GigaOM » GigaOM RoadMap 2011

What’s the next frontier in the connected world?

Colleen Taylor — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:00:45 +0000

Thanks to the billions of broadband-enabled devices that have cropped up in recent years, in many ways the world today is more plugged in and connected than ever before. But the high level of interest and investment in the technology industry at the moment shows that many folks out there still believe there is lots of growth yet to be realized.

The question now is: Where, exactly, will the new developments be? Where is there still big potential to add connectivity that can make our lives better? I pulled aside a few tech industry leaders who spoke at the GigaOM RoadMap 2011 conference just before they each took the stage last week to find out. As you’ll see in the videos embedded below, they each had definite opinions on the subject.

Tom Conrad, the CTO and executive vice president of product for music streaming pioneer Pandora Media, says that his company is working on making its technology available everywhere there are people, from cars to refrigerators:

Matt MacInnis, the founder and CEO of iPad textbook company Inkling, thinks that individual students should be more connected while they’re studying. Essentially, the end of the “bookworm” reputation could be nigh:

Things started to get really interesting with Frank Moss, the tech industry veteran who led Tivoli Systems through its IPO and subsequent merger with IBM in the mid-1990s, and more recently worked as the director of the MIT Media Lab from 2006 to 2011. According to Moss, the next frontier for connectivity lies within our own bodies — right down to the cellular level:

Salim Ismail, the global ambassador and founding executive director for Singularity University, also believes that the realm of connected devices should expand to inside our own bodies. He took it one step further than Moss, though: Eventually, he said, technology will be used to measure things like luck, consciousness and self-awareness. It’s fair to say my mind was a bit blown by this one:

What do you think? Are there still untapped opportunities for connectivity, or have we as a society hit the saturation point for plugging in? If you have any insights, please weigh in using the comments.

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Pandora: Spotify is our friend, not a competitor

Colleen Taylor — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 01:39:04 +0000

Pandora Media was a pioneer in the business of streaming music over the Internet, so it’s understandable for people to think that Spotify, the popular new kid on the online music industry block, is a Pandora competitor. But according to Pandora’s CTO and executive vice president of product Tom Conrad, the companies are actually friends, not foes.

“I think of Spotify as being largely complementary to what Pandora is. Daniel Ek, the [Spotify] founder, has said that they see themselves as the future of the record store, and Pandora as the future of radio,” Conrad said in an on-stage conversation with GigaOM Pro analyst David Card at the GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco Thursday. Not surprisingly, Conrad said, Pandora is just fine with Ek’s opinion there. “We’re really comfortable with that categorization, because it captures well our thinking about it.”

After all, traditional radio and radio stores have lived in harmony for decades. And the semi-random element of discovery that Pandora Radio provides is markedly different from totally on-demand services such as Spotify, Conrad said. And in fact, there’s potential for the two companies to work together more closely in the future. Conrad put it this way:

“One of the principal purposes of radio is to help artists sell their music. And as the music industry matures, it may be that the dollars traditionally spent on purchased music transitions to things like subscription services like Spotify. And I think that transition takes place, it’s not hard to imagine part of our role will be helping people connect from their listening experience on Pandora into subscription services, just like today we help them connect into things like iTunes and Amazon MP3.”

You can watch the entirety of Tom Conrad’s interview at GigaOM RoadMap 2011 in the video embedded below:

Photo by Pinar Ozger

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Hot or not: The IPO market is what you make it

Barb Darrow — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:33:48 +0000

Those who think the IPO market is in the pits have short memories. If you look at historical data over the last 20 years, you will find that the bubble of the late 1990s was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to IPOs. Isn’t that why they called it a bubble?

Lise Buyer, founder of Class V Group, which counsels startups on IPO strategies, says people with only a decade of IPO experience have a skewed view.

“There is so much talk about how the IPO market is broken. Well, go back 20 years, look at the data. Maybe when times were abnormal isn’t now, but the 1995 to 2000 bubble,” said Buyer, who compiled the data for an E-trade-sponsored panel at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference. Buyer knows a little something about IPOs. She was a buy-side analyst for T. Rowe Price before joining Google to help guide that company to its wildly successful IPO in 2004.

In her view, 75 percent of those “bubble” companies — names like Pets.com, Webvan and other poster children of dot.com bomb excess — should never have gone public to begin with.

