Internet Changes Everything

Chaos by design: Google

Chaos by design - October 2, 2006

The inside story of disorder, disarray, and uncertainty at Google. And why it's all part of the plan. (They hope.)
FORTUNE Magazine
Adam Lashinsky , Fortune senior writer
September 20 2006: 9:29 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- Spend just a few minutes on Google's sprawling campus in Mountain View, Calif., and you'll feel it right away: This is a company thriving on the edge of chaos. Google (Charts), age 8, is pulling in $10 billion a year in revenue and is worth about $125 billion, but the vibe is far more freshman mixer than profit-seeking firm whose every utterance is scrutinized for deeper meaning.

The 1.3-million-square-foot headquarters is a mélange of two-story buildings full of festive cafeterias (yes, they're all free), crammed conference rooms, and hallway bull sessions, all of it surrounded by sandy volleyball courts, youngsters whizzing by on motorized scooters, and -- there's no better way to put this -- an anything-goes spirit. It's a place where failure coexists with triumph, and ideas bubble up from lightly supervised engineers, none of whom worry too much about their projects ever making money.

An edgy management style

Take the case of Sheryl Sandberg, a 37-year-old vice president whose fiefdom includes the company's automated advertising system. Sandberg recently committed an error that cost Google several million dollars -- "Bad decision, moved too quickly, no controls in place, wasted some money," is all she'll say about it -- and when she realized the magnitude of her mistake, she walked across the street to inform Larry Page, Google's co-founder and unofficial thought leader. "God, I feel really bad about this," Sandberg told Page, who accepted her apology. But as she turned to leave, Page said something that surprised her. "I'm so glad you made this mistake," he said. "Because I want to run a company where we are moving too quickly and doing too much, not being too cautious and doing too little. If we don't have any of these mistakes, we're just not taking enough risk."

When a million-dollar mistake earns a pat on the back, it's obvious this isn't your normal corporation. To figure the place out, I've repeatedly been told the person to see is Shona Brown, the 40-year-old ex-McKinsey consultant who is Google's senior vice president for business operations. That's what it says on her business card, anyway, but she might as well be Google's chief chaos officer. She literally wrote the book on the subject, a 1998 bestseller called "Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos." And fittingly, on the day I'm to see her at the Googleplex, my press escort and I get hopelessly lost. Finding anyone here requires precise navigation and the ability to read color-coded maps. We get so badly turned around -- entering the wrong building's lobby, backtracking through shrubbery to another -- that we arrive 17 minutes late. Even real estate at Google is chaotic.

Click here to read more on Google's leadership

Brown has made a career of arguing that anarchy isn't such a bad thing -- which is why Page, co-founder Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt hired her in 2003. A business theoretician in a company dominated by engineers, she considers Google the "ultimate petri dish" for her research, though her job is anything but theoretical. In addition to overseeing human resources (called "people operations"), Brown runs a SWAT team of 25 strategic consultants who are loaned out internally on ten or so projects at a time -- restructuring a regional sales force here, guesstimating a market size there.

The company's goal, says Brown, is to determine precisely the amount of management it needs -- and then use a little bit less. It's an almost laughably Goldilocksian approach that Brown also advocates in her book, co-written with a Stanford business professor. The way to succeed in "fast-paced, ambiguous situations," she tells me, is to avoid creating too much structure, but not to add too little either. In other words, just make it not too hot and not too cold, and you're done. "If I ever come into the office and I feel comfortable, if I don't feel a little nervous about some crazy stuff going on, then we've taken it too far," she says.
A "Googley" approach to business

Crazy definitely trumps comfy at Google. You have to keep your wits about you on campus just to avoid smashing into one of Google's 8,000-plus employees. Meetings typically start on the hour, and young Googlers tend to hover outside scarce conference rooms beforehand. They doodle on hallway whiteboards, contributing inside jokes, such as sinister new ways to expand the company's online advertising program. ("AdSense for Eyelids," reads one.) Celebrity sightings are ho-hum. A couple of years ago I was having lunch at Google's sunny outdoor courtyard when Page and Brin sat down at my table with their guest, comedian Chris Tucker. George Soros lectured at Google the day I met Brown. Google advisor Al Gore shows up often.

Nurturing such an off-the-wall culture is a luxury only a company that's performing stupendously well can afford, and Google is certainly doing that. Two years after going public, its stock is up more than fourfold, and it's so profitable that despite helter-skelter spending on everything from mammoth data centers to worldwide sales and engineering offices, Google is generating more than $800 million in cash each quarter. In the process, Google is thrashing the competition -- in market share, deals won, buzz -- notably Yahoo (Charts) and Microsoft (Charts). It's also cozying up to a growing list of heavyweights you'd think would be warier, including News Corp (Charts)., Viacom (Charts), and ad-agency giant WPP (Charts).

If Google's engine is running fast, then naturally it's also running hot. That sheds light on all kinds of blunders -- many of them dwarfing Sandberg's -- which Google likes to explain away as its Googley approach to business. (Googley being a cloying description these people actually say out loud. Frequently.) The company is figuring things out as it goes, and not quite as effectively as you'd expect from its stellar financial results. Its new products haven't made nearly the splash that its original search engine did. Critics have mocked its self-righteous "Don't be evil" motto when, for example, Google decided to scan copyrighted books for its book search index. Even Google's rocket-ship stock price has been grounded. After a run from $85 in August 2004 to $475 last January, it has puttered around $400 for most of the year. Says Benjamin Schachter, an analyst with UBS: "Investors are saying, 'Enough of what you're going to do. What does it do to the numbers?' "

What concerns investors is whether Google can come up with a second act. There's nothing to suggest that its growth engine -- ad-supported search -- is in trouble. But it's clear from Google's tentative lurches into new forms of advertising and its spaghetti method of product development (toss against wall, see if sticks) that the company is searching for ways to grow beyond that well-run core. It's the reason, for example, that Google requires all engineers to spend 20% of their time pursuing their own ideas. Successful second acts are exceedingly rare in the technology business -- or in any business, for that matter. Microsoft followed Windows with Office. Intel jettisoned its memory-chip line to rule microprocessors. Even Apple, which executed one of the most remarkable rebirths ever with the iPod, had to go through a painful decade to get there.

What emerges from months of interviews with employees ranging from fresh-out-of-college hires to the CEO is that Google firmly believes it has a framework for figuring out the future. It should come as no surprise that the plan is as irreverent, self-confident, and presumptuous as the company itself. Google's executives don't articulate it this way, but the framework can be found in the title of Shona Brown's book: structured chaos. Indeed, along with Googleyness, chaos is among the most important aspects of Google's self-image. Understanding how Google thinks about chaos -- like Page's teachable moment after Sandberg's million-dollar mistake -- is critical to divining where the company goes next. "Are lots of questions hanging out there in the market?" asks Sandberg. "Sure. Because we don't always have an answer. We're willing to tolerate that ambiguity and chaos because that's where the room is for innovation." Good strategy -- if it actually works.

In "Competing on the Edge", Brown describes a sizzling Silicon Valley software company from the 1990s that was confronting the joys and hardships of hypergrowth. She identifies it only with a pseudonym, Galaxy, and it bears a striking resemblance to Brown's current employer, which didn't exist yet. "Galaxy was populated by smart, hip twenty- and thirtysomethings who were chosen for their brains and their attitude," she wrote. "Tour Galaxy and you'll be struck by the college-like atmosphere. Landing a job at Galaxy is hard. The screening process is intense. Once hired, the Galaxy philosophy is to let people 'do their own thing.' " But Galaxy had one glaring weakness: "The firm was living off one set of unusually successful products, whereas the rest of the businesses were much more modest performers."
Finding a follow-up act

What vexed Galaxy is precisely Google's challenge today. For all its new products -- depending on how you count, Google has released at least 83 full-fledged and test-stage products -- none has altered the Web landscape the way Google.com did. Additions like the photo site Picasa, Google Finance, and Google Blog Search belie Google's ardent claim that it doesn't do me-too products. Often new services lack a stunningly obvious feature. Users of Google's new online spreadsheet program, for instance, initially couldn't print their documents. The calendar product doesn't allow for synchronization with Microsoft Outlook, a necessity for corporate users.

Other major initiatives like Gmail, instant-messaging, and online mapping, while nifty, haven't come close to dislodging the market leaders. Much-hyped projects like the comparison-shopping site Froogle (nearly four years in beta and counting) and Google's video-sharing site have been far less popular than the competition. One of Google's biggest misses is its social-networking site, Orkut, which is a hit only in Brazil and -- as Marissa Mayer, Google's 31-year-old vice president of search products and user experience, says with an impressively straight face -- is "very strong in Iran." Sometimes promising new products are buried so deep within Google's sites that users can't find them. "You can only keep so many things in your head," acknowledges CEO Schmidt. "Even if you're the No. 1 Google supporter, you cannot remember all the products we have."

This presents a conundrum: Impose order, and Google becomes just like everybody else; let chaos rule, and run the risk that Google's flailing about hurts its pristine brand and reputation for brilliance. Clarifying its intentions would be a start. "We need to do a better job of communicating which products we expect to be killer apps and which are experiments," Brin told a gathering of journalists in May. There's been progress. In June, Google released its online payment tool, Checkout, as a full-fledged product. Mayer, who has the final word (except for Page) on what appears on Google's home page, has established a war room to piece together a plan for better integrating Google's many products.

It's going to be a battle, though, simply because Googlers are adding features by the bushel -- and more are coming. Niniane Wang, a young engineer who worked on Gmail, is now assigned to a confidential project believed to involve social networking. Louis Monier, a Digital Equipment veteran who launched its AltaVista search engine, recently left eBay to join Google in a top-secret capacity. Katie Jacobs Stanton runs Google Finance, Google Blog Search, and two other projects. This summer she temporarily moved with her husband and three children to Bangalore to get closer to the engineers who built the finance site. Since Google Finance doesn't run ads or any other revenue-generating features, I ask Stanton how long the site can ignore making money. Her response: "Theoretically, forever."

In fact, Google is making money slyly, if slowly, on some of the very products that seem like mere whiz-bang. Consider Google Earth, the ubiquitous cable-news prop and workplace time waster that lets users view incredibly detailed geographic photos from around the world. It started as a satellite-imaging software company called Keyhole. "Sergey [Brin] was playing around with it and got enamored with Keyhole," says John Hanke, Keyhole's original CEO (and now a Google employee) before Google bought it in 2004. "At a staff meeting, he put Keyhole up on one of the projectors and started showing people their houses and flying around." The startup, whose images were confined to the U.S., had been bringing in modest revenue from real estate companies, but that's not what interested Brin. "When we got to Google, one of the first questions Sergey asked was, 'Why can't you look at the whole world at once?' " says Hanke. Two years later the company is integrating ads into Google Earth. Search for "pizza" while hovering above your neighborhood, and you'll get the idea.

Neat toys are about more than creating Web pages on which Google can slap ads. Google Earth has been downloaded more than 100 million times, and embedded in each download is a request from Google to place a toolbar, a Web gadget that includes a search box, permanently on a user's Web browser. That seemingly innocuous query is a gold mine for Google, because the ever present box increases the likelihood users will search on Google. The more people search on Google, the greater the chances someone will click on an advertiser's ads. "We know the lifetime value of a toolbar user," says Mayer, who offers the example to counter the notion that Google isn't trying to profit from its fancy doodads. "So we know how much value we're getting back out of somebody who downloads Google Earth and then subsequently downloads the toolbar."
Strategic Partnering

This virtuous cycle of more users conducting more searches benefiting more advertisers is precisely what makes Google so irresistible to business partners -- even those who feel threatened by it. Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of ad agency holding company WPP, has been outspoken in his fear that Google could obviate companies like his. (Automated ad auctions entail less overhead than armies of schmoozing ad executives, goes the argument.) He titled a section of his latest annual report "Google: Friend or Foe?" In an interview, he suggests the short answer: "The bigger and more successful you get, the more people want to bring you down." But it's not that simple. WPP, Sorrell notes, is Google's third-largest customer, measured by the amount of advertising it purchases on Google for its clients. Sorrell says Google wants to improve its access to WPP's clients, and he's inclined to allow that -- provided there's something in it for WPP. "We represent 20% of media revenue worldwide, and we're definitely not 20% of Google's revenue," he says. "We'll see how we can work together."

Working with Google and grumbling about it is quite in fashion. Viacom's MTV recently signed a deal for Google to distribute its videos to the Web publishers in Google's AdSense network, which lets the publishers run ads supplied by Google's advertisers. Comcast, which has been Google's ideological opponent in an acrimonious legislative battle over government regulation of Net access, is particularly pleased with the revenue it gets from having Google power the search results on its Comcast.net home page for broadband users. In both cases, the older companies profit from Google's superior Internet advertising network. Indeed, after initially scaring "old" media, Google has become the go-to partner for juicing Internet revenues.

Chumminess with the establishment is in the air in mid-August when I meet with Schmidt, two days after Google's announcement of a landmark deal to provide search over numerous News Corp. properties, notably MySpace. (Google guarantees News Corp. $900 million over 3½ years in exchange for an unspecified share of ad revenue.) In our 90-minute interview, I remind Schmidt that at a lunch for journalists in March, he repeatedly mentioned MySpace almost wistfully, seeing how Google had been a bust in social networking.

"We didn't know what to do about it," he says. "Now we know." He explains that Google's new social-networking effort has at least two prongs. The well-known part is the MySpace deal; the other is Google's technology to improve search on social-networking sites, which so far only MySpace has agreed to use. Schmidt's explanation is a bald attempt to declare victory after an obvious defeat, since MySpace trounced Google's Orkut (not including, of course, those triumphs in Brazil and Iran).

The MySpace deal reveals the Google leadership triumvirate's visceral style. The transaction might never have happened, says Schmidt, if Brin hadn't flown to meet with News Corp. executives in Pebble Beach, Calif., where Rupert Murdoch was hosting an A-list bull session on global issues. (Schmidt was vacationing in Europe; Page was in India.) "We sent Sergey because he's very intuitive," says Schmidt. "He goes down there and sort of hangs with them for a while and comes back and says, 'You know, I'm really sure we should do this.' And it's not a numbers argument. It's a feeling of commitment."

Winning MySpace kept the Web's gem of the moment out of the hands of Microsoft and Yahoo, which both privately claim that Google overpaid by several hundred million dollars. Whether that's true won't be known for years. Tim Armstrong, Google's New York-based head of North American sales and the company's point man in the MySpace negotiations, pooh-poohs the notion that Google got taken.

"What people aren't seeing is our ability to model deals," he says. "I would guess that Google was not offering to write the biggest check for this partnership." In any event, the deal created a fan in News Corp., which has steadfastly refused to place any of its Fox shows on Google's video site and yet is positively giddy about its budding advertising relationship. "I actually don't view them as overwhelmingly competitive with us," says Peter Chernin, News Corp.'s president and chief operating officer. "They are trying to sell advertising, and so are we. But at their core I view them as a technology company, and we are an entertainment company. It's a happy and convenient marriage."
Mapping the future

It's great for Google that Murdoch & Co. love it so, but that doesn't change the impression that Google is winging it -- after all, the deal only came together after Brin descended from the clouds to peer into News Corp.'s soul. When I ask Schmidt whether his company actually has a plan, he does what engineers tend to do in situations like this: He gets up and starts drawing on a whiteboard.

A billionaire at 51, Schmidt cuts the typical Silicon Valley figure of somebody's successful, but otherwise average, dad. His khakis-and-oxford uniform is standard, as are his wire-frame glasses and Supercuts-inspired hairdo. Schmidt's doodling, which he's also done recently for the Google board of directors, tells the story of where he sees Google's money coming from for years to come. He draws a series of connected clouds representing the history of the computing industry, from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to today's mobile devices. The gist of the illustration is that there's practically no money left to be made in computers, not in hardware or software. The money, instead, is all in Web applications, a trend Schmidt had been predicting since his days as chief technology officer at Sun a decade ago. Users won't always be traveling to the Web on the PC, which is why he scribbles lines for cellphones, cable set-top boxes, Treos, BlackBerrys, and so on. Schmidt's most compelling point -- and the most visible glimmer of a method to Google's madness -- is the power behind the not-so-secret data centers Google is building, particularly a 30-acre facility in Oregon whose existence he references without provocation. "That massive investment should translate into the ability to build applications that are impossible for our competitors to offer, just because we can handle the scale," says Schmidt. (Microsoft, Yahoo, and IBM, each of which is spending heavily on similar big iron, would beg to differ.) He's talking about processing-power-sucking Google applications like Gmail and Google Earth -- and unannounced products on the drawing board.

Google has also begun to show how it plans to use that power for advertising services that go beyond search. Brokering video ads for MTV is new terrain, as are the graphical display ads Google plans to sell for MySpace. The company is engaged in an 18-month-old experiment to auction text and graphical ads for newspapers and magazines. It's also in the process of integrating its biggest acquisition to date, a radio-advertising company called dMarc Broadcasting, which Google bought in January for $102 million in cash plus a potential performance-based payout of more than $1 billion. dMarc automates the process for delivering radio ads to about 10% of the country's 10,000 stations. By merging dMarc into Google's AdWords, Google's online system for auctioning search terms, it will offer its advertisers -- who so far hawk their wares in 75 words or less of written text -- the ability to deploy radio ads as well.

It's a bold push. "We see very clear ways to improve advertising for all users," says Armstrong, the sales chief. It's the "all" in his aspirations that frightens anyone in Google's path. Or used to, anyway, before people started noticing that not everything Google does rocks the world. Nick Grouf, CEO of Spot Runner, a well-funded Los Angeles startup that does even more for television advertisers than dMarc does for radio, sees an Achilles' heel. "It's their incredible focus that got them this far," says Grouf. "But all these new initiatives suggest a dilution of that focus."

With so many moving parts, it's natural to wonder if Google is truly a company for the ages -- or whether it's the next Galaxy, that fast-moving, arrogant, one-hit wonder in Shona Brown's book. To believe that Google will find its second act, you have to accept the hubris and the chaos, and that the brainiacs who got lucky once will do so again. Google desperately wants to believe its nonlinear approach is all part of the plan. But as the company's big thinkers are the first to admit, most of the questions about Google aren't answerable. Try as they may, no one can truly control chaos. Top of page
From the October 2, 2006 issue

September 24, 2006 at 01:47 AM in Portals | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Google makes deal with MySpace

globeandmail.com : Google makes deal with MySpace

Associated Press

New York — Google Inc. reached a deal Monday with the owner of MySpace.com to pay at least $900-million (U.S.) in shared advertising revenue and become the exclusive search provider for the popular online hangout.

The deal, which marries the Internet's leading search engine with the top social-networking site, means News Corp. will have essentially paid off the bulk of the $1.2-billion it spent last year to acquire both MySpace and the online video-game company IGN Entertainment Inc.

Under the multiyear deal, News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media unit will add Google search boxes to MySpace and other sites, likely by the end of the year, and Google will provide search results and keyword ads targeted to people's search terms. Google will also get first rights to sell any display ads not sold by Fox directly.

Because the primary reason people leave MySpace now is to conduct searches on Google, according to Fox executives, letting MySpace users enter such queries directly on the site allows it to retain visitors longer and thus boost its advertising potential.
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The Globe and Mail

But just as importantly for Google, the deal lets the search company benefit from queries at MySpace instead of seeing those ad dollars go to rivals Yahoo Inc. or Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.

August 8, 2006 at 01:02 AM in Portals | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Fuzzy maths

Google | Fuzzy maths | Economist.com

May 11th 2006 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition
In a few short years, Google has turned from a simple and popular company into a complicated and controversial one

MATHEMATICALLY confident drivers stuck in the usual jam on highway 101 through Silicon Valley were recently able to pass time contemplating a billboard that read: “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com.” The number in question, 7427466391, is a sequence that starts at the 101st digit of e, a constant that is the base of the natural logarithm. The select few who worked this out and made it to the right website then encountered a “harder” riddle. Solving it led to another web page where they were finally invited to submit their curriculum vitae.

If a billboard can capture the soul of a company, this one did, because the anonymous advertiser was Google, whose main product is the world's most popular internet search engine. With its presumptuous humour, its mathematical obsessions, its easy, arrogant belief that it is the natural home for geniuses, the billboard spoke of a company that thinks it has taken its rightful place as the leader of the technology industry, a position occupied for the past 15 years by Microsoft.

In tone, the billboard was “googley”, as the firm's employees like to say. That adjective, says one spokeswoman, evokes a “humble, cosmopolitan, different, toned-down” classiness. A good demonstration of googley-ness came in the speeches at a conference in Las Vegas this year. Whereas the bosses of other technology companies welcomed the audience into the auditorium with flashing lights and blasting rock music, Google played Bach's Brandenburg Concerto Number Three and had a thought puzzle waiting on every seat. The billboard was also googley in that, like Google's home page, it had visual simplicity that belied the sophistication of its content. To outsiders, however, googley-ness often implies audacious ambition, a missionary calling to improve the world and the equation of nerdiness with virtue.

The main symptom of this, prominently displayed on the billboard, is a deification of mathematics. Google constantly leaves numerical puns and riddles for those who care to look in the right places. When it filed the regulatory documents for its stockmarket listing in 2004, it said that it planned to raise $2,718,281,828, which is $e billion to the nearest dollar. A year later, it filed again to sell another batch of shares—precisely 14,159,265, which represents the first eight digits after the decimal in the number pi (3.14159265).

The mathematics comes from the founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The Russian-born Mr Brin is the son of a professor of statistics and probability and a mother who works at NASA; Mr Page is the son of two computer-science teachers. The breakthrough that made their search engine so popular was the realisation that the chaos of the internet had an implicit mathematical order. By counting, weighting and calculating the link structures between web pages, Messrs Page and Brin were able to return search results more relevant than those of any other search engine.

So far, they have maintained this superiority. Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an online industry newsletter, ranks Google as the best search engine, Yahoo! as second-best, Ask (the re-named Ask Jeeves) third, and Microsoft's MSN last among the big four. Google's share of searches has gone up almost every month of the past year. Including those on AOL, an internet portal that uses Google's search technology, Google had half of all searches in March. Excluding AOL, the figure was 43%. This is why people “google”—rather than, say, “yahoo”—their driving directions, dates and recipes.

Mathematical prowess is also behind the other half of Google's success: its ability to turn all those searches into money. Unlike software companies such as Microsoft which get most of their revenues from licence fees, Google is primarily an advertising agency. It does not sell the usual sort of advertising, in which an advertiser places a display on a page and pays per thousand visitor “impressions” (views): it has perfected the more efficient genre of “pay-per-click” advertising. It places little text advertisements (“sponsored links”) on a page in an order determined by auction among the advertisers. But these advertisers pay only once an internet user actually clicks on their links (thereby expressing an interest in buying). This works best on the pages of search results, which account for over half of the firm's revenues, because the users' keywords allow Google to place relevant advertisements on the page. But it also works on other web pages, such as blogs or newspaper articles, that sign up to be part of Google's “network”.
The world brain

These two interlocking “engines”—the search algorithms coupled with the advertising algorithms—are the motor that powers Google's growth in revenues ($6.1 billion last year) and profits ($1.5 billion), as well as its $117 billion market capitalisation. Its horsepower is the reason why Andy Bechtolsheim, Google's first investor (as well as a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a big computer-maker) still holds on to all his shares in the firm. It's all about advertisers “bidding up the keywords” in Google's auctions, he says. “How far this thing could go, nobody can say.”

Since its stockmarket debut, however, Google has been adding new and often quite different products to this twin engine. It now owns Picasa, which makes software to edit digital photos on computers; Orkut, a social-networking site popular mainly in Brazil; and Blogger, which lets people start an online journal. It also offers free software for instant-messaging and internet telephony, for searching on the desktop computers of users, for (virtually) flying around the Earth, for keeping computers free of viruses, for uploading and sharing videos, and for creating web pages. It has a free e-mail program and calendar. It recently bought a firm called Writely, which lets people create and save text documents (much as Microsoft's Word does) online rather than on their own computers. Google is also scanning books in several large libraries to make them searchable. It is preparing to offer free wireless internet access in San Francisco and perhaps other cities, and dabbling in radio advertising. And that is only the start of a long list.

Whether these are arbitrary distractions or not depends on one's point of view. For Messrs Brin and Page, they make mathematical sense. Mr Brin (“the strategy guy”) has calculated that Google's engineers should spend 70% of their time on core products (ie, the search and advertising engines), 20% on relevant but tangential products, and 10% on wild fun that might or might not lead to a product. The result is that lots of tiny teams are working on all sorts of projects, the most promising ones of which end up on the prestigious “top 100” list that Mr Page (“the product guy”) spends a lot of his time on. Most of the items on that list in theory have something to do with Google's mission, which is “to organise the world's information”. Scanning and indexing books, for instance, brings offline information online.

The outside world increasingly sees it differently. Among Google fans, the company has come to epitomise the more mature (ie, post-bust) internet generation, which goes by the marketing cliché “Web 2.0” (see article). In this context, it is assumed to be working on absolutely everything simultaneously, and every new product announcement, no matter how trivial, is greeted as a tiny step toward an eventual world-changing transformation.

At a minimum, this hypothetical transformation would consist of moving computation and data off people's personal computers and on to the network—ie, Google's servers. Other names for this scenario are the “GDrive” or the “Google grid” that the company is allegedly working on, meaning free (but ultimately advertising-supported) copious online storage and possibly free internet access. Free storage threatens Microsoft, because its software dominates personal computers rather than the internet; free access threatens other internet-access providers.

At a maximum, the transformation goes quite a bit further. George Dyson, a futurist who has spent time at Google, thinks that the company ultimately intends to link all these digital synapses created by its users into what H.G. Wells, a British science-fiction writer, once called the “world brain”. Google, Mr Dyson thinks, wants to fulfil the geeks' dream of creating “artificial intelligence”. Passing the so-called “Turing test”, created by Alan Turing, a British mathematician, to determine whether a machine can be said to be able to think, would be the ultimate reward.
From primes to share prices

But many who deal with Google in their daily lives are getting fed up with such grandiose notions. Google's shares, after nearly quintupling since they began trading, have fallen in recent months. Pip Coburn, an investment strategist, says that “Google was a simple story at one point: online ads on top of the most popular search mechanism on the planet. Simple. But now it is pretty much a mess and to get the stock going again, the company may need to work on its own simplicity so as to match the simplicity of the Google home page itself.”

Mr Sullivan of Search Engine Watch says Google has become distracted. “Oh, give me a break,” he wrote in his blog after yet another product announcement. “A break from Google going in yet another direction when there is so much stuff they haven't finished, gotten right or need to fix.” He points to a rule in Google's corporate philosophy that “it's best to do one thing really, really well,” and suggests that the company is “doing 100 different things rather than one thing really, really well.”

Google is thus starting to look a bit as Microsoft did a decade ago, with one strength (Windows for Microsoft, search for Google) and a string of mediocre “me-too” products. Google Video, for instance, was supposed to become an online marketplace for video clips, both personal and business, but has been overtaken by YouTube, a start-up that is a few months old but already has four times as much video traffic. Google News, where the stories are, characteristically, chosen by mathematical algorithms rather than by editors, perennially lags behind Yahoo! News, with its old-fashioned human touch. Google's instant-messaging software is tiny compared with AOL's, Yahoo!'s and MSN's.

Google is beginning to resemble the old Microsoft in another way, too. A decade ago, Microsoft stood accused of stifling innovation, because entrepreneurs would stay away from any area of technology in which it showed any interest. Google, whose slogan is “Don't be evil”, hates this comparison and wants to think of itself as ventilating rather than stifling the ecosystem of developers and entrepreneurs. “I don't see how they can say that,” says an entrepreneur and competitor who is too afraid of unspecified consequences to speak on the record. Like most of Silicon Valley these days, he finds Google's slogan ridiculous, because “we're not evil either, we just don't go around saying it.”

Entrepreneurs like him are getting annoyed by Google's seemingly endless “betas”, also known as “technical previews”, when new products are not yet officially launched but available, ostensibly for testing and review. Traditionally, beta reviews were meant to last weeks or months and were targeted at testers who would find and report bugs. Google seems to use betas as dogs sprinkle trees—so that rivals know where it is. Google News recently graduated out of its beta after about four years.

In fairness, Google's role today is more complex than Microsoft's was in the 1990s, when start-ups often hoped to “exit” by listing their shares on the stockmarket, and were occasionally expunged by Microsoft before they got there. Today, start-ups (such as Writely, Picasa, Orkut and Urchin) often use Google (or the other internet titans) as the exit, selling themselves to the big guy. It works for individuals too. Paul Rademacher is a software engineer who last year came up with a clever way of combining Google's interactive maps with other websites. Google hired him.

To Google's initial surprise and subsequent chagrin (is it not enough to vow never to be evil?), it alienates more groups of people as it enters more areas of modern life. It appeared to be genuinely taken aback that some book publishers oppose its plan to scan their books and make them searchable. Google also seemed surprised when privacy advocates voiced concerns over its practice of placing advertisements in contextually related e-mail messages on its webmail service, and again this year when it announced a Chinese version that censors the search results.

Slowly, the company is realising that it is so important that it may not be able to control the ramifications of its own actions. “As more and more data builds up in the company's disk farms,” says Edward Felten, an expert on computer privacy at Princeton University, “the temptation to be evil only increases. Even if the company itself stays non-evil, its data trove will be a massive temptation for others to do evil.” In a world of rogue employees, intruders and accidents, he says, Google could be “one or two privacy disasters away from becoming just another internet company”.

Such concerns are forcing Messrs Brin and Page, still in their early 30s, and Eric Schmidt, whom they hired as chief executive and who is in his early 50s, to behave increasingly like a “normal” company. Google recently sent its first lobbyists to Washington, DC. Its decision to build an “evil scale” to help it devise its China strategy was more unusual, but its hiring of Al Gore, a former American vice-president, to aid the process, was just the kind of thing that old-fashioned empire-building firms do all the time.

Other companies are reacting in traditional ways to Google's dominance. Former rivals, such as eBay, Yahoo! and Microsoft, are exploring alliances to counter its influence. When Microsoft tried to buy AOL from its parent, Time Warner, Google's Mr Schmidt flew in for talks that led to Google taking a defensive stake in AOL, thus keeping it out of Microsoft's and Yahoo!'s reach. In response, Microsoft has contemplated buying all or part of Yahoo!, and has recently announced a vague but large increase in research spending which amounts to an arms race. Google is now alleging that Microsoft is unfairly steering users of its web browser to MSN for searches, and is preparing to dispatch lawyers to keep Microsoft in check.

Google thus finds itself at a defining moment. There are plenty of people within the company who want it to play the power game. “The folks who are closest to Larry and Sergey are very, very worried about Microsoft, as well they should be,” says John Battelle, the author of a blog and a book on Google. Yet the company's founders themselves may not be prepared to drop their idealism and their faith in their own mathematical genius. They have always wanted to succeed by being good and doing good. “Never once did we consider buying a big company,” says David Krane, Google's 84th employee, by way of example. It would not be googley. It would, he says, be “yuck”.

May 11, 2006 at 11:28 PM in Portals | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Pins Hopes on Calendar

Google Pins Hopes on Calendar

For all of the hoopla surrounding Google's products, the company sure has struggled to generate smash hits outside of Web search. Sure, Google's maps, with their eye-catching satellite imagery, have been a scorching success. But many other ventures, from shopping site Froogle to social networking hub Orkut to Google Talk instant-messaging client, have generated little enthusiasm.

The company hopes to better the record on Apr. 13 when it launches Google Calendar -- a free, Internet-based calendar that helps users keep track of important dates, events, and information.

Early indications are promising. Several analysts who have tried the product believe Google (GOOG) may be on to something. Google Calendar differs from most other online calendar services because it lets users publish and share the information, as well as overlay events from other calendars.

SYNCED SCHEDULES. Google Calendar users, for example, could sync their own calendars with those of a spouse and children to more efficiently plan a summer vacation. "Our goal is to reduce the burden of running a calendar," says Google Product Manager Carl Sjogreen.

That may be just the start. Google's goal is to make this not just an end product, but rather a platform for organizing events and sharing information, analysts say. "Google has rethought the entire role of a calendar," says Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. "It recognizes you have several calendars to manage and that you have to interact between them."

Calendar could thrust Google into other new areas, including territory occupied by the likes of Evite, owned by Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI). Google Calendar lets users plan events, including sending out invitations and reminders, keeping track of RSVPs, and interacting with potential guests.

ADS FOR EVENTS. Although Google has not announced how it plans to make money from the calendar offering, event planning could provide prime real estate for advertisers. A local costume store could advertise in conjunction with an invitation for a Halloween party, for instance. "Events are highly monetizable," says Li.

Google will initially integrate its beta calendar product with its two-year-old e-mail service, Gmail (see BW Online, 10/26/05, "Gmail: Just a Bit Too Quirky"). The fledgling e-mail service could use the shot in the arm that may accompany added features. Despite a sleek interface and free, jumbo-size accounts, analysts estimate that Gmail has attracted about 10 million users. Not bad, but it's less than 10% of the amount of e-mail users at Yahoo or Microsoft's Hotmail, say the analysts.

Elgin is a correspondent in BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau

April 13, 2006 at 12:55 AM in Portals | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Google architecture

Peeking Into Google

March 2, 2005
Peeking Into Google
By Susan Kuchinskas

BURLINGAME, Calif. -- The key to the speed and reliability of Google (Quote, Chart) search is cutting up data into chunks, its top engineer said.

Urs Hoelzle, Google vice president of operations and vice president of engineering, offered a rare behind-the-scenes tour of Google's architecture on Wednesday. Hoelzle spoke here at EclipseCon 2005, a conference on the open source, extensible platform for software tools.

To deal with the more than 10 billion Web pages and tens of terabytes of information on Google's servers, the company combines cheap machines with plenty of redundancy, Hoelzle said. Its commodity servers cost around $1,000 apiece, and Google's architecture places them into interconnected nodes.

All machines run on a stripped-down Linux kernel. The distribution is Red Hat (Quote, Chart), but Hoelzle said Google doesn't use much of the distro. Moreover, Google has created its own patches for things that haven't been fixed in the original kernel.

"The downside to cheap machines is, you have to make them work together reliably," Hoelzle said. "These things are cheap and easy to put together. The problem is, these things break."

In fact, at Google, many will fail every day. So, Google has automated methods of dealing with machine failures, allowing it to build a fast, highly reliable service with cheap hardware.

Google replicates the Web pages it caches by splitting them up into pieces it calls "shards." The shards are small enough that several can fit on one machine. And they're replicated on several machines, so that if one breaks, another can serve up the information. The master index is also split up among several servers, and that set also is replicated several times. The engineers call these "chunk servers."

As a search query comes into the system, it hits a Web server, then is split into chunks of service. One set of index servers contains the index; one set of machines contains one full index. To actually answer a query, Google has to use one complete set of servers. Since that set is replicated as a fail-safe, it also increases throughput, because if one set is busy, a new query can be routed to the next set, which drives down search time per box.

In parallel, clusters of document servers contain copies of Web pages that Google has cached. Hoelzle said that the refresh rate is from one to seven days, with an average of two days. That's mostly dependent on the needs of the Web publishers.

"One surprising limitation is we can't crawl as fast as we would like, because [smaller] webmasters complain," he said.

Each set of document servers contains one copy of the Web. These machines are responsible for delivering the content snippets that show searchers relevant text from the page.

"When we have your top 10 results, they get sent to the document servers, which load the 10 result pages into memory," Hoelzle said. "Then you parse through them and find the best snippet that contains all the query words."

Google uses three software systems built in-house to route queries, balance server loads and make programming easier.

The Google File System was written specifically to deal with the cheap machines that will fail.

"We take our files and chunk them up, then you randomly distribute the chunks across different machines, making sure each chunk has at least two copies that are not physically adjacent -- not on same power strip or same switch," Hoelzle said. "We try to make sure that even if one copy goes away, another copy is still here." Chunks typically are 64 megabytes and are replicated three times.

All this replication makes it easier to make changes, Hoelzle said. Google simply takes one replica at a time offline, updates it, then plugs the machines back in.

Because these chunks are randomly distributed all over, Google needs a master containing metadata to keep track of where the chunks are. When a query comes into the system, the file system master tells it which chunk server has the data. "From there on, you just talk to the chunk servers," he said.

