The next billion

The above image is from the reddit discussion "After seeing a recent post about the population of Indonesia, this occurred to me" and is a powerful illustration of where the next billion people coming online will reside.

With much of the western world already online, over 80% according to the The World Bank, the next billion will come from other geographies centered on people dense areas in South East Asia due to scale and cost of connectivity.

This will have great implications on online product and services going ahead both in terms of user behavior and product monetization, with a heavy slant towards mobile and new types of payment solutions.

Three Recommended Links #3RL

• Map: More than half of humanity lives within this circle - A break numbers down of the countries with in the circle by Caitlin Dewey at the Washington Post.

• Closing Keynote Interview with Clay Shirky - FORA.tv - A very insightful talk at Quartz - The Next Billion Forum by New York University Professor Clay Shirky who shares his thoughts on several aspects of changes with these next billion users.

• Dave McClure: The Gospel of a Lean VC [Entire Talk] - YouTube - Venture Capitalist Dave McClure at 500 Startups talks about the new opportunity with the next billion online users with in different language groupings at Stanford University Entrepreneurship Corner.

Image by reddit user valeriepieris

The PayPal Mafia

Much of the first generation of Internet businesses blew up in the Dot-com bubble back in early two thousands, while there were much crticism in mass media, a few books like eBoys by Randall Stross has given some interesting accounts of events leading up to the bubble bursting.

Even though the fall out of the Dot-com bubble was pretty nasty, a handfull of companies did survive to become multi billion businesses, one of them was PayPal which back in 2002 became a part of eBay.

Even more impressive is how a handfull of the (many) founders of PayPal went on start even more amazing companies within the technology space, to such an extent that the term PayPal Mafia was coined, with several parallels to the Fairchildren who seeded much of the semi-conductor revolution in Silicon Valley.

Three Recommended Links #3RL

• The PayPal Mafia - A great article in Fortune from 2007 with one of the first mentions of The PayPal Mafia and how the group of PayPal founders was doing five years after the eBay acquisition.

• PandoDaily Presents PandoMonthly - A series of interviews led by Sarah Lacy with three of the most visible founders with in the group; Reid Hoffman who went on to start LinkedIn, Elon Musk founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, Peter Thiel who is now a venture capitalist and was the first outside investor in Facebook.

• PandoMaps: An interactive map of the PayPal Mafia | PandoDaily - An interesting interactive map of the relationships within and outside of the group.

Image by flickr user sacks08 under CC BY 2.0

The value of mobile

The age old question of "Feature, Product, Company" is more complex on mobile then on the desktop, on desktop platforms product were usually a suite of feature, but on mobile a feature can be a product with the home screen or launcher being the suite that contains the features.

This wave of atomization of products to features is clear in term of the current number of apps on iOS and Android, both hitting over the one millon mark a while back.

This perspective gives a starting point for how to determinate where the value of mobile lies, for now it seems that the value does not reside in the networks that dominanted on the desktop where your identity and attention was tied to you online logon, as with the case of Facebook Login, instead your identity and attention seems centera round either the device or portable open identifier like phone number.

Three Recommended Links #3RL

• Facebook plans suite of standalone mobile apps for 2014 | The Verge - Reports from earlier in 2014 with Facebook trying a new approach to the mobile in a more atomized matter by Ellis Hamburger.

• Messaging: Mobile's Killer App | stratēchery by Ben Thompson - The day before the Facebook and WhatsApp deal, writer Ben Thompson argues that the value of mobile could lie with in the mobile messaging platforms that innovating fast and gaining ground quickly.

• Whatsapp and $19bn — Benedict Evans - On the day of the Facebook and WhatsApp deal Benedict Evans, an analyst with VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, makes a great argument for why the value of mobile resides in the device platforms.

Image by flickr user GBPublic_PR under CC BY-NC 2.0

Monetization of mobile

The dust is settling from the Facebook and WhatsApp deal and the massive price tag has sunk in somewhat, still there are a lot of questions on how Facebook will get a return on the $19 billion acquisition.

In desktop computing environments the online advertising modell has been very successful in terms of monetization. But for mobile computing the limitations of hardware and connectivity creates a different set of cognitive limitations that influences the monetization opportunities thru ads.

Three Recommended Links #3RL

• Alibaba: The First Real Test for Amazon’s Business Model - Harvard Business Review - A thorough three part analysis of monetization for Internet businesses by Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere.

• Mobile Advertising: The $20B Opportunity Mirage | Monday Note - Looking at the mobile advertising opportunity from a user perspective, a very insightful post by former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée.

• The freemium model rules for consumer apps. But alternatives will emerge — Gigaom Research - Colin Gibbs of Gigaom Research shines some light on how the preferred way of monetization on mobile, using the freemium model, will have some challenges a head for the billions of mobile computing users in emerging markets.

Image by flickr user Tsahi Levent-Levi under CC BY 2.0

Innovation lives everywhere

There are many misconceptions about innovation in general and few have studied the subject in-depth as professor Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School. In Christense’s research he makes a difference between sustaining and disruptive innovation with the latter being what many people consider innovations per se.

Further more there is the common misperception that manufacturing, many times done in South East Asia, is nothing more then basic assembly lines with little value and even less room for innovation, something that even Steve Jobs disagrees with in the Isaacson book.

