No day without thrill and challenge!

Dear Friends,

it is more than time to move to my very own wordpress blog. Feel free to comment, subscribe, and let me know how you like it. The Link is:

http://www.axelschmiegelow.com

All old posts are there too, so no content is lost.

Cheers

R0cketrabbit

After having gone underground with a series of negotiations, I'm back withe the facts and some insights:

- Sevenload (http://www.sevenload.com) got a Financing from Burda Digital Ventures, the venture subsidiary of Burda group, a leading German Media Group

- Oneview (http://www.oneview.com) got a financing from a leading Media group as well, but that is still somewhat in stealth mode.

This introduces an exciting new phase in both ventures. Sevenload has reached new highs in usage. While competitors benefit from integration in TV channels, tend to trick somewhat on their figures, and basically are positioned as "videos generate traffic, traffic generates advertising impressions, ad impressions generate revenue", sevenload is going for the Long Tail of content, creating a series of specialised audiences and trying to create advertising value there.

We have negotiated for months on the financing deal with a series of Venture Capitalists and strategic investors. We opted for Burda because it gave us a combination of media competence on their part and independence to pursue our own entrepreneurial course.

We closed the deal more than three weeks ago but wanted to gain some time before communicating it. We had carefully crafted a press release - only to discover that an early talk and its misinterpretation has led, a day before the release, to the faulty and undesired headline that we had been acquired. While this certainly serves the purpose of strengthening the positioning of Burda as a digital innovation leader, it is important for us to stress that we remain entirely independent and this is a pure venture financing. Lesson learned: remain on top of any and all first contacts to the press and lock in the main media with exclusives.

The other surprise was that the news generated so much response. The video market remains a very hot spot.

These are exciting times indeed... Last week saw me (us) at DLD with a fascinating charge of speakers and attendees - and a historic moment.

Conference host Hubert Burda, Owner of Burda Group, one of Germany's largest Media Houses, jumped up on stage and delivered a smashing and spontaneuous speech in praise of entrepreneurial creativity , citing "companies such as sevenload and Alexander Straub" that revolutionize markets.

I also noticed that denkwerk has great recognition as the factory of ideas that is its name-giving founding idea. Great recognition on that even from competitor Regine Haschka of ID-Media, and from Paulus Neef, Founder of Pixelpark. We shared war stories on Wildpark back in the 90s. I bonded with Christiane zu Salm, said Alexander Straub and Martin Varsavsky (once more) as well.

Highlights were also David de Rothschild, fiercely engaged in educating children to ecology, and James Murdoch, who portrayed some really smart strategies to neutralize CO2 emission at BSkyB and earn money at the same time. His key was the climate opportunity as opposed to the climate change.

I will tell more soon...

Exciting conference! Loic le Meur at his best. The Usual Suspects turned up, a definite Highlight was Martin Varsavsky. But they even had Simon Peres come and the inevitable - at least if it's campaign time in France and it's Loics home turf - Sarkozy, who delivered a remarkably expectable speech in French to 50% international audience.

We boostrocketed as http://www.sevenload.com because we grabbed the microphone a couple of times, and I was positively surprised to see that sevenload and denkwerk and qype

http://www.qype.de

already had quite a reputation, even outside Germany. I enjoyed what happened off the panels, in the lounges, and in restaurant back rooms most - can't say too much about it now, but Digital Life is bound to be exciting the next couple of months.

Another interesting encounter was a SEC-enforced very tacit Lars Hinrichs on the OpenBC/XING IPO, there's one man who knows the pitfalls of Stock Market Law and will not put himself in a spot. We did end up however, musing about Greed and Selfishness as human traits that like to rear their ugly heads as soon as the opportunity arises...

I'm very excited about this new project - we are launching a new type of conference under the brand "Upload" - It's in beta, so the URL now is:

http://www.upload2007.com/

But soon it will shine under its real name, Upload 2007.

It is an ambitious project, but we want it to be the blending of an online and an offline event. The offline conference is set to be more in-depth, more comprehensive, and more international than any I've seen. I certainly hope it will succeed, and it only will as the joint effort of all thinkers out there - so you are heartily invited to comment, post, blog, think, and come.

