As I try to come up with a theme for the first Asian edition of LIFT, I am somehow getting a strong intuition that we are leaving the revolutionary phase of the Web industry, and about to enter a more boring and less innovative period (Bruce Sterling won’t disagree with me). A number of weak signals seem to be announcing the end the cycle of hyper innovation that marked what will one day be remembered as the early days of the web, or the 1994 - 2006 period.

At Kinnernet, I jokingly told Thomas Mygdal that the Silicon Valley is facing Detroit-a-zation. What were once innovative and agile startups are increasingly becoming pachyderms hampered by overgrowth, internal politics and shareholders pressure. The big CEOs - once mavericks celebrated and envied by the whole business community - are becoming bus drivers. Eric Schmid’s days probably look more and more like the ones of Marcel Ospel or Carlos Ghosn, and with each hour passing Google’s organization inches closer to the IBM model rather than the edonistic company proned by the Zentral Intelligenz Agentur. Web companies employees have too much work, need to stay later than their bosses, have to raise their profiles to get good reviews, etc.

While in Korea, I systematically asked my interlocutors what they thought were today’s “hot” topics. Their answers: ubiquitous computing, urban technologies, robotic toys, green technologies, open source objects, etc. The web? “It was interesting seven years ago!”  It is now a commodity, and this has a deep impact on the industry and on its culture. What happened?

• The rise of incremental innovation
  Incremental innovation has replaced fundamental innovation. We are not discovering new territories - like when Friendster, Google, or Hotmail were invented - but are developing the ones that have already been explored by others, bringing smaller improvements like a new interface, a new way to receive an information, a new mix of existing services. A striking example of this is social networks, where entrepreneurs are almost done exploring the different possibilities. It started with networks about the past (classmates, copains d’avant), then about the present (Facebook, MySpace), and now it is about the future (dopplr, mixin). Nothing revolutionary, just a lot of talented people busy not leaving any stone unturned in the same field, exploring a finite space.
• Maturity = less hunger
  The industry is more mature, which means many of us have something to lose. We all have a status, more conflicts of interest then ever (the web 2.0 world is skunk drunk on its own kool-aid), bigger egos. Time goes by, and most industry leaders are fifteen years older and nature made them more risk averse. Sneakers have been replaced by leather shoes, and the Johnny Cash rule (which says you are never as good as when hungry) is now playing against us.
• Early adopters became gatekeepers?
  Where is the new generation? Aren’t they interested, or is it that we don’t listen to them? Have we - the early adopters - become gate keepers? Every time I go to a web conference I am struck by the fact the average age of speakers is always around 40. What happened here? Do we really only have Kevin Rose, Matt Mullenweg and Mark Frauenfeld innovating under 25? Could it be that there is a whole layer of innovation we simply don’t look at?
• Excitement is building in other fields
  If you haven’t watched Bruno Bonnel and Rafi Haladjan’s talks you probably haven’t noticed, but robotic toys have a huge future. Mobile continues to rock Africa and Asia, green technologies are the hot topic in Sand Hill Road, new interfaces are opening up huge possibilities. It seems other fields are offering more exciting opportunities than the web!

I am sure I could come up with more reasons but let’s hear your opinion first. Do you feel like it is the end of a cycle? Why? Is the web just another industry where success depends more on having an MBA than a revolutionary idea and a taste for risk?

Update: ChangeWaves says the Infotech sector is not yet geriatric. We can resume normal breathing.

The Swiss TV (probably one of the country’s most advanced organization when it comes to multimedia, and I don’t say that because they are partners of LIFT but because theirs shows are available online a few minutes after they have been aired) is launching the second edition of the Pacte Multimedia, a national contest to promote the best multimedia projects in the country. Who will succeed Mixin? Maybe you, enroll and you might win 50′000CHF to pursue your vision!

[…] any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.Ethan Zuckerman’s Etech talk on Digital Activism

Nice rule of thumb ;)

Ken Burns, an American director who produces documentaries on wars, speaks about the power of images in a Telerama interview:

“Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, during the first gulf war. Late September, PBS [The remarkable American public channel] aired my movie on the American civil war - eleven and a half hours of black and white images, only Americans killing other Americans. Before the broadcast, 90% of viewers surveyed said they were supporting the war against Saddam. After, the appetite for war had diminished by a quarter.”

