JamBase – an emerging, sustainable business model

Interesting overview in today’s Mashable about Jambase, a music/concert information search/social networking service. JamBase has been operating for 10 years now and things seem to be coming together for them. Latest stats are:

• over 500,000 users
• 40,000 artists
• 50 genres
• 50,000 venues covered

What got me thinking were the core elements behind JamBase’s success. They are global, offer near real-time, host social networking where users can personalised their JamBase, share information & upload user-generated content as well as having easy access professional artist music. Revenues are from advertising and concert/artist promotion. Joining-up is free…but you have to nominate at least one friend’s email address to complete the registration.

My impression is that the numbers indicate network effects gaining momentum…the reach is global and participative…seems to add-up to a sustainable new business model.

Google, Kodak, and the Localization of Content

“Location, location, location,” is increasingly becoming the mantra around new media services, and 2008 seems poised to be a year of growth for hyperlocal content delivery and other location-based services.

Recent developments such as Google News Local, EveryBlock and newspaper ‘microzoning’ are providing new media alternatives for communities and local businesses to create and distribute local content. Local content here means ‘hyperlocal’ content, where the target audience is the local neighbourhood, local sports competititon or local whatever – as is defined by users. Yet another example of the rapid development of the Social Web.

read more | digg story

Pervasive data here and now

Dan Hill has posted an excellent piece called the street as a platform. Taking a ‘here-and-now’ view, Hill describes just how pervasive data networks already are in the urban environment – and raises  substantive governance and legislative questions that are present in the contemporary street.

Having been one of those people that have talked about the pace of changefor some years now, Hill’s narrative led me to reflect on how much ‘change’ is actually here and now.  To paraphrase William Gibson, it’s like the future is already here… and it is becoming evenly distributed. In what Hill calls “a twitching, pulsing cloud of data”, we have (a by no means a comprehensive list):

• online games, newsfeed reader software, video reviews, Google Maps, WiFi and GPS enabled connectivity on mobile devices
• sensor networks indicating the level of ambient daylight on the street
• networked high-resolution display screens used in public places for a variety of purposes such as real-time coverage of sporting events, and semantic connections across complex databases (such as library data and movie clips)
• street infrastructure to support wireless connectivity, geographic information systems, sensor networks and collaborative research projects.

Together with:

• the digital divide and variable digital literacies 
• consumers not being aware of pricing differentials
• online fraud and hacking
• variable network reliability
• a mixture of data that is proprietary, enclosed and privately managed, and other data that is open, collaborative and public.

The governance and legislative issues to deal with go to levels of openness, responsibility, privacy, security, interaction, user awareness and social inclusion/exclusion. The message here is, it’s time to act on these issues now.

Hill goes on to invite us to imagine what the street will be like over the next few years from the deployment of more ubiquitous and pervasive computing…and to consider the challenges involved in identifying, understanding and acting in response to the continual state of flux and change.

Mobile Exec: Google & Yahoo Are Stealing Our Billions

The mobile industry is booming with service providers, making it easy for customers to access all kinds of media and information. The only problem is that the carriers are letting themselves turn into nothing more than information pipes for other companies to take advantage of, says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin.

Exactly so, and supports my analysis. Innovation in the computing world is quick, user responsive and highly competitive – challenging for telcos indeed.

read more | digg story

Mobile world – blending telecoms and computing

Driven by high levels of growth globally, expanding functionality and high-levels of personal attachment that users have to their devises, it’s no wonder that companies like Google see mobile as their future. It is worth while taking a look at the strategic moves at play.

A clash between web-based and telecommunications business models and culture is evident. World-wide-web services are provided independently from the underlying infrastructure – at odds with tradtional voice and data telecommunications services. Google is promoting that same openness…to a mobile industry used to being in control. Web-based innovation and use is driven from ‘the edge’…while telecommunications operators do not want their services to be commoditized.

Looking more closely at telecommunications companies, those operating 3G networks manage end-to-end operations through specifications and standards developed by 3GPP the industry standardisation body. Radio-frequency spectrum bands for mobile networks are allocated to network operators under exclusive-use licences. Overall in the mobile sector, voice and SMS remain the highest revenue-earning services.  There is a clear preference by at least some 3G service providers to control multimedia and web services.  Telstra’s NextG service marketing promotes unmetered access to online directory, music, photos, TV and blogging services provided by…Telstra.  Mobile network consumer behaviour and usages pattern information is usually restricted – far more so than the ‘world wired web’.

