Alert Blog Reviews

The drama surrounding Skype as of late played out like a business soap opera. The accusations flew from both sides of the fence with founders and owners going at it tooth and nail. Check out Kara Swisher’s account over at All Things Digital for the blow by blow description. Now it looks like the ‘all clear’ can be sounded as an agreement has been reached. Here’s a synopsis for you from TechCrunch Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology. So now the world can rest easy that Skype should move forward without the imminent threat of being taken out of the market. Of course, just because this part of the story is concluded that is no guarantee that something else might not crop up. That goes for anything though. So what’s one of the proposed new owners Skype think? TechCrunch spoke to Marc Andreesen about the settlement. “The deal was never held up. The money was in escrow and was going to close” even if the lawsuits weren’t settled. The transaction is on track to close later this quarter. The other investors are Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Index Ventures and Mike Volpi are out of the deal. Josh Silverman will continue to be CEO. Andreessen is glad that the lawsuits are settled and that the “Joltid IP is now owned by Skype,” but was prepared to litigate if it didn’t work out. He explains: “This was a completely known situation going into it. It was one of the reasons the deal was available, because of the situation. We assumed it would be a good idea to bring the founders on board and resolve all the issues, we are very pro-founder. There was some drama along the way, but we came out with everybody in the same boat rowing in the same direction.” So now everyone is in the same boat and rowing in the same direction. Skype is tracking for $740 million in revenue so all is good with the world. Yippee! Unfortunately, all you need to do is check out the real news and know that this is as far from the truth as it can possibly be. Have a good weekend and stay safe.

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Skype Founders Re-Found in Settlement

Welcome to this Friday’s version of surveys, research and statistics to ponder. Of course, how and what you ponder always has more to do with the source of the statistics and your mood which makes the numbers kinda funky but ‘Hey!’, if we didn’t have stats what would we do with our days? This latest statistical ‘he said / she said’ consists of different numbers regarding the state of e-commerce. Today’s particpants are, “In the red corner”, comScore. They are in the red corner because they are reporting that e-commerce is slipping for the first time in the history of the world (you get it right?). “In the blue corner” is Forrester who tells everyone to not get our knickers in a twist because even in the cruddy economy e-commerce is the light on the hill or a veritable economic ‘beacon o’ hope’. Today’s match is brought to you by the Wall Street Journal . On Thursday, comScore reported that U.S. online spending in the third quarter slipped 2% to $29.6 billion versus last year. That represents the first time since comScore began tracking the figures that online spending has shrunk for two quarters in a row. (Online shopping was flat in the first quarter, and slipped 1% in the second quarter.) ComScore was slightly more upbeat about the potential of growth in the fourth quarter, if only because we’ll be comparing it to last year’s dismal fourth quarter. But on Monday, Forrester Research put out a report that reached a different conclusion: online sales in November and December are likely to grow 8% compared to last year. Moreover, a survey Forrester conducted with the National Retail Foundation found that online retailers reported sales in the third quarter grew 16%. Geesh, can’t we all just get along? Let’s just say this. The rest of the article is the two researchers pointing fingers at each other saying that how they collect data is better than the other guy and having a researchers equivalent of a “my dad can beat up your dad” argument. How about we do this? How about we look at what has happened and then work toward getting better. Then we assess if we did or did not get better after we actually DID SOMETHING! What a concept. Aren’t rosy predictions and unfettered prognostications how we got into this mess in the first place? Isn’t predicting the future that never was a mistake? If the Internet truly is a better way to do things then why can’t we find a better way to assess things rather than act like we have some magic 8-ball or crystal ball that tells the future as well. We don’t. My prediction? People will go out and do their very best to make something happen in Q4 regardless of these predictions and then they will live in the world of reality of whether things are good or bad, not in the fantasy land of what they may or may not be in the future. This research is for the big boys and not the rest of the world and even then it’s dicey at best. One man’s opinion. Have a fun Friday!

Excerpt from:
E-commerce. Up? Down? All Around?

Ad Age today summarize the state of the search engine marketing industry —and it’s largely good, including the fact that we’ve weathered the recession well so far, we’ve seen tremendous growth over our lifespan and most marketers are convinced of, interested in or doing SEM in some form. Naturally, the report focuses on the elephant in the room—the biggest search engine in the world. Google dominates the search market in almost every country of the world—but there are a few places where competitors might be able to find a chink in Google’s armor. Bingahoo is cited as one possible challenger, although by the measure Ad Age is using, a combined Yahoo/Bing share would be 26% to Google’s 65% of the market. However, Bing has shown notable success, including a report from Nielsen in July: According to Nielsen data from July for the U.S., 27% of Google searchers also used Bing at least once that month, and 39% used Yahoo. Of course, the same holds true for Bing and Yahoo searchers — a majority of them also use Google. We saw similar reports on low search-engine loyalty back in February as well, even before Bing and its marketing blitz. But the fact that people are at least trying Bing bodes well for Microsoft—since CEO Steve Ballmer pledged to spend up to 10% of MSFT’s operating income a year to pushing Bing to the top of the heap (up to $2b/yr). The other major area is mobile search . While lots of people do turn to Google for their mobile search, just like they do with . . . “immobile” search—and Android is helping with that—Ad Age reports that the number of mobile Internet devices outweighs the number of computers—which means that lots of mobile Internet users don’t have a desktop habit of Googling. Instead, they may use whatever default their service provider or phone includes (again with the Android). What do you think? Does it really matter if Google is so dominant in the search industry, or is fine and dandy (as long as they don’t penalize your site)? Can they be beaten?

