Om and Arrington’s keynote at FOWA

October 3, 2007 | Spark Clients

Live from the Future of Web Apps conference in London… here are a few highlights from this morning’s fireside chat with Om Malik and Mike Arrington. The conversation focused mainly on the types of web apps these guys think make the most sense (financially and from a use case perspective) and of course, Facebook. Who can remember the last day when Facebook didn’t come up in conversation at least once?

Ryan Carson, organizer of the conference, had a few questions for Om and Mike. The first one was what business models and companies look most interesting. Om likes Mint.com (personal finance website) for its ease of use and ability to solve a real problem. He likes Cubic for similar reasons, which lets consumers call internationally with their cell phone for low rates (personally, we think Rebtel is a much better option). Mike really likes the music space right now, especially a company called Amy’s Street that lets artists upload their DRM-free music to the site and the pricing is based on the song’s popularity. Songs start at “free” and as more people buy it the price increases to a maximum of $.99. So, the more popular a song, the more it costs.

Next question was whether companies should try to bootstrap or take outside financing. Om thinks it depends on what your goals are…if you’re just doing something fun, you don’t have to spend much money on the architecture and can build a small sized web company relatively easily. If you want to be big, you have to go raise money. But, for the early days, try to bootstrap to test your idea, if it works and is gaining traction, think about approaching outside investors. You would be in a stronger position to do so at that point anyway.

The Facebook discussion focused on the lack of “game changing” applications and how companies could protect themselves from creating a popular app just to have Facebook copy it and start competing with them directly. Mike had a good piece of advice, which was to try and get a grant from the FB Fund, which was created to finance (not invest in) applications for the Facebook platform. He reasons that if you take a Facebook grant they’re less likely to “stomp all over you competitively.” However, at the end of the day you have to realize that building a successful Facebook app opens you up to direct competition from the company and there isn’t a whole lot that has to be done, so just be aware of it.

Om talked more about the existing apps on Facebook and how, generally uninteresting they are. He wants to see smart applications that have some barrier to entry. Except for the Scrabble game, which he thinks is fantastic. He also like the application created by Jeff Pulver called Free World Dialup (look for FWD) that lets you call real world phone numbers from Facebook. He said it could become a directory, or white pages.

A few final points:
- Om thinks there is a great opportunity for enterprise widgets. Data in big companies is siloed, and you could use consumer web 2.0 technologies to pull it in, exposing the right information to the right person. You could even think about doing one customized application for one person because cost of creating these applications are so low
- Mike thinks the game is not over with regard to social networking. We saw it with Friendster, MySpace is on the decline. There are things that could be done better and Facebook is not the pinnacle of social networking
- Om thinks European start-ups have an advantage over companies in the U.S. because there is better broadband infrastructure and it’s much easier to incorporate mobile into their business plans from day one
- Mike likes companies that figure out how to give away their software for free, but still find a way to charge for some parts or make money a different way
- Final questions: where will Facebook be a year from now? Mike said, “getting ready to go public” and Om said, “dealing with all sorts legal issues”

-Rachel

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