Vinny Lingham's Blog

I put together a rather detailed post, relating more to the frustrations I have had dealing with merchants who have agencies that pull wool over their eyes – I decided to post the article on Revenews due to the more relevant audience.  I wonder how many other performance marketers have had similar frustrations?!

I’m not sure how many of you are familiar with the Digg Labs, but the Digg team has really come up with some VERY cool flash tools to play with – or have they? If you pay attention to the small print on the bottom of the page, tt’s particularly interesting to note that the development was actually done by a little known design firm (by myself anyways), called Stamen Design in San Francisco. By using Digg’s API (Application Programming Interface) and Flickr & Root.net’s API as well, they have developed some awesome applications for these clients of theirs.

In the “What we do section” they describe themselves as follows:

Stamen’s client work and the research projects we pursue present us with as broad a variety of design challenges as we could hope for: from providing live views of social networks as they happen to covering live bicycle races over the internet, from building collaborative applications for car designers to describing the lifetime output of an all-but-uncategorizable artist/architect.

While we use a wide range of techniques to help us understand this broad range of concerns, our response has most frequently taken two forms: mapping and data visualization.

Anyways, they look like a real smart bunch of guys with a decent enough client list. The real point I’m trying to make that is that they build these cools apps through the use of API’s, the upsurge of which, was predicted on this blog, about a year ago.  In a few years time, we’ll wonder how we ever did without them (if we don’t already).

I can already see sophisticated design, marketing & advertising agencies starting to use API’s the way that Stamen have done with Digg & Flickr and create fascinating flash applications and widgets.  The world of API’s are upon us!!

This weekend has been dominated by my new toy, the i-Mate JasJar, which I bought on Friday, which replaces my old Sony-Ericcson P910i. I’ve spent the whole week working on it and configuring it to work with my Mac laptop. It’s a bit pricey, but luckily we get free phones (or heft discounts) when we renew our contracts every two years in South Africa, so I’m not complaining. I’m not going to post a detailed review like this one but I having used it for only a few days, I can say that it’s been a pleasure so far. It works with the bluetooth on my laptop and in my car, and I’ve managed to find software for it to work on the Mac. It’s basically a 3G GPRS PDA Phone, and after a bit of configuration, I am now able to make free calls using the WiFi in my house or office & Skype, browse the net, etc. It’s actually quite a pleasure, so far – so I highly recommend it.

That said, it’s obvious that for once, I haven’t spent any time working this weekend – so I don’t have any interesting blogs to post for this weekend, but the week ahead looks busy indeed!

Web 2.0 businesses are being spawned at a rate faster than anyone could have predicted a year ago – although Michael Arrington would have argues this point when he started TechCrunch! Even we at incuBeta have jumped on the bandwagon with Synthasite, our AJAX (Web Based) development platform which is being released shortly.  The reality is that this space is happening and Web Applications are the way forward, regardless of the doubt that exists today.
So what are the long term prospects for these types of businesses?

1. Make it profitable through either advertising (Google AdSense) or subscriptions (Paid or Freemium model)
2. Sell to Yahoo, Google, etc
3. Raise VC ad infinitum
4. Sell to an ISP (I’ll come back to this point in a sec)
5. Take on Microsoft & the other heavy hitter software companies (ala BaseCamp).

So back to point number 4, the main topic of this entry.  Given the rate at which the cost of bandwidth has decreased, and the speed it has increased, Internet Service Providers are quickly scrambling to find better ways to improve their margins and acquire customers, given the price sensitivities of their particular industry.

The irony of this is that my personal belief is that ISP’s will start to acquire Web 2.0 startups in order to bundle their services along with their monthly subscriptions and offer a better overall value add to their users (i.e. get your AOL Broadband account and get free web based MS Word(Writely), MS Project/(BaseCamp), Frontpage/(Synthasite), Excel/(Google Spreadsheets), Flickr, etc).  Users will look to find ISP packages that also suit their software requirements as well, and pay the flat $30 fee for broadband with software services.  Instead of reducing prices, ISP’s might and should start looking to increase their web services offerings dramatically – perhaps this will fuel the buzz around Web 2.0 companies even more.

Well, as expected, MySpace have opted NOT to build their own PPC system as speculated and instead have decided to partner with Google – instead of rehashing the news – here is a link to Bloomberg’s article.

I’m quite shocked at the  value of the deal as I would think that it would have a much higher value over nearly 4 years, but be that as it may – it will be interesting to see how Yahoo counters this move.