I have not reread the book I wrote in 1997 (Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age) , but I don't think I would be totally embarrassed if I did. You can red the Wired article cited below and judge for yourself.
If you're in the US, enjoy the last few days before Labor Day! If you're elsewhere, have a good August and a great September. And make a new mistake today!
Like most things, if enough people start using something, a viable market will be created. I would never have thought I would have stopped shooting Film when I bought my first pro-digital at the end of 2004, but I did and Kodachrome and Polaroid are dead.
There will probably be a new protocol for something that succeeds the Internet someday. But what's more interesting is how the people using the Net will be using it...
The question about revenues for cellphone healthcare apps wasn't about investment advice. It was about the overall business outlook -- where income is, of course, one measure of a large, viable market.
LOL, to artfrank :) Esther, [re too much web ID info:] are you aware of the MIT project PersonasWeb? [If you are] Although largely a research and experimental online app, from a public standpoint, would you say the something like it would be a good gauge at how much the Internet (and the 'unknown others') "knows" about each individual, and of what use will something like this have to the common user in the future?
re VCs - they are mostly dripfeeding their current investments, it seems. But I don't have the stats. Right now there are a fair amount of great new startups showing up, and it's a good time to invest. But a lot of VCs are still a little too wary.
Mobile Health apps sound like something that will save the End User money, by not having to constantly go to their doctor and listen to him ruminate about whether he should buy a Ferrari (true story)
Esther...Do you see VC firms changing the way they operate in the sense of moving more towards later stage funding, rather than the true first round start up investing?
Are VC firms flush with cash due to the slow down in the IPO market or are the putting that money to use in smaller prvate projects?
Mary Jander - honestly, I don't see the challenges of intellectual property theft and copyright infringement as the world's biggest problem. For people in that business, the challenge is developing appropriate business models, as I wrote back in 1994 - will get cite in a minute...
Alan Reiter asks: Do you see mobile/cellular healthcare applications (heart monitoring, glucose monitoring, etc.) as generating significant revenues during the next 12 to 36 months, or is it a longer-term play?
Michael Singer... no, that doesn't really bother me. The technology is there for people to use it as they will - and if some people's Starbucks habit supports a tool that an African soy farmer can use to price his crops, that's great.
Esther, I mean that some of the original standards work done on GPS technology is now used to tell us when a Starbucks is nearby.. or how about that country code for Lybia now used by bit.ly
Esther, do you think we will ever be able to overcome the challenges of intellectual property theft and copyright infringement that the Web has brought to the fore?
re Facebook - visible to whom? I assume their board hears a lot more detail than we do! As a private company, they have a right to privacy... Their policies re data are still a work in progress, but by and large they do a pretty good job of explaining them.... sometimes in excruciating detail.
Re: "info collectors should do a *much* better job of explaining what they are doing." Great point. It's troubling when we find out as we go along just how much sites like Facebook are collecting about us and how they intend to use that data... after it's basically too late. I'm still unclear on Facebook's policies, but I think they make them intentionally obscure.
By and large, I think *nondiscriminating* service-based pricing is fine. If I don't use a lot, I don't want to pay for the people who do... I think this issue is being discussed disingenuously by all sides...
ID theft is a security issue as opposed to a privacy issue, though they are related. Too much info makes ID theft easier to perpetrate.... but privacy is a personal decision around what one feels comfortable letting other people know. Long run, from the sites' side, it's about giving users control over (the use of) their own data.
Are we giving away too much of our own info? I think "we" should make up our own minds how to live.... but info collectors should do a *much* better job of explaining what they are doing. I would llike to see companies compete on the basis of clarity rather than obscurity and obfuscation.
I thnk self-monitoring is a big deal, and I hope it will lead to more people taking better care of themselves. Just google "quantified self" to see what's going on. lots of actitvity, two Meetups (another one of my favorite investments, and I'm sitting here in the Meetup office right now)....,
Will we live to regret how much Google and other major Web players know about us? I mean, we talk about ID theft, and yet we're giving our identities away
one cool product from India is Multi-Mouse - which lets multiple people manipulate multiple mice on the same PC through a dongle. allows several kids to learn together in a classroom where PCs are scarce.
Hi Esther, Do you see mobile/cellular healthcare applications (heart monitoring, glucose monitoring, etc.) as generating significant revenues during the next 12 to 36 months, or is it a longer-term play?
sorry, trying to keep up. re digerati, over to whoever said it! re cool new things from emerging markets, a lot of neat new cell phone apps, some relevant to the developed world and some not. Overall, they are much bettter at making high-quality things cheap.
