When Rick Nucci says he runs an internet company based in Philadelphia, people in Silicon Valley look at him funny. “We would come out here to meet with VCs,” he remembers, with a bit of a smile. “They would say: ‘Philly? Do you guys have internet there? Are you working in some sort of Amish commune?’” He ended up partnering with a venture capital firm in New York. But for others, it’s far more surprising that Nucci runs an internet company that was bought by Dell.
Google has officially pulled the plug on its web energy management tool PowerMeter. The project, which Google launched two years ago, just “didn’t catch on the way we would have hoped,” says Google in a blog post, and the tool will be shut down Sept. 16, 2011 (giving users enough time to download their data before the end of the service).
PowerMeter has seemed to have been on life support for much of the time it’s been in existence, and last I heard, it had brought in just 11,000 users. Turns out it’s difficult for a large Internet company to convince utilities to partner with it, and it’s also hard to get consumers to care about energy consumption. At the same time, PowerMeter was closely tied to smart meter data when it was first launched, and smart meter installations were still in an early stage back in 2009 (and still are).
PowerMeter enabled its users to monitor and manage their energy consumption online via an iGoogle widget, if the utility had agreed to connect their smart meter data with Google. Utility San Diego Gas & Electric and smart meter maker Itron became Google PowerMeter partners. Later, Google opened up the PowerMeter API and connected with gadget makers to make it more of a direct-to-consumer tool.
PowerMeter stemmed out of Google’s philanthropic arm Google.org, and Google long said it didn’t plan to make any money off of the tool. Well, that turned out to be true. Other companies that have launched services and gadgets in the home energy management space have changed course or folded. Microsoft launched a similar tool to PowerMeter called Hohm, which it later evolved.
Still, Google’s moves are often influential, even if they aren’t profitable. Google’s launch of PowerMeter worried startup competitors and entrepreneurs at the time, and scared some utilities who didn’t want Google owning the relationship with its power customers. PowerMeter also brought a lot of attention to a space that, for the most part, can be less-than-sexy.
Google shutting down PowerMeter will also draw attention. Startup Wattvision, which makes a low-cost energy home energy management tool, wrote on its blog yesterday that it’s offering a -off coupon for this weekend only — use the coupon code: “byepowermeter”.
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AVOS, the new startup run by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, brought much more clarity to its strategy Monday by announcing its acquisition of social media analytics startup Tap11. The deal suggests AVOS could be targeting the market research segment, a move that would pit the startup against some of the tech industry’s heaviest hitters, including Google, Salesforce.com and even large ad firms.
AVOS launched in late April with a headline-grabbing acquisition of social bookmarking pioneer Delicious from Yahoo, but thus far, its exact strategy has been tough to pin down. On its website, AVOS describes itself simply as “an Internet company” that aims to “help solve the problem of information overload.”
In a presentation at GigaOM’s Structure Big Data conference in March, Tap11 Co-founder Braxton Woodham described the startup as an “Omniture of the real-time web” that companies can use to track what’s being said online about their brands in real-time (check out the video below). Tap11′s technology tracks specific topic mentions on Twitter and catalogs the information into searchable archives that companies can analyze. Tap11 has expressed plans to expand to other social platforms, but as evidenced by its sale to AVOS, the company’s technology is pretty impressive as is: With more than 140 million Tweets being posted daily, sifting intelligence from Twitter’s firehose is no small feat.
Together, the capabilities of Tap11 and Delicious could allow AVOS to build an analytical dashboard that companies can use to monitor everything that’s being said about their brands on the web. Understanding public sentiment is the Holy Grail for consumer product companies– Procter & Gamble alone spends 0 million a year on market research– but even the most well-funded firms still conduct the majority of their studies offline with decades-old tools like panels and telephone surveys.
Recent deals such as Salesforce’s purchase of Radian6 and Google’s acquisition of TalkBin indicate the tech industry’s big players have just started to see there’s an opportunity to make a lot of money by helping bring the market research industry into the Internet age. With the Tap11 deal, AVOS may be setting itself up to compete with some pretty heavy hitters.
