The Top 100 Web 2.0 Applications list is now officially launched – the full list is below, after appearing this morning in a feature section in BRW magazine on Web 2.0. A few quick comments:
* See the scope and criteria for the list.
* No doubt many will disagree with what has or hasn’t been included in the list. That’s inevitable in drawing boundaries around defining Web 2.0 applications. We have been strict in applying our scope, and many very worthy applications have not been included in the list, not because they’re not excellent, but because they haven’t met our judge’s view of what constitutes a Web 2.0 application.
* A few more applications have come to our attention since the list was finalized. In a very dynamic landscape we cannot hope to cover everything, but we are continuing to build as comprehensive a view of the landscape as possible. Please let us know what we’re missing.
* Despite the caveats above, we’re very happy with the list and what has come out of our efforts in creating it. It provides the broadest coverage of the Australian Web 2.0 landscape available, and we are sure will achieve its intention of supporting and drawing attention to the value created by Australia’s vibrant online entrepreneurial community. I hope and expect that the 2009 list will once again represent a far deeper and richer landscape featuring many global success stories.
1. mig33
Website: https://www.mig33.com/
Person/Company: Project Goth (Steven Goh/ Mei Lin Ng)
Description: Global mobile and web-based community, including social networking and messaging such as IM, email, text and photo sharing. Founded in 2005 in Perth and now based in the US. Has raised US$23 million, and has over 7 million users across 200 countries.
2. Confluence
Website: https://www.atlassian.com/
Person/Company: Atlassian (Mike Cannon-Brookes/ Scott Farquhar)
Description: Enterprise wiki with 5,000 clients in over 80 countries. Based in Sydney and San Francisco. Atlassian has over $22 million in revenue with no external funding.
3. Red Bubble
Website: https://www.redbubble.com/
Person/Company: Martin Hosking/ Peter Styles/ Paul Vanzella
Description: Art gallery and creative community where artists can upload art and sell it in many formats. Over 100,000 items sold in 71 countries in the first financial year. Has raised $3.7 million in funding.
4. 3eep
Website: https://www.3eep.com/
Person/Company: Rob Antulov/ Nick Gonios
Description: Social networking platform covering sports from national to school level for sports enthusiasts, players, teams and parents, allowing discussions and photo and video sharing. Has licensed the platform in Australia, Canada and Germany, and is also run as a stand-alone social network.
5. Engagd
Website: https://www.engagd.com/
Person/Company: Faraday Media (Chris Saad/ Ashley Angell)
Description: Web service application that creates ‘attention profiles’ of users, and enables these to be used in customising services and content for users.
Read more →
How Web 2.0 creates value
By Ross DawsonBelow is the sidebar I wrote in for BRW‘s Web 2.0 feature, accompanying our Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications list. The reason I was most pleased about getting the list into a mainstream business magazine is that it is a significant step in getting the broader business community to understand the value and transformative power of Web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call the participatory web). While the geeks and early online adopters are swimming in this world and engage in continual conversations with each other about what’s happening, it is critically important that the messages spread beyond this community. That is central to what I’m trying to do.
Another sidebar in the report written by Technology Editor Foad Fadaghi on Start-up challenges is available online (though that’s all – the rest is subscriber only :-( ).
Web 2.0 for business
The many applications of Web 2.0 in business include increasing employee productivity with collaboration tools and better access to information, gaining insights into consumer attitudes and behaviours, engaging customers in personal relationships and providing personalised customer service.
Web 2.0 for consumers
Some consumer uses of Web 2.0 tools are to communicate with their friends and family, find out what products and services others have liked and manage their lives more effectively.
Web 2.0 for creators
Creators of art, video, photos, music, writing and more can share their creations, collaborate with others in developing them and get rewarded for their creativity.
Web 2.0 for investors
Through Web 2.0 start-ups, investors can access the fastest growing sector of the economy, establish low-cost trial ventures and reach global markets.
Web 2.0 for innovation
Web 2.0 tools help innovators to collaborate across boundaries and connect their ideas to the global marketplace. They are central to Australia’s integration into the rapidly growing hyper-connected economy.
UK and Australia lead the world in online advertising per capita
By Ross DawsonTechcrunch has just published a very interesting analysis of valuations of social networks. Here is its methodology:
I have charted the figures of interactive advertising spend per Internet user from this data below.
Source: Techcrunch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Comscore
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What marketing executives think about your privacy
By Ross DawsonAn article in Forbes titled What Privacy Policy? quotes data from a study by the Ponemon Institute, summarized below.
