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Browser-based writing, calculator and spreadsheet. Seamless compatibility with MS Office. Created a bridge, can send documents back and forth. Anywhere, any time access, 1 gb of online storage, collaboration support. Simple document management. Free. May put ads in future versions, using contextual ads but without invading privacy.

Mashup API, take Office documents, and want to show them to readers of your blog, e.g. you want to show an Excel spreadsheet to people on your blog, currently you have to either download Excel spreadsheet or convert to an image. So can instead use ThinkFree API.

There are also browser extensions for Firefox or IE to view any link to office document inside the browers. OS X dashboard, Google and Yahoo widgets. Also a WordPress plug-in.

Can convert, say, Powerpont into Flash. Spreadsheets are turned into HTML, and it looks almost identical to the original. Viewer.thinkfree.com

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Started off in a studio flat in Whitechapel. Matthew came over in 2005 as lead web developer.

Early Growth lessons
Don’t overextend – scale with your growth not before. Until you need the four man tent, stay with the two man tent.
Make sure revenue sources scale with increased usage, e.g. Google ads, user subscriptions
Involve users in your web application’s story, make sure that they know about your start up, know that you’re growing, and make them ivolved in the growth. If it’s a social network, growth should be a selfish aim, recruiting new users should improve their own experience. be as open as you can afford to be, it will pay off.

Late 2004, Audioscrobbler and Last.fm has separate sites. But site news was front and centre, and they talked candidly. Put development up there as part of the product. Started off with a donation model. Had server failures, followed by a flurry of people giving money to buy new servers. As soon as you pitch it as a feature set, it doesn’t really give you the opportunity to do that.

Openness and growth
In 2004, had a cool service but needed data. Rather than try to do it themselves, they created the Audioscrobbler Protocol 1.0, so that any developer could create an app that sent track data to their server. Once you had a profile, you should be able to access it via webservices For developers wanting to make a plug-in, they have to see a ’round trip’ and see their results helping users. Immediately had Winamp, iTunes, WMp, Amarok, plug-in. And dozens more.

Promote a community around your application. They had forums and news on the front page. People to hear bad news than no news. So they want to know that a disaster is happening rather than be cut out of the loop. They will be more likely to tolerate your growing pains then.

Showed their submission graphs to the users to that people could see what what happening. Users appreciated information. Appreciated transparency. When things went bad, they would parody their graphs.

People found the 404s funny, and took advice to go make a cup of tea literally and Flickr’d it.

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Commoditisation. Formal definitions is “a change from monopoly to perfect competition”

Or:
yesterdays hot stuff –> today’s boredom
how novel, exciting and new –> uninteresting, unloved and taken for granted.

EG, electricity, Exciting in 1890s. It mattered, it provided new competitive opportunities, could replace people with machines. 1930s we had the national grid.

Rare thing becomes a common thing, ubiquitous, distributed.
When something is novel and new, it provides a competitive advantage.
When it is common it becomes just the cost of doing business.

1990s, web sites were novel and new, so web designers were hot. We made a different, created a competitive advantage. Except we didn’t – all that was happening was a big IT arms race, everyone wanted bigger and better IT. And if you weren’t armed, you were history.

New thing > leading edge > standard products > utility service

Constant move towards commoditisation. IT is not a strategic choice, it is a cost of doing business.

Trends:
Software as service
Utility computing
Web 2.0 – implies there are things that are old had and commonplace
Can’t insist on oodles of cash to build what we used to build. Now people want commonplace as cheap as chips. What should be cheap? Operating environments. No competitive advantage on having your own web infrastructure. Is a phrase for this competitive market – yak shaving. Doesn’t makes sense to do things over and over, pay someone else to do it .What is needed is an environment to build and release what you want and pay for what you use, e.g. Amazon S2.

Zimki. Build what you want without ever going near a database. problem of vendor lock-in, so Zimki is open sourcing everything. Will be able to switch environment, take your app and go elsewhere, or sell resources back. More like the national grid idea. Balance supply and demand. Lots of waste in hosting, and when there is waste there is opportunity, both financial and environmental.

