According to Harvard associate professor Anita Elberse the The Long Tail popularized by Chris Anderson is flawed. It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story. The report analyzes the implications for retailers and marketers and how they can prosper from the phenomenon.
Microsoft announced the launch an all-in-one security and productivity software subscription service for consumers called Equipt that combines Microsoft Office and Windows Live OneCare. There service will be sold through Circuit City starting in this month. The service will cost $69.99 for a one-year subscription. Each subscription will be good for three home computers.
According to Ina Fried of CNET, the idea behind the subscription service is to convert more new PC buyers into Office buyers. It plays on the fact that although most people don't buy Office at the same time as a computer, many do purchase a security software subscription and Microsoft is trying to tap into the fact that while many people would rather find a copy of Office that they don't have to pay for (either an older version or a pirated copy) they are willing to pay for security software.
eBay announced the launch of a new services for sellers and developers. The services expand the reach for sellers with a new platform, new APIs and a new way for to get in front of eBay sellers.
The new platform initiatives are significant in that they enable developers even more opportunities to make more money with eBay. The program gives developers access to all the data that eBay's existing online app for medium- and large-scale retailers. EBay estimates that their developer program currently has 70,000 members who have created approximately 12,000 live applications.
"We're announcing opening up the eBay.com site for developers and in the process enabling a new monetization channel for developers," said Kumar Kandaswamy, Senior Manager, Developer Platform Strategy, eBay Developers Program. "With Project Echo, the next generation eBay platform that is being announced, developers can embed their applications where hundreds of thousands of sellers manage their businesses on the eBay.com site." Like other online apps that have become platforms, such as Salesforce.com and Facebook, eBay's new initiative, called Project Echo, will give developers not just access to rich data they can package up for customers, but also a marketing channel for their applications.
Project Echo will allow app developers to pitch their apps to just the potential customers they are looking for. For example, if an app is designed only for high-volume electronics sellers, Project Echo will make sure that those sellers get queued up to see pitches for the app; other sellers won't be bothered with it.
In order to get into the Project Echo program, developers have to meet certain standards for trustworthiness. Also, all apps must have 30-day free trials. In return, developers will get access to "special APIs that are only available to people who integrate in Project Echo," according to Max Mancini, senior director of Mobile Platform and Disruptive Innovation.
New online exchanges are allowing small businesses to hedge against earthquakes and catastrophes the same way big business has done for years. Companies such as Weatherbill.com and Stormexchange.com buy large contracts and sell them in smaller chucks at prices that are affordable to small business.
Priceline.com recently a deal where the company will refund money to buyers of its vacation packages if it rains more than a half an inch a day during half or more of the holiday. Priceline can afford to do so, by using financial products that hedge against extremes in heat, cold, wind and rain.
The new online exchanges allow companies to hedge against almost any type of risk to their business, such as a change in weather, higher crude oil prices, rising commodity prices or interest rates.
Small hotels in coastal areas can hedge against hurriances like the big chain hotels and minimize the risk exposure to their business. John Cavanagh, CEO, Carvill Reinsurance, said "I think a lot of retail interest will be developed". Maybe here will be a hedge against $5 gas prices for individuals or maybe someone will create derivative for the Web 2.0 companies to hedge against revenue that might not materialize.
Barack Obama's campaign spent $3.5 million on web advertising between January and April. Of that $2.8 million was spent on Google according to Federal Election Commission filings by Obama for America.
It is estimated that as much as $3 billion could be spent by political campaigns on all forms of advertising. The Obama campaign deployed a mix of pay for performance and display ads on Yahoo, Specific Media, Pulse360, Microsoft's DrivePM, AOL's Quigo and CNN. Spending for other candidates were not available.
Below is a break down of publicly available spending related to online advertising and media strategy for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. See also: Barack Spends $1 Million On Google.
Spending Category Barack Obama Hillary Clinton Google $2,941,500 $67,000 Yahoo $350,500 $9,186 Yahoo Right Media $23,560 $0 Yahoo Pulse $36,500 $0 Microsoft $67,500 $0 Facebook $26,000 $0 AOL $25,000 $0 Broadband Enterprises $80,000 $0 CNN.com $24,000 $0 Politico $36,000 $0 Gothamist $2,800 $0 Web Consultants $93,162 $0 Ad Consultant - Howard Wolfson n/a $997,000 Media Strategist - Mandy Grunwald n/a $2,540,000 Pollster - Mark Penn n/a $3,800,000 Direct Mail - Mark Penn n/a $10,000,000
Time Inc. is bringing back to life Health.com to capitalize on the growing demand for online health information and services. The relaunched portal will include an interactive component to enhance the user experience, feature blogs, a full symptom and drug database, and tips on healthy living.
