twopointouch

I’ve just wobbled home from Wobble 2.0, the first of the new Chinwag Live event series. The big question on every one’s lips was, of course, whether we’re in a new economic bubble.

Mike Butcher has seen more booms than Basil Brush thanks to his time spent at NMA and the Industry Standard. Chairing the panel, he recalled the web design bubble, the ISP boom, the portal boom and the print media booms of the late nineties. He’s got a terrible sus­pi­cion that he might be the unwit­ting star in some sort of techie version of Groundhog Day.

Dave Nicholson of Zopa pointed out the lack of any IPO fever or day-​​trading in Internet stocks, key char­ac­ter­istics of the dotbomb era. He also explained that he thought that being first to market with its e-​​bay for loans scheme would protect his business from being ripped off by copycats. Building a com­munity around the service was, he thought, helping to “leverage network effects” in a web 2.0ish way.

Matteo Berlucchi of Skinkers was next up. The company makes most of those down­load­able news-​​headlines-​​on-​​your-​​desktop applic­a­tions for media com­panies, it seems. There’s also a rather-​​cool-​​sounding P2P dis­tri­bu­tion service on the cards that will adapt to whatever ‘receiver’ (ded­ic­ated app, email, RSS, SMS, etc.) that you’re using. He’s a bit more scep­tical and pointed out that mergers and acquis­i­tions appeared to be the new IPO fever.

Ryan Carson was more buoyant again and pointed to the low cost of launching a decent product. His own offering, Dropsend, makes him £70K a year, but that isn’t enough to make his company of five people prof­it­able, so its main business remains organ­ising large tech events. The gist of his position was that if you’ve got a good idea, just do it.

The final pan­el­list was Andrew Orlowski of the Register. One of the best-​​known Web 2.0 sceptics, Orlowski was arguably the most impressive speaker. His main point was that “the big returns on invest­ment are going to come from solving the really big problems that we face — and that isn’t what Web 2.0 is doing.” It’s not an economic bubble — there’s been $500mn invested in Web 2.0 com­panies, appar­ently, which isn’t all that. Orlowski argued that we’re in a rhet­or­ical bubble. Infrastructure people just aren’t sold on the idea, he sug­gested, and ulti­mately Web 2.0 is “present­a­tion layer people trying to solve infra­struc­ture problems.” Why has this idea taken such hold? Because there’s so very little trust in the media, the gov­ern­ment or big business. Web 2.0 offers an off-​​the-​​shelf ideology that promises hope through radical trust, or dogma as Orlowski sees it. Infrastructure guys are not big fans of radical trust, as you may have noticed the last time you tried to do anything sexy with your company internet connection.

There’s one school of thought that says that simply asking these ques­tions proves we’re not in a bubble. That the caution and scep­ti­cism that exists around this phase means that we’re in no danger of over-​​inflating our egos about its chances of success. In that case, though, the fact that we’ve been talking about global warming for twenty years would mean that it won’t ever happen. I’ve been buying English straw­ber­ries on the way to work recently which suggests a flaw in that logic.

As per usual, the ‘after-​​show party’ was as enlight­ening as the formal part of the evening. I was espe­cially pleased to catch up with Helen Keegan of Beep Marketing who has almost com­pletely sold me on the idea that it will be mobile phones not web browsers where the really big tech­no­logy revolu­tion happens. Why? Because they’ve got mobiles in Africa, India and China, not web browsers. OLPC doesn’t seem like it’s going to change that any time very soon. Ultimately, what the 100,000-odd people who read Techcrunch etc. do with their browsers is going to look pretty piddly compared to, say, the Chinese using their mobiles to get the latest news. Mobile tech­no­lo­gies are also easily mon­et­ised and people are used to the idea of paying for mobile stuff in a way people on the web are res­istant to.

Helen’s also keen on the idea of mobile TV. I once said I’d never use a mobile phone so I won’t make any sweeping gen­er­al­isa­tions about this, but I’m not really sold. I once bought a mobile TV — one of those 2-​​inch screen jobs — and used it once. I never see anyone else using them either, so I can only conclude that people don’t really want to do that. But then again, I prefer writing to tele­vi­sion anyway, so I’m probably prejudiced.

Going to stuff, so you don’t have to.