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ohra | India Head, Regalix | February 9, 2008
3 34981 | Bangalore

THE NEXT GENERATION CUSTOMER ACQUISITION ENGINE

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Before the Web…

 … were competing computing technologies

 … some competing OS

 And then emerged Windows as a major Platform…

… with packaged software applications
… with tightly coupled APIs
… and frequent releases

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Then came the Web…

 … with Client-Server technology

 … and, hyper-linking

 This saw the emergence of sites such as…

… Rediff, Geocities, Britannica Online, Directories
(Yahoo)

 And this was

… One way web or read only web
… Primitive interfaces (Netscape vs. IE)
… Taxonomy (Yahoo directory)
… Pull medium (sites needed to have stickiness to
get users back)
The next-generation online customer acquisition engine
Then happened Web2.0 …

 Blogger (read + write, comment)

 Wikipedia (read + write, review, debate)
 Flickr (view, upload, tag)

 No directories: Tag content the way you want …

… Not taxonomy but “folksonomy”
… view what others have liked
… recommend to others, and view others’
recommendations

 A read-write, participatory web

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

How Web2.0 Got its Name

 The concept was born at a brainstorming session

between O’Reilly and MediaLive International

 Dale Dougherty, VP O’Reilly

 Background: Dot-com bubble had just burst
 Companies that survived had something in
common

 Could these be called the Web2.0?

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: An Overview

 Strategic Positioning
 The Web as a Platform

 User Positioning
 You control your own data

 Core Competencies
 Services, not packaged software
 Architecture of participation
 Harnessing collective intelligence
 Cost-effective scalability
 Re-mixable data sources and data transformations
 Software above the level of a single device

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Web as a Platform

 Netscape vs. Google

 Netscape  Google
 Desktop application  Web application
 Strategy: sell high-end  Never packaged or sold
servers running web  Delivered as a service, with
applications users paying for the service,
 Tried controlling standards directly or indirectly
for displaying content

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Web as a Platform

 DoubleClick vs. Overture,

AdSense
 DoubleClick  Overture, AdSense
 Is a web service (like  Any small advertiser can
Google)… place an ad in any small site
… but is not participatory  They serviced the long-tail
 Advertisers call the shots,
and not users
 Bulky, contractual
placements of ads on large
sites, for large advertisers

 Leverage customer self service to reach out to

the entire web, not just the head, but the long
tail too
The next-generation online customer acquisition engine
Web2.0: Harnessing Collective
Intelligence
 Hyperlinking: Sites are bound to the structure
of the web by links
 Google’s breakthrough in search – PageRank –
uses link structure rather than type of content to
provide search results
 Ebay – a collective activity of it’s users. Ebay
grows as activity grows. Ebay, only provides a
platform
 Amazon – sells the same products as its
competitors. But they have higher user
participation – reviews, different ways of
interacting, user activity produces better results

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Harnessing Collective
Intelligence
Companies that have extended the above
 Wikipedia – an online encyclopedia: Radical
concepts
change in the dynamics of content creation.
Trust.
 Del.icio.us, Flickr – pioneered “folksonomy” (in
contrast to taxonomy) – collaborative
categorization.
 Cloudmark – spam filtering, by aggregation of
individual decisions
 Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, on which most of the
web runs, is relies on open-source – collective,
net-enabled intelligence

 Blogging
 Usable technology
The next-generation (easy
online customer to publish own content, rather than using
acquisition engine
Web2.0: Rich User Experience

 Applet (1992)
 Java delivered Applet (1995)
 Macromedia’s Flash based “Rich Internet
Applications”, many years ago
 Full scale applications happened only with Gmail
 Technology that Google used was termed AJAX,
which is a collection of
 XHTML, CSS
 DOM
 XML, XSLT
 XMLHttpRequest
 Javascript, to bind everything together

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Visual Design?

 Very user friendly

 Feature rich
 People are not shy to use color
 But lots of white
 More text than images
 Logos are rounded, colorful, playful?
 Again, very usable

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Design Patterns

 Long Tail: Small sites make up bulk of the

internet’s content. Leverage customer self
service and automatic data management
 Data is important: Try and create a unique
hard to replicate data
 Users add value: In form of data (reviews,
original content), behavior
 Self-learning apps: Applications should be
intelligent enough to gather user behavior (top
10 views, highest clicks, etc)
 Rights reserved?: Benefits come from
collective adoption and not restriction.
 Always a Beta?: On the web one does not need
to have software releases. Change as often, if
The next-generation online customer acquisition engine
Web2.0: What is proprietary? What is
the biz model?
 Desktop applications were, now they are open
source.
 Web applications were (advanced mail, etc), now
they are not
 If for a news company, news is not copyrighted,
and is freely distributable, how does the news
company make money?
 For some companies, such as MapQuest, it would
be data they can license. Companies like Google
are already giving this data out freely.

 So in the end, it is not products, not services, not

data. It is the amount of traffic you can garner.
More traffic could mean more revenue
The next-generation online customer acquisition engine
Web2.0: Beyond the web, beyond the
community: Web3?
 Making it collaborative.
 Making it a web enabled service.
 Moving completely away from the desktop
storage
 Moving away from desktop applications.

 Web3 – some thoughts: All pervasive, always on.

For the businesses.

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Implications for Media

 Publishers now no longer leverage all the content

 It is now easy to create content (Blogs)
 It is now easy to distribute content (RSS, feed-
readers)

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Are we going into a Bubble?

 Yes! There is a lot of frenzy to innovate.

 And lot of money to back it with.
 And some of the applications don’t really make
any sense! E.g., myLot. To me, even MySpace
does not make much sense, when compared to
Orkut!
 But again, innovation never goes waste

 Finally, you are safe if you are thinking about the

user, have a clear reasoning of how this is useful.
Don’t be a part of the fad

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Some creative Web2.0
applications?
 Zopa: Taking money lending to the masses
 Zimbra: Messaging and collaboration
 Tictrac: Online time tracking
 World66: A wiki on Travel
 NetworthIQ: Track your networth online
 OpenID: Single identity across all applications
 Foldershare: Keep your files online
 HousingMaps: Craigslist + GoogleMaps: A
mashup

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Thank You!

A journey of a thousand miles

begins with a single step.
-Chinese Proverb

Nimish Vohra
India Head, Regalix
+91 98453 34981 | Bangalore

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine