fowalondon07

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.

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...)