The recent Groupon IPO may be a sign of the bubble resurging. Skeptics point to the fact that $900 million of the $1.1 billion Groupon raised went to early investors. The perception that only a privileged few insiders can actually make money off an IPO is something that could break the IPO market. Many wrote at the time of the launch that new investors should run, not walk, away from Groupon shares.

Buyer said that’s the kind of thing that could really kill the market for IPOs. Her view is that companies have to earn an IPO, do the research, do the investment, and be transparent about it.

On the other side of the aisle are those who say it’s already way too hard to go public. Count among them panelist Michael Moe, CEO and founder of GSV Capital. Moe said regulations and red tape are keeping even big tech companies out of the IPO race. They want to stay private longer, to avoid these hassles.

“Sarbanes-Oxley is just one issue. I don’t know a CEO in Silicon Valley who wants to be public,” he said. Currently, a privately held company with more than 500 investors must share financial information with them. There is a move afoot to boost that limit to 2000 investors.

Staying private longer lets companies mature and build a better business, according to Moe. “Investors want more mature companies. That genie is not going back in the bottle.”

Others argue that as companies take on investors, they take on responsibilities. “By the time you have 500 investors, it’s not just your buddies anymore and they need to know what you’re doing,” Buyer said.

The idea that the “poor, struggling Zyngas and Facebooks of the world” can wait till they have 2,000 investors before they have to disclose, doesn’t pass the smell test for her.

Companies that want to go public have to jump through the hurdles and prove themselves.

Bottom line from Buyer: “You’re not entitled to go public, you have to earn the right.”

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Dropbox: much more than storage and sync

Barb Darrow — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:34:23 +0000

With 45 million users, Dropbox is a hugely popular cloud storage service. Consumers use it to store photos, documents and other material so they can access it from their PCs, phones, or other devices. But it’s much more than that, said Drew Houston, founder and CEO of the company.

Businesses can — and do — use it to offload chunks of IT infrastructure as needed.

The Charleston Symphony Orchestra, for example, had to cut its IT staff but still had a server running email and other apps in a closet. Instead of keeping that thing chugging away, they went to hosted email and put the rest of that server data in — you guessed it — Dropbox’s cloud, he said.

The company’s success has been greatly aided by the fact that consumers want the same nifty tools they use from home, in the office, Houston told attendees of the GigaOM RoadMap Conference on Thursday afternoon.

People’s work tools used to be better than their tools at home, but that’s no longer the case. So if they use Dropbox for their family photos, chances are they’ll start using it for their work documents.

It also helps Dropbox’s case that today’s connected world isn’t always all that connected. “My mom has her music in iTunes but her phone is a Droid. So even though all of her devices are connected, they don’t talk to each other,” Houston said.

Clearly he sees Dropbox as the mother ship for all his mother’s (and everyone else’s) digital cargo. The proliferation of mobile devices has only driven more demand.

That cloud-based repository can also alleviate a lot of the headaches around moving big chunks of data around for business users or consumers. “Big email attachments and uploads — that’s the kind of thing that goes away if all of your stuff is in the cloud by default,” he said. “We can preview it, transcode it.”

As for what’s next, he didn’t provide a ton of detail, but he hinted that Dropbox will get better at uploading and managing all sorts of files.

“The way we manage files on a computer is insane. We’ve had this system for decades, but there’s still no one button that says ‘put this online,’” he said.

Dropbox will also be able to store not only a person’s photos but the metadata about that photo, the location information. “All of these things become possible. We can index all that metadata in the pictures and then tel you where the picture is taken, and maybe give you all the pictures taken within ten mile radius.” This sounds like a lot more than storage.

Dropbox is not alone in this hot cloud storage market: it competes with Box.net, Carbonite, Backblaze and others that are duking it out for the cloud storage needs of consumers and businesses. But it’s clearly growing gangbusters. The 45 million users Dropbox now claims is up from 25 million in April. The company just closed $250 million in funding.

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Confirmed: WordPress crosses 60 million blogs

Colleen Taylor — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:20:29 +0000

Updated. WordPress now powers more than 60 million blogs, founder Matt Mullenweg confirmed Thursday. The online publishing platform is now fielding in excess of 300 million unique visitors per month.

Update: About half of those 60 million blogs are powered by WordPress.com, the service owned by Automattic that hosts WordPress blogs, Mullenweg said. WordPress is an open source software that people can also download to run blogs on the web servers of their choice.

