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Akamai’s State of the Internet Report
Digital platform company Akamai has released its latest State of the Internet Report . The report covers the last quarter of 2009. Among the findings are the persistence of Russia as the top location for attack traffic and of South Korea for speed of web connections.The number of unique ports attacked has increased by almost three times what it was in Q3. Sponsor The single oddest statement in the report is Akamai’s contention that “slightly more than 465 million unique IP addresses, from 234 countries, connected to the Akamai network- 4.7% more than in the third quarter of 2009, and 16% more than in the same quarter a year ago.” Given that most countries in the world recognize between 194 and 196 countries, it is difficult to understand how even the most liberal definition of country could result in Akamai’s total. Here are a list of important and interesting trends that Akamai has identified in Q4. Attacks Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 198 unique countries around the world. Russia remained the top attack traffic source, accounting for 13% of observed attack traffic in total. The United States, China and Brazil took second and third and fourth place for a total of 20%. Akamai observed attack traffic targeted at more than 10,000 unique ports. Users Akamai observed a 4.7% increase (from the third quarter of 2009) globally in the number of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai’s network. Ending 2009 at 465 million unique IPs. The metric grew 16% from the end of 2008, and nearly 54% from the end of 2007. The United States and China together contribute 40% of unique IP addresses in the world. The Scandinavian countries have the highest number of IPs per person. In the U.S. it was New Jersey that took that honor. There are 32 countries with fewer than 1,000 unique IP addresses. Speed South Korea retained its lead as having the most high broadband (over 5 Mbps) and the highest average speed (12 Mbps). In the U.S., the state of Delaware retained its lead, growing to 72% of connections to Akamai occurring at 5 Mbps or greater. Delaware also maintained the highest average connection speed in the United States, increasing to 7.6 Mbps. Over 40 of the mobile providers surveyed had average speeds of over 1 Mbps. Two out of three U.S. mobile providers lost speed for the second quarter in a row. Discuss
Startups and the Lure of the (Hyper)Local
For a long time, technology has been touted as a force that can help us connect globally. But the urge to stay connected locally remains. And the same technological innovations that have facilitated global commerce and communication now seem to be turned towards helping us (re)connect to our neighborhoods, communities and local businesses. As buzz around location-based networks and services grows, “the local” is poised to be a place that’s increasingly the emphasis for innovation and entrepreneurship. Sponsor People want to know what’s going on locally. People want to shop locally. People want to network locally. And hyperlocal services make it easier to engage in and market to a local community. Technology need no longer be feared by local businesses as something that would drive their customers elsewhere – namely online. Although location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla have received significant attention as part of this trend, they are far from the only services. Hyperlocal search and news sites are two other services that have seen recent growth. Last week, Milo.com , a website that enables shoppers to research products online but then make their purchases locally, added products and real-time inventories for over 100 independent, mom-and-pop stores across the country. While Milo.com has served the “big box” stores for some time, this move to incorporate smaller retail outlets marks another way in which the local is starting to take advantage of online opportunities. “Smaller stores that once viewed technology as a threat, now see the benefit it has for reaching potential shoppers and attracting new customers into their actual brick and mortar locations,” says Jack Abraham, Milo.com founder and CEO. Abraham says that Milo.com helps local businesses address the classic problem of how to get new customers in the door, but offers the best of both worlds – that is both an online component for reading reviews and the assurance that if they drive to their local store, they’ll find the item in-stock, ready to “touch, feel, and buy.” The hyperlocal can offer both geographic and content granularity – the ability to focus on a very specific location and subject matter that might otherwise be too small to be served. By merging the local and the online, businesses can respond quickly to meet the needs of their customers. Startups have long used local communities as a testing ground for both marketing and business models before opting to expand. The increasing interest in the hyperlocal might make it more than just a launching point. What do you think of the potential for expansion of more hyperlocal startups? Discuss
Lessons for Entrepreneurs from World of Warcraft
