First Tuesday - Confession to Make
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Last night I went to my first First Tuesday event in Ireland. I used to go to them in Sydney in 1999-2000 and oh how things have changed! Back then it was all about style, but no substance, chinking wine glasses, and migrating to the side of the room that had financiers. Last night was rather different, although there was one similar theme - more on that later.
I have a confession to make though. I actually went along last night expecting to hear about "Next Generation - What's Next for the Net?". I read the email invite in a hurry. What last night's discussion was actually about was "Next Generation Networks - What's Next for the Net?". I realised this when I took my seat, up the front, where there's no early escape route. The room was a virtual who's who of the telcoms and ISP industry, and me. When the panel introductions were made, and the key speaker was eircom's Chief Technical Officer, Geoff Shakespeare, I decided to approach this in the same manner as I used to take with some of my more maths orientated economics lectures: listen acutely, don't get freaked out by acronyms, and see how you go....
Luckily Geoff Shakespeare is one of that rare breed of technician who's obviously so on top of his subject, but is able to communicate that with an audience who may not be quite at his level of knowledge. He made a very interesting presentation on eircom's plans for the next generation network (to you and me, that means the big pipe that enables all the good stuff). He took us through a very interesting pitch on VDL2 slammers - ones that are in cabinets no less - and I even laughed at his joke about needing a cabinet the size of a tardis! He used a lot of food allegories, the one I remember most was where he said that eircom wants to design a sausage maker and churn out the sausages! Using the churn word in a roomful of telcoms people was, I think, rather brave!
Questions and answers followed and the issue of what would be done with all of this bandwidth arose. This is where it got really interesting. Many people took the floor and, along with the panellists, the general consensus was that the revenue to pay for all of this big fat pipe development, content, etc. would come from advertising. This is where I was reminded of First Tuesdays in Sydney. Back then it was all about building websites and selling banner ad space on them. The logic was that these sites would be so fantastic that they'd drive millions of users to click on banner ads which would be funded by advertisers...
Well we all know the story of the dot com bomb.
And while we now have more sophisticated contextual advertising avaiable to us now, that is by no means sufficient to pay for the next generation network. Let's face it - do you ever click the ads you see in your gmail? I don't. But that's another day's posting - when to use pay per click and when not to... come back tomorrow folks for that one. . .
My opinion is that the evolving Web 2.0 models of the social networking sites are the ones that will work. That is, let everyone use your service for free. Get them hooked! Then, let them pay an annual fee to use the service with all the bells and whistles on. Don't go charging a lot. Charge a small amount - like €25, but charge millions of people €25 and become a millionaire!!
Sites that are doing this right already are: Flickr, the wonderful 37signals - eg. Basecamp, Skype.
Labels: Web 2.0 First Tuesday Future of the Web
1 Comments:
I made the same mistake at a talk at google once - when the population of the room is 99.9% male and a gag about the eight IP layer being religion get's the biggest laugh of the night, then you know you are in trouble.
I agree with you about 37 Signal's stuff, they really focus on how usable something is. As for Flickr, I'm not sure if they actually make any money though, seeing as the bandwidth costs are so high. (Well, the guys who created the company did, but Yahoo! might not be.)
BTW, have you seen http://twitter.com/