Web Entrepreneurship

There is a unique form of entrepreneurship that’s only become feasible thanks to the ecosystem provided by the World Wide Web.
Watch this Jeff Bezos video, recorded in 1997:
Fast forward to today, and we have Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates trading positions on Bloomberg’s wealth index.

I wish there was a human impact index for entrepreneurs! They would also hold similar positions on that.
Key Themes from the Interview
The 1997 interview was dominated by Jeff’s understanding of, and enthusiasm for, the magical power that hyperlinks (HTTP URLs) brought to the Internet by way of Web Abstraction.
Here are some screenshots illustrating various forms of abstraction that each add different dimensions to the Web ecosystem.


This is the focal point of Jeff’s interview.
At this stage in the Web’s evolution, the Semantic Fidelity of a Hyperlink was at best coarse-grained, as perceived by the User Agents we used to "surf" this new frontier, always under our direct and constant control.
Today, we have Smart User Agents (some in the form of Browser Extensions), which can surf on our behalves, without our direct attention, and equipped with an ability to create and exploit fine-grained semantics engrained in RDF Language sentences (a multilingual digital shorthand for natural language).
Moving forward, we have a Web ecosystem with additional (and increasing) granularity, that provides new opportunities for entrepreneurs (new and existing) who take the time to understand what’s around the corner.


Conclusion
The Web is an ecosystem that continues to fuel innovation, courtesy of its underlying architecture. Jeff Bezos’ journey is a great reminder of what is possible when an environment (like the Web) facilitates powerful intersection of opportunity, capital, and innovation.
One last thing
Here are some end-user tools (here, built as browser extensions for Chrome) that can help you understand and exploit what’s coming next.
- dokieli — for taking ad-hoc notes, in structured or unstructured form
- OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer (OSDS) — for visualizing structured data encountered in web-based and local documents
- YouID — for identity and privacy handling, working nicely with dokieli and OSDS
- OpenLink Data Explorer (ODE) — data transformation middleware

