New Florence. New Renaissance.

"Ten web startups to watch"

MIT Technology Review profiles

Pinger
Pownce
qik
Dash
Ushahidi
Qtech
33Across
Peer39
Mashery
Anagran

Enterprise RSS Day of Action

That's what we are honoring today.

Web 2.0 Expo

The Big Daddy event kicked off today in San Francisco. While people are still arguing about what exactly Web 2.0 is, it is also time to celebrate the hundreds of creative companies launched in the lat few years.

Click below to enlarge the photo below from stabilo-boss.

A Zagat book on Doctors

WellPoint, the Indianapolis-based health insurer, has teamed up with Zagat, the publisher of rating guides on restaurants, hotels, and travel destinations worldwide, to judge and rate physicians. WellPoint allows its 35 million insured to post online reviews of their doctors. After visiting a physician, the patient can log on to the website of WellPoint and “grade” the healthcare provider on a 4-point scale, including availability, communication, office environment, and trustworthiness. Following a 10 patient-feedback, WellPoint compiles and analyzes the info and assigns a rating of the physician, or over-all score from 1 to 30.

Read more here

The "custom-made" Web

"A new research project from Intel Research, in Berkeley, CA, is trying to take some of the mystery out of crafting a mashup. Called Mash Maker, the project aims to let people use their ordinary Web browsers to combine information from different sites.

If, for example, you are looking at apartments on Craigslist, you can easily add information about nearby restaurants from Yelp, a recommendation site, essentially augmenting the data on the Craigslist page. With another few clicks of a button, you can put the apartments and Yelp listings on a Google map, which will also appear within the Craigslist page. The next time you visit the Craigslist page, you can reopen the mashup, and it will automatically use new data from the site."

MIT Technology Review

"Top 10 Web apps"

Carsonified - "We received over 3,000 votes from all over the world. This isn't a scientific survey - it's more of a straw poll of our friends and colleagues across the industry - but we think the results are pretty conclusive."

The top 10

Gmail - web mail
flickr - photo sharing
Twitter - micro-blogging platform
Facebook - social network
Ravelry - "knit and crochet" community
WordPress - blogging platform
Mint - web analytics
last-fm - music
Basecamp - project collaboration
livejournal - social network

The Customer is Not a Moron. She's your daughter.

Read this blog on Diggnation by Josh Bernoff

How would David Ogilvy go after this new consumer?

And how would he take to the new world of web analytics?

FASTforward '08

I spent a day at the FASTForward conference in Orlando and listen to 4 provocative keynotes. All about Search, as a proxy for web and other analytics. FAST, a Norwegian company in the fast growing enterprise search space, was recently acquired by Microsoft

a) John Hagel, expounded on the work he has been doing over the last few years around "Pull Platforms" - which leverage a new breed of empowered consumers (with search and other information sources) and talent - as against traditional Push Programs which worked in the past as demand was more predictable and processes could be standardized a lot easier.  The biggest threat to most corporations- that these consumers could leverage the talent themselves (or are also the talent themselves) and cut the middleman out.

I talked to him afterwards and he believes the single most important capability for an enterprise is identifying and developing new forms of talent that understand the new consumer. And he is big on networked communities like that of Li and Fung, a Chinese company, which helps apparel designers around the world connect with 10,000 highly specialized providers of production and logistics services. He also cited Cisco Connection On-line with 40,000 partners.

b) Then it was Clare Hart, President of  Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group and she showcased "search without the search box"  Using her Factiva  2.0 tool kit she demoed two roles at a bank - an investment banker, and a wealth management exec - and the analytics they would see driven by an "event" - say missed earnings at a stock. What's impressive is the range of information (from news feeds, blogs, streaming stock information, and proprietary customer and other data) and data types (docs, graphs, videos etc) all customized by role, linked and triggered by event types which have "anticipatory discovery" done ahead of time. So instead of having users run multiple and inconsistent queries seeking such information,  much of it has been thought out and being processed in background. I talk to too many folks who think a better UI to enter transactions or queries is "user empowerment". Giving a user powerful information with little user involvement like Clare showed is a much higher form of user empowerment.

c) Then on to Dave Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. His last slide showed a well manicured topiary and next to it a pile of fallen leaves in stunning Fall colors. He loves the disorganized pile and thinks enterprises have tried too hard to organize data into information and made it "soulless" . The web is about links and links should be unpredictable and "messy". Some would call it anarchy, but it was a refreshing perspective on not trying to predefine data models, and instead let communities of internal and external users influence it. They will always bring broader and fresher "tags" than a corporate team can ever think of. 

