The decadence of Venture Capital

Venture capital is out. The financial world is evolving and so are investment strategies. In a recent post Guy Kawasaki pledged for focusing on inexperienced entrepreneurs. About a week ago I was on a panel with Henry Wong from Garage Ventures inviting everybody who want to start a company to grab his business card. His pitch: "Don't worry about valuation - think what you can do with all the money".

An experienced entrepreneur would just roll his eyes and walk away. The ROI on Sandhill Road is no better than Wall Street. So why take the risk? VCs are in trouble and the latest post "In search of inexperience shows it".

The 7 reasons why entrepreneurs avoid Venture Capital today:

1) Ownership
Creating a company and following the entrepreneurial instinct is more than just fulfilling a dream to be one’s own boss. It is creating something that is better than what we have today, a journey to find people who help shape the idea, will buy it because it is better and a journey of evolution, improvement success and failure. Entrepreneurs need partners and not a financial owner that takes 50% of a company for a hand full of dollars and make it their own.

2) Passion
Entrepreneurs are extremely passionate about their idea and need to go their way with no interruption and constant "help" from an investor. Passion is not a guarantee for success but a key ingredient that once broken, breaks the business

3) Founding Leadership
A recent report from Morgan Stanly compared the world leading innovators such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco and others. One of the metrics was passionate founders in the executive bench. 9 out of ten got a check. VCs typically replace the leadership team within 3-5 years and bring "experienced" executives to the team, making the founder a second degree player.

4) Business Objectives
VCs are in the business’ business. Making money from shoving around companies. Butting less and less money in the first place to invest in more and degrade to 1:10 ration of a winning deal to a 1:20 ration. It's also called risk management. Entrepreneurs aren't players who like to play in that category. Business objectives of both groups have departed to far from each other.

5) Disruption
True entrepreneurs come up with disruptive ideas and try to make a difference. VCs are not really looking for such ideas - even so they say so. When Google was founded, it was Andreas Bechtolsheimer, one of the founding members of Sun Microsystems who gave Google money not a VC - Jee who would invest in this where we have Yahoo. Since Google went public VCs invested in over 50 search engines. Very disrupting. VCs didn't invest in MySpace or YouTube in the first place but now invest in 100ds of social networks or video sites - very disrupting.

6) Investment Profile
True Entrepreneurs ceased building their business plan to match a best practices list of people like Guy Kawasaki hoping that it matches the trend. The opposite is the case, true entrepreneurs have counterintuitive ideas, don't follow mean stream and create businesses in very different ways. entrepreneurship is no longer matching the idea of a VC to invest in.

7) Venture Capital Success
Entrepreneurs became very critical when it comes to the success of a VC. While some entrepreneurs don't really care as long as they get the money - true entrepreneurs do care. Today’s ROI of an average VC firm is lousy. They are under huge pressure to deliver results to their investors in order to maintain their management fees of several hundred thousand dollars per head and keep their Aston Martins and Ferraries. That pressure makes them irrational. And the downfall continues.



At the same time very attractive alternatives raised from that downfall. Healthy individual investors are much more likely to invest in disruptive technologies and true entrepreneurs. Large successful companies all have investment arms and seek people with new ideas and the ability to make the idea a successful reality. Even banks, which kind of evaporated from the entrepreneur’s scene, are back with very creative offers. And as Garage Ventures strategy is just a representation of what other VCs doing, seeking inexperienced entrepreneurs at all cost - the success rate will further decline until Venture Capital may completely reinvent itself sometimes in the very distant future.

Clearly people like me know that they are "unfundable" after stating their opinion. But that's the point, we don't care. Venture capital is just no longer of any interest - we are going after true investors who have only one goal: using their money to make more money - instead of expressing their opinions on tactical measures at board meetings.

Yahoo blocks Xeequa and others

It looks like Yahoo has a new spam filter. All emails from Xeequa, Tanooma and ChannelExcellence are blocked by Yahoo. We are working on the issue but it is extremely difficult to deal with Yahoo - so in the meantime GMAIL accounts work just fine.