Client machines are responsible for dealing with fault tolerance. If a client requests a file from the specified chunk server and gets no response within the designated time period, it uses the meta information to locate another chunk server, while sending the file master a hint that the first chunk server might have died. If the master confirms the chunk went out, it will replicate the chunks that were on it to another server, making sure that the information is replicated at least the minimum number of times.

"You were vulnerable for only a very brief period," he said.

To enable Google programmers to write applications to run in parallel on 1,000 machines, engineers created the Map/Reduce Framework in 2004.

"The Map/Reduce Framework provides automatic and efficient parallelization and distribution," Hoelzle said. "It's fault tolerant and it does the I/O scheduling, being a little bit smart about where the data lives."

Programmers write two simple functions, map and reduce, to create a long list of key/value pairs. Then, the mapping function produces other key/value pairs. "You just map one pair to another pair," he said.

For example, if an application is needed to count URLs on one host, the programmer would take the URL and the contents and map them into the pair consisting of hostname and 1. "This produces an intermediate set of key/value pairs with different values."

Next, a reduction operation takes all the outputs that have the same key and combines them to produce a single output.

"Map/Reduce is simplified large-scale data processing," Hoelzle said, "a very simple abstraction that makes it possible to write programs that run over these terabytes of data with little effort."

The third homegrown application is Google's Global Work Queue, which is for scheduling.

Global Work Queue works like old-time batch processing. It schedules queries into batch jobs and places them on pools of machines. The setup is optimized for running random computations over tons of data.

"Mostly, you want to split the huge task into lots of small chunks, which provides even load balancing across machines," Hoelzle said. The idea is to have more tasks than machines so machines are never idle.

Hoelzle also demonstrated how Google uses its massive architecture to learn from data. It analyzes the most common misspellings of queries, and uses that information to power the function that suggests alternate spellings for queries.

The company also is applying machine learning to its system to give better results. Theoretically, he said, if someone searches for "Bay Area cooking class," the system should know that "Berkeley courses: vegetarian cuisine" is a good match even though it contains none of the query words.

To do this, the system tries to cluster concepts into "reasonably coherent" subclusters that seem related. These clusters, some tiny and some huge, are named automatically. Then, when a query comes in, the system produces a probability score for the various clusters. This kind of machine learning has had little success in academic trials, Hoelzle said, because they didn't have enough data. "If you have enough data, you get reasonably good answers out of it."

In addition to improving query results, Google uses this learning to better deliver contextual ads for its AdSense service to Web publishers, as well as to more accurately cluster news stories within Google News.

Google's redundancy theory works on a meta level, as well, according to Hoelzle. One literal meltdown -- a fire at a datacenter in an undisclosed location -- brought out six fire trucks but didn't crash the system.

"You don't have just one data center," he said, "you have multiples."

March 13, 2006 at 01:25 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (56) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo lowers expectations for original content

Yahoo lowers expectations for original content - Yahoo! News

By Lisa Baertlein Thu Mar 2, 7:22 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web media company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) wants to lower expectations for how much original programming it will produce as part of its online information and entertainment offerings, the company said on Thursday.

Yahoo will not do a string of one-off projects, focusing instead on combining program content with licensed, user-generated and other content, Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens said.

Speculation about the company's plans to deliver its own programming has swirled since Yahoo, which is headed by former Hollywood studio chief Terry Semel, hired Lloyd Braun in late 2004. Braun is the former chairman of the entertainment division at Walt Disney Co.'s ABC network.

Among the projects put on ice by Yahoo is "The Runner," a reality program Braun brought over from ABC, according to published reports.

Stevens declined to give specifics on the number or names of productions that were planned or are being dropped.

"We're focusing on tying all the different pieces together. We won't pursue a project unless we think there is an opportunity to make a sustainable business of it," Stevens said.

"I think they may just be trying to ratchet the expectations down," Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff said of Yahoo's plans.

Internet gossip sites recently have suggested that Braun was leaving the company due to differences with Semel, something Braun and other company executives dismissed in an article printed in the New York Times on Thursday.

The New York Times cited Braun saying that Yahoo would embark on only a handful of new ventures this year, not the dozens he had promised, and that his early expectations for what he could do at Yahoo had been overly grand.

"Nothing significant has really changed. We have lots of concepts in development, some will get green-lit and some won't," said Stevens.

Yahoo executives have repeatedly said they do not intend to recreate television on the Web, envisioning instead a new entertainment venue that plays up the interactivity of the Internet.

Online companies like Yahoo and Google Inc. have been aggressively pursuing video content deals -- from licensing agreements to user submissions -- in a bid to expand advertising and other business opportunities.

But investors have become concerned that the red-hot growth fueling those companies is cooling.

"It is not easy to figure out what you do here. Nobody knows the right way to do it," Bernoff said.

Meanwhile, network reality television show producer Mark Burnett is playing the field.

Burnett was the producer of "The Runner" at Yahoo and has done marketing tie-ins for his "Survivor" and "The Apprentice" reality television shows with the Internet company.

He recently signed a deal to produce an online treasure hunt series called "Gold Rush" with Time Warner Inc. Internet unit AOL.

Yahoo is developing its own interactive series called "Treasure Hunt," reportedly with Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg.

March 4, 2006 at 04:44 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

British video engine to rival Yahoo

Technology, Technology news, Times Online

By Rhys Blakely

Blinkx, the British internet search company, today launched an online video service to challenge Yahoo! and Google, the American giants planning to dominate the fast-developing market.

The privately owned company has formed a partnership with ITN, the news producer, to make video content searchable online. In a first for the search specialist, revenues will be raised through advertising.

Blinkx had been linked to a string of potential suitors, including News Corporation, the parent company of Times Online. However, the move to host advertising has led insiders to suggest that the British company, already lauded as a pioneer in the search market, could now resist any takeover attempt.

"They are not actively looking to get bought and are signing more deals with content providers and are launching new services – such as the advertising model to begin to monetise blinkx," a source close to the company said.

Users of the ITN service will be able to search an archive of video clips through a voice recognition system that blinkx has spent several years developing.

The company hopes its technology, which has been used by the US Department of Homeland Security to eavesdrop on al-Qaeda terrorists, will give it an edge over its much larger American rivals. Google recently ran into problems with its own video search service, which attracted critical reviews from investors when Wall Street analysts found that it frequently broke down.

Blinkx also plans to use the ITN model, where advertising revenues will be split between the two partners, as a base for expansion. The company has deals that do not involve advertising in place with content providers such as Forbes and BusinessWeek, publications based in the print market which have used blinkx to move into video.

Suranga Chandratillake, Blinkx’s co-founder and chief technology officer, told Times Online: "The CNNs of the world already have the technology and the sales teams to launch their own, self-contained products. But there is a significant market for smaller content providers. We believe we can play a major part in bringing them to the web and making them searchable."

The blinkx system will also give advertisers the opportunity to target different consumers with marketing campaigns. Relevant adverts could also be attached to particular news clips, Mr Chandratillake said.

"For example, if there is a story about Luton Airport being out of action, we could run ads showing people how to get to Gatwick."

Online video services are being widely touted as a crucial next step for internet companies. Yahoo!, the internet portal business that owns the world’s most popular website, has already taken the step of commissioning video content to use online.

Meanwhile, Google, the leader in online advertising, was last week hit by suggestions that text-based markets are approaching maturity in territories such as the UK.

As shares in Google slumped 10 per cent after the company failed to hit Wall Street’s ambitious growth targets, analysts looked forward to the revenue potential of the group’s video services.

Analysts from Morgan Stanley said: "The thing we were most excited about was the launch of Google Video … In spite of the glitches, the product is fun, and history has proven that fun can be monetised."

Blinkx already searches content from Reuters, the largest producer of television news, and claims that raw footage from the news agency can be searched on its site within one minute of being shot.

The new service can be accessed at www.itn.co.uk and www.blinkx.tv.

To have your own say on Google, visit the Times Online technology blog.

February 8, 2006 at 08:27 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google - The bubbling sound of stock flowing down the plug hole

Google - The bubbling sound of stock flowing down the plug hole

By Paul Hales: Thursday 26 January 2006, 10:42
IT TOOK JUST a week for Google to move from all-conquering hero to bad-ass villain.

Last week, the company founded on a single search algorithm was being lauded for standing up against the US administration’s Big Brother-style thirst for information on its own citizens. The only people then concerned that Google was refusing to open up its databanks to Government snoops were the shareholders, worried the impact of such a move may have on the fatness of their wallets.

This week, Google’s in the dock for daring to allow the authorities in China to control what can be seen on Google’s search pages from the within the People’s Republic. In standing up to the US (hurrah!) while kowtowing to the Chinese (boo!) Google has put itself in the glare of the media spotlight for all the wrong reasons. From here on it, can only get worse.

Ordinary folk who use Google to look stuff up are discovering that Google keeps a file on them. Media darling of the day is Californian Kathryn Hanson, who according to Katie Hafner in the New York Times, panicked after entering the phrase 'rent boy' into Google’s ubiquitous engine, after reading about failed UK Liberal Democrat leadership candidate Mark Oaten’s penchant for pairs of the aforementioned article. So close is Hafner to Hanson that she observed that latter turning "immediately" to her boyfriend, concerned that she could now be, "whisked away to some navy prison in the middle of the night".

Hafner/Hanson was concerned over the US moves to get Google to cough up the search data. She may now be more concerned to learn that Google's professed aim, according to its founders, is to know more about her than she herself does.

For the search favourite certainly likes to record users’ IP addresses. It also likes to employ a lifetime cookie what won’t expire until 2038. Users of the firm’s Gmail service will be aware that they are urged never to throw away a single email. Why? Well it may be of no practical use to the user to have to search - cumbersomely, we might add – through masses of saved mail to find the one or two that may be of some use. But it will be of commercial use to Google to build up a profile of your mailing habits over, say, thirty years. Oh. And is the email service tied to the search engine? Yup? Rent boy worries indeed.

So Google now has a problem on its hands, and one which will cause more shareholders to jump ship that those that already did so last week. For the public will begin not to trust it. No wonder Yahoo, having thrown in the towel as a web search outfit, has decided that it is back in with a shout.

Strange that Google, having risen so high has gotten itself in such a pickle. It’s done a Microsoft and outgrown its boots and begun to alienate its users. Unfortnately for it, the only way is down. Still, it likely has collected more data on individual web users than the CIA. And information, after all, is power – or so they say.

January 26, 2006 at 08:36 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

The personalization of newspapers

1995 paper from Krishna Bharat, who is the creator or Google News, that just came out of beta. Additional background here at "the next big thing".

An interactive, personalized, newspaper on the WWW - Kamba, Bharat, Albers (ResearchIndex)

Abstract: This paper discusses the personalization of online newspapers based on our experience with the Krakatoa Chronicle, an interactive, personalized, newspaper on the World Wide Web (WWW). The personalization of newspapers involves both social and technical issues. In social terms, it is important that users can control the extent of personalization, because newspapers are not only a means to get personally interesting articles but also a way to get information you are not explicitly looking for

Download file

January 24, 2006 at 12:51 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance

Yahoo! gives up quest for search dominance

By JONATHAN THAW
BLOOMBERG NEWS

Yahoo! Inc., one of the first Internet search companies, has capitulated to Google Inc. in the battle for market dominance.

"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

Yahoo!'s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google's dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp. in Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising.

"In some countries, it's already game over in search, with Google the clear victor," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan in New York. "Google's product development pipeline runs at such a fast rate that it's very difficult for any company, Microsoft or Yahoo! to catch up."

Shares of Yahoo! fell as much as 13 percent Wednesday, the day after the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company reported fourth-quarter profit that missed analysts' expectations. The stock rose 43 cents to $34.17 Monday in Nasdaq stock market composite trading.

"It kind of makes you wonder about how serious they are about search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of London-based SearchEngineWatch.com, which tracks the search industry. "It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it's realistic or not."

Yahoo! founded in 1994 as one of the first online directories of Web sites, switched from Google's search engine to its own technology two years ago.

To boost revenue from each search, Yahoo! plans to make ads more relevant to search terms, meaning people will be more likely to click on them. Advertisers pay Yahoo! a fee when Internet users click on the ads.

"We have held our own, and we should gain revenue share in the industry as we roll out these new initiatives," Decker said in the interview after the company reported earnings last week.

advertising
"Our goal has been to hold our share and to be a leading, if not the leading, total marketing platform, which would include both brand and search."

Yahoo! handled 19 percent of global Internet searches in November, a drop from 27 percent a year earlier, according to Web tracker ComScore Networks Inc.

Google's share, by contrast, rose to 60 percent from 47 percent.

Decker last week cautioned analysts on a conference call against taking the ComScore figures too literally, saying the data exclude Asian countries where Yahoo! is "exceptionally strong."

January 24, 2006 at 12:42 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo tumbles on profit news

TheStar.com - Yahoo tumbles on profit news

Jan. 18, 2006. 10:50 AM
MICHAEL LIEDTKE
ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo Inc.'s shares dropped more than 11 per cent early Wednesday as investors expressed their disappointment with the Internet powerhouse's inability to reap bigger gains as advertisers shift more of their spending to the web.

Yahoo's shares plunged $4.66, or 11.6 per cent, to $35.45 (U.S.) in early trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

he selloff came after Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company reported late Tuesday that its fourth-quarter profit nearly doubled but fell shy of analyst expectations.

It marked the second consecutive quarter in which Yahoo reported earnings growth that investors interpreted as a sign that the company isn't capitalizing on the online advertising boom as well as its rival, online search engine leader Google Inc.

"Yahoo has a good story going; it's just not as good as Google's," said Internet industry analyst Safa Rashtchy of Piper Jaffray. "We would expect to see faster growth in a growth market that seems to be on fire like this one."

Yahoo earned $683.2 million, or 46 cents per share, during the three months ended in December. That represented an 83 per cent increase from net income of $372.5 million, or 25 cents per share, at the same time in 2004.

The 2005 results included a $310-million gain triggered by a complex deal that left Yahoo with a 40 per cent stake in Alibaba.com, China's largest e-commerce company.

If not for that gain and other accounting items unrelated to its ongoing operations, Yahoo said it would have earned 16 cents per share. That figure fell a penny below the average estimate among analysts polled by Thomson Financial.

Revenue for the quarter totalled $1.5 billion, a 39 per cent increase from $1.08 billion in the comparable 2004 period.

After subtracting the advertising commissions that Yahoo paid to other websites, the company's fourth-quarter revenue stood at $1.07 billion, in line with analyst estimates.

Although Yahoo's profits have been steadily rising in recent years, the company has struggled to develop an automated system that's as effective at serving up moneymaking ads as Google.

"Frankly, Google has done a better job than us," Yahoo chairman Terry Semel acknowledged during a Tuesday interview.

Both Yahoo and Google display text-based ads on hundreds of websites in addition to their own, but only get paid when the links are clicked on.

Google's knack for enticing clicks has generated a long stretch of stellar earnings growth that has eclipsed Yahoo's. As a result, Google is currently worth twice as much as Yahoo, even though it started three years later.

"It's like we built our house first and someone came along and built an even better house," Semel said.

Investors have been betting Google will surpass analyst expectations Jan. 31 when it's scheduled to report its fourth-quarter earnings.

January 24, 2006 at 12:08 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google throws bodies at OpenOffice

Google throws bodies at OpenOffice | CNET News.com

By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: October 31, 2005, 4:00 AM PST
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Google plans to hire programmers to improve OpenOffice.org, a demonstration of its affinity for open source initiatives and one the company believes also shows sound practical sense.

OpenOffice has its roots in Sun Microsystems' StarOffice suite of programs. Five years ago, Sun turned its proprietary software into an open-source project. Only recently, however, has the competitor to Microsoft's Office attracted serious attention.

Now Google believes it can help OpenOffice--perhaps working to pare down the software's memory requirements or its mammoth 80MB download size, said Chris DiBona, manager for open-source programs at the search company.

"We want to hire a couple of folks to help make OpenOffice better," DiBona said.

Google has shown an affinity for open-source software, which are programs developed in the open and available for free. Many of the company's programmers came of age in the open-source era, so advancing the open-source agenda comes naturally, DiBona said. But the company also has business reasons to justify its open-source embrace.

"We use a fair amount of open-source software at Google. We want to make sure that's a healthy community. And we want to make sure open source preserves competitiveness within the industry," he said.

Earlier in October, Google and Sun announced a partnership to boost several software projects, but released few details. Asked about OpenOffice collaboration, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the time only that the search engine power would "work to make the distribution of (OpenOffice) more broad." But OpenOffice, like the other software projects the partners intend to work on, competes directly with Microsoft software--a point that has not gone unnoticed.

As one of the most-watched companies in the industry, Google's involvement has helped Sun draw attention to OpenOffice.org. And there are other reasons the software is taken more seriously as an alternative to Microsoft Office. For one thing, OpenOffice.org 2.0 was just released with a modernized interface and some new features. For another, OpenOffice.org supports OpenDocument, a standardized file format that many endorse as a way to break the lock-in of Microsoft's proprietary formats.

DiBona didn't mention a wider competitive perspective in giving Google's rationale for investing time and money on nonproprietary software. "We were looking for ways to work with Sun and ways to help users. This is a good place to spend some resources," he said.

Google's heavy use of open-source software for its operations has kept its developers in touch with cutting-edge technology, but the do-it-yourself approach has also meant that its employees have technology maintenance responsibilities that most companies leave to others.

Some believe Google eventually will have to settle with a more conventional approach: buying technology instead of building it in-house. Among them is Brian Stevens, chief technology officer of Linux seller Red Hat. He said many customers began with their own versions of Linux before turning to Red Hat for support.

"With most customers, we have a relationship that started that way. Every financial services company, the Department of Energy--almost everyone got Linux in a nonstandard way on their own," Stevens said. But Google probably won't keep its in-house Linux version, he predicted. "That's not where their competence is. They've got a lot of other problems than building Linux distributions."

A peek under the hood
Google is notoriously reluctant to describe the particulars of its search-computing data center, which served the demands of 380 million people in August. But DiBona did discuss some details.

The company uses the Linux operating system for its mainstay search service, he said. Its Linux core begins not with software from a company such as Red Hat, or Novell's Suse Linux, but rather from the version that project leader Linus Torvalds posts periodically to the kernel.org Web site.

Among the open-source technologies used by Google are the Python programming language and the MySQL database, he said. In addition, Google's Blogger site uses Apache Web server software and the Tomcat package for running Java programs on the server.

The GCC compiler software, used to create nearly every open-source program in existence, also is widely used at Google.

Sun's Java also figures prominently, even though it's not open-source at its center. "We make great use of Java at the company," DiBona said, including for Gmail. The company claims the Web-based e-mail service has millions of subscribers.

Sun hasn't released the fundamental part of Java--the virtual machine component--as open-source software. However, the Apache Software Foundation is working on an open-source Java effort called Project Harmony, an initiative that now has IBM developer support.

"I think they'll succeed wildly," DiBona said of Harmony. "They're so good at this. They say, 'We're going to write this software,' and it gets done."

Despite Google's liking for open-source software, plenty of programming at the company is proprietary.

"We're never going to open-source PageRank," DiBona said, referring to the algorithm the company uses to choose which search results to present. "It's the thing that makes Google Google."

Open-source output
Google isn't only an open-source software consumer. It's an open-source producer as well: For example, employees submit software to the Apache Axis Web services project, DiBona said.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also employs some open-source notables:

• Sean Egan, leader of the GAIM project for instant messaging software;

• Alex Martelli, a leading Python developer;

• Greg Stein, the Apache Software Foundation chairman and a manager of the Subversion source code management software.

• And Ben Goodger, the lead programmer of the Firefox Web browser project, as well as a few other Firefox programmers.

Google also has published several open-source projects, including tools for debugging software, improving its performance, monitoring MySQL databases and using the AJAX software for richer Web page interfaces.

But so far, there is a significant limit to the group-programming facet of Google's projects: The company doesn't yet accept outside contributions.

Some developers have offered the company contributions meant to improve Google's open-source software--for example, to add 64-bit support to 32-bit software. That cooperation is awkward right now for reasons relating to intellectual-property control, DiBona said.

"We've been slow in being able to accept outside patches," he said. But the company is working on a contributor license that lays out patent and copyright terms for outside contributors. "It's something that pays to be very, very careful about."

The company has helped outside open-source projects, though. Through a $2 million program called the Google Summer of Code, the company sponsored 400 college-age students to work on open-source projects last summer. Each got $4,500 if they met their goals, which 84 percent did. Another $500 went to each of the several open-source projects that helped organize the effort, DiBona said.

Open-source software is good for young programmers, DiBona said, noting that it gives them real-world problems to solve and teaches them self-management skills.

"We think open-source is pretty important," DiBona said. "Without it, the industry would not be as good as it is now to newcomers."

January 15, 2006 at 05:15 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (39) | Top of page | Blog Home

European Tech Giants Craft Search Engine

European Tech Giants Craft Search Engine - Yahoo! News

Wed Jan 11, 9:46 AM ET
By ANGELA CHARLTON, Associated Press Writer
PARIS - Quaero is billed as Europe's answer to Google, but it has a lot to live up to.

The awkward word — which means "to search" in Latin — is unlikely to flash across the continent's computer screens anytime soon.

So far Quaero is just a scattering of top tech minds in labs across France and Germany, working on what they hope will be the world's most advanced multimedia search engine.

Quaero epitomizes European ambitions — especially for French
President Jacques Chirac — of creating alternatives to U.S. technological prowess. But facing off against super-rich, super-talented U.S. companies may prove daunting for the cumbersome consortium of European companies and public agencies hatching Quaero.

"We must meet the global challenge of the American giants Google and Yahoo," Chirac said in an address last week laying out his policy priorities for 2006.

"Today the new geography of knowledge and cultures is being drawn. Tomorrow, that which is not available online runs the risk of being invisible to the world," he said.

Designers insist that Quaero will not just be a search engine but a set of tools for translating, identifying and indexing images, sound and text.

The technology would work with all platforms — computer desktops, mobile devices and even televisions — and be sold to television companies, filmmakers, post-production facilities and anyone who creates or uses audiovisual content, according to France's electronics giant Thomson.

"Yes, it's highly ambitious," said Jean-Luc Moullet, who oversees the Quaero project at Thomson. "There's nothing to compare it to."

But details are scant. None of the key players — including Thomson, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom — would comment on cost.

Mountain View, California-based Google Inc. wants to become a lot more than an Internet search engine.

It's already introducing an array of new software and offering telecommunications services that move it well beyond its roots. Google also has been aggressively seeking ways to import offline media, such as books and television shows, into its Internet search engine.

Quaero is hardly the first attempt to develop a compelling alternative to Google, which has emerged as one of the world's best known — and most valuable — companies just seven years after its inception in a Silicon Valley garage.

Even U.S. technology powerhouses like Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp. haven't been able to erode Google's dominance, even after spending tens of millions of dollars to improve their search engines. Through November, Google held a 40 percent share of the U.S. search market, up from 35 percent in the previous year, according to comScore Media Metrix. Google's lead outside the United States is believed to be even larger.

Quaero is the latest in a string of largely French-led efforts to compete with America's dominance of the global marketplace, a theme of Chirac's foreign policy.

French broadcasters are planning an international television network aimed at presenting a more French view of world events than CNN and the British Broadcasting Corp. The network, CFII, will broadcast in French and English to Europe, the Middle East and Africa beginning sometime in the next year.

Europe launched a satellite last month aimed at rivaling the U.S. Global Positioning System. France has also launched an effort to put libraries online, a response to an ambitious book-scanning project at Google.

Techies are cautious about Quaero's prospects.

"Europe has a lot of catching up to do," said Jerome Bouteiller, editor of the French online magazine Neteconomie.

January 12, 2006 at 01:21 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (47) | Top of page | Blog Home

Logo with a look for every occasion

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

By Fran Yeoman
IT IS perhaps the most-viewed two square inches of advertising space in the world, and for those lucky enough to feature on it results can be dramatic.

Google’s homepage logo lost its letters for the first time this week and changed to a coded series of dots in the company’s signature colour scheme of blue, red, yellow and green in honour of Louis Braille’s birthday. As a result, the Royal National Institute of the Blind’s website, which was listed on Google’s links for more information, recorded a million hits — four times more than the previous day.

The Google masthead is altered to mark special occasions about 50 times a year, with the chosen subject brought to the attention of millions during its 24 hours of fame. All this makes Dennis Hwang a very powerful man. Mr Hwang, 27, has a highly technical day-job as a webmaster for the search engine. But he is also the “Google doodler”, a role he first took on when still a trainee at the company’s headquarters, Mountain View, California, in 2000.

Mr Hwang’s first creation was for Bastille Day, but the logos idea originated when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, went on holiday the year before. They posted a drawing of a Burning Man to alert Google’s then-modest band of users that they would be at the festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, and would not be in to answer the telephone if the website crashed. Mr Hwang has since adapted the logo to mark everything from World Aids Day to the Transit of Venus.

James Joyce has been in a Hwang design, on Bloomsday, June 16, the day on which Joyce’s novel Ulysses is set. Mr Hwang said: “It is surprising and gratifying to hear that an organisation like the RNIB can benefit that much from something as simple as a logo.”

Unsurprisingly, competition to appear on Google’s worldfamous homepage is fierce. “As soon as you do one organisation they all clamour for a logo,” Mr Hwang said. The space, he said, is “not for sale”, and will never feature a commercial subject.

The RNIB was delighted with the Google effect. Margaret O’Donnell, RNIB’s web manager, said: “We couldn’t have bought that kind of awareness or advertising.”

Mr Hwang does have to beware of political correctness and national sensibilities, however. Logos can be restricted to one country to avoid offending another, such as when the first “O” in the word “Google” became a poppy for Remembrance Day in Britain, but Mr Hwang’s doodles have on occasion caused complaints.

Irate e-mails soon alerted him to the existence of Belgian Flemish speakers when he commemorated the birthday of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands on the Dutch-language site, while autumn leaves on a Thanksgiving design prompted an e-mail from Australia pointing out that it was spring there.

Google’s influence is so extensive that “googling” has become a verb for internet searching, and last week the company was voted eighth in a BBC Radio 4 “Who Runs Britain?” poll, ahead of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor.

January 7, 2006 at 11:47 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google to 'launch own PC'

Google to 'launch own PC' | The Register

Windows-free, of course
By Tony Smith
Published Tuesday 3rd January 2006 11:59 GMT
Get breaking Reg news straight to your desktop - click here to find out how

Google is planning to provide an own-brand Windows-less PC and sell the low-cost system through a partnership with retail giant Wal-Mart. The machine and/or the sales deal could be announced as early as this coming Friday.

So claims the Los Angeles Times, citing unnamed sources. Whether they've seen the text of Google co-founder Larry Page's Consumer Electronics Show keynote, which he'll make in Las Vegas on Friday, isn't clear, but it's suggested that the talk will cover the new box.
Click Here

As the paper notes, analysts from investment house Bear Stearns last month claimed Google was preparing a box capable of shuffling digital Internet-sourced media content around the home across local wireless or wired networks.

Crucially, the rig is said to be based on Google's own operating system - most likely Linux in Google clothing - rather than Windows.

Yes, that old chestnut. But while it has been often claimed in the past that Google wants to get into the OS business, there's been no compelling reason given why this would be a good idea. Google's strengths are internet advertising - which is were its money comes from - and its search engine brand. Whether the latter is strong enough to translate into a very different arena - computer hardware - is open to question. Beyond any licensing fee it makes from its manufacturing partner, what's the gain?

Pissing off Microsoft? It might, but releasing a Google OS is a very long way from displacing the Beast of Redmond from its PC throne, particularly in the desktop segment. Apple hasn't done it and Linux hasn't done, and both have had many years to try. Google wouldn't exactly be short of competition on the hardware side either.

The idea of a low-cost, consumer-oriented information processing system isn't unattractive, but it's been tried before and largely failed. In part, that's because the offerings didn't have a backer of the wealth of Google behind it, but unless the vendor seriously limits what the thing can do, sooner or later the support calls start flooding in and the cost of helping non-technical buyers install new software and updates start mounting. All this just to get a few more ads in front of a few more eyeballs, which is the motivation Google is perceived to have behind launching its own PC? ®

January 4, 2006 at 12:59 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google's parents watch their 'child prodigy' taking on the Earth

The Australian: Google's parents watch their 'child prodigy' taking on the Earth [January 02, 2006]

The undisputed king of search is growing at breathless speed with stock trading at 95 times earnings, Paul Durman reports
January 02, 2006

IN his letter to shareholders in Google's last annual report, Sergey Brin, one of the company's founders, compared the search-engine company to a seven-year-old child. "Google was born in 1998. If it were a person, it would have started elementary school last summer. While it may seem we have come far already, this is just the beginning of a lifetime."

It was in 2005 that Google grew up. In only its first full year as a public company, it became the world's most valuable media business, a testament to the explosive growth of pay-per-click advertising. By last Friday, its shares valued the business at $US124 billion ($169 billion) -- five times its value on flotation in August 2004.

As Google's revenues continue to double year-on-year -- sales for 2005 look set to reach $US6 billion -- it has become increasingly hard to ignore the company's impact on the wider economy. This is certainly true for traditional media groups. Newspapers are suffering from weak sales of classified advertising, while television broadcasters are struggling with a fragmented audience that is spending more time online.

The seemingly endless ambition of Brin and co-founder Larry Page poses a challenge for other industries, too. Google Talk and the Gmail e-mail service represent a first tentative step into telecoms. Google's proliferation of web-based services is also perhaps the biggest threat to Microsoft in the software giant's 30-year history.

The strong growth in online advertising -- and Google's increasing share of that business -- is the principal reason the company's share price has soared from $US193 a year ago to $US415 last Friday. Brin and Page, still both only 32, have taken advantage of the rise, each cashing in $US1.3 billion of shares.

An aura of invincibility has grown up around the internet company, fostered by the pace of its product innovation. One of the most stunning examples was the June launch of Google Earth, which uses satellite pictures to allow users to "fly" through space to see views of places of interest.

The company has also introduced video search; cleverly integrated its mapping and local-search services; launched a desktop search tool; and announced the creation of Google Talk, its response to the fast-expanding area of internet telephony.

Many of the new products have yet to generate much in the way of revenue. Google's shares already trade on dizzying multiples -- 95 times its earnings in 2005.

Google remains heavily dependent on its original activity, the one where it is the undisputed king -- search. Many of the firm's newer products encourage more online searching, thus creating more opportunities to display its pay-per-click ads.

Critics suggest that Google is more vulnerable than is immediately apparent. Its pre-Christmas agreement to pay $US1 billion to Time-Warner for a 5 per cent stake in AOL underlined the importance Google places on securing online traffic from the internet service provider. With 26 million subscribers, AOL is the single biggest source of Google's search inquiries, and hence its revenues.

The company faces many challenges. They include coping with the sheer pace of its growth, and the inevitable impact on its culture, noted for its lack of hierarchy and its emphasis on employees' enjoyment and self-fulfilment.

Google began last year with 3000 employees; by the end of September it had almost 5000. It is hiring at breakneck speed in every part of its business. Until recently, it had only a skeleton sales and marketing operation in Europe. Now it has 800 employees, and is looking to recruit 100 software engineers in Zurich.

Despite this rapidly rising payroll, Google openly admits that it lacks experience operating outside of the US.

The first signs of a Google backlash are already visible. The company's rapid hiring, bidding up the cost of the best software talent, has raised hackles in Silicon Valley.

The Google Print initiative -- a bold attempt to digitise the world's books -- has angered many authors and publishers who fear that the company's plans amount to wholesale copyright infringement.

There are also concerns that Google's business could facilitate an invasion of privacy. This issue first arose in 2004 when Google launched Gmail, causing outrage when people realised it planned to display ads based on the content of emails.

As Brin could plausibly argue, these are the difficulties of a business growing up in the full glare of global publicity. In last year's annual report, he pointed out that "if Google were a person, it would graduate from high school in 2016. Today, it would only have seen a glimmer of its full potential".

Some glimmer.

The Times

January 1, 2006 at 12:58 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (95) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Revamps Search Ad Plans

RED HERRING | Yahoo Revamps Search Ad Plans

The media giant’s search marketing business wants to be numero uno in the field it helped create.
December 26, 2005

Yahoo Search Marketing’s getting an extreme makeover.

Earlier this year, Yahoo re-branded its online marketing unit. What was once called Overture became Yahoo Search Marketing in a move to more closely identify the group with its corporate parent. Next step: the unit moved from Pasadena, California, into fancy new offices in Burbank, California, home of Walt Disney and other high-profile media companies.

And now, its executives are launching an aggressive assault to regain some ground lost to search leader Google in an area they had once pioneered.

Among the key moves this year, the Yahoo unit in August expanded its Publishers Network, the network of sites that it serves up ads on, to include small-sized publishers (see Yahoo Treads on Google Turf). Until then, Yahoo had primarily worked with large publishers like CNN, The Washington Post, and ESPN to display ads on their sites.

By opening up the network to the wider publishing community, it hopes to expand its reach to rival that of Google’s. In the four and a half months since the network opened up to small publishers, blogs have rapidly grown into the most common publisher category.

Yahoo’s moves come of course as the Internet media company seeks to carve a bigger piece of the online advertising pie, which is expected to amount to $19 billion by 2010, according to JupiterResearch. Search advertising will make up about $7.5 billion of that, the research firm estimates, and Yahoo wants to build its share.

Willan Johnson, vice president and general manager of the Publisher Network, says his team is looking to work with publishers to give them a say in picking ads that would show up on their web pages.

Under the new program, publishers of blogs and other web sites can give Yahoo the categories of industries for which they think their audience would want to see ads. Of course, Yahoo’s systems would also continue to generate ads based on the content of their sites.

“They’re trying to do a lot of different things to provide for a variety of needs out there,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst with The Kelsey Group. “They’ve had mixed success. But there’s a lot of creativity and they’re striving to capture more advertisers.”

Waiving Fees

Casting a wider net for publishers isn’t the only step Yahoo has taken. The online marketing unit has also waived its requirement for advertisers to spend a minimum of $20 per month for sponsored search, a move that makes it more competitive with Google, which doesn’t charge minimums. In sponsored searches, businesses pay to have their names come up when users input certain key words in a search box.

Steve Mitgang, senior vice president of product marketing at Yahoo search marketing, says he knows he’s got a huge opportunity in front of him.

“I don’t think we’re short on vision or opportunity,” said Mr. Mitgang. “It’s being able to take advantage of that and being able to lead the market.”

That may be what investors are looking for. Yahoo’s stock has declined recently, trading on Friday at $40.65, off the $42 range it reached in late November.

Beating Google

Yahoo clearly has its challenges. In the past, analysts have said Yahoo isn’t as nimble as Google at executing services and applications. Until very recently, Yahoo’s new services and products would often hit the market without much fanfare, analysts say.

In many cases, Yahoo managed to launch key products before its rival, which is located just a few miles away in Mountain View, California. But the media and the blogging communities have overlooked Yahoo’s innovation as soon as the search giant launches the same service.

That was the case in November, when Google said it would allow people to bid for ads on content sites separately from bids for search-based ads. Yahoo’s advertisers have had that option for more than a year, according to Mr. Mitgang.

YSM’s Longish History

Yahoo Search Marketing has been around for eight years—though with a different name. Overture was born at startup incubator Idealab in 1997. A year later, it came up with the concept of sponsored search, which refers to the practice of a search engine pulling up paid-for listings in response to a query.

It also developed the model of having advertisers bid on keywords to figure out where the ads would be placed. Yahoo, formerly a client of Overture, bought the Pasadena, California-based company in 2003 for $1.63 billion.

Search companies like Yahoo and Google, which grossed revenue of $3.6 billion and $3.2 billion respectively last year, have built their fortunes on search-based advertising.

Google is clearly the search leader, getting more than a third of all search queries, according to comScore Media Metrix. That means it has a wider audience when it comes to search.

And as Google continues to grow its revenue, which is almost completely advertising-based, with each passing quarter, Yahoo needs to go on the offensive.