I look forward to it, and today was just the budding of the sapling from a steamy greenhouse earth.

Just a short post in the context of SIME to quote an excellent post by Bertram about that - sorry, it's in German:

http://www.gugelproductions.de/blog/2006/wie-sozial-ist-social-media.html

Its worth reading for the links and english quotations even of you don't speak the language.

I just spent an exhilarating and exhausting 2 days @ SIME

http://www.sime.nu

invited as a speaker by my friend Ola Ahlvarsson, Co-Founder of Boxman, Founder of result:

http://www.result.com

[btw the first time I see a company with a beta blog as only company representation on the web]

It was exciting to meet and talk to Loic Le Meur (sixapart), Martin Varsavsky (skype, Fon), Tariq Karim (netvibes), the inevitable Andreas Weigend (former CTO of Amazon and feature conference showmaster), Nico Lumma (mabber), and Bob Stumpel (advertising guru from holland). Microsoft was there to present its new Windows Live and how it sees the future of advertising.

A number of new startups out there, and many discussions about the individual gaining the means to become an economic entity on the web.

I had a slot with Tariq and Nico about Everything 2.0. I started off with a video about how

http://www.sevenload.com

was creating new opportunities for the Digital Boheme - in the person of jobless actors - to present themselves, having now, through sevenload, secured a job to present the leading dating platform neu.de as actors in advertising.

http://sevenload.de/videos/RKDMt8B

I then tracked the success of sevenload back to its appeal for a broad, real-world audience, fulfilling real (everyday) needs.

All this is gradually - and at a fast pace - changing the was we do business, and more importantly, the way our society works.

I had the pleasure to be a speaker at an OpenBC Event in Brussels, on a panel with Eric Archembeau, serial entrepreneur turned VC. The tune I was to play was the answer of the Founder to the VCs - after ING and Eric described requirements for getting a funding. Well, here goes what I said (click on Image to run the presentation).

As always, that’s a difficult discussion. First of all it’s important to remember that “Versioning” the web is initially a marketing trick, albeit a powerful and a valid one. It does make sense to try to assess the pace and scope of change in and through the Digital Revolution. In our internal discussions at

http://www.denkwerk.com

we differentiate the technical, the social and the business levels of analysis. Our very broad clusters are as follows:

Web 1.0:
It is particularly inexact to retroactively dub the pre-2004 era as „Web 1.0“, since that is a rather vast period of time which underwent different phases in itself. When did it start? With Tim Berners-Lee & the appearance of Mozilla in 1993? With the first Social Network (sic!), the Well, in the 1980s?, With the ARPANET in 1968?

Tim O’Reilly coined “Web 2.0” as a call to reconsider the then ruling technical paradigms and the generalized underestimation of the social and economic impact of the internet in post-bubble headache times. But the 90s, the bubble, and 2001 – 2003 constitute a wild rollercoaster of different developments. In our view in short:

Technology:
The first simple websites evolved to more and more interactive, from static to dynamically generated, from handcrafted to cms-driven, from pure media to more and more transactive, and these vast increases in value remained through independently of the vast hyperbole of expectations that the New Economy and Irrational Exuberance engendered. In software paradigms though, simple web development and early script-based architectures and languages were supplanted by Enterprise Application thinking, the advent of web services, and the JAVA Revolution. After 2001, you were a wimp if you stuck to PHP.

Social:
Mostly Early Adopters went from discovering the web and portals as sources of information to accepting shopping, then dating and other increasingly interactive services and transactions.
The Internet, however, was never “lean-back”, a prerogative of TV.

Business:
The only really working business models (at high volumes) were
a) lead generation for existing brick and mortar business (“click and mortar”)
b) Online Advertising (mostly banner, after 2002 more and more search engine marketing)
c) E-Commerce (online sales, B2C or B2B )

BTW: Many ideas that now resurface in Web 2.0 were imagined just then, but failed because user behaviour and markets weren’t there yet. We founded

http://www.oneview.com

as a very early precursor of deli.cio.us, for example.

Web 2.0:
Somewhere around 2003, disgruntled entrepreneurs, the aforementioned PHP Wimps, the Linuxites, and others started reforming and having Galilean Moments („eppure si muove“ – “and the Earth does rotate”). That is what O’Reilly picked up at his conference in Fall 2004 when he coined Web 2.0.