When film critic Roger Ebert posted on his blog that “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” he seemed to incur the wrath of the gaming community, and the entry now has over 3,000 comments, many protesting Ebert’s claims. Ebert wonders why the designation of art or not-art matters to those who play video games: “Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, “I’m studying a great form of art?” Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.” Sponsor Here’s an argument to make gamers happy. According to John Seely Brown, former director of Xerox PARC , massive multiplayer online games demonstrate ways in which groups can manage information and maximize learning. At a recent lecture as part of Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, Brown said that World of Warcraft guilds can serve as models for entrepreneurs in understanding how to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. Brown urges entrepreneurs to look at WoW for ideas on how to boost information management and performance feedback. Brown points to the guild, the game’s primary organizational structure, as the way you “get things done in World of Warcraft.” Noting that over 12,000 ideas are posted to the official World of Warcraft forums daily, Brown points to the necessity of having a guild in order to process this information. “If your guild is going to be successful,” says Brown, “you have to figure out how to get the members of your guild to process tens of thousands of new ideas.” The guild structure, Brown argues, allows for groups to crowdsource information and to test, filter and disseminate strategies. The most successful guilds also meticulously record and review their performances. “In terms of extreme performance,” says Brown, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. World of Warcraft high-end guilds do after-action reviews on every high-end raid.” Brown praises the way in which WoW players have developed their own dashboards so they can constantly measure and adjust their own performance. Brown argues this vigilance around feedback helps WoW players learn exponentially. With over 12 million World of Warcraft subscribers, chances are WoW is an incubator for future entrepreneurs, whether or not the game is “art.” Discuss
GetGlue Adds New Releases to Recommendations Made by Human & Machine
It’s hard to keep up with all the newly released movies and music these days, but a lightweight social network with a whole lot of smarts under the hood says it can now offer you personalized recommendations of new releases that suit your very particular interests. GetGlue is a semantic web browser plug-in that has, for years, been smart enough to recognize when you’re looking at the same musical group across different websites, be that on Last.fm, MySpace or elsewhere. The service recently added a stream of recommendations of music, movies, books, magazines, wikipedia articles and other things you might like. How can it tell what you’ll like when something is brand new, though? Today the service has launched a “new releases” section, where human editors rush to classify brand-new media. Then the semantic robots can serve it up to the right users, still hot out of the oven. It’s pretty cool. Sponsor GetGlue founder Alex Iskold says he’s learned a lesson similar to what formerly automated tech news aggregator Techmeme has learned: algorithms and user generated content can take you a long way, but there comes a point when it’s good to hire some dedicated editors. The service asks you to like or unlike a wide variety of things. It then uses that feedback to build a taste profile to compare against things it finds put into its database and find the stuff it thinks you’ll like. That’s harder with new releases, though. “When something new is coming out, we don’t know what it’s like, so you need to have proffessionals tag it,” Iskold told us. “We have two editors on staff who look across the spectrum of new releases each week. They draw the similarities between things in a deep way – the tagging system we use will be unvieled later. We use really eclectic tags to characterize what kind of zombie or vampire movie something is. We also use tags brought in from other systems and our users find cool new things really fast.” The end result is a nicely displayed stream of big icons for personally recommended newly released movies, music and books. You think you’re hip to your scene now? Wait until you’ve got a network of contacts, a semantic robot and real human editors all working together to bring you the freshest content in your weird little niche. To be honest, I’ve been testing it out today by switching from new album recommendations on Glue over to Apple’s Lala.com , where it’s easy to listen to full albums once for free. That’s not the way Glue wants you to use it, but that’s the way I like to use it so far. The Down Side It’s an incredible system, when it works. GetGlue knows though that there are some challenges in this kind of game though. First, it’s not easy to present this kind of flow of data to users without either overwhelming them or boring them. Many of GetGlue’s latest changes