Security and Data Risk in the Age of Social Networks

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 3

Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes. Or, you may download the file.

Over the past four years we have seen an explosion in the volume of personally identifiable information (PII) online as social software and user generated content have allowed millions of people to create, manage and share their data in the cloud. While the rewards have been pretty clear (lower barriers to participation and collaboration) the risks have not been understood so clearly.

But where there is risk, insurance is sure to follow…

Drew Bartkiewicz of The Hartford has been considering these trends and has helped create the first security product around online data risk, “CyberChoice 2.0.” Drew sums up much of his thinking when he says, “Credit is to the financial markets what privacy and trust are to Web 2.0” (you can’t have one without the other). Fittingly, we spoke in New York City the morning after Lehman Brothers went under.

Part two of this interview is available here.

Web 2.0 Expo Europe Videos Up

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 1

Many of the keynote videos from last week's second Web 2.0 Expo Europe are available. The highlight for me was definitely Tim's conversation with Martin Varsavsky, the CEO of Fon. He discussed his path from Argentina to Spain, his handling of the credit crisis a year before Sequoia's warning and his philosphy as an entrepreneur.

Other mainstage highlights included:

A Conversation Between Yossi Vardi (International Technologies) and Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media)
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (Tinker.it!), In Case of Turbulence: Open Source Hardware
Saul Klein (Index Ventures), The European VC Market
Leisa Reichelt (www.disambiguity.com): Redesigning Drupal.org: An Exercise in Open Source Design

Unfortunately, only the mainstage sessions were recorded by us. You can find many speaker's slides online. More videos will be coming this week, including my conversation with John Lilly (CEO of Mozilla) on their product's future and the Tele Atlas's CTO's talk on their crowdsourced mapping process.

Updated: Dopplr provides a visualization of where our attendees came from. It's great to see most of Europe so well represented.

Customer Service is the New Marketing: Interview with Lane Becker

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 5

Or, you may download the file.

The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers.

Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and bad to the 1.4 billion people on the Internet. Zappos exemplifies the positive benefits of extraordinary customer service while Comcast shines a light on the perils of getting it wrong.

Lane (co-founder of Get Satisfaction) speaks better than anyone about the power of building relationships via a strong customer service focus. During the Web 2.0 Expo New York we had a discussion that digs into
· What is meant by Customer Service is the New Marketing
· The challenges of moving to a customer-service-as-marketing model

The most insightful moment, in my opinion, comes when Lane talks about how even smaller companies, and companies not structured to provide superior customer service, can use new technology to get it right.

My favorite quote: "Historically, customer service has actually been customer avoidance" Remember that next time you need to schedule Comcast!

Lane agreed to answer some of the comments to this video post - so if you have questions - fire away.

(Disclaimer: OATV is an investor in Get Satisfaction)

Open beats Closed: Best Buy’s new APIs

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 9

Welcome to Joshua-Michele Ross, who joins the Radar team with a focus on how Web 2.0 is affecting business strategy - Sara Winge

Best Buy is a pioneer when it comes to unleashing the talent of their own staff; from the Loop Marketplace that allows employees to submit ideas for Digg-style ranking AND funding across divisions (for example an HR manager can fund an idea from a customer service employee) to their use of prediction markets and their support of the employee-driven social network, Blue Shirt Nation.

Now they are hoping to tap into the developer talent pool with remix.bestbuy.com which they announced at the recent NYC Web 2.0 Expo. According to project lead, Dave Micko, Remix is “an open API to access all of the data that feeds www.bestbuy.com. So, all of the rich information featured on Best Buy’s extensive, deep and content rich web site will now be available publicly via a simple, REST-based API call. “

While other big box stores are thinking small and releasing unappetizing Facebook widgets like this:


Best Buy is thinking much more strategically about the value of the Internet by allowing anyone to reinvent their entire online store. With “access to all the data that feeds Bestbuy.com” imagine the potential of creating your own, curated site on top of Best Buy’s catalog and supply chain. Imagine top Blue Shirts running their own online stores with select merchandise that they stand behind or imagine a thousand home-theater geeks and “go-to-guys” (and girls) extending their expertise and word-of-mouth via their own online stores.

Much needed breakthroughs in ecommerce usability (product and catalog navigation, visualization, design and findability) are now open to thousands of developers to work on. Best Buy will be able to bring that intelligence back into their organization. The only missing piece seems to be some form of compensation for folks who actually go to the trouble of creating their own stores; reward zone points, commission, reputation etc.

