Web and Internet Related Articles

The Next Disruptors (Internet specific articles extracted)

By Erick Schonfeld and Chris Morrison, Business 2.0 Magazine

Disruption is easy to spot - in hindsight. The railroads were always going to be better than canals and wagon trains. The telephone was bound to edge out the telegraph. The transistor was clearly superior to vacuum tubes. In recent years, digital cameras have stolen the market for film, the iPod has started to replace the CD and Google seems to be disrupting just about everything else.

But many companies are still coming to terms with the flood of new technology. Even when it’s right in front of your face, disruption can be hard to see.

THE DISRUPTOR: Blinkx
THE DISRUPTION: Web video search and ad insertion
THE DISRUPTED: Search engines and the TV ad business

The largest segment of Internet advertising, thanks to Google, is search. And the fastest-growing segment is video. San Francisco-based Blinkx believes that by putting them together, it can create a business that is greater than the sum of its parts. Blinkx is a video search engine that indexes more than 14 million hours of video available on the Web, everything from YouTube clips to old episodes of Seinfeld. Blinkx’s special sauce - something even Google doesn’t have - is software that can turn speech into text and count how many times a word pops up in a video. This is very useful to anyone selling targeted ads for, say, Junior Mints. Blinkx can also cluster videos together by topic.

In June, Blinkx announced a video advertising service called AdHoc, which CEO Suranga Chandratillake, borrowing a phrase from Google’s business model, describes as “AdSense for video.” The ads can take many forms: clickable “bugs” that crawl across the screen, banners that appear around the video, and, perhaps most innovative, a list at the end of the video of all the products mentioned in it. This fall Chandratillake will try out the ad system in his own peer-to-peer Internet video service, Blinkx Broadband TV.

Blinkx faces some formidable challengers: Google (Charts, Fortune 500) and Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500) have not given up on video search. But video is a different beast than the rest of the Web, and Blinkx has shown that it knows how to hunt it. If Blinkx can stay ahead of its giant rivals, it could one day take on regular TV. “It is only a matter of time before cable and satellite providers let you forage beyond the set-top box,” Chandratillake says. “When that happens, you will need a really good search engine.”

THE DISRUPTOR: PatientsLikeMe
THE DISRUPTION: An online community where patients can discuss and track medical conditions
THE DISRUPTED: The health-care industry, medical research

When Stephen Heywood developed Lou Gehrig’s disease, his brothers Ben and James turned to the Internet to learn as much as they could. There was plenty of basic data about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), as the condition is formally known, at sites like WebMD. But firsthand accounts about what the disease was like from the patient’s point of view were fragmented and scattered all over the Web.

So Ben and James, both mechanical engineers, teamed up in 2004 with classmate Jeff Cole to found a Web site to consolidate those accounts and help patients track their progress. They called it PatientsLikeMe, and it immediately developed what many other social networks struggle to achieve: a deep and engaged community, driven by members with a personal investment in the site. It started with ALS patients eager to share stories of what did and didn’t work for them but quickly grew to embrace users suffering from multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and HIV/AIDS.

“If there’s one patient in the world with a particular treatment, they’re there,” Ben Heywood says. “You see everything that everyone is trying.” The site has only a few thousand members, but it is capturing 10 percent of newly diagnosed ALS patients every month.

For researchers, access to such an engaged community of patients is a fast bypass around restrictive privacy rules that tie scientists in red tape. “The existing setup is very slow,” says Paul Wicks, an ALS researcher in London who got involved in the site in 2005. “For an old research project of mine, it took me about two years to get the questionnaire together and send it out. With this site, I can do the same thing in 30 minutes.”

 

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