Category Archives: companies

Jimmy Wales on Charlie Rose

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Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, discusses his Wikia search projectand the internet. He’s the chairman of Wikia, Inc. He thinks it’ll be 2-3 years before they have a robust product.

“Democratic, participatory” search project.
“Google, Yahoo, Ask” have similar, proprietary and closed search. He wants to break up the idea that a few companies should be so dominant.

Making search ubiquitous. He thinks Google may not have problems with WIKIA because they can keep matching up ads, advertisers, and buyers as they have been.

Wales thinks Facebook made the right decision to turn down Yahoo’s billion+ offer for Facebook, calling it an “interesting gamble”. “He’s a pretty sharp guy” (Zuckerman), and Wales thinks that unlike Myspace, Facebook is doing right by the customers. Notes increase of spam and advertising intensity of Myspace.

Wikia major initiatives: Search, Reference Works for humor, opinion, sports. 66 languages plus a “Klingon language” project. “Roll this revolution” into many other areas. What makes the internet great is that it’s a “global platform for people to share knowledge”. Keeping it “open” appears to be a key guiding principle for Wales, and his admirable efforts at Wikipedia support his sincerity in that mission.

Wales suggests that Firefox is the best browser, primarily due to features that he sees as the result of the open source development model that created Firefox.    He says that monopolistic activity by Microsoft has slowed innovation, but feels that Google is a friend of Open Source.     Wales recounted telling Bill Gates at Davos that Microsoft search is so bad people are switching away from it as the Vista default, and suggests that he’ll have fun trying to build a better search than Google with Wikia.

Why blog? Howard’s got 5 million reason$.

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When I encourage folks to blog I like to emphasize that a blog is *very unlikely* to make much if any money.

Luckily I was not advising the clever Walstrip folks who just videoblogged their way to a 5 million dollar aquisition by CBS. Good for them! Howard wants to top it off with a spot on Letterman. I bet he’ll get it.

Bebos, billions, and why Yahoo is starting to piss me off.

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Yahoo may buy Bebo, the British “Myspace”, for a billion dollars. That is a LOT of money – about 3% of Yahoo’s market cap. Presumably this, like Yahoo’s unsuccessful Facebook aquisition attempt, is Yahoo’s approach to recapturing the market dominance it enjoyed back in the day. Dominance through the aquisition of a social network rather than developing their own.

They should know better than to trust their existing criteria for decisions about aquisitions. Yahoo is the company that aquired Overture’s pay per click technology years ago, and then managed to cede dominance in that area to Google. Ever heard of Google? Yahoo probably could have *owned* Google, but it seems higher management didn’t think search had the monetization potential of … broadcast.com which was purchased for billions.

Isn’t it time for top management at Yahoo to let innovation, not aquisitions, rule the day? This approach has worked very well for Google, who’s main mistakes now appear to be in aquiring things like YouTube which in my opinion is unlikely to recover YouTube’s 1.6 billion price tag and will certainly pester Google with big money lawsuits for decades. Yahoo’s still got a LOT of great technical people, especially in the developer and new business divisions. More importantly, the world is producing hundreds of thousands of new, brilliant innovators every year, most of whom are chomping at the bit to bring new and exciting innovation to the hungry online world. Why not devote the billions to this rather than purchasing companies with marginal revenues and long term prospects that are more hope and prayer than reality?

With the latest flurry of high priced aquistions it almost seems like, to the big players, the billion dollar deal is the new million dollar deal. I remain skeptical that deals of this size pay off in the long run – certainly very, very few of the early pre-bubble ones did not pay off for companies. I’d suggest that the smaller deals (e.g. Flickr) do have potential, but that Yahoo’s top management is looking for a killer deal that simply does exist while the innovation approach (ie much, MUCH more support to the core values and teams at Yahoo) is starting them in the face. Traffic? Yahoo’s got plenty of it. Modest changes can send millions of Yahoo users to any new idea, so why not do this *a lot more* and test *a lot more ideas*.

Edison suggested that there is always a better way, and it’s time for Yahoo to ….. find it.

More Bebo-logy from Techmeme:

Yahoo may net Bebo owners $1bn

 

 

Bebo/YHOO: My Rumor’s Bigger Than Yours

Yahoo May Be Bidding For Social Network Bebo: Report

Yahoo: When You Can’t Buy Facebook, You Buy Bebo

Bebo is not for sale


AppleGate

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Here in Southern Oregon, Applegate is the charming valley and river that was named after early settlers. For Silicon Valley the new term “AppleGate” refers to the top tech blog Engadget’s posting of a fake email suggesting that Apple’s iPhone would be delayed. The report led to an almost immediate sell off of Apple stock and a 4 billion dollar decline in Apple’s market capitalization, though the stock rebounded quickly when it became clear the email was a fake.

This appears to be a *superb* example of how information is reflected by the stock market and how quickly. I get the idea the (bogus) iPhone delay rumor affected the price of APPL almost immediately but have not checked the timing.

