A Silicon Valley Entrepreneur's Musings on 2005

2005 was a crazy year for me and 2006 looks like more of the same. Before 2006 rolls around I thought I would share some of the questions, lessons, lists and various other things I have on my mind this New Year’s Eve. These are in no particular order of importance other than the order than emerged from my stream of consciousness.

1. This isn’t Web 2.0, it’s Web 3.0 – Web 1.0 was the early manually edited days of Yahoo! et al. Web 2.0 was what most people consider the bubble days of Excite, eBay, etc. Web 3.0 is totally different. It’s user generated and tagged content, Ajax, social networking, on-demand applications, and the idea of the Web as an OS (instead of Windows).
2. What is going on with our political system? Does a dual party system even work?     
3. In 2006, an Iraqi government and country will emerge that is backed by Iran, bordering on the dangerous zone of religious, and completely nothing like the democratic state we claimed we wanted. The real solution to the Middle East problem is not to install governments; it is to modernize the Arab world to bring them up to the same standards of living and openness of Europe or the US.
4. The year of the blog will be 2006. Sorry, make that the year of RSS. Random question: how many blog search engines can there really be?
5. Mobile isn’t ready yet for primetime, it’s coming in 2007. Mobile gaming was a bubble, even    though Jamdat sold for a crazy amount, that was a fluke. Even though lots of great startups like my own 4INFO and others are emerging, there won’t be truly converged devices and deep mobile application penetration until someone can solve the form factor limitations of the cell phone and networks are advanced and OPEN enough for true broadband to work on phones. Who’s building applications that soccer moms will actually use? This is the long tail and there is money in it!
6. Someone will create a dedicated mobile advertising system like adwords but for SMS/WAP. The question is just who is going to be the first people that will really be able to measure conversion.
7. Google is not evil, it’s just not good anymore in the eyes of the techie world. I think this applies to any company that users feel like they played a part into making big, which then cashes out for lots of money. For example, I noticed this week that I have lost daily interest in del.icio.us since Yahoo! acquired them.
8. There are still interesting things left to do on the web. Start-ups like meebo, trulia are just some examples. I have always said that people are driven by basic needs and those are reflected by websites that are successful: food, sex (aka dating), pleasure (travel), shopping, and finding information.
9. The online advertising market is much bigger than most people realize, Google is only the tip of the iceberg. Companies like adteractive and adbrite have gained significant market share without the mainstream public every realizing it.
10. Social networking companies like myspace, facebook, linkedin, and plaxo, are slowly dying. Spoke and Friendster are already dead.
11. New companies are popping up this year like it’s 1999. Hallelujah.
12. The puzzle game Sudoku is taking the world by storm (at least bookstores anyways). In every family I know at least one person got a Sudoku book for Christmas.
13. Starting a company is hard work. Some of the best reads I’ve found on setting a company culture and making sure things are set up the right way: Ten Rules for Web Startups and Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management. 
14. Social software is now the social Web (Yahoo has done best job of jumping on this with its acquisitions of Flickr and del.icio.us). A whole host of start-ups have followed or will follow: digg, flock, thenorp, tagged, riya, karmaOne, and the list goes on and on. This is Web 3.0 to me. 
15. What happened to all the interest in China? Seriously… the Chinese PR machine must be keeping all talk about how China is now the world’s X largest economy really tight under the lid.
16. I just realized: are there any US airlines that aren’t bankrupt these days? Are Southwest and JetBlue the only carriers that haven’t come out of Chapter 11 recently?
17. All of a sudden gas prices drop 30% post-post Katrina are we are all thrilled? Do you realize that most people are still paying over $2.10 a gallon for unleaded?
18. Does apple really need to keep advertising the iPod so much? I mean San Francisco is completely littered with bus stop billboards, scrapes, highway signs and more. What would happen is apple stopped advertising so much? Would their market share quickly decline? Random side note: was in Europe this November and absolutely NOBODY on the subways or buses was listening to music on an iPod. Most were on Sony or Nokia cell phones / mp3 players.     
19. Products/Websites I use on my laptop on a daily basis: Firefox (kicks IE in the booty), Outlook, Yahoo IM, AIM, Excel, new Yahoo! Mail, Skype, Yahoo! Desktop Search (x1), Typepad, Google Analytics, Google search, CNN, ESPN, and a whole host of RSS feeds in my Firefox bookmarks.

There you have it. My 19 random musings on 2005 (20 just seemed overly round). Hope you enjoyed and have a great 2006.

Zaw

UPDATE: Some other great thoughts on 2005 and tips on 2006.

• 100 things we didn't know this time last year
• Party like it's 2006