About Matthew Buckland

Recent Posts by Matthew Buckland

LeapPad: The Tablet That Kids Can’t Seem to Put Down

This is an odd review for me to write, because my opinion doesn’t count. It’s not designed for me, it’s designed for kids. But kids suck at writing gadget reviews, so I dug deep into my inner toddler to seek out any childish delight in the LeapPad, a low-tech iPad for kids that’s packed with educational apps.

As a geek-tastic adult, my first instinct was to label the LeapPad a complete failure.

It uses outdated technology. Its touchscreen is an old skool “resistive” panel instead of the smart, smooth capacitive touchscreens used by most of today’s modern tablets and phones.

Moreover the graphics are poor. They are low resolution, pixelated and blocky, and the interface is generally clunky. The device’s chunky plastic shell reminds me of the 90s and Fisher Price tug-alongs.

It gets worse: You have to use a stylus on the LeapPad, not your fingers — and we know how much children like to use their fingers. Sure, say the LeapPad’s manufacturers, this teaches your children the fine motor skills to hold a pen. It’s a convincing reason — but I can’t help but feel it’s really because of the poor touchscreen.

The app store is fairly expensive and the offerings on it are not as varied as you’d find on a full blown app store like Apple’s AppStore or Android’s App Market. The unit also runs on batteries, no recharging from the mains, which makes it eco-unfriendly, and a pain to keep swapping out batteries, which run out fast (and are pretty expensive these days).

But having said all this, I think you should buy it.

But the kids love it
Here’s the rub — the children I tested it on (a three-year old and a six-year old), loved it. They couldn’t put it down. In fact, they quickly abandoned the iPad they had been using for the past two years and quickly became obsessed with the LeapPad. Maybe the LeapPad manufacturers are onto something. Maybe it’s because while the LeapPad is no technological marvel, it hits the spot for the little people.

There are subtle features that make it attractive to children, like the ability for a child to build their own profile and stick their own face on that profile, displayed throughout the device’s OS. Narcissism is big in the world of toddlers, so it instantly gives them buy-in and makes the device feel familiar to them. The apps that come with the Leappad are also directly tailored for children, both in educational and entertainment value.

The app market may not be varied, but the quality of the apps is high and they are all focused on children – in the ‘grown up’ app stores this can be hit or miss. The apps were designed with kids in mind and you get the feeling quite a bit of thought and precision went into their design.

Hi-tech or hi-kid?
If you want to give your child a head start and get them using tablets with educational apps, is the LeapPad a good route to go? It’s a tough call. My feeling is that if you are price-sensitive, and not a technophile family, then head for the LeapPad. Over a one-month period, our iPad developed cobwebs and we became a “LeapPad family”.

However, the iPad too has plenty of educational apps and it is a far superior device. The only problem is that you don’t know what you are getting in the app store and have to dig deep and spend time finding the good stuff in the app store. But the iPad is quite an expensive children’s toy and mine permanently has a degree of snot and slime on it (Also some other stuff that I don’t want to know about). A possible option is to head over to an online classified site like Gumtree and pick up a second-hand iPad 1 that is already a bit roughed up.

Gear it or Burn it?
I’m going to Gear it. I think the makers of the LeapPad are on to something, but they need to pull up their socks and do some work on their device. The LeapPad is technologically stuck in the stone-age and the manufacturers appears blissfully unaware of the massive advances of the past five years. On the other hand, I can’t argue with the price, or my children’s obsession over the device. They love it. Who really cares what I think?

Who it’s for:
If you’re reading this, it’s not for you. It may very well be for your kids, though.

What we liked:

• Kids love it. Nuff said.
• Apps are clearly designed for kids, and are high quality in fun and education

What we didn’t like:

• Old skool tech, old old skool styling.
• Having to use batteries instead of charging. OK, yes, you can buy rechargeables, but that adds a whack to the cost.

 

.mobi is Dead and It’s Back to the Future

There was a time where it made sense to have a separate mobile site, running in parallel with your old faithful desktop website. We put these mobile-only sites under domains like “m.myveryspecialsite.com” or “myveryspecialsite.mobi”.

The argument was that because our online offering was being accessed via a different medium with different capabilities, we therefore needed clearly distinct sites. Mobile phones then were simple beasts, because they were mainly just phones with a bit of web browsing thrown in. These phones were not capable of showing complex, visually busy sites, so it made sense for website owners to just “start again” and create a simple, standalone companion mobile site.

