Now you can watch youtube videos directly within gmail chat.
January 22, 2009
January 21, 2009
Web video not ready yet for prime time
Many people in the US were at work yesterday morning during the historic obama inauguration. They tried to catch it on the web, but many had technical diffculties. I guess web video has ways to go still.
Google owns top 2 search engines
Video is huge. Here is a data point.
People do more searches on youtube (owned by google) than yahoo.
More and more people are using youtube to do research.
Social Platform Wars
Application platforms are the hottest trend in all the social media sites such facebook, twitter etc. This seems to be the new battlefront where important wars are being fought for the attention of developers and users.
History of Social Platforms
Before there was myspace and facebook, there was friendster. Friendster was the cool hangout for a while, but myspace took over the leadership position by allowing users to customize their profile pages with various widgets. Youtube leveraged myspace user base by offering an emebddable video player to become the largest video site in the world and were purchased by google for $1.6B. Myspace themselves only got $580M from news corp. There were some other companies such as photobucket (photos) and imeem (music) etc. that leveraged myspace to establish a large user base for themselves. News corp later bought photobucket for $300M. So the first major social platform was the customizable profile pages on myspace. It was quite primitive and there was no way to tap into much of the power of the networks. Myspace maintained tight controls over the advertising and monetization of the widgets.
Then facebook changed the game with the release of their development platform in August of 2006. They provided a powerful platform that allowed the 3rd party developers to create social applications that tap into the power of ’social graph’ of users. But more imprtantly facebook (unlike myspace) allowed the developers to serve advertising in their applications and keep all the advertising revenues to themselves. This was quite revolutionary at that time and caused a frenzy among the developers. Thousands of facebook applications were created and many companies were funded to develop and monetize facebook applications. This helped facebook grow much quicker than myspace.
In this battle for social networking supremacy google was sidelined. Google owns orkut which is pouplar in india and brazil but not much elsewhere. Not to be out done by facebook, google partnered with myspace (google provides search advertising to mypsace) and other social networking sites threatened by facebook platform to create ‘open social’ development platform. It allows the developers to create applications once and have then run on all the open social member sites.
Google wanting to one up facebook identified one area of weakness in facebook to attack. Though facebook provided access to user social graph data to facebook applications they did not allow for it to be exported or used out of facebook. Google created ‘friend connect’ that allowed any third party site to add social networking functionality leveraging the social graph of open social platform. Facebook resposnded quickly with their own version called facebook connect.
Now the platform craze is in full swing. Most of the social networking sites call themselves ‘platforms’ and offer apis for application developers and third party sites to leverage the social graph data. This led to creationof companies that aggregate the user activity feeds from various social networking sites into once place. Friendfeed is an example of such a company.
While all this was going on, a small company called twitter was spun out, in 2006, from another failing podcasting startup called odeo. It is a microblogging and social networking site that allows the users to send out short updates (text messages up to 140 characters) called ‘tweets’ to each other. This has gained rapid popularity among the tech savvy and is continuing its fast growth even today. Twitter is also positioned as ‘platform’ where 3rd party applications are developed on top of twitter messaging system.
In all this frenzy, several companies are getting created for the sole purpose of developing and monetizing applications on these social platforms.
Challenges of social platforms
Despite all the hype and heavy traffic, social networking sites are still searching for a business model that can effectively monetize all the users. Most of them are yet to be profitable. They all cite google as an example of a company that ultimately found a great business model. However it must be remembered that google turned profitable in 2001, three years after its launch. Facebook is 5 years old and twitter is almost 3 years old. There is no sign of their ‘adsense’ equivalent. The advertising market is in a free fall and the economic outlook is bleak for the foreseeable future. It is time to ’show me the money’.
Google actually thrived in the nuclear winter of post dotcom crash. Can any of these social networking companies do a google and take off in the bad economic times? This will be the question that determines their survival as independent companies and more importantly as ‘platforms’.
Billion dollar question
Can social platforms support large (billion dollar) profitable companies when they themselves are not?
That is an interesting question.
Microsoft windows was a great software platform for a long time. IBM PC was a great hardware platform. They enabled the creation 0f billion dollar companies. Both microsoft windows and IBM PC products were hugely profitable billion dollar businesses.
Can we think of examples of platforms that created large profitable businesses while they themselves are not?
Opensource software comes to my mind. That may not be relevant to social platforms as all the major ones are commercial.
So why are all these companies and developers flocking to these social platforms. Access to huge number of users. Though it must be noted that very few applications actually get meaningful number of users.