Commoditisation is a growing trend and if you’re not looking at it you can bet your competitors are.

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Development of community on the net
– Personal home pages and profile
– Personal content creation
– Ability to interact with others
– ability to ‘friend’ with others.

Benefits of community
– heightened customer loyalty
– self-policing
– amplified word of mouth
– better feedback
– stronger ad more interesting filets on content

Three levels of communcity
– lightweight social processes: Digg, Last.fm, Craisglist, Del.icio.us, Amazon, Netvibes
– collaborative information structures – Flickr, YouTube, Threadless
– high-end collaboration – Wikipedia, Lostpedia, OS projects, CouchSurfing

Case studies
Flickr – photo sharing community. What is success? Growing healthy communities. Flickr still growing a healthy community.
Twitter – SMS community. Just answer the simple question ‘what are you doing right now’. People subscribe and find out what you’re doing. Grown fast. Addictive, if you haven’t tried it don’t cos we like it working.
Wordpress – developer community
Threadless – art-based apparel community
Barcamp – geek conference community

Common themes
– sense of fun/play
– keeping the dialogue going
– “wouldn’t be awesome if…”
– “simple platforms for building on”
– compelling stories
– rewarding of community members

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Way back when, no one thought that we’d be using the internet for the things that we do now, like Voip or video streaming. No discussion of the future of web apps would be complete without discussing trends.

Current state of web applications for online communities. If you think about the web you think about content, but web based email is the number one web destination, even beating search. Traditionally Outlook, Eudora, but people use webmail a lot. IM and chat is tarteing to move up the ranks, thanks to tech like Flash and Ajax. Almost every successful website is based around some community aspect. There’s blogging, social networks, but some less obvious ones like Wikipedia, eBay where reputaiton was a key driver, and even Amazon. This is a hallmark of ‘Web 2.0’.

But it’s not a new concept. We had webrings way back when. There was the Open Directory project which still going with peopel contributing human-created directories.

You can have a dialogue, you can have mashups.

Exciting time, lots of technologies that are going to change the way that people communicate.

Trend towards disaggregation and personalisation. Can be scary for traditional companies, so instead of having a portal, people are going to where the information, niche or news it. Great for users, embodiment of long time. People can come together around a passion. Has a risk – you can lose control over an app which can be good. But one of the things people talk about YouTube is that it’s so easily embeddable, Photobucket was similar, they drove a lot of the image serving for MySpace. But as they grow larger, there are risks. YouTube faces copyright question. Google News faces challenges on copyright in Belgium.

Same risks and opportunities in the communications space. Communications tools embedded in situ, e.g. IM on a website.

Mobile is a big driver. Content and community apps that follow users wherever they are.

People are spending a lot of time online, but they aren’t going to a portal or a destination. Blurring of online or offline worlds. This is evident in Second Life. Brands are establishing an identity in virtual worlds, e.g. BBC, Toyota, Vodafone. SL is just one, there are more – There.com, WoW, that have active, vibrant online communities and commerce.

Interesting questions. Users don’t really understand the technology they are using. We have responsibility to ensure that our apps are safe, neutral, secure. Despite all the publicity, people don’t care about online privacy, they don’t worry about what happens when they put their data online. Security boxes just get clicked past. So need to ensure that the default behaviour is the right behaviour.

Who to trust is a difficult, and OpenID distributed identity management makes this even more complicated.

Tools we build must be accessible to all. Those who are visually impaired, deaf or motion impaired, older generations, different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Need to balance tools that are powerful and mash-upable and customisable, but also easy to use for consumers.

Need to create a world that’s rich online, which compliments the world offline. We are here to make the world a bit better, to have a bit of fun and make a bit of money.

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I’m here today and tomorrow at Carson Sytems’ Future of Web Apps conference in London – they let me in so that I could blog it and provide them with summaries of each session for their site, so you’re going to see pretty comprehensive coverage. Enjoy!

