Results tagged “leweb”

Gosh, Le Web time already? Yup - it's now held twice a year. Summer's Le Web is held in the UK. While it's smaller than the main Parisian event, it still brings together an inetresting mix of European and intercontinental digerati for two days of discussion and netwoking. And, once again, I'm an official blogger at the event.

in three weeks' time I'll be in London for Le Web's UK edition, liveblogging as I normally do. (You can actually see me at work in the front row if you look carefully at the image above from last year...)

This year's theme is The Sharing Economy.

If you fancy coming along - the event is held in Westminster - I have a discount code for you: OBDISCOUNT will save you £200 on the cost of a ticket for Le Web.  

• Compile a list of links to archive content related to people likely to be featured at the event (say, the Oscars
• Monitor the hashtag for the event, as well as event coverage
• As people are mentioned, tweet out links to archive content that matches, using the event hashtag
• Enjoy the traffic gains

(I actually make a guest appearance in this one - look for me at about 8:10... ;-) )

It was a persistent rumour at Le Web in Paris last year. And now it's confirmed: a summer Le Web in London...

Not much chance of hypothermia at this one. ;-)

Daniel Ek, Co-Founder & CEO, Spotify

This was a liveblog I abandoned because it didn't seem "content rich" enough. I originally planned to mix it with the Sean Parker interview, as he's an investor in the service, but that proved big enough to stand entirely by itself.

I have a confession: I'm not a Spotify user. Oh, I have the app on my Mac and iPhone, but I've never got into the habit of using it. I still habitually play music from my own collection. I'm so middle-aged. However, I'm also aware that it's reached almost cult-like status amongst many of my more webby friends, so I was interested in hearing Ek talk more about it..

Spotify arose as a response to the growth of piracy in Sweden - they wanted to make it easier to consume and share music that it was to pirate it. What happens if you have iTunes with ALL the world's music in it? "We wanted it to work everywhere, like water." Loïc seems to be unaware that it was available for years in the UK before it headed to the US, which is odd. Cracking the US wasn't easy, says Ek - it took two years. They set targets for themselves, and proved repeatedly to the record labels that this works. What are people paying for? Portability.

Big news: Spotify radio - a streaming experience. 

It's a "lean back" experience. Unlimited skips, unlimited stations. That's a direct play against things like Pandora, and actually makes it more appealing to me - rather than having to pick and choose songs, I can fire it up and let it run.

The business has £2.5m paying customers - the majority paying €10 per month

So, are they going to sell? Ek says not. They just want to build a great company - everything else is secondary. The objective is not to sell.

Music fans might also enjoy the video from the party for Le Web attendees, featuring the Ting Tings...

Sean Parker, General Partner, Founders Fund & Shervin Pishevar, Managing Director, Menlo Ventures

So many companies come to us without a complete team, says Parker. For example, they need a really good engineering leader, who can code and can hire and grow a team rapidly. Without that, they'll struggle until they become successful enough to recruit someone. Parker doesn't like sack management teams, but to take an operational role in the companies that he manages.

Alexia asks about Gowalla, which both were an investor in. They both seem happy with the deal to sell it to Facebook, as Parker described it as a "good exit for Josh". Parker suggests that the company wasn't innovative enough in combatting Foursquare, remaining too similar to the leading product. Everyone has their failures, says Pishevar, and if you don't fail, you don't have a place at the table. He suggests that people need success amnesia - instead of resting on their laurels, they push forwards with new things after a success. The same should be true for failures. That's the inspiring part of entrepreneurship.

And we're getting quite philosophical now. Pishevar is talking about people losing their fear - "fear becomes finite, hope become infinite" "We are not afraid of death..."

Parker thinks Spotify was his chance for redemption after Napster. He's helping fix problems he created. At one point he couldn't get meetings with guys in the record labels, and now he considers some of them good friends. Media business tend to be insular, run by a small elite. But it's a shrinking industry, so it's harder and harder from everyone from artists to publisher to make money. Parker's (self-proclaimed personal) view is that the best music in the world is NOT being made today. The mechanism by which the music gets to your ears is unable to take risks with the artists that come to them. They let bands get a long way into their career before they fund them.