Well, it’s not so obvious any more. The landscape has changed. The argument that you need a separate mobile site isn’t quite so compelling any more. In fact, in many cases, it doesn’t make sense to split your site in two anymore, and here are three reasons why:

1. Enter the smartphone: Mobile devices are more powerful and can render richer content these days. What this means is that you can create a richer mobile site that is much closer (although different) to your desktop site. In most cases, you can display many of the elements of your main site on a smartphone mobile screen. When this happens, the argument that you need to create a completely new mobile-focused site wears thin, because it’s now probably easier for you to create the same rich website as your desktop one, but just reworked for a narrower screen.

You may argue that vast majority of people on this earth still use simple phones, and yes you would be right. But this is the point you are missing: I don’t care about the now, a brief transient period in the world’s history, I care about the way it will be. It’s what you call a long-term business strategy.

2. Enter the social web: People are sharing content like never before. Sites are reporting that their biggest referrers are Facebook and Twitter, with Google now relegated to third. People share regardless of platform. Someone will share an article on their desktop computer, and it will be picked up by someone via their phone or tablet device. As a result it doesn’t make any sense to split your site, and share separate addresses, one for your mobile site and one for your desktop site. It makes sense to keep one, unified address. The more universal your site is, the less confusion and the more power it holds.

3. Multiple devices: There’s no such thing as a big screen and a small screen any more. There are now screens of multiple and variable sizes. You want your web application to look good on a 43″ TV screen, on a desktop computer, on a tablet, on a phone and even the oddly-sized Samsung Galaxy Note (Is it a tablet? Is it a phone?). It makes no sense to build separate sites for these multiple screen sizes, which will keep varying in size as more gadgets are produced. The economical answer is to build once and build to fit on any screen.

So where does that leave your “.mobi” or “m.” strategy. Well these are merely going to be domains that are marketing devices, pointing to your desktop site — and if a user happens to view it on a mobile site, your server will pick up the device type, and the site will dynamically adjust. In fact there may be no point in having these separate mobile domains at all in the future. They may just become defunct.

You may argue that powerful smartphones and tablets are able to view your full website, so why would you need to create customised sites. This is a cop-out. You do need to make adjustments on your site that play to the strengths of a particular screen size, Mobile OS, or device. But this is the wrapping, not the core.

Mobilize on the front-end or the back-end?
There are two ways to mobilise your site. You can do it on the front-end or you can take the back-end approach. An article on Memeburn a while back on responsive web design explored how a website can adjust dynamically, on the fly to a screen size it finds itself on. This is hardcore. It probably demands a large download and you may find yourself making compromises on your design. It may be too hardcore for now, but this is the future.

The other way to display your mobile version is via your site’s back-end. Your main desktop site, which is actually now all your multi-device, multi-screen sites rolled into one, would detect a device and then decide which theme or style sheet to render to suit the screen. The difference here is that it is all one site, using the same database, using the same articles and most importantly using the same web address.

A mobile-only online business doesn’t make sense to me any more, as does a business that just plays to the desktop web. Sites and services should be one thing, reformatted, on every device. Granted it may not be the now, but it’s certainly the future.

The Closing Web: Chris Anderson on FREE & Radical Pricing and The Long Tail

If you don’t know who Chris Anderson is, you don’t really understand the internet. He’s one of the great technology thinkers of our time who has given us new ways of understanding how the medium has influenced business and society, and where it is all going.

Anderson is the editor of Wired Magazine, an authority on tech culture, trends and innovation. Time Magazine called Anderson one of the world’s 100 most influential thinkers.

The Wired editor is best known for popularising two key ideas that have helped shape internet thinking today: The Long Tail and Freemium. Companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix are long-tail companies, using the internet’s ability to reach a wide, varied and niched audience at fractional costs. Freemium is the idea that if you offer basic products or services for free, and charge for advanced features, you’ll be more successful. These ideas have been espoused in his two best-selling books, Free: The Future of a Radical Price and The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More .

Anderson is due to speak at Discovery’s Leadership Summit in the coming weeks with other luminaries such as former US vice-president and environmentalist Al Gore.

In this interview, part one of a two-part series, Anderson speaks about how our internet experience is moving from open to closed platforms, and how this presents challenges for consumers and opportunities for producers. He also touches on how HTML5 could be the web’s saviour — creating a future high-fidelity, application-like web.

Anderson gives us his thoughts on Google’s latest attempt at social, Google+, and how it’s making up for Twitter’s shortcomings, and shares some insights about his third book.

Matthew Buckland: You speak about the new “App Economy” — do you get the feeling that the web is decidedly out of fashion these days and that people are opting for controlled platforms (such as Apple’s app store)?

Chris Anderson: You’re referring to my “web is dead” article of last year?

