Bharat VijayFounder, Boltell

My background Some web history Inflexion points for web companies Trends in modern web companies

Goal : Identify questions to ask when evaluating trends in the web space

15 year long affair Early-Yahoo!, mid nineties Studying web users, late nineties Web information retrieval, early 2000s Global engineering for web companies,

early 2000 India conceptualized Global Web

products, 2003-2005 Amazon & e-commerce, 2004-2006

uGenie – an India based e-commerce startup (2007)

A startup for the Facebook revolution – weRead (2008)

New Web advertising models (2009) 2nd Generation Information companies

from the web - Boltell (2010)

Apply to portions of Web or any industry Identifying them helps understand trends

and short term plans IMO, applicable in 5-10% of cases, but can

be a costly miss

Is there a Land Grab ? Are the products in an Improve phase ? Are key players beginning to Experiment ? Is it a Survive phase ?

Land

Grab

Improve

Survive

Experiment

Land

Grab

Improve

Dot com crash

Growth/user interest in an area Is there money being invested ? Deferred business returns Powerful ability to spread information Key to a successful land grab is aggregation

Yahoo! Launched upwards of 50 products in a year and it was not alone

More than 10000 applications on facebook in 2007

Off-line information was fast spreading to the web

Web was spreading as a quick, cheap way to get information

People quickly wanted products to try out on the web

Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek and others launched thousands of products in 18 months.

Many companies were bought out for large sums of money

Key question : How important is first to market?

Socially important information was spreading fast.

Facebook embraced openness – allow others to quickly innovate.

Not as much money as 1996, but not as expensive to launch either.

People tried out many products Many companies bought for small amounts,

but successful exits Facebook rockets past Yahoo! And Google as

the messaging platform Key question : How fast can a product grow

through the social network ?

Most dominant players established End users become discriminating in the

new universe Features become important. Companies

and products that offer these features get gobbled up.

Key question : How to Retain customers ?

No immediate danger of a collapse Large companies place some big long

term bets Example – Amazon with S3, EC2

Key question : Should I continue to survive and improve profits OR experiment at the cost of profitability ?

Marketing and customer acquisition Revenues through sales/advertising Customer data Infrastructure to improve/innovate Uptime Capital

Social media integration is a must

Search engine optimization is crucial Surprise – it may be cheaper to market offline ! Mobile apps will go from simple to compelling

SEM can have prohibitive cost – probably a last resort

Key question : Who is able to market using leverage ?

Capital is hard to come by for another 18-24 months.

Mad rush areas like iPhone apps, mobile apps, cloud computing are getting some funding.

Advertising revenues are available for content ads

Surprise : People may actually buy your premium products

Key question that techies don’t ask : How effective are the product sales ?

Cloud based services are already world class

Simple integration/development can be outsourced to 24x7 companies

The keyword is integration – widgets/APIs/virtual servers are available

Surprise : Minimize your time to first set of sales

Very few products – area is wide open for innovation

Google Analytics provides reporting Huge need to marry IR with traffic

trending

Key question : Is there a real connection between data we are measuring and the sales process ?

Information source is now the web. In fact there is too much information – too many informative writeups, too much video, too much news, noise level is very high

Devices are portable, powerful, smart. There are too many types and not yet wired well. China and Taiwan cranking them out by the 10s of millions. But people pay for them unlike the internet.

Taking information through till the transactions and beyond.

Cleantech, Education, Healthcare, Infrastructure are the areas in India getting funding

Q1 2010 - $1.9 billion in funding

Source: Deloitte Consulting Report

Each subdomain has inflexion points – Land grab, Improve, Experiment, Survive

Cost of web marketing is very high. Opportunity for new age content companies.

Web infrastructure can make it fast for you to reach sales and critical business feedback

End users may buy your products through interesting channels

Making sense of customer data today is tough, but is an opportunity

Ask questions to really interpret the trends

Email : bharat@boltell.com