DIGITAL TEM RITMO ACELERADO

Em um ano em que o mercado publicitário cresceu em torno de 5% e quase todas as mídias acompanham esse ritmo lento, o digital e o mobile se destacaram. Com um crescimento de 32% em 2013, de acordo com dados do IAB Brasil (Interactive Advertising Bureau), o meio segue como portal para a inovação e segmentação de campanhas e ações.

 Confirmando tendências globais, o share digital já é o segundo maior entre todos os veículos, atrás apenas da TV. Em 2013, a mídia faturou R$ 6,03 milhões. Embora gigantes como Google e Facebook não divulguem seus dados de receita no Brasil, a crença é de que, caso esses números fossem somados, o crescimento seria ainda mais acelerado. “É um mercado novo e há sinais muito fortes de que o digital está crescendo tudo o que esperamos. Continua com a exuberância que vem sendo, e 2013 confirmou que teremos mais alguns anos pela frente de grandes resultados e de uma demanda ainda reprimida”, afirma Jonatas Abbot, presidente da Abradi (Associação Brasileira de Agências Digitais).

 De acordo com executivos de algumas das principais agências digitais brasileiras, o crescimento do setor no ano foi satisfatório. “Esse número, especialmente levando-se em conta que a expectativa do mercado publicitário como um todo é bem tímida, mostra que cada vez mais os anunciantes estão acreditando em digital”, diz Eduardo Bicudo, presidente da Wunderman. A educação de agências e clientes foi a tônica do ano. “Com os clientes mais maduros, embasados e objetivos no que queriam, abriram-se muitas frentes de negócio. 2013 foi um ano com muita diversidade e consistência”, afirma Andre Piva, CCO da LOV, que apontou os novos produtos e interação com outras mídias como principal marca da temporada.

 Muitas agências full service seguem o movimento de dar maior importância a essa área. “Tivemos um investimento forte no digital, a nossa receita cresceu 30% e hoje três em cada 10 funcionários vêm do lado digital. Estamos passando por uma evolução na cultura digital e hoje o consumo está aumentando em um ritmo maior que o crescimento do mercado publicitário”, diz Martin Montoya, presidente da WMcCann.

Abbot ainda ressalta uma evolução significativa na mão de obra especializada, que cresceu para dar conta de uma demanda cada vez mais específica e mais qualificada. “A pequena e média empresa representa 70% do total de companhias no Brasil. E elas estão criando um mercado de pequenas agências. Neste ano vimos a sedimentação de pequenas e médias empresas e agências que são a cara do Brasil.

O grande dinheiro da internet brasileira está pulverizado”, disse o gestor, que passou de 300 para 700 associados em 18 meses. “Algumas empresas médias e pequenas são muitas vezes o ‘patinho feio’ dos gigantes e acabam ficando com um trabalho básico, por não serem o cliente mais importante. Com isso, muitas delas apostam em agências pequenas, pois lá se tornam a ‘menina dos olhos’ da agência”, analisa Ricardo Rabello, sócio da Iungo.

Impacto e mensuração

Um dos principais pontos positivos de se investir em marketing digital é a precisão de se atingir o público desejado de formas variadas, e a otimização da verba publicitária é percebida por clientes e agências. “Tiros de canhão estão representando cada vez mais um desperdício de munição frente a estratégias customizadas e de relacionamento um a um”, afirma Tiago Ritter, CEO da W3Haus. O desafio é convencer a efetividade da mensuração digital.

 “Para se conseguir comprovar a eficiência do digital, teve que se criar parâmetros que comparam métricas de meios antigos e bem menos precisos”, cita. Como exemplo, o YouTube passou a comparar acessos ao GRP, métrica de audiência bruta usada na televisão.

 A forma de comercialização de display mudou, com a maturidade do realtime bidding. Por meio de cookies, análise de dados e trading desks de inventário, a mídia programática atinge um banco de usuários apurado. Este tipo de compra deve responder por até 15% de toda a oferta brasileira em três anos. Atualmente, o display gira um volume de R$ 2,2 bilhões, de acordo com dados do IAB. Apesar da evolução, existe um grande desafio no que tange a monetização. “A internet não sabe ganhar dinheiro, fica brigando por centavos”, afirmou o diretor-geral do Terra, Rafael Davini.

Responsável pela maior fatia do que é dispendido em marketing digital, o setor de search manteve a aceleração na demanda por espaço. Com faturamento estimado pelo IAB em R$ 3,82 bilhões no ano, os mecanismos de busca tiveram uma evolução de 29% em relação aos R$ 2,2 bilhões de 2012.

Social mantém força

 Como era esperado, as mídias sociais tomaram papel de destaque. Tanto na forma de conteúdo, com o ano marcado por grandes movimentações, como os protestos contra o aumento da tarifa ou em jogos da Copa das Confederações, quanto em termos de business. Novas redes surgiram, as “tradicionais” mantiveram uma aceleração acentuada e o investimento publicitário cresceu globalmente, atingindo US$ 16,2 bilhões, de acordo com um estudo da Generator Research.Abbott: 2014 será o ano da social media

E a tendência é de manutenção e crescimento do setor. “Ano que vem sem dúvida será o ano da social media. Em anos de eleição, o setor triplica de faturamento, e como tivemos protestos e Copa do Mundo, a expectativa é que social media cresça de cinco a seis vezes seu faturamento”, diz Jonatas Abbot, da Abradi.

 O uso dos games como ferramenta de marketing também se tornou mais comum durante 2013. De acordo com Mitikazu Lisboa, CEO da Hive Digital, os anunciantes passaram a adotar novas tecnologias e a incluir ações de gamificação em suas estratégias de marketing. “As empresas, tanto para o marketing interno quanto para o tradicional, estão buscando a gamificação. Há muitos games no modelo multiplataforma, que usa, por exemplo, o conteúdo do Facebook para gerar engajamento. Essa tendência começou este ano e pode se tornar mais forte em 2014”, diz.

Para o executivo, a interatividade e a conversa com o consumidor eram apenas uma promessa no início da década, mas se tornaram realidade em 2013. “Acho que 2014 será um caminho sem volta. Nenhuma grande marca acredita mais que a comunicação é uma via de mão única”.

Mobile registra aumento acentuado

 A verba destinada à publicidade em plataformas móveis registrará um crescimento de 120% em relação ao ano passado. De acordo com projeções do eMarketer, foram investidos US$ 9,6 bilhões globalmente em mobile durante 2013, total que deve chegar perto dos US$ 15 bilhões no ano que vem. Segundo a consultoria, os anunciantes não se sentiam seguros o bastante para anunciar nesse segmento nos anos anteriores, mas isso mudou nos últimos meses.Lobo: mobile será catalisador de negócios e comércio para empresas

A previsão é referendada por entidades regionais e nacionais que preveem alta na mídia também no Brasil. Para Fabiano Lobo, diretor para América Latina da MMA (Mobile Marketing Association), o principal fator para o crescimento do mobile no Brasil em 2013 foi o acesso da classe C aos smartphones – hoje, ela já representa mais de um terço do total de usuários dessas plataformas, conforme dados da entidade. O executivo afirma que isso fará com que o mobile atue como um “catalisador de negócios e comércio para empresas, tomando cada vez mais parte do bolo publicitário digital”.

 A previsão se apoia em informações presentes no relatório Mobile Report, elaborado pelo MMA em parceria com a Nielsen Ibope, segundo as quais 25% dos usuários de smartphones os utilizam como ponto primário de acesso à internet. Além disso, e-mails (75%) e redes sociais (77%), que concentram boa parte das ações publicitárias no mobile, foram mencionados como os principais serviços utilizados.

O crescimento, porém, será ainda mais vertiginoso se anunciantes e agências souberem superar os desafios do segmento, “uma mídia muito pulverizada”, de acordo com Abbott. “A força com que o mobile está dominando a tecnologia até assusta, pois quando falamos nisso, falamos em uma segmentação de mídia absurda”, comenta o presidente da Abradi.

Segundo ele, a maioria das empresas ainda não está preparada para lidar com a mídia e não tem estratégias específicas para plataformas móveis, mas a segmentação pode ser um fator a favor dos pequenos e médios anunciantes. “Já existem a mídia localizada, a geolocalização do usuário e o sistema SMS.

Só esses três aspectos já dão um mundo de coisas para serem feitas. Além de segmentar o perfil do consumidor, dá para saber onde ele está. Para as pequenas e médias empresas, isso faz todo o sentido, pois passa a ser uma mídia mais barata com a qual elas acertam em cheio seu público-alvo”, avalia.

Participação elevada

 Outro fator que contribuiu com os avanços do mobile no país foi a reestruturação na demanda, diz Leo Xavier, CEO da Pontomobi. Ele afirma que em 2013 as plataformas móveis passaram a fazer parte do plano estratégico dos anunciantes, o que configurou um primeiro passo para que o mercado crescesse de maneira consistente – 60% em relação a 2012.Xavier: plataformas móveis passaram a fazer parte do plano estratégico dos anunciantes

Para Xavier, a penetração das plataformas também ajudou. “São 70 milhões de smartphones, 80 milhões de acessos 3G, 63% dos usuários estão com o celular na hora de ver TV. Os serviços exclusivos de mobile começaram a ter um crescimento. É muita gente usando por muito tempo e para muita coisa.

 

A lógica de fazer publicidade onde as pessoas cada vez mais passam tempo pareceu meio óbvia, então muitas marcas passaram a ter uma linha de investimento nessa plataforma. Uma mudança clara identificada neste ano é a recorrência das campanhas”, analisa.

 Além da base, o comportamento muda, e muda rapidamente. O brasileiro adota novos comportamentos no meio digital de forma intensa. Adquirem-se e criam-se novos hábitos no mundo digital e é muito natural que eles aconteçam no mundo móvel por uma questão simples – o móvel é onde tem acontecido os grandes serviços e inovação.