MB: Yes

CA: I love the web, I hope the web isn’t dead, but there is a demonstrable shift in user behaviour towards mobile. And mobile brings with it two things: First of all there is a shift towards apps. Mobiles tend to be optimised for apps because of smaller screens … The other aspect of the web, which was implicit in your question, is the notion of “openness” which is built into the web. And increasingly we see closed platforms that happen to use the web as their transport and display – sites like Facebook — which are not open.

In the definition we chose, Facebook does not count as the “open web”. Your iPad does not count as the “open web”, Xbox Live does not count as the “open web”. They use the internet as transport and sometimes they use HTML as the display technology and sometimes they render in a browser. By and large, they are not open ecosystems and therefore don’t fall into Tim Berners-Lee’s original definition of “the web”.

So I would say there is very much a shift away from the wide-open web to closed platforms. Some of those closed platforms are on mobile, some of them are closed platforms within browsers, but we’re definitely seeing a shift — and frankly it worries me as a consumer but it’s a huge opportunity as a producer. So I am conflicted in that respect.

I love closed platforms as a way to build a business, but as a consumer I prefer open platforms. That’s not hypocrisy, it’s wave particle duality if you will, but that’s where we are.

MB: Why do you think people are opting for these closed, controlled platforms?

CA: Well, do you have any Apple products yourself?

MB: Yes I do…

CA: Well do you now need to ask that question? Apple has proven that a controlled experience can be a very good experience — that with control comes some certainty over the consumer experience. They can dictate how to get stuff, how to use it. And that can be a really smooth experience. Openness tends to bring with it chaos. I happen to like chaos myself, I quite like the web, but every now and then you just want something simple that works. For all that one may object to closed platforms, they tend to be quite a smooth experience.

MB: So what does this say about society? Is it a case of life mimicking art? We live in controlled societies… is this a case of the internet catching up with reality?

CA: Yes that’s a good question. I suppose you’re probably right in some respects, that we do need rules and policies and constraints to make life bearable. I can tell you as a father of children that if it weren’t for rules it’ll be Lord of the Flies. As humans we like freedom, but we also like predictability and some boundaries within which to work. Any designer will tell you that constraints are liberating. Tell me where the walls are and I will innovate within those walls. So I think there is something to that.

Clearly if you look at the app economy, half a million apps or something out there, there are very controlled sets of rules about how to write an app and how to get it in, but once those rules are set there is a huge opportunity for innovation between those walls as we’ve seen. So yes, I think that there is a place for rules and constraints and there is a place for unbridled innovation… you need both.

MB: Will there be a web in 10, 20 years time?

CA: Absolutely. In my article I made that very clear. Right now we’re seeing a shift. Commercial content is tending to shift toward these more closed platforms. Other content such as community, amateur content or content that doesn’t intend to have a business model tends to seek openness for the sake of the largest possible audience.

So you could imagine a bi-polar world where there is a completely free world that isn’t intended for business. This is the world of human-to-human communication and that exists in the open web. Then there is the commercial web which is increasingly closed. That again leans to your point that the “web reflects human society”. You have your job, and you have your life. Your interactions at work are paid interactions. Your interactions with your friends and family are unpaid. The two worlds coincide and superimpose, but the notion of commercial and non-commercial existing in the same domain is completely in line with our civilization, so I don’t see any problem there.

MB: One of the big problems about the world of mobile applications is that you have to develop multiple apps for multiple devices. It’s an industry in tremendous flux. Do you think we will in the future see a universal application standard, so you can develop once for all devices?

CA: That’s what we all want. There is some hope that HTML5 could represent that… we’ll see. We’re pretty bullish on HTML5. We’re certainly developing our apps with that in mind.

With universal standards comes the fear of the lowest common denominator. We love the web, but let’s face it — the web is not a high-resolution design platform. It’s really difficult to create beautiful and predictable rendering designs on the web. You can do it with Flash but then you break all sorts of web conventions. You can do it with fancy HTML, but then it doesn’t work in half the browsers — there’s lots of browsers out there, lots of platforms, different aspect ratios, pixel densities, operating system… some places support different versions of HTML, Javascript, Flash or not Flash, or Silverlight. We’ve been struggling with this for 20 years and it’s not getting any better.

That’s what happens when you have a completely open innovation environment. It’s very hard to establish standards that are universal. I hope HTML 5 can advance on this, but I don’t think it’s going to be the silver bullet to solve all of our problems. Right now it’s pretty simple: it’s an Apple world. You develop for iOS and Android — and you’re done.

As there is more competition, it’ll be more complex. We’re going to bet on HTML5, we’re going to accept that it is going to limit us somewhat in design fidelity — but we will accept that for the sake of production efficiency and flexibility across platforms. We’re going to continue to operate in an app environment because browsers just aren’t there yet.

