Netflix on channel 1

In a transaction estimated to cost Netflix about US$1 billion over 5 years, the DVD and streaming company partnered up with Epix, a cable and internet streaming channel backed by Paramount, Lionsgate, and MGM studios. Considering the fact that Netflix already has an established streaming relationship with Starz, a company that already has streaming rights to Disney movies, this means that Netflix now has a substantial portion of the recent blockbuster movies tied up for its streaming service (Fast Company reports that the combined box office market share of Epix backers was around 21%).

The deal carefully avoids create any controversies around DVDs to establish supremacy in the online streaming space. Netflix is betting, strategically, that the DVD business that brought it to where it is today is a buggy whip type business in a world that is slowly to moving to the cars-like business of online streaming. Now that the netflix player is embedded in a series of devices that allow for streaming across a large footprint (computers, TV and, soon, mobile devices), the company is building up its content catalog.

What Netflix is doing is basically creating a new “on-demand” channel that can sit next to the other channels on a TV screen. The company is sidestepping “appointment viewing,” which requires people to set a particular time and date to see a particular piece of entertainment, to provide instead the equivalent of an always-ready, always-on-demand format of entertainment viewing (kind of like “there’s a movie for that”). It’s a future AT&T predicted in 1993 (as an interesting aside, that very ad campaign was also one of the first banner ad campaigns on the internet) and the company to bring it to you is Netflix.

Basic Internet Tenets

Regular readers of tnl.net will recognize the trend of everything moving to an IP stack. I’ve long held the view (at least since 2004, according to this entry) that cable channels ought to be delivered a la carte over the internet and Netflix may be the first company to successfully deliver an internet-only on-demand channel.

This model, however is predicated on a few key tenets that have made the internet such a great arena for innovation:

• The internet is a level playing field: Large companies do not have an advantage over smaller ones as everyone gets the same level of access to internet resources, no matter whether they are two guys in a garage or a multinational corporation.
• The internet allows any platforms to connect: There is no discrimination on what type of device can connect to the internet, as long as the device respects rules around addressing (getting a unique identifier on the net) and respects every other devices on the net. As a result, computers are seen no differently than mobile phones, TV set-top boxes, game stations, watches, coke machines, or whatever anyone willing to agree with the basic rule set attaches to the net
• There is only one internet: The minute you agree with the basic tenets of the internet, you take it upon yourself to continue supporting them if you want to be part of the internet commons. You are free to leave the internet and go to another network if you want to but you cannot call that the internet if it’s a different network.

A different view

But not everyone seems to agree. Earlier this week, Google, a company that has greatly benefited from the current tenets of the internet, decided that now that it was a large company, it could throw the internet under the bus by breaking some of those very tenets.

In a joint announcement with Verizon, the company proposed a compromise on net neutrality discussions that starts out with the right concepts and eventually gets off-track to a point where the basic tenets of the internet would no longer be valid.

Before I go into the details of what’s wrong with the proposal, let’s first look at what’s right (although I have to take what they say with a grain of salt since I’ve trusted the company in the past only to see it turn its back on earlier announcements):

A broadband Internet access service provider would be prohibited from preventing users of its broadband service from:

1. sending and receiving lawful content of their choice;
2. running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and
3. connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service.

I would have some questions on the definition of “harm” here but, for the most part, these seem to be points that could be agreed upon.

The lines would also carry a non-discrimination principle that are, for the most part OK, except for the following sentence (emphasis is mine):

Prioritization of Internet traffic would be presumed inconsistent with the non-discrimination standard, but the presumption could be rebutted.

I would argue that striking those last 6 words would make the rest of that section OK.

The next section is about transparency and the proposition of providers telling people when they do discriminate or make other modifications seems sound.

However, it starts going downhill from there. Provisions like network management (a tricky area that ends up being the place of most disagreement), additional online services, wireless broadband and case-by-case enforcement give up on the notion of the internet as a simple (or stupid) network.

It is true that network management is necessary to the proper functioning of the internet commons but, as Barbara Van Schewick (via Fred Wilson) points out, there is a simple rule on dealing with net neutrality:

A non-discrimination rule that bans all application-specific discrimination, but allows all application-agnostic discrimination. Discrimination is application-specific if the discrimination is based on the specific application or content (e.g. Skype is treated differently  from Vonage), or based on classes of applications or content (e.g. Internet telephony is treated  differently from e-mail).

The main challenge in Google and Verizon’s proposal is the idea of a differentiated internet. If the first two components of their proposal (consumer protection and non-discrimination) were considered valid, the rest of the policy framework would be invalid. One cannot say in the same sentence that a broadband provider is prevented from allowing users and applications almost unfettered access to the net and then turn around to say that this may not be the case for new applications or parts of the net.

Like it or not, the wireless internet is part of the internet. While there are parts where it can be controlled, internet is still a word that works as singular and has no plural. Anything else (a differentiated network) is not the internet and don’t let people tell you otherwise.

Motivations

So what motivated such proposal? Well, first of all, it appears that there are a number of strategic areas where Google could do well in appeasing the telecom and cable industry:

• The Android OS is a natural fit here as Google is working on ensuring that it will do better than Apple in the mobile space.
• GoogleTV is another arena where the company would benefit from sitting on a “differentiated network” where it could serve content as a premium package. In its fight with Apple (Apple’s business model is still largely predicated on selling hardware, like AppleTV), Google could offer an advertising-sponsored model carried on differentiated pipes.
• Of course, another arena would be wherever there are tools that are potentially threatening Google. For example, pictures from Picasa could be served at a faster rate than pictures from Facebook on that network. Or movies from YouTube could get priority access over movies from Netflix.

So, having established that Google has much in terms of alignment with the telco industry, it is now time to question whether its motives are truly in line with its previous policy of not being evil or whether they are better aligned with pure profitability motives. The decision could allow the internet to grow or the world to return to the pre-internet world of balkanized networks.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The internet at a crossroad. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

For months now, the FCC has been working on defining a broadband roadmap for the country but sadly, in discussion with people both inside and outside the FCC, it appears that the agency has gotten kidnapped by the telecommunication industry, often times parroting lines that come straight out of the industry’s mouthpieces.

While the plan is not due for another month, I can tell you that, as late as a few weeks ago, the FCC was thinking of setting the definition of national broadband at a laughable speed of 3Mb per second, a speed so low that some of the larger providers don’t even offer it anymore. The reasoning is that it would be achievable and good enough for most applications today.

In December, at a conference sponsored by the Aspen Institute, I challenged members of the broadband task force to think more aggressively and was presented with a barrage of “well, in our studies of international broadband trends, we have not find a single use case, outside of P2P piracy, for higher speed networks.” I countered that this type of thinking, had it been applied to the year 1999 would have made 56k the rule of the land. To think based on today’s limitations is to limit tomorrow’s opportunities and it appears that our government is about to do it again.

At the time, I did not have any examples of potential use for a higher speed network (and mind you, I was advocating 100Mbps to the home, not 1Gbps as Google is) but fortunately, with the success of Avatar in movie theaters, and the unveiling of bluRay in 3D and TV sets and TV stations in 3D, it appears that potential use case for those types of networks could develop in the form of consumer generated 3D high definition video stream (with, of course, high definition audio accompanying it). Such a model could require a substantial amount of data to be pushed down the pipes and far exceed what our networks currently can do.

Enters Google, a company that lives and dies by the amount of internet access available. Their products cannot exist without an open internet (an example of how a less open internet access affects Google can be seen in today’s report that Iran banned access to Gmail) and increasingly, their ambitions require faster internet access, whether it is to offer video, telephony, or other services. An efficient internet and, increasingly, a fast internet, is what they need to grow. Having tried playing nice, it looks like the company is now deciding to take the gloves off in its fight with the telecommunication industry by throwing the gauntlet down.

It’s not the first time Google decides to throw its weight, and substantial cash hoard, around to help it accomplish longer term changes in the telecoms industry. Three years ago, the company managed to get wireless phone networks to be more open by threatening to enter the market.

Sadly, it appears that our government is more beholden to the interest of the telecommunication industry than it is to helping the country regain its leadership role in the technology world. The last decade has seen the US stumble from a leadership position in broadband speed to not even making the top 10. And our government is about to support this anemic state with a policy that will fail to really provide the country with what it needs to remain competitive.

Google, on the other hand, is looking to the future and sees that, unless something radical is done, the country will slip further behind. By announcing that they will deliver 1 Gbps to half a million homes, they hope to get the competitive juices flowing into the telecoms industry. If I were them, I would shoot for high concentration places like New York or San Francisco to demonstrate the capabilities at a faster rate and hit right into some of the most competitive markets, potentially hurting the margins of telecommunication companies if they don’t play along.

There are, of course, many challenges to Google becoming a broadband provider. The company already knows a lot about users and becoming a broadband provider would give them access to even more information, potentially creating concerns about privacy. There is also something clearly self-serving to Google’s approach in this but, as was the case with its earlier stance on China, its interest seem to be aligned with the consumer’s. I wish the government would react in the same way.

