Home John Doerr at Web 2.0 Conference

John Doerr at Web 2.0 Conference

Here are some notes taken from John Doerr’s talk at the Web
2.0 Conference
, held October 2004 in San Francisco. Thanks to IT Conversations for
recording it!

John Doerr is a
well-known venture capitalist, who apparently had the foresight to back Google in 1999
when few others did. His Web 2.0 speech had a lot of insightful nuggets and tantalizing
snippets of insight. I got the feeling he was holding a lot back, but that’s to be
expected from someone who is on the board of both Google and Amazon. Still, very
worthwhile listening to. Or if you can’t be bothered listening, here are my notes:

Parallel Webs

After about 10 minutes of banter and rambling, it got interesting at the 11.40 minute
mark. That’s when Doerr launched into his Web 2.0 theories. He started by saying “…take
the idea of the string theory and apply it to the Web”, which led to his suggestion that
there are “at least 6 parallel webs.” Although this caused a round of titters in the
audience, I think everyone was on tenterhooks! So the 6 parallel webs are:

* Near Web -> the PC upfront; “innovations are around services”; examples:
Friendster, Visible Path

* Far Web -> tv web; people don’t interact with it as much; e.g. Akimbo.com, which
delivers video to your tv set

* Here Web -> one that is “ubiquitously pervasive”; e.g. phones

* Weird Web -> “talk to and it talks back to you” e.g. 3D VRML where the perspective
changes; An example company is TellMe, which offers voice recognition over your phone
(e.g. directory assistance – AT&T uses it)

* B2B Web -> the plumbing behind the scenes (xml, rss, web services – eg amazon);
example: “companies building and promoting wikis”.

* D2D Web -> Device Web (e.g. RFID info, remote sensors, smart dust)

He puts the 6 Webs under rubric of “EverNet”. The most interesting one sounded like
the “Weird Web”, which John said had “opportunity for innovation” further into the
future.

Platforms

Doerr talked a bit about platforms. The OS as a platform was followed by databases (eg
p2p), and now we have web / web services / “search in particular” (“a very powerful
platform”).

He said browsers are not so much a platform, but “a great enabler”. People in the
Netscape era used the browser as a thin client. He said that “most of the old web-based
services [Web 1.0] are in the process of being systemically reinvented – including the
browser.” He reckons “browsers are going to come back”, but dismissed the likelihood of
Google doing a browser.

Opportunities

When questioned what are the opportunities or markets open for entrepreneurs, Doerr
said there is scope for “lots of web services-based companies”. In particular “really
targeted services for the explosive Hand Web” [aka the Here Web] – for example, social services and tracking
services.

“We live in time and we’re assaulted by events”, Doerr went on to say. He wants
filters to be developed so that we’re only assaulted by “the most relevant information”.
That’s a “Google-sized” technical challenge, but an example of something he’d invest in.
There are also opportunities to tackle information that is not currently on the
Web – he gave the example of a video company that could aggregate all the backlist info
about videos.

But he cautioned that a lot of those types of opportunities will go to “the
larger companies” and the smaller innovators should be wary of “getting in the way” of
Google, Amazon, EBay or Yahoo!.

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