Web 2.0 Summit review from Troy Angrignon

Troy Angrignon has a great review and HUGE detail of the Web 2.0 Summit with 3 days of notes. This is his summary:

• Web 2.0 is real. In fact, it's even more important than when Microsoft had their epiphany about the internet ten years ago
  
• We're at the beginning of the ramp for things like social media and mobile
  
• This year, we grew users 10-15%, usage 20-30%, and monetization 30+% and that looks like it will continue
  
• video has surpassed text everywhere all the time
  
• Internet Advertising is still under-represented so ad spend will shift from 8% of the total spend to about 15% of the total spend and will make this transition very quickly.
  
• It's now possible to build an entirely virtual company by outsourcing every single component of it
  
• Application development speed continues to leap ahead radically
  
• find and go towards the large white spaces
  
• there is lots of capital out there; ideas and good teams are the limiters; there's no excuse for not raising money right now
  
• web services and mashups are going to explode
  
• find passionate users, let them drive your products and your business
  
• In fact, let them help you BUILD your product if possible
  
• Build your products so that people either love them or hate them; don't aim for the zone of mediocrity.
  
• LOVE your users
  
• To keep good people, ensure they're passionate about what they're doing, give them the ability to somewhat drive their (and your) success and innovation; engage them in decisions
  
• Realize that you can build things now collaboratively across the web in ways that were not possible before
  
• Do something bold that changes the game
  

Goldcorp gave up their sacred data and $500K to make $3.4B in revenues.
Bob Parsons cancelled the GoDaddy.com IPO because the analysts were too annoying.
Amazon wants to start running your businesses because frankly, they can do it better, cheaper, and faster than you can by a factor of 100x.

• 
  
• the better your product, the less you have to use traditional marketing;
  
• focus on niches;
  
• we're at the beginning of the curve on immersive environments and they will play a larger and larger part in our economy;
  
• help people make money on top of your platform;
  
• Watch the cashflow (daily!); it's more important than profits (for a smaller company);
  
• Making money is better (and way more important) than finding investors
  
• Adapt quickly
  
• Create passionate users who will help you create your business
  
• Listen to yourself; listen to your customers; don't listen to analysts; never listen to the doubters.
  
• measure what counts but remember that "not everything that counts can be measured, nor does everything that can be measured count." (be careful what you measure);
  
• operational excellence can be a a defensible long-term strategy, and significant point of differentiation; (Microsoft, Amazon, Fedex)
  
• Profit or size?
  
• Most people: make it profitable right off the bat; then build with revenue as fast as possible;
  
• Bezos: go for size!
  
• On finding the next opportunity:
  
• Calcanis/Dmitry: stay focused on your original business!
  
• Bezos: Always keep exploring down dark tunnels for new business opportunities! ecosystems beat platforms beat applications beat features;
  
• there was a lot of contradiction regarding how companies should or should not start small. I think it shows that there is no right answer. There will be a plethora of small companies and others will choose to get the funding to get big fast as we did in Bubble 1.0

I wish I was there! I certaintly concur with his thinking on-

• online avertising is still in its infancy
  
• starting a business is now easier than ever b4 (4 the 'webbie' kind)
  
• go towards the large white spaces and focus on niches
  
• mashups are going 2b BIG
  
• get passionate users
  

He also wrote some of the dailogue on some talks/interviews with:- 

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley: The State of the Internet Part 3
has some interesting metrics on Yahoo, Google, Customer Acquisition, Advertisers, Commerce, and more ... I've copied out some of the key ones.

• approx 60% of internet traffic may be Peer to peer filesharing of "unmonetized" video
  
• Skype would rank #3 in the world for telecom providers (behind China Mobile and Vodafone). It may still have the title of "fastest product ramp in history". Skype carries approximately 7% of all global cross-border calls and that should double in the next year or two.
  