Update (February 16, 2009): It looks like the FCC is finally starting to move in the right direction on the bandwidth issue.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title In Google We Trust. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Broadband Penetration

It wasn’t much going out on a limb to estimate that broadband penetration would increase. However, the implications are generally harder to extricate. The rise of VoIP has been realized, with my predictions about large-scale operators adopting VoIP as their own only partially realized. All the major operators do have a specific VoIP offering but few are using it as a total replacement of their backend so I guess I was overly optimistic in my assessment.

In terms of other implications of broadband, though, my predictions about video where correct: Apple did announce (or is that pre-announce) a living room strategy with the iTV (new name to be announced at MacWorld). My assumption that they would not market it as a computer are correct and that direct access to the media store and emphasis on HDTV seem to be correct. Also in video, Google did offer a pay per view system (on Google video) but not in partnership with AOL… and my assumption of this generating good buzz for AOL, allowing it to do an IPO, was way off base.

TV stations increasing their online position with advertising supported media was also correct. I was, however, early in my predictions about ad insertion mechanisms being better targeted than traditional advertising. Currently, online video advertising is still about equivalent to TV advertising (minus the large audience size) so better targeting is something that will probably come in the future.

YouTube could easily be considered a new type of video aggregator, and its acquisition by Google fits into my thinking about major portals acquiring those new aggregators. I was also (I must admit my own surprise here) partially correct in predicting that Tivo would open up and start positioning itself as a new aggregator for content online and offline. I was dead wrong, however, on it being acquired, as I was about Yahoo! acquiring NetFlix.

TV stations going fully online was also overly optimistic. While a few efforts, like TrioTV, were launched as a way to keep flagging brands alive, no small station went completely online in 2006. What happened, however, was that large stations put popular shows online, rankling some of their affiliates in the process. The idea of putting local news online is what I would consider one of the big missed opportunities for traditional media. It’s content that could be repositioned online easily and could be sold on a network basis in terms of advertising so I’m surprised that it hasn’t been done yet. Maybe in 2007.

My predictions about the trajectory of vidcasting seemed to be pretty dead on. Amanda Congdon signing up with ABC can be seen as the beginning of a trend, in terms of vidcaster moving to traditional media. Traditional media are still seeing this phenomenon as small and largely to be ignored but the rise of citizen journalists has gotten them to pay a little more notice (reference Senator Allen and the Macaca incident and you start understanding the power of citizen powered video).

On the infrastructure end, my predictions about outcries relating to the security of the network were wrong but incumbent line operators asking for more control was not: the fight over Net Neutrality is the battleground pitting operators who want to close up the net vs. people who believe that the Internet has been successful because of that openness. I sit in the latter camp and I think this fight will continue through 2007 and probably beyond.

Growth and Scalability

My predictions about 2.0 sites being unable to cope with explosive growth proved wrong. Looks like there are a lot of people out there who are doing great work making sure that those sites stay up and kudos to them for that.

My fears about mainstream media hedging out the traditional blogs also appeared wrong. Traditional media did attempt to co-opt blogging but, apart from a few exceptions (Business Week comes to mind), few have achieved any major traction in the space. It appears that established bloggers are now the new gatekeepers of the blogosphere and traditional media will not be able to displace them (I suspect that the next move by traditional media organizations will be to co-opt those bloggers now).

Radio stations did offer more shows via podcast, which is a very welcomed improvement I had predicted. However, very few TV stations are offering shows via vidcast. Hosting services offering a share of advertising revenue did start to appear but few podcasters signed on, as it turns out that my predictions about escalating bandwidth cost constraining podcasters were wrong.

On the crash and burn side, few companies actually did so little talk of bubble burst 2.0 have happened. Stories about Google hubris have started appearing and as I write this, Google has lost 10 percent from its highest price this year (the stock is trading at US$461 while its high was US$513) so I guess I got this one right too.

My bets on consolidation were wrong and LinkedIn was not acquired. Oh, and tagging as a market hasn’t really been decimated. Instead, it appears that Yahoo! loves the concept and has gone out to buy most of the players in the space.

My prediction of a massive Google backlash also proved incorrect. While rumblings are starting to happen among tech luminaries, those have had little effect on how business operates and interacts with Google, and thus has had little effect on Google itself so far.

While new companies emerged in the analytics space, none of them really provided anything revolutionary I can think of so my guess on this space being a great new area of activity was wrong. However, I think it’s a space that does need more work.

Trust did not become as hot a topic as I thought it would. While there were a few discussions around trust-related issues in the blogosphere (the most recent examples to come to mind are the payperpost debacle and the recent Microsoft laptop delivery discussion), trust itself did not become a major topic. My prediction about anonymous editing of Wikipedia was partially correct, though, as Wikipedia is working on a tighter policy and better controls. My predictions regarding a major hack of Wikipedia were wrong (thankfully) but I’m glad that they are taking the appropriate steps to deal with minor problems before they became major.

Conclusion

I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised with how accurate a number of my predictions were. This year was a pretty amazing one and my success rate on this effort makes it that much harder in terms of predicting 2007 as I now have to keep up with a good rate of success. We’ll see next year when I review the 2007 predictions I should be making soon.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2006 Predictions — The Review. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Looking Back

In the ensuing 6 years, I’ve been going over and over what went wrong and discovered more lessons along the way: the market conditions were wrong, we were young and arrogant, and, for the most part, we didn’t really understand the magnitude of what we were trying to accomplish: to remind people, our goal was to launch a website in 16 countries (15 EU countries + the US) on day one, localizing our site for each of them. At the time (1999), no one had accomplished that broad a coverage (nor had anyone even tried to).

So it seemed a little crazy but, then again, crazy people had built Netscape, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon in the previous few years. So crazy seemed not only possible but it seemed to be the key to success on the Internet. The problems we encountered fell in a number of areas: currency exchanges, tax issues, language localization, integration with many fulfillment partners and a front-end experience that called for broadband connections. We basically wanted to build eCommerce 2.0 long before there was a web 2.0.

Looking Forward

So fast-forward to now. Broadband uptake is nearing 50% in many of the target countries and the number of users has grown tremendously, governments have learned about internet ecommerce and now have specific rules relating to it. And integration across many system is what web services and mash-ups are all about. Do I smell progress? So let’s revisit my old post (which later was published in Business 2.0) points and look at them through the 2006 lens.

The Currency Problem

Back then, the 16 countries we targeted meant 16 different currencies.

Today, with the rise of the Euro as a unifying currency, the same 16 countries only have 4 different currencies (the UK still being stuck on the pound sterling and Denmark keeping its currency a national one pegged to the Euro. The US and the Euro are the other two currencies covered.) This greatly reduces the complexity of pricing models across Europe and makes the overall cost of managing the catalog much lower.

Back then, we actually had to build our own currency tracker, with people inputing the exchange rates daily into the system to keep everything aligned.

Today, you can get access to currency exchanges via web services (just off the top of my head, I can think of Reuters and CBS Marketwatch providing this type of data), therefore automating what was once a manual task and, once again, reducing administration costs for the catalog.

Tax Issues

Back then, there was no consistency in the way taxes were assessed on goods sold online. The financial people at Boo.com version 1 spent a lot of time with a big 5 accountant group and a lot of local government to lobby for normalization of rules around taxes on cross-border business.

Today, because all of those governments understand the value of internet commerce and because many have worked in conjunctions with each other (through the G8 and the EU) to normalize rules surrounding taxation of goods sold on the Internet the problem is easier to solve.

Back then, we had to build our own systems to track all the vagaries of the different tax systems. It wasn’t a build vs. buy decision because there were no packages offered on the market to deal with this.

Today, you can buy software packages that has all the taxation rules built in so that problem is no longer one you need to build for. You can just buy the technology and let the vendor worry about the changes in taxation laws.

Language Localization

When we set out to build Boo.com, a strong component was the idea of offering the online store in the local language of the user. Boo.com was actually the first store to offer as high a level of customization by market and we had to make a number of changes to the e-commerce software package to make it into a globalized platform. Remember that, at the time, e-commerce was primarily the domain of US and UK companies so selling in a language other than English was rare. E-commerce sites which sold goods in non-English markets were generally customized on a one off basis but no one, prior to Boo.com, had attempted to have a single back-end system run multiple countries.

Today, more vendors are selling solutions which can be customized across a variety of western languages. The solutions are not yet perfect but, for the most part, they work (there are still a number of issues when it comes to localization across 2-byte languages, especially when it comes to site with mixed languages.) Back then, we also had to develop a content management system that could handle translation workflows and management of content in multiple languages. It wasn’t pretty but it worked and it required a lot of internal translation to happen. Each product had description, sizes, etc… available in multiple languages. That part was actually a fairly large management of content nightmare. Today, modern content management system can handle more complex workflows (allowing to track when translations are completed) and even can provide hooks to farm-out translation of the content to external parties. This substantially reduces the cost of a multi-country offering.

Integration with fulfillment partners

Back then, a fair number of people at Boo.com were experts in EDI (or electronic data infrastructure) because EDI bridges were the only way to integrate into our fulfillment partners. Web services didn’t exist so we had batch jobs triggering every hour to the warehouses at DeutchePost and UPS so they could pick, pack and ship the orders. This was expensive and probably the area where we lost the most money on a single transaction.

