ext337: [Future of Web Apps] What's Next for Web Apps

Weblog

Michael will deliver his thoughts on the trends, techniques and technologies that will inspre the next generation of web apps.

(live blogging with all the attendant misspellings, mistakes and missed contexts)

Presenter
Michael Arrington, Editor, TechCrunch

Adobe’s apollo project: bring flash applications to the desktop without using a browser
Digg has changed the way people get their news; drives 20% of TechCrunch traffic which makes them TC’s most important partner even though they don’t have a relationship
Zoho is an online office competitor; has a total of 10 applications online
PopSugar (with 13M page views a month) shows the power of blogs
Raising too much money and then spending it is a bad thing
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Shared Attributes of Winners
- Passion for what they are doing
- Do something extraordinary; do something that catches people’s eye
- Remove serious friction
- Great founder dynamics
- Perfect revenue model not required
Shared Attributes of Losers
- Poor founder/team choices
- Lifestyle/ego entrepreneurs
- Raised too much money
- Over business-planned
- Forgot about scaling
Market Aturation
- Avoid
  - Social Networking
  - Social Bookmarks
  - Video
  - Photos
  - Blogging/podcasting paltforms
  - Portals/homepages
  - Feed readers
- Potential
  - Platform (backend stuff; things that can help other companies do things)
  - Desktop Apps
  - Office efficiency
  - Cloud storage
  - Identity
  - Developer Tools
  - Market Desctruction (like free411)
  - Enterprise (TechCrunch is launching a blog on enterprise)

Q&A:

excited about Yahoo!’s new mail that is launching later this fall (based on OddPost)
odesk or elance used for volunteer projects in nonprofit projects
Buy salesforce stock. They own the platform that a lot of companies are building on.