John Batelle of Federated Media interviewed Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Loudcloud and Ning.

John: At what point did you know when Netscape was going to be big?

Marc: It ramped really fast. Released it to 100 people and then it went viral. However, it wasn’t until they founded Netscape that he felt it would be big. At the time, the cable companies were advocating interactive TV and it wasn’t clear how it would play out.

John: Are you concerned about how the big players/cable companies are approaching the web now?

Marc: It depends on who you are speaking about. Most media companies are still not prepared for the shift. Newspapers are in a free fall and still don’t know how to respond. There The telecom players are huge enablers, but they are uneasy about being positioned as commoditized future so they are looking a pricing structures to protect themselves.

John

Marc: At the time, nobody was making money online. John Doerr believed in them. They launched three businesses – not-for profit, enterprise and advertiser supported browser. All three worked.

John: MS built what you built, what do you think about that?

Marc: MS even used the original Mosaic code to launch their browser. We didn’t know what the future business of the company would be. The enterprise software business was doing very well. The advertiser business grew quite large as well. We just knew we needed to adapt.

John: How might it have turned out differently?

Marc: the big surprise – how many things done early have lasted and done well. JavaScript is an example. At the time, it was needed. Then it went into a hiatus and had a resurgence. Cookies are another example. They came up with the idea over a weekend when they needed to figure out how to develop a persistent shopping cart. Another example is a back and forward button. At the time, they couldn’t think of anything better, now it has gone all over the place in the operating systems and into applications.

John: Talk about the cloud. What do you think about the idea of a web operating system?

Marc: I saw the browser as a half way step. The surprising thing has been the persistence of many of these things, including the browser. The browser is the access point for the audience, which creates a self-reinforcing trend to build the applications in the browser.

John: put on your industry observer hat. Talk about some of the big names. Start with Microsoft.

Marc: Wonderful company (laughing). I think they have a very important role to play. The mesh work that Ray and company are doing is great stuff. Today, there are more counterweights to MS. It seems to have splintered and fragmented.

John: What about MS buying Yahoo?

Marc: I think it will be successful if they do the deal and they could be successful separately. Other companies will still be successful. The underbrush will continue to be successful.

John: Ning raised a bunch of money – What do you mean by the coming nuclear winter?

Marc: I have no idea about what’s really going to happen. The credit markets are bursting. After the stock bubble, the money went into real estate and then into credit. While tech doesn’t have a lot to do with these industries, everything is linked together. If consumers spend less, companies cut back and tech gets hit.

John: Talk about Ning. Why is Ning not Facebook?

Marc: Ning allows people to build their own Facebook like applications. Over 250,000 networks. 1,500 networks per day….

John: How do you feel about the idea of data portability?

Marc: we are very pro data portability. They have lots of ways to get data in and out of the system. There is not a lot of demand for this yet, from either consumers or developers.

John: What about OpenSocial?

Marc: Facebook did an amazing thing opening up it’s platform for developers. It was a powerful idea. However, it was closed to Facebook. That created a need for an open standard, which led to OpenSocial.

Audience: Do you view yourselves as a platform or will you get into networks yourself?

Marc: we are a platform business. We have no intention of getting into networks ourselves.

John: How are CPMs. Are you getting your 17 cents?

Marc: Much higher than that. The networks being focused lend themselves to better advertising opportunities.

Audience: What can you say about Bill Gates?

Marc: He’s made a tremendous impact on the industry. It’s hard to see what things would be like if MS had not been able to standardize the operating system. Interesting, the mobile world is more like the PC industry before a standardized operating system. It’s holding things on mobile back.

Audience: What can we do about browser security leaks?

Marc: I can’t do anything about it. It’s just a continuous cat and mouse game that will be a continuing story to come.

Audience: what role can academia play in a conference like this and in the future?

Marc: Most of what happens in tech, is brewing in the university systems. They need to do a better job of teaching business skills to go along with the technology skills.

Here’s the video:

Technorati Tags: Marc Andreessen, Ning, Netscape, Web20Expo

Slide makes fun little widgets. They recently did a round of investment raising $50 million at a $500 million valuation. Max says that they will make money from these applications through selling advertising and direct to consumer sales. Max just returned from Asia where he sees virtual goods selling in the billions of dollars.

