ICANN Approves Generic Top-Level Domains: New Era of Innovation or A Flood of Spam? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has put to rest three years of speculation by giving final approval to generic Top-Level Domains that they think will be the future of site addresses and brand homes on the Web. Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) are essentially specific destinations for brands. Companies will be able to buy their brand and attach it to a URL. So instead of seeing Pepsi.com, the soda manufacturer could have Pepsi.soda or something similar. It will not be cheap to get your own TLD, with an $185,000 application fee and $25,000 a year to run the registry. Yet, some Internet advocates are crying foul, saying that gTLDs will create new headaches in cybersquatting, trademark issues and excessive spam. "I think this is probably the biggest change to the the Internet since we have had it," said Jeff Ernst, Forrester analyst.
ICANN is providing safeguards to ward off mass cybersquatting. The Biggest Thing to Happen to the Internet Since .Com? John adams talk cloudy. Semantic Web. The Web Parenthesis: Is the “open Web” closing? Heard of the “Gutenberg parenthesis”? This is the intriguing proposition that the era of mass consumption of text ushered in by the printing press four centuries ago was a mere interlude between the previous era of predominantly oral culture and a new digital-oral era on whose threshold we may now sit. That’s a fascinating debate in itself. For the moment I just want to borrow the “parenthesis” concept — the idea that an innovative development we are accustomed to viewing as a step up some progressive ladder may instead be simply a temporary break in some dominant norm.
What if the “open Web” were just this sort of parenthesis? What if the advent of a (near) universal publishing platform open to (nearly) all were not itself a transformative break with the past, but instead a brief transitional interlude between more closed informational regimes? That’s the question I weighed last weekend at Open Web Foo Camp. But for many users, these principles are distant, complex, and hard to fathom. Why the web economy will continue growing rapidly cdixon.org – c. Here’s the really good news for the web economy over the next decade. Consumers are spending more and more time online, yet only about 10% of all advertising dollars are spent there. Let’s assume that, over time, ad spending on a medium becomes roughly proportional to the time consumers spend using that medium.
I doubt there are any technologists reading this blog who doubt that in five years most people in industrialized countries will spend 50% or more of their “media time” on the web. This means there are hundreds of billions of ad revenues waiting to move to the web. Advertising is usually divided into two categories: direct-response and brand advertising. Direct-response advertising tries to get users to take immediate action. It is therefore very likely that most of this new ad spending will be brand advertising. Right now there are lots of inhibitors to brand advertising dollars flowing onto the web. One Truth About Technology Architecture: Loose Coupling - Contin. One Truth About Technology Architecture: Loose Coupling One of the great things about being focused on investing in web services is that the technical challenges faced by almost all of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio tend to be the same.
The solutions on the other hand vary widely. Some companies rack their own servers, others are at traditional hosting companies and some are entirely in the cloud. Some use Java, others PHP, many mix languages. One pattern, however, has emerged that I now consider as close to a “truth” about technology architecture as it gets: Loose coupling is necessary to combine scaling and the ability to innovate.
Before explaining what I mean by loose coupling, here is what happens when you don’t do it. So what is loose coupling? So how does loose coupling enable scaling and innovation? I believe loose coupling is so critical that it should be a board level issue for web companies. Google should open source what actually matters: their search ra. Websites live or die based on how a small group of programmers at Google decide their sites should rank in Google’s main search results.
As the “router” of the vast majority of traffic on the internet, Google’s secret ranking algorithm is probably is the most powerful piece of software code on the planet. Google talks a lot about openness and their commitment to open source software. What they are really doing is practicing a classic business strategy known as “commoditizing the complement“*. Google makes 99% of their revenue by selling text ads for things like plane tickets, dvd players and malpractice lawyers.
Many of these ads are syndicated to non-Google properties. But the anchor that gives Google their best “inventory” is the main search engine at Google.com. The alleged argument against doing so is that search spammers would be able to learn from the algorithm to improve their spamming methods. Startup Ecosystems Take Time.
Saul Klein, co-founder of Seedcamp and one of the top VCs in europe, has a long and thoughtful post up on the evolution of Seedcamp. In it he says: In my mind, helping to bring some cohesion to our region's distributed network of talent, capital and is a 15-20 year project. ……Getting to the right point takes time, and the cycles that kicked off what we now know as Silicon Valley began nearly 50 years ago.Investing legends like Arthur Rock (Fairchild Semiconductor), Don Valentine (Cisco, Apple, EA), Don Lucas (Oracle), Dave Marquardt(Microsoft) and John Doerr (Netscape, Amazon, Google) and the entrepreneurs they backed created franchise businesses that still dominate the technology industry today.
