Archive for สิงหาคม 15th, 2008

For Yahoo, momentum, not management, a problem

The trials and tribulations of the Yahoo executive suite have been well chronicled in the media off late: from the recent exit of their sales ace to Terry Semel being replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang, as the top man on the totem pole. The management shuffle aside, Yahoo has a bigger problem on its hand: the traffic, be it search or total visits is beginning to resemble New York Yankees in the Major League Baseball rankings.

Folks from Citibank analyzed the data collected by comScore, and found that Yahoo has started to lose ground to Google in terms of total visitors.

The total number of visitors to various Google properties was up 18% (year-over-year comparison) to 536 million, with Microsoft getting 528 million (up 5%), and Yahoo being #3 with an actual decline – about 2% (year-over year comparison) in the number of monthly visitors to 470 million. This is the second month of consecutive declines for Yahoo.

To put things in context, the worldwide Internet traffic grew 9% in the month of May 2007, while US saw a 3% increase in the traffic for the month. In US, Yahoo remains #1 with 131 million visitors, up 0.3%, the lowest we have tracked. Google is at #3 position with 120 million unique visitors, up 15% year-over-year.

Like most, I do feel that comScore and its methodology leave a lot to be desired, though they are a good trend-indicator. The trends don’t bode well for Yahoo. If monthly unique visitors page views are (flat to) down, then this could (indirectly) impact Yahoo’s bread-and-butter brand & display advertising business, as the company indicated in their most recent chat with the analysts. (Maybe Wanda Harris Millard, the outgoing Yahoo sales ace was robbed of her job.)

Yahoo has already lost the search battle and is losing the mindshare as well. It trails in mobile search business as well. In mobile space, M:Metrics reports that smart phone users prefer Google over Yahoo when it comes to mobile services, especially in US and UK, where Google commands 62.5% and 31% reach. Yahoo in comparison has about 33.5% and 11% reach respectively.

In an increasingly competitive marketplace, Yahoo seems to be losing momentum, especially in areas where it has been traditionally strong. It is going to be a long slog for Jerry Yang and his crew before Yahoo is restored to its growing ways – it that is at all possible.

Google is killing me. Damn! (Religions -Sensitive) don’t read.

Do you believe in Go(d)ogle???
It sounds stupid!   but it ’s something which really happened!!

No Buddhisms, No  Christians, No Catholics, No Muslim ….

We have only 3 choices to respect.
Microsoft :Google :Apple

Visual Search Platform Viewzi Launches Timeline View

Visual search platform Viewzi launched “The Timeline” view this week. We reviewed Viewzi back in April, but they’ve added a whole new experience to their search platform with this new lens on content. Now you can look up something like “iPhone apps” and you’ll receive a plethora of search engine results from left to right, rather than top to bottom.

When you mouse over an article, the article lights up in blue and gives you a brief description. From there, you can click on the blue box, which will give you a larger snippet of text as well as a screenshot of the page and the date of the article. From there, you can click a green button and be on your way to the page.

Search engine result pages are displayed from top to bottom in order of relevance and are colored from light blue (most relevant) to dark blue (less relevant). Pages are also displayed on the timeline from right to left according to the last updated timestamp. Viewzi gets its timestamp data from Google.
The timeline is expandable, and you can drag a white bar across the top of the screen to search older results or scan more recent results. One thing I wish Viewzi had in the timeline view is the ability to get rid of some of the results (for my own viewing purposes), by offering me a little X at the top of a single result. Or at least the ability to hide a result so I could sift through more of them.

Overall, this has always been a remarkable looking search engine, so timeline view is a great addition to the package.

In other Viewzi news, the team is also developing an iPhone app that gives you multiple views (text, photo, etc.) and will let you bookmark your favorites under your Viewzi account.

They’re also building an Adobe Air desktop app that functions as a media

A man without love~ Listen up!

I can remember when we walked together
Sharing a love I thought would last forever
Moonlight to show the way so we can follow
Waiting inside her eyes was my tomorrow
Then somethin’ changed her mind, her kisses told me
I had no lovin’ arms to hold me

Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love

Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Knowing that it’s cloudy above
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love

I cannot face this world that’s fallen down on me
So, if you see my girl please send her home to me
Tell her about my heart that’s slowly dying
Say I can’t stop myself from crying

Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love

Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Knowing that it’s cloudy above
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love

Every day I wake up, then I start to break up
Lonely is a man without love
Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out
Lonely is a man without love

Pikaba is Classifieds Recommendations for Buyers (The Startup Review)

How Classified website became 2.0 Read this and copy then…………………………..

20 word description: Pikaba is a social shopping community offering a reverse auction model where merchants bid for your shopping needs.

