Conferenza

Web Apps: A few suggestions toward happier customers

I didn't get the chance to attend Under the Radar's recent Office 2.0 event. But I'm a regular reader of Rafe Needleman's WebWare newsletter and posts, where he recently offered a "best of show" list. (Rafe and I go back to the days as friendly competitors when I was running Network Computing Magazine at CMP, and he ran Corporate Computing at Ziff-Davis.)

I'm a heavy user of Web apps, from Google Docs to CentralDesktop. (Disclosure: Google's a client.) I've signed up for and tested more of them than I can remember. And I have a few suggestions for developers of these applications, which would help them make happier customers.

1. Have real users test your signup process. Many Web app vendors seem to be simply copying the signup process from other Web apps - including their mistakes. It's the simple things, like whether you pop up a window to show your privacy and usage policies, or simply show a new browser screen - often forcing customers to lose all the data they entered when they click back. If your programmers make these Web 0.0 mistakes, send 'em back to HTML school.
2. Simplify your pricing levels. Some Web apps have five or six different levels of pricing, with very granular differences between them (500 entries per month versus 1000). Think like a customer: Do you really want to get an upgrade notice every time you have an active month? Three or four levels (including free) is about max, unless you're packaging different sets of services in suites for different users. And even then, simplify, simplify.
3. Make "free" as robust as possible. Corollary to #2, give users enough breathing room to really test your application. Consider 30-day full evaluations over 0-day ratchets on services that limit capabilities so much, new customers won't truly understand why your application is great.
4. Think a lot about import & export. It's easy to think of your application as the only one in the world, or that you can lock in customers by limiting their ability to move data in and out. (Outlook, anyone?) But if you're offering a database, or a forms generator, or anything where data could come from another application, make it insanely easy to import and export. And if you want to add icing on the cake, put RSS support into every page you possibly can - both out and in.
5. Don't underestimate support requirements. Many of the current generation of Web apps aren't extremely complicated, but when a customer needs help doing something that pushes the boundaries, make sure you're up to the task. We've found, for example, that we've rarely needed help with our CentralDesktop site - but when we needed them, they responded rapidly, often overnight. That's how you build loyal customers: One competent response at a time.

Why do these kinds of things matter? The comparative ease of knocking out Web apps means there's no category won't have numerous competitors the moment something appears to be sticking in the marketplace. So if you don't focus on ease of use from day zero - and that means your signup process as well - new customers will rapidly click away to another application.

gB

Graeme Thickins: ETech Turns 6, and Goes… Where?

In a shift to the softer side of life for its mostly technologist attendees -- more of a "humanities" focus, as one observer termed it -- the 2007 version of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference was decidedly different from previous editions. It turns out that technology is really about people, and life, and fun, and happiness, and good health, ETech was trying to tell us. With that decidedly more fuzzy focus, one might conclude that the technology industry is indeed showing its age.

The O'Reilly organization produces a lot of conferences. I don't know how many of them have continued under the same name for a half-dozen years, as ETech has. Technology conference life-cycles rarely last this long, which is a tribute to O'Reilly. But the general, if largely unspoken, feeling this year was that this event -- which has had so many ardent followers for so long -- seemed to be struggling for an identity in its sixth year, or at best was in transition. Not that it didn't draw a big crowd, or feature many great speakers and presentations. It was just difficult to put one's finger on an overriding takeaway from this one -- except that there wasn't one.

And maybe that was the point. More than one attendee was heard to say that this year's conference really didn't feature any breakthrough emerging technologies. There were no news events, no major introductions of anything we hadn't already heard about. ETech was just a huge mixed bag -- a potpourri of so much stuff, so many topics, there was surely something here for everyone. But attendees had to really work at this conference experience to get their money's worth, making their own way and defining their own takeaways. More than several I spoke with seemed at a loss to explain the event for themselves, personally.

O’Reilly chose a "magic" theme this year, which was interesting, though abstract in its promise and not entirely paid off in the execution. But there were many fun moments. The evening events, the “mathamagician” show, the Make Fair, the Werewolf game session, all were big favorites. And the "1/2 Baked" session that Dave McClure put on was an absolute laugh riot. Five teams of five were each given two random words, as contributed by the audience, and had about 15 minutes to come up with a company pitch to a panel of VCs, based on these arbitrary company names. (The strange theme of at least three of these names? Death. Hmmm....)

