Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology

In the web applications arena it’s not given that big players succeed, but rather the field consists of a massive amount of independent and entrepreneurial small companies and even hobbyists, that might not even have a commercial intent initially. One reason this works is that it’s so darn simple to develop and host web applications for a worldwide audience. Most fail of course (how many communities can a world bother with), but due to the Darwinistic and chaotic nature of this marketplace a few will succeed, that satisfiy the needs of many users.

Examples:

Twitter, still a very simple service that in my opinion hasn’t evolved a bit in two years. Supposedly now run by 20 people, supposedly has no profit, has funding enough to run in the black, yet knocks the socks off heavily-funded Jaiku (acquired by Google) and similar services in popularity and mindset. At the same time being a service type so simple that before its inception no one would believe it would have any applicability at all, and many still don’t believe so.

Piratebay, tracking torrents via an amateurish site that looks like crap, yet caters to the needs of a whole world: free multimedia content, whether legally obtained or not. Some funding, but considering the lawsuits against them, no possibility whatsoever to fend off those lawsuits financially, except due to the fact that Piratebay doesn’t actually store any multimedia content, so conceptually they are in the green.

Skype: Certainly Skype has always had a commercial intent, but it’s still been resource-efficient along the way, where the main value has been the free phone client: Free to get and free to use. Sure, there are commercial services complementing Skype, but that’s not the core reason people use Skype. As Skype is acquired by eBay (but might be sold off, according to info from eBay) the company never had to be in the black to still hugely succeed from an owner perspective.

Facebook, initially a internal service for Harvard University’s students, proved to be so generally useful that it was further developed and opened up for general use. Nowadays it’s a quite advanced service, probably the most advanced community in the world from a technical standpoint, due to the third-party application architecture. Still remaining the most popular community for working people, decreasingly so for pre-teens and teens (children don’t want to be on the same community as their parents). Certainly by now a fully commercial service.

What else will pop up from nowhere, that will be spawned by a few guys, possibly not even with any commercial intent, and yet will become a huge (as in world domination huge, at least for a while) success?

I’m sure there are big new opportunities in other areas, where timing is everything, but finances and manpower are initially almost nothing.

Posted by Anders Borg 11:45 | Permalink