INNOBLOG

Being a Bostonian and a big sports fan, I found myself with the Ticketmaster website loaded in my web browser at exactly 10:59 am this morning. While I had a sense that my quest for Celtics playoff tickets would shortly present me with a challenge, I had no idea that surmounting that challenge would contribute to a multipurpose innovation making an important contribution to society.

After a tough loss last night, our beloved Celtics are locked in a 1-1 struggle with the Detroit Pistons. With home-court advantage now gone, the Celtics head to Detroit for two games. Were either the Celtics or the Pistons to win the next two games, at a minimum, a decisive fifth game would take place back in Boston on Wednesday evening, May 28. As a result, the Celtics announced that they would put tickets to that decisive fifth game on sale at 11:00 am this morning.

Refreshing my web browser quickly, I hoped to be one of the first fans to reach the Ticketmaster page through which I would submit my ticket request. 10:58 am. 10:59 am. The page had yet to load. 11:00 am. Suddenly, the page was visible! I entered in the number of tickets I hoped to purchase, along with my desired arena section and price level. I clicked Submit.

After a brief delay, I was presented with a CAPTCHA. Developed at Carnegie Mellon University and standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart," a CAPTCHA is a challenge measure that websites implement to protect themselves from automated software programs. Often a distorted set of words or numbers and letters, modern CAPTCHAs are very hard for software programs to read while humans can identify the characters fairly easily.

After the CAPTCHA is presented, the website requests that the user type the exact set of characters into a text field. While humans are able to complete the task, software programs nearly always fail. As a result, requests from humans are allowed into the system — often services such as email account registration or ticket brokering — while automated requests are denied. Since spammers and ticket resellers often try to use brute-force, automated request programs, CAPTCHAs have become a sometimes bothersome, but necessary verification measure.

In my particular case, I encountered a CAPTCHA provided by the reCAPTCHA system, a program also created at Carengie Mellon and used by Ticketmaster. While completing the verification exercise, I noticed the following text on the right side of the page:

Digitize Books One Word at a Time
By entering the words in the box, you are also

helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive

and preserve literature that was written before

the computer age.

 

While tickets for the fifth playoff game sold out almost immediately and I was stymied there, I did some research into the reCAPTCHA system. As it turns out, reCAPTCHA was developed to help digitize books while also protecting systems from automated requests. The reCAPTCHA system presents two words to the website visitor — one word that an optical character recognition (OCR) program has been unable to read, and another word that several humans have correctly identified. If the visitor identifies both words correctly, the system passes the initially unknown word to additional visitors. If those visitors enter the same text response as the first, the system accepts the translation.

                According to a recent article, the use of reCAPTCHA by Ticketmaster, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and other sites is helping Carnegie Mellon’s book archiving project successfully identify approximately one million words every day. Despite such a pace, Carnegie Mellon reported in late 2007 that approximately 100 million books remained to be digitized, a task that will still take 400 years to complete, despite the contribution of reCAPTCHA.

                While I was unable to secure a pair of Celtics playoff tickets, I was somewhat heartened by the fact that I had contributed to a worthwhile effort without knowing it.   

Here at Innosight, we often encourage would-be innovators to consider taking a business model from one industry where it is well established into another where it is not. This type of play is often very disruptive, as the imported business model allows an entrant to either meet a previously unsatisfied need or meet an already satisfied need, but in a cheaper or more convenient way. MinuteClinic, for example, is a disruptor weve been tracking for some time now that has realized success by applying a fast-food business model to healthcare.

Baby Plays is another example of this type of disruption that is just starting to build momentum. Baby Plays was launched last October by a Houston, Texas mother who became frustrated as she watched her home fill with toys her twin infant sons quickly lost interest in. As she thought about how she could rent DVDs online, she realized that a rental option for toys would satisfy her need perfectly. But since no company she could find was offering such a service, she decided to launch one herself.

The Associated Press called it "Netflix for the toddler set. I think its a very appropriate label. Not only does the service work a lot like Netflix does (you pay a monthly subscription fee, create a wishlist of toys, etc), but I think Baby Plays is similarly disruptive.

