Mike Arrington of Tech Crunch is onstage at FOWA2 and talking in some detail about what it takes to get a good Web 2.0 startup going. Here's my notes, unedited:
Mike Arrington, Tech Crunch
2006 was not a bubble. The hurdle to become public is much greater. $600m vc invested in Web 2.0 startups. Context of cheaper startups. YouTube bought for 3x the vc investment. MySpace $25m/month ad revenue. Companies failing - good sign. The best is yet to come. 1. Have a good idea - invent, destroy, remove friction. 2. Have a business plan (though some of the best had none). 3. Have a revenue model. 4. Build it cheap, test the waters. 5. Avoid a high burn rate. Amie Street music market. Jingle Networks free business information. The Buzz Factor: Solve a real problem, Don't be the 200th video sharing platform, Have a blog, If buzz isn't happening rethink the product. Opportunities: Apollo offline/online platform. DRM and movies/music/tv. Portability of data and services (pipes, ning, teqlo). Mobile (iPhone)
Technorati Tags: Business, Conferences, futureofwebapps, fowalondon07, Web
4 comments:
Apollo could certain transform the web applications market together with Firefox 3, with the ability to easily switch between online/offline status.
It's also interesting how many startups still focus on building a "feature" rather than a company that has a clear view on how it will generate revenues and connect with its customers.
I'm all for the online/offline thing too John, which is why I tend to use caching offline readers for things like rss feeds, podcasts, etc. I wish Apple's Mail program integrated more seamlessly with the .mac webmail service - at the moment it's a little too much either/or. I see no good reason why the desktop client couldn't use the web API to fetch and retrieve files (other than the horrendous performance of .mac) which would make life behind an academic firewall much more tolerable.
I'm not familiar enough (yet) with Apollo to comment on the specifics, but I do have some problems with layering another API over our native OS APIs, and I think there are parallels with Java, and why that failed as an abstraction layer. I'm even less convinced that Adobe are the company I'd trust with it. They're awfully fickle, and tend to be marketing rather than technology led. I'll look at it with interest though.
Robert, perhaps the announcement that Firefox 3.0 will also endeavour to support online/offline synch will allay your concerns re Adobe being the "owner" of this space.
Yes John, that makes me much more comfortable. I'd be happy with offline/online being a cross-browser thing, and I think the reality is that's how it will turn out. Some AJAX-based sites already handle it fairly well (writing your updates when you get a connection for example), though we need more than that to have this functioning usefully. What's your perspective? What aspects of this do we need?
Post a Comment