In my short time here at my new company I’ve become even more bullish on what I’m calling Money3.0. Why Money 3.0? Well, Money’s been around a long time, and I think Money 2.0 was really pioneered in the 50’s with the brith of payment cards. I think we have amassed significant intellectual property and world-wide acceptance and availability of technologies that we helped bring to market that lay the groundwork for what I’m calling Money3.0.
I use 3.0 specifically in relation to the 2.0 so often used in the media, in the techdailies, bizrags, blogosphere and the like. Web2.0 is a lot of things to a lot of people and I don’t want to go into detail about the topic that is covered so completely in so many other places. Suffice it to say that there are many undercurrents and social memes and technology driving those phenomena, and I want to make one distinction clear.
I think it is important and it is truly at the root of this coming transformation, or what I call the exformation of our industry. Don’t worry, I’ll explain exformation in detail in this blog. Meanwhile, you can google it to start to get up to speed on it.
Web1.0, early CERN, WWW and HTML.
We all know web1.0 was the static web. The world wide web of one-way information, pictures, cheesy music and flaming spinning logos. In other words, a lot of hype that helped an entire new generation get acquainted and familiar with concepts like market bubbles, paper millionaires and implosives corrections. Who would have guessed what good training that would be?
Web1.0 is where many of the currently “cool” tech titans cut their teeth on making what would eventually become marketplaces or economies in their own right. The emergence of ecommerce sites and disruptive innovators like Amazon, eBay and Rhapsody began to prove out that business could be made on the web while companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle watched for the business model to emerge. Companies that took it upon themselves to making this burgeoning ecosystem more user-friendly and useful like Google and Yahoo! Carved out nice niches for themselves by providing entirely new services that the traditional companies didn’t understand. Many a picture of a furry mammal (the upstarts) running around tapping dinosaur eggs (the tech incumbents) was rampant on the net.
Web2.0, O’Reilly’s Participatory Contribution Revolution
Web2.0 is the read-write web, or the participatory web. O’Reilly (and no, not the Factor, but Tim, the Geek) is most lauded as the coiner of the term, though he was more like its biggest promoter. Web2.0 is wikis, blogs, RSS, XML and podcasts. Everybody wants to be in on 2.0, right? Put 2.0 on the end of something and there is an implied inflection point in whatever product, good, service or experience you’re providing. 2.0 inspires many a vision of grandeur about the democratization of the tools of content production and participatory nirvana the likes of which wikinomics or freakonomics or whatever your favorite economic buzzword du jour could sell you. And these were not necessarily bad things. 2.0 innovations brought us sites like flickr, youtube, delicious, digg, upcoming, evite, and of course, social networking favorites, myspace, LinkedIn and facebook, oh my!
Many electronic payment upstarts that are now long gone tried to do for the web what the payment card industry had done for banking, but it was hard, especially as the banking and financial sites began to dip their toes in the web2.0 waters after PayPal’s meteoric rise and acceptance.
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