No one would argue against the fact that this is an insider event for geeks. Non-developers cannot possibly understand what all these self-defined "cool kids" are talking about half the time. And that's just fine with them: They’re just here to have a good time. In fact, that's the main definition I had in my head about this event before I got here, anyway, based on past experience: It's primarily a big, fun time for developers.

This ETech was a long one. Many people arrived Sunday and stayed through Thursday afternoon. There were even some pre-event, more business-focused tutorial sessions on Monday, but I wasn't able to make it to ETech till Monday evening. One of these tutorials, for aspiring entrepreneurs, I'm especially bummed I missed: "Coder to Co-Founder: Entrepreneuring for Geeks", by the founder of Wasabe, Mark Hedlund. But this post by Phil Windley recaps it wonderfully.

There were too many sessions for me to recount, though I did post about several on my blog. But the best overall recap I've seen is Another ETech Sprint Complete, by Chris Lott at his Ruminate blog. And Dylan Tweney's interview of Tim O'Reilly as the event wound down, posted on his Wired News Epicenter Blog, O'Reilly Wraps Up, is telling.

Want more takeaways? Search for etech2007 on Technorati, and read blog posts from individual attendees. You'll get as many perspectives as there were people. And again, maybe that’s the whole point of this year: No strong, consistent theme, just a whole lotta tech.

-- Graeme Thickins

Web Ventures: Wrapup

It was a little disappointing that few of the VC panelists at the end of the day were willing to name companies they found interesting or not. Perhaps they didn't want to give away investments they were considering. But here are some who did.

• Brian Ascher from Venrock thought that in the advertising category, if you want to monetize the long tail you need to specialize. He liked HispanoClick for focusing on Hispanic sites. BigTribe helps people plan vacations by aggregating service providers by location.

• In the enterprise, everyone felt the nice thing is that widgets are coming in the back door, with people buying small programs and expensing them. Ascher liked the idea of offering incentives to give people reason to participate, because otherwise "folks may be reluctant to act on behalf of the enterprise." He mentioned Jive Software for collaboration tools with reward points, and H3 for converting people's social networks into job referrals with cash rewards.

• Chip Meakem at Kodiak Ventures mentioned Widgetbox, which inserts tools into blogs, social networks, web sites and auctions, as well as Voxant, which aggregates video, audio, print, and photo news sites. But he was unsure of the monetization potential. In social networking, he thought Kaboodle's social shopping network "makes tons of sense."

• Chris Moore at Redpoint Ventures praised ClickFacts for trying to detect click fraud, but was unsure of monetization.

• Ken Elefant from Opus Capital also liked Kaboodle. In search, he liked Cognition Technologies and Powerset for offering a natural language program for making searches easier (AskJeeves redux?) In social networking he liked Flixster, a social network based around people's favorite movies.

• Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners mentioned Lijit for plugging search into blogs.

• Eric Hippeau at Softbank also liked Flixster as a "highly capital efficient business model," and Powerset for its natural language.

Panelists also debated whether the potential for a major new general-purpose search engine was over, given Google's entrenched psoition. Elefant and Hippeau thought it possible, although Hippeau noted that it was "not for the faint of heart."

Most everyone else thought there was no chance, because Google had everyone's dedication, even though blind taste tests showed it no longer gives better results than other search engines. In the conference's most embarassing moment, Liew demonstrated his point by asking who in the audience used Google as their primary search engine. Every hand in the audience seemed to go up, so he asked who DIDN'T use Google first. Only person raised her hand -- Anke Audenaert from Yahoo. But then, I remember a time when people said no one could displace Yahoo in search, either.

- Richard Brandt

Web Ventures: Do You Speak Internetese?

Randall Rothenberg, CEO of Interactive Advertising Bureau, gave us an update at Web Ventures 2007: Internet advertising accounts for just 6% of all advertising, but is still growing at 30% - 40% a year. But there's a lot of confusion because there's a new language on the Internet -- Internetese? On MySpace, says Rothenberg, "you will find things you just cannot understand if you're over 23." That means we need a new advertising language as well. Everyone agreed that most traditional advertisers still don't know how to deal with this medium.

