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State of the Web: Bangladesh

I recently spent six weeks volunteering in the depths of rural Bangladesh. During that time, I lived in a town of 50,000 people (Rayenda) – of which about 30% had electricity (which went out for hours at a time, several times a day), few had running water, nobody had a landline, and the only car in the town was owned by a western NGO. I counted a total of 5 computers in the town, and not many more televisions or radios.

The only technological shining star in Bangladesh is the cellphone. While penetration is still relatively low, probably 15 – 20% of the people in rural Bangladesh had cellphones (a somewhat higher proportion in urban areas). Inexpensive Nokia phones are if not affordable, at least within reach for many of the poor via installment plans. Airtime and text messages are ridiculously cheap too: fractions of a cent. Its the archetypal leapfrog example: towns and people who’ve never had access to communications beyond word of mouth now have access to a cutting edge GSM cell network.

Shocking fact: cell coverage in Bangladesh is 100% - the laser-flat topography and ubiquitous towers mean that you can talk and text literally anywhere in the country, however ridiculously remote it may seem. Another interesting thing is that a cottage industry of charging stations has sprung up in villages with electricity or generators, allowing people from un-electrified areas to sit and enjoy tea or dinner while their phone is charged.

Through-out the country there is little knowledge of the web, and even less reason to acquire such knowledge. In rural areas, cellphones are the sum total of electronic interaction for the average person. Most people had not heard of the internet or email (or ATM’s, modern banking infrastructure, or any of the electronic services we take for granted), and the few who had had only sporadic and slow access. In urban areas awareness of the net/email/etc. was much higher, but access is limited. Because no Bangladeshi services (airlines, newspapers, banks, anything) have online components, there’s little reason to make the internet a part of day-to-day life either.

For as long as I can recall the western world has been maundering on about the mobile web and the shape it will take. While some countries (Korea, Japan) have started down the path of mobile payments and entertainment (dmb, etc.), I think that it is countries like Bangladesh who will truly point the way to the next generation of online, mobile targeted services. Consider:

1. There’s no legacy systems of sunk investment to slow the purchase or development and deployment of new systems.
2. There’s no interface expectations: well we who are used to the full internet find WAP browsers and clipped pages to be a frustrating exercise, its all net new and value added to the people of Bangladesh.
3. It makes financial sense for Bangla businesses to extend themselves via mobile and skip the bricks and mortar phase entirely (banks provide a good example here).
4. There’s plenty of resources (coders) available just over the border in India to bring services into existence.
5. The economics of micropayments for mobile services make sense in Bangladesh where (a) the population is large (150M) and concentrated in a geographically limited area that takes little infrastructure to service, and (b) the people are conceptually acquainted with micropayments from the tariffs that they encounter during their day-to-day lives.

Anyway – that’s it in a nutshell. There’s a new world of millions of web users coming that will have never known the “web” - no browsers, no email, no rss – just a 1 inch Nokia screen. Who’s positioned to profit from this surge? How can you or your business be a part of it?

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Tweetmeme DOA?

I’m fitting this in while visiting family, so this post is late, and likely short on insight - that being said, after pouring hours and days and weeks of hobby-time in building a relevancy algorithm (see: techwatching) I feel the need to comment on Tweetmeme, which launched yesterday to much fanfare.

Divining interesting-ness from a content pool depends on a number of bits of information that provide relationships between disparate bits, allowing them to be linked together into a topical unit (i.e.: a cluster of stories all discussing a certain topic) that makes sense. Over on TechWatching, I use four things to create topical units (”story clusters”):

1. forward links - the pages that a blog post links to
2. back links - the pages that link to a given page
3. keywords - the meaningful words that posts share - i.e.: proper names like “Google” are counted, conjunctions like “and” are not
4. time - content must have some chronological proximity to be considered “linked” - i.e.: an article about Google from two months ago is less likely to be discussing the topic-du-jour than an article from two hours ago

Now, Techwatching indexes blog posts - which are characterized by all of the above four points - i.e.: blogs are noted for linking, posting quickly (chronological proximity), using relevant keywords and so on. My question about Tweetmeme is whether Twitter provides the same fertile breeding ground of memetic confluence as blogs… Personally, I think its ephermal nature and limited length works against it. Aside from the occaisonal exceptions (Apple events, the socal fires), Twitter seems to be pretty scattershot - and those special situations seem to me to be better served by something more explicit, like hashtags.

techmeme, techwatching, tweetmeme twitter

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Is EveryBlock is going to bump into EveryProblem that BlockRocker did?

