Category Archives: Web 2.0

Bookhabit Springs from Webfund Stable

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“E-reading has come of age”, says Clare Tanner director of bookhabit.com a New Zealand website that assists fledgling authors to find a market for their work by employing a “long-tail” approach to demand aggregation. The new site is also a perfect exemplar for why we need much better Internet bandwidth across the Pacific to markets in the Northern Hemisphere.

The venture, which launches this week, allows authors to upload their works in pdf format and employs a graduated reward system as sales increase. Readers can view the first chapter for free but pay as little as US$2.50 if they choose to upload the entire book. The price of a book rises once it passes through certain sales thresholds.

Tanner says the site is ideal for new or unpublished authors wishing to test the market because it instantaneously exposes their work to a global audience and the author receives up to 40% of the sales revenue, compared to around 5-12% with traditional publishers. 

To promote the site there will be a book writing competition with a top prize of US$5,000 commencing on 3rd of March. The ten authors who receives most downloads will go forward to a judging panel for final assessment on merit. Tanner says that the world of publishing is like a mine “full of undiscovered gems” because only a tiny percentage of submitted works ever make it to press.

Bookhabit.com is an early spinoff project from Stefan Korn’s Webfund initiative. Korn, a Wellington based entrepreneur with a strong e-commerce background, started Webfund to aid others in realising their online dreams. Webfund evaluates web-based business ideas, matchmakes projects with investors and then helps to build and implement the ventures cost effectively.

Korn says there is no limit to the creativity out there in terms of new business ideas. Webfund provides a one-stop shop for getting new web-based ventures up and running in double quick time as well as a means for investors to participate at entry level in highly innovative new service offerings.

What if Google Ruled the World?

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The debate over Google Knol vs Wikipedia continues to rage unabated before Knol has even been launched. But the real issue is the gradual spread of Google’s tentacles.

Google have clearly signalled their intent to drive new revenue streams from owning online content. And what better way to quickly build up a rich cache of material than to invade Wikipedia’s domain? But Knol differs from Wikipedia in that the focus is on authorship, so it’s more like a blog/wiki mashup.

Wikipedia is a wonderful project, but it has always suffered from a credibility gap. With crowd-sourced content we can never be certain where the boundary between truth and folklore lies. Knol addresses that to a certain extent through the use of accredited subject matter experts. How much editorial influence will be vested in individual users is not clear at this stage.

Some commentators have already predicted a disturbing dystopian future in which “content and advertising become indistinguishable”. But in the “co-production economy” I thought we were supposed to be able to subvert and avoid vested interests and traditional media?

But there is another important principle at stake here. If Google both owns the content and controls the search hierarchy, that seems like a great deal of power to concentrate in the hands of a single corporation. Will Google rise to be the most powerful media outlet in say another ten years? In war, the victor gets to rewrite history. That’s a concern here too.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is again making serious overtures to Yahoo. (Microsoft’s new CFO, ex-pat New Zealander Chris Lidell, is rumoured to be driving the purchase proposal.) MS clearly needs to shore up its offering in the face of Google’s incessant assault on its patch. We will probably end up with an online content and advertising duopoly. Either way, the dim flame of unfettered “citizen journalism” and freedom from vested corporate interests is likely to be snuffed out. Webstockers might like to chew over this possibility whilst they dine out at Google’s expense this week.

Webstock Show Hits Town

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Web 2.0 luminati from New Zealand and abroad roll into Wellington this week for the annual Webstock event. The festival of web design, innovation and usability has risen to such fame that Google have even come to the party with sponsorship.

As the centre of the digitally creative universe in New Zealand it is entirely appropriate that the event is hosted in the heart of Wellington city; long may it continue to do so. The fact that the workshops are already sold out is a testament to the brilliant work done by the locally based organising committee as this event goes from strength to strength. Well done people.

And if you missed out on a place, we hear that presentations will be available on the highly “user-centric” and “content-oriented” website in due course.

Webstock – 11-15th Feb, 2008 – Wellington Town Hall

Not in the Spirit of Good Customer Service

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I have always been fascinated by things aeronautical and have had a long association with the local aviation industry as both a recreational and commercial pilot. I’m an unashamed plainspotter from way back and I follow developments in the global airline industry quite closely. So it was with some surprise that I read about an appalling incident in which the arrogant CEO of a U.S. airline sent a vitriolic personal email response to a customer that had complained.

