People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics–everything rippling and folding and looking misty–on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.”

–Tim Berners-Lee, May 2006

Web 2.0 is well documented and talked about. The power of the Net reached a critical mass, with capabilities that can be done on a network level. We are also seeing richer devices over the last four years and richer ways of interacting with the network, not only in hardware like game consoles and mobile devices, but also in the software layer. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to create a program. We are seeing that manifest in Web 2.0 and 3.0 will be a great extension of that, a true communal medium … the distinction between professional, semiprofessional and consumers will get blurred, creating a network effect of business and applications.”

–Jerry Yang, co-founder and CEO of Yahoo, November 2006

“Web 1.0 was dial-up, 50K average bandwidth, Web 2.0 is an average one megabit of bandwidth and Web 3.0 will be 10 megabits of bandwidth all the time, which will be the full video Web, and that will feel like Web 3.0.”

–Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, November 2006

Had to happen sooner or later, right? The lexicographers who gave us the term Web 2.0 have finally gotten around to issuing an “official” definition of Web 3.0 and, having undoubtedly scurried to trademark the term, are probably already plotting the pricey industry conference that will accompany it.

So what is Web 3.0, “officially”?

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”
–Jason Calacanis

In other words it’s Web 2.0 2.0, Web 2.0 with another 1.0’s worth of marketing BS. Or, as Josh Kopelman, managing director of First Round Capital, aptly puts it, “any Internet-based company that has launched after 2004.“

Here’s an abbreviated summary (some of it gleaned from company Web sites) of the presenters:

• Xobni–”inbox” spelled backward–aims to “take email back.” Basically, it’s offering a new way to view email: users get improved organization, faster search and better navigation of their mail. Xobni creates an information profile for each correspondent, providing relevant historical information.
• Orgoo. Company bills itself as “your personal communications cockpit,” enabling users to organize in one place their email accounts, IM accounts, video chat, video mail and SMS. Orgoo will be free (launch by end of calendar year), with nothing to download from the Web; it will be downloadable on mobile devices, and can be accessed from any Web browser or mobile phone.
• App2you: This custom Web-application creator lets developers create web apps without having to perform database coding or designing. Users simply sketch their pages from scratch or choose a template from app2you’s gallery and then modify it to suit their needs. Once the pages have been outlined, app2you creates a hosted, database-driven Web app using patent-pending technology. App2you intends to generate usage-based revenue from fees for enterprise applications and ad-based revenue from non-enterprise applications.
• Mint: Anonymous and secure money-management service. Unifies disparate bank and credit accounts in a single UI. Company claims that Mint does in an hour what Quicken does in 29 hours. Service updates daily with your latest financial info, alerting you to looming overdrafts, etc. Also indexes and categorizes all your transactions. How does it make money? Seems there’s a “save money” tab that identifies banks offering lower interest rates, utilities offering rebates, etc. Presumably, there’s some sort of kickback arrangement here.
• Kerpoof: Company hopes to change the way kids use computers. Goal is to be top destination site for kids. An active site as opposed to the more passive ones that exist today. CEO cites popularity of Neopets and Club Penguin. Kerpoof is browser-based, offering kids tools to create pictures, coloring-book pages and movies they can save and share with others. CEO claims movie tool actually teaches kids object-oriented programming. Movies are created by selecting pre-existing clips and audio tracks. Demo of a short film created last week by an 11-year-old girl.
• Judges panel:

  What was your favorite?

  Digital pioneer Esther Dyson likes Mint (interesting, since I believe she’s an investor in Wesabe).

  VC guru Guy Kawasaki likes Kerpoof. Also likes Xobni, but says he hopes it didn’t pay for the name because “that’s a dumb-ass name. If I were an investor and heard you paid money for that name I’d shoot you.”

  (Dyson and Kawasaki are setting a much more engaging tone today.)

  Arrington likes ‘em all. Asks Kerpoof CEO “is object-oriented programming really that easy?”

