Web 2.0: It's a great time to be an investor

The Web is clearly changing before us. Most folks don’t have a complete picture of what’s happening, but the media’s attention to blogging is a clear sign to many that things are different. Indeed they are! Blogging or weblogs have been around for many years; Fred Wilson gives a few good examples in his post, Blogging 1.0 . What’s different about today’s Web is that new technologies and behaviors that have popularized the blogging phenomenon, are also transforming the Web from a medium where information is simply published and remains static, into a platform where applications reside and services are distributed. This transformation is being referred to as Web 2.0 .

Web 2.0 is a collection of small pieces of loosely joined technologies coupled with a movement towards collaboration and interoperability. This has enabled control of information to shift to individuals and has given us a voice like never before. We are now able to easily locate and connect with like-minded circles and form social networks that drive mass-collaboration — wikis , open-source and tag-based folksonomies are all examples of this.

Implications of Web 2.0 will be far reaching. It has already significantly affected how I use the Web. I now find information not through Google or Yahoo but through services like del.icio.us , Technorati , and Gataga . I use these services to create RSS feeds from tags so that new postings are delivered daily to my news aggregator . I now categorize the most relevant information into new RSS feeds of blogs that I then subscribe to. In some cases, I use a collection of these feeds to create TagClouds that generate automatic folksonomies that allow me to analyze the popularity of related information (tags) over time. Does this make me a geek? Probably so, but it also makes me an early adopter of things to come that will have implications on every major Web property — from Ebay to Amazon. An arms race is clearly already happening between Yahoo and Google as evidenced by a spate of recent micro-acquisitions of promising Web 2.0 startups Flickr , Dodgeball , Blo.gs , etc. These strategic acquisitions are a clear attempt by each to acquire knowledge, technology and data to position them to capture mindshare and advertising dollars from the changing Web.

A changing investing landscape

The post, It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur , by Joe Kraus provides interesting details of how cheaper hardware, free software infrastructure and search engine marketing have made it less expensive to start a company. Additionally, I’d add that Web 2.0 has changed the rules for entrepreneurship by lowering barriers to entry enabling bootstrapped startups to gain visibility not through advertising, but primarily through social networks and blog fueled promotion. These changes are impacting venture investing as well – consumer applications are now back in vogue while investments in enterprise applications are suffering due to the pricing pressures that open-source applications and LAMP architecture are creating within the enterprise.

Even more dramatic will be Web 2.0’s impact as a platform for the development of rich Internet applications and services. Ajax is enabling the creation of plug-in free Web apps that rival the performance of client-based desktop applications – Oddpost and Google Maps are great examples. Open API’s are enabling the creation of apps on top of apps – TagSoup and the Craiglist - Google Maps hack illustrate this. It is my opinion that these developments represent the very tip of exciting innovation to come — innovation that will require a new approach to venture investing led by a new breed of angel and venture investors that are able to successfully balance irrational exuberance with prudent funding to fuel the creation of new platforms for growth.

Posted by Clarence Wooten on July 04, 2005
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