Technology:
On the technology side, Web 2.0 can be oversimplified by describing it as a set of new or renewed technical paradigms:

a) the return of scripting and DHTML.
b) AJAX and the transformation of websites into dynamic applications
c) much faster development speed, prototyping
d) APIs and total interoperability of all digital services (mashups, microformats etc..), the rebirth of standards
e) the end of the concept of “the site”, with functionalities spreading across converging media (web, mobile, TV) instead

Social:
a) You Are Not Alone:
If “Web 1.0” was all about discovering the potential of interactive services, then Web 2.0 is the discovery of the Fellow Users, of the immense potential of finding online people that you can share interests and needs with.

b) You Can Do Things Together / User Generated Content:
New Web 2.0 tools let the vision of the web as a collaborative platform slowly become true: every type of content can be shared, discussed, rated, and messaging allows constant and instant, but also deferred and intermittent interlocution with other users (networking, messaging, Blogging, co-shopping etc…).

c) Mashup Everything / User Generated Functionalities:
The combination of different services, information, and functionalities that the technical paradigm shift of web 2.0 makes possible opens a whole new set of possibilities for networked and collaborative behaviour on the web that creates value from the wisdom of crowds and the knowledge of the few.

Business:
a) Businesses are under pressure and with the opportunity of adapting to the fact that the consumer / customer has an increasingly wide, reliable, and truthful range of sources of information and first-hand experiences with any given product.
b) Creating customer communities becomes increasingly relevant as a business factor. This increases the demand on long-term accountability and trustworthiness of business institutions
c) In the same vein, Business and Media monopolies on information and broadcasting power are dwindling with the advent of increasingly differentiated access to the opinions and knowledge of customers and the creation of increasingly valuable User Generated Content and Community-Based or Collaborative Functionalities. This doesn’t mean a perfect world of truthfulness, but it certainly shifts power to the customer.
d) an open question is by whom and how is this information power, the interlinking of customers, and the long tail of business, going to be aggregated, thus creating the next Googles?
e) On the long tail of business, even the most absurd niche markets can network worldwide, thus creating market volume until now completely untapped.

Web 3.0:
We don’t really need a new term – but it is clear that versioning will somehow be inflationary, since it is such a nifty marketing tool. So we might as well tackle the definition now (and secure some mind share early on, hehe).

In our view, Web 3.0 describes where the different patterns and revolutions might lead to. Think “minority report”, “Neuromancer”, “Matrix”, for early paradigms (not literally of course, we’re between 30 and 1000 years away from that). It is hard to describe and open for discussion, but we see the following trends:

Technology:
a) Interoperability and total convergence of all media and networks to form the Evernet
b) The End of The Site: Functionalities can be used by any user on any device in any network.
c) Everything is mashed or modular or snippeted or microformatted, so that a search on your handheld will deliver a topical article, four experts, seven alternative topical products to be ordered along with their ratings and reviews, three according services and information about what your friends or respected contacts think about the topic, all in one fell swoop.

Social:
a) The rise of the „Digital Boheme“ – in a No Man’s Land between employment, freelance and artistic lifestyle, everyone on the web can “market” whatever talents he has, whenever and however much he wants.
b) Thus, “virtual environments” will play a much bigger role in determining the social status of an individual much more than his geographic environment used to. In other words, the lost liberal hippie tech geek living in, say, Oklahoma suddenly gets a life and recognition – that’s one of the reasons for the hype about Second Life.
c) Thus a) and b) become more and more determining for the identity of the individual – with all due consequences
d) Technology and the networking of individuals and their expertise will lead to an increasingly efficient tapping of the Deep Web (that has been building up since 1974), thus creating a “semantic and human web”, where searching and finding delivers increasingly complex results, ranging from data / documents to Evernet functionalities and sites, to experts and interest groups and events.

