WordpressA growing ecosystem, not only for media 2.0

Who am I?

• Fabrice Epelboin, 38 yo, French raised in the US

• Startupper since 1995

• 1995 - Babel, web agency, +300 employees, bubble-crashed

• 1999 - Owendo, IT shop, IPO’ed

• 1999 - Prizzo, Priceline mee-too

• 2004 - Agorami, white label social networking platform

• 2007 - Botsarena

• Web strategy consultant for major Eu media companies

• IT B2C prospective consultant for IT companies

IT for a startup

• What are the IT choices available when starting a venture?

• Knowing that:

• Initial project definition WILL change

• Initial business model WILL change

• Initial features WILL evolve

• Fundings WILL be limited

• You need several alternatives ready in case your choice fails

Dream IT

• Who can provide this?

• Ruby on Rails

• Scaling is a nightmare, beside that, it’s nearly perfect

• PHP+Drupal

• IT can be a nightmare, but Drupal has proven to be a solid startup fondation

• PHP+Wordpress

• Considering RoR scaling problem, WP+PHP is a safe alternative

• Features provided via plugins narrows the choices but speed up the dev process, etc.

• many more, of course...

Dream IT

• Must have

• Rapid prototyping

• Low cost (IT, project management...)

• Iterative design

• User feedback / Co-creation (Lemeur vs 36signals)

• User as tester (e.g. fine user management)

• Users as feature designer

WP IT as Lego

• WP, WPmu: blog, cms

• BuddyPress: Social network

• BBPress: Forum

• eCommerce plugins

• Vast plugin library

• What else do you need? a new Plugin, perhaps? See IT ecosystem

playing in the WP ecosystem

• Media 2.0 ecosystem

• Blogs as micro-companies

• Blog networks

• Tomorow’s high-traffic socialwebsites

• Ad network as a link between micro-media

• Designers (premium theme getting very impressive)

• IT ecosystem

• Services (Askimet, widgets, etc)

• Consulting

First WP startup

• Beside media 2.0 ventures, what do we have?

• Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors

• Yet to come Kawasaki projects

• Thedesigncanopy, WP as lite CRM ?

• WP in intranets: Weka

• Botsarena, personal attomated aggregator

• Tomorow...

• Social network & WP... look at Automattic

• WP as an alternative to Socialtext

Thanks!Any questions?

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/epelboinemail: fabrice.epelboin@gmail.com