It isnt a solution for everybody (at roughly 30 dollars a month it seems a bit expensive), but I think for many young, stressed-out mothers, or for those who might only occasionally care for children, like grandparents, the convenience offered by Baby Plays will trump online buying from eToys or trips to brick-and-mortar outlets like Toys R Us.

The influential Wall Street commentator Henry Blodgett has some darned good advice for Yahoos Jerry Yang as he begins to digest Microsofts 45 billion dollar takeover bid:

Bring Steve [Ballmer, Microsoft CEO] a copy of The Innovator's Dilemma and ask him to read it before he goes to sleep. Suggest he focus on the chapter that describes how some companies have successfully resisted being disrupted (by creating stand-alone entities that are free to destroy the mothership).

Blodgett is exactly right. As he argues, Microsoft is so focused on sustaining its massively successful core products Windows and Office that its approach to the Internet is inherently shackled. It has never fully embraced the dynamic power of the Internet to unleash transformative new business models. Instead, it has used the Internet in a sustaining fashion to supplement its core properties (Internet-based help for Microsoft Word, anyone?), while clinging to web 1.0 platforms like Hotmail.

Unsurprisingly, MSN continues to lose ground to Google. While everyones favorite search engine wholeheartedly embraces cloud computing as the ultimate destiny of the Internet and fashions its business model accordingly, Microsoft demurs. Cloud computing, after all, will spell the death of its core products as we know them.

This, of course, is the sort of classic behavior that Clayton Christensen describes in his books. The essence of the Innovators Dilemma is that powerful incumbent companies become blinded by their success to the point where they cannot understand or contextualize new, different, and disruptive business models that threaten their core businesses. This pattern has played out in industry after industry, from the disk drive companies, minicomputer manufacturers, and integrated steel mills that Christensen first wrote about to the newspapers, cable TV providers, and department stores that continue to get disrupted today.

Microsoft is no different. Over a decade after it publicly committed to the Internet and took on Netscape, the company still has not opened the aperture to new and different business models, still has not thought outside the box about what the Internet is and can be. Unless it handles the Yahoo acquisition correctly by maintaining an appropriate degree of autonomy, or, as Blodgett calls it, leaving it free to destroy the mothership Googles disruptive march will continue.

Wikia, a for-profit company started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, made news yesterday when it took the cover off Wikia Search, ending months of speculation about what shape the high-profile startups open source search engine would take. Currently online in its alpha stage, Wikia Search promises that its open architecture will strip away the black box that surrounds search as run by the Googles of the world and ultimately leverage the collective wisdom of the internet to provide better search results.

Reviews thus far, however, havent been very positive. The blogosphere has not been too high on Wikias capacity to return even mediocre search results.

The reviews dont seem to faze Mr. Wales or the folks at Wikia too much, however. One need only click on the "about us button on the Wikia Search home page to find that even its creators dont have any illusions about where their product stands now: We are aware that the quality of the search results is low; Mr. Wales put it even more bluntly in a response to Michael Arringtons review over at Tech Crunch, writing "Yeah, the search sucks today.

This all begs the question: why would they take the cover off of Wikia Search if they absolutely knew it was terrible?

One might think that the answer, as it often does here on the Innoblog, lies in the patterns of disruption. Perhaps Wikia, the story goes, understands that to displace an incumbent the entrant needs to make trade-offs, developing a product that is worse than the incumbent along some dimensions while improving along other dimensions, particularly those that consumers really value. So it has pushed out a search engine that is worse along traditional metrics that define quality in search (like relevancy of results), but better along other dimensions (it provides a sense of community and channels human involvement). With time, Wikia doubtlessly hopes, its community will rapidly improve the quality of its search, elevating it to a level where it matches or overtakes the leading incumbents like Google or Yahoo.

It sounds like a decent story. And it might be. But just as I thought back in August when I wrote about Wikias acquisition of Grub, I dont think it will work. I have two reasons.

