Web 2.0

My friend Ahmed Humeid (co-founder of video start-up ikbis.com) has asked Has the Arab web 2.0 failed? He provides a scathing analysis of the state of the Middle Eastern interweb and and suggests that it's still stuck in Web 0.5. He suggests that 2008 may be more interesting as some of the international players start focusing on the Arab market, big media brands take the web seriously and the mobile operators join the game.

I had shared some thoughts on "Web 2.0 in the Arab World" late last year with some policy wonks in DC. Here is the crux of what I argued:

There are three main challenges to "Web 2.0" in the region:

1. Low internet penetration
   Across the entire Middle East and North Africa (MENA), you're looking at approximately 25 million internet users (of which less than 6 million have broadband). But that doesn't give you an accurate figure for the size of the market - to get that number we need to remove Iran and Israel which leaves us with an astonishing figure of under 10 million internet users and about 3 million broadband users.

   Whichever way you look at it, 10 million is not a big number. To put it into perspective, France alone has nearly 16 million internet users (with 12 million broadband users) but entrepreneurs are finding it difficult to start-up just for the French market. Loic Le Meur tells the story of Richard Branson telling him that his problem was that he was French which limited his market. Loic has moved to decided that it was too small a market to start Seesmic in so he moved to San Francisco.

   This of course does not mean it is impossible to build a company or site for the Arabic interweb, it just means that there is a problem of scale.

2. Online advertising market immature
   So even if you managed to capture a sizable chunk of the online audience, you're faced with a problem of revenue generation. Forget trying to build a business based on a subscription model (which is so 1.0 anyway) since credit card penetration is probably lower than internet penetration. So what you're left with is seeking out online advertising or sponsorship.

   I have yet to see a serious player in this market (if you know of one please let me know ASAP) which sadly means that there is no serious underlying business model. This is changing slowly - Google has setup shop in the region and has been promoting Adwords to the marketing folk but I suspect it will take some time before we see impressive CPMs.

3. The environment is not conducive for startups
   But even if there was an advertising model that worked, we're still left with the fact that there isn't a strong internet startup culture and most online plays lack any serious innovation. Even the sweet services from the TootCorp gang are more or less localised versions of Silicon Valley startups (Ikbis = Youtube & Watwet =Twitter).

   Of course, this problem isn't limited to the region but it should be something people are concerned about. I've seen people being put down in so many ways when trying to launch something new and novel. I have two university students interning for me - they are super-smart, motivated and hardworking. There is no reason that they couldn't build a rockin' internet company. Unfortunately I've seen many people (from lecturers to people who should get it) continually being totally hostile to the web projects they work on. Definitely not the way to foster innovation....

   And lest we forget the bureaucracy...

Challenges are meant to be overcome and I'm confident that progress will be made. With some of these challenges it is just a matter of time and maturity. Google has entered the regional market and have noted that based on their data there is a “trend that what happens in US/Europe happens 6-12 months later in MENA”. This, coupled with the following factors provide lots of opportunity:

1. High mobile penetration
   In some parts of the region the mobile penetration is just ridiculously high. As soon as the mobile operators start making data cheaper, there will be lots of interesting opportunities in the mobile web. Of course, chances are that you're more likely to see a tripling in internet penetration before you see the mobile operators charging reasonable rates...
2. Rapid growth in Internet access
   The market is small now but the population is approx 300 million so there is going to be lots of growth as people come online.
3. Youth Boom
   This growth becomes much more interesting when you couple it with the youth boom in the region. Lots of young people mean lots of people ready to login. These young people have a thirst for information and expression. And it's about time someone other than these ridiculous SMS to TV Music Stations filled this vacuum.

I've been loose during this post when talking about "the region". One needs to be aware that you cannot speak of the Arab world as if it is one homogeneous entity where time and space does not matter (Edward Said already settled this in Orientalism almost 30 years ago). Some of the key differences within the region are:

• Internet and Broadband Penetration
• Available Technologies
• Disposable Income (Gulf States Wealthier)
• Languages (Arabic ubiquitous but also French, English, Farsi ...)
• Different political realities / attitudes
• Different responses from political regimes

After discussing the challenges to Web 2.0 in the Arab World, I want to issue a little challenge as well. A few weeks ago I was taunting my star developer with the news that 15 Israeli Startups were chosen out of a application pool of 70+ to go on the Israel Web Tour of Silicon Valley where they would be meeting the who's who of the internet. My taunt? Can you name me 15 web startups from around the region who could sit across the table and pitch to Google, IAC or Facebook?