Anke Audenaert, VP, Network Optimization at Yahoo, still believes in the value of demographic data, and thinks there would be real opportunity in combining demographic data with targeted advertising (buying keywords) -- if anyone can figure out how to do it. It raises privacy issues.

Ted McConnell, the surprisingly interesting Director of Digital Marketing Innovation at Procter & Gamble, would like to figure out how to advertise within social networks -- "I keep thinking, if I could just talk to them..." But in those networks, people talk to each other, not to advertisers. "If you talk to them in way don't like, they hate you. If they don't like you but you still get brand awareness, you're "selling yourself up the river." Personally, I think that has always been true of TV ads and ads in movie theaters, but nobody has had a way of measuring that hatred before.

Everybody talks about interactive advertising but few seem to do anything about it. Rothenberg said his most memorable online ad was "Subservient Chicken," in which Burger King allowed people to tell the animated chicken what to do. Lots of fun. Sharon Weinbar, Managing Director of Scale Venture Partners, said her favorite was Cheerioke: Cheerios created an avatar that would move its lips when you sang into the phone. You could dress it up and email it to friends. So why aren't we seeing more interactive ads?

Weinbar adds that for online advertising, "It all comes down to: Are you creating value for the consumer?" If your ad doesn't provide some value to the user, don't do it. Google could have told them that.

- Richard Brandt

Web Ventures (from Richard Brandt)

The Web Ventures conference sure ain't what it used to be in the heady days of the dot-com boom, when VCs with bulging pocketbooks roamed the halls and meeting rooms to find companies they could give their cash to. I used to walk down the halls past the company presentation rooms looking for the rooms where the audience overflowed in the halls, since those were the presentations getting all the buzz. These days there are still several VCs milling about the San Mateo Marriott, but there isn't an overflow crowd anywhere. There are no more crowded hallway discussions of what people have seen, and just a few conversations in quiet corners of the San Mateo Marriott.

But VCs and entrepreneurs are still trading business cards and talking, and the attendees still feel the interaction is worthwhile. Most of the major VC firms have someone here, but the caliber of the speakers isn't what it used to be: How can they have a panel on Search without anyone from Google participating?

I'll give you a few highlights of the presentations first, although too many of them are in the panel format that Gary hates. Unless you can get panelists to start fighting with each other over whose opinions are right, there's not a whole lot of excitement in them.

But first up, Josh Grove, senior research analyst with Dow Jones VentureOne, led off the conference with a few statistics:

There's no irrational exuberance yet. In 2000, VC investments peaked at 2000 $94.8 billion. It has slowly been recovering from the 2001's plummet, reaching just $28 billion in 2006.

Of that $28 billion, $683 million went to Web 2.0 companies, $292 million to online advertising companies, and $504 million to search companies. (Not too surprisingly in this me-too business, the two biggest categories of presenters are search and social networking.) Search companies get the highest valuations, an average of $15 million, compared to $11.2 million for online ad firms and $6 million for Web 2.0 companies. Adjust your business plan accordingly.

The most active investors in these fields were Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Benchmark and Sequoia.

- Richard Brandt is a long-time tech business editor from Business Week and Upside magazines, currently writing a book on Google and attending conferences for Conferenza

TED2007 - TEDprizes

This is the third year of TED Prizes, and perhaps the most spirited yet.

Each winner receives $100,000 to be put towards working with the TED community to establish a single wish that can make a change in the world.

- James Nachtwey, Photojournalist.

The most stunning images one can imagine in two dimensions must include those taken over the last quarter decade by James Nachtwey. His pictures of war, conflict and social strife since 1981 are not easy - far from easy - to view. But they are critically important.

Nachtwey has during his career as a freelance journalist reported from Northern Ireland, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatamala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil, and the United States.

His wish is for help for an un-disclosed "vital story that needs to be told," and to help device an innovative and exciting way to use news photography in the digital era to illustrate that story.

- Harvard Biology Professor E.O. Wilson presented his wish for a means for creating "an encyclopedia of life" seeking to make all information about life on earth, noting that only about 15% of a projected 1.5 million species on earth have even been identified. "It can inspire a new generation of biologists to continue the quest that started for me, personally, 60 years ago.

