Venkatarangan Blog

Members in the panel where: 

1. Don Dodge – Microsoft
2. Kimbal Musk – CEO, Me.dium
3. Robert Scoble – Fast Company
4. Dave McClure – 500 Hats
5. Kevin Rose – Founder, Digg
6. Ryan McIntyre – Foundry Group (Representing Venture Capital in the panel)

• Social networks today don’t make much money, and that is very crucial for Myspace and Facebook on how to make money for themselves and help their ecosystem in making money
• Remora model (A small fish latching on to a big fish to swim) of revenue. An example was Photobucket depending on Myspace and then Myspace cutting them out
• Digg has a revenue deal with Microsoft’s Advertising deal. Digg is making money from people who are submitting, how do they feel?. Digg feels it is not work that their users are doing, if it is work users will not come again. It is because users care to share. Digg is working on making it easy to share with friends by enabling submission on the homepage, all with a single-click no need to visit Digg pages at all
• Excite when started spent few million dollars for basic servers alone which were needed to crawl few million sites and the RAM alone was like $70,000
• The VC companies will find it difficult to find companies where they can invest less and make 5 to 10 times revenue. Most People are not doing the maths right, so ,if a VC is investing $25 Million then they are looking at exists at $100 to $200 Million levels. There are few acquiring possibilities at these levels
• Don’t focus on the run of the mill CPM rates, instead go for the niche audience where you can charge premium like a magazine model
• There was a great question on "Why Web 2.0 revenue opportunities are being explored by startups only with USA market and not open to Europe. There is no recession in Europe, still why no monetization efforts outside USA"
• Me.dium had to launch the beta with $0.5 Million investments mainly on hardware alone. Me.dium’s long term goal is to get the real nuggets out of the click thru’ data to understand and identify important activities. Google has solved 1% of this problem of what you are intending to do and that itself is working out to several billion dollars
• Web 2.0 is a loss leader for something, nobody knows for what yet
• Me.dium when they launched were scared about privacy because they asked users to give all information that they can give about usage. Robert Scoble says "Privacy is dead"
• For every niche service that will cost $10 or less per month you can start to charge, there is good chances people will pay. Here again you will not get 100% conversion, but you need to give initial service free for users to taste the service and then look for some percentage conversion as paid users
• One of the research shows that 3% of your free audience will maximum convert to paid

I had a question to panel on how all this all affects "Mobile" but I didn’t an answer for it

Angus Logan, Sr. Technical Product Manager from Windows Live platform presented on:

• 400 million live ID users, 1bn authentications / day
• All services of Windows Live free upto 1 million users / month
• Today you have to go login.live.com to sign in, you can customize the page for select msn/microsoft sites only. Later 3rd party sites will be allowed to do this
• Windows Live tools for Visual Studio makes it super easy to implement Live Platform
• Windows Live you can associate with your local user/password store
• You can share your Windows Live Contacts Ids safely and under control to the sites you want to
• Increased Silverlight streaming hosting capacity for free
• ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria) which consumes AtomPub service end points for Application Base Storage, Photo API, LINQ to cloud capabilities
• Check out the new version of dev.live.com for new 7 Quick-Apps which are open source that are end to end scenarios.