2008/05/27

Idea: Does Google Own the Search?

Tim O'Reilly, Mike Arrington and a lot of other people are discussing the latest Microsoft moves in the search market. Some are believing Google has won this battle, at least for now.

Idea

Should Microsoft and Yahoo stop fighting for the search market and just leave it in Google's hands?

Microsoft is dropping the Live Book Search, but launches Live Search Cashback. Where does Microsoft want to be positioned in the search market?

Details

This whole discussion started when Tim O'Reilly has published in a blog post the following advice:

my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn't. That is, unless Microsoft makes you so good a deal for your search assets that you just can't say no. But either way, let yourself be quit of the destructive competition and focus on adding real value for your users.

My advice to Microsoft: outsource your search to Google too!

In reply, Mike Arrington is raising quite a few good points

  • We are just getting started in search.
    There are so many areas on search that remain to be conquered. Semantic search. Real language/AI search. The deep web. Media search.
  • Search monopoly and a healthy internet are mutually exclusive.
  • [...] the CPC (cost per click) model is flawed, but in Google’s favor because it puts fraud risk inefficiently on the advertisers, who have no way of controlling it at the search engine level. CPA (cost per action) models work much better, but Google has done little more than test them.

Not far ago, I was also expressing my concerns related to video content search, even if there are quite a few contenders on this market.

In the following comments and new Tim's post, both have finally agreed that Tim's original advise was not about leaving Google approach to search unchallenged, but rather something that sounds more like Seth Godin's Purple Cow: instead of playing the catch up role, Microsoft and Yahoo should be investing their money and energy into researching something new, worthy and remarkable.

I also think that Tim O'Reilly opinions were triggered by the Microsoft's attempts to monetize search through the introduction of Microsoft Live Search Cashback, a new service on which the opinions are quite disputed right now.

However, there are signs that Microsoft is starting to look differently at the search market, as it has currently dropped the Live Search Books project (which was a reaction to Google's Book Search).

Posted by Alex Popescu at 3:27 AM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: , , , ,

2008/05/23

Idea: Twitter Needs Patience and Minds

Twitter became addictive for its users. When going down they get frustrated. Those users with technical background are discussing on what is wrong and how can it be fixed.

Problem

Twitter.com What is wrong with Twitter's current architecture? How would you fix it? What parts must be scaled out and how?

Alex Payne, one of the Twitter core developers, has finally blogged on this topic and described the real problem:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency's sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system.

Many of the best practices in scalability are inapplicable to the peculiar problem space of social messaging. Many off-the-shelf technologies that seem like intuitive fits do not, on closer inspection, meet our needs.

A good explanation of the problems was published on TechCrunch:

The issue is that group messaging is very difficult to achieve at a grand scale. Other large sites such as Wordpress and Digg are mostly dealing with known problems, such as how to serve a large number of pages or a large number of images. Twitter is unique in that it needs to parse a large number of messages and deliver them to multiple recipients, with each user having unique connections to other users.

Idea

Many ideas have been published on what and how to fix it.

Russel Beattie was talking about a decentralized implementation in the form of Jabber bot in his posts Decentralized Twitter thoughts and has even created a demo Peep - an Open Twitter Server.

Eran Hammer-Lahav who created Nouncer, a developer platform for building microblogs, explains in Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I his experience on dealing with such architectures.

Implementation

This is a 'discussion' I've caught last night:

Tim Bray: How many geeks, I wonder, are scribbling Solutions To The Twitter Problem on their internal mental whiteboards at this very moment?

Alex Miller: Seriously, though, I really wonder how many twitter 2.0s are *launching* right now

asteris: Too many, but not enough to produce a solution, apparently.

Currently there are a few alternative similar systems, like Pownce or Jaiku, but considering that the feature set and the traffic and the additional environment is not the same, it is difficult to say if they were able to address all the problems Twitter is facing.

Details

The above mentioned alternatives and most of the suggested solutions have been discussed over and over again. Alex Payne is assuring the Twitter users that:

We'd like people to know that we're motivated by the community discussion around our architecture. We're immersed in ideas about improving our system, and we have a clear direction forward that takes into account many of the bright suggestions that have emerged from the community.

If you have ideas you'd like to share you can reach me on Twitter. Or you can try applying your ideas by working on Twitter.

What we see at Twitter today is a very useful and popular service, but one with very complex underlying technical challenges to overcome. Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find [...], but will also need a little patience from users and those of us observing.

Posted by Alex Popescu at 4:07 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: ,

2008/05/22

Idea: Vision on a Business Card

Idea

Be able to describe your business as shortly and understandable as possible.

Implementation

Venture Hacks have posted a whole entry on the idea of:

Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.

calling it the high concept pitch.

Details

The definition given by Venture Hacks is:

A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence.

The post also talks about how to create your high concept pitch and what benefits you are driving from having one.