  Kerpoof CEO says yes.

  Dyson says no, not according to the true definition.

  Kawasaki says company is making a marketing mistake by even using the term.

  Dyson asks everyone for a two-word explanation of how they make money. Answers: Lead generation, advertising, then “pleasing the user,” which draws laughter all around.

  Someone asks how Kerpoof can compete with successful social-network-based sites like Club Penguin. Kawasaki says that as a father he would much rather have his kids using something like Kerpoof than consorting with 60-year-old pedophiles on kiddie social networks.

  Arrington notes that today’s judges panel is much harsher than yesterday’s. Follows up with question: “So which company sucks the most?” (Now that’s a great question. Too bad no one answers.)

  Dyson asks how Mint can track transactions from all companies, even small local ones. CEO says company has a massive, constantly updating database of merchants.

  (If there’s a TechCrunch40 2, it should have a permanent panel comprised of Kawasaki, Dyson, Arrington, Yossi Vardi and Ryan Block [the last two from yesterday's session]–a far more engaging and entertaining group of folks.)

• Jason Calacanis is back onstage, describing the voting process employed by a panel of judges (which will be done with poker chips).
• Cubic Telecom takes the stage. Discussing trials and tribulations of traveling internationally with cellphone, including roaming charges. Up comes a slide of CEO’s phone bill from two weeks in France: $14,000. Next is a screen of cubic’s MaxRoam service, which is launching today. Allows you to make every international call made on your mobile a local call. (First demo failure. No signal.) The company notes, nevertheless, that you can put as many numbers on the phone as you like.
• Yap is next. Company rep says “We speech-enable your mobile Web. … the product literally speaks for itself.” (Hardy, har, har.) Voice texting. Advertising. Keywords pull up text ads. Example: “We should get coffee” pulls up a location-specific Starbucks ad. (Presenter complaining about lack of connectivity in conference room.) Tech meltdown on stage, GSM trouble, audio trouble as well. Presenter desperately trying to demo some sort of Yap-twitter application. But: “server not found.” Moving on to the next demo …
• Ceedo is next. This is a lightweight virtualization platform, now introducing a new product: Ceedo mobile, a “self-contained device.” The application allows a user to put PC applications on a phone’s flash memory. The user can then connect phone to any PC and use it to launch a localized version of that user’s original PC. These standard PC applications are stored on phone and launched virtually. The demonstration begins with a launch of Picasa from phone. Picasa brings up users’ pictures and Picasa editing tools, etc. Then, pulls up blogger, exports Picasa photos to blogger application and creates blog post. If I understand it correctly, Ceedo acts as an interface between phone user and Web. Why anyone needs such an interface is beyond me. (Presumably, that’s why there’s no mention of business model.)
• Yap is back onstage after the earlier tech meltdown. In a nutshell, we’re told, Yap is “making text messaging while driving safer” with speech-to-text-messaging application for mobile devices. Well, this is odd. … Yap, apparently in a nod to Britney Spears, is lip-syncing the presentation. The whole thing was prerecorded. Presenters are ad-libbing, uncomfortably, over the audio track.
• LoudTalks, the next presenter takes the stage. (Hails from Russia, and with no company logo on the screen behind presenter, I have no idea what company he represents.) Ah, here it is: LoudTalks. Internet walkie-talkie. (Hmmm. Looks like we’re about to see another demo drown onstage. Volume control issues. Demoed conversation is unintelligible; perhaps a better name for the company would be “SoftTalks.”) The Internet’s walkie-talkie is apparently having talkie issues. (Speaking of Internet walkie-talkies, isn’t that what most audio chat applications are these days?) Calacanis to the rescue! He takes the stage, somehow resolves the volume issue. (Q: “How’s the weather in St. Petersburg?” A: (from LoudTalks rep in Russia) “Very cold.”
• TruTap now on. “Our inspiration as a company is to bring the social life of young people to one, free, universal, mobile service.” Begin demoing UI: Web 2.0 design cliche. Application offers blogging, IM, messaging, contacts, social networks, broadcast messaging (one-to-many, a la Twitter) all in a single interface. User can log onto a variety of IM clients and social networks simultaneously. The beta version is available on AT&T. (My god … Trutap developers take stage and perform Boys-II-Men-style jingle. What a multitalented bunch (and apparently quite at home with public humiliation.)
• Judges panel. Judges take stage after Calacanis remarks on the kindness and restraint they’ve shown in their assessments so far. Implores them to be more critical. Pull no punches. That shouldn’t be difficult, given the quality of the presentations we’ve seen so far. That said, many of the judges seem to have a penchant for speaking too far from the mike, so it’s impossible to tell if any of them are following through. Guess we’ll have to watch presenter expressions to see if there are any hurt feelings.
• The surprisingly audible Marc Andreessen asks the same distribution question he asked of the last group of presenters.
• Inaudible Om Malik question met with unintelligible answer from Ceedo guy.
• Calacanis asks Wired’s Chris Anderson if he’s seen a company yet that he’d profile in Wired. Judging from Anderson’s evasive redirection of a reply, the answer seems to be no.
• Engadget’s Ryan Block notes that Yap’s application is dependent on connection to the cloud. essentially useless without it and at this point in time at least, there are lots of folks who aren’t connected to the cloud. Yap rep ducks question with the standard “That’s something we’re already aware of and working on a solution to address.”
• Calacanis asking Om which company wll be here five years from now as
  an independent company, Andreessen which is most likely to get angel funding. Andreessen says he’d use Ceedo, but isn’t sure about business model, noting that presenters have a tough road ahead of them if they don’t have distribution from major carriers. Om says TruTap is most likely to be bought, and Cubic most likely to be around five years from now. Quite the endorsements, given palpable lack of excitement with which he delivers them.
]]> http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070917/next-up-at-techcrunch40-mobile-and-communications/feed/ 2 http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070917/techcrunch/ http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070917/techcrunch/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:00:40 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070917/techcrunch/ Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski is live-blogging TechCrunch40, a two-day conference in San Francisco highlighting what its organizers consider “40 of the hottest new start-ups” from around the globe. Additionally, another hundred or so companies are demoing their products, some of which he’ll feature here.