Then there is the question of platform companies competing with application companies. If there is an application that becomes increasingly popular, what prevents the platform companies from launching a competing product. Take the example of iLike, a popular music app on facebook. Facebook is planning to offer a music service of their own. This is an important issue that may come in the way of creating a large profitable businesses on these social platforms.
Ultimately the jury is out on these social platforms. They are still evolving. But there is no question that social media is going impact everyones digital lifestyles.
January 19, 2009
Obama
Obama will be taking oath in few hours as the 44th US president but as the first african american to do so.
I never thought I would see this happen in my lifetime. It happened alright. But how?
It was a perfect storm. Obama is an extraordinary candidate with a remarkable ability to connect with people and one who is very comfortable with his mixed race. He is very different from any of the previous african american candidates that tried without success. Unlike them, he did not feel the need to represent the grievences of african americans and therefore was not as encumbered by their weight.
His primary demcratic challenger was someone who was also trying to create histrory. She is a woman. She was certainlyweighed down by the added pressures of trying to become the first female president. She was not just any woman but a former first lady. In retrospect, I am not sure if it helped or hurt her. Probably both. The great thing is that she will given an opportunity to play a very important role as the secretary of state.
He was also greatly helped by an unpopular outgoing president. The country is facing unprecedented economic and security challenges. Its global reputation and ability to influence is also in serious jepoardy. The country is ready for change. Obama is that change.
Finally, Obama ran a campaign that is unlike any other before in the history of US presidential elections. He disrupted the old campaign models. His rivals, in both democratic primaries and US presidential elections, didn not know what hit them. They were playing the game by the old rules. Obama rewrote the rules. He used the new media and the internet/web very effectively to energise a grassroot volunteer base and launch a direct-to-citizen campaign and fund raising model that older methods simply could not match. He defined how campaign2.0 should work.
It took all this for the US to have its first black president. But this is just the beginning.
I will say this. Obama is not just the first black president. Obama has an opportunity to be a US president for the ages. He has an opportunity to be remembered in the same light as Lincoln and Roosevelt. Obama will be taking his oath using the same Bible used by Lincoln during his inauguration. I hope this is more than a symbolic gesture, an acknowledgement of the great opportunity in front of him.
He must grab the opportunity and deliver. He needs to pull the country back on the right track and make sure it remains the most powerful country in the world over the next millenium. It is not going to be easy. But from what I have seen so far he has it in him to do that. He is assembling a great team. That is the sign of a great leader. He picked someone who fought him tooth and nail (sometimes quite bitterly) to be his secretary of state. That takes being secure with yourself. Great leaders surround themselves with people better than themsleves. He seems to be engaging republicans even more than his own perty men, and that is the sign of a great leader. The country badly needs someone that can rally everyone around a collective cause, not just democrats and young people. Everyone.
Will Obama bring the same inventiveness and resourcesfulness he showed during his campaign in rebuilding America?
I look forward to seeing what he can achieve and how the history will remember him. I wish him the best of luck. I hope tomorrow ushers the dawn of a new era.
Slumdog Millionaire
Small is the new big.
This movie was made with a budget of a mere $14M. It will probably make $100M.
There was a very real chance that it was headed straight to DVD after it was completed. But Fox Searchlight took a chance and it is now a global sensation. It went 4 for 4 at the golden globe awards. It will probably win multiple oscars.
How can this happen? How did this happen?
It took a perfect storm where things fell into place beautifully.
Danny Boyle made a beautiful film based on a fantastic story, lovable characters, captivating locales set to the brilliant music of AR Rahman. But that is only part of the story.
Fox Searchlight did a masterful job of creating excitement and buzz. I am sure the internet/web played a big role in that as well.
Bollywood is gaining global popularity. So the timing is right. This is bollywood masala packaged just right for the hollywood. Recent Mumbai attacks surely increased the level of interest in the movie as a majority of it was shot in Mumbai.
The movie was first released in just a few theaters in the US. Helped by the buzz, the movie caught fire and expanded into more theaters. Its success at the globes has turned it into a blaze and if it tastes any success at the oscars it may turn into a towering inferno.
The movie is just like its protagonist boy from Mumbai slums going on the Indian version of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ show and winning it all. But he did not do it for money. He did for love. Danny Boyle did not make this movie to make $100M. He did because he loved the story. But he has a chance to win it all.
That is a great Bollywoodesque story in itself.
January 18, 2009
Welcome!
Hello. Welcome to my blog.
My name is Raja Jasti. I am an entrepreneur living in Silicon Valley.
In this blog, I will write about many things that interest me such as internet, mobile, media, business, entrepreneurship and entertainment. I hope you enjoy reading my blog.