Web 2.0 – High Order Bit – The Internet in China
Mary Meeker, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
10/6/04 China is the most populous country in the world and the top priority for China’s leaders is long term, sustainable economic growth with relatively high levels of employment. Technology is the designated vehicle for driving growth and the Internet is at the core of technological innovation. However, there are many disruptive forces, challenges and risks to face. You can get a copy of the 5 year or 10 year plans the Chinese government puts out.

In technological adoption, China is second in the world with 87 million users, and they are likely to be number one within 5 years. South Korea has a broadband penetration of 70%. Shanda networking has 236 million registered gamer accounts (non unique in China). Ringtones has a $3+ billion annual market. 1 out of every 6 phones is a picture phone. Apple has 70% of online paid music market.

11 Points to the Internet in China:

1 – The number of connected users is significant and growing rapidly. Mobile phones, cable and telephone connectivity will be significant.

2 – The relative web site usage momentum is strong (Alexa).

3 – The next generation is very active on the Internet (70% under 30 years old).

4 – Online media development is in the early growth stages.

5 – Wireless messaging services are ramping up quickly, although transitions are occurring.

6 – Broadband acceptance is growing rapidly.

7 – E-commerce is in the very early stages and governors exist. There are poor credit systems, inefficient logistic and transportation systems, low levels of trust and low levels of expendable money.

8 – Challenges for multinational companies create opportunities for Chinese companies.

9 – The third generation Internet entrepreneurs are impressive. Even with broad-based experience, leadership is not abundant. Management experience is low.

10 – Sustainability of Internet-related revenue and profits is still unproven, but the market opportunity is large.

11 – The government is focused on ramping up the Internet, in part to boost domestic and global trade.

Web 2.0 – High Order Bit
James Currier, CEO, Tickle, Inc.
10/6/04 James is also the VP for Consumer Services for Monster.com. As far as he knows, they are the only ones to make a business into consumer psychology and insight. People are using the web for social uses, not just for work anymore. Thousands of personality tests are taken each day on Tickle.com. Tickle offers self assessment tests, matchmaking and social network. It has 14 million active users, and 200 million tests have been taken. Consumers want someone to dig into their psychology for them.

We have five insights into the web consumer.

1 – It’s all about me (tell me about me). They want to hear about it all day long and never get sick of it. They want you to know them and appreciate them. The web, unlike other types of media, allows you to make a mirror. The web is about me, other media is about other people. Web 2.0 is about connecting with people at the identity level. Reflect information to people about what they’re up to and how they fit in. Consumers will expect this over time.

2 – Sex and work, work and sex. Our sites focus on these two needs.

3 – Your mind is different than your consumers’. You need to get out of yourself to understand the soccer mom. People in this room are a very unique type of person. Our minds think about power, technology, knowledge, code, gadgets, work, money (in bills), and sex. Our consumers think about puppies, babies, God, Nascar, celebrities, money (in coins), sex.

4 – Psychology changes over time. Consumers are more willing to use their credit cards on the web and to share personal information and personal photos. This has changed over the past 3 years. Match.com has matched consumers’ psychological shift over the last 12 months. You need to understand where your consumers are and understand where to launch applications.

5 – Understand consumers’ motivations. For instance, the propensity to buy vs. age. 25 year old males are worried about competition, 35 year old males and females are looking for understanding, and 51 year old females are looking for affirmation.

Tickle is occupying the old DEC building at Maynard. We’re seeing 2 world colliding in the business model of Monster.com and the psychology of Tickle.com. How do we take these insights and apply that to big business. Match making is a 0 margin business right now. People want us to tell them where to go when they’re in the midst of a life changing decision. They want more intelligence in the process they’re involved in. We’re taking matchmaking techniques and applying them to jobs. People have 11 job changes on average over their lifetimes. $100 billion is lost each year in stress related activities. If we can help people make better decisions and have less stress, we can make both big businesses and their employees more happy in the long run.

Web 2.0 – High Order Bit
Dave Sifry, Technorati, Inc.
Founder and CEO
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10/6/04 State of the Blogosphere

Our web service tracks what’s happening on the web right now in the world of weblogs. There are 4.1 million blogs that we’re tracking. The median time from post to index is 7 minutes. Weblogs are like the exhaust of personal attention streams. Who is linked to who is an indication of authority. When links are created to a site, that person becomes and influencer.

What are people saying about my company and my products? What are my competitors saying? What are people saying about the political cycle?

