I am blogging here.
And for English reader it's here (a sub-category).
Vox is nicely build but I find that the service is too closed for me... no widget possible... no Html ///
Vox would have been a killing App 1,5 years ago ... and would have capture all the value of blogging and sharing.... but in an open world it feels like a prison. Cons overcome pros.
Source : GenuineVc "The Royal Throne in the Entertainment Business – Don’t Kill the Messenger"
Analyst Spencer Wang of Bear Stearns just published a very good overview of the dynamics of the entertainment industry
which argues that “aggregation & context and not content are king.”
There isn’t anything entirely ground-breaking in the report, but it’s a
great overview synopsis of a lot of the trends occurring in the
industry. (You can download the presentation here)
Nicholas Carr summaries the report
well, “Wang argues that both ends of the value chain - content creation
and content distribution - are increasingly characterized by oversupply
and hence weak profitability. Value, as a result, is migrating to the
center of the
value chain, where content aggregation and branding take
place. The profit, in other words, is in packaging.”
[Leafar: And we are in an era of personalized packaging, think about creating your nike, writing text on the back of your ipod .... etc / People are gonna ask for a personnalized packaging that fit their identity]
I largely agree with Wang’s conclusions – that “new competitors… [of]
viable aggregators [are going] to emerge” and that “startups are likely
to be more nimble [than incumbent creators of content],” However, I’d
like to add that messaging with others, and the intersection of that
activity with content creation is a large piece in the puzzle. Yes, the profit is in the packaging of entertainment, but also in the packaging of messages as well.
Digging blog is efficient when done by the writer : found in a previous note from GenuineVc
Connectivity over content – or being content? I haven’t been able to shake the theme from the (long and somewhat dated academic) article written by Andrew Odlyzko, “Content is Not King,” which has stuck with me since I read it last September. Maintaining “that connectivity is more important than content,”
November 2006 will get a Hall of Fame, it's a 24 months of work that come under the spolights over the last 3 weeks. Leweb3 is gonna be awesome, speaking with smart people about what we have been thinking about probably for almost 5 years ... and working over for the last 2. Great discussions mean good inputs & outputs.
If you missed it, Fortune's journalist Jeffrey O'Brien has just written an interesting article about recommendation titled : "The race to create a 'smart' Google !"
He presents the recommendation star system : Choice Stream [I dislike their "we picture you in one sec apporach"!], Pandora [it's editor recommandation], Slide [that one is trickier] from apprition order for the pitures.
Here are some extracts :
"We don't just buy products, we bond with them. We have relationships with our things." and No Logo is also a way to define yourself.
There's a sense among the players in the recommendation business - from newcomers like MyStrands and StumbleUpon to titans like Yahoo and Sun - that now is the time to perfect such an algorithm.
The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of
discovery. What's the difference? Search is what you do when you're
looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you
didn't know existed, or didn't know how to ask for, finds you.
But there is no go-to discovery engine - yet. Building a personalized
discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of
expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today.
It's no easy feat, but if a company can pull it off and make the formula portable [= Movable Playlist & Library] so it works on your mobile 
phone - well, such a tool
could change not just marketing, but all of commerce.
Personalized recommendations," says Brent Smith, Amazon's director of
personalization, "are at the heart of why online shopping offers so
much promise." So far, the company has struggled to deliver on that
promise. Its system favors popular, obvious items and tends to come off
less like a trusted shopkeeper than a pushy salesman
Levchin is careful to say he's rolling out features slowly and will
only go as far as his users will allow. But he sees what many others
claim to see: Most consumers seem perfectly willing to trade preference
data for insight. "What's fueling this is the desire for
self-expression," he says.
[Identity my dear Levchin, you need to be puzzling]
Raising money is about finding VC (i.e Venture Capital) or BA (Business Angels). So lately, I've spent a lot of time searching for the right ones (VC/BA), the ones I will go after (I need to start somewhere). What I'm looking for is Affinity, something that does not fit in slide but which will team vision, cash and of course men.
So I'm looking for them using the web, tring to look at what they have done and if possible (but it becomes easier with personal billboard -i.e: blog/space-) what they said.