On the plus side, Yahoo has extensive global reach. In the United States alone, it had 125 million unique visitors in November, up from 116 million a year ago. It has a lot of information on its users, due to the fact that most of them have to register—and even subscribe—for some of the services.

Integrated Media Campaigns

For Yahoo to really take on Google, it will need all the help it can get from its search marketing unit, which is the foundation its revenue stream is built upon. And as it comes up with innovative ways to capture ad dollars, it needs to look to solutions like integrated media campaigns, which refer to campaigns that blend the offline and online worlds.

That Yahoo is a portal that offers search as well as various consumer-oriented vertical niches, such as travel bookings, auto sales, and health information, to name a few, works to its advantage.

Honda, for example, used YSM to run an integrated media campaign when it launched the Ridgeline truck in January. In addition to TV spots, print ads, and direct mail, the ad agency bought a bunch of keywords that would pull up Honda’s Ridgeline at the top of search results.

People don’t use the web to buy cars in droves—less than 1 percent of all auto sales take place online—but using search helped Honda increase the number of visits to its site.

Online ad budgets at offline industries are beginning to increase as businesses realize the web can help them generate buzz and do what traditional print and TV ads used to do.

But no matter how you look at it, search-based advertising is in many ways still in its infancy. And it will evolve over time as advertisers increasingly come on board.

“These are still very early days,” says Mr. Mitgang. “A lot of marketers still have to start to participate [even as] a lot are moving beyond experimentation into optimization.”

December 27, 2005 at 09:48 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home

AOL to stick with Google

AOL to stick with Google | CNET News.com

By Stefanie Olsen and Elinor Mills
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: December 16, 2005, 2:39 PM PST
update Google may pay $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in America Online as part of an exclusive deal with Time Warner that would strengthen ties with the search giant instead of dumping Google for Microsoft.

As part of the current negotiations with Google, AOL would be able to sell additional ads for its search engine also powered by Google on top of those provided by Google, according to a report Friday in The Wall Street Journal Online. Google also could promote AOL Web sites among sponsored links in search results, according to an unidentified source in the report. The report said the deal would not be finalized until after Time Warner's board meets on Wednesday.

Representatives at AOL parent company Time Warner, AOL and Google did not return calls seeking comment. A Microsoft representative declined to comment.

AOL was in talks with Microsoft this year about forming a strategic partnership, with negotiations at one point touching on a potential buyout or a Microsoft investment in AOL, a person familiar with the negotiations, who asked not to be identified, told CNET News.com.

The talks escalated in recent months to focus on a broad, long-term partnership that News.com's source described as a "game-changing deal for the media business." Under the proposal, Microsoft and AOL would have combined their advertising forces to form a massive global advertising network, selling multimedia, brand- and search-related ads for their own Web sites and third-party sites on the Internet. The deal also would have included joint promotions and content-sharing between the sites.

Then, AOL suddenly told Microsoft early on Friday that the deal was off the table, opting to forge stronger ties with its current advertising partner, Google. The Dulles, Va.-based media company has been interested in selling its own search-related ads, which are currently provided exclusively by Google, the source said.

The shifting negotiations apparently put an end to a heated and closely watched contest between Google and Microsoft over a key source of Google's advertising revenue. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Google derives as much as 10 percent of its advertising revenue and traffic from its partnership with AOL through sponsored listings within its search engine. And although that percentage has dropped from 12 percent a year ago and will likely continue to fall, the estimated $400 million in revenue isn't likely easy for Google to give up.

The reported Google-AOL deal would give AOL a valuation of $20 billion. Time Warner shares closed at $18, giving it a market capitalization of nearly $84 billion, compared with Google's $430.15 a share close and more than $127 billion market cap. Microsoft, meanwhile, saw its stock close at $26.90, giving it a market cap of more than $286 billion.

Google had 48 percent search market share in October, compared with 22 percent for Yahoo, 11 percent for Microsoft's MSN and 7.2 percent for AOL, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

JPMorgan analyst Imran Khan predicted the deal would have a slightly positive or no impact on Google's earnings and would make it harder for MSN to have a strong advertising network.

"We believe this deal makes it more difficult for MSN to develop a strong advertising network as scale is very important in order to attract (advertisers)," he wrote in a research report. "By tying up AOL, Google has made it more difficult for MSN's ad network to reach critical mass."

Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy said the proposed deal delivers the most benefit to Google, as opposed to AOL. If the deal goes through, Google will retain its search relationship with AOL, as well as its revenue source, and stave off Microsoft in its quest to acquire AOL as a partner. Finally, Google will be able to use AOL's network as a test lab for new services, such as its banner and display advertising sales. Google, for example, could sell a display ad for AOL pages and maintain its search engine's signature spare look.
In other news:

* Merging the laptop with a cell phone
* Theater owners think digital
* Shedding light on Flickr
* New 'Kong' monkeys with game industry

In contrast, the deal doesn't necessarily help AOL greatly, Rashtchy said.

"AOL's biggest challenge is still to reposition the company" as a player in the Web content business, he said. "This would be more of a cash infusion for that than anything else."

Yahoo and Comcast reportedly were in talks with AOL at one point too, but dropped out of the race, leaving heavyweights Google and Microsoft to duke it out.

AOL was initially a huge success, bringing millions of Americans online with its ubiquitous subscriber CDs and Internet-made-easy campaigns. After Time Warner and AOL's $109 billion merger in 2001, AOL began weighing on the old media company's stock as AOL lost dial-up Internet subscribers to faster broadband connections.

AOL recently had a makeover and a huge shift in its business model, launching a new AOL.com portal and opening up its formerly walled-off content to the Internet at large. The move was designed to help grab some of the dollars going toward Google and others in the fast-growing Internet advertising market.

The changes weren't fast enough to suit billionaire Carl Icahn, who directly and indirectly controls 3 percent of Time Warner shares. Icahn has been organizing a proxy battle for control of the company and wants to split AOL off.

December 16, 2005 at 05:54 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (80) | Top of page | Blog Home

Spears Most-Searched for Item on the Web

Spears Most-Searched for Item on the Web - Yahoo! News

hu Dec 15, 7:09 PM ET

NEW YORK -
Britney Spears didn't release an album of new material this year, but the new mom is still No. 1 on Yahoo's annual list of the most-searched for terms on the Internet.

Spears, who has topped the list for three of the last four years, lost out to "American Idol" in 2004.

Although the 24-year-old pop star released an album of remixes, "B in the Mix, The Remixes," in November, it was the birth of her son, Sean Preston Federline, on Sept. 14 that brought her the most attention, Yahoo said Thursday.

Following Spears were, in order, 50 Cent, the Cartoon Network,
Mariah Carey, Green Day,
Jessica Simpson,
Paris Hilton, Eminem, Ciara and
Lindsay Lohan.

The list of overall top searches, all of which were entertainment related, "shows us that people are fixated on the activities of pop culture icons," Yahoo "Buzz Index guru" Erik Gunther said in a statement.

Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) has claimed that its search index spans more than 20 billion Web documents and images, though that figure is virtually impossible to verify because there is no official auditing system.

Of the top news searches, "tsunami" led all other stories, followed by "
Iraq" and "
Michael Jackson trial."

December 16, 2005 at 03:02 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers

Yahoo offers Movable Type for bloggers - Yahoo! News

By Eric Auchard 2 hours, 37 minutes ago

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Six Apart Ltd., creator of Movable Type -- the most popular software used to create professional blogs -- said on Sunday Yahoo will be the preferred supplier of Movable Type for small businesses.

The partnership is the latest in a string of deals by the world's largest Internet media company as it seeks to embrace so-called "social media," the new generation of Web sites that encourage Internet users to share written text, photos and videos.

On Friday, Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us, a site for users to share their favorite Web links. Earlier this year, it acquired Flickr, which offers a way to annotate and share photos.

Yahoo will effectively act as the preferred provider of Movable Type for small business users, taking advantage of its scale and efficiency, Anil Dash, vice president of professional products for San Francisco-based Six Apart, said in a phone interview.

"This is going to be our recommended (sales) channel for small business," he said.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo said it will offer commercial blogs based on Movable Type as part of its existing small business Web-site management service.

Yahoo provides customers with a unique Web address, blogging tools and business-class e-mail services with spam and virus protections for less than $12 a month.

Movable Type is commonly used by businesses, Web designers and professional bloggers to create easily updated Web sites. Other blog software such as Google Inc.'s Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and Six Apart's own Live Journal, are more often used to create blogs for individuals.

Yahoo hosts roughly 30 million individual Web sites, including hundreds of thousands of small business sites, said Rich Riley, general manager of Yahoo's small business unit. One in eight U.S. online stores are hosted by Yahoo, he said.

Yahoo is one of the world's largest suppliers of hosted Web sites, which refers to Web sites set and maintained for customers by Yahoo for a monthly subscription fee.

Six Apart said it had optimized the underlying software in Movable Type so that it responds twice as fast as the same software offered by Six Apart's own Web site.

Six Apart continues to develop versions of Movable Type designed to run inside big businesses, along with its consumer-oriented Live Journal software and a quick set-up version of Movable Type known as TypePad.

Separately, Dash said Six Apart's Japanese unit is developing a version of Movable Type to run on Oracle database software, in a bid to encourage wider use of blogs among big businesses. Six Apart was developed to run on open source database software originally.

Privately-held Six Apart, founded four years ago by husband-and-wife team Ben and Mena Trott, counts 100 employees worldwide. It has received nearly $12 million in funding from backers Neoteny Co. Ltd. and August Capital, Dash said.

December 12, 2005 at 02:57 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (36) | Top of page | Blog Home

Here's your desk. Now start doing marketing stuff

Stories from the early days of Google.

Xooglers

So, now I was Google's online brand manager. What exactly did that mean? I didn't have a clue, and evidently no one else did either. It was as if some corporate biological alarm clock had gone off: "You know, we're at that point where we need to have somebody to do all that stuff that's not engineering. Let's get us some of them marketing folks. And since the world is divided between online and offline, we'll get one of each."

November 25, 2005 at 02:03 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone.

Wired 13.12: Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone.

By Kevin KelleherPage
It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce.

Of course, Google has always wanted to be more than a search engine. Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world's information. High-minded as that sounds, Google's ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.

In less than a decade, Google has gone from guerrilla startup to 800-pound gorilla. In some ways, the company is a gentle giant. Whereas Microsoft infamously smothered new and open standards, Google is famous for supporting them. And the firm is softening its image, launching a philanthropic arm, Google.org, with nearly $1 billion earmarked for social causes. But that doesn't reduce the fear factor, and Google knows it. Omid Kordestani, the company's global sales guru, said at a recent conference, "We're trying to find ways so we are not viewed as a gorilla." Given its outsize ambitions, that's one search Google might not be able to handle.

Is the sky falling? That's how it looks to panicked tech companies across the Valley as they contend with Google's ever-expanding power and ambition.

VIDEO
Today, Google Video is a motley mix: clips of monkeys performing karate and robot dogs attacking iguanas. Tomorrow? No one knows, but everyone is worried.
Who's threatened: Comcast and other cable providers, Yahoo!, TV networks that still shun the Net
Signs of panic: Comcast wants to be the Google of television. Yahoo! bristles at any mention of Google Video. Networks were stunned to find Google compiling a database of their programs.
Reality check: Google Video is up and running. The question is, How much content can it attract - or pay for - to fill the database. Watch for a strategic acquisition, even something big. TiVo?

CLASSIFIEDS
When secrecy-obsessed Google let news of "Google Base" slip, it looked like an aggressive entrée into online classifieds. The test service can search ads like used-car and personals listings, which would mesh with Google Local and might even kick-start Orkut, Google's social network.
Who's threatened: craigslist, eBay, Monster, Tribe.net
Signs of panic: Within hours of the Base bombshell, eBay's market value dropped by almost $2 billion. And even before that, the classified sites were nervous. CareerBuilder and others fretted about letting Google host their feeds.
Reality check: This may be an extension of Froogle rather than a stand-alone product. But it could expand to everything from travel to eBay-like offerings.

TELECOM
Free Wi-Fi in San Francisco, instant-messaging software, a widely anticipated VoIP foray - Google's telecom initiatives seem designed to make life radically easier for users.
Who's threatened: Comcast, SBC, Verizon, Vonage, what's left of AOL
Signs of panic: Surprisingly few so far, partially because Google says it has no plans to offer Wi-Fi beyond San Francisco. Still, Comcast coined the word Comcastic - is that its answer to Googlicious?
Reality check: Something's clearly afoot, and it could be big. With great power comes great regulation - so Google recently opened a DC lobbying shop to combat "centralized control by network operators."

OPERATING SYSTEMS
If anyone can fulfill the dream of turning the Internet into the operating system, it's Google. If the company chooses to develop an OS, the move will cement Google's other initiatives into a powerful whole.
Who's threatened: Apple, Microsoft
Signs of panic: When one of Microsoft's key operating system engineers defected to Google last year, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threw a chair across an office and vowed to kill Google.
Reality check: The migration of applications from PCs to the Net is already happening - and it's key to Google's future. But the likelihood of a Google OS depends on what Microsoft accomplishes with its new OS, Vista.

PRINT
What if a search engine trolled not just every page on the Web, but every page in every book? Amazon.com tried it first, then Google said it would "make the full text of all the world's books searchable by anyone."
Who's threatened: Amazon, Microsoft, book publishers
Signs of panic: Against the interests of a legion of obscure writers, the Authors Guild sued Google. The Association of American Publishers, with more to fear, did the same. Microsoft and Yahoo! have joined a group that's creating its own book search service.
Reality check: Making every book searchable sends a clear signal that Google has the brawn to organize the world's information. But a vicious backlash could drown out that message.

PRODUCTIVITY PROGRAMS
Google joined with Sun Microsystems in October to jointly promote and distribute apps like the Google Toolbar and Sun's free OpenOffice software. Wider distribution of the toolbar, Google's most potent Trojan horse, gives the search engine access to a world of desktops.
Who's threatened: Apple, Corel, Microsoft
Signs of panic: Microsoft launched its own toolbar and protested the decision of the Massachusetts Information Technology Department to dump Office for open source alternatives.
Reality check: It may be a fiendishly clever way to attack one of Microsoft's highest-margin products, but this tactic can't be a top priority. Google Toolbar will thrive without Sun.

ECOMMERCE
Froogle threatens no one yet. But what if, as the development of Google Wallet suggests, Google handled your every online transaction? The potential revenue from Google's cut of each purchase would make AdSense look like AdCents.
Who's threatened: Amazon, Buy.com, eBay
Signs of panic: After reports speculated that Google might take on PayPal, eBay said it would pay up to $4.1 billion for VoIP rebel Skype. Wall Street's read: With PayPal under fire, eBay needed a new growth area.
Reality check: Rather than take on PayPal directly, the company may start with something less ambitious, like handling payments for premium video content. But after that? Watch out.

November 24, 2005 at 08:17 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

The Great Google Wipeout

The Great Google Wipeout - Chronicle of a corporate death foretold. By Jack Shafer

Chronicle of a corporate death foretold.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 7:35 PM ET

Click image to expand.
It wasn't like it had never happened before in the tech world. At the beginning of the 1980s, an Apple computer was the only box a self-respecting user would own. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, IBM PCs, CompuServe, Nintendo, Netscape, AltaVista, AOL, Dell, the iPod, and Microsoft all held, at one time, what seemed like impregnable positions in their markets. In late 2005, as the price of a share of Google broke $400 and every software, advertising, print, broadband, and entertainment CEO in the country cowered in his executive bathroom sobbing about what the creative destruction crew from Google was doing to his business, the popular search engine seemed invincible.

Oh, some commentators, such as Adam L. Penenberg in Slate, had gone out on a ledge to speculate that the company had peaked. But they were dismissed as deadline johnnies who had to write something contrarian to satisfy their editors. But it wasn't until Knight Ridder Inc.'s largest stockholder, Private Capital Management LP, called for the newspaper chain's breakup that the creative destruction of market forces turned on Google and began its rout. The young company that arrogantly thought it owned the Internet soon learned that its only assets were tens of thousands of computers, terabytes of hard-disk storage, a terrific page-rank algorithm that coughed up pretty accurate searches, billions in the bank, and a dandy logo.

Private Capital's proposal didn't kill Google, but it signaled the newspaper industry's vulnerability, which in turn set off a chain reaction that did slay the firm. By forcing a sale of the Knight Ridder 32-newspaper chain (Philadelphia Inquirer, San Jose Mercury News, Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, et al.), just as Google had slithered in with Google Base, Private Capital created a panic. Classified ads were a $15-billion-a-year business for daily newspapers, and the conventional wisdom held that the newspaper industry had no way to fight back against Google, let alone earlier interlopers eBay and craigslist.

But then the recently re-Webified Rupert Murdoch of News Corp.—a media revolutionary always a step ahead of his peers—arrived to buy Knight Ridder and the newspaper properties of the stagnating Tribune Company (Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, et al.) and built the national classified database to end all national classified databases. He allowed customers to have classified ads their way: They could get them free or paid and sell the goods or services at set prices or by auction; they could have them displayed in a News Corp. paper, on the News Corp. Web site, on cell phones, and in podcasts, or any combination of the above. He could also send data from his DirecTV platform in space or by using slivers of his conventional TV stations on earth. Pricing was determined by who the customer was, what they were selling, how much they were willing to pay for placement, and whether they wanted to upload a video of the thing they were selling. Google Base stumbled, and eBay acquired the rest of craigslist in a fluster to catch up.

Next, Rupe fused MySpace.com, another savvy acquisition, into the network to expand its reach to the young people who refuse to read the newspaper. Then he rescued the Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe, and the Gannett and Hearst chains by inviting their classified pages to join his combine—for free. He hadn't turned altruist in his old age but was acting on the theory that the larger his network, the more valuable the individual pieces. (Murdoch could always come back and buy out the demoralized and starving Grahams, Sulzbergers, and Hearsts with his fabulous profits. He had time. He was a young 77.) He took his classified network international by integrating his London Timeses and his U.K. tabloids as well as his BSkyB satellite TV system, adding his Australian media properties and continental newspapers, too.

Like the Apple iTunes operation only bigger, RupeWeb was a sort of "Club Web." Its content was for members only and invisible to the Web spiders of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. (Some people call this kind of Web the "invisible" or "deep" Web.) Many RupeWeb users started helping themselves to the new search engine he had purchased in his acquisition of Lycos. Capitalizing on plummeting hard-disk prices, faster processors, growing bandwidth, and sleek new algorithms, the RupeGrab search engine ran loops around Google. People didn't even seem to mind that RupeGrab billed its search results as "Fair and Balanced."

RupeWeb immediately put a bite into Google's billions-of-dollars-a-quarter AdSense and AdWords advertising platforms. So did Microsoft and Yahoo! search, which had reached parity with Google. Google had also lost its "don't be evil" cachet ever since founders Sergey and Larry had purchased a Boeing 767-200 and crashed it into Coit Tower while doing barrel rolls over the San Francisco Bay. They survived, but their reputations and that of their company did not.

Then Amazon threw Google a curve it couldn't hit. Google had alienated the entire book-publishing business with its universal book-scanning project, one that paid the publishers in lip service rather than cash. Amazon leveraged this alienation to convince the major New York publishers—including Murdoch's HarperCollins, of course—to make nearly every book in print available via its "Search Inside" feature, which could already be searched in tandem with Amazon's A9 search engine. Giving publishers a cut of the book sales and book rentals obtained through search was an essential part of the deal. The book feature of the A9 search engine made it another Club Web, almost as useful as Murdoch's. Amazon added music lyrics, composers, titles, and artists and extended its IMDb.com database of film and TV artists and film dialogue. It became the dominant online seller of CDs, DVDs, books, and downloadable music, movies, and TV. Information didn't want to be free, Amazon figured out. It just wanted to be sold at a variety of price points, just like feature films were—at the theater, on pay-per-view, on DVD, or free thanks to the largesse of advertisers. The only ones who mourned the passing of iTunes were the deranged iPod people.

Having plunged into too many businesses at once, Google had become distracted. Regulators throttled its local Wi-Fi initiative. Its plan to build out ad-supported computer services—word processors, spreadsheets, databases—for end users had died when Microsoft jumped in first with a superior polished suite. Google, as users of its desktop search had learned, wasn't good at writing client applications. Microsoft, now run by Scott Moore, who had defected back to the company from Yahoo!, continued to trump Google on the desktop and used its know-how and market muscle to write lingua franca search and communications software for all the smart devices, services, and nano-gizmos that people were plugging into the Web: phones, media players, medical monitors, life recorders, cars, houses, ships at sea, personal satellites, and USB-ready newborns as well as the Club Webs belonging to individuals and institutions.

The wheels really came off Google not when it got thrown out of China for accidentally offending the regime, and not when it purchased Time Warner and then sold it for a huge loss, and not when Google TV and Google Phone flamed out. The problem wasn't that the Web wasn't growing. It was growing like a hothouse fungus! Google just couldn't keep up with the zigzagging beast. The final reckoning came when a Wall Street calamity of the highest order struck: Google failed to deliver increased quarterly earnings for the first time in memory. The stock buckled and the firm retreated into Chapter 11.

Meanwhile in China, a couple of 22-year-old computer scientists had an idea for a company based on the new economy in which a terabyte costs a penny, processors are too fast to measure, and bandwidth is too plentiful to charge for …

*******

I should acknowledge my debt to Chip Bayers, whose similarly titled Wired feature from almost a decade ago inspired this one. John Ellis started my fever-dream with his weekend piece from the Wall Street Journal. Also, I own Microsoft stock, most of which cost me more than today's closing price. Google me or send me e-mail via Google's soon-to-fold e-mail service: slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

November 22, 2005 at 05:14 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Search engine use shoots up in the past year

11/27/2005 | MemoMemo | Lee Rainie

Search engines have become an increasingly important part of the online experience of American internet users. The most recent findings from Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and consumer behavior trends from the comScore Media Metrix consumer panel show that about 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.

These results from September 2005 represent a sharp increase from mid-2004. Pew Internet Project data from June 2004 show that use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30% to 41% of the internet-using population, which itself has grown in the past year. This means that the number of those using search engines on an average day jumped from roughly 38 million in June 2004 to about 59 million in September 2005 – an increase of about 55%. comScore data, which are derived from a different methodology, show that from September 2004 to September 2005 the average daily use of search engines jumped from 49.3 million users to 60.7 million users – an increase of 23%.

This means that the use of search engines is edging up on email as a primary internet activity on any given day. The Pew Internet Project data show that on a typical day, email use is still the top internet activity. On any given day, about 52% of American internet users are sending and receiving email, up from 45% in June of 2004.

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/167/report_display.asp

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November 22, 2005 at 01:09 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google gives Web users a new base

Google gives Web users a new base - Yahoo! News

Wed Nov 16, 1:00 PM ET

TORONTO (Reuters) - Google Inc launched a service on Wednesday that gives Web users an online venue to publish anything from a recipe to a research paper.
ADVERTISEMENT

The service, called "Google Base," invites users to choose labels and attributes for their content that will make it easier for other people to search the site.

The service (http://base.google.com) is free and gives a unique Web address to each user's content, allowing people to easily post information without the need to create and maintain a Web page.

Depending on the relevance of the content, users' information may also appear on other Google properties like Froogle and Google Local, Google said.

Google has 380 million users per month, according to its Web site, and has been expanding its services to include products such as email and voice and instant messaging.

Last month, Google said it was testing the Base service, but would not confirm whether the move was part of a broader push into online shopping to compete with the likes of eBay Inc. or Amazon.com Inc..

Analysts said then that if Google combined the publishing system with its Froogle shopping service and other offerings, it could compete with local classified advertising on sites such as eBay or Craig's List or online shopping at Amazon.com.

November 17, 2005 at 09:29 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google: birth of a money machine

Google: birth of a money machine - Sunday Times - Times Online

A new book by David Vise tells how the search engine learnt to accept ads without damaging its purity
GOOGLE first showed up on the radar screens of those beyond its circle of devotees in 1999, when it received $25m (£15.6m) in venture-capital funding.

But for a long time, even after its brand became well known and the search engine was cranking out millions of responses free of charge to computer users around the world, the company struggled to generate cash. With the notable exception of two companies, Red Hat and Netscape, nobody was willing to pay for the right to license the Google search engine.

In that first year after Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested in the firm, it looked as if the sceptics who said they had wasted a huge sum of money might be proved correct.

“The original business idea was aimed at licensing the underlying search-engine technology to a variety of other internet companies and enterprises,” said Sequoia’s Michael Moritz. “During the first year we were concerned that the market we were pursuing was more difficult and more intractable than we had anticipated.

“The negotiations with potential customers were protracted,” Moritz went on. “There was a fair amount of competition, and we didn’t have a direct sales force. The customers were very harsh on the prices they were prepared to pay. It was clear that if we were going to pursue that path, it was going to be a brutal path.”

Although Google was averaging 7m searches a day by the end of 1999, its revenue from licensing deals remained small. The Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t care about getting rich, but they didn’t want Google to flounder. If the business could not sustain itself, they would not be able to fulfil their vision of making all the world’s information easily available to users without charge.

The duo wondered how best to navigate this maze. Anything that compromised the relationship of trust they had with their users would be unacceptable to them, even if it generated a lot of money for Google. They were uncertain about advertising, and had included a strongly worded statement on the subject in a 1998 paper they published on Google technology.

Ad-funded search engines are “inherently biased towards the advertisers”, they wrote, suggesting that “the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for consumers to find what they want”.

At the same time, advertising was a type of information that some users might want. Perhaps not all ads would violate the Don’t Be Evil motto that Brin and Page had adopted for their company.

Yahoo, the giant internet site, was dependent on ads. It saw search as a sideline feature that it contracted out. When it came to search, Yahoo’s manually edited, categorised directories couldn’t keep up with the mushrooming web, and the directories became less valuable. To address that problem, Yahoo relied on other firms, such as Inktomi, to crawl the web as an unbranded search engine and augment the results Yahoo served up to users.

Microsoft, for its part, didn’t see consumer search as a big business opportunity and invested in numerous other areas. Both Microsoft’s MSN division and America Online were relying on third parties to provide them with unbranded search results.

Page and Brin seized the opportunity to hire bright technologists and focused on doing one thing: search. Google’s revenue might not be growing rapidly, but its employee brainpower was. Instead of paying these engineers big salaries, Google offered them mediocre pay and thousands of stock options that might prove valuable some day if the company prospered. This was the typical Silicon Valley bet that bright engineers made.

Brin and Page, who interviewed every prospective employee themselves, had their pick of talent, since they were hiring while everyone else was firing. It also helped that Google was a private company during the technology bust. For all the pressure mounting on Google because of its lack of revenue, it was nothing compared with the angst at publicly held companies that had sold stock to investors at high prices only to find that having a dotcom name was not enough to guarantee survival.

With a superb search technology and a growing edge in the quality of its employees, Brin and Page sought to figure out how to keep Google afloat without compromising their lofty principles. Rather than focus on licensing its search technology to businesses, they decided to concentrate on profiting by allowing advertisers to reach their growing and loyal legion of users. Google would continue to keep search results free — just as television networks offered entertainment and news free — and would look to make money by selling unobtrusive, targeted advertising to businesses on the results pages.

A few search engines, hungry for cash, accepted money from websites in exchange for placing the sites in search results. Brin and Page saw this as a “particularly insidious” form of bias and eschewed such payments. They also disliked the flashy, irrelevant banner ads that littered the internet. But there was another path to profit: running targeted “text only” ads that were triggered by users’ specific search requests.

“We are about money and profits,” said Brin, revealing his conversion from strident student to pragmatic company president. “Banners are not working and click-through rates are falling. I think highly focused ads are the answer.”

One company that caught Brin’s attention, for the simple reason that it seemed to be making money by selling ads to accompany search results, was GoTo.com, later renamed Overture Inc.

Although most consumers had never heard of Overture, it provided the ads that appeared with search results on Yahoo, America Online, EarthLink, and other leading internet sites. In fact, in contrast to the backlash against annoying pop-up and banner ads, search-related advertising was just about the most appealing game in town, and one that was growing.

Brin and Page began studying Overture and immediately found aspects of its approach distasteful. Among other things, it would sell guarantees that websites would be included more frequently in web crawls if a business was willing to pay extra for it.

The Google Guys had two choices: they could hire Overture to sell ads to display alongside search results on Google.com, or they could try to sell advertising themselves.

The decision was not difficult. Google wrote all its own software and built all its own computers. If Brin and Page believed in anything, it was their own ability to get things done. Why couldn’t they sell ads themselves and keep 100 cents of every dollar, rather than share the proceeds with Overture? Doing it themselves would also give them total control, enabling them to avoid potentially dangerous conflicts and any perceptions that might damage Google’s stature as a trusted brand name.

So the two decided to emulate aspects of what Overture had started in 1998 on the ad side, with some tweaks. The newly emerging business strategy was simple: continue to produce free search results, and profit by selling ads. The key was to make it clear they would not bias the search results.

Brin and Page talked to many people before embarking on the path toward ads to ensure they didn’t make any mistakes. They became persuaded that, just as there was a clear distinction between news stories and ads in newspapers, they could achieve the same thing on Google.com.

But they hated to clutter the clean interface that had been its calling card from the start, so they kept the homepage free of ads, and they developed strict standards for the size and type of ads they would display elsewhere. They decided also to have a bright line on the results page that separated the free search results from the ads, which they would label “Sponsored Links”. That way, nobody could argue that the search results were combined with the ads, yet the ads would be clicked on more often under the heading “Sponsored Links” than if they were simply labelled “Ads”.

The ads were to be brief and look identical — just a headline, a link, and a short, haiku-like description. Initially they were sold one by one, mostly to larger businesses that could afford hefty ad campaigns. But by using their own technology they soon moved to a model that enabled advertisers to sign up easily online. This cut costs, and brought midsize businesses into the fold. Text ads could be up and running on Google in minutes after a company provided its credit-card number.

“To their eternal credit, Larry and Sergey both lighted on what was happening with (Overture’s) business model and came to understand pretty rapidly what an attractive business that was,” said Sequoia’s Michael Moritz. “And it didn’t take long for us to understand that it made sense to go where the money was being spent. And it was being spent in the advertising business much more readily than in the licensing business.”

As the months passed, Brin and Page had another breakthrough idea: ranking ads based on relevance, as they did their free search results. Instead of merely displaying an ad from the vendor willing to pay the most, Google ranked its ads according to how much someone offered to pay and how frequently computer users clicked on the ad. More popular ads rose to the top; less-popular ones drifted downward. Brin and Page reasoned that the ads clicked on the most frequently were the most relevant. In other words, they trusted their users to rank the ads. It was consumer pull, rather than business push, that would determine where ads appeared.

Google had not been first in search, but it had come up with a way to produce superior results. It had not been first in search advertising, but it had done it cleverly and with more integrity than Overture.

Still, Brin and Page felt that their search engine was at risk. Google had a growing brand name and millions of computer users turned to it for search daily, but it had no customer “lock-in” through site registration or an e-mail service. What if someone else came up with better search technology? They had to remain focused on improving search through innovation. Google’s results were better than those generated elsewhere, but they did not always answer the question on the user’s mind.

“The great thing about search is that we are not going to solve it any time soon,” Page said in early 2000. “There are so many problems and failings. I see no end to what we need to do. If we aren’t a lot better next year, we will already be forgotten.”

Google’s superior search delivered a big enough audience for businesses to target their advertising, but how well it would all work remained to be seen. By the middle of 2000, Google was handling 15m searches a day compared with the 10,000 of a year-and-a-half earlier. Computer users were flocking to Google, but would they start clicking on ads, too, enabling businesses to sell products and Google to sustain its financial model? Brin and Page remained confident, but scepticism abounded about the company’s ability to make it as a business that gave search results away free and refused to accept both banner ads and paid placement in search results.

In December 2000 Business Week ran a story under the headline, “Will Google’s Purity Pay Off?” In it, people wondered aloud if Google could survive by focusing on search and users more than on money However, Google was now winning awards for the quality of its search results, and the media were taking note. Brin and Page had found a way to accommodate advertising without subtracting from the user’s experience, and they held fast to their principles regarding the mixing of free results with paid ads. “When somebody searches for ‘cancer’, should you put up the site that paid you, or the site that has the better information?” said Brin.

© David A Vise 2005

Extracted from The Google Story, by David A Vise, to be published by Macmillan on November 18 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49 with free delivery from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585

November 13, 2005 at 02:17 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo pulls out of America Online talks

AP Wire Stories

By ANICK JESDANUN
AP Internet Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Yahoo Inc. has pulled out of discussions over buying a stake in America Online Inc., leaving Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. as the leading potential suitors.

The decision to abandon the talks came after Yahoo chief executive Terry Semel and chief finance officer Susan Decker met in late October with Time Warner executives in New York, said Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens.

Stevens said Yahoo had "politely passed" on proposed terms and "walked away from any interest in a deal."

Two people close to the discussions said a key stumbling block was Time Warner Inc.'s insistence that it retain majority ownership in the AOL unit. They spoke on condition of anonymity because public discussions of any private negotiations were contrary to their companies' policies.

One of the people, familiar with Time Warner's position, said one arrangement under discussion had called for Yahoo to pay Time Warner in stock worth $13 billion for an 80 percent stake in AOL's growing content business, which includes its Web sites and the news, music and other services featured on them.

Under that proposal, the person said, Time Warner would keep all of AOL's Internet access business, which is in decline as users abandon dial-up connections for higher-speed cable and DSL lines.

The Yahoo withdrawal, reported earlier on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, leaves Microsoft and Google as the leading contenders, with Google possibly combining with Comcast Corp. in a bid.

The interest in AOL comes as the company transforms itself from a declining "walled garden" focused on providing dial-up access to a provider of free content that is tapping the recent boom in online advertising.

Late last year, the Dulles, Va.-based company abandoned its longtime strategy of exclusivity and began making its rich offerings - including concerts, news, sports and e-mail - available through AOL.com for free, a model Yahoo drove to become the Web's top brand.

The Web portal side of AOL's business is worth about $11.3 billion, based largely on AOL's advertising potential, according to media analyst Michael Nathanson at Sanford C. Bernstein.

A Google deal with AOL would give the Internet search leader a way to build a portal - and grow its advertising potential - while preserving an existing relationship with AOL. More than 10 percent of Google's revenues come from a partnership in which AOL uses Google's search results and the two companies share ad revenues.

A deal with AOL would be in Microsoft's interest as it could dampen competition from Google and create synergies. Microsoft's MSN online division and AOL share many businesses, including an online portal, instant messaging services and dial-up access.

There would also be considerable overlap between AOL's and Yahoo's businesses.

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., is the leading Web destination, according to Nielsen/NetRatings and comScore Media Metrix, as more people head to the Internet for news, entertainment, communications and other services.

Yahoo shares rose 94 cents, or 2.5 percent, to close at $38.69 Thursday on the Nasdaq. Shares in New York-based Time Warner rose 5 cents to close at $17.71 on the New York Stock Exchange.

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November 12, 2005 at 10:05 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

A library at your fingertips

A library at your fingertips | Economist.com

Nov 4th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda
Big technology companies have pledged to make many thousands of books available online. The commercial prospects look shaky, but this new front in the battle between the world’s leading internet portals will yield a valuable resource for all

A FEW years ago, at the height of the dotcom boom, it was widely assumed that a publishing revolution, in which the printed word would be supplanted by the computer screen, was just around the corner. It wasn’t: for many, there is still little to match the joy of cracking the spine of a good book and settling down for an hour or two of reading. But a recent flurry of activity by big technology companies—including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo!—suggests that the dream of bringing books online is still very much alive.

The digitising of thousands of volumes of print is not without controversy. On Thursday November 3rd, Google, the world’s most popular search engine, posted a first instalment of books on Google Print, an initiative first mooted a year ago. This collaborative effort between Google and several of the world’s leading research libraries aims to make many thousands of books available to be searched and read online free of charge. Although the books included so far are not covered by copyright, the plan has attracted the ire of publishers.

Five large book firms are suing Google for violating copyright on material that it has scanned and, although out of print, is still protected by law. Google has said that it will only publish short extracts from material under copyright unless given express permission to publish more, but publishers are unconvinced. Ironically, many publishers are collaborating with Google on a separate venture, Google Print Publisher, which aims to give readers an online taste of books that are commercially available. The searchable collection of extracts and book information is intended to tempt readers to buy the complete books online or in print form.