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Can someone really watch movies online for free? Anyone sure may. Nonetheless, there are several various ways this can be done. To start with, it’s important to have a good knowledge of what types of movies you can watch, as well as which are really free. A lot of sites often called peer-to-peer networks are available in which users exchange video files with other users that they have on their PCs. They normally have to utilize a specific software program in order to watch free movies. Great info about how you can download movies along with downloadable movies via internet.
Most of the time, there aren’t any costs associated with sharing, except sometimes, in which you may be requested to pay a small fee that contributes towards sharing software technical support. By doing this, you can share any kind of data files you want. Nevertheless, one thing to consider is that most of the movies that you find being shared are in fact often illegal and break the copyright laws set forth by the federal government. Webmasters protect themselves with a disclaimer that asks members to be responsible within sharing. Nevertheless, a lot of people are lured since they’re able to instantly download many of the recent motion picture releases.
It’s essential to understand the penalty charges which are connected with copyright violation, they are often large fees and penalties, and it is your responsibility to be careful. It’s also advisable to prevent your children from illegally watching free films online whilst sharing. Depending on your internet company (ISP) you can take steps to make sure that neither you nor your kids access illegal films.
The easiest method to see completely free movies via the internet, without dealing with potential legal cases or costs, is to locate open public domain movies. These films become open public domain after the copyright on that particular movie title has expired. Some businesses renew their copyrights and some do not. When they do not renew the copyright any person can watch, share, or distribute the film any way they think fit. You could even post it on a website and stream it so that other people can enjoy it without having to be worried about the possible repercussions.
You will need to have software program installed on your computer in order to see films online. Generally this means Windows Media Player or QuickTime. For those who have a computer image card that boasts of a TV out line, you may be able to view the motion picture on your TV as well.
Some men and women do not particularly want to see movies online on their laptop or computer. If that is the case,you might want to download the film and then burn it on to a disk, which will enable you to enjoy it on your DVD player and TV. For many people, this means a higher quality experience. There are many formats which will work with your DVD player, just be sure that you have the correct one prior to burning it.
If necessary, you can get a data file converter. The actual duration of your download is determined by many things for example bandwidth, internet connection, and video data file size. Meaning, if you are downloading a 800 megabyte file, having a 512 kbps connection speed along with a 64KB/s transfer rate, it might take you around three hours to download your movie data file. In case you have an internet connection that is slower, it may be feasible for you to simply watch the film on the internet, rather than to download the video.
Over the past few days, there has been a heated debate about Quora, a year-old startup, that offers a more sophisticated version of Yahoo Answers’ question-and-answer platform. Quora has found success with early adopters because of its high-fidelity content, but it has also grappling with the arrival of the masses, which are going to drown out those signals with noise. This dichotomy is one of the toughest challenges for not only Quora, but for any other Internet service with dreams of mega-success.
Let’s face it: Today, success on the consumer Internet essentially equates with scale. Unless you have scale — which is nothing more than a nerdy euphemism for massive mainstream adoption — you don’t have much of a chance of becoming a major Internet company.
Our systems of monetization on the Internet all hark back to old media — television and print. The concept of audiences and cost-per-thousand impressions are the terminology used by media companies of yore. The other monetization models involve subscriptions, where people pay for a service or information, and what is known as e-commerce, where you buy goods such as books, clothes and shoes.
You need to be Internet scale to fit the current monetization models — advertising and subscriptions — and make meaningful revenues worthy of a large company.
So, What Works on the Internet?
In order to answer that question, I turned on the time machine of my mind and started thinking about successful (and not so successful) Internet companies, many of which have vanished under petabytes of history. If you look hard enough, it becomes clear that many successful consumer Internet services have three things in common that allows them to scale, get investor attention and, more importantly, bring in the much-needed revenues (and eventually profits).