But maybe more importantly, all these businesses created the raw materials (talent, seed capital and technology) for next generation of the today's winners like Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com and many many others. In the second decade, you start to get it right. Chiffres Web. Top 10 Internet Startup Scalability Killers – GigaOM. Compare the recent sale of Friendster for a reported $26.4 million with Facebook’s projected 2010 revenues, of $1 billion, and we have a stark reminder of how the inability to scale can kill a startup. “All they had to do was keep the damned servers up and running,” Matt Cohler, a former Facebook executive and general partner at Benchmark Capital, says in Adam L.
Peneberg’s book “Viral Loop,” but Friendster failed to scale and the cost was enormous. So what should Internet startups avoid in order to grow? As former tech executives and consultants to hundreds of startups, we’ve seen how some companies scale and others fail, and we’ve assembled this knowledge in our recently released book “The Art of Scalability.” Take a look at our list of the top 10 scalability killers. 1. Thinking Scalability Is Just About Technology This is really the reason we wrote our book. 2. 3. We’ve written about how to hire, fire and mentor and why to remove underperformers quickly for superior teams. 4. 5. 6. Would AT&T or Comcast Have Created Google? The answer to that question is no. They had their chances. In the early days of the Internet, when dial-up was king, the telco companies were in the driver's seat.
They had the customer relationships. They had the on-ramp to the Internet. But they did not create Google, Skype, Facebook, or even TCP/IP. Why am I talking about this? And here is what is at stake: the architecture of the Internet. If we let the providers of Internet access control what runs on their pipes, we will cripple the elegantly layered architecture of the Internet where access is decoupled from applications. Don't sit on the sidelines in this debate. Most platforms start as applications | The Equity Kicker.
Creating a platform business is the dream of many entrepreneurs and their VCs – and it is easy to understand why. Successful platforms have huge scale and customer lock in and, to an extent at least, if you own a platform you can sit back and watch the dollars roll in as other companies build their businesses on top of yours. So I’ve been thinking about how successful platforms come to be, and it seems to me that most of them start off as applications. I’m writing this post today having just read about Facebook’s latest step towards being a platform business imminent launch of a share location feature which will work both on site and via an API. As we all know they started as a profile surfing application business and then communication service via messaging and news feeds.
Then when they had sufficient volume of users to be attractive to third parties they became a platform as well, first with their applications API, then with Facebook Connect and now with location. URL Shorteners Slow Down The Web – Especially Facebook’s FB.me. It’s hard to imagine a Web sans URL shortening services nowadays but you can rest assured that they’re here to stay – for better or worse. Question is: how do the likes of bit.ly, TinyURL and Goo.gl score in terms of speed and availability? That’s exactly what Dutch startup WatchMouse sought to find out, by monitoring the performance and uptime for 14 popular URL shorteners for a whole month. Turns out most really don’t perform all that well, and that URL shorteners actually increase the load time of pages significantly.
As you can tell from the graph embedded above, a lot of URL shortening services add half to nearly a full second to page load times. To measure this, WatchMouse checked each URL shortener every five minutes from one of its monitoring stations, which are located across the globe. According to WatchMouse’s findings, Facebook’s FB.me is by far the slowest of the pack, adding over two seconds on average to the page load time after the click on a link. StatCounter: IE6 Usage Falls Below 5% In The US, But IE8 Still O. Microsoft’s oft-lamented browser, Internet Explorer 6, may finally be put to rest. This will make many a Web developer happy – but also Microsoft itself. Web analytics company StatCounter claims its latest global data set shows IE6 usage in the US and Europe has fallen to 4.7 percent of the market from 11.5 percent a year ago.
That said, IE8 usage in the US increased to 30.5 percent in May (up from 8.5 percent a year ago) while IE7 is currently at 16.6%, so it’s not all bad news for Redmond. Firefox 3.6 comes in second in terms of browser usage in the US, with almost 19.85%, while Google Chrome 4.0 only has some 6.5% of market share according to StatCounter. Update: Results from Net Applications paint a similar picture, although different numbers: the firm has Internet Explorer’s overall share dropping to below 60 percent from 67 percent and Firefox at the 24 percent mark, up 2 percent from the same period last year.
Hopefully, everyone will soon see the light.