My third annual technology trends piece is up at VentureBeat...
Tech trends for 2010 — a Netscape moment coming up
When I made my tech trend predictions for 2009, we were in the middle of an economic meltdown. This year, I’m less focused on the recession and — thanks to my one-year old twin girls — am wading my way through a flood of information on baby products, toys and books. My mind has wandered between thoughts of Bugaboos and Ooyalas, Leapfrog and Playfish, or Seuss and Seesmic. Still, here are my tech trends for 2010.
Online Shopping Clubs Will Mature
Online shopping clubs aren’t anything new, but these post-bubble incarnations are. Leaders in this segment tend to hold “flash” sales (limited-time sales) and restrict sales to members only. Luxury goods lead this space with France’s Vente-Privee hitting $966 million in revenues this year and U.S’s Gilt Groupe earning almost $150 million in revenues in 2009. By 2010, within four years since launching in the U.S., the companies in this space will have achieved over $2 billion in worldwide sales. Talk about hockey stick growth!
This same model has transferred to other categories, with many luxury players launching travel offerings under their banners. There are also more narrowly focused sites launching, such as Totsy for moms and One Kings Lane for home décor. Woot in the U.S. and One A Day in Korea are flash sale sites that sell only one item everyday. One A Day hit $13 million this year and projects $28 million in sales for 2010 under this simplified model.
Much of this tremendous growth has been driven by the steep discounts all these sites have provided through access to excess inventory. There are concerns this category might see some trouble once the economy picks up and retailers begin rightsizing their inventory. But I believe it is here to stay because — similar to how Zynga and Playfish brought lazy interactivity to the online casual gaming space — these new e-tailers are pushing products and brand relationships to the lazy shopper. It won’t be just about discounted goods, since players like Gilt are already pushing exclusive, in-season goods. So I predict that 2010 will be a breakout year for this ecommerce category and it will move far beyond discounted luxury goods.
Gaming Will Advance Beyond PCs and Consoles
2009 was a great year for online gaming, with Zynga, Playfish, and others leading the charge and showing the power of Facebook and the social networking ecosystem’s distribution power. The next stage of online gaming will be led by more powerful gaming platforms and engines for mobile and the browser... (full article)
UPDATE: VentureBeat has a syndication partnership with the New York Times, so they select some articles everyday to republish in their Technology section and they picked my op-ed today.
Showing posts with label technology trends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology trends. Show all posts
Monday, December 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Is your product a “must have” or “nice to have”?
My tech op-ed is up at VentureBeat. Check it out:
IS YOUR PRODUCT A "MUST HAVE" OR "NICE TO HAVE"?
I also posted the version that was unedited by VentureBeat's editors at NowPublic. This original piece is chopped into two articles at VentureBeat with the second being published next week. This one is longer and I don't think they appreciated my reference to "Something About Mary" :)
IS YOUR STARTUP A "NICE TO HAVE" OR "MUST HAVE"?
With the downturn in the economy, numerous people are talking about starting a new business or company. Whether it’s a technology startup or new restaurant idea, I’ve heard of more and more people meeting to brainstorm and working to bring their ideas to fruition.
Whether you’re in the idea generation stage or have already started to build your new thing, you should take a breath and reassess whether the concept still holds your initial level of enthusiasm. Can still envision 30 million visits during the first month? Are you still as enthusiastic as you were when you came up with it? Do you believe your product or service is a “must have” and not just a “nice to have”? If not, step back – being a successful entrepreneur requires high – some say insane – levels of dedication to your idea.
There’s a great scene in the movie “Something About Mary” where Ben Stiller’s character, Ted, picks up a hitchhiker who is a psychotic killer and budding entrepreneur:
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7. Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Comedy aside, how familiar does this pitch sound to all you entrepreneurs or intrepreneurs out there? The reality is that the hitchhiker’s idea was a “nice to have” and wouldn’t have threatened the well-marketed 8-minute Abs video even with his insane level of dedication. Of course, he’s not similar to your pitch about your product, but does it remind you of your friends’ new thing? They all hope to have the next awesome product that will change the world, or at least get crazy traffic on Facebook. The driver of sales or user adoption? It should be as obvious as a 7 minute workout being more attractive than an 8 minute workout, right?
Most entrepreneurs are too close to their topic to realize where they really are on the user adoption curve. As an entrepreneur, you’re hoping that the jump from what Geoffrey Moore describes as “innovators” and “early adopters” to the “early majority” is short, but unfortunately, in reality, sales and user adoption rates are about as easy to predict as blockbuster movies.
Must Have, Meh, or What Does It Do Again?
For entrepreneurs, one method to frame the product development process is whether your product is a “nice to have” or a “must have.” Here, “must have” is loosely defined and can be identified by answering questions like:
• Is it easy for people to recognize that your product will save them a significant amount of time?