Today, services like fulfillment by Amazon provide the same service at a substantially lower cost and with less integration headaches as web services are making it easy to integrate their services into an e-commerce operation. That saving alone could justify the existence of Boo.com 2.0 (actually, it would be 3.0 as FashionMall tried to resurrect Boo.com once already).

Front-end

No discussion of Boo.com can be full unless we talk about its front-end.

The Broadband Penetration Problem 

Many people laughed at the attempt we made at creating a more user friendly interface to e-commerce. Back then, a more interactive experience meant using Flash. It was the only way to get a lot of parts moving together. Things like Zoom-In/Zoom-out or Rotate type of effects were hard to accomplish with DHTML and much easier to do so with Flash. Since XML didn’t exist, we didn’t have AJAX. Since we didn’t have AJAX, we went with Flash. Since we went with Flash, the assets were large. Since the assets were large and the average user was connecting via a 56k modem, the site looked slow.

The idea was that every click should feel snappy, a model now common with AJAX-based applications but we failed in one assumption, which is that broadband penetration would move at a faster rate. Our expectation were that 1Megabit lines (much slower than what one now gets via cable or DSL) would be readily available within a year. That was a very flawed assumption and we had not planned any contingency for any slower a deployment.

Selling clothes requires details

Another interesting challenge was that we were trying to sell clothes online. Evaluating a DVD, CD, or book online is easy. However, clothing is different: when people shop for clothes, they like to feel the fabric, look at the details in the fabric. That experience was hard to reproduce online. Back then, what we set out to do, in order to help mimic some of the experience was to have highly detailed pictures of the goods. 

Every product was shot multiple times at a stunning 5 megapixels per picture (the highest possible resolution at the time). This meant picture files that were about 1–2 Mb per file, something that seems small in the era of Flickr and YouTube but was massive in the era of 56k modems. The advantage of such detailed pictures was that you could zoom in to a level higher than what you could do in a store (part of our attempt to compensate for the fact that you couldn’t touch the merchandise). Today, such level of detail is standard among most of the online clothing manufacturers and with more broadband lines, it’s no big deal.

Another innovation we introduced was the presentation of products in 3D. You could basically rotate every product in our inventory any way you wanted. This, at a time when QuickTimeVR was not on the marketplace. This meant getting our photography partners to come up with completely new approaches to taking product shots, sometimes requiring as many as 15–20 shots per product in order to get everything right. Those pictures were then taken into Flash and adjusted so that you could rotate the product and zoom in and out of it, a feat that now seems pretty standard, using QuickTimeVR.

All that photography work didn’t come cheap, especially when you consider that this was done across 5,000 products and that all the assets were then stored on our servers (Hard Drive space was nowhere near as cheap as it is now). 

Modeling

Another innovation was the introduction of virtual models you could use to try the clothes on. Today, Sears offers a lower quality version of what we were offering back then (their model still requires a reload of the full page to turn it.) Because all the products had 3D equivalent, modeling them was relatively easy and we decided to throw it in as an extra feature that helped enhance the user experience. Once again, because of the processing and bandwidth required to make that happen, the idea was ahead of its time. 

Miss Boo

So we now all know that chatty avatars on web sites are not a good idea. The concept behind Miss Boo was to help make the experience similar to that of a store, with a sales assistant (Miss Boo), helping you out. Our long term goal was to have Miss Boo attached on the back-end to a real person so we could have integrated IM while you were shopping (that plan never came to fruition as the company had other concerns after launch). In the process, though, we’ve learned that avatars are generally despised and probably helped many sites avoid them.

Tagging

Because we wanted the experience to be a more communal one, we had a way for users to tag clothing (well, we didn’t call them tags, we called them “LaBOOls” (labels, with a Boo in the middle, get it?) in the great tradition of badly named things on our site). However, because there was no AJAX or other way to quickly get the data back and forth, it required a reload of the whole page after each tag was applied. The feature was quickly killed in order to gain speed but I can’t think of any other site that had tagging on products at the time (if I’m wrong, please rectify me in the comments).

Chatty Tone

The BooZine (Boo Magazine) was our attempt to create a more friendly, open tone when dealing with users. We didn’t want to be just a store, we wanted to engage the users. When our forums (remember, this is before blogs were popular) started filling up with vitriolic comments, we were forced to shut them down, closing a channel of communication for users to us. It was a real shame but I think our attempt can be mirrored in the way most web 2.0 companies now have a blog that they use to receive feedback from users.

A more mature market

Back then, few people were buying stuff online. Even fewer were buying clothes online and an even smaller number than that was buying hip clothing. Considering all the challenges Boo.com was trying to address, its target market was just too small to make it a successful business.

Today, blogs like CoolHunting, HypeBeast or MocoLoco show that there is a market for the types of goods Boo was trying to sell. That, in itself, could be a good reason for Boo.com to come back: The market they were addressing is finally there. However, it may also be a reason for it to not comeback: the market they were addressing now has competitors in it.

Was Boo.com the first Web 2.0 company?

I have to admit that I’ve been feeling a certain level of uneasiness about Web 2.0: to me, there didn’t seem to be much there that I had not seen before: web services (yup, done since 2000), user generated content (tried it in a limited fashion with with the “labools” and forums), more transparency (tried that with forums in the past), chatty tone (attempted at Boo). What I failed to realize is that where we failed was in the way we implemented things. But looking back now, the reason it didn’t feel new was that much of that experimentation was on our site only, not part of a more widespread phenomenon.

Another thing that got me thinking along the way of Boo.com as a Web 2.0 company was the excellent post on Pixel Acres about the visual design of web 2.0. Let me explain, picking points from the article:

Integral to Web 2.0 is harnessing the input of website visitors. Users can generate content for a web service, promote it in a “viral” peer-to-peer fashion, and improve it’s data quality through their opinions and preferences.

Users of Boo could create their model, share it with friends (following the UGC model, I guess). So the input component was there, as was the sharing one.

Most Web 2.0 sites come across as friendly, approachable and small-scale, using subtle design decisions to gain our trust.

Every decision about the front end was to make it appear friendly, chatty and hide as much of the complexity as possible (that’s why so many people thought what we were doing was easy but badly implemented).

Bright, cheerful colors dominate Web 2.0 sites… Bold primary colors suggest a playful, fun attitude and also help to draw attention to important page elements.

One word: orange. The boo.com site had cheerful colors all over the place (sometimes so cheerful that I worried it would be seen as a toy)

Rounded Everything: The friendliness of rounded corners is in keeping with the comfortable, informal tone of many web 2.0 sites… In a great FontShop article analysing the logos of Web 2.0, it was clear that rounded typefaces are all the rage. This smooth approach to type lends a modern playfulness to a company’s visual identity.

Yup, Boo.com was round, very round, even the logo and the fonts. From a visual standpoint, it was much closer to today’s web 2.0 site than the ones it lived among.

Most Web 2.0 sites devote prime real estate to the message that they offer a free service.

Well, we kept pushing our “Free” boozine (Boo Magazine) and looked at it as a way to hook people into coming back again and again to the site.

You won’t find any stock photography of smiling support staff on a Web 2.0 site — that’s a tactic favored by small companies trying to mimic large corporations. Simple icons and screenshots are the order of the day when it comes to imagery on Web 2.0 sites. 3D and beveled icons can lend elegance and polish to a page design that is otherwise fairly stark.

Boo.com was 100% stock photography free. It was all icons and cartoons.

A good Web 2.0 app ought to be lightweight and easy for users to grasp, and clever visual design and copywriting can help remove barriers to entry. Smart use of layout, color, type and copy can go a long way towards easing the pain.

Well, we failed on the lightweight end of things but the design was to be as airy as possible.

As far as Web 2.0 is concerned, bigger is definitely better. Bigger text, that is. Large text is easy on the eye, and coupled with snappy copywriting makes information easy to absorb. And now that accessibility is cool, it’s possible to be a hotshot web designer and use enormous type.

… and back then, people said we didn’t make good use of the real estate because the fonts on our screens were too big. However, note that accessibility was inexistant at Boo.com

The layout of Web 2.0 sites might be described as minimal. With a focus on legibility and ease of use, good use is made of white space. White space allows important information to stand apart, provides rest for the eye, and imparts a sense of calm and order. Generous leading also makes text copy easier for the eye to follow. Some Web 2.0 layouts are so minimal that they verge on boring, but designed well, an uncluttered page can be incredibly tasteful.

Yes, we had a lot of whitespace.

Friendly, informal copywriting allows a more personal relationship with website visitors.

People complained that our content was too informal, actually. I guess taste has changed in the following years.

So, from a visual standpoint, we may have established some of the rules that are now considered good visual rules for Web 2.0 companies. Of course, feature wise, we didn’t have RSS (it had not achieved the level of popularity it now has) and worked largely as a walled garden (all interaction happened on our site) but Boo.com was probably sitting closer to a Web 2.0 sensibility than most companies that existed at the time.

Conclusion

Based on past history, the complexity that existed back then has largely disappeared, making it possible for Boo.com to exist in the web 2.0 world. The market has also evolved to the point where many of the innovations first introduced by Boo.com are now considered mainstream and where many of its barriers to entry seem to have disappeared. This means that Boo.com could have a chance at surviving this round. However, one would have to be careful about overspending on advertising (a crime that Boo.com was responsible of, with its massive multi-country ad budget). A question that remains on the viability of the brand is whether the errors of the past have damaged the brand to a point where it would not be able to come back. It is probably the most dangerous factor in the rebirth of Boo.com and, if the negative press of the past overshadows the re-emergence of this company, it could be a fatal flaw that could ultimately make this a bad idea.

