www.dpingram.com

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I knew it wouldn’t be far behind!

At the last SF New Tech meetup at the Metreon on May 30 I watched the preso from justin.tv. AT the end my question was this:

“When will we see Justine.tv?” I asked, half tongue-in-cheek.

Well my lovelies, here it is: http://www.justin.tv/ijustine

Here’s a little fun, copy the following URL, change the “your.name” bit for your first and last name and see what you get.
For example, if your name is John Smith, you’d use http://john.smith.youaremighty.com/

Here is a quick preview of some fun to come… Today you can use izimi to share files so you can embed images, videos, etc into web pages, but pretty soon you’ll be able ’share’ devices. Here is an example of a shared device, a webcam, where the feed is embedded into a web page…

Just to be clear, this is a LIVE FEED direct from a users own PC!

view in external viewer

I was chatting to one of the founders of salesforce.com a few days ago about the merits of software delivered as a service over the web, negating the need for locally installed apps. I’m talking about the concept of SaaS (Software as a Service), and the reason the conversation came up is because izimi (my company’s software) is most definitely not SaaS. Which is the way of the future, we debated.

Now when you’re talking to someone who has built one of the world’s most successful and fast growing software companies on a SaaS architecture you’d better listen, those words are not to be taken lightly. So how could I resolve this conflict, is there just one way that will win out, or is it more complex than that?

My view is that, for some applications, vendors will find themselves adopting the SaaS route. You’ll see as you read on that I think it’s exactly the route to go for some. On the other hand, I think we must be cautious not to automatically assume this works for all classes of application - you have to consider the commercial and technical drivers that are in play, as they both have a bearing.

The conversation went back and forwards for a few days afterwards by email, and this is the realization I came to. I’ll use the two real examples which were naturally the subject of our discussions: salesforce.com and izimi. Actually it’s a bit embarrassing putting izimi in the same sentence as salesforce.com - the former is huge, with hundreds of thousands of corporate users and a current market cap north of $5bn. The latter is an 18 person startup and certainly worth a little less at this stage. Nonetheless, they serve as useful examples of two different types of software application:

Salesforce.com

The market they’re in is CRM, enterprise software, large databases, and complex business rules/logic - traditionally speaking a potential management and deployment issue for any organization. Therefore SaaS (salesforce.com’s approach) is great here. What MIS manager wouldn’t see the benefit of outsourcing the provision of the software/service to someone else who will manage all of the deployment, development, upgrade, support, and backup issues? One of the biggest problems with the pre-SaaS client/server enterprise software is deployment and management at the users’ desktops – that’s just one of the problems and yet on its own it’s a major headache.

Enterprise software users are also generally considerate of their total cost of ownership when looking at new business apps. When they are investing in new client/server apps they have to consider an (often considerable) license fee, support costs, training… Saleforce.com takes all those financial concerns away, and avoids the upfront capital investment in software (which often is a pain to deploy, doesn’t work as it should, and is soon out of date).

Also worth noting is that many organizations that deploy client-server enterprise apps (as opposed to the SaaS approach) end up getting drawn into so much customization and integration that they subsequently require a good deal of bespoke consulting, design, and integration just to get and keep their apps running. All the major ERP and CRM vendors have huge services businesses to support those customers and it’s a big part of their business. Often the economic promises of integrating client-server business apps with other internal system have proved to have been outweighed by the cost/time penalty of doing the work required to get there. SaaS software like Saleforce.com’s products let organizations get running quickly without that big MIS overhead, PLUS with APIs like Apex those that do want to do the integration have a means to do so if they wish.

izimi

Something like izimi is a totally different product to the previous example. It’s a different application, different class of users, and different factors governing which architecture best suits. Firstly it’s not an enterprise product, so we’re not talking about MIS managers overcoming a bunch of problems or financial concerns to make a buying decision. It’s for individuals (though could be used by groups in companies) who want to instantly share any type of digital assets without any restrictions in terms of file type, size, etc. It doesn’t require the processing of complex business rules and it doesn’t require the management of large databases of business-critical data.

Now, the story gets more complicated (as these things always do) because, at present, if you want to share multiple files multiple times with multiple people you tend to use one (though probably more) of the upload-store-and-serve websites (these could be thought of as SaaS offerings). These sites work OK, but there are problems: having to wait for uploads (and sometimes media processing) to complete before stuff is available; uploading 5 files is simple and fast, but 300 files is much more time consuming; most upload sites restrict users on file type, file size, quantity; many upload sites do not preserve the original file format (e.g. many convert to flash media, destroying the original file format). izimi offers an instant option for these people and removes all the limitations currently imposed. So in this use for these users there is some benefit to having a lightweight app like izimi residing locally, and none of the MIS headaches that an enterprise app suffers from.

