Copacetic

Scoot on over to the PutPlace blog and see what we have to say about the new MobileMe service  from Apple.

So Flash isn’t good enough for the iPhone.  Not having a rich client on the iPhone is nonsensical so Steve must have a flash-like play up his sleeve. Perhaps Microsoft and Apple are cooking up a little SilverLight pie?

Microsoft need a serious partner to put SilverLight on the “its not a Windows only play” route. Steve hates giving license fees to Adobe and would prefer to have his own solution. So barring that the best spoiling play is to get into bed with Microsoft. Who knows what deal he could get from Microsoft on the back of that bet, better support for Microsoft Office on the Mac, or even access to the Bejing Olympics for Apple technology…

I attended the BT Mashup in London last Thursday (21st September). The subject of the talk was,

…Digital Lifestyle Aggregators (DLAs) and how the emergence of this service layer will be the key battleground during the next few years

The panel was impressive with Marc Canter (who coined the phrase Digital Lifestyle Aggregator), Tariq Krim (of Netvibes fame) and Sam Sethi of the recently launched TechCrunch UK. These guys were joined by some boosters from Etribes (Simon Grice) and BT (Steve Stokols), who sponsored the whole gig. Tony Fish vigourously moderated the complete proceedings.

Marc gave a quick intro to Digital Lifestyle Aggregators which he described as Portals 2.0.  He then gave a lightening fast history of the space which I can summarise as,

• Early 90′s: Portals 1.0: My Yahoo! Killed all innovation in the Portal space
• Mid 90′s: Ofoto, Shutterfly, Personal Identity
• Late 90′s: Blogging, RSS
• Early ’00′s: Social Networking, VOX, HabboHotel, CyWorld
• Advent of Hierarchy: LuSpaces, AIMPages, Netvibes
• All based on Open Standards Interconnection

Stephen Stokols then hit the stage with an advertorial for BT Contact. This is an unlaunched BT service that will give people an online contact manager with RSS feeds, skype, instant messaging and presumably other services in the future. Steve recokons they can make more from the users they gain on BT contact that what they lose on lost voice revenue. I asked a question about how they would make this transition and while Steve gave a fudgy answer, Marc piped in with “They are loosing these customers anyway, whether they do something about it or not” which covered that base.

Steve proposed the following key trends:

• Blurring industry lines (Telco vs. search vs. aggregator vs. mobile)
• Advertising as a key revenue stream in the future
• Realtime PC communications (VOIP and video)
• Social networking
• It no longer about switches its about software
• Names instead of addresses

Nothing ground breaking here, but unusual to hear it coming out of a telco representative’s mouth. According to Steve BT has 18 million fixed line customers (nice money if you can get it).
Another interesting factoid I picked up is that Al Noor Ramji is now the CEO of BT. Ramji cut a swathe through Swiss Bank Corporation in the 90′s completely revamping their IT department and setting a trend for all the other banks in the City of London by focusing on technology as a key differentiator. This may be the reason BT is taking such a radical approach in cannibalising its existing customer base.

Simon Grice then talked about Etribes  which he described as ‘MySpace for Generation X’ i.e. 35 to 55 year olds.  All the usual stuff is provided, blogs, home pages, forums etc. Apparently its a personal publishing platform…. hmmmm!

Netvibes founder Tariq Krim then talked about they got started basically scratching an itch around managing lots of RSS feeds.  Word of mouth has netted the company over 5 million users. Good man Tariq!

This was followed by a panel discussion where the debate went to and fro between the panel and the audience. Some commentary I caught (but without attribution, sorry, I was scribbling furiously),

• YouTube suceeded by allow early and easy embedding (no adverts, just the YouTube logo)
• Only 1% of users currently use RSS, what about the Gen-X-ers who just don’t get RSS? How long will it take before Web 2.0 passes the Mom test? (i.e. Mom can use it on her own)
• Web 2.0 is about owning your own content, with the ability to syndicate your content via microformats (with copyright notices if needs be)
• Web 2.0 needs to move outside the RSS community (after IE 7.0 is adopted?)
• GYMAA : Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, AOL will control our future if we let them
• Every application will have a menu item Add Friend in the future
• NetVibes found its customers “analog style” i.e. in MeatSpace
• Apple and Google will promote a closed system for DLAs if we let them
• I want to aggregate my life, but I don’t want to be aggregated
• Turn on the fibre, only 3% of available optical fibe is turned on. Telcos have a stranglehold on this commodity
• How do you generate trust? Make it easy to leave a service and take your content with you
• Bebo and MySpace are Digital Content jails
• DLA’s will go away (e.g. disappear into the infrastructure)

A great session which covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. Would have been even better if the whole day had been set aside. Well worth a trip to London.

Om Malik reports on the incredible synchronicity between the Apple and Google Stock prices.

You can’t send links to music you’ve found to people or blog links to music for that matter.

Darren points out that Microsoft’s new ad-center doesn’t support Firefox (or I believe any browser other than IE). This is a patently stupid position and the immediate reaction is to look on it as a deliberate attempt to exclude Firefox and other browsers. However I believe the explanation is simpler and runs right to the very heart of Microsoft’s culture.

Most people in Microsoft drink the coolaid and are completely immersed in Microsoft culture. In their eyes Safari and Firefox users are marginal communities they don’t understand and could care less about. All their internal propaganda tells them that IE is the world’s most popular browser and also has the biggest market share. There complete technology stack is based on activeX controls and the the minute they start coding it takes a huge amount of energy to buck the status quo inside MIcrosoft and say we will work with the other browsers. They have time to market constraints just like the rest of us. So they take the path of least resistance, whack their site together with Visual Studio Web tools and hey presto, instant incompatiblity, straight out of the box.

It would take a message from Bill to change this but that ain’t about to happen, despite all Robert Scoble’s good works.

Just spotted this, looks like Robert agrees with me.

Om Malik talks about Apple quietly poaching marketing share of the large Storage vendors (Dell, EMC, HP etc.). Anything priced at under $2 per GB is definitely worth looking at, and hey, finally a reason to introduce the Mac into your organisation…..