It took Mazy Kazerooni, Mind 1, a little over a month to convince me to go to the Future of Web Apps in Miami (FOWA). Immediately after getting back from The Crunchies he mentioned it - and pushed hard. “Its going to be awesome dude, tons of great speakers!”. I wasn’t convinced. I mean come on, if I’m going to spend hundreds of dollars to fly across the country I want to be sure its going to be worth it. “DUDE! MATT! FOWA is next week! We need to make a decision!”. I was in a corner… I wanted to go…but I didn’t want to spend the money. “Matt Mullenwag and Kevin Rose are speaking!”. SOLD! I agreed to go and we quickly packed our carry-ons.

After two flights, a two hour layover, and multiple unfulfilling bags of peanuts, we made it Miami. Strangely enough Miami is exactly what it looks like in the movies - lots of tan people rollerblading. It almost wanted to make me laugh. I mean I’m from Orange County, which is nothing like “The OC”…but these guys were exactly how TV and Hollywood said they were. Anyways… I digress.

We checked out Barcamp and then later headed over to the Nokia party. There we participated in some crazy game where we were supposed to yell as loud as possible. Sounds fun right? Maybe…but the burn in my throat was nothing compared to how it caught fire after I started drinking. I bet there’s a Nokia guy laughing at my pain this very moment. Jerks.

Finally, Friday, it was time for the Future of Web Apps. We got in around 9am and with only four hours of sleep - just in time for Mullenwag’s speech. The thing about Mullenwag is that he’s so intelligent that he could tell you anything and you’d believe it. He’s also a super nice guy. When he responds to someone with a different opinion, he’ll do it with a friendly attitude but at the same time he totally obliterates whatever they just said. Then to top it off he gives this little chuckle after he’s done talking that has “I just owned you” written all over it. Its amazing.

The talks were okay, mainly everyone was discussing how to scale and technical stuff like that. The one highlight would be when Blaine from Twitter was on stage telling everyone how he’s so glad that Twitter had been up for the past few days. Joke was on him though - Twitter was down during his speech. His phone was ringing constantly throughout everything, and like many of us expected, turns out it was Twitter calling. Blaine hurried off stage to fix everyones favorite microblogger among heckles from the crowd “Help us Blaine! We need Twitter!”.

The parties alone made the trip worth while. Mazy and I were literally attacked by people who wanted access to Ustream’s API. It was insane… it was also a wake up call - We’ll be releasing a public API soon. We also met with a bunch of companies and people who could use Ustream by either integrating it with their site and/or doing a live show. From FOWA alone we made a lot of good contacts and Ustream is going to be all the better because of it.

Even though the actual conference wasn’t amazing, our trip to Miami was a major success. The tech community as a whole is highly intelligent and willing to help each other out - its great. So many eager entrepreneurs and so much energy in this industry… it really makes it an exciting business to be in. We’ll definitely be going back.

With FOWA over its time for SXSW! I hope to see a lot of Ustreamers there.

For now though, its time to sleep. Got to wake up in time for my flight tomorrow…

March 6th, 2008 | Mind A (Matt Schlicht) | No comments

I’ve been pondering this for a while and I’m still not really sure. Currently, they’re not bringing in nearly enough revenue to make that valuation sane.

Facebook’s primary asset is the large amount of information they have on their users. They have not yet monetized this asset to it’s fullest potential. I’ve thought of a few things they could do that I think would make their valuation a lot easier to swallow.

• They need to allow social ads to be placed on third party sites
  

This would basically be Facebook’s answer to adsense. Any user browsing a third party site while still logged into Facebook would see the same ads they’d see there, except with hopefully some different ad sizes and much better placement. Once enough Facebook users have been to a third party site running social ads, a demographic profile for the site can be made. The ads served to non-Facebook users, or simply users not logged into Facebook would be based on this.

edit: I’ve thought of this a bit more, and I have a bit to add. I think once a demographic profile is created for a whole website or pages of a website, potential advertisers should be able to look at this information as well as traffic information and choose to buy CPM based ads specific to certain sites or demographics. Sites could place minimum CPM requirements to prevent their inventory from being sold for less than they’d like. This adds value for publishers because of the extensive demographic information Facebook can gather and display to advertisers. This adds value to advertisers because it allows them to quickly and easily target the demographics they want in a manner they’re familiar with, while at the same time making the process of buying ads from specific publishers hassle free.

• They need to work on product recommendations
  

Facebook is very good at reminding you that a friend’s birthday is coming up. This is a great opportunity for them to use the information they have on users in a way that adds value for both Facebook and it’s users. A simple link that says something like “Need gift ideas for *friend*?” could prove to bring in a lot of revenue. This link could take a user to page with recommendations for products for that user based on the information in their profile as well as information gathered by Beacon. Of course, users are likely to know even better what their friends would like than Facebook, so from the initial suggestions it should be made very easy to browse and search through other potential gifts. Friends who know exactly what they would like could even make a wish list which users would be able to see and purchase off of.

To add even more value for Facebook, they could incite competition between potential partners for this (Amazon, buy.com, overstock.com, etc).

• They need to build a system for companies to easily find potential employees

It’d be great if Facebook build an app for jobs. Companies would pay some fee for each job listing. They would be able to target potential employees by education level, location, and previous job experience. Every user with the app installed who fit the criteria of the job listing would receive a notification about it. This would all be opt-in by nature of an app, and adds a lot of value for any user who adds it.

Everything on this list adds value for everyone involved, especially Facebook. I feel confident that if Facebook implemented these or similar ideas, they would see a harsh increase in revenue with no to minimal user backlash.

- Mazy

February 3rd, 2008 | Mind 1 (Mazyar Kazerooni) | 3 comments