Semantic Web

[via Atanu] Andy Carvin writes about the applicability of the Semantic Web to online education.

One example that clearly comes to mind is embedding metadata to content that connects it to specific education standards. For example, lets say you find a website about the history of India and Pakistan that contains stories of families forced to flee their homes and cross the border when the countries split apart. These stories might fit nicely in a lesson plan youre doing for your geography class on human migration and refugees, as part of the National Geography Standards. The Semantic Web would allow you to tag this page as being connected to the specific standard on understanding human migration, embedding a URL into that website that links into to a machine-friendly definition of that standard. From that point onward, any other teacher searching the Internet would be able to make the connection between that specific website and that specific standard. And the same principle could be used to link online content with lesson plans and the teachers who use them. Suddenly, what started as a search for an educational website leads you to a social network of educators using that site in their classroom to meet a specific standard.

Of course, you may think we wont want to spend our days tagging websites to connect them to standards. But wait a second – millions of people are tagging websites every single day. The very idea of Web 2.0 is built upon people volunteering their time to create content and add richness to it, making connections between ideas. Even if only a small fraction of us spend our time charting out these connections, that still adds up to huge sums of people.

TECH TALK: Two-Sided Markets: HBR article

While reading the latest issue of Harvard Business Review (Octover 2006), I came across an article on Strategies for Two-Sided Markets by Thomas Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne. The title was intriguing. It was the first time I had actually come across the phrase two-sided markets even though as I realised later, I had experienced these markets closely over the past decade. The article was interesting enough for me to think and delve into the topic some more.

Here is the abstract for the article:

If you listed the blockbuster products and services that have redefined the global business landscape, you’d find that many of them tie together two distinct groups of users in a network. Case in point: The most important innovation in financial services since World War II is almost certainly the credit card, which links consumers and merchants. The list would also include newspapers, HMOs, and computer operating systems–all of which serve what economists call two-sided markets, or networks. Newspapers, for instance, bring together subscribers and advertisers; HMOs link patients to a web of health care providers and vice versa; operating systems connect computer users and application developers. Two-sided networks differ from traditional value chains in a fundamental way. In the traditional system, value moves from left to right: To the left of the company is cost; to the right is revenue. In two-sided networks, cost and revenue are both to the left and to the right, because the “platform” has a distinct group of users on each side. The platform product or service incurs costs in serving both groups and can collect revenue from each, although one side is often subsidized. Because of what economists call “network effects,” these platform products enjoy increasing returns to scale, which explains their extraordinary impact. Yet most firms still struggle to establish and sustain their platforms. Their failures are rooted in a common mistake: In creating strategies for two-sided networks, managers typically rely on assumptions and paradigms that apply to products without network effects. As a result, they make many decisions that are wholly inappropriate for the economics of their industries. In this article, the authors draw on recent theoretical work to guide executives negotiating the challenges of two-sided networks.

When we think about it, two-sided markets are all around us. Newspapers and magazines are often sold at prices below cost. The publishers make the money from advertisers. TV programming, for the most part, comes for free, with advertisers again paying the channel to reach the audience. Google has taken the notion of free to extraordinary heights (quite literally, with services like Google Earth!). As users get an increasing number of services for free, advertisers have been spending money to connect with the eyeballs.

So, what are two-sided markets? What are the business opportunities around these type of markets?

Tomorrow: Overview

The Next Billion Users

WSJ writes how tech firms atr wooing the next users:

The Intel projects in two of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies — and similar ones in other countries — are part of a broader push by it and other tech giants to do well by doing good in poorer parts of the world that until recently have been largely cut off from technology.

Their aim is to reach what executives call “the next billion users” of consumer technologies like the Internet and cellular phones. The images of executives helping the poor can also help maintain good relations with the government, a critical part of doing business in both China and India.

Amazon’s Next Bet

Business Week writes:

Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility. It’s as if Wal-Mart Stores Inc. had decided to turn itself inside out, offering its industry-leading supply chain and logistics systems to any and all outsiders, even rival retailers. Except Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.