To call Yahoo for support is another interesting exercise: pay $29

Oh well - another item in the comparison list Google vs. Yahoo

Internet Monopoly

Today I tried to get the new Fiber to the home from Verizon (FiOS). Unfortunately our area is not served by Verizon. O-ton Verizon sales rep :"You know it is a monopoly we can't serve your area, AT&T is". Hmm - I tries AT&T but they don't have any high speed Internet in our area. So I checked back with my current provider Comcast Cable - yes, I have Internet via cable but when I check bandwidth with my little tool I see upload speed of some 70 Kb.

Wow - and that all happens in Silicon Valley. Some times I hope I would be somewhere in Eastern Europe, 5MB fiber to the home.

So was that what we had in mind when we went from a government owned telecom to the "free market"?

Can you hear me - can you hear me now?

Happy New Year 2007

With the beginning of the new year and changes in the blog software I'm experimenting with a new Blog for Xeequa and updating this blog. The new software for Blogger is pretty cool - B U T as I converted it to the new format I guess I lost a lot of the old customizations such as the Technorati Links, Feedburner Links etc. Oh well...

Please visit also my new blog which is http://Xeequa.blogspot.com

Web 2.007 (Web two dot oo seven)

And of course – in the typical spirit of Silicon Valley – here are some more predictions:

- YouTube will have much more users then MySpace
- Web 2.0 will enter the business world
- LinkedIn will go public
- Investments in traditional software will be next to nothing end of 07
- The number of Internet users: 1 Billion
will become the "number of the year" for all marketers
- World of Warcraft may be another IPO candidate
but may be purchased by Sony and runs on the “cell”
- Xeequa will have more customers by end of 2007 than SFDC
(just kidding – but you get the ambition)
- Second Life will become the leading virtual business party spot
- TV and print adds will further plunge to total none importance
- Relevance as measured by Technorati, Alexa and others
will become the market cap index for private companies

Let me know what you predict :-)

Xeequa receives first award

What an honor - the company is not even launched yet and we get our first award. On Zolis block you can read:
And the Winner of the Weirdest Company Name Award is: Xeequa
I couldn't help to get some explanation. But hear the whole story on the 15th when we launch the company.
In any case, thanks Zoli.

Xeequa Company Launch

For many this this will come as a surprise. Only a hand full of people and a team of engineers knew about it. Today we declare end of stealth.

January 15th 2007 I will launch an new force in the collaboration space and particular Indirect Business. Xeequa, the new company is in business to help companies instantly create and manage profitable partner alliances. Unlike today’s channel management solutions, which are owned by one vendor for “their” channel, Xeequa allows instant Cross-Company Collaboration for all companies with all partners simultaneously. All based on Web 2.0 technology.

Tanooma, the SaaS directory, will also early next year come out of Beta. We already changed the advertising mechanism to Adsense by Google which allows us to simply interact with Google to leverage our ad space. SaaS companies can self register; self service their profile so that Tanooma is pretty much a fully automated - self supporting entity. Registering a company or searching through the SaaS industry on Tanooma is completely free of charge and we have no intention to charge for being represented there. That allows us to have the most complete directory in the SaaS space.

SIIA OnDemand Conference

An interesting conference – somewhat competing with Saascon in San Francisco. While Saascon was directed to SaaS End Consumer and bringing SaaS closer to the broader public, "OnDemand" was a conference for industry leaders discussing the future of SaaS.

The first few presentations reflected the clear trends and expectations that SaaS is going mainstream and many speakers and panelists predicted that SaaS will replace many on premise applications in the next few years. However some on premise applications like global large scale ERP implementations will remain behind the firewall for quite some years. An analogy was drawn to the 80's when PCs replaced terminals - yet today - 25 years later - mainframes and even terminals are still in business. The SaaS future seems to be in the hands of the new generation software companies who are built for SaaS from ground up. Discussions made obvious that companies who need to change from a license product business to an on-demand model will have a very hard time. While some predict that most license software companies will fail to make the move, others put the example of Concur up, who successfully made that transition in a two year effort.

An interestingly large portion of the conversation on the podium and on the floor was around indirect channels. While sales organizations are not large enough and marketing budgets are limited, SaaS vendors need to find ways to attract partners to spread the word and help implement their solutions. Some companies present their successes with channels.

