I really like WordPress though, and though the new layout at Google is nice and minimalistic, I was dumb enough to sign up for the Blogger in Beta -there’s lots of work for the blogger team to do!

In any case, please head over to http://metoopointo.blogspot.com for the latest posts (I am no longer posting new articles here). I have started moving the posts from here (hey beta boys, howsabout some decent importing!) and I expect with a few days that all will be available at the new site.

So that’s http://metoopointo.blogspot.com for the semi-latest (but because of that even more intelligent comments!) on Web 2.0 and other assorted matters. To subscribe to the new RSS feed, please copy http://metoopointo.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default into your RSS readers.

See you over there!

Holding many job seekers back, though, is the fear of making a fool of oneself — or worse, sabotaging one’s career. That’s what happened recently to Aleksey Vayner, a Yale University student who applied for an investment-banking job with Swiss bank UBS AG. His video résumé — which was entitled “Impossible Is Nothing” and featured him lifting weights, showing off his tennis serve and ballroom dancing — was widely watched on YouTube and made Mr. Vayner an object of ridicule. He didn’t get the job, and UBS is conducting an in-house inquiry into whether the link to the video was leaked by an employee.

But what about dating sites? I know, it’s a throwback to the eighties, with imagery of a chair in front of a tv in a seedy office somewhere, but it might just pick up. It seems a logical expansion too. I mean, it’s a well-known fact that people using pictures in their online ads get a lot more replies than those who don’t. So video might up the ante in that sense, when everybody has mastered Photoshop. But for now, embarrasment still wins out I’d imagine (you worry about sexy holiday shots floating on the internet? Imagine the anxiety a video mashup of yourself could do to you!). So sites like PodDater are still very much the domain of the very foolish or the very brave (or vain), at least for now.

I don’t know what to think about this. I understand and agree with the need to block these convicted offenders from social networking sites and the likes, but it seems very difficult to me to identify someone by way of maintaining all sorts of databases and doing real time cross checks.

Here’s just a thought, if we accept that sex offenders are registered in a national database with their home address, why not go straight to the source, and include their IP address (and ensure they can only access the net from home using a fixed IP address, something a parole officer and the ISP can see to) in there as well? That way, you have a very straightforward blacklisting option in hand. I’m sure other sites would like to use the same list as well.

To be sure, this is harsh, but at least it will be clear and simple, and an extension into the online world of existing offline policies. On top, you can have a clear debate on the desirability of this. Now it seems that all sorts of privacy laws touching back alleys are going to be taken, which will undoubtedly result in errors being made in the identification process, posing all sorts of questions on how to wipe that misinformation again, and legal recourse.

Just fix ‘em (the IP addresses, ahem). Hey, could be a nice slogan!

Gluck describes configurable culture with buzzwords like ‘Instantaneous, Editable, Global, Networked, Multi-Sensory, Interoperable, Archival, Customizable and Hackable!’ -note the exclamation mark following Hackable, readers of these pages will by now know I love these cutesy embraces of counter-culture by big corporate hounds, mostly because to me it always proves how dangerous it is for marketing execs to be cooped up in an office surrounded by similarly enthusiastic marketers.

Bogatin then touches on an earlier post of hers, about the upcoming Super Bowl game, which will see the first ‘user-involved’ content appear in its commercials. This touches directly on my previous post about a company called ViTrue, which is producing tools and campaigns for companies looking to involve consumers in safe yet fun creativity surrounding their brands.

I said it then and I’ll repeat it now: this won’t fly. Take away the Super Bowl and the novelty, and what you’re left with is treating consumers like monkeys, happy to play safely with brands, to further glorify them. It’s also unnatural, mind-controlling like. You want me to sell to me, like that. I am a firm believer in Web 2.0, the social aspects of networks and the marketing potential for the next twenty years, but this is not the way to go about it. People who sincerely think that there’s a magical formula to get consumers to sell to themselves, are simply not understanding what Web 2.0 stands for, which is in many ways a maturing of the consumer, and should be treated with more, not less respect and equality.

If the Web 2.0 community at large goes along with this proposed direction, it would be a huge sellout, accepting that they are not changing the face of the web, but that they are mere tools, facilitators for Big Corporate America .

I just realized that’s the first (and the last!) time I said ‘Big Corporate America’ in my life. I’m that serious, folks :)

This morning, Prudential’s Jesse Tortora asserted that “the production ramp has already begun” in small quantities for an Apple slim phone to be available for sale late in the first quarter of next year, or early in the second quarter. Tortora expects a smartphone to follow 1-2 quarters later, “likely” in the third quarter.

He also expects Apple to produce a music phone and a wide-screen iPod. In fact, he believes Apple is planning volume production of a widescreen iPod for the calendar first quarter of 2007, with an introduction late in the first quarter or early in the second quarter.

