Trends in the Web Space, from an insider

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Trends in the Web Space,from an insider

• Bharat Vijay
• Founder, Boltell

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Todays Talk

• My background
• Some web history
• Inflexion points for web companies
• Trends in modern web companies
• Goal Identify questions to ask when evaluating
  trends in the web space

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The Web and I

• 15 year long affair
• Early-Yahoo!, mid nineties
• Studying web users, late nineties
• Web information retrieval, early 2000s
• Global engineering for web companies, early 2000
• India conceptualized Global Web products,
  2003-2005
• Amazon e-commerce, 2004-2006

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The Web and I

• uGenie an India based e-commerce startup (2007)
• A startup for the Facebook revolution weRead
  (2008)
• New Web advertising models (2009)
• 2nd Generation Information companies from the web
  - Boltell (2010)

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More than 2 Billion people online
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Question What is the penetration ?
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Evolution of the web
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Inflexion points

• Apply to portions of Web or any industry
• Identifying them helps understand trends and
  short term plans
• IMO, applicable in 5-10 of cases, but can be a
  costly miss
• Is there a Land Grab ?
• Are the products in an Improve phase ?
• Are key players beginning to Experiment ?
• Is it a Survive phase ?

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Evolution of the web
Improve
Land Grab
Dot com crash
Experiment
Survive
Improve
Land Grab
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Land Grab

• Growth/user interest in an area
• Is there money being invested ?
• Deferred business returns
• Powerful ability to spread information
• Key to a successful land grab is aggregation
• Yahoo! Launched upwards of 50 products in a year
  and it was not alone
• More than 10000 applications on facebook in 2007

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1996 Land Grab

• Off-line information was fast spreading to the
  web
• Web was spreading as a quick, cheap way to get
  information
• People quickly wanted products to try out on the
  web
• Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek and others
  launched thousands of products in 18 months.
• Many companies were bought out for large sums of
  money
• Key question How important is first to market?

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Yahoo! 1996
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Yahoo 1998
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2007 Land grab (facebook)

• Socially important information was spreading
  fast.
• Facebook embraced openness allow others to
  quickly innovate.
• Not as much money as 1996, but not as expensive
  to launch either.
• People tried out many products
• Many companies bought for small amounts, but
  successful exits
• Facebook rockets past Yahoo! And Google as the
  messaging platform
• Key question How fast can a product grow
  through the social network ?

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Improve era

• Most dominant players established
• End users become discriminating in the new
  universe
• Features become important. Companies and products
  that offer these features get gobbled up.
• Key question How to
• Retain customers ?

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Experiment Era

• No immediate danger of a collapse
• Large companies place some big long term bets
• Example Amazon with S3, EC2
• Key question Should I continue to survive and
  improve profits OR experiment at the cost of
  profitability ?

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What does a web product need ?

• Marketing and customer acquisition
• Revenues through sales/advertising
• Customer data
• Infrastructure to improve/innovate
• Uptime
• Capital

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Marketing trends

• Social media integration is a must
• Search engine optimization is crucial
• Surprise it may be cheaper to market offline !
• Mobile apps will go from simple to compelling
• SEM can have prohibitive cost probably a last
  resort
• Key question Who is able to market using
  leverage ?

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Capital and Revenues

• Capital is hard to come by for another 18-24
  months.
• Mad rush areas like iPhone apps, mobile apps,
  cloud computing are getting some funding.
• Advertising revenues are available for content
  ads
• Surprise People may actually buy your premium
  products
• Key question that techies dont ask How
  effective are the product sales ?

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Infrastructure and Uptime

• Cloud based services are already world class
• Simple integration/development can be outsourced
  to 24x7 companies
• The keyword is integration widgets/APIs/virtual
  servers are available
• Surprise Minimize your time to first set of
  sales

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Web Customer data

• Very few products area is wide open for
  innovation
• Google Analytics provides reporting
• Huge need to marry IR with traffic trending
• Key question Is there a real connection between
  data we are measuring and the sales process ?

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Todays opportunities

• Information source is now the web. In fact there
  is too much information too many informative
  writeups, too much video, too much news, noise
  level is very high
• Devices are portable, powerful, smart. There are
  too many types and not yet wired well. China and
  Taiwan cranking them out by the 10s of millions.
  But people pay for them unlike the internet.

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Todays opportunities

• Taking information through till the transactions
  and beyond.
• Cleantech, Education, Healthcare, Infrastructure
  are the areas in India getting funding
• Q1 2010 - 1.9 billion in funding
• Source Deloitte Consulting Report

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In a Nutshell

• Each subdomain has inflexion points Land grab,
  Improve, Experiment, Survive
• Cost of web marketing is very high. Opportunity
  for new age content companies.
• Web infrastructure can make it fast for you to
  reach sales and critical business feedback
• End users may buy your products through
  interesting channels
• Making sense of customer data today is tough, but
  is an opportunity
• Ask questions to really interpret the trends

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Thank you

• Email bharat_at_boltell.com