With sustaining innovation well on the way in manufacturing economies, mainly in China and South America, we are seeing more innovations when it comes to their respective services industries.

Three Recommended Links #3RL

• Where Innovation Lives - O'Reilly Radar - A great podcast on topics of innovation within the global manufacturing industry and how innovation at scale influences those economies.

• 5 ways China's WeChat is more innovative than you think - An interesting sustaining innovation perspective on Chinese consumer Internet services giant WeChat by Josh Horwitz.

• It's Official: China Is Becoming an R&D Machine - Tea Leaf Nation - A brief summary of a NSB report by Truman National Security Project fellow David Wertime covering how political and global dynamics is shaping the futures of innovation in China.

Image by flickr user Prachatai under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Facebook and WhatsApp

On February 19th Facebook announce that they will acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion, making the deal the largest acquisition ever for venture-backed company, the deal sure raised some eyebrows.

Given that Facebook's business is mainly selling ads towards its users, there was an initial worry that user data from WhatsApp would be offered to Facebook partners, but the messaging from the WhatsApp team has been clear; that it would not happen (for the time being at least).

Given the strong position the WhatsApp founder has taken against having ads and collecting user data for monetization, some early tries of other interesting means of monetization has been tested by WhatsApp and their partners.

Three Recommended Links #3RL

• WhatsApp: The inside story (Wired UK) - The Founder Story told by David Rowan, gives an interesting insight into the founder duo of WhatsApp.

• WhatsApp’s anti-ad philosophy is really a broad new vision for mobile – Quartz - A look at the apparent contradiction between the business models of WhatsApp and Facebook, and perhaps a new way to fund basic services on mobile going forward, by Zach Seward.

• WhatsApp - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Even though the founder story of WhatsApp focus on privacy and security, this Wikipedia article gives an pretty detailed account about the companies spotty track record.

Video by Bloomberg

Social trends to private

With the latest financial reports in from Twitter and LinkedIn, there are signs reiterating the trend that the more public leaning “one to many” social networks are more hitting a slow down in terms of growth.

Much of the growth in the consumer Internet industry right now is towards the more private "one to one” or "one to few” types of services with much of the user growth and product innovation occurring in South East Asia with services like WeChat, LINE and Kakao Talk.

In some cases we are also seeing expressions of private in terms of ephemeral services like Snapchat or even anonymous services like Secret.

There are several dynamics at play here (mobile, fatigue of publicness to mention a few) which really opens up for opportunity to innovate for the next billion of Internet users.

Three Recommended Links #3RL

• Messaging App War: WeChat and Line are Leaving KakaoTalk Behind - A great summary of the top 3 messaging service with roots in South East Asia by Enricko Lukman.

• Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps - NYTimes.com - Nick Bilton of the New York Times Bits Blog takes a look at a group of new more private oriented social services.

• Do Millennials Believe in Data Security? - Harvard Business Review - Data from a great survey on attitudes towards privacy and security among users with focus on millennials by Sarah Green.

Image by Flickr user Amnesty International UK under CC BY 2.0

Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella

On February 4th Microsoft announced that Satya Nadella would take over the role of CEO at Microsoft.

Much of the attention these days is focused on the consumer technologies companies and especially on the four horsemen Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Yet Microsoft still has an important role in both enterprise (Office and Windows) and computing infrastructure (Azure and Server products).

It will be very interesting to see what Satya Nadella has planed for the tech giant, given that he seems to have a non Windows centric view of the world considering his previous work with the Azure services for mobile.

Three Recommened Links #3RL

• Windows Weekly 348 | TWiT.TV - From the "Microsoft camp" writers Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott.

• Ken Turns Effect - The Talk Show - Mule Radio Syndicate - From the "Apple camp" writers John Gruber and MG Siegler.

• Vector 29: Microsoft's new CEO and Lenovo's new Moto | iMore - An interview with technology industry analyst Ben Thompson.

Image by flickr user Pierre Lecourt under CC BY-SA 2.0 license

Ghost vs Squarespace

As with most endeavors, an initial phase of researching the tools needed for the task is an excellent opportunity to dig into some interesting products and technologies. Finding a simple yet suitable platform for writing is no easy feat these days.

First platform that came to mind was Wordpress, I've used it for several projects in the past and it has massive user and hosting adoption. Though I quickly realized that Wordpress has grown far beyond my needs, it is not just a platform for writing but a full CMS now days, one might say it has become the Microsoft Office of online publishing. :)

After some additional research two services ended up on my short list; Ghost and Squarespace.

Ghost - Highlights

• FLOSS project on Kickstarter started by former Wordpress developers
• Excellent Markdown editor with preview
• Great collection of themes

Squarespace - Highlights

• Solid company and platform 10 years in the making
• Amazing tools for customization of themes
• Great mobile apps

I decided to go with Squarespace for now, though I really like the super elegant Markdown editor on Ghost, too bad it lack simple Google Analytics support.

Image by Flickr user Huasonic under CC BY-NC 2.0 license

Welcome

With close to 40.000 tweets on Twitter over the past few years, most of them being curated links that I've shared, I began to think about what an additional formats I could make use of for my content curation online.

Going forward I intend to post interesting links, comments and insights on topics relating digital strategies, analysis and trends.

I hope that you will enjoy my posts! :)

Image by flickr user ☻☺ under CC BY-SA 2.0 license