I"m a big fan of Rod Beckstrom, so I'm hopeful. And they seem to finally have done s-thing about domain-tasting. But I'm not a big fan of hundreds of new TLDs. It seems to be making a market for stone-soup stones. there's nothing evil about it, but I would say it's not as useful as space travel....
Hi Esther - I'm interested in some of the cooler innovations you've seen coming out of emerging economies, now that ICT access and skills are starting to reach critical mass. Are VCs starting to look to these areas for opportunities?
There was an earlier question -- Esther, you're described on your Wikipedia page as "a founding member of the digerati." the questions was what is is (are?) the digerati and do they still exist?
QUESTION FOR ESTER: What do you see being monetized that you didn't think possible 5 years ago? How has this monetization affected your business? Other businesses?
Here is a list from Esther re: her interests form Huffington Post: "My board seats include CVO Group (Hungary), Eventful, Evernote, IBS Group (Russia, advisory board), Meetup, Midentity (UK), NewspaperDirect, Voxiva, Yandex (Russia)...and WPP Group (not a start-up). My other other direct IT investments include Flickr and Del.icio.us (sold to Yahoo!), BrightMail (sold to Symantec), Orbitz (sold to Cendant), ActiveWeave, BlogAds, ChoiceStream, Dotomi, Linkstorm, Medstory, Ovusoft, Plazes, Powerset, Resilient, Tacit, Technorati, Visible Path, Vizu.com and Zedo. And I have some Google (my primary source of liquidity) in a brokerage account.
Question for Esther: You spoke earlier about opportunities in emerging markets where ICT is just taking hold. What are some of the more exciting and innovative developments you are seeing coming from entrepreneurs and startups in these parts of the world, that make creative use of social computing, mobility, etc?
question to esther: do you think social networks like twitter will become a commodity and be integrated as a value-added feature on other content websites? Or will it continue to have its own unique presence?
As far as facebook goes, I think it's a great way for a company to promote an event or product (Fan of...) and it's a lot cleaner than MySpace to look at.
QUESTION FOR ESTER: WHat are the areas that people are investing VC in and What are the top three stumbing blocks for your getting VC What new technologies are you utilizing for gaining VC.
I guess the only way to get rid of the annOOOOOYing cowbell chat sound is to stop chatting and ask everybody to do the same. Thus I ask kindly all to refrain from posting.
This is my last hit of the Post button for the duration of this radio broadcast.
Survey result regarding the current conversation on the value of social media; of 277 companies survyed 211 think social media is provably valuable to them. The companies who rate it as not valuable or less valuable sell high-end products, specialized services, etc.
well, someone (I think it was Scott Raynovch) was saying that a lot of the investment models have no positive value in the conventional sense of what capitalism is supposed to be... they are basically just wasys to fleece people who are more stupid than you
I think you could make that argument about anybody who invests capital in a capitalist economy, but I think that it's more likely to be true the higher you expect your own return to be!
An Australian friend of mine complained that US hedge Funds were bleeding her country dry (This complaint was a few years ago) and all they were doing was looking for the fast buck, but hurting her county's economy and the value of their dollar.
I mean that if you look at the outcome of their investments in either area, there is an impact on the public overall and an impact on their own rate of return. Because they're businesses they maximize the latter, and that means that they don't necessarily worry much about the former.
I think there's a general disconnect between what people do to get a high return on their investment and the general public interest. Neither the hedge funds nor the VCs invented it, but the disconnect is real in both areas.
I want to know if while in space she was exposed to Cosmic Rays... and does she feel like her arms can stretch a mile long, turn invisible, or want to burst into flame?
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Research shows that the youth of today like Facebook – but not blogging or Twitter. Does that mean Facebook has won, or just that it's not yet out of favor? Will all the services we see today fade into Ovaltine-or-Wheaties status in just a few years?
What kinds of companies are doing the most innovation in the data center? Turns out it's midtier enterprises that are taking the "Just Right" approach.
Ray Kurzweil's Blio and Apple's iPad tablet will make it easier than ever to have books "read" to us, says Dr. Kim, who believes that talking tablets will become interwoven into our consciousness as we "merge" with the increasingly elegant machines we hold in our hands.
