Posts Tagged Twitter
Is 2010 the Year of Curation?
Posted by tloverro in Marketing, Technology, Venture Capital on August 9, 2010
Complex and Overwhelming
Simple and Welcoming
We see certain themes that come through the startup & venture community that define periods of time. These themes are often illuminated by successful pioneers, such as YouTube : user generated content, Facebook : social networking, Zynga : social gaming, Gilt Groupe : flash sales, Groupon : locals deals. I have noticed another theme recently that I believe deserves attention: Curation.
Curation is the act of making the internet less intimidating to end users.
Jetsetter is perfect example of curation and executed brilliantly as well. Booking travel can be particularly overwhelming. If I am looking to to Italy for instance, what cities should I go to? What hotels should I stay in? Where do I even begin researching something like that. We’ll each likely have a different answer to that last question and that’s where Jetsetter comes in. Because Jetsetter has a target audience in mind (affluent, luxury-seeking, but still budget conscious), they can cater to this one crowd. They deliver deal after tempting deal, doing all the work for you. You don’t have to spend a week wading through the bog that is TripAdvisor or, God forbid, dead tree travel guides. Jetsetter says, “We know who you are and why you’re here so we’ve selected a few awesome resorts and hotels around the world.” This model inverts the travel business model everyone else has. Orbitz and their ilk assume you you know when and where you want go. But why? What a silly assumption. Unless we are traveling for business, at some point we make must make a decision on where to travel for pleasure, therefore there must exist a point at which we don’t know where we want to go. At the end of the day, all of the options Orbitz, Hotels.com and TripAdvisor present are way too much work relative to my inherent preference for utter laziness. Very much in alignment with my golden 80/20 rule (20% of features deliver 80% of value), Jetsetter says “The hell with customization, here are your goddam deals and you’ll like ‘em.” It’s a very Apple-esque model (Apple doesn’t have 15 models of phones, they essentially sell one) and I love it. Please do the work for me. That’s why I am paying you anything. Don’t just give me a bunch of search algorithms, please deliver real value. I am a lazy human, not an always-optimizing robot.
Groupon is another terrific example of curation. There are infinite “experiences” you could buy in your community on the internet but Groupon selects one particularly cool experience each day at a bargain price and neatly delivers it into your inbox in an easily digestible form. Because Groupon presents the user with very limited choice, the company is curating ways consumers can get out of their house and have fun. Groupon users may find themselves booking reservations at restaurants they never had previously heard of, skydiving when they never considered it or going on Segway tours when they previously thought Segways were reserved for complete doofuses [Ed: I have a strong inclination to inflect the singular "doofus" as "doofi" even though it would be ungrammatical, but then again maybe it wouldn't be.]
Flipboard is yet another example of curation. The internet is like a vast series of tubes, but Flipboard routes only the tubes you want into your “social magazine.” Only news from the folks you follow on Twitter (and via Twitter lists) and Facebook friends make the cut. Flipboard even provides their own editorialized Twitter lists: FlipTech, FlipArt, etc.
Hunch is another variation on curation in that it blends human and machine curation. Hunch will learn about you via a series of questions and you can contribute your opinions on a vast array of topics and questions. Rather than asking Google, you can ask Hunch. This is a good idea if the decision requires some discretion (ie which wristwatch to buy?).
Even Twitter is increasingly a curation engine. The world is full of news from myriad sources, but I rely on the trusted folks I follow on Twitter to curate the best news for me. Of course, Digg, StumpleUpon and their ilk are also curation engines.
Ok, so there are many examples of curation in the world across startups and the internet. What does all this mean and why is it important? Curation signals a shift in the web. Five or ten years ago, all you needed to do was deliver content–a lot of content–and you could expect users to separate the wheat from the chaff themselves. Think: YouTube. That’s not good enough anymore. We have reached a point of information overload and there is now significant value in boiling the vastness of the interwebs down within specific verticals.
