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LiveIdea.ru interview with Anatoly Milner, iTech Bridge creator

  1. Hello, could you introduce yourself to our readers?

    What interests you more: yesterday’s my life or today’s?
  2. Actually, today's, but if you can, a few words about yesterday ...

    The main production life, if I may say so, was in my Kiev. A computer engineer, a programmer. He was the leader of several projects in the field of SAPP and control systems. He defended his thesis. He founded and was the chief editor of the largest publishing house in those days in Ukraine, which published newspapers, magazines and reference books on the subject of IT and telecommunications. Both for users and for professionals. The specifics of the wild market of those times, known to many businessmen, made me an immigrant. What I call Ukrainian M & A happened. Take a look at the website of the SoftPress publishing house that swallowed us. The main part of the publications listed there was established by me. I think you can move to today?
  3. Yes please.
    ')
    I live now in the USA. Since I didn’t prepare a spare airfield at the time and left empty-handed, I had to start all over again. Now I have a small company iTech Bridge . Gradually taxied to the social Internet. Consultant for professional and business applications of social networks. We are doing a little SaaS (software-as-service). By the way, I can not stand the word "social" in the context of the Web.
  4. And why are you against this word and what do you mean by the term “Social Network”?

    There is such a thing as a “false friend of a translator”. As an example, control is usually given. It is known that this word cannot be translated as “control” - only “control”. The same can be said about “social”, and even more so about the combination of “social networking” that is more commonly used in relation to Web 2.0. Both that and another is better translated as “broad communication”. The word “social” in the Russian language has a completely different meaning. You, for example, never say “social television” - only “public”. Well, oh well, unfortunately, you cannot get anywhere from the “social network”. But as far as my understanding of this term is concerned, we will need another interview to clarify this issue ( laughs ). I can only say that I always try to draw the line between a social resource as a product and a social network as a community that has rallied around this product.
  5. What project are you working on at the moment?

    We are trying to build a social resource for specialists. This resource should support information activities in a wide variety of professional fields. It can be used as a means of searching, evaluating, sorting and accumulating information, analyzing and generalizing it.
  6. Anatoly, tell me, what is dictated by the desire to create a new social network, than you are not satisfied with dozens of existing ones?

    Resolve the counter question. And can you among the dozens (or rather hundreds or even thousands) of existing resources name at least one that solves the tasks of our project? Those tasks that I outlined above.
  7. I should think…

    Do not waste your time. All the same, do not remember. There are no such resources in Web 2.0! In RuNet there is no one among them either. If you take the complex social resources of mass use such as MySpace , Facebook , VKontakte and the like, here everything revolves around blogs, a little bit of forums, a little bit of “karma”, good internal mail and friends, friends, friends. Sorry, I forgot that there are no friends anymore, only the "friends" remained. Only in one case, these friends are more interested in sports, in the other - music, in the third - something else. Sometimes they live in the same city, sometimes they are scattered all over the planet. That's the whole difference.
  8. You talk about massive social resources. What about Enterprise 2.0 . Is there really nothing for professionals?

    Of course have. I'm not talking about Runet - business "social sphere" here and does not smell. But in the West they talk a lot about it. But let's see what Enterprise 2.0 today is in the part of interest to us, which is sometimes collectively called MyBusinessSpace. There are two main applications of social resources for business. The first is the corporate web itself. Each such corporate resource, first of all, is private and serves the employees of a large company through its Intranet. Sometimes “open” services are provided to customers and partners of the company.
  9. And the second direction is to use Facebook? But entrepreneurs do not like this resource.

    Yes, the second direction of Enterprise 2.0 is the use of mass social resources for business purposes. As a rule, these are complex resources like Facebook. They are widely used for example for marketing or recruiting. We are talking about professional social resources that are not directly tied to the needs of a particular company. Although no one, of course, forbids them, if necessary, to make them purely corporate. By the way, such “open” resources will largely remove from managers what you are talking about, the so-called “Facebook syndrome”, not to mention MySpace. After all, it doesn’t cause objections in smart managers if an employee goes, say, to a science and technology library or to a conference during working hours.
  10. But don't you go the same market niche that LinkedIn and My Circle work on ?

    You are absolutely right, it is she. I would just add Plaxo here. However, the resources you mentioned are, if I may say so, mono-service. And their only social service is aimed at solving the main task - the establishment or restoration and expansion of business contacts. We are talking about complex information rich resources. Business contacts are also needed here, of course, but they still play a secondary role.
  11. And yet, what kind of functionality do you put into your project? How will your network be fundamentally different from the existing ones?

