WebDosBeta is today!

We've just finished the presentations section of the WebDosBeta conference in Madrid; so far, some interesting projects have been shown; slight blogging-app heavy.

Now starting the roundtables. Will blog a summary at the end of the day.

Posted

The silent revolution in Spain’s broadband market

I've written for the broadbandwiki about the recent game-changing ADSL offer by Jazztel in Spain.
(20 meg down/ 1 meg up + unlimited local/national calls + wifi/router for 30 euros/month!)

Now, via Martin Varsavsky's blog (in Spanish), we learn that Jazztel is gaining 3,000 gross adds per day, or roughly 90,000 per month.

To put that number in perspective, the growth of the entire Spanish ADSL market has averaged maybe 70-80,000 per month over the past 2 years.

So assuming that Jazztel's churn is no higher than that of its peers, either they have succeeded in exploding the market's natural growth rate, or are devouring the growth of every other player (maybe even forcing some into a situation of negative net adds).

Either way, this is powerfully disruptive news. Are Telefonica investors aware of the silent revolution taking place in Spanish broadband?

Posted

To Nicholas Carr: about Web 2.0, Wikipedia, the CIA, amateurs, and Spain’s population

Hi Nicholas,

I love your writing style; it's very funny and irreverent, and makes us all think about things from a fresh angle. Your post about the amorality of Web 2.0 is a classic read: "This isn't the language of exposition. It's the language of rapture": great stuff! You and Kevin Kelly have like an asynchronous online version of Crossfire going on; for sure, please keep shaking things up.

But I have to take issue with the attacks you and The Register have written on Wikipedia, and the participative nature of Web 2.0. In particular, you build up a black & white worldview defined by "amateurs" and "professionals" that I think is very counter-productive to thinking about the real challenges of Web 2.0.

On "Amateurs" vs "Professionals"

So you write,

"The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional... Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call 'the mainstream media' "

But exactly what is the definition of an "amateur"? Or a "professional"? And who decides what label you deserve?

I read blogs written by prominent venture capitalists, marketing gurus, university professors, successful entrepreneurs, engineers, hedge fund managers, equity analysts, and many others who are unquestionably considered "professionals" within their chosen field of work.

These people are anything but "amateurs". Besides their "offline" qualifications, they're people who help bring down racist politicians;  raise awareness of crappy products; come together to organize relief efforts; provide companies with early feedback; and so on.

Do you honestly believe these people are "amateurs"?

Something else you write:

"Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs."

Your choice of examples for the "professionals" is certainly good. But it doesn't have to be such a stark choice. I think blogs can play a complementary role to the MSM in various ways, one of which is to fisk very obviously wrong information that goes uncorrected.

In my own blog, I've taken issue in the past with the sloppy data that the Economist Intelligence Unit are using to publish their MBA rankings. Now, I have nothing to do with any MBA programs, I'm not a journalist, nor do I know anything about how these rankings are compiled, and nor do I really care. In this subject matter, at least, I'm very much an amateur.

But I find it very irritating to see a brand that I respect like the Economist let their standards slip like this, so I blogged about it. And from the small but steady traffic that post continues to generate every day, from readers all over the world, I think I've been able to make a small contribution to the integrity of the discussion of MBA rankings.

You really came down hard on Wikipedia in your post. So let me give you another example, one that actually involves Wikipedia.

I live in Spain, a country that has experienced spectacular population growth in the past 6 years. Fertility rates in Spain have been below replacement level for long enough now that all of this growth has come from immigrants attracted to the warm climate and growing economy.

Around 2000, the population of Spain was about 40 million, and it was expected to stay at pretty much exactly that level for many years before starting to decline. Instead, massive immigration has pushed the population to an estimated 44 million. Ten percent growth in 6 years, all from immigrants!

But if I go to the CIA World FactBook, the entry for Spain states:

"Population: 40,341,462 (July 2005 est.)"

This is just flat out, factually wrong. And not just a little wrong, but almost 10% off.

As if to complete the illusion of rigor, we're told this is a "July 2005 estimate".

I fully realize the folks at the CIA are all overworked and busy trying to find this bad guy, but surely they could spare an intern to check up on the data they're disseminating to the world?

Estimating the population of Spain shouldn't be that tough- we're talking about a modern Western European country. One could check the local press for population figures like these:

January 1, 2005: 43,975,375 (estimated- official data come out early 2006)

Or even better, surf on over to the national statistics institute and get the latest, official census data:

January 1, 2004:         43,197,684 (official data)

You might be wondering why I care about this? For the same reason that I came down hard on the Economist: it irritates me to see brands I respect issuing research that is so obviously wrong. Now when I look at EIU or CIA data, I start to second guess whether what I'm reading is actually accurate. How many of the world's business plans, economic models, and research projects use as base assumptions the numbers that come out of the CIA World FactBook or the EIU World in Figures?

But here's the funny bit: what if that CIA intern, assigned to double-check the population estimate of Spain, doesn't speak Spanish and so can't navigate the Spain's statistics institute website? Easy, just head over to...Wikipedia! For in this very same place that you called an "incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids" is the following figure for the population of Spain:

Population: 43,209,511 July 2005, estimated

Ok, the figure isn't sourced, and still seems to underestimate what the INE and other sources have published. But it's still far more accurate than the CIA's estimate!