Those things are:
Now I don’t mean to suggest that you must have all three to be successful — but if you do, your chances of finding fame and fortune are much higher. Google, for instance had a clear sense of purpose (search/looking for information) and was simple enough to use (a search box on a white page, you don’t get simpler than that). As a result, it was able to become a 0 billion (in market capitalization) behemoth. Some might argue that finding the results one was looking for was “fun,” but I think that’s a bit of a stretch.
On that note, I don’t want to underscore the fact that these three elements aren’t the only reasons services become a hit. They have to be the right products at the right times. There is the undeniable element of luck, but the services also have to have that mysterious “it” factor, that something which makes millions of people go clicking.
Pop the Popcorn and Turn on Netflix
Now let’s look at a service that combines all three aspects: Netflix, which has seen its market capitalization go up 10 times over past 36 months.
And since it isn’t ad-supported, the company has done the next best thing — priced it low enough that people don’t mind paying for the service every month, even though they may or may not tune in enough to justify spending the money. The low price point — a month for the streaming-only option — is why people put up with the service’s limited access to the latest movies.
Yelp Needs No Help
Another company that has done a good job of combining the three aspects successfully is Yelp. The San Francisco-based company is valued at over 0 million and has 41 million users as of December 2010. Yelp offers reviews of everything from local eateries to maid services. It even has had its share of scandals.
It works because it has the three elements:
Being a bit of a big-city snob, I don’t much care about using Yelp, but many others do and use it obsessively. In fact, the company is so popular that Google wanted to buy it, and when that failed, it started trying to kill the service.
Yelp, however needs to scale, that is, have a lot of people use its service so it can keep generating page views, for it needs to show billions of banners to make millions of dollars in revenues. Same goes for other companies.
Like Yelp, Groupon is another company that has combined three elements and built what seems to be (at least for now) a scale business. It has a clear purpose (save you money via discounts), is simple to use (the offers are sent right to your inbox — even my mom can use it) and it’s fun. It has grown massively and is doing a big book of business.
Ditto for Skype, Facebook and several other services that blend these three elements and build enough scale to make money off their audiences. Interestingly, many of these companies found favor outside of Silicon Valley first before they became big in Palo Alto, Calif., so to speak.
Minus One, Hoping for a Home Run
One of the hotter companies on the web these days is Foursquare, the New York-based, location-based-services company. It’s certainly simple to use, and it’s fun to participate in. After all, who wouldn’t like to own the JetSetter badge.
Back in 2000, when the world was going to broadband, Google changed people’s behavior and found growth. I think Foursquare, like many of its peers, is at the right place at the right time, to tap into a the shift to anywhere computing. All it has to do is find its purpose.
It might have found it, though Dennis Crowley isn’t sharing it with us or anybody just yet. I can guess that Foursquare’s true purpose is to help discover new places and new things to do.
Digg Your Own Grave
Every time a service deviates from the magic formula, it tends to lose its way. Let’s take Digg as an example. Digg became popular because:
The company raised a lot of money, and it tried to justify its existence by diversifying into different verticals. Somewhere along the line, the service’s noble mission got hijacked by search engine optimization experts.
If that wasn’t enough, the company decided it needed a new direction. Digg management, displaying a complete lack of understanding of their own core value proposition, took a ham-fisted approach to redesigning the service. It was never meant to be social in a Twitter-sort of way. Instead, Digg had always been social in a group-hug sort of fashion.
Oops!
Now compare that with StumbleUpon, which not only survived eBay but is thriving, quietly, mostly because of its ability to focus on its core values — discovery of content in a simple and fun manner. (See Google Trends comparison chart, below. Red is for Digg and blue is for StumbleUpon.)
I don’t mean to pick on Digg, but it’s a visible example of what happens when companies lose their mission and deviate from the magic formula.
Somewhere in there is a lesson for Quora!
I will follow up with part two of this post, on the importance of connectedness and ubiquity, later this week.
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