social media

Cisco’s new broad, vague Web 2.0 program

Cisco announced a broad if somewhat vague program to bind the Elements of Web 2.0 applications into a cohesive whole. The details on this vision were extremely difficult to extract, and we could find no Cisco material online to offer more insight. But it appears to us that Cisco is proposing a broad concept of service-from-mashups where APIs used by various social networks, sites, and even operators could be combined in some centralized way to create new services.

What is even less clear is exactly what role Cisco proposes to play in this. Will it offer a product set, host a service, or both? All this said, we admit that it just might be that Cisco is looking at the area of reformulating service creation—a major focus of our own interest—and also the area of using social networking and similar Web evolutions as the basis for collaboration and communication, another thing we believe to be essential in shaping the next generation of services.

In short, Cisco may be on to something and we’ll try to figure out what exactly it is.

Regarding the fate of VC-funded web businesses

Analysts and venture capitalists (VCs) are joining forces to warn that the days of running a web business for years with no revenue are over. The latest round, generated by Gartner, is aimed at the social media players who are the latest in the net-company crowd to get funded and are still largely unprofitable. We believe that the whole venture process is tainted by hype-based promotions that border on pyramid swindles, so winding back in VC investment will likely have little real impact on the market. However, it will certainly have an impact on employment in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and there may be a period when even good startup ideas have little access to capital, especially in the first half of 2009.