Few people understand the Internet and how it is evolving as well as John Borthwick, the co-founder of Betaworks whose Think/Musings blog is food for the Internet intelligentsia. One of the many online phenomena he articulated early and well is the real-time Web, or what he called originally The Now Web. These days, Borthwick is contemplating the next stage of the Internet's development, the Web of Things. To dip into these heady issues, The Deal caught up with Borthwick earlier this month at Shake Shack II, an informal gathering of 300 of the smartest folks on the New York tech scene. Watch the video below or download it on iTunes. For more on Borthwick, the Now Web and the Web of Things, read below the video. - Mary Kathleen Flynn
At The Deal, we've been following Borthwick and Betaworks co-founder Andrew Weissman closely since the beginning of 2008. Back then, when we dubbed Betaworks "the most influential early-stage investment firm no one's ever heard of," we were intrigued by the firm's hybrid model of both investing in Web 2.0 startups and simultaneously developing them. The firm's profile was raised in July of 2008, when Twitter Inc. acquired Betaworks' Summize search engine, marking the firm's first exit.
What struck us was not what Borthwick said about the sale, but rather his description of a new immediacy to the experience of the Internet, which he called the Now Web: "There is something new going on here. Somewhere in the past few months the way that I experience the Internet and specifically live information changed -- there is a 'now web' emerging out of an ecosystem of loosely coupled products."
After interviewing Borthwick at Shake Shack II earlier this month, it's obvious my next assignment will be to look into the Web of Things.
For those who want to follow with me, check out a recent white paper written by Tim O'Reilly (who coined Web 2.0 when he hosted the first conference on it in 2004) and John Battelle about how objects in the real world have on the Internet "information shadows" (a phrase credited to Mike Kuniavsky, co-founder of Adaptive Path and ThingM).
O'Reilly and Battelle write:
For instance, a book has information shadows on Amazon,
on Google Book Search, on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing, on
eBay and on BookMooch, on Twitter, and in a thousand blogs. A song has information shadows on iTunes, on Amazon, on Rhapsody, on
MySpace, or Facebook. A person has information shadows in a host of
emails, instant messages, phone calls, tweets, blog postings,
photographs, videos, and government documents. A product on the
supermarket shelf, a car on a dealer's lot, a pallet of newly mined
boron sitting on a loading dock, a storefront on a small town's main
street -- all have information shadows now.
I'll be looking into the Web of Things in greater depth over the coming weeks. Feel free to share your thoughts on it below, or on Twitter, where I'm @MKFlynn.
