Lightweight Models and Cost Effective Scalability

Lightweight models and cost effective scalability is talking about doing more with less in web 2.0. The changes in cost, reusability, process and strategy have made it possible to have a cost effective solution in adopting business models, development models and technology to market cheaper and faster without sacrificing potential growth.

Evernote Home Page

This week’s application that follows some of this pattern is Evernote. Evernote is a note taking application where you can type a text note, clip a web page, snap a photo or grab a screenshot and present it as a note where it is easily cataloged and searchable. What’s more is that it is available on all desktop platforms as well as smartphones. Your notes can be synced online so that your notes are accessible anywhere with an internet connection.

And how does Evernote fit this week’s pattern? Evernote scales with demand as you would expect with them increasing exponentially (see reference) up to the 3 million users since Evernote first opened in 2008 with a small staff of 30. Evernote has also syndicated their business models by integrating with other web services, hardware, mobile and desktop software. An example is a web service called Cliqset where it keeps together your social streams like updates on facebook, twitter and youtube, that you can send to Evernote for safekeeping. There wasn’t really any evidence of outsourcing by Evernote but they did integrate with ABBYY to quickly expanded into foreign language markets. The Evernote revenue model is based on a mix of Premium Services and Subscription Services where users use Evernote for free but have a few ads and a monthly quota of storage which you can pay to upgrade to premium where there is no ads and storage quota increased as well as other neat features like accessing note history. They called it freemium (see reference) and Evernote sustains this because they have great long-term retention rate, a product that increases in value over time and variable costs.

The real issue for Evernote is competition, it does what it does well with recording notes from different media and even interpreting text from pictures and photos. However Springpad has recently become competitive with semantic technology (see reference).

In the future Evernote might even eliminate the need for pen and paper notepads as its such a neat tool for note keeping as well as being easily accessible anywhere with an internet connection that most will use it for the convenience it brings.

Reference:

Evernote zooms past 3 million

Evernote Company on CrunchBase

Evernote Integration

Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and Mail Chimp

Evernote accelerates company growth by enlisting ABBYY

Springpad takes on Evernote with Semantic Technology, Barcode Scanner

Leveraging the Long Tail

At first I thought it was a form of crowbar with an animal’s tail but “Leveraging the Long Tail” is in fact about niche markets that sell few in products but in a combination with other niche markets form a long tail of market opportunities. The internet makes this even more possible with infinite shelf space as shelving will never become an issue, micro-markets as the internet is comprised of small sites and each can be considered a niche and cost advantage as selling online is cheaper.

Hollrr Home Page

Th web 2.0 application this week is Hollrr, as quoted from the site:

“Hollrr is the fun and easy way to share recommendations for great new products”

Hollrr has been leveraging the long tail by building on the driving forces of the long tail by making the long tail longer and fatter with their “shout” system where users can share new products and services from underdog companies or new businesses in forms of tags as well as expanding on a niche within that tag with others that provide similar products and services. The way Hollrr is set up provides new ways of connecting supply and demand with users either adding or searching for a specific product or service. You can follow people similar to twitter because they either discover or recommend cool stuff that you are interested in. Hollrr has yet to use algorithmic data management to match supply and demand with recommendations as they were only founded in 2009 and as yet do not provide enough of a database to do so. However Hollrr does provide an architecture of participation to match supply and demand with “comment” and “like” links where users give comment or recommendation to a product and the “like” link to show how much they liked the comment or recommendation. Hollrr also leverages customer self service by providing “my accounts” to users that allow setting changes, privacy, personalization and more for those who sign up as you can only view as a browser of the site but commenting and adding products require an account.  The low cost of being online has also been leveraged as Hollrr is fulfilling an aggregation role similar to eBay but only in providing recommendations and reviews of products to share with friends.

The only issue I really have with Hollrr would be the lack of commenting in some categories. As with other sites that rely on recommendations and reviews as their basis in selling products and services, Hollrr does have the cold start problem where any new introduced products and services are basically without recommendation or review until someone comes along to provide one. I guess that is why Hollrr links to your facebook or twitter account to provide a starting friend base to review and comment on your discoveries.

Now that we had a look at Hollrr we can see that while its still in it’s infancy as long as they continue in building up a more substantial user base of introducing and recommending products and services they can become the no. 1 recommend and review of things your friends, families or relatives are interested in.

References:

Hollrr – Company Info

Hollrr – The foursquare for product reviews

Hollrr – About Us

O’Reilly Web 2.0 Patterns

Perpetual Beta

Beta, is a word often associated with a test of a product release with a goal of finding bugs before the final release. In the case of O’Reilly Web 2.0 Patterns, the Perpetual Beta is “…the development and release of a service in which constant updates are the foundation for the habitability or usability of a service” as quoted from Wikipedia. Skysa is the web 2.0 application that we will be assessing and it is a application that provides a website tool bar that allows you to add a range of features or applications to your website easily without installing any software.

