Let's Focus on Web Innovation Again!
We've discussed before on Read/WriteWeb about how we've entered The Digestion Phase of the Web, a term that Alex Iskold coined. He defined it as "a period of time for us to reflect, to integrate, and to understand recent technologies and how they fit together." Tim O'Reilly has also been reflecting on how innovation has slowed down and consolidation is occurring.
But something doesn't sit right with me when we start talking about reflection and consolidation. Both of those things are happening, for sure -- and much of today's tech news and blog coverage is about M&A and how big Internet companies are integrating web 2.0 features. Which is precisely the problem! It's not nearly as interesting as Web innovation. I can't be the only person bored with the tech blogosphere these days. How can we - as bloggers, entreprenuers, businesspeople - get back to thinking about actual innovation?
A lot of the Web technology that has inspired me in recent months is Mobile Web apps and the Semantic Apps we're beginning to see blossom on the Web. Also, like Tim O'Reilly, I find myself increasingly interested in what is bubbling up from China and other international markets. It's not to say Silicon Valley isn't still fascinating (Google's OpenSocial and Android initiatives were both fine developments), but there are new innovations and markets that are in many ways far more interesting than what is happening in Silicon Valley.
So in an attempt to break through to the other side, I've set myself the task of investigating 'the next wave' of Web innovation. It's something all our writers look for - e.g. Marshall Kirkpatrick's superb analysis of the Twitter ecosystem (and Twitter is certainly innovative and something to watch), and Josh Catone's analysis of facial recognition platforms. So what else is out there in terms of Web innovation?
Where Web Innovation is Happening - All Over the World, in Certain Segments
Tangos Chan of China Web2.0 Review posted a very interesting set of slides that he presented at an event organized by Orange Lab, called "Web 2.0 in China: What’s Next?". He first makes the point that China's Web scene is not just made up of copycat sites - he says that phenomonem is happening all over the world. Then Tangos reveals some areas of innovation in China:
Image via Tangos Chan
When you think about it, the above list of current Web innovations could easily belong to any other country - including the US. Real or near time communications technologies (online forum, IM, etc) are a hot area of innovation currently; and again I point you to Marshall's Twitter post. In Rebecca MacKinnon's excellent summary of recent China Web 2.0 events, she points to Tangos' comments on a couple of Chinese IM services of interest: Anothr and Jiwai. Anothr delivers RSS feeds to your IM client (it started out in Skype, but now supports others), while Jiwai is a similar service to Twitter.
Jiwai homepage
Mobile Web has been on everyones list of 'The Next Big Thing' for a long time. The (potential) market is undeniably huge. Noted Mobile author Tomi T Ahonen blogged earlier this year that there are 2.7 billion mobile phones in the world. To put that in perspective: there are 800 million cars, 850 million personal computers, 1.3 B fixed landline phones, 1.4 billion credit cards, 1.5 billion TV sets. Tomi's post is from January, so the figures will have changed since then - but the point remains that Mobile Web is where a lot of innovation will happen, simply because that's where the users are. It's also well known that China, Japan, Korea and other parts of Asia are very heavy Mobile users - often at the expense of the PC.
There will of course be amalgams of current trends with near future ones - e.g. Tomi Ahonen noted in an October post that the mobile social networking market is worth $5 billion now. This is apparently bigger than the current revenue derived from browser-based social networks. Or as Jason Grigsby put it, "today’s big thing–social networks–is already bigger on mobile devices than on PCs." [incidentally I got the last few links from Marshall Kirkpatrick's Twitter stream!]
A couple of innovative and well-liked Mobile Web apps I posted about recently are Fring and Shozu. Fring is a free mobile VoIP software, that lets you connect to all your IM services and talk for free when connected to 3G or Wi-Fi. Shozu enables you to send your videos and photos from your phone to the Web - e.g. your Flickr account, YouTube, Facebook. Plus the big Internet companies of the West are ramping up in mobile - particularly Google.
In his slides, Tangos mentioned mInfo - a natural language mobile search service that works through WAP and SMS.
