Martin Wells

Big News. Tangler has gotten together with the STIRR network to host a mixer event in Sydney — the first outside the valley.

The event will be held on Wednesday 6th of December starting at 7pm. It’ll be standup, with finger food supplied, and a whole bunch of interesting and entertaining ’startup games’ for the night, including an episode of half-baked.com.

We’re also inviting 3 to 5 startups to show off their stuff. If you have a startup, or know of one who would like to get involved, please let me know.

What you need to do:

1. Go to the wiki page and register yourself on the RSVP list (it’s first come first served so hurry up)
2. Pass this on to people you think would be good to have at the event (internet startups or associated industry).
3. Think of an aussie internet startup that would like to demo and have them contact me.
4. Send me a web 2.0 joke. (Or simply provide an answer to “How many web 2.0 startups does it take to change a light bulb?”)

Also, a big thanks to the event sponsors:

• Technology Venture Partners
• Atlassian
• Tangler

Here’s an extract from a recent Tangler discussion on online marketing. Read on if you’re a fan of Geofrey Moore.

mick

Posted 03 Nov 06, 05:07AM

There is an interesting phenom going on where there are so many people using the Internet and knowing how to ‘get it done’ that there is the possibility of skipping the early adopters and going straight to the big chunk mass market. Hmmm……

Of course this is referring back to Geofrey Moore’s great but aging book, Crossing the Chasm.

In it, Geoff says that to get to the early majority and the mass market from the early adopters you have to cross a void. On the geek side you have a technically strong but usably weak product. To get to the other side you have to polish it off and also work your butt off to get the first few users who act as your reference group to the rest of the early majority.

Makes sense.

But what about MySpace? Is it technically strong? NO!! Is it polished and easy to use? NO!! So how did it get to the mass market? And did it even have an ‘early adopter’ period?

Well it probably did. Even if it was just teen agers who are technically strong, or technically exploratory. Then it moves little by little to the right. Not because the product get’s easier to use or technically better, but just because people with the confidence in the product introduce it to the next person.

“Then just click ‘Add to Friend’. Yeah, sometimes it screws up. Just click back and click it again. Then you have to put in this code thing. Just go to photo bucket. I don’t know. Type it in Google.”

So the chasm isn’t skipped, it’s just not about technical brilliance. It’s about investment in training.

What do you think?

aj

Posted Today, 04:00PM

It’s also about ‘getting’ the site. I’m sure there’s loads been written about MySpace but I think it was easy to ‘get’ and easy enough to use. And it met a need.

Marty

Posted Today, 04:04PM

I’m not sure moore ever described early adopters in a market as being technical as such. I think you can segment markets and products by a relative level of discontinuity (the pain) versus the potential value (the gain). Innovators and early adopters have high pain and therefore high-gain, then it slowly moves out down the pain level. But that movement is driven by other factors, such as style, relevance, perception, price etc. the ratio of those is the ultimate balancer of market coverage.

mick

Posted Today, 04:07PM

I disagree. Techies play with new toys even when they openly admit they don’t have any pain. They play. Early adopters try new things. It’s about risk taking. Sometimes the pain is actually highest with early majority but they struggle through with what they know rather then explore new ways to solve their problems.

Marty

Posted Today, 04:16PM

to a certain extent that’s a false market… without pain they wont stay.. let’s call it the “techcrunch chasm”

mick

Posted Today, 04:20PM

yeah, I agree. it’s true, especially for consumer, that it’s hard to keep innovators. if you get them, then they can become passionate, but they generally have lots of tools and are happy to have multiple (even 5+) for the same ‘job’, each doing it in a specific way or to a specific audience. e.g. for flickr I upload directly, via phone, via my uploader, via the uploader on my (old) pc. and that’s just 1 photo tool. Now I have photo booth, iphoto, I use blogging, I paste to tangler, I even use photobucket, etc. many tools.

The tech crunch chasm is right. You get trials, but no adoption/love. But sometimes that’s enough to move onto the early adopters. e.g. they say “Hey, dude, you should try photobucket, I tried it and I am going to keep using ftp, but you’ll love it.”

Mick bought a mac book pro… now he sits next to me and makes little sounds - sometimes delight, sometimes pain. Of course, if this is any indication, he’s in done the right thing. To quote: a mac book pro is….

A brand new lick-ready smooth-as-love Core 2 Duo Super Orgasm Deluxe Ultrahard Modern Computing Device Designed by God Herself Somewhere in the Deep Moist Vulva of Cupertino Yes Yes Don’t Stop Oh My God Yes.

Someone pass me the kool aid.

So I’m chatting with Craig about the Web 3.0 meme (mostly involving geek jokes) and he says,

“We need web 2.1 first”

“What’s web 2.1?”, I say.

“A Web 2 release that works.”

