Crowded Mature Markets Don't Scare Blekko or RockMelt

                              
Two of the most heavily anticipated and visible product debuts in the past month have been Blekko, the slashtag-happy curated search engine powered by humans and fancy algorithms, and RockMelt, the new social-centric Web browser that drags Facebook alongside throughout your page perusing experience. Both took years of development, sport dozens of employees and raised significant capital. Both are intriguing enough to gain curiosity from early adopter tire kickers. And both are raising eyebrows from skeptics who wonder why otherwise smart folks would charge headlong into what are clearly mature markets with many high profile competitors. For every ubergeek checking out the latest toy, there is somebody else wondering if the world needs "yet another" search engine or Web browser.

Short answer: The world always needs new innovation, and there are countless examples of companies entering into crowded markets that needed some shaking up, who found tremendous success - including in these two markets.

Corollary: To consider either Blekko or RockMelt a success does not require either of them to topple the dominant market leader. Blekko is not a Google search replacement in most cases, and Rockmelt won't necessarily have you uninstalling Firefox. If they can get 1%, 5% or 20% of the market, it is significant indeed. (See: Don Dodge from 2007: Why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 Billion)

Google Takes On Crowded Search Market, Firefox Takes On IE

Google's entry into the search market at a time when Alta Vista could be considered the quality leader, with additional players such as Excite.com, Infoseek, HotBot and yes, Yahoo!, may seem like ancient history now, but the company looked at an industry which needed disrupting. It obviously worked. Meanwhile, Firefox emerged, through Mozilla, out of the ashes of Netscape, burned by the overwhelming market leader, Internet Explorer. It's now safely assumed Firefox is the strong #2 to IE, with Google's own Chrome holding the #3 position and Apple's Safari at #4.

One could highlight the opportunity for reinvention of new markets for some time strictly by looking at Apple and Google alone, even though there are many more examples, from big companies and small alike who have looked big brand names in the face and pushed ahead anyway.

Google Reader Emerges to Take On Bloglines

If you read Chris Wetherell's fantastic two part series about the birth of Google Reader, and Mihai Parparita's companion piece about how he joined the team, you can see significant skepticism over whether the world needed yet another feed reader when NetNewsWire and Bloglines did just fine. Reader now is easily the #1 share holder and Bloglines just closed up shop.

Apple Introduces an MP3 Player and a Phone!

In October of 2001, Apple introduced a hard-disk based MP3 music player. The MP3 player, called iPod, launched with competing players like the Creative Nomad Jukebox and Rio's line of digital audio devices already in the space. That they launched an MP3 player seemed like madness. To others, their launch of the iPhone was similarly crazy, even after the iPod's runaway success. Resident curmudgeon John Dvorak warned in 2007 that Apple should pull the plug, adding "It's the loyalists who keep promoting this device as if it is going to be anything other than another phone in a crowded market."

The crowded market had plenty of room for Apple.

One doesn't have to look too far away from this space to find that Google's Android OS took on the successful iPhone, as well as Symbian, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and others, and found opportunity to grow significant market share. Facebook launched into a market occupied by Friendster and MySpace. Gmail was introduced years after Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail had amassed millions of users apiece.

Is it going to be a challenge for Blekko and RockMelt to separate themselves from aggressive competitors? Absolutely. But often, empty markets without participants are empty for a reason - and crowded markets are there because there is potential seen by multiple players. Blekko and RockMelt each now have the opportunity to compete on their merits, and attract their own target users. It's not necessarily a zero sum game, and both seem to competitive enough to bring value, with enough humility to not trip over their own hubris.

The Third Wave of the Web Will Be Uniquely Personal

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the increasing attention crisis facing many of us as we work to find relevant and beneficial content from the many different sources that are challenging us for our time and energy. The gist? More content is being created in more places and "can't miss" content is increasing at the same rate, making many of us feel we are constantly in a state of missing things, forced to chew through the noise to find the best updates, but still falling short.

I believe we are on the cusp of a massive change and opportunity on the Web today - one that will no doubt be debated, but one that I am seeing morph in front of us, as the Web evolves, and initial problems are considered solved, while new ones crop up.

The First Wave: Information and Access

The first wave of the Web, and even precursors to the true Web, like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, was to deliver information, to connect information, to make it available, and eventually, searchable. The first wave saw the building up of an infrastructure of pages with links and images, audio and video, with structures based around links to show how pages and things were connected. This first wave of the Web was all about information posting, discovery, search and retrieval.

While it may initially have seemed the "winners" of this game would be those providing access to the Web, including ISPs like AOL and Earthlink, browser providers like Netscape, portals, such as Yahoo! and Excite or commerce engines like Amazon and eBay, the largest victor turned out to be Google, who made this massive information pile easily discoverable, monetized and fast to access. While many many other companies made money of information and various pieces of this wave, Google emerged on top of the first wave.