CEO’s 100 word description: Pikaba (founded by Microsoft ex-SQL Marketing Director) is a consumer-oriented social shopping community that harnesses the power of social networking to bring sellers and buyers together.

Pikaba offers an online marketplace to buy/sell any goods and services and make your shopping process as simple as ABC:

* Post requests asking any product or service
* Pick up best deals based on vendor’s competition, community’s recommendations (from Pikaba members and Advisors) and group buy.

In addition new website functionality will soon allow you to manage your favorite products in ‘wish lists’ and arrange ‘got lists’ to showcase your unique shopping experience.

Mashable’s Take: Pikaba is a new classifieds site that uses people’s requests as a core feature of its search capabilities. Instead of simply searching for items you’d like on Pikaba, you can submit a request for an item you’re looking for and take the wait-and-see approach.

While most classifieds sites like CraigslistCraigslist already have sections where users can post their requests, Pikaba is hoping to benefit both buyers and sellers by providing a marketplace that is built around consumer needs for defining an actual point of demand. The ads placed by those requesting items to purchase are similar to a regular classifieds ad, with description and images, etc.
Though a major focus of Pikaba is the requests posted by buyers, sellers can still post their items just as easily. Unlike other automated matching and payment systems like Dawdle, Pikaba still follows a more traditional method for connecting buyers and sellers, though there are some additional price comparison options for buyers to select the seller with the best deal, and other options for embedding an ad across the web.

As we’ve seen with services like Zliok, one great byproduct of this approach is that the seller can easily identify the items they should invest in to rent or sell. Of course, the marketplace needs to be large enough to support a seller actually investing in such a system, but it certainly helps the larger supply and demand chain when you have such supplemental data at your disposal.

Outside of its own marketplace, this data can be used for search and recommendation purposes, on a number of levels. For instance, this consumer data could be used somehow at the local level for a search engine such as grayboxx, or at the broader level with recommendations from a service such as myStrands.

Lijit Raises Another $7M; Plans Ad Network Launch

Lijit, the company that develops search applications for online publishers and publisher networks, has just closed a $7.1 million Series C round of financing, led by Foundry Group. Existing investors Boulder Ventures and Colorado Fund I, managed by High Country Venture, have also participated in this round. Lijit has now raised more than $10 million in total, following an earlier round last year.

Lijit offers social search widgets for individual blogs or online publishing networks seeking additional traffic and recommendations. Through connecting one’s social media content (and beyond) across the Web, Lijit can create a well-linked stream of collective of products that allows site visitors and readers to extend their relevant experience based on topics of interest and in turn generate more traffic and revenue for the publisher.

With the funding, Lijit now plans to begin monetizing all of those widgets, launching its own ad network. Additionally, Lijit will be expanding opening new offices and hiring more employees so that the company can continue to develop new products and maintain subsequent development

Hope Abounds, but Where’s the Reality in Mobile TV?

All this talk about Mobile TV has gotten out of hand lately.  First, people claim that it’s the future and the next thing you know, you can’t get rid of it.  And to make matters worse, the iPhone has complicated matters even more and according to some, has forced companies to start thinking of ways to bring mobile TV to your life in a big way.

“iPhone’s success raised the bar of consumer expectations regarding mobile multimedia,” said John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at eMarketer. “Handset manufacturers worldwide are in the midst of revamping their product lines against this new benchmark.”

And although I’m still suspect about the future of Mobile TV and personally feel that it’s nothing more than a waste of time and money, others tend to disagree.  In fact, many companies think it could be at the epicenter of the rise in mobile advertising over the next few years.

But when the reality of the situation hits them squarely on the face, I’m sure they’ll come around to the thought that mobile TV advertising has no future because the space is littered with products that suffer from poor video quality and even worse programming, creating an experience that fails to capture the quality and usability of watching a YouTube video on an iPhone or even watching a video online.

As Gaunt explains, “Until consumers are presented with a clear-cut, simple and inexpensive value model for accessing mobile video and TV content, it will be hard to segment audiences at either an industry or geographic level.”

Will Yahoo Take Advantage? Fire Eagle.

At Yahoo Brickhouse today, the company released the general availability of Fire Eagle, the location-based platform that enables developers to build applications and integrate its location-based tools into your existing service. That means you can allow your users to insert their own location whenever necessary and Fire Eagle can track it for location-aware services, or you can enable GPS for a more automated process that works with users that have supported devices.

Privacy is of course a major concern for Fire Eagle, as it allows you to update your location across any authenticated partner site. So you can think of Fire Eagle as a centralized service that knows your location, and sends out updates to its participating sites that you have authorized.

