New Media Coffee House

Web 2.0: Five Companies to Watch

In "crawling" the show floor at Moscone West at the Web 2.0 Expo, I wanted to track down the new comers that stood out as having potential to gain significant visibility in the coming months. Here are five that stood out for me as having a lot of upside.

1. Topix – A couple of the country's major newspaper chains, The Tribune Co. and Gannett, are fighting back with a Web 2.0 site of their own. Newspapers are losing revenue at an alarming rate due to blogging and free services like Craigslist. This is a community-driven news collection service similar to Digg with a local twist. This has a lot of potential, and as an ex-newspaper guy I wish them well.
2. Vidoop – This 20-person company made a lot of noise around their new image-based password protection scheme. They say it will dramatically improve the security of logging into Web sites and thwarting would be identity thieves. Moreover, they have a great revenue model of selling the images used for creating passwords to the highest bidder. Assuming this scheme proves to hacker-proof as the Vidoop folks claim, look for this company to grow swiftly.
3. Fatdoor – The plan was to launch at the Web 2.0 Expo, but the 3-month-old company didn't make the deadline. Look for launch sometime in late May/early June. This company has a strong team, headed by Chairman Bill Harris, former CEO of Intuit and Paypal. The service's tag line is "get to know your neighbors." According to the Local Onliner, Fatdoor "crawls the Web for publicly available info (college, job, church, clubs, blogs) and is being designed to help neighbors establish commonalities from the get go." Seems like the need for this is significant.
4. Coghead – One the things that has always amazed me is how business types, when presented with some sort of data or project tracking challenge, default to using an Excel spreadsheet. While spreadsheets can be made to do these types of thing, it's really not a very good experience. Web 2.0 tools like Coghead offer a much better solution, and make it easy to migrate those unweidly spreadsheets to a sleek online app. Coghead has a catchy name and logo, a well-thought out site, reasonable pricing, and what seems like lots of marketing dollars. It could be the one to watch in this emerging space, although I also like Dabble DB among others as well.
5. Bungee Labs – Creating cool Web 2.0 apps involves more than just sitting down and cranking out some Ajax. There's a lot of infrastructure involved which can put Web 2.0 development out of reach for most small and medium business. The new Bungee Connect service announced at the show provides a hosted Web 2.0 development environment that pulls together tools and APIs to make it easy for developers to create rich apps and then deploy them on Bungee servers. Say goodbye to static Web sites.

No more print editions. Now what?

One of the trends that we in the PR biz are observing is the rapid decline of print publications. InfoWorld was the latest to stop producing a print edition and go solely online. It's not likely to be the last. 

For those of us who have stacks of magazine lying around our homes and offices, this isn't necessarily a good thing. There are plenty of times when I don't want to be sitting at my desk in order to read the latest edition of the Economist. Maybe I want to read when I'm lying in bed, on the train or at the doctor's office. PCs aren't really great for this. Even laptops are too big and clunky compared to a magazine.

That's where the new Nokia N800 Internet tablet might just be the thing. At the Web 2.0 conference, Nokia was out in force hyping this gadget. After playing with it for a while, I'm convinced that this device, or something like it, will be the way we'll consume information in the future. For more detail, read CNET's review here. If the Web and New Media are really going to be ubiquitous, we need better ways of accessing content than just sitting at a desk staring at a monitor.

This device is designed primarily as a tool for surfing the Web and can provide a rich multi-media experience, just like what you get with a PC (or an iPod). It's small and light so you can take it anywhere. I could see using this to catch up on the news and my favorite bloggers over a cup of coffee and a bagel. Compared to print, I have the added option of being able to write my own posts, or add comments.

Beyond the news, essential services are moving online. A great example is electronic signatures from our client DocuSign. With this gadget I could "DocuSign" documents from just about anywhere.

Cell phones and PDAs miss the mark with screens that are too small and use sub-standard, non-standard Web browsers. Consider too that the N800 runs a Nokia version of Linux, so pretty much anything you can with a Linux desktop, you'll be able to do on the go. The iPhone may offer similar capabilities, but Apple's iron-fisted control will be a negative.

Once these gadgets go mainstream in the next few years, look for the trend to online-only editions to accelerate. The cost and environmental impact of print and paper will be harder and harder to justify. I, for one, am not complaining.

DocuSign Gets Podcasting

Our cool clients at DocuSign really understand the power of podcasting. Recently, we worked with them to produce podcasts about some big customer announcements with Expedia and Quadrant Homes.   