Skysa Home Page

Why does Skysa conform to the perpetual beta pattern? Well, first of all it’s been released as a beta and they’ve released early and often with the Skysa News page showing recently added features. From what I have tried out it also seems Skysa is encouraging users to be co-developers and real-time testers with the Suggestion Box in the Forum and  allowing registered users to submit Support Tickets once they’ve encountered a problem for it to be fixed in a timely manner. Skysa was not very clear about any types of shadow applications used or if any but in their privacy policy they did specify the gathering of two types of information from users. Voluntary information from the forum, surveys and polls as well as aggregated tracking information from tallied page views that give usage tracking without identifying the user. The data would probably be used to instrument their product so that they know how users are using their product as well as driving product development.

Skysa if continued to be developed and used will impact greatly on how we view and socialize on the web as its function of integrating many rich applications in a toolbar to be customized and displayed at the bottom of your web page will centralize activities to one page with an example like finding a web page on cats that you really like and with a Skysa toolbar at the bottom will easily let you tweet, facebook, digg and others, translate to a different language, minimized instant messaging, add as many search engines that you want and many more in development. Of course Skysa also have issues like what site actually accepts the Skysa toolbar, your own site which takes HTML code, blogger, WordPress, Ning and Spruz are the currently accepted sites of Skysa. Hopefully we will see more in the future.

References:

About.com – WebTrends: Beta

Skysa FAQ

Skysa News

Skysa Beta Article

O’Reilly Web 2.0 Patterns

Software above the level of a single device

This week we are looking into a Web 2.0 application that is a “software above the level of a single device”. Foursquare is an application for mobiles that lets you “check-in” to places that you have been and leave behind tips and to-dos. Taking a direct quote from the site: “Foursquare on your phone gives you & your friends new ways of exploring your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things.” Foursquare fits the pattern “software above the level of a single device” in that it’s data and service are integrated across devices, desktops and internet servers. Foursquare is accessible across devices like the iphone, Android, Blackberry, Palm and even on the desktop but in saying that, foursquare is primarily a mobile application. It uses GPS and past history when used without GPS to validate check-ins of users. Foursquare encourages users with earning badges for using foursquare and signing up with some businesses to give the most frequent patron who check-in foursquare some discount or perk.

foursquare Home Page

Similar applications include Gowalla and PlacePop which I have spent time trying out. Both have similar functions as foursquare with slight differences. PlacePop lets you add places with photos or pictures in their database  but is only accessible from web browsers and iphones for the time being. Gowalla only allows you to check-in with a mobile device with gps or  but supports multiple mobile devices like foursquare. Foursquare and Gowalla have maps that show you the location with a marker but PlacePop doesn’t. Overall all three applications allow you to add friends from Facebook and Twitter to invite them and add them to your friends list so that you may view their trips and vice-versa.

As you would expect security concerns have been brought up with applications like these and sites like “Please Rob Me” has exposed how twitter posts of your location can enable criminals to rob your house. Despite these concerns Foursquare does provide privacy settings to allow posts to be posted on Facebook and/or Twitter or to disable them altogether or only allow posts to friends in foursquare.

In the future it could change the way we meet up in a crowd or festival and accidental meetings with friends, relatives, people you know who happens to be in the area. Going to places can trigger to-do lists that you may have forgotten or alerting you to things that may be of interest to you. Foursquare can also make great guides to foreign places a trip to be enjoyed as I’ve known sometimes how traveling internationally and even locally can be daunting if looking for places to visit or suggestions for sightseeing. Overall Foursquare is an application that encourages users with awards to explore their surroundings as well as interacting socially with other users via mobile devices.

References:

Foursquare home page

Article on Foursquare

Gowalla – Similar application to Foursquare

PlacePop – Similar application to Foursquare

Rich User Experiences

Yea! to Rich User Experiences. This week’s topic we look at how the potential of merging the desktop applications and browser based applications to give users an enriching experience by combining the best of two worlds. It all comes down to satisfying the user during the experience of using a data-rich, collaborative and networked applications.  The Web 2.0 application today is Aviary, developed with Adobe Flex it’s a creative application that lets you do image manipulation online although recently they’ve added in an audio editor. The link is here Aviary.

Does Aviary provide a rich user experience? As an image manipulation application you access online, what can you expect out of it. Upon arriving at the home page the first thing you see is the entry to the tools, simplicity in design with two rows of buttons. Each tool has it’s own help video and tutorials are provided for all of the tools. Recently Aviary have opened their full suite of applications to be used by everyone and in doing so got rid of the subscriptions and that means encouraging more users as well as getting the perks of saving your images on Aviary. This has made Aviary more usable and simple as all you need is to sign up for an account and you can start image editing. The search feature took a moment to find as it was under “Discover Creations” but if you sign up a picture of a magnifying glass will be displayed besides the toolbar and all you have to do is click it to search. Aviary preserves content addressability by opening new links for each tool and you do everything within that window. There is also adaptive personalization where Aviary keeps track of how their tool is used to improve their applications but I did not try the tool long enough to notice how deep the personalization are. Your works are backed up on their server so as long as you got an internet connection you can access it. I guess the only problems that Aviary faces would be the usual problems associated with hosting servers such as availability and connectivity. When I used the tools it was as fast as opening an application on your computer but I guess dial up users might have trouble as I’ve heard that it was slow for some users. The Privacy, Permissions and Licensing are all listed in their FAQ so users can easily find out what they’re entitled.