• Or a significant amount of money?
• Do people quickly see how much better it plays their music?
• How much better it allows them to access data?
For example, back in 2005, when I was working on my startup GoingOn Networks, we identified a trend of blogging and social networking entering the corporate world. We built a private-label social media platform, thinking that companies would soon recognize this trend and purchase our software-as-service platform.
In hindsight, the first two years were painful. A long education process, working on quelling fears of “opening up” to customers, and another long sales cycle. We were hoping our market chasm would be the neighborhood creek, but we found out it was more like the Grand Canyon. Plus, by 2007, about thirty competitors were also targeting this market. I realized that our social media platform wasn’t a “must have” and maybe not even a “nice to have” during our early years because our target market first needed to be greatly educated on the benefits of social media. It felt as if more often than not, sales meetings went like this:
Me: “Open, two-way communication with your customers is more effective…”
Potential customer: “Like a walkie-talkie?”
Me: [Sigh]
For consumer plays where users don’t pay for the product, the “must have” bar might be set a bit lower than for paid products, but it’s still a significant hurdle for the early majority to spend their time (even if it doesn’t cost money) on something new of which the benefits aren’t obvious, easy, or quick to grasp.
So how do you figure out whether your insanely great idea is likely to find customers and become a “must have”? When you’re trying to identify “must haves” in the market, consider these techniques:
Trend Surfing. Extrapolate a current technology, trend, or “must have.” What is the next product in the evolution of an industry? Consider the evolution from the Walkman to MP3 players to the iPod. Or look at what emerging technologies will create new market opportunities. For example, Qualcomm and its CDMA technology. Or exercise trends that created a whole new market of Pilates videos and trainers. My personal favorite is the rise in popularity of specialty bacon, where I can also plug my “Ode to Bacon.”
There are numerous examples, but the reality is that it’s difficult to predict and ride such trends. I learned this from GoingOn, and my prior startup, HeyAnita, when voice recognition technology was hot. With competitors such as Tellme and BeVocal, our space raised over $300 million in 2000, but quickly faded a few years later when users didn’t widely adopt a voice-controlled interface.
Twitter seems to have hit the right wave on the trend from blogging to micro-blogging. Initially, it was just an echo chamber of Silicon Valley people tweeting to each other, but now even major media outlets such as CNN, ABC, and ESPN see communicating in 140 characters as a “must have.” Like Twitter, if you do catch a trend wave, it swells, and you execute well, then you could be golden, with a profitable tech company or the best-selling line of Pilates videos on your hands.
Identifying a Market Gap. Where in the market is there an underserved need? Is there a place in the market that a taste is not being met? Chipotle filled a desire for fast casual Mexican food. Netflix let people easily rent obscure movies and keep them as long as they wanted without late fees. Meebo met the demand for a single, unified IM platform. What element is missing in a market – one that you know and are passionate about – that you believe you can fill as an entrepreneur?
For instance, back in the old days before the majority of malware came from websites and links to them, there was an opportunity for different kinds of anti-malware products. Brian Kellner, now Newsgator’s VP of Products, gave me some interesting insights into his days at anti-spyware company Webroot in the 1990s: “Webroot was one of the first two companies to release an enterprise anti-spyware product at a time when Internet Explorer had a lot of vulnerabilities and anti-virus companies didn’t catch spyware. The product was tremendously successful because it really hit the pain avoidance and laziness needs.”
But as much as Webroot tried to make deployment and management of the solution easy, when both anti-virus offerings and browser security got better, the cost of owning and running a dedicated anti-spyware solution became unattractive. “The pain level dropped significantly as anti-virus companies added adequate anti-spyware protection and it was much easier to just run the anti-virus software alone,” says Kellner.
So, for a while, Webroot was a “must have.” But when other, possibly bigger, companies start tapping into the Market Gap you found and have been filling, you need to find other ways to remain a “must have.” For example, by trying to extrapolate to the next logical “must have” in your market (Trend Surfing), or by making sure your product keeps something attractively unique about it, or is just clearly the best of its kind.
Building a Better Mousetrap. What product category is doing well, but could be done even better? Do you have an idea for something that will clearly be the best of its kind? IKEA did it for the budget-conscious furniture retail market. Zappos.com turned shoe shopping into a very convenient, easy, low-pressure experience. What features are missing that could be implemented and allow a new player to change the market? Friendster to MySpace and Facebook. MySpace and Facebook provided more value that simply connecting with friends through music and then third-party applications.
