Mike Butcher

I find it interesting that a site started by a 16 year old student to lobby in favour of science and animal testing is unavailable today. But the 16 year old’s original blog is still up, where you can comment and contribute to the debate. Meanwhile the anti-vivisectionist site for Speak doesn’t allow people to comment on their news stories. So which side is more open to debate do you think? And why has the Pro-Test site been taken out, I wonder…

The Guardian has had some foresight in putting the Changing Media event together. Let's hope it lives up to its ambitions…

Can we get a Podbop for the Uk please? Anyone out there interested?

How about this? A Web 2.0 Innovation map:

“The Web 2.0 Innovation Map grew out of an interest in how Web 2.0 development is distributed geographically. Using the lists of Web 2.0 applications from various sources (see listings) and a bit of elbow grease to locate addresses, the Innovation Map was born. The locations listed here have come either from a WHOIS lookup or the contact information from the web site itself. Locations are not guaranteed to be accurate.”

Mooky is a not quicktime downloadable magazine which you can subscribe to on iTunes. It’s made-for-the-iPod video content which, I think, has a lot of potential. Professionally done, it and probably most appeals to a youthful, iPod owning audience – although I think the idea would work for others markets as well. Why not get a video podcast from CNBC, for instance? (They do audio ones right now). This is an area I see the iPod competing more and more with mobiles – because mobiles just don’t sync with broadband content via the PC because most handset makers (make that all) haven’t caught onto RSS yet.

Jason Calacanis nails the reason why YouTube is not a real business. Why? Because it’s making a lot of traffic out of pirated material. Bully for them, but a real business this does not make. Still, YouTube’s service is useful for the rest of us in the mean time, whether they get bought or not.

Cary Marsh, Mydeo.com

Paul Munford, Monty’s Mobile Gaming Outlook

This week Mbites.com brought together Cary Marsh, co-founder of consumer streaming video start-up Mydeo.com and Paul Munford, editor of must-read weekly mobile industry newsletter Monty’s Mobile Gaming Outlook, for the first in a weekly series of podcasts.

Hosted at the cool London private members club, Adam Street, the podcast covered recent events at 3GSM, the global mobile conference and whether we really think the current hype about mobile video “has legs”. Download the MP3 file here (approx 16MB, 15 minutes long).

If you’d like to be a guest on the next podcast, where we’ll be documenting some of the most interesting new development in digital and mobile media, contact Mike Butcher.

“They stole our revolution. Now We’re stealing it back”. So runs the tagline at the end of the weekly email newsletter for technology geeks, NTK.net. And although the slogan has been running since 1997, in 2006 the slogan has never been more appropriate. Standing outside a cold London town hall, watching hordes of mostly fresh-faced young men (I counted six women among 800) file in to a conference on the future of web applications, “stealing back the revolution” feels like an appropriate phrase. It’s a long way from an autumnal day in San Francisco, Oct 2004. But was this dawning of the mythical “Web 2.0″ movement in the UK, or another false dawn for the Uk internet industry?

The phrase Web 2.0 started life as media savvy way to bill a conference put on by technology luminary and publisher Tim O’Reilly in October 2004. This tried to pin down some of the emerging trends online, which didn’t seem to fit into the old “just another web site” box.

The conference built on earlier theories about the “Semantic Web”, which treated the web more like an operating system in its own right, rather than just a telecommunications network. Web 2.0 was also about mass participation of ordinary people – so blogging and communities fitted in.

For the next year or so the term grew in currency until just about anything new online was being labeled as “Web 2.0.”

A year later, in October 2005, The Web 2.0 conference convened again, and this time the sense of a “bubble” was palpable. Whereas smaller web developers had attended the first event, the second was noticeable for the addition of large online firms and venture capitalists, all hungry to exploit the new momentum in the Web industry, for so long in the doldrums after the bubble burst in 2000.

You could hardly blame them. 2005 saw some of the biggest business deals done online for five years. The August 2004 flotation of Google had kick started a year of gang-busting rises on technology stocks. A new wave of US sites like Flickr, MySpace, Upcoming, del.ici.ous were all bought out and various commentators landed on the Web 2.0 handle to lump these events in together.

Fast forward to the present, and the Web 2.0 movement hit London in the form of several physical events all within the space of a week. The future of Web apps conference, an MSN dominated event billed as “Mashup” at the Royal Society of Arts, and one by New Media Knowledge on creating innovation and Web 2.0 startups in the UK.

So is another dotcom bubble starting to occur, or is something fundamentally different happening? And is the UK about to “miss out” again, given it had barely 6 months of boom last time around?