Thanks to Ammar, Abdurahman, Basheer, Moeed, Morad, Riyaad and Safdar for helping flesh out these ideas.

The folks at Zoopy posted the second half of the presentation I gave at the Digital Citizen Indaba last week.

I previously blogged about Common Craft video explaining Wiki's. They've done it again - just in case you're new to all this Web 2.0 mumbo jumbo watch this video for a nice easy explaination of social bookmarking:

You can find my social bookmarks here.

Ethan Zuckerman is a Conference Bloggin' Ninja and he has just shared some of his "secrets". I first saw him in action at the 2nd AlJazeera Forum where he was pushing out blog posts as fast as our live broadcast was beaming over air. While there were a couple of people blogging the conference, Ethan sealed his Ninja status by live blogging the panel he was speaking on. Yes, he was up on stage with his MacBook pounding out this post. Now I'll admit to occassionally taking my laptop into especially boring and longwinded meeting (not any meeting you've invited me to of course...) to catch up on my RSS feeds but blogging while talking on a panel with Chris Dickie and Amy Goodman?

Of course, he was back the next year blogging again. Mind you, he slacked off a bit the second time round but then who can blame him - we're great company out here in Qatar!

Liveblogging isn't easy - the first time I tried it was at our Forum where I banged out a post on the session New Media: Blogging and Beyond which I had organised. I also gave it a go at the Future of Web Apps in London but the shoddy WiFi caused me to stop halfway. This left me with a folder on my desktop full of rough notes on each session which read like more of a transcript than anything else.

Which brings me to what differentiates a Conference Bloggin' Ninja from other livebloggers - the ability to weave a cohesive narrative into the post while also providing a bit of context and commentary into the mix. All within a couple of minutes...

There are two things that most early adopters were clamoring for this month: an iPhone and an invitation to join Pownce, which is the new twitter-like sharing service founded by Kevin Rose and friends. Invites to Pownce are so rare that apparently people are selling invitations on eBay.

I've been itching to get in - in fact, I was on the verge of sending Daniel Burka (the rockin' designer of Digg and co-founder of Pownce whom I met at FOWA earlier this year) an e-mail groveling for an invite (listen, I'm in the middle of the desert - the little things give me joy). In my quest for an invite, I IM'ed Morad:

me: do u have a pownce invite yet?
morad: pownce?
me:tsk, tsk...kevin rose's twitter killer
morad: oh that...didn't know he announced it yet
me: behind the curve...that's what happens when u leave web for two weeks
morad: I am sick! I need help!
morad: did you get invitation?
me: don't have invite - if i get one you'll be the first to get invited by me

I'm always pleasantly surprised at how networked Morad is. Unfortunately, he's had a back injury and has been out of the office for a couple of weeks. More painful is the fact that he has difficulty using his PC due to the pain. This of course, didn't stop him from rushing out and procuring an invitation and then getting me in.

Being in early has it's benefits - I managed to secure my first name (which happens to be very popular) as my screen name.

I've got a couple of invites now so if you're feeling geeky and want to play with Pownce, drop me a note. Also feel free to check out
my Pownce page.

They blog industry rumours and chat cholesterol...

Last week Richard Sambrook, the Global Director of News at the BBC blogged about speculation of changes at AlJazeera and rumours about a demotion of the Director-General, Wadah Khanfar. Khanfar responded (by comment) :

Richard,

You shouldn't believe everything you read in the press.

Apart from my cholesterol, everything is under control.

So there you have it folks! Let it never be said that the BBC and AlJazeera don't get "Web 2.0" :)

Great video that explains it all via CommonCraft

Everyones favourite South African Newspaper Media Empire, the Mail & Guardian is launching it's new blogging platform Amagama. It's based on WordPress MU and looks very sleek. Of course, they're having a couple of teething problems but that's natural since they're moving over all their old BlogMark users.

If you don't have a blog yet, give it a try...

Mashable has a story about Israel-based Blue Security's new product Collactive.

Blue Security are best known for their aggressive anti-spam service which they had to shutdown after the spammers hit back at them and took out Six Apart's Typepad blogging platform as collateral damage.

They have now created a new web app called Collactive that allows users to easily "game" social news features by enabling you to co-ordinate large groups of friends/supports to skew online results. It does this by letting you send out "All Points Bulletins" to supporters urging them to take some sort of action on social sites like Digg, YouTube, Reddit, BBC News, etc. The action the end-user needs to take ranges from just viewing a story to voting on a story (or "burying it") or to e-mail it in order to promote it to the most e-mailed stories list.