are focused on making the user experience more pleasant: bigger images, collapsed bundles of shared items, etc. Can the service find a balance between giving you strong-enough recommendations on one hand and regularly offering up new recommendations on the other? In past versions of the product, I’ve received too few recommendations to keep me coming back. Hopefully new releases will scratch that itch. Iskold also says that after “liking” only 15 musical artists, I’m actually much less active than most of the 400,000 registered users of the service. Personally, I’m more drawn to the Wikipedia recommendations on GetGlue than anything else. The new releases in music might be roughly in the same sub-genres I usually listen to, but that doesn’t mean they are any good. Finally, all this “liking” obviously begs the Facebook question. Writing as an ostensible Facebook competitor about that giant network’s radical innovations unveiled last week, Iskold wrote the following in a widely-read article here at ReadWriteWeb about Facebook’s Open Graph: “Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let’s give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web.” Today he emphasized in speaking with me that Facebook is new to what it’s just begun to do, but his company has been doing it for years. There’s no guarantee that Facebook will get it right, he said. It’s hard to say for sure that GetGlue has got it right, either. But as a work in progress, it’s pretty darned good and today’s new additions are very interesting. Discuss
Learning From Failure: One Startup’s Story of What Went Wrong
Devver , maker of developer coding tools and TechStars 2008 graduate, announced last Monday that it would be shutting down after being active for nearly two years. News of a startup closing up shop is never a fun thing to hear about, but fortunately many lessons can be gleaned from the experiences of the entrepreneurs. Today, co-founder Ben Brinckerhoff provided just such lessons with an insightful blog on the Devver journey and why he and co-founder Dan Mayer are choosing to move on. Sponsor An unfortunate truth about startup culture is that a lot of the most valuable lessons are learned when entrepreneurs fail to heed them. Some notice their mistakes early on and can pivot their products and business toward a more successful future, but sometimes they don’t realize their mistakes until its too late and there is nothing that can be done. This was the case with Brinckerhoff, Mayer and their startup, Devver, which they say failed to focus enough on one of the most important parts of building a startup: customer development. As Brinckerhoff points out in Monday’s blog post, the company assumed they had found their minimum viable product (MVP), and as a result focused more on product development than listening to customers’ needs. “You can teach a hacker business, but you can’t make him or her get excited about it, which means it may not get the time or attention it deserves.” – Ben Brinckerhoff “Our mistake at that point was to go ‘heads down’ and focus on building the accelerator while minimizing our contact with users and customers (after all, we knew how great it was and time spent talking to customers was time we could be hacking!),” writes Brinckerhoff. “We should have [been] asking, ‘Is there an even simpler version of this product that we can deliver sooner to learn more about pricing, market size, and technical challenges?’.” Both Brinckerhoff and his co-founder are “technical founders,” which means their specialities are on the development side, not the business side. The only other person the pair hired to help out, a fellow software developer, also fits into the technical side of the startup. Brinckerhoff says this may have been one of the hurdles that led to the downfall of the company. “Looking back, it would have been to our advantage to have a third founder who really loved the business aspect of running a startup,” writes Brinckerhoff. “Having solely technical founders is non-optimal. You can teach a hacker business, but you can’t make him or her get excited about it, which means it may not get the time or attention it deserves.” Brinckerhoff also adds that having a split team located in different states contributed to the company’s struggles, but it seems to me it was more of a hassle than a reason for failure. Split teams are actually growing in popularity and probability for success, as we discussed earlier in the year with companies like Blank Label and chocri . Devver undoubtedly had issues with its split setup, but its likely that it didn’t contribute toward its closing as significantly as the other errors. Regardless of this issue, its clear that the Devver team learned and shared some valuable lessons about the importance of customer development. As Steve Blank noted during his presentation at last week’s Startup Lessons Learned conference, startups shouldn’t be too eager to product management before customer development. Devver may have jumped the gun a bit in terms of over developing their product, so learn from their mistake and remember to develop your customers before throwing the kitchen sink at them. Discuss