In speaking with Brian Rakowski, former lead product manager for Google’s Gmail product and current Product Management Director for its Chrome browser, he explained how he led the launches for these two products and how to make them better than any of the competitive products already out there: “Both Google Chrome and Gmail were new entrants in existing spaces so we spent a lot of time getting to know the market-leading products in their categories and identifying the biggest user pain points. For webmail, it was small storage quotas and clunky, inefficient interfaces. For browsers, it was general instability and unresponsiveness, especially on advanced webpages.” Google succeeded nicely with both of these, with Gmail surpassing Youtube earlier this year as the second-most-visited Google property and Chrome gaining just under 3% marketshare after one year. Rakowski concludes, “In the end, the best way to test whether you have a “must have” product is to threaten to take the prototype away from your early users. If they don’t riot, start again.”
Brian has a great insight here. Would users of Microsoft’s Vista have rioted if it had been taken away? No, there probably would have been celebrations throughout office buildings all over the world. What about Segway after all its hype? Maybe only mall cops would have grumbled.
Like the story of Webroot and anti-spyware becoming part of anti-virus solutions, the Building A Better Mousetrap category also brings up the importance of sustainability. How do you maintain being a “must have” in your market? During the 1990s, my favorite search engine was Alta Vista, but it didn’t maintain its “must have” status and gave way to Inktomi, which eventually gave way to Google. Google has been maintaining its “must have” status by not only staying on top of the search algorithm game, but also by offering superior or extremely competitive complementary products and services to its users: Adsense and Adwords for advertising, and nicely integrated apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs that make it easy to make Google your default online place to get things done. (Yet even Google has had its share of failures or incompletes such as Google Lively, Froogle, Checkout, and Spreadsheets.)
Finally, with all three of these techniques for identifying a potential “must have” opportunity – Trend Surfing, Identifying a Market Gap, and Building a Better Mousetrap – keep regularly asking yourself “is mine a “must have” product?” questions like the ones listed earlier. And of course make sure you’re still insanely excited about your own idea most days of the week – because if you’re not excited, it’ll be hard to make others think of your product as a can’t-live-without-it “must have.” But hopefully, these techniques and examples are giving you some extra inspiration on how to get to the next step in your new great idea.
IS YOUR PRODUCT A "MUST HAVE" OR "NICE TO HAVE"?
I also posted the version that was unedited by VentureBeat's editors at NowPublic. This original piece is chopped into two articles at VentureBeat with the second being published next week. This one is longer and I don't think they appreciated my reference to "Something About Mary" :)
IS YOUR STARTUP A "NICE TO HAVE" OR "MUST HAVE"?
With the downturn in the economy, numerous people are talking about starting a new business or company. Whether it’s a technology startup or new restaurant idea, I’ve heard of more and more people meeting to brainstorm and working to bring their ideas to fruition.
Whether you’re in the idea generation stage or have already started to build your new thing, you should take a breath and reassess whether the concept still holds your initial level of enthusiasm. Can still envision 30 million visits during the first month? Are you still as enthusiastic as you were when you came up with it? Do you believe your product or service is a “must have” and not just a “nice to have”? If not, step back – being a successful entrepreneur requires high – some say insane – levels of dedication to your idea.
There’s a great scene in the movie “Something About Mary” where Ben Stiller’s character, Ted, picks up a hitchhiker who is a psychotic killer and budding entrepreneur:
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the exercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7. Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Comedy aside, how familiar does this pitch sound to all you entrepreneurs or intrepreneurs out there? The reality is that the hitchhiker’s idea was a “nice to have” and wouldn’t have threatened the well-marketed 8-minute Abs video even with his insane level of dedication. Of course, he’s not similar to your pitch about your product, but does it remind you of your friends’ new thing? They all hope to have the next awesome product that will change the world, or at least get crazy traffic on Facebook. The driver of sales or user adoption? It should be as obvious as a 7 minute workout being more attractive than an 8 minute workout, right?
Most entrepreneurs are too close to their topic to realize where they really are on the user adoption curve. As an entrepreneur, you’re hoping that the jump from what Geoffrey Moore describes as “innovators” and “early adopters” to the “early majority” is short, but unfortunately, in reality, sales and user adoption rates are about as easy to predict as blockbuster movies.
Must Have, Meh, or What Does It Do Again?
For entrepreneurs, one method to frame the product development process is whether your product is a “nice to have” or a “must have.” Here, “must have” is loosely defined and can be identified by answering questions like:
• Is it easy for people to recognize that your product will save them a significant amount of time?
• Or a significant amount of money?
• Do people quickly see how much better it plays their music?
• How much better it allows them to access data?
For example, back in 2005, when I was working on my startup GoingOn Networks, we identified a trend of blogging and social networking entering the corporate world. We built a private-label social media platform, thinking that companies would soon recognize this trend and purchase our software-as-service platform.
