The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

THE NEXT GENERATION CUSTOMER ACQUISITION ENGINE

Web2.0Nimish Vohra | India Head, Regalix | April 7, 2023

+91 98453 34981 | Bangalore

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Before the Web…

… were competing computing technologies … some competing OS

And then emerged Windows as a major Platform…… with packaged software applications … with tightly coupled APIs… and frequent releases

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Then came the Web…

… with Client-Server technology … and, hyper-linking

This saw the emergence of sites such as… … Rediff, Geocities, Britannica Online, Directories (Yahoo)

And this was… One way web or read only web… Primitive interfaces (Netscape vs. IE)… Taxonomy (Yahoo directory)… Pull medium (sites needed to have stickiness to get users back)

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Then happened Web2.0 …

Blogger (read + write, comment) Wikipedia (read + write, review, debate) Flickr (view, upload, tag)

No directories: Tag content the way you want … … Not taxonomy but “folksonomy”… view what others have liked… recommend to others, and view others’ recommendations

A read-write, participatory web

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

How Web2.0 Got its Name

The concept was born at a brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International

Dale Dougherty, VP O’Reilly Background: Dot-com bubble had just burst Companies that survived had something in common

Could these be called the Web2.0?

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: An Overview

Strategic Positioning The Web as a Platform

User Positioning You control your own data

Core Competencies Services, not packaged software Architecture of participation Harnessing collective intelligence Cost-effective scalability Re-mixable data sources and data transformations Software above the level of a single device

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Web as a Platform

Netscape vs. Google

Netscape Desktop application Strategy: sell high-end servers running

web applications Tried controlling standards for

displaying content

Google Web application Never packaged or sold Delivered as a service, with users

paying for the service, directly or indirectly

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Web as a Platform

DoubleClick vs. Overture, AdSense

DoubleClick Is a web service (like Google)…

… but is not participatory Advertisers call the shots, and not

users Bulky, contractual placements of ads

on large sites, for large advertisers

Overture, AdSense Any small advertiser can place an ad in

any small site They serviced the long-tail

Leverage customer self service to reach out to the entire web, not just the head, but the long tail too

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Hyperlinking: Sites are bound to the structure of the web by links Google’s breakthrough in search – PageRank – uses link structure

rather than type of content to provide search results Ebay – a collective activity of it’s users. Ebay grows as activity

grows. Ebay, only provides a platform Amazon – sells the same products as its competitors. But they have

higher user participation – reviews, different ways of interacting, user activity produces better results

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Harnessing Collective IntelligenceCompanies that have extended the above concepts

Wikipedia – an online encyclopedia: Radical change in the dynamics of content creation. Trust.

Del.icio.us, Flickr – pioneered “folksonomy” (in contrast to taxonomy) – collaborative categorization.

Cloudmark – spam filtering, by aggregation of individual decisions Linux, MySQL, Perl, PHP, on which most of the web runs, is relies

on open-source – collective, net-enabled intelligence

Blogging Usable technology (easy to publish own content, rather than using HTML or CMS) RSS – unique content delivery mechanism. Converts a pull medium to a push medium Bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a major role in shaping search results

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Rich User Experience

Applet (1992) Java delivered Applet (1995) Macromedia’s Flash based “Rich Internet Applications”, many years

ago Full scale applications happened only with Gmail Technology that Google used was termed AJAX, which is a

collection of XHTML, CSS DOM XML, XSLT XMLHttpRequest Javascript, to bind everything together

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Visual Design?

Very user friendly Feature rich People are not shy to use color But lots of white More text than images Logos are rounded, colorful, playful? Again, very usable

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Design Patterns

Long Tail: Small sites make up bulk of the internet’s content. Leverage customer self service and automatic data management

Data is important: Try and create a unique hard to replicate data Users add value: In form of data (reviews, original content),

behavior Self-learning apps: Applications should be intelligent enough to

gather user behavior (top 10 views, highest clicks, etc) Rights reserved?: Benefits come from collective adoption and not

restriction. Always a Beta?: On the web one does not need to have software

releases. Change as often, if you improving the experience

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: What is proprietary? What is the biz model?

Desktop applications were, now they are open source. Web applications were (advanced mail, etc), now they are not If for a news company, news is not copyrighted, and is freely

distributable, how does the news company make money? For some companies, such as MapQuest, it would be data they can

license. Companies like Google are already giving this data out freely.

So in the end, it is not products, not services, not data. It is the amount of traffic you can garner. More traffic could mean more revenue opportunities in terms of ads.

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Beyond the web, beyond the community: Web3?

Making it collaborative. Making it a web enabled service. Moving completely away from the desktop storage Moving away from desktop applications.

Web3 – some thoughts: All pervasive, always on. For the businesses.

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Implications for Media

Publishers now no longer leverage all the content It is now easy to create content (Blogs) It is now easy to distribute content (RSS, feed-readers)

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Are we going into a Bubble?

Yes! There is a lot of frenzy to innovate. And lot of money to back it with. And some of the applications don’t really make any sense! E.g.,

myLot. To me, even MySpace does not make much sense, when compared to Orkut!

But again, innovation never goes waste

Finally, you are safe if you are thinking about the user, have a clear reasoning of how this is useful. Don’t be a part of the fad

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Web2.0: Some creative Web2.0 applications?

Zopa: Taking money lending to the masses Zimbra: Messaging and collaboration Tictrac: Online time tracking World66: A wiki on Travel NetworthIQ: Track your networth online OpenID: Single identity across all applications Foldershare: Keep your files online HousingMaps: Craigslist + GoogleMaps: A mashup

The next-generation online customer acquisition engine

Thank You!

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.-Chinese Proverb

Nimish Vohra

India Head, Regalix

+91 98453 34981 | Bangalore