Indie 2.0

I always listen to what Tim O’Reilly has to say. Smart guy who knows tech and has a good track record of accurately foreseeing (and guiding) trends (he coined “Web 2.0″). It’s well worth checking out his presentation a couple weeks ago at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

In case you don’t have the 24 minutes to do that, here’s my own notes on Tim’s excellent and illuminating presentation, with two small beefs or points of difference I have. (My notes are exact quotes, combined with paraphrase, combined with text from his slides. I skipped some things I personally found less interesting or new.)

Dan’s Notes on Tim O’Reilly’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo 2008:

Deep trends behind Web 2.0:

The internet as platform
Harnessing collective intelligence
Data as the “Intel Inside”
Software above the level of a single device
Software as a service

Web 2.0 sometimes too narrowly defined (e.g., so as not to include Google).

It’s not just about “participation”, it’s about literally: we are building a platform to make the world smarter, to make businesses smarter, to make ourselves smarter…. We’re at a turning point. It’s akin to literacy or the formation of cities…. As part of that there are new rules about where businesses get value.

Three Big Opportunities Ahead
1. Enterprises understand that Web 2.0 is aobut turning themselves inside out
2. Web 2.0 evolves into cloud computing and the internet operating system
3. Mobile phones and ubiquitous sensors lead us to ambient computing

Enterprises are beginning to understand that Web 2.0 is about turning themselves inside out, becoming network citizens, opening themselves to the world in new ways.

O’Reilly has a Web 2.0 Bootcamp for businesses

But the real heart of Web 2.0 is collective intelligence: Harnessing network effects to build applications that get better the more people use them.

Web 2.0 is about finding meaning in user-generated data, and turning that meaning into real-time user-facing services

Google does this; a bank does not. Google “page rank” was the beginning of the Web 2.0 era. It was the realization that there was meaning hidden in links; a link was a “vote”.

Enterprise 2.0 means letting users into your back office, and turning your company inside out… Or waiting for an innovative startup to do it for you.

RightScale and Heroku are development frontend companies growing up as part of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing ecosystem.

EngineYard going head on with Amazon Web Services and GoogleApps.

Facebook is valued at much more than WordPress because the market values consolidation, which could lead us back to a few big players (like Microsoft epoch).

Collective Intelligence = Data as “Intel Inside”. Every true Web 2.0 company is building a database whose value grows in proportion to the number of participants–that is, a race to accumulate network-effect-driven data–with accelerating returns to the winners.

The Web 2.0 Paradox: Applications built on open, decentralized networks lead to new concentrations of power (e.g., Amazon, Google, etc.)… unless we build in interoperability at each new layer. So this is happening in the area of social graph (e.g. OpenSocial). So that’s why things like “programmable web” really matter. Think about the web as an open platform.

Software is above the level of a single device (even the iPhone). “Mobile” does not equal the phone. (E.g., LiveMesh, which unfortunately works only on MS platforms)

Mobile phones used as game playing interface in public: e.g., Megaphone. The phone is part of an ecosystem.

Quake-Catcher Network: uses motion sensors in Macs to gather seimological data, with thousands of distributed sensors.

Sensors and Ambient Computing. We are moving out of the world in which people typing on keyboard will drive the collective intelligence applications. Increasingly, applications are driven by new kinds of sensors. We’re moving from the personal computer era into the ambient computing era.

Visionary companies… are not afraid to make bold commitments to “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”.

-Microsoft’s BHAG in 1978: “A pc on every desktop” (DEC exec at the time: the pc is just a toy)
-Google’s BHAG in 1998: “Organize all the world’s information”

In the same way, a lot of people are dismissing Web 2.0. Do you think we’re really done yet? No. This is an amazing confluence of technology and opportunity. And there’s some big problems that need to be solved.

My beefs:

1. O’Reilly: “What we used to think of as a computer is really just a device connected to the global computer. You guys know that. When you don’t have wifi you go ‘man, this [computer] is a piece of junk, let me throw it away. When you can’t get cell phone coverage, it’s a piece of junk. When you’re not connected to the cloud, it doesn’t really matter.”

Well, this is not true in the area of digital video and photos. Moore’s Law is allowing us to do 3K (3072×1536 pixels at 24 or 48 fps ultra hi-def) movies for US$3K (on a Red Scarlet), and there’s no way you can process (edit, render, color correct, transcode) that on the computing cloud. In fact, the trend is for indie filmmakers to get their own little super computers (e.g., Assimilate’s Scratch) to handle this stuff.

2. Tim’s talk does not really address Enterprise 2.0. Here doesn’t mention any Enterprise problems that can be solved by Web 2.0 means or technologies. It’s more: How you can use Web 2.0 to get a “big hairy audicious goal” and become a big (or bigger) enterprise. Rather than how currently big enterprises can/should harness Web 2.0.