In hindsight, the first two years were painful. A long education process, working on quelling fears of “opening up” to customers, and another long sales cycle. We were hoping our market chasm would be the neighborhood creek, but we found out it was more like the Grand Canyon. Plus, by 2007, about thirty competitors were also targeting this market. I realized that our social media platform wasn’t a “must have” and maybe not even a “nice to have” during our early years because our target market first needed to be greatly educated on the benefits of social media. It felt as if more often than not, sales meetings went like this:
Me: “Open, two-way communication with your customers is more effective…”
Potential customer: “Like a walkie-talkie?”
Me: [Sigh]
For consumer plays where users don’t pay for the product, the “must have” bar might be set a bit lower than for paid products, but it’s still a significant hurdle for the early majority to spend their time (even if it doesn’t cost money) on something new of which the benefits aren’t obvious, easy, or quick to grasp.
So how do you figure out whether your insanely great idea is likely to find customers and become a “must have”? When you’re trying to identify “must haves” in the market, consider these techniques:
Trend Surfing. Extrapolate a current technology, trend, or “must have.” What is the next product in the evolution of an industry? Consider the evolution from the Walkman to MP3 players to the iPod. Or look at what emerging technologies will create new market opportunities. For example, Qualcomm and its CDMA technology. Or exercise trends that created a whole new market of Pilates videos and trainers. My personal favorite is the rise in popularity of specialty bacon, where I can also plug my “Ode to Bacon.”
There are numerous examples, but the reality is that it’s difficult to predict and ride such trends. I learned this from GoingOn, and my prior startup, HeyAnita, when voice recognition technology was hot. With competitors such as Tellme and BeVocal, our space raised over $300 million in 2000, but quickly faded a few years later when users didn’t widely adopt a voice-controlled interface.
Twitter seems to have hit the right wave on the trend from blogging to micro-blogging. Initially, it was just an echo chamber of Silicon Valley people tweeting to each other, but now even major media outlets such as CNN, ABC, and ESPN see communicating in 140 characters as a “must have.” Like Twitter, if you do catch a trend wave, it swells, and you execute well, then you could be golden, with a profitable tech company or the best-selling line of Pilates videos on your hands.
Identifying a Market Gap. Where in the market is there an underserved need? Is there a place in the market that a taste is not being met? Chipotle filled a desire for fast casual Mexican food. Netflix let people easily rent obscure movies and keep them as long as they wanted without late fees. Meebo met the demand for a single, unified IM platform. What element is missing in a market – one that you know and are passionate about – that you believe you can fill as an entrepreneur?
For instance, back in the old days before the majority of malware came from websites and links to them, there was an opportunity for different kinds of anti-malware products. Brian Kellner, now Newsgator’s VP of Products, gave me some interesting insights into his days at anti-spyware company Webroot in the 1990s: “Webroot was one of the first two companies to release an enterprise anti-spyware product at a time when Internet Explorer had a lot of vulnerabilities and anti-virus companies didn’t catch spyware. The product was tremendously successful because it really hit the pain avoidance and laziness needs.”
But as much as Webroot tried to make deployment and management of the solution easy, when both anti-virus offerings and browser security got better, the cost of owning and running a dedicated anti-spyware solution became unattractive. “The pain level dropped significantly as anti-virus companies added adequate anti-spyware protection and it was much easier to just run the anti-virus software alone,” says Kellner.
So, for a while, Webroot was a “must have.” But when other, possibly bigger, companies start tapping into the Market Gap you found and have been filling, you need to find other ways to remain a “must have.” For example, by trying to extrapolate to the next logical “must have” in your market (Trend Surfing), or by making sure your product keeps something attractively unique about it, or is just clearly the best of its kind.
Building a Better Mousetrap. What product category is doing well, but could be done even better? Do you have an idea for something that will clearly be the best of its kind? IKEA did it for the budget-conscious furniture retail market. Zappos.com turned shoe shopping into a very convenient, easy, low-pressure experience. What features are missing that could be implemented and allow a new player to change the market? Friendster to MySpace and Facebook. MySpace and Facebook provided more value that simply connecting with friends through music and then third-party applications.
In speaking with Brian Rakowski, former lead product manager for Google’s Gmail product and current Product Management Director for its Chrome browser, he explained how he led the launches for these two products and how to make them better than any of the competitive products already out there: “Both Google Chrome and Gmail were new entrants in existing spaces so we spent a lot of time getting to know the market-leading products in their categories and identifying the biggest user pain points. For webmail, it was small storage quotas and clunky, inefficient interfaces. For browsers, it was general instability and unresponsiveness, especially on advanced webpages.” Google succeeded nicely with both of these, with Gmail surpassing Youtube earlier this year as the second-most-visited Google property and Chrome gaining just under 3% marketshare after one year. Rakowski concludes, “In the end, the best way to test whether you have a “must have” product is to threaten to take the prototype away from your early users. If they don’t riot, start again.”
