Bill Schlough (SF Giants)

Why does wifi make sense for a baseball park? The Giant’s business objective is to win the World Series. Use tech to enable success on the field, including video coaching and scouting app, started in 2000. But more about taking care of the fans in the ballpark, so how does wifi make money? It’s free, and a few other ballparks are experimenting, but no one knows what the business model is but yet various marketing partners like the fact that there is free wifi that the fans can use. Marketing partners want to get their wifi devices in the hands of the fans and they are together figuring out how to use wifi to do that.

Fans use wifi at the ball park for two reasons

– to stay connected, do email, specially when losing 16-3.

– to use interactive services provided by the Giants, such as digital dugout which you need to be at the ballpark to use.

Peter Sisson, Teleo

What VoIP means to telecoms. Billions of dollars of telecoms equipment is about to become irrelevant, but this creates a lot of opportunity.

Old thinking was that telecom was equipment, but now it’s software. VoIP is a computerised device.

Old thinking was that voice is a separate service, but now voice is just a feature, i.e. you can do voice over any equipment. No sense to keep data and voice apart.

Use Teleo to turn Outlook into a telephone. Add a tool bar so you can phone someone who emailed you by a single click (if you have their phone number in your address book). Any phone number on the web – just click and then it makes the call.

New revenue models

– 800: paid inbound calls with 800 numbers

– pay for placement in yellow pages

– pay for search engine placement

Combine those so local plumber bidding for placement on Google, but when you click on it you get put through on the phone.

Stuart Henshall (Skype Journal)

It’s not Vonage who are defining VoIP, it’s people like Skype. User models are different for Skype – people who leave Skype on all the time so that they can just have presence. Allows easy conference calls. Changes the way we think about communications. Can create presence in a simple way.

[Excerpts from the discussion.]

Bill: Chicken and egg problem – how many people bring a laptop into a ballpark? Get 100 – 150 laptops per game, but it’s the wifi PDAs that will be used. They make more sense, the LifeDrives and iPaqs the wifi-enabled Treos. But the business people will bring more laptops on a weekday game than a weekend game. So as these connected devices become more common then they’ll see more uptake.

There’s an issue of ‘cool’ too – here it is cool to have a laptop, but at a game it is not. What if a there’s a ‘fly ball’ that smashes your laptop screen? That’s not cool.

Privacy – if can do replays online, then people will share devices in a collaborative, social way.

There are different demographics that we deal with, but it’s not to much women vs. men, but age. Business people are looking for an opportunity to stay in touch witht he office, to leverage the Digital Dugout, to use that information. Don’t see kids with PDAs, but you will, and we will be ready for it.

Peter: I find it’s impossible to predict what people do with technologies, and if you try you get it wrong. I never wanted a camera in my cellphone, but now I’m sending people pictures all the time. When IM came out, I thought why not send an email, I just didnt’ get it, but now I IM constantly.

There are nuances. IM is right for some conversations, but sometimes email is better, or a phone call. I always fail when I try to predict what people will do with technologies but it’s amazing what people will do with them.

Stuart: One thing to watch is what is going to happen with dual mode handsets, wifi and GSM, so what emerges in terms of linux based. Skype is cross-platform, and have Linux and Symbian, so when they do they will have presence on your mobile phone with your buddy list, so it’ll be a new Plaxo. So if a Skype-like product really emerges and becomes effective in a wifi-centric world, is that the UI and the interface you want to use?

The handset becomes the phone via wifi. It becomes about useabilty and simplicity.

Point from floor: VoIP is by the telecos for the telecos. Skype is for the people.

Question: What if city-wide wifi comes, will that affect your ballpark wifi?

Bill: Not really, if it comes, we’ll embrace it and we don’t care if it’s our wifi or someone else’s.

supernova2005

Since Anderson published the original Long Tail chart, two things have changed. Firstly, the niche sellers in the long tail are selling more, so the tail is growing as a fraction of the whole. Moving from an era of mass markets to millions of niches.

1990: Explosion of products [numbers, not blowing products up]

Now: Explosion of information about products

Forces in the long tail:

– democratisation of tools of production – PCs make making it cheap

– minimise transaction costs – internet makes selling it cheap

– power of consumer WOM – internet makes talking about it cheap

Three opportunities

– long tail aggregators, reach the head and the tail, e.g. Amazon

– niche suppliers, get aggregated by someone else

– filters, help people find what they want

More likely to find satisfaction in the long tail, but have to look harder for it.

Have always had filters, but these are pre-filters, like editors of a mag who decide what goes in. Now we have post-filters, e.g. peers who review after publication.

Flattening the long tail affects which business models are viable. Long tail distributors can supply more different products.

[Anderson then goes on to show a bunch of graphs, not many of which I agreed with, but without them it’s hard to make notes. This guy talks at a speed which makes me look like an amateur. This talk is a repeat of a workshop that was on yesterday which I missed, but which Nat wrote up on his blog.]

supernova2005

Lili Cheng (Microsoft)

Caterina Fake (Ludicorp)

Amy Jo Kim (SocialDesigner.Net)

Mena Trott (Six Apart)

Evan Williams (Odeo)

Evan: The speed with which people are adopting podcasting compared to blogging is surprising. The idea that normal people participate in media has reached a tipping point. It wasn’t obvious 5 years ago when we started blogging, but podcasting is a continuation of the same thing.

Mena: One of the biggest things is that smaller audiences really matter. Mena has an internal blog that talks to a small number of people, and it’s a different conversation than say, Jonathan Schwartz blogging to several thousand.