OK. After a registration foul-up (don’t you know who I am?!!!!!!!), and innumerable technical difficulties (I am, indeed, writing this on my iPhone, and I’m beginning to realize that Steve Jobs may not have been exaggerating when he said that after a few weeks of typing on this virtual keyboard, “you’ll be flying.”) I am finally up and running.

(Eric Savitz of Tech Trader Daily got in a good post on the five search-and-discovery demos that started the conference in earnest this morning, along with comments from the panel of judges.)

Given these early difficulties, I have no detailed posts on the first round of presentations, just some general observations:

• Big focus on video from first presenter.
• All presenters seem to suffer from the same Web 2.0 Tourette’s Syndrome, uncontrollably spouting Web 2.0 jargon: Ajax, long tail, etc.
• Note: if a drinking game existed that required participants to take a drink every time a presenter used a boom 2.0 cliche, I’d have alcohol poisoning by now.
• Conference co-sponsor Jason Calacanis just told everyone with iPhones to turn their Wi-Fi feature off because the devices are “crashing our Wi-Fi network.” How frigging Web 2.0 is that?
• Judges panel: Seated next to Marc Andreessen, Engadget’s Ryan Block
  looks like a Mini-me version of the Netscape founder.
• Yahoo presents a new service, not yet available. Long-winded intro. Conference organizers should have forced “big presenters” to adhere to the same eight-minute pitch rule.
• It’s called Yahoo for Teachers. Online lesson plans. Social networking for social good. (Wonder how long it took Yahoo PR to come up with that one?) Bit of a yawner, this one.
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