Max says that the widgets Slide makes are very engaging. They engage users in a way like Television and in some cases even more deeply. He describes how Juno the movie used Slide’s Super Poke application to do a Pregnancy Test action that 370,000 people voluntarily used the action.

Max describes how they are obsessed with collecting and analyzing data. Charlene asks about privacy. Max describes how their data analysis from the user level up. They aggregate the users into segments of like activities. However, they don’t know the user id or email because that’s not provided by the social networks that host their applications.

Charlene asks about the risks from the social network hosts. Max describes how once consumer finds something they like and actively seek it out. He uses the Adobe /MS to show how if you focus on something that is of real value, with lock in you have a protectable business.

What about application spam? Stop throwing sheep at me. Max says that this is one of the most challenging issues. The power of these networks is the ability to spread things at an incredible rate and the temptation to expand is quite strong.

He says that the spam problem breaks into to different types of problems. The first is, abusive users who spam people. That part will get handled as other abusive activity gets handled. The harder part is the genuine use by heavy users. It can be perceived as spam by light users. Max says they thing that the path ahead is giving the users control and filters to help them decide how they will participate.

What’s the secret sauce of success? Max’s first four startups failed, but the fifth did well and the Slide is the sixth. He says that one of the things he has learned is the importance of drive when hiring people. He says that the two things he watches are the number of people who embrace the applications world wide and the number of employees who will be millionaires on a IPO. He says that his one last piece of advice is from Winston Churchill – Never, never, never give up.

Here’s the video:

Technorati Tags: Max Levchin, Web20Expo, Slide

In what was certainly the funniest and most enjoyable presentation at Web 2.0 Expo, Dan Lyons AKA Fake Steve Jobs, discusses how he came to start the Fake Steve blog and explains why he thinks it works. Thanks to the Web 2.0 team for putting together this video and the other videos from the Web 2.0 Expo.

You can find more videos of the keynote presentations at Web2Expo channel on Blip.TV

Technorati Tags: Fake Steve Jobs, Dan Lyons, Web20Expo

Tim O’Reilly interviews Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun. Sun pioneered the phrase the network is the computer.

Tim asks Jonathan about how he uses blogging to help run Sun.

J: Blogging as a term at some point will become achronistic. Its about communication. Why not use the internet to communicate effectively and authentically. One of the toughest parts of the job is communicating with the 33,000 employees. Why not communicate with them and everyone else at the same time.

T: Controversy part of the strategy?

J: If you talk about undifferentiated things that are expected then nobody cares. You have to take a position to have anyone care.

T: What’s the worst horror story for your PR department?

J: Most terrifying when GC started writing a blog (lol), never really terrified the PR department, but have scared the IR department at times. Required a link to safe harbor statement.

T: How should/could people use blogs?

J: View it as a way to communicate. Communicate in the way that’s most effective to you.

T: Recently bought MySQL. A billion dollars is a lot for a company that gives its product away.

J: Integration is going fantastically. MySQL is not a charity. It was making money and growing like a weed. They were in the midst of doing an IPO and we felt that there was a great synergy with what Sun does. They now get 70,000 downloads everyday so they get 70k new touch points every day that they can introduce Sun’s infrastructure to.

T. What about the network providers and cloud computing?

J: Whatever we can use to reach consumers and touch them. Increasingly the touch points will be everywhere.

T. The cloud creates the ability to create these really interesting data collections.

J: We have huge numbers of downloads and updates. We get a huge data exhaust from this that provides us with insight into what’s going on around the internet.

T. Do you view Amazon as a utility?

J. Clear pricing and substitutability are earmarks of utilities. The lack of substitutable APIs means that the don’t have the ability to move easily across providers. Users want that complete portability. If we get there, we will also get to clear pricing.

T. Talk about scientific computing. How do you see the low end and high end converging.

J. We see three pools of computing - business automation, erp, hr 90% of market. Two other segments - high computing and social infrastructure services that are both growing fast. These segments are growing really fast because the costs to do this have dropped so fast. He points to a company called Aggregate Knowledge - (an Amazon like collaborative filtering application that filters information across multiple data vendors). What he really needs is these really fast SMP machines that can handle the terabytes of data and huge computing really fast.

