Written on July 18, 2008 – 10:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A few weeks ago I wrote a sarcastic article about Google’s efforts to gain popularity in Russia. Native search engines like Yandex and Rambler dominate this market, and Google obviously has been feeling threatened by that. So in the first week of June, the search giant started a billboard campaign in Moscow. This move looked like it was made out of desperation. Today Google made a more serious effort by acquiring Russian contextual advertising service Begun for 140 million dollars from Rambler. 
Probably to conquer some market share - as it grants them access to 40,000 advertisers and 143,000 partner sites - but could there be a second - more important - reason? Maybe this acquisition has something to do with Project Spaghetti - Google’s plan to generate more advertising revenue from YouTube.
Begun introduced contextual video advertising just last month
As I reported on June 30th, Begun integrated contextual advertising for video content on Rambler’s video sharing community, Rambler Vision. From that day on, 1.3 million visitors per month (and counting) would see the ads. Advertisments are based on the tags and are sold on a CPC bases.
This ad-introducing experience might come in handy when Google integrates video advertisement on YouTube.
YouTube only generates $200 million a year
Because YouTube badly needs a advertising strategy. Last week, the Wall Street Journal got two anonymous sources talking about YouTube’s failing advertisement strategy. The video giant generates 10 billion video views a day, but ‘only’ manages to make $200 million a year from advertising. Thus the Google-owned company might introduce pre and post-roll ads, said the sources to WSJ.
Welcome to the Valley, now let’s make money
You see the connection? Not only will Google gain more popularity in Russia, it has also acquired a company that knows how to make money from ads. Google will gladly welcome these fellas in Silicon Valley to turn YouTube in a profitable business.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 17, 2008 – 1:38 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
My co-editor Boris is not just a blogger, but a serial Internet entrepreneur. Starting a bunch of companies comes with success - like his first one, V3, and more recently, Twittercounter -, and failure. Today, we’ll discuss the latter.
One of Boris’ ideas didn’t really worked out. Preople (Pagerank for people) is a tool that checks your Internet fame - using a “complicated calculation”. In the early days of this product - March 2005 -, it received quite some press coverage and several web celebs - like Matt Mullenweg - calculated their score. Just like Twittercounter (Feedburner for Twitter), it concerns the human ego, which seems to be the key to success.
Well, turns out it isn’t: as Preople has become the home of spammers and bad php arguments. Preople needs some medical help from a geek, somebody who has the time and will to give the ego booster tool a second chance.
Boris isn’t gonna be that geek, as he’s busy with this blog. He decided to put his baby on eBay. Not for free though, as potential buyers can start bidding at $999,- (€630).
I’m not sure whether this auction will succeed. But hey, I’m here to inspire you. So here’s another way to get rid of a start-up that doesn’t tickle your fancy anymore.
Written on July 15, 2008 – 2:18 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Viacom, owner of media channels as MTV, accused Google to facilitate copyright infringement on Youtube. The lawsuit that followed summoned Google to comprehend and give user-data to Viacom, data included the user playlists, IP addresses and time-codes. That was two weeks ago, today we find that Viacom stepped down from their original demand.
Google will not be obligated to provide the user-data to Viacom. “We have reached agreement with Viacom and the class action group,” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said. Youtube will anonymize the data before it is published to Viacom, leaving out critical information such as usernames and IP addresses.
I am not in favor of copyright infringement, and I support the idea of a monetary stream back to the respective artist, but the original settlement was one step closer to Viacom suing everyone that watched the latest videoclip of Madonna on youtube, or worse, who has been Rickrolled for that matter! This settlement is a step in the right direction for privacy protection, congratulations.
Written on July 10, 2008 – 3:17 pm
Eric Bun, business innovation consultant
Tuesday, IBM and Linden Labs (the creators of Second Life) announced that they’ve reached a breakthrough -It is possible to teleport your virtual characters to multiple platforms. A breakthrough because it evangalise the importance of data portability and interoperability for new web applications. Alright, so teleporting virtual characters among scattered virtual worlds becomes possible by now? Is it already possible to teleport my boring Second Life character to Google’s new virtual platform named Lively?
Lively
This week Google launched a new initiative that creates a real character in a virtual world surrounded by social networks. You can create a personal avatar and make or join a virtual 3d room, invite friends and get social. Not very innovative, unless you incorporate the fact that they also mashed up with other social networks as Youtube and Picasa. It now even becomes possible to project your own video on the plasma screen in your room. Well, other authors already did an extensive review on the application and business model opportunities. Therefore, no need to discuss the application myself.