Link:
Where Can Google Be Beaten?

Google went a long way toward answering the naysayers of their Google Apps offering. How you ask? By winning a contract to provide e-mail and other Internet services to the City of Los Angeles. Nice get. While winning a contract is just the first step in proving that Google is a serious threat to the stronghold of Microsoft’s software business, it’s a pretty big step. This kind of deal will be felt up and down the left coast (that’s what we East Coast folks refer to the West Coast as). Starting in the great Northwest there will be some serious Steve Ballmer hand-wringing and maybe another Bobby Knight-like chair throwing moment or two. In NoCal (the Google Plex in Mountain View in particular) there may be some Tiger Woods-like fist pumps of victory. While in SoCal it’s likely that no one outside the people who made the decision will know or care because it’s not directly about them. Different strokes for different folks, right? Yahoo Finance tells us that while this is a victory for sure there are the typical concerns that still need to be overcome and there’s nothing like a financial penalty to overcome those issues. The Council voted unanimously for the $7.2 million deal with contractor Computer Sciences Corp. to replace many city computer systems with the so-called Google Apps services. An amendment added shortly before the vote makes the contract contingent on Computer Science agreeing to pay a preset penalty if a security breach occurs. The contractor’s project manager David Barber said he believed such an agreement would be reached. The city’s police officers’ union and privacy advocates had raised security concerns over the Google contract because it places data online rather than on individual computers under the city’s direct control. I bet dollars to donuts (there was a police officer reference after all) that Microsoft is assigning the task to someone to watch this thing like a hawk and to know just when and to what degree a security breach occurs if at all. This particular battle could be looked back on as a game changing moment as there is an ‘out with the old and in with the new’ theme. The big loser? Novell. The move will also end the city’s 7-year contract to use Novell Inc.’s GroupWise e-mail and record-keeping software, which city workers have complained is slow and crash-prone. Novell senior vice president said during the Council hearing that many city departments were not using the most recent version of GroupWise and reiterated an offer to provide additional services for free. That kind of ‘excuse based selling’ is not recommended and does not fly in today’s business world does it? My question is why weren’t they upgraded by Novell so they could at least have a shot at keeping the business? Silly me for asking such an obvious question, right? Meanwhile back at the Plex all is good with the world. “In our view, this can be a watershed agreement,” said Dave Girouard, president of the Google division that provides business services. “There’s a lot of cities and counties around the state and around the nation who were watching this.” Translation? If you are a Google rep and you are talking to any of the big government agencies you better set an appointment now to make it happen in a local government near you. So Google continues to expand far beyond the world of search. I’m not surprised are you?

Link:
Google Wins Over the City of Angels

Search is changing very rapidly these days and it looks like we are going to need to buckle up to keep up with the changes and, even more likely, the rumored changes. Until I can use something myself (which means the rest of you can as well) then it is all rumor. Experimentation is the order of the day in search and especially as it relates to social search and the holy grail of real time search. Since bing and Google have both announced their deals with Twitter regarding using Twitter’s vaunted stream to allow the world to update us with whatever the world deems important (note: while that sounds valuable on the surface I think that getting through the spam and other crap is going to be a pretty big deal for the end user to stomach but that’s for another day I suppose) the talk is all about how we can harness this new age of on-demand information. Google’s Marissa Mayer informally rolled out a Google Labs experiment which was introduced yesterday and reported by TechCrunch At the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer unexpectedly came on stage to unveil a new product. She first announced that Google has also reached a deal with Twitter, which she wrote a blog post about earlier in the day, following the announcement that Bing and Twitter had done the same thing. But Mayer had more to share. There’s a new Google product called “Social Search” that is launching soon in Google Labs. This is a new feature that allows you to see results for queries from people in your social network. This works by using your Google Profile. If you fill it out with the other social networks you’re a member of, such as FriendFeed, Google will scan who you are connected to and give your results from those people. Nifty, I suppose. First, let’s define the people that are in many of these networks of ours. How many of them do we really know and also how many are reliable sources of any data to begin with. Not that this idea isn’t interesting it just seems that as we put more and more power into the hands of people with no experience there will be a degree of “train wreckiness” in the results. Also, as some people start to feel some power around being a source I suspect the limits of what is newsworthy will be stretched paper-thin pretty quickly. So enough of the negativity, right? This Google Labs thing could be interesting. It will work with your Google profile and be opt-in for now according to Mayer (which implies later on it won’t be? When it’s not, it will likely end up like the personalized search history that not many are aware of which means more data for Google. Yay.). So this should take place in the next few weeks and we’ll keep our eyes peeled for any updates. When it does happen are you interested?

Originally posted here:
Google’s Social Search for You and Yours