The Web 2.0 Generation

I have been following the streaming video market fairly closely over the last year, given my previous involvement with Inzum, and my present work as a streaming video consultant. When Inzum officially launched on April 20th, 2007, we had been in contact with NBBC (the National Broadband Company) about securing NBC TV content for our site. Shortly after our launch, we stopped hearing from NBBC, at which point we learned that NBC was joining with NewsCorp (the parent company of Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch) to form their own streaming video venture, then referred to by the codename MPG. Many people saw it as another attempt at a YouTube killer, although we imagined it to be more of a preemptive Joost killer of sorts. Since then, the venture (rumored to be the brainchild of NBC’s CTO) had fallen off the map and didn’t even have a name or a vague, hinting website like many startups. It became known as Clown Co. after a joke made by some folks at Google, and was mentioned in June on TechCrunch in an article about called Everyone’s Gunning for YouTube. Still, it was not on many people’s radar screens as Joost dominated the streaming video headlines.

This changed yesterday, however. Simultaneous articles on VentureBeat and TechCrunch, titled Providence Invests $100M into NBC-NewsCorp Video Site and Wow - Clown Co. Got That $1B Valuation (Still Nameless Though) respectively. Without a beta, or even a website, Clown Co. has a projected value of one billion dollars! While a venture created by two American TV giants has a lot of potential, it has a long way to go in the public’s eye before it can prove itself to be worth that much. I will be interested to see how the streaming video market grows and solidifies, but with money like this being tossed at it, the expectations are set very high.

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People who know me know that I am passionate about startups native to my home town in Madison, Wisconsin. Ever since my first experiences in the Madison startup scene with Inzum, an abortive idea spawned in a college dorm by my good friend Ashutosh Gupta and I, Madison startups have been close to my heart.

One of the most exciting Madison startups currently in operation is Sharendipity, and I am privelaged to be working with them as they grow. Right now, Sharendipity is still in private alpha, and things are fairly under wraps. The three letters NDA mean that I can’t provide any exciting screenshots yet, but I can point you to the blog Sharendipitous Moments, with an entry by Sharendipity’s Greg Tracy called Answering the Big Question that describes the company’s mission. This is definitely a startup to watch, and you can expect to see much more about them over the coming months.

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With the vast numbers of web applications that I interact with on a regular basis, I see many great interfaces, as well as many terrible ones. Through that, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: the interfaces of enterprise web applications feel like they are still stuck in the 1990’s, while all of the innovation seems to be happening on the consumer level. This may seem obvious, and in many ways it is, but it is a trend that should not exist. There is no reason why the simple design elegance and AJAX functionality that exists in applications like Google’s Gmail, 37signals’ Basecamp, and even Wordpress, which I am using to write this post, should not have a place in enterprise environments.

I’ve discussed this problem recently with several of my clients, and I believe I have identified the primary reason: fear of incompatibility. Between company firewalls, ancient browsers, and disabled features in the interest of corporate security, many enterprise developers shun technology like AJAX since many company employees are unable to run JavaScript. This limits the client-side processing that enables interface elegance in the consumer web applications I discussed above. While all of this functionality can be somewhat replicated with server-side processing in languages like PHP and ASP.NET, having to reload the page after any user interaction is slow, cumbersome, and often irritating.

No perfect solution exists to this problem right now, but I believe there are two approaches that developers can take in response:

1. In the short term, designers can implement AJAX functionality in web applications and also implement a server-side fallback plan that allows the application to function without JavaScript. If this isn’t feasible, corporate support of Flash is rapidly increasing with the rise of Flash-powered online streaming video, so sophisticated applications can be developed in Flash form.

2. In the long term, a standard for client-side processing needs to be developed that will be supported by industry. The only true web standards that have ever been widely supported in industry are HTML and CSS, and that needs to change over the next few years. It will remain to be seen whether the W3C is capable of delivering something like this, or whether it will come from somewhere else.

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