Em 2014, a previsão é de que a publicidade móvel amadureça e ganhe ainda mais destaque entre os anunciantes. 2013 foi o preâmbulo de um movimento que deslanchará nos próximos anos e verá mais marcas e mais empresas estabelecendo estratégias para o segmento. “Não dá para não tratar esse negócio de maneira estratégica. Está na pauta a necessidade de entender como se apropriar dessa oportunidade”, conclui Xavier. (Propmark)

 

VENDAS DE TABLETS CRESCEM

 As vendas de tablets no Brasil em 2013 foram 142% superiores às registradas no ano passado, tornando o dispositivo ainda mais popular no país. Ao todo, foram vendidas 7,9 milhões de unidades ao longo do ano, de acordo com estimativas da IDC (International Data Corporation), que prevê um crescimento adicional de 26,6% em 2014, quando 10 milhões de novos tablets entrarão no mercado nacional.

De acordo com a IDC, boa parte das vendas extras foi estimulada pela oferta de aparelhos vendidos a preços mais baixos, o que chamou a atenção dos consumidores de faixas sociais médias.

 

A estimativa é de que 22% dos tablets vendidos no Brasil neste ano estavam na faixa de preços entre R$ 500 e R$ 1 mil. Já aqueles com preço superior a R$ 1 mil passaram de 40% para 15% em participação nas vendas de 2012 para 2013.

 

A análise do IDC sugere que os dispositivos mais caros estão perdendo mercado no Brasil para opções de baixo custo. Segundo o relatório, cerca de 95% dos tablets vendidos no ano rodam com o sistema operacional Android, do Google.

 

Intenção de compra

 Apesar do crescimento no consumo de tablets no país, odispositivo ainda tem espaço para ganhar na vida do brasileiro.

Um estudo conduzido pela Ipsos neste ano concluiu que 47% dos consumidores querem comprar um tablet, mas 80% da população ainda não considera o aparelho um substituto para computadores. Além disso, apenas 3% disseram ter preferido um tablet a um PC ou laptop no momento da compra.

 

Quanto a marcas, 42% dos entrevistados disse não ter preferência por marcas, mas 49% dos que tinham tablets disseram ter perguntado a familiares e amigos sobre qual modelo comprar. Além disso, apenas 28% disseram que comprariam um aparelho recomendado por funcionários de uma loja. (Propmark)

 

“POLÍTICAS DE PRIVACIDADE DEMANDAM MAIOR TRANSPASRÊNCIA”

 Se no Brasil a discussão sobre privacidade online ganhou maior notoriedade nas últimas semanas ao impactar diretamente dados sigilosos do governo e da própria presidente Dilma Rousseff, na Europa essa discussão ganha cada vez mais relevância na atuação de agências e anunciantes diante do ambiente digital.

Uma quarta-feira (18), em Londres, a consultoria de privacidade online Truste reuniu especialistas para discutir a transparência das práticas adotadas pelas marcas e seus parceiros, bem como o impacto delas perante o público geral.

“O papel do nosso modelo de negócios não é bem entendido e depende de nós mostrar como ele funciona, bem como seu valor econômico”, declarou Nick Stringer, diretor de relações regulamentais do IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) do Reino Unido e líder da EDAA (Europe Interactive Digital Advertising Aliance), entidade responsável pelas práticas de autorregulamentação da publicidade online na Europa.

Apesar de enxergar uma boa evolução nesse caminho, o executivo destacou que ainda há muito mais a ser realizado para garantir tal entendimento e transparência nos processos.

Vice-presidente de marketing da Truste, Dave Deasey apresentou uma pesquisa indicando que a privacidade é o fator mais importante para 20% dos usuários de dispositivos mobile.

Para os demais respondentes, ele aparece sempre na segunda posição, perdendo apenas para a preocupação com a duração da bateria. De acordo com o levantamento – válido para o mercado britânico –, 37% dos respondentes disseram checar se os aplicativos baixados possuem uma política de privacidade clara antes de dividir informações pessoais.

Privacidade social

 O evento aconteceu no mesmo dia em que o Facebook anunciou mudanças em suas restrições, permitindo jovens de 13 a 17 anos para publicar posts livremente. A rede social preparou medidas de proteção para realizar a mudança, mas elas não foram bem aceitas por pais e especialistas.

Para Kathryn Montgomery, professora de comunicação da Universidade de Washington, nos Estados Unidos, a decisão pode ter impacto negativo para o público envolvido, já que adolescentes tendem a assumir riscos e, muitas vezes, não conseguem mensurar as consequências de pequenos atos.

“A decisão do Facebook tem seu próprio modelo de negócios como base. Permitindo que os jovens dividam mais sobre eles mesmos, fica mais fácil aos anunciantes coletarem dados sobre os menores de idade, que ignoram o fato de que seus interesses estão sob um microscópio digital”, analisou. (Propmark, com informações da Marketing Week e da Associated Press)

 

   PROMO PROMETEU, MAS ENTREGOU POUCO

 A opinião é próxima da unanimidade no marketing promocional: um ano bom, porém, mais difícil do que se esperava. Para a maioria dos representantes das principais agências de promo – ou do mais recente chamado live marketing –, os resultados foram positivos, mas com leves revisões no meio do caminho e com muito mais suor que o esperado diante dos planos traçados 12 meses atrás.

“O ano de 2013 prometia muito, mas entregou pouco. O crescimento projetado era de 15% e deve ser fechado entre 3% e 5%. Foi um ano estranho”, classifica Kito Mansano, presidente da Apro (Associação de Marketing Promocional) e do Sindilive (Sindicato das Empresas de Live Marketing), nascido em agosto.

 “As coisas estavam acontecendo, mas em um volume menor do que o esperado. As pressões por diminuir custos e taxas, por parte dos clientes, também afetou nosso negócio”, relembra.

Para José Victor Oliva, presidente da Holding Clube – controladora de sete empresas ligadas ao setor, com destaque para a tradicional Banco de Eventos, além de Samba, Rio360 e FanClube –, foi um ano que “surpreendeu negativamente”.

 

“Houve uma grande dúvida pelo lado dos clientes de como seria o ano com Copa das Confederações, além do perfil instável da economia local e da desconfiança internacional com o futuro. Isso tudo junto nos levou a um ano medíocre”, avaliou Oliva, apesar de citar resultados de crescimento para boa parte de suas empresas.

 “Não foi fácil e vimos bastante gente se queixando”, considera Claudio Xavier, sócio-diretor de criação da NewStyle. O profissional também cita a economia como um dos fatores, mas também outra queixa recorrente do setor: a baixa valorização dos serviços promocionais por parte dos clientes.

“Muitos deles estão querendo tabelar nosso trabalho, mesmo a parte criativa, precificando-a como commodity”, enfatiza.

“Os clientes pararam de se preocupar com a qualidade em primeiro lugar e passaram a se dedicar a cortes de custo, cortes de ideias, briga de números, o que é preocupante”, adiciona Oliva.

 Único entre os entrevistados que celebra sem ressalvas os resultados do ano, Fernando Figueiredo, presidente do Grupo Talkability – que tem a Bullet como principal empresa –, considera 2013 “um ano para lembrar para sempre”.

“Ele começou difícil, muito pela ressaca de 2012, mas veio numa crescente e franca recuperação”, completa.

Porém, assim como Xavier e Oliva, Figueiredo cita a questão do departamento de compras dos clientes falando mais alto que o marketing como um dos problemas – e talvez sua adequação a este novo modelo uma das receitas do sucesso de sua empresa em 2013.

“Fizemos vários ajustes e alterações em nossa operação, criando inclusive uma mesa de compras interna como uma forma de remar a favor do cliente. As agências que não fizerem contas estão fadadas ao fracasso. O grande desafio é se adaptar ao novo modelo de negócios dos anunciantes, muito baseado em ROI e rentabilidade”, analisa.

Projeções

 

Um ano de Copa é sempre bem-visto pelo mercado como um todo, sobretudo no setor promocional. Eleições, porém, tendem a gerar um cenário inseguro que, muitas vezes, trava investimentos e estratégias dos anunciantes. Para boa parte dos executivos entrevistados pelo propmark, o balanço será válido mais uma vez este ano – pendendo, felizmente, para o lado positivo de um primeiro semestre aquecido frente à possível retração do segundo.

 “Deve ser um ano parecido com 2013, porém um pouco melhor. Prevejo um investimento forte no primeiro semestre e o segundo mais desacelerado – com muita gente segurando para ver o que vai acontecer na eleição”, estima Xavier, da NewStyle.

“Teremos um primeiro semestre bastante movimentado e com ótimos resultados, especialmente por termos três grandes clientes envolvidos com a Copa e outros com a necessidade de estabelecer conexões com as pessoas fora do ambiente do futebol. Mas, se pudesse fazer uma previsão, veria o segundo semestre bastante enfraquecido, com um momento de segurar custos”, complementa Rodrigo Rivellino, presidente da Aktuellmix.

Oliva ressalta que, para seus negócios, 2014 já se mostra extremamente promissor. “Em todas as minhas empresas, fechamos o panorama do ano que vem superior ao que alcançamos em 2013.

O Banco de Eventos já vendeu, antes de começar 2014, 50% do que fizemos em todo este ano”, revela. Em sua opinião, a Copa será positiva para o live marketing, especialmente, por uma nova visão dos anunciantes.

“Os clientes estão entendendo que não é suficiente só comprar uma cota na Globo, ou fazer uma ação temática, se não houver uma ativação por trás disso”, afirma.

Figueiredo, da Bullet, também crê em um bom impulso perante a Copa, inclusive diante das marcas sem ligação oficial com o evento.

 

“Estamos sentindo um agito muito maior dos não patrocinadores. Vejo dois tipos de anunciantes: os que não iriam fazer nada e estão fazendo por causa da Copa; e os que só estão direcionando seus esforços para o evento, sem necessariamente trazer novos investimentos”, revela.

 

Para ele, porém, o ponto-chave do ano serão as eleições. “O Brasil com uma economia medíocre e um dos menores crescimentos de PIB do mundo. E conhecendo o pouco que o país tem feito nesse sentido, haverá muita injeção de recursos – e isso, por um lado, será muito bom. As eleições vão fomentar o Brasil mais que a Copa do Mundo, e o setor de promo principalmente.”

 

Mansano é otimista com relação às duas datas. Quanto à Copa, ele é mais cauteloso, considerando que “ela vai alavancar os negócios, mas não para todos”.