Brian has a great insight here. Would users of Microsoft’s Vista have rioted if it had been taken away? No, there probably would have been celebrations throughout office buildings all over the world. What about Segway after all its hype? Maybe only mall cops would have grumbled.
Like the story of Webroot and anti-spyware becoming part of anti-virus solutions, the Building A Better Mousetrap category also brings up the importance of sustainability. How do you maintain being a “must have” in your market? During the 1990s, my favorite search engine was Alta Vista, but it didn’t maintain its “must have” status and gave way to Inktomi, which eventually gave way to Google. Google has been maintaining its “must have” status by not only staying on top of the search algorithm game, but also by offering superior or extremely competitive complementary products and services to its users: Adsense and Adwords for advertising, and nicely integrated apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs that make it easy to make Google your default online place to get things done. (Yet even Google has had its share of failures or incompletes such as Google Lively, Froogle, Checkout, and Spreadsheets.)
Finally, with all three of these techniques for identifying a potential “must have” opportunity – Trend Surfing, Identifying a Market Gap, and Building a Better Mousetrap – keep regularly asking yourself “is mine a “must have” product?” questions like the ones listed earlier. And of course make sure you’re still insanely excited about your own idea most days of the week – because if you’re not excited, it’ll be hard to make others think of your product as a can’t-live-without-it “must have.” But hopefully, these techniques and examples are giving you some extra inspiration on how to get to the next step in your new great idea.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Did You Know 4.0
HatTip to Dan W. Updated video on how "a surge of new technologies and social media innovations is altering the media landscape." It's also amazing to think that a majority of this driven by a small area in our world called Silicon Valley.
Love the prior version...
Love the prior version...
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
"Lessons from Asia for Tech Sector" by Benjamin Joffe
HatTip to Patrick P. Didn't know that Benjamin Joffe, who co-organizes the Open Web Asia Conference with me, put up these slides. Pretty cool, Benjamin.
Lessons from Asia for Tech Sector -
Mark Suster, who blogs at Both Sides of the Table, has his take aways here:
1. Wacky, weird and low cost: Before diving into what I learned in the deck I want to share something crazy. Motorola gave us in the US the RAZR (before they stopped innovating). But China literally gave us the Cell Razor. Benjamin brought in a cell phone where the bottom pulls out and you have an electric razor. No joke.
2. Film innovation – If Benjamin’s analysis is right – even many of our most successful films have been adaptations from Asian films. I knew some were but the scope was surprising. Especially Star Wars & The Matrix.
3. Internet users in US – 225 million, mobile 260MM. China Internet: 340MM, Mobile a staggering 650MM. Don’t bet that China won’t innovate in mobile. (slide 29)
4. 70% of Korean population has Internet speeds > 5mbps (and avg = 15 mbps) – don’t bet that the Koreans won’t innovate on online content (slide 30). Larger online game market ($1 billion) than Japan despite 1/3 population and 1/2 GDP per capital (slide 99). Way ahead of the US on mobile gifting.
5. More than 90% of Japanese mobile subscribers are on 3G networks (vs. 20% in the US) (slide 30), More than 50% have mobile TV & NFC chipsets (slide 87). Mobile ARPU = a staggering $110 / month for content and commerce alone (slide 88). Massive fall-off in ringtone and massive uptick in full songs (slide 89) —> still think we shouldn’t be watching what’s happening in Asia? Sales of avatars in social games nearly 50% of total revenue eclipsing revenue from affiliate transaction, ads or paid games (slide 97). Mobile game content revenue > PC game revenue (slide 98)
6. China’s leading social network (Tencent, who’s product is QQ) already does more than $1 billion in revenue. That’s 2x Facebook estimates. Tencent market cap on public market is $21 billion, Facebook’s is a theoretical $3-15bn (slide 52). China is innovating in many of the categories that the US is trying to solve now including mobile couponing, vertical social networks, Internet TV, etc.
7. Free-to-play gaming with micro transactions has become huge in Asia with very nice profit margins. EA and others in the US are copying this success (slide 71)
Lessons from Asia for Tech Sector -
Mark Suster, who blogs at Both Sides of the Table, has his take aways here:
1. Wacky, weird and low cost: Before diving into what I learned in the deck I want to share something crazy. Motorola gave us in the US the RAZR (before they stopped innovating). But China literally gave us the Cell Razor. Benjamin brought in a cell phone where the bottom pulls out and you have an electric razor. No joke.
2. Film innovation – If Benjamin’s analysis is right – even many of our most successful films have been adaptations from Asian films. I knew some were but the scope was surprising. Especially Star Wars & The Matrix.