First, while many disruptions start out inferior to incumbents, they are at least good enough to attract a core group of consumers. Wikia is so disappointing that it might even fail to meet the good enough standard for even the tech-oriented, open source banner-waving, down-with-the-corporate-stranglehold-on-the-internet set to commit to it. Its index is so small right now that the search can, in many instances, barely be said to work. And its community-oriented features are limited, allowing account-creating users to do little more than post pictures, evaluate search results and write mini-articles describing search terms.

My second problem with Wikia is that it seems to be trying to be a low-end disruptor in a market that isnt yet overserved by leading incumbents. Low-end disruption, the type of innovation that starts off poorly but improves, eventually disrupting incumbents by being "good enough along traditional dimensions and better along new, customer-valued dimensions, typically works only when consumers are overserved by incumbent solutions. But with web search, people arent overserved by the Googles of the world. Instead, people are underserved, they consistently want more out of search engines than even the leading incumbents can provide today. In underserved markets, entrants only succeed by besting incumbents at the things that incumbents do best. Does Wikia really hope to produce more relevant search results than two-hundred billion dollar market cap search companies?

Bottomline: Wikia needs a game-changing feature in a market where a game changing feature might not even exist. The best search engines arent yet serving consumers at the level that they want. Wikia is going to have a difficult time doing any better. I predict a tough road for Jimmy Wales & company ahead.

Two weeks ago, the British rock band Radiohead announced that they were releasing their long-anticipated new album in ten days time. Ordinarily, when a band finishes an album, it takes three or four months to get it into stores, but Radiohead accelerated this process by self-releasing their new songs, online. If avoiding the record labels altogether wasnt enough, the band made even more of a splash by asking fans to name their own price for the digital download.

Innosight President Scott Anthony posted his take on Radioheads innovative distribution model over at the Harvard Business School Publishing website. In brief, Scott characterizes the scheme as disruptive, and points out that its impressive and immediate success ought to be instructive to the music industry, which is still reeling from the disruptive onslaught of digital music:

"Interestingly enough, early data suggests that customers are paying comparable prices to what they would pay in stores or online (full disclosure, the author ponied up $10 for the digital download). This is great news for Radiohead who doesnt have to split revenue with distributors and the record label. Early estimates pegged the groups first day take at around $10 million from sales of 1.2 million albums.

Not only will this effort provide a bonanza of data for economists, it is yet another nail in the disruptive coffin of the major music labels.

Historically, record labels provided a very valuable set of services. They scoured the world to identify up-and-coming artists. They helped those artists build fan bases. And they provided different ways for musicians to connect with that fan base.

New mechanisms allow the collective to identify new artists. For example, buzz-worthy bands start attracting friends and friends-of-friends on News Corps MySpace. Last.FM (purchased earlier this year by CBS Interactive for around $300 million) keys users into obscure artists they might like based on their preferences. This democratizing of talent discovery mimics changes in the lending industry, where credit scoring techniques obviated loan officers who used intuition and judgment to make lending decisions. Radiohead is demonstrating the power of a direct model in the music industry.

The genius behind Radioheads move is that they are capitalizing on the revolution in access enabled by digital distribution a revolution that has rapidly dilated the market for non-mainstream music. Back in the go-go 90s, when, in my teenage years I found myself moved by Radioheads particular brand of wry pre-millenial dystopic anomie, the mainstream distribution channels available to me (FM radio, MTV, Rolling Stone, etc) were too narrowly focused on manufactured pop and fashions of the moment to give me what I was looking for, to "get my job done in innovation parlance. I wanted to trace the sonic lineage of the music I liked, to discover cool bandsand all a kid could do in this regard was trawl through record stores, scour British rock magazines, and worst of all talk to burnt out old dudes.

Nowadays, of course, this task is effortlessly and painlessly accomplished through iTunes and Wikipedia and Myspace and Facebook and Pitchfork and last.fm, and every kid on campus is bopping to would-have-been-obscure indie music on their iPod. This massive democratization has made it so much easier for the casual fan to find and access music, and, for a band, all it takes to get downloaded by every kid on campus is buzz and what creates buzz like a clever, counter-intuitive, disruptive new business model?

