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News & Updates - Thursday, February 8, 2007

Web 2.0 Where Is It Going?

We are attending an event today about Web 2.0 with VCs Peter Rip at Crosslink and Intel's Rob Rueckert; start-up front-men Hans Peter Brondmo (Plum) and Alexa Bard (Goowy) and DEMO conference organizer Chris Shipley.

+ We got a taste of the pain that the Web 2.0 mavens must go through constantly trying to define Web 2.0. The question of whether Netflix is a Web 2.0 company elicited a 15 minute discussion, for example. The agree upon definition is that Web 2.0 is defined as an improvement over Web 1.0, its low cost to build, and its about user generated content.

+ Intel's Rueckert says that he is very interested in Enterprise Web 2.0 and says that in conversations with Fortune 500 companies, they are most interested in new collaboration tools. But of course the CTOs are nervous about losing control so progress is slow. Still he says Intel folks use several blog tools, wiki tools, etc.

+ Peter Rip says he is most interest in semantic Web companies.

+ The VCs agree that they are not interested in investing in startups that are dabbling. They want to invest when a startup has a growing audience and needs the capital to grow and maintain it.

+ When asked what is their business model, Alex Bard gave an nice honest answer to the affect that he could have 4 income streams but its largely irrelevant until he can gather a large loyal audience. Our other startup exec agreed.

+ Given an early struggle with revenues, everyone agreed that audience metrics and feedback where the key to business. Peter Rip says that the CEO of his portfolio company Riya send out a daily email with an update on audience metrics.

+ Plum's CEO said that he thinks it can be important to be opportunistic with revenues. He took a six figure check recently even though he said it would divert resources from where they wanted to be. It gives them more resources to tack back and forth to ultimately reach their destination.

+ Of all the folks on the panel, Chris Shipley had the best idea. She was headed for a 2 week vacation on some islands off the coast of India where there would be no Internet.

VC Peter Rip Recommended that startups not raise VC funding unless they have to. This is why.

View - Peter Rip Blog
View - Plum blog
View - Goowy Media blog
View - Guidewire Group