Starting this week, we've added a new bullet point to our weekly internal meeting: Weekly insight. Every week one of us presents something they've been thinking about or something new they found interesting. I went first, here's my insight.
At the Mobile World Congress this year, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley said something interesting that has stuck with me since. He said: "the primary product that Foursquare is building is the API". And that the focus for Foursquare in 2011 will be "data-crunching", with the goal to unlock previously unknown patterns.
A couple weeks later I was reading about Color, the latest photo-sharing app start-up (unless another has launched since, it's hard to keep track these days). In an interview Bill Nguyen, one of the founders, explained the idea behind the company: "It's not about photo-sharing, it's really about data mining".
That led me to think about strategic assets. What is the strategic asset of today's large digital companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Netflix? It's the data. To aggregate and analyze data in an intelligent way is a major part of the business idea. It is key to stay ahead of the competition in product development.
Thinking about it this way, it also makes sense why many startup services are free to use and why they open up their services through APIs for other developers to build upon. Their competitiveness isn't in their consumer-facing products, it's in the data that these products generate.
In the digital world where everything is available anywhere and anytime, creating experiences that are engaging enough to convince users to spend their time on just your service is hard. Convincing them to come back is even harder. Data is key to achieving this. Knowing how consumers use your service is key to create relevant and engaging experiences.
The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced that media companies need to start thinking strategically about data. Not only saving and analysing data in an intelligent way, but maybe even consider it as a screening parameter for which services we should develop. What data will this service generate and how does that add to our overall understanding of our customers?
Only by knowing our users will we be able to create compelling and relevant experiences. Our future competitiveness will depend on it.
/Jonas
PS. In the following discussion, my colleague Megan told me about a presentation that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman held at SXSW. He said that "the next wave of web services will be all about data. In Web 2.0, people started sharing tons of data about themselves online, and Web 3.0 will be all about mining and remixing that data to build highly personalized experiences and also visualizations of patterns of thought and behavior across large groups of people." Spot on! :)
Read more:
http://pro.gigaom.com/2011/03/why-color-is-more-than-yet-another-photo-sharing-app/
http://gigaom.com/2011/03/16/are-apis-the-new-black/
http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/foursquare-venue-project/
http://www.macworld.co.uk/digitallifestyle/news/index.cfm?newsid=3260989&olo=rss
http://thenextweb.com/location/2010/03/16/foursquare-dennis-crowley-talks-revenue-api-brands-badge/
http://www.fastcompany.com/1739108/reid-hoffman-data-wrangler-of-the-modern-age
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