Web 3.0: A Web of One?

Web 3.0, when it arrives, will be about using all sorts of personal data to create a customized "Web of One" experience. At least that's the hope.

25 Startup Commandments: Great Stuff!

1. Your idea isn't new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.

2. Stealth startups suck. You're not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.

3. If you don't have scaling problems, you're not growing fast enough.

4. If you're successful, people will try to take advantage of you. Hope that you're in that position, and hope that you're smart enough to not fall for it.

5. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that's really the case, you shouldn't be doing your startup.

6. Your competition will inflate their numbers. Take any startup traffic number and slash it in half. At least.

7. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Leonardo could paint the Mona Lisa only once. You, Bob Ross, can push a bug release every 5 minutes because you were at least smart enough to do a web app.

8. The size of your startup is not a reflection of your manhood. More employees does not make you more of a man (or woman as the case may be).

9. You don't need business development people. If you're successful, companies will come to you. The deals will still be distractions and not worth doing, but at least you're not spending any effort trying to get them.

10. You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.

11. Starting a company will teach you what it's like to be a manic depressive. They, at least, can take medication.

12. Your startup isn't succeeding? You have two options: go home with your tail between your legs or do something about it. What's it going to be?

13. If you don't pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?

14. Startups are not a democracy. Want a democracy? Go run for class president, Bueller.

15. You're doing a web app, right? This isn't the 1980s. Your crummy, half-assed web app will still be more successful than your competitor's most polished software application.

+10 More Startup Commandments

1. You will have at least one catastrophe every three months.

2. Outsource effectively, or be effectively outsourced.

3. Do you thrive on stress and ambiguity? You'd better.

4. The best way to get outside funding is to be successful already. Stupid but true. But you, cheapskate, don't need money, right?

5. People will think your idea sucks. They're even probably right. The only way to prove them wrong is to succeed.

6. A startup will require your complete attention and devotion. Thought your first love in High School was clingy? You can't take out a restraining order on your startup.

7. Being an entrepreneur requires a healthy amount of ignorance. Note I did not say stupidity.

8. Your software sucks. So what. Everyone else's does also, and re-architecting is the kiss of death for a startup. Startups are no place for architecture astronauts.

9. You do have a public API, right?

10. Abject Terror. Overwhelming Joy. Monstrous Greed. Embrace and harness these emotions you must.

Provided by Mark Fletcher, http://www.startupping.com/

Web 2.0 Enterprises

I wouldn't say many small or mid-sized businesses or entities are adopting tools such as wikis, blogs and the like, but it appears lots of enterprises have figured out they are quite helpful. At least that's what one IDG survey finds. Nor would I venture so far as to say the generally more collaborative world we seem to be moving towards is transforming older hierachical and closed modes of organizing enterprises. But something is happening. And it ultimately doesn't matter whether a transformation creates the new tools that are needed, or the existence of the tools foment a transformation in the ways things are done. Either way, more collaboration results.

"The Network is the Computer"

Unfortunately, some of us can remember John Gage, Sun Microsystems co-founder saying this in 1984 or so. Nearly a quarter of a century later, we still haven't fully gotten there. With the rise of peer to peer technologies, many will offer we won't need to go there. Oddly enough, and for all sorts of reasons, network-centric computing is starting to look a lot like the older client-server model many thought we were morphing beyond.

Users don't care about that, of course. What they care about is how their lives change for the better. And there now is no question but that this new age of "computing architecture" is changing things. We would argue it is for the better, though the outcome is open.

We used to talk about "the network as the computer." Today, we talk about Web 2.0, which uses the networked computing platform and adds social elements (Dion Hinchcliffe produced the graphic). In some ways, "the network as the computer" will change at least some of the methods we employ to discover and retrieve video, audio and other content.

In the enterprise space, it might simply mean the ability to access centralized databases with a Web browser as the front end. At least at first. Later, more collaborative modes will develop, where end users collectively create value and knowledge of usefulness for enterprises. The analogy is Amazon and eBay, where much of the value of the service is created by users.

Still, there are clear portents. There's salesforce.com, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, all of which deliver computing resources and applications on a hosted basis.

What changes here is much more than the way we use computational resources. Networked computing changes what we can do with computational resources. And those new ways are going to serioiusly shake business models across media and communications.