Previous business model innovators in the rock world include the Rolling Stones, who pioneered the band-as-mega-corporation concept in the 70s and 80s, and David Bowie, who "went public by securitizing his catalogue in 1997. That said, this skeptical listener sure finds it interesting, if not slightly ironic, that Radiohead, avowed crusaders against globalization and the premier flag-waving anti-corporate band of the last decade have gone and bought into this notion of band-as-corporation

When people think of successful innovations they often picture technological innovations; conjuring up images of the latest gadget or the most-talked about website. These associations are by no means erroneous, innovation success often includes a component of technological improvement or application, but associating innovation success only with a technological edge doesnt complete the picture. The reality, one that firms often miss, is that successful innovators dont just develop an innovative technology, product or service, they develop an innovative business model that allows an idea (be it new or old) to flourish.

Few places is this reality more apparent than in the realm of municipal Wi-Fi.

Over 400 municipalities large and small across the United States have built, are building or are planning to build municipal Wi-Fi networks. Here's a Map. But many of these projects, including some high profile ones like San Francisco, have stalled recently as the same firms that only a couple of years ago were falling all over themselves to bid and win municipal Wi-Fi contracts are discovering that their business models are not sustainable.

Earthlink and other companies who bid on early municipal Wi-Fi projects frequently agreed to build and maintain the networks at their own expense. They also made other concessions; agreeing to share revenue from ads and subscriptions, to provide free access to city workers and to pay for space on city light poles where access points would be mounted. These companies hoped to create profitable networks by relying on the public to sign up, replacing their current internet subscriptions (whether dial-up, DSL or Cable) with municipal Wi-Fi offerings.

But city residents havent subscribed in the numbers that were anticipated. Glenn Fleishman, an editor at wifinetnews.com told Business Week that only 1-2% of populations have signed up, much lower than the 15-30% subscription rates expected. The reluctance of the public to adopt municipal Wi-Fi is forcing EarthLink and others to pull back. New EarthLink CEO Rolla P. Huff said in his July 26th earnings call that his company would "delay any further build-outs and scale back operating expenses. An understandable move given that EarthLink has lost money for the past four quarters and estimates that it will continue to lose money throughout the end of this year.

It seems to me that EarthLink has committed two classic innovation blunders. First, it took a disruptive technology (Wi-Fi) and tried to apply it using a sustaining-type model (general public internet access), leading to significant losses. This blunder, however, would have been quickly corrected had they not compounded it by committing a second blunder; Instead of testing the assumptions of their business model in a cheap, low risk way (by first building Wi-Fi networks in smaller cities or by building a network for limited and specific uses instead of general public access), EarthLink tried to "go big immediately. It wasnt patient for growth, nor impatient for profit.

In so doing, EarthLink learned that it isnt reasonable to expect a profit from public subscriptions and ads. It learned that it should require cities to cover some of the costs of construction, or at least sign up as anchor tenants for the network. These are lessons that theyve spent untold millions learning. Millions that they neednt have spent if theyd have followed the principles of disruptive innovation that we at Innosight advocate.

And following the principles of successful disruptive innovation is exactly what Id recommend to EarthLink now. Im convinced that Wifi still has disruptive potential. (Even if other technologies, like WiMax loom on the horizon). To harness this disruptive potential, EarthLink (and others) should look first to develop profitable foothold markets, remembering that it should be patient for growth, but not for profit.

EarthLink might find that municipal WiFi is better suited to smaller cities and markets where other competitors (the DSL and Cable internet providers of the world) are absent or less willing to lower prices in order to respond, and where rollout costs are lower. Indeed, many of the 400+ municipalities that have built, are building or are planning to build Wi-Fi networks are smaller, "tier 2 or "tier 3 communities. Not all of these small communities are success stories. For every St. Cloud, FL there is a Lompoc, CA, but the stakes are lower and the sort of lessons EarthLink needs to learn in order to finally develop the profitable business model it needs before it can make it in San Francisco and other big cities will come cheaply and with less pain.