Open beats Closed:
This move reflects one of the new strategic principles at work on the Internet: Open beats Closed. There are two readings of open beats closed - both correct and on-point for Best Buy. First, it is the literal injunction to be consistent with the norms of behavior on the Social Web; authentic, transparent and candid. Second, businesses are finding new ways of sourcing content, innovation and market insight and energy outside of their organization. They are letting more people to contribute by allowing access to once tightly guarded data or business processes (via APIs and mashups). As a result they are redrawing the boundaries of the traditional organization. As we dig deeper into the network economy closed companies are going to find it more and more difficult to survive against open companies.

Has anyone in the Radar community seen a similar, open move by a big, traditional company? I have not.
(In full disclosure: I have worked with Best Buy on several initiatives but have nothing to do with the remix project.)

Web Meets World

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 35

My talk last week at Web 2.0 Expo in New York was entitled "Web Meets World." I covered this theme from two directions:

1. The idea that in the future, Web 2.0 "collective intelligence" applications will be driven by sensors rather than people typing on keyboards. What's more, this idea is also key to "enterprise 2.0." Dell's integrated supply chain, which takes real time demand feedback from purchasers, and sends that information all the way back to suppliers in a kind of autonomic process, is more Web 2.0, in many ways, than their heralded Dell Ideastorm initiative. The opportunity for big companies is to turn their IT departments from a back office operation into the brains of their enterprise, enabling autonomic response to constant stimuli from their users. Understanding what WalMart has in common with Google is more important than understanding how to apply Facebook to customer interaction.

2. The idea that the big problems facing us as a world renders the outsized focus of developers on lightweight consumer applications a bit silly. "Stop throwing sheep and focus on stuff that matters" was how CNet described this part of the talk, and that's probably a fair summary. In retrospect, though, I realize I need to make the connection between the two parts of the talk clearer: there's a huge contribution that Web 2.0 techniques can make specifically to the world's biggest problems. Instedd's approach to early detection of infectious diseases, Ushahidi's approach to crowdsourcing crisis information, Witness's harnessing of consumer video to report on human rights abuses, and AMEE's APIs for exchanging carbon data between applications, are all part of the "instrumenting the world" trend that I was talking about in part one of the talk. And in classic "watching the alpha geeks" fashion, they are a key part of the early warning signs that have led me to conclude that this is the next big trend. As I delivered the talk in New York, I think I failed to make the connection as explicit as I should have.

Here's the video of the talk. Let me know what you think.

One more question: at the end of the talk, I urged everyone to register to vote, and to take the election seriously. In the course of making that request, I let my personal politics show (I am a strong Obama supporter.) Most people in the audience seemed enthusiastic, but some have complained about politics intruding at a tech conference. What do you think? (I think that the current election is going to have a huge effect on our future, and is very much grist for Radar. But I'd love to hear arguments, pro and con.)

Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 7

In the Jonathan Schwartz interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco yesterday, I screwed up. After learning we weren't set up for audience Q&A with microphones, I thought, "well then, I'll just suggest to the audience that they twitter questions @timoreilly, and I'll check my phone during the interview." I kept checking, but no questions. Bummer. Not till I heard complaints afterwards that I hadn't asked any of the questions did I do a little digging, and discover that I had twitter set to show me only @ replies from people I'm following. Bad idea.

To all of you in the audience, a big apology for the screwup.

However, I did collect all the questions after the fact, and forward them on to Jonathan to answer by email. The questions and Jonathan's answers are below. I've presented it as if it were a twitter interview, snarfing up the questions from tweetscan, and then getting Jonathan's twitter image from his own feed. [Another big oops: that isn't really Jonathan's twitter feed. Will take out links till I get the correct one. Thanks to Scott Ruthfield for the heads up.] But in reality, he answered the questions by email, after I sent him the whole group in one email message.

triplebsoul : question for Sun " how is sun planning to balance environmental issues with scaling computing needs (power consumption, etc) "
2008-04-25 12:32:48

JonathanSchwartz: Sun's going to stretch the limits of engineering and our collective imagination to make the world's most efficient datacenter infrastructure - from OpenSolaris power management, to Blackbox datacenters. And although that's obviously important to our business, and to the planet, what matters most in managing environmental risk is the world's appetite for power - if that continues along the pace it is, we can slow the growth of power demand through datacenter innovation, but I doubt we can stop it. Every 100,000,000 new PC's in the world creates the need for many, many, many megawatt power plants.