    Thanks for asking. On this subject, I am ready to talk as much as necessary. But in order not to bother you and readers, I’ll just say that the complex social resource that we build organically (I emphasize this word) integrates into itself and quite specifically “delivers” services such as blogs (personal and collective), forums, social bookmarks, social news, social news aggregators, wikis and other co-creation opportunities. As you see, this list considerably exceeds the one adopted in traditional complex resources like MySpace and Facebook.
  12. Do you mean only test content?

    Not. A single information stream at the output of the resource combines the most diverse information, including video and audio. The information in this stream is ranked by quite original algorithms that take into account the estimates of both the users themselves and the experts. At the same time, the structure and content of the information flow is the subject of multi-level customization and filtering, which takes into account the personal interests and preferences of users. In particular, users may refuse to trust other users and even experts. For this, the traditional mechanism of "friendship" has been significantly modified.
  13. And what is absolutely no analogues?

    No straight lines. Of course, there are indirect, in separate fragments of the project. I would single out here: bigthink , ClearSpace (with wiki), reddit , technorati , well, and, of course, habrahabr (without wiki). As for information ranking algorithms, I emphasize once again that they have no analogues. We, in any case, are not known.
  14. What age level is your social network?

    Just not on the age of basic Twitter users. I think, in general, soon all the “girls with pigtails” will go with him to mobile social networks. And the Internet is growing up. And it's not even about age, although our average user will still be older than the current average. The main thing is that the user of our resource is a true professional, and those, I believe, can be ONLY from among intellectuals.
  15. You position your project as an “intellectual” and “intelligent” network, what is included in these concepts for you?
    Again the terminological question. To begin with, intelligence and intellectuality are not the same thing. When I first started talking about all this, they started laughing at me. Like, some nonsense carries. There can be no social Internet intelligent, by definition. Thank you top4top ( laughs ) at least for the fact that its creators, thanks to their monetary millions, albeit only in words, have legalized intellectuality and intelligence in relation to social resources.
  16. And what do you think about the concepts of “intelligence” and “intellectuality” that you like so much?

    For me, intelligence is determined by the state of mind in the amount of total erudition. Intelligence, above all, is determined by the state of the soul, or inner culture. The higher the internal culture, the higher the intelligence. The state of mind plays a secondary role. We all know well that not every intellectual can be called an intellectual. However, let's agree, no more terminology questions to be asked.
  17. Already agreed. And how do you think of organizing a network so that intellectuals and professionals, and not just people “pass by”, actually enter it?

    For the time being we discard aspects of functional sufficiency and quality of service implementation, without which no one needs our resources, in general. Imagine that everything planned has begun to play. Including played and special mechanisms for assessing user information and the users themselves. As I said, these mechanisms are one of the most original parts of our project. And, namely, they, in particular, are designed to protect our resource from bystanders and random, let's say, information. And, generally speaking, the problem of protection from a random user is not the worst. It’s harder to solve the problem of how to reach your main user.
  18. And how are you going to do this?

    We really hope for the revolution of social platforms that is happening on the Internet now. In this regard, we are looking forward to when LinkedIn will fulfill the promise and open its platform Intelligence Application, compatible with Open Social. Maybe it will be possible to connect to LinkedIn users by installing the application of our resource there. But, of course, this is only one of the promotion options we are considering.
  19. And why did you emphasize that the task of protecting against a random user is only private?

    Because the main task of the evaluation mechanisms introduced into the resource is another. And I have already spoken about this. The correct ranking of information flows, taking into account the specific interests of specific users - this is what matters most to us. We want, finally, to move from the madness of the crowd, typical of most of Web 2.0, to the wisdom of the collective mind.
  20. Due to what your network (or resource, in your opinion) will develop? Where are you going to get sources of funding?

    The question is, of course, interesting. Where to get? And there, where all startups take - from investors. But we are going to contact them after the completion of work on the demo version of the resource. In other words, we don’t hope for seed financing. Well, and then, of course, we cannot do without third-party investments. The project is still quite large. And not in the amount of software codes even a problem. Entering today's crowded social resource market requires significant overhead for every line of code. They exceed the cost of programming itself by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, this attitude continues to grow inexorably. Ideally, of course, we want to find a strategic partner. For example, Microsoft with its concept of Software + Service suits us very much ( laughs ).
  21. You have a lot of experience in this field, what other projects have you worked on?

    I can not boast of extensive practical experience, namely, in the field of the Internet. However, as I have already told you, I have enough experience in leading large-scale IT and publishing projects, and in implementing them. Perhaps this is what is now lacking for many generators of ideas. After all, the days of the gold rush of Web 2.0. are over. The next step is growing up. I think this concerns not only users, and the concept of the social Internet, but also web startups.
  22. What is the most interesting thing on the modern Internet?