It might also apply jobs-to-be-done thinking to municipal Wi-Fi. What jobs, other than giving the public internet access, can municipal Wi-Fi get done? St. Cloud, FL found that emergency response services including firefighters and EMTs were greatly benefited by Wi-Fi. Corpus Christi, TX built a municipal Wi-Fi network in order to more efficiently and cheaply monitor utility usage. Perhaps convincing cities to subsidize subscription costs as a way to help bridge the "digital divide amongst city residents meets a political job. While each municipality is going to have its own unique set of jobs, I would bet that many of the jobs will be present in most communities. If it can turn municipal Wi-Fi into solutions for these sorts of jobs (particularly those that cant be accomplished by competing technologies like DSL or Cable), it might find success.

The bottom line is that municipal Wi-Fi is a technology that companies like EarthLink (whom I have singled out here in this entry because of their prominence, I could have written about others) have failed to apply with a sufficiently innovative business model. But if they can learn the right lessons from their struggles and develop a better business model through the application of disruptive innovation principles and jobs-to-be-done thinking, there is still hope.

In recent days, Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all announced new online storage offerings. Approximately 17 months after Amazon.com launched its own "Simple Storage Service, the widening race to stake claims in online storage heralds the impending emergence of a new platform, or paradigm, that has massive disruptive potential.

On August 7, Apple announced that user accounts on its .Mac service would now feature 10GB of storage, increased from 1GB. According to news reports, the increased storage level would not result in an increase in the yearly subscription rate ($99) for .Mac.

Two days later, on August 9, Google announced that folks with Google accounts could purchase additional online storage capacity over-and-above the free 2.82 GB allotted to Gmail and the free 1 GB allotted to Picasa Web Albums. For $20/year, one can purchase an additional 6 GB of storage (the minimum upgrade level) and there are three greater price/storage tiers up to an additional 250 GB of storage for $500/year. At present, the storage can only officially be used for Gmail and Picasa accounts, although one suspects that through the use of an extension such as Gmail Drive (not approved by Google), individuals could use that space to drag-and-drop any file for remote storage.

On that same day, Microsoft announced that Windows Live SkyDrive, an upgrade to Windows Live Folders, was publicly available. Still in beta, the service comes with 500MB of free online storage that folks can use, much as the Gmail Drive solution noted above, to drag-and-drop any file for remote storage. SkyDrive also allows for the posting of files to public directories that anyone can browse.

Given the decreasing cost of storage solutions and the revenue generated by online advertising, it is not surprising that free or inexpensive online storage options are beginning to enjoy accelerating growth in both variety and capacity. Coupled with the growing availability of wired and wireless broadband connectivity, it seems to be just a matter of time before the mainstream user transfers the majority of his or her storage from local/attached solutions to cloud-based solutions. Ultimately, only limited applications will required the type of performance that local/attached solutions can provide while cloud-based solutions will be less expensive, more accessible, and more reliable from a data backup standpoint.

Consider the implications of the following scenario. End-users are already beginning to discover the benefits of no cost, ad-supported, online services. The depth and breadth of those services will expand extremely quickly and it is likely that the majority of frequently-used applications will move online, perhaps with the exception of performance-intensive applications. As Google and other providers have already proven (and as we have blogged about here, here, here, and here), some of the local client-based applications used most frequently by consumers and enterprises, including electronic mail, word processing, and spreadsheets, can be quite compelling in an online-only form.

The expanding availability of high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity will also make it possible for end-users to increasingly store their own personal files online, making them easily accessible from any connected client with that accessibility delivering tremendous value. Furthermore, it seems likely that if end-users are willing to accept a certain level of advertising (say, the interaction with one advertisement a day or listening to a brief audio advertisement before the beginning of a song), online hosts may be more than willing to offer free, unlimited multimedia files to end-users to draw them to such advertisements or to have greater access to their habits and preferences.

The logical progression of this scenario finds end-users completing an increasing amount of those computing jobs-to-be-done online, particularly those of a personal nature. Further, consider end-users accessing their music or video files from a personal computer at home, a mobile phone while walking, a car while driving, or an airplane while traveling. Next, consider end-users knowing that they can always access all of their content from any location, just so long as they have some connected, smart client device, from a mobile phone or personal computer to a vehicle or watch to a television or other appliance, within reach. The value of such accessibility, particularly if it is ad-supported, is clear and significant.