We think about the web in a different way. The current motivation is that the web is the biggest library. A place with lots of indexed information. Yahoo! did the card catalog. Google did the citation index. But what’s going on in the library?

Weblogs are a fundamental change in how you think of the web. The web is changing. It is now part of the social fabric of our society. Look at a weblog and see what they’re doing over time. Look at what everyone’s talking about over time.

How do you make sense of weblogs? There’s the Google rank idea. How many people are linking to you. That’s an indicator of your authoratativeness, but not an indicator of truthfulness. When links are created, before other people are linking to them, that person is an influencer and may be a topic expert.

There’s a way to do this automatically.

The blogosphere is growing. The slowest we’ve seen it double is every 5 months. There is a new weblog every 7.4 seconds. English is no longer 50% of weblog space, but still the largest plurality. Weblogs’ posts/day follow when major events are going on. There’s a 45% abandonment rate after 6 months. There are about 4 posts per second. In the current political environment, more people are posting on politics. We’ve seen a jump in activity after the Dean scream, the Nick Berg beheading, US political conventions, and Cryptonite lock story.

With the Cryptonite lock story, we saw postings 5 days before the mainstream press took it up. There were videos of how to unlock the lock and lots of link love. Cryptonite was completely clueless until the mainstream press picked it up.

Weblogs are getting more influence. And it’s increasing. People still trust the mainstream media, but blogs are coming up. We’re also seeing the rise of corporate blogs, although these are still only a small sliver. The proliferation of RSS in still low, at only 31.2% of all blogs. And only 28.2% of all rss feeds are full text. The more people who link to you, the more likely it is that you have a rss feed. A RSS feed gives people more ways to pay attention to you.

What’s next?
Attention.xml to make it easier for rss readers. Technorati API to make it easy for web developers. Synthetic feeds and watchlists. We have a hackathon tonight at 665 3rd street, suite 207.

Web 2.0 – A Conversation of Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com
with John Battelle
10/6/04 John:
Marc’s a little gun-shy about saying things in public forums because of the SEC and their quiet period. But this is being webcast and streamed to the saleforce site so everyone can see it. What happened during your quiet period?

Marc:
As with Google, and any high profile company, there are a number of issues you have to be aware of that you didn’t have to before. But at least we didn’t give an interview to Playboy. We announced our customer and subscriber numbers today. We have about 185,000 subscribers and have 12,000 customers. Our problem know is how we’re going to make those customers successful and grow the business to show that this is a new paradigm and a new platform.

John:
I know you have opinions about the SEC and the quiet period. What do you think of the process? Can the new paradigm stand? All eyes are on a company, but they can’t communicate.

Marc:
Reuters did an interview with the SEC Chairman and he said that a lot of these rules came from a time when communication was a lot different than today. And they’re going to take a good hard look at that.

John:
What type of advice do you have about that?

Marc:
I’m a software executive, I’m not planning on running for office. I am co-chairman for ptech which is the President’s advisory board on technology. We analyze trends and see if the government is funding the right things. We recently posted the health care report. I can’t understand Washington DC. It took me 2 decades to understand Silicon Valley.

John:
Do you find the ptech process invigorating?

Marc:
Ptech is the most fascinating thing I’ve done. I get to hang out with top computer scientists. You can really see the huge amount of change happening in the depth of technology itself and the potential of it. It’s up to us to harness it. Security has a lot of work in it. We’re benefiting today as an industry from the tremendous amount of research which was funded by the government decades ago. We need to radically increase some of those areas of research to keep the pole position.

John:
Google had an auction process in their IPO. Did you consider that and did you think that was revolutionary?

Marc:
I’m a very naive person in this stuff. I thought the auction was supposed to create efficient Market price so the company received the correct Market valuation. That was not the impression I got with the Google IPO. I don’t think the auction process worked as they would have liked.

John:
In the space you inhabit, what is it about this space (the IT industry) that creates these characters when software is so pedestrian? Such as Oracle and all the ego jousting that goes on in this industry.

Marc:
You see that in a lot of companies. IBM executives have created tremendous things. They have a secret network that makes deals with each other. Lots of other executives are doing things too. Microsoft has incredible people but you haven’t seen the same spread of executives as you have seen elsewhere running next generation companies.

John:
We have Larry Ellison and the SEC Chairman yachting against each other. This is theatrics. You’re good at it too. Your company is successful in its own right. In the midst of the 2001 bust, you had a party that felt like 1999. We asked Henne about your model, about software as a service. He said that they’re looking at it but revenues are huge over here.

