Future of Web Apps – Michael Arrington

Michael Arrington was the first presenter of the second day. Many people told me that he is very cocky and full of himself so I was expecting the worst. I thought his presentation was quite good and he does not hold back on his opinions which provided good value for the overall presentation. I recorded several of his comments in mp3 files which you can download below including his comments on the “Apple Incident” earlier this week. Oh yea, he also stated he would like to be Digg CEO.

Winners, Losers, and Companies to Watch

Winners: writely, grouper, skype, newroo, flickr, weblogs, myspace, bloglines, userplane, ksolo, blogger, del.icio.us

Very good bets: digg, facebook, youtube, photobucket, zoho, stumbleupon, popsugar, plentyoffish, netvibes

Ones to watch: jobster, riya, zillow, flock, sharpcast, rocketboom, 1-800-FREE411, odesk, secondlife, wordpress

What were they thinking: inform, gather, pubsub, browzar, jigsaw, squidoo

Winners – Shared Attributes

• passion for what thye are doing
• doing something extraordinary – purple cow
• removing serious friction
• great founder dynamics
• never raised big money
• perfect revenue model not required
• and launched with post on tc

Loser Attributes

• poor founder team choices
• lifestyle/ego entrep
• raised too much money/spent too much money
• over business planned
• forogt about scaling

Choosing Your Platform

• php
• ruby
• java
• .net

Client Platform

– net, ajax, flash, xul, adobe apollo (his fave)

Saturated and Unsatured Markets

• social networks
• social bookmarks
• video
• photos
• blogging platforms
• feedreaders

Big Potential for Success in the Near Term

• platforms
• desktop apps
• office efficiency
• cloud storage
• identity
• developer tools
• market destruction – i.e. 1-800-FREE411
• enterprise