Posted by Alex Popescu at 11:48 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: , ,

2008/05/21

Idea: 7 Steps of Guerrilla Marketing

Idea

Guerrilla Marketing refers to unconventional marketing practices. These are usually employed by startups and bootstrappers as they don't require big budgets, but rather lots of imagination and energy and unconventional thinking and practices. Terms like viral, buzz, alternative marketing are usually associated with guerrilla marketing

Implementation

  1. The purpose of the marketing - The physical action you want your prospect to take.
  2. How you’ll achieve this purpose - your competitive advantage and benefits.
  3. Your target market - who are you aiming to benefit?
  4. The marketing weapon you’ll use - online, offline, magazine print, etc.
  5. The niche and your position and what you stand for.
  6. The identity of your business - Not who owns it, but what you stand for.
  7. Your budget - This should be expressed as a percentage of your projected revenue.

Details

You can read a detailed explanation of the 7 steps of the 7 steps of Guerrilla Marketing Strategy on Building an effective Guerrilla Marketing Strategy

Posted by Alex Popescu at 3:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: , ,

2008/05/12

Online video content search engines

In the previous post Video Content Everywhere I was mentioning a couple of concerns related to video based content. Today, I am listing two some of the existing video content search engines.
People are now looking for the videos in search. It’s gone from serendipitously finding videos or someone forwarding it to you, to actively going out and searching for it. (Bill Tancer)

After looking at a couple of video content sites I have expressed a couple of personal concerns related to this type of content:

  • it is still hard to be indexed and searched
  • it is hard to skim over video content and measure its relevance
  • it is quite impossible to reference/quote specific fragments
  • it is way quite hard to produce high quality content, while producing low/crappy quality is way too easy

so I have decided to look what solutions are available at this moment. I have put together a list of the major solutions:

blinkx video content search engine blinkx, which claims to be the world's largest and most advanced video search engine, explains what is needed to achieve good indexing results while working on video content:

blinkx listens to the sound track using speech-to-text technology, looks at the images on screen using advanced video analytics, and reads other information embedded into the file by using media-analysis plug-ins to extract, for example, closed captioning. In this way, blinkx is processing as much information as possible to enable both extremely accurate search, and more advanced operations such as automatic hyperlinking of related content or implicit query, which understands the content a user is producing and viewing.

Most of the above video search engines (those that are not directly hosting video content) have developed partnership networks with some of the most well known video sites, but I guess the next step would be to have their technologies adopted or plugged directly into these so that the search can be performed on site.


In case I have missed any of the existing video search engines, please leave a comment and I will update the above list.

Posted by Alex Popescu at 11:18 PM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: ,

2008/05/09

Video content everywhere

In a market clearly dominated by YouTube (including Google Video), new products seem to come out every day.

Companies don't seem to be worried by the YouTube market share and they are launching new video related products every day.

Not so long ago, we have heard from Seesmic about video-based comments that comes in the form of a Wordpress plugin and their plans to provide similar plugins for Moveable Type and Typepad.

We also have video for intellectuals provided by FORA.tv :

and BigThink with their short very topic focused videos:

One thing that I liked on FORA.tv was the possibility to watch either the whole video or just the Highlights, an approach that is somehow addressing one of my main concerns related to video content

(This video for intellectuals/smart people tagline sounds like something I have heard about in the .ro space too)

I must also mention the online TV guides with video: MeeVee (unfortunately, I've had to spend some time trying to find a program that was really available, so I must confess that I wasn't too impressed by their services) and also the video on demand solutions like Sezmi , which "combines traditional TV content, movies and internet video".

Last, but not least, there are all those products offering new approaches for monetizing video content, but these will be covered some other time

While I'm most definitely loving rich media content, I am still having a couple of concerns related to video-based content:

  • it is still hard to be indexed and searched
  • it is hard to skim over video content and measure its relevance
  • it is quite impossible to reference/quote specific fragments
  • it is way quite hard to produce high quality content, while producing low/crappy quality is way too easy

Posted by Alex Popescu at 5:45 PM 0 comments
Labels:

2008/05/08

What would you say about .ro users?

I have written this entry a couple of days before the eBusinessIntro/DaAfaceri. It was quite interesting to find out that quite a few players on the .ro market are having similar feelings and so I have decided to update the entry and post it.

There cannot be an online business discussion without covering the demographics topic. At eBusinessIntro/DaAfaceri this topic has occurred over and over again and it ranged from school and personal education up to what can be done by the online players. Unfortunately, there weren't any clear conclusions other than the basic things:

You should be interested in getting the money and not how you are getting them.
Give the prospective users more options and at some point they will realize it is useful.

But what is so special or uncommon about the .ro users that make the online players discuss it over and over again? Well, except the facts that we are really missing the basic information (like how large is the market) and any real and trustworthy demographics (age, studies, etc.), there may be a couple of more interesting aspects that the online businesses should be aware of.

So here is how I would characterize the online community according to my short experience in this (particular) space

The .ro user space is very young (sometimes even childish), most of the time unfair, but definitely passionate.

Is it something in this that can be used? I guess this is up to you. And in case you are having a bit of a hard time to believe the above, then I'll encourage you to check the comment threads in the following samples (warning: ro knowledge is required):

How would you characterize the .ro users?

Posted by Alex Popescu at 5:06 PM 0 comments
Labels:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)