But according to him, this is just the beginning: WordPress’ developments on the social and mobile fronts are on track to drive even bigger growth in the months ahead.

“The things that are ultra compelling are more social features,” Mullenweg said in an on-stage interview with Mathew Ingram at the GigaOM RoadMap conference in San Francisco Thursday. The company is especially jazzed about the engagement it gets from adding social features to the platform. “We were typically doing ten page view per unique user. With some of this new [social] stuff, we see that go up an order of magnitude.”

Mobile development will also be a big priority for WordPress’ future, Mullenweg said, noting that early efforts to address the space have been received quite enthusiastically by users. “The mobile platform has grown 7x in the past year, and we have four to five million active users logging into WordPress’ mobile platform daily.”

But don’t get it twisted: Mullenweg says WordPress is not making these moves in response to competition from other popular web platforms such as Tumblr. “We don’t really think about it in terms of competition. We think about it in terms of our users,” he said, noting that WordPress is typically used differently than such services as Tumblr and Twitter. “WordPress is about doing your entire website, not just your blog. 92 percent of users are using it as a content management system in addition to a blog.”

Meanwhile, WordPress doesn’t plan to abandon its core allegiance to open source standards as Automattic continues to expand as a for-profit company. “I’m kind of an open source hippie. Everything I’ve ever built has been built on open source technology,” he said. “I believe morally and philosophically that the future of not just software, but everything, is open source… and along this path, I don’t see any gating factors to our growth.”

This post has been edited to clarify the information regarding WordPress the open source software, WordPress.com, and Automattic. We regret any confusion.

Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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Need to optimize your sleep? There’s an app for that.

Derrick Harris — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:23:33 +0000

It might sound like science fiction, but Jawbone Founder and CEO Hosain Rahman says we’re headed to an era where our bodies can be connected to everything in our world, including our air conditioners. It won’t be innate, of course, unless we literally have chips implanted in our bodies, but a device like Jawbone’s Up Band could make it possible.

Talking about his company’s new wristband device at RoadMap today, Rahman painted a picture of lives so optimized by data about our bodies that even new parents like himself can wake up refreshed every morning. The band measures an incredible amount of data about individuals — from how many calories they burn to how efficient their gaits are to how much deep sleep they got — and displays it via an iPhone app. As users start to understand more about the information they’re seeing and how it relates to their lifestyles, he said, they’re more motivated to act accordingly.

But the Up Band isn’t just about displaying data and leaving the rest to users, it’s also about helping. For example, Rahman said, the band’s alarm function is a gentle vibration on the user’s wrist during a time when the user is in a light sleep. That way, it’s not as jarring as being woken by a blaring alarm clock during deep sleep, and users are more likely to get up feeling well and ready to face the day. There also is a social element to the Up Band, so users can see how their peers are doing and try to keep up, or engage in challenges to see who’s eating the healthiest or being the most active.

As impressive as the device and associated app are, Rahman acknowledges that we’re just at the beginning when it comes to better our bodies via data. For one, he said, most people haven’t even given a thought to the idea of monitoring the data their bodies generate, so you have to go slow. You can’t “kill people with sensors” off the bat, he said, but let them grow into the new lifestyle. What Jawbone has found is users actually start to understand the data rather quickly, and then they’re anxious to see more and more information to take the experience to the next level.

Ultimately, as more people get on board with monitoring their data and more device manufacturers open their APIs to partners, we could start seeing connectivity between our health sensors and other connected devices. One example Rahman gave was a connection between the Up Band and a home’s air conditioning system. Knowing that a user had just ran five miles because the band told it so, an air conditioner might adjust the house’s temperature so that the user doesn’t cool down too quickly.

It’s tough to tell how many people will actually buy into Jawbone’s vision of personal health, but it’s difficult to argue with the company’s approach. As Rahman noted, phones are becoming the center of people’s digital lives, so why shouldn’t we expect they’ll use them to better understand how our lifestyles affect our bodies? There already are apps to program everything from DVRs to alarm systems to ovens, so what’s one more that might actually help us live a little longer?

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Bechtolsheim: AWS, open source rewrite rules for startups

Barb Darrow — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:01:00 +0000

Today’s tech entrepreneurs would be out of their minds to build out their own data centers rather than renting capacity from Amazon or another low-cost provider.

That wasn’t a direct quote, but it’s pretty much the takeaway from Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Arista Networks (and also of Sun Microsystems).