Things are changing of course. Standards developed by the computing sector (such as SIP) are being incorporated into the telecommunications industry adaption of IP-based networks under the so-called ‘next generation networks’ change program, delivering amongst other things multimedia, presence, instant messaging and voice-over-IP services.

Now, lets take a look at the web-perspective. According to Reuters carriers that Google has signed-up for Android (it’s open-source software to make the internet work better on mobiles) include Deutsche Telecom and T-Mobile. China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and Telefonica have all signed up to Google’s Open Handset Alliance. The momentum builds…but it is early days yet. The FCC’s open spectrum policy has yet to be tested.

In summary, different approaches are obviously at play…based on differing assumptions about the inter-relationships between networks, content and user innovation and choice.

User reaction to mobile web services will be very interesting. People are used to getting content of their choice. Apple’s experience with hackers making merry with i-Phone code is one example of this expectation expressing itself in very clear terms.

Social networks and network effects

Today’s Next supplement of The Age describes examples of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs leveraging Facebook to rapidly accelerate user take-up of their applications.  Lee Lorenzen, CEO of Shop.Com spent nine years to get 500,000 registered users, but then “Facebook application iLike, from developer Rockyou, added 600,000 users in eight hours”.  It works by a Facebook user adding the application after having been invited to do so by a friend.

Call it what you will – viral marketing, the Participative Web, the open & innovative dynamic of the internet - Lorenzen’s experience is an excellent example of web-based innovation and scale advantage, and leveraging the network effects of social networks.

Through opening up their platform to third-party applications developers, Facebook benefits from a virtuous circle-like retention and growth of their user-base.

Another pointer from the article was to the Facebook Developers Garage phenomenon.

And just one other message from this informative article – an observation from Dr Marcus Weichselbaum, CEO o f applications developer TheBroth, that “People within Facebook have everything they need within Facebook. They do not want to go to an outside website” – a view that resonates with my earlier point about the potential for social networks sites to be a hub for entertainment, news, information, connecting with friends – and shopping!

What’s old and what’s new in social network services

When thinking about social network services (SNS), what do most people have in mind? MySpace, Facebook and Bebo may well come quickly to mind. What is it that SNS do? What probably comes to mind are activities like sharing a personal profile, posting photos, videos, and music, writing about shared interests, organising social activities (like parties!). Some may reflect back on several years of blogging, where knowledge is shared and created through online collaboration. I’ve heard about 15 year-olds in Melbourne, Australia swapping their social network address first, mobile phone number second.

The growth in SNS has been rapid and global.  According to ComScore ’hundreds of millions of people around the world are visiting social network sites each month and many are doing so on a daily basis”.

That’s a very potted history of SNS use. So what’s emerging? Quite a lot actually. Here some examples:

• Loomia lets readers of online media (who are also Facebook users) see a list of recommended news articles referred by their Facebook ‘friends’.
• eFans is a social network for sports fans (combining a sports portal and social network).
• MySpace and the BBC have annouced a partnership  to enable MySpace users to share some of the BBC’s programs by embedded them into their personalised profile pages. Imagine the potenial for viral distribution through network effects…and if a ‘big hit’ occurred…what that would do hasten the shift from mainstream to online TV.
• MySpace as well as Facebook have opened up their sites to third-party developers…adding fuel to the pace of innovation.
• Bebo has partnered with UK and USA broadcasters to provide professional media companies and individual users the opportunitiy to create and upload their own content, and monetise content through serving and selling their own advertising.
• Professionals have started using LinkedIn as their sole contacts repository.

Common threads here are the SNS’s are shaping up to be integrated hubs for individuals and their extended networks to connect, communicate and to access and share tailored news, information and entertainment.  Advertising is moving online to SNS as well as search.  Mainstream media is moving online via SNS - not migrating so much as complementing traditional broadcast services.

What may well lie on the horizon? I would suggest embedded voice, video as well as text, IM and chat; communication between virtual and real identities.

Seems to me that social network services are shaping up to be drivers of innovation and substitute/preferred services for social and entertainment needs – and business knows it!