Marc:
That’s the same comment we’ve heard before. Larry saw software service before anyone, but Oracle has a hard time executing because they’re so invested in their software ecosystems. It is a technology opportunity, Marketing opportunity, business model opportunity and distribution opportunity. There are many dimensions and you have to execute across all of them. The problem is how. When I started my company, I had conversations with all these guys. None of them took it forward with veraciousness that we did because it’s hard with a big company. Oracle is driving an aircraft carrier, not a speed boat.

John:
In a perfect world where the world turns and see your vision of software enterprise. When they realize that, what does the industry look like? Great vertical stacks of services or what?

Marc:
The industry will be much bigger. We’re on the threshold of the greatest opportunity in the history of the Tech Industry. You just need the ability to execute on that. The industry has the ability. When you look at web services, it was a big change of how technology was architected. Client-server computing was over a decade ago. We saw the browser emerge 10 years ago. It’s a whole new game and web pages are the repository of your data, living in a browser or on some other device. This is a radical departure from only a few years ago. When I look at that and the potential of new applications, we’re looking at the surface of birth of the software industry colliding with traditional Internet computing.

John:
With ptech and the CFOs of traditional companies, they seem very conservative and don’t want to try anything new. The new Web OS feels new. Salesforce is new. These guys rather spend 10 times more with Henne and SAP. What do you say?

Marc:
That’s the curve of technology adoption of Jeff Moore. If you’re scared by that you shouldn’t be in the industry. The people in this room are at the beginning of the curve. Most people in IT have no idea what this is yet. That’s how new businesses are made. That’s the power of our industry. If you can catch on to a paradigm, you’ll have the tiger by the tail. We can see the potential.

Web 2.0 – Web as a Platform
The State of the Internet Industry
10/5/04

John Battelle, Battelle Media
Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
(not a transcript)

Tim:
The old software stack consists of proprietary software, hardware and hardware lock-in. The web stack consists of proprietary software, integration of components and data lock-in. We need to migrate down to data suppliers and up to companies achieving network effects.

John:
The architecture of participation is seen in google, flickr, ebay where they let the user build the content which creates network effects.

John:
The architecture of participation is seen in google, flickr, ebay where they let the user build the content which creates network effects.

Tim:
Amazon overlays network effects on a commodity business. Data is the Intel Inside. The networked world must standardize. Software apis are no longer the lock in point (microsoft vs. msn). The control of data, databases, namespaces is the advantage now, provided by companies such as navteq, mapquest, cddb, network solutions, adwords, ebay.

John:
There’s innovation in assembly and value in aggregating, managing, analyzing, and creating simplicity out of complexity. Companies such as dell, spikesource and rojo are doing this.

Tim:
In our Safari web based subscription service, we’re looking to deconstruct books and allow professors to create custom text books and companies to provide custom corporate data sets. Why buy 10 books when you can put the data you need into 1?

John:
Lightweight business models where distribution, development and AOP means new generation. Amazon and ebay vs. walmart. Google and Yahoo news vs. New York Times.

Tim:
We’re seeing the end of software upgrade cycles. It has taken Microsoft over 5 years to get to Longhorn. The web is constantly updating in a launch and iterate cycle. Companies such as salesforce, itunes, firefox, quicken use the web as their upgrade platform. We’re seeing enriched service through IMs and boards.

The ipod is software above the level of a single device, designed from the getgo to go from hardware to the web in an integrated application.

John:
The Power of the Tail – the force of many. 1 million sites with 1000 users is far more powerful than 100 sites with a million users. 100,000 bands selling 5000 albums not 50 bands selling 1 million albums. This has brought independent bands and record labels straight to their listeners. Adsense has brought advertising to the small companies.

Tim:
The Tail is growing. Just look at Amazon and all the users developing from their api and selling on their sites.

Web 2.0 – High Order Bit
What can we learn from the Adult Industry?
Andrew Conru, CEO Friendfinder.com
10/6/04 If you told someone you were in the adult industry 10 years ago, they’d think your nuts. But this is one of the largest segments of Internet traffic on the Net today.

What can we learn?

The first personals site was in 1993, adknowledge in 1995, friendfinder in 1996. Now we have a dozen Internet web companies and 80 destination sites.

