New technology, new business!

The Internet is always a happening place – in a cyclical manner, either business drives technology evolution or technology drives new business ideas. Web 1.0 was about ‘Read only’ with largely static information push whereas Web 2.0 dealt with ‘Read Write’ phenomena – examples are social webs, refined search engines, online media, content aggregation/ syndication and mashups (Flickr, Google Maps etc). Here are a few technology changes which are impacting business on the internet…

As per ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus, some of the key trends are:

- Structured Information (Data and Services) and not Pages are the future focus (e.g. Amazon E-Commerce API, Dapper, and Twitter API etc) which leads to concepts such as Symantec Web, Filters / recommendations and Personalization. All of this makes social and business interaction more secure, authentic and better organized.

Symantec web leverages existing web information, applying specific vertical semantic knowledge and delivering results as a consumer centric web application. A good example is Reuters Open Calais API that does a semantic markup on people, companies, places and events. Therefore, data portability and connectivity become very important for enabling the Symantec web. Some of the other products to watch include Twine, Freeset, Powerset, Talis, TrueKnowledge, AdaptiveBlue, TripIt, Spock, Quintura and Hakia.

- Data driven web is about APIs, web services and open data standards becoming more prominent – also beyond the PC, as the focus again shifts to mobile and IPTV which are again structured content- we can also see a lot of PC applications being made available on the mobile to provide a seamless experience. There are many open data products – e.g. Google’s Android mobile OS, data remix products like Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes, lifestreaming apps like Tumblr, Jaiku, Onaswarm, FriendFeed etc.Open data standards involve data portability (taking data from one site to another – e.g. dataportability.org), open IDs (portable single sign on IDs), Social networks (e.g. Google’s Open Social) and APML (attention standard or what you read, write, share and consume).

- Mobile web focuses on applications and services that are portable, location aware and integrated with physical world. The mobile phone is always on, always carried and has a built in payment model that makes it attractive as a revenue generator. Devices like iPhone have revolutionized the web UI, added full feature desktop applications and rich HTML emails (competition to blackberry). Some interesting mobile apps include Gmail Java app, Google maps for mobile, Opera Mini, Fring (VoIP and IM), Twitter (for micro blogging) and Shozu (send media to the web).

- Recommendation engines cannot be far away with all that content on the web! These are primarily driven by a user need for personalization and involve different techniques (personalized, social, item or a combination of all the three). Examples of such engines include Amazon, Netflix, Stumble Upon, delicious, Pandora etc.

Business view of these technologies

As per the McKinsey Quarterly, some of the key business trends include Information based business; automation of information, putting more science into management, using customers as innovators and extracting value from interactions. Interestingly, these relate directly to the technologies mentioned above in more ways than one and mostly revolve round the internet! Throw in a few more concepts like virtualization 2.0, web gadgets, branded professional video content, wireless USB and high speed Bluetooth and you have quite a handful of technologies to keep you busy for a while!!

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