Good Managers and Bad Strategy

Knowledge@Wharton writes about comments by Michael Porter:

Bad strategy often stems from the way managers think about competition, he noted. Many companies set out to be the best in their industry, and then the best in every aspect of business, from marketing to supply chain to product development. The problem with that way of thinking is there is no best company in any industry. “What is the best car?” he asked. “It depends on who is using it. It depends on what it’s being used for. It depends on the budget.”

Managers who think there is one best company and one best set of processes set themselves up for destructive competition. “The worst error is to compete with your competition on the same things,” Porter said. “That only leads to escalation, which leads to lower prices or higher costs unless the competitor is inept.” Companies should strive to be unique, he added. Managers should be asking, “How can you deliver a unique value to meet an important set of needs for an important set of customers?”

Cheaper Tech

Hal Varian writes in The New York Times:

As technology advances and costs go down, a lot more amateur video will be produced. Economic rent comes from scarcity. It is true that there is only one Tom Cruise, but it is equally true that there are only 24 hours in a day. The more time young people spend watching Lonelygirl15, the less time they will have to watch Mr. Cruise.

I don�t think that the age of the megastar is over. Quite the contrary, there will still be big-budget movies, and stars with drawing power will still command high salaries.

But, at the same time, I believe that there will be a flowering of creative, inexpensive and compelling semiprofessional content available via the Internet. This content will occupy more and more of people�s attention, particularly young people.

Parakey

IEEE Spectrum writes about Blake Ross’ new venture:

The problem, according to Ross, is theres no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications.

Rosss answer is named Parakey. As he describes it, from a users point of view, Parakey is a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do. Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefoxs. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, hes building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And hes leading the charge with a simple battle cry: One interface, not two!

HBO’s Broadband Plans

Business Week writes:

If HBO takes on the Internet presence expected in the coming months, it could cause no small dustup with some of HBO’s biggest customersnamely the cable and satellite companies that charge fees for beaming HBO movies and shows such as The Sopranos and Entourage into America’s homes.

HBO executives have been hashing out the details of what they will offer online, and a spokesman says no formal decision has been made. But programming will almost certainly be offered via a subscription service, much like the mixture of HBO movies and original fare such as The Wire, Deadwood, and Big Love now offered by cable and satellite operators for a monthly fee of $10 to $12 or more.

Desktop and Web Integration

Read/Write Web writes:

If either Microsoft or Google is successful at grabbing the other’s data, the most useful byproduct of their efforts will be new ways to easily move data between the desktop and web. The result of this battle will further blur the lines between purely desktop and exclusively web applications.

But as often happens when elephants trample the landscape, they create new opportunities for smaller, more nimble animals to grow and prosper. As Microsoft and Google narrow their focuses on each other, they will either fail to notice the landscape is changing underfoot, or will be unable to adapt quickly enough. It’s not just naive optimism; there’s plenty of historical precedent. Just as Ford couldn’t build all the world’s cars, AT&T all the world’s telephones and IBM all the world’s computers – neither Microsoft nor Google will be able to write all the world’s software. In fact, the very rise of Google demonstrated this to Microsoft. As a result, the consumer and business software markets are poised to open up as never before.

India’s Middle Class

Sramana Mitra writes about the opportunities in targeting the 300 million segment:

Today, however, the opportunity for fueling more growth via education still remains, at all levels – from K-12, as well as in college and graduate education.

In pursuing this, one should squarely keep in mind the NIIT model, and refrain from trying to sell technology to schools. [I recently had lengthy discussions with Atanu Dey who is researching this topic and harbors desires to do something entrepreneurial.] The Sylvan / Kumon learning center model, for one, would be very successful in India, and tutorial centers are very popular places, helping clear exams such as JEE.

Other obvious areas that the Indian middle class spends wallet share on are Bollywood, Cell Phones, and Consumer Staples. JobSearch and Matrimonial Classifieds are also popular categories, and are being thoroughly addressed by the internet investments of recent times.