2 month Sabbatical

Wow - 2 month through the US from coast to coast. Yes, this was a very educational, interesting and relaxing tour. Never in my live I had 2 month off - and yes it is hard to get back into business mode. On the other hand this was so helpful to better understand the country, the diverse cultures, peoples, challenges and opportunities. We came back thinking "California is an island".

Software as a Service is big - in California. But in the rest of the US? We talked probably to more than 100 different folks in Bed & Breakfasts, Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, Gas Stations, Supermarkets, in Parks or elsewhere - not a single person had an idea what Software as a Service is. Hmmm - so how are we doing in terms of SaaS marketing?

We visited computer stores: "What is hot these days?" "Multimedia in any way or shape." Videos, photos, MP3... Any business around Internet? Cable Modems, better screens, faster machines, a laptop for grandpa. On software? Antivirus programs. Microsoft? Hmm don't know nothing hot.

Now we are back and totally recharged

Interviewing Channel Thought Leaders

I interviewed several channel thought leaders from within the SaaS industry and share the details in my other blog "Channel-Excellence".

The essence so far:
The SaaS Channel is finally coming into existence. It is not so much the traditional VAR and Reseller now moving to SaaS, but much more completely new companies that form a business specifically to fill the gaps of the SaaS industry. These catalysts do basically 3 things right - that truly enhances the value of the SaaS vendors:

1) They connect (integrate) multiple SaaS applications to a complete information infrastructure (Implementation Services).
2) They provide additional ongoing services including content creation, modification or improvement in very many shapes (Recurring Services Model) .
3) They help smaller local businesses to overhaul and improve their very individual business processes and leverage the fast to implement SaaS application to provide tools to actually service those improved processes (Consultative Services).

The SaaS channels are true catalysts to the SaaS industry. They work in a very different way than traditional VARs and resellers did - and exactly that is the value they provide. SaaS Catalysts accelerate the SaaS industry and will become a true cornerstone to our future.

1,000 podcasts

Podcast has been in interesting topic for many people in the last few years. One person how ever took it to a new extreme: Eric Mattson. His own goal: Conducting 1,000 podcasts, interviewing marketers, innovators, entrepreneurs and other interesting people. I was number 68. Check it out.

Channel Excellence - the book

After 25 years in indirect business - growing channels for Rockwell International, building my own global distribution organization (Computer 2000), today part of Tech Data, successfully growing yet a new channel during the DotCom boom (Infinigate) - while the saying went "The internet eliminates the middleman", then building a new category of Channel CRM Software as founder and CEO of BlueRoads and lately helping the SaaS industry to create a whole new channel structure, I decided to write a book about "Channel Excellence".

I'm pretty far and plan to publish it in about 12 weeks. In the meantime I will interview channel chiefs, channel workers and people who helped shape the indirect channels in the high tech industry. Any inputs are very welcome!

To support that project I created a separate blog ay http://www.channelexcellence.com

Channel Sales & SaaS

Much is written about how Software as a Service will kill the indirect channel. SaaS vendors flip a switch and the application is live. It seams that the 250,000+ US based VARs and resellers go out of business any soon. But wasn’t that the story when the Internet came into existence? Or earlier when CDW opened their doors? Or… 1850 when the industrial revolution started?

N O – the channel isn’t going to die!
I recently talked to a few executives in medium and larger size organizations. And there was 1 single question that makes it so obvious what role a channel needs to play in SaaS: “Who has the capability to help us put it all together” – “Who can help me composing my new IT world which may consist of multiple vendors for different jobs i.e. Sales, HR, Expense Management and so forth”. The channel business simply hasn’t really started yet. But here are already several cases with great success stories.

B U T – the new industry needs a new type of channel.
There is no need for a warehouse, for technicians to install and configure software. The new world needs business savvy and business process aware people. There is no margin to be made from reselling but money from consulting, implementation, integration and ongoing maintenance. Feel free to download my whitepaper at Tanooma.


SaaS is not only no danger for the channel – it may actually be the biggest business opportunity in IT history. About 1 Million early adopter started with SaaS so far. About 750 Million will join the party in the next 10 years or so. That requires 1 – 5 Million Channel partners to act as catalysts for that new industry; it may turn out an even bigger channel than in the traditional IT industry.