For music to go viral, we needed to establish a free tier of service, says Parker. By creating that with Facebook, we've allowed anyone to experience any music for free. Apple's licensing model doesn't support social distribution of music. Spotify is starting to answer the question of how we'll find our new music in future...

Parker puts his biggest failure as the hiring at Napster - he got the wrong people, a certain breed of "parasitic leech". You have to recognise that, and eradicate them as you would any insect. He was too you and naive to tell the difference between a competent executive. Pishevar learned from a period when he had custody of his kids, and was trying to write business plans while looking after his children. He also learnt that you shouldn't build business 10 years ahead of its time.

And some guy is claiming to be Sean Parker's son from 10 years into the future... One way to get a meeting.

Parker feels that the social media elements of politics haven't been figured out yet. the 2008 campaigns made a lot of claims, but it was more about making the candidates seem relevance than any actual effects. He thinks next year's election will be the one where social media comes of age. Social media can deliver a relationship between people more cost effectively than traditional methods - and that's how it could change things, by letting a less well funded candidate win.

Someone from the audience asked why Spotify now requires Facebook. If you build a music  product that's designed to be isolated, then social doesn't matter, says Parker. If you want a network, then you really want everyone sharing, and so enforcing the Facebook login enables that. They made a bet that Facebook is so deeply penetrated that there's enough people that it won't adversely affect their growth.

1. Your talents emerge young, so follow your passions...

Sometimes entrepreneurship starts young. Bill Gross, Founder & CEO, Idealab was 12 when he started running candy arbitrage on his street, buying sweets in one place cheaper than the prevailing price, and then selling them at a profit, while undercutting the local shop. I started publishing a newspaper for the kids on my street when I was eight... Working at something you're passionate about makes a huge difference.

2. Mobile is replacing the web

Forester's research shows that more and more customers are choosing apps over the website of online retailers, according to George Colony, Chairman & CEO, Forrester Research. 45% of the companies are taking money from the web to apps. Bear in mind that the web is not the same thing as the internet. The web will be replaced just as other services have been before.

3. Context + Social Data = Useful Analysis

Is Twitter chatter around an event or a TV show just noise? Is it media? Or is it one of the best research tools you have? Take a wild guess...

4. Sometimes simple applications of technology fund more interesting research

Ariel Garten, Co-Founder & CEO, Interaxon made a return appearance with more developments on her thought-controlled tech - which they're using for games. At least, for now...

5. A grown man in bunny ears is very distracting

I have no idea at all what that demo was about...

The Ignite talk at Le Web I'm most interest in: Sara Rosso from Automattic

No-one is inspired by a cubicle-filled office. But we're locked into thinking about productivity as something that happens in an office. But what should that be? Some people are more productive at home, at the beach, in a co-working space. But remote workers are still viewed with suspicion in most businesses.

Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, are completely distributed. They don't have an office. Their staff are scattered all over the world. Rosso lives in Milan...

How do they do it? Private chat on IRC, Skype and a bunch of internal blogs are the key communication tools. It means that all the information and discussions in the company are searchable as soon as you join. IRC is their "showing up" in the office. Everyone needs to be a self-starter, though, they need to manage themselves, and they need to over-communicate on their progress.

Companies need to be distributed because they can recruit from a bigger pool of talent. You can move beyond the idea of the Apple Store-radius of recruitment.

They meet once a year (at least) for a mix of fun and work. 

Jeremiah Owyang, a partner in the Altimeter Group, has a question for us: Is your business ready for social business? You wouldn't trust a pilot, a surgeon or even a member of your shop staff if they didn't have training. Yet many do with social.

We're still really early in social - maybe the 1998 equivalent of the web. Companies are rushing to integrating social - but they're not doing pod job. The Washington Post tried to integrate with Facebook 11 different ways on one page. Why have you spent years getting people to come to your website just to send them straight to Facebook. The mainstream media are upping their coverage of social media crises.