So what?

My realization is that it’s a case of horses for courses - I don’t see a death-match taking place across the board – within application classes, yes definitely, but across different application classes, I don’t think so. I can’t say that all software development and delivery will go one way. In some applications SaaS suits perfectly and appears to be the future (that’s why people like SAP and Siebel are feeling threatened by Salesforce.com). Simultaneously in others it doesn’t suit so well and alternative architectures may play better, hence the routes taken by products like izimi.

I think the trick is to consider the particular circumstance and ask does one route or another best help us overcome users’ problems. If one works better than the other for your class of application then use it, if it doesn’t don’t just follow the crowd.

Hey well, at the end of the day its all food for thought, and that’s the point of openbusiness.cc, lots of opinions count. What’s yours?

David Ingram

my company - www.izimi.com my blog – www.dpingram.com

I’ll be making a 5 minute prezzo and joining the panel discussion at the next North West Startup event in Manchester in June. The event is sponsored by KPMG.

The keynote speaker is Ajaz Ahmed (Freeserve, Callserve, Tiva Services, Browzar), and other presenters include Sam Sethi (Blognation, Vecosys), and Alain Falys (OB10, Omnis Mundi).

The organizer and moderator is Manoj Ranaweera (founder of ebdex, founder of OpenCoffee Manchester)

A funny but serious vid about the changing relationship between advertisers and consumers. Enjoy.

This is a copy of my recent post as a guest blogger on Christian Ahlert’s brilliant Openbusiness.cc.

I remember not so many years ago we were told we would never get more than 128K over copper wire. The renowned authorities told us this was the reason that the growth of the Internet into the home would always be limited because of the lack of fast connectivity that businesses enjoyed. The upstarts countered by pointing to the enormous investments that the telcos and the pure-play ISPs were putting into the market: it wouldn’t be long before we would in fact have as much as 512K, possibly more, in every home!!!

The experts scoffed; no matter how much investment was put into the backbones and local exchanges, there was no way the infrastructure providers were going to dig up the routes from the exchanges to the individual houses in order to lay fibre. No way. This was known as the problem of ‘the last mile’. The maximum speed over copper had been reached, we had hit the limit. The established wisdom was very clear on this point.

I tell this story to, a story of very recent history, to highlight the perils of predicting the future based on the evidence of today, because whilst izimi has its supporters it too has some critics who dismiss it as a pipe dream. Izimi, and technologies like it, will play a BIG part in the future of the internet, but as with any innovation there are people who just don’t know it yet.

I got involved in izimi in May 2006. It’s a long story, but to cut it short let me just say that a few smart people that I greatly respected asked me to come along and help them turn a piece of clever technology into a user product, something that helped people do some of the things they were already doing but faster, easier, better. When I saw the vision I was taken by the simplicity of it all. Izimi does away with middlemen, and turns on its head the notion that you must first upload your content to a third party website in order for others to be able to see it. Now, it’s fair to say that the technically adept were doing this anyway with static IP addresses and web servers, but your average internet user doesn’t have the knowledge to do this, so they have to rely on the third parties. The accepted wisdom is this: if I want to share something widely, I upload it to someone else’s servers, get a URL, and my friends use that URL to get to my stuff. OK, so there are upload managers for some of these sites, tools that make the upload process work in the background, but it’s still a kludge, a substitute for doing it yourself.

What is the internet all about? I’d say that the answer you get depends upon who you speak to and what vested interests they hold, but for me there’s a large dose of information empowerment and personal freedom involved. The internet is not heavily regulated, nor should it be, but there are corporations out there whose entire businesses are built upon owning, or at least controlling, our data, our lives. This will increasingly become a problem as the implications for the loss of control of our personal data become clearer. If we voluntarily give it away now, we become more dependent upon these giants simply to continue to operate. We get dependent, unable to move, its called supplier lock-in. Without us even knowing it we are giving over control, and losing our independence.

I believe the Internet should remain unregulated, power to the people if you will, and technologies like izimi, that let us do the very things that these third party store-and-serve providers, keep us free. Jeez, I’m an idealistic b******. But can my idealism really work, or do the technical limitations of today put a spanner in the works? Good question, and one that you can help me answer. Read on.

