I’m very glad to announce a new blogger on Tech IT Easy: Leonard Sellem.

Leo is really passionate about the media industry: he said he would emphasize his posts on the business of editing, publishing & broadcasting, advertising trends, new media, IT infrastructure in the media industry, interactive marketing & actually anything related to high tech Leo feels like posting something on. Leo also runs his own blog, obviously focusing on the media: e-Remediable.

Leo and I already worked together @ AFIDORA, an online French think tank on the geopolitics of the Middle East I had cofounded in 2002 with my mate Jeremy Ghez, developed from scratch to a structure that matters in the Paris geopolitical landscape, and left in mid 2006. Actually, Steve & Alex, also bloggers on Tech IT Easy, also used to be colleagues of mine at AFIDORA. So one may tell Leo has real hands-on experience of what online edition is, and one wouldn’t be mistaking. Leo recently spent 10 months traveling the globe as a corporate auditor with Schneider Electric.

Leonard now works as a business developer in the advertising industry in Morocco, and will graduate from leading European business university HEC Paris with a Master in Management Science specialized in high tech management in September 2008. A French national, Leo is a lover of Toulouse (his native city), and a citizen of the world.

I’m very happy to have you with us Leo. Warm welcome on behalf of the Tech IT Easy team!

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Remember 2 days ago, I was threatening Youssef of organizing a huge demonstration if he didn’t blog about what he knows best: software architecture. But Youssef know how important staying close to one’s customers (in our case, bloggers, from our readers) is and how to keep them happy: he just started a series of articles on the urbanization of information systems (in French only, sorry about that). You may read it here on his blog bearing his online nickname: Joseph Cargo. Excellent stuff.  I wish there’s (a lot) more to come or… But thanks Youssef, I mean it.

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“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”            

      Considering the number of comments and most of all very interesting private emails I received from a number of readers (to them: THANK YOU), apparently there’s a real case for posting about Web 2.0 here. In the ever-going process of sucking up information from you guys to complete my working paper, here’s the next step: trying to identify the major trends affecting Web 2.0.

First of all, let’s recall my definition of Web 2.0: Web 2.0 = user-generated content+social networking features (sorry Jeremy, I disagree about your definition).

OK, so now, here’s the big question what’s next ?

Let us explore just a few possibilities.

1)  Mobility. Although one might consider this only as a non-disruptive, incremental innovation, it seems clear to me that social networks, including the most advanced ones, who can understand well the needs of the PDA/smartphone/handhelds devices market will gain a significant advantage. Geolocalized services might prove more than useful for most Web 2.0 companies. Imagine a social network able to track automatically people (OK, it may sounds like Big Brother): this means that you might eventually find a friend in no time who happens to be hanging around next door. Of course telcos operators could eventually provide themselves such a solution, but hey: who wants to be dealing with 36 different social networks ? I believe the most successful social networks will eventually end up as “social life webcenters” - sites you just visit every single day of your life to get in touch with the world. The best candidates for these are networks you are actually using most of the time – ie websites you essentially access through a PC, be it a laptop. By the way: I believe Google Maps services for the iPhone and other smartphones, as well as m-facebook.com are the forerunners of such an evolution.

2) Mashups. Right, so definitely most readers actually understand better these strange things than myself. What I understand personnally is 1) basically mashups consists in APIs or Web Services provided by various sites, and aggregated in brand new website 2) more fundamentally, this implies a growing modularity of Internet sites, favored by XML and Javascript technologies (or else one must explain to me why these nasty little bits of HTML codes you just copied-paste from various websites to implement, say, a traffic counter on your 1990’s website cannot be dubbed as mashups !). It seems like the dream that Apple failed to concretize with OpenDoc, ie shifting the focus from application to “document”  and designing specific workplaces on the go (thanks to various modules), proves to be more useful in the Web sphere. So far so good.  But…What next ? Can a website really consist in a collection of bits of websites ? And what about IP issues ? Whereas mashups can wisely complete the user generated content trend (FlickR feeds on a blog, for instance) I am not that sure that they will deal a new hand for the Web 2.0 economics.

3) Market dynamics. This is more serious. I expect most social networks to gain more and more functionalities and enrich permanently their mission statement. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook and MySpace actually tried to compete, in the end, with eBay, Match.com, Monster.com, Youtube etc…

This particular point deserves an explanation. Becauses uses are so different, many specific websites have gathered a huge user base, and occasionnally a very nice traffic. Meetic has million of users, so has eBay (a true Web 2.0 company Matthias ), so has LinkedIn, etc… The finality of such companies are not the same, but wait a minute…couldn’t it be the same users (mostly) for all these services ? I think this is likely. So instead of subscribing to a social network, maintaining an active eBay account, searching for job on monsters,etc… why not try to MERGE IT ALL and provide a unique service, where a unique login can make you access to all the different activities: dating, netwotrking, buying&selling, providing UGC, commenting news, etc…

I definitely believe that the company which will eventually design a simple way to introduce smart privacy settings, while keeping a simple switch for a user from a service to another, could actually end up as the big winner. I have no clue yet if this will be done by a merger, a series of partnerships (OK, so Facebook develops a marketplace on its own, fine…but the experience will be just so bad for people trying to sell rare/peculiar objects) or adding new functionalities to existing sites. But I may be thrilled by such a result.

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Heard today at a venture ecosystem gathering:

“A VC sowing cash in a start up to see it grow is like a man & woman, married, making a baby. Statistics say 60% of men cheat on their wives and 30% of women cheat on their husbands. I believe the same goes for venture capitalists (men) and start uppers (women).”

I can’t think of so many examples though. Hope it’s not true

• I remember a few (bad?) VCs withdrew their money when they could (diluted management) in the aftermath of the bubble burst in 2001. I can think of other. But to avoid such situations, be good and you’ll get good VCs on board.

• VCs who managed to ‘package’ well crappy start ups just to get rid of them and sell it to the big guys around (ORCL, CSCO, GOOG, MSFT, YHOO, IBM, AAPL, etc.) but then it’s not cheating with one’s wife: if the big player bought it, it means it sucks in due diligencing and assessing opportunities; or maybe the VC had the right arguments, at the right time. It’s his/her job after all. Too bad for the big ones.

• When it comes to entrepreneurs, I don’t see any reason why they would cheat on their investors. Maybe overselling your business plan a bit? Isn’t selling yourself the very rule of the game? And if the VC buys it, isn’t (s)he appropriating it at the same time?

Any interesting concrete story, anyone?

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