3. Internet users in US – 225 million, mobile 260MM. China Internet: 340MM, Mobile a staggering 650MM. Don’t bet that China won’t innovate in mobile. (slide 29)
4. 70% of Korean population has Internet speeds > 5mbps (and avg = 15 mbps) – don’t bet that the Koreans won’t innovate on online content (slide 30). Larger online game market ($1 billion) than Japan despite 1/3 population and 1/2 GDP per capital (slide 99). Way ahead of the US on mobile gifting.
5. More than 90% of Japanese mobile subscribers are on 3G networks (vs. 20% in the US) (slide 30), More than 50% have mobile TV & NFC chipsets (slide 87). Mobile ARPU = a staggering $110 / month for content and commerce alone (slide 88). Massive fall-off in ringtone and massive uptick in full songs (slide 89) —> still think we shouldn’t be watching what’s happening in Asia? Sales of avatars in social games nearly 50% of total revenue eclipsing revenue from affiliate transaction, ads or paid games (slide 97). Mobile game content revenue > PC game revenue (slide 98)
6. China’s leading social network (Tencent, who’s product is QQ) already does more than $1 billion in revenue. That’s 2x Facebook estimates. Tencent market cap on public market is $21 billion, Facebook’s is a theoretical $3-15bn (slide 52). China is innovating in many of the categories that the US is trying to solve now including mobile couponing, vertical social networks, Internet TV, etc.
7. Free-to-play gaming with micro transactions has become huge in Asia with very nice profit margins. EA and others in the US are copying this success (slide 71)
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Wired Seoul, The World's Most Networked City
Time magazine has a good piece on Seoul, the world's most wired city. I lived in Seoul from 2000 to 2004 where I really learned that most behaviors related to technology usage are not culturally bound but dependent on the availability and ubiquity of technology. Some of my thoughts are in an old piece, "Where Technology Is Ubiquitous, Opportunity Abounds."
"Seoul: World's Most Wired Megacity Gets More So" TIME
"Wired Seoul" (photo essay)
The systems ensure that the city's 20 million residents live within one giant hot spot, where wireless access is available from almost anywhere for a small fee.
"Seoul: World's Most Wired Megacity Gets More So" TIME
"Wired Seoul" (photo essay)
The systems ensure that the city's 20 million residents live within one giant hot spot, where wireless access is available from almost anywhere for a small fee.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Tech Trends for 2009 — This Time Global
Last year, I limited my predictions to the U.S. market. But the global economic meltdown has made the world flatter — and landed our nation flat broke. So to keep things interesting, I’ll extend my prognostication across borders.
I was playing with the idea of titling this column “Top Ten Tech Bailouts for 2009″ or “DeathCrunch: 2009,” but thought it best to keep our VentureBeat readers in high spirits (what with the holiday cheer and all). So without further ado, here are my top global trends to watch for the new year:
PC and online gaming continue healthy growth
There is no better indicator of this than World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King’s first-day sale of 2.8 million copies in mid-November. At $40 each, this accounts for $112 million, an astounding figure. I imagine the folks at Blizzard Entertainment had a pretty nice holiday party — drinking eggnog and munching on gingerbread cookies, macaroons and Turkish Delight to their hearts’ content…
And it’s not just the geeks keeping this segment of the market afloat either. Remember Swingers? Solid proof that cool, hip, unemployed men (and there will be many more of them) tend to play a lot of games.
But does this mean that all video game companies are recession-proof? Will that many more people opt for lazy, relatively inexpensive entertainment over going out? Not really. The NPD Group, a leading consumer market research firm, recently issued a report showing a dip in the overall video game market. October saw an 18 percent increase over sales from last year, but November’s sales were only up 10 percent. So the downturn is in fact taking a toll.
Console sales — which made up $9.4 billion of the $18.9 billion gaming industry in 2007 (according to the Entertainment Software Association) — will take a major hit. How many people will be willing to drop a few hundred bucks on a console? Plus $50 more for a game easily finished in a few days or weeks? That’s a lot to ask in the current environment. Even perennial favorites like Rock Band and Wii Fit will probably trend down due to expensive accessories.
PC and online gaming account for only 9.5 percent of total gaming sales ($9.5 billion). But the segment has the strongest prospects for growth. MMORPGs (massively-multiplayer online role-playing games) and others with multi-dimensional interaction options provide continuous character development, storylines and gameplay that bring you into contact with likeminded others. This gives them longevity and makes them worthier of that initial investment.
Video game makers should take note: Titles that deliver more value over a longer period of time will bring in more money during tough times — and that’s exactly what PC and online games do.
Surface computing slowly breaks into the mainstream
Traditional mouse and keyboard setups will start to be replaced by touch-sensitive screens that allow users to control functions with their fingertips. Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart PC is just the beginning.