I think that Aviary is a look at what successful merging of desktop and web applications can do under Web 2.0, it’s ticked all the right boxes and I have to say it really caters to fulfill the user’s experience. In the future I hope to see them expanding to form a community of creative users that encompasses the globe.

Reference:

http://web.magicsoftware.com/MagicSoftwareBlog/bid/20372/Rich-Internet-Applications-User-Experience-vs-User-Interface

http://www.insideria.com/2009/09/50-most-usable-rias.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviary_%28application_suite%29

Innovation in Assembly

Today we talk about Innovation in Assembly. It means how innovation is shown when people decide to take one or more web service’s API and using their specified data and functionality to create a new web service that may be useful, surprising and unintended from the original web service function.

This week’s example is liveplasma, it’s a relationship search engine of music and movies that shows visually the relationship between artists or bands and movies, directors or actors. It uses the Amazon eCommerce API for the data and relation search. An example of liveplasma in action would be say searching for films by James Cameron, after inputting the director’s name a visual map of that director and his related films will show and you get a map of films that you can also click on that will show a new map about related directors, actors and films.

So using liveplasma you can search for your favorite movies or music and find related items of interest that you may be interested in purchasing. Unfortunately it’s only linked to amazon.com for the product so you can’t really shop around for better prices but in the future it could be made to list online vendors and perhaps some quick description of the product. The music search could be made better as it only list artists/bands and relations between artists/bands, no albums released or music description. Liveplasma could benefit from mashing up with other API’s to better it’s search.

As of now I’ll say that liveplasma have not matured enough to differentiate itself from amazon other than the simpler, easy to use and visually pleasing interface. It will require a bit more work in terms of displaying more relevant information and vendors to be used commercially.

References:

http://mashable.com/2009/10/08/top-mashups/

http://www.programmableweb.com/mashup/liveplasma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicovery

Data is the next Intel inside

Today we look at an interesting web 2.0 application called Blinkx. According to the company, Blinkx is the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine. I don’t know if it’s true but it is a most impressive web 2.0 application that models itself on today’s topic, “Data is the next Intel inside”.

Blinkx Home Page

Blinkx uses a combination of methods to web crawl through the web to catalog videos. They include as quoted from the site “blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video.”  In this data driven era where web 2.0 applications can become successful by following the best practices of  “Data is the next Intel inside”, Blinkx have created an unique, hard to recreate source of video data that amounts to about 35 million hours indexed. It also enhances the core data by allowing a section to submit your own videos as well as partner up as a media partner if your a media organization and if your a member you can also comment on the videos. It’s designed with reuse in mind like RSS and users are able to send videos to friends for viewing and even to put it on their own blog, MySpace or Facebook wall.

Compared to other similar cataloging sites like YouTube, Blinkx searches differ by it’s separation from the standard metadata based keyword search to an in depth analysis of videos, audios, viral and TV contents.This creates a more in depth search and thus an invaluable and unique database for Blinkx to utilize. Hopefully in the future this technology that Blinkx have invested in can pave a road to the development of the semantic web.

Here’s a few links of reference but most information come from Blinkx site itself:

Blinkx climbs Nielsen chart
Blinkx information

Blinkx news

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Today in my search of Web 2.0 apps that fall under the category “Harnessing Collective Intelligence”, hence my title. I came across a site that catalogs your travel experiences. It’s called Wegor and you have to sign up and create an account to upload but viewing is free for all. It’s a community that promotes sharing travel experiences of any traveler from around the world. The three main things you can do is write blogs about your travel, upload photo albums and mark your trip on Google map. Not as popular as flickr the photo sharing site but similar in their functions. While Wegor focuses on the photos and experiences of the traveler, flickr is primarily a depository of photos to share with your friends, family and practically everyone around the world.

Wegor Home Page

Wegor can be used as a  form of contact and safety net for interested parties to check that their friends and relatives taking long vacations or trips on their whereabouts from the uploaded photos and blog about their day. Otherwise it could be used as a reference for other users in planning their trips to the same area.

I guess the only issues with this Web 2.0 app would be the privacy of your photos and blogs. But of course, common sense dictates that you should remember that whatever you upload online can be viewed by anyone with an internet connection so a bit of sound judgment is all you need when uploading your photos and texts online.

In the future I hope to see a bit more travelers joining the site as with a bigger fan base of contributors it can become the number one place for planning vacations and trips overseas as well as a way to keep tabs on your whereabouts.

That’s all for this post and I hope you’ve enjoyed my blatant advertising of a web 2.0 app.  :-p

Hello world!

Hi Everybody!

This is my first foray into the wonderful world of social networking with Web 2.0 Applications. I hope to expand my experiences and socialize with you all online.

So see you guys around.