I know that you "wouldn't depend on it as a source, and..certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper", but let's admit that it's a whole lot more transparent, and adaptable, than the opaque processes at work behind sources such as the CIA and EIU. And as we've just seen, in some cases it's quite significantly more accurate as well.

On "Scary Economics"

Well, that what you called it. But if you look at software development, from any angle, over the years much of what was once work done by paid-for employees has vanished under the tide of ever improving programming languages, debugging tools, development environments, version control software, and the opening of vast, indexed content/tutorials/fixes/code samples/etc available to all at any time.

Far from putting all programmers out of work, these improvements have made programmers much more productive, and therefore more capable of spending their time on solving more important problems.

That's the dynamic that is starting to take place in the content business. At a rapid clip, the building blocks of content creation are being commoditized: access to sources, aggregation of basic data and statistics, fact-checking, and so on. This trend extends deep into the value chain of content businesses: where before you needed an ad sales force, today you need 3 lines of javascript and a Google AdSense account to get started; where before you needed to find a distributor, today a free download of WordPress will suffice.

I've worked for consulting firms where the respective telecoms practices would invest a lot of consultant and researcher time to benchmark things like mobile phone and internet access tariffs in countries around the world. No value added, just aggregating the data. And this work was probably being duplicated simultaneously by dozens of firms, none of which would dream of sharing the data with one another.

What a waste. Instead, today we have the BroadbandWiki, which in less than a few weeks has collected and made freely available, loads of useful information about broadband markets in dozens of countries. This is maybe the building blocks of what equity analyst James Enck was calling "open source research".

And rather than being a "threat", it's actually a great opportunity to free many man-hours around the world to solve more interesting problems than redundantly compiling information inside closed environments (your company).

Your "scary economics" strike me as just modern-day luddite fear of a world where content and the  technical and social systems that help people find, create, manage, and distribute it are constantly improving. Welcome to the world of programmers; don't worry, you'll survive! And if you're willing to adapt, you'll be grateful for all the change.

Phrasing for the real issue here could be called "challenging economics", which Om, Silicon Beat, and others raise the alarm about: Web 2.0 participation is moving ahead but still sorely lacks new business models to compensate companies sharing data, and users sharing content/time. To address this problem, have a look at some stimulating ideas by venture capitalist Peter Rip. I believe many of the problems that you describe in your blog will be resolved by systems along the lines of what Peter is hinting at.

Finally, I can't emphasize any better the positive aspects of the participative nature of Web 2.0 than by this very blog post, because I'm just a guy with a humble blog, working on a vertical search startup (yeah, yeah- who isn't), writing from Barcelona, Spain. One of the amateurs, by your definition! But thanks to Web 2.0, here we are having this discussion.

Cheers,
Yannick

Posted

A Lebanese dude and his Swedish wife name their newborn, “Google”

Let nobody henceforth accuse me of being too internet-obsessed.

This couple have set the new benchmark.

Link: www.google-kai.com">Google KAI is the name of our SON www.google-kai.com.

UPDATE: heh, a reader wonders where is child named "Yahoo!" (exclamation point in name essential!);  I think of all the Internet powerhouses, "Amazon" would be the best name. Can't believe I'm having this conversation with people!

Posted

Well, that was fast! The “open” Web2.0 starts to “close”

"Openness" is one of the hallmarks of web 2.0. But is the Brave New World of mash-ups going to close up as quickly as it opened?

Classifieds aggregator Oodle reported over the weekend that Craigslist has banned Oodle from aggregating its listings. The interesting, even passionate comments show this is a major move that could have consequences on how, and why data are shared and distributed between internet companies.

And now come reports that eBay has modified its policies to force PayPal to be the only payments processor for eBay users; the assumption is that this is a move to facilitate blocking any move by Google into this area. (salient quote: the "other business interests" of any payment processor will be evaluated by eBay before being allowed. Indeed!)

Is this the start of a trend?  Of course, eBay and Craigslist are not the first to expose this key digital faultline of the Internet. Google's News channel consists entirely of screen scraping data off newspaper websites; yet it strictly forbids anyone from screen scraping its own News site!

In the early days, when all is new and in beta and people are blind by the tech-love of seeing innovative stuff, these issues are for the most part ignored. But as we start to see sizable traffic and revenue patterns fluctuate, many existing players might feel that being "open" is rather little more than an invitation for a competitor to steal their lunch.

In any case, it's interesting to see two major players who have built their businesses on the basis of a community-friendly, even hippy and anti-corporate image, would so openly appear to be circling the wagons in such a business-minded reflexive way.

I can't blame existing players for wanting to protect their turf, and sometimes it's a delicate task to identify a partner from a competitor. But this behaviour does seem very much motivated by self-preservation rather than by the needs of consumers, which long-term probably defeats the original point of self-preservation. And surely the needs of consumers will be better met by openness than by closed systems.

