Last night, HispanicNet had a wonderful series of talks and a panel presentation on the state of multimedia and the web version 2.0. I was very impressed by the quality of the speakers and the material that they presented. I also got a great many suggestions from the people that I spoke to on how to improve my networking and expand my number of contacts.

The presentations started with Cheryl Contee. Her talk was on how Web 2.0 and social networks can help your business.  She had two charts that really had an impression on the crowd. The first showed the percentage of 30 year olds in the US who read the newspaper. It peaked around 70% back in the 30’s. The invention of the radio started to bring the percentage down slowly. The invention of the television increase the drop (or negative slope, for those of you who remember how to graph a line). With the Internet, the percentage is currently down to 30% and looks like it is falling off a cliff. There was some discussion in the audience on if there will be paper-based newspapers or magazines in the future.

The second chart showed the popularity of various social networking sites across the world. Facebook and MySpace rule in the US, but Bebo is where it is at in Europe. If you want to follow the crowd in Asia, you should look at Friendster (remember them?).

The second presenter was Carlos Melcer of intouch group inc. His talk focused on US Hispanics and the mobile phone and Internet market. I knew that Spanish TV was growing fast, but I had no idea that radio was still so popular among Hispanics. Also Hispanics save a very small percentage of their money compared to the general US population, which is great for marketers but maybe not so great for Hispanics. One out of every $12 spent in the US comes from Hispanics. I am sure that there would be a great market for Spanish language tours from Geogad. More for my To-Do list.

The third presenter was Jeff Ulin. He gave a brave effort at speaking during his talk with his terrible cold, but his voice completely gave out later during the panel discussion. It was a real pity because his talk was all about revenue and permission models for multimedia content on the Internet. This is his specialty in his practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The crowd was really eager to learn more. Hopefully, he will be able to return at another time and continue the discussion.

The last talk was given by Kul Wadhwa, Director of Business Development for Wikipedia. Wikipedia has hired Wadhwa to increase revenues without changing its non-profit status or, more importantly, alienating its 100,000 volunteers. So how do you make money with completely free-to-use-any-way-you-want content? You work with book publishers to create paper versions of your content. You partner with YouTube on providing video content on Wikipedia pages. I had also heard of an effort by Wikitravel to package their content as paper-based travel books. Don’t laugh. Lonely Planet did something very similar with their users’ travel suggestions when they published their Blue List.

What I thought was very interesting is that China has banned Wikipedia because Wikipedia insists upon retaining its neutral point of view in its articles. Even so, the inventive Chinese hackers have managed to make the banned Wikipedia site one of the top 200 sites in China. Wikipedia has some serious competition in China from Baidu. Baidu has copied the content of Wikipedia’s pages, reformatted it into their own pages and presents it as their content. It is a new take on the quote:

We have met the enemy and they are us.

I attended a talk given by Dave Nielsen entitled “Marketing to Web 2.0 Developers” at the Marketing SIG of SD Forum. I spoke to another CEO of a widget making startup, so the crowd was interested in the topic. But the talk was more a disconnect with what the crowd was expecting.

Dave Nielsen is best known as the author of PayPal Hacks, a great book if you want to use any of PayPal’s more advanced features on your site. The info in his talk was at too high a level for most people. That CEO that I mentioned above left the talk early. It just did not give him the practical info that he wanted. The talk was spent mainly defining terms. Ironically, the speaker did not even mention Web 2.0 until the last 10-15 minutes of the talk. Mostly it was ancient history. In Nielsen’s defense, ancient history for the Internet is last year, and his audience was a mix of technical and non-technical people.

The biggest issue that I had with his talk was his definition of “developer”. Nielsen defined developer very broadly as anyone who uses an interface to customize something. Our biggest disagreement is that he seemed to use “developer” interchangeably with “early adopters”. By this definition, the first users of YouTube to upload and share videos with their friends were developers because they “created” their own YouTube page with the YouTube interface and spread the gospel of YouTube to their less technically sophisticated friends.

In my point of view, such early adopters are your first customers who are using the product that your engineers designed in the way that it was designed to be used. They are customizing the product to their wants into something that has not been produced before, but they are not developers. I would think that a better word than developer might be content creator since that is what these customers are really producing that is unique.

On the other hand, I do believe that a person that creates a new widget or app for Facebook is a similar site is a developer. While they are using an interface developed by, for example, Facebook engineers for third parties to develop apps on Facebook, these new apps really are like new programs being built in the “Facebook programming language and interface.”

This weekend, I visited WhereCamp 2008 at the Googleplex. I believe that they have held this unconference for 3 years now, but this was my first visit. The organizers of the event tried something new this year. Participants were welcome to camp out at the Googleplex on Saturday night in tents provided by Google. I spoke to a person who had done so. He had come from Ohio and was unprepared for the chilly Mountain View nights. I told him that he camped out at a good time. This weekend, Silicon Valley was actually suffering through a heat wave that broke several records.

