1. Trends in the Web Space, from an insider
Bharat Vijay
Founder, Boltell

2. Today’s Talk My background Some web history
Inflexion points for web companies
Trends in modern web companies
Goal : Identify questions to ask when evaluating trends in the web space

3. The Web and I 15 year long affair Early-Yahoo!, mid nineties
Studying web users, late nineties
Web information retrieval, early 2000s
Global engineering for web companies, early 2000
India conceptualized Global Web products,
Amazon & e-commerce,

4. The Web and I uGenie – an India based e-commerce startup (2007)
A startup for the Facebook revolution – weRead (2008)
New Web advertising models (2009)
2nd Generation Information companies from the web - Boltell (2010)

5. More than 2 Billion people online

6. Question : What is the penetration ?

7. Evolution of the web

8. Inflexion points Apply to portions of Web or any industry
Identifying them helps understand trends and short term plans
IMO, applicable in 5-10% of cases, but can be a costly miss
Is there a Land Grab ?
Are the products in an Improve phase ?
Are key players beginning to Experiment ?
Is it a Survive phase ?

9. Evolution of the web Improve Land Grab Improve Land Grab Dot com crash
Experiment
Survive
Won‘t find this in any book. This is my perspective
Improve
Land Grab

10. Land Grab Growth/user interest in an area
Is there money being invested ?
Deferred business returns
Powerful ability to spread information
Key to a successful land grab is aggregation
Yahoo! Launched upwards of 50 products in a year and it was not alone
More than applications on facebook in 2007

11. 1996 Land Grab Off-line information was fast spreading to the web
Web was spreading as a quick, cheap way to get information
People quickly wanted products to try out on the web
Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, Infoseek and others launched thousands of products in 18 months.
Many companies were bought out for large sums of money
Key question : How important is first to market?

12. Yahoo! 1996

13. Yahoo 1998

14. 2007 Land grab (facebook)
Socially important information was spreading fast.
Facebook embraced openness – allow others to quickly innovate.
Not as much money as 1996, but not as expensive to launch either.
People tried out many products
Many companies bought for small amounts, but successful exits
Facebook rockets past Yahoo! And Google as the messaging platform
Key question : How fast can a product grow through the social network ?

15. Improve era Most dominant players established
End users become discriminating in the new universe
Features become important. Companies and products that offer these features get gobbled up.
Key question : How to
Retain customers ?

16. Experiment Era No immediate danger of a collapse
Large companies place some big long term bets
Example – Amazon with S3, EC2
Key question : Should I continue to survive and improve profits OR experiment at the cost of profitability ?

17. What does a web product need ?
Marketing and customer acquisition
Revenues through sales/advertising
Customer data
Infrastructure to improve/innovate
Uptime
Capital

18. Marketing trends Social media integration is a must
Search engine optimization is crucial
Surprise – it may be cheaper to market offline !
Mobile apps will go from simple to compelling
SEM can have prohibitive cost – probably a last resort
Key question : Who is able to market using leverage ?

19. Capital and Revenues
Capital is hard to come by for another months.
Mad rush areas like iPhone apps, mobile apps, cloud computing are getting some funding.
Advertising revenues are available for content ads
Surprise : People may actually buy your premium products
Key question that techies don’t ask : How effective are the product sales ?

20. Infrastructure and Uptime
Cloud based services are already world class
Simple integration/development can be outsourced to 24x7 companies
The keyword is integration – widgets/APIs/virtual servers are available
Surprise : Minimize your time to first set of sales

21. Web Customer data Very few products – area is wide open for innovation
Google Analytics provides reporting
Huge need to marry IR with traffic trending
Key question : Is there a real connection between data we are measuring and the sales process ?

22. Today’s opportunities
Information source is now the web. In fact there is too much information – too many informative writeups, too much video, too much news, noise level is very high
Devices are portable, powerful, smart. There are too many types and not yet wired well. China and Taiwan cranking them out by the 10s of millions. But people pay for them unlike the internet.

23. Today’s opportunities
Taking information through till the transactions and beyond.
Cleantech, Education, Healthcare, Infrastructure are the areas in India getting funding
Q $1.9 billion in funding
Source: Deloitte Consulting Report

24. In a Nutshell Ask questions to really interpret the trends
Each subdomain has inflexion points – Land grab, Improve, Experiment, Survive
Cost of web marketing is very high. Opportunity for new age content companies.
Web infrastructure can make it fast for you to reach sales and critical business feedback
End users may buy your products through interesting channels
Making sense of customer data today is tough, but is an opportunity
Ask questions to really interpret the trends

25. Thank you