New Rules for the New Internet Bubble
Carpe Diem We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. First, to understand where we’re going, it’s important to know where we’ve been. Paths to Liquidity: a quick history of the four waves of startup investing. The Golden Age (1970 – 1995): Build a growing business with a consistently profitable track record (after at least 5 quarters,) and go public when it’s time.Dot.com Bubble (1995-2000): “Anything goes” as public markets clamor for ideas, vague promises of future growth, and IPOs happen absent regard for history or profitability.Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity.The New Bubble: (2011 – 2014): Here we go again…. (If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.)
Google Takes On Facebook With New Social Network Google+
Watch : Everything Is a Remix
The internet is over
If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of course, because they'll be too busy playing with the teleportation console – I'll be able to be quite specific: I was in a Mexican restaurant opposite a cemetery in Austin, Texas, halfway through eating a taco. It was the end of day two of South by Southwest Interactive, the world's highest-profile gathering of geeks and the venture capitalists who love them, and I'd been pursuing a policy of asking those I met, perhaps a little too aggressively, what it was exactly that they did. What is "user experience", really? What the hell is "the gamification of healthcare"? Or "geofencing"? Or "design thinking"? The content strategist across the table took a sip of his orange-coloured cocktail. This, for outsiders, is the fundamental obstacle to understanding where technology culture is heading: increasingly, it's about everything. Web 3.0 The game layer The dictator's dilemma Biomimicry comes of age
“Internet est une révolution de la consultation plus que de la production”
Il y a 4 ans, nous rencontrions André Gunthert, directeur du Laboratoire d’histoire visuelle contemporaine (Lhivic), pour évoquer avec lui la révolution Flickr. Depuis, le web 2.0 s’est largement installé, même s’il a aussi largement montré ses limites, notamment à transformer tout un chacun en producteur de contenus, d’images, de vidéos, de textes… Il n’est pas étrange qu’aujourd’hui, ce ne soit plus tant la manière dont on produit des images qu’il nous intéressait d’interroger, que la manière dont on les consulte. Le web créatif des amateurs est-il en train de céder le pas face au web des industries culturelles ? InternetActu.net : Le contenu généré par l’utilisateur (User generated content, UGC) est-il vraiment le “trésor” du web 2.0 ? André Gunthert : Sur YouTube, le modèle dominant n’est pas celui de la création de contenus. Les chercheurs ont tendance à considérer la production plutôt que l’activité de consommation. Pour les images, la situation d’abondance est très nouvelle.
Le mythe de la courbe l'adoption des technologies
Vous connaissez certainement la courbe de l’adoption des technologies du Gartner (le Hype Cycle – Wikipédia -, c’est-à-dire comme on devrait le traduire plus littéralement « le cycle du battage publicitaire des technologies ») publiée chaque année par cet institut d’études américain pour distinguer les technologies les plus prometteuses et celles en passe de tomber dans l’oubli. Nicolas Nova sur le blog de la conférence Lift en faisait récemment une critique plutôt instruite, reprenant les propos de plusieurs blogs qui ont éreinté la méthode. Image : La courbe générale du Hype Cycle par le Gartner. La réflexion est partie du travail de Julian Bleecker qui essayait de dresser une typologie des façons dont on représente le futur. La courbe du Gartner décrit un cycle des produits et des technologies, mais estime que tous connaissent un pic d’attentes démesurées, puis, après une période de déception, qu’ils finissent par être adoptés par les gens. Autre reproche.
Agencies As Incubators
Does it make sense for an ad agency to launch an incubator for tech start-ups? You could (and many no doubt would) say that this was merely a distraction from the day job. An unnecessary aberration from what agencies are meant to be doing. Personally, I think it makes a bunch of sense. Here's why. This year's Cannes Lions seemed to be a marker in the sand of how the tech and ad worlds are increasingly colliding (or 'marrying on the beach', as Mel eloquently put it). The Portland Incubator Experiment has been going for a couple of years, actively supported by Wieden & Kennedy, and serving "as a hub for community, entrepreneurship, and creative thinking." This reminded me of this rather intriguing (and anonymous) answer on Quora about how Apple uses its significant cash reserves to maintain a decisive advantage over its competitors in product quality. What Apple have foreseen, is the advantage that comes from building a unique pipeline of smart cutting-edge technology. Image courtesy
How the Internet Gets Inside Us
When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in communication we’re living with are unprecedented.
