lets buyers watch contractors' every move via webcams, screenshots and a keyboard/mouse activity indicator. My initial reaction was, who would put up with this kind of ongoing surveillance? But Gary Swart was able to convince me that his tracking system benefits coders as well. Since their work is meticulously documented, they are protected from billing disputes.

Esther Dyson pointed out in her keynote that wikis are not process aware - but Koral and Smartsheet are! And Andrew McAfee said that managers' receptiveness to Office 2.0 tools depends on whether their objective is to maintain control or facilitate collaboration - but Freshbooks and EchoSign might actually be more conducive to the former than the latter.

Stowe Boyd writes that Office 2.0 is about connectedness and not productivity, and knowledge acquisition versus knowledge management - but I think many of the companies above offer all four.

Ismael himself defines Office 2.0 as online services - but maybe its boundaries are broader?  You can send snail mail invoices through Freshbooks, receive faxed contracts through EchoSign and make phone calls through Joyent Connector.

By the way, thanks Ismael!! I feel like I learned more in two days at the show than I have all year - not just about Office 2.0, but about questioning assumptions.

Snails are Faster Than Broadband!

From the October 16 issue of the New Yorker:

Yossi Vardi, who is sixty-four, helped found ICQ...  He presented meticulously researched, technically correct but completely ridiculous charts and graphs. He compared various data-transfer systems: ISDN, ADSL, Wi-Fly (that is, pigeons). Then he showed a slide of a snail hitched to a tiny chariot with DVDs for wheels. If each disk contains 4.7 gigabytes of data, and if the snail (chasing a scrap of lettuce) travels at 0.000023 metres per second, the snail-system performance rate is over thirty-seven megabits per second. That blows ADSL out of the water. (There are flaws, however. As Vardi noted, "In some regions, most notably France, culinary habits may pose a denial-of-service problem.")