Of course, this sort of thing has been going on for a while - people have been e-mailing lists saying "Hey! BBC has a poll so please go and vote for side X" but a tool like Collactive makes it so much more "organised".

Interestingly, they offer an "enterprise version" as well...I can see lobby groups and net activists making heavy use of this sort of tool in order to promote their cause or to give "their side of the story" more prominence. This has serious trust implications - we somewhat trusted social media systems because our peers recommended what they thought was interesting or honest. This sort of organised gaming used to be the domain of SEO's out to make a buck. Now that politics is involved the stakes are so much higher than just a few clicks or back links.

So out goes the "wisdom of the crowd" and in comes "information warfare" Web 2.0 style...

Ethan Zuckerman posted about a the rise of African blog aggregators a few weeks ago. I had previously written about a couple of different Arab blog aggregators so it was interesting to see how my comrades back South were sizing up.

I've been signed up for both Afrigator and the Mail and Guardian's Amatomu for about 3 weeks now and have been pleasantly suprised. Amatomu has already managed to galvanise the South African blogosphere - I've personally found myself spending more time bouncing around South African blogs linked off Amatomu.

Afrigator has the potential to do the same for the wider continent - it's still early days and it still has to gain critical mass. One of the old-school ways they are trying to gain visibility (and some link love) is by giving away an iPod (and some t-shirts) to people who help sign up bloggers. Vincent Maher (from Amatomu) has setup a Buzz Graph to track the impact of the Afrigator campaign - which is very cool - using one aggregator to track the growth of another!

The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0? :

DO NOTHING

And then your bright, thoughtful and energetic staff will do it for you. Trouble is they will do it outside your firewall on bulletin boards, instant message exchanges personal blogs and probably on islands in Second Life and you will have lost the ability to understand it, influence it, and integrate it into how you do business.

The second easiest way is to find ways of allowing this to happen inside the firewall which can be as simple as sticking in some low cost or free tools and then making sure your existing organisation can:

GET OUT OF THE WAY

The third easiest way is to do the second easiest way and then engage those who would have done the easiest way and get them to help you:

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

And the hardest way .......

.... you don't need me to tell you that!

Marc Lynch has an interesting post called "Brotherhood of the blog" on the Guardian's comment is free. From the article:

Over the last few months, young Muslim Brotherhood members have begun blogging in force. This sudden, dramatic development may come as a surprise to western observers, who generally assume that blogging empowers liberal, pro-western voices. And it's true that the first wave of Arab political blogging featured mostly westernized, relatively liberal voices writing in English - often brilliantly individual voices who made little claim to represent the broader political spectrum. Much coverage of the Arab blogosphere continues to focus on these voices....

But the Arab political blogosphere has changed. Over the last couple of years, a new wave of more politically engaged bloggers has emerged, often writing in Arabic and deeply connected to local political campaigns. The young Bahraini bloggers who denounce repression against human rights NGOs, or the young Egyptians using blogs to support the Kefaya movement and expose police brutality still fit a recognizably liberal story of popular empowerment. But the Egyptian Muslim Brothers using the same blogging platforms and the same campaign strategies to raise awareness of the imprisonment and mistreatment of their brethren do not.....

Still, the Brotherhood's online activity has more in common with the secular political activists of the younger generation than with the older members of the Brotherhood. Today's younger Muslim Brothers are trying to harness blogging technology to generate the kinds of solidarity, support and attention that Alaa Abd al-Fattah and Kareem have enjoyed

This is an interesting trend to watch since many may argue that the Muslim Brothers represent the broader Arab (or Muslim) opinion. When Ethan Zuckerman, a co-founder of Global Voices (GV) was in Doha last year one of the things we discussed was that the GV bloggers (while fantastic) were not neccessarily representative of the broader communities that they came from. My concern was that since they are mostly English speaking and affluent (at least affluent enough to use an internet cafe) and thus may not represent the same aspirations as the "Arab Street" (or South American Street or African Street...). Of course, the good folk at GV are aware of this and are currently looking to hire an Outreach Director to bring others into the conversation.

And now that the Muslim Brothers from Egypt are blogging, it would be interesting to see how much weight Global Voices (and other bloggers) give to these voices.

via BuzzMachine

The embargo just came off a BBC announcement that they’re putting video on YouTube to reach more audience, worldwide. “YouTube is a key gateway through which to engage new audiences in the UK and abroad,” BBC Director-General Mark Thompson said in the release. “It’s essential that the BBC embraces new ways of reaching wider audiences with non-exclusive partnerships such as these.” Smart, those Brits.