Business – we call it VIRAL SOCIAL COMMERCE
In the virtual worlds of the web 3.0 or Evernet, every individual will get a much fairer share of his or her social and economic status. If until now, the consumer was an object of the economy, he increasingly becomes a an active element in every one of his areas of expertise and interests. (Someone who is into handmade puppets from the Münsterland [a region of Northern Germany] can connect to fans of handmade puppets worldwide an be recognized as an expert and set up business selling access, expertise, or even the puppets themselves – if he chooses to do so).

We could call it the Ebaying of life – but the differences to the Ebay model are:

a) it expands virally along social network lines
b) it is not focused on price, and probably not even profit-oriented, but is a blend of social and economic rewards that triggers individual behaviour
c) it is in an elementary sense democratic, with almost any space for very individual definitions of success and lifestyles.
d) thriving in such environments will require new business, communication, and marketing models in almost any industry.

In Science Fiction, the various visions of the emergence of a web interlinking society almost invariably include that web become a determining factor of social and economic status in the real world. We aren’t that far away from that, even if reality always tends to be mundane. What is almost certain is that already today, the web liberates the individual even from very difficult forms of seclusion, allowing him to overcome niche market intransparency and increase his social and economic impact in society.

What we are doing at sevenload (http://www.sevenload.com), itravel (http://www.itravel,de), oneview (http://www.oneview.com) and Qype (http://www.qype.com) is working toward that vision.

Join us, discuss, hire in, let’s create the tools of this evolution step by step!

Today, a rare Post in German, as I don't know when I'l have the time to rewrite this stuff in English in the next couple of days - It's a quote from an internal discussion about Web 3.0 @ denkwerk:

Wie immer ist es eine weite Diskussion, und eine, bei der wir auch als denkwerk unseren Standpunkt besetzen können. Aus unserer Sicht hat die Versionierung des Webs eine technische, eine soziologische und eine geschäftliche seite:

Web 1.0:
ex-post Begriff der an sich schon unsinnig ist, weil die Zeit von 1996 bis zum Ausrufen von Web 2.0 durch Tim O'Reilly im Herbst 2004 selbst mehrere Phasen hatte. Deswegen kann man diese Phase entweder sehr intensiv oder sehr kurz beschreiben. Im Kern hatte Tim das Bedürfnis, nach dem Zusammenbruch der New Economy einen Begriff zu finden, mit dem man verkünden konnte: Es lohnt sich doch, im Internet eine tiefgehende Revolution zu sehen. Daher nur die Eckpunkte der Zeit vor 2004:

Technisch: erst Rumstümpern und Probieren, dann ab ca. 99/2000 die Grosse Java Revolution und Sollten Wir Nicht Alles Doch An Die Klassische IT Anbinden?

Soziologisch: erstes Kennenlernen und langsames Durchdringen von Shopping überhaupt und Internet als Informationsmedium - übrigens nie Lean Back, da das immer noch das Fernsehen ist.

Geschäftlich: E-Commerce und Online (Banner, später Suchmschinen)-Marketing

Web 2.0:

Technisch: Hey, es geht ja doch einiges mit Skriptsprachen und gutem DHTML - nennen wir es doch einfach AJAX! (Ok, die Geschichte ist komplexer als das, aber das ist es doch im Kern). Relevant wird das durch sehr viel grössere Entwicklungsgeschwindigkeit (zumindest für erste Ergebnisse), Vielseitigkeit und einer Usability, die dem Nutzer statt Ladezeiten das ("asynchrone") Durchführen von Teilfunktionen bietet.
Zweite wichtiger Punkt: API Everything, alles setzt auf Standards und ist interoperabel.

Soziologisch:
a) You Are Not Alone: (Wieder-)Entdeckung der Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten mit anderen, des Findens Gleichgesinnter - und dadurch verbessertes Informations- und Aktivitätenangebots
b) You Can Do Things Together: Reife der Kommunikationstools, so dass diese Vernetzung zunehmend aktiv sein kann (Messaging, Blog, Co-Shopping etc.)
c) Mashup Everything: Die Verbindung von Informationen shafft neue Informationsmacht für Nutzer und Nutzergruppen (zB Google Earth mit Restaurantführer etc...), und überall kann ich die anderen Nutzer, die das auch interessiert, sehen / kontaktieren