TCO for SaaS Applications

SaaS is all different and so is their TCO discussion!
The discussion about the total cost of ownership for SaaS solutions is on the rise. In my last 5 years of selling SaaS solutions into corporate America – customers range from multi billion dollar global enterprises where we installed truly global solutions spanning multiple continents and even multiple external legally independent but connected organizations – the question of TCO was present, yet the conclusion may come as a surprise.

Let me start with the “good old days of IT”. Total cost of ownership was the “sum of all fears”. And they came in various flavors and shapes. The calculation typically started with server systems, backup capacity, network infrastructure, routers, hubs, cables, then of course the respective software, the operating system, the database, the applications itself, the tools, update cost, migration cost, maintenance contracts for software and hardware. Then we got more sophisticated and included air-conditioning, the floor space, energy, related facility cost and of course the personnel to run the whole show. Lately there is even more cost involved such as rising security cost, disaster recovery management related cost and also all the management overhead. As we try to customize the solution more and more – sometimes we customize us to death – we have cost that is even harder to calculate. With all that, financing the whole structure became another none negligible cost item.

To get even more sophisticated we added opportunity cost, downtime cost, resources that needed to be available in case something goes wrong. In the 90s we learned that the actual software for instance is actually just some 15% of the total cost (depending which calculation you use and which consultant you ask). And at the end we even had to purchase software that helped us to calculate the TCO which came on top of the TCO.

After about 20 years of TCO discussions it is interesting to note that there is still no generally accepted method or formula to calculate TCO in a way that we can compare values, benchmark ourselves and our vendors. Even worse – TCO became a ever more fuzzy marketing weapon with no real value associated that either financial analysts can build a judgment on, executives can base decisions on or purchases can be measured by.

Now let us look into the TCO calculation for a modern software as a service based information system: Let me take the same buckets: Server, backup, software, operating system, database, updates, migration, aircon, space, infrastructure, support, services, teams, financing and all the rest of it. Isn’t it interesting that we get all that for $20-$200 per user per month from a SaaS provider depending what we are using? What do we do at BlueRoads, Salesforce.com, Tanooma or who ever in the SaaS space for customers large or small, regardless whether it is a multi billion dollar Avaya or a 10 Million Dollar medical device startup. We, the SaaS providers, own and run the data center. We do OS upgrades; we manage the database servers and build the application around the database we choose. We do not need to worry about compatibility with 3 database vendors and their 50 different versions. We deployed the application, we provided the update, we manage the data migration at major updates, we support the user because we ARE the technical back end, we pay for energy, the server space. We do the system financing, the depreciation, the planning, the disaster recovery. The monthly software fee BECOMES the TCO unless we do something that is simply yesterday IT – we force the vendor to deploy it behind the firewall, customize it, put it on the customer’s server, and ensure compatibility to their database…
But that is NOT Software as a Service – this is an in-house web based application server, no different from any client server application.

Now the magic question: How on earth can a SaaS provider do that all for 60 bucks a month? Well if you think of it, Salesforce.com spreads their IT cost over 20,000 companies – not 1. But also for smaller SaaS companies – IT cost is may be still 1/1,000 of the cost of an internal IT organization simply by spreading it over 1,000 customers.

My conclusion – put the TCO discussion to rest (Sorry Gartner) – and may be worth mentioning there is no OWNERSHIP of the application, it is a service.

Tanooma Beta Phase 1

This is a little bid like my first child was born. Even so it is still closed Beta, we are out! Already fixed first bugs and collected first feedback.

After a presentation yesterday at the SIIA conference and the SaaS Workgroup - we feel pretty confident that we hit the right buttons. The SaaS industry needs a place to go. And while the larger vendors will build their user communities we are building a hub where all the users and communities will find each other. We will soon provide ways to not only expose applications, solutions, companies, people and expertise but also local and vendor bound communities.

One of the amazing things in Tanooma is our Genetically Networked Architecture (GNA) which went also live today. Rather than having endless attribute fields and complex related tables for those attributes we invented a whole new method of dealing with the DNA of people, products, companies, skills, possessions and other objects. We literally took the biological DNA concept and implemented it into software. Every attribute is a BASE, every serious of attributes becomes a GENE and all those attributes together become a Chromosome. Nothing a user or anybody other than us has to worry about. It is deep in the inner architecture of Tanooma but it does what we couldn't do in traditional methodologies: Manage an enormous amount of attributes for all sorts of people, companies and products and expose them in any variety quickly over the Internet. For those of you who are interested in that particular topic: I run a special blog for "Genetic Computing".