T. Asks about how Google is running on all these really small computers.

J. If you take a closer look, these are really high performance machines. More like what Sun sells.

T. What about virtualization?

J. We will be a leading provider of this and it will be free. We want everyting to be virtualized. We want them to be twice as efficient and that will likely result in twice as many being bought.

T. What about the power consumption?

J. We’ve already hit the problem. In Tokyo, the cost of the energy is higher than the cost of the computer. This is a problem. Still only half of the CTO’s are responsible for their energy costs.

T. How have you greened your infrastructure

J. The Niagra platforms an example of this. Went from 0 to $1billion within one year. It’s optimized for power efficiency.

T. Once the other half of those CTOs become aware of the power problem it will play into Sun’s cloud computing agenda

J. The other thing that’s interesting. When I asked the CTOs about whether they used MySQL, no one raised their hand. When I checked they had all downloaded it between 500 to 5,000 times.

T. Talk about the Black Box.

J. Moving air around is really inefficient. Power sources shift as well. We need to make it portable. The most portable thing is a shipping container. We are now in deployments of these mobile computer data centers.

T. Any last thoughts

J. The network is the computer, data is the currency. ZSF storage innovation is an important part of this. We’ve been very aggressive moving out to connect with the part of market that thinks about data. Free products and great ideas are the best way to connect with that market.

UPDATE: Here’s the video

Click To Play

Technorati Tags: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun, Web20Expo

Yahoo’s CTO Ari Balogh opened his speech at Web 2.0 Expo speaking about about 3 big bets: being the most important starting point for the web, being a must buy advertising property and being open.

He says that Yahoo has been open for a long time. They have lots of open API’s. Flickr is the second largest of these.

He wants to take “open” to a whole new place. He wants to open up all the assets to developers. They want to open up the social network that is Yahoo. It sounds like they have been learning from Facebook and OpenSocial. They seem to recognize that they have the ability to be the worlds largest social platform if they can get this right.

He announced the opening of the beta for search monkey. He says that Yahoo’s open strategy is not just about opening up the search page, but opening up all the aspects of Yahoo.

They will have an application platform and a social platform. They are going to unify profiles across Yahoo go make social possible. The third element is to re-wire all the properties of Yahoo so that there is a consistent API across the different experiences.

They want to rewire the entire Yahoo experience to be social. They don’t view social as a destination. He provides an example of social being used to highlight mail in email system, highlight what’s important to friends in My Yahoo or on the sports page.

Y! OS (open strategy)

• Rewiring Yahoo
• Open Yahoo to developers like never before
• Making Yahoo more social
• Making Yahoo portable.

Search Monkey now, much more later this year. The overall process will unfold over time. Look for releases over this year and next.

UPDATE: Here’s the video of the presentation:

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Open Strategy, Web20Expo

Levi.com’s VP of Marketing, Patrice Varni, spoke at the Forrester Marketing conference about Levi.com’s Project 501, Levi’s user submitted design contest. The project was launched using a branded entertainment segment on the television show Project Runway and an online campaign targeted to women. Digital Podcast covered the launch of the program and asked the question about whether this kind of campaign, done on Levi’s site, could drive a big enough audience to make the investment worthwhile.

Patrice spoke about how at the very start all the parts of the program were completely disconnected. Someone had arranged for the branded entertainment piece on the Project Runway show and as a part of that got a large online buy on the Bravo site.

The project landed in Patrice’s lap and she went to Avenue A/Razorfish and had them develop an online campaign oriented around a very detailed map of all the touch points. Once they had completed the map, they went back through the map and made sure that they incorporated selling pants into the program in a way that featured the right products.

They got 3,000 design submissions to the contest for designing a new Levi’s product. Over 2000 of the submissions complied with the rules. The campaign got 134,000 unique visitors and almost 19,000 registered users. Two-thirds of those were women in target age group of 18 to 25 years old. They had 122,000 design ratings. They also got 924 social networking/blog badges with over 30,000 views.

Interestingly word of mouth marketing on social media like blogs and social networks turned out to be a major driver of awareness about the campaign. Social media drove 38% of the awareness about the campaign as compared to 30% of awareness coming from TV and low single digit for everything else.