The friendfinder online communities have 75,000 registrations per day, run by a private company employing 180 people. At 845 megabytes per minute, we are larger than all the Disney sites and are in league with Google for minutes spent on our sites.

With our first adult site, we learned a lot from the adult webmasters who were into scary hardcore…. math. They’re all chasing the short quick buck of short term ROI and profit. Get visitors to your site with as little cost as possible and convert those visitors as paid visitors. Some sites do nothing but get people to the front door of other sites and some sites specialize in getting the conversions. These webmaster also brought us such innovations as affiliate marketing programs, popup ads, toolbars, downloadable clients, spyware, and collaborative traffic networks.

Adult sites were driven to innovate with 1000 participants and a hypercompetitive environment. The tail in this industry is long.

So what can we learn? Let’s collaborate together. We need to do self-regulated cleanup of our sites and practices. And we need to understand the tradeoffs between short term ROI and customer experience.

Web 2.0 – High Order Bit
Brewster Kahle
Archive.org
10/6/2004
(not a transcript) Idea of Web 2.0 is the integration between government, for-profit, non-profit and educational sectors. We need to smooth out the problems of Silicon Valley. And we can do it if people are bold enough to talk about it all.

Altavista said we’ll just index the whole web. Jeff Bezos said let’s just sell everything. The let’s do it all type of people are successful in a profit world.

We’re doing this with non-digital media.

Books

There are 26 million books in the Library of Congress. Half of these books are out of copyright and a larger number of them are in print. Only a small sliver are actually in print. A typical book digitized is a megabyte. For 26 terabytes, we can digitize 60,000 books. So we’re in the realm of being able to pull this off and you can get this online. Google has announced that they’re following the ‘look inside the book’ idea and are digitizing print materials. It costs $10/book to digitize overseas. They’re working in Toronto to use robotic technology so that it even costs $10/book in 1st world libraries. So for $260 million, we can scan the entire Library of Congress. We can do that!

The bigger question is what we are allowed to scan. We can scan books out of copyright, but we have to find out which books these are. So we’re rekeying the copyright registration records to be able to find out which books they are.

We also have book in copyright but out of print. Kids todays are not going to libraries to do research so we have these orphans languishing in libraries. Most of these books are from the 20th century and there are over 8 million of them. We have filed lawsuit (kahle v. ashcroft) to try to be allowed to get out of print, copyrighted works onto the net. We’re using the non-profit sphere to help in this socially critical venture.

While it’s nice to read books on the screen, let’s get books in our hands. We can print and bind a 100 page book for $1. That’s cheaper than lending a book from a library, which costs $2 according to Harvard. We’re using bookmobiles to do this in countries such as India, Eqypt, Uganda and it’s work. So we have an integrated process in this book to book idea. Scan a book, use the Internet and then print the book.

Audio

In audio, there are 2-3 million disks, lps, cds, etc. And this is a very litigated area. So what can we do with music?

Not very many people are served well by the publishing industry. We have rock and roll bands publishing cds, but also allowing the tape trading of their concerts. So there are about 200,000 songs. The fringe area is served well by the Internet. There are more folk songs, and other non-mainstream genres. This is building up the non-profit record labels, but they need help posting their stuff.

We allow unlimited bandwidth and storage indefinitely for anyone who wants to share their media with a creative commons license. If you want to give things away, now there is an institutional way.

Movies

Are moving images too big to store? There are about 100,000-200,000 movies and 1/2 of them are Indian. So it’s doable to store them, but copyright is a big issue. There are about 600 films not in copyright protection, and about 300 of them are on the web. You can watch them, cut them up, and make your own movies.

Web 2.0 is about building on what others have done. Lego movies is a whole genre where people have stories to tell but no budget to tell them.

Television

We are currently recording 20 channels of television 24 hours a day in DVD quality recording. We have about a petabyte of data, but making it available is a thorny rights battle.

Software

We have changed the DMCA to allow us to digitize and rip software. It was opposed by the software industry, but the US Copyright Office allowed us. We have Yahoo.com in 96 through our web archive. 20 terabytes a month of web archiving, or about a Library of Congress per month. There are 50 million websites and people publishing all the time.