Not to be outdone, Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has unveiled plans for its own foray into the mass e-book market. The firm, which began ten years ago as an online book retailer, now sells a vast array of goods. No doubt piqued that Google, a relative newcomer, should impinge upon its central territory, Amazon revealed on Thursday that it would introduce two new services.

Amazon Pages will allow customers to search for key terms in selected books and then buy and read online whatever part they wish, from individual pages to chapters or complete works. Amazon Upgrade will give customers online access to books they have already purchased as hard copies. Customers are likely to have to pay around five cents a page, with the bulk going to the publisher.

Microsoft, too, has joined the online-book bandwagon. At the end of October, the software giant said it would spend around $200m to digitise texts, starting with 150,000 that are in the public domain, to avoid legal problems. It will do so in collaboration with the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of libraries and universities. (Yahoo! has pledged to make 18,000 books available online in conjunction with the same organisation.) And on Thursday, coincidentally the same day as Google and Amazon announced their initiatives, Microsoft released details of a deal with the British Library, the country’s main reference library, to digitise some 25m pages; these will be made available through MSN Book Search, which will be launched next year.

These companies are hoping for a return to the levels of interest in e-books seen when Stephen King, a bestselling horror writer, published “Riding the Bullet” exclusively on the internet in 2000. Half a million copies were downloaded in the first 48 hours after publication. But this proved to be a high-water mark rather than a taste of things to come. While buyers were reluctant to sit in front of a computer screen to read the latest novels, dedicated e-book-reading gadgets failed to catch on. Barnes and Noble, a leading American bookshop chain, began selling e-books with fanfare in 2000 but quietly pulled the plug in 2003 as interest faded.

The market for e-books is growing again, though from a tiny base. According to the International Digital Publishing Forum, which collates figures from many of the world’s top publishers, in the third quarter of 2004 (the latest available figures) worldwide sales were 25% higher than the year before. Unfortunately, this only amounted to a paltry $3.2m split between 23 publishers in an industry that made sales worth over $100 billion that year.

Both retailers and publishers reckon they will eventually be able to persuade consumers to do a lot more of their reading on the web. Some even hope they can become to online books what Apple’s iTunes is to online music. But there are crucial differences between downloading fiction and downloading funk. Online music was driven from the bottom up: illegal file-sharing services became wildly popular, and legal firms later took over when the pirates were forced (by a wave of lawsuits) to retreat; the legal providers are confident that more and more consumers will pay small sums for music rather than remain beyond the law. And the iPod music player and its like have proved a fashionable and popular new way to listen to songs. The book world has no equivalent.

So the commercial prospects for sellers of online books do not yet look very bright. But they may get a lift from some novel innovations. The ability to download mere parts of books could help, for instance: sections of manuals, textbooks or cookery books may tempt some customers; students may wish to download the relevant sections of course books; or readers may want a taste of a book that they subsequently buy in hard copy.

And the ability to download reading matter onto increasingly ubiquitous hand-held electronic devices and 3G phones may further encourage uptake. In Japan, the value of e-books (mainly manga comic books) delivered to mobile phones has jumped, though it will be worth only around ¥6 billion ($51m) in 2005, according to estimates.
Portal wars

Though the prospects for this latest incarnation of the e-book are unclear, Google, Amazon and the others may see it as a useful weapon in the wider war to dominate the internet. In the quest for visitors, and the advertising revenues they bring, the big portals have rolled out inducement after inducement, from instant messaging, e-mail and web telephony to picture-sharing, games and a host of other new services. By adding yet another feature, they hope to win business from each other—or at least ensure they don’t lose it.

The business of parting consumers from their cash for online books may not prove the money-spinner that Amazon and Google hope for. But this round of the battle between the tech giants will have the happy outcome of allowing the study and enjoyment of a vast pool of written material, much of which would otherwise prove hard to access or difficult to find. Though it may not much change our reading habits, its existence will prove a boon.

November 4, 2005 at 02:46 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google will define the future of software

Commentary from George Colony - Forrester. He has been referring to xInternet for years, and thats been hijacked by Web 2.0.

Forrester Research: My View: The Google Future

Last year, I wrote that Google would fade. I said that search's lack of stickiness, combined with crushing competition from Microsoft and Yahoo! and a changing Internet, would mute the company's prospects.

I was wrong.

But not for the reasons that you think I'm wrong. You're reading in every business magazine on the planet right now about Google's lead in Internet advertising, the $100 billion valuation, all of the brilliant people joining the company, the company's strong financial performance, and how smart Sergey and Larry are.

All of that is true. But none of the conventional and obvious wisdom captures the real importance of Google. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I believe that Google will revolutionize the software business. It's a complex story, but I'll try to keep it simple . . .

Most of us use two types of computer software: 1) programs like Microsoft Word or Oracle Financials, and 2) Web files — like a corporate intranet or Amazon. You can perform many tasks with programs because they are executable; they contain millions of lines of computer code that enable you to underline words, calculate profit and loss, check spelling, etc. You pay for programs — ostensibly to defray the high cost of writing all of those lines of computer code.

In comparison, the Web files we use are like documents. When you click on a link for a site, the server at that site sends you pages of information. Web files are mostly static — they can't do much compared with programs. Their limited functions (buy buttons, search) don't execute on your computer — the server that you are connected to does most of the work.

So it's pretty simple: Programs can do things; Web pages are static documents. Here's where the plot thickens.

Forrester has predicted that Web pages will get replaced by programs — we call this executable Internet (X Internet). In the future, when you click on your bank's site, servers will download a program to your computer, not static pages. Once that program is installed, you will be able to "converse" with your bank, run financial models, analyze your net worth — do much more than you could have with old Web pages.

Google will be the company that leads this revolution. It is already writing programs like Google Toolbar and Google Desktop Search that run on your computer but blur the divide between your desktop and the Internet. And they are very powerful programs. Do a test. Search in Microsoft Outlook for an email from a friend — for me the search took 21 seconds. Then try the same search in Google Desktop Search: 5 seconds.

Google is also leading a pricing revolution. Google's programs are free, funded through advertising and syndication. This is a prescient move. I foresee a world in which even enterprise applications like financials, ERP, and supply chain software will be advertising-funded.

So here's Google's playbook: 1) have the best search; 2) have more of the world to search than anyone else through the digitization of university libraries, earth images, maps, etc.; 3) attract the most advertising and syndication; enabling the company to 4) give all of its software away for free; which enables it to 5) change the rules and economics of the software business and define the future through its pioneering work in X Internet.

What It Means No. 1: Large corporations should get Google executable Internet programs onto their corporate desktops. Google Desktop Search, Google Toolbar, and Google Maps will drive productivity. In addition, this move gets corporate IT ready for a world in which free executables will begin to proliferate. IT staffs will learn to incorporate Google's programs and application programming interfaces into corporate Web experiences.

What It Means No. 2: Google' stock price may not be insane. When you are restructuring an entire industry, your best years as a company typically lie ahead.

What It Means No. 3: Vista (formerly Longhorn) had better be fantastic, and Microsoft had better be able to re-spark its culture of derivative innovation. Bringing back stock options may be the first stop on that journey — as a way to re-attract the best and the brightest. I predict that Microsoft, under attack from advertising-funded software (and other factors like open source), will lose its monopoly-driven 25% net profits over the next several years, having to settle for 13%-15% nets (still astronomical compared with the average for most large corporations).

What It Means No. 4: The coming of executable Internet fundamentally changes the software and Internet landscape. Microsoft is an obvious loser. The closed, centralized architectures of Oracle and SAP will get a bunch of new salesforce.com-type challengers over the next five years. Amazon, AOL, eBay, and Yahoo! will be stuck with old Web-style experiences — not as easy, fast, and customizable as the executable Internet experience. That is why Google may be so dangerous for its Internet brethren — it knows programming and they don't.

In the past year, Google has proven to me that it is way more than just a great search company. It can jump into the program game — and play under a completely new set of rules: executable Internet and free. Unless Larry and Sergey lose focus and the company's charter devolves into esoteric pet projects, Google is going to change the world.

George

October 31, 2005 at 01:57 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (741) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Wallet May Debut Soon

RED HERRING | Google Wallet May Debut Soon

An analyst says the search giant could roll out its online payment service for the holidays.
October 28, 2005

Google may launch its widely anticipated online payments system Google Wallet before the holidays, an analyst said Friday, giving the search giant yet another way to profit from its widening Web empire.

The service is expected to rival eBay’s PayPal, which allows web users to transfer money from, say, consumer to merchant without using a credit card. PayPal users have to credit their accounts using bank accounts or credit cards.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said Google Wallet will not be a PayPal clone. Unlike PayPal, analysts speculate that transactions would be limited to ones between businesses and consumers. The service would probably not allow more personal uses, such as a friend sending money to a friend. But like PayPal, it would likely be a stored value account.

Dan Schatt, an analyst with Celent, a research and consulting firm, predicts the search giant will release the service by the end of the first quarter, if not for the holidays. Google spokesperson Sonya Boralv said there was no announcement.

By launching this service, Google would likely control even a greater share of user activity on its site. With the pay-per-click model it popularized, the company collects a fee anytime a user clicks on an ad. With Google Wallet, a consumer that clicked on an ad for a product could purchase that product without leaving the site.

However, both the user and the merchant on the other end would have to sign up for the service in order for the transaction to take place, Mr. Schatt said. The money would move from the consumer’s account to the merchant’s, with Google pocketing a fee.

Google, which posted $1.05 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter, derives most of its revenue from ads, mainly pay-per-click ones (see Google Revenue Jumps 96%). With Google Wallet, the pay-per-click model could evolve into a pay-per-purchase model, suggesting that merchants would pay Google a fee for products purchased.

Big Payoff

The move would give Google a strong hold on its customers in more ways than one. The service would provide the company with an additional revenue stream. But it would also provide the search giant with information on customer purchase habits and patterns.

That information, in turn, could help the Mountain View, California, company with its targeted advertising service, AdWords. One possible sign that Google Wallet is imminent: A posting on the company-written Google AdWords blog asks users to transition from using an AdWords login to using a Google Accounts login before January 15.

There’s also potential for Google to blend the service with other enhancements it’s already made to its offerings. Mr. Schatt said Google could add its voice capabilities to the mix, allowing it to integrate pay-per-call ads, which are online ads that direct users who click on them to a call with a live person. eBay is planning a similar scheme with its recent acquisition of VoIP provider Skype.

Another big announcement expected from Google is a service that would take the search company into the world of classifieds and online selling (see Google May Take on eBay). That service, expected to be called Google Base, will marry well with any online payments service.

Google Wallet combined with Google Base could offer sites with voice buttons connecting buyers and sellers, making it a complete e-commerce platform. Google already runs Froogle, a shopping search engine, and offers a form-fill function on its toolbar that stores encrypted information.

The new offerings could end up making the firm a strong competitor to eBay, which boasts PayPal and Skype. It also means Google, the No. 1 search engine controlling more than one third of the search market, could become an entry point to a lot of e-commerce, something that no doubt would give rival portals much to worry about.

Users could search for a product on Google, discuss it with the seller, and buy it using Google wallet without leaving the site, or that’s the idea anyway.

October 29, 2005 at 10:18 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo! Begins Beta Testing of New Yahoo! Mail

IT News Online > N. America - Internet - Yahoo! Begins Beta Testing of New Yahoo! Mail

IT News Online Staff
2005-09-14

Yahoo! has begun beta testing a new version of Yahoo! Mail. The new Yahoo! Mail beta is said to provide a faster experience with enhanced functionality, such as drag-and-drop email organization and message preview.

Like the current Yahoo! Mail, the new version is browser-based, making it universally accessible from any computer connected to the Internet, without the need for a software download. The beta incorporates the technological expertise demonstrated by Oddpost, a company acquired by Yahoo! in July 2004.

The beta has been made available today to a limited group of Yahoo! Mail users in the U.S and will be broadened to include additional Yahoo! Mail users worldwide in the coming months. Yahoo! plans to make the new version available to all users after the completion of beta testing. Beta testers will be able to toggle between the different versions of Yahoo! Mail in order to try the new interface.

"This beta gives people a faster and more dynamic way to experience Yahoo! Mail, yet continues to offer the same features they rely upon today: great anti-spam and virus protection, tons of storage, it's all there," said Ethan Diamond, director, product development, Yahoo! Mail. "We're looking forward to receiving feedback on the beta as we continue the development process."

The beta version of the new Yahoo! Mail includes increased speed and features such as:
- Fast and easy-to-use interface that functions like a desktop client application
- Drag-and-drop message organization
- Reading pane to instantly view messages
- Comprehensive and speedy search of email headers, bodies and attachments
- Ability to view multiple emails at the same time
- Automatic check and delivery of new mail
- Keyboard shortcuts and right click menus
- Ability to scroll through all message headers in a folder, rather than page by page
- Address autocomplete
- Protection from spam and viruses
- Available on Firefox (Mac/Windows) and Internet Explorer (Windows only)
- Remains free, supported by advertisers.

Yahoo! said the enhanced speed and features are made possible by using technologies such as dynamic HTML (DHTML), XML and SOAP.

October 29, 2005 at 10:04 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (25) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google flight takes off

Google flight takes off - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

By Elinor Mills, CNET News.com

Flight details are the latest example of Google's mission to bring together disparate sources of information

Google has launched a search feature that use Web services to let people quickly get airline flight information.

Users can type in two different cities, or airport codes, in the Google search box to bring up two boxes for entering departing and returning flight dates. Below those are links to the travel Web sites Expedia, Hotwire and Orbitz. Clicking on one of those links leads directly to flight options for their selected itinerary on that site.

"Google is testing a new search feature for specific flight inquiries between two points," Google said in an e-mailed statement.

The move comes one day after Yahoo debuted its new Trip Planner beta, which allows people to create, share and print personalised trip itineraries.

Earlier this week, Google quietly began testing a new service to enable people to post and make searchable any type of content, including used-car listings, which some speculated would put it in competition with online auctioneer eBay.

October 29, 2005 at 10:44 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

IBM to use Google desktop search deep inside firms

IBM to use Google desktop search deep inside firms - Yahoo! News

By Eric Auchard Fri Oct 28, 9:39 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM and Google Inc. are collaborating to make it easier for office workers not only to search for local documents and personal e-mail but to delve deep into corporate databases, the companies said on Friday.

IBM is linking up its OmniFind corporate search system with Google's free desktop search for business to make it easier for users to locate information throughout an organization that is often locked up in many separate systems.

"Getting these two products together makes sense for both of us," David Girouard, general manager of Google's enterprise business unit. "If you want to have a good corporate search product, you have to have desktop search," he said.

In the collaboration, Google wins IBM's endorsement among corporate technical managers for its desktop search product and IBM gives corporate information workers an already popular entry point into back-office databases through Google's search.

Searchable data ranges from e-mail to computer files to blog postings to corporate repositories of data, images, audio or video. Much of this is not available using public Web search tools. Typically, it is hard to reach inside a company except by trawling through many different programs.

"There is a lot of information that passively sits inside an enterprise," said Jon Prial, IBM's vice president of content management. "Our intention is to provide more of an active service that gives a single view of all that information."

No money is changing hands in this partnership by the world's biggest computer company and the leader in Web search.

But coming just weeks after a software and research pact by Google and Sun Microsystems Inc., the IBM deal enlists yet another potential ally as Google increasingly faces off with rival Microsoft Corp. on PC desktops.

Prial downplayed any grand strategy in IBM's dealings with Google, but said it was part of a broader push IBM calls "information as a service," which the computer company plans to make more explicit over the coming months.

This move draws on 14 acquisitions IBM has made since 2001 through which it is seeking to give corporate users a single view of product or customer information or to find "non-obvious" ties between people or products.

NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK

Users of IBM's WebSphere integration software would have access to information stored inside rival business databases and content management systems, not just those from IBM.

"There's a lot of raw data inside an organization -- as much as 80 percent is unstructured and something has to happen to make it into information," Forrester analyst Barry Murphy said of data forgotten on employee hard disks or other places.

IBM customers can use the Google-IBM search combination by buying IBM products and services and building their own in-house system or rely on IBM to create a pre-packaged system, tailored to the company's industry, the company said.

Its first custom-built system, called IBM Crime Information Warehouse, aims to give government and police agencies fast access to crime statistics, incident and arrest reports in a single view that can help discern crime patterns, IBM said.

Mountain View, California-based Google eschews big, formal alliances with corporate technology suppliers like IBM. That's been the traditional route less-established software suppliers have used to win corporate acceptance of their products.

Google's strategy is rather to use its popularity with consumers at home to slip into offices by relying on the actions of millions of employees to each download its tools.

"Information technology used at work has been evolving much more slowly than among consumers," Girouard said. "We think there is a great opportunity (for our consumer users) to bring products to the workplace that are Google-like," he said.

Google shares set a new record in Nasdaq trading on Friday, closing at $358.17, up about 1.5 percent. IBM shares closed down about 1.1 percent at $81.42 on the
New York Stock Exchange.

October 29, 2005 at 10:37 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (52) | Top of page | Blog Home

Once again, it's Microsoft vs. Google

Once again, it's Microsoft vs. Google | News.blog | CNET News.com

Is it just us, or is Microsoft vs. Google starting to resemble Yankees vs. Red Sox these days?

The two are increasingly competitive-- at least when it comes to Web search, mapping, instant messaging and other areas. And money is no object.

No coincidence then that latest face off between the two rivals comes in the suddenly lively area of book search.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it will join a library book digitization project sponsored by Yahoo and Internet Archive.

Microsoft is likely hoping for a less litigious experience than Google, however. Google faces two lawsuits alleging that the search giant is violating copyright law by scanning and digitizing all or parts of the collections at the libraries at universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Michigan, plus The New York Public Library.

The Yahoo-Internet Archive project will digitize only texts in the public domain, except where the copyright holder has expressly given permission. The project also will make the index of digitized works searchable by any Web search engine, unlike Google, which will be the only search engine for the books it digitizes.

Cash always helps pave the way. Microsoft has committed to paying for the digitization of 150,000 books in the first year, which will cost about $5 million.

October 26, 2005 at 04:14 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google tests classified ad tool

Google tests tool that could post classified ads - Oct. 25, 2005

Analysts say new service could help search firm compete with eBay, Amazon for online shopping biz.
October 25, 2005: 6:24 PM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. said Tuesday it was testing a new service that lets Web users publish information online, but it would not confirm whether the move was part of a broader push into online shopping to compete with the likes of eBay or Amazon.com.

Analysts and blog commentators have been abuzz this week over purported Web page screenshots showing a new service called "Google Base." Another related service could offer online payments and would put Google head-to-head with eBay Inc.'s (Research) PayPal payments service.

"Google Base," as depicted in screenshots on Google-watching sites, encourages users to post details of their small business enterprises, articles on current events, automobile listings and even scientific research.

"We are testing new ways for content owners to easily send their content to Google," Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez said in a statement.

"We're continually exploring new opportunities to expand our offerings, but we don't have anything to announce at this time," Rodriguez added.

Analysts said that if Google combines the publishing system with its Froogle shopping service and other offerings it could compete with local classified advertising on sites such as eBay, Craig's List or online shopping at Amazon.com (Research).

The site, "Search Engine Roundtable", links to a posting, http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/002705.html, attributed to Google in which the company is said to be introducing a tool at a closed meeting it calls 'Google Zeitgeist'05 Partner Forum' being held on Google's Mountain View campus.

October 25, 2005 at 10:00 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (31) | Top of page | Blog Home

With Fewer Paying Up, AOL.com Shifts to Free

With Fewer Paying Up, AOL.com Shifts to Free - New York Times

By STUART ELLIOTT
Published: October 14, 2005

THOSE skeptics who have long predicted curtains for AOL are turning out to be right - only not quite the way they envisioned.

Curtains, a large blue pair to be exact, are the images being used in an estimated $50 million campaign to promote AOL.com as a free Web portal. The campaign, in online and offline versions, depicts computer users parting the curtains to reveal a bright white light on the other side.

"The new AOL.com," the ads proclaim. "Now open to everyone." Several agencies are producing the various aspects of the campaign, from the traditional, like television commercials, to the unconventional, like text ads on Web search pages.

The campaign has been in development for months, ever since AOL's parent, Time Warner, decided to shift strategies (again) and offer at no cost much of the content and features that had been available only to subscribers of America Online. The reason is that despite all the elaborate previous changes to the subscription service, paying users continue to flee.

Still, Web sites that are part of AOL, which include Moviefone, Mapquest and Netscape, remain popular destinations with computer users. Their continued appeal is the reason behind the recent talks between Time Warner and other major media companies regarding potential investments in America Online.

In the weeks before the AOL.com campaign was scheduled to start appearing, word began to circulate that Time Warner and Microsoft had explored a variety of potential combinations of America Online with the MSN Web portal. Then, on Wednesday, reports circulated that Comcast and Google were negotiating with Time Warner to buy a minority stake in the AOL Web portal. Regardless of the outcome of those discussions, the campaign will continue to be introduced, America Online executives say, because of the need to pursue the new strategy.

For one thing, wooing computer users to a free Web site is intended to capitalize on the booming market for online advertising, which has enriched competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

"It's about building AOL's audience to make money through advertising, e-commerce and search in a much bigger way than we're able to when we were focused only on the subscription service," said Kevin Conroy, executive vice president for AOL Media Networks in Dulles, Va.

"It's in the spirit of 'go where the water's going,' " he added, "getting in sync with where today's high-speed Web users are and serving their interests." A recent survey indicated that more than 40 percent of Americans online now had broadband service, enabling them to access the Internet faster and be exposed to more so-called rich media applications like banner ads with embedded video clips.

Indeed, such ads are among those being used by America Online to promote the free portal.

"Our challenge is to pave a smooth road for broadband users to get to all these features and content that are now available on the open Web," said Andreas Combuechen, chief executive and chief creative officer at Atmosphere BBDO in New York. The agency, a unit of BBDO Worldwide, part of the Omnicom Group, creates campaigns for the paid service called AOL for Broadband and is also producing the online advertising for AOL.com.

A sibling Omnicom agency, OMD, is handling the online media buying, purchasing ad space for the campaign on hundreds of Web sites like those operated by CBS, Cnet, Discovery, Walt Disney and eBay.

The online ads have what Mr. Combuechen described as an "inclusive, celebratory" tone, meant to reflect the personality that America Online is seeking to impart to the site.

Using the curtains as a branding device is the idea of the agency producing the offline advertising, the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., part of the Interpublic Group of Companies. The curtains are intended to evoke fond memories of movies, plays, concerts and other entertainment, appropriate because much of the content offered free on AOL.com is centered on film, music, television, games and sports.

Entertainment offerings like concert clips, movie trailers and excerpts from TV shows are one of the four "big themes" or "value pillars" of the free portal, Mr. Conroy said. The others are news and information; convenience, "helping you get things done" like shopping and buying movie tickets; and "connecting you with others" through e-mail service, instant messaging, message boards and blogs.

The search engine marketing elements of the campaign are the most extensive ever tried by America Online. The more limited past efforts were undertaken "to drive member acquisition" for the paid service, said Jeremy Cornfeldt, vice president for search and affiliate marketing at Carat Fusion in New York, the agency handling the assignment that was formerly named Carat Interactive. Carat Fusion is part of Carat Americas, owned by the Aegis Group.

"If we are releasing content to the Web, we need an approach to drive traffic to the new portal," Mr. Cornfeldt said, then to keep track of "how many pages they are consuming, how many channels of AOL.com are they going to and how often they're coming back."

For example, Mr. Cornfeldt said, Carat Fusion conducts research on how users search for information on concerts and movies, then works to ensure that AOL sites are listed as often as possible.

If someone types the words "Live 8" at Google.com, referring to the benefit concert in July, the first result in the listings, after the paid ads, would be a link to content on AOL.com. And indeed it is: "Live 8 Reflections" on AOL Music.

Such efforts are, however, works in progress. Two weeks ago, typing in the phrase "watch movie trailer" on Google.com brought up as the first result, after the paid ads, a link to a listing on Moviefone.com for " 'The Chronicles of Narnia' movie exclusives." But now at the top is a link to Apple's Web site, and the Moviefone link is not even on the first page of results (it is a sponsored link). Other elements of the offline campaign created by Martin include ads in the Life (entertainment) section of USA Today; ads in a lengthy list of magazines published by the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner, like Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated and People; and billboards in the Los Angeles, New York and Washington markets. A Martin sibling, Initiative, is handling the media buying.

On radio, there is a promotion with the Infinity Broadcasting unit of Viacom, which includes disc jockeys on more than 30 Infinity radio stations talking about what they see each day on AOL.com.

October 14, 2005 at 11:20 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (78) | Top of page | Blog Home

Microsoft, Yahoo to Link IM Networks

BetaNews | Microsoft, Yahoo to Link IM Networks

By Nate Mook, BetaNews
October 12, 2005, 10:55 AM

UPDATED Microsoft and Yahoo announced on Wednesday a blockbuster interoperability deal that will reshape the landscape of the fragmented instant messaging market. The companies will connect their IM networks so users on each can communicate with one another using text and voice chat free of charge.

Starting in the second quarter of 2006, customers of both services will be able to see their friends' online presence, share emoticons, and add new contacts from either Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger to their buddy list.

The agreement marks the first time major players in the highly-competitive IM industry have officially partnered up to enable cross-network communication. Interoperability has always been a hot topic among instant messaging providers, but had never yielded a compromise.

In 1999, Microsoft connected its MSN Messenger client to AOL's AIM network - without authorization. The move let to a cat-and-mouse game of AOL cutting off its new competitor and MSN re-establishing communication with each update. Microsoft eventually gave up and focused on improving its client.

Such disparate messaging networks led to the creation of third party clients with the ability to connect to each simultaneously. AOL and others were initially critical of applications like Trillian, but eventually backed down and ceased efforts to block the newcomers.

"IM interoperability is the right thing for our customers, our businesses and the industry as a whole, and Microsoft is delighted to help lead these efforts with Yahoo," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in a statement.

"This is truly a turning point for the IM industry," added Yahoo CEO Terry Semel, "and we believe our agreement with Microsoft will help usher in a new era of IP communications."

Yahoo and Microsoft will now command upwards of 44 percent of the market, according to research firm Radicati Group, putting new pressure on market leader AOL, which holds around 56 percent market share with AIM and ICQ. And according to recent comScore Media Metrix numbers, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger together reach 33.5 million unique users each month, more than the 23 million running AIM.

But competing with AOL is likely not the primary reason Microsoft and Yahoo have linked up. The new threat to the IM heavyweights comes from voice chat and upstarts such as Skype that have taken the communications industry by storm. Google, meanwhile, recently launched a communications client called Google Talk that focuses on simple PC-to-PC calling.

Still, a source at Yahoo expressed concern about the new partnership to BetaNews, hypothesizing that interoperability will only serve to strengthen Microsoft's position in the market.

Recently, IM software clients have evolved to link consumers to other services beyond just chat - from blogs to search. And if users are able to message contacts on Yahoo through the MSN client bundled with Windows, it could hamper Yahoo's efforts to reach more eyeballs.

Microsoft is also reported to be in talks with Time Warner, and a deal to open the door between MSN Messenger and AIM has been rumored. However, nothing concrete has come from the discussions thus far.

October 12, 2005 at 08:47 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (34) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo unveils blog search tool

Yahoo unveils blog search tool | CNET News.com

By Alorie Gilbert
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: October 10, 2005, 7:00 PM PDT
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Yahoo has revamped its news search tool to grab material from thousands of blogs in addition to headlines from 6,500 newspapers and magazines.
The company launched a test version of the new tool on Monday, saying it aims to give consumers a more complete view of the news.

"Our expanded news search dramatically increases the consumer's ability to find events that matter to them, from major news stories, citizen reporting, commentary and pictures that might not be covered by the mainstream media," Neil Budde, general manager of Yahoo News, said in a statement.

The move was largely expected ever since the company began testing a blog search feature on its Korean blog site in August.

The search tool unveiled on Monday separates blog headlines from other headlines, displaying them in different columns. By clicking on "all blog results," users can find photos related to their search from Flickr, Yahoo's photo sharing service. They may also find relevant material from Web sites they've marked as favorites via user-generated tagging.

Previous Next Yahoo and Google are facing off in the blog arena. Google introduced blog search about a month ago, and last week it began a public test of a news reader service that lets users subscribe to headlines from blogs and news sites.

Because there are so many blogs, keeping on top of them is challenging. Technorati, a blog search specialist, tracks nearly 19 million blogs and says the number doubles every five months.

Initially, Yahoo News Search will have access to material from hundreds of thousands of blogs but will eventually scan millions, said Joff Redfern, a director in Yahoo's search unit.

October 11, 2005 at 11:55 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

Managing Google's Idea Factory

Managing Google's Idea Factory

Marissa Mayer helps the search giant out-think its rivals

In late 1998, when Marissa Mayer first heard about a small outfit called Google, she barely batted an eye. The Stanford University grad student was urged by her adviser to pay a visit to two guys on the computer science building's fourth floor who were developing ways to analyze the World Wide Web.

But Internet startups were as common as hay fever in Silicon Valley. Mayer, then 23, was leaning toward taking a teaching gig at Carnegie Mellon University. And the thought of joining up with the university's techies wasn't exactly appealing. "I knew about the Stanford PhD types," she muses. "They love to Rollerblade. They eat pizza for breakfast. They don't shower much. And they don't say 'Sorry' when they bump into you in the hallway."

Fortunately for both Google Inc. (GOOG ) and Mayer, she had a change of heart. A headhunter persuaded her to reconsider the search startup, and she ended up joining Google in early 1999, as a programmer and roughly its 20th employee. Since then, Mayer has emerged as a powerful force inside the high-flying company. Her title, director of consumer Web products, belies her power and influence as a champion of innovation. Mayer has her hands on virtually everything the average Google user sees -- from the look of its Web pages to new software for searching your hard drive. And she helps decide which new initiatives get the attention of the company's founders and which don't.

It's no small task. Co-founders Larry E. Page and Sergey Brin have long declared their mission is to "organize the world's information." Yet only in recent months has the staggering scope of their ambition come into full relief. Google is moving to digitize the world's libraries, to offer all comers free voice calls, to provide satellite images of the world, and perhaps to give away wireless broadband service to millions of people. Google really seems to believe it can make every bit of information available to anyone anywhere, and direct all those bits -- whether text, audio, or video -- through its computers before they hit users' brains.

ROCKET RIDE
Mayer doesn't handle all this herself. One of the key reasons for Google's success is a belief that good ideas can, and should, come from anywhere. Page and Brin insist that all engineers in the company have one day a week to work on their own pet projects. An ideas mailing list is open to anyone at Google who wants to post a proposal. What Mayer does is help figure out how to make sure good ideas bubble to the surface and get the attention they need. The task is becoming more complex as Google grows, with a workforce of 4,200 now and revenues on track to hit $3.7 billion this year.

It's increasingly important, too. Google's rocket ride has attracted a swarm of competitors, from giants Microsoft (MSFT ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ) to upstarts like Technorati and Exalead. They're all aiming to take away a chunk of Google's search traffic, which puts a premium on the company's ability to develop other technologies. "People are used to typing in Google to search," says Chris Sherman, editor of the industry newsletter SearchDay. "But its competitors are doing a really good job of rolling out quality features and products." Microsoft Corp. has even explored taking a stake in America Online Inc. so that it can claim for itself the millions in revenues that Google gets from providing AOL with its search technology.

The woman charged with helping come up with Google's response is a tall, striking blonde with blue eyes. At 30, Mayer still carries herself with the erect posture of the ballet dancer she was in her youth. She grew up in Wausau, Wis., a city of 40,000 about 3 1/2 hours northwest of Milwaukee. She aspires to live up to the example of her grandfather, who served as mayor of Jackson, Wis., for 30 years, despite being crippled by polio as a child.

In Wausau, Mayer was one of the top debaters on her high school team. Then the brainy teenager decided to try out for pom-pom squad and made that team, too. To some who knew her, Mayer was making a point. "She wanted to smash the image of the airhead cheerleader," says Jim Briggs, Mayer's high-school debate coach. Her debate team ended up winning the Wisconsin state championship; her pom-pom squad was the state runner-up.

A large part of Mayer's success at Google is due to her ability to travel easily between different worlds. When she first joined, the company had something of a high-school cliquishness, albeit in reverse. At lunch, the coolest kids -- in this forum, the smartest geeks -- sat together. On the periphery, sales and marketing folks gathered. Mayer could hold her own in either realm. "She's a geek, but her clothes match," says one former employee.

Mayer continues to bridge the gap between MBAs and PhDs. She helps decide when employees' pet projects are refined enough to be presented to the company's founders. Such decisions are often made through an established process, with Mayer giving ideas a hearing during her open office hours or during brainstorming sessions. Yet she is also good at drawing out programmers informally, during a chance meeting in the cafeteria or hallway.

During a casual chat in 2003, a worker told her about the project of an Australian engineer, Steve Lawrence. He was developing a program to track and search the contents of his computer, which ran on the Linux operating system. Knowing Google had to figure out a way for people to find stuff on their own computers, Mayer tracked Lawrence down and asked him about developing a version of his software to search any PC. He was enthusiastic, so she helped assemble a team to work with him. The result: Google introduced its desktop search in October, 2004, two months before Microsoft. "Marissa has been very successful as the gatekeeper for a lot of these new products," says Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google.

Part of Mayer's challenge is realizing when certain formulas falter. For years she ran the company's Top 100 priorities list, which ranked projects by order of importance. But as Google's workforce grew, the list soared to more than 270 projects. Last year Google execs decided it had run its course, and shut it down. "People don't get attached to the processes themselves at Google," says Bret Taylor, product manager for Google Maps. "It's very unusual. Even at small companies, people tend to say: 'This is the way we do X."'

Mayer's typical workday starts at 9 a.m. and doesn't end until about midnight. Her glass-walled office is intentionally situated across from the engineering snack area, where programmers grab evening coffee or munchies. Often on these late nights, engineers will bend her ear as they take a breather from their work, bringing her up to date on the countless ideas percolating through the ranks. "I keep my ears open. I work at building a reputation for being receptive," she says.

This theory is in action on a sunny Friday afternoon in September. Mayer walks around her office, shared with an assistant and two other employees. Outside the door, seven or eight programmers and product managers have been milling about since 3:30. Most wear jeans, tennis shoes, and checkered or striped shirts, all untucked. Some pace the hall and talk quietly on their cell phones. Others sit on chairs, their arms folded, waiting patiently.

OFFICE HOURS
At 4 p.m., her three-times-a-week office hours begin. It's a tradition Mayer brought over from her days at Stanford, where she taught computer science to undergrads. Over the years, such meetings have spawned some big ideas, including Google's social-networking site Orkut.

First to enter her office are a pair of techies -- a man and woman in their mid-20s. Sitting across from Mayer, separated by a desk with a Dilbert coffee mug and a toy robot still in its box, they forgo the pleasantries and launch into hushed banter. The duo is stumped over which languages the Google Web site should be available in. Although it is already translated into more than 115 tongues, from Arabic to Zulu, they wonder whether they should proceed with more obscure choices. Before one minute elapses, Mayer interjects. Google shouldn't be the arbiter on languages. Just include anything considered legitimate by a third-party source, such as the CIA World Fact Book, she says. "We don't want to make a large geopolitical statement by accident."

In ones or twos, all the visitors get a brief hearing, typically five minutes. She gently rebuffs one group seeking to put a link to Hurricane Katrina information on Google's home page. The site for hurricane victims, she argues, isn't useful enough yet. She brainstorms with a product manager on how to measure and compare the freshness of Google's search results against its rivals'.

One of the final groups marches in to discuss a personalized search product. Many pundits describe personalization as the Holy Grail in search. An engine that knows your preferences and interests intimately could tailor the information delivered to improve results. Google has been offering rudimentary personalization for a year, but more is expected in the future. With two people in Mayer's office and another on speaker phone, she grills the trio about the service's name. She's not enthusiastic about the initial suggestions. "You're killing me," she says.