In a packed Kensington Town Hall, over 800 web developers pushed fire regulations to the limit (200 more had to be turned away) to hear speakers from some of the poster children of the new wave on the Web including Flickr, Google, Yahoo!, 37signals.com, feedburner.com and Haveamint.com.

The “Future of Web Applications” conference was organized by Ryan Carson. An American living in Bath who himself developed a Web 2.0 application, Dropsend.com, said: “There’s a real buzz because we made it affordable for ordinary coders to come. The culture of the UK we’re trying to battle is the perception that there isn’t innovation happening here. Dropsend was contacted by VCs, but none of them are from the UK, for instance.”

During the event, Carson gave a much lauded presentation on how to build a Web 2.0 company and application from scratch, and unusually with costings. The final figure came to £25,680, which seems a paltry amount, given that del.icio.us was sold for a reputed $30m after a similar tiny investment.

In fact, Joshua Schachter, who created del.icio.us, also spoke to the assembled crowd. Del.icio.us perhaps typifies the Web 2.0 movement among small teams of hackers and developers. Created as a hobby project to publish Schachter’s collection of favourite web sites online, it became a place where you could browse other people’s. This created a huge buzz, since suddenly people could easily find out what was “hot” long before any media outlet had deemed to report on it. Del.icio.us – together with sites like Flickr – allow free-form tagging of sites, which creates a taxonomy created by ordinary folk, dubbed a “folksonomy”.

But hard-core Web 2.0 proponents don’t talk in terms of what people do online, but what machines do. Speaker David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals.com wrote a computer language called Rails, which is often called “Ruby on Rails.” With is he built, Basecamp.com and Tadalist.com, simple online project management tools which have put the wind up much larger firms in the space.

Kicking back in a leather sofa in Kensington, Heinemeier Hansson chuckles about all the fuss.

“Web 2.0 is a Joker card for anyone to use at this particular moment in time,” he says. ” It’s amazing we’ve gone on for so long without people really defining it.”

He puts the new wave down to some very simple things. After ten years of the Web and the development of computing, “software is free, hardware is cheap, so all you need is passion and time. We’ve removed the obstacles to create something online. Thus you see a bubbling up of new projects that do interesting things.”

He says Web 2.0 is not a full-blown dotcom bubble. “To me a bubble is when everyone is on board. To me there’s more dissent. And no-one is really making any money compared to last time. A handful of companies have been bought out, but that’s a couple of drops in the ocean.”

He thinks that this time round Web 2.0 will be a seen as a platform where normal people can build a sustainable, long term business by offering services and software.

He developed Rails to be a programming the framework which sits on top of the Ruby programming language which means it’s much easier to create simple, elegant web services quickly. The result means a much better experience for the web site visitor.

So, for instance a user can interact with the site without having to load lots of pages – all the work is done within the one screen. Typical examples of this include Google Maps and functions on Flickr.com. This is achieved by using a language called Ajax to build javascript applications faster and more easily.

Web 2.0 sites end up doing more of the hard work for the user, which probably means they will appreciate a site more and return more often.

Cal Henderson, chief architect of Flickr.com, also spoke at the conference. He says Web 2.0 is “”It’s just a name for a bunch of technologies that have been around longer than the term.” He defines Web 2.0 as being about the collaboration and aggregation of data, along with an opening up of software by firms to make this possible. One example is firms releasing the code for their Application Program Interface (API), a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications.

“Mashups” of APIs are creating a buzz online because of the possibilities of literally mashing up several data sources. Typical mashups often involve Google Maps, such as Housingmaps.com which mashes together real estate ads taken from Craigs List with maps.

Tom Coates, a ’social media’ expert and blogger, who built a thoughtful reputation at UpMyStreet and the BBC and recently joined Yahoo! says the “web is starting to change dramatically and become more than the sum of it’s parts”

He says we are moving form a world of linked web pages to a world of data sources linked via APIs: “The data is moving to the centre and becoming more connected in a way it never was before. [It's becoming] a web of data sources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways that users can connect together.”

So, for instance, as an internal experimental project at Yahoo! which is not public, he bult a “Yahoo! Astronewsology”. This merges information from the Yahoo! News site with Astrology predictions. Thus you can compare what was supposed to happen to, say, Capricorns that day, with what actually did happen.

Although this is a humorous application, Coates says that the effect of anything which is a “mashup” of data sources ends up making both services “better and more useful. The consequences are that this creates massive creative possibilities, accelerated innovation and no one has to build the same service twice. To real people it means a greater sense of connection – and whatever they do generates more value.”