We have a spiral towards social media sanitation. If we respond on social media without a strategy, we can actually make things worse. So... a social business hierarchy of needs. (The slides will be on his blog later)

Foundation

Getting the basics right. Why are we doing this? What education do you need? Educate employees around tools is a basic minimum. Dell use unconference style training. Intel have an internal certification programme.

Safety

Get the right team in place. He's got five models - he talked about them last year. The average size of a corporate social media team is 11. Weber Shandwick has pretend crises to practice on.

Formation

Looking just at work accounts, owned by the company - many companies have proliferating accounts right now. 1 out of 330 employees are using these tools for business purposes.

Enablement

If you're running social media in a business - you need to let go and let the running move to the business units. Most companies still have it locked in Marketing. Support is usually next, following by product. This level is rarely reached by most companies. Salesforce rewards their top social media employees - Chatteratti.

Enlightenment

Social, local and mobile enable you to start predicting what your company need to provide. Websites will increasingly be assembled on the fly, based on mobile data. Websites as we know them will change, and conventional advertising will go away - replaced by contextually useful. But we are years away from this.

Most companies have yet to integrate social data into their main customer relationship tool.  But to get to that point, you need to climb your way up this hierarchy.

The slides:

So, what does Marissa Mayer have to offer us this year? After all, we had Schmidt yesterday... Well, a few things.

• Checkins + Deals will launch next week
• Latitude is still under development - 10m active users

She thinks there's lots of activity in local still. It's natural that there will be winners and locals. What will make for success? Transactions? Data ownership? That's where Google has put the emphasis, because they think that they can innovate with. Location is useful on phones in particular. Maps follows voice and texts as the major use for a phone. As of June, maps has more usage on phones than on desktop.

Why go for indoor maps? Plenty of places that are large, indoor and confusing: shopping malls, airports, etc. It's not just the maps, it's locating people within the spaces. No GPS inside, so they use WiFi signals to locate you. A survey tool takes measurements of WiFi strength every few feet within the building...

Google+ is vital to her team - local feeds social feeds local. Chances are if you're going somewhere, you're going there with someone or to meet someone. Social and mobile working together offer real ways of working together. They've learned a lot from Wave and Buzz. Wave was a great concept, but was over-promised and too hard to understand. Buzz taught them a lesson about privacy.

There's a clear company line emerging about Android - it's ahead of iOS, Google services are better on Android. They're clearly wedded to it as the future of the product.

Becoming Microsoft or becoming Yahoo? Which is the bigger fear? asks MG Seigler.

"Every company is it's own thing."

"That's not one of them."

"I'm not going to pick one of them."

Surprise!

What does it take to be a great product manager? asks Chris Heuer. Finding the right people - those who can look at technology, see what is possible, and create a great product. By the time they come to her, they've passed the technical hurdles, so she wants to see what excites them. She wants people with enthusiasm, not those who are "too cool for school". They need to build products that delight things, and you need to understand what delights you first to do that.

 From 5m to 20m users in a year. Partnerships with companies like Orange in France, to give their users a free year of Evernote Premium. A refreshingly free way with their figures - apparently the only way to build trust with users who might store their memories in the service for a lifetime. It must be a Phil Libin presentation. He's covering much of the same ground as last year so far. 750,000 premium users - less than one in 20, but then the don't pressure people to upgrade. "Free" Evernote is the main product. They got profitable about six months ago, but are back in the red now, as they're hiring as fast as they can. They'd need to put the brakes on that to go back into profitability. Oh, and they now have offices internationally - including  forthcoming one in Zurich, the first in Europe.

Two new apps:

Evernote Food

Food is one of the things Libin is capturing all the time in Evernote. Easting is one of his "core competencies". It's a separate app, because he believes that mobile should be simple and clear in their function. Mobile apps should be simple, but desktop apps can be unified. Capture a photo of your food - the app automatically captures the restaurant, and pulls up related notes.