Health.com will join an already crowded space. The leader in the space is WebMD, with 19.9 million unique visitors, Waterfront Media's Everyday Health, with 14.7 million uniques; AOL Body, with 12.1 million; Revolution Health, with 11.5 million; and the National Institutes for Health at NIH.gov, with 9.6 million according to ComScore Media Metrix for April 2008.
Craigslist has responded to eBay's lawsuit filed against Craigslist and its board of directors.
We are surprised and disappointed by eBay’s unfounded allegations, which came to us out of the blue, without any attempt to engage in a dialogue with us.
Coming from a shareholder that views craigslist as a prime competitor, filing suit without so much as mentioning these assertions beforehand seems unethical, and hints at ulterior motives.
Ensuring the future well-being of craigslist and the craigslist community is admittedly very important to us. But Ebay has absolutely no reason to feel threatened here — unless of course they’re contemplating a hostile takeover of craigslist, or the sale of Ebay’s stake in craigslist to an unfriendly party. (In which case, they’re out of luck).
For our part, we have always treated eBay very fairly as a minority shareholder, and plan to continue doing so, despite this unfortunate development.
Addendum in response to commenter question - To be perfectly clear, eBay’s stake in craigslist has not been unfairly diluted as they have claimed.
Enterprise 2.0 will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013, according to a report by Forrester Research. The top priority for enterprises will be social media applications and tools and most of the money is expected to flow to social networking tools and mashups.
Forrester defines Enterprise 2.0 as the corporate version of Web 2.0. Here’s the research firm’s definition:
In Forrester’s view, the key hallmark of Web 2.0 is efficiency for end users, and the ultimate goal is to use technology like Ajax, rich Internet applications, blogs, wikis, and social networks to foster productive, advantageous behavior among employees, customers, partners, and other networks such as Social Computing, the Information Workplace, and collective intelligence.
Across the board, Web 2.0 tools enter a crowded space full of legacy software and processes that are difficult to displace and with which Web 2.0 software must integrate to be fully effective. Integration with lightweight applications like email and Excel, as well as heavier applications like Web content management suites, campaign management software, portal software, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, must all be addressed over time.
Google has befriended Salesforce.com and recruited the company to battle Microsoft. Salesforce’s customer relationship management software and Google’s suite of office productivity applications, which includes e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets programs will be integrated into a single software package that will be offered over the web.
The offering competes with Microsoft’s customer relationship management software, which is integrated with the its Office suite. Google is seeking to displace Microsoft by offering a web based alternative.
Dave Girouard, Google’s Vice President said the product would have new features like letting users keep track of e-mail sent to a customer right on that customer’s sales record, and a group of people collaborating on a sales account would be able to communicate by instant message with one another".
“In the history of hosted software to date, applications could be like islands,” Mr. Girouard said. “They don’t really work together seamlessly. This is a first of its kind.”
“Salesforce has belatedly recognized that it is important to link C.R.M. apps to productivity tools,” said Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft’s C.R.M. unit. “It has been core to our product since we launched five years ago. It validates our strategy.”
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com. However, Google has introduced a service called Google Market Solutions that competes directly with Salesforce's App Exchange. Also see Google Is Frienemy.
Google just announced the creation of an online marketplace for Google-related solutions released by 3rd parties. The site named "Google Solutions Marketplace" will organize 3rd party solutions built by using Google components. The aim of the site is to simplify match-making between the customers, products and professional services.
The Marketplace's initial focus is to connect customers of communications and collaboration products like Google Apps and Enterprise search with 3rd parties that sell complementary products and services.
For users, the Marketplace has search, browse, and end-user ratings to make it easy to locate and purchase from a vendor that meets their needs. For developers and partners, the Marketplace makes it easy to create information-rich vendor and product listings to reach new customers and grow sales. And listing is self-service and free.
HP is rolling out a new service to move file storage from your computer to the internet. HP Upline is the company's take on cloud computing where data and applications are stored in the internet cloud versus locally. The service will provide unlimited storage to SMEs, home offices, and end consumers. Plans start at $59 to $299 per year for storing, sharing, and backing up files. A free, basic, and limited service is also available.