But mashing up APIs are not just crazy geek ideas. As Coates points out, the BBC has released the API for its programme information, allowing developers to build tools which bring people back to their programming. And in the future, not release an API may mean your online business will turn into a “backwater” says Coates.

In theory sites with these newer approaches could start to have a competitive advantage. And small teams can also make use of the web to market their ideas through blogs. Who needs vast marketing departments?

“Size is no longer an advantage and often a huge disadvantage. Microsoft was one of the firms that made Ajax work, but they are almost the last ones to make it work,” says Heinemeier Hansson. Microsoft famously won’t be ready with Atlas till late this year. It took just three people to make Basecamp.

It’s partly factors like this which are getting business people excited about Web 2.0, and igniting the hype about a new dotcom bubble. Bubble 2.0 anyone?

As Ashley Friedlein, CEO of e-consultancy.com, points out, Web 2.0 style application are probably going to be “great for online retailers.” It makes sites faster. That means people buy faster and are more likely to come back. And its no coincidence some developers at the conference were from large financial institutions, including American Express.

But back on the conference floor, some voices of frustration were emerging. The brave new 2.0 world means more power than ever before can be wielded by small teams of committed geeks, perhaps a satisfying riposte to the hordes of Google developers and the Venture Capitalist driven dotcom bubble of old. But where are these crack teams coming from in the UK?

Delegate Peter Nixey of WebKitchen.co.uk says “The trouble is Web development has not been in fashion in the UK. Developers go and code secure systems in Java for banks, but we’re not breeding Web 2.0 developers in the UK. In the states it is and you can get a decent job The City hinders the opportunities here because the risks of being an entrepreneur are too high. There aren’t any TechCrunch BBQs here where someone will come along and buy you for 500K.”

Entrpreneur Gareth Knight, of OneAfrikan.com, says: “I hope this event will kick start the UK. The UK new media industry revolves around advertising and marketing and not around technology. All the top web agencies are in media, not technology. An investor who I talked to said are you prepared to go to Silicon Valley, because that is what it’s going to take.”

Attending the conference was Paul Birch, co-founder of BirthdayAlarm.com in 2001, and one of the few UK entrepreneurs to have taken a UK-based start-up to Silicon Valley. He believes the UK is not ready at all for the next wave of web services.

“What is the same as the last time we had an upturn in the Internet business, is that the UK has fucked up again. We enjoyed just six months of the last bubble. The US are beating us by a factor of 20-1 this time round,” he says.

“The fact is Web 2.0 will produce lots of multi million dollar businesses. But the difference in the US is that there is an ongoing conversation between techies and business and they can interface. In the UK we don’t seem to have that middle layer,” he says.

Right now there is not big money, because Web 2.0 firms can do it cheaply without the need for venture capitalists and large investment. Development is now a commodity item.”

Also attending the conference was Simon Murdoch, Amazon’s first boss in the UK and now an active angel investor in companies such as Videoisland, Shazam and FriendsAbroad.com, a new Internet service for people who want to improve their language skills. Murdoch says, without a hint of irony that “there’s potentially a paradigm shift going on. Web 2.0 is data being interconnected, which means you can do things quickly and in interesting ways. We’ve only just started to understand the applications that can come out of this. Ultimately they will may a tangible difference, but it’s quite hard to predict how. The developers are evangelical about this, and the examples are just the first ones. It will take time for 800 people to go into their areas and turn them into real products for real people.”

“It’s too early to have affected the investment community. What’s going on here is more like 1997 in Web terms. Here’s cool stuff, and now think about what to make happen. Only then do you think about the business models,” he says.

Paul Farnell, a student at Manchester Metropolitan University, who has created Sitevista.com said: ” Universities here don’t encourage startups in the way US universities do. They do it from a commercial angle and take equity – in the UK they don’t.”

Just as the Web Apps conference sung the praises of the web as a new field for data, similar noises were being made at an exclusive event in London that Wednesday evening. At an event called “Mashup” organised by Midentity.com, Sam Sethi, a consultant to MSN UK, spoke before an audience not of geeks but of mostly pin-stripe-suited businessmen.

Sethi said the “GYM Club” (Google, Yahoo and MSN) are out to form networks into which Web 2.0 service could be plugged in from outlying companies. But underneath it all, is data – and the gold standard will be our identities and reputations. Why? Because advertisers will demand that we are better and better targeted.

