Web 2.0, Coming Soon to a Government Near You

It's interesting that in today's economy and with all the budget cuts in governments worldwide, that one area that is seeing active promotion & budgeting for, are the new communication tools generically branded as web 2.0. This brings a bunch of positives for both solution providers and users. For users, it means not only more information and potential accountability from their governments, but also the broad user adoption will encourage increased industry standards making it easier for more people to work with and use.

Examples of Government using Web 2.0

• Jul 4: With boost from Obama, Web 2.0 government takes off
• Jul 2: Web 2.0 warfare from Gaza to Iran
• Jun 30, EPA Water Quality Video Contest
• Jun 30: Gov Geeks a Hit in New York
• Jun 30: The Four Pillars of Effectively Using Web 2.0 in Government
• Jun 30: Poetry, radio and Web 2.0 tools part of the battle in Afghanistan

Of course, there are trade-offs to any new communication tool. There are the more responsible motivations pushing for openness and accountability, and shall we say a less responsible motive such as for propaganda and influence. Either way, the push for more information should be an overall positive to better communicate both constituent concerns as well as the appropriate government solutions.

New Odysen Beta Surveys, Short & Sweet

In taking a cue from Twitter, have reduced the beta product surveys from one larger survey to several smaller ones, one for each application in development. Each survey has one page with just a few questions about how you use the application and a second page to sign up for beta release trial when available.

Here are the new surveys available:
Calendar & Events
Contacts, Social Networking
Documents, Online Storage
Inbox, Email
Networks & Groups
Start Pages, Widgets
Todos & Project Management
Websites or Social Bookmarking

Thanks for your support and feedback!

Start Pages are Everywhere

Over the last couple years, Start Pages have gone from a new niche that everyone was trying out, to now more of a standard expected offering, with various widget formatting options. For example, here are a few recent postings for start pages:

• CircLabs Launches Circulate for Start Pages & Email Alerts
• Netvibes moves closer to Hyper Personalization
• How to Set Multiple Anime Start Pages
• Mint integrates with Yahoo Start Pages
• List of 17 Personalized Start Pages, from Netvibes to New York Times
• 7 Ways to create your own Social Start Page

What used to be dominated by news of pure play providers Netvibes & Pageflakes, now loads of websites are employing some aspects of the start page application, which is probably natural as the start page itself is just an integration of widgets, with differences mostly on the style or look and feel when using the application.

The look and feel or user interface is important and can it can be difficult sometimes to find the right balance, a format that provides as much information as needed, but not too much to become cluttered or busy. The most important aspect though is probably that it has a good integration with other things that you're using it for. For example, the New York Times version would be focused with widgets of New York Times features, vs iGoogle is more connected to their internal applications, and so on. How well they integrate for the needs of their audience will be ongoing give and take relationship.

Asia Ramping SaaS to $300M in 2009, Profits Questionable

In another sign of continued SaaS customer acceptance, ZDNet Asia provided a summary of a new IDC report, countries included were Australia, China, India, Korea, and Singapore (note this excludes Japan). Overall, this SaaS market is expected to hit $300M in 2009, with Australia at $134M and China at $86M.

Surprisingly China wasn't higher, at least more than Australia, but another report from TMCNews summed it up as:

"What Chinese SaaS service providers are waiting for is the day when Chinese smaller businesses get into the habit of paying for SaaS service."

This coming from the frustration of only ~10% of registered users are paid users and many of the local software vendors (UFIDA, Kingdee, and Alisoft) are seeing their SaaS endeavors as a big money pit.

I think this though is a sign of any industry in its' infancy, where it just takes time for people to get used to something different, such as putting their company data on the web. This is also supported by the fact of their stated user base of ~300k, which of a total of 43M SMB, is still very early in any type of user adoption metric.