I wish much luck to the parties involved in the relaunch. Hopefully, they won’t suffer from the same arrogance we suffered from in the first iteration of the company and will be able to build a strong business around this brand.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Why the Boo.comeback makes sense. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Today’s news that the Net Neutrality bill was defeated may create future problems for American internet businesses but will not kill the Internet, as some have claimed. Instead, it will probably dictate, in the long run, the death of the very proponents of a ban on net neutrality: phone and cable companies which have been trying to overreach in their attempt to fatten up their bottom line.

Looking at the stakes

At issue in this debate is how bandwidth is distributed and whether it should be metered in any fashion. At the current time, in the US, most people who get broadband pay a flat monthly service fee that gives them unlimited bandwidth at up to a certain speed. Under a new model many phone companies and cable companies are trying to popularize, this would change. Their view is that certain services, like phone service or video service, require more bandwidth and therefore should be charged in a different way. they would basically introduce new charges that would offer access to such service for a premium.

The fear from many is that such model would get them into the business of monitoring what type of services are available and being selective in what access they offer. For example, they could start offering access to certain sites at a premium fee but decline access to other sites or degrade the service in such a way that those other sites would not work well on most computers.

Short term impact

In the short run, few will feel the impact of the communication providers’ strategy. A few pockets here and there will start failing but, all and all, only new services will be affected. Where it gets interesting, however, is when new offerings start making their way onto the Internet.

At the current time, the US is already starting to lag in broadband penetration. This will become a bigger issue if the telecommunication providers have their way as they will probably start moderate increase in the basic price of broadband access. Some may consider this view alarmist but history tells us that basic rates on phone service have generally been increasing, which is interesting considering the complains about competition forcing companies to lower their rate. The same increase in rates has been true on the cable side of the equation, where rates of service are slowly moving up.

As price is one of the major levers in increasing broadband adoption, such rise in prices will only slow things down. Of course, it may not be a point of concern until one considers the global marketplace. Unlike the United States, other countries are rapidly moving to increase broadband adoption and the speed of broadband lines altogether. What that will result in is a greater capacity to create and develop next generation applications that they will then be able to resell to the rest of the world.

We’ve already witnessed the rise of foreign companies establishing themselves almost overnight as major player with the recent appearance of Skype, a company that was born outside the US borders and rapidly acquired a following that made it worth several billion dollars. This wealth generation happened outside of the US because broadband was cheaper and more accessible there. I’ve also recently seen offerings by a couple of non-US companies that may follow the same curve and I am getting concerned about the US ability to compete if bandwidth is not widespread, increasing in size and inexpensive enough for all.

Restrictions on broadband access and degraded (or uncompetitive speeds) may ultimately represent a major Achilles heel in the US ability to compete on the global stage.

Long Term Impact

But what if…

John Gilmore, prominent Internet activist, once said

The Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

Extending the approach, one could start wondering how the net would work around censorship at the source (which is basically what limited access could become).

Enters the concept of Mesh Networking. In a mesh network, computers can work in a peer to peer fashion to connect to each other. One could envision mesh networks being created out of thin air (using wireless Internet access card) without having to go onto the lines of the telco providers. Of course, the issue would still be in terms of traveling over long distances to ensure that sites that are located in far away locations are still accessible. This problem could be solved by some of the content providers themselves, who could enter in some form of social contracts amongst each others agreeing that they would carry each other traffic back and forth, bypassing some the last-mile telco providers in the process. Under such a model, Google’s data center would allow for amazon to use their bandwidth and vice –versa, Microsoft or Yahoo would allow each other similar rights of way and so on… As they all operate large facilities, they could cover a substantial portion of the US public and bypass the telcos all the same.

Under such a scenario, people would start abandoning the restrictive networks offered by phone and cable companies to access the more free and open network offered by the content providers. The result would be an eventual displacement of the telco providers in the long run and, due to probable resentment fostered in the process, an evaporation of any revenue from their other services as those would probably be tied to line access.

Conclusion

If Net Neutrality goes, US competitiveness will be affected negatively and will result in more new wealth being generated outside of the US than in the US. Furthermore, in the long run, an overreach could result in people abandoning the telcos altogether, if Mesh networks take off.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Life After Net Neutrality. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As broadband access to the net becomes more prevalent, those applications will increasingly shift to a net-only model. We’re already seeing this switch with applications like webmail or search, which are purely web-based. Similarly, applications like desktop search now integrate with an online component (for example, Google Desktop Search allows you to store documents on their server or services like Plaxo allow you to store data in an online repository and resync it with different devices) and move data back and forth.

As broadband access continues to increase, the important part is not just the speed (although it is an important factor since it allows for richer online experiences) but I would venture that the more critical part of broadband access is the always-on point. Because a broadband connection does not require to dial-in, it is increasingly becoming ubiquitous. Much as people do not think about the systems of filtration and delivery that provide water to their house or the systems of power generation and distribution that allow them to use electricity, the prevalence of broadband will decrease discussions of what is on the net and what is off it. Applications will just be there and a cloud of connectivity will exist around all of us.

To this end, two potential scenarios could play out: the first one would see the communication providers (telephone companies, cable companies, etc…) continue to provide different access points around the globe. However, another potential scenario could develop around the area of a mesh network that would tie all users together in a peer-to-peer network that would be managed by every single user. One could envision each computing device connected to the cloud to allow for some traffic to go through. Because the protocols that dictate internet based communications have been designed to distribute communications across a number of points (what is called, in more technical terms, packetized communication), one could envision a scenario where an increasing amount of communication would happen in areas independent of the systems provided by the communication providers.

The rise of always on, always fast communication can already be seen in some countries like South Korea, where such thing is considered so commonplace that few people bother discussing it. The United States, unfortunately, are starting to fall behind on this and, because large telecommunication providers are trying to protect their monopoly on access to the high speed lines, efforts to increase speed and coverage could be impeded. However, in the long run, something like a mesh network could make an end-run around the telecom companies, which would then put such decisions in the hands of users.

This is the second article in a 6 part series. You can read the following parts here:

• Part 1: Intro
• Part 2: Always on
• Part 3: IPzation
• Part 4: Sensors
• Part 5: Participatory Applications
• Part 6: Conclusion

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Future Tense — Always On. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Broadband penetration

Broadband penetration will continue to increase in the United States and Europe. Large scale deployments of city-wide broadband efforts in several large cities will start making internet access similar to phone or electric service, widespread and the type of thing few people think of. On the bleeding edge of the Internet access development world, some large scale networks, most probably coming from phone companies, will break the 10-Mbps barrier and close in on the 100-Mbps speed, making internet access on par with regular local network access.

The downside of this widespread deployment of high-speed internet access will be in the phone industry, where next generation (3G) rollouts of high speed wireless networks will prove costly and offer lackluster service considering its high price. This will force a drastic reduction in prices towards the end of the year or early 2007, in an attempt to recover some revenue from the large investments.

Implications of increased broadband penetration

The increase in broadband penetration will have several large implications, including the rollout of more voice over IP services, video services, and the infrastructure security.

Voice Over IP

Voice over IP will continue to see widespread deployment and large phone companies will start migrating their full networks to IP-based traffic. This will make VoIP the primary form of telephone communication for wired lines by the end of 2006, though few people will be aware of the change as it will largely happen behind the scenes, not touching people’s independent system.

Telephony services will increase as the VoIP phenomenon continues to increase. Expect early efforts in video telephony to start rolling out and becoming more mainstream towards the end of the year. Also expect to see the rise of wireless devices that can bridge the gap between computer and regular telephony, providing access to the network in a number of different ways.

Video

Video over IP will be very hot in 2006, with several major changes in the industry. First will be the announcement, by Apple, of its new mac-mini intel-powered platform designed specifically for the living room. Following on the success of the iPod, Apple will market the device less as a computer and more as a video consumption tool that will include stunning high definition resolution and will offer direct access to the iMedia store (formerly known as the iTunes music store) where one will be able to download movies and TV shows, as well as content created by amateurs.

Google, in partnership with AOL (and its sister companies within the Time-Warner world), will offer a pay-per-view system, mirroring some of the iMedia store offerings. The system will be available both in the AOL closed garden client (where it will use some level of acceleration to speed up delivery) and on the web through a new client package offered by Google and largely developed by the AOL client software team. The strength of the move will generate enough positive buzz for AOL that Time-Warner will be able to spin-off the unit and will be considering an IPO towards the beginning of 2007.

Seeing their advertising revenues eroding, TV stations will start offering more content online, also sponsored by advertising. New types of online video ad insertion and tracking system will be created by several companies, with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! offering aggregated model based on something similar to Google AdWords but offering not only targeting based on keywords but also based on certain demographic information.

New video aggregators will start appearing, offering a way to customize your own TV station. Some will be acquired by the major portals (unless the portals themselves have already developed that capability by the time this trend manifests itself). Meanwhile, Tivo will recast itself as one of those portals and will be acquired by Microsoft and merged with MSNTV (unless it is acquired by Sony, and merged with the PlayStation 3, or Panasonic, and kept as a standalone.)