Evernote Hello

Similar thing for people. Photos of people, map of where you met them, and any related notes. Uses the iPhone gyroscope to makes sure you get good photos, and grabs four to create an animated "moment". Links to social networks are going to come in the next version.

Evernote is build for Libin - he can't remember stuff. He likes food. He can't remember people's faces...

They're up to six apps now. Where are they going? They want to reimagine what tools for the modern knowledge workers look like. Office as the model doesn't take into account 30 years of ethnology development. What are the tools for a modern person who has narrow boundaries between home and work? That's Evernote.

More than once this Le Web, I've heard American voices talking about how they used AirB&B to get themselves a room in Paris. The concept is allowing you to pay to borrow someone's guest room or apartment, villa or other property. Indeed there are everything from apartments through to castles and islands - and even entire (small) countries...

The company started in 2008 on a couple of credit cards, and has grown through two rounds of funding. How much traffic do they get from appearances on TV shows like Conan O'Brien. The answer? Not much? It make have a reputation effect, but not a usage spike. Average person in New York makes $4000 a year using the service - and that's at 4 nights a month let out.

And now Brian Chesky, Co-Founder & CEO is falling into buzzword bingo "community" "platform" - he suggests that Airbnb is becoming a platform without really giving us any details of how. Ooh, Tourism 2.0. New buzzword. However, his point that by bringing tourists and travellers into residential neighbourhoods, they're bringing new business to companies that never had a tourist base before.

One interesting revelation: they had to more actively manage their would-be "landlords" - people who are unresponsive or are attracting poor ratings are contacted and, if they don't respond, removed from the site. Last year, they had a user vandalise a host's apartment. They responded with rolling out dozens of new features for security, and instituted a 24/7 helpline. Not clear exactly how that would prevent it happening... Chesky has lived the service though - he spent a year living out of apartments he rented from the service.

They have a network of 2000 photographers worldwide who they pay to go and photograph properties at no charge to the hosts. And they found them by e-mailing people in their community.

They have $112m from their last round of funding. They intend to invest in search and discovery on the site as a priority. They hope to become, as he puts it, the Google of places and experiences, rather than info.

1. All that's old is new again

Publishers that are working with Flipboard for special content sections are able to sell their adverts in that app at about the rates they were able to in print, according to Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard. New distribution channels = new opportunities for revenue

2. New teams work in new ways

Joanna Shields, VP & Marketing Director EMEA, Facebook talked about how virtual teams are able to work together in the company internationally, but using social tools to keep themselves better connected than they would be if they were sat next to each other. Zuckerberg has a Friday open mic where staff anywhere in the world can ask him questions. Our workstyles are changing fundamentally.

3. The one thing more useful than data is MORE data

Foursquare is starting to use that vast database of checkins it has built up through Mayorships and points and badges to build a recommendation engine, and that's what their Explore product is. Build a fun product to capture data, and then build a new product on top of that data... And that data, because it's crowd-sourced and up-to-date, is being used as a default location API by many other companies - could they also be pushing data back in to add to the value of the data? Liveblog here.

4. The dark times are what makes you

Kevin Systrom, CEO, Instagram pointed out that many startups go wrong because they don't have enough problems to focus their minds. Their pivot allowed them to figure out exactly what they were. (Want to know the story of Instragram's pivot?)

5. Small teams can overturn conventional wisdom - with enough money

The final presentation of the day, from George Whitesides, CEO, Virgin Galactic, pointed the way to overturning the assumption that things that are the preserve of the big - be it business or, in this case, government, can be overturned by a small, innovative team - as long as that team has enough money. Liveblog here.

How is life after the LinkedIn IPO? Exciting, loads of new faces and very little turnover, suggests Allen Blue, Co-Founder & Vice President of Product Management, LinkedIn. But that doesn't come easy, he suggests. You have to work hard to build a future and opportunities for each employee, so that they feel that the best opportunity is right where they are.