In the podcast about the Expedia announcement, our client Matt Schiltz, CEO of DocuSign, and Gene Harden, Director of Lodging at Expedia talked about how Expedia is speeding up their time to market by using DocuSign’s web-based electronic signature service. Gene says his team is now on track to be able to sign all of those 45,000 contracts that they have with hotels around the world faster and easier than ever before. Best of all, now there’s no more writer’s cramp for the Expedia folks from all of those time-consuming hand signatures. And, no more wasted time sending stacks of paper through their fax machines. 

Quadrant Homes is a great example of a “green” builder that is interested in minimizing the company’s impact on the environment by using DocuSign instead of wasting paper and ink.

We also had fun doing a podcast with a high-octane real estate agent who is one of DocuSign’s #1 fans.  Tom Gonser, Co-founder of DocuSign, talked with Kevin Boer about the benefits of using DocuSign for real estate transactions. Check out Kevin’s blog here.

If for some reason you’re still using old-fashioned pen and paper to sign your documents, you really should check out DocuSign.

Today’s Coffee House Tip: Lose the pen and paper, save a few trees, and “DocuSign It” instead!

Web 2.0 – Gets the Groove On

One of the best thing about being part of the tech industry is the periodic sense of excitement when some new world-changing, life altering technology or initiative starts to take off. In some case, the technologies really are hugely impactful. Going back a few year, the PC generated this buzz. All of a sudden computers went from giant warehouse sized machines to something that could be used by individuals in homes or offices.

From there, the Mac with its 1984 Super Bowl commercial created a big buzz, followed by Microsoft and Windows 95. Then came the Internet, shortly followed by the Java development language. Imagine, write a program once and run it anywhere. Some of the buzz has lived up to the hype, others have missed the mark. But the cycle of something new is always exciting.

Now the buzz in tech is swirling around Web 2.0. The money, ideas and innovation are flowing into new generations of applications that allow people to connect and collaborate in new ways. Such is the case here at the Web 2.0 expo with crammed sessions and a packed show flow. Walking through the show floor isn't a exercise in the same old, same old. Around every corner is something new, some great new thinking. Where will all this go? Who knows. There will be some winners and of course a lot of losers. In five years, the tech landscape may look much different, or it may look pretty much the same. Still there's plenty of buzz and that makes it all a lot more exciting and fun.

Web 2.0 Expo – Fun & Games with the Web

I'm posting live today from the first-ever Web 2.0 Expo. Last year it was just a conference. Now it's a full-scale expo (with full-scale pricing) all about doing fun and innovative things with the Web. When you think of where really interesting things – the black swans if you will – are taking place in tech, this is it.

Right now I'm listening to a session about local search marketing. It does seem like Web 2.0 systems could improve a lot over the Yellow Pages by tapping into folks who know best about local hotspots, the best roofers or tastiest pizza. Early efforts like CitySearch back in the Web 1.0 era never seemed to really resonant.

So what's the black swan here?

Here is one. Yahoo! points out that mobile could be a big driver since people are often out and about when they want something. Perhaps they want to do instant price comparisons. Or, if restaurants get on board, the guest book could be put online and people could scan for open tables. If this data starts getting gathered, some interesting trends could emerge. I don't know if this is revolutionary, it could make it easier to find small businesses, and for small business to market themselves more effectively.

Now back to the price aspect. For this session, there were five panelist who largely gave product demos followed by a Q&A. If I had actually spent the $1,500 conference fee, I wouldn't be a happy camper. As an experienced tech-trade show attendee, I can safely say I didn't pay $1,500. I've always maintained that presenting useful information leaves a much better impression than product demos during trade show talk. That's something that will never change. Hey guys, I don't care if its Web 2.0 and cool, I don't want to hear you hype your product on my dime.

  

Get a Cup of Coffee

We've been working with our clients for years on their blogging strategies and working behind the scenes in the new media world to create buzz and build online communities.  That said, a big part of what we do has been -- and will continue to be -- focused on the traditional media. But the mix is changing pretty significantly, especially in high tech. And the pace of change is accelerating.

There are (at least) three significant trends going on now that fundamentally impact how businesses can communicate with their audiences:

• Print publications are either dying off or going online
• Bloggers are gaining in influence and market impact
• Social media technologies break down the barriers between companies and customers

It's clear that these changes are permanent, but it's also clear that companies are in the very early stages of figuring it all out. For example, one of our clients, Open Text, recently created a blog and podcast channel (with our help), and is one of the first companies in its space to do so.  What's also clear is that we all have a lot to learn about what works -- and what doesn't -- in new media.

We see this blog as a gathering place where innovative marketing and public relations people of all stripes can get together to exchange ideas and learn new things. We hope to foster a dialog about the powerful new ways people get and act upon information in the constantly evolving new media world.