The combination of low-cost data center infrastructure and rapidly evolving, free or nearly free open-source development tools means that tech startups can get going cheap, and if things don’t work out, move on to other things, Bechtolsheim said today at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference.

When does it make sense for a startup to invest in back-end infrastructure?

Hardly ever, it seems.

A company might build out its own infrastructure only if it’s raised a lot of venture capital, he said. But it needs to be a lot. And even then, maybe AWS is a better way. “Netflix … uses Amazon for infrastructure. Here’s the leading, largest company in a field deciding it’s cheaper and more efficient to use a competitor for infrastructure rather than building its own.”

Silicon Valley is notorious for its high-cost structure. “It’s hard to justify the cost of doing anything locally when the cost of power is 30 cents per kWh here vs. 3 cents for Amazon,” he said.

And it’s not just a hardware thing. “The current quality of software tool sets have improved unbelievably,” he said.

“Software programming levels have improved from C to C++ to Java to Ruby to you name it. You can now do more with fewer people and open source deserves all the credit here for creating and maintaining these tools,” he said.

The net effect is that barriers to entry have collapsed for people who know how to use these tools — and who know enough to avoid heavy spending on infrastructure hardware. “That changes the model to allow for experimentation. Unlike ten years ago, when you had to raise tens of millions to get going, now you can do it on your credit card,” Bechtolsheim said.

Bechtolsheim is also on the board of the new Open Compute Foundation, formed by Facebook to propagate specs for standard, energy-efficient data center infrastructure. OCF hopes to bring open-source innovation that so improved software tools into the hardware realm.

For those brave souls wanting to build data centers, the OCF blueprint could help. But, Bechtolsheim said, that’s for truly big companies that need to do huge webscale computing, not for startups.

For nearly every entrepreneur weighing a tech startup, it’s better to rent than to buy or build.

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Nest and the Apple-ification of the thermostat

Erica Ogg — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:47:10 +0000

The Nest burst onto the tech scene in the last few weeks, making waves unheard of for a product you’d never guess anyone would care about: the home thermostat. But there’s a reason the device sold out in 72 hours: the creator, Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod, took a page from the design and usability gurus at Apple to create a good-looking, efficient and easy-to-use device. At GigaOM RoadMap on Thursday, Fadell talked about how he and his team are rethinking a 50-year-old industry with lessons from the king of consumer-friendly electronics.

Fadell looked at an industry that was badly in need of innovation. Not just in the technology under the covers, but in terms of usability and design. “Thermostats looked like PCs from the 90s: square, beige, nothing innovative, and very expensive,” he said. So when he was contemplating home heating and cooling, he wasn’t inventing something new so much as rethinking and improving an established product — much like he did with the iPod in 2001.

Here’s how he consumerized an otherwise boring, staid product:

Make user interfaces as simple as possible. The Nest is styled like a dial. Fadell said this design was inspired by what you actually do with a thermostat. “Ninety-nine percent of the time you’re turning it up or down,” he said. Hence the dial and a single button.
Embrace proven technologies. The Nest is basically a smartphone on the inside, with the same computing power. It has two types of wireless connectivity, five sensors for temperature, humidity, light and two activity sensors to detect when people are in front of the device. And it has a removable — and therefore user-serviceable — battery.
Use technologies that will delight users. Fadell and team did something you wouldn’t be surprised to see from Apple with regard to how the device blends into its environment — something they call “chameleon design.” There’s a mirror inside with “a special edge that picks up incident light”, and through internal reflection it picks up the color of whatever’s around it. “So we didn’t have to make a specific color, we could just reflect back the color around it to make it blend in,” he said. It also uses sensors to passively learn about the owners of the home where Nest lives. It can learn about the heating and cooling patterns in your house, knows your activity, like how often you walk in front of it — and therefore how much time you spend at home — and can learn your patterns of how you like your temperatures. All of that means the thermostat can self-adjust its energy use to save money and resources.
Keep standards high. Of all of it, the most difficult thing was to handle this as a startup and not as a company with billions of dollars in the bank. And Fadell cautioned not to think cheaply or cut corners with the excuse that you’re just a startup. At Apple, he said, you have “a huge sandbox of technologies, capabilities and resources. You can’t go back [after that] to the startup way. You want to do it the best way possible.”