Mike at TechCrunch has a nice play by play and graph of AppleGate, and the Engadget post AppleGate post is here.

Google and Privacy

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Here is a nice post from Google about their new policy to anonymize search info from users. Like many I have been critical in the past of Google and others for storing this information with little regard to who owns it or saying what they’ll be doing with it.     Yahoo and MSN do not (yet) have similar policies so I think Google can rightly claim a higher road since they have also been the one who has fought Government attempts to nab search data.   (I have mixed feelings about that since, unlike folks like Battelle, I fear commercial abuses  more than I fear the Government will use my data in illegal and harmful ways.

Microsoft may buy Yahoo = a good idea.

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Wow, I’m liking my Yahoo stock which just jumped over $5 per share,but Microsoft couldn’t you have announced the possible bid to buy Yahoo about a month back when I had my 2000 YHOO 30 calls? With Yahoo at $33.34 I could have sold that 1000 investment for a cool $67,000!

WSJ Story (paywall)

NY Post Story

Henry Blodget thinks it’s important to spin off a new company rather than just suck Yahoo up into the borgness of Microsoft.

But hey, I do think this aquisition/merger is a good idea. Yahoo is very different from Microsoft. However, to the limited extent I interact with MS and Yahoo it seems to me that both of those corporate cultures have become bureaucratic, sluggish, and uninspired when compared to Google’s freewheeling yet very productive approaches. Yet very importantly, the people I meet from Yahoo and MS are often as impressive as those at Google, and certainly capable of great things as all these folks reinvent the online world on a regular basis.

If Microsoft can pool the innovations of the LIVE project with Yahoo’s superb developer support programs, and hire and inspire more people to have the evangelical zeal of Googlers, it could be a whole new online ballgame.

Update:  Om Malik’s reporting that WSJ’s reporting the talks appear to be off already.

Duh…. you believe in Vudu?

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No offense to Vudu but it’s not going to play in Peoria. Vudu appears to be a brilliant innovation in movie downloading, partly because it allows the user to start watching the show immediately and thus offers true “on demand” movies.

However it takes a lot more than being the best of the lot in terms of providing a user with streaming movies on demand to be a successful company. Much of the company’s, mainstream media’s, and blogosphere’s breathless gushing about this product is ridiculous. Mom and pop are NOT going to pay hundreds of dollars for a Vudu box *plus* pay per movie fees so they can have a downloadable movie experience.

This is another of the hundreds of silly silicon valley ideas that seem reasonable to sharp, young tech folks pulling down $10,000 per month who are not intimidated (in fact who like) stylish new gadgets and having a 10th remote control in their living room arsenal. Unfortunately for Vudu and other startups catering to this group, this group is a tiny fraction of all consumers and almost totally non-representative.

Early adopters? Sure, but it’ll be years before people demand the type of experience Vudu is offering.

Vudu, unless they find a way to provide really cheap hardware and really cheap downloads (they won’t find this), will fail as soon as the VC cash burns up.

Fueling the IPOD revolution was free (though often illegal) content. The crackdown on illegal online music distribution has been somewhat successful, and it’s much easier to stop online movie distribution which remains a relatively small problem for the industry.
Instead of too little too late Vudu is offering too much too early at too high a price.

I don’t believe in Vudu.

More from Engadget 

Another victim of Google’s cleverness? Zunch Marketing goes belly up.

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I don’t know Zunch, but I’d argue that it’s generally good riddance when overpriced fancy SEM firms go belly up. As Google creates easier, better, and cheaper ways to do great in-house SEM (e.g. Analytics and PPC management) it’s not surprising places are opting for this approach. For the most part the big SEM firms are dramatically overselling types of SEO that cannot be done at all or are best done in-house or with the greater expertise found in small SEM shops and freelancers. My $9600 bad experience with a fancy SEM firm last year led to a refund, but that was thanks to threatening to blog about it and the written guarantee of increased traffic. I think very few get refunds despite generally poor performance.

After a clever and intense process of selling me on the service it was frustrating to watch them apply generally good but obvious principles of SEO. Also frustrating to note that I knew more about SEO than they did from attending a few Webmaster World Conferences.

So, is Zunch the beginning of a new trend? Perhaps a good trend.

Google buys DoubleClick for 3.1 Billion

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Google as advertising juggernaut continues the aggressive “advertising baron” expansion with today’s purchase of DoubleClick. I doubt it was DoubleClick’s technology that made this attractive to Google, rather the stable of existing advertisers and – perhaps most importantly – keeping DoubleClick away from Google rivals. It seems to me a key part of the Google strategy is to buy technologies and sites like YouTube and DoubleClick to effectively dry up the lake of opportunity for advertising rivals, especially Yahoo and MSN.

Yahoo’s also got good news today with a big newspaper deal, coming on the heels of Yahoo’s Viacom deal. I was surprised Yahoo stock didn’t reflect these positive developments but Yahoo’s stock fate seems to be tied more to the perception of Yahoo as a second fiddle to big and brilliant Google than to developments in the marketplace.

More from NYT