Technology, Venture Capital, Private Equity

“Web 2.0″ is a phrase that I’m beginning to loathe using these days. It is typical of most concepts in technology. At first, it is catchy and trendy to get hooked on to and talk about. Then, gradually from there, it goes to becoming mainstream to mundane and finally it gets so abused and its definition so far removed from what it was conceived to connote in the beginning that it starts losing appeal for serious technical usage. Yet, if one were to trace the history of the WWW and what the phrase Web2.0 was essentially meant to capture, it was the notion of the evolution of the Web from a repository of content to a platform of interlinked services. 
The beginnings of this could probably be traced to Dave Winer’s formulation of the SOAP protocol, which MS immediately latched on to and made the cornerstone of its .Net platform (or at least thats the way they marketed it). Of course, the phrase Web2.0 was still not invented back then, but critical pieces of the functionality to make the transition happen were beginning to fall in place. While this was going on, the other major parallel development that was taking place was this whole “social” and “user generated” phenomenon. Then, somewhere along the way, the two converged and it wasn’t too hard for someone like a Tim O’Reilly to come along and give the beast a name – “Web 2.0″. The tech community also contrived another novel moniker for such interlinked services – “Mashups”. 
For long, I have been a skeptical about the utility of mashups. It seemed that the only examples of mashups that its proponents could cite were to do with map applications (like Google Earth or Yahoo Maps) superimposed on other popular Web applications such as Craiglist or local yellow pages directories etc. I was of the opinion that it could have a limited place in the world of consumer services, but would find it hard to gain widespread acceptance amongst serious business users (read corporates / enterprises). I have been following the Teqlo adventure ever since I learnt about it on the Peter Rip blog. I was beginning to wonder whether I was missing something in my understanding of this space. And lo, we had Jeff Nolan, a former SAP Ventures partner, who was hired as CEO of Teqlo announce on his blog that he was quitting the startup and that Teqlo “needs more time in the oven” and later Peter Rip himself admitting that Teqlo needed a course change.
As my thoughts on the subject were getting firmed up, I bump into this company – Sky Click, which indeed seems like a successful “Web 2.0 mashup” and has forced me to do a rethink. Before we get into what Sky Click does, it is important to note that one of the key attributes of a mashup is that ideally the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts. What that means is that mashups should deliver a value to the end user which is uniquely defined and hard to achieve otherwise. And thats precisely what Sky Click does. It is a sort of a sales leads generation service for small websites and businesses. It combines two of the most successful Web 2.0 hits – Skype and Salesforce.com and allows its subscribers (small website owners) to incorporate a click to call facility in their websites. It supplements this with a call center in the back end and is also linked to a salesforce.com application for tracking the leads. So, when a user visits the subscriber’s website, he has the option of leaving his ph no or his Skype id to allow sales reps to contact him. Sky Click’s reps in its call center then call up such interested users, qualify them and share the qualified leads back to the subscriber (website owner) via the salesforce.com application. So, in effect, a small business or website can have its own virtual call center facility for generating sales leads for a few hundred  10 dollars subscription fee a month. Neat. Since, no small business can afford to own and operate a call center on its own.
On learning about Sky Click, I am beginning to believe that SaaS applications like Saleforce.com could form the cornerstone of mashup adoption in the enterprise world. And, maybe thats how Teqlo will be repositioned going forward. Am I right Peter?