Yahoo have announced that they will be aquiring MyBlogLog for a (rumoured) $10m. Wow! Meteoric or what? The YouTube deal fed the big dreams, MyBlogLog is feeding the small ones. It was founded in March, but only really got moving in October when TechCrunch profiled them. Since then they’ve exploded in growth. An incredibly simple idea that in hindsight (always is) was obvious. Let people reading your blog expose themselves to others, then leverage that into a social network. They played on one of the core motivations of blogging: self-promotion.

So is it worth $10m? At first I thought it was crazy, but when you think about it this was one of those land grab deals. Another service will really struggle to overrun MyBlogLog because it already has most of the big blogs and is gaining serious traction. For Yahoo to come out with its own product (2-3 coders could write MyBlogLog in a couple of months) would have been technical possible, but they would not have gained traction against an existing service, let alone the Yahoo brand probably working against them.

Yahoo buying MyBlogLog has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with betting on a winner — if they keep going the way they are now, the product could well unify the entire blogosphere. The value then would be 2x-20x what they are now. Yahoo are making a smart bet and showing they have their ear to the ground.

Congratulations to Scott, Eric and Todd — your hourly rate for this project was $1543.209. (3 people averaging 60 hours per week for 9 months)

12 beers, 5 aussies, 1 football and a melbourne cup party in San Francisco where we didn’t even see the race. The inevitable result: let’s play aussie rules across 2nd street — it was Mike’s idea. (thanks for the photos chris)

I was at the Stirr Founder’s Mixer last night in Palo Alto and it was great. A really casual event for a few hundred (at least it felt like a few hundred) valley founders, investors and “between-company’ers”. Met some really nice, really smart people.

Four companies did presentations on their products — and they only had 60 seconds to do it. Kind of nice, since the audience didn’t have to spend too long hearing about a product they didn’t find interesting (for whatever reason). If you liked the CEO’s pitch you could go and see a demo at a booth they had setup. Companies presenting were:

Frucal - a mobile shopping tool (you just call in with a product’s ISBN and it’ll tell you the best online prices for it). Neat.

Kongregate - a social gaming system - submit games, earn rep points etc. seems to be mostly flash based.

Krugle - source code search for developers (talked with these guys about working with Tangler, might be interesting). Very nice solution to a common probnlem.

Liftopia - online lift tickets, nice.

Congrats to Sanford and his team for pulling off another great event.

I’ve just dropped Mick and Cameron Reilly off at the airport, which sort of marks an end to Web 2.0 week in San Francisco. It was a 24-hour-a-day flurry of geekery, cars, food, parties, presentations and San Francisco-style (of which it has a lot). Events: Widgets Live, ISPCon, Web 2.2, Citizen Summit and Aussies Invade Techcrunch. The usual hype of the valley, on steroids.

Shouts out to all my co-conspirators this week: Richard MacManus, Nik Cubrilovic, Mike Cannon-Brooks, Chris Saad (and Nik), Cameron Reilly, Big Mick, Chris Mesina and Tara Hunt… I’m sure I forgot someone, but I’m too tired to care.

The week that was…

At ISPCon today in Santa Clara, and guess what? The wifi rocks. ISPs might be struggling to find business models under the weight of the carriers, but man do they know how to network a joint.

Interesting that a great many ISPs have found success as MSPs (managed service providers) focusing on the boom in hosting, managed apps and software as a service, most of which is coming from the Web 2.0 drive (the general growth of web apps). Access is dead or dying in the US market as it continues to commoditize, and the models of bundling and media distribution once touted as the saviors for carriage are being shredded. Over time access providers will be forced to strip everything back to just the value they have (the physical infrastructure) and nothing more. The real big producers (Google, Fox, News) are the ones that will dominate the content channels, and the great triple play (something I’ve never been a big believer of) has failed to deliver much more than a minor convenience of everything on one bill.

The future of the ISP/MSP isn’t so bleak: they just need to focus on servicing their markets real need: getting on, staying on and using the internet.

I attended the Widgets Live! (don’t forget the exclamation mark) on Monday in San Francisco. First issue: settle on a name. I counted 10 different terms used: widgets, gadgets, panels, miniapps, panes, objects, modules, slides, components and portlets. I’m going with “screenies” (you heard it here first)

The event was organized by Niall Kennedy and Om Malik (thanks guys it was great), so it certainly had pedigree, and it being the day before the juggernaught that is the ‘Web 2.0’ conference (the one that spawned the term itself) meant everybody who was anybody was in town and looking for some pre-conference action.

Really liked the format: one big room with constantly rolling presentations and speaker panels, a big hall, and good coffee (even though it ran out). There was a real buzz to the place that just came from the general ‘next web’ arena.

And the bad: for a web conference the wifi sucked. Fon (the wifi sponsor) should be slapped. 50% packetloss was not something to put your name to. Would also have been nice to get more power for notebooks (though I appreciate powering 300 notebooks can be a little tough). That aside, it was a great event.

Lots of photos.