Tortora says he expects Apple to sell 7 million iPhones in calendar 2007 and 15 million in 2008, contributing 8 cents a share to earnings in fiscal 2007 and 29 cents in fiscal 2008.

Meanwhile, Tortora says there is “new evidence that Apple has hired video game designers,” which he says suggests that “Apple may have interest in entering the video game market longer-term.”

That’s a lot of gadgets! iPhone, iPod/iPhone and a wide-screen iPod. I’m guessing the video game designers will do something for the iPhone and a new iPod -it’s a must for phone users and a wish for many PMP users. Can’t wait till January.

We aim to cover online video from end to end and front to back. We’ll point you to hot startups, hot videos, hot pipes — tracing the talent, money, code, and data across the network. We’ll combine the signature GigaOM skepticism with a healthy sense of wonder for all the cool stuff that’s going on out there. And lots and lots of pictures and video.

Liz Gannes will be doing most of the blogging, and the first posts look interesting enough to check back sometime soon.

Another interesting announcement, GigaOm have taken down their IPNetworked site, and will relaunch it in spring, ‘with a focus on data centers, and their amazing transition.’ Definitely worth waiting on, data centers are a thing close to my heart, so I for one am looking forward to reading that one.

It’s saying nothing, literally. Just a bunch of equally proportioned diverse (manual in hand, no doubt) shiny happy people jumping around, careless, happy, soo individual, while some bullet points flow over the screen. The music too, is uninspiring. At least Windows 95 had the Stones with Start Me Up (below).

Same message, way better execution.

[via Gizmodo]

The initiative is beyond reproach of course, and probably lots of good will come out of it -but folks, reading this just made the whole thing feel a little bit odd. Maybe corporate communications hacks need to be taught on how to block their interpretation of the word ‘spontaneous’ when they are blogging.

Baidu has long dominated search in China, where competitors Google and Yahoo are still trying to make inroads. With 120 million internet users and growing fast, China has the world’s second largest internet population.

But revenue-wise, China is a dwarf still. Japan’s approximate $1 billion annual search revenues is about five times China’s worth. Baidu’s Chief exec Robin Li on the expansion plans:

Mr. Li said Baidu has spent about six months preparing for the move into Japan. The company is planning to operate there by itself but is “very open” to working with a Japanese company, he said. Baidu feels it will have an advantage because the Japanese written language is based on Chinese characters.

He wouldn’t say how much Baidu plans to invest, but he said the company has plenty of cash from its initial public offering last year, when it listed its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market. Baidu reported about $138 million in cash and equivalents as of Sept. 30.

Still, Japan is sure to be a challenge. Baidu has long said that its Chinese roots give it an edge against foreign competitors in China. In Japan, Baidu is not only foreign but also far less well-known than its U.S. rivals. Moreover, some analysts say Baidu has benefited from being seen as cooperative by China’s Internet regulators, who put strict limits on Web content and who have sometimes blocked access in China to Google and other Baidu competitors.

Mr. Li said Baidu’s advantage in China comes not from any positive relationship with regulators but because it has been better at tailoring its services to local users’ needs. He said the company plans to replicate that in Japan. “We understand the local user better,” he said.

this will be interesting to follow, how a restricted company at home competes in a free market like the Japanese. Apart from cultural challenges, (I think it’s a little easy to think that comparable character sets will give it an edge) it poses interesting questions on Baidu Japan’s search results and hosting policies, and the obvious comparisons it will draw with their Chinese site.

That is, until Amazon launched their Web Services. I’m a great fan of this collection of tools, which enable developers to use Amazon’s vast experience and technology to offer the most scalable and reliable applications in a hosted environment (for extensive reviews, go here and here). With their launch,  Amazon entered the hosting space, and should now also be considered a hosting provider of sorts. And that’s what I want to talk about, because hosting providers do not have an answer.

Caught in a Gap

Hosting providers traditionally have focused on offering websites, whether on a shared server, dedicated or virtualized. They can be split into two basic groups: large bulk hosters which rely on economies of scale and are more centered on either shared services or highly automatically provisioned dedicated services (the process of purposing a server and loading it with applications to fit the customer’s need). GoDaddy ranks as a good example of a leading bulk hoster, Rackspace is another, dominant in the dedicated space.

On the other end of the hosting spectrum, there are a number of niche players, offering either a generic hosting service to a specific vertical (like logistics companies, health care providers or such), or more complex services to a generic set of customers. The latter group tends to focus more on Software as a Service or SaaS, but not necessarily so. They can be defined in small as far as their customer base goes, but offering high-margin services, either because of the type of service, or the close, often personal relationship with their customers.