Backups of the Backups

We have a copy of all our data in San Francisco, Egypt, and Amsterdam. So that we don’t loose everything like when the original libraries were burned. We are currently working on a beta search on our site. Please visit us and help us pass on our collective knowledge to the next generation: http://recall.archive.org

Web 2.0 – High Order Bit Joe Kraus, Founder, DigitalConsumer.org 10/6/2004 Introduction of JotSpot

Wikis are growing like weeds. They centralize information that has previously been scattered among organizations. Information was previously joined by hyperlinks, but wikis allow you to gather the information into one place. The first phase of the web was populating the small pieces of information. Web 2.0 is to increase the number of ways to join the information together. There is no generalized way to loosely join multiple pieces together.

The customization of software has lead to software that doesn’t work the way you think it should, it works the way the company thinks it should. We need customizability, flexibility, light weight software for specific needs.

We have built a web-based software that looks like a wiki. It is a platform that loosely joins information together that is spread across email and business applications. It’s an application wiki.

Example: VPEngineering Wiki

If you have Homer Simpson as your top candidate for a job, you can type in a description for him in a wysiwyg interface. You can attach his resume (excel or word document with an html preview). Our software provides version control and allows you to compare and switch to different versions of a document. You can manage email between Homer and yourself. And every page in the wiki is an email address, so you can cc his page with an email and authentication code and send it out. There are full page permissions so you can control who sees what.

You can rank Homer with a 3 and save that he’s visiting on 10/15. With a form you can collect rank and full name and can edit the form to include his next visit. This form will be in a wysiwyg editor. Then you can apply this form structure to Homer’s page and now you can edit the page to fill in the form. The software automatically generates table of all the people with the same information. And now VPEngineering candidates and calendar information all in one place.

You can start with abstract information and then add structure. You can integrate a news feed by placing it into the form. So if we add integrate a news feed into a form with search for Homer’s previous company and also pull in a google search on Homer. Homer’s page and all pages with this form inherited has this information integrated into it. So now you have a clickable pull down information with yahoo news and google search on it.

Now from our labs, you can integrate into salesforce.com. If you’re in salesforce’s page, you can setup a form to gather information automatically. And get realtime information about your customers.

We’ve started off with a wiki and built more structure around the principles of a wiki.

Jeff Bezos – What is Web 2.0?
10/5/04
(not a transcript)

Web 0.0 was the original Amazon, which had 1 million titles and was just static html. No search on the home page, it was a click away. This is a one size fits all approach. (search on archive.org for a look).

Web 1.0 is Amazon today with personalization, dynamic content, content which is created by humans but placed by computers. The site is customized and is a result of 9 years of innovation, problem solving, mistakes and moving forward. Web 1.0 is about making the web interface better for humans.

Web 2.0 will be Amazon’s web services and about making the internet useful for computers. The webservices make the customer reviews, product images, product attributes, sales rank and shopping cart available in an api. The business model is that this helps Amazon sell more products by having other people innovate with their services. Amazon pays people to use them through their affiliate program.

Web 2.0 will be Amazon’s web services and about making the internet useful for computers. The webservices make the customer reviews, product images, product attributes, sales rank and shopping cart available in an api. The business model is that this helps Amazon sell more products by having other people innovate with their services. Amazon pays people to use them through their affiliate program.

Alexa web service is an example which has 100 terabytes of web crawl available to anyone who wants to use it. You can pass them a url to see if the site has adult content. You can find out of a site is slow or fast, or find all the leaks on a site. You can see usage patterns on the web.

Musicplasma.com is done by 2 people in France. If you search for indigo girls, it will bring up a 3 dimensional search results where you can see all the groups and artists which are related and how through a flash based interface. If you click on a link, it goes to amazon to allow you buy the album. This shows the value of the Amazon web services in allowing 1000 different flowers to bloom and to expose all types of different innovators.

Scoutpal.com is written by a software engineer whose wife sells used books on Amazon. She used to go out to garage sales to find used books and was spending too much time doing this. The engineer used cell phones with barcode readers attached to connect to scoutpal to get back real time data from Amazon about how much the book costs. This is something that Amazon may have thought about, but it would not have been very high on the priorities. With the open Amazon api, it lets the ecosystem develop.

A9.com is Amazon’s search engine. If you search for clark gable carole lombard, it brings back multiple columns of results (web, images, etc.) which open different results sets. It uses googles services for web and image results, imdb.com for movies, guru.net for reference info. An internal service is provided to allow you to search your site history which is stored on their server for universal access from wherever you are accessing the site.

Web 2.0 is about thin front ends which tap into web services with powerful back ends.