The Second Wave: Social

The second wave of the Web, which is still ongoing, is that of social. With an infrastructure in place to post information, transfer it from person to person and place to place, the friending experience of social connections was duplicated, from offline to online. Sites like Friendster and MySpace erected networks were you could connect person to person and see photos, get reminders on birthdays, and more. Plaxo connected your offline Rolodex. LinkedIn replicated your business network, and Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Foursquare have emerged to be powerhouses in terms of sharing your every move, by video, by photo, location check-in and status update.

Now, we connect to people and follow or friend one another the way we once searched for keywords and news listings. In this wave, Facebook looks like the clear winner, if there must be just one, setting the agenda for how friend relationships are measured, and counting registrations in the high hundreds of millions. YouTube is the default for sharing video, while Twitter has carved out a solid niche for short updates, and Foursquare is the location space innovator, but Facebook is the giant in the second wave, whose numbers dwarf all challengers.

The Third Wave: Personal

Now that the world's information is posted, linked, indexed and searchable, and friends are connecting, sharing, liking, and following, the quest is on to streamline the noise and give the Web another dimension - one not measured by the data, or who led you to the data, but you as an individual. The third wave of the Web, I believe, is going to be about personalization by individual based on that individual's preferences - explicitly stated or otherwise.

The declaration of the next wave of the Web being personal is not shared universally, of course. Some say the next wave is all about mobile. Others may say the next wave is all about location. But the right approach to 'personal' absolutely encompasses each of these things. With our smartphones and tablets being increasingly powerful, they are practically an extension of us, and we are relying on them to discover relevant things, content, places and products for us as individuals. Similarly, our location is an ingredient of who we are - for where we are impacts our decisions, and what tips are relevant, be it for news, for restaurants, lodging, dating or anything else. So "personal" as an individual is both local and mobile.



   my6sense: Personalized Streams for Me on my Mobile

Personal As In Me.

A lot of services say they are "personal", when in fact, most of what they do is actually social.

These services may leverage your social graph to provide personalized recommendations based on what friends or other people similar to you may like - much like television shows group people of similar demographics to guess what commercials are best suited for which episodes in which time slots. The hope may be that the more your friends like something, the more likely you are to click it or buy it. Peer pressure, you know. Meanwhile, other services say they are personal because you have specifically provided them with information about you and what you like, which goes partway to discovering your interests, but is incomplete, and possibly inaccurate, as you may want to indicate that you are something that you are not, or you may have overlooked some of your own interests in the name of rapid completion.

Beyond these initial attempts is a new wave of companies trying to crack the code of the real you. Of course, my6sense is one of those companies. Our goal is to deliver a personalized experience in all possible aspects of your life, finding the right information for you at the right time in the right context, based on you as an individual. But we are not alone. Take, for example, Hunch.com, which is talking about personalizing the Internet, and says they can build a taste profile for you, based on your own unique interests and tastes. Also, in October, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch previewed Gravity, founded by former MySpace executives. In that piece, which he headlined as "The Personalization War", he said "I saw my own Interest Graph based only on my Facebook and Twitter streams over the last several months and it’s scary-accurate."

Recommendations from Hunch.com for Me

Gravity says they will help "The right information find you. Hunch says it "Personalizes the Internet". You've heard me talk about my6sense for some time - discovering your "Digital intuition". Besides the crazy folks like us who are thinking about this constantly, there are other smart companies on the case. Start with personal recommendations from TiVo, Amazon and Netflix. Look at Google Reader Magic and Google's Priority Inbox for Gmail. Look also at LinkedIn's purchase of Mspoke for personal recommendations and Facebook's splitting of the Most Recent feed and that of the News Feed.

Get Inside My Head

The companies looking ahead to the next wave realize it is not enough to serve up the same content to everyone, as each of us is unique. We are not our friends any more than we are our neighbors or our colleagues or even our own spouses. Our interests are unique and we all want to find content tailored to our own interests. While some people are battling with the challenge of information overload and sheer noise, smart engineers are working to solve these problems - the incredible test of mimicking the human brain's ranking function, and learning what to show when, and what to make a lower priority.

The continuing rapid growth of information creation and sharing, combined with pervasive connectivity, increased capability of smartphones and other mobile devices and the growth of location is all pointing us into a direction where the services on the other end have more potential to know you than those of years past, and you have the ability to be inspired by the right information in the right place more than ever before. This is a wave, one that benefits from all these mega-changes in the Web, that small companies and big ones alike are seeing. Maybe there's another big winner in there, just like there was in the last two. Regardless, the direction is clear. Show me my Web for me.

Disclosure: I am the vice president of marketing for my6sense. Hunch and Gravity can be assumed competitors, while other companies mentioned can be considered potential partners, peers or competition, dependent on their own individual business situations.

