Most of the time

BrightSpot Media: a better way to target advertising?

I'm always fascinated by businesses that break old paradigms, and I was introduced to BrightSpot by someone I met by chance at a party on Lake Washington last month.
BrightSpot media attempts to increase the value of internet advertising by rearranging the relationships between advertiser, content, and consumer.

In the traditional model, advertising subsidizes consumer access to content: I get free searching because advertisers pay Google to place ads on my search results, and pays them even more if I click on one of the ads. For Google, substitute Fox Sports, Forbes, and any number of content providers.

No surprise, the advertiser may be reaching people completely uninterested in the advertiser, which makes the placement costs wasteful. The ads rarely add value to the user’s experience (think of those annoying ads that precede MSN news videos) and users may avoid the content as a result.

The proposition for users
BrightSpot treats the time users spend viewing ads as a user-owned asset that can be used to pay for other content they want. In other words, the BrightSpot users earn dollars for watching targeted commercials on Brightspot.tv that can be applied to select content partners. A BrightSpot user can contribute to a charity, get Gamefly subscription, or Napster To Go subscription by agreeing to watch ads on Brightspot.tv.

 

The proposition for advertisers
Advertisers reach a targeted audience that has selected their ads to watch and are assured the user watches the entire commercial. While anyone can become a Brightspot user, Brightspot targets users who have already enrolled for online subscriptions (Napster users for example), who are more likely to view ads to support their online habit.

BrightSpot builds user profiles which help advertisers to have a deeper understanding of the audience and reduce wasted placement. Advertisers can also use keywords to describe their target consumers’ interests, buying habits, and general marketing demographics.

 

The proposition for content providers
Content providers like Napster get a set of potential subscribers whose tastes are well known and segmented, and whose time watching ads can be directly converted into subscription payments.

Is this different?
Basically, Brightspot arranges for users to be paid to watch ads. This isn't new. Brandport Sweepstakes, Clixsense, Adbux and several others already do this in one way or another.
Brightspot differentiates itself, though, by:

• Targeting an audience already predisposed to internet subscriptions
• “BrightMatch” technology that searches through the audience and matches the advertiser to the right viewer
• Using questions to ensure customer understanding of the ads and qualifying the ad watching
• Providing a marketplace: a set of content on which a user can, and likely will, spend her earnings. Brightspot connects users to a network of content providers, so that earnings can be transferred directly to online subscriptions

Overall, Brightspot has hit a higher value proposition and a higher tone in branding their service and presenting their company.

I don't know if they are the last word in improving the relationship between advertising and content, but they are a step in the right direction.

[thanks to Beti Cung and Nicolas Kardas for comments)

Unified Communications announcements from IBM: a sign of increased dependence on Lotus?

I think there's more behind the announcement that IBM has acquired a web conferencing service, WebDialogs:

WebDialogs, based in Billerica, Mass., has developed audio and video conferencing software with more than 500,000 users. Its acquisition echoes the purchase in May of a similar company, WebEx, by IBM rival Cisco.

...

WebDialogs technology operates as an online service, and IBM said it will add a software-as-a-service delivery model to its Lotus Sametime messaging-software suite. Sametime already offered Web conferencing, but IBM hadn't offered that technology as an online service.

Microsoft acquired Placeware's (now Live Meeting), web conferencing service in 2003 so, at one level, the WebDialogs acquisition will fill an important  gap in IBM's real-time communications (RTC) product line. While opinions vary on which company is currently leading in enterprise RTC adoption, a recent survey (I saw this in Peter de Haas' blog) concluded that:

... Microsoft has a commanding lead in the enterprise unified communications space with 48% of those surveyed stating that they are currently using or considering to use Microsoft OCS within their organization as compared to 35% currently using or considering to use Cisco UPC and 24% currently using or considering to use IBM Lotus Sametime.

More notable than the need to stay competitive in RTC, though, this acquisition may signal  a strong IBM focus on Lotus and Notes.

That hasn't always been the case. 2002 was the start of an extended period when IBM appeared, at best, to be ambivalent about Notes/Domino future and sometimes downright hostile in pushing Websphere and DB2 as the key elements of their application and portal strategy. That period led to Lotus revenue declines in 2002 and 2003 (IBM didn't say how much).