First semi public presentation of Tanooma

I posted a lot about the change the SaaS Methodology will have to the software industry. Also I discussed with may of you the challenges every SaaS provider has and how we could make a quantum leap at times where budgets are small and global trade is increasingly complex.

In times where marketing budgets are extremely tight, sales cost need to be reduced to the max – yet – a global market with over 750 Million PC users (our current installed base) need to be addressed in order to successfully compete. We all need to find new ways to market. The old idea of a market place didn’t really work, we need to think differently. Let us show you next Wednesday what we mean.

Tanooma is already the world largest SaaS directory even before we go live in a closed Beta May 18th. Today we have over 350 SaaS vendors, over 150 SaaS focused consultants and solution providers, about 100 SaaS focused investors, SaaS enablers, SaaS analysts, SaaS Experts and other industry contributors listed. The company is founded with the mission to help grow the SaaS industry to about 100 Million Internet Software Service users in the next 5 years.

We are going to collapse a complicated global industry business network into one fast accessible “Virtual Economy”. Users will find more vendors, more partners and more expertise in one place than in any other industry. Customers will be able to make educated decision in a fraction of the time compared to traditional solution evaluation. SaaS users will find a rich set of services such as Single Sign On, License Tracking, User-Supports-User Networks and more – all for FREE! Consulting partners will be able to rapidly build their vendor portfolio like in no other industry before and vendors will have almost instant access to hundreds of potential partners and daily growing. And this is only the beginning.

With Tanooma’s new “Human Interaction Model” (HIM) we rewrite the book of collaboration. As Denis Pombriant (Beagle Research) said after a briefing: “This is SO NEW, I really wonder where this can lead us”.

We will present Tanooma for about 20 Minutes at the SaaS Workgroup meeting on Wednesday May 17th. You need to register with SIIA for the workgroup meeting at http://www.siia.com/events/prereg.asp?eventid=576

First Tanooma Progress Report

We are having great traction in our development effort. The application is shaping up and we are still on plan to launch "Closed BETA" on May 18th. It is amazing to watch how fast development can be done these days by using smart tools. Creating a virtual economy isn’t easy. No place to look and see how others do it. No technology to read about and no processes to learn from other than abstracting how the physical economies were built – like in the US 250 years ago or Germany after complete distraction post WWII. But creating a whole new thing is such a rare challenge - it is a blessing.

The biggest challenge we were facing was the fact that users in Tanooma have by default multiple “lives”. There is the desire to manage personal applications like online bank accounts, access to financial services, online tax and other services. But there is also a need to mix that with the business applications such as CRM, accounting, marketing, research, HR applications and so forth. So for the first time the personal world and the business world has no longer clear boundaries. We needed to develop an architecture that ensures a single point of view but at the same time administrative separation for business and personal data. Even more difficult: if a user leaves a company. Business assets need to be cut while personal assets shall remain – and soon new business assets (applications and services) will be acquired. That new degree of complexity how ever should be completely transparent to the user – we promised simplicity! By looking into nature we began to copy genetic and motoric mechanisms and learned how to keep all that in the background. Like we don’t “think” we have to breathe and contract our heart mussels, a Tanooma user will not worry about the complexity of a virtually connected world.

The key focus of the Tanooma development is on its "Human Interaction Model" (HIM). Making it easy to search, find, identify, decide, relate, contact, connect, disconnect, communicate, learn, build and grow. The Tanooma world tries to eliminate boring tabulated data and get more interactive than any business application today. Even so we are far away from our vision – we will be able to show the path.

May 18th companies such as SaaS vendors, consultants, investors, enablers and other industry contributors will get access to the system and start configuring their outlet – so that June 20th when we allow users to beta test the new world, will find not only company names but details about their products and services.

We aggregated about 360 SaaS vendors, 85 SaaS focused VCs, 40+ Industry Analysts who track the SaaS space, a few new SaaS Enablers (companies like OpSource) and over 100 SaaS experienced consulting forms. All in all close to 700 companies dealing within the SaaS industry. The industry is not only slowly maturing – it is becoming VERY big – already.

