StartUp2.0 is a competition of European web 2.0 startups. Tomorrow, May 10th, they will be voting on a list of the top 15 web 2.0 startups. You can see the list at Read/WriteWeb (which is in itself a very interesting blog).
The list of startups is not much different than those here in the U.S. (there’s lots of social networking and video in what they do) except for one difference. There seems to be more focus on geolocated services. This is partly because mobile providers in Europe have been providing excellent location-based services for a while whereas here in the US it’s still trying to get off the ground. And that’s despite the fact that GPS is a system created and owned by the US Department of Defense.
In a previous post, I talked about the loss of separation of work and life, the fact that we are now able, and do, work at all times from all places.
Another related effect of information technology is that of the shortening attention span. IT increases our efficiency, not by enhancing our brains (that’s still in the works), but by complementing them. Our brains haven’t changed. We still can only store 7 plus or minus 2 items on our short term memory. But technology can do all of the low-level information processing for us, allowing us to be a lot more productive while still using our slow-as-an-abacus brains to do only higher-level information processing.
Being human, however, we still constantly want to do more in less time. The result has been that our attention span has become shorter and shorter. The act of leaning back and allowing ourselves to be immersed in a slow and long experience (whether it’s reading a book, watching a movie or a speech, or listening to music) is giving way to accessing quick and short snippets of information for entertainment, education, work, or anything else.
Hence, the rise of the 2-minute clip on YouTube or the “elevator pitch” of the entrepreneur. The latter, a pitch of an idea in the time it takes to ride an elevator, became famous during the dotcom boom when there was an entrepreneur around every corner and venture capitalists had very little time to devote to each one of them.
Today, there’s an article in the NY Times about Sony is shrinking down entire episodes of classic shows like “Charlie’s Angels” and “Starsky and Hutch” to 3.5-5 minute “minisodes.” They will be part of a new service called the Minisode Network which will be a dedicated online channel, though the minisodes will first air on MySpace.
I, for one, am all for conciseness and brevity. In fact, in my e-business class, I insist on presentations of my students’ business plans that are no longer than 15 minutes, and written plans that are 15 pages or less. As I tell my students, the people who will read them or hear you talk will quickly move to the next thing if you go too long. But my need for quick information pieces goes beyong business presentations. There is a hilarious show on the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim called “Robot Chicken.” It’s a bunch of stop animation shorts, some of which are just one or two seconds long. They are some of the funniest stuff on TV. And it’s just the right pace and length for my attention-span-challenged brain.
This one is from the section on “Weird interactions of humans with technology.” The NY Times reports on Cheddarvision TV, a website where one can go and watch cheddar cheese age. That’s it. It’s just a webcam on a round of cheddar that just sits there.
Apparently, it’s a huge hit. It has been viewed over 900,000 times so far (and I’m sure many more since the NY Times article). But people go even further.
As befits an inert object of obsession, the cheese has become a blank slate upon which admirers can express their passions and idiosyncrasies. Poems and songs have been written about it. It has been invited to a wedding. At Easter, it received an anonymous gift of chocolate and decorative chicks.
Hmmm… I’ve been trying so hard to increase my blog readership. I guess all I need is a piece of cheese and a webcam.
But seriously, people are strange. They’ll find meaning, comfort, or excitement in the most mundane or the weirdest things. Technology just makes more of them available. If I was Tom Calver, the owner of Cheddarvision TV, I’d start showing Google ads on the site. Though he does offer viewers the chance to buy his cheeses online.
In typical NY Times fashion, the article on Cheddarvision TV ends on a “philosophical” note:
“It’s a security,” he said. “It’s something that’s there 24 hours a day. I heard of someone who said they looked at it before bed and found it a nice, comforting thing. You should really talk to a psychologist.”
About a week ago, I got an invitation to become a beta tester of Joost for which I signed a while ago. Joost is the latest project of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). Just like their two previous applications, Joost uses a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to deliver digital content. In Kazaa that consists of general files (though mostly music and video files) and in Skype it consists of digitized phone conversations. In Joost, the digital content is TV video. The idea is that I can open Joost on my computer which is connected to the Internet via broadband and have on-demand TV content available to me. What’s the real innovation? The use of a P2P network. Instead of all the users getting the TV content served to them by a few very powerful servers, all users’ computers act both as clients (receiving video) and servers (sending video to other clients). In this way, the larger the network, the more powerful it becomes. The opposite of a traditional client server model where as the number of clients increases, the servers become less and less able to serve them all.
So, being the geek that I am, I got really excited about trying Joost. Installing it was a breeze. I opened the application and sat back to be amazed.
Well, let’s just say there’s a reason why there is such a thing as beta testing. While the interface is slick and the promised value-added features are cool, the actual content deliver was often jerky with sometimes garbled sound. Now, I know this may also have to do with my network at home and even with my laptop which is not the newest machine in the world. But it fulfills all the recommended specs in terms of hardware and my broadband connection is a through standard Time Warner cable modem. So, most likely, the sub-par quality is just due to growing pains. And maybe because the P2P network itself is still too small to really be able to distribute content smoothly and efficiently.
Oh, and another problem. The content kinda sucks. Joost is still trying to make deals with major providers. The incentives for them could be big. For example, if I am watching a show, let’s say “Grey’s Anatomy”, on my laptop using Joost, I can actually have advertising shown to me that is specifically targeted to me. Not the general advertising shown on a regular TV based on the large demographic to which I am assumed to maybe, probably, hopefully belong. More target advertising is more effective advertising is more expensive advertising.
Joost is still new and needs to prove itself. But the two guys who have created it have already proved to be amazingly disruptive innovators. I’m sure that by the time Joost is out of beta, it will not disappoint.
I just found this today. I will definitely be using it next time I am teaching me e-business class, right before (or after) I discuss HTML, XML, and the Web 2.0 environment.
Posted by technodarwinism 
Posted by technodarwinism 
Posted by technodarwinism 