Maybe someday browsers will support standards that allow us the design scale that we want — in which case we won’t need to ship an app. That would be great but we are not there yet.

MB: So a future website could actually look pretty much like an application on an iPhone or iPad device?

CA: It could do. We’re not wedded to executables, we’re not wedded to applications. We are wedded to a high-fidelity consumer experience. Right now an application is the only way for us to achieve that. If tomorrow’s browsers allow us to achieve the same thing, using the web model of content with the application being in the browser itself, that would be great — but we haven’t seen that yet.

MB: What would your advice be to Apple? Obviously HTML 5 threatens its turf. We’ve seen what some major media companies like the Financial Times have done in this space, with their web app versus the iOS app.

CA: I have learned long ago not to try and give advice to Apple. They don’t need my advice, they are doing fine on their own. The great thing about Apple is that they have an extremely coherent vision of one way of doing things — and again I love clear and coherent vision. I know how to navigate with it to accommodate them or navigate around them. Clarity is good.

But I don’t think it’s the only vision out there. It’s good to see Android rising as a competing vision, but there will be others. My advice to Apple is “keep doing what you’re doing” because that’s really helpful in establishing a direction and executing well on that. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where Apple was the only company, but I wouldn’t want to live a world where Apple wasn’t there at all.

MB: Should Apple embrace HTML5 and this new way of creating free apps outside its proprietary operating system? Is that the way Apple should go?

CA: Again, I am in no position to be prescribing any path for Apple. I think Apple understands HTML5 certainly better than I do. I have no doubt they will integrate it where appropriate.

MB: What’s your take on Googarola, the Google acquisition of Motorola Mobility?

CA: I don’t claim to know anything special about it. What do you mean?

MB: Well essentially — Google acquiring a device manufacturer and moving into hardware. What is your take on that?

CA: I don’t know if that’s what they are doing. You say they are moving into hardware, but there are other possible explanations — they could be buying a patent portfolio, they could be buying some technology spinning off others, they could get into hardware and they could spin something off the hardware side. Those are all valid approaches, but I am not privileged to their thinking on that.

MB: So do you think it would be a good idea for Google to move into the consumer hardware space? And what advantage do you think that would give them?

CA: I really don’t want to speculate on that.

MB: For me, what makes today’s web and mobile sites or platforms successful is “simplicity”. We live in an age of distraction and we have lots competing for our attention. Do you think simplicity, the concept, is key to the successes of many of the large successful internet companies of today?

CA: Yes, I think that’s well put. Simplicity is one way to put it. It’s lowering the barrier to entry. It’s clear what to do and it’s clear how to do it. That’s crucial. I think what we’ve learned from Apple is focusing on clear easy benefits. It’s the key to their success. All companies have lessons to learn there.

Google has clearly made some mistakes in social by building products that were too complex to both use and understand. I think Google+ is an effort to make something simpler and more obvious. It’s obviously more complex than Twitter.

One could argue that for all Twitter’s success, its simplicity is also a constraint in that it’s hard for the service to evolve to address secondary issues of true conversations without adding a whole layer of complexity that’s contrary to their mission. I do take your point, and broadly, simplicity is something every successful product has — but it can’t be the only thing it has.

MB: It seems you’re quite weary on commenting on what Apple should or shouldn’t do — but here’s a big question… We’ve see how Android has grown in numbers, so do you think that Apple should open source its platform like that of Google’s Android?

CA: I am not going to go there. My tablet is an iPad, and my phone is Android… I live in both worlds. I am huge open-source evangelist. As you know my robotics company is 100 percent open source. I fully understand the advantages of open source, but that said, I love my tablet. I think that the Apple model, a closed system in the hands of a visionary genius, is a beautiful thing. So I am not really dogmatic about this, I think there is a place for both open and closed. I wouldn’t want the world to be only one or only the other. I think Apple is doing just fine. They don’t need to deviate from a successful model.

MB: Looking at the open ecosystems and the closed ecosystems that you’ve come across, what would you say are the strengths and weaknesses of either of these?

CA: There are books to be written on that. It’s a big question. Broadly the strength of openness is that you get a breadth of participation and lots of new ideas come in. There’s lots of energy, there are applications you wouldn’t have thought of and you could do faster, cheaper and better in open.

The downside of open is that, in the absence of clear leadership and vision, it can become chaotic and over-burdened with things that are very interesting to software engineers but not very interesting to the rest of the world. We’ve definitely seen lots of open source software projects become over-complicated. And to your earlier point about simplicity, the genius of Firefox is that in the hands of strong leaders they’ve managed to make it a simple and easy to use product, despite all the bells and whistles that software engineers might want to put in. So I do think that openness is an incredibly powerful technique, but requires very a special class of strong leaders with clear visions to be successful.