Today sees the widely covered launch of EveryBlock - a hyper-local aggregator. Coverage is characterized by words like “redefines” and “slick.”

All of which is great for the people behind Everyblock, and I wish them all the best. For what its worth though, I tried a similar concept a few years ago at BlockRocker.com. The concept was simple: find every localize-able bit of info consistently published on the web, index it, and map it. Blockrocker spat out reviews, real estate listings, pictures, events, and so on, and offered nicely customizeable RSS feeds to boot. I even had a “geotag this page” bookmarklet, tag builders for del.icio.us and blogger to encourage geotagging, and so on.

If you go past BlockRocker today, you’ll find it to be a wasteland, which hasn’t been materially updated in years. I’ve cut it down to blog posts only, and even then, only those that have been explicitly geotagged by their authors. “Why,” you ask?

Because hyperlocal has consistenlty been a technology without a market. Interests are generally not boxed by locale, and localization does not necessarily convey relevance (or traffic). This applies to news stories, photos, and so on. The second part of this rant is that generally people aren’t that interested in local data - for example, TC talks about the power of Everyblock being able to pull up a list of recently cleaned graffitti in Brooklyn. Huh. How many people are going to want to check up on that regularly? Finally: the lack of good meta-data and the overabundance of certain types of listings (events and photos were my biggest problems) meant throwing users repeatedly into a needle a haystack situation.

Anyway, I didn’t intend this to be a negative post, and I really do wish the EveryBlock team good luck. Adrian Holovaty seems well equipped to lead the site to success, and perhaps the time has come for a well-resourced hyperlocal to succeed. I suppose I’m just grumpy about my own inability to execute anything in this space.

blockrocker everyblock

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Apparenlty $35M is the margin between life and death

A $35M loss is apparently all it takes to bring down a company with billions in revenue and thousands of physical locations, according to CNET’s Don Reisinger. Its a good thing Don doesn’t do automotive journalism; given the way Ford and the General have survived years of losses of much greater magnitude in the face of nimble, innovative competition, Don would have been driven mad by their failure to comply with his dreary prognostications.

Ok, things don’t look great for Blockbuster. On the other hand, they have a physical distribution network in place and massive brand recognition; if management could pull themselves together, I can’t believe they wouldn’t be able to leverage those two assets into something meaningful.

blockbuster cnet

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The Phone Rings for Thee: Google to announce Monday?

The WSJ is reporting that Google is set to announce its GPhone plans Monday (Nov. 5), announcing partnerships with T-Mob and Sprint initially. God willing, that will push bloody Facebook and OpenSocial off of TechMeme for a few days.

So - what does a GPhone mean to me?

Familiar Business Model: I’m assuming that the GPhone will be a mobile OS built by Google, deployed on hardware built by others, serviced by multiple carriers, supported by localized advertising of some kind. That layout seems like a natural fit for Google: its got a familiar business plan, a familiar ethic (open platform!), and forwards the mission of organizing all of the world’s data, an increasing amount of which, in the form of call records, contact data, videos, and photos is tied up in mobile devices. Hell, if you think about it, its an near mirror of the desktop world: Google writes apps and services, deployed on hardware by multiple vendors (every desktop and laptop ever made), supported by ISP’s.

Optimized for the Cloud: IMHO this is where Google will really differentiate. If the OS provides a well-conceived conduit into Google’s cloud, it will be golden. I want to…

1. Access my mobile voicemail through GMail online.
2. See my call history online.
3. Be able to make voice calls online and see that history on my mobile.
4. Have a single online/mobile contact infoset.
5. Save & load pictures and video too and from a GDrive storage cloud automatically.
6. Enjoy true calendar integration - i.e.: if a GCal event is set with an alarm 15 minutes before, I want my phone to ring with a reminder, wherever I am.
7. A full suite of API’s and mobile developer tools to spur development and innovation on the platofrm.
8. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Apple is inching its way there with the iPhone/iTunes marriage - but its synchronization is limited to your desktop, whereas Google’s is global. Of course, Apple’s strategy is tuned to the mass market - its a model that people are familiar with, as reflected in sales. I’m guessing that Google’s geek-centric value propositions are going to see slower initial adoption, buy greater long-term penetration, even if white labeled.