Upon the premise that a rapidly growing percentage of end-users are willing to accept advertisements and give up some personal information in return for free content and services, the long-dominant American model of personal computer-centricity and repeated hardware and software upgrade cycles now comes into question. With the exception of computing-intensive jobs, such as video game playing and high-performance computing, there is no reason why the vast majority of applications and vast majority of end-user content will not simply find its way online in the future.

Once end-user tasks shift from local applications and storage to online storage and online access to information and applications, the age-old emphasis on local computing resources will begin to fade. Rather than building or purchasing personal computers with significant hardware specifications and thick, expensive layers of local software, from the operating system to office suites, end-users will increasingly look for connected client devices with browsers capable of satisfying their particular jobs.

If the job is one of content creation, for example, the end-user will seek out a client with a large-display, keyboard and mouse, and a browser capable of delivering a compelling, hosted, word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation application. If the job is one of mobile content access, the end-user may select a small client device in the form of a mobile phone or media player with limited display and input capabilities, but long battery life, portability, and a browser capable of accessing and playing streaming multimedia through speakers or headphones.

If an end-user is simply looking for glanceable information, he or she may choose a small client in the form of a stylish, connected, watch with a wearable design, but minimal display capabilities and a limited browser capable of displaying only text-based information such as news and instant messages. Perhaps the end-user is driving to work and would like his or her messages read verbally as well as access to streaming audio, maps, and directions the browser built into the car would do the trick. During breakfast, a display on the side of a refrigerator, perhaps coupled with a limited browser and touchscreen, would deliver the morning news in a manner conducive to passive consumption, rightsized to the relevant job.

Prior to the delivery of applications or content, online hosts would identify the characteristics of the client device, the browser, and the connection and deliver an appropriately-formatted experience. If the client device and browser are full-featured and able to leverage a wired, low-latency, high-bandwidth broadband connection, the host would deliver a rich, pleasing, bandwidth-intensive experience. On the other hand, If the client device and browser are designed for mobility and online via a spotty, high-latency, relatively low-bandwidth connection, the host would adapt, greatly reducing the feature set delivered and ensuring that only the most essential bits and pieces of information found their way to the client device. Essentially, content and applications would be available in any location, at any time, and end-users would select the most appropriate client device and browser for their specific needs, tasks, and usage profile.

The implications for this scenario on the business of software, hardware, services, and content are significant and the potential for disruption is widespread. Will the network finally become the computer? Are the days of the personal computer and packaged software, as we know them today, numbered? How soon might this scenario play out? What are your thoughts?

This past weekend, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales new startup, Wikia, announced that it had acquired an innovative web crawler called Grub, moving it a step closer to offering an open-source search engine. But is the Grub acquisition a step in the right direction?

Grub works differently than the webcrawling systems used by search leaders such as Google or Yahoo!. Rather than maintain a giant bank of computers that "crawl the internet, indexing it as they go, Wikia can use Grub to spread out the computing burden. Anyone can download the client and contribute their own processing power and bandwidth to the effort.

The innovation isnt just a cost-cutting measure. According to Grubs website, "Almost 50% of the database a search engine uses is either out-of-date, or incomplete at any given time. For this reason, Jimmy Wales says that "search is broken.

I wont argue with that fact that 50% of a search engines database is either out-of-date, or incomplete. Im not a search guru and really dont know. But as a user of search engines like Google and Yahoo (and, occasionally Windows Live), I have some doubts as to whether the comprehensive index Wikia hopes to create is really the way to innovate in search.

Grubs stated goal of creating and maintaining an up-to-date, comprehensive internet index is an innovation that consumers cant absorb. Based on my own experience, I think that the Googles and Yahoos of the world do a fine job of indexing. The pages they leave out are probably not the ones most people want to find. Most peoples frustrations with search arent related to incomplete or out-of-date indexes, but probably have more to do with the difficulty of finding the right combination of keywords that bring up the desired search results.