Caterina: One reason Flickr has traction is that a lot of work that Ev and Mena did with blogging and social networking made it possible for people to contribute their own content to the web. They felt more comfortable posting things about their life, themselves, etc. My Space and Friendster got people used to the idea that a digital id wasn’t a weird thing to have. What is going to be very important is trust networks, and this came to the fore with social networking, which exposed that there are networks of people we trust with our content and it makes things possible on the net.

Lili: One of the interesting things about this media is that we used to use comm tools to explicitly talk to people, to interrupt people and people feel cautious about that so dont’ say things because they dont’ want to bother them. Blogging is more of an implicit method, so it’s more informal and allows you to communicate without interruption.

Amy Jo: Coming out of the games industry. Interested in social apps that reach a lot of people, and the opportunity is the reinvention of what entertainment is and how that merges with communication. Blogs are a form of entertainment and coming out of the games industry, it gives us an opportunity to think about what entertainment is. What’s exciting is user/player-created content, which is an important expression of identity online whether it’s a blog or playlist.

Caterina: Data-sharing is a social activity, and if you could see two sources of data, such as a grocery list and a musical playlist, you could figure out a lot about a person.

Amy Jo: Building trust is another theme. Throwing a bunch of crap up doesn’t build trust. Blogger and Flickr is a way of building trust, and there are different layers, and it’s contextual.

Mena: With blogs, people who are reading get this perception of who you are, which you are responsible for because of what you write.

Caterina: Given the option of making your photos public or private, 82% of photos are public. In Snapfish or Ophoto the photos are all private, so this is really new. When the default was private, they still had 50/50.

Kids don’t expect privacy these days, they put everything up there. We are all aware that the computer doesn’t’ have the same kind of memory as humans have, it archives things whereas people forget. So what’s going to happen in 20 years when they are going on job interviews?

Lili: Self-moderation evolves over time. And it’s cultural, so different countries evolve differently.

Mena: There’s going to be a point where there are going to be more complex permissions, so you can control who sees what.

Amy Jo: When people get a phone for the first time, they get very excited about it, and they go through an arc. Start off over enthusiastic and then they moderate themselves. Same with social networks. So often opening everything up is often a phase, not somewhere people stay. And it’s a function on where you are in your life and what you are doing.

[more was said but i had backchannel duties to attend to]

supernova2005

[Again with the patchy notes, sorry. Too many channels to monitor.]

Collaborative content.

The next step is that you don’t pay for services/content.

The step after that is that they pay you.

We’re not leaving behind old models, just adding new ones.

Driven by customers, not producers.

Everyone has an email, everyone is on the network, so it won’t be long before every leader has a blog.

Authenticity is absolutely paramount. Hiring people to write your blog is like hiring someone to write your email.

Traditional way of communicating with employees is to pass the message down, but it’s like Chinese whispers. So need a more reliable way to talk to employees.

Wants to only talk through the blog, and doesn’t want to deal with conditional access through the firewall, so wants to externalise internal communications, and dissolve the intranet and extranet. Legally some things can’t be discussed, but if someone sends out an email, you can bet someone will send it out of the company.

Some aspects of corp. strategy are sensitive, but the distinction over time between intranet and extranet is a joke, it’s all the same over time.

Future issue is authentication, and laptops will be authenticated like email can be. But that should be a choice of the individual.

Evolution of the network into a vast, participating network is big news.

supernova2005

Janice Fraser, Adaptive Path

The new internet embraces openness, relinquishes control – large shift in philosophy.

Most online services assume the publisher provides value: difference between Citysearch.com with content and events calendar decided by an editor, and Upcomming,org which shows events that friends are interested in. By relinquishing control over content and opening content up to users, increased value, more relevant.

Disintermediation adds value – best e.g. is Wikipedia. People take responsibility for publishing content which is accurately and valuable. Becoming asymptotically more correct – so are going to be 95% accurate.

Implications of collective wisdom in enterprise. What if people could tag information with useful tags in, say, Oracle.

Flicker is the commonest example, biggest competitor is Kodak EasyShare Gallery, but site is typical and comfortable for marketing communities. Compare that to Flickr, which is far more personal, with content and value that’s created not by a marketer but by friends and strangers.

So what does this do to marketing? It’s a form of disintermediation, and it’s not that it’s not commercial, it’s that the foundation …

Interruption from floor: You’re not saying anything controversial, but you are co-opting people to provide content for you so you can make money off. Flickr isn’t different, it’s just repackaging people’s materials as ‘authentic’.

Janice: It’s very different because it’s really authentic. Authentic is a word you don’t like. But marketers like messages, but that doesn’t matter, people develop their impressions based on their experience, not on your message. It’s about shifting the focus from what the ad agents want to present to what the community wants to create.

With Wikipedia, people expect to contribute. The expectations that people are coming to the internet with are different – instead of it being how MS does business, it’s how everyone does it. Instead of it being what developer communities know, it’s transferred to the wider world.

From floor: Having open standards which people can build upon is new.

From floor: Want to know what is new, not look at the differences between existing services.

Janice: I think a lot of what’s new is what existing packages are doing with providing more user-centric stuff.

AJAX. Big projects aren’t as interesting as small subtle ones. Very lightweight, small app, like BackPack or BaseCamp from 37 Signals. Tools that people can pull out on a case by case basis, so not supposed to have a big return, but will be used by lots of people.

Feature stinginess – over-wraught apps that have too many features are short lived and the pendulum is swinging towards lightweight, easy to implement, easy to maintain, single focus apps.

[Hard session to take notes in – lots of questions]

From floor: Flickr is actually feature rich, but easy to use etc.

Janice: A philosophical shift.

Kevin Marks: The release early, release often methodology of web apps is seeping into other areas of development, and APIs is a part of that because it allows incremental development.

[OK, I give up on note taking on this. I just can’t keep up.]

Supernova2005