After web 2.0
My kids will grow up and they won’t understand how I lived and coped in a world without the web. I always found it amazing how my parents never really had a television growing up. How did they live their lives?!
We now live in the web 3.0 world, it is almost hard to remember what the world was like in the web 1.0 world. Do you remember how we had to dial-in our internet. The world has moved on a lot since then.
A brief history of the world wide web.
Web 1.0 Access to a new world- dial-in internet, netscape- ye that extinct company.
Web 2.0 Shared Economy. The birth of generation Y, social media and user-generated content.
Web 3.0 Collaborative economy. Cloud software. This is kinda where we are now.
We now live in a world that is more open than ever before driven by user generated content, social networking and collaboration as greatly envisaged by Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. We are entering into a world of uncharted territory. No one knows what the future holds. Great innovation serving our needs does not always win. Better Place just recently went into bankruptcy. The idea that the world doesn’t need electric cars nor that Better Place’s product is useless is simply not true. At some point at some time Better Place’s vision will be implemented on a large scale, unfortunately they will not be around to reap the benefits.
The Better Place bankruptcy teaches us about the importance of timing when creating a business. You may have a profound vision and an innovative product, but will it be possible to distribute it? Sometimes some things are too big or too great for their time. Great products often do not reach the mass market and sometimes our hopes and dreams may take a little longer to be fulfilled.
As seen above it is becoming easier to scale cheap and free products to millions of users, but getting people to part with their hard-earned cash as never been easy and this still remains a challenge for all innovation in today’s world.