The Tomigaia Blog

Report from the 56th IETF Meeting

After attending this spring's IETF meeting, I feel that I have a much better idea of how the organization works. It is still a refuge for the gods of the Internet, and they are an interesting bunch. I was very busy, and didn't have much time to socialize, but did meet a very interesting person there, a Michal Wasserman, who was both an engineer and a very good composer of piano music.

As for trends in technology, it is hard to judge that from the IETF, but I can tell you that IPv6 is very popular, and so is SIP.

I will be at the next IETF meeting in Vienna, and hope to enjoy my first meeting in Europe! See you there.

Off to San Francisco for the 56th Meeting of the IETF

I am off to San Francisco for the IETF meeting. I hope to post any interesting happenings while I am there. There should be a good group of people there since many technology folk live in the Bay Area.

Is there a trend towards micropayments for content or services?

I have been thinking a lot lately about how anybody will make money on the web in the future. It seems that web advertising has become less effective every year. "Pop-ups", "Pop-unders" and other annoying tactics have made most web users hostile to web ads, and more and more lawsuits are taking place. (See this article about the Gator situation, where a piece of spyware was swapping ads in web pages.)

Many sites are now using a "pay-to-not-see-ads" policy, and in many cases it seems to be successful. Users get to have a much better experience using the site, and the site gets the funding it needs to operate directly from the information consumer. Some shareware products, like Eudora, use the same technique to make users pay for using an application.

Some sites, like the New York Times, are free, but charge to see old articles. This model makes sense to me for many reasons. The evolution of business models in the world of publishing did not lead to a dead end. I think that paying for good content through micropayment subscriptions will be the next wave for content sites. The only new wrinkle is that subscriptions will be dynamic and of much finer granularity. (For example, subscribing to the "Science" section of the newspaper for the next 3 weeks.)

One very interesting company that I have been meeting with that has developed solutions for content providers who want to begin charging for content is Javien. They have built a service that is easily branded by the customer with their own logo and interface, and that allows sites to charge on a pay-per-view basis, a subscription basis, or both. Some of their customers sell access to archives, others sell monthly reports. In the future, they hope to integrate with other systems and enable music and movies to sold through their system as well.

The key to their technology is the ability to securely protect content to be sold. All the content is kept in a secure proxy server, and only released to the user once the payment has been made.

I think that this kind of solution will be the only way that most web-based content businesses will survive. But before this is truly viable a universal system, perhaps based on Federate Identity (MS Passport, Liberty, etc) that will make this type of transaction effortless to the user.

A Venture Success Story from Japan? Yes?

I have been wondering if there have been any ventures that are growing right now in Japan, and have been sad to see little news of this type in the media I read. Then I read a story in a newsletter I get monthly called the Japan Entrepreneur Report by Tim Clark of the Sunbridge Venture Habitat. (I also heartily recommend Tim Clark's Japan Internet Report!)

Once you read the lead story on Freshness Burger and Book Off!, you get the impression that all you have do to succeed in business in Japan today is to promote "health, naturalness, environmental consciousness, de-standardization, personalization, individualization, and priority on high-touch over high-tech" at the workplace. And don't forget "aggressive outsourcing", "working for the benefit of others", "a clear, easy-to-understand pricing policy" and lack of legacy systems.

As someone who worked as a manager in Japan for a couple of years, I think that there is some truth to this idea, but it seems too narrowly applicable to me. Some of this applies only to retail services, some to all service industries.

Perhaps as Japan goes through the eye of the needle, and many moribund companies finally go bankrupt, there will be more openings for ventures to try new ideas. There is more than just fast food and books to go after, but the barriers to entry in other areas of the service sector must be signifigantly larger, since they have prevented other entrepreneurs from breaking into them so far.

I agree with Tim that service sector is the only sector in Japan that will show growth during this recession, but I am not sure if there are a list of ad-hoc rules that will work for all parts of the service sector.