The rest, which is the vast majority of hosting service providers, sits in between, caught in Porter’s ‘Gap in the middle’, taken from his Generic strategies on competitiveness. They both lack the scale to compete on price, like the bulk hosters can, or the uniqueness that the niche players can offer. They simply offer everything that their neighbors have on offer, and often match their prices. The result is a large percentage of hosting providers struggling to compete, and in the long run to survive. This might not seem too apparent in many cases, but we only have the disproportional organic growth of the internet itself to thank, which is often many times higher in many markets than the churn rates.

The move towards Software as a Service

I touched on SaaS before, a concept that fits nicely with a company’s SOA strategy. I’ll dig in a bit to show how this concept, though in itself still in development, is a precursor to my storyline.

SaaS, the migration of applications from inhome deployments to data centers, from where they are served to company users over the internet and either terminal applications or browsers isn’t new. The first wave started around 1998, when ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) started to realize the potential of the internet and how a company network, on which their applications sat, could be replaced by the internet itself. Yet for many reasons it proved too soon. The cost of connectivity (compare the cost of a T1 in 1998 to the cost of a DSL line now), a lack of standards, and IT departments which weren’t really focused on cost-cutting, not to mention decision makers that weren’t ready to store sensitive data outside the company, all impeded that it took off back then.

Now things are very different. Connectivity has been commoditized, securtity issues have been dealt with, and the recession of 2001 have all contributed to SaaS being embraced this time around. ISVs all started looking at their applications (again), and needed a hosted version to compete with market leaders (as in the case of Salesforce.com which has had a tremendous impact on the adaptation of SaaS in the CRM business and beyond, from smaller independent vendors to heavyweights like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft).

At the same time, a number of hosting providers donned themselves the term ASP, or application service provider, but it’s not SaaS. Wikipedia’s entry on SaaS says it well:

The reason for moving away from the term ASP or Application service provider is that the ASP generation was merely traditional client-server applications with HTML frontends added as an afterthought. These applications were hosted by third-parties who ordinarily did not have application expertise, but were managed servers. Because the applications were not written as net-native applications, performance was poor and application updates were no better than self managed applications. By comparison, current net-native SaaS applications or independent portions are updated regularly, many daily.

This gradual shift in the terminologies also is a direct reflection of the change in the business requirements demanded by clients. The focus in SaaS is more on what the customer wants rather than what the vendor could give as was the case in an ASP.

Early SaaS approaches were application service providers (ASPs) who ran a turnkey application on behalf of their clients. But ASPs generally did not build the application themselves; rather, they took an off-the-shelf application (such as a messaging platform, an enterprise requirements planning tool, or a salesforce automation package) and ran it for customers.

And it clearly shows the threat coming from Web 2.0 (which I like to think of as a ‘mini-SaaS’) and SaaS: hosting providers stand the risk of being pushed back into commoditized services, namely power and space, and letting Web 2.0 and SaaS providers run away with the value.

Value Added Services

Think about it. Who’s sooner capable to offer a full range of services to a small business, the ISV who hosts their application and plugs into a wholesale program to offer website hosting and email? Or the hosting service provider, which already offers these low-value services, but would need to build its own applications? Both ISV and hosting provider would give you an opposite answer as to what the non-core value-added services is. So which is it?

In my opinion, the ISV, whether a one-person operation or a large multinational like Oracle, stands the best chance in the long run to win over a customer.

When you think about it, many hosting providers do offer their own applications, primarily the control panel or sitebuilding tools that they have developed inhome (though this is more and more becoming a thing of a past, because of cheap plug-and-play alternatives companies like SWsoft have on offer).

Conclusion

So what’s left to do for hosting providers? Should they sit back and let Amazon cater to every web developer out there, and be content with at least operating in an expanding market, allowing to -for now- push back the difficult decisions on how to get a competitive advantage in that overcrowded gap in the middle I mentioned before? The answer isn’t simple here. A lot will probably do nothing for now, instead trying to get as much critical mass until the moment arrives when the market growth isn’t that strong anymore. Many of them will fail, and will disappear.

Others will nichefy themselves, which is difficult coming from the middle. I will mean cost-cutting, layoffs and a reinventing of their marketing and sales strategies. Again, of those who opt to do this, many will fail (though in effect, less than those opting to compete long run with the price leaders).

And a few will retool themselves to become hybrid SaaS providers, getting smart Web 2.0 developers on board, offering some consumer brands along with clear hosted services for small businesses. They will build upon their inhome development skills, and act as incubators for budding developers -but not like Amazon does, who will become the GoDaddy for developers. These hosting providers will have partnerships, revenue shares and so on high on their agenda, to ensure that by solely hosting their apps, they will not set up a competitor in the long run.

These three options will play out whenever the market for hosting services matures. It’s not good strategy to wait and see -Amazon’s Web Services have already shown what will happen when that time comes.