How the Web works & How that conflicts with .MOBI

The context around .MOBI

Currently, few Web pages are designed to be accessed via mobile devices. Many sites can't be displayed on tiny cell phone screens, and most take a much longer time to download than on a PC (this is due to packet latency which is much higher on cellular vs. copper). Mobile Top Level Domain headquartered in Ireland aims to change that in part by setting up a new domain name specifically for wireless Internet Web sites called .MOBI.

Just as dot-com is the domain name for many Web pages on the wired Internet, .MOBI will become the suffix for Web pages that are formatted for cellphones and other wireless devices. Essentially this becomes a new partition of the Internet designed specifically for mobile devices.

The design goal of the Mobile Top Level Domain is simple. They want web developers to follow a set of rules designed to make surfing easier on mobile devices. For instance one rule would require a .MOBI site not to use popup windows for advertising or allow other windows to appear. Another rule would be to ensure that web pages are formatted “single column” vs. the current multi column format and at the same time reduce the amount of content to a more manageable portion to ease the download time.

Why the web works – it’s all about 4 simple rules

1. The Web is simple


2. The Web is flexible and forgiving (The browser ignores things that it doesn’t understand).


3. The Web is heterogeneous, which means it works on all platforms (Not just Windows)


4. The Web is loosely coupled. Most previous computing architectures required tight integration between the “server” program that stores the data and the “Client” program which manipulates it. In contrast there is no need to upgrade the Web browser every time a Web publisher changes a site. Server and Client are loosely coupled.

Why this conflicts with .MOBI

Item 4 is the crux of the issue. By partitioning the HTTP information space into parts, one designed for access from mobile devices AND the other part designed for different devices, an essential property of the Web is destroyed. Instead of a loosely coupled infrastructure you’ve now created a tightly integrated structure between the client (mobile device) and the server.

Netcraft indicates that in May there were 81,565,877 sites on the Internet. Think of this as “the long tail” vs. the few high end portal sites like Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL which can afford the new .MOBI extension fee $$$. These 81 million sites represent the “rest of the Internet”. So far this year over 7 million new sites have been added which projected out through the end of the year is close to 17 million new sites. It is extremely unlikely that these sites will adopt a .MOBI extension for their mobile content, instead they will simply build their own mobile content which aligns with item 4 above.

Over time new server and client software will emerge that makes the Internet “Mobile Aware” without breaking the current loosely coupled architecture, this will render the .MOBI extension a moot point.

The Problem with Mashups

When doing the research for my next startup I spent a considerable amount of time looking at mashups… my criteria for a business must follow the two prime directives…

1. A known customer with a identifiable problem


2. Measurable, sustainable, profitable revenue from volume

Lets start with number 1… a known customer with an identifiable problem. Who is the customer for a mashup? I suppose to answer that question you have to figure out what the mashup is going to be? According to the programmable web blog (link) a quarter of the 200+ API’s come from 7 providers. That’s right 25% or roughly 50 API’s just come from 7 vendors. The vendors are Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, EBay, Six Apart and AOL.

According to Netcraft there are roughly 81 million web sites on the Internet. Think of this as the long tail. None of them are mentioned in the top 7. Of those top 7 “content” sites how many actually “own” the original content? I’m really not sure of the answer. Google gets satellite images from someone else, EBay doesn’t have any original content it’s supplied by sellers, Microsoft is a platform company, Six Apart is blogging which is owned © by the Blogger. Which leaves AOL… they own Time Warner so I would assume that they actually have content that they own, that they could sell.

So I’ll whittle the list down to one content provider with an API set that maybe I could build into something. Only one problem – AOL owns the content and won’t be too pleased if “I borrow it” and resell it. So expect the API to come with a set of restrictions.

Next stop.. what’s the identifiable problem I’m solving. I have no idea. Personally I’m drowning in content. I’ve got more content than I know what to do with and I pay absolutely nothing for it. It streams in everyday.

So if the total market for Mashup API’s is 7 vendors, the available Mashup for real content that someone “might” be willing to pay for is 1 and there are no identifiable problems that it solves, exactly why do we need to do mashups?

I suppose the answer is “aggregation”… here is the link to a weather mashup (link) It combines Google’s mapping capability with NOAA’s weather capability. So what… I have an extension in FireFox that does the same thing except without the map. I don’t need the map because I know where I am. If I need weather I go the weather channel directly or NOAA or the myriad other places I can get what I need. Nothing is more than 1 click away ever.