“Ela oferece subprodutos muito nichados, o que reduz um pouco as possibilidades. Porém, as empresas que souberem aproveitar as possibilidades, com ativações e ações paralelas – respeitando as regras da Fifa –, poderão crescer muito.”

 

Sua maior divergência da opinião geral, mais próxima da previsão de Figueiredo, é em relação às eleições.

“Acredito muito na retomada. Geralmente vemos, em ano de eleição, os clientes segurando os investimentos para entender o mercado. Mas, com o empurrão dado pela Copa, isso está mudando. Os ousados vão se destacar, exatamente por não ficarem aguardando. 2014 será o ano de arriscar, de quebrar paradigmas – especialmente esse mito de que não se investe em ano de eleição”, enfatiza o presidente da Ampro. (Propmark)

A SELEÇÃO DO PYR

Pyr Marcondes, da Revista Proxxima, selecionou 15  importantes artigos publicados em meios de comunicação de outros países. Reproduzo aslguns deles. Os outros você poderá encontrar no site da Proxxima.

1.             Where Is Social TV Heading in 2014?

. Expect More Investment in Second Screen and New Performance Indicators

(By:  Jesse Redniss,  cheief strategy officer at Mass Referencie, in Advertasing Age) -- As we wrap up 2013, it looks like social TV is being pushed to its tipping point. Not only are we starting to find hard evidence proving the powerful return on investment of second-screen and social TV, we're seeing real-time insights into what viewers are actually watching. Let's take a quick look back at some key moments in 2013 and see if we can divine what 2014 will have in store.

Prediction 1: Big boys grabbing all the toys. Throughout 2013, we've had flurries of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships in social TV. Over the last few weeks, it's become a blizzard. With increased validation by multichannel video programming distributors, the market is finally showing signs of maturation.

GetGlue was acquired by i.TV in November. Then i.TV, whose platform enables content discovery for AOL, Huffington Post and Entertainment Weekly, received funding from DirecTV earlier this month.

Other TV resource apps are wooing users -- and video programming distributors -- through cooperation. Individually, the apps offer cool features, but when bundled, they become game-changers like NextGuide, which offers engaging second-screen mashups, data and utility. NextGuide is working with companies including DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Fox.

As the cable and satellite companies try to woo back the cord-cutters -- people who used to subscribe to a multichannel service like Time Warner Cable or AT&T but now watch shows and movies online or through services like Apple TV and Netflix -- we'll see major players continue with increased investment in and adoption of second-screen technologies in 2014. With that, consumers will have more access to great content and utility across all screens as the living room becomes a unified-screen experience. New tablets bundled into a premium-cable package upgrade or cable-subscription sign-up will be the norm.

Prediction 2: Big insight leads to big action. The biggest news this month has been Apple's acquisition of Topsy, immediately followed by DataSift's $42-million funding announcement. Both companies, social-analytics firms, collect and analyze thousands of pieces of social content every minute. While Apple's plans for Topsy are unclear, there's no denying the invaluable proof that social analytics can provide

In 2014, Big Data will lead to Big Insights and Big Action. We'll see new benchmarks and key performance indicators emerge. Expect to see a cost per touchpoint/tune-in, or CPT, a flexible metric that will measure physical engagement on touch screens. We will finally find a metric that proves both digital and social activity attribution and direct causation to tune-in. With powerhouse Comcast teaming with Twitter to roll out See It, a Comcast platform that connects Twitter conversations and promotions around content to the actual viewership of TV shows, movies and sports, we can see the CPT right around the corner.

Prediction 3: Power to the people. We will start to see content influenced by real-time social data and insights, which condense the research process into minutes, not weeks. We've seen the beginnings of this already with fan- voted endings and live audience voting.

Prediction 4: Agencies change the channel to transmedia strategy. For me, the union of Big Data with media strategy means that instead of just buying on-air ads, agencies will make more strategic buys, focusing on a balance of mass reach and networks with the most energized fans or the largest social footprint. The movement from strategic to adaptive marketing will create real-time campaigns that are relevant to consumers on a minute-by-minute basis.

Prediction 5. Second screen becomes almost second nature. When Dora the Explorer asks a question and pauses for an awkward four seconds, instead of yelling at the TV, children now are grabbing a tablet and answering the question. If you have young children, as I do, the targeted Facebook ads for Disney Junior "Appisodes" are ubiquitous.

These second-screen watch-along Appisodes aren't just fun and engaging, they're educational. Providing young children with a platform to touch, answer and engage with their shows, Dora and Boots can help teach your child how to count and spell, while you can track their progress on these apps. In 2014, this market will explode, funded by millennial digitally-native parents with infants and toddlers.

 . Help & Support

 (by Diana View) -

Question

Which browsers are supported by HubSpot?

Answer

HubSpot's supported browsers

You can use HubSpot on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers. To take advantage of all of HubSpot's features, you'll need to use one of the following supported web browsers:

Windows Supported Browsers

§  Google Chrome (latest version)*

§  Mozilla Firefox (latest version)

§  Internet Explorer (9 and above)

Mac Supported Browsers

§  Google Chrome (latest version)*

§  Safari (latest version)*

§  Mozilla Firefox (latest version)

*Note: Only partially supported for the CMS.

Please note that Internet Explorer 8 is no longer fully supported by HubSpot. This will allow our development team to bring you excellent new features at a faster pace.

How to update your web browsers

It is generally a best practice to keep all of your web browsers updated to the latest version to ensure that any webpage you visit will render properly for you.

Here's a quick guide on updating to the latest version of the most popular web browsers. Note that the placement of settings buttons may vary if you have an older version of each browser.

·     Software

·         Pricing

·         Case Studies

·         Partners

·         About

·         Blog

Make HubSpot better today, upgrade your browser!

HubSpot works best with the latest browsers. We highly recommended updating your browser or installing a new one so you can get the best possible experience with HubSpot. See our documentation for more detail on HubSpot's supported browsers.

·         Google Chrome

“A fast new browser from Google. Try it now!”

Latest Version: 25

Install or upgrade

·         Mozilla Firefox

“Your online security is Firefox's top priority. Firefox is free, and made to help you get the most out of the web.”

Latest Version: 19

Install or upgrade

·         Safari

“Safari for Mac and Windows from Apple, the world’s most innovative browser.”

Latest Version: 6

Install or upgrade

·         Internet Explorer

“Designed to help you take control of your privacy and browse with confidence. Free from Microsoft.”

Latest Version: 10

Install or upgrade

Can't update your Internet Explorer browser due to IT regulations? No worries, we've got you covered. Learn how to install Google Chrome Frame in our browser documentation

The Future Of Education Eliminates The Classroom, Because The World Is Your Class Massive Open Online Courses might seem like best way to use the Internet to open up education, but you’re thinking too small. Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences. Written By Marina Gorbis Marina Gorbis  the Executive Director at the Institute for the Future and author of The Nature of the  Furure, in The Guardian

Dennis R Mortensen predicts that in the future, newsrooms will be even more data-driven. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

It's been a little more than two years since we launched our predictive analytics platform for editors, and it has been an amazing 24 months supporting their efforts to programme content on homepages, section fronts and in social channels.

At about that same time, Andy Carvin of NPR was covering the Arab spring and he provided a model for the future of newsgathering by tweeting at potential sources and confirming reports from more than 9,000km away. Many, if not most journalists have now found their way on to Twitter and, like Carvin, are using the conversation and its data with great success.

So what about this predictive data we use today? Is it also a model for the future and, if so, where is it taking us? These past two years have seen it adopted in hundreds of newsrooms globally, and we can use this experience to consider the next 24 months, for what may be an even bigger story of newsroom transformation. At Visual Revenue, we think it might look like this…

Among the many changes and trends we've seen in newsrooms around the world, what we cannot and must not overlook is human nature. It's natural for every one of us to want to predict the best outcome – for any situation – especially an editor, who is plugged in to a position of regularly trying to find the best stories to promote. They make predictions every day, multiple times per day.

But the editor continues to live in this stormy place where predictions must happen faster and faster, with even more variables and more channels of data – some reliable and some not – pressing them to decide, to judge, and to predict. Do it instantly, or it's too late! The luxury of time would be nice, but this job rewards the swift. There is no reward in suggesting the best front page for yesterday's paper.

Thus, the emergence of data.

What we've seen in two years is that, when we arm these editors with the right data, they grow more confident. Instead of making 50 daily updates to their homepage, they'll do 75. They take a more active hand in sculpting not just content, but the behaviour of their audience, and they courageously resurface content that otherwise may have been deemed "old". Editors with data enthusiastically do a job that comes naturally to them: exercising judgment of what their audience truly wants and what content they will adore.

When we arm knowledgeable human editors with more data, they don't race to the lowest common denominator, but rather toward richer, better experiences. Good editors now embrace and devour the data to find out, almost like Goldilocks, when their promotion is too soft or when it's too aggressive. Then it is their intuition, skills and instinct that get things to be just right.

When we arm editors with data – particularly with more of the right social data – you will see them exploit social media and social sharing, not to the benefit of Twitter or the social channel, but for the purpose of driving people back to their property. They will discover, select and craft content that drives people not just to re-tweet it, because there is no direct value in that. They will use social channels as a discovery engine for an audience that will one day fall in love with their content.

The newsroom of tomorrow will be decidedly and enthusiastically even more data-driven. To the editors who lead this newsroom, they will not equate this embrace to surrender; it will not lead to lowest common denominator judgment. Data will drive decisions and accelerate accomplishment; it will help differentiate brands and journalists, and provide jet-engine propulsion to the exercise of good judgment on the part of editors.

This will not be because it can or it should, but because it must. Data as a complement to human editorial judgment is what will enable editorial teams to compete in the audience business. Advertisers have long since and wholeheartedly bought into data, and they are using it so aggressively through exchanges and programmatic buying that they are squeezing every last ounce from publishers. This imbalance must be addressed, and it can only happen with a combination of data-driven thinking and distinctive editorial voices.

Tomorrow's newsrooms will be filled with clear measures of editorial success and, sometimes, failure, plus plain unambiguous directions on the steps to address them. What will not be so clear is the voice that defines each property's response. That will lie in the hands of the editor – exactly where it should be.

