Archimedes Ventures has a number of focused initiatives, all part of our general interest in the evolution of the Internet from a publishing platform into a transport for a diverse set of human interactions. Our goals are focused on the development of Web 2.0 companies that are able to evolve new technologies and models for doing business in the post Internet 1.0 world. In practice this means we are interested in companies which take advantage of two primary trends. Firstly the trend towards the 2 way web, where new content is published in large quantities and in real time by millions of people at the edge of the network. And secondly the trend for the separation of content from its old forms. Text is no longer necessarily embedded in a web page, it can be syndicated through RSS or ATOM. Audio is no longer tied to the Radio network. It can be Podcast or streamed or downloaded. TV shows are no longer necessarily tied to TV Networks. They can be delivered on demand across IP networks. And so on. These trends throw many business models into question. Search will change, Classified advertising will change, Media consumption will change, Web browsing will change, audio and video consumption will change. And when we say change, we mean from the Web 1.0 models developed between 1994 and today.

Classified Listings 2.0 Classifieds is a market segment largely served by two entities, newspapers - primarily local - and online companies like eBay and Craig’s List. We believe that the emergence of structured blog publishing and Semantically tagged content will create opportunities to remake the entire model for Classified advertising. We have invested in edgeio as part of our efforts in this area.

Radio 2.0 Video didn’t kill the Radio Star and Podcasting will not kill it either. However, the ability of creators to distribute content directly to consumers will alter the economic relationships between creators and distributors whilst also allowing for a flowering of massive amounts of new content, and therefore more choice, for listeners. From live events to archived ones, audio freed from the constraints of broadcast is happening fast. Archimedes ventures is invested in EarningsCast.com and intends to make further investments in this area.

Publishing 2.0 Weblogs are simply the first incarnation of self-publishing. They have all the limitations of most first versions. Archimedes will be working with others to help develop subsequent, and more flexible and powerful tools for self-publishing in all mediums - text, audio and video.

e-Commerce 2.0 What would Amazon look like if there was only RSS, and no HTTP? in the answer to that question lies the future of e-Commerce. RSSBuys.com is an early experiment that is grappling with this question. Archimedes is engaged in this area.

Internet Advertising 2.0 Google has revolutionized the advertising market. However, in the years since AdSense and AdWords were conceived enormous changes in the ecosystem of the Internet have altered the balance between the large traffic sites like Google.com and the many millions of small publishers. Serving advertisers made sense in Web 1.0. In Web 2.0 it is the aggregated publishers who have the majority of the traffic growth. A successful Web 2.0 advertising platform will serve publishers first and advertisers will compete for the traffic the publishers command. We are incubating AdsFAIR to compete in this market.

TV 2.0 The BBC has announced that it intends to distribute much content to end users across the Internet, On demand. We believe that this trend is unstoppable and that new, demand based and subscription based models will emerge to manage the distribution of this content. The living room, and the portable device will evolve to support these models. Networked, time based, programming is at the beginning of its decline into a medium mainly relevant to live events. Archimedes will invest in this area.

Search 2.0 Searching old content by crawling and indexing it was the right solution for the early Internet. AltaVista first, and then others, did a great job of this. Google perfected it and applied a relevance and ranking algorithm that made it stand out from the crowd. However, as the velocity of change of data has increased, and the proportion of new data in the whole has grown, indexing and crawling appear dated. Relevance measured by links seems irrelevant for data only just published. Other measures of relevance need to emerge. Search will change more in the next 10 years than it did in the first 10 years of the Internet. Archimedes intends to play a part in evolving new methods of delivering complete and meaningful results to searchers. We have invested in RealNames.

Communications 2.0 Telephone callers looking for product advice convert into buyers at about 53 times the rate of web clickers. It is now possible to launch a phone call from a web click. Archimedes is focused on the convergence of telephony and search and directory services. CIRXIT is one place we are investing time and energy.