Learning Something New Every Day

Every day I learn something new. Today I was at an organizing meeting for the First Annual Housatonic Habitat for Humanity Golf Outing. I can attest that I know almost nothing about golf. I played just once — in August 1976. I will never forget it — 98 degrees, 98% humidity, and no skill. That was enough to convince me that golf would not be a part of my life. In spite of this, Chris Brown, executive director of Housatonic Habitat for Humanity, put the arm on me and convinced me to help him organize an outing with the goal of raising enough money each year to build one more house for a family in need of simple decent housing. It was hard to say no. I had been the first president of HHFH ten years ago and I strongly believe in the Habitat goals and have seen the great work that it’s many volunteers are doing in partnership with the families. What I learned new at the meeting today was about "hole in one insurance". (read more)

The future is… Linux televisions

Recently I spoke with Munir Kotadia at ZDNet UK in London about the future of the Internet — a subject I love to talk about. One of Munir’s questions was "How long can Microsoft dominate the browser market?". "Browser market", I said? Sure, if you look just at PC’s you would wonder why anyone would try to compete with a monopoly that has 95 percent of the market. However, if you look at the market for Internet devices with browsers on them — including televisions, PDA’s, phones, automobiles and virtually any kind of device that has a chip on it and a network connection — then you get a much different picture. How many devices will have a chip and a network connection? All of them — billions of them. Basically, everything becomes a computer on the Web and then no one company dominates that market. There is a huge opportunity for innovation and we are the very beginning of the potential. This is why I am optimistic about Opera Software.

The other topic Munir asked about was why Linux is so popular? There is a perception that Linux is about "free", but my belief is that Linux is about "freedom". I got some feedback from a few readers who said I was more than a little off base with my Linux comments. Maybe, but it is what I believe. It is not about free because it is not free, no software is free. There are implicit costs involved in using any software. The issue is about freedom — for people to make the choices they want to make with the software they use and to have the partnerships they want with other vendors.

The complete interview is here.

Two Percent And Growing Fast

In my book, Net Attitude, I said we were 2% of the way into what the Internet has in store for our business and personal lives. In current speeches I have been saying 5%. There are various metrics one could look at to get an idea of the Internet’s penetration. The WordPOPClock projection is that the world’s population on March 1 will be 6.35 billion. The world’s Internet users at any point in time is somewhere around 5% of that number. More important than the numbers are the things you can and can’t yet do using the Internet. I believe that 95% of the desirable things that could be done on the Internet are not yet being done.

One of those things is purchasing of goods and services. It is getting easier every day but we have a long way to go. For 2003, online retail spending, excluding travel and auctions, grew 22% over 2002 to $52 billion. Including travel, the total was $93 billion, up 27% over 2002. These are impressive numbers and I expect we will continue to see double digit growth for quite some time. However, let’s put it in perspective with the "offline" world. Walmart just announced their sales for the last quarter — $74.9 billion. That equates to $832.2 million per day or $34.7million per hour. In two days, Walmart (one company) sales exceeded the sales of all companies online for 2003. (read more)

Demo Pictures

Demo 2004 was an excellent conference — I learned a lot and got to see many old and new friends. Ben and Mena Trott, from Six Apart Ltd. in San Mateo, California showed their newest Typepad tool for bloggers. It lets mobile bloggers — "mobloggers" as they are called — put their digital photos, along with audio and text, on their Web sites. (AP Photo by Roy Dabner).

Greg Reinacker of Newsgator (L) and I looked on as Doc Searles of Linux Journal showed us his blog on the big 17" laptop. Picture by Mitch Ratcliffe of RedHerring. There are also a couple of pictures from last year’s Demo panel.

I am awaiting the FedEx truck to pull up with a delivery from Amazon. The Logitech Pro camera will enable me to try out Sightspeed.

