Yannick Laclau

UPDATE2: Wow. It’s very heartening to see, via my statcounter, that this post is being read by people all over the world. I count at least 30 different countries. Great exposure for local companies here, and I’d love to be reading about the equivalent startups in other places. If anyone out there is blogging about startups in other countries, particularly small ones, let me know and let’s spread the word around.

UPDATE: Oops, just correcting a mistake below. I’ve been informed that Enrique Dans is actually an IT professor, not a journalist. Sorry for the confusion!

WebDosBeta is over; It was an intense day of startup presentations and
panel discussions. More than 150 people from all over Spain attended.

Interested in a snapshot of what Spain’s internet community is up to?

Browse the list of presenting companies (scroll to bottom), and click on over to
check them out- there’s some good stuff out there!

Why WebDosBeta?

This was a grassroots initiative started by Albert Armengol’s post on the lack of innovation in Spain. Journalist IT professor Enrique Dans  and
SixApart’s man in Spain, Victor Ruiz, picked up on this meme and the
three of them kicked off, via the blogosphere naturally, the idea to hold a conference.

Some thoughts

• Congrats to the organizers- it went down pretty well
  • The event had its own wiki (of course!)
  • Companies not able to present live were invited to present virtually on the wiki
  • The event was certainly photographed- masses of pixs on flickr
  • Instant buzz: on the day of the event, WebDosBeta became the 2nd most searched term on Technorati
  • All participants grouped online for networking in eConozco , a LinkedIn  for Spanish business people
  • Conference had its own real-time tag cloud!
       

• Spanish innovation
  • It’s alive! There are great hackers here, and totally
    cluedtrained entrepreneurs who are as internet-addicted,
    tech-passionate, and buzzword-savvy as anybody anywhere. But I guess
    the problem is that it’s not a very large group, they’re not clustered
    anywhere in particular, and are desperately undercapitalized. Almost
    everybody presenting seemed to be totally bootstrapped operations!
  • There were some really interesting companies presenting, some
    still largely working the local market, but others very much projecting
    internationally. Check the companies section below for some more info.
  • Discussion around innovation circled around these issues.

• Drop the brands
  • It adds prestige to the event to invite people from Google,
    Yahoo, etc., but frankly, they hardly add any value. All the really
    interesting stuff about these big companies seems to be happening at HQ
    in the US, so having the "country manager of X de Espana" just to claim that X brand name was there is actually wasting people’s time. Compared to Martin Varsavsky
    (real entrepreneur, presenting his own new startup) or Luistxo
    Fernandez (the Basque dude from Tagzania), listening to the corporate
    people was about as stimulating as watching someone read PR press
    releases.
  • I think that for everyone attending, it’s much more interesting
    to discuss with real entrepreneurs, even if their companies are tiny.
    Entrepreneurs can add real value by speaking very forthrightly on
    topics that are going to be top of mind with all their fellow
    entrepreneurs in the audience- the struggles for financing, strategies
    for sales growth, issues around product development, the nitty-gritty
    of tech trends, recruiting, dealing with competition, figuring out
    expansion, etc.
       
• Martin Varsavsky
     
  • This guy deserves a bullet point all for himself. Clearly the
    rock star of the conference, a born salesman, and probably the richest
    guy in the room (worth over $500 million? founded and cashed out of
    Viatel, Jazztel, Ya.com, etc.)
  • Anyway, he presented his latest project, FON .
    It’s a weird, kind of exciting, kind of half-baked project, and I’m
    still struggling to get my head around whether it makes sense or not.
  • Maybe the most interesting aspect of FON so far is how Martin
    has been able to literally blog this company into existence. More on
    this in a future post!

     
   

Companies presented (live and virtually, via the Wiki) – in no particular order!

• Tagzania (English)
  • Sort of a Delicious + Google Maps; tag locations easily; view, share, aggregate it all on maps
• MusicStrands  (English)
  • Algorithmic + tag-based music recommendation engine; VC-backed; part-US team including former Amazon Chief Scientist
• EyeOS  (English)
  • Open source project to do a "Web Based Operating System"; respect to the team- 3 18-year-old catalan kids built this thing!
• DiceLaRed  (Spanish)
  • Sells customized portals to companies/orgs to present aggregate
    topical news to their consumers; aggregates media, blogs, boards.
• Blogometro  (Spanish)
  • Technorati/Blogdex for Spanish-language blogs; needs work, but still fairly authoritative for local blogosphere; nice vibe
       