Geschäftlich:
a) Business muss reagieren und besser damit umgehen, dass der Konsument immer mehr weiss und rausfindet (zB wie hacke ich die Regionalcodes meines DVD players, in 4 min. über Google zu finden; welches Produkt taugt wirklich etwas; wo ist es wirklich zum Reisen schön; was ist bei jenem Skandal wirklich los)
b) Vernetzung von Konsumenten (s.o.)
c) User Generated Content: die andere Facette des o.g.: Die Menge und Qualität des von einzelnen Nutzern / Konsumenten erstellten Contents hat inzwischen eine entscheidende geschäftliche Relevanz. Der Experte für die Unterscheidung der unterschiedlichen Produkte in jedem noch so abstrusesten Business-Winkel (long Tail), z.B. Häkeldecken für Hunde, ist für Jedermann findbar - das schwächt klassische Werbeinstrumente!

Web 3.0:

Technisch: offensichtlich noch nicht klar, aber -
a) Totale Konvergenz zum Evernet (alle Medien miteinander nahtlos kommunizierend)
b) "Seiten" werden Applikationen, die an sehr vielen Orten durch sehr viele Endgeräte und in beliebiger Kombination abrufbar sind
c) Entsprechend fortschreitende Modularisierung einzelnen Funktionen eines digitalen Angebots (z.B. automatische Preissuche bei Content seiten zu bestimmten Produkten

Soziologisch:
a) "Digitale Boheme" - im Grenzbereich zwischen Angestellten-, Freiberufler- und Künstlerdasein kann jeder im Netz gar nicht, ein bisschen, oder vollkommen entgeltlich "zu Markte tragen", was er kann.
b) "Virtuelle Lebensräume" - die Vernetzung von Freunden und Kontakten bestimmt viel mehr als die Geographische Verortung, in was für ein soziologisches umfeld man lebt - das ist ein bisschen der Hype um Second Life
c) a + b werden zunehmend identitätsstiftend - mit allen Folgen, die das haben kann
d) natürlich gehört hierzu auch das Phänomen der weiteren Erschliessung des (übrigens seit 1974 existierenden) Deep Web zu einem semantischem Web, bei der Suchen und Finden immer komplexere Ergebnisse liefern, die eine Mischung aus Dateien, Webfunktionen und Seiten, Experten, Interessensgruppen und Ereignissen sind.

Geschäftlich - wir nennen es VIRAL SOCIAL COMMERCE:
In den genannten Lebensräumen wird jeder nicht nur wie bisher, zum ökonomischen Objekt als Konsument, sondern gleichzeitig zum öknomoischen Subjekt als handelnder Akteur und Vermarkter seiner spezifischen Fähigkeiten, Kenntnisse, oder der Dinge die er beziehen kann (wer weiss, wo man handgemachte Puppen aus dem Münsterland findet, kann die im Netz verkaufen, indem er eine Fangemeinde dazu findet oder gründet, etc....)

Es ist ein bisschen die Ebay-isierung aller Lebensbereiche. Unterschiede zu Ebay sind:

a) es verbreitet sich viral
b) es ist nicht primär preisfokussiert, sondern interessensgesteuert
c) es ist urdemokratisch, mit viel spielraum für klassische Nerdiness , Losertum, moderatem Erfolg etc...
d) es wird völlig neue Modelle brauchen, um aus Sicht von Unternehmen hieraus geld zu machen

Es ist auch ein wenig die schrittweise Erfüllung von solchen Science Fiction Konzepten wie in Neuromancer, The Matrix etc.. beschrieben - in diesen Romanen hat ein virtuelles Netz eine grössere Rolle in der Definition der gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Bedeutung des Einzelnen, als die reale Welt. Das ist auch logisch, da das Netz die räumlichen und zeitlichen Begrenzungen des sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Aktionsradiusses des Einzelnen empfindlich erweitert, auch wenn die Realität immer etwas banaler ist als die theoretische Sicht vermittelt (siehe die zunehmende Diskussion in der Blogosphäre darüber, für wen man das eigentlich macht)

Einige der Modelle, um aus diesen Entwicklungen zukunftsfähiges Geschäft zu generieren, versuchen wir als denkwerk ja gerade zu begleiten, auch bei den Startups wie Sevenload, Oneview, itravel, und Qype.