Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How big is your developer ecosystem? I imagine that part of your strategy is to unleash the whole creativity of the developer ecosystem on your platform.

Jeff Lawson: Yes, we have over 400,000 developers using our platform.

Sramana Mitra: Are these large companies? What’s the mix of that ecosystem?

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A Latin American Unicorn From Argentina

Adapted from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0.

So far, we have only looked at American companies [Tableau, FireEye, RightNow, Palo Alto Networks, Kayak and SuccessFactors] in the Unicorn series.

There is a market of 500 million people – nearly 8.6% of the world’s population – that the business media all too often neglects, serving up story after story on China and India. Forgotten is all of Latin America.

Between 2000 and 2007, the number of Internet users in Latin America grew from 18.1 million to 122.4 million, a compounded annual growth rate of 32% compared with only 12% in North America during the same period. Average penetration across Latin America was approximately 21.5%, compared to 71.4% for the US. Even with such low penetration, Latin America’s Internet population represented close to 10% of the world’s Internet users.

Fast forward to 2014, numbers have exploded, touching 300 million. Analysts forecast 393 million users in 2017.
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New Book – From eCommerce to Web 3.0

Excerpt from my new book, From eCommerce To Web 3.0: How To Leverage The Evolution Of The Internet.

Back in 2007, even before the iPhone was launched, giving us a powerful computer in our pockets or handbags, I started outlining a vision for Web 3.0.

There are numerous definitions of Web 3.0 floating around. Tim Berners-Lee, a father of the World Wide Web, talks about the “Semantic Web,” a way that computers employ the meaning of words – not just pattern matching – along with logical rules to connect independent nuggets of data and so create more context for information. The formula that makes the most sense to me is this: Web 3.0 results from combining content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search. Or, to put it in a handy phrase: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Here’s what it means.
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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What you have today is a product and a business model that is just starting to come into the market? This business model is not generating $5 million in revenue?

Benoît l’Archevêque: If you only consider Azzimov, no. But if you consider the whole entity, yes.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically trying to turn people with major traffic to a Google-kind of business model. It would be interesting to see if they can execute on their side on these ad sales and generating affiliate networks. You’re leaving the execution in their hands. They’re not set up to execute on these kinds of principles. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 6)

Benoît l’Archevêque: It’s like the 411 service in North America where people call to get services. In China, they have salesmen receiving the call. People call and say, “I’m looking for this.” The person receiving the call will not only give the information but also go and complete the sale. Azzimov is included in that. They have the affiliate program already in place.

Sramana Mitra: I understand the advertising and lead generation, but how does the affiliate program work?

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Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the case of Google, they have web self-service advertisement capabilities like Google CPC. If I, as a small business, want to advertise on Google, I can go to Google’s website and set it up to do that advertising. Do you have that in place as well?

Benoît l’Archevêque: Yes. We call that ad boosting. We can do product placement in site. We can actually increase or not, depending on the context of the search. Also, we do product re-targeting. For example, you have a blog. You would like to have contextual products offered in the article you were doing. We can actually place products beside the articles. We call that product re-targeting. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 4)

Benoît l’Archevêque: There are three revenue models in Azzimov: advertising when you search, the lead generation system that I just explained, and the affiliate model. When someone buys, there’s a percentage take off that. Put that aside. Take that business model, but apply it to mobile. >>>

Trying to Turn Carriers and Retailers Into Google: Azzimov CEO Benoît l’Archevêque (Part 3)

Benoît l’Archevêque: I’ll give you a very quick example. If I do a search on Italian, red, and car, you see a Ferrari. What we have created is a new dynamic knowledge graph where we only store words once. If I have 500,000 bottles of wine, I’m not going to store the word wine 500,000 times because I have 500,000 different bottles of wine. I will store wine once. I will store red once. I will store the words that are not common to create this other group of products. We were able to build a new way of structuring data. We can now take homogeneous and heterogeneous data and deconstruct and reconstruct in real time. For us, it’s a matter of seconds.

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