Jajah and Intel: Fully Replacing Your Phone with Your PC?

“Killing  Mobile Operator  with VOIP “

It wasn’t that long ago that Ribbit was acquired to become part of BT’s larger plans to make voice applications more prominent in main stream use cases, and not surprisingly Jajah has begun to respond with a new feature that makes your PC “act more like a phone.”

Taking advantage of Jajah’s telephony, built on its own infrastructure and the Intel Remote Wake technology, PCs can accept phone calls from the sleep mode in order to receive a call. This partnership can also be used to make phone calls, using Jajah’s global IP-based network. So how important is this particular feature? Depending on how regularly you use your computer for phone calls, this could be quite important. Especially if you’re living the life of an always-connected blogger, ensuring that you never miss a tip for a new post while you’re sleeping (and your computer is sleeping too).
In the larger scheme of things, this new feature speaks to the ongoing trend of the computer “competing” with the telecom and mobile industry. We’ve seen new product releases coming from the mobile industry in response to the iPhone, but we’re also seeing some developments for computers in terms of competing with the web-based functionality that mobile devices provide, which compete (on some level) with the desktop and notebook industries that have historically provided primary access to email, web and calendar applications.

In making the PC operate more like a mobile device, as far as voice-applications go, we’re seeing a furthered merging of PCs and mobile devices especially for business use. While this has been going on for some time, it’s clear that the PC market is more active in finding ways to integrate itself into this larger movement, which is evident in Jajah’s new offering.

What’s the Future of Online Video? Time to Ask the Leaders (Live Stream)

Live Video streaming by Ustream

Think about Internet videoSelling-Entertainment-Online Jan-08 four years ago. Can you remember that far back? What did people use to share videos? Really, how much video were you watching in 2004?

The answer is: probably not much. Why? Because there really wasn’t anything in terms of online video. YouTubeYouTube didn’t appear until 2005. uStream.tv and justin.tv were not until 2007. And the rise of Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV is a very recent phenomenon. In the large scheme of things, online video is very recent and still volitale - YouTube is the only stable player, and it still can’t generate enough revenue.

So I am sitting down with several of the leaders and innovators of online video to get their thoughts. The live panel will answer questions about how they’ve seen online video grow and the direction they see it headed. You’ll also be able to ask the panelist questions via uStream chat. And you can always watch this recorded if you miss it live.

Social Ad Networks: Win, Lose, or Draw?

It wasn’t so long ago that social advertising networks were scarce and select. While they arguably still retain their selectness when placed adjacent to the world of general advertising on the Web, their number has grown considerably in the last several seasons and the industry is now very much a bustling marketplace.

Though larger economic woes afflicting the globe may put a bit of a damper on growth in the short term, the social sphere is altogether rising, and thus the advertising field that functions in tandem in all its various colors is growing more and more active.

In recognition of industrial expansion in the social realm, particularly at this moment steadily converging networking and media efforts, altogether forming very potent monetary opportunities, we’ve decided to take a sort of snapshot of some of the actors in the marketing business, if only to see how it has evolved to become the burgeoning moneypot it is today. We don’t mean to offer an overview here of what each offers individually. Rather, this is more a collective observation of what has occurred and, with a healthy bit of educated guesswork, envision what is to come.

There are the big name actors which tend to make the largest of headlines. Google involves itself in the social networking and social media spaces both, to various degrees. Its services have been adopted by a segment of Facebook application developers, for instance. It maintains some presence on MySpace, too. Also, Facebook itself has operated an ad network of its own for some time, though it primarily addresses the desires of marketers to target niche audiences and buy bulk placement in one sweep. There’s nothing small or selective that any of these names are attempting to do with in-house resources.

Independent outfits, meanwhile, are more open to a variety of commitments, and can go quite far in bringing special attention on the quality of service behind the distribution push. Names like SocialMedia, Lookery, iLike, AdBrite, VideoEgg,

AOL Acquires Lifestreaming Service Socialthing

In a move that aims at shoring up AOL’s stable of social networks, the company announced today that it has acquired Socialthing!, pending the satisfaction of certain undisclosed closing conditions.

After the acquisition closes,AOL says that Socialthing will become a part of the company’s People Networks division. Currently, AOL’s People Networks division is made up of social platforms, like Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Goowy, and Yedda, that AOL believes, will lead the company’s online presence going forward.

The acquisition of Socialthing, which is still in private beta, strongly suggests AOL is trying to become a major player in the social networking space and attempting to capitalize on some of the fads of the day. In just the past few months,AOL acquired Bebo and launched a lifestreaming initiative within AIM that has pushed the company towards a more community-driven focus.