Fundamentally, a single repository for your communications info, accessed through multiple channels (phone, internet) just makes sense. Google, as others have noted, is a natural fit to quarterback this combination of software, hardware, and infrastructure. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Google can pull it off.

apple, google, gphone, iphone, microsoft, sprint, tmobile wsj

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Miro vs. Joost: The Doctorow Doctrine

Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing’s slayer of DRM, writes this morning about open source Joost-killer “Miro.”

Miro has done extensive outreach to indie creators, has no privacy-invading tracking of your viewing habits, delivers HD video, and is built on free software and open standards. [from BB]

Download the free software, pick the channels you want (over 2,500 of them at present, and anyone can publish new channels), and Miro will subscribe to your favorite net-shows, checking their RSS feeds for new episodes and downloading them with BitTorrent… It doesn’t matter what video format the shows are in, because Miro includes VLC, the open video player that can play pretty much every file-format on the net. [from BB]

Cory then points us to the Miro vs. Joost page on the GetMiro site, which summarizes Miro’s benefits vis-a-vis Joost, and wraps it all up with “Do you want corporations to decide what you watch?”

A few thoughts:

Yes. Most people do want corporations to decide what they watch. That’s what the vast, vast majority of people have accepted already with cable TV, satellite TV, BlockBuster or NetFlix for rentals, and so on. If you really think about why that is, it makes sense: media corporation’s programming decisions reflect aggregated demand trends - i.e.: to produce popular programming, they produce shows that people will want to watch - i.e.: they’re acting as a content filter based on their gestalt understanding of popular culture.

That understanding is never perfect, and to be sure media co.’s are guilty of trying to manipulate popular culture and dumb it down (boy bands, “reality” tv, and everything else banal). But - independent programming isn’t inherently any better - take a look around YouTube and see how culturally significant or politically insightful the average user-created, crowd-sourced, indie-produced net clip is.

So - regardless of my own political affiliations, do I consider freedom from corporate rule to be a source of competitive advantage for Miro? No. Consumers want to consume. Not filter, sift, evaluate, subscribe, and then consume.

Corporations remove all of the barriers between consumers and consumption, and consumers have stated - more or less unanimously - that they’re willing to pay the financial and cultural (reduced selection) price for that value proposition. Joost recognizes this, and capitalizes on it.

Ultimately, Miro is positioning itself as a long-tail content portal - an entirely valid niche product category, where it will no doubt enjoy success in a number of market segments. Positioning itself vis-a-vis Joost, is IMHO folly, however - its a different value proposition that appeals to different usage scenarios and different markets.

Hopefully Miro does better than the last, almost identical entrant in this market: crowd favourite FireAnt (see initial review comparing FireAnt to Joost, later problems, and “acquisition“).

boing boing, cory doctorow, doctorow, fireant, joost miro

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Google’s OpenSocial: tough questions outstanding

Let’s start by summarizing Google’s “OpenSocial” API: its a Microsoft strategy. OpenSocial is targeting developers with the hope that a plethora of must-have OpenSocial apps/widgets/services will drive adoption of the member social networks.

I have some questions…

1. Will OpenSocial get adoption in the developer community? The OpenSocial union depends on developers wanting to develop apps across the properties included. Are there currently crowds of developers complaining about how difficult it is to code for both LinkedIn and Orkut? If not, will OpenSocial kickstart the developer rush? Does OpenSocial serve a real need - or a business case / marketing strategy?
2. Will the availability of widgets translate into member growth? Assuming that the developer community does take to OpenSocial, will their produce translate into new members, increased activity from existing members, both, or neither? Does anyone really understand the market dynamics of the widget economy?
3. Where’s MySpace? Or Bebo? Obviously Facebook isn’t going to be a part of this. But - the one-tonne gorilla MySpace is still going out on its own API/developer path. From where I sit, its sort of looks like a third party situation in American politics - MySpace is the Ralph Nader that’s going to screw OpenSocial’s Al Gore. If only they could run on the same ticket…

Yeah - so I’m not too bullish on OpenSocial. It strikes me as an initiative that looks good on paper - but in practice lacks the market relevance to really get traction. Mathew’s more positive, though he notes the absence of FB and MySpace. Richard is rabidly enthusiastic. Marc and Ning are obviously happy too.

So - after weighing in all of those opinions, do I still think the battle is over? Has Facebook won? Well, no - but they have a significant first mover advantage and have repeatedly shown conceptual leadership in the social networking space while others have languished.

