Web 2.0 Expo - Wednesday, April 18, 2007, Afternoon Sessions
Well this is it for this conference. After the afternoon sessions it’s done. I’ll post my notes on these sessions and then I’ll write up a wrap-up of the conference.
The first session of the afternoon was “Web 2.0: Show me the Money” by Jeremy Liew, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
I’m contacting Jeremy to get a copy of his presentation as it was full of useful data. Once I get it I’ll post it here.
- Pointed out 2 of the primary ways to make money are media sites and ecommerce sites and compared private vs public ventures for needed revenue, traffic for breakeven etc.
- Online startup costs are low. This is something I know about having launched a few successful businesses for very little upfront costs.
- If you’re having a third party build your online business for as little as 20K allowing you cheap entry into the market.
Advertising RPM (Revenue per thousand pages):
- One example with $5 CPM and $2.8 million needed in revenue for break even, then you need 50 million pageviews per month
- Technorati 12 million pageviews per month (Comscore - underepresents monthly reach, but still useful)
- Some ecommerce sites to look at: allheart.com, hats.com, fileaves.com doing $7 million in sales
- Newegg $1.3 billion in revenue, Zappos $271 in revenue projected for 2007
Some of the above might be confusing but once I get the presentation online the picture will get clearer.
The second session I attended in the afternoon was “Ten Ways to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan by Kevin Hale, Co-Founder, Infinity Box Inc.
His presentation is available here.
- Is this new? no but presentation is unique
- Techniques; Big things with small teams, technology mashups, word of mouth of marketing
The Ten Ways:
1. Expose yourself to harsh conditions
- less hardware, less features, less money
- practice in stress, practice disagreeing
- do things people hate
2. Be a nomad
- nomads don’t wander: they are mobile, tents, offensive,
resourceful, hunters, protein
- the value of hunger
3. Loot Efficiently
- Profit per X (most profit per X)
- Strip away & measure
4. Say No to Infantry
- Infantry, calvary and archers
- Be efficient, create just a cavalry that incorporates
everything
- Be lean
5. Get the people talking
- Gmail - invitation only at first, other people emulating this now
6. Do not fight the enemy by their rules
7. Appropriate the best people and skills
8. Build bridges
9. Inspire fierce loyalty
- Took care of the family. Nothing new.
10. Remember the lesson of the many headed snake
- Stick to your core competence
The last session I attended was Designing for Web 2.0: The Visual Ecosystem by Luke Wroblewski, Luke Interface Designs and Principal Designer, Yahoo! Social Media
Web 2.0 Shifts
Locomotion -> services
- enabling conversations, manipulation of services
- Display surfaces (Flickr)
- Content creation (Writely)
- Aggregation (Digg)
- Entertainment (YouTube)
Pages -> rich interactions
- Ajax Interface design
- OLD: user action -> screen reload -> data update
- NEW: user action -> data update ( leaves out the reload aspect)
- Bill Scott, designing for Ajax.
- Visual design considerations
- invitation
- transition
- feedback
Sites -> content experiences
- Sites are turning into content experiences
- Content Creation Tools: blog postings, 120,000 new per day
- Content Aggregators: digg has 1 million registered users
- Entertainment: YouTube streaming x videos per day
- 24% content - 76% site overhead (interesting, just one major site example)
- New York times good example - VA tech story, layout is good.
Webmasters -> everyone (is making things)
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