So why emphasize Lotus now? Three reasons:

1. The product has recovered somewhat.  Following the declines in 2002 and 2003, Lotus revenue increased in 2004(+ 2.7% over the prior year), 2005 (+9.7%) and 2006 (+12%). Recent IDC and Gartner reports estimate Lotus software revenue in 2006 somewhere close to $1B.
2. More competition from Microsoft. IDC and Gartner estimate that Notes/Domino has trailed Microsoft Exchange in messaging since 2003, but recently Sharepoint alone has seized a good piece of the collaboration platform with revenues of over $0.8B. That challenges two IBM software businesses: Lotus (collaboration) and Websphere (application middleware which includes portals).
3. IBM values the Notes user base beyond collaboration. It's axiomatic that a strong end-user base is a great asset in maintaining and growing enterprise software adoption, but most of IBM's software revenue (and profits) comes from  middleware, databases and operating systems hidden in corporate data centers.  Lotus is the only IBM product line with broad user identity, so the Eclipse-based Notes 8 client is IBM's next attempt to revitalize and grow the user base they need for long-term software influence in growth areas like VoIP and Business Intelligence.

The last item -- building a user base -- is the most important and is good news for Lotus. IBM will likely pull out all the stops to break the pattern of previous attempts, which includes TopView, OS/2, SmartSuite, Metaphor, and Taligent.

Enterprise 3.0 Panel at the MIT Club of Northern California

I was a panelist at the MITCNC event Enterprise 3.0: Where is it Headed? on Wednesday this week.  The topic was subtitled "the impact of Web 2.0 on the prosumers" and was the first in a series of panels on Web 2.0's impact on the enterprise software market.

The other panelists were:

• Tim Harvey, VP Planning, Webex, Cisco Systems
• Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager, Google Docs and Spreadsheets
• Tom Cole, General Partner, Trinity Ventures

Sramana Mitra, Entrepreneur and Strategy Consultant moderated and based the discussion around her definition of Enterprise 3.0.

It was an enjoyable event with good questions from the floor, although it trod much of the same ground as the past couple of years of SIIA On-Demand and SaaScon conferences. That is to say the by-now standard list of benefits (ease of adoption, rapid releases, ... ) and concerns (security, data migration and integration, ...).

I'm a bit troubled by terms like Enterprise 3.0 (and even Web 2.0) which seem vague and created mostly as a platform for punditry.

That said, I did get into the spirit of things and suggested three tenets of an environment where enterprise applications are delivered as services from the cloud:

• Mass customization would be a requirement for any complex business process. In other words, customers would demand as much flexibility from the cloud as they do from the customized in-house solutions they use today. That requires an architecture which allows for flexible schema and business logic, and it's a daunting prospect. Microsoft's architecture evangelism team has developed some best practice implementations on that topic and for more on that subject, read Fred Chong's and Gianpaolo Carraro's blogs. I used Dave Duffield's company, Workday, as a great example of a revolutionary architecture, and you can read about it here (you may have to register).
• Services delivered as (and subsidizing) software. I've written about this before, but the basic premise is this: 
  • software -- including business software -- can be subsidized by someone other than the people who use it the most. A couple of examples stand out: Rearden Commerce and Klir Technologies. Both Klir (IT monitoring) and Rearden (procurement) provide direct business value to their enterprise customers. However, both companies have found a way to make their user community valuable to other service providers: Rearden to the folks whose products are being procured (Amex's travel services for example), and Klir to the companies (like Cisco or Dell) whose IT equipment is being monitored. Sadly, Klir didn't make the transition to profitability when they moved to the SaaS model, but that doesn't invalidate the model.
• The Rise of the Platforms. The future behemoths imho will be the providers of pervasive and general services, like storage ( e.g. Amazon's S3), streaming (like Microsoft's Silverlight Streaming Service, and the current big players in services, like American Express and UPS who are already extending their current specialties into business services for enterprises and consumers.

Added 8/20:

A couple of other posts on the event:

From Sramana, the moderator

From Zoli Erdos, an attendee

Another view of jobs on the Collaboration Platforms

I was mildly taken to task by Ed Brill about my post that the data on a UK IT jobs site reflected the vitality of the underlying platforms. That site showed significantly more jobs on Exchange and Sharepoint than on Notes/Domino.

 

Ed used Jobs search site indeed.com to show the reverse. His specific search was flawed, but his general point was fair: other jobs sites show different results.

 

The two sites in question sites show approximately the same number of IT jobs, but there are  major differences between them:

• The UK site is structured. I.e someone has categorized each job. Indeed.com is just a plain text search, so you have to search for combinations of product and company names to count the jobs.
• The UK site includes IT jobs only. I.e there are no jobs for bankers or plumbers. Indeed.com covers jobs of all types, so you can never be sure you've hit all the relevant jobs and excluded the irrelevant ones (e.g. "Heat Exchange specialist", "take Notes at meetings," or "Domino's Pizza").
• The UK site appears to count jobs only once. I couldn't find any duplicates there. Indeed.com has lots and lots of duplicates.