cynthiagentry : ask JIS about the role of academia in the future of Sun, and in the future of Web 2.0
2008-04-25 12:32:46

JonathanSchwartz: It's hugely important. The majority of the world's change agents, media consumers and entrepreneurs graduate from universities every year. There's a reason Sun stands for "Stanford University Network." That's the world from which we spawned, that's the world we focus on with open source technology (you might remember we just concluded an agreement with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Education to build a national curriculum around OpenSPARC and OpenSolaris - made possible by our IP being free and open...).

Sierralog : Question to Jonathan: Did you ever assess the success of you corporate blogging in terms of "ROI" and if so, how? Thx
2008-04-25 12:31:51

JonathanSchwartz: No. It just seemed like an IQ test. If I talk, people that are interested listen. If I don't speak up, they have nothing to hear.
 

amitc : Q for Jon: Beyond MySQL, Sun boxes and Java, what else does Sun has to offer Web Devs, PMs & Entrepreneurs?
2008-04-25 12:29:44

JonathanSchwartz: Um - that's certainly a good start, isn't it? :) I guess the majority of our focus within the next twelve months will be around our data management and storage offerings - starting with ZFS, and the potential of dual-licensing it under the GPL to see its growth within the Linux environment (alongside MySQL). As you'll see with our rolling out of network.com services, we plan on offering a ton of developer infrastructure as a service, as well.

buildakicker : How can this web2.0 help out or even work within the government?
2008-04-25 12:29:29
 

JonathanSchwartz: Hm - that's up to the government, no? We serve a lot of government customers, and they're very, very interested in network computing. Governments exist to serve the people. The people have internet connections. Put two and two together - you get governments interested in the web.

JesseStay : does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen?
2008-04-25 12:26:30

JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.

I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.

Everything.

No exception.

coogle : One question I have for him is how the Sun acquisition of MySQL is going to impact the open source space and Sun long-term?
2008-04-25 11:12:36

JonathanSchwartz: It's going to open a flurry of doors for MySQL, and it's going to open a flurry of doors for Sun. It already has - as I said, the MySQL team just closed the single largest deal in the history of MySQL, a $10m deal to a global technology company. I'm pleased as punch with the progress we're making there, and we're deluged with inquiries from traditional enterprises (vs. Web 2.0 companies) wanting to know how to get enterprise support for a product they've used in development, but have, until now, not felt comfortable putting into commercial deployment. Now they feel comfortable deploying it - and we're right there with them to help make it happen.

And we're investing heavily to build a whole spectrum of products optimized for MySQL - stay tuned, you'll start seeing some amazing stuff.

rghanbari : For Jonathan Schwartz: What does Google app engine mean for Sun? Programming/deployment model makes Sun platforms irrelevant
2008-04-25 11:07:50

JonathanSchwartz: You know, one wonders how we can generate nearly $14,000,000,000 in revenue when I keep hearing technology x, y or z makes Sun irrelevant. Microsoft tells me MSN Search makes Google irrelevant. Not sure I buy that. OpenOffice doesn't make Microsoft Office irrelevant, either, it creates competition (that's why we have about 100,000,000 users!).

Competition's a good thing, it creates choice. Rumor has it developers like, and value, choice. Throw a sheep at me when that stops being true.

andrewsavikas : EC2 and AppEngine get a lot more attention that sun's grid (cloud) offerings. why is that? who's using sun's grid?
2008-04-25 11:05:47

JonathanSchwartz: Tons of high performance computing customers use our grid - we never targeted the mass developer. But stay tuned, you're going to see a lot more about network.com within the next 6 months.

GraemeThickins: Please ask Schwartz how much time he spends/day writing for his blog & how that's changed over past year; also, does he Twitter?
2008-04-25 11:03:33

JonathanSchwartz: Yes, I Twitter. No I won't tell you my user ID.