The success of closed is that you have the traditional form of command-and-control organisation, so that a clear vision can create a good product without having to jump through all sorts of hoops in inventing new organisational structures. In the open source world if you have a clear vision that’s not enough, you also need to create an organisational structure that incentivises all these volunteers to follow your vision. In a company it’s really easy, you pay them and you tell them what to do. So I would say that leadership and vision is easier to execute in a closed system than it is in an open system. But in those rare cases where you have leaders with both vision and organisational skills, an open system can get you there faster.

MB: What technologies do you think are defining our future in the web and the media world?

CA: Obviously the shift toward mobile and tablets and smartphones in particular is the biggest driver. I think what we’re seeing here is an opportunity to rethink the user interface, rethink the experience of consuming media. It’s rethinking pricing, rethinking how we get media, rethinking what social means as a form of marketing. So it’s like the web was 20 years ago, it’s a brand new domain. Nobody really knows anything and we’re all groping in the dark. We’ve learned a lot from the web about what works and what doesn’t work and I think that we have an opportunity to right some wrongs.

For example, on the tablet, this time these platforms have come out with an eCommerce model built in via the iTunes or Android stores. This means we have the capacity to try different pricing and economic models. Before we didn’t have the physical ability so everything had to default toward banner ads as a business model.

But now we have the capacity to do everything from Freemium to micropayments to pure paid content. We have the capacity to integrate with social and really understand what people want, how they get content in a way we didn’t have 20 years ago on the web.

Obviously we continue to do print and the web as well as we can and innovate there, but mobile is an opportunity for us to really come at these questions of what business are we in anew and through radical experiments in trying to figure out what consumer behaviour is going to look like and how people want to interact with our products on tablets and smartphones. As Wired magazine it’s our job to be a laboratory for these things. You’ll see more and more experiments coming out in that.

MB: It’s been some time since you wrote your book. Give us some successful examples of freemium.

CA: Since I wrote the book, the app economy has risen. Right now freemium is really the only major business model in the app economy since the rise of the iPhone, the iPad and the Android Marketplace. The shift of consumer behaviour from traditional desktop to mobile has all been built around freemium. There are many examples prior to the app economy but they are largely on the web. The rise of the app economy and the dominance of freemium within that has been the big new trend.

MB: What’s your take on Google+? Do you think that it is a fresh new take on social networking, or do you think just more noise?

CA: I like it a lot. I think it’s early days yet so I am still trying to figure out quite how to use it and get critical mass, but I think it solves one of the problems of Twitter which is a lack of a secondary engagement stream, and the notion of comment and of being able to engage in a conversation with people that doesn’t have to be broadcast to all of your followers.

I like that a lot. I like the multimedia aspects of it. It’s really easy to share pictures and videos and get a little preview of the links. I think that it’s still harder to navigate than Twitter. There is still the feeling that it doesn’t have the same critical mass of Twitter. It’s coming out of the gate, because you can write longer which I like and you can include photographs.

It’s become a more contemplative or thoughtful place than Twitter. Google+ feels less newsy and ideas are more fleshed out than condensed into snippets like Twitter, but by the same token it feels less urgent. Google+ is a more contemplative place and more incoherent. I haven’t yet managed to create a stream that feels as focused as my Twitter stream, but these are early days yet.

I would rather post on Google+ than I would on Twitter mostly because I am just not funny enough or pithy enough to get my thoughts down to 140 characters. So I like having a little more room, I like having a comment stream. I like engaging in a proper back-and-forth with people that doesn’t have to be broadcast to my followers.

That said, I am still on Twitter, I find it very useful for little broadcast messages where I want to point people to a link so I think [the answer is] somewhere between those…

I am pretty bullish on Google+. I do think that it’s going to work this time. It’s relatively well designed and it gets better by the day. I am a big fan of Google’s overall efforts and integration across the products. I pretty much live on Google with Gmail, Calendar and Docs and all that. I want this to succeed. That said, I am not giving up on Twitter any time soon.

MB: Your third book… can you tell us a bit more about it and the ideas you’re exploring there?

CA: This is based on an article I published in Wired last year called “The New Industrial Revolution”. It’s about the extension of the web’s revolutionary innovation model into the new world. Basically it’s about how the “Maker Movement“, which is using democratised tools of production, is providing a new manufacturing model and can be a new way to make things — real things that both allows more people to do it… a longtail of products that don’t just necessarily fit the mass-production model and possibly the future of manufacturing the developed world where labour costs may be high, but innovation potential is higher yet.