Having lost in the bidding war for Tivo, Yahoo! will decide to acquire NetFlix and merge it with some of its video offerings, providing not only distribution of DVDs but also online streaming of content.

On the strength of revenues from online ads, some small cable or local TV stations will start offering their complete programming slate online, for free, and adverting supported. This will rankle a few of the cable companies and syndicators who looked to those companies as another revenue stream. Meanwhile, on the same basis, most local TV news will be available online for free through an advertising supported model. During one major story, a local TV station’s feed will compete with the national networks in terms of reporting, as more viewers flood its website than watch the same story unfold on television.

The competition for those types of stories will continue to increase, as citizen journalism provides raw unscripted video of events. Videocasting, following on the success of podcasting, will start seeing some traction with a few podcasting and vidcasters signing deals with traditional media. Traditional media will look at it as an interesting set of development but one that ultimately won’t be trusted by the public because they do not have the right seal of approval; their prediction will turn out to be wrong.

Infrastructure

The rise of broadband and the increasing numbers of basic services running on the internet infrastructure will give rise to fear that the infrastructure is under-protected. From a technical policy viewpoint, electronic infrastructures will become a major national security matter with fears that the very openness of the internet could represent a large security risk. This will be seized upon by the network providers (phone companies, cable companies) and some security consultants as a way to push for policy that will allow those incumbent communications services to administer their networks with tighter control, with decision as to what they are willing to let run on the network and what they are not willing to. A subsequent battle will ensue as VoIP companies and media companies will complain about the network providers squeezing them out. No decision on any of this will be made in 2006 but the debate will continue through 2007 and beyond.

Growth and Scalability

2006 will be an explosive year in the Web 2.0 sphere. Explosive because it will see triple if not quadruple digit growth in number of users but also explosive because it will see several popular sites unable to deal with the capacity issues relating to that explosion.

On the RSS end, the explosion in growth will really start when Internet Explorer 7.0 becomes a priority upgrade on windows stations. The inclusion of some RSS feeds as defaults in the browser will prove to be too much for some sites which had not expected the onslaught of millions of new hits. Readership from RSS readers will increase as more users realize that they can get their favorite sites delivered to them instead of going out and checking to see if they are updated.

As more people discover RSS, more of them will start valuing blogs and many will start their own. However, the concept of becoming a professional blogger will decrease as many people who thought they could make money off their blog will find that the effort in doing so was higher than they had expected and will abandon their blog.

Meanwhile, other web 2.0 subjects will fail: Tagging services like del.icio.us will be see as too complicated by the general public (although they will continue to thrive in the more geeky world) but tagging of pictures (as in Flickr) will continue to grow. Most blog networks will fail to attain the amount of traffic required to play seriously in the advertising world and will be forced to either merge or shut down. Meanwhile, companies offering only a set of web services with the idea to generate revenue solely from advertising may find themselves in a bind as advertising revenue will fail to grow at the same pace as the new offerings.

Implications of Growth

The explosive growth in traffic see during 2006 has implications across a number of players in the blogging world and metadata space. It also has implications in terms of scalability, business, and trust.

Blogging, podcasting, vidcasting

As blogging takes better hold in the mainstream (your parents WILL be blogging), the number of subscribers per individual blog feed will drop into the low teens, with blogs being read by close family members and friends only. A few breakout blogs, specializing on particular narrow subjects will manage to increase their readership but the world will largely consolidate around less than 1,000 major blogs: of those, the vast majority will not be from any members of the Technorati 100 or any other such list. The vast majority of those mainstream blogs will be the ones created by mainstream media outlets, which will use their existing reach to heavily promote their own blog.

Radio stations will increasingly start offering podcasts and TV stations will offering vidcasts. Most, however, will do so through centralized hosting capabilities provided by their parent companies. Smaller podcasters and vidcasters will have a hard time to compete with those larger companies as they are forced to look into ways to support their own bandwidth costs and will sign contracts with hosting services promising a share of advertising revenue in exchange for doing the hosting: that share will largely go to the hosting service with many podcasters/vidcasters finding they are not really making more than a few 100 dollars a months from all their hard work.

Crash and Burn

One of the hosting services will crash in a major way, taking with it a few days worth of the hard work of thousands of people who were hosting on it. The provider will initially recover but suffer a subsequent crash that will seal its fate as a doomed company. The majority of its users will leave and join one of the larger hosting services provided by Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google.

Beyond the hosting world, scalability will also be a hot buzzword as more services, ranging from RSS hosting providers like FeedBurner to search engines like Technorati and Feedster to analytics providers like Google and MeasureMap will experience temporary failures and growth pains.

The cost of upgrading the service infrastructure will be too much to bear for some companies, which will be forced to shutter their door, sell out, or merge with a similar service. Meanwhile, many web-based service companies will fail to generate enough advertising revenue to continue upgrading. A flurry of mergers and closures will happen over a few months, leading people to wonder if this is bubble bust 2.0.

The downside of all those fears about a bust will be in the increased number of negative stories about technology in the mainstream media. Stories will mention the hubris of web 2.0 founders and will showcase Google as a typical example of this hubris, highlighting its free lunches and other things that were thought cool in 205: As a result of all those negative stories (and others but more on that later), Google will loose several billions (possibly even tens of billions) of dollars from the high of its market capitalization, shedding anywhere from 10 to 25 percent off its high.

After the consolidation, there will only be one or two independent players in each of the following (notwithstanding the fact that there will also be offering from the bigger portal players): blog hosting , vlog hosting, podcast hosting (WordPress and Typepad will either be the two in these three sectors or will have merged), blog search, social networks (speaking os social networks, Yahoo! or Microsoft will buy LinkedIn (if it’s Microsoft, LinkedIn will quickly be integrated with Outlook and offer Plaxo-like features).

Meanwhile, a sector which will have been decimated will be tagging. Following slow adoption by the mainstream, largely due to the complexity of adding tags to pages, many tagging companies will fail. Tagging, as a concept, however, will remain and be adopted by most major search engines: as Metadata entry is simplified with the introduction of Windows Vista and Office 12 (both of which will be delivered by Microsoft to a relatively lukewarm market), and tagging becomes a browser feature, it stops being a differentiator.

Trust is hot topic

Fear of Google knowing a little too much about people will bring a slate of bad press for a company that was the darling of the mainstream media in 2005. The introduction of its Google finance service, hooking up into people’s bank accounts and payments systems will be seen as the company becoming too large a player, with fear of it becoming a monopoly. The backlash will first start in silicon Valley, with many tech luminaries starting to tear down the company. It will continue with publications that were once its biggest cheerleader becoming its biggest detractor. As a result, many of the companies that relied on Google for key services (advertising, analytics) will try to distance themselves from it and start looking for other providers (meanwhile, companies looking for funding will excise Google from their business plans, in order to avoid being associated with it by VCs). Yahoo! will pick up some of the adsense/adwords business, along with Microsoft, which will offer a similar service.

Meanwhile, in the analytics space, new companies will be formed and attract a lot of venture capital. Many of them will offer ways to opt-out of their tracking and some will offer added incentive to people willing to provide them with more information. New models in the space will emerge and at least one player will provide a revolutionary approach that will change the analytics landscape.

In the blogosphere too, trust will be a major subject as some of the top bloggers will grapple with issues surrounding defamation of character, libel, accuracy, and reliability after a top-name blogger is sued for something he/she said or linked to. Furthermore, some of the top bloggers will grapple with issues relating to invasion of privacy as they become more famous in the mainstream media.

On the Wikipedia end, anonymous editing will be abandoned after the revelation of a major hack altering minor facts over several months in an automated fashion has rendered a core version of the wikipedia unusable. The wikipedia trustee will revert wikipedia to an earlier date, erasing all changes performed during that period of times and destroying several significant entries on 2006 current events. The mainstream press will pile on about the inaccuracies of wikipedia, bringing back earlier scandals as proof that no information on the internet can be trusted unless it comes from a reliable source (incidentally presented as being a member of the media establishment).

Conclusion

In late 2006, a substantial portion of these predictions will be wrong and some may turn out to be dead on (although most of the ones mentioning companies by name will most probably be wrong).

Meanwhile, on a personal level, 2006 will be a year of big changes. However, I promise it will also be a year of continued writing on TNL.net, even if it is at the same substantial post every week or two rate that readers have gotten accustomed to. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2006 Predictions. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Voice Over IP

VoIP experienced tremendous growth in 2004 but it was just the beginning. This year, much more will happen in that space.

Cable providers will start deploying VoIP services on their networks and phone companies will start bundling VoIP services with their DSL offering as a way to compete. By year end, all major broadband providers, whether they are offering services over cable or DSL lines, will have a VoIP service bundled with their access service.

Unable to compete with the larger telcos, some smaller players in the market will merge on order to lower their cost per subscriber by bringing their infrastructures together. Also, independent VoIP companies will sign peering agreement with each other in order to bypass traditional telcos and lower the cost of connectivity from one independent VoIP company to another.

Further pressure will be put on all players on the American market as overseas companies will start targeting U.S. customers. Before year-end, at least one company will offer an unlimited calling to several countries plan. Other plans will provide unlimited calling to each continent. This will start putting pressure on established government monopolies in several countries, especially in Europe.