The BBC will put up clips of new shows and promotional stuff about such stalwarts as Doctor Who. BBC Worldwide — which, as a for-profit division will take advertising — will show clips from Top Gear, Spooks, shows with David Attenborough, and more. And BBC Global News will provide 30 news clips a day, also ad-supported (and available only to us ferners). From the release: “Users will be able to comment on clips, rate them, recommend them to friends and post their own video responses to communicate with the BBC and other viewers.”

The BBC press release is here.

paidContent has a good round-up of what this non-exclusive deal means :

-- The main BBC entertainment channel will be a “public service” proposition, featuring no ads, but meant to drive people to BBC’s own websites.
-- BBC Worldwide: The second entertainment channel will feature self-contained clips - about three to six minutes long - mining popular programmes in the BBC’s archive. These will have pre-roll ads, and controversially these ads can be seen in the UK.
-- The news channel, which will be launched later this year, will show about 30 news clips per day. These will have ads, and for that reason, these clips can be seen outside the UK only.
BBC digital head Ashley Highfield said the BBC would not be hunting down all BBC-copyrighted clips already uploaded by YouTube members - although it would reserve the right to swap poor quality clips with the real thing, or to have content removed that infringed other people’s copyright, like sport, or that had been edited or altered in a way that would damage the BBC’s brand.

Next week will be interesting...

The long awaited Drupal Association (that's the Belgian version of a foundation) has finally been launched.

From the announcement :

On January 15, 2001, Dries Buytaert started a new hobby - he created the content management system that became known as Drupal. Six years of phenomenal growth have followed. The Drupal project has evolved from a part-time interest for a handful of students to one of the most thriving and productive open source software projects in the world.

Drupal has been a community effort since its earliest days - and a wildly successful one. The project's the size and scope are now getting beyond what an ad hoc group of volunteers can realistically manage. In response, the Drupal Association has been called into existence. Its purpose is to support the vibrant Drupal community and help provide what it needs to continue to grow and flourish in the future.

Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is very close to my heart. When I first started using it back in 2004 it was a bit of a love/hate relationship until I had that "Aha!" moment that comes to every Drupalhead after he discovers admin/access and the page.tpl.php file.

So as soon as I figure out how to change my country in PayPal, I'll be off to donate to the Drupal Association. It's definately money well spent.

While the Association is currently not accepting donations for specific development tasks, I hope it is something they have planned for the near future. Being able to organise bounties or set aside funds for particular features/modules is something that is urgently needed. An efficient and transparent method of matching developers to people who are willing to pay is badly needed. I'm not saying that the Association should fund these requests - rather they should be able to manage the process of matching people who want with people who need.

Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) came out with guns blazing at a panel debate on why European startups were trailing behind their US counterparts. One of the reasons? The BBC.

His reasoning is that the BBC is getting involved in all sorts of markets outside of broadcasting and since they are publicly funded, they don't have to turn a profit. This then puts all sorts of negative pressure on startups who now have to compete with free (or publically funded) products.

Check out this video to see why Micheal Arrington thinks the bbc should be dissolved.

One of things Arrington pointed to was the CBBC "virtual world for kids" that the BBC is working on and how that announcement must have disrupted four or five startups.

I'd love to hear Ben Metcalfe's take on Arringtons comments.

Tarek Aziz Karim , the founder of Netvibes is making an announcement about netvibes today - they are introducing a "Universal Widget API". It's one widget to rule them all where there code will recognise the widget engine and serve up the correct widget.

Once a widget is made using the API, the same widget can made available on Google, Netvibes, OS X and others. Preview it at http://eco.netvibes.com/uwa.

Also, Tarek just announced that they will also be supported OpenID.

More detail on TechCrunch.

Daniel Appelquist, a Senior Technology Strategist and Program Manager at Vodafone Group Research & Development is presenting on the "Future of Mobile Web Applications". He just put up a slide from the Mobile Web Best Practices Group on mobile best practices:

• Design for one web
• Rely on web standards
• Stay away from known hazards
• Be cautious of device limitations
• Optimise navigation
• Check graphics and colors
• Keep it small
• Use the network sparingly
• Help and guide user input
• Think of users on the go

Remember this post on .mobi?

One of the themes at the Future of Web Apps is the commoditisation of IT infrastructures. Both Wener Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com and Simon Wardley of Zimki discussed how they were building business models based on providing infrastructure as a service.

(While both of them focused on the infrastructure challenges, it is worth checking out this article on how Google is looking to get into the enterprise market - the value proposition is elegant : "Managing enterprise software has become ridiculously complex so why spend valuable resources on it when it isn't your core business?")

