A very interesting piece in the LA Times today talks about the potential for striking Hollywood writers to turn to the web with new venture capital-backed properties.
If the strike ends tomorrow perhaps these stories will die down, but it’s looking more likely that the transition of major players – top tier Hollywood creative talent in this case – to risk and innovate on the web, to figure out the revenue and structural and logistical models that others will follow, is quickening in part because of the writer’s strike.
I think this transition is inevitable. It simply makes sense for people to consume the vast majority of content on the web. It’s just a matter of how and when this transition – already well underway of course – will take place.
We’re waiting for the big columns to a-tumble now – exciting times!
Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer announced that his company is planning to buy 20 web companies a year over the next five years.
Even if this assertion is hyperbolic, it shows that industry giants such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are fueling up, beefing up, and counter-moving one another by gobbling smaller, nimbler, and more innovative tech companies.
In a way, the relative path to riches and fortune for your average young tech genius in the proverbial garage is easier than it was 10 years ago, and perhaps ever before. Instead of the daunting task of assembling VC millions and climbing the mountain to a successful IPO, it’s now possible to slave away in your parent’s basement or dorm room for a year years on limited or zero funding with the hope of getting gobbled up for a few quick millions by one of the titans.
Further, for the right kind of tech entrepreneur, that’s a much more interesting prospect than bothering to go to college or start out as a cubicle slave at a starting wage at a much larger company. And in fact starting your own company and then getting bought out by a larger one can often be a way to accelerate way up the food chain.
In short, this is a good thing for everyone. The big question and hope is that the big companies do something interesting with both the technology and employees that they gobble up.
A Mark Evans piece that muses about the possibility of a “web 2.0 aggregator” that could bring applications like GMail, Skype, and Basecamp all to one My Yahoo or Netvibes-like personalized homepage got me thinking about an only partially related idea having to do with web start-ups. But sticking with the personalized homepage thing for just a second, what I would dearly love is to have the ability to bring a few widgets right into my GMail page. GTalk, an IM application, is integrated into GMail, so why not give people a little widget for their calendar, for instance. This would make me very happy, even though I’m revealing what a slave I am to Google products!
Okay, onward. Here’s one of the things that I would love to do if someone threw a few barrelfuls of VC cash my way: run a blog that smartly aggregates blog posts everyday from web and tech start-up companies. So in other words, when MyBlogLog announces an interesting feature rollout or when Evan Williams writes (incredibly concisely) about nifty things going on at Twitter, this site would annotate it and perhaps add a pithy comment or two for good measure.
I think this would provide a valuable service for the web obsessed TechCrunch/Techmeme crowd as well as for industry insiders and journalists.
I’m a sucker for what I think of as “smart aggregation” and believe that the proliferation of web content will allow for plenty of these kinds of ideas to do well and make money when executed properly (accounting for all of the mistakes, pitfalls, acres of quicksand, and all the rest of the problems that every start-up faces!). Think about… a place that compiles the most interesting or strangest MySpace blog posts, a place for celebrity blog posts (Britney, Rosie O’ Donnell, Fifty Cent, etc.), sports figures, TV and movie personalities, and on and on.
It’s Friday. What better time of the week to let your geeky entrepreneurial dreams cry free?
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch offers a surprisingly personal and wistful piece this morning about how Silicon Valley was more fun when it was less venture capital-fueled and PR-drenched. The good old days are now in the rear view, circa 2005. And then, he writes, “Somewhere in there the money started rolling in.”
Arrington’s legitimate fear is that with the focus on big press hits and eye-popping venture capital infusions, there will be less time to genuinely appreciate, promote, and nurture true innovation, industry-changing ideas, and “beautiful products and genius developers.”
Arrington concludes: “It may be time for some of use to leave for a while and watch the craziness from the outside again. In a few years, things will be beautiful again. The big money will be slumbering away, and the marketing departments will be a distant memory.”
I lived in the midst of “the craziness” during the 1.0 web boom days of the late ’90s. I worked at a start-up in the Bay Area that boasted a real indoor batting cage, pool table, foos ball (Lords, I miss that thing terribly), air hockey, and ping pong. Later, I worked at a San Francisco start-up where lavish Friday night parties were the norm, where round after round of Lemon Drop shots – this being the “company drink” for reasons unknown – freely flowed for all those who would sip its salty-sweet flavors.
Now and throughout the “web 2.0″ era, I’ve lived and worked in Los Angeles, outside of the sphere of Silicon Valley. This perspective helps me to realize that while “the craziness” may be on the rise once again up north, innovation and focus on great products can now come from just about anywhere.
The “flattening” elements that Thomas Friedman describes in The World Is Flat allow small teams of entrepreneurs to build and run web products and services on the cheap, at a tiny fraction of the cost that it would have taken just 8-10 years ago. Office space is no longer a necessity, hardware and bandwidth costs have plummeted, and virtual communication has vastly improved. Open source code and cheap software packages now create an environment where good ideas can be effectively executed by passionate and dedicated entrepreneurs.
In other words, while the craziness may be back, there are new hordes of web entrepreneurs and developers who don’t need or even necessarily want any part of it.
Stan Schroeder of franticindustries (quickly becoming a must-read for this online media cultist) agrees, emphasizing that most people could care less about Silicon Valley culture. It all comes down to products and services that make life and work easier, more fun, more interesting, and so on. And Mark Evans smartly points out that Michael Arrington’s feelings are somewhat ironic considering that the web 2.0 wave helped bring him stardom, riches, and the position of being “one of the most influential people on the Web.”
Kara Swisher of All Things Digital sums up well by writing: “Today, the new companies, for the most part, are actually useful and much more disciplined and with much less lofty goals. While most are built to flip, they offer features that improve the experience on the Web for consumers and businesses and are filling in areas that need improvement. In fact, while there are some mildly laughable ideas, it is hard to find any on the level of the party that was 1999.”
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch offers a 
