The next-generation online customer acquisition engine THE NEXT GENERATION CUSTOMER ACQUISITION ENGINE Web2.0 Nimish Vohra | India Head, Regalix | June 4, | Bangalore

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Before the Web…  … were competing computing technologies  … some competing OS  And then emerged Windows as a major Platform… … with packaged software applications … with tightly coupled APIs … and frequent releases

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Then came the Web…  … with Client-Server technology  … and, hyper-linking  This saw the emergence of sites such as… … Rediff, Geocities, Britannica Online, Directories (Yahoo)  And this was … One way web or read only web … Primitive interfaces (Netscape vs. IE) … Taxonomy (Yahoo directory) … Pull medium (sites needed to have stickiness to get users back)

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Then happened Web2.0 …  Blogger (read + write, comment)  Wikipedia (read + write, review, debate)  Flickr (view, upload, tag)  No directories: Tag content the way you want … … Not taxonomy but “folksonomy” … view what others have liked … recommend to others, and view others’ recommendations  A read-write, participatory web

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine How Web2.0 Got its Name  The concept was born at a brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International  Dale Dougherty, VP O’Reilly  Background: Dot-com bubble had just burst  Companies that survived had something in common  Could these be called the Web2.0?

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: An Overview  Strategic Positioning  The Web as a Platform  User Positioning  You control your own data  Core Competencies  Services, not packaged software  Architecture of participation  Harnessing collective intelligence  Cost-effective scalability  Re-mixable data sources and data transformations  Software above the level of a single device

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Web as a Platform  Netscape vs. Google  Netscape  Desktop application  Strategy: sell high-end servers running web applications  Tried controlling standards for displaying content  Google  Web application  Never packaged or sold  Delivered as a service, with users paying for the service, directly or indirectly

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Web as a Platform  DoubleClick vs. Overture, AdSense  DoubleClick  Is a web service (like Google)… … but is not participatory  Advertisers call the shots, and not users  Bulky, contractual placements of ads on large sites, for large advertisers  Overture, AdSense  Any small advertiser can place an ad in any small site  They serviced the long-tail  Leverage customer self service to reach out to the entire web, not just the head, but the long tail too

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Harnessing Collective Intelligence  Hyperlinking: Sites are bound to the structure of the web by links  Google’s breakthrough in search – PageRank – uses link structure rather than type of content to provide search results  Ebay – a collective activity of it’s users. Ebay grows as activity grows. Ebay, only provides a platform  Amazon – sells the same products as its competitors. But they have higher user participation – reviews, different ways of interacting, user activity produces better results

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Harnessing Collective Intelligence Companies that have extended the above concepts  Wikipedia – an online encyclopedia: Radical change in the dynamics of content creation. Trust.  Del.icio.us, Flickr – pioneered “folksonomy” (in contrast to taxonomy) – collaborative categorization.  Cloudmark – spam filtering, by aggregation of individual decisions  Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, on which most of the web runs, is relies on open-source – collective, net-enabled intelligence  Blogging  Usable technology (easy to publish own content, rather than using HTML or CMS)  RSS – unique content delivery mechanism. Converts a pull medium to a push medium  Bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a major role in shaping search results

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Rich User Experience  Applet (1992)  Java delivered Applet (1995)  Macromedia’s Flash based “Rich Internet Applications”, many years ago  Full scale applications happened only with Gmail  Technology that Google used was termed AJAX, which is a collection of  XHTML, CSS  DOM  XML, XSLT  XMLHttpRequest  Javascript, to bind everything together

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Visual Design?  Very user friendly  Feature rich  People are not shy to use color  But lots of white  More text than images  Logos are rounded, colorful, playful?  Again, very usable

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Design Patterns  Long Tail : Small sites make up bulk of the internet’s content. Leverage customer self service and automatic data management  Data is important: Try and create a unique hard to replicate data  Users add value: In form of data (reviews, original content), behavior  Self-learning apps: Applications should be intelligent enough to gather user behavior (top 10 views, highest clicks, etc)  Rights reserved?: Benefits come from collective adoption and not restriction.  Always a Beta?: On the web one does not need to have software releases. Change as often, if you improving the experience

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: What is proprietary? What is the biz model?  Desktop applications were, now they are open source.  Web applications were (advanced mail, etc), now they are not  If for a news company, news is not copyrighted, and is freely distributable, how does the news company make money?  For some companies, such as MapQuest, it would be data they can license. Companies like Google are already giving this data out freely.  So in the end, it is not products, not services, not data. It is the amount of traffic you can garner. More traffic could mean more revenue opportunities in terms of ads.

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Beyond the web, beyond the community: Web3?  Making it collaborative.  Making it a web enabled service.  Moving completely away from the desktop storage  Moving away from desktop applications.  Web3 – some thoughts: All pervasive, always on. For the businesses.

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Implications for Media  Publishers now no longer leverage all the content  It is now easy to create content (Blogs)  It is now easy to distribute content (RSS, feed-readers)

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Are we going into a Bubble?  Yes! There is a lot of frenzy to innovate.  And lot of money to back it with.  And some of the applications don’t really make any sense! E.g., myLot. To me, even MySpace does not make much sense, when compared to Orkut!  But again, innovation never goes waste  Finally, you are safe if you are thinking about the user, have a clear reasoning of how this is useful. Don’t be a part of the fad

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Web2.0: Some creative Web2.0 applications?  Zopa: Taking money lending to the masses  Zimbra: Messaging and collaboration  Tictrac: Online time tracking  World66: A wiki on Travel  NetworthIQ: Track your networth online  OpenID: Single identity across all applications  Foldershare: Keep your files online  HousingMaps: Craigslist + GoogleMaps: A mashup

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine Thank You! A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. -Chinese Proverb Nimish Vohra India Head, Regalix | Bangalore