Web 2.0 Movers and Shakers
June 19, 2006 – 9:55 pm by coachwei | Category web 2.0 |At the “heyday” of the Internet gold rush, new companies bubbled up on a daily basis trying to revolutionize pet market, toy store, furniture, gay/lesbian commmunity, grocercy, CD distribution… To the point that everyone was scratching their head - Is there anything left to do at all?
Yes, we have tried a lot of ideas (some of which are just plain bad ideas), created a lot of wealth as well as burned a lot of investement. The earth shattering wave of “Internet” came, covered every corner that we can think of at the moment, stayed and changed our life forever.
Yet that is still just the beginning. The impact of the web/Internet is still in the beginning.
I see tremendous opportunities of better leveraging the web for business computing within the enterprise context. What is “enterprise mashup”? If you peel the surface, it is plain old “integration”. It is “integration” done at the front end, leveraging web standards and thus accessible to wider range of developers. What does Ajax mean for enterprise? How about Software as a service? And On-demand computing? How does open source play into all these? What is the right business model under this new context? To enterprises, “Web 2.0″ means not only technologies but also user/market evolution, ways to do business, ways to interact with customers and ways to build companies,etc. Nexaweb (http://www.nexaweb.com) is one of the companies that truely understand “Enterprise Web 2.0″ and know what to do (yes, I do work for Nexaweb) - the matter is execution.
Let's take a look into the “consumer” space. What does web 2.0 bring to the “consumer” space? Of course, there are technology components such as Ajax, Mashups, blogs and wikis, etc. However, beyond technology, there are areas that web 1.0 never explored successful that are ripe for exploration now: user participation, community and interaction, broadband penetration, social networking, new media, advertisement as a business model…Obviously there are lots of good examples in US:
- HeyLetsGo(http://www.heyletsgo.com): This is a company that i have a lot of faith in. Great team, great backers, great opportunity, great fun (do you know the monthly HeyLetsGo party is the social scene to be in Boston?);
- Kayak(http://www.kayak.com): nice work.
- BrightCove: Internet TV pioneer and excellent execution so far.
- Meebo (http://www.meebo.com): interesting company as the next Yahoo or Google acquisition. Not huge but definitely there is money to be made here.
- etc. (There is a good list of companies that i will write about later. Drop me a line if you think some company worthy of me looking into).
Let's put another dimension into this mix - globalization(oversea markets, outsourcing and offshoring, …). I have been looking at a few interesting companies in Asia:
- Baihe.com (http://www.baihe.com), 51.com(http://www.51.com), qihoo.com (http://www.qihoo.com), http://www.blogcn.com, etc.
None of them is particularly innovative or groundbreaking, but each of them is fairly interesting. They are all backed by great backers with many millions of US dollars and all showing great signs of success, in a world that you would imagine being dominated by Sohu, Sina, Yahoo, Google etc.
We are at a great moment of history - to bring the web much deepers into our society and human life. There are great opportunities ahead of us.
Congratulations to Jeremy Geelan (http://jeremy.linuxbloggers.com/), the leading voice for I-technology and the sys-con face that we all have to come to love. It is a great journey over the last six years for me personally being on the vendors side of “building, marketing and selling products” interacting with Jeremy on the media side of “covering the market, vendors, products, customers, etc”. Congratulations to his new web 2.0 startup, neXplore Technologies!