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Jack Dorsey: Technology like Twitter makes us more human

Colleen Taylor — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:18:45 +0000

In the super-connected world in which we live now, people often lament about the downfall of old-fashioned face-to-face interaction. But according to Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Square, when technology is really done right it should actually allow us to be more human, not less.

“I firmly believe that the more understanding we embrace… with technology, we have more empathy,” Dorsey said in an onstage conversation with Om Malik at the GigaOM RoadMap conference held in San Francisco Thursday. Reading Twitter streams that detail the day-to-day habits of our contacts is an example of this, he said. “We can minimize conflict because you have an understanding of where people are coming from.”

Though the prevalence of mobile devices connected to the web has led people to spend much more time staring at screens, Dorsey said the real victory of the companies he is involved with is that they can actually encourage real human interactions. He put it like this:

“Both [Twitter and Square] are great at encouraging more face-to-face human interactions… I believe strongly that this information and these tools help us be better, but we need to be sure as builders of tools that it’s not overwhelming, that it’s meaningful, and that it’s not distracting. That it’s not something that puts technology first; it puts humans first. And the humans’ use of the technology first.”

That is by no means an easy task, though. In a world where more and more new features become possible every day, one of the biggest challenges for tech entrepreneurs will be staying focused. “Simplification is number one. Working really hard to get something down to an essence is one of the hardest things to do,” he said. But it’s also important to keep a sense of humor through it all. “Making things fun is a big thing as well. We’re in a very serious industry, and we’re in a very serious time. We have to remember to relax, and have some whimsy in your applications.”

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The time for healthcare tech startups is now

Barb Darrow — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:01:21 +0000

Don’t listen to the naysayers. The time to jump into healthcare IT is now, said Frank Moss, director of new media medicine at MIT’s Media Lab. Creative technologists working in mobility, social networking and nano devices should actively seek health IT opportunities, and seek them now.

Here’s why:

1: Med students are wired and ready.

Ten years ago, medical students didn’t carry laptops. “Now if you go to Harvard Medical School, it looks like a cafe in Silicon Valley or Austin. Everyone’s got an iPad,” Moss said at the GigaOM RoadMap Conference on Thursday. As these students become doctors, there will not be the resistance to health IT that older doctors exhibited, he said.

2: There’s a big B-to-B opportunity now.

Any employer of any size knows it can’t afford employee health costs as they stand. They know they need to help employees reduce disease. “This is a huge market for startups,” Moss said.

3: A big B-to-C opportunity is coming soon.

IT innovators see it coming and they’ll work out a business model. Moss isn’t sure if it’ll be advertising or subscription-based, but it’ll be here, he said.

Moss, who wrote an Op-Ed piece on the topic in The New York Times, acted as a cheerleader for prospective entrepreneurs who might be spooked by uncertainty around payback.

“Don’t listen to the VCs, who say there’s no business model. They’ll change their tune very soon,” he noted in his onstage discussion with GigaOM Pro analyst Jody Ranck.

For those who take the plunge, the satisfaction can be huge, he said, citing Dr. John Moore, a ophthalmologist who gave up his practice after one year despairing of the amount of time he had to spend on insurance paperwork.

Moore moved to the MIT Media lab, where he worked on a smartphone app that lets patients collaborate with their doctors on their own healthcare. “They see what the doctor sees, and can change their behavior,” he said.

One such app enables HIV patients at Boston Medical Center to visualize how HIV develops into AIDs, how the virus attacks their T cells and what happens if they do or do not take their medication. Using that app, he saw the percentage of patients sticking to their drug regime soar from 25 percent to 95 percent, Moss said.

By democratizing medical care — giving people the ability to understand their disease — things can change, said Moss.

He cited the use of sensors and other tools to help people self-administer care. “Change is driven by the consumer or the individual. As these tools come online, they will change how chronic care, acute care, primary care and drug discovery is accomplished, he said.

Moss sees resistance on the part of healthcare pros and VCs as a good thing. “I’ve been through this before. I attacked people who believed PCs would not be a part of enterprise environments,” he said. Well, that certainly changed. “We’re at that point now where the naysayers, who say the healthcare reimbursement system will not work for this, that the incentives pay on the wrong metrics, or that Americans don’t care about healthcare — all that indicates fear that they’re wrong.”

“Now is the time for entrepreneurs to get on this issue. If you’re into technology and biology and social media and nano technology — it’s all coming together to create tremendous opportunities for people to use this data to change their health. It’s a great time for patient-centric healthcare.”

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