MaRS

iPad

Besides creating content that tells magnificent stories and choosing platforms that sustain an ecosystem, a complete framework also need applications to facilitate the interaction between users and media.  In my previous two blog posts, I gave a preview of the most promising developments in content and platform in 2010.  Although content is the centre of the digital experience and the platform determines the audience, an application is perhaps the most important of the three components when discussing how to repurpose existing information so that it is accessible and usable.

There are many intermediary applications encoding and decoding electronic files on different platforms before one can consume content in text, audio or visual forms.  For instance, users first find digital media through web search engines before they can watch videos online.  2010 will see many applications that challenge the status quo of how we consume and think about digital media in our homes and in the workplace.  Here are three items on my to-watch list:

Developers: Applications for innovation

The Innovation Movement, a coalition spearheaded by the Consumer Electronics Association to advocate “…policies that stimulate America’s innovation economy and promote entrepreneurship,” launched a contest recently that caught my attention.

Targeting software application developers, Apps for Innovation is calling for entries in one of two categories:

• Apps that illuminate with data how innovation and entrepreneurial activity are at work across America
• Apps that will help the members of the Innovation Movement advance policy goals that support innovation

Here’s the round-up of the week in the newsfeeds. Below I highlight my favourite articles of the week from each category.

Today’s Top Pick – “Ottawa’s technology community strengthened through $44 million initiative“. Find out more under Information and communication technology.

Tale of 100 software entrepreneurs

A recent great blog from IPO Dashboards, “How long does it take to build a technology empire?” talks about the results of research on 100 of the most successful software companies now in business. It shows that they took an average of 10 years to reach $50 million of revenue. The data covers at least 30 years of company formation, so on average there are three companies founded every year that make it into the top 100.

Some older stats I calculated based on research into technology company formation shows that, on average, it takes about six years for a software company to get to $10 million revenue. Thus, getting to $50 million in ten years (the average on this list) makes sense as this is a 50 per cent annual growth rate from years six to 10.

Crumbling monoliths bring opportunity

Monolitten – “The Monolith” – is a 17m high Norwegian monument. As with all monoliths, The Monolith is carved out of a single piece of rock – in this case, granite.

During the 1990s, the monolithic software application dominated the enterprise software market, both architecturally and in business models. Originally associated with mainframe computing, in software terms, “monolithic”  describes a self-contained software package in which user interface and data processing code is wrapped into a single, proprietary solution with little or no interaction with other software. Software empires like Microsoft, CA and Oracle were all built on the back of monolithic solutions.

The enterprise applications market is changing away from the monolithic model — driven primarily by the ubiquity of internet-related technologies, making the monolith increasingly porous and dependent on services, lightweight applications and deep links with data and functions delivered by third parties. This isn’t news to anyone who pays attention to the field – it merely confirms a trend.  However, as monolithic software packages become a thing of the past, we’re finding opportunities for start-ups in this space. This is discussed in MaRS’ latest Market Snapshot: Enterprise Applications: Opportunities for Ontario’s software start-ups