INTERVIVIEW WITH MARC ANDRESSEN

In doing research for a post on “The Enterprise Cool Kids” at the tail end of last year, I interviewed Silicon Valley veteran Marc Andreessen about where he thought the enterprise was headed.

While excerpts of that interview made it into the post, the transcript of the entire interview was so good it deserved to be published in its entirety.

************************

Alexia Tsotsis: Since people like me (millennials) are putting pressure on our IT departments to buy products that we can actually use and aren’t blinded by, what do you think the enterprise space will look like in the next five years?

Marc Andreessen: Yeah. So let me maybe start with sort of – top-down and bottoms-up is how we think about it, because both are important — so let me start with historical context and then maybe go to the stuff happening right now. Is that all set?

Alexia Tsotsis: Yeah, it’s perfect.

Marc Andreessen: So the computer industry started in 1950 and basically ran for 50 years with the same model, which was a model where all of the new computers, all the new technology, all the new software started out being sold for the highest prices to the biggest organizations.

So originally the customer was the Department of Defense. It was the first customer for the computer. In fact, one of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was like one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don’t know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time. Maybe hundreds of millions of dollars in current dollars.

And then five years later computers became — they dropped half in price and then the big insurance companies could buy them, and that’s when Thomas Watson, who ran IBM at the time, was quoted as saying, “There’s only a market need in the world for five computers.”

The reason that wasn’t crazy when he said it is because there were only five organizations that were big enough to buy a computer. So that’s how it started. And then IBM came along and productized the mainframe, and then all of a sudden big normal companies — manufacturing companies and banks — could start to buy computers. And then DEC came along and came out with the minicomputer, and then all of a sudden smaller companies could start to buy computers. And then the PC came out and then all of a sudden individuals could start to buy computers. But the PC only ever got to hundreds of millions of people. It never got to billions of people.

Now, the smartphone has come out and it can get to billions of people.

And so it has always been this kind of trickle-down model for 50 years. We think that basically about 10 years ago the model flipped. And so we think that the model flipped to a model where, today, where the most interesting and advanced new technology now comes out for the consumer first. And then small businesses start to use it. And then medium-size businesses start to use it, and then large businesses start to use it, and then eventually the government starts to use it. But this is a complete change from the way it has always worked.

Alexia Tsotsis: It’s grassroots versus trickle-down.

Marc Andreessen: Versus trickle-down. And the reason is because – the reason fundamentally is because now that you have got these things, you have — now that you have a computer in everybody’s hand, all of a sudden all these barriers — it used to be these barriers to market entry were so big, it used to be there just weren’t that many early adopters in the world. To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something.

And now all of a sudden you have got this global market of all these early adopters that have smartphones connected to the Internet, and they can just pick up their things and run with them.

And of course consumers can make buying decisions much more quickly than businesses can, because for the consumer, they either like it or they don’t, whereas businesses have to go through these long and involved processes.

So that’s the big, big, big change that’s happened. And that’s been reflected in the entrepreneurial community, where entrepreneurs, especially between 2000 and 2008, entrepreneurs really only wanted to do — for the most part wanted to do consumer software, because that’s the only software that they could actually get anybody to adopt. It became very hard to get businesses to adopt new stuff.

In the last five years, there’s been this sort of acknowledgment of the consumerization of the enterprise, which is consumer product development, design methods applied to business software, of which SaaS and cloud and all these things are examples. Salesforce.com, Evernote is an example. So now you have got the rise of this new set of companies that are sort of consumerized technology for businesses.

Then from a bottoms-up standpoint what you said is exactly right, I think, which is that the new generation of employees grew up on smartphones and tablets and touch and everything, social networking and Twitter and everything else. And so if you take a typical mainframe or, even these days, PC-based system and you give it to a 22-year-old college graduate, it’s like beaming in products out of the Stone Age. Why would you do that? Why would you force people to use all this old stuff?

And then that leads to the big thing that’s starting to happen right now, which is this “Bring Your Own Device” movement, where more and more companies are saying, well, basically, if I have to support smartphones and tablets anyway, and my CFO is probably carrying around an iPad and all my new employees are coming in with iPhones, so I have already got to support this stuff, so then I might as well encourage it.

And I might as well basically have a model where instead of issuing a company laptop to everybody or even a company phone, why don’t I just let people bring in whatever device they want and just plug-in and access it.

And then they get all excited, because then they say, well, not only are my employees going to be happier and more productive, but then I don’t have to buy them hardware anymore, so I can cut my budget. So that’s the big thing that’s starting to happen right now.

Alexia Tsotsis: So how does it affect the way people are building? I have about five companies that have made this list. Some of them are yours — Okta, which is big on the Bring Your Own Device thing, because you are logging in through Okta. Okta, Cloudera, Box, GitHub, Zendesk, and Asana. Are there any that I have missed?

Marc Andreessen: We just invested in this company called ItsOn, that we announced yesterday.

Alexia Tsotsis: Oh, the mobile –

Marc Andreessen: The mobile billing. The advantage — the thing that that’s going to be able to do is do split billing in a new way, between the business and the consumer. So on a single device you will be able to cleanly build data usage by application. So your employer can pay for your Salesforce.com and your Workday data usage on your phone and you get to pay for your Facebook and your Hulu usage. So that will be another enabler for a lot more of the Bring Your Own Device stuff.

Marc Andreessen: We have a bunch of stealth investments. I mean, this is a big, big thing — big change for us, so we have a bunch of stealth investments — I mean, companies that haven’t talked about what they are doing yet.

Who else? I mean, there is a bunch, who else should we have –

Alexia Tsotsis: Platfora.

Marc Andreessen: What’s that, Platfora? Yeah, Platfora is the actual user interface layer on top of Hadoop. So sort of Platfora and Cloudera kind of go hand in hand.

Actually — we have another one actually that is — well, it sounds esoteric, but it actually is very relevant. We have a company called Tidemark, which is in a category. It’s called Enterprise Performance Management, which is kind of a weird term. It’s basically large-scale financial planning and analysis for big companies.

The significance is it has a — I believe it only — I don’t know if it only or primarily, but I think it only has an iPad UI. So it’s the first complex financial system for big companies, where the assumption is that the user is on an iPad.

That’s a really big deal, because that category of software, line managers and businesses have never actually used that software themselves. Instead they employ analysts to use the software who become highly trained on the software.

By putting the iPad UI all of a sudden you can have anybody in the business have access to all the financial analysis and planning. Even in a very deep sort of sector of enterprise software where most people would never see it, this change is having a big impact.

What else? Asana you mentioned.

Alexia Tsotsis: Asana, Box, Zendesk, these are the companies that I am assuming I will be using four years from now to run my business.

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, exactly! Exactly right! Then of course Workday, of course, Salesforce.com, of course NetSuite, 37signals. We probably have three or four others in our portfolio that I am blanking on, but yeah, this is sort of the — and then by the way, the corresponding thing is that a lot of this is on how you run a business and then how you do marketing, of course; AdWords and Facebook and Twitter, all these systems and then all the enabling systems for that; so HootSuite and Marketo and –

Alexia Tsotsis: GoodData.

Marc Andreessen: Oh, another one, GoodData. So GoodData is at the intersection of kind of marketing and business. So GoodData is an actual easy-to-use analytics package. It’s sort of like a supercharged version of Excel that lets you suck in data, you can suck in all your Facebook advertising campaigns, you can suck in all your Salesforce.com data, and you can run — you can actually, yourself, as a small business person, actually analyze and find friends and data.

Alexia Tsotsis: I have heard good things about them and they just sent us a guest post.

Marc Andreessen: They are very good. So then you add up all these companies and you are like, “Well, okay, so number one, they are all basically new companies. I think who is not on that list are all the existing companies that sell business software.”

Alexia Tsotsis: SAP, Oracle … I mean I wrote a post about this that was supremely misunderstood and then today SAP came out with SAP Jam, which is a competitor to Yammer and to Salesforce, but it’s their own socialized CRM, like HR management software. I worry about this because it’s not going to work. You can’t fight the future.

Marc Andreessen: Oh, right, right, right. I mean, the joke about SAP has always been, it’s making 50s German manufacturing methodology, implemented in 1960s software technology, delivered to 1970-style manufacturing organizations, like it’s really — yeah, the incumbency — they are still the lingering hangover from the dot-com crash.

So a lot of incumbent business software companies did what a lot of big companies actually did and other industries, media companies after the dot-com crash, which is they said, “Oh, thank God we don’t have to worry about this Internet thing. It’s over. Stick a fork in it. It’s not going to be a big deal.” And then it turned out that it actually wasn’t over, and they still haven’t adjusted.

Alexia Tsotsis: Yes, and we are watching that now. And so the other reason that I am very interested in delving deep into this space is that it seems like IPOs like Workday, Palo Alto Networks are sort of — they have metrics and analytics that Wall Street understands, more so than a Facebook; like “We are going to sell X number of this in the next year.” So it would seem like they are an antidote to, or at least less offensive than, social/consumer Internet companies are to the public markets.

Marc Andreessen: For now. The whole market goes back and forth in whether they prefer enterprise businesses or consumer businesses. The argument in favor of consumer businesses is you don’t have these crazy end of quarters like when the IT purchasing manager doesn’t buy the product and the company misses the whole quarter.

The advantage of the consumer businesses is they tend to be much broader-based, much larger number of customers, that tend to over time be a lot more predictable. The advantage of the enterprise companies is they are not as subject to consumer trend, fad, behavior.

But I would say the market is schizophrenic. So right now we are in an era where the market wants enterprise companies. I am just saying like wait a year, that will flip again; wait another year after that, that will flip again.

It’s sort of the picks and shovels thing. Like everybody — it’s like the consumer businesses get really hot and then everybody realizes that there is lots of competition and that those models have — they are complicated businesses and they have their issues, and then everybody gets all excited about picks and shovels.

And everybody rediscovers the picks and shovels analogy and says, ” Oh, the Gold Rush in California, the people that made all the money were the guys who were selling picks and shovels to the prospectors.” And then people realize the picks and shovels business is really hard, and then everybody says, “Oh, we should invest in the consumer company because they” — so it’s just –

Alexia Tsotsis: It’s cyclical.