Henry Blodget has done some great analysis on the valuation of Craigslist.com which he pegs at around $5 billon. I asked Craig some questions at the Web 2.0 Conference and Expo in January to come up with a valuation. Here is my take base on my discussion with Craig:
Pageviews Craig said that they are doing about 10 billion pageviews a month.
Bandwidth I figure given Craigslists traffic they would get preferential committed rates for bandwidth and I would guess based on my experience that it about $1 million a month or $10-15 million a year.
Web Site The site is written in perl and java and runs on linux. The design has not changed much since the beginning and there are no plans to do so said Craig. He also did not want to elaborate on the infrastructure roll outs, maintenance or the number of people involved with that part of the operation but I suspect they have 5-7 people doing that. I also would also make an educated guess that they are rolling out 5-10 servers a week to keep up with demand.
Server Costs I guess monthly replacement costs to be $100,000 per month and actual physical hosting could be as high as $1 million per month. I could be off base here. So the total would be about $10-15 million.
Total Operation Costs I figure total data center operation costs to be $15-30 million. Employee costs I would guess at $5-6 million for 25 employees. So the total costs would be $20-35 million.
Revenue I asked Craig about this too and did not want to elaborate. However a rough calculation taking into account the fees for job posts and apartment listings in the various cities works out to about $1-1.5 million per week or $78 million for the year.
Valuation What valuation would a public company generating revenues of $78 million less operational costs of $30 million (range is $20-35 million) with no debt, that has a 30% growth rate get? It is not unusual to see trailing P/Es in the mid 30's. eBay has a P/E of 125 and Yahoo has a P/E of 60. Based on these number Craigslist could be worth $2-6 billion.
While US social networks are waiting on advertisers to shifting their ad spending their way.Tencent, a Chinese internet portal which operates QQ.com is not banking on advertising. The company reported revenues of $523 million and an operating profit of $224 million. About 60% of the revenue came from services like games, virtual currency called QQ coin (which is fake currency paid for with real money), an additional 21% came from mobile services like ringtones and only 13% came from online advertising. QQ.com is reported to have over 300 million active accounts. Yes you heard that right. That is 8 times the size of Facebook or the same size as the US population.
Facebook on the other hand posted revenues of $150 million in revenue for 2007. The company has raised over $400 million and there is growing nervousness over its valuation and its ability to monetize its user base. Bebo, which was purchased by AOL for $850 million had revenues of just $5 million. MySpace purchased by News Corp. for $560 million is projected to haul in $1 billion this year.
Barack Obama's campaign spent $1 million on Google for the month of February 2008 versus $67,000 for Hillary Clinton, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Barack's also outspent Clinton on social networking sites and other web properties. Barack spent more on new media than Clinton who spent heavily on old media. Barack raised $45 million online in February versus $30 million for Clinton. Here is a break down of their media related expenditure for 2008 up to today from the best available public sources.
Spending Category Barack Obama Hillary Clinton Google $1,000,000 $67,000 Yahoo Web Ads $99,341 $9,186 Yahoo Search Ads $58,000 $0 Facebook $4,900 $0 Web Consultants $93,162 $0 Ad Consultant n/a $997,000 Media Consultant n/a $2,540,000
Is Google evolving into a portal? That was the debate at SES New York. Of the 1.2 billion or so search queries on Google during a one-week period in January 2008, 17% of the queries were sent to Google destinations reports James Lamberti, SVP, Search and Media, comScore.
"The search result page is beginning to operate as a destination. The consumers are a priority. Not the marketers," said Lamberti. Google sent nearly 400 million search referrals to their own multi-media properties, such as YouTube, over six months. That includes 148 million referrals to YouTube and 173 million to Google Images, the comScore data show.
John Battelle, CEO, Federated Media, said "Google's moves, including its purchase of YouTube and use of video overlay ads on that property, suggest the company is rethinking its business model."
Battelle also wondered out loud whether Google gives preferential treatment to its own content, such as Google Finance over Yahoo Finance? "It's interesting, if you put in 'stocks,' Google Finance comes up first... It used to be that Yahoo was first," he said.
Jack Menzel, project manager for Google's Universal Search, said the aim is to provide relevance. "We try not to promote ourselves any more than we believe is fair," he countered. "We try to be relevant as possible and not biased toward ourselves."
Battelle went on to say exact what most are thinking these day. He said, "You guys are becoming a media company and let's call it that." He went on to say that he had met with comedian Damon Wayans previously and Wayans told him that he's a YouTube partner, has a revenue sharing arrangement, and indicated that YouTube guarantees his channel 60 million impressions.