And the amount of time I spent writing my blog depends upon what I have to say, and what's going on in our business. It varies dramatically, unlike the amount of pressure I feel from the imaginary editor that sits on my shoulder telling me it's been two weeks since I've posted anything pithy.

mkrigsman: Ask Jonathan Schwatrz why IT departments are so scared of web 2.0 proliferation. Awkward question for him, but he's a big boy.
2008-04-25 11:02:10

JonathanSchwartz: The companies I talk to aren't scared of innovation, they're in love with it - it's a source of business value and competitive advantage. Companies scared of IT are likely to be buried by their competitors that aren't.

Sun's customers, bluntly put, are those that see IT as a weapon. Those that see it simply as a cost... good news, they'll be able to reduce their costs, given clouds and free services and labor arbitrage, to near zero. But we'll be far more focused on those delivering the network services to them that make that transition possible.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with the CIO of an oil company. He started the meeting by telling me "I don't understand why Sun's still around, IT's a commodity to me, who cares?" Until I reminded him his business just delivered more in quarterly profit than we delivered in annual revenue. And his business was built upon selling a...

Commodity. In his case, oil.

Commodities are where are all the money is, just ask Google, Verizon, Goldman, Sachs or Exxon. But commoidities also require R&D - those that couple the two, R&D and an ability to navigate commodity markets, tend to do rather well.

timoreilly: Thanks a lot for agreeing to take all these extra questions, Jonathan!
 
 

JonathanSchwartz Thanks, again, Tim - it's always a pleasure to hang out.

Web 2.0 Expo SF Launchpad: Six New Startup Stars

by Dave McClure | comments: 4

This year's Launchpad at Web 2.0 Expo SF features six new Web 2.0 startups that have captured our interest and attention:

1. Acquia
2. Triggit
3. Chirp Interactive
4. Oortle
5. JobScore
6. TradeVibes

Here's a brief description of each of these cool new companies:

Acquia is an open source software company providing products and services for the wildly popular Drupal social publishing system. At Acquia, we believe that open source development and social publishing technology have the power to connect people and unleash their collective creative potential in order to achieve great things.

Triggit makes it quick and easy for web publishers to monetize their sites with advertising. Using a cross platform web application, publishers can now drag and drop ad units directly into their pages, optimize efficacy and track the results. Triggit takes the pain out of monetization.

Chirp Interactive (www.chirp.com) creates solutions that help you discover relevant and interesting friends, content, and information that helps you stay connected with your friends and derive value from your relationships. Our first product, chirpscreen, helps you discover and share the content you care about. The items displayed can range from photos and messages from your friends, to items you may want to purchase, to public pictures on topics of interest. We source this content from sites like Facebook, Flickr, eBay and Twitter to provide you with an engaging, interactive display of content that you can easily share with friends.

Oortle enables people to share rich media with each other in real-time, using their existing social networks & connections. Oortle's "synchronous web" applications span social networks and take user engagement to the next level. Our first product Photophlow has been praised as a live version of Flickr, and has demonstrated a dramatic increase in user engagement on Flickr photos with its chat, social search and synchronized photo viewing. Today we are also demoing our second product Videophlow, an application for sharing & watching YouTube videos in real-time with your friends.

JobScore empowers employers to recruit cooperatively. Today, companies spend billions of dollars recruiting online, only to disqualify and discard virtually every resume they receive. The JobScore Network makes it easy for you to efficiently build your own candidate pipeline and zero in on qualified job applicants. Then, you can share resumes with other employers, exchanging your un-hired resumes for qualified, interested candidates. JobScore is a win-win: we privately connect your un-hired candidates with similar jobs and offer you on-demand access to the qualified people you need.

TradeVibes is the best way to discover and research hot new startups online. It's a platform for our community to share, discuss, and evaluate information about these companies. TradeVibes is also a tool for finding and sharing news and opinions about companies. By using the collective wisdom of our community, TradeVibes separates the best startups from their competitors. Here is a link to a TradeVibes product video screencast. TradeVibes was founded in 2007 by four early employees of PayPal who shared a passion for entrepreneurship and cool new startups.

The crowd will be discussing the Launchpad on Meebo starting at 1:30 PM PST.

[disclosure: dave mcclure is an advisor/investor in 2 of the startups listed above: Oortle & TradeVibes. LaunchPad startup selections were made by our VC judging panel, not by either of the conference co-chairs brady forrest or dave mcclure]

Social Graph Foo Camp--the Videos

by Sara Winge | @sarawinge | comments: 6

On a stormy weekend back in February, O'Reilly hosted Social Graph Foo Camp (David Recordon and Scott Kveton were the instigators; we were happy to say "Yes" when they asked to hold the party at our Sebastopol campus). Google announced their Social Graph API on Friday morning, adding fuel to the fire as the intense discussions got underway. We managed to drag some of the Campers away from the proceedings, sit them in front of a video camera and capture their thoughts about the state of the social graph. We also included a summary in the latest issue of Release 2.0 (free excerpt). 

