IPod Touch may replace IPhone In Korea
Interesting article on Web 2.0 Asia about how a new cheap unlimited wireless plan from Korea Telecom may very well give users an option of using their IPod Touch to replace more expensive IPhones in Korea.
Web Apps may be the next stage of Enterprise/Web 2.0 Adoption
One of the more anticipated sessions at this weeks Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco is Danny Kim’s on Web 2.0 mobile adoption in Korea and how the trends in Korea may portend for future US mobile usage (if we can ever upgrade our archaic mobile data networks..but thats another article) of Web and Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise Mashups are finally coming into their Own
Also at the Web 2.0 Expo, Serena Software, JackBe and Kapow plan to formally launch new and updated enterprise mashup development software and marketplace solutions. Look out for future OnDemand Beat blog articles where we will review each of these firms solutions.
Has Interest in Web 3.0 Peaked? Jonas Bolinder, editor of Implemented has reported that mentions of Web 3.0 in the blogosphere reached its height in October 2007 and has not recovered. Looks like marketers and VC’s may have a harder time coming up with a buzzword for the next iteration of the consumer internet.
Oracle WebCenter, originally announced in 2007, is now in production and will be Oracle’s foundation for Enterprise 2.0.
WebCenter is an enterprise portal that can be used to display information about people, processes and data. The architecture of WebCenter is aligned with Oracle new mantra of “Complete, Open and Integrated” for its current and future products and solutions.
During his keynote, Charles Phillips oversaw a demo of Oracle WebCenter that focused on the ease of use of setting up Ajax enabled portlets with WebCenter. Quite a bit of the demo was used to show how Webcenter could be used to quickly get Enterprise 2.0 functionality into place within a company without extensive amounts of coding.
Oracle WebCenter is part of Oracle’s extensive and growing Fusion Middleware solutions that now include Business Intelligence, Application Servers, Enterprise Performance Management and the soon to be added suite of tools from BEA.
In a very short period of time Oracle has created a very comprehensive line of solutions for the Enterprise 2.0 space and will be interesting to watch over the coming years as the products mature and gain additional market share.
Unless you are just returning from Spring Break in Siberia you have probably heard about Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture Alltop.
Launched on March 11, Alltop is an aggregator along the lines of PopUrls, that was created for an audience that would never use an RSS reader or create a custom news page.
The OnDemand Beat was recently added to the social media section of Alltop. (Look for us all the way at the bottom of the social media page) The OnDemand Beat is in an A-List neighborhood, right next to GigaOm.:-)
The launch of Alltop has not been without its share of “controversy” as Jeremiah Owyang and Web Worker Daily articles give a hint of the wildy divergent opinions of the site.
Although I understand and use RSS daily I find Alltop to be very useful once you get the hang of the interface. I like the convenience of being able to have a quick look at the latest articles (preview of articles are available via mouseover) of interest in one place. For its core audience Alltop should serve as a gateway to the Blogs they are interested in and should not intimidate the typical user.
The Economist article equates social networks to free email such as Hotmail or Google mail and predicts that social networks have quickly come to be an expected and free part of any internet portal. In this context social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook should not be a destination in themselves, but the components of the social networking sites should be part of a users everyday internet experience.
I agree in that in these trying economic times the advertising model that most if not all of these social networks are built upon is not a sustaining business model. Advertising revenue for established media companies is and has always been cyclical in nature and even with the lower cash burn rates that today’s Web 2.0 companies have compared to their Web 1.0 predecessors, wont provide enough recurring revenue to stay in business after the venture funds runs out.
Venture funding in itself is a bit faddish and indications are that Social Networks/Web 2.0 are no longer the VC flavor of the month as VC’s move to investing in Green/Clean Energy and Renewable Technologies.
Will be interesting to see if some of the venture funding that was wildly invested in Consumer Social Networks/Web 2.0 will now invest in Enterprise and Enterprise 2.0 Software firms. Most of these firms actually have a real revenue producing business model and are; in the case of Enterprise 2.0 software firms, in the process of rearchitecting packaged solutions to Software as A Service.