• Blogs continue to double every 7 months
  
• American Idol receiving 63M votes (via mobiles + internet) in the final 4 hour round
  
• User Generated Content based sites have moved into the top 15 global websites
  
• North America is becoming less dominant on the internet
  
• Broadband penetration has finally hit the 25-30% "sweet spot"
  
• Global Mobile 2.5G/3G penetration has hit the 30-35% "sweet spot"
  
• rich media will be the next avenue for US internet advertising spend growth
  
• Search is the top customer acquisition tool for online retailers
  
• Search is also the cheapest customer acquisition channel
  
• eBay has outstripped classifieds 9:1 but the newspapers still make all the money - a correction is inevitable. eBay listings have gone from zero to 921M listings in 8 years
  
• Video is most of the P2P traffic
  
• Apple has sold $16B worth of iPods and music/videos in only three years
  
• Google + Yahoo = ~58% of US online ad revenue
  
• Google and Yahoo share approximately 30% of their revenue with their partners
  

A Conversation with Jeff Bezos

We have removed the "muck"; You come up with an idea, you wade through the muck, and then eventually you get to working on the fun parts. And then when you come up with your NEXT idea you have to go through the muck all over again. up to 70% of your time, energy, and dollars for web-scale apps goes into undifferentiated, heavy lifting and "muck"...."We make muck...so you don't have to."...

Korea's MySpace Challenger: CyWorld Revealed

• 20M subscribers, 40% of the population of Korea; 96% of 20-29 year olds ; 20B monthly page views
  
• =Myspace + iTunes + Google + IM + eBay
  
• we brought young women in their early 20s (who didn't use the internet) to the internet. We made the entire system appealing visually to young women.
  
• the base service is free...but charge for the personalization
  
• Integrated with IM NateOn is causing a decline in MSN. NateOn went from 0 to12M users; MSN went from 10 to 6M.
  

Enterprise 2.0 mashups, with Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com

• You have to move from being a killer app to a killer platform
  
• an elastic database; 10 Terabytes, 500,000 subscribers
  
• mashup of Google map and salesforce.com into a tool that allows you to find bikram studios. Some third-party did it via iRows
  
• We mashed up Skype as well showed their Skype status
  
• We now have >400 applications sitting on App Exchange; grab the app you want and it populates your workspace.
  
• ... cubes for mashup developers. $20K/yr per cube buys you a spot in our building where you can work closely with us to build your product that sits on our platform.
  
• 
  
• Side note: When I spoke to Michael Platt, Chief Architect from Microsoft at the New New Internet conference in Virginia, he told me that "mashups are the most exciting thing I have seen in years" and the Emerging Technology guy from SAP stated outright in the Enterprise 2.0 session at Office 2.0: "Mashups are the future of our [SAPs] business."
  

What GoDaddy knows, with Bob Parsons

• he talked about why they filed for and then withdrew their S1 application to become a public company. It cost him $3M to realize that once he went public he would have to listen to the advice of a lot of people who had no clue about his business.
  
• "I met a lot of analysts who didn't know the basics and who focused on short-term financials rather than on good solid business basics."
  
• Cashflow is WAY more important than paper profits
  
• We will have $340M revenue and cash of $50M of cash flow ($1M free cashflow PER WEEK) so I think we're doing okay
  
• When it comes to promoting your company, everybody wants you to fall in line and offend nobody. That's just the wrong idea. To be different you have to be polarizing.
  
• we let podcasters create their own ads for us - they're weird and crazy...
  
• Don't forget the fundamentals and be VERY careful who you listen to.
  

Venture Capital: Roger McNamee (private equity) and Ram Shiram (seed investing). I've just taken some of the key points:

• ... cheap to start a company; it is hard to find talent though :)
  
• Content companies are very hard to build and grow
  
• ... having too much money is a problem for startups - "indigestion is worse than starvation."
  
• ... A lot of the most attractive ideas need less than $1M
  
• ... too much money floating around there
  
• ...don't equate money with success.
  
• ...be careful of increasing your valuation too quickly and pricing yourself out of the market from an acquisition perspective
  
• ...Building your business and serving people is your primary job. Raising funds is secondary.
  
• User-generated content ... will be huge.
  
• ...look at enabling forms of user generated content.
  
• ...companies less than $1B don't get any notice from the analysts anymore
  
• ...Build something great and the exit will take care of itself
  
• ...Just find smart money and work, work, work!
  
• ...Focus on the size of the pie, not on the size of the slice
  
• ...Find the person who you want to call at 2am with bad news and also with great news and who have the contextual expertise about your business.
  
• ...Entrepreneurship is not for lightweights. Life is hard.
  

I love the last comment and indigestion one.
Like Wow! a lot to take in. Great notes Troy

Lal