Only a day later 40 people gathered in central London bar to hear speakers from Yahoo, Last.FM and Video Island talk about why there are so few Web 2.0 firms in the UK, brought together by New Media Knowledge. The debate there was about how to bring out Web 2.0 innovation in the UK – where one developer had to resort to sleeping in a tent on a London roof to be able to afford to run his idea online.

Stories like this contrast with the media’s image of “dot-commers.”

Tuesday last week saw the return of a distinctly bubble-economy, billed as a direct echo of “First Tuesday ” the notorious networking event for venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs of the late 1990s.

The contrast with the geeks at the conference couldn’t have been more palpable. While developers queued for a sandwich lunch on the Thursday, the revivalists behind “Second Chance Tuesday” quaffed drinks for five pounds a time at a central London private members club as they were filmed by TV crews.

As one blogger who attended wrote: “Since when are budding entrepreneurs known for being flush with cash?… I didn’t bump into many (new) people doing any web apps – most of the people there seemed to be focused around advertising / media / fashion.”

In all, it smacked of a time when hype was favoured over substance.

Meanwhile, British Web innovators continue to have to make a choice: job offer in San Francisco or rooftop in London?

Returning from the 3GSM Congress in Barcelona, I couldn’t help wondering if all the hype was really missing something important – why we love SMS.

So let’s review that hype.

Basically the “Mobile World” thinks it’s going to move towards a totally Internet-based future, where every phone is IP-enabled and we all roam around, using voice and data on the move. A vast new world of video and music downloads will open up to us. Oh yes.

Of course, it’s going to take time. As Vodafone CEO Aurin Sarin pointed out during the show, the shift towards a world where we play a flat rate to access the mobile IP network, as we do currently in broadband, will not happen overnight. What he rather glossed over (perhaps because it is obvious) was that mobile operators make vast sums from voice and messaging (and don’t forget roaming calls to Barcelona) so any move towards this new business model is only going to happen when operators have something else to replace their current models.

So say hello to PIMP.

PIMP is the “Personal Instant Messaging Platform” apparently. Great name guys.

Anyway, PIMP is going to be the method operators will use to switch us from a world where everyone pays to message, to one where only the sender pays. This is supposed to be their answer to the alternatives, shortly to be provided (if not already) by MSN, Google and Yahoo!, who all want to move their millions of instant messaging customers over to mobile, and serve ads at them.

Now all of this presumes that we will be buying Wi-Fi phones in droves (Nokia announced a new GSM/WiFi phone at 3GSM) and dumping SMS.

But all the evidence shows that not only are we addicted to SMS messaging but, not unlike Heroin, we are practically mainlining it into our eyeballs (SMS that is).

According to Mobile Data Association (MDA) figures 2005 was another record year for text messaging growth in the UK. In November we sent 2.79 billion SMS messages. Person-to-person texts sent across the UK GSM network operators showed an increase of over 23% on the total sent during the same period in 2004. And, by the way, we have no idea how many person-to-machine or auto-response texts were sent since no-one ever releases the figures.

And even as we move towards a 3G world, the analysts are confirming that we can’t kick the habit. A study by M:Metrics of owners of 3G phones in the UK and Germany found that 3G users use even more SMS than 2G phone owners.

It found that 3G users are five times more likely to use the multimedia capabilities of handsets, doing more messaging, gaming, watching video and downloading new content.

“Despite the varied new messaging options, 3G subscribers are still more likely to use SMS in comparison to non-3G users, so we are not seeing cannibalisation of SMS revenues, as some have speculated,” said Paul Goode, vice president and senior analyst, M:Metrics. “Instead, we see that they are sending SMS while being twice as likely to use mobile e-mail and instant messaging.”

So what does this tell you? SMS isn’t about to be replaced by ’sexy’ 3G services, and in fact it will only expand further.

This mirrors what happened in the Internet space. As broadband penetration spread, what happened? The faster speeds meant people accessed and consumed more online. They didn’t necessarily want more broadband ‘content’ (although music downloads and video have obviously been huge) but the mainstream of users just wanted more “internet” – email and web surfing. They knew what worked – it just needed to be *faster*. The same experience will happen with 3G. We’ll just message more, since sending and receiving texts will be much faster.

But here’s a parting thought. With new services coming on stream and the old stalwarts of voice and SMS coming under increasing competition, will other multimedia services take up the slack?

Somewhow I doubt it. SMS can only get cheaper, but at the end of the day it remains the same products – 160 characters of pure, unadulterated, highly personal communication.

People LOVE messaging, and they’ll do it by the cheapest, most widely available means, and that’s going to be SMS for a long time to come.

Check out MocoNews for my blog coverage of 3GSM.