I always thought that customers were stakeholders in any business, the oxygen supply that ultimately determines the difference between success or asphyxiation. Apparently not according to Ben Baldanza, CEO of Spirit Airlines in Florida. Spirit is a high growth low cost carrier that primarily serves a niche market between the U.S. and Carribean/Central America. Most of its customers are low to middle income holidaymakers and returning migrants.

Last year Baldanza was forwarded a complaint by a couple who missed a concert because their flight was delayed. The couple wanted a refund for both their flights and concert tickets. In any angry outburst Baldanza “inadvertedly” replied directly to the couple by email instead of forwarding his response to the customer service rep. He basically told them where they could shove their refund claim form. “We owe him nothing…let him tell the world how bad we are.”

That’s exactly what the complainants did, with just about every consumer advocacy and business blog in the U.S. picking up and running with the story. Bad news travels fast. I first read about this incident through an article in Air Transport World appropriately entitled “How Low Can You Go?”. Apparently Spirit Airlines prides itself on the fact that there is no receptionist to greet visitors arriving at their headquarters because this saves 2 cents per customer. It seems like the company has a lot to learn about relationship building and delivering on service.

I mention this episode because it underlines how the Web can be a twin edged sword. Sure it allows aggregation of content and customers and a hefty global reach. But it can also bite back hard when things go wrong. Corporations can no longer rely on anonymity in a connected marketplace. It doesn’t matter that James and Christine only paid 75 buckseach  for their air ticket – they are still valuable customers. Reputational capital is an important part of a company’s intangible asset base.

To be fair, the airline did offer to refund the price of the air tickets only. But why was the CEO even dealing with this complaint in the first place? Clearly not his area of expertise. If your business does not have a quality assurance programme and strategy for dealing with complaints it is fatally flawed. Oh – and by the way, Spirit Airlines made a loss of $US 49 million in 2007.

Will NZ Miss the Pacific Cable Boat?

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Apparently Google are engaged in talks over investing in the Unity cable project aimed at spanning the Pacific Ocean with terabits of new bandwidth. It could turn out to be a wise investment on two fronts. Firstly there is obviously a return on the revenue generated by digital traffic. But secondly it ensures that the burgeoning middle classes of Asia-Pacific have ongoing high speed access to applications hosted in America, amongst which Google is aiming to become the provider of choice.

A lot of commentators are talking like Google is setting itself up as a telecoms operator but this is not true. Google may have the cash, but it does not have the expertise to contemplate such a project. The word is that Google are in fact talking to an Australian telco about the new venture.

 Unity is not the only initiative aiming to add capacity across the Pacific. Verizon are working on a project linking to China and North Asia and Southern Cross have just commenced a major upgrade of the cable that links Australasia to North America. All of which is good for consumers because as domestic networks improve, so the demand for international bandwidth increases.

The slow rollout of domestic high speed bandwidth is often upheld as the reason why we will never see a Google or a Bebo spring out of New Zealand. But it looks more and more like a U.S. centric hub and spoke kind of network, everywhere you look now. Naturally providers of innovative global digital content and services then look to the United States as the preferred site to host their offerings. I think that is why we do not yet see anything special built and hosted here in NZ, despite the fact that digital creativity abounds.

In fact there was a visionary project about five years ago called “First Light” that aimed to set up a direct NZ-Singapore cable. The project failed because of difficulty in negotiating “last mile” access at the Singapore terminal. In retrospect it is now clear that New Zealand missed a major opportunity.

Silicon Valley Challenges Auto Makers to Think

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A brainstorming conversation held at Google’s headquarters has led to VC investment in a new kind of electric car. Think, a Norwegian based manufacturer of next generation electric cars, is pitching the project as foreshadowing a paradigmatic shift in the logic around personal mobility and connectivity. Not only does their concept vehicle have green credentials, but it is marketed entirely via the Internet and is itself web enabled with communications and self-diagnostic tools. In an article in Business 2.0, Think CEO Jan-Olaf Willums outlines just how the company intends to compete against the huge car manufacturers.

But the technology is not without issues of its own. One glitch is that the kind of battery you need to provide energy for a small car still comprises about half the capital investment of such a vehicle. To solve this problem, Think plan to set up battery leasing and reconditioning franchises to support vehicle owners. There is also the question of the environmentally sound disposal of battery components when they reach life’s end. With input from other tech firms in Silicon Valley, these and other problems with the batteries will no doubt be addressed over time.