Mike Arrington – The Future of Start-Ups and Web Companies

(Sorry, missed the first five mins of this.)

We’re just getting started, there is no bubble. Companies are failing early, which is how it should work.

it’s just that the best internet apps are still to come. Digg, and YouTube are not the epitome. Some of the companies launching in the next couple of months are good, and one will give Digg a run for a money.

What to focus on:

1. Have a good idea: Digg, Del.icio.us, did this – it was stuff that they wanted to do themselves. Once you have a good idea, to be successful either:
– invent a market
– destroy a market, which is a lot more fun

2. Have a business plan
It’s good to have a business plan, but some of the best start-ups never had one. YouTube ditched their original business plan.

3. Have a revenue model
Especially if you have costs. YouTube had a hideous bandwidth bill, burning a million dollars a month. You need a plan to make money.

4. Build it cheap, test the waters
If it doesn’t scale, that’s ok in the early days, but don’t build a fully scaled platform then hoping that the customers will come. Chances are they won’t.

5. Avoid a high burn rate.
Most dangerous time is just after a company raises a few million dollars. Want to avoid feeling of insecurity, so they start paying more than they should, travel more than they should, hire a PA or PR when they don’t need one. If you’re careful, 5/6 million dollars can last 5 or 6 years. Easy to get away with is, because there’s always a good excuse. Stay the wya you were the first six months when you had no money and spent no money.

However…

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Has two talks he could give – collaboration, one of the great challenges facing free software community. Have some dam good tools, and produce world class software, but if we’re going to step up to the next level that our grannies can use, and be confident and comfortable using, we’ll have to amp up the collaboration.

Or… can look at some of the mountains that we have to climb. If we want to establish the norm, there are some key challenges.

Crowd voted for challenges.

Free Software Rules
The web rules – Apache is the no 1 web server; free software CMS; applications.

Reverse auction, start with no 13 and work to 1.

13 – Pretty is a feature.
Absolutely true. When I was able to show someone Firefox and it looked so sweet, less interested in the magical underpinnings, or free software, or extensions… than in the fact that it looked reallly good. Need to look at the real pioneers of classy sofware and see how they use their stuff. So Gnome focused very much on distilling the essence of software and making it good. See same meme in KDE environment, who make things look pretty.

To be de facto, needs to look and feel super-polished. Means we need to accept some contraints, and think about human-computer interaction.

12 – Consistent packaging.
When an industry’s in transition it’s a difficult time. People tell me the difficult thing about Linux is that they don’t know how to install software. No installer like InstallShield. Compounded by numbers of distros and packages.

Installing external software is an old way of thinking, happens in the old world.

Eg. Oracle used to take days to install, but OracleExpress takes minutes. Should basically wish for it and it’s there. We can do that in the free software world far better than in paid, because we can create the alliances between software.

But the packaging is the elephant in the room. Used to be an area of real innovation, but now we need convergance. Debian did well early on, so need to think about commonalities. Ideal: common packaging format that’s easy to work with so that developers have something build into their project. It should be trivial.

Indicator of success is when you see propriorty software guys adopting free software packaging, as Oracle has done.

11 – Simplified licencing.
Whatever you think, they started out with a framework for people to decide how they want to their licence. CC have said there’s a specturm, like it or not, and some people are happy with things others won’t like. This is what the universe of people out there looks like. Consistent licences.

In software, we have 150 – 200 licences. So running into some annoying incompatibilities. Need to understand what the CC guys have done well, and then adopt it.

Essence of success is not OS, but free software. Some people want to be somewhere else on the spectrum than me, but better to have a framework for that .

10 – Pervasive presence
Linux desktop can start to be a genuine thought leader, a genuine innovator, and presence is going to be there. So need a universal addressbook, knowing the channels through which you communicate, give an idea to the user an idea of who’s out there.

meshnet. bunch of laptops in this room, so how hard would it be to figure out who is around? There is work going on, but if we could treat this as a common infrastructure, so that we enable collaboration platforms.