More interesting opinion on this issue on the Clipperz blog.

closing thought: a blog entry I read a few weeks ago predicted this was possibly going to happen because there was no business model, or even basic transaction model for shared and mashed-up data on the web. So in a world where the map comes from Google, the auction data from eBay, population data from the Census bureau, and wish lists from 43Places, how is revenue divided if the resulting application is a revenue-generating one? Maddeningly, I can't find this post anymore :(

UPDATE: A reader has pointed me to the post I was looking for about the broken transaction model. It's a great read, and I think holds the key to cracking this emerging dilemma. Funny how in the end the best search engine of all was still the human kind!

UPDATE2: Well, the proof is in the traffic. I've been "Memeorandumed", no doubt thanks to Om's kind words. The sudden surge of visits prove to me that Memeorandum is establishing some seriously influence in directing people to the ongoing conversations of the web.

Posted

France Telecom is losing 10,000 customers *per week*

Latest report on the state of local loop unbundling in France shows mad quarterly growth of 41% for fully unbundled lines.

Each fully unbundled line represents a customer relationship fully extinguished for France Telecom, and the current rate of 10,000 lost customers per week is just the current snapshot of a trend that is still accelerating.

FT will try to ease the inevitable pain by aggressivelly stealing customers from neighbouring countries like the UK and Spain, both of which are on the cusp of ULL & ADSL2+ explosions (message to fellow European incumbents: if I'm going down, you're coming down with me!).

2006 promises to be very, very ugly for incumbent fixed line operators.

Link: NetEconomie :: Le d¿groupage continue de s¿duire les fran¿ais.

Posted

MySpace has more traffic than Google

Latest Internet traffic stats, which I reproduce below via A VC, are stunning. Page views last month, largest web properties, from Media Metrix: Yahoo! - 43,700MM Time Warner - 31,600MM (AOL is roughly 70% of this) Microsoft - 21,800MM (MSN is part of this) eBay - 10,900MM MySpace - 9,600MM Google - 6,300MM * MySpace, which didn't even exist 2 years ago, has more page views than Google * MySpace is growing at 50% per quarter * It's still a US-centric phenomenon. Can/will it scale internationally? A VC makes has the salient takeaway: "Who is the smartest guy on the Internet right now? Maybe not Sergey and Larry. Maybe Rupert Murdoch. Does $500mm sound like a bargain? It does to me." To that I add a concluding observation that in this field, there really is no long-term stability whatsoever. A startup launched today can really challenge the biggest players with incredible speed.

Posted

I’ll be blogging WebDosBeta in English!

I will be coming to Madrid to attend the WebDosBeta conference. It's going to be great to catch up with some of Spain's top entrepreneurs, and meet some new ones!

I'll blog the event in English, which hopefully should help give a bit more exposure to some of the interesting things happening down here in Spain.

If I can find some time, I'll try to profile some of the entrepreneurs there. I've been thinking of doing this for some time now with entrepreneurs in Barcelona, and find myself inspired by the great work Rodrigo is doing in France! His video interviews are great; maybe we should just convince him to show up directly instead?

I'm actually coming to Madrid the previous Friday; interested in meeting up for a drink? Send me an email: yannick_laclau at yahoo dot com

Posted

Small is Beautiful, Estonia: even the Economist agrees

Not one day after my post about the Estonian Internet elections, the Economist today publishes its own story on the miracle that has taken place there.

Yesterday, I wrote:

The 37Signals people have often written about Small is Beautiful in the context of business and product development. I wonder if it doesn't also extend to nations. It just seems to me that tiny Estonia can (and do!) outmaneouver bigger countries with innovative practices like the online elections.

And behold, the Economist's article title:

"Estonia & Slovenia: When Small is Beautifully Successful"

It's great that the Estonian miracle story is starting to come out. As usual, the Economist does a great job of summarizing in its tight writing many fascinating factoids, among which:

  • Last quarter, Estonia had the fastest growing economy in Europe, with a scorching 9.9% annual rate (our very own China in the Baltics!)
  • 80% of Estonians file their taxes online
  • It only takes them a few minutes each, no doubt because their tax code is a simple 24% flat tax (soon coming down to 20%, because they've fully paid their national debt and are running a surplus!)
  • Those tax returns are processed in 5 days (is there any country in the world that does this faster?)
  • The economy is open- no restrictions on foreign investment, no subsidies, no import tariffs.
  • Besides being the software development centre for Skype, recently bought by eBay for around $5 billion, Estonia is also home to PlayTech, one of the leading gaming software firms. PlayTech is rumored to be preparing itself for a $1 billion IPO.
  • Finally, something I wasn't aware of before, is that Estonia has a booming education market, and is even attracting students from as far as Asia!

Efficent, debt-free government, an English-fluent workforce, and an economy with excellent terms of trade, building world-class competence in software and education...this is the dream of just about every other developing country in the world.

The scale of these achievements are even more remarkable when one considers that the whole of Estonia has only 1.3 million people, and not 15 years ago was a country in total economic collapse (hyperinflation, massive unemployment, the works).

Link: Estonia and Slovenia | When small is beautifully successful | Economist.com (warning: premium article- must be a subscriber to read)

Posted