SaaS and Rapid Development Technology

As we progress with our prototyping effort it was time for us to decide what kind of technology we will use for our final application. So I had several conversations with executives from Macromedia trying to understand their strategy around ColdFusion, I explored Ruby on Rails, considered an Ajax/JavaScript pure play and obviously the traditional Java world. I learned a few interesting things: the most prominent community and also one of the top 10 sites in the Internet: Myspace.com is built on ColdFusion. I noticed that my Bank of America online banking application is a vast ColdFusion site. I was reminded that Java and JavaScript are two very different things and Ajax is a JavaScript based environment/methodology. Yet the richest and most widely used user interface outside HTML is Flash. The world is not as homogeneous as it was. It is no longer Java versus .net like it was C++ versus Basic.

Clearly Java is a very powerful development environment and a developer can pretty much do anything - but also make any possible mistake and take for ever to debug their code. It very much reminded me at the assembler days. Assembler was this powerful, development environment which produced lighting fast code. How ever development took for ever, mistakes were difficult to debug and changes to difficult to implement.

In the fast moving SaaS and Web 2.0 world we are at a similar crossroad. Do we go with the traditional Java code or do we rethink even that. In Tanooma we came to the conclusion that we choose speed over secure tradition.

The soon to be ready for Beta of Tanooma is a multi tenant multi organization cross communication application. Meaning multiple accounts such as SaaS vendors will use it, unlimited users will look at the respective offerings, consultants will be able to connect with vendors but also with users and investors will be connected with any company they are invested in or interested in. A technology which I call "Account Bridge" supports that cross organization cross communication. The development environment needed to allow that kind of complexity, support clustering to support a large amount of users to be simultaneously logged in and perform their activities. While Java seamed to be the logical choice - we decided to go with ColdFusion, AJAX, JavaScript, ActionScript and Flash. It took only 3 month to develop a functional prototype. The application is richer than pretty much anything on the market today - but at one price: There is no longer this one "language" we use. It is a collection of best of breed tools which all promised to interact - and we are very lucky: they do. But Tanooma is not the only company that questions Java as a development platform. Many of the new apps whether they come from Google, AjaxLaunch or many others avoid the long and rather complicated development cycles and leverage the rather new and much more user attracting Flash and Ajax world.

Single Sign On for SaaS

Single Sign On seems to be one of the hot items when it comes to SaaS application usage. While traditional software resides on your PC and you just load it - Internet Software Services need to be securely accessed over the Internet. The need for SSO (Single Sign On) becomes pretty obvious. As users have more and more SaaS applications in conjunction with other online services, the user-ID/Password handling becomes kind of ugly. Yes you can store them on your PC, but that doesn't feel too save either. In particular when you think of all the applications you access outside salesforce.com, BlueRoads, Recruitmax, RightNow and you name it such as etrade, schwab, bankofamerica, ebay, amazon...

Now - SSO is not that easy. There is either integration work to be done so that each and every software vendor is good with the service or there has to be whole new ways to be developed. We are working on various options within Tanooma and will provide some alternatives when we come out. But there is not only a technical challenges to overcome but also legal issues in regards to contract definitions. Some vendors for instance - such as LinkedIn, have very specific definitions in their contract regarding how you access the application.

So the SaaS industry has to overcome 2 battles when it comes to SSO - a technical acceptable solution and a legally respected way of doing it. We will work on both and welcome any input or concerns.

Yet another rapid change in the browser world

I remember the days where Internet Explorer was 97% of the used browsers. Right – that was after the time where Netscape was 90% and IE was 5%. But if I look at my stats today IE is down to 62%, Firefox is 23% and – check this out Opera is 10%; others 5%.

Now a related dynamic: new Web 2.0 products like AjaxSketch or AjaxWrite are only available for Firefox. Isn’t it a bold move to develop something and ignore the dominate technology? Well there is stuff out there that is simply not possible in IE.

Talking about Web 2.0. I found a great chart at oreilly's site, explaining Web 2.0 versus Web 1.0:

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

Also checkout TechCrunch.com it's a great site to be up-to-date with Web 2.0