• Trabber  (Spanish)
  • Vertical search engine for flights; good stuff- watch these guys.
• CompareBlogs  (Spanish & English)
  • Tools to understand better subscribers of your blog feed; still
    work in progress, but interesting experiments. Feedburner should be
    offering this stuff
• Weblogs, SL  (Spanish)
  • Spanish Weblogs, Inc.; profitable, growing network of 11 themed blogs; also creating blogs for corporates, movie releases
• FON  (Spanish)
  • Software to share your wifi; if you share yours, you can use
    everyone else’s; also a wifi phone angle in there; and an adsl sales
    angle; and maybe other stuff, too!
• Festuc  (Spanish)
  • Spanish Dodgeball (mobile social networking/dating); launching soon
• EasyPodcast  (Spanish & English)
  • Client to facilitate podcast creation
• Tractis  (Spanish)
  • Web services to broker, arbitrate contracts
• NectaRSS (Spanish)
  • Algorithm to filter blog posts by relevancy; based on PhD research
• Aud’asti  (Spanish)
  • Tools to track the comments you leave on other blogs
       

Finally…

This dude with the big hair in all the flickr photos is Javier Candeira; he’s a big copyfight activist and also runs Barrapunto,
Spain’s version of Slashdot. Anyway, funny thing is that I’ve exchanged
emails with Javier several times over copyright issues in Spain, but I
don’t think I could have guessed he sported that particular hairstyle!

We’ve just finished the presentations section of the WebDosBeta conference in Madrid; so far, some interesting projects have been shown; slight blogging-app heavy.

Now starting the roundtables. Will blog a summary at the end of the day.

I’ve written for the broadbandwiki about the recent game-changing ADSL offer by Jazztel in Spain.
(20 meg down/ 1 meg up + unlimited local/national calls + wifi/router for 30 euros/month!)

Now, via Martin Varsavsky’s blog (in Spanish), we learn that Jazztel is gaining 3,000 gross adds per day, or roughly 90,000 per month.

To put that number in perspective, the growth of the entire Spanish ADSL market has averaged maybe 70-80,000 per month over the past 2 years.

So assuming that Jazztel’s churn is no higher than that of its peers, either they have succeeded in exploding the market’s natural growth rate, or are devouring the growth of every other player (maybe even forcing some into a situation of negative net adds).

Either way, this is powerfully disruptive news. Are Telefonica investors aware of the silent revolution taking place in Spanish broadband?

Hi Nicholas,

I love your writing style; it’s very funny and irreverent, and makes us all think about things from a fresh angle. Your post about the amorality of Web 2.0 is a classic read: "This isn’t the language of exposition. It’s the language of rapture": great stuff! You and Kevin Kelly have like an asynchronous online version of Crossfire going on; for sure, please keep shaking things up.

But I have to take issue with the attacks you and The Register have written on Wikipedia, and the participative nature of Web 2.0. In particular, you build up a black & white worldview defined by "amateurs" and "professionals" that I think is very counter-productive to thinking about the real challenges of Web 2.0.

On "Amateurs" vs "Professionals"

So you write,

"The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional… Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in
their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call ‘the
mainstream media’ "

But exactly what is the definition of an "amateur"? Or a "professional"? And who decides what label you deserve?

I read blogs written by prominent venture capitalists, marketing gurus, university professors, successful entrepreneurs, engineers, hedge fund managers, equity analysts, and many others who are unquestionably considered "professionals" within their chosen field of work.

These people are anything but "amateurs". Besides their "offline" qualifications, they’re people who help bring down racist politicians;  raise awareness of crappy products; come together to organize relief efforts; provide companies with early feedback; and so on.

Do you honestly believe these people are "amateurs"?

Something else you write:

"Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New
York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I
will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs."

Your choice of examples for the "professionals" is certainly good. But it doesn’t have to be such a stark choice. I think blogs can play a complementary role to the MSM in various ways, one of which is to fisk very obviously wrong information that goes uncorrected.

In my own blog, I’ve taken issue in the past with the sloppy data that the Economist Intelligence Unit are using to publish their MBA rankings. Now, I have nothing to do with any MBA programs, I’m not a journalist, nor do I know anything about how these rankings are compiled, and nor do I really care. In this subject matter, at least, I’m very much an amateur.

But I find it very irritating to see a brand that I respect like the Economist let their standards slip like this, so I blogged about it. And from the small but steady traffic that post continues to generate every day, from readers all over the world, I think I’ve been able to make a small contribution to the integrity of the discussion of MBA rankings.

You really came down hard on Wikipedia in your post. So let me give you another example, one that actually involves Wikipedia.

I live in Spain, a country that has experienced spectacular population growth in the past 6 years. Fertility rates in Spain have been below replacement level for long enough now that all of this growth has come from immigrants attracted to the warm climate and growing economy.

Around 2000, the population of Spain was about 40 million, and it was expected to stay at pretty much exactly that level for many years before starting to decline. Instead, massive immigration has pushed the population to an estimated 44 million. Ten percent growth in 6 years, all from immigrants!

