Return of the Portal

All things old are new again.  I'm convinced the mobile apps movement is progressing at  breakneck speeds.    We aren't more than a year or two away from the "web" as we know it being regulated to an afterthought or become the second thing that gets developed for, it will be mobile first as Fred wilson says .

I believe this will evolve into content creators and media companies returning to the old idea of the web as the walled garden approach.   Web 2.0 was all about API's and mash-ups the app model will make entrepreneurs return to the idea of the early 2000's web of getting someone to your site and keeping them there.  This time it will be to try to get you to install the app and never close it by providing a large breadth of content all with ads surrounding it.

Think of this as being the equivalent of today's newspaper and magazine only with metrics of who is interacting with the ad. Again this is the same as the click through idea of the old display ads.  Now I'm sure (or not) that markers of learned a little from the old days and will try and provide relevant ads based on location, and other things fed into the app through facebook and the like.   Overall I think this is a step backward but we all have "app fever" and brands, startups and old media companies know it and will capitalize on it.

Not looking far enough down the road on data centers

I remember 2 or 3 years ago thinking that we would be moving toward "the cloud" and that would require more space for companies who provided web services will need space for their services. This would necessitate building of larger data centers where people could house their severs. The way I saw this as an opportunity for someone who wanted to build out this infrastructure

Well fast forward to today and while we have moved toward the cloud in email and sales software, etc. I didn't consider consolidation within the cloud. There's an undeniable move toward efficiency I guess I missed the idea that would end up with all the service providers using a few cloud companies. They will build their own data centers not lease a rack in a third party place. Look at companies like amazon, salesforce, google, rackspace are all building out custom data centers. Web startups are just using these mammoth Internet companies and i don't see that changing. There may be a niche still for some companies to lease some server space in the end we'll all be just buying cycles of someone else's cloud.

Apple's new cloud