Cyberposium 16 Speakers Highlight Deep Investment in

Content, Predict Decline of Private Cloud

by Douglas Melchior (OC) on December 6, 2010
Almost 600 people gathered last weekend on the HBS campus for Cyberposium 16, the worlds largest business school technology
conference. This year, Brad Garlinghouse of AOL, Joe Kennedy of Pandora, vmWare founder Diane Greene, and HTC CEO Peter Chou
delivered the keynote addresses. In past years, the conference included Jeff Bezos, Halsey Minor, Craig Newmark, and Jerry Yang.
AOLs Brad Garlinghouse kicked off the conference. Although he kept tightlipped about the new AOL mail, which it released on Sunday,
Garlinghouse did talk about AOLs push into local content. He left the audience with two takeaways: consumers want to see aggregated
content, and that content should be delivered through narrowed choice sets, much in a way that Pandoras algorithm delivers its music
content.
The next keynote was Joe Kennedy, who successfully turned around Pandora from an almost bankrupt company to a 70+ million-user service
by building a great product and marketing it by word-of-mouth. He says his service differentiated itself by investing in humans to decode
and understand the content, not simply creating an algorithm to do it. He foresees Pandora entering the vehicle market to compete with FM
radio.
The conference then broke into panels. In the online video panel, Googles Payam Shodjai predicted that consumers will engage with fewer,
but more content-rich ads, pointing to the Old Spice commercials as an example. One of the industrys challenges, the panel concluded, was
creating a coherent advertising experience across platforms, bringing mobile and the web together.
The second series of panels included Innovations in Payments. This, the panel concluded, is a challenging problem to solve. According to
the Karen Webster of Market Platform Dynamics, only 7% of payments are online. Few merchants outside of Amazon actually create the
infrastructure to learn from payment data. Privacy, and the threat of margin erosion and payment complexity, is forcing some users to return
to cash. Mobile wont solve this problemmerchants refuse to accept a shift in the industry in a chicken and egg holdup.
Diane Greene, who founded and built vmWare, came on stage. She sees a major commoditization of server, data storage, and routing
technology as large, public data centers become more prevalent and as these players edge margins from traditional enterprise players whose
customers will eventually migrate to the cloud. She outlined five barriers to this switch: trust and privacy, data control, rapid pace of
innovation, inertia of migration, and the vested interests of in-house IT staff. Greene mentioned that she is an investor in Rockmelt, which
was heavily discussed among the conferences participants.
The third series of panels included a panel on online advertising, moderated by Jordyne Wu of the inbound-marketing firm Hubspot. Jordyne
questioned advertising spending, a threat that was picked up by Chan Suh, founder of Agency.com, who criticized the circle of ignorance
and the vested interests of thoughtless marketing budgets. The advertising industry, from a customer perspective, could become less relevant
as internet users curate more content on services like Twitter and Facebook, rather than relying on advertising as a source of product
information.
The last panel series included an Enterprise Cloud panel, moderated by Flybridge Capitals Matt Witheiler. This year, the discussion focused
less on defining cloud computing and more on the impediments that Diane Greene outlined in her earlier talk. Donald Leka of Transmedia
reinforced the private clouds cost disadvantages, as billions of dollars are lost through proprietary technology duplication. Brad
Meisles of vmWare also chimed in: the business models currently in place could change, as the utility payment model of services consumed
may not persist.
Peter Chou, CEO of mobile device maker HTC, presented last with a most enviable revenue growth chart. The main takeaway from Peters
talk was that building a brand from a history of ODM was challenging and involved deep investment and commitment to quality.
Overall, there were a few trends from the conference. The first was that consumers are demanding a slimmer set of higher quality content
delivered through a narrower choice set. The second takeaway was that the transition to the public cloud, despite short-term hurdles, is
inevitablethe cost effectiveness of large cloud providers will push customers to consume cloud services at ever declining prices.