I just arrived from Israel, where I could live my second Kinnernet experience. Just Amazing! I learnt quite some things over there, which I want to share here. First of all, I think that new developments on the Internet are stopping down. Why? Probably, the threatening crisis and the need to monetize everything, which is the new priority. Instead of innovating, startups are focusing on finding new ways to earn money. Also many are putting much effort on getting new resources from their venture capitalists. It’s clear that the market is not as booming as last year, when Twitter was the star of this geeks’ conference.
As a matter of fact, there are big rumors that Joost is closing down, as it can not show a business model, and that Fon is negotiating a sale to BT. As of the Web 2.0 scene, it is more clear than ever that Facebook is here to stay and that more and more people spend part of their lives on sites like Twitter or Facebook. “I live in the cloud”, said social media expert Deb Schulz.
Companies and organizations are also starting to use social media in an intensive way. For example, Reuters is already using Twitter to scan conversations in order to get news before any other agency. The United Nations is also using mashups and Twitter to inform people about its human development projects around the world.
Every geek has either an iPhone or a Blackberry, which allows him/her to stay online for ever. Video is already on the mobile, but people don’t seem to use it. Besides that, advertising agencies admit that it is going to be very difficult to monetize online video. “It is very hard to replicate the TV model on the Internet”, explained Marc Reed, CEO of WPP, while accepting that Google’s search ads are not enough.
For him, there is also a big problem with data: online ads do not yet give enough information as to convince advertisers. He also gave a very interesting forecast: online advertising will become more important than offline one this year in Sweden.
Por cierto, en Youtube hay una interesante crónica de Kinnernet 2008:
“Instead of innovating, startups are focusing on finding new ways to earn money”
Well, I’d say that finding new ways to do something should have some innovation in it 🙂
Lack of worthwhile business models is the ailment of the bubble since we do live in a capitalistic society and, as the saying goes, no money no honey…