I’m far from becoming a Microsoft fan, but Microsoft Surface is an important step forward for this technology, which will only become more pervasive in the next year. And Microsoft isn’t the only player in the game. As a TEDster, I have to plug Jeff Han’s multi-touch interface (see video below). All the while, Innotive, a company I advised, offers very cool interactive display technology.
The novelty of surface computing has led Microsoft into partnerships with Sheraton Hotels, Disney and Harrah’s Casino Hotels. These resorts have installed touch screens in their lobbies to provide local information and media tailored to their customers’ needs. The technology may only be mindly entertaining for now, but it provides substantial practical value. With the ubiquity of the iPhone, multi-touch screens are becoming increasingly intuitive, and already feel more natural than typing on a keypad in some settings. Say, for example, you are presented with a multi-touch screen as a menu in a restaurant — one click with your finger orders your meal.
But there’s even more potential in the boardroom with smart white boards becoming a reality. Imagine all the graphic facilitation geeks in your office suddenly gaining the ability to map out their ideas with just their hands? Joyous pandemonium! Dry-erase marker bonfires amid hearty rounds of Kumbaya! (At least that’s how I picture it.)
Shift from offline to online ad spend picks up speed
Advertising goliath GroupM projects that global ad spend will decrease by 0.2 percent to $458 billion in 2009 — dropping 3.2 percent to $157 billion in the U.S. alone. But I think online ad spend is a different story, and should see slow but steady growth. After all, eMarketer forecasts an 8.8 percent increase in online ad spend from $23.6 to $25.7 billion in 2009, and a 10.8 percent increase in 2010.
What will drive this growth? In short, more advertisers waking up to smell the recession. Newspapers make up only 5 percent of Americans’ media diet, yet they consume 30 percent of ad dollars. A report from Morgan Stanley last month revealed that, last year, advertisers spent $288 per home on internet advertising and $818 per home on newspaper ads. There’s something wrong with that picture when “death spiral” is the phrase usually ascribed to the state of print journalism. And more brands are starting to realize it — newspaper advertising has dropped 18 percent (about $2 billion) from this quarter last year.
Innovation increasingly imported from Asia
I appreciate Fareed Zakaria’s vision of a post-American world, but if we’re talking about 2009, I’d narrow it down to just Asia. Already, China and India produce five times as many engineers as the U.S., and it’s predicted that 90 percent of all engineers will hail from Asia by 2011. Yes, as in two years from now.
For the time being, the U.S. leads in R&D worldwide with 35 percent of the total output. China comes in second with 16 percent, and Japan in third with 13 percent — but both are catching up fast. The money is there, no doubt. It’s the culture of creativity and entrepreneurship that will really give these countries the boost they need. Innovation and idea generation are fairly strong in Japan and Korea, and have been picking up in China and India due to improving education and a reverse diaspora. Taking these factors into account, Asia is clearly poised to overtake the west in technological achievement in the coming decade.
As a student of Czech economist Joseph Schumpeter and Columbia University’s Richard Nelson, I believe that this type of achievement is the primary driver for long-term economic growth. With its workforce dominating engineering, its growing entrepreneurial spirit and its hunger for knowledge, Asia is positioning itself as the world’s primary economic engine — with the potential to reign indefinitely.
Regardless, the U.S. will maintain its leadership in innovation through the end of next year, but perhaps not long after that. Will Asia’s brute strength in the tech arena outweigh cultural, legal and policy limitations?
This is a question not just for 2009, but the next five or even ten years. For now, these are my predictions for the year ahead. Do you agree? What global trends do you taking hold in 2009 and beyond?
Originally posted at VentureBeat.
I was playing with the idea of titling this column “Top Ten Tech Bailouts for 2009″ or “DeathCrunch: 2009,” but thought it best to keep our VentureBeat readers in high spirits (what with the holiday cheer and all). So without further ado, here are my top global trends to watch for the new year:
PC and online gaming continue healthy growth
There is no better indicator of this than World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King’s first-day sale of 2.8 million copies in mid-November. At $40 each, this accounts for $112 million, an astounding figure. I imagine the folks at Blizzard Entertainment had a pretty nice holiday party — drinking eggnog and munching on gingerbread cookies, macaroons and Turkish Delight to their hearts’ content…
And it’s not just the geeks keeping this segment of the market afloat either. Remember Swingers? Solid proof that cool, hip, unemployed men (and there will be many more of them) tend to play a lot of games.
But does this mean that all video game companies are recession-proof? Will that many more people opt for lazy, relatively inexpensive entertainment over going out? Not really. The NPD Group, a leading consumer market research firm, recently issued a report showing a dip in the overall video game market. October saw an 18 percent increase over sales from last year, but November’s sales were only up 10 percent. So the downturn is in fact taking a toll.