What it shows is distinctly fairly different attitudes and perception from privacy and security executives at large organizations, compared to those of marketing executives.
At the Future of Media Summit 2008 held in mid-July in Silicon Valley and Sydney we’ll be looking at the future of privacy and targeted advertising. Broad behavioral advertising requires either dominant players that have the breadth of relationships that they can serve relevant advertising to many viewers wherever they go on the Internet, or sharing of detailed information and profiles between market participants.
Read more →
Mapping newspaper layoffs – where will the journalists go?
By Ross DawsonErica Smith of Graphic Designer has done some great map mashups of US newspaper layoffs so far in 2008 (4,490+) and in the last seven months of 2007 (2,185+), as below.
While you can pick out trends from the maps such as a big rise in layoffs in the North-East, this is more about underlining the trends in newspaper jobs.
One of the key topics at the Future of Media Summit 2008 on July 14/15 will be the future of journalism. I absolutely believe that journalistic skills and training are immensely relevant in the economy today. However many current newspaper journalists will have to adapt their skills to new jobs and roles, often outside traditional media. We will explore, among other issues, how this transition might happen.
US newspaper layoffs: 2008 to date
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Review of the Top 100 web apps launch, event, and coverage
By Ross DawsonSome quick thoughts on the Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications launch and event last week:
* Everyone seems to have had a good time at the launch event – I certainly did! A great bunch of people
* For me the primary reason to create the list and get it into BRW was to help link the tech entrepreneurial scene in Australia with business. I think that mainstream business is starting to recognize the many ways Web 2.0 is extremely relevant and important.
* This space is – I hope – at some kind of tipping point where it has reached critical mass and will surge from here. Expect plenty more activity from me and others in helping this along.
* The big themes that came out of the panel discussions on the day for me were about the role of these kinds of applications and entrepreneurship in the economy (see also link to Elias Bizannes’ thoughts below).
Will be back soon with some thoughts on what we can learn from the list about the global Web 2.0 space.
Online event coverage:
Read more →
I belatedly enter Twitterland – participating in a cross-section of human conversation – this is true “micro-messaging”!
By Ross DawsonI set up my rossdawson Twitter account this morning. I know I’m very late to the party, but will now be exploring this space.
I’ve followed Twitter and its peers from the beginning as well as I can as a non-participant. My attitude has always been that my primary online presence is my blog – everything flows out from that. I don’t have enough time to write anything near as much as I’d like on my blog, so I felt that starting to Twitter would take away from the little time I have to devote to blogging. I do have a very intense schedule almost all the time, with major events, speeches, and deadlines succeeding each other in rapid succession, on top of a stack of travel. I consider it my top priority doing my client work and events as well I possibly can, and while creating content is a core activity for me, it can’t take over other things (for now).
Clearly momentum has built over time in my intent to get onto Twitter, and have been playing with the idea for a while. I actually decided to get on after last catching with Shannon Clark in a San Francisco café earlier this year. He told me that Twitter was at the center of his life, and gave a compelling description of the benefits to him in being across and in the conversation.
However I’ve been so busy that I never quite found the time to get it going. I’ve certainly been active on FriendFeed, and using tools such as AlertThingy in fact has given me much of the functionality of Twitter, in allowing messaging across my activities, following Twitter feeds, and responding on FriendFeed.
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Living Networks – Chapter 5: Distributed Innovation – Intellectual Property in a Collaborative World
By Ross DawsonDownload Chapter 5 of Living Networks on Emerging Technologies
Every chapter of Living Networks is being released on this blog as a free download, together with commentary and updated perspectives since its original publication in 2002.
For the full Table of Contents and free chapter downloads see the Living Networks website or the Book Launch/ Preface to the Anniversary Edition.
Living Networks – Chapter 5: Distributed Innovation
Intellectual Property in a Collaborative World
OVERVIEW: Innovation and intellectual property increasingly dominate the economy. As technology advances, no firm has the resources to stand alone, and collaboration with others is becoming essential. This means that new business models are needed for developing intellectual property and sharing in its value. Open source software provides us with valuable lessons that can be applied to many other aspects of business and innovation.
This chapter on innovation and intellectual property was one of the most important in Living Networks, I thought, and is absolutely as relevant today as five years ago. Innovation is the source of the majority of value-creation in a networked world, and how we deal with intellectual property can either enable or block human progress, on every level.