- Former President Bill Clinton noted that people who are not in office have more opportunity to make changes than ever before - and not just the hyper-wealthy, but also mass groups now able to organize using the Internet and electronic communications. The Tsnami response from the United States elicited contributions from 30% of U.S. households, with an average donation of $57, he noted.

Clinton's wish is for TED to help build a nationwide healthcare system in Rwanda as an example of a replicable system that could be introducted to other economically poor countries as well. "We have a chance to prove that a country that almost slaughter itself out of assistance," can build a sustainable, high quality rural health system for the whole country, where per capita income is less than a dollar a day.

Last year's winners:

- Larry Brilliant, who was named head of Google's philanthropic arm on the eve of last year's TED, whose wish was fulfilled with the creation of the NGO dubbed INSTEDD as an early detection, rapid response network for threats to humanity such as pandamic and a variety of disasters.

- Cameron Sinclair, whose wish was completed earlier in the day when his web site for architectural collaboration went live, and immediately attracted attention from thousands of architects, with dozens posting projects already within hours of the site going up.

- Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim is in the process of establishing a round-the-world film event, Pangea, for May 2008 in which the global community is welcomed to participate in a public film festival at major sites around the world. The Sapling Foundation, which owns TED, has provided additional support.

TED2007 - LiveBlogging, Fellow bloggers, etc.

Best rolling live blogs are available, btw, include: the prodigious Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Guissani, both prolific, semi-official bloggers of the event in whom we have tremendous awe.

Also, check out Tom Guarriello, who's also done a vlog.

A more complete listing is posted by Bruno at the official TED blog.

TED - Icons. Geniuses. Mavericks.

The second presentation brought us down to the cellular level - with tremendous animated graphics by medical graphics artists working with Harvard University's biology department. Courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman, one picture of what Bolinsky calls "the FedEx of the cell" delivering newly created biological components within the cell [photo courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman's blog, a great spot for live-blogging coverage, as always. Thanks, Ethan.].

The work is well encapsulated with a stunning three minute animated clip he shows of the inner life of a cell.

Did I mention that the theme this year is "Icons. Geniuses. Mavericks." though perhaps those concepts apply as much to the ideas and memes represented here, as much as to the presenters.

There was a high level of energy following the first session, more than on other first days of late, when many folks slowly drifted into Monterey.... and the Main Room was so packed for the second session that quite a few people decided to move back out to the more relaxed simulcast rooms.

"TED's gone Hollywood," said one multi-year TEDster. Yes, there is a pedominance of stars, many of whom were particularly enchanted with how Swedish medical demographer and scientist Hans Rosling's close of the first session... when he pulled off his shirt to reveal a muscle tank-top, then swallowed a sword of at least 18 inches on stage. For real, not just a stunt.

Well, it was not so long ago, that folks complained that TED had become mostly T (Technology), a little E (Entertainment) and lower-case D (Design). Kudos to Chris Anderson, June Cohen and others for restoring the Entertainment industry participation at TED... take it away....

TED 2007 launches in space, nanobio

The TED conference, bulging to its largest ever with some 1,200 participants and speakers, launched its 2007 edition in outer space, with an elegant journey via the Cassini space mission to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, presented by planetary scientist Carolyn Porco.

Titan is cold, roughly -350˚ Farenheit, and has been cloaked from scientists by the thick haze of its atmosphere of methane and other chemicals. However, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe returned images of rivers and water bodies, presumably of liquid methane, as it descended towards a landing on the surface of Titan. Porco declared these first pictures ever taken from a moon of the outer solar system should have been met by ticker tape parades throughout the United States and Europe, though of course it was not.

Porco also describes Enceladus, a moon roughly the size of England and Wales in which polar canals emit plumes suggesting liquid water under ground. She ends with a glorious image from a total eclypse of the sun from the other side of Saturn - explaining the outside the rings comes from the plumes of Enceladus, the tiny moon.

The talk followed a rambunctious parade of colorfully costumed brass musicians that started on stage, and emerged later in the two simulcast rooms downstairs from the Monterey Conference Center auditorium here.

Even the legendary TEDbags of gifts, pictured at the TEDblog site, are bigger and tougher than ever, including bright roll-on luggage.