WhereCamp had a good crowd over the weekend, but Sunday, the day that I attended, there were not as many sessions as the day before. Of the sessions that I attended, the one that I got the most out of was the session on Maps Copyright. A lawyer presented some slides that showed some of the maps that people had tried to copyright recently. Since practically nothing had been added to the basic map data that was provided by the U.S. Federal government, there was nothing to copyright. But still people wasted time and money to try.

There were some interesting map demos that were given. What was most interesting was how broadly the term “maps” had been taken. One somewhat related demo was a site that allowed users to create social maps. For example, the presenter showed social maps of the governors of the US state and could toggle the map between their party affiliations, their religion, their sexual orientation, etc. Another interesting social map showed the top US executives and which companies they ran and which boards of directors they sat on. Following on the theme of power and money, he also had a map that showed links between people who had raised campaign contributions for US political parties and then were appointed as ambassadors to foreign countries.   

One project that created the most buzz had nothing to do with maps. A student presented his science project, which was a 3D display. It is based on principles applied previously in the area of 3D displays. His take on it involved using faster and more up-to-date hardware than displays that I had seen in the past.

Michael S. Malone published a really interesting article on popular well-known bands releasing their albums for free. The latest band to release their music for free is Nine Inch Nails. The best part about this release is that fans can do what they want to the music including mixing and reusing it in their own projects.

Why would an artist give away their music? Because they make most of their money from the concerts, t-shirts, and other add-ons, not from selling albums. Years ago, the record companies had the advantage that they were the only source of music distribution: selling records to stores, having music played on the radio, getting music made part of TV and movies, etc. The Internet has completely killed their distribution model. iTunes started the job. MySpace and Facebook with their pages that let artists showcase their own music has finished it off.

While this new freebie system may work for artists, it leaves the big record companies with nothing to contribute with their current business models. That does not mean that the record companies have to die, but they will need to change. In an interview given by Jin-Young Park, a Korean pop music manager, he explains that the big record companies that he meets with don’t get that the CD is dead. He makes his money by cultivating talent and marketing the acts.  Quoting directly from his interview:

When prospective U.S. partners ask music mogul Jin-Young Park where he’s from, he has a conversation-stopping answer: “I’m from the future.”

It’s a deft riposte that opens up space for Park, who discovered and managed Asian pop phenomenon Rain for many years, to spool out a string of facts that make record execs weak in the knees. “In meetings with music labels here, they talk to me about releasing albums,” says Park. “They can’t accept that there’s no such thing anymore. Where I come from, CDs are nothing—they’re just souvenirs. I tell them, ‘Wake up!’”

There is so much to say about Microsoft’s latest actions that I really requires multiple posts.

Patrick Logan’s blog pretty much summed up what regular people think about Microsoft’s Mesh. Probably many folks at Microsoft feel the same way, but they keep their mouth shut. They know where their paycheck comes from.

The saddest part of the post is the last which quotes Bob Warfield.

There are 100 engineers at work on Live Mesh already, and lots of key functionality (like version control) nowhere in sight. Aside from the Tactics of Monopoly, the other Fail mode is creating a giant monolith of software. Vista is a painful example of how far things can go wrong. Mesh is, at its core, another attempt to rework the document and folder file system. Microsoft promised this in Longhorn for years but never delivered.

The sad part is that 100 Microsoft engineers working for two years has produce something that no one is especially excited about. Love it or hate it, Twitter accomplished something much more unique and interesting over a span of two years with only three engineers.  

Warfield’s own analysis goes on to talk about how Google takes a more open approach that gets others excited enough about the app that they freely put their own time into it. At the end of a few months, the initial effort by a few Google engineers and potentially hundreds of unpaid volunteers (see Google’s Android Competition results) quickly produce great results.

It is hard to understand what it is that is holding Microsoft back. It is not that it is a big company. Apple, Google, and Sun are big and have produced some great products and open source platforms. It can’t be that they are not located in Silicon Valley. After all, they are neighbors of Amazon. The problem may be that their management believes that they really are the smartest people in the room. They may truly believe that a few hundred people at the top of the Microsoft corporation really does know more than millions of web users. 

They have a history of producing products that suit them, not their customers. Even their latest Mesh product sounds like a product that is more useful to Microsoft to get control back over their customers than useful to their customers to get control over their data and devices. Maybe some setbacks like Zune and Vista will help them to put the customer first.

Given their history of not playing nice with others, who really will want to work with Microsoft to make their product better? If third parties like Apple don’t want their products like the iPhone to work with Mesh, then will Mesh be of any real use? If it does not work globally, will it end up a partial (or worse, no) solution for customers?  

Possibly the problem that Microsoft has with creating hot new products is that the company functions from the top down but with no real vision of what the future can bring. I remember back in the mid 90’s that it seemed to take Microsoft forever to understand the importance of the the Internet. This delay allowed Netscape, Amazon and other Web 1.0 companies to get a chance to grow. I remember thinking what was wrong with Microsoft that they could not see what every college student at the time could see: the Internet was where everything was going. I guess that Microsoft’s upper management did not talk to new college hires. I am guessing that they still don’t.

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