So back to the prime directive – I don’t know who the customer is, I don’t know what his/her problem is that I would be solving, and I have no idea how to monetize someone else’s content to generate measurable sustainable profitable revenue from volume. And I guarantee that if someone does figure it out then the content originator is going to want a piece of the pie, if not they will simply cut of the “spigot” that supplies the content and then I’m out of business.

In my opinion mashups are not  a good investment.

Windows Media player 11

In a word it, “Rocks!” – I understand why people use iTunes because they have an iPod, but if they don’t there is simply no reason to do so anymore. Microsoft have done an incredible job with Media player. Fast, elegant and simple to use. If this is a harbinger of Vista then we are all in for a real treat.

It’s amazing what a little competition does for the giant in Redmond. There are some exceptional people there who know how to code and deliver a great product. Watch out Google, they’ve got you “bore sighted” in, and history is on their side.

Liars figure and Figures lie

Another great post from a VC.. (http://redeye.firstround.com/) called 53,651 (which indicates the number of readers of Techcrunch).

Finally they are waking up to the fact that some stats don’t mean a darn thing. I’ve been watching with great interest all the Web 2.0 nonsense. Everybody’s crowing about how many readers or page views or whatever they have.

What are they not crowing about – cash… that’s right, cold hard cash in the bank. That’s what it all boils down too… I was there in ’98, ’99, 2000 and watched everyone talking about how many page views they had and how many people were using their free software. None of those companies are still around. Why not? No cash, no business model. Web 2.0 is a lot like the late ‘90’s – all kinds of mash ups, (my partner and I were doing this in ’98) all kinds of AJAX (re-branded DHTML again back in the 90’s).

I’m going to make a prediction, most of these companies will cease to exist in 3 years. VC’s are putting some money into them, but not a lot. Kind of like a spray and pray model. The entrepreneurs will have two year to execute and of course during that time Darwin will get most of them.

Here’s my next prediction for where the real action is going to be in the next two years (real growth will start in 2008) and that’s mobile. The dominant player will be Microsoft with Google and Yahoo secondary players.

Why do I like mobile so much – in a word – tiny… not form factor – but programming factor. This device really plays to our (5o9 Inc) company's strengths. There are hardly any programming resources to speak of… anyone designing for this device better be good and don’t think Java is going to solve your problems – it won’t and for one simple reason. This is NOT the same as the desktop environment where you have gigabytes of storage and memory.

I just checked in my control panel (add/remove programs) I have two Java runtime environments totaling over 250MB’s – this is crazy. On the mobile device you have no more than 4MB’s of RAM to play with otherwise the devices performance just goes out the window.

Mobile levels the playing field, adds a new “platform” to the internet and will change the way we communicate by merging contact with content. The winners will be those with a real business model that generates “cash” not meaningless reader stats.

Google’s servers are full!

This quote appeared a few days ago on various web sites. Today Stu Philips wrote a blog about “Big can be ugly” (link: http://1vc.blogspot.com/)...

It’s a great read – and you can clearly see why Google is spending close to $2 billion a year on capX. Rumor has it that they are purchasing around 200,000 new servers a month. Wow – that’s an immense amount of servers. Pretty soon you’ve got over a million servers to maintain. Imagine getting hit by a virus. Ouch…

YouTube, MySpace and the other social networking plays are all spending big on infrastructure. It’s an arms race that only really benefits people like AMD and Intel (I wonder if Google is buying any Sun servers?). The cost of maintaining these servers is huge, and the bandwidth they consume is equally huge.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all have the luxury of sustainable business models – I would argue that Microsoft is better positioned because it has the Windows Platform revenue stream, Gaming and Search, whereas Google only has search.

All the others have to continue to spend – great for VC’s as their ownership position continues to climb – tough news for the entrepreneurs as dilution becomes a way of life.

It will be interesting to see where things stand in a few years. Millions and millions of servers holding all kinds of “un-interesting” data.

Microsofts Mobile strategy starts to unfold

And it's going to be big. Microsoft and Qualcomm to integrate WM into Qualcomm Chipsets Virtually all CDMA phone vendors (excepting Nokia and a few others) use Qualcomm's chipsets, so this will make it much simpler and cheaper forphone vendors to sell Windows Mobile devices. In 2003 Microsoft had just one device maker and one operator signed up to support WM. Now its up to 47 hardware makers and 100 operators. 2008 is when I predict the real action takes place. WM needs one more solid rev (interim patch is due 2007) which is on track for 2008. I believe that within 3-5 years Microsoft will dominate Mobile as it dominates the desktop. Now if MSN can leverage Mobile before the other Giants do - then I'd start buying Microsoft stock right now.