After a few minutes of discussion, Mayer presses the group on the product's features. Google's top brass is having its next product-review session shortly, in which nascent ideas get either fast-tracked or sent back for further tinkering. So Mayer asks the big question: "O.K., let's take it to Larry [Page]. Are you guys ready to product review tomorrow?" They assure her that they're set to go.

Office hours are just one way in which Mayer connects with inventive engineers and managers. Another is Google's ideas mailing list, the e-mail thread to which anyone can submit or comment on an idea. At times, the thread more resembles a form of techie Darwinism. Google newcomers who proffer an especially obvious suggestion ("Why don't we search blogs?"), or something off-topic like how to arrange the cafeteria tables, often suffer withering rebukes. "It's about 50% new ideas, 50% indoctrination of new employees," says Mayer.

It's all part of a culture not for the faint of heart. Google oozes with what one ex-employee calls "geek machismo." Intellectual sparring can get heated. In the cafeteria, "food gets thrown," says the former employee.

What Mayer thinks will be essential for continued innovation is for Google to keep its sense of fearlessness. "I like to launch [products] early and often. That has become my mantra," she says. She mentions Apple Computer and Madonna. "Nobody remembers the Sex Book or the Newton. Consumers remember your average over time. That philosophy frees you from fear."

It's just one way Mayer tries to maintain the search company's original culture. That's no easy task. Movie night, for instance, used to be a piece of cake when perhaps 100 employees descended on a local cinema. Today, organizing such an event is a full-time job. Yet Mayer handles several of these a year, from picking a movie with the right geek cred (say, Star Wars: Episode III) to ordering thousands of tickets to writing the software that lets her track who has received them. "She still walks around with a laptop, handing out all the tickets beforehand," marvels Google's Silverstein.

It makes sense for Mayer to stay in such close touch with the swelling ranks of Googlers. She may need every one of their bright ideas to keep the search giant ahead of the competition.

October 10, 2005 at 01:37 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Sphere, the Relevant Blog Search

Om Malik’s Broadband Blog » Sphere, the Relevant Blog Search

Blogs are big. There are 19 million blogs, and a few thousand will go online by the time you get done reading this. To paraphrase a popular disco ditty - so many blogs, so little time. Technorati, Feedster and Icerocket do a good job of searching the blogs, the information that is presented to the end-user is like giving people the cow, not the steak. The big issue is finding relevant and intelligent blog posts on a specific topic, that are based on authority. The authority is not an arbitrary decision of a human community, but a “collective effort.” Google tries to do this in its new Reader by restricting “google search” to RSS feeds. But that’s not the answer.

October 9, 2005 at 01:50 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (28) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Introduces Feed Reader

Google Introduces Feed Reader

Continuing its push into the universe of blogs and feeds, Google has launched a feed reader application. Google Reader is a browser-based application that works with virtually all popular browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Google Reader is "the most comprehensive feed finder available," said Jason Shellen, the Google product manager who spearheaded the development of the program. Comprehensive, yes, but Reader also adheres to Google's trademark simple, easy-to-use design philosophy. "We're trying to find an easier find and subscribe model for feeds," said Shellen.

October 8, 2005 at 02:56 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (34) | Top of page | Blog Home

'GoogleOffice': A Microsoft Office Killer?

'GoogleOffice': A Microsoft Office Killer?

By Mary Jo Foley
If 'GoogleOffice' ever materializes, it won't be going head-to-head with Microsoft Office. Instead, expect some new MSN services in the pipeline to emerge as Redmond's secret weapons.

To hear Sun, Google and the Anything But Microsoft campers tell it, Microsoft Office will be officially toast any day now.

I say they're wrong. But not because Microsoft Office — even with 90+ percent of the desktop office suite market share to its credit — is unbeatable.

Even though Sun and Google did not, as many predicted, announce this week a "GoogleOffice," pundits say it's only a matter of time before the pair could hatch such an animal.

Whenever — and if ever — Sun and Google deliver a light-weight, fast, cheap Web-based Office alternative, Microsoft Office will not be its primary competitor, however. Instead, the growing collection of MSN Services, especially the pending "Kahuna" Hotmail upgrade and Microsoft's as-yet-unannounced hosted SMB collaboration bundle, will be what the Redmondians pit against the new "StarOffice in the sky" offering.

Microsoft Office is a "smart" (a k a, fat, bloated — choose your beefy synonym of choice) client. It's not meant to run over the Web. Ask folks who've tried using a hosted version of Office. It's a slow and painful experience.

Outlook Web Access and Kahuna (the Hotmail/Outlook Web Access successor, also known as MSN Mail) are Ajax applications. They were designed from the get-go as Web apps.

Kahuna is currently in a small private beta test. The Kahuna team, which has been blogging and Channel 9ing its way into visibility, has said to expect Kahuna to look nothing like Hotmail. The app will look and feel a bit like Outlook, but will be faster, simpler and safer than its predecessor, team members have said. No word yet on when it will go live or how it will be distributed or packaged. But it will be a "brand new service," the team members promise.

Kahuna isn't the only potential competitor to a Google Office. Sources have said to expect a new hosted collaboration suite aimed at small/mid-size business customers to launch under the MSN banner some time soon. The bundle will include e-mail, unified messaging, instant messaging, VOIP and data-conferencing capabilities all rolled into a single, hosted collaboration suite, partners told Microsoft Watch.

With its latest reorg, and its decision to unify the platforms and MSN services teams into a single division, the Microsoft brass put in place a structure better suited to defend against Sun/Google-style partnerships and their associated services offerings.

It's not clear to me that Microsoft's combined platform and services unit is ready to go on the offensive, however. Kahuna is Microsoft's answer to Gmail and other Web mail programs. The forthcoming MSN SMB collaboration suite is a hedge against eBay/Skype. Is there a hot technology arena where Microsoft has fielded a new product first over the past few months and others are scrambling to catch up? I am coming up blank.

Help me out here, readers. Point me to a place where Microsoft has Google and other competitors on the run. And, while you're at it, how about firing over some suggestions for services you think Microsoft's combined platforms/services division should field in the next year or two to combat the perception that the old Microsoft dog can't learn any new tricks.

October 5, 2005 at 01:47 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Office?

Next Up: Google Office?

October 3, 2005
Next Up: Google Office?
By Susan Kuchinskas

There's a Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. These times must be really interesting for Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) CEO allegedly said he'd crush Google (Quote, Chart), his company's rival in search, and the lucrative ad business it engenders. On Tuesday, Google may strike back at Redmond's heart: Microsoft Office.

Google and Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) will hold a press conference on Tuesday at which they're expected to announce a collaboration to bring StarOffice productivity applications to Google users.

StarOffice is Sun's suite of integrated word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database software based on the OpenOffice open source project.

StarOffice or OpenOffice users can add their own browsers and e-mail applications, while Sun offers Sun Java Communications Suite for customers that want to add messaging, collaboration, calendaring and scheduling tools.

Google's dip into OpenOffice began with its hiring of Joerg Heilig, former director of software engineering at Sun, according to Gary Edwards, a consultant and designated representative of the OpenOffice.org open source community.

"He was the project manager for StarOffice, a longtime employee of the Star division, and a very important person to StarOffice," Edwards said. "When he left, there were some real tears. Also a great deal of apprehension."

Community scuttlebutt was that Google was on a hunt for OpenOffice and StarOffice developers, and everyone in the company's Hamburg division was a target, according to Edwards. "No one knows what Google was going to do with Joerg, but they had the keys to the kingdom when they got him," Edwards said.

It has long been rumored that Google is developing its own operating system or desktop, with an online calendaring application scheduled to be released in October.

The partnership with Sun seems to indicate that Google's direction is to build out what is, in essence, an alternative to Microsoft Office. Google already offers e-mail, photo managing and instant messaging applications.

Vendors of hosted business productivity tools didn't seem concerned about a threat from Google. Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra, which last week delivered a beta version of an open source browser-based system for e-mail, calendar and contacts, said that Google's entry would validate Zimbra Collaboration Suite's strategy.

Via e-mail, Marc Benioff, CEO of hosted applications provider Salesforce.com (Quote, Chart) said simply, "Google is a consumer services company."

But the ramifications go far beyond free, online apps for consumers, Edwards said, because StarOffice is far more than just an alternative to Microsoft Office. StarOffice -- or OpenOffice -- is based on standard XML, so it can act as the transformation layer between any application that can read the XML file format and legacy applications.

"If Google comes along and … provides some basic AJAX-based editing, and allows people to do this editing in XHTML and OpenDocument, you have a clear line of capability that goes from simple HTML to a little bit more complicated but data-centric XHTML to a truly bridging XML technology, OpenDocument," Edwards said.

OpenDocument is an OASIS standard for a single XML-based file format for text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical documents. It was ratified in May.

Google already offers Gmail users plenty of storage for their e-mail archives. If it extended that storage to other kinds of documents that were generated in conformance with the OpenDocument standard, and then combined that with a Web-based productivity suite to connect users to their stored information via any browser, the result would be a platform that could transform business collaboration as well as consumer communications.

"Imagine StarOffice running on the desktop, and Google perfecting the [file synchronization]," said Edwards. "Then you have your collaboration space carved out immediately for you, and Google is hosting it."

October 4, 2005 at 01:07 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google beats Microsoft, and MIT beats Harvard, at least in one war game

"Battle for Clicks" War Game - MIT Sloan School of Management Newsroom

MIT Sloan Fellows assume identity of Google in an all-day "Battle for Clicks" war game

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 27, 2005 — Google's high-tech sparkle was on display at the all-day "Battle for Clicks" war game between students from MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School on Sunday, April 10. MIT Sloan Fellows who assumed the identity of Google overcame strong challenges from a Harvard team representing Microsoft, as well as student teams representing Yahoo! and AOL/Time Warner to win the game and capture the $5,000 winner prize.

The game was run by Fuld & Co., a Cambridge-based strategic intelligence consulting firm, which typically conducts such games for corporations in private, closed-door sessions. This is the first time such a game has ever been run in public, and the first such competition involving students from these two world-class business schools. A war game is neither a war nor a game, but rather an enlightening analytical exercise that often leads to truly creative business strategies.

The MIT Sloan Fellows team that represented Google was well prepared. "The competition focused on strategy development," said Brian Courtney, one of the MIT Sloan Fellow participants. "Our current classes in technology and marketing strategy gave us the confidence to debate anyone."

The Google team pushed a strategy of global growth, deepening penetration into the enterprise, spreading search technology beyond computers into other electronic devices, and developing more partnerships. A panel of judges from Forrester, IDC, MFS Management, and Jefferies & Company rated the teams and had Google first, Microsoft second, AOL/Time Warner third, and Yahoo! fourth.

"I believe we won because we competed as a team," said Courtney, "We worked together studying the materials and we shared all relevant research so we were all equally prepared. We also brought a great deal of work experience to the table. Because of this we weren't tempted to overreact to the fictitious market changes that the game presented."

The Google strategy impressed a Google associate product manager in attendance, Enrique Muïoz Torres. "I was impressed by the depth of analysis that went on," he said.

Torres pointed to comments from some team members as to the importance of Google maintaining technical superiority: "In competing with Microsoft, having the highest quality product isn't enough."

The competition, which lasted all day Sunday, was a see-saw battle. At the event's midpoint, TimeWarner held first place, focusing on its 22 million AOL users, 19 million of whom use Instant Messaging. Since users are abandoning dialup for DSL and Broadband, the TimeWarner team focused on strategies to keep its Instant Messaging users as well as users who want a "clean experience" (no spam or viruses) and no adult-rated material.

As part of the competition, Fuld & Company challenged the students to deal with a series of plausible political events that would have severe repercussions for each of the companies. For example, Mike Sandman, the Fuld facilitator, fired this scenario at all four teams:

Taxing the Internet: The Federal Communications Commission enacts regulations enabling states to collect sales taxes on e-commerce based on where the buyer lives, not where the company is based. These events are expected to dampen online sales and online ad revenues. Consumer cost would be an average of 67 cents a month for AOL users and $1.57 to $1.98 a month for DSL and Broadband users.

All four teams shifted gears to strategize their survival. The company teams made offers for mergers or licensing agreements with each other, with all of them pursuing Time Warner and its highly prized print and broadcast content.

Throughout the War Game, teams had to focus on economist Michael Porter's Four Corners Analysis — drivers, assumptions, current strategy, and capabilities — before developing future strategies. The teams claimed their major benefits to customers were as follows:

* Yahoo! has the most eyeballs, with users willing to pay for personalized content.
* Microsoft has the most cash, owns the desktop platform, MSN and Hotmail.
* Time Warner has content, print and broadcast media venues for bundled advertising, and the most popular instant messaging service.
* Google has a worldwide consumer market with 30-plus percent of its revenues coming from outside the U.S., content in 100 languages, and the most ubiquitous search engine.

"The game ended with the same excitement and strategic inventiveness with which it began," concluded Leonard Fuld, president and founder of Fuld & Company. "All four teams described plausible yet innovative strategies that were applauded by both the panel of judges and by Mr. Torres, the observer from Google. While the MIT Sloan Fellows team representing Google won, the arguments and counter-arguments flying across the room added to everyone's strategic knowledge. This was the ultimate benefit from this and every other war game — both this unusually public session, as well as the more typical private forums."

Said Courtney, "MIT won because we worked together to understand the market and the companies involved. Without the team effort in preparation, I do not believe we would have done as well. Because we prepared as one, we won as one. "

Fuld has conducted War Games and competitive intelligence assignments for more than half the Fortune 500 and Global 1000 and looks forward to having these students meet in another similar war gaming encounter next year.

September 26, 2005 at 02:06 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

Ask Jeeves decides to axe Jeeves

BBC NEWS | Technology | Ask Jeeves decides to axe Jeeves

Search site Ask Jeeves is getting rid of the iconic valet that has been its companion since its earliest days.

Citing "user confusion" over what the butler character represents the search site has said that Jeeves will soon be phased out.

There is no firm date for when the character will disappear from the Ask site, but it will soon stop being the brand's most prominent icon.

No decision has been made about a new name for the Ask search site.

Butler begone

The decision about the axing of the Jeeves valet character was revealed in a Goldman Sachs investor conference by Ask owner Barry Diller.

Mr Diller's Inter-Active Corp bought the Ask Jeeves group in May 2005 for $1.85bn (£1.03bn).

In a statement Ask said that over the last year it had been investigating user perceptions of the Jeeves character.

Jeeves is named after the extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful valet character created by celebrated comic novelist P G Wodehouse.

However, Ask's research revealed that Jeeves was getting in the way of people realising that the search site had changed and that it can handle many more types of queries than just straightforward questions.

"As a result," said the Ask statement, "the character may be phased out as the prominent icon of the brand, although no timeline or details have been determined."

In line with a series of changes made to the Ask site last year, Jeeves got a makeover which saw him get slimmer and more tanned.

In its statement Ask said that no decision had yet been made on the new brand name it will adopt to show how the search site had evolved.

September 25, 2005 at 03:17 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (52) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google branches out into television

Google branches out into television

By Nick Farrell: Friday 23 September 2005, 07:20
GOOGLE is apparently branching out into television.
here
A few bloggers have apparently seen an advertisement for a full time project manager for GoogleTV in Mountain View.

According to the blogs the job called for experience developing/launching products in one or more of the following areas: interactive TV, set-top-boxes, personal video recorders, video-on-demand, IP TV or cable TV technologies.

Unfortunately, as word of the ad got out, Google pulled it from the site so we have to take the bloggers' word for it.

Google spinsters do quite well at generating rumours. The IT press had shed loads of hints before GoogleTalk was announced so this could be another one.

More here.

September 24, 2005 at 05:46 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

It's Not TV, It's Yahoo

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/technology/24yahoo.html?ex=1285214400&en=2baa0d1a8a9617c1&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
By SAUL HANSELL
Published: September 24, 2005

As Discovery orbited the Earth in early August, millions of people visited Yahoo, which runs the most popular news site on the Internet, to see the nail-biting conclusion to the troubled shuttle mission. Could NASA find a way to bring the astronauts home safely?

Despite the drama and the huge number of people flocking to the site, Lloyd Braun, the television impresario hired last year to oversee Yahoo's media operation, was not satisfied. All Yahoo was offering its users, Mr. Braun fumed, was a white page filled with links to other sites on the Web.

He made his frustration clear to Scott Moore, who had defected from Microsoft to run Yahoo's news operation. Within a few hours, Mr. Moore orchestrated a quick fix to make the shuttle page comply with Mr. Braun's mantras: "more immersive," "more engaging," and most of all, more original programming.

Mr. Braun's handiwork is just starting to be seen at Yahoo. And as he increasingly puts his stamp on the company, the rest of the media - both old and new - are watching carefully, if not nervously.

As chairman of ABC's entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like "Lost," which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" are in the works.

There will be elaborate attention-grabbing events and video-heavy programs in nearly every category of content Yahoo offers, from sports to health. The first is called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," an audio-video-photo-blog-chat room, run by Mr. Sites, an experienced foreign correspondent, who plans to visit multiple war zones over the next year.

All this Hollywood frenzy still skirts a question: Is Terry S. Semel, Yahoo's chief executive and the former co-head of Warner Brothers, trying to turn Yahoo into the interactive studio of the future?

The short answer is yes, but Mr. Semel's ambitions are far bigger and more complex than that. He wants Yahoo to be seen as more akin to Warner's parent, Time Warner, which mixes content like Warner and CNN with distribution, like its cable systems. Yahoo is both of those and a lot of software, too.

Mr. Semel describes a strategy built on four pillars: First, is search, of course, to fend off Google, which has become the fastest-growing Internet company. Next comes community, as he calls the vast growth of content contributed by everyday users and semiprofessionals like bloggers. Third, is the professionally created content that Mr. Braun oversees, made both by Yahoo and other traditional media providers. And last, is personalization technology to help users sort through vast choices to find what interests them.

Madison Avenue's rush online is feeding this activity, both the simple but highly specific-target text ads that flash on Web searches and the Internet versions of TV commercials.

Increasingly, Mr. Semel and others are finding that the long-promised convergence of television and computers is happening not by way of elaborate systems created by cable companies, but from the bottom up as video clips on the Internet become easier to use and more interesting. Already, video search engines, run by Yahoo and others, have indexed more than one million clips, and only now are the big media outlets like Viacom and Time Warner moving to put some of their quality video online.

"The basis for content on the Internet is now shifting from text to video," said Michael J. Wolf, a partner at McKinsey & Company. "This allows advertisers to take advantage of the kind of branding advertising they are used to on television."

Mr. Semel thinks that his approach combining content and technology could well make Yahoo the place people go first when they decide what to watch, as well as where to surf.

"You are not going to have 1,000 channels, you will have an unlimited number of channels," Mr. Semel said. "So you aren't going to use a clicker to change channels."

Yahoo has no shortage of competitors. Google and Microsoft are aggregating video content of others, but not making their own. Big media companies are starting to package and produce online video programming, like new offerings from MTV, owned by Viacom, and ESPN, a unit of Disney.

Time Warner's AOL unit is Yahoo's most direct and ambitious competitor in video programming. AOL attracted a lot of attention with its interactive presentation of the Live8 concerts, and it is developing offerings, including a reality show about the music business and an entertainment news show. Indeed, Mr. Wolf predicts that Yahoo may face difficulty in competing with the integrated media companies, like Time Warner. "The television programmers now have the upper hand because they have a great deal of content they can use for a variety of purposes and promote it on their existing programs."

So Mr. Braun's job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet. Find a way to combine the best of Hollywood's talent with the voice of the masses. And do it all before the biggest media and technology companies get there first.

The afternoon after Mr. Braun complained about Yahoo's shuttle site, Mr. Moore was able to show his colleagues the fix at a brainstorming retreat at a resort in Santa Barbara: he had replaced Yahoo's trademark spare white graphic design with a deep-space gray page. And instead of just links, the top of the page had a big box containing Yahoo's own video coverage of the shuttle right at the top. When the feed was live, a big headline trumpeted the action.

Mr. Braun was grateful for the fast action, but he spent much of that afternoon pushing his team to think of how Yahoo could cover future space missions, once his Media Group team and the software they are writing is fully in place.

"I said if we would do this six months from now, think of all the things we could have done," Mr. Braun recalled, at a recent breakfast at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica.

"Should we have shown the launch from all these different camera angles?" he said. "Should we have the user go on the space walk with the astronauts so we literally watch live what they see, monitoring their vital signs? Should we be a fly on the wall monitoring the conversations back and forth?"

Throwing out ideas a mile a minute, he talked about ways to bring in more information about the personal lives and families of the astronauts "so we are really connected to these people." And he looked for ways that Yahoo users could add their own views and other content to the package.

Mr. Braun's boundless energy and creative enthusiasm was the hallmark of his time at ABC as well.

"Lloyd was all about there are no rules," said Thom Sherman, who worked for Mr. Braun as the head of ABC's drama programs. "He was all about the big idea, not about things down the middle."

Michael Davies, the executive producer of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," said: "Lloyd has no creative restraint whatsoever. He is almost creatively reckless."

Mr. Braun, 46, grew up amid some of the most creative personalities of the 1960's and 70's. His father, David Braun, a leading music lawyer, would invite clients like Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond and George Harrison to his home in New Hyde Park, N.Y. Mr. Braun initially followed his father into entertainment law, but ultimately found contract negotiations too confining and moved into production, first at Brillstein-Grey, where he helped create "The Sopranos," and then at Disney and its ABC network.

Mr. Braun's fondness for expensive, quirky ideas caused frequent conflicts with Disney's management, co-workers said.

Disney management's "style was to put the pressure downward, and Lloyd felt a lot of that," Mr. Sherman recalled. Mr. Braun tried to fend off what he saw as meddling and create space for his team to work independently. "He said let me try it," Mr. Sherman recalled. "If I fail fire me, but let me have the reins."

In April 2004, Michael D. Eisner, then Disney's chief executive, called Mr. Braun's bluff, firing him and Susan Lyne, the entertainment unit's president.

While Mr. Braun's willingness to fight for the ideas of his creative colleagues won him loyalty at ABC, Mr. Braun's image at Yahoo is decidedly more mixed. Some inside and outside Yahoo criticize him for a slow start. And there have been complaints as entrenched Yahoo workers in its Sunnyvale headquarters were ordered to move to Santa Monica and report to newly hired bosses, plucked from AOL, CBS and Fox as well as Microsoft. Several executives quit and others asked to be reassigned.

"Sometimes you have to take a step back in order to take three steps forward," Mr. Braun said. Yahoo, he said, was organized around running discrete sections of its vast site and had no process for developing creative ideas. "At ABC, if I had an idea, like 'Lost,' the moment we decided to do it, we knew the process to take it to writers, get a pilot, ba da da. Here none of that exists. The whole infrastructure has to be created."

When he arrived at Yahoo, Mr. Braun immediately bonded with Bharath Kadaba, an engineer who leads Yahoo's media technology group. Mr. Braun, hardly a techie, asked Mr. Kadaba to explain the history of the Internet, how computers work and to show him what Yahoo's programmers were actually doing.

Mr. Braun has never been shy about reaching out for help, like the time he hired Fred Silverman, the programming master who propelled ABC from last to first place in the mid-1970's, with shows like "Starsky & Hutch," to teach him the black art of network scheduling.

These are lessons he says he is applying at Yahoo. Indeed, he is planning a schedule of programs next year, much as a network might think about a fall season.

For this year, a handful of programs will emerge, in addition to the Kevin Sites site. Mr. Braun's group has introduced "Blog for Hope," a series of celebrity blogs about coping with cancer.

And later this year it will introduce an adventure travel program with Richard Bangs, a self-styled trip leader, who had worked for Mr. Moore at MSN.

"I come from a medium which allows you to represent a pretty static linear picture," Mr. Braun said. "It's very passive." At Yahoo, he does not plan any half-hour or hourlong programs, but shorter segments that users can assemble into longer experiences of their own choosing.

The Internet reflects what Mr. Braun calls "the A.D.D. generation," where people watch TV, read something online, chat on a cellphone and send instant messages - all at the same time. He talks of short, frequent video segments, surrounded by other information that users can interact with in their own way and contribute to as well.

One of Yahoo's secret weapons, Mr. Braun says, is that it can personalize information for the interests of each user, such as its My Yahoo page and the song recommendations provided to users of its music service. Mr. Braun is weaving this technology into a video player Yahoo will introduce near the end of the year.

"It will almost be like a television set," Mr. Braun said, except as people watch one program, on the center of the player, other areas will offer additional programming choices, based on their past viewing habits. It will let them use Yahoo's video search to find programs from amateur videographers and video bloggers. And it will, of course, promote the glitzy shows Mr. Braun is creating.

"People want the freedom to do exactly what they want to do," he said. "But they also like to be programmed to and reminded of the different things that exist. Yahoo is in a position to do both of those."

September 24, 2005 at 09:24 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google to scan books online

This will be revolutionary. There is a generation who read "on-screen" and the fact they are predominantly out of print books, could make Googles work the more powerful.

Under the publishers' program, Google has deals with most major U.S. and U.K. publishers. It scans titles they submit, displays digital images of selected pages triggered by search queries and gives publishers a cut of revenues from accompanying ad displays.

But publishers aren't submitting all their titles under that program, and many of the titles Google wants to scan are out of print and belong to no publisher at all. Jim Gerber, Google's director of content partnerships, says the company would get no more than 15 percent of all books ever published if it relied solely on publisher submissions.

That's why it has turned to libraries. Under the Print Library Project, Google is scanning millions of copyright books from libraries at Harvard, Michigan and Stanford along with out-of-copyright materials there and at two other libraries.

September 20, 2005 at 01:07 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo! newsblog to cover world's warzones

By Holden Frith, Times Online

Yahoo! News has hired a veteran war correspondent to report on each of the world’s armed conflicts for a website called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone". The journalist will spend a year visiting a selection of the countries listed as war zones by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, recording his experiences with digital cameras and updating the website with regular video, audio and text reports.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1777979,00.html

Mr Sites, who has worked for CNN and NBC, provoked controversy in November last year when he released footage showing a US Marine shooting an unarmed Iraqi in a mosque in Fallujah.

On this assignment, Mr Sites will travel alone, employing local translators in each destination, his only constant companion being a rucksack full of high-tech communications equipment.

As well as satellite modems and telephones, which will provide internet access from even the remotest of trouble spots, he will carry three digital cameras, one for photographs, one for video and one mounted on a headband like a miner’s lamp. Power will come from a solar generator.

"It’s an incredible opportunity to help develop the next step in the evolution of journalism and to tell a different set of stories more completely," Mr Sites said. "We are going to put a human face on every story we cover. Our reporting will be story-driven, like any compelling tale."

Yahoo! said in a statement that Mr Sites would seek out stories not usually covered by the mainstream media and would avoid the temptations of "pack journalism", in which groups of reporters descend on a hotspot, only to move on to the next incident after a few days.

A company spokesman, David Sawday, said that the project reflected Yahoo!’s commitment to expanding its news coverage, which consists mainly of links to stories on sites run by newspapers, broadcasters and news agencies. "We’re very focused on delivering the best media content," Mr Sawday said. "Conflict reporting is central to a balanced, mature news offering."

The project marks another stage in the rise of the weblog as a supplement to serious journalism. Not long ago, the blog was the reserve of geeks and conspiracy theorists, but established news sites now offer an increasing range of weblogs and reader forums, increasing the immediacy and interactivity of their journalism.

"The power relationship between print and online is tilting towards the internet," wrote Dan Sabbagh, The Times’s media commentator, in a recent article. "Simple-to-use news filters, such as the Bloglines service, have made it easier to monitor and search for news and comment, putting personal blogs and small websites on a par with the BBC and The New York Times as information sources."

September 13, 2005 at 09:26 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

New legal threat to Google over GMail

By Miles Costello, Times Online

Google, the internet search engine, is facing a renewed threat of legal action from a company that claims to own the intellectual property rights to its GMail e-mail service.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9075-1776740,00.html

Independent International Investment Research, a British company that specialises in research and has several leading City investment banks as clients, argues that it launched "G-MailTM web based email" in May 2002.

IIR's version of G-Mail was developed by one of its subsidiaries, Pronet, which specialises in research about the currency markets for banks and other financial institutions.

The idea was that subscribers to its research could use G-Mail to disseminate it and discuss it over the web confidentially.

The development came nearly two years before Google unveiled its own branded e-mail service, known at "GMailTM".

Google's GMail services give subscribers their own web-based e-mail account with the benefit of vast amounts of storage space.

IIR said this morning that, after about 15 months of "correspondence and negotiations" with Google in an effort to have the "superiority" of its claim over the trade mark to G-Mail recognised, discussions are now at an end with no agreement having been reached.

IIR, led by chairman and chief executive Shane Smith, accused the search engine of "failing to respect the intellectual property rights of others" and said it had no alternative but to pursue an expensive legal action that it admitted it could ill afford.

Mr Smith, who founded the company and is the leading shareholder, told Times Online that the two companies had held "detailed discussions" over the terms of a possible settlement, with both sides making offers but failing "to meet in the middle".

He said he was "reluctantly" considering taking legal action against Google, which could involve his family trust selling shares in the group to fund the claim.

"I feel it is up to me as the founder and the major shareholder. We're not going to sit on the sidelines while a company uses our intellectual property rights," he said. "We're confident that we have the funding available to us and we're girding our loins," he said.

An independent valuation report commissioned at the end of last year by IIR, whose clients include Bank of America and Commerzbank, estimated a "conservative" value of between £25 million and £34 million for a royalty claim against Google for the G-Mail trademark.

IIR has already indicated that it would be prepared to settle for less than this amount, which was calculated using a royalty fee of 0.5 per cent.

IIR pointed this morning to a similar trade mark disagreement between Google and a company in Germany, stating that both firms were "frustrated" with Google's behaviour.

IIR is considering joining forces with this company in its possible legal action against Google.

IIR said this morning that "despite strenuous efforts, achievement of a settlement involving agreement on a fair value [for the intellectual property rights to G-Mail] is currently out of reach. Your board has not been able to reach a settlement with Google and is therefore considering taking further legal action to protect the group's intellectual property.

"This has also been the experience of the owner of a similar trade mark in Germany, who has recently sought and obtained a preliminary injunction against Google extending its use of the Gmail trade mark in that country.

"The party in Germany and your board are both frustrated with the manner in which we believe that Google is failing to respect the intellectual property rights of others, and shares with your board a commitment to take whatever steps are necessary (collaboration where appropriate) to seek to protect those rights."

Google was not immediately available for comment.

September 13, 2005 at 09:22 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google beats Microsoft, and MIT beats Harvard, at least in one war game

MIT Sloan Fellows assume identity of Google in an all-day "Battle for Clicks" war game

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/2005-battle-forclicks.php

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 27, 2005 — Google's high-tech sparkle was on display at the all-day "Battle for Clicks" war game between students from MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School on Sunday, April 10. MIT Sloan Fellows who assumed the identity of Google overcame strong challenges from a Harvard team representing Microsoft, as well as student teams representing Yahoo! and AOL/Time Warner to win the game and capture the $5,000 winner prize.

The game was run by Fuld & Co., a Cambridge-based strategic intelligence consulting firm, which typically conducts such games for corporations in private, closed-door sessions. This is the first time such a game has ever been run in public, and the first such competition involving students from these two world-class business schools. A war game is neither a war nor a game, but rather an enlightening analytical exercise that often leads to truly creative business strategies.

The MIT Sloan Fellows team that represented Google was well prepared. "The competition focused on strategy development," said Brian Courtney, one of the MIT Sloan Fellow participants. "Our current classes in technology and marketing strategy gave us the confidence to debate anyone."

The Google team pushed a strategy of global growth, deepening penetration into the enterprise, spreading search technology beyond computers into other electronic devices, and developing more partnerships. A panel of judges from Forrester, IDC, MFS Management, and Jefferies & Company rated the teams and had Google first, Microsoft second, AOL/Time Warner third, and Yahoo! fourth.

"I believe we won because we competed as a team," said Courtney, "We worked together studying the materials and we shared all relevant research so we were all equally prepared. We also brought a great deal of work experience to the table. Because of this we weren't tempted to overreact to the fictitious market changes that the game presented."

The Google strategy impressed a Google associate product manager in attendance, Enrique Muïoz Torres. "I was impressed by the depth of analysis that went on," he said.

Torres pointed to comments from some team members as to the importance of Google maintaining technical superiority: "In competing with Microsoft, having the highest quality product isn't enough."

The competition, which lasted all day Sunday, was a see-saw battle. At the event's midpoint, TimeWarner held first place, focusing on its 22 million AOL users, 19 million of whom use Instant Messaging. Since users are abandoning dialup for DSL and Broadband, the TimeWarner team focused on strategies to keep its Instant Messaging users as well as users who want a "clean experience" (no spam or viruses) and no adult-rated material.

As part of the competition, Fuld & Company challenged the students to deal with a series of plausible political events that would have severe repercussions for each of the companies. For example, Mike Sandman, the Fuld facilitator, fired this scenario at all four teams:

Taxing the Internet: The Federal Communications Commission enacts regulations enabling states to collect sales taxes on e-commerce based on where the buyer lives, not where the company is based. These events are expected to dampen online sales and online ad revenues. Consumer cost would be an average of 67 cents a month for AOL users and $1.57 to $1.98 a month for DSL and Broadband users.

All four teams shifted gears to strategize their survival. The company teams made offers for mergers or licensing agreements with each other, with all of them pursuing Time Warner and its highly prized print and broadcast content.

Throughout the War Game, teams had to focus on economist Michael Porter's Four Corners Analysis — drivers, assumptions, current strategy, and capabilities — before developing future strategies. The teams claimed their major benefits to customers were as follows:

* Yahoo! has the most eyeballs, with users willing to pay for personalized content.
* Microsoft has the most cash, owns the desktop platform, MSN and Hotmail.
* Time Warner has content, print and broadcast media venues for bundled advertising, and the most popular instant messaging service.
* Google has a worldwide consumer market with 30-plus percent of its revenues coming from outside the U.S., content in 100 languages, and the most ubiquitous search engine.

"The game ended with the same excitement and strategic inventiveness with which it began," concluded Leonard Fuld, president and founder of Fuld & Company. "All four teams described plausible yet innovative strategies that were applauded by both the panel of judges and by Mr. Torres, the observer from Google. While the MIT Sloan Fellows team representing Google won, the arguments and counter-arguments flying across the room added to everyone's strategic knowledge. This was the ultimate benefit from this and every other war game — both this unusually public session, as well as the more typical private forums."

Said Courtney, "MIT won because we worked together to understand the market and the companies involved. Without the team effort in preparation, I do not believe we would have done as well. Because we prepared as one, we won as one. "

Fuld has conducted War Games and competitive intelligence assignments for more than half the Fortune 500 and Global 1000 and looks forward to having these students meet in another similar war gaming encounter next year.

September 10, 2005 at 06:21 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google hires 'father of the Internet' Vinton Cerf

Google hires 'father of the Internet' Vinton Cerf - Yahoo! News

Thu Sep 8,11:49 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. on Thursday said it hired Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to become the company's "chief evangelist."

Cerf, 62, whose official title will be chief Internetevangelist, was hired away from telecommunications company MCI Inc. and charged with exploring new Internet applications for the Web search company. MCI is in the process of merging into Verizon Communications Inc.

In an interview, Cerf, also chairman of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (
ICANN), the governance body, said he hoped to retain the role in ICANN and avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Google serves as a registrar of Internet domain names and technically has business interests governed by ICANN.

Cerf is widely known as the "father of the Internet" for his role in developing the TCP/IP standards that structure the Internet, joins several other high-profile engineers who have joined Google in the last year.

September 8, 2005 at 09:45 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Ebay in talks to buy Skype

Ebay in talks to buy Skype - Yahoo! News

By Justin Hyde and Eric Auchard Thu Sep 8, 3:51 PM ET

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 8 - EBay Inc. is in talks to buy Web telephone phenomenon Skype Technologies SA, a source said on Thursday, prompting a 4 percent drop in shares of the online auctioneer amid concern Skype could crimp highly-profitable eBay's growth

A deal would combine eBay, a company prized by many for its ideal Internet business model -- connecting millions of paying customers as buyers and sellers -- with Skype, a two-year-old Web firm growing explosively, but with limited revenue.