I spent a few minutes with him later and you can see the man's bright lights - though on his blog he describes himself tongue-in-cheek as "a Ph.D in philosophy that entitles him to affect an air of smug obscurity whenever he chooses"

d) Dave was followed by Tom Davenport, who, of course has written many books on analytics. Tom's presentation was as much about disciplined analytical rigor as Dave's was about enjoying the messiness that comes from the web. Tom's presentation focused on companies like Harrah's and Progressive which have for long known the value of mining intelligence from mountain of data. He updated that with newer examples of  analytics the web is facilitating from recommendation engines at NetFlix to better customer experiences at Careerbuilder.com as it optimizes across millions of job searches.

I spent a day at the FASTForward conference in Orlando and listen to 4 provocative keynotes. All about Search, as a proxy for web and other analytics. FAST, a Norwegian company in the fast growing enterprise search space, was recently acquired by Microsoft

a) John Hagel, expounded on the work he has been doing over the last few years around "Pull Platforms" - which leverage a new breed of empowered consumers (with search and other information sources) and talent - as against traditional Push Programs which worked in the past as demand was more predictable and processes could be standardized a lot easier.  The biggest threat to most corporations- that these consumers could leverage the talent themselves (or are also the talent themselves) and cut the middleman out.

I talked to him afterwards and he believes the single most important capability for an enterprise is identifying and developing new forms of talent that understand the new consumer. And he is big on networked communities like that of Li and Fung, a Chinese company, which helps apparel designers around the world connect with 10,000 highly specialized providers of production and logistics services. He also cited Cisco Connection On-line with 40,000 partners.

b) Then it was Clare Hart, President of  Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group and she showcased "search without the search box"  Using her Factiva  2.0 tool kit she demoed two roles at a bank - an investment banker, and a wealth management exec - and the analytics they would see driven by an "event" - say missed earnings at a stock. What's impressive is the range of information (from news feeds, blogs, streaming stock information, and proprietary customer and other data) and data types (docs, graphs, videos etc) all customized by role, linked and triggered by event types which have "anticipatory discovery" done ahead of time. So instead of having users run multiple and inconsistent queries seeking such information,  much of it has been thought out and being processed in background. I talk to too many folks who think a better UI to enter transactions or queries is "user empowerment". Giving a user powerful information with little user involvement like Clare showed is a much higher form of user empowerment.

c) Then on to Dave Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. His last slide showed a well manicured topiary and next to it a pile of fallen leaves in stunning Fall colors. He loves the disorganized pile and thinks enterprises have tried too hard to organize data into information and made it "soulless" . The web is about links and links should be unpredictable and "messy". Some would call it anarchy, but it was a refreshing perspective on not trying to predefine data models, and instead let communities of internal and external users influence it. They will always bring broader and fresher "tags" than a corporate team can ever think of. 

I spent a few minutes with him later and you can see the man's bright lights - though on his blog he describes himself tongue-in-cheek as "a Ph.D in philosophy that entitles him to affect an air of smug obscurity whenever he chooses"

d) Dave was followed by Tom Davenport, who, of course has written many books on analytics. Tom's presentation was as much about disciplined analytical rigor as Dave's was about enjoying the messiness that comes from the web. Tom's presentation focused on companies like Harrah's and Progressive which have for long known the value of mining intelligence from mountain of data. He updated that with newer examples of  analytics the web is facilitating from recommendation engines at NetFlix to better customer experiences at Careerbuilder.com as it optimizes across millions of job searches.

Widget World

Wikipedia defines widgets as "a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation."

Fast Company  lists some of its favorites

Virtual Trade Shows

Don't enjoy spending time traveling to Orlando or Vegas for conferences and then walking for miles and miles at the exhbiits?

Unisfair, a Second Life type environment, offers an alternative - the company just closed $ 10 million in funding.