Read part two of this interview on the Future of Media and Journalism. The above: with additional reporting by Michelle Atagana and Steven Norris.

China, Russia, South Africa….and the Facebook Connection

There is something going on in China, Russia and South Africa. Via various internet investments and creations, these three countries combined have built up major stakes in some of the world’s biggest sites and social networks.

Russian investment company, Digital Sky Technologies (DST), now owns about 7-10% of Facebook by various estimates, putting the company among Facebook’s biggest owners. Via its sister company Mail.ru, another 2.4% of Facebook is held. Recently, according to the New York Times, DST ploughed a further $50-million into Facebook.

DST also owns about five percent of the popular social gaming company Zynga and another five percent of the prominent shopping-coupon company Groupon. The company is now apparently eyeing a piece of Twitter, but then again who isn’t?

The Mail.ru Group, which has grown into the biggest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world, owns 100% of Russian social networking site Odnoklassniki, and has a significant stake in the country’s other major networking site, Vkontakte. DST also owns the early-web era instant messaging service ICQ, an interesting investment because the service is somewhat of a fading star.

The Chinese and South African connection
There is also a Chinese, and even a South African connection to the Russian group.

South African emerging markets media giant Naspers, an $18-billion company, also owns a stake (reported at 28.7%) in DST, and therefore indirectly holds a stake in Facebook.

Naspers also owns a chunk in TenCent’s QQ, China’s largest instant messenger and social network. In December 2010, QQ.com ranked 9th overall in Alexa’s internet rankings, ahead of Twitter which ranked 10th. According to Business Day, TenCent had about 637-million registered users in December 2010.

Ironically Naspers hails from a newspaper background, but started to make serious money via pay-TV operations in South Africa and throughout Africa. Naspers operates from a home market with a comparatively small internet user base of anywhere between 7-12 million South African users, so this may explain why the company has been aggressively fishing beyond its borders for internet properties.

Naspers is headed by a tough, shrewd and ambitious Cape Town-based CEO in Koos Bekker. At home, the company owns the largest internet media player in News24, which attracts a modest — by world standards — five million monthly users. It also owns a piece of the South African MXit, a mobile-app-based IM now claiming around 25-30-million world-wide users.

In 2001 Naspers bought the 46,5% piece of Tencent for $32m, making it the largest shareholder in the then three-year-old company. Then QQ had just 18-million accounts. As Tencent grew and turned into the world’sthird-largest dot-com by market value, the value of Naspers’ stake jumped more than 400-fold to exceed R14bn.

With these impressive figures, it appears that Tencent’s QQ platform may be challenging Facebook as the world’s largest social networking platform. They are not exactly comparable platforms because QQ is an IM first and a social network second. For Facebook it is the other way round. But a broad definition of “social network” — a somewhat abused term these days — could put the companies in the same category.

In September 2010, Naspers snapped up yet another social network, but this time in the US. The company bought a “controlling interest” in social networking site Multiply. Multiply, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida,reportedly has more than 11-million registered users.

Naspers also owns Indian social networking play Ibibo, as well as various ecommerce platforms in Eastern Europe, South America and other parts of Asia. The company holds 25% of Singapore-based BuzzCity, a mobile media company that runs a global advertising network on the mobile internet.

Memeburn has it on good authority that Naspers sometime back had an opportunity to buy a piece of business networking site LinkedIn, but turned it down at the time — a decision which has caused some regret at the company.

The Russians are not coming, they have in fact arrived
On the other side of the world, the other figure leading this new emerging markets internet charge is the low-profile Internet tycoon Yury Milner. Milner is also the chairman of Mail.ru.

The shaven-headed businessman trained as a physicist in Moscow before starting out as a manager at the World Bank. He began investing in the Russian Internet in the late 1990s and founded Mail.ru in 2001.

A report in The New York Times noted that if DST had invested 50 million dollars (37.5 million euros) more in Facebook, its combined stake with Mail.ru would be worth about 500 million dollars.

Mail.ru made its debut on the London stock exchange in November and was valued at 5.71 billion dollars on flotation.

In a rare interview with business daily Vedomosti late in December 2010, Milner said that Mail.ru had “chosen a strategy to have a global expertise in a very narrow sector”.

He said that in every Internet sector, there was a tendency for one single firm to become dominant, and that the company had picked Facebook as the leader in English-language social networking.

“On the Internet there is a tendency for ‘winner takes all’ and a leader emerges in every niche with surprising consistency,” he said. “This is the main issue that we look at. When we made our first investment in Facebook, it was not obvious that it was a winner.”