Business guru and VC Francis McInerney, who describes himself as a “futurist, strategist and realist”, has a similar view on all this:

“Basically, Izimi obsoletes YouTube. This is a phenomenon I advised customers about over a decade ago when I demonstrated that when information costs fall far enough, strange things happen… By disintermediating social networks like YouTube, Izimi precludes the strategy of Viacom of forcing social networks to pay for material that can no longer be copyrighted. Izimi software lets individuals syndicate whatever they want, from whomever they want, without using intermediaries like YouTube. This impels copyright owners to attack their customers, tens of millions at a time, or to create copyright-free business models.”

(http://www.northriver.com/blog/2007/03/07/izimi/)

What does all this mean? Well, the same forces operate in every business sector, and it goes like this: as the speed of business increases, driven by the availability of better and easier-to-use tools (generally technology) among those further down the supply chain, those who occupied the middle and upper tiers of the supply chain find themselves becoming marginalised, driven out, or at least forced to radically change their business models. It’s tempting to think that this doesn’t apply to our sector, the media/information/technology sector, and so we need not consider it, but the truth is it does.

We are in the information business, and what this means to us is this: “speed of business” means the speed of information flow, “availability of better easier to use tools” means technologies like izimi that help the laymen do what previously only the techies could do, “those further down the supply chain” means you and I, the information consumers and producers. In fact the effect is amplified in our sector because its less of a supply chain, and more of a supply net/web: with the advent of UGC (user generated content) the consumers and producers sit right next to one another, on the same tier, and those intermediaries that provide the service of store-and-serve of our content are the guys who have seen a need, seen a niche brought about by slow and unreliable internet connections, the behaviour of old school users who turn off their computers at night, and made a business for themselves by occupying the middle ground.

Well, guess what? The times they are a-changing, and now we have reliable and fast internet connections, computers that are increasingly doing more than just getting email or writing letters – and we are increasingly leaving them on – and software that lets us share files, not just to a closed group who have also downloaded the same software as us but with anyone on the internet with just a web browser, with just a few mouse clicks. Suddenly the masses can easily do what previously only the technically adept were able to do. So, izimi is not the established model, it is an innovative way to do what hundreds of millions of people have been doing for years – just faster (in fact instant), simpler, and free.

How is the product to use? Well, we got a lot of beta user feedback over the last few months, and it’s very humbling when you discover how supportive and how constructive beta users can be. For instance, we definitely need to improve the UI: it’s too clunky and takes too many clicks to publish one file right now. We also need to make it simpler to publish multiple files, and we need support for private sharing (today its all publicly indexed on izimi.com).

Are there practical challenges? Yes. There are a few, for example: what happens when I turn my machine off? What about the speed of serving content? What about transfer limits imposed by my ISP?

Does izimi have the answers? Yes, I believe we have many of them, and we’ll see technical solutions to these practical problems rolled out in short order. (We still have a few unknowns, and I have an idea to post some of those for discussion in the Openbusiness forum in the next few days – I think they would make for some stimulating debate)

I’d like to thank our existing users for their feedback to date, and also let you know that there’s a whole heap of new stuff and tweaks coming in June with the next version. I’d also like to invite more Minibar and Openbusiness fans to come take a look and tell me what you think - if you get the current version at www.izimi.com you’ll have a baseline against which to compare the next release. I’d love to hear your thoughts so please feel free to mail me (david at izimi dot com) or collar me at the next Minibar.

The new version of ThinkFree Docs allows users to tag, search and share MS office docs and ThinkFree docs in its online community.

This is the word from the Techcrunch story:

The addition of tagging is immediately evident. Documents viewable by the community now come complete with ratings, embedding code, comment fields, downloading options and the obligatory post this to Digg/ Furl/ del.icio.us buttons. In many ways it’s moving into the territory previously claimed by Scribd, the new features at ThinkFree share a lot of similarity with Scribd, and yet they are not exclusive unto themselves, building upon an already very smart online Microsoft Office alternative.

Thinkfree currently has 275,000 users.

Rumours of photobucket acquisition by MySpace are now confirmed, for $250m. There is much discussion comparing this acquisition to Google’s YouTube buy last year. Photobucket is currently getting around 80% of the unique visitors that YouTube was getting at around the time it was acquired for $1.65bn, showing that on this metric at least Photobucket is undervalued compared with what YouTube achieved. Obviously its not as clearcut as unique visitors though.

Photobucket has around 40m registered users and is adding around 85,000 a day.

Using the ‘unique visitors’ metric, YouTube was paid around $67/head, and photobucket is at around $13.

This recent news throws more light on the story a few weeks ago about MySpace blocking photobucket content. What a negotiating tactic, several other potential bidders are said to have been scared off by the move.