TechCrunch Real-time Stream Event

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.