It’s official – Google buys YouTube for 1.65 billion. Yikes, the early estimates of 1.6 billion were off by 0.05 billion which is real money even to Google. Unless Zuckerman wises up soon that 50 million will be the entire Facebook deal value!
Yahoo’s Hack Day was so successful I have yet to read anything but positive reports – in fact most are downright glowing with enthusiasm for this mashup fest down at the Yahoo mother ship in Sunnyvale. I wish I could trade my lackluster experience at this year’s Google Party for a back-in-time ticket to Yahoo’s Hack Day.
Gordon over at GetLucky.net, a Yahoo employee, provides what seems to me several key insights about Hack day, but more imporantly about why Yahoo, not Google, is the company to watch.
Of course, until Yahoo Panama gets their *ASS IN GEAR* with a high quality contextual advertising paradigm, Wall street will continue to think that they suck ….
Gordon on Hack Day:
… the stuff that we do better than our competitors may have a chance to shine in the spotlight, in front of the audience that matters most. Much of the mindshare that Google has captured through applications like the GMaps API, etc. has been held because of the nature of convenience. Once a coder builds an application on top of a specific interface, switching to another API requires some real motivation…
emphasis belongs to me, the insights belong to Gordon though I’ve written about this stuff several times as well. Yahoo could wind up “owning” 2.0., which is a cool type of ownership where the big guy facilitates millions of long tail, little guy developments and transactions and publishing enterprises. The big guy shares *most* of the revenue with the little guys but the volume creates huge wealth for the big companies and modest wealth for the smaller ones. Users are rewarded with better content, rich interactive experiences, noninvasive advertising, and encyclopedic information. When 2.0 is done right everybody plays, everybody wins.
Recent reports indicate that the Playstation III may not be ready for prime time. At a Tokyo game show testers revealed that game play was sometimes erratic with reboots needed. SONY stock dropped on this news.
For parents having trouble sorting through all this my son has a Video Game Summary he did for me here.
This post about Eric Schmidt of Google has moved.
Generally I like price guarantees which tell you that the company is 1) fairly confident they are usually offering the best pricing on stuff and 2) allow you to relax a bit and book while still surfing around for a better trip.
But Expedia’s “simple” and “Best price” guarantee did make me laugh a bit when I noted in the fine print that the Expedia airline ticket must be at least $6 more to qualify. Not a big deal of money (though with a family trip it’s enough to care about), yet somehow the notion of “best price” that is not the “best price” smacks of the kind of bogus pitch everybody is tired of hearing.
Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody had a good faith best price deal with no fine print where “best price” meant simply the best price for a comparable (rather than perfectly, exactly, unlikely-to-be-found-in-exact-same-form thing?
Here is a nice summary of insights from Guy Kawasaki, clever marketing guru, about what young people are doing online and on phone. Supports the ideas that the future is highly mobile and must be highly “permission based” in it’s marketing.
Won’t it be interesting if the new age of marketing becomes a lot like 1800 style marketing? There, you’d go to the hardware store or the grocery and ask the retailer to hand you things. In the new age this is becoming a trip to trusted niche sites (or Costco.com and Wal-Mart?) for information and shopping and then asking the computer to fetch stuff for you and add to your electronic shopping cart.
Yahoo Hack Day is already shaping up to be a fantastic event. I really hate to miss this developer campout down in Sunnyvale that is featuring hands-on developer classes today, a yet-to-be-named big time entertainer tonight, and a hack contest tomorrow. Folks are camping at the heavily Wi-Fi armed Yahoo campus in rooms and the lawn. Cool.
Some resources for those of us who missed this are over at Jeremy’s blog.
I’ve been watching Yahoo the company and Yahoo the stock for over a year, and finally put my money where my mouth is and picked up 600 shares at 25.31
I feel the stock is really undervalued due to what should soon be a huge wash of new cash that Yahoo will get next spring from the launch of the publisher network to a wider audience. This is Yahoo’s version of Google’s adsense which nets Google about 43% of their revenues and growing. This is the long tail money and I think the smart money says the long tail money will eventually be the big money. In the old days I would have thought “Wall Streeters MUST understand this process and thus the price MUST already reflect this”, but after the internet stock meltdown it was clear that Wall Street did not understand many aspects of the online economy and didn’t care about them much anyway.
Also important to my decision was that Yahoo’s been doing the best 2.0 stuff for some time. For example today’s Yahoo Hack Day, a special event open to developers from all over, is a brilliant example of how Yahoo! wants to take back their old reputation as the coolest company and may just do it.
They deserve to be treated much better, both by online commenters and by Wall Street, because Yahoo!, far more than Google or MSN, is coming up with both simple and complex developer tools to facilitate the new internet, which is shaping up to be a monstrous, layered, interconnected, cross referenced and community-fied ocean of information where distinctions between websites and even businesses are broken down along the lines of what people need to learn and need to do. That’s cool.
| Action | Buy |
|---|---|
| Symbol | YHOO |
| Description | YAHOO INC |
| Quantity | 600 |
| Order Type | Market |
Even thanks to a highlight by A-list blogger Jeremy of my AOL lawsuit post yesterday it looks like my Cicarelli “test post” is by far the top interest item here at Joe Duck, and it appears this is due to high placement at MSN for the term … Cicarelli.
This little Cicarelli experiment is suggesting to me that the gap between readers and blog writers is much wider than I’d thought, and it may change my approach to blogging. Perhaps throwing in junk topic posts every so often is a good way to shake up search prominence even for non-junk topics. Hard to test that but it seems to be happening – presumably as people who come for Cicarelli stay to read about …. Web 2.0 or Global health and welfare?!
But alas at Technorati we see that Cirarelli is down to search term number 9. I fear her fame, and mine, shall be as fleeting as a teenager’s search preferences.
Posts that contain Cicarelli per day for the last 30 days.
Get your own chart!
Hey, I really like the Mall of America. When we visit our Minnesota relatives we often head over there for a day and it’s really an intriguing place. In some ways it’s the capital of American retail consumerism, a dubious but interesting distinction. In a world fraught with violence, intolerance, war, disease, and hardship isn’t it nice to have four miles of enclosed, climate-controlled store fronts, amusement park, aquarium, and theme restaurants? No? C’mon, you call yourself an American?
Travel Channel notes:
The Mall of America is effectively an entire enclosed city. Designed by 40 architects and designers over a period of four years.
Giant Rectangle, allowing strolling without backtracing.
Each floor has over a MILE of storefront space.
4 malls in one with different themes:
North Garden
West Market – RR station theme.
South Avenue – Southern grand hotel theme.
East Broadway – modern high tech design
Glass sphere spy cams document shopper’s every move.
120 security gaurds plus dogs to sniff out trouble.
250k visitors daily during peak times
Camp Snoopy makes 25 million per year.
20,000 parking spots in 3 square miles of parking. State, symbol, and color designations to help mall visitors find their car.
20 sit down restaurants plus 30 fast food.
14 screen movie theater.
Chapel for marriages is the “Chapel of Love”.
5 themed restaurants and Hooters is the most popular watering hole in the mall.
Underwater Adventures is a huge aquarium located in lower sections.
Joe Duck 