Milner said he planned to invest the proceeds of the IPO in Internet projects, which he called “one of the most promising areas for the next 10 years”. The Mail.ru Group and DST are part owned by Alisher Usmanov, a Russian billionaire of Uzbek origin who first invested in DST in 2008 and is also a major shareholder in Arsenal football club.

The Silicon Valleys of emerging markets
The first ten years were all about Silicon Valley — the undisputed king of web innovation and home to the great internet properties that have defined the online landscape of today. The next ten may see the famous Silicon Valley share its mantle with new and rising centres of internet innovation in key emerging markets like Asia, Eastern Europe, South America and Africa.

Disclosure: Matthew Buckland previously worked for Naspers’ News24.com. He is now involved in his own internet startup. Originally posted on Silicon Valley Watcher.

Emerging Market Social Networking Superpowers: China, Russia & South Africa

There is something going on in China, Russia and South Africa. Via various internet investments and creations, these three countries combined have built up major stakes in some of the world’s biggest sites and social networks.

Russian investment company, Digital Sky Technologies (DST), now owns about 7-10% of Facebook byvarious estimates, putting the company among Facebook’s biggest owners. Via its sister company Mail.ru, another 2.4% of Facebook is held. Recently, according to the New York Times, DST ploughed a further $50-million into Facebook.

DST also owns about five percent of the popular social gaming company Zynga and another five percent of the prominent shopping-coupon company Groupon. The company is now apparently eyeing a piece of Twitter, but then again who isn’t?

The Mail.ru Group, which has grown into the biggest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world, owns 100% of Russian social networking site Odnoklassniki, and has a significant stake in the country’s other major networking site, Vkontakte. DST also owns the early-web era instant messaging service ICQ, an interesting investment because the service is somewhat of a fading star.

The Chinese and South African connection
There is also a Chinese, and even a South African connection to the Russian group.

South African emerging markets media giant Naspers, an $18-billion company, also owns a stake (reported at 28.7%) in DST, and therefore indirectly holds a stake in Facebook.

Naspers also owns a chunk in TenCent’s QQ, China’s largest instant messenger and social network. In December 2010, QQ.com ranked 9th overall in Alexa’s internet rankings, ahead of Twitter which ranked 10th. According to Business Day, TenCent had about 637-million registered users in December 2010.

Ironically Naspers hails from a newspaper background, but started to make serious money via pay-TV operations in South Africa and throughout Africa. Naspers operates from a home market with a comparatively small internet user base of anywhere between 7-12 million South African users, so this may explain why the company has been aggressively fishing beyond its borders for internet properties.

Naspers is headed by a tough, shrewd and ambitious Cape Town-based CEO in Koos Bekker. At home, the company owns the largest internet media player in News24, which attracts a modest — by world standards — five million monthly users. It also owns a piece of the South African MXit, a mobile-app-based IM now claiming around 25-30-million world-wide users.

In 2001 Naspers bought the 46,5% piece of Tencent for $32m, making it the largest shareholder in the then three-year-old company. Then QQ had just 18-million accounts. As Tencent grew and turned into the world’s third-largest dot-com by market value, the value of Naspers’ stake jumped more than 400-fold to exceed R14bn.

With these impressive figures, it appears that Tencent’s QQ platform may be challenging Facebook as the world’s largest social networking platform. They are not exactly comparable platforms because QQ is an IM first and a social network second. For Facebook it is the other way round. But a broad definition of “social network” — a somewhat abused term these days — could put the companies in the same category.

In September 2010, Naspers snapped up yet another social network, but this time in the US. The company bought a “controlling interest” in social networking site Multiply. Multiply, headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, reportedly has more than 11-million registered users.

Naspers also owns Indian social networking play Ibibo, as well as various ecommerce platforms in Eastern Europe, South America and other parts of Asia. The company holds 25% of Singapore-based BuzzCity, a mobile media company that runs a global advertising network on the mobile internet.

Memeburn has it on good authority that Naspers sometime back had an opportunity to buy a piece of business networking site LinkedIn, but turned it down at the time — a decision which has caused some regret at the company.

Original post over on Memeburn.

Enter the Age of the Petabyte, Exabyte and Zettabyte

As internet consumers we’re now firmly in the age of the terabyte. A terabyte (TB) is equal to about one thousand gigabytes, and it is storage space sorely needed in the age of High Definition (HD) video.

Hard drives that have capacities of 1TB and 2TB or more are common-place in electronic shops. About ten years ago it was rare to hear the term terabyte, except perhaps in a science-fiction context or you were trying to (mistakenly) impress your geek girlfriend or boyfriend.

