Web 2.0 Over and Out @ WEB 2.0 JOURNAL

Web 2.0 Over and Out

Many of us in the VC community have been quietly wondering about the state of Web 2.0 innovation

Aug. 3, 2007 09:00 AM

Peter Rip's March 19 dated EarlyStageVC blog entry created some buzz and feedback recently. Peter joined Crosslink in 2006 as a general partner, and focuses on software, Internet services and infrastructure, and consumer services.He has over 25 years of experience as a successful entrepreneur, venture investor, and institutional investor. He has focused exclusively on early stage technology companies. Before becoming a venture investor, Peter co-founded Silicon Compiler Systems, a major IC design automation software company acquired by Mentor Graphics in 1991. He began venture investing in 1992. He has specialized in investing in early stage companies, several of which have been acquired by AOL, CA, HP, Microsoft and others. Prior to joining Crosslink, Peter was a Managing Director at Leapfrog Ventures and the Managing Director of Knight Ridder Ventures.

In his "Web 2.0 - Over and Out" titled blog entry Rip writes:

"Many of us in the VC community have been quietly wondering about the state of Web 2.0 innovation. We aren’t seeing much. Startup activity remains strong, but the consumer web landscape seems to be populated with the same bodies with different skins. Another video deal here; another social networking deal there, and social [feature] everywhere.

The apogee of this Web 2.0 hit me on Friday when I was having lunch with my daughter in San Francisco. There was a conversation at the table next to us between a 30-something and a 50-something, The younger was explaining to the elder that they had web site with the following attributes

Users can share any kind of information from files to photos
Storage isn’t expensive, so we don’t police it today, yet
Users can invite their friends; that’s how we get new users
We launched a few months ago and are doubling every month
We haven’t quite figured out our revenue model, but we think it is freemium (“Let me explain what that means…”)

Of course, this is the generic Web 2.0 company template. Overhearing the dialog felt like the 2007 version of Joe Kennedy getting stock tips from his shoe shine boy. Web 2.0 is in the water, drink up.

We now know the fourth quarter of 2006 witnessed the mainstreaming of Web 2.0. It began with the YouTube acquisition, followed by a rather incumbent-centered Web 2.0 conference, culminating with the coronation of user-generated media as Time’s Person of the Year.

The notion of Web 2.0 as a wave is now rather long in the tooth, as cycles go. I believe Tim O'Reilly and John Battalle first coined the term in early 2004.

I thought one way to check the energy dissipation around “Web 2.0” would be to look at Web 2.0-centric media. Three properties that one can reasonably say are pure plays in the Web 2.0 mainstream are Techcrunch, Gigaom, and Technorati. "

After disussing his view and his position on this subject and illustrating his point of view he ends his blog entry with:

"VCs have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future. Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible. Web 2.0 is now firmly in the category of What Is.

The only thing I can say in defense of "Web 2.0" is that it's not "Venture Capital."

Published Aug. 3, 2007 — Reads 11,208
Copyright © 2007 SYS-CON Media. All Rights Reserved.

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The Web 2.0 Journal News Desk keeps you up to speed with all that's happening in the world of the read/write Web and all its mushrooming new facets - from tagging, wikis, mash-ups, and image-sharing to "Advertising 2.0," podcasting, and The Writeable Web.

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