Web 2.0 Summit and related meetings in San Francisco are really cutting into posting frequency here. Thanks, by the way, to people who attended my session on Enterprise 2.0 yesterday. We had a good set of panelists (Ross from Socialtext, Jeff from Teqlo, Avi from Dabble DB, and Michael from Freshbooks), and despite being in a cavernous meeting room, I was able to spark some discussion with audience, which was great.
As an aside, Freshbooks’ back-extraction of realtime data — average invoice size by industry, receivable cycle length, etc. — from how people use the service got people’s attention. While we haven’t quite reached the point where software as a service is a loss leader that makes its money through advertising and through meta-data generated from usage, we’re going to be there sooner than many people think.
Finally, if people are interesting in reading deeper and more academic on this stuff, you can go all the way back to Shoshana Zuboff’s classic “In the Age of the Smart Machine”. She coined the word “informate” to describe how any automated process, whether in the office or on the plant floor, throws off reams of information, most of which is wrongly ignored.
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Great insight on monetization beyond just ads. Monetizing based on meta-data generated via usage is clearly a trend we’re going to see more and more. We’re at the leading edge of that right now.
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