But how long will it be till we are throwing the term “petabyte” around as easily? A petabyte is the next notch up in the measurement of digital storage, and represents about a thousand terabytes. In large companies where a huge amount of storage is needed for supercomputer processing, a petabyte is not an uncommon term to hear.

The 2009 movie Avatar is reported to have taken more than one petabyte of local storage for rendering of the movie’s well-known 3D CGI effects. The popular online multiplayer game, World of Warcraft, utilises 1.3 petabytes of storage to maintain the game. The famous Internet Archive, which keeps a record of websites since the start of the web, claims to store about three petabytes of data, and in 2009 was growing at a rate of about 100 terabytes per month. The four experiments in the Large Hadron Collider will produce about 15 petabytes of data per year. And Google apparently processes as much as 24 petabytes of data daily.

In case you’re wondering, after the petabyte comes exabyte, zettabyte and then the old family favourite, the yottabyte. But it’s going to take a really long time before you’re asking your mate: “So how many yottabytes have you got in your hard drive?”

As of 2010, no storage system has even achieved one zettabyte of information. The combined space of all computer hard drives in the world do not amount to one yottabyte, but was estimated atapproximately 160 exabytes in 2006. As of 2009, the entire Internet was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes… so we’re getting there.

The infographic below helps put it all into perspective: One single petabyte is equal to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. It’s also equal to 13.3 years of HD-TV video.

About 1.5 petabytes is equal to the size of 10 billion photos on Facebook. The total manufactured hardrive space in 1995 was equal to about 20 petabytes. According to the infographic, fifty petabytes is then apparently equal to the entire written collection of work by all of mankind (in all languages) since the dawn of civilization.

Credit and credit. Original post on Memeburn.

Twitter CEO Suddenly Resigns

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has announced on the company’s official blog that he is to step down in favour of the company’s COO, Dick Costolo.

Williams will now “completely focus on product strategy”. Costolo is the co-founder and former CEO of Feedburner, which was acquired by Google in 2007.

Writes Williams in a post entitled #newtwitterceo: “The challenges of growing an organization so quickly are numerous. Growing big is not success, in itself. Success to us means meeting our potential as a profitable company that can retain its culture and user focus while having a positive impact on the world. This is no small task. I frequently reflect on the type of focus that is required from everyone at Twitter to get us there.”

Williams says this led to “a realisation” with the launch of the new Twitter interface: “I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.”

The service has seen dramatic growth since it was launched in 2006 by Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. Twitter now clocks more than 90-million tweets every day and boasts 160-million registered users. Despite these impressive numbers, the company has only 300 people working for it, up from 20 when Williams first took the CEO mantle in 2008.

Williams says Costolo has been a “critical leader” in devising and executing Twitter’s new drive at monetisation, while simultaneously running the company in a hands-on manner.

Williams says that he had insisted on bringing Costolo on as the COO a year ago which had caused “questions” from the Twitter board.

“…I knew Dick would be a strong complement to me, and this has proven to be the case… Given Dick’s track record as a three-time successful CEO, I’m confident we can make this a smooth transition,” writes Williams.

Twitter is ‘Not a Social Network’

Twitter is not a social network says Twitter Vice President for Business and Corporate development Kevin Thau, it’s all about news.

“Twitter is news. It is information. Twitter is actually transforming the nature of news. It’s transforming the way you are consuming information and think about news. When it comes to breaking news I don’t think there has ever been a platform as interesting as Twitter,” he said.

Speaking at Nokia World 2010 in London, Thau also spoke about how it has become the norm that when there is a “disaster or revolution it gets broadcast on Twitter first”.

Thau noted that now for the first time, Tweets are becoming part of history. The US Library of Congresstakes a dedicated, specialised feed from Twitter, officially storing every single tweet for posterity.

He said that Twitter’s attempts at monetisation via promoted Tweets is “working really, really well”.

“Monetisation is something we have started to emphasise quite a bit at the company,” he said.

The service, which now boasts 145-million users and is the world’s 9th biggest website (Alexa), is growing faster outside the US, than in the US. Upwards of 60% of Twitter’s traffic now originates from outside US. Thau noted that Twitter was “exploding” in countries like Japan, India, Brazil and Indonesia.

Thau mentioned that twitter.com’s unique user figure stood at around 210-million, which means millions of people use the service to just browse Tweets, rather actively use the service to Tweet themselves.

He also spoke about how the company’s “mobile DNA” is still a strong part of its culture, and how the company doesn’t make a big distinction between their mobile site and desktop site.

“We are an example of a successful internet company that started as mobile first. We started off as an SMS service. We won’t treat mobile any differently from how we treat our website. We don’t have a separate strategy for monetisation on mobile. It will be the same as that of the web,” he said.

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