VoIP will also experience strong growth within the enterprise, with companies looking to open-source solutions like Asterisk to replace their PBX infrastructure with a lower cost alternative.

As all this happens, equipment will not only become cheaper but will also become much easier to use and install. Along with it, new sets will come out, with cordless VoIP offerings becoming much more common. Competition in this space will be on features available in new handsets.

With substantial portions of the phone network switching to VoIP, video telephony will start taking hold. However, the price of equipment will still be too high for those services to experience the kind of growth other sectors in the VoIP market will experience.

Entertainment Convergence

The convergence of the computer and other entertainment forms (television, radio, gaming, mobile phones) will continue, further blurring the lines in the convergence world.

With broadband now being the major way to access the Internet in the United States, Internet usage for new forms of entertainment will grow. Along with it, however, will be a continuing challenge to the established media order.

The challenges faced by the music industry with the introduction of Napster will now be the new reality for the movie and television industry. Five years ago, I started seeing the phenomenon emerge and believe the four step process of the digital asset dance will be full blown for the MPAA this year. The MPAA will spend part of the year suing companies and users for downloading movies. However, they are also better prepared that the music industry in that they are already offering legal download services like MovieLink.

While litigation will be one of the ways convergence appears on the front page, many providers will find a way to mine this new world for new dollars. Expect some companies to start offering legal download of television programs for a fee. As the Internet becomes the standard telecommunication infrastructure, content will start getting carried more heavily. Phone companies will start using this to offer bundle TV services with their DSL offering as a way to compete with the cable TV companies that have invaded the telecom turf. Before year end, at least one traditional telco will offer TV over IP. All that content will be protected by DRM systems, getting people more and more used to having less and less rights over the content they receive.

Meanwhile, on the wireless end, the introduction of more powerful mobile phones and the introduction of faster mobile phone networks will also play out in the favor of content producers. As voice traffic revenues continue to decrease, expect mobile phone companies to push data services such as downloadable movies and downloadable music more heavily. By year, MP3 will be the standard format for cellphones and Apple will offer a mobile phone version of the iTunes music store, allowing users to download music from the store and customize their phone with the latest hits.

On the non-Internet end of things, video on demand will continue the strong growth it experienced in 2004 and more programming will be offered in HDTV format, prompting an increase in sales of televisions and tuners that can receive those signals. Meanwhile, radio will follow the path taken by cable television in the early 80s. As satellite radio takes hold as the new “edgier” alternative to traditional radio, people will get more used to the idea of paying for radio. However, they will also require that those services be offered over the Internet as well as over the proprietary networks like XM and Sirius.

But not all content will be coming from big corporations. The grassroots will also play a key role in the distribution of online media in 2005. While podcasting has been the domain of a few geeks in 2004, easier to use tool will bring the phenomenon to the forefront and expect more audio services to be available from regular users. Following on the tail of this phenomenon will be an increase in videocasting from individuals. Much of it will be disappointing but a few gems will emerge, creating new stars who will emerge from the Internet and move on to more traditional media, based on the fame of their online offerings.

Business

Mergers and acquisitions will dominate the software world this year, as more companies realize that the only way into the enterprise is through a complete set of offerings. Expect several multi-billion dollar mergers and/or acquisition. In my mind, McAfee will be acquired or merge with either Symantec or CA; SAP will be acquired by Microsoft; Business Objects will be acquired by Oracle. As holds true for such precise predictions, none of this will actually happen the way I predicted it.

In late 2004, IBM left the personal computer business, selling its unit to Lenovo, a Chinese manufacturer. Expect the same to happen to at least one other PC vendor this year as the margins on personal computers continue to decrease, turning them into commodities.

Apple

Apple, which to date has resisted the price pressures other computer manufacturers have experienced, will introduce a cheaper version of their Macintosh. This, however, will not stem the continuing loss of market share they are experiencing. As Linux continues to grow, the Apple story in the computer business becomes more and more difficult and the company will increasingly rely on the consumer device business as its savior, building a new economy around the success of the iPod and iTunes music store.

The company will not, however, release a video player this year. Among some of the new features I would envision coming from Apple are:

• A flash-based iPod, which will be even smaller than the iPod mini and will be in the $100-$150 price range
• A partnership with a phone company to create a phone that will be able to download music from a special version of the iTunes music store and play MP3 ringtones
• An iPod with audio recording built-in
• A portable camera with iPod-like features
• A new way to send pictures from the iPod directly to printer via Airport express

While it focuses on the music business, Apple will not spend much time updating its laptop business. Adoption will drop in that part of the business as PC vendors start selling sub-$500 laptop PCs, making the iBook look expensive by comparison. Apple will try to enter the low cost market but not with a laptop: they will introduce a mac without monitor for under $500, offering integration with the iPod, and plugs to attach the computer to a television as its major features.

On the software end, the company will introduce a Word Processor and Spreadsheet program. They will release them, along with Keynote, as a complete package named iWork which will be aimed at students and small businesses. The package will be available for free on new computers.

Development

Blogs and RSS will continue their growth and will move strongly within the enterprise space. Adoption of RSS will continue its explosive growth but crest in 2005 as users start trying to find ways to cope with the information overload. New components in RSS readers will attempt to help organize RSS feeds but those basic efforts will initially fail and discussions will be set towards the end of the year as to the effective way to organize large amounts of data.

Weblogs and content management systems will start covering some of the same ground and enterprise will start using weblogs internally at the departmental level. Meanwhile, external employee weblogs will start becoming the focus of more litigations as corporation try to retain their intellectual property and fight the kind of transparency that comes from having employees talk openly on the web. Internal rules and regulations will be set in how employees can use blogs.

Meanwhile, in the development world, Service Oriented Architectures will continue being the approach to delivering next generation services. SOA will grow largely internally but some companies will start exposing some web services via XML to their partners. A new set of interesting new applications will come out as a result of those exposures.

Security and trust will continue to be big subjects and I suspect that trust will become an even bigger one with new standards emerging around the concept but no general agreement as to the best implementation.

Open source software will continue its strong growth, getting into more and more specialized fields. With the delays in delivery of Microsoft’s next operating system, Linux will continue to grow but complaints about price will start to arise. While the open source movement has offered free software, there will continue to be an increase in the price of supported version of the software.

Personal

I’ll promise to update the blog more often, will do OK for a little while and will then fall back into my regular pattern of a couple of updates a week. Or not… Either way, only the new year will tell.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 2005 Predictions. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The FCC and the cable TV industry recently came head to head when it comes to a la carte pricing . The concept of a la carte pricing is that consumers would be able to buy any TV channel in a model instead of being forced into buying a bundle of shows as part of the standard offering.
The cable industry contends that a la carte pricing is bad because it will wreak havoc with the economic model of the cable business. It’s true that it will do so as large media companies like Viacom and Walt Disney currently force cable operators to broadcast their less popular channels in exchange for the rights to broadcast their top properties, like MTV or ESPN and will no longer be able to do so if a la carte becomes a reality. They will also have a harder time selling an audience package to their advertisers as there will no longer be any guarantee that buying an ad in a package that reaches MTV and Spike will ensure the same kinds of hits.

However, where a la carte works is if a model is established to offer flexible pricing models for those channels. Smaller TV channels could be priced to consumers at a lower monthly rate but a higher premium could be gotten on advertising as they are representing a more targeted audience. This represents a much more difficult financial models for them as it gets closer to a pay for performance approach when it comes to advertising.

Another part of this effort should be to start offering a la carte TV channels over broadband Internet access. The cable packagers are afraid of this because it could represent an intrusion in their model, which packages cable television with broadband Internet access. If a la carte offerings start appearing for anyone with a fast Internet connection, the cable companies will now have increased competition from DSL providers as they would loose their competitive advantage (since no one else can currently offer television and broadband access over the same lines.) This increase in the competitive landscape would eventually result in price wars in terms of package bundle that will benefit consumers. Consumers will eventually be able to either choose your own set of channels or buy some combos of popular ones. For example, a company could offer a deal that would include channels that cater to sports fans and a different deal to people interested in news.

Once again, the only smart approach is not to resist but figure out the best economic approach in this new competitive landscape. Since cable companies have already figured out, to some extend, how to offer bundles (they do offer them on premium TV channels like HBO and Showtime), they are ahead of their phone company competitors. What they will do with that lead is still up in the air.

Tomorrow, we will look at how the telephone companies have their own issues to deal with when it comes to the modular by design approach.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Modular by Design — Cable TV. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

While companies from Intel to Microsoft are talking about how they plan to implement digital rights in the future and are taking tentative steps in that direction, Apple is working on a strategy that covers multiple platforms beginning today. The iTunes music store may be an interesting story in terms of the consumer market but it seems to me that there is also an interesting play at hand for a business to business model. If Apple succeeds in its implementation of the music store (and there is little doubt that they will), they could turn around and start offering a set of products and services to organizations dealing in digital goods.

