Just recently, I’ve been thinking about the women’s market on the Web. I had been fortunate enough to meet a number of women entrepreneurs and as I saw what they were working on, it got me thinking about women’s products and services on the Net.
When I thought of women focused Internet products, all I could see were sites dedicated to men, fashion, shopping, and baby care. Why is that? These may be the most prominent of all topics that women *seem* to focus on, but they also seem very shallow and very stereotypical. Surely women must be interested in other things too?
I suppose entire industries have been built around these categories, and thus maybe they are a faster path to profits as product manufacturers want to advertise around those content areas. You talk about fashion and gain a following, and voila! you’ve got fashion advertisers wanting to buy ads on your site. Seems pretty easy to me.
So do women think about anything else but the “big 4”? I would think that women weren’t so shallow as to think about nothing but the “big 4” and there must be opportunity for women focused products and services beyond these topics. I think the problem is two-fold.
First, I don’t think people are thinking broad enough about women’s products and services.
As soon as you try to target women for your site, you immediately think about the stereotypical things that women think about all day. I think this is missing the boat. You can definitely focus on the “big 4” and there is much improvement that can happen in those categories. But I think there must be more content areas than these. Are women interested in NOTHING else but men, fashion, shopping, and baby care? COME ON. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous just to read a statement like that?
I also think there is much that could be done beyond content.
For example, what if you put a feminine spin on email? Is there some optimization in the way women communicate that hasn’t been capitalized on yet? This can be in functionality, the GUI, visual design (and I’m not talking about making it pink), and other subtle or visible modifications. My belief is that this is hugely unexplored, and that sometimes taking the functionality and tweaking it slightly, can have a huge effect on the users. If this is done correctly, it is possible that women will all of a sudden find your product a little more attractive, a little more fun, a little more everything and may not even be able to articulate it.
Look at the difference between Windows and Mac OS. At a gross level, you could say that they were both icon-driven windowing systems with menus and mostly controlled by mouse. But once you start playing with either, you’ll find it’s the subtle differences that make the Mac OS so much better than any Microsoft product.
Second, I think the lack of women entrepreneurs on the Net, both in management and in engineering hampers the development and exploration of women’s products and services.
If you look at most development teams, they are primarily male. Today’s universities are just not turning out nowhere near as many women engineers as there are male engineers. So what happens. Whole product teams are working on products that subtly become more male oriented because that’s where their natural sensitivies lie. They’re men, so they design things that resonate with themselves.
So you see the problem I have with women’s products today. Women should be designing women’s products, not men. And while many women’s product teams are led by women, I still don’t think there are enough women on the team to really make the differences seen and felt. Products are simply rehashed men’s products – I would even argue that today’s gender neutral products are inherently men focused simply because they are designed by teams that are largely composed of men. That doesn’t mean that women can’t use them; but it does mean that the subtle optimizations that could occur, aren’t.
So let’s ask ourselves: what if a gender neutral Web product today were designed and engineered solely by a team of women? Would it come out the same or different?

About 3 weeks ago, our venture fund was named Neuron Ventures. Then we had to change it. We spent $500 to do a trademark search and found at least two other people with names close to ours and in our industry.
What a completely saturated world of names this has become.
Between cybersquatters, the limit of our vocabulary, and the creativity of wordsmiths there is very little left.
So to name something, you first brainstorm a whole bunch of names. Then you do domain name searches. After all, how can you do business in 2006 without a website? Once you find an unused domain name, it doesn’t stop there. You need to search for close prefixes and word portions and also potential variants in combinations with the name. Any variants close enough to be possibly associated or mistaken for your name need to explored then for working in your industry.
For our previous name, Neuron Ventures, there was already a Neuro Ventures out there, as well as a Platinum Neuron Ventures. Both were venture funds so we had to ditch our name and get a new one. Thus, we did not want to risk a cease and desist letter from someone who feared we could be infringing on their name, and we did not want others mistaking us for them and vice versa.
If only we had done the name search in the beginning….spending $500 to save ourselves from this grief would have been a small price to pay.
At some point, it will become a serious problem for the entire Web. The namespace is getting extremely filled up. How long before 99% of the words you could come up with are already taken? It’s almost getting as bad as trying to pick a new email name on Yahoo! Mail or AOL. Would Neuron Ventures have to become Neuron_Ventures_2938182? You’ll have to spend a million bucks to hire a professional naming firm just to come up with a new name!
The new name for our venture fund is Chroma Ventures.

..when companies care less about profit and more about doing something good for the community.
On April 2, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Death by Smiley Face: When Rivals Disdain Profit”. It talked about how all these new Web companies came into being to provide a great and much needed service to the Web community and focus on doing it well, rather than turning a profit.
It brought me back many years, when Gmail was first launched with 2 GB of free space in it. At the time, Yahoo was selling via yearly fee 1 GB of mail space. Yahoo became almost neurotic in anxiety about it! I was amazed. After all, Google, their biggest rival in search was about to threaten a huge premium service revenue stream by offering something that many people were paying for….for FREE – and then some!
And now, according to this NY Times article, many other examples exist where companies will provide a great service but not have profit generation as a primary goal. It certainly provides an interesting point of disruption to new Web businesses, and old traditional businesses too.
I thought back to one thought I had during that Gmail 2 GB/Yahoo Mail 1 GB for a fee time. And that was: What if Google were to offer everything that Yahoo had for free? What if everything Yahoo did for profit, or any other company on the Web for that matter, was, all of a sudden, available for free AND the service was as good or better? What if a whole population of users suddenly flocked to these free services and the profits of Yahoo dropped preciptiously, as well as many other Web companies? My fear was that with the profits from search marketing, Google could have stuck it out much longer than any competitor by offering their services for free and killed every company whose livelihood depended on profits generated from those very services that Google decided to put up for free.
And now with the Web 2.0 way of doing things, you can build pretty complex stuff for almost no cost at all. So two guys in a garage can truly put up something that would have taken many (expensive but talented) engineers to write from scratch.
So tell me, what if everything on the Net were available for free?

It must have been sometime in the middle of 2004 when the term Web 2.0 really gained momentum. A combination of the opening up of data sources, the social aspect employed against common services, the changing of economics from the dotcom boom years, the ease of development using open source technologies, and a shift in power from traditional companies to the people themselves especially in areas like journalism, among a myriad of other things – Web 2.0 was embraced by just about everyone.
But now, in less than 2 years, we’ve raced to Web 2.8 and accelerating. With everyone jumping on the bandwagon, there are now TOO many blogs, TOO many little tools, TOO easy for others to take your idea and incorporate it into their own services. How does a consumer differentiate between all the services out there, whose reported competitive differentiators are indistinguishable in the minds of the consumer? A lot of these services were also built with no business model in mind. How do they support themselves? They may be cool mashups and little desktop tools, but they aren’t big enough to drive enough revenue to support even the developer.
Sure now the Web has transformed quite a bit since the early growth days from 1995 to 2001. But I would argue what is next? The Web’s quick development time has also become it’s own way of forcing evolution to run at lightspeed. Like the frightening mutations of viruses becoming resistant to drugs faster than new ones can be developed, the Web is also transforming at an alarming rate – too alarming for those of us operating in the Web world to keep up?
Is there a Web 3.0 about to appear and what will that look like?