But if I go to the CIA World FactBook, the entry for Spain states:

"Population: 40,341,462 (July 2005 est.)"

This is just flat out, factually wrong. And not just a little wrong, but almost 10% off.

As if to complete the illusion of rigor, we’re told this is a "July 2005 estimate".

I fully realize the folks at the CIA are all overworked and busy trying to find this bad guy, but surely they could spare an intern to check up on the data they’re disseminating to the world?

Estimating the population of Spain shouldn’t be that tough- we’re talking about a modern Western European country. One could check the local press for population figures like these:

January 1, 2005: 43,975,375 (estimated- official data come out early 2006)

Or even better, surf on over to the national statistics institute and get the latest, official census data:

January 1, 2004:         43,197,684 (official data)

You might be wondering why I care about this? For the same reason that I came down hard on the Economist: it irritates me to see brands I respect issuing research that is so obviously wrong. Now when I look at EIU or CIA data, I start to second guess whether what I’m reading is actually accurate. How many of the world’s business plans, economic models, and research projects use as base assumptions the numbers that come out of the CIA World FactBook or the EIU World in Figures?

But here’s the funny bit: what if that CIA intern, assigned to double-check the population estimate of Spain, doesn’t speak Spanish and so can’t navigate the Spain’s statistics institute website? Easy, just head over to…Wikipedia! For in this very same place that you called an "incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids" is the following figure for the population of Spain:

Population: 43,209,511 July 2005, estimated

Ok, the figure isn’t sourced, and still seems to underestimate what the INE and other sources have published. But it’s still far more accurate than the CIA’s estimate!

I know that you "wouldn’t depend on it as a source, and..certainly wouldn’t recommend it to a student writing a research paper", but let’s admit that it’s a whole lot more transparent, and adaptable, than the opaque processes at work behind sources such as the CIA and EIU. And as we’ve just seen, in some cases it’s quite significantly more accurate as well.

On "Scary Economics"

Well, that what you called it. But if you look at software development, from any angle, over the years much of what was once work done by paid-for employees has vanished under the tide of ever improving programming languages, debugging tools, development environments, version control software, and the opening of vast, indexed content/tutorials/fixes/code samples/etc available to all at any time.

Far from putting all programmers out of work, these improvements have made programmers much more productive, and therefore more capable of spending their time on solving more important problems.

That’s the dynamic that is starting to take place in the content business. At a rapid clip, the building blocks of content creation are being commoditized: access to sources, aggregation of basic data and statistics, fact-checking, and so on. This trend extends deep into the value chain of content businesses: where before you needed an ad sales force, today you need 3 lines of javascript and a Google AdSense account to get started; where before you needed to find a distributor, today a free download of WordPress will suffice.

I’ve worked for consulting firms where the respective telecoms practices would invest a lot of consultant and researcher time to benchmark things like mobile phone and internet access tariffs in countries around the world. No value added, just aggregating the data. And this work was probably being duplicated simultaneously by dozens of firms, none of which would dream of sharing the data with one another.

What a waste. Instead, today we have the BroadbandWiki, which in less than a few weeks has collected and made freely available, loads of useful information about broadband markets in dozens of countries. This is maybe the building blocks of what equity analyst James Enck was calling "open source research".

And rather than being a "threat", it’s actually a great opportunity to free many man-hours around the world to solve more interesting problems than redundantly compiling information inside closed environments (your company).

Your "scary economics" strike me as just modern-day luddite fear of a world where content and the  technical and social systems that help people find, create, manage, and distribute it are constantly improving. Welcome to the world of programmers; don’t worry, you’ll survive! And if you’re willing to adapt, you’ll be grateful for all the change.

Phrasing for the real issue here could be called "challenging economics", which Om, Silicon Beat, and others raise the alarm about: Web 2.0 participation is moving ahead but still sorely lacks new business models to compensate companies sharing data, and users sharing content/time. To address this problem, have a look at some stimulating ideas by venture capitalist Peter Rip. I believe many of the problems that you describe in your blog will be resolved by systems along the lines of what Peter is hinting at.

Finally, I can’t emphasize any better the positive aspects of the participative nature of Web 2.0 than by this very blog post, because I’m just a guy with a humble blog, working on a vertical search startup (yeah, yeah- who isn’t), writing from Barcelona, Spain. One of the amateurs, by your definition! But thanks to Web 2.0, here we are having this discussion.

Cheers,
Yannick

Let nobody henceforth accuse me of being too internet-obsessed.

This couple have set the new benchmark.

Link: Google KAI is the name of our SON www.google-kai.com.

UPDATE: heh, a reader wonders where is child named "Yahoo!" (exclamation point in name essential!);  I think of all the Internet powerhouses, "Amazon" would be the best name. Can’t believe I’m having this conversation with people!