9 – Pervasive support
Or the perception of. People say that ‘Its’ lovely but it’s not supported’, but there are numbers that you can call, but people don’t think it’s supported. So transform support into perception of pervasive support. Cafe guy has a guy who has a phone no. for people to ring. The knowledge is there, so hard to find grads with no Linux experience. Need to get people to tell others.

8 – Govaritye Ra Russki
Translation. If you look at how well software is translated, it’s easy to think we’re doing well. 347 languages who have more than 1 million speakers. So we have to invest in the translation effort. Build the platforms to support the needs of translators. Need to be translated upstream, so it’s easiest to distribute. A lot of effort in building bridges. Need to help the documentation guys, but the infrastructure is written for the Linux people, not the developers.

007 – Great gadgets
Interested in Troll Tech. The gadget world is going to be one fo the next major frontiers for free software adoption. Linux has gone from 0 – 20% market share in 2 years. Palm, Symbian, Windows, but Linux has grown massively in the last two years. But it’s fragmented, large numbers of small manufacturers, who need an OS at low/no cost. So not the sort of momentum.

As a community we could change that. Lot of value in having the same OS for your desktop, phone and other devices. Need a Gadgubuntu.

6 – Sensory immersion
In the audience there was one person who plays World of Warcraft (which was Jim Purbrick… from Second Life). Ten people in Second Life.

Joi Ito has a room in his house for playing WoW, with screens up and he can have as full an immersion as possible.

Need to extend sensory interaction with web and the real world. Make this a goal of free software, and be pioneering ahead of the proprietory world. Need to feed people information, and sensory immersion is going to be an aread where free software can pull ahead.

5 – Getting it together
Collaboration. Think of the things we do as free software developers. We track bugs, exchange translation, project management but it’s ad hoc and organic. If we want to stand up and compete with Redmond we need to elevate that to a higher level. When we do a release it’s backward looking, because we look at what’s lready been done. We can’t get data fro the future… so there’s lag, there’s innefficiency. So we don’t know that Firefox is going to release something at a future date.

I belive that it’s possible to release software predictively, and collaborate across software. Lots of layers in a stack, but don’t have good tools for coordinating work across layers. Would like to see a sort of Basecamp HQ. Build infrastructure to help plan and manage projects. So if OpenOffice release is going to slip, then we can work more efficiently.

Need to think about knock-on consequences when one product’s release date slips.

(4 – Seems to have got a bit intermingled with 5.)

3 – Extra Dimension
Vista. Everyone’s trying to learn how to invent new interface metaphors. Things haven’t changed for 15-20 years. We’re going to see a radical innovation soon. Office 12 is really interesting work, and we need to be equally brave and bold. Because of the shift to a world where windows are transparent and really part of a 3D infrastructure, we can have all sort of new opportunities.

iTunes 7 – that kind of innovation. Were not moving to a true 3D world. bue we do have 2.5D. Right kind of place to have large ammounts of innovation.

Look at FireFox’s extensions. LIke to see same thing in Free Software. Need to expose that extra 0.5D.

2. Granny’s new Camera
Impossible to predict what sort of things people want to connect to, and can’t priedict what is going to be invented. Kernal community really need to hear this message. Got the world’s fastest USB stack, but there are many didfferent stacks, so it’s hard to think of a consistent platform that the next generation USB drivers will work on.

The ability to ship software today and connect it to software in 3 years time is essential.

Start to create interfaces that are stable. Maleability, flexibility, etc. But also standard interfaces for device mfrs.

Can’t expect to have perfect interoperability, but can improve a lot.

1- Keeping it free
Microsoft is experimenting with shared-source, but that’s not enough to see the source. It’s about harnessing the source the way you want to. But as free software gets more pervasive and more powerful there’ll be more temptation to subvert it and send it in different diretions. GPLv3 is important, the discussions are are important; anti-patent groups are important, DRM also and tricky interpretations of licencing are the most dangerous things facing us.

EuroOSCON06