Corporate Innovation Strategy
However, I would like to stress one interesting perspective of this story. I wrote an interesting article for CIO magazine (to be published in July 2008) in which I already mentioned the rewarding mechanisms and the particular time scheme of Google employees to create their own innovative projects. Again, Lively came about during Google’s “20 percent time” which is a rule of thumb for engineers to devote 1/5th of their time on their projects and innovation. In today’s world where customers bargaining power is rising and the need for innovation to differentiate is enormous, Google set an example for a valuable innovative strategy. In my daily practice as an innovation consultant I continuously notice how companies experience innovation. The innovation strategy is always a discussion about investing in your company’s portfolio or brand on the one hand, and fulfilling the daily operations on the other hand. Of course, I understand that Google’s time scheme is somewhat extraordinary, yet I do think that it can serve as a good example that valuable innovation requires investments both in capital and resources. Probably most of Goolge’s initiatives that come up during the 1/5th rule never reach a stage of becoming the next big thing, but Lively has the potential due to Google’s huge userbase and ability to integrate it with various other services.
Image: Flickrimage teleport (mercurialn)
Written on July 10, 2008 – 1:14 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yahoo is a pioneer of the Web 2.0 giants. In an industry where blogs, organizations, press, and companies just talk about the possibilities and the urge of opening up - Yahoo is the only major Internet company that really experiments with these new standards. Whereas dozens of companies take small symbolical steps, Yahoo just talks in terms of leaps. After embracing OpenID, the Sunnyvale-based company now opens up its search platform to third parties with the launch of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).
How to get back at Google
Although they state their goal is to “foster innovation in the search landscape“, we all know it’s a daring strategy to win back some terrain on Google. The big G has over 68 percent of the search market and is often called THE leader in search. Somehow, they keep on strengthening this position and it seems like they’ll never give this no. 1 position away. The Yahoo executives have realized this, and now take a different road to search success. I can’t say it better than Marshall Kirckpatrick from ReadWriteWeb, who stated that Yahoo “attacks Google with an army of verticals” - referring to the vertical search engines who will use the index of Yahoo to offer specified results for niches.
The revenge of the alts
These vertical engines now suffer from a lack of indexed sites - as it’s nearly impossible to create an index of the relevant parts of whole web. Yahoo has accomplished this, and now makes it possible for these alternative search engines to focus on the product, not the technology. As Yahoo will offer the folllowing features:
Ability to re-rank and blend results – BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!’s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
Total flexibility on presentation – Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
BOSS Mashup Framework — We’re releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
Web, news and image search — At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we’ll be adding more verticals soon
Unlimited queries — There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day
With this, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales sees the prediction he told me in January becoming reality: “Good quality search is becoming a commodity item. The search quality of Google, Yahoo and Ask are actually very similar. So the idea that Google is some kind of technological powerhouse, is actually not longer true.”
See some examples of BOSS at Hakia and Me.dium.
Written on July 9, 2008 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Wall Street Journal has an important web story today, as they’ve found two sources willing to talk a bit about YouTube’s advertisement plans. YouTube only makes $200 million a year with advertising. Yes, “only”, as you might expect a video service with over a billion video views each day to come up with a little more ad revenue. This gets the executives at Google a bit nervous, as they still have to justify the 1.65 billion acquisition. Therefor, they’re thinking of drastic measures - like pre-roll ads all over the place.
One of the - unfortunately anonymous - sources said that a review executed by Google North America advertising president Tim Armstrong had identified an impressive number of 105 problems within the ad-selling division. This review is part of Project Spaghetti, a nickname for the extensive evaluation of the YouTube advertisement plan that will end before or during Q3. Although Armstrong seems worried about offending the audience of YouTube, he WILL adopt pre- and post-rolls. At least, that’s what the secret sources say.
This probably will alienate some of the YouTube users, but most people will just take it for granted. There are ads on TV too.. And this group gets more important, as they’ll become more profitable for Google. So the increasing revenues will make up for the few thousand people that find a different video home.
[Via paidcontent.org]
Written on July 8, 2008 – 3:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you haven’t add Fubiz to your list of RSS subscriptions yet, do so now (this also applies to our feed by the way). As the Fubiz bloggers take care of your daily doses of inspiration by posting visually appealing articles about photography, graffiti, fashion, graphic design, architecture, and art. Sometimes tech blogs and Fubiz meet. This would be such an occasion - since Fubiz has posted a D.I.Y. idea that concerns Google.
The photographer of this Stockholm pic uses the Dutch Google Images interface as a photo frame, creating a modern Escher-like illusion of Google Images in the analog world.
Written on July 4, 2008 – 11:07 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The subversive-looking Google Streetview cars have hit Paris to shoot a touristic stroll past highlights like the Tour d’Eiffel, Place de la Concorde, and, the Place Charles de Gaulle (depicted below). Not the touristic part, as the ‘normal’ areas of the city aren’t covered. Some Valleywag commenter complains that the Google Cam didn’t shoot anything east of the Louvre. Anyway, when you DO cross a well-known area on the Google Map, this is how it looks like:
Google Streetview shows 360 panoramic photos of cities from ground level. So far, lots of US cities and some parts of Italy and France have been covered. The ultimate goal of Google is to cover the whole world, which is obviously pretty ambitious, really exciting as well as a touchy subject. As you can imagine, ladies in bikinis and men leaving strip clubs aren’t really fond of Google Streetview.
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