That is one good reason to root for TV. I am not sure he would get eleven hours to make his case on YouTube. I hear his new piece, The War, is a must-watch documentary on the second world war - the “good war” - with dozens of veterans telling their intimate stories and suffering.

Search, social networks, blogs, and RSS […] are driving more and more users deep into today’s Web properties. Now, the majority of consumers bypass a site’s home page completely. […] Every page is a home page.

Avenue A Razorfish 2008 Digital Outlook Report (via Guy Kawasaki)

Quite an interesting report, concluding (among other things) that pay walls are finished, convergence is not happening, and digital “has become the darling of the media and advertising worlds”.

It is funny to see the web’s oldest buzzword - “home page” - disappear after such a long life. Time as come to say good bye, and the clock is ticking on other terms like “blog” or “wiki” as every single site seems to open up to two ways interactions with visitors.

Biiiiiiiiig breaking news this morning: Facebook loses 400,000 UK users in a month

Facebook has suffered its first drop in numbers in 17 months of successive monthly gains. That’s according to online usage research firm Nielson Online, which claims the number one social networking site experienced a 5 per cent drop in unique users between December and January from 8.9m to 8.5m.

Facebook’s biggest rival, MySpace, also experienced a 5 per cent drop during the same period, with a unique monthly user figure of five million. Third-placed and teenage-focused network, Bebo, suffered a 2 per cent drop between December and January, with figures of 4.1 million unique monthly users.

Link

Now the whole “I told you so” and other “the end of social networking is near” can start. Truth is Facebook is getting boring, and now that we all have our 500+ friends it is getting harder and harder to find a reason to go and visit that site. But a big question remains: where do all the bored workers go next?

I was on TV yesterday (video here, be nice) talking about Google’s domination, and came up wondering who is still clicking on ads these days. Conventional wisdom used to say that “new users click on ads”, but now that we are all turning into savvy internet veterans with years of surfing under our belts, who still thinks that the results on the right ARE the non-sponsored results?

A new study released this morning came up with a few interesting findings about ads-clickers and tells us that “heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad click”.

The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers. Further preliminary Starcom data suggests […] shows no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked.

Link

If the other 50% are indeed fake clicks then we are headed towards a nice crash of the current Internet monetization system.

Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

• Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.
• They don’t like to buy online much and as a result don’t do it very often, whereas especially for these kids finance is not really a problem. It’s a trust issue.
• Although they consider their online friends and real friends to be the same (even if that’s talking about 300 people), the ‘real world’ is very important for them and don’t want to spend too much time online.
• Facebook is definitely still very hot! It’s used for planning of the immediate future and also for homework. Email within Facebook is used, but for totally different reasons as regular webmail such as Windows Live Hotmail.
• Last stunning fact: The images you find within the results of an image search are free to use for whatever reason, why else are they there? That’s the reaction when someone talked about Creative Commons. So we told them these images still are owned by someone and have some kind of copyright applied to it.

Link

We need such a panel on stage one of these days.

The TSR is uploading the LIFT08 speeches in almost realtime on nouvo.ch/liftvideo

Enjoy and pass the word :)

I had an interesting conversation with a friend who is the co-founder of an online groceries store that delivers food (real food, « organic » as the Americans would say ;) to the citizens of this country. You go to a website, push a few buttons, and you get your food delivered at home the next day. A simple value proposition, one of the biggest logistical challenge I have ever seen hiding behind it.

At some point he told me this:

« My daughter never went to a supermarket. She is 10 years old and knows either online stores - for basic products - or the farmers’ market – for touching products and have a real shopping experience. »

I won’t argue against the fact he is not representative of the whole population, nor will I try to speculate on how much of this situations comes from the girl’s will to support her daddy’s business ;) But it is an interesting evolution. Never go to a supermarket is now conceivable, and if was not true 10 years ago.

If you visit a Carrefour store in France, you will notice how they are focusing on giving consumers a different experience, branding each section of the shop with extreme care, making it more attractive, different, « authentic ». You can get your aspirins from a lady sporting a white blouse, a totally different experience than getting it yourself from a random shelf.

The future of grocery shopping might be a wonderful, sensitive and spectacular experience on one side, with computers, recommendation engines and home delivery on the other. Does that strike a cord? Sounds an awful lot like Apple stores to me.