I believe that the iTunes music store will eventually drop the music part of its name in the future, when video becomes the thing to download. The underlying data structure already points to Apple’s ambition to move into other media format. So let’s look into the future…

As broadband becomes more pervasive, video becomes an attractive thing to download. At that point, Apple start offering TV shows and movies in a store similar to the Apple music store. They can then decide that there are areas they want to play in (read: where they want to manage the store) and other areas where they might want to offer customized system. Showing the iTunes music store as a proof of concept of their way to do DRM, they approach large studios and/or labels. From there, they can show that their store is running on Apple hardware and runs a server version of their operating system. Much like they are packaging streaming solutions with that software, they could start package digital rights management solutions.

So who’s the market here? Well, for starters, Apple is probably not going to want to create too much competition with its business to consumer segment so I think looking at movie studios may not be the right thing to do. However, they could look at TV stations, both in the US and abroad and start offering on-demand video services, wrapping QuickTime (as a streaming format) into their own proprietary DRM flavor. Going beyond that market, they could also look at the corporate market for companies that want to do internal presentations but ensure that only certain groups have access to certain presentations.

Another potential direction for Apple would be to look at software delivery. Using their proprietary DRM and an infrastructure similar to the one powering the Apple music store, they could deliver software packages either on a per-use basis, or as complete package. Now that they have crossed the divide between the mac market and the windows PC market, there are a lot of potentials for them to figure out how to mine the field.

Bottom line: Apple now has a strong cross-platform offering for distributing protected data. As the early lead in the market, they now have potentials to expand a lot beyond the world they run in.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Apple: Cross Platform DRM. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On its face, the argument seems to work. Some more thoughts on it:

High-volume auto-retrieval would only be practical for users on high-bandwidth connections, but there are enough of those to cause spammers serious trouble.

This part could be handled by having the mail servers themselves take care of this. In most cases, mail servers are sitting on broadband lines. The reason for this is that they need to always be on to receive mail. If such counterstrike is to work, it has to come from those mail servers.

A refinement to the system would be to also include a whitelist. The reason for a whitelist is that it would allow publishers to register with the whitelist in order to avoid a counterstrike. One of the difficult issues in dealing with spam is identifying false positive. A false positive occurs when a piece of mail is marked as spam even though it isn’t a piece of spam. Most false positives arise out of email lists from publishers because some of the criteria used to identify spam (lots of URLs, sent to many people, sender is not same as reply-to, etc…) are also met by publishers. By creating a whitelist, one could remove some of those false positives. Over time, an increasing amount of legitimate sources would be identified.

There is, however, a need for some level of accountability. Any list (either a blacklist or whitelist) should be published for everyone to look at and some policy should be set to establish steps as to how one can go about being removed or added from/to one of those lists.

Another item that needs to be addressed in this is the user-agent string generated by such a filter that fight back. Such a tool should use a popular user-agent like the one for IE so that it becomes indistinguishable from other traffic, making it harder to block it out. The tool should also generate IP addresses that are equivalent to the addresses of sub-domains below the mail server (otherwise, a spam site might just block the mail server from doing traffic blasts).

In general, I like the concept and hope that someone out there is working on implementing it. It falls in the great tradition of the net routing around problems. Spam is now getting to the level where it undermines the net as a whole, as spam messages are grabbing increasing amounts of bandwidth. Regulation alone cannot work as a lot of spam emerges from countries beyond US jurisdiction and it would take a very long time to implement any kind of policy that works globally.

The answer to the spam problem must thus be an engineered solution and the counterstrike approach seems sound. One could envision this being implemented as part of mail servers in the future, a step that would ensure some higher level of support.

However, the counterstrike approach will only work for so long as spammers will find new ways to subvert the system. A question remains as to what will be the next step. The counterstrike model will work in terms of hedging out some of the smaller players but larger sites might still continue to strike. A way to handle this part might be to completely black them out of the net. In order to do so, one would take the blacklist of sites and add it to a web proxy blocked site list. The effect here would be to black-out sites over time, based on their being found guilty of spam. This may be the next level of escalation in the spam wars and might get us to the point where, unfortunately, we might all end up in gated online communities, blocking out some of the people who are not willing to play nice. The net may lose some of its own freedom in the process but that, unfortunately, may be the only way to completely eradicate spam in the future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Counterstrike on Spam. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The key is in the incremental approach taken to developing those services. The first thing is that the larger companies largely sat the initial rush out and learned from mistakes made by dotcoms. From there, they have figured what the pitfalls are and can now roll out services that customers will want. This incremental approach really represents a new set of opportunities for people willing to go back and see what goods and services developed unsuccessfully during the dotcom rush have potentials. Once you’ve identified an opportunity, examine where the previous business went wrong, learn from their mistakes, and start rolling new services out quietly. After initial tests, expand. Of course, as always, keep an eye on the bottom line and you will be a winner.

It sounds really dumb but that’s where the dotcom revolution went wrong. The hubris of the late 90s was eventually the undoing of many companies. Now that the easy money has shaken out of the field, people taking a slow, careful approach are reaping some of the benefits.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Incrementalism. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

That’s a lot of things, if you think about it, for a single device but it points to a variety of possibilities. For starters, it makes it pretty clear that gaming consoles are growing up. With this device, Sony is signaling its intent to take its leadership in the gaming world and extend into a more widespread all/media space, serving as a home server for any bits that gets into the house.

The broadband connection, combined with DVD burner, hard drive, and an interface that includes video seems to point to the possibility of their offering a video on demand service in the future, as well as music on demand or something similar. The presence of the memory stick slot increases that chance as people could buy music online, burn it on the memory stick and play it in their Sony Clie or other Sony MP3 player. Alternately, this slot could be used to upload pictures from cameras that have a memory slot (and those cameras are made by… Sony)

The demonstration on the interface video seems to also point to the possibility of integrating video and music. Could it be the beginning of an integrated suite that would allow people who bought a Sony video camera to quickly edit their films, add some music from the Sony music store, and then burn it to a DVD or ship the movie over a broadband connection?

The presence of a TV tuner and hard drive should definitely send shivers down Tivo’s back, as it points to a built-in digital video recorder being pretty much a sure thing with this. With the DVD burner, one could easily then copy the shows to a DVD too!

There seems to be so many possibilities. Considering the fact that Sony owns movie studios, music studios, and gaming companies, it will be interesting to see how they shape their business model around this. Furthermore, it’s going to be interesting to see what Microsoft will try to do as a counter-move.

One question remains though, why is Sony coming out with such a device in late 2003-early 2004, when it is supposed to come out with the PS3 in 2005. Is there a chip in there (or maybe there’s something in the software) that would eventually allow for an automatic upgrade to the PS3 engine? Or could it be that the PS3 will be delayed to late 2005-early 2006, leaving this box as a stopgap measure before Microsoft comes out with Xbox 2?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Sony to Introduce Media-centric Gaming Box. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

On one side, you have smaller operators like Boingo that are trying to make a go of it without anything else. My bet is that the future of such operators lies in being acquired, either by a telephone company (in that particular case, I would bet on Sprint acquiring them since Boingo already has a relationship with their PCS division).

On another side are existing large mobile operators like T-mobile who are trying to create a bundle that includes mobile phone service and data service all in one package. Those will probably continue to move successfully but will be forced to lower prices as time goes on.

Now, with the Verizon offer, I expect to see not only DSL operators (a market which has gone through a lot of consolidation, leaving mostly the incumbent telcos in charge) but also cable companies looking into bundling this type of solution. As a result, Wi-Fi may actually become a loss leader in a battle that includes a much wider range of services. What this will mean for new business betting the future on a Wi-Fi only revenue strategy will need to change their message if they hope to survive.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Verizon and Wi-Fi. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Here’s a crazy thought, why doesn’t the company break it all down into an access division (probably going to Road-Runner) and a content division (probably going to AOL). Using charge-backs, they would trade money back and forth and Road-Runner could keep focusing on access (inheriting a lower speed dial-up system in the process) and focus on converting dial-up users to broadband, while AOL would focus on developing content and tools (the AOL software) that would run on both system.

Obviously Road-Runner has figured out how to sell access and AOL is good at building software that is easy to use for the average computer user. Let AOL get rid of the access layer (the client already does TCP/IP) and focus on improvements to IM, mail, and content and let Road-Runner focus on selling access and you have a pretty powerful combo.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Lack of synergy. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Strong Growth

France had been a leader in terms of establishing an information society but was starting to get trapped by its legacy Minitel tool. The Minitel was introduced in France in the late 70s as essentially a precursor to the web. The service allowed users to read online versions of magazines and newspapers, shop in online catalogs, chat, play games, and have access to every government office. In the early 80s, Minitel penetration became so high that the government-owned phone company decided to drop printing of phone books and move that service to the Minitel.

Fast forward to the late 90s. France is still on the Minitel and the Internet has gotten wide acceptance in the United States. At that point, Internet penetration in France is sluggish as few people see any value in it. As a result, the French government issued an ambitious plan to move France onto the Internet. As is the case for every major government project, little happened for several years.

However, the combination of government support for a new Internet initiative and the rise of global services finally started a revolution in French online services. According to several people I talked to in Paris and in the south of France, the effects of the Internet were not really felt until about a year ago, when a sudden usage explosion started. From 1999 to 2001, the number of Internet users in France tripled and it is expected to double this year to about 30 million. As more and more services are now moving away from the Minitel and onto the Internet (as I was told by an American living in France, the Minitel is now fairly useless as most everything has moved onto the Internet.)