Marc Andreessen: It’s cyclical. It’s deeply cyclical. But we are in an environment right now, to your point, where there has been huge rotation out of the consumer companies into the enterprise companies.

Alexia Tsotsis: It seems like the consumer market is starting to cool — I mean, not starting, but the signaling is there.

Marc Andreessen: Yeah. It’s unpredictable. All you need is for one of the new enterprise companies to completely whiff a quarter and their stock will collapse and then everybody will get all freaked out. I mean, it’s just a continuous — the reality is every single business is hard.

Alexia Tsotsis: I love this.

Marc Andreessen: There are no easy businesses in the world other than maybe Google, but other than that, there is no easy business anywhere in the world. So what happens is Wall Street gets enamored by the businesses that look like they are easy, until it turns out that they are not, and then Wall Street gets disillusioned and freaked out, and then rotates into the businesses that they think are going to be easy, and then they get endless disappointment. It’s like a seventh or eighth marriage at some point.

At some point the problem isn’t with your seventh wife. At some point the problem is with you.

Alexia Tsotsis: Is the solution “keep calm and carry on,” or what is the solution to this?

Marc Andreessen: There is no solution; it’s a permanent state of affairs. So this is a big part of what actually we do. A big part of why venture capital actually is important and enduring is because the public market is flighty and late-stage investors are flighty, and customers for that matter are flighty, and so you can’t — if you are running one of these companies you can’t — you just can’t rely on people being balanced. They are just not going to be.

And so you have to have a level of determination to just stick through the good times and the bad times. And you need to have investors at the core of your company who are going to support you through that.

The big advantage that we have as a venture capital firm over a hedge fund or a mutual fund is we have a 13-year lockup on our money. And so enterprise can go in and out of fashion four different times, and we can go and invest in one of these companies, and it’s okay, because we can stay the course.

And then what happens is everything tends to get better, all the products tend to get better, all the companies tend to get better over time if they are working hard at it. So we are fine. Like if everything we are investing in goes out of fashion, we are not going to change anything we do, because we can’t change anything. We are already invested in these companies; we can’t sell our stock. We don’t have to sell our stock. So we just say, we will go back to work. And then at some point it really gets exciting again.

Alexia Tsotsis: I guess the trick is to be hyper-aware.

Marc Andreessen: So the big thing we try to do is be aware of the difference between the reality and the psychology, and the reality tends to progress in a certain way and then psychology tends to whip all over the place.

It was very educational for a lot of us to go through the dot-com crash, because you remember, in 2002, like there were a number of universal truths asserted in 2002; the Internet didn’t matter, consumer Internet business was dead. Larry Ellison in 2002 came out and gave a speech and said the correct model for enterprise software, enterprise computing, will last for 1,000 years.

He said all these kids that were trying all this new stuff and it didn’t work, and now we know it didn’t work, and so the model is going to be the existing IBM and Oracle for the next 1,000 years. And everybody kind of said, hmm, you know, that makes a lot of sense, like all that innovation stuff didn’t work, and so –

Alexia Tsotsis: That’s what David Sacks said.

Marc Andreessen: Exactly, this is the fact. People reach a point where they start to get a little bit too rich, maybe a little bit too old, and they start to say these things.

And then so here we sit 10 years later and we are in the middle of a complete reinvention of everything in enterprise computing, and it’s like, okay, like that’s the reality. People happen to be excited about it again at the moment. That’s great. I am happy for that. But wait two years and they will be depressed about it again, but that won’t keep it from happening. It will still happen.

Alexia Tsotsis: It’s just like the fashion industry. So because it’s heavily fashionable now, do you see it being over in a year?

Marc Andreessen: No, I don’t mean to make a specific prediction. I don’t know if it’s a year, two years, four years. Look, all of the products are going to keep getting better. All of the trends that we are talking about are going to keep continuing. Nothing is going to stop consumerization of the enterprise. Nothing is going to stop Bring Your Own Device. Nothing is going to stop Software-as-a-Service. Nothing is going to stop cloud. All those things are just going to keep going.

I am just saying people are going to be — they are all excited about them now. At some point again they will be unexcited about them and then at some point after that they will be excited about them again. So it’s hard to draw conclusions about the importance of the trends or the progress of the trends by the current level of press coverage, the current level of Wall Street enthusiasm.

Alexia Tsotsis: So beyond the press coverage, beyond the fickleness of trends, beyond the application layers — because most of those companies are just apps — what are the real opportunities you see in the enterprise stack as it stands right now?

Marc Andreessen: Well, there is a whole bunch. So there is a big thing — there are a couple of big things that are happening. So one of the really big things that’s happening is, historically the best enterprise technology was only — it’s a trickle-down thing — the best business technology was only ever available to the biggest companies.

And so if you were a Fortune 500 company with a big IT department, you had a huge advantage over a small business that was trying to compete with you, because you just had so much more budget and staff and professionals and expertise and access to all these big vendors and you could spend tens and millions of dollars on all this stuff.

So it was very easy for — in the old world it was very easy for big companies to use IT as a weapon against small companies.

The classic was Walmart versus local retailer, right? Walmart’s advantage in logistics and in pricing and in data analytics was just so great that they could kill small retailers at will.

Today all the consumerized enterprise stuff is as easily usable by the small business as it is by the large business. In fact, it’s probably more easily usable by the small business than it is by the large business, because with a small business it’s like you can just use it, like you don’t have to go through a long process, you don’t have to have a lot of meetings, you don’t have to have committees, you don’t have to have all this stuff, you can just start picking up and using it.

So the best technology for inventory management and for financial planning and for sales-force management and for online marketing can now be used just as easily or more easily by a small business. There is an opportunity here for a shift of the balance of power for big businesses to small businesses.

And then for vendors, the companies we fund, there’s an opportunity to really dramatically expand the market, because a company like Oracle, as successful as it is, it only really has about 5,000 customers that really matter worldwide. Whereas, a company like Box or a company like GitHub could have 500,000 customers or 5 million customers that really matter, and that’s a huge change.

So market expansion, small business versus big business, what else? Oh, the shift, the other big one, the shift from CAPEX to OPEX. So the shift from buying a lot of servers and databases and software licenses and networking equipment, the shift instead to just renting it all. So the shift towards cloud services.

So we don’t have — no company that we invest in anymore actually ever buys any hardware. I mean, they buy their laptops and that’s basically it. And increasingly they might not buy their laptops, because their employees will just bring their own devices. But they don’t buy servers. They don’t buy storage devices. They don’t buy any of this stuff, they just rent on AWS. And they don’t buy sales-force automation software, they rent on Salesforce.com.

And so having sort of a much lighter-touch way for businesses to be able to get funded, you just need a much smaller budget. And that’s why you see these — you see it in the startup world, you see three or four kids with laptops who are able to go do amazing things on a global scale for no money. And I think businesses are going to figure out more and more how to do that as well.

Alexia Tsotsis: Do you think that the biggest inefficiencies are at the network layer, the database layer, or the storage layer currently?

Marc Andreessen: All the above. They are all changing. I think they are all changing.

Alexia Tsotsis: What do you think about the interplay between the enterprise market becoming more efficient and the explosion of the consumer market because you don’t have to pay for something like storage?

Marc Andreessen: I don’t know, it’s sort of all intertwined. I mean it’s all — because a lot of what businesses do is then offer consumer services based on all these changes. So it’s kind of all — that’s why I say it’s kind of all happening at the same time, a lot of the same stuff.

I would say the consumer Internet companies — in a lot of ways if you go inside the consumer Internet companies and you see how they run, it’s how all their businesses are going to run. They are going to be doing all of the same kinds of things. The big businesses are just in the process of trying to figure out how to catch up.

So everything, Hadoop and scale-out architectures and cloud services, and the whole thing it’s all — and use of new technologies like Box and GitHub, the consumer Internet companies all are just built this way. And then if you go inside a big consumer product’s company or a big manufacturing company, they are all trying to figure out how to make the jump. But it’s all kind of the same stuff.

Alexia Tsotsis: So which of the big incumbents do you think are most likely to get disrupted by this new wave of the enterprise cool kids?

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, this is the part where I get into the most trouble.

Alexia Tsotsis: That’s why we save it for the end.

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, exactly! I don’t know if I am going to — let’s see, I am going to try and figure out if I am even going to answer the question.

So I would say for sure — like the systems companies, like the companies that provide hardware, the server companies and networking companies, the bad news for them is the end customers are not going to buy as much stuff; the good news is the cloud companies are buying a lot of stuff.

So for every server that’s not bought at a manufacturing company, there’s a server being bought at Amazon. So it’s a change in purchasing pattern for all the gear, but the gear is still being bought.

I think it’s at the software layer where the big disruption happens. I think it’s application software in particular and just sort of an extended infrastructure software. It’s like anything for which there is a — any piece of installed software for which there’s a web or a cloud equivalent, I think is in real trouble, and I think that’s just now becoming clear.

The other thing that’s happened is 2012 seems to be the year of the actual SaaS tipping point, like where big companies are now saying, you know what, it’s fine, like I can do it, I can do Salesforce, I can do Workday. Because there used to be lots of issues around can I trust the security issues or liability issues, and an awful lot of big companies are now saying, “You know what, I am going to save so much money, the service is going to be so much better, my users are going to be so much happier, more productive. I have got to make this stuff work on iPhones anyway, so I have got to do something new.”

“My old software vendors are charging me these huge upgrade and maintenance prices. I can switch to SaaS for less than the cost of the maintenance on the old software.” Like, at a certain point it becomes –”Oh,” and then on security it’s like, “Yeah, I may have concerns about SaaS security, but it turns out I have the concerns about my own internal security anyway.”

So every one of these companies has had an employee steal a laptop that has 25 million customer records on it, and they are like, “Well, okay, if I can’t even lock that down, then why am I that worried about whether somebody is going to break into Salesforce.com?” And by the way, Salesforce.com has gotten much better at security.

So there is a bunch of new technologies coming out that are going to make cloud and SaaS even more secure, and I think are going to end up making — I think cloud and SaaS are going to end up being a lot more secure than anything inside the firewall. So that’s the other thing that’s about to happen.

Alexia Tsotsis: So which enterprise companies are doing their best to adapt to just this tidal wave of trends and which ones are just completely failing?