Console sales — which made up $9.4 billion of the $18.9 billion gaming industry in 2007 (according to the Entertainment Software Association) — will take a major hit. How many people will be willing to drop a few hundred bucks on a console? Plus $50 more for a game easily finished in a few days or weeks? That’s a lot to ask in the current environment. Even perennial favorites like Rock Band and Wii Fit will probably trend down due to expensive accessories.
PC and online gaming account for only 9.5 percent of total gaming sales ($9.5 billion). But the segment has the strongest prospects for growth. MMORPGs (massively-multiplayer online role-playing games) and others with multi-dimensional interaction options provide continuous character development, storylines and gameplay that bring you into contact with likeminded others. This gives them longevity and makes them worthier of that initial investment.
Video game makers should take note: Titles that deliver more value over a longer period of time will bring in more money during tough times — and that’s exactly what PC and online games do.
Surface computing slowly breaks into the mainstream
Traditional mouse and keyboard setups will start to be replaced by touch-sensitive screens that allow users to control functions with their fingertips. Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmart PC is just the beginning.
I’m far from becoming a Microsoft fan, but Microsoft Surface is an important step forward for this technology, which will only become more pervasive in the next year. And Microsoft isn’t the only player in the game. As a TEDster, I have to plug Jeff Han’s multi-touch interface (see video below). All the while, Innotive, a company I advised, offers very cool interactive display technology.
The novelty of surface computing has led Microsoft into partnerships with Sheraton Hotels, Disney and Harrah’s Casino Hotels. These resorts have installed touch screens in their lobbies to provide local information and media tailored to their customers’ needs. The technology may only be mindly entertaining for now, but it provides substantial practical value. With the ubiquity of the iPhone, multi-touch screens are becoming increasingly intuitive, and already feel more natural than typing on a keypad in some settings. Say, for example, you are presented with a multi-touch screen as a menu in a restaurant — one click with your finger orders your meal.
But there’s even more potential in the boardroom with smart white boards becoming a reality. Imagine all the graphic facilitation geeks in your office suddenly gaining the ability to map out their ideas with just their hands? Joyous pandemonium! Dry-erase marker bonfires amid hearty rounds of Kumbaya! (At least that’s how I picture it.)
Shift from offline to online ad spend picks up speed
Advertising goliath GroupM projects that global ad spend will decrease by 0.2 percent to $458 billion in 2009 — dropping 3.2 percent to $157 billion in the U.S. alone. But I think online ad spend is a different story, and should see slow but steady growth. After all, eMarketer forecasts an 8.8 percent increase in online ad spend from $23.6 to $25.7 billion in 2009, and a 10.8 percent increase in 2010.
What will drive this growth? In short, more advertisers waking up to smell the recession. Newspapers make up only 5 percent of Americans’ media diet, yet they consume 30 percent of ad dollars. A report from Morgan Stanley last month revealed that, last year, advertisers spent $288 per home on internet advertising and $818 per home on newspaper ads. There’s something wrong with that picture when “death spiral” is the phrase usually ascribed to the state of print journalism. And more brands are starting to realize it — newspaper advertising has dropped 18 percent (about $2 billion) from this quarter last year.
Innovation increasingly imported from Asia
I appreciate Fareed Zakaria’s vision of a post-American world, but if we’re talking about 2009, I’d narrow it down to just Asia. Already, China and India produce five times as many engineers as the U.S., and it’s predicted that 90 percent of all engineers will hail from Asia by 2011. Yes, as in two years from now.
For the time being, the U.S. leads in R&D worldwide with 35 percent of the total output. China comes in second with 16 percent, and Japan in third with 13 percent — but both are catching up fast. The money is there, no doubt. It’s the culture of creativity and entrepreneurship that will really give these countries the boost they need. Innovation and idea generation are fairly strong in Japan and Korea, and have been picking up in China and India due to improving education and a reverse diaspora. Taking these factors into account, Asia is clearly poised to overtake the west in technological achievement in the coming decade.
As a student of Czech economist Joseph Schumpeter and Columbia University’s Richard Nelson, I believe that this type of achievement is the primary driver for long-term economic growth. With its workforce dominating engineering, its growing entrepreneurial spirit and its hunger for knowledge, Asia is positioning itself as the world’s primary economic engine — with the potential to reign indefinitely.
Regardless, the U.S. will maintain its leadership in innovation through the end of next year, but perhaps not long after that. Will Asia’s brute strength in the tech arena outweigh cultural, legal and policy limitations?
This is a question not just for 2009, but the next five or even ten years. For now, these are my predictions for the year ahead. Do you agree? What global trends do you taking hold in 2009 and beyond?
Originally posted at VentureBeat.
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