Tag Archive for 'Google'

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Facebook’s Platform will Rule them All

Published on November 17, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

“Email–I can’t imagine life without it–is probably going away,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in June, citing how only 11% of teens use email daily.

That’s the same story parroted Monday by Sandberg’s boss, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who introduced the company’s new messaging service by suggesting a generational shift away from email.

Based on Sandberg’s and Zuckerberg’s comments, it’s no surprise the blogosphere proclaimed the social network’s new service a “Gmail killer.” But that’s entirely the wrong term to be using. For starters, Gmail isn’t that big a deal. It has only a 15% market share. Hotmail has double and Yahoo triple that userbase. Facebook isn’t interested in killing off any of them as a messaging platform–its goal is to rise above them all, contain them all, and thereby rule them all [Source].

Related stories:

  • Why Facebook Wants Your E-Mail [Click]
  • How Facebook plans to reinvent email and online messaging [Click]
  • How Facebook’s Messages System Helps It Win [Click]
  • Schimdt on Facebook Messages: Competition Is Good [Click]

Web Browsing is turning into Social Browsing

Published on November 9, 2010 in Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

In a recent study of 21-29 year old females, there was a surprising number spending as many as five hours per day on Facebook, with much of that activity being what the respondents nearly all called “nosing around” (called “social browsing”).

This largely consists of seeing what your friends are or were up to: Reading status updates, clicking and watching video links, shuffling through photos of friends’ nights out and comparing those nights to ones own.

To people familiar with Facebook, this behaviour, of course, is not unexpected. But what there can be found most interesting about it was that, for this group, social browsing had largely replaced all other forms of web browsing.

What’s most important about this behaviour, from a brand marketing perspective at least, is that when many of these women needed to look something up—information on a venue, or a band, or a consumer brand—they were more likely to look first for information on the site where they were already spending all their time: Facebook.

What does this kind of behavior mean for online marketers? Well, for starters, brands primarily interested in targeting a younger, female demographic should focus on building brand Facebook pages at least as comprehensive as their brand websites [Source].

Game Changers: Sergey Brin & Larry Page

Published on October 31, 2010 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

As part of highlighting Game Changers, Bloomberg has reported with an insightful video on on Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The video follows Sergey Brin and Larry Page from their first meeting at Stanford to the new media mega-company on a collision course with old media businesses of newspapers, books, movies and television. Along the way to its astounding success, the co-founders have redefined advertising, created a chain of products such as Google Maps, News, Gmail and have taken on rival giants like Apple and Microsoft [Check out the video here].

Google & CIA invest in Analytics Venture

Published on July 30, 2010 in International Business. 0 Comments Tags: , .

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, have injected sums (less than $10 million each) into Recorded Future, a company that goes through “tens of thousands” of websites and looks for related actions and conversations between, for example, Twitter accounts, blogs and websites, and analyzes them in order to spot events and trends as early on as possible [Source].

Google Gets Semantic

Published on July 17, 2010 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

Google has acquired Metaweb Technologies, a five-year-old San Francisco startup that maintains a massive open database that details all sorts of real-world stuff in an effort to “build a smarter, more connected Internet.”

“The web isn’t merely words—it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly,” Google said in a blog post.

Google’s emerging rival Facebook recently announced the Open Graph, a way to map all objects on the web like movies and places and peoples’ relationships to them. The metadata required for this would create a rival structure to what Metaweb has built. And because Facebook has the “like” data recording the preferences of its 500 millions users, it would be in the best position to harness the metadata to create a compelling search product.

Google to Acquire Air Travel Data Company

Published on July 2, 2010 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A new Google search tool to allow people to search easily for air travel and book travel plans is now on the runway. Google said Thursday that it had agreed to acquire ITA Software, a 14-year-old company that makes software that organizes flight and pricing information, for $700 million in cash.

Given that about half of airline tickets are sold online these days, it’s perhaps no surprise that Google has just snapped up ITA Software in a deal worth some $700m. The search behemoth says it is getting its hands on ITA, which gathers and processes flight information such as seat pricing and availability, to make it easier for people to find quickly the flights they want at the very best prices [Source].

Office politics

Published on May 13, 2010 in International Business. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Microsoft bids to keep its grip on corporate computing against Google’s challenge.

In a significant move, Microsoft announced new, web-based versions of popular applications such as Word and Excel as part of the “Office 2010” release, and unveiled changes designed to make it easier for workers to collaborate using its software. These initiatives come at a critical time in the evolution of corporate computing. After dominating the office desktop for so long, Microsoft now faces a growing challenge from a variety of companies that are betting they can leverage the cloud to erode its share of the market.

Among other things, the new, web-based version of Office will make it much easier for workers to use documents and spreadsheets on a host of different devices, including smart phones. Microsoft has also tweaked its software to make it easier for people to, say, embed videos in PowerPoint presentations and to integrate data from their social networks into online calendars and e-mail services. And the company plans to offer a free, stripped down version of its web apps that will compete directly with Google’s mass-market offering [Source].

Apple Hunts for Startups

Published on May 3, 2010 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Apple is accelerating the rate of acquisitions as the company vies with Google for mobile technologies and talent. Since returning to Apple as CEO in 1997, Jobs has made 13 acquisitions, according to Bloomberg data. Of those, five happened in the past seven months alone.

“The pace has really picked up, there seems to be a strategic shift,” said Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co. in New York. “It looks like there’s an acquisition frenzy going on between Google and Apple in the sense that there’s an increasing urgency on Apple’s part to stay even if not ahead of Google in the phone space and apps space.”

Patent filings may provide clues to potential targets. Apple recently sought patent protection for mobile purchasing and touch-screen technology. Even with the new attention to M&A, Apple will maintain its strategy of focusing on smaller companies rather than taking on the risks of integrating large ones into Apple’s culture.

With more than $23.1 billion in cash, Apple has plenty of money to keep purchasing small startups. Counting long-term investments that the company can “liquidate in a day,” Apple had $41.7 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter, Broadpoint’s Marshall said, In comparison, Google had about $26.5 billion, he said [Source 1] [Source 2].

Google’s Next Search: A New China Strategy?

Published on April 12, 2010 in Emerging Markets and International Business. 1 Comment Tags: , .

It was probably only a matter of time before China and Google would find themselves in a major conflict. On the one hand, you have an authoritarian government that believes it has the right to censor information available to its citizens. On the other, you have a California-based Internet company committed to the free flow of information.

In mid-March, Google halted operation of its Internet search engine on the Chinese mainland and started directing users to its Hong Kong site, which is uncensored. Chinese officials retaliated on March 29 by blocking some of Google’s mobile Internet services. Knowledge@Wharton discussed the entire matter here.

Facebook More Popular Than Google?

Published on March 18, 2010 in Social Media. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

According to the latest Hitwise analysis, Google’s lost its crown as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. last week. The new king of Web site traffic is, of course, Facebook.

During the Winter holidays there were a few momentary spikes in traffic which placed Facebook on the top, but if you check out the graph of the long term trend shown above, you can see Facebook’s meteoric rise is now on target to meet or beat Google. And if that curve continues on its trajectory, which it may well do for a while (its market share is 185% up over the same week in 2009, for example,) Facebook will become number one by a huge margin, versus the tiddly little 0.04% separation it currently has above Google’s 7.03% share of average weekly market share.

Nonetheless, Facebook is now in a position to leverage those user visits to seize control of the online ad-placement business from Google–advertisers will begin to do the math and work out which site will get their ads in front of more eyeballs. And while Web 2.0 has been with us for a while, the fact that more people are visiting Facebook than Google indicates that this interactive revolution has really changed online habits [Source].