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If you’ve ever found yourself asking yourself what happened to your day, here is some potential insight into the answer…(from the New York Times)

The question becomes: what behaviours will you change to reduce the amount of time spent doing ‘unproductive’ activities?

In the past three years, we have witnessed emergent signals of a radical change in the nature of the Internet. Like the transition that preceded it, where its focus shifted from its original, technological orientation to a content-centric positioning, this next phase will bring a dramatic shift in fortunes for some of the major players.

While subtle, the change is profound. The label many use to describe it – the Come to me Web – best captures its essence. To appreciate the ramification of the changes in both technology and consumer behaviour we are witnessing, we need to revisit its precursor: the I Go Get It Web. Under this paradigm, content was at the centre of the universe, and most effort was directed to targeting and luring consumers to the content. The balance of power lay in the hands of the content owners; the leading business meme advocated aggressively capturing and monetising ‘eyeballs’.

In this environment, consumers were obliged to locate and seek out content and related services of interest. Not surprisingly, search engine technologies were highly valued, as were portal-style offerings that optimised the effort-reward equation by aggregating useful content in a single place.

The dominant mindset of content owners was to publish content for a single purpose – reading – and to treat computer screens as the digital evolution of printed books. The business objective, then, was creating and disseminating read-only information, and the challenge was making that information findable.

In the I Go Get It world, ‘findability’ became the overarching metaphor, and it borrowed much from the physical business of publishing, as evidenced by the emphasis placed on replicating print layouts and making content navigable through the use of publishing concepts. That most consumers accessed content via a single device undoubtedly influenced this state of affairs. It led to ‘format’ wars, as content owners sought to lock-in consumers by mandating the use of plug-ins and other proprietary formats.

The adaptation of a physical product mindset brought with it a range of artificial constraints around content access, use, and re-distribution and, similarly, how to enhance content products via the connectedness the Internet enabled. Only now, as our understanding of the true potential of digital services matures, and as emerging technologies decentralise power, are we seeing a dramatic change in both our metaphors and use of the Web.

The Come to Me Web neatly inverts the paradigm. Users, not content or technology, are at the centre of things. They are using tools and services that bring the content to them, ready to hand, on their preferred access device.

Decoupling content from its publishing containers has enabled consumers to use, aggregate, store, re-use, re-combine, and re-distribute content. This has fundamentally changed consumers’ perception of content: it has become “my” news headlines, “my” music, and “my” weather. This changing usage, and altered expectations, has forced the growing adoption of open standards and formats, as consumers seek to ensure maximum availability of ‘their’ content. Service owners are even starting to promote open APIs, so that others can create useful tools using their content, because this is what consumers are demanding.

The main hurdle for consumers has shifted from being able to find information to being able to re-find information they have already collected. This has spawned increasing activity in the area of ‘ambient discovery’; technologies designed to sniff out clues about what you will be interested in next (as distinct from now) and present you with it before you even ask.

These changes in consumer behaviour will have significant impact on the business of the Web. We can expect to see two things: increasing audience fragmentation and decreasing site traffic. Both will remain obscured initially due to an overall rise in online activity driven (ironically) by the increasing usefulness of new information platforms.

Increasing audience fragmentation will occur because consumers will become more responsive to site and content recommendations provided by peers and new technologies, displacing the primary role of search engines in this area (which tend to concentrate traffic on a handful of popular sites). Site traffic will decrease because consumers will be able to avoid visiting the original source of content, either because the content is coming directly to them (say, via RSS) or a peer is passing it on. Given the predominance of advertising-driven revenue models, Web measurement metrics will soon evolve to address the obvious difficulties this creates.

In the Come to Me Web environment, it will be incumbent upon service providers, and advertisers to go where your audience is, not where you would have them be.

I’ve been invited to sit on a judging panel at a pitch session being held on Friday by the Mobile Enterprise Growth Alliance (MEGA).

Over the past 4 months, 10 teams of entrepreneurs have been mentored through the process of fine tuning their business concepts, and the pitch session is designed as a dress rehearsal before these entrepreneurs unleash their ideas on potential investors.

As I prepare for the judging process, I thought I would share some of my thoughts and experiences of the ’startup scene’:

