First, Google purchased DoubleClick, next it was Microsoft that bought aQuantive and now it’s Yahoo’s time to get its own online advertising company.
Yahoo has just acquired BlueLithium, the #6 ad network in the US, for $300 million, far from $3.1 billion Google paid for DoubleClick and just 5% of the amount of money Microsoft spent on aQuantive.
Microsoft’s top technical executive, Ray Ozzie, has recently said that Google success in finding in advertising revenue “was a wake-up call within Microsoft”. But he said Microsoft plans to do more than simply mimic Google by rolling out Web-based versions of desktop programs or following its particular search and advertising model.
Instead of jumping belatedly into the fray with Web-only programs, he said Microsoft will pursue a mix of software loaded on PCs and Internet services that also work with the growing array of mobile devices, a strategy he called ‘’software-plus-service'’.
He said he sees free, Web-based, ad-supported software as a way to extend Microsoft Office’s reach, but gave no specifics. ‘’Advertisers do want a targeted audience,'’ he said. If Microsoft can deliver it, ‘’I don’t see a reason why advertisers won’t move'’. What comes next? Only time will tell.
Just a few days from being launched and Yahoo Pipes is putting lots of minds to work:
- five cool ways to use Yahoo! Pipes
- del.icio.us flavored web search
Lots else. What comes next? Only time will tell.
Yahoo! has just launched a new service called Yahoo Pipes which offers users the ability to easily create data mashups from remixing popular feed types, including Yahoo! Search, Google Base, Flickr photos and any RSS feed on the web. Yahoo! describes it as an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that allows you to create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.
Pipes also provides a set of functional modules to let users manipulate and transform data in oder to get the desired output. This set includes a powerful content analyzer, several data formatters, sorting modules and even translating services using BabelFish translating engine.
All these modules are integrated in an easy-to-use visual drag and drop editor that simplifies the job of building a mashup without writing a single line of code. The resulting feed can be for private use or shared with the Internet community. As Tim O’Reilly has defined it:
Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.
According to Google, their mission is to organize the information. In this case Yahoo! has won a battle letting the users create more organized, filtered and useful information by theirselves. Could it be a step towards Web3.0 in which users not only contribute but can take advantage of the rest of information their own way and share it? What comes next? Only time will tell.
Google is going to transform its Google Video service, in which users upload video content to be shared, into a Google Video Search service, a search engine to look for video content no matter where it may be hosted.
A logical step considering Google’s world-famous mission which is to organize the world’s information. Even more, after YouTube’s acquisition, Google has had two compiting products on the market and finally it’s time to fully integrate YouTube into Google’s product portfolio.
Additionally, according to Financial Times, Google is planning to share advertising revenues on YouTube with the users who upload the clips. Good news for top YouTubers and one more incentive for those users producing quality videos. Could it be the first step in building a real Google TV? What comes next? Only time will tell.
Chinese online population hit 136 million people by the end of 2006 becoming the world’s second largest behind the U.S. with a total online spending of $35,5 billion (47% more than the previous year).
Average Chinese Internet user spends $22 a month online, including payment to online services providers as well as shopping ang gaming. Still, the most popular Internet services in China are search engines (dominated by Baidu and Google and, to a lesser degree, by Yahoo!) followed by Internet portals (led by Sina.com, Netease.com and qq.com) and e-mail services.
But the most rapid growth in usage last year came from blogging. China now has 20.8 million bloggers. Top blogging sites are hosted by Sina, Qzone and MSN. Other new Internet services that are gaining particularly wide acceptance are personal Web pages similar to those on MySpace and video-sharing based on the Web 2.0 standards similar to YouTube. What comes next? Only time will tell.
Krugle (pronounced ‘kroogle’) is a search engine for software developers that helps in finding source code among open source projects or public code in the web. It also allows to find particular projects or to search over technical documents.
Besides the common search engine capabilities, this web application presents a great usability as users can keep their search results and browse over other related searches without losing the results in a tabbed-IDE-style way (IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, a well known interface among their potential users). Furthermore, Krugle also offers capabilities to add comments to the code that users can share among the community in a web2.0-manner.
Launched in early 2006, Krugle has become an essential tool for developers and, despite its phonetic similarity with ‘Google’, they both have nothing to do with each other. Google, on their side, is developing a similar application that still stays as a ‘lab project‘. It is called Google Code Search.
Nevertheless, Google Code Search is far from being a real competitor for Krugle. It lacks many of Krugle’s functionality and only adds regular expression based search. But we all know what happens when Google is second best. Just remember YouTube. What comes next? Only time will tell.
A new startup has just launched to help people in the hard task of reading daily news. Daylife, as it is called, offers its users a new way to read the news with a wide variety of perspectives.
The service crawls the news from several respected news sites and automatically analyzes and classifies them to find out hot topics and top stories of the day, becoming so far a Google News’ competitor.
But Daylife also adds automatic relationships among stories, people, places and organizations giving its user the ability to explore the connections their own way. Furthermore, Daylife offers the posibility of having your own “world” with your selected topics and preferences with just a simple click on a little star nearby any kind of content.
On the other hand, Daylife lacks functionalities for community discussion, rating content or RSS feeds. Considering that the market is hot for mergers and acquisitions (remember yesterday’s purchase of StudiVZ), there can be a bright future for a service like that as long as they include all so-called web2.0-like functionalities. What comes next? Only time will tell.
Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is planning to start a wiki-based search engine that will probably be launched in early 2007 with Amazon as partner.
The main idea behind this project is to build a human-based search engine over computer-based algorithms like the ones that Google and Yahoo! work with. According to Mr. Wales this kind of systems is no match for the editorial judgment of humans. So this new concept of search engine will rely on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot.
The search engine has widely and wrongly been reported as being called “Wikiasari” which, as Wales has stated, that name refers to a former similar project, Wikia search engine, not affiliated with Amazon, A9, or Wikipedia.
Like its potential competitors, the revenue model for this new search engine will be advertising, though Mr. Wales himself thinks that catching up with Google, Yahoo!, MSN or even smaller players like Ask.com will be a difficult challenge. What comes next? Only time will tell.