20
Feb
07

The Future of Start-ups and Web Companies - Mike Arrington (TechCrunch)

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By Paul Lomax
Categories: FOWALondon07 and Internet Industry

The Future of Start-ups and Web Companies

Mike Arrington (TechCrunch)
Notes from The Future of Web Apps conference, London, 2007

Key factors of success for start-ups

  1. Have a good idea
    • Invent a market (digg)
    • Destroy a market (eg craigslist)
    • Remove friction (eg youtube, skype) – eg cost, tech
  2. Have a business plan
    • (But be prepared to throw it out…)
  3. Have a revenue model
    • Youtube was burning $1m a month on bandwidth…
    • Myspace was making $25m a month before google deal
  4. Build it cheap, test the water
    • Research is bad? [Maybe if you have an early adopter audience...]
  5. Avoid high burn rates
    • Stay hungry!

AIME.ST – digg for music, price varies by popularity, defined by downloads

  • Solve a real problem
  • You must (as founders, devs, etc) blog
  • Create buzz – and if you can’t, then rethink your product (not your marketing)

Opportunities in 2007

  1. Offline / Online
    • Adobe Apollo lets you create offline apps using html, ajax, etc
    • Firefox 3.0 is rumoured to include offline capabilities
    • Websites that access the filesystem
  2. DRM for music/tv/movies
    • Anybody who can crack this has it made
    • Joost is working on it
  3. Data and service portability
    • Teqlo, Ning, Pipes
  4. Mobile
    • Edwin Aoki, Chief Architect at AOL and Chris(?) Wiles, Product Manager at Google agree

About

Paul LomaxPaul Lomax is Head of New Media for the Guardian Media Group's Regional Division and divides his time between London and Manchester in the UK. He's a former entrepreneur, a technologist and an experienced general manager and has been a digital professional for well over ten years.

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