• The average startup is launched by a ’specialist’ - someone with deep skills in a specific area (be it coding, marketing, product development etc.) but shallow/no skills in other ‘must have’ areas (business planning, marketing strategy, customer orientation, financial discipline etc.).
• Startup founders tend to play to their strengths - founders with a coding background get stuck into the code, and give little attention to defining the market, developing a robust business model etc. People with a business background do the exact opposite - they write reams of pages about the market, business opportunity, revenue potential etc., but do very little prototyping and market validation.
• Startup founders are, by definition, optimists - they underestimate how long it will take or how much it will cost to secure their first customer, break even etc.
• Startups have little cash, but, equally, can ill-afford not to seek assistance. The corollary is that getting advice can actually reduce time to market, which conserves cash and is thus capital positive.
• Australia is a very ordinary market for early stage startups - the sooner you can progress your start-up through ‘Death Valley’ and gain the size/momentum needed to interest VCs, the more likely you are to survive (even if you opt not to accept VC money).
• There is never a shortage of money. Money will always find good investments. The problem is that most investment opportunities are rarely well refined and usually poorly presented.
• Most startups, being run by ’specialists’, have very poorly developed investment propositions. The business plan + pitch documents tend to steer to the founder’s strengths. Tech types talk all about the technology, and don’t drill into the market + the business case for the investor. Business types talk all about the business, but don’t drill down into how the product will be developed and brought market.
• A key contributor to some of these problems is the type of people start-up founders typically turn to for guidance - accountants and lawyers. In the main, accountants think start-up planning is all about mapping and monitoring cashflow, and lawyers think it is all about legal protection of ideas, IP and contractual rights. While undoubtedly important aspects of new businesses, there are larger issues that need to be addressed in most startups as they take their first steps to market.

Of course, simply articulating these problems doesn’t solve them. I’m currently working on a side project with several colleagues aimed at just that: helping entrepreneurs (and would-be entrepreneurs) to help themselves in overcoming these and other challenges that crop up in the first years of life in a start-up.

Hopefully I’ll be in a position to announce something more formally soon.

A scan of recent activity in the Australian start-up sector suggests that, for many Australian new ventures, launch planning is rooted in a single, dominant objective: ensuring the business is “born global.” Nowhere is this mindset more apparent than among software-based start-ups, led by organisations such as Atlassian, Tangler, Freshview, and 3eep, among many.

Australian businesses have a long history of being export motivated. Nonetheless, the traditional approach to internationalisation required that companies first establish a solid local market position before commencing offshore activities. Even then, export market development tended to be a gradual process, following a series of incremental and sequential stages, with commitment decisions made according to a range of factors, including market perceptions, offshore experience, and management capacity.

What is driving the Born Global attitude?

A ‘born global’ business is one that starts international activities right from birth, entering overseas markets immediately, often multiple countries simultaneously.

What is causing new ventures to opt for such a potentially high risk strategy? This more aggressive approach to offshore market development has emerged for a number of reasons.

Chiefly, it is as a result of Australia’s size. While Australia’s economy is in good shape – it is currently valued in excess of $750 billion, was last in recession in 1991, and has averaged 3¼% growth in GDP since then - the fact remains that we are a relatively small population. We constitute less than 1/3 of 1% of global population, our economy is the 16^th largest in the world, and we account for little more than 1% of global GDP.

With over 98% of global populations and global trade outside of Australia’s borders, a compelling argument exists for adopting a globalist perspective. Undoubtedly, those start-ups who choose to ‘leapfrog’ the traditional business growth cycle, and launch directly into international markets, see the world as their marketplace from the outset.

Additionally, over the past decade, we have seen significant developments in communications technologies. The rapid penetration of fixed, wireless, and mobile broadband services are not only enabling technologies for servicing a global market, but also a key driver of market demand for innovative software services.

Finally, Australia’s growing ex pat community is playing a role. Only a few decades ago it was quite rare for Australians to gain offshore work experience. Today, it is not only increasingly common; it is relatively easy for those still firmly rooted in Australia to tap into this network of experience.

Are Software Start-ups Unique?

Several other drivers peculiar to the software sector are shaping launch strategies:

• Export market homogenisation – Since the demise of the Berlin Wall led to the broader embrace of free market ideologies, both Western and Eastern cultures have become increasingly homogenised by entertainment technologies and the activities of modern conglomerates. This market homogenisation makes for expanding global consumer segments with readily identifiable and uniform tastes, interests, and desires.
• Operating system monocultures – While there are usually myriad OS offerings for any given hardware or device platform, the general trend is towards monocultures, where a single operating system has the dominant share (as Microsoft Windows does, for example, in corporate, home and online environments). The presence of software monocultures significantly expands the market for complementary software products while reducing development risks.
• Open Source – The growing availability of robust Open Source software development tools and environments such as Ruby on Rails, MySQL and PHP, and the communities of interest they attract, has dramatically reduced the costs associated with launching software products capable of scaling to meet global market needs.

Two further factors can be isolated as having a disproportionate impact in fostering a globalist mindset among software entrepreneurs.

The first is lowering barriers to entry into the Australian market. Industry giants, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, are serious competitors for any software start-up. Their existing audience reach, brand dominance, and capitalisation, together with mainstream consumers’ preference for ‘tried and tested’ companies, mean start-ups must assume offshore competitors will capture a large portion of the local market. One logical competitive response is to seek critical market mass by aggregating small pockets of customers across multiple markets.

The second is the desire by founders to position their start-ups to secure offshore investment. Australian entrepreneurs have long complained about the ‘immaturity’ of the local private equity market, pointing to the lack of money available for early-stage funding and less tolerance for risk among Australian VC firms. Attracting offshore investment is problematic, as investors prefer businesses with local market operations, the dynamics of which they are more familiar with. Positioning a start-up to enter attractive private equity markets, such as America or Europe, provides greater options for securing investment.