The only real question is about what uptake will be like in the world’s largest car market. But given growing unease over climate change and uncertainties around oil supplies, it seems like quite a good time to be revisiting the electric car idea. Traditional car manufacturers have struggled to innovate around finding greener solutions for transport. In fact they have struggled to redefine their industry at all despite huge financial losses.

But liquid fuels (of one sort of another) seem likely to remain a major part of the mix for a long time yet and electric vehicles may still struggle against the prevailing marketplace until there are further stepwise break-throughs in the technology.

[tags] cleantech, sustainability, technology [/tags]

Free Online Apps: What’s the Catch?

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Microsoft is currently trialling an initial release of its free online developer toolset PopFly. It provides enough kit to get yourself up and running with your very own Web 2.0 site plus an inbuilt social network for the developer community. The hosted application requires a “Flash-like” plugin called Silverlight.

The only limitation on users is their imaginations and the fact that PopFly version 1.0 still has a few eccentricities yet to be ironed out. In time honoured fashion this has not discouraged MS from releasing it to a willing public in order to carry out free user-lead testing on their behalf.

PopFly is a response to other hosted offerings such as Yahoo’s HotPipes which goes by the rather esoteric descriptor of “interactive feed aggregator and manipulator”. That’s geek-speak for “recombining” the assets of other web 2.0 sites and placing them at your fingertips and for others to use.

Microsoft is competing in this space because it doesn’t want to be outflanked by its arch nemesis Google (and others) who are populating the Web with hosted applications as fast as they can build them. But there is another more subtle reason. You simply cannot run PopFly unless you have IE 6 or 7 and Windows XP or Vista.

Upgrading your O/S seems to be less of a cultural imperative than it used to be in the past. Until quite recently I was happy running my basic home office business functions, such as email and word processing, on a Windows 98 platform. It remained reliable and has only once succumbed to a viral infection, from which there was a full recovery of data. Furthermore, “broadband” connectivity is so slow in the suburbs that my experience of “media rich” applications could hardly justify spending my hard earned cash on a new O/S. Hence MS know that they now need to make a much stronger case for late adopters like me to upgrade by providing free toys to play with online – toys that only work with the most recent version of their ubiquitous O/S.

But I’m still nervous about being tied to a single service provider for life. So why doesn’t someone clever make an easily installable Linux based O/S for laptops, complete with a nifty applications toolset? Then I don’t have to be reliant on Microsoft (or Apple) or Google to get my work done. Well apparently Ubuntu has the answer. Ubuntu is a free open source operating system that has its own user/developer community and is now reportedly installed on over 100,000 private and government owned computers.

The downside is that Ubuntu is still evolving. And whilst it performs adequately in a basic setup, it can be a wee bit buggy to install where there are lots of peripherals, sound cards, drivers and other toys involved. Furthermore Ubuntu has not been embraced (yet) by the likes of Adobe or by games developers for example. However support groups are popping up like mushrooms, as are new applications that do work with the Ubuntu O/S. A company called Canonical facilitates the project and offers to provide software support on a commercial basis whilst releasing upgrades and promising to keep the software free of charge. It’s a great example of how crowd-sourced content and user communities can make a difference in the world of technology. No doubt a lot of people are watching to see if this business model can be made to work on a global basis.

If anyone has tried Ubuntu, please do share your experiences.

[tags] Ubuntu, open source software, crowd sourcing [/tags]

Generation C and the Co-Production Economy

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I predict that one way or another we’ll be hearing more about “Generation C” the Community of talented individuals who Connect to Co-Create Content. What a mouthful! Appropriately, the phrase itself has been popularised by online articles and has begun to take hold with the aid of viral marketing, virtual magazines and blogging. Idealog ran an article on the topic about a year ago.

The concept probably had part of its origins in Richard Florida’s controversial, but widely read book The Rise of the Creative Class, which explores the Post-Industrial shift towards “knowledge work” involving technology and/or creative pursuits and how this is impacting on cities and economies.

Labelling the co-production economy as the next Renaissance is possibly going a little far at this stage and I still believe we do need to question the validity of crowd-written editorial. Contrarians like Andrew Keen go even further, espousing a dystopian view of the future whereby the Internet enables the lowest common denominator to prevail in the world of arts and letters. He describes Web 2.0 as  a “vertiginous media world in which content and advertising become indistinguishable”. However, Keen may have an axe to grind. He founded an Internet startup company that crashed and burned during the first tech boom.