This is all to say: there's a lot of innovation happening in the Mobile Web right now. They're not digesting or consolidating, they're inventing!
Conclusion
I'll discuss more about Mobile, Semantic Apps and other areas of innovation in future posts, but the one main point I want to make here: there is a ton of Web innovation happening out there. Beyond The Digestion Phase, beyond Consolidation, beyond Silicon Valley. Those things are all necessary and interesting, but beyond all that there is exciting innovation happening in the Mobile space, in places like China and Korea, in real-time communications platforms like Twitter, etc.
When I was at the Mobile 2.0 conference in October, one of the presenters made a joke about how their small 1-day event compared to the much bigger Web 2.0 Summit being held later that week. The presenter said something like: "in 10 years time it'll be the reverse: Mobile 2.0 will get the big crowds and Web 2.0 Summit will be the niche conference." [it was said much more wittily at the time!]. That to me sums up the enthusiasm I see in Mobile Web and other segments. That enthusiasm is missing from other segments of Web technology, or at least in the coverage they receive in tech blogs (RWW included sometimes) -- where X startup gets a new social networking feature (yawn!), or X gets $X funding (who cares), or X is acquired by Y, or worse, X is rumored to be acquired by Y! BORING!!!
I'm not in a position to call a stop to The Digestion Phase. But I do want to emphasize that for Web technologists, entrepreneurs, bloggers - now is the time to focus on the next stage of Web innovation. Some of you will be busy consolidating your businesses, looking for M&A; opportunities, integrating, reflecting. But don't forget that right under your nose is a lot of opportunity in the tech segments mentioned in this post.
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Thanks Richard - well articulated.
But the question then goes down to what is innovation? Are you talking about invention - the concept whereby people create new technology? Innovation is when people apply existing inventions in new ways. A quote I read recently was something along the lines of the guy inventing the wheel was brilliant; but the guy that attached another three was a genius.
Innovation, in my eyes, is really where money gets made. I think you are right - we have had lots of invention; it's now time to reflect, to manipulate them and innovate. But in doing so, lets be mindful that the two concepts are very different. The tech industry has largely been in invention mode.
Posted by: Elias Bizannes | November 20, 2007 3:49 PM
Good point Elias. I guess I mean innovation in terms of creating new things - which (you're right) can be mashups, integrations etc. IM is a good example -- it's a relatively old technology, but there are lots of new things that can be done with it.
Thanks for the comment Elias!
Posted by: Richard MacManus | November 20, 2007 3:59 PM
I don't often do this, but let me bow down to thank you for this article, well written and much food for thought.
Posted by: Robin Wauters | November 20, 2007 4:04 PM
Richard, sometimes the change one see in others is actually happening within. This has happened before -- the press looks for innovation to come from big companies, and then it comes from left field, where they weren't expecting it. In the 90s, the constant story from the press was "What we need is more innovation from Microsoft." Of course Microsoft went along with it, yes, what we need is more of our innovation. :-)
You have changed, you've gone from being a blogger to being a journalist. You compete with other journalists. Nothing wrong with that, you want to make some money, you can do it that way. But you're not covering innovation, as you say, you're covering the bigco's because that's who pays your bills. It may be hard to see because you're in the middle of it. Ask a fish to describe water and the fish says there is no such thing.
Posted by: Dave Winer | November 20, 2007 4:12 PM
Richard this is fantastic.
The absolute biggest problem recently is that it feels like the tech industry is just moving symbols around.
All the Web 2.0 cliches are used too frequently as spring boards to create actual products.
Posted by: Steve Spalding | November 20, 2007 4:13 PM
It may appear that innovation is not occurring because much of what is reported on in tech blogs is a relatively small area. I think innovation does not necessarily happen with a press release and news story and cascade of stories across the tech blogosphere.
I don't think there's much reflection going on-- people are out there trying for the next big thing, and to make money today. My opinion, of course.
Posted by: Morgan | November 20, 2007 4:31 PM
@1 already said it.. boils down to What is Innovation... /ac.