Negotiations between eBay of Silicon Valley and Luxembourg- based Skype are on-going, but could yet fall through, the source familiar with the situation cautioned.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post reported that eBay may buy Skype for between $2 billion and $5 billion. The talks follow similar rumblings over the past month that Skype was in negotiations with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Inc. and Internet search leader Google Inc..

Spokespeople for the companies declined to comment.

The source Skype management was still considering what strategy to pursue, slowing talks.

The company has hired Morgan Stanley to evaluate strategic options, including a sale or an initial public offering, according to another source close to the situation.

"I don't see a lot of point to eBay buying Skype," said Hoefer Arnett analyst Martin Pyykkonen, who, independent of the Skype speculation, has been recommending investors reduce their holdings in eBay.

"I am certainly in the camp that this rumor makes little sense," Pyykkonen said. "If eBay were to make this sort of move it would basically be admitting that 'our core market is decelerating."'

Skype has grown explosively, but does not charge for most phone calls placed with its software, provoking debate about how much the company is worth.

Analysts allowed that Skype's free calling service could serve as a useful additional feature for connecting buyers and sellers in the auction process. Skype's paying subscribers also are heavy users of eBay's PayPal online payment service.

EBay stock dropped $1.55 to $38.90 on Nasdaq.

Legg Mason analyst Scott W. Devitt said the market was likely concerned about uncertainty surrounding eBay's strategic reasons for pursuing Skype, as well as any dilution of eBay's shares from an acquisition.

Skype has about 52 million registered users for its free service and 2 million users for its pay-calling service, but has never officially revealed revenue or profit figures. Skype calls are free to other Skype users, but the company charges a fee to connect to traditional land-based telephones.

Independent industry analyst Jeff Kagan said a deal between eBay and Skype would represent a major strategic shift for eBay.

"This would be a big move away from the auction business for eBay and could be a sign of a change in strategy for the company as the telecommunications industry begins to explode again," Kagan said in an e-mail.

Last month, in an interview with Reuters, Skype co-founder Janus Friis shrugged off suggestions Skype may be acquired by bigger rivals, such as Google Inc.

Google, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news),, Microsoft Corp. and America Online have all recently moved to expand their Internet-based voice services. Only AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc. , offers a voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) service that can connect with regular phones as Skype does.

Skype was co-founded by Swedish businessman Niklas Zennstrom, who also created the Kazaa file-sharing software. As of October 2004 the company had raised $24 million in funding, mainly from venture capital firms.

To date, the large U.S. incumbent telephone operators say they have seen little to no effect from Skype and other messaging services. They see their main competitors in cable companies offering telephone services and, to a lesser extent, independent VOIP provider Vonage, which recently passed 1 million customers.

(With additional reporting by Franklin Paul in New York)

September 8, 2005 at 09:44 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo 'helps China track down and jail dissident'

Telegraph | News | Yahoo 'helps China track down and jail dissident'

By Richard Spencer, China Correspondent
(Filed: 08/09/2005)

Yahoo, the American internet firm, was accused yesterday of helping China's state security police track down and jail a dissident.

Reporters Without Borders (RWB), a media pressure group, said it had learned that Yahoo was approached over the case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist.

Mr Shi, 37, had posted on the internet a copy of an internal Chinese government document banning media comment on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last year.

Yahoo Hong Kong provided the investigators with information which enabled them to track down Mr Shi's email and internet details, according to RWB.

He was jailed for 10 years in April for "leaking state secrets", a charge often used to suggest that dissidents, human rights activists, and even lawyers who make contact with overseas organisations, are spies.

Mr Shi is one of almost 40 journalists and so-called cyber dissidents in Chinese jails. Several, like him, took to using the internet as a medium after leaving or being sacked from state media. He previously worked for Contemporary Business News.

Despite claims by Tony Blair of a "sea change" in attitudes towards democracy and human rights, China has recently cracked down on dissidents and journalists.

Among others held are Ching Cheong, a British passport-holder from Hong Kong who was a correspondent for the Singapore Straits Times, and Zhao Yan, a researcher for the New York Times. Mr Ching has been accused of selling state secrets to Taiwan, though supporters say his offence was to try to publish interviews given by Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese leader purged for being too lenient on the Tiananmen protesters.

Zhao Yan has been in jail without charge for almost a year, though his arrest is said to be connected to a New York Times story about the final retirement last year of former President Jiang Zemin.

Other internet firms have been criticised for co-operating with the Chinese government.

Google and Microsoft have gone along with censorship, Google by omitting banned websites from its Chinese-language news site, Microsoft by incorporating "banned word filters" in its Chinese software.

But the handing over of confidential information in Hong Kong, which is not even with the jurisdiction of the Chinese legal system, has particularly worried RWB.

"It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government's abuses and it is quite another thing to collaborate," it said.

Hong Kong has maintained the British justice system more or less intact, and a court order would be needed to force Yahoo to hand over the information.

China now has 100 million web users but it also employs a 40,000-strong internet police force as censors, with some even used to "guide" conversation in chatrooms.

RWB gleaned the information about Mr Shi's conviction from a leaked copy of the verdict.

Yahoo Hong Kong made no comment yesterday but was "looking into it".

richard.spencer@telegraph.co.uk

September 7, 2005 at 08:39 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo lets users search e-mail photos, documents

Yahoo lets users search e-mail photos, documents - Yahoo! News

By Eric Auchard Tue Aug 30, 1:03 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), which supplies more than 200 million e-mail accounts globally, said late on Monday it has improved the way people can search text, photos and documents inside e-mail.

Advances in the way people search e-mail reflect the transformation of the popular text communications medium into a means of sharing photos and other documents, turning e-mail increasingly into an individual's personal history archive.

"It's definitely more than what e-mail of yesteryear was," Sabrina Ellis, Yahoo Mail's director of product management, said in a phone interview on Monday ahead of the announcement.

"E-mail is becoming more central to people's lives," Ellis said. "People are storing more things that are personal."

The need to search e-mails is an outgrowth of the expanding capacity of e-mail systems. Spurred by Google's rival Gmail e-mail service, Yahoo offers 1 gigabyte, or billion bytes, of e-mail storage free, or 2 gigabytes for a small annual fee.

"As soon as you have more to store, you need more ways to search," JupiterResearch analyst Eric Peterson said. "A battle is shaping up between Yahoo and Google over who can best organize people's information."

Last week, Google Inc. upgraded its Google Desktop search system to index a user's Gmail or Microsoft Outlook e-mail accounts while also searching the hard drive and Web search history.

While yet to offer such an integrated method of searching all of one's computer resources, Yahoo has made a wide range of incremental innovations to help users manage their personal data, Peterson said. The contest is only just getting started.

SEARCHES FOR PHOTOS, IGNORES MISSPELLINGS

Moving beyond simple keyword searches, Yahoo will now allow users to trawl through e-mail files in far greater detail. Searches can focus on subject lines, the body of text and even attached documents, without first having to open the e-mail.

Searches return snippets -- 3-line summaries in the context of adjacent text -- that show a user exactly where each result was found. The left side of the search page includes a navigation menu that offers alternative approaches to search.

Searching for photos by name returns a slideshow of thumbnail versions of the pictures, allowing users to visually select the picture or pictures they wish.

The system is even designed to compensate for a new illiteracy made possible only by the computer age.

Users can search for prefixes, or just the first few letters of a word, in recognition of the sloppy or casual spelling of many e-mail writers in the age of electronic spellcheckers, Ellis said.

Yahoo plans to offer the new service to a small group of its U.S. users initially and then introduce it progressively to users around the globe over the next several months. Users don't have to take any action to enjoy the new service.

A promotional link will appear in the upper right corner of a user's e-mail account when the new search features are available, Yahoo Mail senior product manager Drew Garcia said.

With an estimated 219 million e-mail accounts in July, Yahoo held 35.1 percent of the world market, just behind Microsoft Corp., with 221 million Hotmail users, or 35.5 percent, according to comScore Media Metrix data.

Google counts an unspecified number of "millions" of users for its more recently introduced Gmail.

Yahoo e-mail promises to work quickly because Yahoo indexes all mail, photos and document attachments on its own servers as it passes through the systems from correspondent to recipient.

Users should note that, as more and more personal data passes over such e-mail systems, privacy issues may arise.

"In general, we respond to legal process or requests from law enforcement, as needed," a spokesman said when asked how Yahoo would respond to subpoenas of such e-mail archives.

Details of Yahoo's privacy policy are at http://privacy.yahoo.com/

September 1, 2005 at 08:21 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google studies selling print ads to online clients

Google studies selling print ads to online clients - Yahoo! News

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google is looking at taking its online advertising program into print.

The Internet search leader, which draws the bulk of its revenue from online advertising, said it has bought advertising space in PC Magazine, only to turn around and resell the space to some online clients who place Web ads with Google.

"Google is testing a program to place ads from our advertising network into U.S. print publications," Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said.

"This limited test is part of Google's continuing effort to develop new ways to provide effective and useful advertising to advertisers, publishers and users," he said.

September 1, 2005 at 08:19 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google's 'Intelligent' Desktop 2

Google's 'Intelligent' Desktop 2 - Yahoo! News

By Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post Staff Writer Tue Aug 23, 1:00 AM ET

Google Inc. yesterday released new software that collects information based on a computer user's behavior and displays updates of news, weather, Web sites and unopened e-mail messages on a toolbar on the side of the screen.

The test product, called Google Desktop 2, is the second incarnation of a program launched last fall. By using Google's trademark search software, it aims to be a more personalized version of products such as Apple Computer Inc.'s Dashboard and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s Konfabulator, programs that deliver icons to the screen and keep photo, alarm clock, scheduling, music, currency converters and news applications running while the computer is in use.

"It functions as an intelligent Web agent," said Nikhil Bhatla, Google Desktop product manager. The software indexes a Microsoft Windows user's previous Web searches, pages visited and photos saved, and automatically customizes the toolbar to reflect those preferences.

At least initially, the software won't generate money for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, which does not currently plan to sell advertisements on Desktop 2, according to Bhatla.

But it gives Google a higher profile on the computer monitor, and that in turn gives the company potentially greater control over the user's behavior, said Greg Sterling, an analyst with the Kelsey Group, a firm that researches the directory and local media business.

"They want to make themselves an entry point for all of your needs," he said. If users find Desktop 2 useful and download it in large numbers, for example, it may begin to compete with the browser as an entry point into the Web, siphoning traffic away from Microsoft Corp.'s popular Internet Explorer.

If a user has searched for weather in Arlington, for instance, the Desktop toolbar will show the day's weather and the next-day forecast. If the user checked up on a stock the previous day, Desktop will display the latest trading price of that stock, updated every minute. News clips from frequented sites are updated every 10 minutes. Blog clips are updated every 30 minutes. At the bottom of the toolbar is a tool that allows the user to search content on the computer, as well as the Web.

Windows of information can be turned on or off, according to the user's preference. So, for example, a Google e-mail user can add a window to display the newest incoming messages on the toolbar.

As Google adds more features to the toolbar, Sterling said, "it circumvents the need to do things on a Microsoft [operating system]."

But Desktop 2 faces some hurdles. With so much software already available, and with threats of spyware and viruses on the Internet, many consumers are weary of downloading additional software, Sterling said.

August 26, 2005 at 07:27 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Analysis: Google Unlikely To Change Fragmented IM Market Aug. 24, 2005

InformationWeek > Instant Messenging > Analysis: Google Unlikely To Change Fragmented IM Market > August 24, 2005

In launching Google Talk, the search company is hoping for interoperability with the major networks built by AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. Experts say it's unlikely.
By Antone Gonsalves
TechWeb News

As the new kid in the instant-messaging market, Google Inc. wants to be friends with everyone, but it's unlikely the seasoned players will let rivals get close to their subscribers.

In launching Google Talk , the Mountain View, Calif., search engine called for interoperability with the major networks built by America Online Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo Inc.

"It's the Holy Grail," Joe Wilcox, analyst for JupiterResearch, said of interoperability.

It's unlikely, however, that the granddaddy of IM, AOL, will open up its base of 41.6 million subscribers to competitors. In comparison, Yahoo, which has the second largest network, has less than half the subscribers of AIM at 19.1 million, according to web metrics firm ComScore Networks. MSN has 14.1 million subscribers.

"AOL isn't letting anybody into their network, if they don't have to," JupiterResearch analyst David Card said. "There's no incentive for AOL to cooperate with anyone."

That incentive, however, could come in time, if IM vendors decide to take the service beyond the ability to have immediate text conversations with friends, family and colleagues. The portals have already added PC-to-PC voice calls and have extended IM to cellular phones. They could go much further in developing a communications platform that tightly integrates email, voicemail and IM, making it all accessible through multiple devices.

The heart of such a communications hub would be the contacts directory, Card said. Besides grouping people by their relationship with the IM subscriber, such as a family member, friend or colleague, the directory also establishes whether they are reachable. That could one day be expanded to add how the person wants to be reached, by PC, cellular phone or some other device.

Microsoft, according to Card, is very much focused on IM as a broader communications platform.

While the evolution of IM could be a potential battleground for the major portals, telecommunication companies and wireless carriers, it's more likely that partnerships will occur, and communication networks will open up, much like email is today, Card said.

"It makes everything more valuable, if the network is bigger," he said.

In the meantime, AOL, Yahoo and MSN are connecting IM to more services, such as online music, in order to build loyalty and help keep subscribers. Locking in customers would also be a strategy behind the building of a unified communications platform.

Google Talk, however, is notable in that Google has not linked its IM client to anything but its web mail service GMail. Therefore, it's difficult to see where Google is heading.

"It's very Spartan," Wilcox said of the new product.

August 26, 2005 at 12:07 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google launches instant messaging service

PC Advisor - Expert Advice you can trust

by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service (Miami Bureau)

Talk is cheap

Google is continuing to expand beyond its core search-engine business into web-portal territory with its launch today of an instant messaging (IM) service with voice communications capabilities.

"At a high level, this indicates that, whether it likes it or not, Google is officially a web portal and media company," said Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst.

The consensus has been that Google has to branch out from its search-engine roots and build a suite of online services as varied as the ones from Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN and AOL.

The main reason why observers feel Google needs to build up an arsenal of web-portal services is that users aren't very loyal to search engines. However, users are loyal to web-portal services such as instant messaging, photo sharing and webmail because they provide ways to communicate with others.

The other reason observers say Google needs to broaden its suite of services is that Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have spent the past year aggressively venturing into the search space, Google's stomping ground.

Industry observers have speculated for many months that Google would develop a consumer-oriented IM service to compete against those from AOL, Yahoo and MSN. The speculation is over now that Google's IM service, Google Talk, is finally here.

Weiner said that to gain users, Google Talk will have to be a compelling service with as many bells and whistles, such as emoticons, as the other IM services, as well as complementary applications.

One thing Google has on its side is its decision to build Google Talk on the open XMPP (extensible messaging and presence protocol) framework, which might make Google Talk more attractive to developers than other networks built on proprietary protocols, according to Weiner.

Google Talk is in beta (or test) mode and requires that its users have an account with Google's free webmail service Gmail, according to Google, because Google Talk and Gmail are tightly integrated.

For example, Google Talk users' login information will be the same as the details they use for Gmail. Also, users will be able to access their Gmail inbox from within the Google Talk interface and send emails from there. Google Talk will alert users about new messages received in their Gmail account.

Another point of integration is that users' Gmail contacts will be loaded automatically into their Google Talk interface, making it possible to exchange IMs with those who have downloaded the IM software.

Google Talk users will also be able to invite people in their list of contacts to download the IM application, and even contacts who aren't Gmail users will receive an invitation to sign up for Gmail so they can get Google Talk.

Gmail, launched in April 2004, is still in beta mode and new users have to be invited by an existing user to sign up for the service. Gmail users typically have 50 invitations available.

To talk to contacts on Google Talk, users should click on a ‘call’ button in an open chat window or on the phone icon next to names on the contact list. A user can have multiple voice sessions open but only one can be active at any given time. To use this feature, users need a PC with a speaker and microphone or a headset.

Regarding the current lack of interoperability among the three largest consumer IM networks - Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger - Google said it is committed to work with IM service providers to establish links between its service and others.

Users can download the necessary Google Talk software at www.google.com/talk/. The software runs on PCs with Windows XP or Windows 2000.

In addition to Gmail and Google Talk, Google has other non-search online services such as the Picasa application to share and organise digital photos, and the Orkut social networking service, whose access remains restricted via invitation-only, like Gmail.

Google has a blogging service, called Blogger, which is one of the most popular of its kind. Google also has given users the option of populating its notoriously sparse home page with syndicated feeds, weather information, stock quotes, news and other information.

August 24, 2005 at 11:40 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

From your lips to Google's ear

TheStar.com - From your lips to Google's ear

Popular search engine adds next level
Will launch Internet voice chat service

EMILY CHUNG
BUSINESS REPORTER

It all began with a little search engine that could. Then, as we Googled away, other applications appeared — news, maps, email and a desktop organizer. As of today, you needn't leave the comfort of Google for even a gab with your friends.

With the expected launch of Google Talk, its new instant messaging program with voice-over-Internet capabilities, the company once viewed as the antithesis of Microsoft is another step closer to cyber world domination.

"To get ... instant messaging into the picture, it's just another step along the way of kind of being a complete destination," said Jon Arnold, a telecom consultant with an interest in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, which allows phone conversations over information networks such as the Internet).

Google's e-business model has so far spun its popularity as a search engine into advertising dollars like none other, Arnold says. Its email, news, and mapping services are already giving other services a run for their PayPal credits, despite its late entry into those arenas. Last week, the company launched Google Sidebar, a desktop search and organization application. That was punctuated by the announcement of plans to raise $4 billion in a secondary stock offering — which some analysts speculated could be used to fund far-flung projects such as Internet telephony.

And now, Google Talk is being released in a beta test version (a preliminary version launched to test for bugs and solicit user feedback) for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It will be available to users who have or sign up for an account with the company's free Gmail email system. The voice chat requires that both the caller and recipient have speakers and a microphone hooked up to their computers. The new Google program features a basic user interface with few graphics, much like the main Google search site.

"We'll have an uncluttered interface that allows you to search over your contacts pretty easily," said Georges Harik, director of product management at Google. "It just stays out of your way unless you want to connect to someone."

Google based its software on the Jabber open standard (a list of publicly available technical specifications for instant messaging software), which will work with smaller networks that are based on the same technology. Text messages can be exchanged with users of Apple Computer Inc.'s iChat, Cerulean Studios' Trillian and the open-source Gaim program.

Google also is inviting programmers to build its technology into their software, including computer games.

With Google Talk, the company hopes to capture a potentially huge audience. AOL's messaging program has about 41.6 million U.S. users, followed by Yahoo Messenger with 19.1 million and MSN Messenger with 14.1 million, according to ComScore Media Metrix's July report.

"Once you can bring voice (and) messaging together, you've really got the consumer pretty tied up," Harik added, "and then that advertising model that Google has done so well with can really be taken to a whole other level."

Tied up is about right. During her holidays, Dawn Verhart, 27, of Toronto spends 12 hours a day signed into Microsoft's MSN Messenger. The Richmond Hill special education teacher has been typing conversations with her friends and family for eight years via text-based instant messaging, first with ICQ (now owned by AOL), and now with MSN. Her contact list includes her sister and brother-in-law in the U.S., who met via instant messaging, and about 30 other people all over southern Ontario.

"I'll go by (my computer) and see who's on and if there's anybody I want to talk to, I'll talk to them," she explains. She likes the fact that she can tell if people are available. "It's cheaper, too, than long-distance phone calls."

Harik said Google has no intention of trying to become a popular bridge to the other major instant-messaging providers. "We're not going to do anything like force other networks to inter-operate with us."

But without compatibility with programs such as MSN and Yahoo Messenger, sceptics argue it will be difficult to get users like Verhart to switch from established programs.

She agrees. "I think people like just using what they know," Verhart said, explaining she switched to MSN from ICQ because most of her friends were on MSN.

However, outside developers who incorporate Google Talk into their programs might try to enable such inter-operability.

Whether or not that happens, Arnold thinks good voice features could potentially win users over from text-dominated messaging programs like MSN and Yahoo Messenger. "They have modest capabilities to do voice, but they don't have really good capabilities to do voice."

He said the recent success of Skype, a VoIP service that has gone from 2 million to 47 million users since the start of 2004, illustrates the potential. And he added with Google's business might and know-how, the company's late entry into the messaging and VoIP world might not be a serious handicap.

"It's all right to be late to the party when so little money has been made," he said. "The voice game is still very early days."

Unlike Internet phone services such as Vonage and Skype, Google's voice service does not support calls to the regular telephone system.

On the other hand, Arnold notes, "Google is a much bigger name than Skype." Almost everyone has used Google, and that might make them willing to give Google Talk a try.

"Google's got some good things," said Verhart, "so if it's up to the same standard as their search engines and their map programs, it's probably okay."

With files from associated press

August 24, 2005 at 10:16 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google 'set to launch' voice messaging

Google 'set to launch' voice messaging - Industry sectors - Times Online

By Rhys Blakely, Times Online

Google is set to introduce an instant voice and text messaging system this week, according to reports. The venture would mark the first time the internet search and advertising giant has moved into communications.

The Los Angeles Times said the new service would be called Google Talk and could be launched as soon as tomorrow.

Google Talk would allow users to hold voice conversations with other computer users, the newspaper quoted a source as saying. The New York Times had hinted yesterday that Google could launch a news "communications tool" this week.

If the reports are accurate, the new service could be similar to Skype, the free VoIP (voice over internet protocol) software that allows users to make voice calls through their computers and over the internet at a fraction of the cost of traditional services.

It is thought the new Google service will also include an internet-based text-messaging component similar to Microsoft’s popular MSN Messenger.

Google was not prepared to comment when contacted by Times Online.

Earlier this year a Google job advert led to speculation that the company could be exploring an investment in "dark fibre" networks – unused fibre optics cables which could be used to transmit massive amounts of data and form the basis of a substantial communications system.

Rumours that the company could be planning a large new venture were stoked last week when Google announced plans to sell more shares on the Nasdaq stock market to raise up to $4 billion in cash.

The company has said it has no plans for large acquisitions in the short term, but analysts have questioned that, noting that even before the secondary offering, the company has around $3 billion in cash on its books.

As it already dominates the internet paid-search advertising market, investors may demand that Google demonstrates it can fasten its hugely popular brand to other services and products to fuel future growth.

Signalling such an intention, Google yesterday launched a computer toolbar that hooks on to Microsoft's Windows software and which could seek to usurp the world's most popular operating platform.

Google's Desktop 2 builds on an existing application that allows users to search the hard-drive of their computers through a Google toolbar on their desktop. The updated version will "piggyback" Windows 2000 or Windows XP and will display stock prices, personalised news headlines and weather reports on the right-hand-side of Windows pages.

The company describes the tool as "a personal web assistant" that "learns the user's habits and interests". It will, for example, automatically bring you news reports from what it works out are your favourite sources.

Analysts said the tool could be the first incarnation of a Google web browser that could eventually rival Microsoft's Internet Explorer. "Let it be known from this moment: Google is serious. It wants to take your desktop away from Microsoft," said Brad Hill, a technology writer at the Unofficial Google Weblog.

August 23, 2005 at 03:21 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google vs. Yahoo: Clash of cultures

By Stefanie Olsen, Special to ZDNet
21 June 2005

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analysis On the walls of Yahoo's modest Silicon Valley offices there are posters with sketches of oddball inventions that have landed patents, such as a portable bird cage. The point: If a bird cage can get a patent, Yahoo's employees can come up with something big if they put their minds to it.

Google vs. Yahoo: Clash of cultures: ZDNet Australia: Insight: Software

Google -- in roughly the same time span -- has broadened its business to do something its executives said they didn't want to do: Become a portal like Yahoo that offers services like free Web e-mail, social networking, publishing tools, maps, shopping, news and video search, and now brand advertising sales.

"There's a constant focus on each other," said a former Yahoo employee who asked to remain anonymous. "We (would) know everything they're working on, they (would) know everything we're working on."

They're fighting over a bigger cut of the currently US$8 billion global search advertising business, which is expected to be worth US$22 billion in five years, according to Piper Jaffray. What's more, search ads are increasingly part of lucrative brand advertising campaigns. Worldwide online brand advertising is expected to grow 21 percent this year from US$11.3 billion to US$18.2 billion, according to Goldman Sachs.

The posters are promoting a program called the "Idea Factory" that is supposed to goose inventive thinking at the 10-year-old Internet-giant-turned-media-powerhouse. Through Idea Factory, staffers are urged to submit notions for improving everything from the company's products to its campus.

Five miles down the road at offices of archrival Google, inventive thinking is assumed. At Google, engineers are expected to spend one day a week on a project of personal interest. It's a mandate that's spawned new services such as Google News, which now attracts 7.1 million visitors per month, according to Nielsen NetRatings, and the social networking site Orkut, which has yet to be integrated into the search site.

Jerry Yang
Jerry Yang
Co-founder, Yahoo
As the two giants tussle for domination of online advertising dollars, it's increasingly clear that this tug-of-war is really a test of what kind of corporate culture an Internet company needs: Is it a by-the-numbers and increasingly Hollywood-savvy environment like Yahoo's? Or can an intellectual playground like Google continue to grow and thrive even as it approaches US$4 billion in annual revenue?

The answers to those questions could have a lasting impact on how Internet companies are formed in years to come. If Yahoo comes out on top, investors could insist on a chief executive like Yahoo's Terry Semel, a longtime Warner Bros. executive known for his media savvy and no-nonsense directives. If Google continues its rocket ride, they could look to an Eric Schmidt, a passionate technologist by training and education who is happy to let his engineers steal the limelight.

"Google is... all about individuals fulfilling or exceeding their potential, and employees are given significant license to foster this," said Geoffrey Moore, high-tech guru and author of the popular management tome "Crossing the Chasm." Yahoo used to be like that, Moore says. But under Semel, who took over Yahoo's corner office four years ago, it has morphed into a more mature company with tough management discipline, but perhaps lacking the creative giddiness it had in its early years.

David Filo
David Filo
Co-founder, Yahoo
The two companies share a common DNA but are taking divergent paths. Yahoo's co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were doctoral candidates in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1994 when they started work on their first search engine. Two years later, Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin also collaborated as Stanford doctoral candidates on a search engine called BackRub, a predecessor to Google. Page's dorm room was the company's first data centre, and the two entrepreneurs even called on their friend Filo for advice before starting Google in 1998.

"The biggest difference right now is Larry and Sergey still run Google, and Terry Semel has a much bigger say at Yahoo," while its co-founders aren't typically involved in day-to-day operations, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch.com. "Google is still infused with the whole Larry and Sergey spirit, if you will."

It's not just the cultures that clash. The two companies' businesses also are on a collision course, competing for the same Web visitors and advertising dollars. In the last three years, Yahoo has reshaped one of its core businesses around Web search and related advertising, making itself second only to Google in search ad dollars, with technology that many believe is keeping pace with that of its younger rival.

So far, both companies are prospering. In the first three months of the year, Google reported revenue that doubled year over year to US$1.26 billion with net income of US$369.2 million, nearly six times more than in the comparable period in 2004. Yahoo's revenue during the same time rose 35 percent to US$1.17 billion and net income doubled to US$205 million. Yahoo's market capitalisation is US$51 billion; Google's is US$76 billion.

But the approaches these two companies are using to go after the same advertising dollars are remarkably different, and are a reflection of the skills of their top executives.

Semel shakes up Yahoo
Semel arrived at Yahoo at perhaps the lowest point in its history, replacing popular chief executive Tim Koogle four years ago. He brought with him a reputation as a no-nonsense businessman with an eye for the big picture and a Rolodex filled with Hollywood contacts.

A year later, Semel brought in Dan Rosensweig as the company's chief operating officer. Rosensweig, a former executive at CNET Networks (the publisher of News.com), clamped down on spending and made individuals accountable for the profitability of their divisions.

That's not to say they didn't spend aggressively on acquisitions. From 2002 to 2003, Yahoo bought search engine Inktomi for US$235 million, employment site HotJobs for US$436 million, and commercial search pioneer Overture Services for US$1.7 billion.

Yahoo has taken a less financially risky approach in the last year despite its growing profits. It's been systematically examining and buying upstarts in up-and-coming markets. An example is last week's acquisition of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) company DialPad. Others have included the photo-tagging site Flickr and e-mail company Oddpost. All the recent acquisitions were so small they didn't significantly impact earnings, so financial terms were not disclosed.

Yahoo, many analysts believe, is entering a new era as a media company rather than a tech innovator. It's been building a Hollywood headquarters and an entertainment team under newly hired Lloyd Braun, a former ABC executive. Sources say that Semel will spend more of his time there. In Hollywood, the company will be in a better position to strike partnerships, license content and create new original programming.

Larry Page
Larry Page
Co-founder, Google
That's not to say Yahoo is ignoring its own technology, which proponents say gets the short shrift when compared with Google. When Yahoo acquired Overture, it also landed AltaVista, one of the oldest search engines on the Internet, along with Inktomi. Top-notch engineers came with the acquisitions. Yahoo also recently hired Ysama Fayyad, a rocket scientist from NASA's jet propulsion team, to head up its research labs.

"The technical skill that it takes to scale (products) for 400 million users is something Yahoo hasn't been given credit for in the past. It requires rocket science," said Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens.

Yang also spearheaded an effort to attract top engineering talent.

Called Project Guru, the initiative is meant to encourage staff to scout for experts in various fields such as search algorithms and Internet communities.

Google hired Eric Schmidt, the chief executive at the troubled software company Novell, in 2001 to run the show. But as the prospectus for the company's initial public offering states, Google is run by a triumvirate. Schmidt may be the boss on paper, but he clearly shares authority, industry insiders say.

Google's US$2.5 billion war chest and freedom let employees throw many new services against the wall to see what sticks. But critics question whether Google has an efficient process for managing innovation. The free e-mail service Gmail, for example, is still in beta testing after nearly two years.

"It's like the Wild West at Google. They have enough money and enough disregard for the status quo," said one industry insider who asked to remain anonymous.

When it comes to acquisitions, Google rarely spends big. Often, it acquires upstarts in growth markets that no one saw coming, such as the Stanford search project Kaltix, the advertising technology company Applied Semantics and the blogging software provider Pyra Labs.

The biggest arrow in Google's quiver is its engineers. Google's research and development budget was nearly US$80 million in the first three months of 2005, more than twice the previous year, and it continues to attract some of top talent in the country, such as Adam Bosworth, a programming guru who spent years at Microsoft and BEA Systems. Yahoo spent roughly US$119 million in a category called product development.

"You won't find any bored engineers at Google," the company's Web site says. "You will find friendly colleagues, fascinating projects and the opportunity to make life better for tens of millions of people every day."

Sergy Brin
Sergy Brin
Co-founder, Google
Google execs seem well aware that they have to continue to innovate to maintain their edge. It's widely expected that Google will unveil a Web browser and possibly a thin-client operating system, and Microsoft will be a formidable competitor when or if this happens. Google is also building a payment system for video consumption, a major deviation from the company's traditional business.

So who wins?
Though Google is bigger, Yahoo appears to have the upper hand when it comes to warm relations with Madison Avenue. After the dot-com bust, Yahoo ate crow and approached marketers with a more humble, bottom-line pitch. Under direction from advertising veteran Wenda Millard, Yahoo's sales team now focuses on traditional partnerships and handholding with ad agencies. Yahoo also runs an internal telemarketing group whose sole responsibility is to call small agencies and companies to work with Yahoo.

In contrast, Google's approach relies on classified advertising that is based on technology rather than relationships.

"Yahoo has a big branded advertising business. Google is all search. To the extent that brand advertisers want to participate in the Internet, Yahoo's a better bet," said Rob Sanderson, a financial analyst at American Technology Research.

"Yahoo hand-holds you everyday. They look to (be) a strategic partner," said Sarah Fey, president of Isobar, one of the largest interactive agencies.

Financial analysts and industry watchers say there's room for both companies in the Internet economy. But they worry that Google, just like Yahoo, will at some point have to go through its awkward years.

"I do believe that Google will hit a wall eventually, and it will hit it spectacularly," said the book author Moore. "The real question is: What will it do then?"

August 22, 2005 at 11:43 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google tool watches as you work

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google tool watches as you work

Google's desktop search software is being overhauled to become a digital helper that reacts to what users do.

The move is likely to intensify competition between Google and rivals Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

The revamped software will suggest web links, personal documents and images that might be relevant to whatever someone is doing with their computer.

The tool also automatically subscribes to feeds from weblogs and news sites that a user visits.

Competition time

The update expands the abilities of Google's desktop search system that was first released in October 2004.

The first version let people search through all kinds of documents and e-mail messages they had stored on their home computer just like they did on the web.

The revamped desktop search system is much more active and keeps an eye on what users do and instantly displays relevant webpages, blog entries, documents, messages and photos in a hovering, on-screen panel.

Included in the revamped product are a series of applications that expand the abilities of the panel. One can automatically sign a user up to the RSS feeds on webpages to let them keep up with favourite sites.

The panel can also monitor different e-mail accounts and show incoming messages as they appear. It also lets users generate a list of the most-used documents and files so they can launch them as soon as they are needed.

The update brings Google into line with rivals.

Some of the abilities of the panel, such as presenting information about local documents as a user types, have been available in programs such as Blinkx for more than a year. Yahoo's desktop search system and Apple's Spotlight also returns real time results in the same way.

Others, such as the ability to get at frequently used files and newly arrived e-mail messages, pitch Google into more direct competition with Microsoft as it directly replaces some of the features of the Windows operating system.

Toolbar battle

Desktop and toolbar search software have been heavily pushed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Ask Jeeves and many others over the last year as these rivals look for an edge in the battle for users.

Yahoo is currently winning the battle to make people convert to its toolbar according to audience monitoring outfit ComScore Media Metrix.

In its latest audience figures, ComScore reveals that in July 2005 11% of all US searches were carried out via toolbars and 51% of all those queries were launched from users of Yahoo's toolbar.

But Google still rules when it comes to searching via browser. ComScore found that 36.5% of all US searches were conducted via Google in July 2005. Yahoo had a 30.5% share and MSN a 15.5% slice.

The new test or beta version of Google desktop is available to download and works with Windows XP and 2000.

August 22, 2005 at 11:25 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Is Set to Bring Web to Users

Google Is Set to Bring Web to Users - Los Angeles Times

# Software called Sidebar will cull news stories, photos and other data without using a browser.

By Chris Gaither, Times Staff Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — Reinforcing its intent to expand beyond the Internet searching that made it a household name, Google Inc. today plans to launch software that pulls news stories, photographs, weather updates, stock quotes and other features onto a user's computer without opening a Web browser.

The new application, Sidebar, highlights Google's efforts to become a ubiquitous gateway for online information. It also puts Google more squarely into competition with Microsoft Corp., which is trying to integrate similar features into the next version of its Windows operating system, and with Yahoo Inc., the Internet's most popular portal.

Sidebar is "not an operating system, it's not a browser," said Greg Sterling, an analyst with Kelsey Group. "But it has elements of both in a certain way."

Sidebar comes bundled with an updated version of Google Desktop, a search tool that finds information on PC hard drives. It sits on the side of the computer screen and frequently queries the Web to update folders displaying news stories and other information. A search box also lets users find files stored on their computers, e-mail they've received and Web pages they've visited.

"We want them to sit back and let the Web come to them," said Nikhil Bhatla, product manager for Google Desktop.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google is the latest Internet company trying to shorten the connection between consumers and the content that interests them. OS X, the latest version of Apple Computer Inc.'s operating system, includes a program called Dashboard composed of little files, known as "widgets," that automatically update with information.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo recently acquired Pixoria, a start-up whose Konfabulator platform allows developers to create similar widgets.

Yahoo, Apple and Google each encourage developers to create new widgets for consumers to install.

Bhatla, the Google executive, touted Sidebar's ability to learn from a user's Web surfing habits. The program will add visited sites to its toolbar and receive automatic updates of postings or photos, so the user doesn't have to visit the site for fresh content. In displaying news stories, the program over time will favor categories that the user reads most often.