Explicitly consider how curation can benefit your company. Should you deploy editorialized curation for a specific target (Jetsetter) or customizable curation for a broad audience (Flipboard)? I believe there’s also a lot of room for new startups with a curation angle. Take any process that still feels intimidating and overwhelming and consider how you can make it feel warm, fuzzy and easy. Yes, it’s true that by doing this you will necessarily need to cut a ton of features and you will not serve everyone all the time, but I think that is often a key to success.
Tech Companies Need a Second Great Idea
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Google, Microsoft, Technology, Venture Capital on May 22, 2010
Here’s a theory I’ve been working on: Multi-billion dollar tech startups (excluding healthcare) require one initial innovation to get the fire started underneath them, let’s call this the kindling, and a second major innovation that works hand-in-hand with the first to throw some real wood on the fire to turn them into companies that stick around for a decade or more. It also seems that each decade requires additional fuel on the fire. If a decade goes by without fuel, the fire turns to a smolder and may extinguish.
● Microsoft was just an OS that had some lock-in but not total, until they found Office. Office has been their behind the scenes showstopper that rakes in the cash and keeps Linux and OS X at bay and it wouldn’t have been possible without Windows. Windows got Microsoft from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and Office (aka Information Worker) from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Since then Microsoft hasn’t had another major innovation and it’s fire has been throwing off less heat.
- Google was just a much better AltaVista that didn’t have a revenue model and, even worse, had one of its differentiators based on the idea they wouldn’t sell advertisements on their landing page. Google’s second great innovation, AdWords hit the scene in 2000 just a few years after the search engine launched and is responsible for the majority of the company’s revenues and profits. Of course, it would not have been possible without nearly every internet-connected individual on earth having used Google as their search engine of choice. AdSense carried Google from 2000-2010 and it seems that 2010 will be the year of Android-just in the nick of time to keep Google on top for a second decade.
- Apple had their first hit with the personal computer powered by a graphical OS in the 1980s but that idea alone slowly decayed for Apple over time as a competitive advantage. The personal computer carried Apple from the early 1980s until the early 1990s and then the company began its decline. It wasn’t until Steve Jobs returned with his vision of the Mac as a “media hub” which started coming together around 1997 that Apple’s fire was reignited for another ten years. Exactly ten years later Apple had their third epic innovation in iPhone OS which of course would not have been possible without the prior innovations.
- Adobe started off in 1982 with their awesome fonts and PostScript, but it wasn’t until 1989, seven years later, they gave Photoshop to the world, which ultimately put a halo around what became their Creative Suite. Creative Suite, like Microsoft Office, has been the rainmaker for Adobe. Photoshop carried Adobe on an unstoppable growth trajectory from 1989 until the early 2000s but then Adobe’s fortunes suddenly looked less bright and avenues for growth became less evident. In 2005 Adobe purchased Macromedia and their Flash technology. Adobe is clearly hoping to get another five years of dominance from Flash, hence why they are willing to battle Apple to the death to keep it around. Can Adobe innovate again?
The list of reinforcing examples could go on and on. There are surely examples of companies that have defied this logic, but not as many as you’d think. There are so many examples of companies that died because they never had a second innovation they are not even worth listing. We also have contemporary examples of companies caught somewhere in the middle.
- Facebook had their…online facebook (for lack of a better word) and that product was innovative enough to inspire what feels like half the world to go online and trust Facebook with their most sensitive information. But will Facebook have a second innovation, one where they invent a radically new and better way to monetize their information and turn those users into cold, hard cash? Will Facebook have an AdWords moment? That is the key question and I believe they won’t succeed unless they do.
- Twitter gave the world real-time access to the world’s eating habits, but like Facebook, the question is whether or not the young company can have an AdWords moment.
A few takeaways:
- None of these companies knew what their second great innovation (and real money maker) would be when they launched.
- The closer together the innovations come, the faster the growth. Hence Google’s AdWords was more akin to pouring gasoline on the fire than chucking on another bundle of wood. However, AdWords was probably more necessary too as Google had absolutely no way to become profitable beforehand and may have gone out of business before a full decade came to pass.
- This framework can be used to analyze the fates of current companies such as Twitter and Facebook.