During the five weeks that the program was running, the top 5 selling products changed from traditional products to the featured products. The traditional core products had a price point of about 44 dollars and sold to an older demographic. The products featured in the campaign were Levi store exclusive, more fashion forward and had price range of 58 to 70 dollars. Literally overnight they got a different demographic and a sales lift that made a measurable impact on sales.

Once the campaign ended, the top 5 selling products switched back to the traditional top 5 selling products.

Patrice said that they had to steal themselves to the loss of control and reaction during the program. Once they had chosen a winner, they had some very negative comments from people who didn’t win. This caused some consternation about the comments and debate about what to do about the comments. Levi decided to leave the comments up and it turned out well as the community policed the problem well.

Perhaps the most important part of the program was the way the program changed the way the company worked to get the digital team working with the marketing team. The online and traditional agencies had to work together to make this work.

While the results may not seem tremendous, Patrice felt that the program was a tremendous success, due to the organizational learning and the level of engagement.

It is very interesting to see Levi’s willingness to experiment and the results of this program. Project 501 clearly provided some hands on learning and capability building for Levi. It is clear that this kind of program can drive sales. The challenge now becomes how how to scale this type of program into a more significant campaign and how to make it more than a five week program.

Technorati Tags: social marketing, case study, Levi

Nancy MacIntyre, LeapFrog’s Executive Vice President for Product, Innovation and Marketing, spoke at the Forrester Marketing conference. Nancy introduced a new integrated service called Learning Path. The service focuses on personalized learning by integrating an online site with toys so that learning can be planned and tracked.

She calls it an “educational GPS” and a CRM for LeapFrog.

The service, which is planned to launch this summer, focuses on 8-13 year olds.

Learning Path automatically collects data from devices and produces reports that get emailed to the parents. It allows the parent to see first hand what the kid has been doing, how engaged they are, where they are on the Learning Path and what LeapFrog product should be next.

LeapFrog is increasing its investment into the LeapFrog website. They now have an educational content advisory board and are working on building community aspects into the site. They are also working on how to mobilize the millions of moms out there who love LeapFrog. They want to increase the strength of connection between the moms and their children by giving them information about how the child’s learning is progressing.

Nancy was asked about what LeapFrog is doing about the kids graduating from LeapFrog to Nintendo and she described their new Didj product as their competitive offering. (Editors note: Seems like Nintendo and LeapFrog should merge. It would be a good fit.)

Nancy was asked about multi-player games and she said that they have a secret product called Maestro that will be a multi-player product for kids and will launch next year.

Technorati Tags: LeapFrog, Learning Path, Forrester

We joined Forrester Research for its 2008 Marketing Forum. This article is the third in our series from the forum focused on customer engagement in a digital media world.

In part 3 of Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement we take on the issue of how to design for engagement. Two presenters at the conference provided us with a couple of frameworks for how to design for engagement.

In the first session, Aaron Oppenheimer, from Continuum, introduced the concept of “resonance testing”. They figured out that clients were too often measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. Aaron argues that the product that tells the story best wins. He says that what he calls resonance design defers the design decisions until we know what works. In a word, wait. Wait until you know what’s going to work.

He suggests the following process:

Find the story

• Figure out what the consumer needs to hear to make a connection

Try the story

• Model the system in different ways because the context is a large part of the emotional design

Test the story

• Find out what works

Tell the story

• Build the product

Aaron provided an example of resonance testing that was used for designing and marketing garbage disposer units. The question is why should someone spend more on the most expensive versus the cheapest one? Horsepower means nothing to consumers and warranties don’t work as customers think all the units will last for ever.

They identified two needs segments:

• quick, unobtrusive clean up;
• eats everything

They then gave potential customers pictures of designs and let them place the designs along a spectrum, where the spectrum was defined by cartoon images of people and the use case. The potential customers then placed the pictures closest to where they thought the product fit relative to the following statements: does a good job for the person who wants quick clean up, does better for the person that wants it to eat everything, does both.

They then identify what about the design signals meaning to customers? Specific attributes were identified and linked to what they mean. Size, texture, look etc all have meaning that can be used to tell different stories.

Once they understood the language of garbage disposal design attributes, they could then design products that would convey the story in the retail environment.