Marc Andreessen: The problem is I have conflicts on this issue, because I am on the HP board in particular, so I can’t really — unfortunately I am kind of gagged on the topic of the big companies.

Alexia Tsotsis: Are you happy with how HP is doing?

Marc Andreessen: This is exactly what I can’t talk about. I just can’t talk about it. So the problem is I can’t talk about HP and I can’t talk about HP’s competitors, so it’s just a no-fly zone for me.

Alexia Tsotsis: I respect that.

Marc Andreessen: So I have to stick to the startups.

Alexia Tsotsis: Let’s see, what about other companies that aren’t in your portfolio?

Marc Andreessen: Although I have a lot of opinions. You mean startups?

Alexia Tsotsis: What about startups that aren’t in your portfolio, because you said that only 10, 15 companies a year are responsible for 97 percent of the returns. Which enterprise companies that aren’t in your portfolio are you interested in?

Marc Andreessen: So let’s see, there is this category of kind of outsourced work.

Alexia Tsotsis: TaskRabbit.

Marc Andreessen: Well, there’s TaskRabbit and Zaarly and companies like that on the consumer side; and then on the business side there’s eLance and oDesk and RentACoder. So these companies that are kind of for — in the sort of mechanical term, distributed workforces and outsource work being run online.

So like oDesk, oDesk you can actually have remote contractors working on a project, and one of the features is that it actually takes snapshots of their screen every five minutes. You can see if — anybody who actually manages anybody, number one that sounds spooky, but number two, “Wow, that sounds great, like, I sure wish I can do that.”

So there is sort of the whole category of an outsourced workforce that sort of — it goes back to what you said about the employees is, you will have — it feels a lot like in the new economy you will have a lot more contractors. You will have a lot more people with sort of fluid careers contracting on a project basis, and then all this technology is going to be an enabling layer for that.

So anybody on their laptop, anywhere in the world, being able to tap in and be able to get work and do work, whether it’s for small companies or big companies like that. There is a whole layer of software there. We haven’t seen anybody really punch through on that yet, but I am very fascinated by it. We haven’t made an investment there yet. That’s one layer.

Let me think, what else haven’t we done? I mean, Cloudera is I think a good — we haven’t actually done an investment at that. We haven’t done an investment at the Hadoop layer. We have done — Platfora is our investment, which is the intelligence layer above Hadoop, but Cloudera definitely deserves to be on the list.

Zendesk and kind of its generation of companies are definitely for real, or so it appears.

What else? We have been pretty active. I mean, we have been trying to take down mostly good companies. We haven’t done anything yet with this whole category of marketing, the new marketing software so like Marketo and HootSuite and companies like that, we haven’t really done anything yet, but that’s a big deal.

It’s sort of like — if you are starting a new company it’s so obvious that you would want to do most of your marketing on Google and Facebook and Twitter, whereas a lot of the existing companies still haven’t wrapped their heads around that.

Education — there is actually going to be more and more. So actually companies are going to get a lot more interested in education for two reasons.

Number one is, a lot of companies need to actually educate their customers or their partners, and a lot of that has to happen online.

And then the other thing is companies are having — if you talk to anybody running a company, they are having real trouble hiring enough qualified people. So companies are going to have to take a more direct role in educating the candidates or educating their current employees.

So the sort of model of employees just show up and they are either educated or they are not is not working very well. There’s lots of mismatches. It’s one of the reasons unemployment is running as high as it is, is people just don’t have the skills they need for the jobs.

So I think employers are going to have to get a lot more actively involved in making sure that the supply of candidates is actually educated and that they can hire somebody who doesn’t yet know what they need to know and actually educate and train them, and a lot of that is going to happen with the new technology.

So we have this company Udacity as an example, that’s going to be, I think, important in all of that.

Alexia Tsotsis: I think the model there is if someone shows up and they have got 80 percent of the skills.

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, let’s teach them — right, exactly, the employer says let’s teach them the other 20 percent. And it’s like, well, instead of literally sending them to college, which presumably didn’t work the first time around or whatever, let’s just go ahead and provide them with the online training. Let’s set them up with their tablet at home with high-definition video. They can develop their remaining skills, or be able to retrain people once they are in the jobs.

The other is there is this real issue, like for some people it feels great to never be tied to a specific employer and to always be doing contract work and be changing jobs every two years, and it feels like it’s fun and exciting and exhilarating. For a lot of people that’s really scary. And so the lifetime employment promise that the big companies used to be able to make was very compelling for a lot of people because it felt safe.

So now you are in a world where the big companies can’t deliver — even if they wanted to deliver on lifetime employment, they can’t, and so then they have got sort of two choices.

One is, do they start to basically be a lot rougher with their — they start to do a lot more layoffs, a lot more restructurings. I remember IBM — I don’t think IBM had a layoff for 50 years. And I was actually at IBM — I was an intern at IBM when they were ramping up for their first layoff I think they had ever done, and, like, the level of freak out in the company was beyond belief. And people had no idea what to do if they got laid off from IBM. And it turns out their skills weren’t actually very useful to work for any other company, because IBM was so unique in how it ran.

So I think the companies have a real question about how do they develop their workforces, how do they make sure that their employees stay relevant for the purpose of staying inside a company for a longer period of time? And then how do you get the workforce over time to be a lot more flexible and adaptable, so that if you have to layoff a ton of people, or if you have to get out of a line of business, or if you have to expand into a new business, how do you get your current employees to adapt better to that?

Alexia Tsotsis: Do you think that’s the most ripe-for-disruption area in the enterprise currently?

Marc Andreessen: I don’t know if it’s the most, but it’s a big issue for every company. It’s a big issue for companies, because companies have hundreds and thousands of employees, it’s like, yeah.

Alexia Tsotsis: What are the top three issues that startups don’t exist for yet, because that sounds like one that a startup doesn’t exist for …

Marc Andreessen: Sort of. Education is a big component of it, yeah, it’s possible, it’s possible. I don’t know. We will wait for the entrepreneurs to answer that question.

Alexia Tsotsis: Probably the biggest enterprise cool kid is GitHub?

Marc Andreessen: They are a big one, yeah.

Alexia Tsotsis: And you made a major investment?

Marc Andreessen: Yeah. We think it’s the largest investment ever done.

Alexia Tsotsis: How did you convince them to take your money?

Marc Andreessen: That’s the key thing. So they were beating off venture capitalists with a stick. So they actually — I don’t know if you remember this, they used to have on their website, they used to say — they had four metrics that they would put on their website. They had, I think, it was number of users, number of projects, number of code check-ins, and amount of venture capital that they had raised, and that final number was always zero, and they were really proud of that.

The GitHub guys did an amazing job. It’s very rare actually to find a main — it’s very rare to find an important company that never raised any money. It’s very rare that they actually successfully bootstrapped, because it’s just so hard to do if you can’t invest any money.

So what they did was incredibly impressive. They reached a point though where they decided that they had the opportunity to become a very big and important company. And again, I would say there was a top-down and a bottom-up reason for that.

The top-down reason was they are the place, we think, and they believe, they are the place where all the software code wants to live. They are the place where all the open source code increasingly lives. All other code increasingly uses a ton of open source code. And so all the software basically wants to be in the same place, and it wants to be in the place where all the open source software is.

So they have an opportunity to be the main company that provides the systems for developing software, number one, which is just a very big opportunity, and they really decided to go for it, and that requires investment on their part.

And then the bottom-up reason was because they have enterprise customers lining up, like they have enterprise customers bombarding them with interest in buying services on GitHub. And they did not have — at the time we invested they didn’t yet have any sort of sales or marketing kind of motion to be able to do it on. They didn’t have a Salesforce, they didn’t have the sort of pricing plans — the whole thing to be able to do that — and we have a lot of experience with that.

Alexia Tsotsis: So who are the enterprise companies and do they have –

Marc Andreessen: Tons, it’s like the who’s who. I mean, they gave us access. One of the things they did in the diligence process was they gave us access to the email box that had all the incoming messages from all the CIOs and purchasing managers and all these big companies. And it’s literally like, “Hi! I am from big bank X and we already have like 600 people on GitHub and we want to buy an enterprise license. Who do we call and where do we send the check?” And they just had the email queue up this, and they didn’t have — they weren’t — like it’s just sitting there.

And so we are working with them to help them build out the sales and marketing capability to be able to really go get all that business.

Alexia Tsotsis: And that’s how it will make a billion dollars a year?

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, yeah. Well, I don’t know, we will see how. I mean, aspirationally, yes. It should be a very big business. Historically companies in that market have been very successful. Big one, Rational is a big company that IBM bought a while back that’s in the same market.

And then even companies, Mercury Interactive was a big company that HP bought that was in a similar kind of market. And then in the old days you had companies like Borland and Lotus that were very big in these markets. So this is sort of the new version of all that. So if it works it should be very — I mean, it’s working, so it should be very big.

Alexia Tsotsis: So we are watching the collapse of Zynga and Groupon and LivingSocial in the consumer space. Where is the bloodbath going to be, if there is one, in the enterprise space?

Marc Andreessen: I don’t know. Probably in the second and third tier. I mean, usually when you have a funding boom, categories usually get overfunded.

So probably it’s in the second- and third-tier competitors. We actually get yelled at for this a lot, but we really believe it. So the big technology markets actually tend to be winner take all. There is this presumption — in normal markets you can have Pepsi and Coke. In technology markets in the long run you tend to only have one, or rather the number one company in — the number one company in any consumer products — cars, the number one company in cars is, I don’t know, Toyota or whoever it is.

Alexia Tsotsis: I think it’s Toyota.

Marc Andreessen: Fifteen percent or 18 percent market share. The number one soft drink has only 60 percent versus Pepsi, but like what is Coke as a percentage of all drinks, it’s, I don’t know, maybe 10 percent.

The big companies, though, in technology tend to have 90 percent market share. So we think that generally these are winner-take-all markets. Generally, number one is going to get like 90 percent of the profits. Number two is going to get like 10 percent of the profits, and numbers three through 10 are going to get nothing.