Posted by: ac | November 20, 2007 4:35 PM
Sorry to sound really dry and boring here, but.. I think the next "big thing" is going to be innovation on the back end rather than the front-end / the Web. The last few years have been a major period of innovation for the public facing Web, while technologies in the back office have remained relatively lackluster.
With the various security scares, data leaks and new data protection policies coming along lately, a lot of companies are looking to bring services under their own management. I've had enquiries from quite a few companies who have been looking to get Web 2.0 style services directly into their enterprise, but running on their own backends for internal use. Not many Web 2.0-sphere companies have chosen to focus on the backend (Newsgator are a major exception) but I think this is going to become the next hotbed for innovation.
Many companies are either not getting any benefit out of the "mass-socialization" of the larger Web, or have fatigued of it, but they still want to take advantage of the technologies and innovations in a more direct, internal way. Imagine an in-house "FaceBook" for companies with, say, 100 - 1000 employees. It'd be powerful stuff, but the existing intranet systems that dominate this area are so far behind the times that it's unfunny. There's a lot of money to be made in the backoffice, and I think people are going to wake up to it in the next year.
Posted by: Peter Cooper | November 20, 2007 4:43 PM
Fantastic article.
As much as I would love to see mobile web apps become 'The Next Big Thing' I think the biggest thing holding people back is the price for a data plan. Your average user wont pay the extra $20 a month per phone for internet. And without lots of people it's a bit hard to develop any kind of social apps.
I'm participating in the Android competition with the hope that when Android enabled phones start rolling out more people with have higher end phones which will help power the richer mobile apps we are waiting for.
Posted by: Jason | November 20, 2007 4:58 PM
I'd surmise 90% of the bosses (ie., biz owners) won't want some internal facebook... though I'm sure 99.9% employees regardless of rank would want it... just human nature.. /ac.
Posted by: ac | November 20, 2007 5:04 PM
Richard - every time RRW talks about the "digestion phase", I cringe a bit, because the "dynamics of the digestion phase" is such a retread of what everybody else in IT calls the hype cycle.
RRW is a lot better when it's offering new ideas than when it's trying to rebrand old ones.
Other than that, this is an interesting article.
I wonder if part of what you're feeling reflects the fact that a lot of the technologies that are getting the blogosphere's fleeting attention are fundamentally pretty useless.....
Posted by: James Lewin | November 20, 2007 5:05 PM
Is it just me who sees the juxtaposition between this post and the one immediately below (Facebook dropping "is" from something-or-other)?
Posted by: Andy | November 20, 2007 5:28 PM
How can we focus on innovation when digestion isn't fully (or even halfway) done?
Isn't it a little self-serving for RWW to mandate that we need to focus solely on what it is RWW focuses on?
Who says we aren't focused on innovation? Are you sure you're not looking in the wrong places?
What an incredible amount of hubris, Richard.
Posted by: Mister Undo | November 20, 2007 6:29 PM
I'd surmise 90% of the bosses (ie., biz owners) won't want some internal facebook... though I'm sure 99.9% employees regardless of rank would want it... just human nature..
That's because you're expecting an internal version of FaceBook to actually be used as if it's the public-facing FaceBook, and in a business that's extremely unlikely (e.g. you're not going to be uploading pictures of your boss or sharing wacky apps.. but things like status updates, internal company apps, etc, would be extremely useful).
Consider an internal Digg, say. It's not going to be full of flamewars and spam, simply because it's internal. Moving Web 2.0 concepts into the back office will result in massive shifts in how those concepts work.
Posted by: Peter Cooper | November 20, 2007 6:59 PM
Putting the number of mobile phones into perspective was very enlightening.
Posted by: David Mackey | November 20, 2007 7:53 PM
I agree, I think we are all ready for something new. Google's open phone OS and mobile web is going to open up things we haven't even imagined yet.
I'm tired of the same stories on all the sites too. I think it's time for blogs to evolve; into what I'm not sure? A year from now things will have evolved and we'll wonder how we didn't see what was coming.