The same principles can be applied to just about any design process. Setting clear objectives up front, finding stories that work to convey those messages, testing the story before designing, finding the specific design elements that convey the story and then translating that into final design is a process we all can learn from.

In the second session, Ron Rogowski, a principal analyst at Forrester, spoke about how to create engaging online experiences. His focus was on how to make your site more engaging. He tells the story of his wife getting an ultrasound, they found a cyst, called a CCAM (congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation), in the babies lung during the ultrasound. The doctors gave them some information, but he quickly went to Google and searched for the term and found a special treatment center at UCSF.

The treatment center has a website with videos of doctors talking about the disease and the treatment procedures. Ron played one of the videos where the doctors speaking about fetal intervention. He says he got more out of 8 minutes on the site than he had from hours of research elsewhere.

Ron found the videos to be very engaging. The site had the three key elements of engagement built. The videos were useful, usable and desirable.

The online engagement imperative is based upon the expanded ability to do new things with your customers and differentiate from others.

Engagement is hard to define and measure. It can be very subjective. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was engaging about an experience. The means of engagement depend on the company and the audience.

With an engaging design, the focus is on what’s there, not on how to make sense of what’s there. There is an incentive to explore and there is a visual and operational appeal.

Functional elements of the site can be combined with branding efforts to create engaging experiences. Ron points to engaging examples that include Mini USA’s car configuration tool, Google Maps, Zillow.com. He points to Blue Nile’s build your own ring application which mimics what customers were doing with data to select rings as an engaging site. Nike is another site that’s engaging. The site allows you to set individual goals and make challenges to others.

Ron highlights Panasonic’s site that allows you check out how a TV will look in your own room by uploading pictures of your living room and then dragging a picture of different TVs onto the picture.

Discovery Channel’s EarthLive is another site with an engaging experience. They use a movable globe as a navigation tool for users to find content.

Humana One’s Plan Pointer application to help guide people to health plans based upon only questions. The application is useful, easy to use and provides a rich UI for the user.

The New York Times pop-art quiz as creating engaging experiences around their stories.

NetShop’s built an application Shop Together. It allows two people to shop together. One person can see what the other person is looking at. They can look at the same page and chat about the page.

Jeep has lots of content about off road driving and a Jeep community.

History.com has an interactive universe application that explains the planets.

How to create and measure these engaging experiences?

Ron’s framework of useful, usable and desirable is the guide for making engaging experiences.

Tools of engagement

• Useful: Design personas to uncover latent user needs through ethnographic research.
• Usable: Embrace a user centered design process that follows known usability practices and test for flaws.
• Desirable: Brand personas to allow your brand to shine through.

Ron’s Recommendations

• Uncover latent needs through ethnographic research
• Define interaction paradigms consistent with brand
• Engage agencies early in the process
• Conduct user and brand reviews before (and after) going live

Links to the rest of this series:

• Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement, Part 1
• Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement, Part 2

See more about the Forrester Marketing event at Digital Podcast and at Jeremiah Owyang’s blog.

Technorati Tags: design, engagement, marketing, Forrester

Digital Media Wire is holding its Future of Television conference on March 25-26 in Los Angeles. It looks to be a great show with lots of interesting speakers and topics. Digital Podcast will be at the event and interviewing as many people as we can to get a pulse on how organizations are responding to the changes in the television industry.

We will be asking precisely two questions:

• What are your organization’s top three priorities over the next year?
• What trends will have the most impact on the industry over the next three years?

We plan on turning the entire interview series in an interesting podcast collection. If you’re going to attend let us know and we will set up time to get your perspective on the industries priorities and most important trends.

Panel topics at this years event include

• The Top Five Digital Media Trends to Watch
• The Outlook for the Television Industry & Digital Media
• Reality Television 2.0: What’s Next?
• Global TV & the Emergence of Worldwide Content Distribution Networks
• Direct to Internet: Producing Content Specifically for Web and Mobile
• New Television Technologies You Need to Know
• The Future of Television Advertising
• User-Generated Content: Show Me the Money!
• Mobile TV: Hit or Miss?
• Who’’s Watching (and are they buying anything)?
• The Evolution of Metrics and Analytics for Television 2.0
• Digital Television (DTV) is Coming!

Technorati Tags: Future of Television