Web 2.0 – A Conversation with John Doerr
Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Interviewed by John Heilemann
10/5/04 John Heilemann (JH):
Everyone is talking about Google and we know you were involved with their IPO. People thought you were nuts 5 years ago to invest in Google. Do you attribute your success to wise-all knowingness or blind luck?

John Doerr (JD):
I’m nuts. I’m lucky in my investments more than wise. Search was the 2nd most used thing on the web. They had revenues and Stanford dropouts.

JH:
There was some reluctance about being a public company and how comfortable they would be with the changes. What types of discussions did you have about that?

JD:
Google waited as long as they could. They didn’t need the cash, but they had an implicit agreement with the employees that they would go.

JH:
Google seems to want their cake and eat it too. Do they feel beholden to the shareholders now?

JD:
Their behavior has changed. They have a long term view of business and opportunity. The 30 year old cofounders will be there for a long time.

JH:
Tell us about the process of going public and its high and low points.

JD:
The process worked out well. The high was raising $1.7 billion. The auction seemed to work well. There was a fear that if we had an auction and the price discovery didn’t work, the price may go way down. The democratic stock auction seemed to work well.

JH:
Google scaled back on their price and size of their offering and the price discovery seemed to have worked. Was that an embarassment or the virtue of the auction system?

JD:
Yes.

JH:
Where is Google headed? Are they future oriented?

JD:
Up and to the right. They want to offer more comprehensiveness in search and their results. They want to offer access to more information that’s not currently available on the web. Better international coverage. More personalized – a Google that knows you. And a deeper advertising network with more products.

JH:
Can you be more specific in a more concrete way for the short term? Most people anticipated your announcement earlier today (inside the book type of searches).

JD:
It should be deployed in the next few weeks.

JH:
What type of defense of Google is involved in that? Web 2.0 idea that it’s more complicated than the second iteration…?

JD:
When you apply string theory to the web, you see a different way to categorize things. You have the near web, which is pcs, far web (tv, web), here web (mobile), weird web (3D, VRML, talk to it and it talks back), b2b web, d2d web, kimbo web….

Browsers are going to come back. Google has the ambition to serve most users with the most information and serve advertisers who pay for users to get the information.

JH:
Are Google and Amazon in direct collision course?

JD:
Perhaps.

JH:
What’s the next big thing?

JD:
Clean distributed energy. Clean water. Cleaner transportation. Sequencing DNA. Finding a cure for cancer. And web services.

JH:
Can you expand on web services?

JD:
Targeted services for handheld web devices. Tracking services so women can track their spouses. Upgrades of the Internet backbone to fiber and all optical switching. Filters based upon 3 million people on mobile phones so that you only get the most relevant information. Storage and computer power are going up and prices are coming down.

JH:
Non-web opportunities?

JD:
Aggregate all backlist information for videos. Be wary of getting in the way of large companies.

JH:
What about the controversy with Google in China? Do you see forsee that conflict with more businesses?

JD:
Yes. The Chinese government shut down Google by controlling the routers in China. If you want to be a robust partner in countries, you have to observe the rules inside those countries. Google is committed to democracy. People who have left China want unfiltered information. Google wants to become the search engine for democracy.

Questions:
Importance of politics on society and businesses. Current role of the web on the election cycle. What type of disintermediating impact does the web have on politics?

JD:
Howard Dean showed the power of the web. Kerry had a record day with the Howard scream. The McCain legislation put the caps on the DNC and RNC. Policy really matters even if you’re nonpolitical so pay attention even to global bills.

Q:
Can you give us an example of b2b rss field?

JD:
Wikis which companies use to build or promote their products.

Q:
Most web innovation in the past has come out of US companies. What extend do you see international companies participating in web 2.0 or leading the way? What VC are you investing in?

JD:
In Web 2.0 most innovation will come in global companies that have presence in China or India, but the innovators will come from the US. In Web 3.0, innovation may come from others. US educational institutions are not performing well. That puts the sand in the gears of innovation. We’re not welcoming foreigns into the universities, and if they do get in, they often leave. If you staple a green card to every diploma, you may get more of them to stay. So we have some big policy problems to address for Web 3.0.

Q:
I have some privacy concerns with Gmail. But what is the difference in how Google respects Germany and China?

JD:
China is not respecting international law, it’s respecting executive law. Google is not censoring the Chinese audience, it is just complying with the Chinese executive law. It feels that if it is going to help the citizens in the future, it needs to be able to be there. To do that, it needs to comply for now to get the foot in the door.