Posted by: Linda MacPhee-Cobb | November 20, 2007 8:25 PM
Dave, I hear what you're saying. But I have to disagree that RWW only covers bigcos. If you check out the RWW posts I linked to here (twitter, facial recognition, twine, etc), you'll see they all cover innovation from small players. But I certainly have no argument that covering bigcos is a part of being a 'news blog' -- although I would actually argue we're more of a magazine blog ;-)
Peter, great point re back office.
James said: "I wonder if part of what you're feeling reflects the fact that a lot of the technologies that are getting the blogosphere's fleeting attention are fundamentally pretty useless....."
RM: I think you hit the nail on the head there!
Andy, if you read Josh's article you'll see he treated the facebook news pretty humorously (I loved the Bill Clinton intro!)
Mister undo -- hubris? Well you're right that this post is a little self-serving :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | November 20, 2007 8:46 PM
@14 - well, then, it's not FaceBook... mightbe they need SharePoint... ;-)
Posted by: ac | November 20, 2007 9:31 PM
Richard, I hate to state what I feel is the obvious, but there is LOTS of innovation going on in silicon valley - and most of it isn't talked about. The big guys dominate the media, and then the paypal mafia (that's a joke, but the players who are the same names over and over again is what I DO mean) is all that gets coverage 9 times out of 10. Even RWW doesn't do much about covering anything new unless it's coming from the big players. And I run around on most of the major tech blogs and they'll be covering the same exact news.
I'd say get out there and start meeting people in the trenches. Stick your nose into places you might not even think about. For example last time I was in San Francisco I went to a Women2.0 pitch session. Companies I'd never heard of, not getting any press, but working their arses off doing cool things. SVASE, TiE, AAMA, EBIG, all these groups have companies out there hungry for press, work, money, employees, partners. Give them some love too. Lots going on out there all over the world that's just not getting coverage.
Posted by: Antje Wilsch | November 20, 2007 10:10 PM
Innovation doesn't happen for long in a vacuum. I think it necessarily follows the money, whether that is VCs investing in innovative technologies, acquirer's buying technologies/teams or public markets buying stakes in tech companies.
So those "BORING" numbers about which companies are getting how much money are probably starting to indicate that the Web 2.0 frenzy of the past few years is beginning to slow from a funding standpoint.
So I return to Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe's comment that overinvestment is good, since it creates all kinds of new technologies...most fail on their own, but the consolidators comb the wreckage and assemble the pieces into something magical.
Posted by: Don Jones | November 20, 2007 10:20 PM
Actually, I talked about Xiaoi in my presentation(and slide) not Jiwai, Mackinnon made a mistake in her summary.
Yes, the list covers rather broad sectors, but I'm not saying there are no innovation in these area in other countries, but you can find innovations among them in China easier. For example, I'd like to mention Xiaoi again. We all know that Chinese Internet users are addicted to instant messenging tools. Xiaoi takes advantage of IM bot to enable you to do almost anything in the interface of IM, but not Internet browsers, because they may seldom use browsers.
Anyway, the presentation slides are too simple, just reading slides without context of my narration may cause misunderstanding sometimes.
Posted by: Tangos | November 20, 2007 10:36 PM
Hi Richard, it is always easy for the industry to look at new technologies, or even new applications of existing technologies. But the real shift that will make a difference, and is therefore hardest to accomplish, is a change in business model. The web 2.0 free (but ad based) business model provides us with lots of technical innovations, and sometimes even handy services, but the business model itself enforces walled gardens and network value creation. It should be about user value creation, not about monetizing the network.
Getting out of the advertisement trap will be the way to get to user centric services. I have said it before "every generation needs a new revolution":
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/every-generation-needs-a-new-revolution/
Posted by: Alexander van Elsas | November 20, 2007 10:43 PM
Richard,
I cannot help myself to post this comment. "Web evolution"! Right, when you call up new web innovation, why not call up the study of web evolution?
No matter innovation or invention, without a theoretic guide, it is aimless. For long time, we may have been accustomed to aimless innovations. We often expect that the quantity of new innovations might make up the lack of quality. But why don't we start looking for qualified innovations from the beginning? If you ask for what the quality is, the answer is to study the evolutionary laws of World Wide Web itself.