Demo Synopsis

I could have spent a week seeing the demos and especially meeting and talking with the many entrepreneurs at the conference. Some conferences have long speeches. Demo has six minute demos and then plenty of time to chat with the CEO and CTO and marketing exec of the companies. I can’t begin to do justice to the innovative products and services that I saw but I hope the following provides a glimpse of what was going on at Demo. (read more)

Demo Heaven

If you love technology, you have to love Demo. This year there were 58 companies on stage during the two day conference. Each demonstrator got six minutes to tell their story and show off their product. Here is a list of all the vendors with links to their sites. I didn’t get to visit with all of them but I talked to quite a few. The following are some that I found particularly interesting. (read more)

Where’s The Money?

The four Demo panelists did a very nice job of explaining their points of view about blogging. They talked about how blogging can fit into one’s personal life, benefit a small business, cope in a major corporation, and streamline the flow of information from blogs to your PC or handheld. Thirty minutes was not nearly enough time to explore all the issues and we wanted to allow some time for audience questions. Not surprisingly, both Bobby Orbach and Amy Wohl asked about how the business model for blogging and how blogging enables money making. Certainly these are fair questions. In fact there are many unanswered questions about blogging just as their were many about the Web ten years ago. Blogging provides new protocols for creating, distributing, publishing syndicating, and reading information. Is there money to be made from protocols? Probably not. Is there money in html or http? Not per se. The money comes from ecosystem; i.e. it comes from content, transactions, and commerce that will be facilitated in new ways using blogging. We are 2% of the way into what blogging has in store for us.

At the Demo lunch there were tent cards on a number of the tables indicating a subject matter from the conference so people could congregate and share. Buzz Bruggerman and Greg Reinacker and I sat at the "blogging" table. Doc Searles was there blogging on his Apple ibook with the 17" screen and G5 chip. We all engaged Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, to learn about how he is providing real-time searching of blogs. If you have any doubts about how fast blogging is growing, take a look at his site.

Blogging Panel

The four Demo panelists and I are looking forward to our attempt tomorrow morning to reveal the big picture about blogging and where it is headed. In case you didn’t see the preview, it is here. If you want to take a look at what the participants and moderator have been writing about lately, there are links to their blogs below. The companies of the four panelists have some really great products that are worth taking a look at if you don’t already use them. I personally use something from each company. Movable Type is my primary tool for blogging. The product is excellent and so is the support. ActiveWords improves my productivity in blogging significantly. See story. I have not been a fan of Outlook but I must say that Outlook 2003 has some big improvements, especially in the ease and productivity of reading mail. Newsgator is a joy. It plugs into Outlook and makes reading blogs as easy as reading mail.

Here are links to the panelists blogs.

Mena Trott
Buzz Bruggerman
Robert Scoble
Greg Reinacker
John Patrick

Demo Travel Woes

Every year I travel to Demo with eager anticipation, but as we all know, travel is not always fun. One of the major improvements in travel is the ability to print out a boarding pass at home before heading for the airport.
American Airlines has made a lot of progress with aa.com over the recent years and I am sure it has been difficult coping with the integration of numerous legacy systems. Unfortunately, I have written about airline woes before involving breakdowns in the American systems and last night I experienced yet another one. (read more)

Power To The People

I knew that eventually competition would begin to take
hold in broadband. I first wrote about this in a
reflection May 12, 1998 — and must admit that my forecast was a bit premature. But now,
at last, it is happening. At last year’s Vortex Conference, Larry
Babbio, vice chairman of Verizon, said
that they had reduced their monthly DSL fee by $15 and that the reduction was
"not promotional". Surely, the cable companies will not stand by and
lose market share. Direct TV is aggressively advertising broadband Internet
access via satellite. Having multiple competing sources of broadband will result in lower prices and higher speeds. That is how free markets work. What we need
is even more competition — and the electric utilities are about to offer it. In this morning’s New York Times, a story by Stephen Labation, F.C.C. Begins Rewriting Rules on Delivery of the Internet, described how the Federal Communications Commission is devising new rules which will allow electric utilities to offer broadband over their power grids. (read more)