    Information, or as they say now, content. In general, I believe that the prioritization of the mass and professional social Internet is different. In the mass, the main thing is communication, in the professional - information.
  23. If you were an investor, in which projects would you have invested money without hesitation?

    If you mean social, then complex information-oriented, and not only for professional use. I want to be understood correctly, we are talking about today and tomorrow. The market of mass resources is already divided. Users are distributed, and according to sociologists, they are not going to change their attachments yet. Giants of this market began to open their platforms. Moreover, there is a trend towards unification of platforms. Now any specialized community can easily build their own little MySpace as an application, for example, to “big MySpace” and run it on Facebook in parallel. By the way, I am sure that in the race "Odnoklasniki" - "VKontakte" will win the one who used to open his platform and make it compatible with Open Social. So, investors are not going to let go of the social web.
  24. You are making a network in two languages ​​at once - in Russian and English, does this mean that you are targeting both Russian and Western users at once? And are you not afraid that this will be the pursuit of two hares?

    This is nothing more than a pragmatic way of entering the market. Of course, it would be easier for me to start from the Russian market. However, it has happened since the time of the Tsar of Peas, that in the spaces of the former Soviet Union technological concepts that came from the ever-decaying West take root much easier. And the Internet here is no exception. There is no prophet in his own country! Every time I tried to promote a new idea, I was always required to present a Western prototype for comparison. There is no direct prototype, there will be no investment. Unfortunately, changes in this stereotype are not visible. And this concerns not only money, but user perception of new products. Therefore, some other social resources of Russian origin now follow the path chosen by us. Indeed, in terms of the cost of developing the second language, it almost does not change anything, and the investment base, as well as the user audience, only expands. Maneuvering space is also increasing. Yes, and open social platforms, on which, as I said, we have high hopes, as long as they exist only in America.
  25. What examples of unsuccessful social networks do you know?

    I generally prefer not to answer such questions. What is a successful and unsuccessful social network? What evaluation criteria will we use when passing our sentence? If we approach the answer to these questions from a business point of view, and I simply cannot imagine a different approach, then there can be only a single criterion. This economic efficiency is profit. Unfortunately, this indicator is available for public viewing and analysis only from open (public) joint-stock companies. But they are not yet on the social Internet and, as economists expect, they will appear here not earlier than 2010. Therefore, by the way, the talk about the second “dot-Com” bubble, which is not today, will explode tomorrow, does not abate. I myself do not expect an explosion. The situation is now completely different. But you still have to pull the steam. So, hard times are coming up for web startups.
  26. What do you expect from users of your network?

    Professionalism along with intelligence. We hope that among our users will be not only IT specialists, but also representatives of all industry segments, both vertical and horizontal. We hope that with time such an information-oriented intelligent project will go beyond the business framework. Therefore, the concept of the project and lay the possibility of transparent (white label) SaaS-platforms that are compatible with Open Social. But this will be the next stage.
  27. Well, and at the first stage at the expense of what your project will pay off and bring in the income?

    You know, I am a supporter of the thesis "You have to pay for the content." But I understand well that in the era of free Internet search, few individuals will pay for the information. Although, to be honest, personally, I would in certain cases pay instead of rummaging through that pile of garbage that “falls out” at the exit of search engines. After all, machine rejection algorithms related to the so-called semantic web will not appear soon. By the way, the volume of search rubbish has increased dramatically thanks to the same social resources. There was even a term describing this phenomenon - splog (spam + blog).
  28. So who then will pay for the content?

    And who said that customer companies cannot pay for quality selected and streamlined content. And pay as users, providing this content, and resource. After all, as a matter of fact, in our resource algorithms of a semantic web, or search with a human face will be implemented. That's just the fee for this “face” and forms the basis of our business model. And we will get additional levers of user motivation. By the way, Google was the first to really begin to parasitize on other people's content. Why don't we start doing the same for Google?
  29. How?

    And here I would like to reveal a little bit later ...
  30. How do you recruit a team? Is it important for you to have only professionals in it, or the main thing - enthusiasm for the idea?

    I have to talk about this for a long time, so I refer you to my blog, where I devoted a whole series of notes under the general title “Start-up or Down” to my start-up torment. Guide for Dummies ... with ideas. ” Briefly just answer the last question. The team must be enthusiastic about the idea of ​​professionals. This is the only way and precisely in this sequence: "dedication + professionalism." But the level of professionalism can be a little and vary. But, at a minimum, the team must include one “acting super professional”. Such a person can, if necessary, combine the functions of a good leader and a class programmer. At the same time, I mean not just a cool programmer, but a professional in the field of modern web construction. Experience shows that there will be no other working team.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/22603/

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