So I try to check regularly a bunch of blog or sites that display "venture free speech". Since my last visit (ten days ago), EquityKicker (a VC blog) has published three posts i simply loved :
Mr Brisbourne is a must read if you are a web-entrepreneur. Here's what he says :
"As I’ve said before to me the web is re-organising around people instead of sites. The parallel between the browser (or maybe early portals) and social networks makes sense in this context. As in the early days of the web there is a whole lot of web2.0 (or social) activity out there, but it is still quite hard to do things that are useful. You can quite easily parallel MySpace today with the early Yahoo!. The difficulty of
driving revenues from traffic in social networks also echoes the experience of the early web. All of which goes to explain why intuitively we are all so excited by what is going on. The logical conclusion of this piece of analysis is that there is still a long long way to go in the current wave and that there will be more $1bn companies formed. Looking for a Google parallel which combines a smart way to organise online identity (ie your social life) and then a slick monetisation play is an obvious place to go"
We started working on U.[lik] because we tought that there was a lot to do (& a long long way to go) and that it was possible to build something that will handle other aspects of the information overflow. Here is 4 paths I acknowledge.
1) Content: Long Tail+Dematerialization = Pandora box of content = content like water = Hyperchoice problem. What you need is a filter (either active or passive) and that's a huge market.[sorry no video because VOX is a closes service ]
2)Identity: Social life is about identity. But, I need to make it right for me before i go out there. Equity kicker sees a tremedous market for Identity managment but before we get to that point we need to be able to deliver online your "multi-faceted" identity. There's still a lot of space for great companies (all the last successes are part of the identity puzzle). Tastes, hobbies and knowledge are not overcrowded and offer great opportunities with lower costs.
[See my full post on Virtual identity]
3)Social: Social network are in their early days. They will have to come closer to real life. One of the main challenge is attention. Over the last few months I discovered alpha products working on this... and they seems to have a bright futur too. Here is one of the example I like most.
"Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so
most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry." Umair
"Part of the problem is that we've built a model off of social networks
instead of attention networks and there's a very subtle difference
between the two. Attention networks recognize power. They recognize
that someone may actually have a good collection of references or be a
good photographer and that someone else may want to pay attention to them even if their own collections are not worthy of reciprocation. Attention networks realize that the world is not an undirected graph." Apophenia
[Source: The Multi-Source Interference Task: an fMRI task that reliably activates the cingulo-frontal-parietal cognitive/attention network]
4)Why Challenging is possible: Here is one point that google hasn't manage to solve. Moral judgments can be expanded to Opinions, Tastes and actually to anything that is Implicit & Personnal. So if you only follow that track there are greats opportunities. Two caracteristics makes Entertainement a very good underlying market :
-Entertainment goods are "experience goods": one knows the value (actually it's more his value) after having experienced it.
-Entertainment goods needs Attention.
[See Youtube for Eric Schmidt Interview]
Conclusion: Social is not about searching, it's about finding. That's why we believe in suggestions/recommandation. One needs to have a simple filter to estimate the value he will derive from any items (either it is News, Entertainement or People). So I fully agree with Equity and I think it's time to Kick.
There are a bunch of really good posts on his blog to go further.
They give faith and believe in disruption.Disclosure:
- Equity Kicker is the avatar/aka of Nic Brisbourne a partner @ Esprit Capital Partners (explaining the pun in the Title)
- Leafar = Raphael Labbé = a co-fonder of U.[lik]
- Stowe is wrong & EquityKicker is right !
One night, I had a dream.... an EPIC one. Expression was everything.... it was me, virtually. No avatar, just a an ubiquitous e-me.... with friends crusin' an earth blue as an orange.
Could have called it Identity 2.0 but I am rather binary and we're on the way, still nesting our identities.
So I breathe and believe.
// Music is not working // have a look @ the original
It's been two years since we start thinking about U.[lik] and we are know ready to be part of the identity puzzle. With our main extra feature : recommendation with affinity; so it will not be just popularity rulin' but attention.
... it's been a really pleasant trip... I believe it still will be !
Flickr source: here version.
Pour le Français voir l'identité virtuelle chez Fred Cavazza!