Google's Sidebar also may contribute to the company's growing feud with Microsoft. The software lets users bypass parts of Microsoft's Windows operating system, which analysts said was sure to aggravate executives at the Redmond, Wash.-based company.

For example, a computer user who types "word" into Sidebar's Quick Find tool may find an icon for the Microsoft Word application among the results. The program can be launched directly from the toolbar. Sidebar also displays frequently used files and applications, which means that computer users don't need to search through Windows folders to find that spreadsheet on which they were working. It also finds Web information without having to open Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

The worry for Microsoft is that the fewer Windows features its customers use, the less important they will believe the operating system to be.

"Being able to get under the covers of any Microsoft application is not going to be seen as favorable by the Microsoft camp," said Allen Weiner, an analyst with Gartner Inc.

Sidebar does not include advertisements, but analysts said they could imagine modules that cycle through display ads based on the pages a user has visited.

August 22, 2005 at 08:58 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

What's next? Web map tracks demand for major news

What's next? Web map tracks demand for major news - Yahoo! News

By Eric Auchard Thu Aug 18,10:43 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - It's debatable how big a deal any specific news event is compared to all the other human mayhem that occurs each day. Journalists, editors, historians and the guy at the end of the bar could probably never agree.

A news mapping service introduced on Thursday by Akamai Technologies Inc. promises to give unprecedented insight into the relative hunger that millions of Internet users have to learn of breaking events minute-by-minute.

Akamai, which helps speed delivery of 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic over its network, is looking to count the sum of page requests across 100 major news sites it serves to rank interest in major events on a scale never seen before.

The Akamai Net News Index provides a map of six global regions and measures the current appetite for news relative to average daily demand in terms of millions of visitors to news sites per minute, per week, within each geographic region.

Spikes in traffic can reveal the next wave of news demand.

"You have never really been able to look at big news events in this way," Akamai Chief Executive Paul Sagan said in a phone interview. "When you can get down to the minute of a day and correlate spikes in news site traffic, you can really begin to see what was going on at that moment," he said.

This aggregate news site data -- the company stresses that it does not track individual surfing habits -- is now available publicly on the Web at http://www.akamai.com/en/html/industry/net_usage_index.html/

In two-and-a-half months of testing before the index introduction, Akamai found the biggest Internet news events were the London bombings on July 7, Hurricane Emily July 15, the combined effects of the Space Shuttle launch and monsoon in India on July 26. The fourth most popular recent Web news event was the June 13 Michael Jackson verdict, Akamai data showed.

Sagan says his Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company plans to make the data available to its customers and members of the public to see what ways they put the information to work.

The news index is in the spirit of the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine, which provides snapshots of vast reaches of the Web in order to preserve online history, or the various Internet Weather Reports, which give Web surfers a glimpse of how essential networks on the Internet are functioning.

IN A PLACE TO KNOW

Because its computers serve up billions of pages of news to Internet readers each day, Akamai is in the unique position of being able to track news consumption on a global scale.

Akamai believes it is in a unique position to be able to track news consumption on a global scale. At any point in time, millions of PC users (and growing numbers of Web-connected mobile phone users) are viewing news on the Internet.

Some of the 100 participating news sites include the U.S.-centered NBC, XM Satellite Radio and ESPN, LeMonde in France and the global audiences of CNN.com and Reuters.com.

Other major sites in the Americas, Europe and Asia cannot be named, Sagan said. "We think we have a pretty representative sample" of the world's major Internet news sites, he said.

When news breaks, studies show that the Internet is displacing television and print media for instant information. Sagan said the index could act as early warning system on major news events, or for retrospective trend research later.

"How do you measure an event of a certain magnitude?" Sagan asked. "No one know what that means really," he said, adding that: "We are going to let people draw their own conclusions."

Sagan hopes the service can be used to help reveal geographic and sociological trends in public spectacles. Data generated by the index could be used by advertisers and investors to map social patterns and make buying decisions.

"How much did it grab public attention? What economic effect did the news have?" Sagan asks. "We can get a real-time, exact view of the data."

August 19, 2005 at 08:28 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home

BlackBerry Links Up With AIM, Yahoo IM

BetaNews | BlackBerry Links Up With AIM, Yahoo IM

By Nate Mook, BetaNews
March 14, 2005, 9:48 AM

Research In Motion announced Monday it has inked deals with America Online and Yahoo to bring instant messaging to its BlackBerry wireless platform. RIM will pre-install full color, graphical IM clients for AIM, ICQ and Yahoo IM networks in the coming months to enable chatting while on the go.

RIM has joined AOL's Mobile Developer Platform to create a fully branded mobile AIM and ICQ interface, and says it will also give BlackBerry users access to AOL Mail via the device. Current BlackBerry users will be able to download the new applications free of charge, the company says.

"With instant messaging enjoying continued growth, we are very pleased to be working with America Online," said Mark Guibert, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Research In Motion.

"AOL's mobile instant messaging services and RIM's unique push-based BlackBerry platform will provide a convenient and powerful communications solution."

Yahoo, which has already signed deals with numerous wireless carriers, will offer similar functionality on the BlackBerry. An enhanced Yahoo Mail and mobile Yahoo Messenger client will utilize the handheld device's "push" technology that automatically sends messages directly to the user.

August 18, 2005 at 01:31 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (34) | Top of page | Blog Home

Upgrade Coming to Yahoo Web Mail

BetaNews | Upgrade Coming to Yahoo Web Mail

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews
June 28, 2005, 11:47 AM

Yahoo said on Monday that a new beta version of its Web e-mail service would be launched in the next two months. The site revision adds technologies that the company gained from its purchase of Outpost, such as drag and drop organization of mail, an instant preview pane, and upgraded search capabilities.

The beta version of the site will only be rolled out to a select group of testers. No target date for widespread release has been set as of yet, according to company officials. Yahoo, which is the top provider of web based e-mail in the United States, counts some 60 million unique users according to research firm comScore.

August 18, 2005 at 01:30 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Music Service Officially Launches

BetaNews | Yahoo Music Service Officially Launches

By Nate Mook, BetaNews
August 18, 2005, 12:06 PM

Yahoo! Music Unlimited, the company's subscription music service, has left beta and Yahoo is preparing a massive marketing blitz to promote its new offering. Powered by the Yahoo! Music Engine, the service brings to the table over 1 million songs at 192kbps with a cost 60 percent less than rivals Napster and Real.

Despite claims that Yahoo's low beta pricing wouldn't last, the company has kept the subscription service priced at just $4.99 USD per month when paid annually or $6.99 USD monthly. Customers can stream or download an unlimited number of songs to their computer, as well as transfer tracks to portable devices.

As with any such service, the songs will become unplayable if the subscription lapses. However, Yahoo also offers a la carte downloads for just 79-cents. Those who wish to forego the monthly subscription fee can also download individual songs for 99-cents - the same pricing as Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Downloads can be played on a total of five PCs or transferred to compatible portable devices. Because tracks are in Microsoft's WMA format, however, they are not compatible with Apple's popular iPod.

To coincide with the official launch, Yahoo! Music Unlimited has received a facelift and now sports a more refined interface. The Yahoo! Music Engine, which also serves as a full media player replacement, has been tweaked as well since its beta debut in May.

Speed and performance of the software was a major area of enhancement in the final release, developers say. Plug-ins, which can add support for Shoutcast or other features, still play a central role as well.

Community features are not limited to plug-ins, however. Yahoo! Music Unlimited attempts to differentiate itself from iTunes and other services by focusing on personalization. Users can setup profiles of their musical likes and dislikes, which are used by Yahoo to create custom home page of recommended artists and songs.

Yahoo is readying a major advertising campaign called "This is Huge" to kick off the general release. Commercials will be shown during the MTV Video Music Awards on August 28 with the tagline: "Over A Million Songs - 5 Bucks a Month - This is Huge." Ad placements are also planned through the end of the year.

Company officials say they want to establish Yahoo! Music Unlimited as "the standard" service for digital music fans by hyping its low price. Yahoo will utilize its extensive online presence to push the music service using banner ads and tie-ins to Yahoo! Messenger.

Future iterations of the software promise to bring faster device transfers and improved syncing, along with better playlist generation and celebrity playlists - a feature offered in Tunes. Yahoo's music catalog, which is powered by MusicNet, will also be enhanced with more charts, exclusive content and classical music.

Yahoo! Music Engine runs on Windows XP and Windows 2000. Yahoo! Music Unlimited is initially available only in the United States, but international support is expected to follow.

August 18, 2005 at 01:17 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo!'s personality crisis

Internet business strategy | Yahoo!'s personality crisis | Economist.com

Aug 11th 2005 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition

Yahoo! is doing so many different things that it may have neglected to figure out what it wants to be

STUDENTS from Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School of Management were recently invited to play a “war game” between the big four internet portals—Yahoo!, Google, Time Warner's AOL, and Microsoft's MSN. The organiser, Fuld & Company, a consultancy, split the students into teams, which began by delivering a brutally honest analysis of each firm's position and then did battle. Yahoo!, its team thought, is in essence a smorgasbord. “I don't have to be the best at everything; I just have to be good enough for you,” said the team's presenter. Google's team, by contrast, was confident that it alone was the true technological innovator. The MSN team, predictably, talked mostly about “leveraging Windows”, Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system, which excited nobody. And the AOL team began its presentation by saying that “we are fortunate just to be invited to the party.” In the end, Google won and Yahoo! came last. The winning team got $5,000.

In the real world, the stakes are far higher, but the basic analysis may prove correct. As if to prove the smorgasbord theory, Yahoo! this week finalised a $1 billion deal with Alibaba.com, a Chinese firm, that will give Yahoo! greater exposure to the promising, fashionable Chinese market, but may make Yahoo!'s product portfolio even less coherent. Yahoo! is primarily a consumer site, with everything from web search and web mail to news, music, photos, games and live chats. Alibaba has been mainly a business-to-business site that hooks up Chinese wholesalers and foreign retailers. This fits a pattern. Terry Semel, Yahoo!'s chief executive since 2001, has “done a notable job turning Yahoo! around” since the losses of the dotcom bust, says Jerry Michalski, a technology visionary in Berkeley, “but in the process he has turned it into, well, a bit of a tart.”

All things to all men

Yahoo!, of course, would disagree. “The only place anyone needs to go to find anything, communicate with anyone, or buy anything,” is how the firm describes itself, adding that it has a web audience of over 345m users in 25 countries. This appears to be paying off handsomely. Last month, Yahoo! reported quarterly revenues up by 51%, and profits up by 70%, compared with the same period last year (excluding the spectacular profits that Yahoo! made by selling shares it owned in its rival, Google). Internet advertising is growing fast, but Yahoo! is growing even faster, said Mr Semel.

Yet by other measures, Yahoo! is not the hottest thing on the internet. Microsoft appears to consider Google its only real threat, and vice versa. If the standard is product excellence, Google seems to be the clear winner in the biggest category, search—its share of searches has been rising, to 52% in America as of June, whereas Yahoo!'s has fallen, to 25%. Ditto for music, blogging, pictures and many other categories—in each, there is another firm that most users currently consider better. If Wall Street is the judge, Yahoo! also loses—with roughly equal revenues, it is worth only 60% of Google's market capitalisation of $84 billion (see chart).

The question, then, is what Yahoo! is ultimately planning to become that is different from its rivals. One clue is the people it is hiring. Starting with Mr Semel, a Hollywood veteran and former technophobe, Yahoo! has been recruiting traditional media types. Its head office is in Silicon Valley, but Yahoo! has been expanding a campus in Los Angeles. Google has nothing in Hollywood, and is hiring software geeks, starting with its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, who previously ran Novell, a software firm, and was chief technologist at Sun Microsystems, a big hardware maker.

Google, in short, is at heart a technology firm. It is about algorithms. Yahoo! sees itself as a media firm. “Google says ‘trust the machine’; Yahoo! says ‘trust the editor or the community’,” says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future. “Its DNA is editors and making recommendations to other people.” Consider, say, the difference between the firms' news sites: Google's story list is picked by computers with no human intervention; Yahoo!'s is edited by journalists. Yahoo!'s Hollywood types do deals with film studios and news organisations—from September, for instance, Yahoo! will offer video feeds from ABC News and CNN. Google's geeks “merely” try to write great computer code.

Yahoo!'s ambition is to become the leader in the 21st century's media industry. In this era, it believes (with almost everyone in the internet industry), content will no longer be generated by a few large, wealthy firms, but by users themselves, through their photo and video blogs, podcasts, hyperlinks and so on. Hence Yahoo!'s purchase of Flickr, a site where people can share pictures with the public or their friends. And hence Yahoo! 360, a service, to be launched this summer, that lets users combine their photos and music, restaurant reviews and blogs in a personal space into which they can invite other Yahoo! users by instant-messaging, voice chatting or simply hyperlinking. Yahoo! wants to “marry search with community,” says Jeff Weiner, Yahoo!'s search boss.

There is a huge problem with this vision, however. Yahoo!'s “business model is necessarily in conflict,” says John Battelle, the author of a forthcoming book on the search industry. With so much content owned by Yahoo! or generated within its site by users, the quandary for the firm will be: “Do you point people to your own stuff or to the most relevant stuff?” If the former, Yahoo!'s reputation as a trusted internet search and navigation brand may evaporate; if the latter, its content may not earn the returns to justify Yahoo!'s investments in it. By contrast, says Mr Battelle, Google, which has chosen not to make content, does not face this conflict.

The dilemma may be even larger than that. “The Yahoo! guys are trying to create a walled-garden experience; they're like AOL in ’95,” says Tony Perkins, the founder of AlwaysOn, an online social network for technology insiders. That is not a compliment, as AOL, which began as a proprietary online service, started its long decline at about that time, after missing the impact of the new, open environment of the world wide web. With “closed” services like 360, says Mr Perkins, it is now Yahoo! that is missing the trend toward an ever more “open web” that will be “full of one-trick ponies” all available at a single click. If Yahoo!'s users get the feeling that they are being ushered to sites purely because they belong to Yahoo!, reckons Mr Perkins, they will simply click out.

This may be Yahoo!'s fatal flaw. “MSN and AOL are going nowhere,” says Mr Saffo, for they have “no soul, no passion.” Yahoo! has passion, like Google and other newcomers. It may also have correctly spotted the shift from old media to new, user-generated media. But, says Mr Saffo, it seems to have missed one thing. The “world of the few and large” belongs to media in the 20th century, whereas this century will bring a “world of the many and small”. Yahoo!, in short, has old-media plans for the new-media era.

August 17, 2005 at 10:10 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google Services That May Invade Your Privacy

Google Services That May Invade Your Privacy - Yahoo! News

By The Associated Press Mon Jul 18, 7:34 AM ET

Privacy concerns and Google's services:

* Personalized Search.

Google is testing an optional service in which results are based partly on your past searches. The service is tied to the same username used to access e-mail through Gmail, post on Google Groups discussion boards and maintain shopping lists at Froogle. Users may inspect and remove specific entries from the list of past searches. However, separate logs are kept for auditing, regardless of any removal.

* Gmail.

Google's generosity in free storage means users never have to delete anything. Company computers scan a user's messages to build profiles for targeting ads. But there is that deep data store. Gmail users can delete messages but Google says that for technical reasons the actual e-mails may not be eradicated immediately.

* Web Accelerator.

Google is testing software for making Web sites load more quickly, accessing copies of pages previously accessed by other users rather than fetching new ones every time. To work, all Web requests must go through -- and get logged by _ Google's servers, much like an Internet service provider.

* Print.

As Google scans millions of library books into its search engine index, it is sometimes requiring usernames to limit access and protect copyrights. But Martin Garnar, chairman of an American Library Association subcommittee on privacy, warns that ``Google as a business doesn't have to abide by the same patron confidentiality rules that libraries do.'' To protect people's rights to read unpopular opinion anonymously, Garnar says, most library computers automatically delete personal information when a book is returned.

* Groups.

Users wishing to respond to Usenet discussion posts, either by adding a message to a group or contacting an item's author directly, now must create accounts and route messages through Google because e-mail addresses have been hidden as a spam-prevention measure.

* Payment service.

Google has yet to share details, but critics say it could add billing information to user profiles.

August 11, 2005 at 09:07 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

US Internet search company Yahoo! claims largest online archives

US Internet search company Yahoo! claims largest online archives - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Internet search giant Yahoo is claiming to be king of the information hill, shoving aside rival Google when it comes to enabling people to find things online.
The reservoir of data that Yahoo taps into for Internet searchers has swollen to more than 20 billion documents, images and audio and video files, Jennifer Stephens of Yahoo told AFP.
"It is not a surprise," Stephens said. "It is something we've been working on...we really are the most comprehensive index on the Web and people should try us."

Google's website indicated on Wednesday that is combed slightly more than eight billion online pages to find answers to people's questions.

Yahoo made the new index measure while preparing "a weather report" for a search engine strategies conference this week, according too Stephens.

"We are still tuning things," Tim Mayer of Yahoo! Search wrote in a company blog.

"So, you'll continue to see some fluctuation in ranking over the next few weeks."

Yahoo uses computer programs that "go out and crawl" documents linked to the Web and return results that are then indexed, Stephens explained.

"So, when a user types in a query, it is easy for us to recall in a split second what is in the index," Stephens said of the process.

August 11, 2005 at 07:08 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (22) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo to pay $1 billion for Alibaba stake

Yahoo to pay $1 billion for Alibaba stake - Yahoo! News

By Scott Hillis 2 hours, 51 minutes ago

BEIJING (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) will pay $1 billion for 40 percent of Chinese Web auctioneer Alibaba.com, taking on eBay and search firm Baidu.com as it extends its reach in the world's second-biggest Internet market.

The highly anticipated cash deal announced on Thursday also merges Yahoo's search operations -- China's second-largest after Baidu -- and Alibaba's business-to-business and consumer Web auction operations, which trail only eBay's.

Yahoo will also fold its Chinese mail, messaging and other operations into Alibaba.

The newly merged entity is valued at $4 billion, and will be headed by Alibaba chief executive Jack Ma. Yahoo gets 35 percent voting rights, with co-founder Jerry Yang taking a seat on a new four-member board.

"We feel this is the best approach for the Chinese market," Yahoo chief operating officer Daniel Rosensweig told reporters at a news briefing in Beijing.

"The most important and unique assets on the Internet are e-commerce, search, communications and portals, and the combination of Alibaba and Yahoo here in China will be the largest company on the Internet with all of the most successful assets," Rosensweig said.

The deal comes as interest in China Internet plays is heating up, as highlighted when shares in Baidu.com more than quadrupled in their Nasdaq debut last week.

With Internet users expected to hit 120 million by the end of this year, China is the world's second-biggest online market, and Ma said he expected it to surpass the United States to claim the top spot in five years.

The deal would give Alibaba cash to fund its operations and future expansion, said Forun Technologies analyst Qiu Changhua.

Yahoo, which has a small online auctions joint venture with Sina Corp., also gains a strong presence in the online commerce market, Qiu said.

"It's a good deal for Yahoo and a good deal for Alibaba," Qiu said. "Now, with Yahoo, Alibaba will get a lot of credibility... For Yahoo, now they have a solid foothold in China."

MADE IN JAPAN

The deal's structure is similar to the one for Yahoo Japan Corp., in which Yahoo holds a 33 percent stake while Softbank Corp., the Japanese Internet communications groups, holds a controlling 42 percent.

"If you look at what we've done in Japan..., we've built a great asset there," Yahoo's Yang said in a phone interview.

Softbank, an investor in Alibaba, is said to have brokered the current China deal, though an Alibaba spokesman said Ma and Yang had begun discussing a possible deal early this year during a meeting at California's famed Pebble Beach golf course.

Softbank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son disagreed with comments that the $4 billion valuation of the new company was too high, and said the fact that Softbank was not selling its entire stake was a sign of confidence that Alibaba would grow.

Softbank is keeping 27.4 percent of Alibaba and can boost that to 30.5 percent by exercising convertible bond rights.

Alibaba's chief financial officer, Joe Tsai, told Reuters his company would eventually like to list shares.

"There's always a view that in the long run we would like to see the company be a public company," Tsai said by telephone.

"But in the medium term, our focus is really on building the business...and really executing."

BUILDING A BUSINESS

Based in the eastern city of Hangzhou -- about two hours from Shanghai -- Alibaba has operations that include a business-to-business e-commerce site, an online auction site called TaoBao that vies with eBay's and a recently launched online payment system.

The company generated cash revenue of $68 million last year and GAAP revenue of $46 million.

The Alibaba business marketplace handled $4.5 billion in domestic and international transactions in 2004, while TaoBao handled $200 million in the second quarter of 2005.

Yahoo's main China business consists of a search service that it got two years ago when it purchased local search site 3721.com for $120 million.

EBay entered China though a $180 million purchase of Shanghai-based EachNet, and has pledged to invest another $100 million in China. InterActiveCorp paid $168 million for 52 percent of Chinese online travel agent eLong.

Online retailer Amazon.com purchased local player Joyo.com for $75 million, and job search leader Monster.com paid $50 million for a 40 percent stake in ChinaHR.com.

August 11, 2005 at 06:47 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Expands Its Search Engine Index

Yahoo Expands Its Search Engine Index - Yahoo! News

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer 2 hours, 8 minutes ago

SAN FRANCISCO - In a major expansion, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) said Monday that its online search engine index now spans more than 20 billion Web documents and images, nearly double the material scanned by rival Google Inc.

Yahoo's expansion doesn't necessarily mean it produces more useful results than Google, which has long been considered the Internet's most comprehensive database.

But the breakthrough gives the Sunnyvale-based company the bragging rights to a widely watched measurement for assessing the power of an Internet search engine.

Yahoo said its index, boosted by a recent upgrade, covers 20.8 billion online "objects," comprised of about 19.2 billion documents and 1.6 billion images.

By comparison, Google said it tracks 11.3 billion objects. That figure consists of the nearly 8.2 billion Web pages that Google proudly touts on its home page and 2.1 billion images, with the remainder of material coming from its group discussions.

Until Monday, Yahoo hadn't publicly disclosed the size of its search index, but industry estimates had placed the figure somewhere between 6 billion and 8 billion.

"This is a great reason for more people to check us out," said Eckart Walther, Yahoo's vice president of products. "We are more comprehensive than anyone else out there."

In a statement late Monday, Google spokesman Nate Tyler questioned whether the size of Yahoo's search index had really surpassed its own. "We welcome innovation in search, but as of this afternoon we have not been able to verify a substantial increase to Yahoo's web index via their search results," Tyler said.

Verifying the index claims of the search engines is virtually impossible because there is no official auditing system, said Danny Sullivan, editor of industry newsletter Search Engine Watch.

Nevertheless, supplanting Mountain View-based Google as the biggest search engine should give Yahoo a potent marketing weapon in a tense duel for industry leadership, predicted Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. "The Google brand stands for search and (Yahoo's) strategy has been to undercut that brand," she said.

Yahoo has had its sights set on Google since early last year when it introduced its own search technology and index to end a business partnership between the two companies.

For the previous 3 1/2 years, Yahoo had been licensing its search results through Google — an arrangement that helped turn its rival into one of the Internet's biggest success stories.

Since the split, Google has maintained a comfortable lead over Yahoo, even as its challenger continued to roll out new features that impressed industry analysts. Through June, Google held a 36.9 percent share of the U.S. search engine market with Yahoo at 30.4 percent, according to comScore Networks.

Generating searches is crucial for both companies because the requests spur revenue-producing ads alongside the results. The strategy has proven highly effective for both companies, with Google earning $712 million through the first half of while year and Yahoo earning $959 million during the same time.

While index size is an important factor in the search engine equation, other components, including the relevancy of the results and the freshness of the index, are even more significant, both Li and Sullivan said.

"You could add a billion pages about Britney Spears and that doesn't mean the quality of results will be any better," Sullivan said. "There have been times when other search indexes have expanded, and the results have actually gotten worse."

August 8, 2005 at 10:23 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (20) | Top of page | Blog Home

Search concepts, not keywords, IBM tells business

Search concepts, not keywords, IBM tells business - Yahoo! News

By Eric Auchard Mon Aug 8,12:03 AM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM (NYSE:IBM - news) plans to give away key search technologies for corporate data retrieval that use concepts and facts instead of simpler "keyword" searches relied upon by consumer Web companies such as Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news), the world's largest computer company said on Monday.

While simple but powerful keyword searches have revolutionized how Internet users locate and retrieve information, IBM is looking to transform how office workers sift through the piles of data stored inside organizations.

"I don't see any of the major players moving into this area," Arthur Ciccolo, head of search technology at IBM Research, said of how major consumer Internet search companies such as Google, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft have focused on the public Internet instead of private record data retrieval.

IBM plans to openly offer other software developers its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), a technology that can analyze text within documents and other media to understand latent meanings, relationships and facts.

Some 15 companies, including Attensity, ClearForest, Cognos (Toronto:CSN.TO - news), Endeca, Factiva, Kana (Nasdaq:KANAE - news), Inquira, iPhrase, Inxight, nStein (Vancouver:EIN.V - news), QL2, SAS, Schemalogic, Semagix, SPSS Inc. (Nasdaq:SPSS - news) and Temis plan to use UIMA as a framework for search and text analysis of unstructured data, IBM said. Factiva is a joint venture of financial information providers Dow Jones & Co. Inc. (NYSE:DJ - news) and Reuters Group Plc (RTR.L).

IBM is also offering its WebSphere OmniFind software for helping users perform searches on unstructured data in a variety of formats or languages, be they located in databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video images.

Ciccolo said UIMA will allow many different suppliers of software used in knowledge management, search, business intelligence and text analytics to work with one another.

The corporate data search framework being made available to other software developers is the result of more than four years of development by IBM Research, with contributions from researchers at top U.S. universities, and support from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), IBM said.

Other researchers working on UIMA are military contractors Science Applications International Corp., BBN Technologies and MITRE Corp. and health care provider The Mayo Clinic.

As an example, a combination of software from Attensity, ClearForest, iPhrase, Kana and IBM can be used by consumer goods makers to monitor the Web for initial complaints about a product defect and locate internal corporate data that might help it quickly respond to potential product quality issues.

There has been an explosion in "unstructured" information on the web, taking the form of documents, images, comment and note fields, e-mail and even rich media like video and audio.

However, the technology has not existed to allow software to search out and make sense of these disparate forms of data.

But the push to render meaning out of unstructured information will take many years to solve. To be sure, the issue is as old as messy filing systems and woolly thinking.

A decade ago many database developers, including Informix, a company subsequently acquired by IBM, said their database management systems were close to solving the unstructured data issue. Yet some 85 percent of corporate data still sits in unstructured form outside of databases, analysts estimate.

UIMA technology is expected to be made available through open-source software site SourceForge by the end of 2005. The UIMA framework can currently be downloaded free of charge from IBM AlphaWorks at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/uima/.

August 8, 2005 at 10:20 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (27) | Top of page | Blog Home

Former IBM researcher to head Yahoo Research

Former IBM researcher to head Yahoo Research - Yahoo! News

Thu Jul 28, 3:52 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web media company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) said on Thursday it named Prabhakar Raghavan, a former IBM researcher, to head Yahoo Research as it competes with rivals Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) for talent.

Raghavan will lead research in key areas for Yahoo, including search and information navigation, social media, community, personalization, and mobility, the company said in a statement.

Prior to joining Yahoo, Raghavan was senior vice president and chief technology officer at Verity Inc. (Nasdaq:VRTY - news), a provider of enterprise search software. He is also the former head of the Computer Science Principles department at IBM's(NYSE:IBM - news) Almaden Research Center.

Yahoo Research has facilities in the California cities of Berkeley, Pasadena and Sunnyvale.

July 30, 2005 at 09:39 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Birth of Google

Wired 13.08: The Birth of Google

Larry thought Sergey was arrogant. Sergey thought Larry was obnoxious. But their obsession with backlinks just might be the start of something big.

By John Battelle
It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin's group.

It was hardly love at first sight. Walking up and down the city's hills that day, the two clashed incessantly, debating, among other things, the value of various approaches to urban planning. "Sergey is pretty social; he likes meeting people," Page recalls, contrasting that quality with his own reticence. "I thought he was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did, too."

"We both found each other obnoxious," Brin counters when I tell him of Page's response. "But we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going." Page and Brin may have clashed, but they were clearly drawn together - two swords sharpening one another.

When Page showed up at Stanford a few months later, he selected human-computer interaction pioneer Terry Winograd as his adviser. Soon thereafter he began searching for a topic for his doctoral thesis. It was an important decision. As Page had learned from his father, a computer science professor at Michigan State, a dissertation can frame one's entire academic career. He kicked around 10 or so intriguing ideas, but found himself attracted to the burgeoning World Wide Web.

Page didn't start out looking for a better way to search the Web. Despite the fact that Stanford alumni were getting rich founding Internet companies, Page found the Web interesting primarily for its mathematical characteristics. Each computer was a node, and each link on a Web page was a connection between nodes - a classic graph structure. "Computer scientists love graphs," Page tells me. The World Wide Web, Page theorized, may have been the largest graph ever created, and it was growing at a breakneck pace. Many useful insights lurked in its vertices, awaiting discovery by inquiring graduate students. Winograd agreed, and Page set about pondering the link structure of the Web.

Citations and Back Rubs
It proved a productive course of study. Page noticed that while it was trivial to follow links from one page to another, it was nontrivial to discover links back. In other words, when you looked at a Web page, you had no idea what pages were linking back to it. This bothered Page. He thought it would be very useful to know who was linking to whom.

Why? To fully understand the answer to that question, a minor detour into the world of academic publishing is in order. For professors - particularly those in the hard sciences like mathematics and chemistry - nothing is as important as getting published. Except, perhaps, being cited.

Academics build their papers on a carefully constructed foundation of citation: Each paper reaches a conclusion by citing previously published papers as proof points that advance the author's argument. Papers are judged not only on their original thinking, but also on the number of papers they cite, the number of papers that subsequently cite them back, and the perceived importance of each citation. Citations are so important that there's even a branch of science devoted to their study: bibliometrics.

Fair enough. So what's the point? Well, it was Tim Berners-Lee's desire to improve this system that led him to create the World Wide Web. And it was Larry Page and Sergey Brin's attempts to reverse engineer Berners-Lee's World Wide Web that led to Google. The needle that threads these efforts together is citation - the practice of pointing to other people's work in order to build up your own.

Which brings us back to the original research Page did on such backlinks, a project he came to call BackRub.

He reasoned that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of citation - after all, what is a link but a citation? If he could divine a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web, as Page puts it "the Web would become a more valuable place."

At the time Page conceived of BackRub, the Web comprised an estimated 10 million documents, with an untold number of links between them. The computing resources required to crawl such a beast were well beyond the usual bounds of a student project. Unaware of exactly what he was getting into, Page began building out his crawler.

The idea's complexity and scale lured Brin to the job. A polymath who had jumped from project to project without settling on a thesis topic, he found the premise behind BackRub fascinating. "I talked to lots of research groups" around the school, Brin recalls, "and this was the most exciting project, both because it tackled the Web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry."

The Audacity of Rank
In March 1996, Page pointed his crawler at just one page - his homepage at Stanford - and let it loose. The crawler worked outward from there.

Crawling the entire Web to discover the sum of its links is a major undertaking, but simple crawling was not where BackRub's true innovation lay. Page was naturally aware of the concept of ranking in academic publishing, and he theorized that the structure of the Web's graph would reveal not just who was linking to whom, but more critically, the importance of who linked to whom, based on various attributes of the site that was doing the linking. Inspired by citation analysis, Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page's rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge - you not only have to count a particular page's links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. The math gets complicated rather quickly.

Fortunately, Page was now working with Brin, whose prodigious gifts in mathematics could be applied to the problem. Brin, the Russian-born son of a NASA scientist and a University of Maryland math professor, emigrated to the US with his family at the age of 6. By the time he was a middle schooler, Brin was a recognized math prodigy. He left high school a year early to go to UM. When he graduated, he immediately enrolled at Stanford, where his talents allowed him to goof off. The weather was so good, he told me, that he loaded up on nonacademic classes - sailing, swimming, scuba diving. He focused his intellectual energies on interesting projects rather than actual course work.

Together, Page and Brin created a ranking system that rewarded links that came from sources that were important and penalized those that did not. For example, many sites link to IBM.com. Those links might range from a business partner in the technology industry to a teenage programmer in suburban Illinois who just got a ThinkPad for Christmas. To a human observer, the business partner is a more important link in terms of IBM's place in the world. But how might an algorithm understand that fact?

Page and Brin's breakthrough was to create an algorithm - dubbed PageRank after Page - that manages to take into account both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of the linking sites. This mirrored the rough approach of academic citation-counting. It worked. In the example above, let's assume that only a few sites linked to the teenager's site. Let's further assume the sites that link to the teenager's are similarly bereft of links. By contrast, thousands of sites link to Intel, and those sites, on average, also have thousands of sites linking to them. PageRank would rank the teen's site as less important than Intel's - at least in relation to IBM.

This is a simplified view, to be sure, and Page and Brin had to correct for any number of mathematical culs-de-sac, but the long and the short of it was this: More popular sites rose to the top of their annotation list, and less popular sites fell toward the bottom.

As they fiddled with the results, Brin and Page realized their data might have implications for Internet search. In fact, the idea of applying BackRub's ranked page results to search was so natural that it didn't even occur to them that they had made the leap. As it was, BackRub already worked like a search engine - you gave it a URL, and it gave you a list of backlinks ranked by importance. "We realized that we had a querying tool," Page recalls. "It gave you a good overall ranking of pages and ordering of follow-up pages."

Page and Brin noticed that BackRub's results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. "They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal," Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines - which ranked mostly on keywords - that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big.

Not only was the engine good, but Page and Brin realized it would scale as the Web scaled. Because PageRank worked by analyzing links, the bigger the Web, the better the engine. That fact inspired the founders to name their new engine Google, after googol, the term for the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeroes. They released the first version of Google on the Stanford Web site in August 1996 - one year after they met.

Among a small set of Stanford insiders, Google was a hit. Energized, Brin and Page began improving the service, adding full-text search and more and more pages to the index. They quickly discovered that search engines require an extraordinary amount of computing resources. They didn't have the money to buy new computers, so they begged and borrowed Google into existence - a hard drive from the network lab, an idle CPU from the computer science loading docks. Using Page's dorm room as a machine lab, they fashioned a computational Frankenstein from spare parts, then jacked the whole thing into Stanford's broadband campus network. After filling Page's room with equipment, they converted Brin's dorm room into an office and programming center.

The project grew into something of a legend within the computer science department and campus network administration offices. At one point, the BackRub crawler consumed nearly half of Stanford's entire network bandwidth, an extraordinary fact considering that Stanford was one of the best-networked institutions on the planet. And in the fall of 1996 the project would regularly bring down Stanford's Internet connection.

"We're lucky there were a lot of forward-looking people at Stanford," Page recalls. "They didn't hassle us too much about the resources we were using."

A Company Emerges
As Brin and Page continued experimenting, BackRub and its Google implementation were generating buzz, both on the Stanford campus and within the cloistered world of academic Web research.

One person who had heard of Page and Brin's work was Cornell professor Jon Kleinberg, then researching bibliometrics and search technologies at IBM's Almaden center in San Jose. Kleinberg's hubs-and-authorities approach to ranking the Web is perhaps the second-most-famous approach to search after PageRank. In the summer of 1997, Kleinberg visited Page at Stanford to compare notes. Kleinberg had completed an early draft of his seminal paper, "Authoritative Sources," and Page showed him an early working version of Google. Kleinberg encouraged Page to publish an academic paper on PageRank.

Page told Kleinberg that he was wary of publishing. The reason? "He was concerned that someone might steal his ideas, and with PageRank, Page felt like he had the secret formula," Kleinberg told me. (Page and Brin eventually did publish.)

On the other hand, Page and Brin weren't sure they wanted to go through the travails of starting and running a company. During Page's first year at Stanford, his father died, and friends recall that Page viewed finishing his PhD as something of a tribute to him. Given his own academic upbringing, Brin, too, was reluctant to leave the program.

Brin remembers speaking with his adviser, who told him, "Look, if this Google thing pans out, then great. If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis." He chuckles, then adds: "I said, 'Yeah, OK, why not? I'll just give it a try.'"
From The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, copyright © by John Battelle, to be published in September by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Battelle (battellemedia.com) was one of the founders of Wired.