LikedIn wants to help in three big areas:

1. Better decision making
2. Better innovators
3. Help get things done

They think about mobile in that way. In 2000, BlackBerry was the mobile king, but it was also a problem, as people were spending all their time on the mobile and not on their lives. So the next stage will be about balance.

LinkedIn offers "outbound intelligence" - the ability to research and make connections before walking into meetings - they call it meeting intelligence. And then the news product is the first step towards keeping people informed. And lastly, they want to support face-to-face meetings. Which brings us to Cardmunch, which is a lovely little app that allows you to upload photos of business cards from your mobile, and upload them for processing. Works great for me. LinkedIn wants to declare victory over business cards - but hasn't quite made it yet.

MG Seigler raises the issue of co-existence with Facebook, and Blue seems unchallenged by the idea, given that professional gives them a defensible position against the social giant.

LinkedIn Answers suffered because often asking a question is admitting ignorance, and thus professionally dangerous. They contemplated anonymous question asking as a response, but settled instead for creating a better environment. The real professional identity concept is important to them.

What they are building is a data resources about people and their professional networks - they'd love to see that built into more applications through the API.

Not the most earth-shattering session - but confirms my impression of an established web product hitting its stride in terms of usefulness.

How is life after the LinkedIn IPO? Exciting, loads of new faces and very little turnover, suggests Allen Blue, Co-Founder & Vice President of Product Management, LinkedIn. But that doesn't come easy, he suggests. You have to work hard to build a future and opportunities for each employee, so that they feel that the best opportunity is right where they are.

LikedIn wants to help in three big areas:

1. Better decision making
2. Better innovators
3. Help get things done

They think about mobile in that way. In 2000, BlackBerry was the mobile king, but it was also a problem, as people were spending all their time on the mobile and not on their lives. So the next stage will be about balance.

LinkedIn offers "outbound intelligence" - the ability to research and make connections before walking into meetings - they call it meeting intelligence. And then the news product is the first step towards keeping people informed. And lastly, they want to support face-to-face meetings. Which brings us to Cardmunch, which is a lovely little app that allows you to upload photos of business cards from your mobile, and upload them for processing. Works great for me. LinkedIn wants to declare victory over business cards - but hasn't quite made it yet.

MG Seigler raises the issue of co-existence with Facebook, and Blue seems unchallenged by the idea, given that professional gives them a defensible position against the social giant.

LinkedIn Answers suffered because often asking a question is admitting ignorance, and thus professionally dangerous. They contemplated anonymous question asking as a response, but settled instead for creating a better environment. The real professional identity concept is important to them.

What they are building is a data resources about people and their professional networks - they'd love to see that built into more applications through the API.

Not the most earth-shattering session - but confirms my impression of an established web product hitting its stride in terms of usefulness.

Leo Laporte, Sarah Lane and Kevin Rose are having something of a love-in on stage, reminiscing about their early days on TechTV, and Rose's move from a behind-the-scenes techie to presenter through finding a bug in Windows, and his subsequent evolution into an entrepreneur. Digg came out of that - he was there six years, but has now left (but remains on the board). The early years of scaling and growing were crazy. He thinks he made a lot of mistakes - hiring, feature development. It was his "first ride on the rodeo".  They locked themselves into the LAMP stack, and once that stopped working for them, they were screwed. They had to bring in new groups of technicians familiar with new technologies.

They also had a continual battle to stop mobs dominating the voting. Now it's dropped from a peak of 38m uniques down to around 10m uniques. "You have a narrow window to get it right," says Rose. It's either 6 months or 10 years, if you're one of the really lucky ones. Facebook and Twitter emerged and started easting their traffic. So they had to try some bold things - Digg 4.0 was one of those. But they didn't pay enough attention to the hardcore users against what everyone was telling them they should do. The new CEO is heading back to those roots.

Oink, his new launch, is an app that allows you to like anything, any object or place at all. The more you rate in a particular area, the more you gain reputation in that area. The system looks for where you're rating things, and gives you more credit if the location and the object or activity match up. He's skeptical about gamification - he thinks it gets old very quickly - you have to build a reward system that gives genuine gains over time.

