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.”

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!’”

Microsoft’s big news at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday was the release of Mesh. It sounds like the Windows Explorer utility on steroids. It seems to be an advanced way to search and update files on your computer, your mobile devices and your family and friends computers.

As we all know, Microsoft has been in the news with their bid for Yahoo. So far, it has not been hostile, but that could change any minute if they don’t get a better answer from Yahoo. Microsoft is having some trouble lately with its Windows Vista OS. This is really the bigger problem. Microsoft makes most of their money from the $300 a pop OS. Microsoft Office is also nicely profitable but easily replaceable with free versions that work just as well. The Xbox is supposed to be a nice gaming platform, but it looks like the Wii has taken gaming from the traditional base of young male gamers to the general population. Very innovative. It is so much nicer to expand into a new untapped market than to keep fighting with your competitors for the same bunch of customers.

Overall, Microsoft’s biggest problem is the Vista OS. The desktop is theirs for now. But what good is it in the Web 2.0 world.

Microsoft’s release of Mesh was covered in this Forbes article, but I think that the most important point is in the second paragraph that says

“Microsoft’s pitch is simple: Today’s world is all about the Internet.”

Microsoft problem: They are not really part of the Internet. For example, if Windows OS was magically removed from all of the computer in the world, about 95% or more of all desktops and laptops would become boxes of useless circuits. But if you were to remove all Microsoft software from the Internet, what would be the damage?

The majority of websites use free open source software like Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, PHP, etc. The servers that are using Microsoft products are paying for them. Most new websites can’t afford to pay for something when they can get for a free open source program that does virtually the same thing.

In fact, Microsoft’s most successful play in the Internet space is their free Internet Explorer browser. But it is easy enough to replace Internet Explorer with Firefox or another some other free browser.

Without Windows, what really remains of Microsoft?

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Mesh, Web 2.0 Expo, open source

Today marks a new day in Geogad’s open source adventure.  The day when I broke down and realized that I needed a book (a really physical paper book) to figure out Drupal.  I am certain that Drupal has a great community of people and a very active forum, but their documentation leaves a bit to be desired when you are a beginner.  The main issue is trying to sort out the meanings of their special vocabulary and how it corresponds to what you ultimately want to do with the site.  

My personal breakdown came in the form of Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress by Robert T. Douglass, Mike Little, and Jared W. Smith. I feel privileged just to have this book.  It seems to be the only Drupal book for sale in a 25-mile radius of the San Jose area.  I gave up with the libraries.  It seems that Drupal has not gotten on their radar screens yet.  I scanned through the book at the bookstore and have managed the get through the first few pages since getting back to my computer.  So far it is just what I needed.  Clear and easy to understand.  

The only points that I don’t understand at present are why they include phpBB and WordPress.  Don’t get me wrong.  I know that phpBB and WordPress are great open source solutions for building forums and blogs.  In fact, this blog is powered by the mighty WordPress.  But Drupal is supposed to include modules for forums and blogs. Are they not up to the standards of WordPress and phpBB?  I guess I will understand better as I read more.  

Stay tuned and wish me luck!  

Technorati tags: Drupal, Open Source , phpBB, WordPress