What’s the temperature in Silicon Valley?
IBM Think Seminar
Vinnie Lauria, co-founder @ lefora.com / organizer @ the Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

We’re getting pass the social...
... and getting back to the practical.

Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup
4 consumer web startups demo to an audience of 150 every month
2-3 years ago, 75-100% of a startups primary function was
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‘social networking’ related
Today, a startup with a primarily ‘social’ function may
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pop-up only every other month

To my surprise, the past 3 months has been a
boom in startup applications at the meetup
Last fall, with the economy in free fall and investors pulling in the
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reins, there was a drop in budding new startups
Now with the economic horizon still unknown and 10%
!
unemployment, creative entrepreneurs are sprouting.
They are creating focused solutions to specific problems
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“Generally Speaking” Past Themes
Social Networking
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Media Sharing
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Collaboration
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Productivity
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Reviews
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All-purpose
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“Generally Speaking” Current Themes
Finances
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Entertainment
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Real-world personalized products
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Content Filtering
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APIs, apps, and middle layers
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Specific Functions
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One set didn’t replace the other
Sites have grown above & beyond
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purely social networking
Social software is an underlying
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requirement to enable new activities
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tcp909/132665279/
Services must fit together like a large puzzle

Think Platforms
Facebook - created a richer offering with less resources
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iPhone - $100+mil market out of thin air
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Twitter - who knows
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It’s no longer Open Source but Open API

Follow the consumer
Unlike the old days of office suites and team collaboration tools,
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social networks, blogs, wikis, & tweeting didn’t grow from large
enterprise offerings
It took a significant consumer adoption before enterprise could
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realize the value
The same is in store for what’s to come with hosted services
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(cloud computing)
Due to corporate resistance, we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg
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Overheard on the internet
“Hosted services are not as powerful”
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“I want to own my data”
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“I want full customization options”
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“How can I trust you?”
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How does a brand new company earn the trust of
100,000 people to hand over their most private
financial data within 4 months of launch?

Bucking the trend
Offer features unavailable anywhere else
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Consistently improve the product so frequently, that in-house
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maintenance becomes a drag
Solve a specific problem ‘really really’ well
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Make the barrier-to-entry so low that alternate self-managed costs
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become prohibitive
Offer a clear & measurable value
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Why startups like cloud computing
Cost -> it’s practically free
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Ease of Use
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Less headaches
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Allows a company to stay focused on their ‘core competency’
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Customer Communication
Team Collaboration
Hosted Gmail Newsletters
(better than email)
Blogging
Google Calendar
Support Forum
Google Docs
Surveys & Forms
Google AppEngine
(for hosting side projects)
Hosted On
ISP
Servers
Amazon EC2 Code Repository
Amazon S3 No more CVS

Keep in mind
Hosted services need to ‘play well with others’ in order to thrive
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Hosted services must be nimble to beat the competition
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“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”
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Because of corporate resistance but wide consumer adoption, there is
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opportunity for bottom-up entry into organizations, just like blogging
and social networking.

Ciao !
Vinnie Lauria
Former IBM’er
Co-founder @ Lefora.com free forum hosting
Organizer @ the SiliconValley NewTech Meetup
San Francisco, California, USA
vinnie@lefora.com