Notwithstanding all the cynicism, I do like Matt Webb’s summation of what Gen C stands for amongst creative and connected people. Community, empowerment and sharing seem like important themes even without referring to the Internet in any way. I’ve seen the phrase “digital socialist” used in the context of freeing up better broadband connectivity and perhaps that moniker applies here too. So is Gen C and the disintermediation of traditional media and consumer channels perceived as a broader threat to capitalism?

Patricia Seybold doesn’t think so. In fact she articulates a somewhat clinical and business centric view. She’s adamant that Web 2.0 is neither a fad nor a phenomenon associated with a particular demographic. Web 2.0 enables not only peer produced digital content, but also opens a whole new channel to engage with customers by allowing them to co-design the products and services they want.  More importantly let’s imagine what might be possible if we networked entire organisations together and let them collaborate on interesting stuff.

But once corporates and government agencies take it onboard, will Web 2.0 then become mainstream and lose its cutting edge? Once everyone is converted to Generation C and is cross-trading the same images, soundbites and information nuggets repeatedly, will this devalue the opportunity? Will we still be able to differentiate between knowledge and folklore?

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The folks at Webstock have organised a panel debate and networking evening in Wellington on June 19th. The topic of the debate is:  “That Web 2.0 is all fizz and no substance”.

Govt. Gets Wise to Web 2.0

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David Cunliffe outlined his government’s ICT agenda in a speech to public service CIOs last week. As minister of all things to do with ICT as well as economic development, he is in a unique position to influence outcomes. Achieving better productivity and enhanced connectivity has never been more important to our economic well being. So it bodes well that we have a Minister who is fronting up and paying attention to the very industry that can enable those things.

At the same event, visiting experts implored the government to get on board with Web 2.0 and start using web technologies to engage with its constituency. The State Services Commission have (finally) heard this message and are now involved in developing a state services framework for online participation.

To their credit the commission have invited a small community of interest to contribute to the policy formation process. Encouragingly, the consultation process makes use of the very technologies being proposed as part of a new toolset to bring government agencies closer to the people.

The only variable missing from the equation is that the government heads of departments have not yet been widely consulted on the policy proposal. Government agencies are brimming over with staff and there is an election looming on the horizon. Implementing an e-participation plan that actually empowers the public, increases transparency and contributes to productivity may yet prove unpalatable within certain quarters. A few government agencies are already well advanced in their use of Web 2.0 technologies and having a cross government standard, sooner rather than later, would be a good thing for service providers and the public who will be the end users.

Making Sense of P2P Content

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Looking around at the proliferation of Web 2.0 applications that involve peer production of content in one form or another, I find I’m still scratching my head and wondering where it’s all going. There are now so many YouTube wannabes that you need a specialised search engine just to index all the crazy video content sitting around on servers out there.

On a more positive note, check out the prophetic and highly rated Worldchanging.com, an internet magazine that connects people with ideas, models and technologies aimed at social equity and environmental sustainability. It’s a thoughtful site that shares knowledge rather than preaches and I predict we will hear more about it in the future. Let’s use the Web to do some good in the World.

I’m also currently enjoying exploring the O’Reilly Radar blog that examines Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies. O’Reilly produce research, publish books and organise technology sector events in the United States. However, the firm has a Kiwi connection in writer Nathan Torkington who has recently moved his family back home to NZ. Torkington is also regarded as a leading light in the Perl developer community and a prime mover behind the New Zealand Foo Camp (another form of peer-to-peer knowledge network). His move lends some more weight to the idea that the peer production of content is breaking down old economic paradigms. You can now dream up good ideas and share them just as easily from Washington as you can from Warkworth.

And with weblogs hovering around the 70 million mark, some commentators are now questioning whether there needs to be some rules and etiquette in place to govern blog usage…if we are to fulfil the democratic potential of peer to peer content. A recent incident, in which Digg had to censor postings because of a legal liability, demonstrates just how loose the protocols around peer produced content really are.

Of course it may be a moot point considering how few of the visitors to Web 2.0 sites actually contribute content. The power of peer produced multimedia still resides with a relatively small group of people for the time being.

[tags] Web 2.0, P2P [/tags]