A View from the Isle

I love technology. Always have. Even as a kid I loved to figure out the gadget du jour. For the past four and a half years I’ve been immersed in what we’ve been calling “Web 2.0” and for the past couple of months I’ve been on hiatus. During this time I noticed that keeping an eye on Twitter, Techmeme and a couple other places, I could stay up to date. I might go a several days without checked my once much vaunted feeds and when I did check feeds, I marked everything older than 48 hours read (thank you FeedDemon!). Again, I didn’t feel like I was missing much.

Walking around BlogWorldExpo this weekend and Gnomedex last month, I didn’t see anything revolutionary or groundbreaking. Nothing that made me step back and go, “whoa”. Yes, don’t get me wrong, there have been some amazing recent innovations for microblogging, video, commenting, lifestreaming, but these are making good ideas better.

I’m thinking, though, that there is, thus far, a tremendous amount of unmet potential in netbooks, the foundation Google Chrome represents for web apps, and what could happen if laconi.ca reaches the status of POP, SMTP and IMAP.

Which brings me to the important question here, who is stepping up to create the “what’s next” thing? I’m going to grant you that I just might have become jaded and a wee bit cynical, but chatting with several folks at BlogWorldExpo, people who’s opinions I value, I got universal nods of agreement. We haven’t see a really amazing something new in a while. Not the shift from 2.0 to 2.5 or 3.0 per se, but something that will have lasting importance.

Yes, touch computing did, as many thought (including me) it would, change how we’re dealing with devices. The iPhone is amazing so is Surface, these are taking interfaces to new levels and we have seen other interesting launches, but something is missing.

And I really wish I knew what that something is.

I wish I could put my finger on it.

Step back with me. No, not in time, up to the “big picture” level of things. We see more and more and better and better ways to share things, do things, buy things, sell things. We’ve seen tremendous innovation in making things faster, more reliable, smoother, integrated.

I love it. I love that I can toss my EeePc in a bag and be able to do things that I needed a larger computer for not that long ago.

Still, something is missing.

I’d love to discuss here, discuss at BarCamp this weekend, what that something might be. Where should we go next.

This would have made a great panel at BlogWorldExpo, and I’m sure that groups of people were talking about this over dinner. I’d love to hear about it.

Let’s hear what your vision of what’s next is, while I mull and formulate my own.

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I hung out with Jordan and the Launch Party gang last night to check out some of Vancouver’s newest and most promising startups. Tagga was there, I hope they weren’t up too late since they are flying to Vegas today, and since I already think they are pretty cool, I can gloss cover them.

One startup that caught my eye was ClarityAccounting, basic web-based accounting for small businesses. Okay, maybe not so basic. Sheila got the full pitch, I was taking pics as usual, but she was really impressed. For $10/month she can manage her side work, teaching, jewelry sales, and other gigs all together. PDF invoices, receipts, access for your accountant. It’s all there. Simply, easily. Sure I’ve tried to use QuickBooks, but wow, it is a royal pain. Not even considering the cost there are the updates (not free btw) and just using it.

And so, I think ClarityAccounting is going to have some legs.

There are two ways to succeed in Web 2.0, etc one is to come up with something brand new and amazing the other is to just make something we need better. Coming up with something mind-blowing amazing, and new, is a rare thing. Doesn’t happen often. The “something better” happens more often, isn’t as sexy, but I think something that can succeed.

The problem with the “something better” is that if your competition is so entrenched (say eBay) that a competitor has to overcome a huge amount of user inertia to get people to switch. Like for me and photos. On Flickr I have over 11,000 pics and I’m not an edge case either. Can you imagine me moving everything to a new service? Yeah no. You’d have to have a way to use the Flickr API to move not only the pictures, but the sets, collections, and tags. Oh and tell folks that I’ve moved my pic. Oh, yeah all the posts where I’ve embedded an image from there …. yeah those would break huh?

See? Huge amount of inertia. I am thinking of doing more with SmugMug for my professional portfolio, but make it my primary photo location? Yeah not likely.

ClarityAccounting, if it has a nice QuickBooks import function, can make it painless. Amount of inertia? Low. If your account weeps tears of joy at what it does, even better. For a new user, they can be sending out an invoice in a few minutes and Sheila said it would take a day or two for her to bring it all up to date. Granted she might not have a lot to enter, that’s still pretty good.

Learning curve? Looked like less than nil.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Make a better wheel. Not in a rainbow of new colours, but something new, smoother, easier, faster, better.

Innovation can be as simple as just being better.

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