Latest report on the state of local loop unbundling in France shows mad quarterly growth of 41% for fully unbundled lines.

Each fully unbundled line represents a customer relationship fully extinguished for France Telecom, and the current rate of 10,000 lost customers per week is just the current snapshot of a trend that is still accelerating.

FT will try to ease the inevitable pain by aggressivelly stealing customers from neighbouring countries like the UK and Spain, both of which are on the cusp of ULL & ADSL2+ explosions (message to fellow European incumbents: if I’m going down, you’re coming down with me!).

2006 promises to be very, very ugly for incumbent fixed line operators.

Link: NetEconomie :: Le d¿groupage continue de s¿duire les fran¿ais.

"Openness" is one of the hallmarks of web 2.0. But is the Brave New World of mash-ups going to close up as quickly as it opened?

Classifieds aggregator Oodle reported over the weekend that Craigslist has banned Oodle from aggregating its listings. The interesting, even passionate comments show this is a major move that could have consequences on how, and why data are shared and distributed between internet companies.

And now come reports that eBay has modified its policies to force PayPal to be the only payments processor for eBay users; the assumption is that this is a move to facilitate blocking any move by Google into this area. (salient quote: the "other business interests" of any payment processor will be evaluated by eBay before being allowed. Indeed!)

Is this the start of a trend?  Of course, eBay and Craigslist are not the first to expose this key digital faultline of the Internet. Google’s News channel consists
entirely of screen scraping data off newspaper websites; yet it
strictly forbids anyone from screen scraping its own News site!

In the early days, when all is new and in beta and people are blind by the tech-love of seeing innovative stuff, these issues are for the most part ignored. But as we start to see sizable traffic and revenue patterns fluctuate, many existing players might feel that being "open" is rather little more than an invitation for a competitor to steal their lunch.

In any case, it’s interesting to see two major players who have built their businesses on the basis of a community-friendly, even hippy and anti-corporate image, would so openly appear to be circling the wagons in such a business-minded reflexive way.

I can’t blame existing players for wanting to protect their turf, and sometimes it’s a delicate task to identify a partner from a competitor. But this behaviour does seem very much motivated by self-preservation rather than by the needs of consumers, which long-term probably defeats the original point of self-preservation. And surely the needs of consumers will be better met by openness than by closed systems.

More interesting opinion on this issue on the Clipperz blog.

closing thought: a blog entry I read a few weeks ago predicted this was possibly going to happen because there was no business model, or even basic transaction model for shared and mashed-up data on the web. So in a world where the map comes from Google, the auction data from eBay, population data from the Census bureau, and wish lists from 43Places, how is revenue divided if the resulting application is a revenue-generating one? Maddeningly, I can’t find this post anymore

UPDATE: A reader has pointed me to the post I was looking for about the broken transaction model. It’s a great read, and I think holds the key to cracking this emerging dilemma. Funny how in the end the best search engine of all was still the human kind!

UPDATE2: Well, the proof is in the traffic. I’ve been "Memeorandumed", no doubt thanks to Om’s kind words. The sudden surge of visits prove to me that Memeorandum is establishing some seriously influence in directing people to the ongoing conversations of the web.

Latest Internet traffic stats, which I reproduce below via A VC, are stunning.

Page views last month, largest web properties, from Media Metrix:

Yahoo! – 43,700MM
Time Warner – 31,600MM (AOL is roughly 70% of this)
Microsoft – 21,800MM (MSN is part of this)
eBay – 10,900MM
MySpace – 9,600MM
Google – 6,300MM

* MySpace, which didn’t even exist 2 years ago, has more page views than Google
* MySpace is growing at 50% per quarter
* It’s still a US-centric phenomenon. Can/will it scale internationally?

A VC makes has the salient takeaway:

“Who is the smartest guy on the Internet right now?
Maybe not Sergey and Larry.
Maybe Rupert Murdoch.
Does $500mm sound like a bargain? It does to me.”

To that I add a concluding observation that in this field, there really is no long-term stability whatsoever. A startup launched today can really challenge the biggest players with incredible speed.

Just getting the blog registered on Technorati.

Technorati Profile

I will be coming to Madrid to attend the WebDosBeta conference. It’s going to be great to catch up with some of Spain’s top entrepreneurs, and meet some new ones!

I’ll blog the event in English, which hopefully should help give a bit more exposure to some of the interesting things happening down here in Spain.

If I can find some time, I’ll try to profile some of the entrepreneurs there. I’ve been thinking of doing this for some time now with entrepreneurs in Barcelona, and find myself inspired by the great work Rodrigo is doing in France! His video interviews are great; maybe we should just convince him to show up directly instead?

I’m actually coming to Madrid the previous Friday; interested in meeting up for a drink? Send me an email: yannick_laclau at yahoo dot com