A few days back (yes, I am a little behind on the blogging...) I had an opportunity to attend the TechCrunch Real-time Stream conference in Redwood City. The theme was the real-time web. And as usual, I volunteered my way in to avoid paying the $99 student price. This conference was spawned due the increasing popularity of many real-time web applications that are taking over our lives, namely Twitter among other things. I personally am not a huge Twitter fan, but it is gaining a huge following lately, with all the media attention in Iran, etc...
The real-time web does not revolve solely around Twitter however. Many startups are jumping at this opportunity to providing real-time data. Real-time search has attracted a whole slew of companies trying to dominate this niche. There are also a lot of startups like NetVibes and Seesmic which are trying to congregate all the real-time data from all the different social networks and showcase it in easy-to-use application. Over the course of the conference I would estimate hearing about 100 startup names, and those only represent the prominent ones in Silicon Valley. Who knows how many have actually entered this space. Ron Conway, a prominent venture capitalist who has been known to have invested in Google, PayPal, and other big successes has estimated the entire real-time web market to be worth about $5 billion.
My views: Unlike many, I do see a monetization opportunity here. However, I also see room for only a few prominent players, Twitter being one of them. Two reasons: First reason is that right now, I think real-time is vastly over-hyped with hundreds of startups in this space. This is going to produce a lot of clutter on the web, which I cannot imagine users handling. This in turn is going to reduce the hype and need of having real-time instant updates all the time, leaving room for only a few players to monetize this space sufficiently to stay in business.
Second reason is intellectual property. There is virtually no IP in this concept. I can see there being one in real-time search but that will converge with traditional search algorithms, which Google is leading. In other domains, the winners are going to be decided because of aggressive marketing, viral-ness of the software, and UI design. Users are not going to be switching between applications doing the same thing as that will be a hassle, so whoever gets them first will win.
All-in-all, I'm not too excited about this space, though I will be keeping tabs on how things progress.
Over the last two days, I spent my time at the Semantic Technology Conference 2009 in San Jose, CA. I was fortunate to be in the area and managed to get a free exhibit pass AND managed to get my manager to allow me to skip work. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about the emerging Semantic Web, network with the key visionaries in the area, and finally provide an answer to myself to a question that hasn't been clear lately: What value does the Semantic Web and related technologies provide to the end user in the short term and long term? I will try to provide a simple answer for now (as it is easy to get lost in the technical jargon out there): The world is becoming increasingly data-driven and your data is adding to this transformation. The Semantic Web is about making your data more valuable as this transformation to an information driven environment takes place. There it is. Simple.
Today, I tagged along with a good friend of mine at work to an event at Stanford University sponsored by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. We had just found about the event that very day and were disappointed to see it was sold out. But we went anyways and realized we could "volunteer" our way in. We signed up as volunteers and had access to a huge dinner and an event with valuable information and fantastic people! Our job was simply to collect and recycle all the plastic name tags at the end of the event. Not a bad deal.
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