OpenSocial isn’t combating a lack of API’s for the included services; its combating the perception the each of these services is a has-been, or is irrelevant.

That’s a big uphill battle that will need to be won with innovation and excellence - not just whiz-bang API’s.

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I’m in better shape than PodTech…

Sorry for the drought in posting - I imagine there will be a bunch of people wondering what this suddenly active feed in their RSS reader is - well, hello! I’m back from another blogger-hiatus.

That being said: let’s talk about PodTech, the struggling vlog content production/distribution company noteable mainly for its hiring of Robert Scoble away from Microsoft. Word on the street is that PodTech is “restructuring/refocusing/etc.” - initially reported as a coming closure by Daniel Lyons, gleefully repeated by TC, and finally responded to via tweet and vitriolic hyperbolic scoble-post.

What is it that makes the Scoble / PodTech trainwreck so compelling to watch? Perhaps is the rumour-carried ego battles that have defined PodTech’s leadership; perhaps the questionable investment (7.5M according to TC) in a company with a sketchy, ill-defined “build-it-and-maybe-they’ll-come” business model; perhaps Robert’s overly-honest stories of salary and million-dollar real estate acquisitions.

Face it: we all gloat a little when we see a company that sold little more than buzz-word hype crash and burn. It would be like seeing Steve Rubel get hired by Second Life as VP of PR, and then having Second Life fold up six months later - talk about poetic justice.

Anyway, none of this is intended to say that I bear PodTech, Robert, or Steve R. any ill-will - its just an interesting self-exam as to why this story of any has popped me out of my hiatus. I have no doubt that Scoble will land on his feet, and for the sake of the other hard working people at PodTech, I hope the rest of the company can too.

Gawker and Sugar Did it Right

On PodTech’s ability to bounce back: I have my doubts. PodTech seemingly jumped into vlogging with a lot of enthusiasm and little planning… the breadth of subject matter covered and distribution execution suggests that the company is wanted to be a self-contained content network - a new-school MSM network-equivalent.

Compare this to the experiences of other New Networks, like the Pop Sugar or Gawker families: focused verticals are launched independently, building their own high-quality audiences. The parent organization provides network connections, business management, and ad sales. The network can grow in controlled fashion with organic growth of individual properties into their segments, or the addition of new properties when deemed appropriate.

IMHO, PodTech bit off too much - even their squiggly devoid-of-meaning logo speaks of lack of focus. Why didn’t they take a smaller investment and choose a vertical (scoble’s tech scene, for instance) to focus on? I’m all for dreaming big/shooting for the stars/etc. but there are good models of growth to following. Going down the “video” road provided an element of innovation; attempting to launch an entire network at the same time just added risk.

podtech, scoble vlogging

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Unintended Consequences: The commoditization of music

One thing that I can’t help but think as I see the sudden rush to sell unprotected MP3’s is that music will become commoditized: that is to say, competition between stores can only be on price at any given quality level (given the digitally identical product offered at all).

When there’s no opportunity to differentiate a product offering, differentiation has to come from elsewhere - price being the first, easiest, and most natural source thereof.

There are some other factors - like the iTunes/iPod easy synchronization value-add - but fundamentally, a 256k/bit encoded song is a 256k/bit encoded song, wherever its downloaded from.

So - is the industry doomed to go to the retailer with the best cost structure, or the retailer willing to tolerate the lowest margins? Maybe. Expect to see some frantic “relationship building” taking place as drm-free retailers attempt to secure exclusive access to higher bitrate recordings, or specific artists or albums.

amazon, apple, drm, itunes music

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Congrats to FireAnt on acquisition

Ahhh, FireAnt - the little company that couldn’t just got bought by another company that couldn’t (ODEO, bought by Sonic Mountain) for $400k.

I first posted about FireAnt in April, where I pointed out that their branding was confusing, their traffic was petering out, and that not having either the old or the new player available for download was bizarre.

I revisited FireAnt a week later (expecting some updates), to receive website errors, and a sputtering, angry response from founder Josh Kinberg.

Since that time, 6 months have passed - and nothing has changed on FireAnt. No new software (still in beta, I suppose). Not even the featured channels on the front page have changed.

So - congrats to FireAnt for getting bought; it seems like the best option as the company no longer seemed to be able to execute on their own - its too bad, I was really pumped about FireAnt when I first stumbled across it. The 400k acquisition price I’m sure adequately reflects the value FireAnt brings to the table after a year of stagnation.

fireant, odeo, podcasts vlogs

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