Combined with growth in other European countries, this represents a market of almost 150 million users in Europe.

Broadband

While most Internet users in Europe still use narrowband, a few people are starting to make the move to broadband. However, prohibitive costs for DSL mean that most broadband users in France are accessing the net via cable. A DSL line can cost over 100 euros whereas a cable modem connection can be had for as little as 15 euros, with averages of 30–45 euros per months for a 500Kbps connection. The big advantage of such connections in Europe is that local phone is metered whereas broadband is not. As a result, heavy Internet users are finding that it is less expensive to get a broadband cable connection than it is to use a modem and phone line.

The Euro

For the first time in history, 12 countries have simultaneously gotten rid of their currencies and moved to create a single monetary block: the Euro is here and it has wide implications on global E-commerce.

No more Austrian schillings, Belgian, Luxembourg or French francs, Finnish markka, German Marks, Greek drachma, Irish punts, Italian lira, Dutch guilders, Portuguese escudos, or Spanish pesetas. No more complexity in trying to convert those from one to the other when doing electronic transactions. Now, the Euro is the currency for this whole zone (dubbed the Eurozone) and it represents a very large market, larger, in fact, than the American market in terms of customers.

One the biggest challenges in dealing with the European market was the lack of standardization when it comes to laws, shipping, currency, and language. With the Euro, a large portion of that problem can be taken care of as members of the Eurozone start moving towards developing a similar set of economic policies.

Essentially, the Euro takes away the barrier of multiple currency transactions that held back some users from shopping online and some vendors from launching e-commerce sites.

A couple of years ago, I alerted our readers to the fact that Europe was quietly rising as a new giant in the global E-commerce arena. With the rise of the Euro, this message is becoming more important. Now that a market of almost 150 million people has been created, the US is no longer the only place where E-commerce can work and as such, it is important for people in the US to start looking at technological developments in Europe. In the long run, a number of European companies will probably become some of the larger players in the online space.

Wireless connectivity

While everyone in the U.S. is starting to pay attention to WiFi, the wireless computing revolution has not yet taken hold in Europe. On the one hand, cell phones keep getting smaller and offering more features (Multimedia messaging is started to take hold among European digerati), there seems to be some lag in the adoption of wireless computing offering. A few underground efforts are getting organized, in a fashion similar to that seen in the USA a couple of years ago.

Conclusion

The Internet space in France seems to now follow a curve similar to the one experienced in the United States in the late 1990s. However, the lack of venture capital and the fact that, much like the United States, France is suffering from an economic slowdown, have tampered the explosion. While acceptance for everything Internet is growing, the adoption of networked technology is following a course that is different from that of the US and UK. While there will be strong growth in the Internet field in France over the next year, expect that revolution to be relatively quiet, compared to what was experienced in other countries.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Internet in France 2002: An overview. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As many of you already know, the game station is a small box that attaches to your TV and on which you can play video games. However, the firepower of new generation boxes now on the market is now equivalent or higher than that of most computers. The main logic behind this was that gamers wanted a more realistic experience and crunching 3D representation in an ever-changing environment required more and more processing power.

Playstation 2 opens the gate

Last year, Sony introduced the Sony Playstation 2, a new gaming system that included a built-in DVD player and a 3D graphic engine that made computer video card look ridiculously outdated. At that time, Sony admitted that their goal was to go beyond games and control the digital living room. Recent partnerships with Macromedia, AOL, and Real Networks seem to show that Sony has established a clear roadmap as to how it would get into the online market. And with a growing installed base of (8 million so far, and an expected 34 million by 2004), Sony could become a major online player.

Microsoft unveils the Xbox

Having survived the browser wars with Netscape (Internet Explorer now controls 80% of the market), Microsoft is starting to worry. If one could download music and exchange videos via a gaming station, as well as play video games, where would the home PC go? And where would that leave Microsoft’s ambitious .net strategy?

As a result, Microsoft had to play in that field and to do so, it went to game developers. After much discussion, the result is here for everyone to test: it’s called the Xbox, and is essentially a PC packaged as a gaming station. If you read the documentation, the Xbox becomes more difficult to classify as simply a gaming box. For starters, there is a DVD player, which was added just to match Sony’s Playstation 2 DVD player. But Microsoft goes further by building a Dolby decoder within the system as well as adding parental controls to the box.

The second thing they added to the box is the ability to put in a CD, play it, and burn it onto the built-in hard drive (through what they call a music manager). All of a sudden, the Xbox becomes a music stereo box.

Going further is the matter of the Ethernet port and the mysterious broadband network touted by Microsoft. Early inside reports point to the first broadband gaming network that might go beyond gaming. At the current time, there are rumors of a network that would also allow for Internet browsing, email, and instant messaging, as well as gaming.

The messaging portion is an interesting one since it would include and optional plug-in for the box called the communicator, a headphones and microphone device people would use to communicate either via IM, or while playing online games. The unit includes a wireless headset with microphone, which could easily be used to make phone calls if Microsoft uses some of the technology it is currently building into the Microsoft Messenger. Long term, the Xbox could become another entry point into MSN, and into the web as a whole.

Moving forward: the Playstation 3

Sony, however, is not resting on its laurels. Now that Microsoft is entering its turf, the company is seeing its dominance on the digital living room being challenged.

With the PS3, originally slated for mid 2003 but possibly being released earlier, Sony plans to integrate offerings from its music and movie divisions into the system.

Considering the fact that the company already offers a suite of MP3 players, it is easy to see that the company will build that functionality into the next box.

Rumors are that the company will build a large hard drive within the box, which would make it a perfect storage area for an MP3 collection.

But going beyond music, the company is also looking at packaging a digital TV recorder within the unit, turning it into a device that would compete with Tivo and Replay in the market for customized television.

Also built into the box would be a TV tuner, and rumors has it that the system would also include a satellite TV decoder. In order to counter the online capabilities of the Xbox, Sony will release an online pack for the PS2 but will build that functionality directly into the PS3 box.

The unit would be offered in two different version: a light version, which would focus on gaming and be sold for around $250-$300 and a more expensive full featured convergence version which would retail for $400-$500.

Games Only: The Game Cube

Meanwhile, Nintendo believes that games and only games is what consumers want out of their boxes. As a result, the GameCube is a smaller, less pricey gaming box. However, this does not mean that it is offering less performance. It’s just that it’s a different take on the world. As far as Nintendo seems to see the world, gamers will want to pay no more than $200 for a gaming box but may be willing to pay extra for new features.

In a concession to Microsoft and Sony, the box will soon sport two different modem adapters: a 56k module for people who use a phone line and a faster broadband module for people who have a network at home. Rumor has it that Nintendo is preparing a membership network with services like online video game, full Internet access, and the distribution of music data. Since the GameBoy advance can interface with the GameCube, it seems that Nintendo is working on a hardware strategy that will make the gamecube a connecting station into the home, while the GameBoy will become a roaming device that can get updates from that box.

Convergence is here

Based on those recent developments, it seems pretty clear that hybrid boxes are now starting to pop up and that we will soon see more applications (initially in the gaming world but eventually in other areas) become the norm. I would strongly recommend that TNL.net readers who are involved in developing online consumer applications pay attention to the gaming space as it is the next arena for which we might have to format our outputs. Based on early showing, I would say that Playstation 2 will keep its predominant position for the next year or so but may be getting some competition from the new underdog in this arena: Microsoft.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Convergence Game. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

At the item level

: This would allow us to specify a particular date for an item. I think it would be nice for those of us who have several days’ worth of content in their RDF channel.

At the channel level:

These could be encapsulated in to an section that would include all links to outside of the channel.

: Much like points to the page the channel is for could point to a page of information about this channel. this could link to a FAQ or more information about the channel.

: Points to a page where wireless devices can go.

: Points to a page where broadband devices can go.

: Points to a page where narrowband devices (browsers for blind people, text-only browsers, etc..) can go.

: Points to a P3P page to check the privacy rules.

: Points to either a VXML source file (which can be read by a VXML browser) or a sound file. For example, it could serve up a radio feed related to this story.

: Same as above with video or SMIL file.

That said, here’s what a source could look like (changes are bold and URLs are fictional (but I cut and pasted my .91 channel content for speed reasons)):

Suggested RSS .92 code starts here

NewDocTypeLinkGoesHere
>

92
">

foo@email.com
            Copyright 1999-present, Me.

            My channel description>/description>
            en-us

http://www.tnl.net/images/TNLpalmlogo.gif

            125
            44
            My channel description


http://www.tnl.net

http://www.tnl.net/about/

http://wap.tnl.net

http://www.tnl.net/100MBpage.html

http://www.tnl.net/under1kpage.html

http://www.tnl.net/p3p.xml

http://www.tnl.net/myvoicebasedchannel.vxml

http://www.tnl.net/myvideofeed.smil

http://www.tnl.net/newsletter/anewstory.html

            Story 1 is described

10/13/2000

http://www.tnl.net/newsletter/olderstory.html

            Happy New Year

01/01/2000

More Details

As part of the deal, I’d also move the original channel link and image link into the external field under a single link header (unless some people can tell me where they have a different link for the image and the channel.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Suggestions for RSS .92 spec. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.