Beating the Market with The Wisdom of Crowds

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Amazon + Two Guys + $0 = Next YouTube

Utility computing and storage is changing the way web services are built.

The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordable:

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred (cheap bandwidth makes this possible)

The next YouTube will be built on Amazon’s Web Services by two guys in a dorm for roughly $0 (see SmugBlog). Amazon S3 now has 5 billion objects stored in it. What's more, it had 920 million S3 requests on its peak day, and 16,607 requests in its peak second (see ReadWriteWeb).

Sun Microsystems offers Utility Computing @ network.com for $1/CPU-hr.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easy and affordabe at $0.10/instance-hour! It is in limited beta but already popular.

Google has many assets and APIs related to utility computing. All kind of data can be stored in Google Base. Their web-scale distributed computing platform is well known. This paper on the Google Filesystem gives us a peek into the future of Web applications and platforms.

Who will build the next YouTube on these utility computing platforms?

What happens when video games meet Web 2.0?

When virtual worlds meet geospatial maps of the planet? When simulations get real and life and business go virtual? When you use a virtual Earth to navigate the physical Earth, and your avatar becomes your online agent? What happens is the metaverse.

"We are in the early years of an unprecedented transformation in our relationship to information technology. As visual-spatial and linguistic (right brain and left brain) creatures, we use complex visual-spatial and language interfaces to interact with each other. Soon our 2D+ (geospatial, augmented reality, etc.) and 3D online worlds will become as visually and data rich as the physical world. We are also gaining the ability to talk to our computers (as well as type) in increasingly natural human language. These developments will produce profound new individual and collective abilities, as well as new risks to be mitigated."

"We contend the metaverse sector, growing from today's mostly 2D and early 3D digital media (including film, games, geospatial web, television, and wireless), will encompass and redefine each traditional economic sector in coming decades, the way each has done in its own historical emergence. Providing plausible indicators and examples of metaverse sector development is a major goal of our roadmap."

Why does Google make so much money?

It turns out that owning the starting point on the Internet is really, really valuable. Check out this interesting post about Google and the Third Age of Computing at Skrentablog.

Google is indeed the start page for the internet. That is why some call them the Ultimate Money Making Machine.

Navigation is a great business in the Networked World. Search is one way to navigate. In my earlier post I wrote about other forms of navigation. Who will make money on those?

Youtube gets 1% attention!

I have mentioned Attention Economy in my earlier post.

How much attention do we pay to different online services?

Youtube reached 1% attention in the U.S. based on the measurement of this compete SnapShot. Attention is defined as the total time spent on a domain as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users.

What online services will capture our attention in the future?
Let me know what you think!

Is Google Too Powerful?

It's the year 2014, and Googlezon, a fearsomely powerful combination of Google and Amazon.com, has crushed traditional media to bits. Taking its place is the computer-generated Evolving Personalized Information Construct—an online package of news, entertainment, blogs, and services drawn from all the world's up-to-the-minute knowledge and customized to match your preferences. And it's all collected, packaged, and controlled by Googlezon.



This is the future according to EPIC 2014, a faux documentary posted to the Web in late 2004 by young journalists Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan.

Do you think google is too powerful? Cast your votes on BusinessWeek!