Wardley made the point that when something is rare, it is a competitive advantage but when it is ubiquitous and distributed it just becomes a cost of doing business. His bottom line : "There is no competitive advantage in having your own web infrastructure" .

This makes sense since not only is repitively provisioning new operating systems, databases, web servers, etc. boring but it is extremely inefficient. Why should everyone be patching, upgrading and monitoring when doing this doesn't provide any competitive advantage.

Wener Vogels wants us to "compete on ideas, not resources" and sees Amazon as the ideal partner to provide the infrastructure.

Based on a paper by John Hagel and John Seely Brown titled "Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources" (pdf) he described a Push vs. Pull model in providing resources. The forces driving alternative resource models include:

• increased uncertainty
• growing power of customers
• intensifying competition
• greater focus on learning and improvision

The challenges to get the infrastructure working right is not trivial - you have to deal with the network, hardward, O/S and all sorts of configurations across all of them. This coupled with the fact that 8% of hard drives fail a year makes this a scary proposition if you have a large online presence.

Amazon is working on a new Pull Model - resources on demand where all your services are coming out of Amazon web services and you only pay for what you use.

The value proposition from Amazon is that this is:

• Scalable - increase or decrease capacity in minutes
• Cost-effective - low rate, pay as you go
• Reliable
• Simple SOAP and REST calls
• Compatabiletransmission between services, decreased latency and consistency

These are my rough notes from the Future of Web Apps in London

What is the right formula is for creating a startup:

• Market Timing
• Key factors
• Areas of opportunity

Are we in Bubble 2.0?

• The difference between now and the bubble is that people are not taking companies public due to compliance and investors will not invest in unprofitable companies.
• $600m venture capital in "Web 2.0" in 2006.
• Facebook almost acquired by $1.62 billion.
• MySpace generating $25m per month in advertising.
• So we're just getting started. And we're seeing companies fail and close shop which is good since in the bubble they just got rolled into oher venture funds after three or four financing rounds.
• Things are just starting and the best internet applications are still to come.

What should you focus on when starting up

• Have a good idea! Better to solve a problem you have than to try to "research" market needs.
• Invent a market
• Destroy a market
• Remove Friction
• Have a business plan ( but Digg didn't have one!)
• Have a revenue model
• Build it cheap, test the waters - don't build a fully scalable solution until you know it is what people want.
• Avoid a high burn rate

But YouTube didn't do any of this!

• Threw away their original business plan and one founder bailed
• flaunted international copyright law
• Burnt through a lot of cash

So why did they succeed?

• they removed friction by providing a much needed services - IPTV (and not user generated video clips). People want to watch the Daily Show online and YouTube enabled that.

• first to market
• so much growth that money poured in to cover burn rate.

Shared attributes of Winners

• Founding team - passion for what they are doing
• Doing something extraordinary
• Removing serious friction
• Great founder dynamics
• Never raised big money or raised it late
• Create buzz

Losers

• Poor founder/team choices
• Lifestyle / Ego Entrepreneurs
• Raised too much money
• Spent too much money
• Over business plan
• Forget about scaling (when you need to scale)
• Have to try too hard at marketing - If buzz isn't happening, seriously rethink your product (not your marketing)

Case Studies:
Case Study : MyBlogLog
1. Launched Oct 19 2006
2. Acquired January 8 2007
3. Never raised a venture round

Case Study: Amie Street
1. Launched mid 2006
2. Two universtiy students
3. No capital raised
4. Can do to music industry what Digg did to news industry

Let artists upload songs and they can initially be downloaded for free. As more people download the price starts going up in cent increments upto 99c.

Case Study: Jingle Networks : 1800Free411
1. Free business information phone number
2. Has taken 3% of US market
3. Get revenue from placing ads before you get the number
4. Force AT&T to compete

Areas of opportunity

• Offline/Online
• Adobe Apollo platform : allows you to use application online and offline. One application to rule them all!
• Firefox 3.0
• File system + html/flash/ajax
• DRM and Music/Movies/TV - Market is waiting for a legal way to do this
• Data and service portability (teqlo, ning, pipes) - need to free users data
• Mobile Applications

Now the one place you'd expect to have free WiFi is at the Future of Web Apps. Alas, that was not to be - the promised "exclusive wifi cloud" didn't materialise.

So, ironically the coverage of web apps will have to operate in offline mode. I had planned to liveblog the conference but due to poor WiFi coverage I'll post my rough notes instead.

For a more visual look at the sessions, check out these excellent mind-map summaries of the sessions (made by Lars Plougmann) on Flickr. (The last time I made a mind-map was probably when I was studying for Matric History with Dylan...)