And the problem is, of course, there is too much venture capital, and so companies three through 10 still get funded. So there are probably lots of sort of second- and third-tier companies that are getting funded right now that won’t succeed, but that won’t have anything to do with whether or not the winner succeeds.

Alexia Tsotsis: Which is all the venture capitalists –

Marc Andreessen: Well, the venture capitalists who are successful in investing in the winners will be very happy with this. The venture capitalists who are investing in the losers will be very sad. But everybody will get freed, because at some point there will be a bunch of companies — a bunch of startups that will go bankrupt, and then everybody will say, that must mean the whole sector is going down.

I just think people get confused. People get confused about — it’s really funny watching the stock. Like the stock market does this all the time. It’s like one Internet advertising company will have a bad quarter and the other Internet advertising companies’ stocks will all drop.

Alexia Tsotsis: It’s tethered.

Marc Andreessen: Maybe, but maybe it’s because the other ones are now taking market share away from the one that had a bad quarter. So I find the markets all have trouble processing cause and effect in the short-term and people get all confused.

Alexia Tsotsis: What is the solution to that? It’s so perplexing.

Marc Andreessen: That’s permanent. I think it’s permanent. I think it’s human nature. There are certain things that can’t be fixed, and I think that’s one of them.

Alexia Tsotsis: One would argue that the enterprise has come back into fashion, because the market is cooling on the Instagram deal being a billion dollars and now being $700 million. The market is cooling on all these photo-sharing apps and just ways to update your friends about your whereabouts.

Is the only reason the enterprise is sexy because it actually makes money and has results, or is there some overlaying tide of innovation that’s happening that’s exciting people simply because it’s culture-changing?

Marc Andreessen: I think it’s all the above. I think the changes are real. The businesses are good, which is nice. And then I think it’s also sector rotation. We talk to a lot of the big hedge funds, mutual funds. It’s really funny. We are talking about big hedge funds, mutual funds, about six months ago they all started saying, well, you know, we really think there is going to be a rotation from consumer and enterprise, and we are going to really get ahead of that. And I am like, yeah, you and 10 other guys in the last two weeks have told me the same thing. It’s like, good job, you are way out ahead on the leading edge on this.

I get to the point where I am just like — my running joke has been, it’s like little kids, like everybody out of the consumer pool, everybody into the enterprise pool. So everybody out of the waiting pool, everybody into the hot tub.

What happens when you have capital flowing in a rotation is, if all the capital starts to leave one sector and go to another sector, then all the stock prices rise in the sector that all the capital is going into, because everybody is buying those stocks.

And then everybody says, wow, look at how much those stocks are going up. We should invest in those stocks. And so the up cycle starts perpetuating.And the down cycle similarly — a lot of reasons people have been selling out of the consumer stocks is because they have been going down, because people have been selling out. So the cycle is perpetuating.

Alexia Tsotsis: So what should the smartest entrepreneur do? You have $1.2 billion to spend. Where are you spending it?

Marc Andreessen: Investing. So the smartest entrepreneurs I think generally ignore all this. We really look for the entrepreneurs who don’t pay any attention to this. We really look for the entrepreneurs who say the following, they say: “I have this really good idea and I know it’s a good idea for the following eight reasons, and I have thought about it and I have worked in the field, and I know what I am doing, and I have talked to the customers and I have figured it out, and I am going to do it. I am just going to flat-out do it. And I am going to do it whether you fund me or whether you don’t fund me or I don’t get funded. I am still going to do it.” That’s the entrepreneur we are looking for.

Sometimes that entrepreneur is in a sector that’s completely dead, and that entrepreneur is going to say, I know that everybody thinks that this sector is just dead, and in fact that’s probably why now is a good time for me to do this — is because I am not going to have very much competition.

Well, so a lot of these companies you talk about now, like Workday and GitHub and Box, got formed and funded when everybody thought enterprise was dead. Just like the consumer companies like Facebook and Twitter got funded and everybody thought the consumer stuff was dead.

So sometimes you get the entrepreneurs who are actually counter-cyclical. They are doing it precisely because nothing else is happening in that sector, and that means the big opportunities are just wide open.

On the other hand, sometimes you get the entrepreneurs who say, “I know I am doing the 36th workforce collaboration system in the consumer side; Google was the 36th search engine, and I know it’s 1999, and I know the whole sector is overfunded, but I have a better idea. I know how to do it better, I know how to do it different. I have learned from the mistakes that everybody else is making, and I am going to be the winner.”

And so we will fund either one. We fund companies in the hot sectors and we fund companies in the not-hot sectors. The only difference is the pricing, and the pricing varies basically by like 4x. But what we have just found or what we have sort of tried to learn from history is you can’t — for what we do you can’t really time the stuff. And the last thing you want to do is look at what’s happening in the public market today. And this is the thing that’s weird about how venture capital works — a lot of venture capital investments are decided based on whatever the NASDAQ is doing.

Alexia Tsotsis: Are you seeing down rounds because the NASDAQ is down?

Marc Andreessen: No, we have not seen down rounds yet. We have not seen down rounds yet, but consumer rounds that are happening now — consumer growth rounds are happening now at 2-4x lower prices than they were six months ago.

And the enterprise pricing is up a lot. Enterprise pricing a year ago was probably half what it is today. Maybe a third in some cases, and that made us happy at the time, but it’s all good.

Alexia Tsotsis: Last question — your top five enterprise cool kids?

Marc Andreessen: I think they are all on your list.

Alexia Tsotsis: They are on my list?

Marc Andreessen: Yeah, yeah.

 

KURZWEILL ON CREATING A MIND

 

I just got done reading Ray Kurzweil's How to Create a Mind, his latest on how machines will soon (2030ish) pass the Turing test, and then basically become like robots envisaged in the 60's, with distinct personalities, acting as faithful butlers to our various needs.

And then, today over on The Edge, Bruce Sterling is saying that's all a pipe dream, computers are still pretty dumb. As someone who works with computer algorithms all day, I too am rather unimpressed by a computer's intelligence, but Kurzweil made me a little more appreciative of what they can do.

He notes that IBM's Watson won a Jeopardy! contest by reading all of Wikipedia, a feat clearly beyond any human mind. Further, as Kurzweil notes, many humans are pretty simple, and so it's not inconceivable a computer can replicate your average human, if only average is pretty predictable. Sirri is already funnier than perhaps 10% of humans.

Human's have what machines currently don't have, which is emotions, and emotions are necessary for prioritizing, and a good prioritization is the essence of wisdom. One can be a genius, but if you are focused solely on one thing you are autistic, and such people aren't called idiot-savants for nothing.

Just as objectivity is not the result of objective scientist, but an emergent result of the scientific community, consciousness may not be the result of a thoughtful individual, but a byproduct of a striving individual enmeshed in a community of other minds, each wishing to understand the other minds better so that they can rise above them. I see how you could program this drive into a computer, a deep parameter that gives points for how many times others call their app, perhaps.

Kurzwiel notes that among species of vole rats, those that have monogamous bonds have oxytocin and vasopressin receptors that give them a feeling of 'love', and those where dads are just sperm donors don't. Hard wired emotions dictate behavior. Perhaps computers can have emotions, you can put in something for sadness when they aren't called by other programs or people, a desire to see users with physical correlates to fertility like smooth skin and tone bodies. But it's one thing to program an aversion to solitude, another to desire a truly independent will.

Proto humans presumably had the consciousness of dogs, so something in our striving created human consciousness incidentally. Schopenhauer said "we don't want a thing because we have found reasons for it, we find reasons for it because we want it." The intellect may at times to lead the will, but only as a guide leads the master. He saw the will to power, and fear of death, as being the essence of humanity. Nietzsche noted similarly that "Happiness is the feeling that power increases." I suppose one could try to put this into a program as a deep preference, but I'm not sure how, in that, what power to a computer could be analogous to power wielded by humans?

Kierkegaard thought the crux of human consciousness was anxiety, worrying about doing the right thing. That is, consciousness is not merely having perceptions and thoughts, even self-referential thoughts, but doubt, anxiety about one's priorities and how well one is mastering them. We all have multiple priorities--self preservation, sensual pleasure, social status, meaning--and the higher we go the more doubtful we are about them. Having no doubt, like having no worries, isn't bliss, it's the end of consciousness. That's what always bothers me about people who suggest we search for flow, because like good music or wine, it's nice occasionally like any other sensual pleasure, but only occasionally in the context of a life of perceived earned success.

Consider the Angler Fish. The smaller male is born with a huge olfactory system, and once he has developed some gonads, smells around for a gigantic female. When he finds her, he bites into her skin and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. He is then fed by, and has his waste removed by, the female's blood supply, as the male is basically turned into a parasite. However, he is a welcomed parasite, because the female needs his sperm. What happens to a welcomed parasite? Other than his gonads, his organs simply disappear, because all that remains is all that is needed. No eyes, no jaw, no brain. He has achieved his purpose, has no worries, and could just chill in some Confucian calm, but instead just dissolves his brain entirely.

A computer needs pretty explicit goals because otherwise the state space of things it will do blows up, and one can end up figuratively calculating the 10^54th digit of pi--difficult to be sure, and not totally useless, but still pretty useless. Without anxiety one could easily end up in an intellectual cul-de-sac and not care. I don't see how a computer program with multiple goals would feel anxiety, because they don't have finite lives, so they can work continuously, forever, making it nonproblematic that one didn't achieve some goal by the time one's eggs ran out. Our anxiety makes us satisfice, or find novel connections that do not what we originally wanted but do what's very useful nonetheless, and in the process helped increase our sense of meaning and status (often, by helping others).

Anxiety is what makes us worry we are at best maximizes an inferior local maximum, and so need to start over, and this helps us figure things out with minimal direction. A program that does only what you tell it to do is pretty stupid compared to even stupid humans, any don't think for a second neural nets or hierarchical hidden markov models (HHMMs) can figure stuff out that isn't extremely well defined (like figuring out captchas, where Kurzweil thinks HHMMs show us something analogous to human thought).

Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche were all creative, deep thinkers about the essence of humanity, and they were all very lonely and depressed. When young they thought they were above simple romantic pair bonds, but all seemed to have deep regrets later, and I think this caused them to apply themselves more resolutely to abstract ideas (also, alas, women really like confidence in men, which leads to all sorts of interesting issues, including that their doubt hindered their ability to later find partners, and that perhaps women aren't fully conscious (beware troll!)). Humans have trade-offs, and we are always worrying if we are making the right ones, because no matter how smart you are, you can screw up a key decision and pay for it the rest of your life. We need fear, pride, shame, lust, depression and envy, in moderation, and I think you can probably get those into a computer. But anxiety, doubt, I don't think can be programmed because logically a computer is always doing the very best it can in that's its only discretion is purely random, and so it perceives only risk and not uncertainty, and thus, no doubt.

The key, as Minsky always told me, was uncertainty, true uncertainty as discussed by Keynes and Knight. If it is truly non-quantifiable, then a computer can not understand it, and they will never empathize with us correctly, never accurately have a 'theory of mind' that comes naturally for humans. After all, without uncertainty, there really isn't doubt, which Schopenhauer said was the essence of consciousness. So, the search for AI, and a model of 'real risk', seemed joined at the hip.

 

·Email

·Print

·Google+

·Del.icio.us

·Digg

·StumbleUpon

·Reddit

·Technorati

·Pinterest

·Slashdot

While most companies weren't looking, social business remade the economy

Summary: Although many companies today are struggling to apply social media to the way they operate, a successful new crop of 'collaborative economy' startups seems to show that traditional business will be fundamentally transformed instead.

By Dion Hinchcliffe for Enterprise Web 2.0 | July 29, 2013 -- 23:02 GMT (16:02 PDT)

4Comments

1 Vote

inShare

more +

·Email

·Print

·Google+

·Del.icio.us

·Digg

·StumbleUpon

·Reddit

·Technorati

·Pinterest

·Slashdot

The evidence has been steadily seeping into the edges of business thinking for years: The online world has clearly and systematically changed the rules of business, and companies must adapt or risk irrelevance. This often seemed self-evident to many of us, even if the ranks of the Fortune 500 and Global 2000 didn't actually seem to change very much as a result. But the times, they have recently changed.

It wasn't until rather recently that a broad swath traditional businesses started to be challenged at their very core by the realities of social business, a set of relatively new concepts that are both embodied by and taken from social media that seemed to imply great changes in the way we work, think, and live.

Admittedly, old media and software -- to hold up two industries almost instantly impacted by the global Internet -- were particularly disrupted early on, by social media and open source respectively, in such a profound way that they no longer look nearly anything like they once did. In sharp contrast to these two examples, most other industries just didn't witness anywhere near the same dramatic threat to their own business models for well over a decade.

However, that now finally seems to be changing. The next-generation digital business seems to have arrived in scale. With the advent of a potent new generation of high-velocity online startups aimed much more deliberately at reformulating the basis of what many types of traditional businesses do, the revolution originally entailed by social business does appear to be happening, but not quite as envisioned.

While it was initially believed that existing market leaders could simply convert their own leadership position in the old economy into a similar one in the new digital economy, it increasingly looks like it will instead be led by digital upstarts that are now pushing the boundaries of just about every traditional type of industry and market niche. And fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you ask, very few classical enterprises seem to be involved this revolution.

The Collaborative Economy: A social business revolution

How exactly is this happening and where? One of the most complete conceptions of how this is currently taking place was recently synthesized by well-known Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang, who has dubbed this next new digital/social revolution the 'Collaborative Economy.'

The basic idea of the Collaborative Economy, like so many major shifts, is actually pretty simple: The world has started moving beyond the simple mass sharing of ideas and media over the Internet. Instead, we have now begun sharing products and services directly with each other en masse using the same social media principles. Owyang believes, and early evidence is starting to support, that this will be much more disruptive than the first wave of social media was.

In his new report, Corporations Must Join the Collaborative Economy, he notes:

Social technologies radically disrupted communications, marketing, and customer care. With these same technologies, customers now buy products once and share them with each other. Beyond business functions, the Collaborative Economy impacts core business models.

He goes on to observe that traditional enterprises don't have to stand idly by and wait for startups to empower the marketplace to meet its own needs:

Companies risk becoming disintermediated by customers who connect with each other. The Collaborative Economy Value Chain illustrates how companies can rethink their business models [DH: my emphasis] by becoming a Company-as-a-Service, Motivating a Marketplace, or Providing a Platform

A typical example of a high impact Collaborative Economy startup is Airbnb, the well-known site where anyone can rent out spare rooms or empty houses for anyone else to use, without the need for an intermediary business that provides the physical facilities. As a clear shot across the bow of the hospitality industry, Airbnb will provide on a peak day placements for up to 200,000 people per night. In comparison, the global hotel megachain Hilton has only 600,000 rooms as noted Thomas L. Friedmen in a recent column about this phenomenon. Thus the size of some of these new startups is now starting to challenge traditional market leaders, often bending or breaking local laws, customs, and regulations along the way, which were never designed for the social business era.

Other examples abound in many industries including transportation (Uber, Lyft), finance (LendingClub), workforce (oDesk), dining (Feastly), corporate real estate (LiquidSpace, ShareDesk), shopping (Yerdle), venture capital (Kickstarter), and countless others, of which these are just a tiny but representative sample.

The real point is that in-the-large it appears to be a broad demographic digital business trend. Owyang's research pegs the current value of the Collaborative Economy at $26 billion today, with other data showing it growing overall at a 25% year-over-year rate. Plotted forward five or ten years, and it is evident that the Collaborative Economy will become a major portion of the world economy sooner or later, and very probably the former.

Part of the reason that the timing appears to be right for these big ideas is that in a consumption-based society we individually now posses so much in terms of usable resources, and yet they are also typically quite underutilized. The sharing economy reaches directly into this vast and largely untapped stored value that consumers now control by helping them make much better use of what they have.

The implications of all this in terms of efficiency, reuse, environmental impact, productivity, value creation, and other important economic, social, and civic factors are potentially enormous. The corollary, however, may be that there is much less room in the economy for traditional businesses which tend to be much less resource-rich, innovative, or cost effective by comparison. In short, they may simply not compete strongly in the collaborative economy, because of a much more labor and resource-intensive legacy approach to meeting market needs.

Much has been made over the extremely rapid change in today's technological landscape, and how slowly companies are adapting to it. For example, well-known data shows that the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has plummeted from 75 years in 1937 to just 15 years today, and has continued to drop steadily. Part of this is an indictment of how poorly companies have been absorbing new technology in a way that is fundamentally useful to the future of their business. The other obstacle to change is the sheer residual value of following the dying path they are on. In other words, the Innovator's Dilemma for the digital era.

As John Hagel and John Seely Brown were recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, there are two overarching trends that are pressuring businesses in the digital age where location doesn't matter and market share is a relentlessly zero sum game of who has the biggest ecosystem:

There are two dominant narratives about the institutional changes we are experiencing and neither one of them gives anyone much respite: The first is that companies will fragment to smaller and smaller entities and even down to individual providers; the second is a winner take all world where only the largest survive. We believe that both of these narratives are too simplistic. We see a world where both of these narratives co-exist and are mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting. Scale and fragmentation interact in a symbiotic relationship where the growth of each is what drives the growth of the other.

What are corporations to do in response?

While the track record of companies in making the transition to the world of social business has been a checkered one, I've long identified incremental success stories here. In speaking with Owyang about the emergence and threat of the Collaborative Economy to the industrial age generation of companies, I have challenged him on what the prescription is to successfully transform. Unfortunately, though he too believes it can be done by some, but not by all, the road ahead is as varied as the company and industry. But looking at the few success stories there are (and there are some), these key points stand out as the corporate mindset needed to transition successfully to social business:

·         Don't compete with your customers, cooperate with them. Easier said that done in terms of corporate culture, but when Collaborative Economy startups are pitting millions of your own customers against you, there's no reason that companies can't decide to play the exact same economic card, at least while there's still some time.

·          

·         Design for change, give up non-essential control, and learn the power laws of networks. Networked social businesses focus on cultivating communities, fostering co-creation, and optimizing shared value, wherever it lies, instead of just creating and selling things. These are also the core skills of Collaborative Economy startups.

·          

·         Rethink the structure and processes of your organization to transition gently but swiftly to a social business. How organizations are resources and operate dynamically is very different in the social economy, learn the rules and way forward.

Naturally, this is just a high-level set of factors for changing with the economic times and facing fast-moving new competitors using a very new rule set. The reality will likely be grittier, more challenging, and surprising to the typical classical industrial age business.

Yet, the greater the changes taking place in the marketplace, then the greater the opportunity. The message here is that it's probably later for your industry than you think. Most businesses will have to learn innovative and effective ways to adapt to the Collaborative Economy in order to survive and thrive, even in the medium term. Fom a customer and corporate perspective both, that may not at all be a bad thing.

·          

Pew: 47% of US Facebook users, or about 30% of all Americans, get news from the social network

By Emil Protalinski, Thursday, 24 Oct '13 , 05:42pm

Given that Facebook is the world’s largest social network with over 1.15 billion users, it’s no surprise that many turn to the platform for news. In the US, about half of adult Facebook users, or 47 percent, get news from the social network.

Facebook has over 128 million monthly active users in the US and more than 101 million daily active users in its home country. Extrapolating the previous figure, about 30 percent of the US population gets news from the social network.

These latest figures come from a survey conducted August 21 to September 2 by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. A “nationally representative sample” of adults 18 years of age or older was used, according to Pew: 5,173 respondents, 3,268 of whom are Facebook users, of which 1,429 are Facebook news consumers.

Yet all this begs the question, how did Pew pick out Facebook news consumers? News was defined as “information about events and issues that involve more than just your friends or family” and Facebook news consumers were defined as those who answered that they “ever get news or news headlines on Facebook.”

All that being said, Pew found most US adults do not go to Facebook seeking news out. In fact, as you can see in the chart above, the vast majority of Facebook news consumers (78 percent) get news when they are on Facebook for other reasons. Furthermore, Just 4 percent say it is the most important way they get news.

In other words, Facebook is big enough now that it can be used to share news to users who don’t actually go out and seek it. In fact, while only 38 percent of heavy news followers who get news on Facebook say the site is an important way they get news, that figure rises to 47 percent among those who follow the news less often.

Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/GettyImages

·          

·