 

Ed searched indeed.com to compare <Lotus AND Notes> with <Microsoft AND Exchange> but that missed:

• IBM AND Notes ... i.e. no mention of Lotus
• "Notes developer" .. with no mention of Lotus
• Lotus AND Domino ... no mention of Notes
• MS AND Exchange ... Microsoft not spelled out
• "Exchange 2000" .. with no mention of Microsoft (there were lots of these)
• etc

 

So, I did a bunch of searches to try and catch the relevant positions, exclude the incorrect ones and not double count. Contact me if you want the specific searches. The results were:

• Notes plus Domino: 34, 424
• Exchange plus Sharepoint: 30,153

 

I am confident that this is close -- within 20%. The indeed.com (mostly US positions) showed Notes slightly ahead, which is mildly counter-intuitive. To be fair, though, the UK results were surprisingly skewed against Notes.

 

So, what does this tell us? My observations (using the principle of least complexity):

• I do believe job postings (and particularly trends over time) reflect platform vitality (i.e. jobs increase with platform share and growth).
• The UK data is well structured and there's no evidence of a systematic bias against Lotus or pro Microsoft. It probably reflects the UK market accurately.
• The indeed.com data is less precise but it's not so imprecise as to be useless. I'd have to conclude that in the US, the platform story is much closer.

Objective data on Collaboration Platforms

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short post about measuring the growth and share of collaboration platforms. I had found a UK website -- ITJobsWatch -- that tracks IT job postings by type of work, pay rates, technology used, and so on.

The data I pulled from the site compared the number of jobs available for the two leading collaboration platforms: IBM's Lotus Notes and Microsoft's Sharepoint and Exchange.

One shortcoming of that analysis is that it represented only the most recent three months, and so didn't show a trend.  Another is that it showed only contract positions. However, in digging further, I found that the site also shows data for the same period a year prior. There's a section on permanent positions also.

So, I extracted data on contracting and permanent IT positions  for the most recent three months, and for the same period in 2006:

• The total number of positions advertised for the category: Application Platform.
• The number of jobs for each of the three products: Notes, Sharepoint and Exchange. Those products  appear only in this category, so they are fully accounted for.

These charts show the results:

Contract Positions:

To summarize, this shows that  in the UK market:

• Over the past year, advertised contracting opportunities for Sharepoint and Exchange increased in both volume and share. Similar opportunities for Notes declined in both areas (also shown here).
• There are about three times as many contracting opportunities for Exchange as there are for Notes. There are also about three times as many contracting opportunities for Sharepoint as there are for Notes. For the Microsoft  Collaboration Platform (Exchange plus Sharepoint) the ratio is six times.

Permanent IT Positions:

To summarize, this shows that in the UK market:

• Over the past year, advertised permanent positions for Sharepoint and Exchange increased in both volume and share. Similar opportunities for Notes declined in both areas (also shown here).
• There are about 15 times as many permanent job advertisements for Exchange as there are for Notes.  For the Microsoft  Collaboration Platform (Exchange plus Sharepoint) the ratio is 17 times.

Some obvious caveats:

• this is just one source in one country and I haven't audited the site in any way. However, the site seems reputable. It has data going back about three years. With a base of about 40,000 positions  in this category alone, it's a pretty broad survey.
• I don't think this shows absolute share. The Exchange:Notes ratio is too high for that.

I do suspect this is a good indicator of both relative share and growth though.

Eight resources every developer should know about

Avi Sagiv, a colleague at Microsoft, just sent me this list of Microsoft programs and resources that every software developer should know about:

Empower. If you are building a product, you get free (or very close to free) access to almost every Microsoft tool and product.

InnovateOn. Technical and business resources for products like Windows Vista, SQL Server, Dynamics, Office Live, Windows Live, ...

nxt. Help migrating applications to the Microsoft platform.

ISV Royalty Program. Embed Microsoft products in your solution.

Service Provider Licensing Agreement. Pay as you go licensing for SaaS solutions.

Solution Profiler to promote your solution to the more than 70,000 customers each month  who search Microsoft.com for technology experts

Channel Builder to create partnerships within a worldwide partner community

The Microsoft ISV Site. Resources, resources, resources

Thanks, Avi