There's much more to be done if we're to create sane and useful approaches to the data portability, identity, and privacy issues created by the social networking juggernaut. The conversation continues today at the Data Sharing Workshop in San Franciso, and next week at Web 2.0 Expo, where a slew of SG Foo Campers will be speaking, including Joseph Smarr, Tom Coates, Niall Kennedy, John Musser, Gavin Bell, Artur Bergman, Ankur Shah, Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Marc Davis, Justin Hall, and Dave Morin.

Nice Take on Web 2.0 Expo from Information Week

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 2

It's among the most satisfying part of my job to seed new ideas, see them spread, take root, and eventually flower. In the process, they often morph into something unexpected, hopefully richer and better than originally imagined. But sometimes they take disappointing side-turns. So, for example, seeing Eric Schmidt equate web 2.0 to Ajax was disappointing. Especially since he went on to describe "Web 3.0" as small applications loosely connected and distributed virally, with data in the cloud, able to run on any device (my "software above the level of a single device") -- all things I'd originally described in my What is Web 2.0? paper. But it's great to see a media story get it right.

In Information Week'sWeb 2.0 Expo preview, Thomas Claburn got it just right:

The Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008, which runs April 22 through April 25 comes at an inflection point in this rapidly growing arena. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), one of the major players in the Web 2.0 space, stands on the brink of being acquired by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is sluggish, which limits the capital available to Web 2.0 startups. Indeed, four years after the term "Web 2.0" entered the industry vernacular, many forward-looking innovators are focused on mobile services and Web 3.0, also called the Semantic Web.

Nevertheless, the conceptual underpinnings of Web 2.0, the Web as a platform, have proven to be sound. It might even be fair to say that Web 2.0 has won.Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft, and Yahoo are busy building upon the Web as a platform, along with thousands of startups and other large companies like Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL), and Sun.

Yet there remains a need to explore Web 2.0 in a conference format because some of its major issues remain unresolved...

The article goes on to outline some of those big, unresolved issues covered in the conference: user control of data, privacy, security, the nature of "open" in an always-on and connected world, the importance of integrating new mobile and semantic web applications, business models beyond advertising, especially in a world in which Web 2.0 platforms are becoming serious business infrastructure. Good stuff. This should be the best Web 2.0 conference yet.

Precisely because we're getting through the giddy stage of "everything ajax, everything advertising," and returning to an understanding that the internet as platform means far more than that, there is more innovation today than there was last year, even as some of the froth seems to abate. Web 2.0 is becoming real for mainstream business in a way that was unthinkable only a few years ago. As Claburn said, "Web 2.0 has won." Everyone understands that this is the new game, not just something for consumer startups. Everyone in the computer industry, everyone in mainstream business, needs to learn the new rules, exploit the new opportunities, and help to invent the future.

This is a better time to be an internet entrepreneur than in the giddiest moments of 2006 and 2007. More real work is getting done, more real problems solved, than at any time since we first called out the resurgence of the Web in 2003/2004 with the name Web 2.0.

Velocity preview at Web2.0 Expo

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

At the Web2.0 Expo this month we have a small preview of some of the topics and speakers at the Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference.  (Radar readers get a 20% discount by using "vel08js" as a discount code... and yes it works with the $300 early registration discount!).

Failure Happens
Friday @ 11:00 am, Room 2009

Artur Bergman and I will kick off the day with an entertaining/informative/eye-opening review of the year’s biggest failures, disasters, and painful lessons learned.

We'll review incidents by underlying root cause with a focus on what could have been done to prevent it. We promise not to be too harsh on anybody, although we will give special attention to particularly ironic failures or those that are "entertainingly coupled" to absurd marketing claims.

(Hint: Send your boss to this talk if they don't understand why you and your whole team need to go to Velocity.)

Even Faster Web Sites
Friday @ 1:30 pm, Room 2012

Steve Souders is the co-chair of Velocity and author of the bestselling book High Performance Web Sites. At the Expo last year Steve gave an incredibly popular talk on the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!.

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