The nature of the intellectual property landscape is that the structures are highly rigid, by definition being set by legislation. However attitudes are rapidly changing, and new approaches such as Creative Commons have gained enormous traction over the last years. Certainly innovation is seen more today than as something that happens across boundaries, though most organizations are still hesitant to open up. The critical next phase is in innovation in innovation models.
The chapter begins by explaining a few basic shifts:
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Official launch of the Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications list
By Ross DawsonThe Top 100 Web 2.0 Applications list is now officially launched – the full list is below, after appearing this morning in a feature section in BRW magazine on Web 2.0. A few quick comments:
* See the scope and criteria for the list.
* No doubt many will disagree with what has or hasn’t been included in the list. That’s inevitable in drawing boundaries around defining Web 2.0 applications. We have been strict in applying our scope, and many very worthy applications have not been included in the list, not because they’re not excellent, but because they haven’t met our judge’s view of what constitutes a Web 2.0 application.
* A few more applications have come to our attention since the list was finalized. In a very dynamic landscape we cannot hope to cover everything, but we are continuing to build as comprehensive a view of the landscape as possible. Please let us know what we’re missing.
* Despite the caveats above, we’re very happy with the list and what has come out of our efforts in creating it. It provides the broadest coverage of the Australian Web 2.0 landscape available, and we are sure will achieve its intention of supporting and drawing attention to the value created by Australia’s vibrant online entrepreneurial community. I hope and expect that the 2009 list will once again represent a far deeper and richer landscape featuring many global success stories.
1. mig33
Website: https://www.mig33.com/
Person/Company: Project Goth (Steven Goh/ Mei Lin Ng)
Description: Global mobile and web-based community, including social networking and messaging such as IM, email, text and photo sharing. Founded in 2005 in Perth and now based in the US. Has raised US$23 million, and has over 7 million users across 200 countries.
2. Confluence
Website: https://www.atlassian.com/
Person/Company: Atlassian (Mike Cannon-Brookes/ Scott Farquhar)
Description: Enterprise wiki with 5,000 clients in over 80 countries. Based in Sydney and San Francisco. Atlassian has over $22 million in revenue with no external funding.
3. Red Bubble
Website: https://www.redbubble.com/
Person/Company: Martin Hosking/ Peter Styles/ Paul Vanzella
Description: Art gallery and creative community where artists can upload art and sell it in many formats. Over 100,000 items sold in 71 countries in the first financial year. Has raised $3.7 million in funding.
4. 3eep
Website: https://www.3eep.com/
Person/Company: Rob Antulov/ Nick Gonios
Description: Social networking platform covering sports from national to school level for sports enthusiasts, players, teams and parents, allowing discussions and photo and video sharing. Has licensed the platform in Australia, Canada and Germany, and is also run as a stand-alone social network.
5. Engagd
Website: https://www.engagd.com/
Person/Company: Faraday Media (Chris Saad/ Ashley Angell)
Description: Web service application that creates ‘attention profiles’ of users, and enables these to be used in customising services and content for users.
Read more →
Top 100 Web 2.0 Applications list released tomorrow morning in BRW and online
By Ross Dawson[UPDATE:] Complete list now up.
The Top 100 Australian Web 2.0 Applications will be launched tomorrow morning. I’ve seen the BRW issue, and the 8 page feature titled The New Web Revolution looks great, including a couple of articles by technology editor Foad Fadaghi, and a few breakouts on the value of Web 2.0, challenges for Web 2.0 in Australia, and the venture capital perspective, as well as the list.
The list will also be released on this blog and the Future Exploration Network site first thing tomorrow Australia time.
Do NOT be put off by the cover of the BRW magazine – we were earlier told that the cover would be on the Web 2.0 feature, but a late editorial decision changed this to a headline on agribusiness :-(.
Ad networks for the long tail: Technorati enters the fray
By Ross DawsonOne of the most important developments underlying the transformation of media is the emergence of advertising networks, that sell advertising and place it across a wide variety of online media properties. Back in the Future of Media Report 2006, describing the role of ad aggregation in supporting the growth of the long tail, I wrote:
Getting others to perform the advertising sales function means media becomes completely scalable. Certainly many of the ad networks are targeting major media properties. Sixteen of the 20 online advertising groups with the greatest reach are ad networks, with online four (Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and Microsoft) distinct online properties (more on this in a subsequent post).
In this world, Technorati, still the leading blog search engine, though far more precariously than before, is today launching an ad network, Technorati Media, according to Techcrunch. Techcrunch says:
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