They have around 40,000 active users at the moment, and several times that in downloads.

This was an older, wiser Rose than I last saw at Le Web. Back then, he came across as arrogant, but the troubles of Digg over the last few years seem to have mellowed him, for the better. This such a new field that people who have had great successes - and then seen them go sour - is still quite small. As the industry grows, that experience must be valuable...

Leo Laporte, Sarah Lane and Kevin Rose are having something of a love-in on stage, reminiscing about their early days on TechTV, and Rose's move from a behind-the-scenes techie to presenter through finding a bug in Windows, and his subsequent evolution into an entrepreneur. Digg came out of that - he was there six years, but has now left (but remains on the board). The early years of scaling and growing were crazy. He thinks he made a lot of mistakes - hiring, feature development. It was his "first ride on the rodeo".  They locked themselves into the LAMP stack, and once that stopped working for them, they were screwed. They had to bring in new groups of technicians familiar with new technologies.

They also had a continual battle to stop mobs dominating the voting. Now it's dropped from a peak of 38m uniques down to around 10m uniques. "You have a narrow window to get it right," says Rose. It's either 6 months or 10 years, if you're one of the really lucky ones. Facebook and Twitter emerged and started easting their traffic. So they had to try some bold things - Digg 4.0 was one of those. But they didn't pay enough attention to the hardcore users against what everyone was telling them they should do. The new CEO is heading back to those roots.

Oink, his new launch, is an app that allows you to like anything, any object or place at all. The more you rate in a particular area, the more you gain reputation in that area. The system looks for where you're rating things, and gives you more credit if the location and the object or activity match up. He's skeptical about gamification - he thinks it gets old very quickly - you have to build a reward system that gives genuine gains over time.

They have around 40,000 active users at the moment, and several times that in downloads.

This was an older, wiser Rose than I last saw at Le Web. Back then, he came across as arrogant, but the troubles of Digg over the last few years seem to have mellowed him, for the better. This such a new field that people who have had great successes - and then seen them go sour - is still quite small. As the industry grows, that experience must be valuable...

Dave Morin had a hand in the launch of the Facebook platform - but now he's the founder and CEO of Path, a mobile journalling app, that's just relaunched. They'd been working on Path 2 for over six month and were "over-whelmed" by the response to the new version last week. Path is, essentially, a modern journal. We all carry mobile phones, and people want to capture moments with them - and often in a private way. Path is designed to allow you to pick and chose who you share with. It's "slightly social", as Morin puts it. You can use it on its own, or share with the people closest to you - even mundane stuff that might matter to them, but not the others in their network.

They're a completely design driven organisation - it's at the heart of how they work. And they're now on both iPhone and Android - Android has more sizes to design for, and less documentation and fewer frameworks, that made it a harder build. But their intention is to be ubiquitous, on all platforms. They're really committed to the idea of the post-pc era. HTML5 wasn't an option for performance reason - and they tried. They couldn't get the "intimate touch" experience. 20 people in the team. And then intent to move to tablets soon. It's a different experience, though, and they want to make sure their tablet design really takes advantage of that.

Will they become a platform? That's the plan over time. He think that the way Facebook has made it much easier to build product that require people's real names is a good model.

How did they move from version 1 to 2? Mainly talking to users, looking at what they said they thought of it, looking at what they were trying to put in Path  - there was a lot of screens hotting of other apps going on, so they made it easier to allow frictionless sharing of other information.

They have over $8m in funding, so they're in this for the long haul.

Isn't this treading on Facebook's toes? Not really, says Morin. Facebook is very focused on becoming the identity service for the web, and has public as its default. Path is focused on family and very close relationship, with default privacy. "Several hundred thousand" users right now.  They intend to monetize through premium services - a fermium play. They have some small filtering options already.

But the key message is iteration. They iterate the product every two to three weeks, which is as fast as they can. The product wasn't perfect when it launched - the changes between the versions proved that. But if you wait until you're happy with the product to launch, you've left it too late...