Grubs index just isnt an innovation in the right direction, it wont be valuable to the end user. What Wikia needs for success is a better search experience for the end user. It might need to be better at semantic search, or maybe it needs to leverage an open community like Wikipedia does in order to give search results a human touch. The problem is that both have been tried, at least in part, before. Will Wikia be able to succeed in an area where so many others have failed?

Wikia is supposed to launch "the first stab of something by the end of year. I suppose well see how innovative it is then.

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal celebrated "10 years since the blog was born by inviting twelve commentators (a spread of folks including politician Newt Gingrich, actress Mia Farrow, and SEC Chairman Christopher Cox) to write about what blogs mean to them.

They didnt ask me. And Ill spare the personal perspective. But blogs are worth writing about here because they fit so many of the classic patterns of disruption:

Blogs provide better performance along some dimensions (customizability, timeliness of information, focus) while sacrificing performance along others (accuracy).

Early on, blog creation required a significant amount of technical know-how, meaning that blogs took hold first with a small number of users who had the knowledge to use them the internets tech savvy. But the base of those creating and reading blogs, and the number of topics blogs cover, has expanded as the technology has become more accessible. Blogs are gaining popularity in all spheres where traditional print media plays, including sports, politics and entertainment.

Blogs also go where traditional media cant into the realm of social networking, allowing friends, families, and others to share their lives through print, pictures and (increasingly) video, online.

Many in the traditional media dismiss blogs, focusing on their deficiencies. This is a classic error right out of the Innovators Dilemma. Of course, their criticisms have some merit, many blogs offer low-quality content, poor writing, and inaccurate reports that circulate rumors. But many disruptions start out this way, and then improve until they are "good enough for the mass consumer.

Blogs are already moving upmarket and improving. The term "Professional Blogger is no longer an oxymoron. Some in the traditional media realize this ESPN, for example, recently purchased the popular basketball blog TrueHoop.com to complement its other online news offerings.

And I think that blogs still have a lot of disruption left in them. Many Americans still dont know what a blog is, and most dont read them even fewer create and maintain them. But the numbers, as shown (appropriately) on this blog, show that growth is strong. (There are many neat graphs tracking the blogosphere there, I suggest you take a look).

As a final irony blogs here, here and here point out that the Wall Street Journal didnt get its facts quite right, blogs are more than a decade old.

Courtship is a timeless ritual practiced by individuals around the globe. In the same way that governments, science and philosophy have evolved so has this enigmatic custom. In recent times technology and the internet have facilitated far more efficient dating than ever before. In fact, according to Jupiter research, internet dating is estimated to have become a $649 million industry in the United States in 2006. Recently a potentially disruptive technology has appeared within the dating landscape which could possibly shake up the internet dating industry. Companies such as MeetMoi (www.meetmoi.com) a VC backed start-up based in New York, have brought the courtship process to the mobile phone. This service allows users to connect with suitable singles that are currently out-and-about in the same vicinity using anonymous text and picture messaging.

Looking at dating through the Innosight, "Jobs to be done lens we see that many daters are over served in multiple dimensions. Most internet dating sites such as Match.com, LavaLife, Yahoo Dating and JDate stress the number of users and extremely detailed profiles as must-have features. Yet, most daters cannot benefit from more than one (or a few) good matches or necessary details. Instead, most daters are looking to "fill a lonely moment or "meet someone interesting now. While certain features, such as the ability to instant message through internet based-dating sites, allow some degree of immediacy, location based mobile dating could potentially change the paradigm.

The greatest question lies in the reaction of incumbent dating service providers. Will incumbents brush-aside the potential threat from mobile dating in order to continue serving their highly lucrative on-line subscribers better, or will they re-allocate resources to take on the potential threat from mobile? Further, is mobile dating a disruptive force or simply a sustaining feature that internet dating companies can choose to adopt? Whichever way the competition for daters pans out we are likely just at the beginning of the mobile dating phenomena.

Amazon.coms recent forays into Internet services have puzzled many analysts and investors. There is great concern that the company is spending way too much time, effort, and money so far removed from and potentially at the expense of its core retail operations. Amazon spent a decade, and billions of dollars, building its e-commerce platform to the point where it reached massive success. So why, Wall Street wants to know, is Amazon so intent on moving beyond retail?