I have tried to tell the world, and now I repeat one more time, that if we believe World Wide Web evolves, there must be evolutionary laws sitting behind. Discovering these laws can help us seek for new innovations with concrete target.
We do not run like a man running aimlessly; we do not fight like a man beating the air. This is the importance of web evolution with respect to web innovation. So, please call up big thinking of web evolution simultaneously when you call up new hype of web innovations.
-- Yihong
Posted by: Yihong Ding | November 20, 2007 11:27 PM
You want innovation?
Give a concept to the your website..Don't just create new technology or just make better what exists.
This is exactly what we are doing in www.wishdone.com
There are lot of established sites in the social networking field but for me there is no concept in this social networks.
Why should i use any of those?Should nt i gain sth?or at least make me feel better?Give a reason to the users to use websites.Find what is missing and develop it.People just to be happier.
Posted by: John Zarkadas | November 21, 2007 6:18 AM
an amazing post!
ok, what i wanna say is that in the mainland of China, the number of mobile phone users will be 0.5 B in 2009, big bucks!
but, there's also a very big problem, most of mobile phone users' devices are very old, only support call, sms, mms, gprs, no edge, no 3G.
so it cannot afford these great services like semantic web, mobile search, mobile social network, etc.
it's true the market in future is out of our imagine, but now, no one can handle it.
Posted by: Mao Xinyu | November 21, 2007 8:37 AM
For the most part, I think the old cliche still holds true: Necessity is the mother of invention. Or innovation, if you prefer...
There's a whole lot of innovation going on involving mobile web, and a lot of it is driven by necessity: developing nations lack the infrastructure for a wired, broadband-based web, and most of their citizens wouldn't be able to afford it anyway. So that necessitates an easily-accessible and cost-effective solution. That's mobile web. And as the mobile web audience increases, marketers will necessarily have to find innovative ways to reach that audience.
But for the rest of us in the wired, broadband-based web, what do we need that we don't already have? Where is the necessity? Greater efficiency and lower cost is always welcome, but beyond that I'm a bit stumped. I'm open to suggestions, of course, but we can't force an innovation on an audience that doesn't have any use for it.
So if you're looking for innovation, the developing world is probably the place you'll find it, simply because that's where it's needed. Why do you think they call it "developing" anyway?
BTW, Richard, "phenomonem" is mis-spelled in the fifth paragraph! :-)
Posted by: Marcello | November 21, 2007 9:00 AM
Someone's got to make some money out of the last lot of innovations first. Where is all the money going to come from to pay for all this innovation?
Posted by: Charlie | November 21, 2007 1:30 PM
Today I partcipated in an event with a lot of people making the silicon valley funding rounds. I know hat only a small % of companies ever get funded anyway, but no one in this group had yet, they have revenue and are live or very far along, several have customers and partnerships already in place, staff and more. Only one had gotten some angel funding thus far (there were 27 companies participating).
Lots and lots of "No's" and "Not right now" and "We'll take a wait&see; approach" answers from valley investors.
I think not a lot of deals are being made right now (even granted it's the holiday time, end of the year etc). And one caveat: none were in green technologies.
Posted by: Antje Wilsch | November 21, 2007 5:37 PM
I realise that this post rapidly became about mobile innovation but based on the title, I would like to suggest that the web community needs to innovate in the are of monetisation.
As I have stated in a recent post (http://www.ideatagging.com/is-the-advertising-model-holding-back-the-next-web-aka-the-graph/), I believe the advertising revenue model is holding back the evolution of the web. As long as people continue to rely on advertising revenue from their websites, they are likely to resist any and all attempts at opening up their data in the way of 'The Graph' as recently described by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Posted by: IdeaTagger | November 23, 2007 6:17 PM
But I certainly have no argument that covering bigcos is a part of being a 'news blog' -- although I would actually argue we're more of a magazine blog ;-)
Posted by: Tramadol | November 30, 2007 1:46 AM