Buzzooka iApp Enhances Google Buzz Mobile Experience

One could be forgiven for thinking all the development around the Google Buzz app ecosystem is weighted heavily toward Android. Sharing a corporate parent, integration between the two platforms, tapping into Google's location and maps database, and the close integration with Gmail besides has made the two a good pair. But there's still a ton of folks out there on iPhones and other Apple devices who have made Buzz part of their social experience. For them, one great option is a new app called Buzzooka - which not only has a fun name, but is fully-featured and intuitive as well.

Available for $1.99 on the iTunes store, Buzzooka replicates the Buzz experience, providing streams from those you follow, a link to your own Google profile, a tab for nearby updates to the stream, and integrated people search. But while Google keeps Buzz embedded in Gmail, making the experience at times feel heavy and slow, Buzzooka just flies - with the most well-known equivalent being that of Twitter for the iPhone. It even offers the option to pull down to refresh.


   Seeing Active Buzz Threads in Buzzooka from My Stream and Profile

In Buzzooka, Google Buzz entries display the user's avatar and shared content. You can click on any piece of content to add a like or a comment, mute the thread, or visit the poster's profile. The app lets you see active comment and like streams, complete with small avatars for those engaging, and jump in yourself, or simply post updates directly from within the app.


   Viewing Rich Content and HTML In Buzzooka

Buzzooka has some nice twists in the app, especially for being so new. First, the app displays full Web content within itself instead of launching you to the iDevice's Safari browser. Second, it even plays rich media content, such as YouTube videos, which may have been shared. And if you click over to the "Nearby" tab, and scroll through recent updates in your area, the embedded Google map shifts along with the user's location as provided.


   Liking an Entry in Buzzooka, Scrolling Nearby Updates

You can configure the Buzzooka experience to show a specific number of posts per screen, and a predetermined number of comments per post. The most active discussions are collapsed, showing the first and last, with the option to expand.


   Searching for People, Changing Prefs in Buzzooka

Buzzooka leverages the Google Buzz API, of course, just as many other clients, including TweetDeck, Seesmic and my6sense have. The greater the partner ecosystem, the greater the network's chance for continued growth.

You can find Buzzooka on the iTunes Store here.

Disclosure: I am vice president of marketing for my6sense. Our Android App also offers Buzz consumption and interaction, which could be an assumed competitor to Buzzooka. Also, we are active Google Buzz API partners.

Sonos' Wireless Dock for iDevices: Simple and Sweet

The last year has forever changed the way I consume and enjoy music. The addition of Spotify to my life (and soon the rest of you in the US) made iTunes a vestigal program good only for synching iPad apps. The addition of Sonos leveraged the power of the Web to tap untold number of electronic music streams from around the world, wirelessly throughout the house. That's why I followed my initial test unit with the purchase of two more, and why my YouTube account is full of videos of my kids rocking out to great sound. Today, a small companion piece, a wireless dock for both iPod and iPhone, arrived in my home, and it makes getting music trapped on all those iDevices incredibly simple to get onto my Sonos. It's simple, small, and sounds great.

Thanks to an address mixup, my review wireless dock unit reached me today, a week or so after the true gadget blogs got their hands on the device. But that didn't make the experience any worse for the wear. After opening the envelope marked "Urgent", the device was streaming music from my iPod Touch to my Sonos players in five minutes or less.

The Sonos S5 systems I have in my home are notable for two primary things - there is no digital display, making the device appear as one big speaker, and also, no way to push physical media. No CD slot. No tape deck. No iPod Dock. The Wireless Dock for iPhone and iPod fills that gap, for the many Apple geeks who want to get music from their iTunes to the best speakers in the house.

Adding the Wireless Dock to Sonos, With AutoPlay in the Office

Setting up the device was truly simple. I plugged it in, added the component to my network using Sonos' desktop software, and it saw my iPod as a music source. Now, I can stream the content from this device (or any friends' devices they bring with them) just by plugging it in and selecting it from Sonos. There's still something magical about clicking pause or play on the computer and having it stop a device wirelessly, but Sonos gets it done. I can even control my iPod Touch with my Android phone using the Andronos software on the Android Market.

My Docked iPod Can Stream to My Sonos Speakers

The retail price for the wireless dock is $119, so it's not the cheapest peripheral ever, but it's a solid add-on for existing Sonos equipment owners, and the device is polished enough to have been made by Apple itself. To be honest, Sonos' hardware is some of the best designed gadgetry in the business, beautiful enough to sit in every major room in my house. That they also have access to all my best sound makes music to my ears.

Disclosure: I received the wireless dock from Sonos for free. I received my initial Sonos S5 unit free of cost as well, and have since purchased multiple devices. In theory, I should tell you I also have free access to Spotify Pro as well, but I'd pay for that too if given the chance. :)