July 28, 2005 at 12:01 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (38) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo buys information 'widget' company Pixoria

Yahoo buys information 'widget' company Pixoria - Yahoo! News

Mon Jul 25, 1:02 PM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. said on Monday it bought Pixoria, a company that provides small, downloadable programs that let computer users quickly get up-to-the-minute information, such as stock quotes and weather reports without using a Web browser.

Terms of the sale, which closed July 19, were not disclosed. The products, which also include such things as an alarm clock and a launching pad for Web searches, are available free at http://widgets.yahoo.com/.

The move comes as Yahoo and chief rival Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) open their networks to independent developers, whose program tweaks at times move technology forward or result in popular products.

Pixoria, is the developer of the Konfabulator engine that builds small desktop applications to help users access Web content and other information from their desktops. The programs are built on an open platform, which allows developers to write specialized programs.

The company's three employees are joining Yahoo as full-time employees.

Shares of Yahoo (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) were up 11 cents at $33.64 in mid-day trading on Nasdaq.

July 25, 2005 at 05:44 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (23) | Top of page | Blog Home

Online advertising drives Google

BBC NEWS | Business | Online advertising drives Google

Internet search engine Google has revealed a huge jump in its earnings after unveiling its recent results.

The US giant, which is valued at about $86bn (£49bn), saw its quarterly profit more than quadruple, propelled by a rise in online search advertising.

Google recorded a second-quarter net profit of $342.8m, compared to $79.1m in the same period a year ago.

The results come two days after US rival Yahoo unveiled a six-fold increase in profit to $754.7m.

Shares in Google have soared since the firm's market debut last year, boosted by strong revenue from advertising.

On Thursday they reached a record high at the close of the Nasdaq, of $313.94, before falling in after-the-bell trade in New York.

Media giant

Google, which was set up by internet entrepreneurs Sergey Brin and Larry Page, is paid by advertisers every time adverts displayed next to its search results are clicked on.

Revenue, almost entirely from the above search advertising, was $1.38bn, compared with $700.2m in the same period in 2004.

However, there "was not as much upside as some had hoped", said Marianne Wolk, internet analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group.

See Google's share price live

The California-based company's meteoric rise was sealed in June after it overtook media giant Time Warner to become the world's biggest media group by stock market value.

In April, Google reported net profits of $369.2m for the January to March quarter, exceeding Wall Street forecasts.

Despite reporting a 40% rise in quarterly revenues on Tuesday, Yahoo's results failed to match Wall Street expectations, raising some doubts about the pace of growth in internet advertising.

China battleground

On Wednesday, software giant Microsoft said it was suing Google for hiring one of its vice presidents to set up a research centre in China.

Google has more than 20% of the Chinese search market and the country is a new battleground for the two firms, which offer online and desktop search tools.

Google's flotation on the Nasdaq in August 2004 was the technology index's third largest US-based initial public offering, or IPO, after Charter Communications in 1999 and Genuity in 2000.

The company is expected to announce its second-quarter results after the Wall Street market closing bell on Thursday.

July 21, 2005 at 07:17 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google to open research center in China

Google to open research center in China - Yahoo! News

48 minutes ago

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - US Internet search powerhouse Google is moving to tap China's huge market by opening a research and development center in the country, the company announced.

Google is creating the base to better connect with the growing number of computer users in China's rapidly growing economy and to tap into the talents of Chinese scientists and engineers, company officials said.

Technology industry veteran Lee Kai-Fu has been hired as president of Google's Chinese operations and will head the new center, slated to be running by October, according to Google.

"It has always been my goal to make advanced technologies accessible and useful to every user, as well as to be part of the vibrant growth and innovation in China today," Lee is quoted as saying in a company statement.

"Joining Google uniquely enables me to pursue both of my passions and I look forward to returning to China to begin this exciting endeavor."

Google officials heralded the creation of the center as a sign of strong commitment to cultivating Chinese talent as well as its intent to form alliances with universities and institutes.

"The opening of an R and D center in China will strengthen Google's efforts in delivering the best search experience to our users and partners worldwide," said Alan Eustace, vice president of engineering at Google.

The Google center in China "will enable us to develop more innovative products and technologies for millions of users in China and around the world," he added.

A computer scientist known for pioneering work in the areas of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, Lee joined Google from US software giant Microsoft, where he was a corporate vice president.

Lee took part in the founding of Microsoft Research China in the late 1990s. He has also done stints working at computer pioneer Apple, according to Google.

"Dr. Lee is the ideal candidate to do great things for Google and for China," Gu Binglin, president of Tsinghua University, was quoted as saying in the release.

Google's headquarters is in Mountain View, a short distance south of San Francisco. Its list of global engineering offices includes facilities in Tokyo, Zurich, Bangalore, New York and elsewhere.

Some human rights and free-speech advocates have criticized Google, Yahoo and other US firms for purportedly accepting Beijing's efforts to censor Internet content.

Internet sites in China are strongly urged to abide by a code of conduct and self-censor any information that could be viewed by the government as politically sensitive, pornographic or illegal.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders last year said it "deplored" the conduct of Yahoo and Google for "bowing directly and indirectly to Chinese government demands for censorship."

July 19, 2005 at 04:59 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home

Who will Google buy next?

Intersting piece from Kuro5hin.

Who Will Google Buy Next? || kuro5hin.org

By Andrevan
Tue Jun 14th, 2005 at 02:05:53 AM EST
Technology

Google is the new Internet behemoth, snatching up small companies left and right. So, in this article, I ask: what tech gems are in the running for Google's growing subsidiary menagerie? To help predict, I will first take a look at who Google has acquired in the past and what Google has done for them, and then I'll throw out a few possibilities for Googlification and discuss where they might fit into Google's strategy.

June 14, 2005 at 10:04 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google: How big can it get?

Google: How big can it get? - Sunday Times - Times Online

Paul Durman and Dominic Rushe in New York question how the search engine group can justify a valuation of $80 billion
Clive Cooke, chief executive of the financial spread-betting firm City Index, had a large cheque to write out last week.

His company has lost £20,000 to a canny housewife who backed a view widely disparaged by many market professionals: that shares in Google would keep on rising.

Last Tuesday, as Cooke was preparing to pay up, Google’s stock price hit another new high, just shy of $300 (£165). That is more than three times the $85 price set last August when the American search- engine company joined the Nasdaq stock market after a difficult and controversial flotation.

That was only 10 months ago. But those troubles seem more like 10 years away. Google now looks set to join the S&P 500 index of America’s biggest companies, which includes Coca-Cola and General Electric.

In its short, public life, Google has repeatedly beaten expectations for its performance — and not modestly, but by a country mile. Riding the booming market in pay-per-click advertising, the internet’s big, friendly giant has grown much faster than even its most fervent fans thought possible.

The latest share surge followed results showing quarter-on-quarter growth in revenues of 22%. Its fast accelerating profits have already hit $443m a quarter, and Google is only just getting started in Europe and much of the rest of the world.

With so much potential for internet advertising, and with so many new services to drive more searching — and therefore more ads and revenue — the opportunities for Google seem almost endless. At least, that’s what the share price is saying.

It is this prospect that has so excited investors. And last week the company’s market value reached $80 billion, surpassing Time Warner and making it the most valuable media company in the world.

That’s right. Bigger than Disney. Bigger than Viacom, the owner of MTV, CBS and Paramount Pictures. Bigger than News Corporation, the ultimate owner of The Sunday Times. Bigger too, incidentally, than deeply troubled “old economy” businesses such as General Motors.

It would hardly be surprising to find Larry Page, 32, and Sergey Brin, 31, the Stanford University PhD students who founded Google, rubbing their eyes in disbelief. Google is only seven years old.

Any lingering scepticism left over from last year’s float is rapidly dissipating. Last week analysts at Smith Barney, part of Citigroup, placed a $360 target on Google’s shares. That would give the company a market value of $100 billion — or about 20 times the revenues Wall Street expects the business to generate this year.

Amid the euphoria, some of the calmest heads are to be found at Google. The founders are sceptical of Wall Street and its tendency to hype, then dump, companies. A look at their financial statements shows them to be far more cautious than many analysts. There are clear warnings that Google’s golden age may not last.

The company admits it faces “formidable competition in every aspect of our business”, particularly from Microsoft and Yahoo. New technology could block its ads, wiping out its revenues. “Our inexperience in the operation of our business outside the US increases the risk that our international expansion efforts will not be successful,” the company said.

But there are more immediate concerns. Google is spending so heavily trying to recruit the staff it needs to support its breakneck growth that costs are spiralling upwards — by almost two-thirds in the past year. Google is renowned as a fun place to work, but all that free food and free childcare is expensive.

“Our operating margin may experience downward pressure in the future as we build the necessary employee and systems infrastructures,” it conceded recently. “We expect that the growth rate of our costs and expenses may exceed the growth rate of our revenues during 2005 and beyond.”

This is the strange world of Google. The $100 billion business with declining profit margins, and where the biggest sceptics come from inside the business.

WHEN Google began trading, it still hadn’t figured out how it was going to make money from its brilliant insight: that web pages could be ranked according to how often they were referenced (or found useful) by other websites.

Google initially planned to license its search technology to other websites. It was not until 2000 that it began charging for text-based ads alongside unpaid search results. Two years later Google moved over to pay-per-click advertising — charging advertisers only when a potential customer clicks on an ad.

“Paid search” was not Google’s innovation, but it was superbly applicable to what was fast becoming the world’s leading search engine. With pay-per-click, advertisers can see exactly what they are paying for. They can measure how much it costs to generate each new sales lead, and which search terms work and which ones don’t.

Choosing the right search terms — finding the right mix of general and specific “adwords” — has become a science in its own right. Advertisers bid for the search terms they think will help customers find their business. The more they pay, the higher they will appear in the paid listings.

The measurability of paid search, and the ability to turn the flow of customers on and off, has made it enormously popular, particularly for travel and financial-services companies.

Last week Ian Carrington, Google’s head of vertical markets, confided to a London travel conference that Easyjet spends £18,000 a day on Google ads. One can start to see how Google’s revenues are set to pass $5 billion this year.

The UK has been quick to embrace pay-per-click advertising, and British firms provided almost 15% of Google’s entire revenues in the first three months of this year. But 60% of its revenue still comes from America. There is huge scope for further expansion.

To drive this process, Google recently hired Nikesh Arora, formerly chief marketing officer of T-Mobile, as vice-president of European operations. Until relatively recently, Google had only 30 or so people in its offices in London’s West End. Now it has more than 100.

To grow, Google has to attract more advertisers, expand into more countries and, most of all, generate more search. This is why it created a litany of new services — Google News, Google Local, Gmail, Froogle — to encourage computer users to look for more information, thus creating more advertising “real estate”. (See below).

These new ideas may or may not pay off. Google’s rivals at Yahoo and Microsoft already have, or are developing, similar projects. Google News, for example, attracts about 7m viewers a month, Yahoo News gets 25m.

Gillian Kent, director of MSN UK, Microsoft’s portal, said: “Google has had a big impact and it started with a better product. But it’s still early days.”

Some 62% of people in Britain visit MSN each month and Kent said its newly revamped search facility was now giving Google a run for its money.

“Search has low loyalty. Google has been a great phenomenon, but the company that delivers the best search will be the company that wins. There is everything still to play for.”

GOOGLE faces other challenges. Yell.com, the online arm of the company that owns Britain’s Yellow Pages, is working with Google to provide the listings information behind Google Local.

Eddie Cheng, president of Yell.com, said this was a way of putting his advertisers before Google’s audience.

Cheng said that while Google was very good for larger, more sophisticated advertisers who were happy working online, its model was less well suited for the thousands of smaller firms who provide the bread-and- butter of local advertising.

Cheng said there were other limitations: “Google is a company that is run from America. They’re thousands of miles away and there’s an eight-hour time difference. They’re good at publicity and promotion (in the UK), but their engineers and core development people are based in the US and they think US. They will have a lot of problems trying to get established in all these other countries.”

ON Wall Street they call it “the whisper number” — an estimate of how a company is going to perform based on analysts’ forecasts, with some market rumour and tittle-tattle thrown in for added spice. Google’s whisper number is now running 15% to 20% ahead of the market consensus.

David Edwards, an analyst at American Technology Research, said companies usually gave enough guidance to keep that number reasonably accurate. But Google, disdainful of Wall Street, doesn’t “do” guidance.

“We’re guessing more than we usually do,” said Edwards, who has a price target of $290, far below those of his more bullish rivals.

For a company that prides itself on giving easy access to information, Google is notably tight with its financials. So far it has surprised Wall Street with good news.

“At some point you would expect that expectations will get ahead of actual performance,” said Edwards. “It happens to most major companies.”

If and when it does, Google’s shareholders may pay a high price. But as City Index will testify, betting against Google has so far been a mug’s game.

At the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a cover of Fortune magazine has been pasted to a wall outside one of the cafes. The December 2004 issue asks: Google — is this company worth $165 a share? Try putting that in Google and making sense of the answer.

MORE THAN JUST A SEARCH ENGINE

Google is best known and most used as a way of searching the internet. But it is rapidly introducing a dizzying range of new services. Here are some of the best and most interesting.

Google News: An easily customised and searchable selection of news from 4,500 sources around the world. You choose whether you are most interested in sport or in business, in entertainment or in technology. One potential flaw is that the most recent stories are presented first, rather than the best or most authoritative versions. Google is working on an algorithm to rank the credibility of news organisations, to ensure that (for example) stories from Times Online rank ahead of bloggers and poorly funded newsletters. 8/10

Google Local: Whether you want a plumber or a pizzeria, this new service will show you who to call and how to find them - even giving directions and awesomely clear and 'zoomable' maps. Sceptics suggest it may need to be refined to cope with ambiguous place names, such as Newport. 9/10

Desktop search: A downloadable tool that gives quick access to the e-mail, document, photo or video clip that you're struggling to find. 7/10

Gmail: Google's attempt at e-mail comes with 2GB of storage space 'so you'll never need to delete another message'. It's helpful to be able to search e-mail, but the way Gmail displays 'conversations' can be confusing and, for long messages, the 'reply' and 'forward' buttons are poorly placed. Google uses the content of e-mails to serve up relevant ads, which has provoked privacy concerns. 5/10

Froogle: Google's shopping comparison site still needs work. Type in 'pink iPod' and Froogle will return a list headed by a pink iPod protective jacket, pink iPod earphones, and other pink accessories in addition to the music player itself. Try the same with Kelkoo (owned by Yahoo) and you will get a (very) long list of firms selling pink iPods. Which is what you wanted. 6/10

Google Image Search: This picture search tool is getting better but it still seems to turn up too many erroneous results. It's fine for Britney Spears, Tom Cruise and Frank Lampard ... and even for Philip Green and Lord Browne. But it makes too many mistakes when searching for less well-known individuals. 6/10

Blogger: Create your own online journal or 'weblog'. Millions do, creating yet more pages for Google to index. Some believe that the blogging phenomenon is a publishing revolution on the scale of the printing press, democratising the written word and threatening to put professional journalists out of a job. That said, most blogs are still unreadable. 7/10

Google Print: Google is working with publishers and research libraries to 'digitise' the texts of tens of thousands of books, making them searchable and available online. Access to texts still protected by copyright is more restricted, but you can read Hamlet in its entirety. 10/10 for ambition.

June 12, 2005 at 11:58 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo sees larger opportunity in voice services

Yahoo sees larger opportunity in voice services - Yahoo! News

By Justin Hyde Fri Jun 10, 1:45 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Internet services company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) is looking to boost its business in the Internet's next big growth area -- voice communications.

The largest U.S. provider of Web e-mail services, Yahoo already has deals with several landline and wireless telephone companies, including SBC Communications (NYSE:SBC - news), Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ - news) and Sprint Corp. (NYSE:FON - news), for a variety of Web-based services.

In addition to voice services, Yahoo is also expanding the reach of its e-mail service, saying earlier this week it would allow Sprint wireless customers to manage their e-mail accounts through their cell phones. Last month, Yahoo announced an upgrade of its messenger service, boosting the ability to make free voice calls between computers.

For what the future could hold, Yahoo points to its deal with Britain's BT Group Plc (BT.L), which sells the BT Communicator -- a version of Yahoo's Messenger that can not only handle voice calls between computers but make and receive telephone calls.

"We view voice as a fundamental aspect of the instant messaging experience," said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications products for Yahoo, in an interview Thursday with Reuters. "We will continue to enhance and expand the voice functionality within Messenger."

The market for the intersection of computer messaging and telephone service has been dominated by Skype, a European software company. The free Skype software allows users to call to any other Skype user globally for free and to make and receive calls at low cost. With little advertising, Skype typically has up to 3 million users online.

Garlinghouse declined to offer specifics of Yahoo's future plans for voice services. But officials at SBC say they were considering a Skype-like service that could be sold with Yahoo.

"We could put one together real quickly," said Scott Helbing, senior vice president for consumer marketing, in a recent interview with Reuters. "We don't have that service right now, but we're interested in it and we're investigating time to market and the services that are out there."

Garlinghouse said Yahoo preferred to work with telephone companies like BT and SBC instead of pursuing customers independently.

"By working with the carriers, we've found there's a very nice symbiotic relationship," Garlinghouse said. With voice messenger services, "one of the nice things with working with BT is it allows us to deliver a much higher call quality."

Garlinghouse said Yahoo saw an opportunity to simplify the growing sprawl of customers' e-mail accounts and voice mail boxes. As part of the SBC deals, SBC customers will be able to access voice mails through Yahoo's e-mail service.

"You're seeing these huge collisions occur, and over time we won't think about ... voice mail, e-mail, or IM," he said. "I think we'll increasingly think about it as 'I have an inbox."'

June 10, 2005 at 07:29 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (17) | Top of page | Blog Home

Meg and the power of many

eBay | Meg and the power of many | Economist.com

The world's biggest online auctioneer is trading on a new sort of future

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MORE than 10,000 people from all over the world will gather in San Jos� on June 23rd to praise, criticise and learn more about a remarkable business that has turned into a cultural phenomenon. Some will be collectors, others aspiring entrepreneurs and quite a few will have become millionaires. For many, the highlight of three days of networking and seminars will be a tour of the headquarters of the company that has made their own businesses possible: eBay. The online-auction firm's annual users' conference is being held in its home town this year to celebrate its tenth anniversary. In that supercharged decade eBay has gone from being a curious child of the internet to one of the fastest-growing companies ever. But adolescent problems are looming.

To remain one of the stars of the ever-evolving web, eBay has to change with it. The company has already achieved one extraordinary transformation: from being a website begun as a hobby and often used to trade collectables such as Beanie Babies, it has become an economy in its own right. It now has around 150m registered users worldwide—not far short of the combined populations of France, Spain and Britain—buying and selling goods expected to be worth well over $40 billion this year. Some 60m of eBay's users are “active��, having bid for or listed items within the past year.

In America, eBay's most established market, its rate of growth is slowing. Nevertheless, the company accounts for about one-quarter of all e-commerce sales, excluding groceries and travel. Some 500,000 Americans, eBay estimates, now make all or part of their living from trading on its site. eBay is also growing in popularity abroad. Around 12% of the time Germans spend online is browsing eBay's site there. Britons are not far behind in their use of eBay.co.uk. And new markets are opening in Asia. Against fierce local competition, eBay is pushing hard into China, which some expect will become the company's biggest market in five to ten years. Meg Whitman, eBay's chief executive, believes there is everything to play for: �I think we are still at the beginning of what eBay can actually become,� she says.

Others also spy the opportunities, not only of international expansion, but also in providing new services that bring buyers and sellers together. This is why the other three online giants, Google, Yahoo! and Amazon, are offering more buying and selling services. Yahoo! and Amazon also host auctions and Google's search facilities�including its comparison-shopping service, Froogle�allow consumers to search for links to whatever they are interested in buying. eBay's $620m purchase on June 1st of Shopping.com adds a shopping-comparison service to its offering.

As the entire internet becomes one huge marketplace with many ways to buy and sell, the challenge for eBay is to corral as much of that trade as possible. Its chief advantage has been the power of many. eBay delivers the efficiency of a global market to buyers and sellers, no matter how small they might be, in a neatly packaged way. As more buyers flock to its website, the more attractive it becomes to sellers, and so the bazaar grows. On top of this, eBay's reputation-management system and other features (see article), establishes a level of order and trust.

Thousands of different categories of items are now traded on eBay. Some of these things even eBay never expected to see. Used cars, for instance, surprised everyone, but are now its most valuable category (likely to be worth some $13 billion this year). Goods sold at fixed prices have come to account for 30% of the value of all goods sold. This, in turn, makes eBay more like an online retailer�but one that carries no stock. The wares of more than 260,000 virtual �stores� are also listed. Fixed prices have helped some categories, such as clothing and accessories, to grow rapidly�these are mostly sold as new items. This alone could be worth $3 billion this year. And new categories continue to appear all the time. One of the latest is for capital goods, ranging from used catering equipment to $100,000 MRI scanners.

The network effect of eBay might seem like a natural monopoly in the making. Indeed, many users howled in protest when in January eBay sharply increased some of its fees. But where else could they go? Ms Whitman scowls: the notion that users have no alternatives is, she says, �awfully arrogant�. There are other online auction sites, but they are much smaller. eBay's real competition, however, is increasingly coming from all over the internet, not least from people selling directly off their own websites and using online marketing methods, such as purchasing search terms on competing sites such as Google, to promote themselves. �Buyers today have many more options than they have ever had in the history of shopping,� adds Ms Whitman. To fulfil its ambition of becoming the world's trading platform of choice, the most important thing the company has to do is keep the vast army of eBayers happy.

Community relations

The eBay �community�, as it is called, can be a vociferous one�especially when it grumbles. �This was a noisy one,� says Bill Cobb about the protest over fee increases. As president of North America, he was charged with responding. The price changes were designed to balance the market, for instance to produce more differentiation between standard listings and optional features which sellers can pay extra for. But the reasons were not well explained, says Mr Cobb. There were other complaints too, so Mr Cobb did the rounds; attending what eBay calls �town hall� meetings with users and participating in debates on its message boards. Some eBay user groups are now plugged directly into eBay's corporate e-mail to alert category managers if things go awry. Executives know they will be buttonholed in San Jos�, but expect it because they are dealing with issues at the centre of many of their users' lives. As Mr Cobb puts it, at eBay �the passion meter runs high.�

That seems to have been true ever since eBay (originally called Auction Web) was founded in 1995 by its chairman Pierre Omidyar, a software engineer. His aim was to create a simple online system in which a group of people could trade goods. As trading began to take off, professional management was brought in. Ms Whitman joined as CEO in 1998 from Hasbro, an American toy company, and later that year eBay became a public company.

eBay is on course to make an annual profit of around $1 billion this year. But any firm that has grown at such a frantic pace, consistently exceeding stockmarket expectations, is bound to take something of a pasting when its momentum slows. That happened when eBay's fourth-quarter results came in a fraction short of what Wall Street expected. Its share price fell sharply but has since partly recovered (see chart). Although results in the three months to March 31st saw eBay's quarterly revenues break through the $1-billion barrier for the first time, Google now rivals it in terms of market capitalisation.

Yet dealing with Wall Street pales in comparison with managing the company to the satisfaction of the eBay community. �Managing is the wrong word,� says Mr Cobb. �We enable, we listen, we respond.� The process is a world away from management at his previous employer, PepsiCo. �Generally in a company the employees know the most about the business. In eBay, our community knows more than we do,� he adds. Ms Whitman concurs: �We make a small number of rules and get the heck out of the way, because the entrepreneurial talents of our users will solve a lot of the problems.�

Such is the inherent beauty of the eBay business model. The users do most of the work: photographing their goods, writing their listings, communicating with their buyers, packing and then dispatching their sales. eBay earns a fee per transaction, enjoying an overall operating margin of 35%.

To keep the sellers and buyers coming back, eBay has to innovate with new features. The latest is a new format called �Want It Now�. This works in a similar way to a wanted ad. Another new service is �Best Offer�, which eBay describes as the addition of the �haggling� factor. It allows a seller asking a fixed price to entertain a best offer. Haggling is, as Mr Cobb says, �a time-honoured tradition of trading.�

Paying up

One of the most powerful services added by eBay was its $1.5-billion acquisition in 2002 of PayPal, an online-payments company. By the first quarter of 2005, PayPal's worldwide number of account holders was up 57% on the same period a year ago to 72m. This gives PayPal more account holders than American Express�and with hardly any marketing. In America, about three-quarters of the value of all the goods traded on eBay are now settled by PayPal.

The payments system was built on top of the financial markets, says Jeff Jordan, PayPal's president. Not only does it greatly speed up payments (they are confirmed instantly by e-mail), but it also addresses one of the main concerns of buying and selling online: fraud. To hold an account, PayPal validates the identity of its users through established bank accounts or credit cards. It then employs a number of powerful anti-fraud measures, the chief one being the simplest: no credit-card or banking details are revealed to either party. Fraud in the PayPal system is said to be about one-third less than that typically associated with most credit-card purchases.

PayPal is now following eBay overseas. As it has in Britain, the arrival of a localised PayPal service typically accelerates the use of the local eBay site. One of the reasons for this is that sellers can also accept credit-card payments through a PayPal account. The online-payments system is free to buyers, with sellers paying a fee. Qualifying sellers (those with good reputations) can even offer through PayPal a buyer-protection service worth up to $1,000. Last year PayPal also announced a tie-up with GE Consumer Finance to allow sellers to offer their customers credit as well.

Apart from its international expansion�which also makes cross-border purchases easier�a big push is being made to have PayPal adopted by other e-commerce sites. Some, especially individual proprietors, already use it. For bigger firms, PayPal is a payment option along with the usual credit and debit cards. The potential to capture an even bigger share of online commerce is, says Mr Jordan, enormous.

One of the great attractions of eBay is its entertainment value; like any great flea market you never know what you will find. As with other websites, eBay can trace where people go and what they click on�not that it always makes much sense. Someone may arrive at eBay following a link from an internet search for a Harry Potter novelty, but leave having bought an Apple computer. Serendipity is a powerful force that eBay is keen to play on, so that almost anything (provided it is not illegal or offensive in its various markets) can be found either by chance or design.

Along with other e-commerce firms, eBay is also interested in local shopping services. Last year it acquired a minority stake in craigslist, a San Francisco-based website operator and one of the pioneers of (mostly free) online local listings. In March, eBay launched Kijiji, which is Swahili for �village�. This is being used as an umbrella brand to offer classifieds in almost 100 cities outside America. In May, Kijiji bought London-based Gumtree.com and Spain's LoQUo.com, both of which also offer city-based classifieds.

Kijiji gives eBay more scope to carry things that do not naturally fit into its existing auction categories, like services, home rentals, personals and jobs, says Ms Whitman. But the project is, she cautions, at its earliest stages of development. So far, for example, there are no plans to export eBay's reputation-management system. But if eBay ever did, agrees Ms Whitman, it might one day be possible to find a plumber in London�and check the comments left on his level of service.

What will the next ten years bring? It seems likely that eBay will continue to become more like a giant portal for many more things�and that Yahoo!, Google and Amazon will evolve along similar lines. eBay executives agree that it is unrealistic to expect traders, however big or small, to use eBay exclusively, although some may. It will be up to eBay to win as much e-commerce as it can by its quality of service.

It will be a tough fight. eBay is not invincible. The company was trounced in Japan by Yahoo! and withdrew from that market in 2002. eBay blames much of its Japanese troubles on being late to enter the country. Building scale fast is a critical factor, says Mark Zaleski. He is chief executive of QXL, a London-based online auction site once seen as a rival to eBay, but now confined to market leadership in just Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. Even in markets where eBay is strong, says Mr Zaleski, it is still possible to compete through specialist auctions. But don't expect huge defections. �It's a bit like a club,� says Mr Zaleski. Some members may grumble and stomp off to a rival, but if most of the action remains at the place they have left, they will eventually wander back.

Networking in China

The battle to scale up quickly is now underway in China, where eBay is spending $100m to promote itself. If eBay is successful there, cross-border trading, which currently runs at about 15% of turnover, should grow. Ms Whitman expects such trade will be much bigger in years to come, as more and more connections are made.

But will she still be running eBay? When Ms Whitman, who is seen as the most powerful woman in corporate America, agreed to be shortlisted earlier this year for the top job at Walt Disney, some analysts thought she might be preparing to bail out of eBay. In the event, she withdrew and Bob Iger, already at Disney, was appointed its boss. Ms Whitman, who once worked for Disney, says she was flattered by the approach but �decided eBay was the best place for me.� She says she will remain at the helm for the next three years�to her tenth anniversary with the firm�and then decide if she is still the right person to run the company. But �where else do you go after eBay?� she asks. Ms Whitman describes her company as �still the best place in the world to start a new business.� Perhaps that is her answer.

June 10, 2005 at 09:11 AM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (32) | Top of page | Blog Home

$80bn Google takes top media spot

BBC NEWS | Business | $80bn Google takes top media spot

Internet search phenomenon Google has overtaken a swathe of venerable rivals to become the world's biggest media company by stock market value.

After its shares hit an all-time high on the New York markets on Tuesday, Google is now worth $80bn (�44bn).

his takes it ahead of media leviathan Time Warner, which is valued at $78bn.

The valuation comes in spite of the fact that Google's annual sales total just $3.2bn, a fraction of Time Warner's $42bn.

Good value?

Some analysts believe Google's shares are now overpriced, a rerun of the heady valuations seen during the internet boom of the late 1990s.

Google's share price

Take a look at Google's share price

Others maintain that Google's high stock value reflects its future earning potential and that its shares could go as high as $325-350.

Google has become the world's most highly-valued media company after only 10 months of trading as a public company.

It now dwarfs more traditional media companies such as Viacom and Walt Disney, which have stock market capitalisations of between $54bn and $55bn.

When it first floated in August last year, its shares debuted at $85.

Google makes most of its money from the sale of advertising that sits alongside its search results.

Modest founders

Google was founded in September 1998 by former Stanford University computer science students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Global media giants by market value

They initially launched the business from a friend's garage after pulling together $1m from family, friends and other investors.

Now still in their early 30s and both multi-millionaires, Mr Page and Mr Brin are said to continue to live modest lifestyles.

Initially, Google got 10,000 queries per day compared with 200 million today.

June 8, 2005 at 03:43 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

New Yahoo download expands mobile e-mail service

New Yahoo download expands mobile e-mail service - Yahoo! News

Wed Jun 8, 9:18 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Internet services company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) rolled out late on Tuesday a paid mobile download that provides Sprint subscribers with e-mail services similar to those available on personal computers.
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The mobile service, offered on Sprint PCS Vision handsets, costs $2.99 a month. Users can manage their Yahoo mail accounts from their cell phones as well as access contact information in their Yahoo address book. Among other things, it also allows users to download their e-mail so it can be accessed even if a Web connection is not available.

Yahoo, the No. 1 U.S. provider of Web e-mail services, competes with Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE:TWX - news) AOL, Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) Hotmail and, to a lesser extent, Google Inc.'s (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) Gmail.

June 8, 2005 at 12:43 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (24) | Top of page | Blog Home

Google's long memory stirs privacy concerns

Google's long memory stirs privacy concerns - Yahoo! News

Fri Jun 3, 8:04 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When Google Inc.'s 19 million daily users look up a long-lost classmate, send e-mail or bounce around the Web more quickly with its new Web Accelerator, records of that activity don't go away.

In an era of increased government surveillance, privacy watchdogs worry that Google's vast archive of Internet activity could prove a tempting target for abuse.

Like many other online businesses, Google (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) tracks how its search engine and other services are used, and who uses them. Unlike many other businesses, Google holds onto that information for years.

Some privacy experts who otherwise give Google high marks say the company's records could become a handy data bank for government investigators who rely on business records to circumvent Watergate-era laws that limit their own ability to track U.S. residents.

At a time when libraries delete lending records as soon as a book is returned, Google should purge its records after a certain point to protect users, they say.

"What if someone comes up to them and says, 'We want to know whenever this key word comes up'? All the capability is there and it becomes a one-stop shopping center for all these kinds of things," said Lauren Weinstein, an engineer who co-founded People for Internet Responsibility, a forum for online issues.

Google officials say their extensive log files help them improve service, fight fraud and develop new products, and unlike many other online companies, it seems willing to pay for the enormous storage capacity needed to save the data.

"If it's useful, we'll hold on to it," said Nicole Wong, a Google associate general counsel.

Google complies with law-enforcement investigations, Wong said. She declined to comment on the frequency or scope of those requests.

From the ground up, Google designs its offerings to minimally impact user privacy, Wong said. Google doesn't share the information it collects from visitors with outside marketers. Employees must get executive approval before they examine traffic data, she said.

Google logs the numerical IP address of each computer that visits many of its sites, and deposits small bits of code known as "cookies" on users' machines to automatically remember preferences like which language they use, she said. Users can reject cookies if they wish, but some services like Gmail, Google's e-mail, will not work without them.

It's difficult to tie cookies and IP addresses to a particular person, Wong said. The IP address of a computer can change every time it signs on to the Internet, and different services use different cookies so the company doesn't know, for example, that a particular Gmail user has visited the Web site of an abortion providers.

POLICIES COULD CHANGE

But absent regulation, there's nothing to prevent Google from linking together those cookies in the future, said Chris Hoofnagle, who heads the West Coast office of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"Events can change corporate culture, and those who use the Google service may experience a shift in the definition of 'evil,"' Hoofnagle said, referring to the company's "Don't be evil" motto.

Rivals like Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Internet service providers such as Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE:TWX - news) America Online also track user activity. But ISPs generally don't hold onto such information for more than a month because storage costs and privacy concerns can mount quickly, said Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who has represented ISPs in law-enforcement matters.

"If you don't have a reason to keep a bunch of data around, it's probably prudent to get rid of it," he said.

Yahoo declined to say how long it holds on to its log files.

Google's generous mail service creates risks as well. While AOL purges customer e-mail from its servers after 28 days unless users specify otherwise, Gmail encourages users to hold onto their messages indefinitely.

Most people don't know that a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old, said Ari Schwartz, an associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"That doesn't mean that Google needs to change its technology, but they do need to do some consumer education," he said.

Even when a user deletes a message it may remain on company servers, according to the Gmail privacy policy.

Some don't see Google's long memory as a bad thing.

"You wouldn't want them to throw away all the queries that have been done -- that's like throwing away history," said Danny Sullivan, editor of the trade publication Search Engine Watch.

Weinstein doesn't think so.

"There's really no good reason to hold onto that information for more than a few months," he said. "They seem to think that because their motives are pure that everything is OK and they can operate on a trust basis. History tells us that is not the case."

June 4, 2005 at 02:50 PM in Portals | Permalink | TrackBack (16) | Top of page | Blog Home

Yahoo Japan to tie up with Nikko Cordial, E*Trade

Yahoo Japan to tie up with Nikko Cordial, E*Trade - Yahoo! News

By Osamu Tsukimori and Yuko Inoue Wed Jun 1, 3:33 AM ET

TOKYO (Reuters) - Yahoo Japan Corp., Japan's top Internet portal, said on Wednesday it would link up with two of the country's leading brokerages as it seeks a foothold in the rapidly expanding market for online stock trading.

The tie-up with Japan's third-largest brokerage, Nikko Cordial Corp., and the biggest online broker, E*Trade Securities Co., will allow Yahoo users to open accounts with the brokers and to order a variety of financial products.

The announcement of the tie-up, to take effect from August or September, sent shares in some online brokerages such as Matsui Securities Co. lower on fears of heightened competition.

"New customers might find Yahoo's services more attractive than those of the established brokerages," said Masayoshi Okamoto, head of dealing at Jujiya Securities. "It will squeeze the competition."

Cheap and easy Internet trading through firms like Matsui, kabu.com Securities Co. and others now accounts for 70-80 percent of total trading by Japan's individual investors, a blow to conventional brokerages such as industry leader Nomura Holdings Inc.

Online trading accounts jumped to about 6.94 million at the end of March, up by about 1.12 million from six months ago, according to a survey released in May by the Japan Securities Dealers Association.

The value of online stock trading reached about 67 trillion yen ($617.9 billion) in the six months en