The answer, we believe, is that Jeff Bezos understands that the key to sustained success is business model innovation. Amazon has deftly moved into new categories and new markets with flexibility and creativity. They consistently look for ways to leverage core capabilities and monetize excess capacity to create potentially disruptive businesses. Undoubtedly, Amazon must be sure to keep its core retailing operation healthy and should not over-commit to new ventures before they prove profitable, but investors should take comfort in the fact that Bezos has an uncanny knack for this most elusive of innovation disciplines.

Consider Amazons corporate evolution: as soon as it established itself as a leading online book seller it began leveraging the platform and infrastructure it built to move into new categories, and in a matter of years became a full-fledged online department store and the webs premiere retailer. Amazon has also leveraged its online real estate and customer base, establishing itself as a broker of transactions and leaser of web space to other retailers. These profitable initiatives have generated synergies that fortify Amazons core business selling other merchants books, for example, vastly expands Amazons catalog, making the site ever more of a one-stop shop while contributing to the overall growth of the business.

Now, Amazon is further unbundling its finely-honed core capabilities and leveraging its world-class core assets. A recent Business Week article describes their latest initiatives a series of calculated moves intended to transform latent capacity and aptitude into profit centers that strengthen the overall business and plant seeds that might grow into disruptive blockbusters. Notice how each initiative solves an important Job to be Done, in comparison to market alternatives:

Elastic Compute Cloud: Amazon leases computing horsepower over the web; the equivalent of one server costs about 10 cents an hour. Computing-hungry startups can make expensive capital equipment investments by buying their own servers or can lease the processing power they need when they need it at a very low cost leasing a full year of power equivalent to one server would cost just $876.

Simple Storage Service: Amazon leases digital storage at 15 cents per gigabyte per month. Buy backup drives or zap it over to Amazon for a buck eighty a gig a year.

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Amazon matches up online temp workers with companies that need menial tasks done. There are some menial, frustrating tasks that any bozo on the street can do easily but that computers just cant do right; when these tasks present themselves companies can either hire interns, tie up their low-level employees with mindless work, or, in some cases, simply leave loose ends untied. Now they can have Amazon connect them with an online temp painlessly, rapidly and at a miniscule cost.

Fulfillment by Amazon: End-to-end e-commerce operations and logistics. Companies can operate their own e-commerce operations and frequent eBay sellers can buy new shelving units for their garage and wait in line at the post office everydayor they can outsource part or all of the process to the worlds most efficient e-commerce logistician. Amazon warehouses merchandise and handles orders, payments, and shipping.

Will all or any of these new ventures grow into blockbuster businesses? That remains to be seen. At the very least Amazon is laying groundwork for a role in the digital future and casting its bets in the hopes of landing something substantial. This aggressively forward-thinking corporate mindset is exemplary, as it generates multiple revenue streams, unlocks new growth opportunities, and could lead to the transformation of markets; it may well transform earths biggest retailer into the premiere web services company.

See: "Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet," Business Week, November 13, 2006

Google recently acquired Writely, a free, online-only word processing tool that has been described as a "web word processor", or a "wiki with permissions". The current version of Writely appears to have about 90% of what you would find in something like Microsoft Word. Regardless of how you describe it, its an XML, internet based word processing system that may open up a completely new way of composing and sharing information.

Initially, our thoughts are that Google will launch this free tool where it is good enough, starting at the low-end by focusing on improving the interface and web capabilities for creating and editing web-based documents such as email and blogs. It is an improvement over current methods " such as drafting documents off-line in MS Word for editing and then moving the text online. It is possible that it will take root as more and more collaboration and communication migrate to online settings.

One of the features of the XML based word processing program is that it will allow users to create as well as store documents online. It is also conceivable that this product could easily take on off-line functionality making it a direct threat to Microsoft. The real value of an offline Google word processing tool becomes apparent when you take into account that having created your document in XML, it is immediately publishable to the web and immediately searchable. The end result is the ability to publish anything to the web quickly and easily from your desktop or the web leveraging Googles processing power and internet reach.

Dont worry about advertising around your new article, Googles ad sense has that taken care of as well.