RatePoint, a startup providing online reputation management platforms for businesses has hit the jackpot with Verisign. RatePoint has got one of the most trusted brands on the internet to resell its product to Verisign's 1,000,000 customers. RatePoint’s online reputation management and customer feedback platform will be offered as a value-added to customers who purchase VeriSign's retail SSL certificate. VeriSign's SSL customers which are mostly online businesses can use the service to rate their overall satisfaction with that business.
The combination of VeriSign SSL with RatePoint will provide VeriSign customers with another way to establish trust amongst its consumers,” said Chris Babel, senior vice president, SSL, VeriSign. “The market for RatePoint is relevant to businesses that use VeriSign SSL certificates to secure e-commerce transactions. Gaining the trust of consumers is vital to business success and adding a mechanism to collect and promote authentic customer feedback and ratings will only further that trust.”
RatePoint's co-founders Neil Creighton, Christopher Bailey, Mike Rowan, Kefeng Chan sold their last company, GeoTrust, to VeriSign for $125 million in 2006.
eBay (EBAY) unveiled the eBay Partner Network, a new global affiliate program for publishers driving traffic to eBay. The affiliate network will be in-house, designed to more fully align the programs across eBay’s global properties and give affiliates expanded access to revenue opportunities across its platforms. Previous eBay's affiliate program was run by ValueClick (VCLK), whose shares a taking a big today. ValueClick in a full service integrated online marketing company.
“Affiliate partners are central to eBay’s ongoing strategy of improving the user experience and increasing engagement,” said Matt Ackley, vice president of Internet marketing at eBay. “The new eBay Partner Network will allow us to have a direct relationship with our affiliates, innovate faster and deliver new products and tools in a more timely and efficient manner, providing new revenue opportunities for our affiliates and creating a more streamlined user experience for our buyers and sellers.”
Microsoft (MSFT) has acquired San Francisco's Rapt, an online ad management company. The purchase price undisclosed. Microsoft has been on a buying spree to catch up to Google in the online search and advertising space.
Microsoft will integrate the Rapt into its Atlas Publisher Suite, acquired as part of the $6 billion aQuantive deal last year. From Microsoft's press release:
With the inclusion of Rapt, the Atlas Publisher Suite allows Microsoft to provide its customers with integrated asset and inventory management, forecasting, yield and sales management, and ad delivery and operations.
CNET Networks, Dow Jones & Company, Expedia, Fox Interactive Media, Microsoft, MTV Networks, NBC Universal, The New York Times Company, Reuters, USA TODAY, Yahoo and many others.
crgslstannounced the launch of a slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist. Craigslist presently does not have a multi-search service. The tool combines RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX to populate the search fields. Housing Maps, does a similar thing, the site displays the apartment listings on Craigslist using Google Maps.
Another Ex-Googler has launched yet another an apartment listing service similar to Craigslist called Rentbits. Rentbits is joining an already crowded space that is fighting to lure users.
Josh Lowensohn of CNET, called the service mediocre. He writes, "In most cases I found the results came from ApartmentHunterz.com, but mixed in with those were listings from Sublet.com and CityCribs.com. Craigslist however, is nowhere to be found, which is unfortunate." More>>
U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton denied Viacom's (VIAb) request to amend its complaint against Google to add a claim for punitive damages. The judge said that common law punitive damages cannot be recovered under the Copyright Act.
Viacom has files a $1 billion frivolous lawsuit against Google's YouTube which is an online video sharing service. Eric Schmidt has previously said that, "Viacom is a company built on lawsuits ... look at their history". Schmidt also pointed to the fact that Viacom was currently being run by a former general counsel of the company, Philippe Dauman. The company founder has gone on record saying "We have engaged in a lot of litigation at Viacom, of which I have been a primary mover."
Litigation has become the cornerstone of Viacom's business model. Viacom is getting squeezed by content producers and distributors. The traditional distrubtion channel for Viacom's product is shrinking. Users' are moving to more targeted and personalized mediums on the internet eg. YouTube. Technology has lowered the cost of production of content and there is more choice that ever and more competition for eyeballs. Viacom's is still operating under an old production and distribution structure which is bleeding the company. So the easiest thing to do is to blank others for your problems. Frankly, Viacom should be happy that users' are keeping its products alive by putting it on YouTube and introducing it to new audiences, who might end up watching it on TV thanks to YouTube.
Amazon, plans to start selling wine over the web in the U.S. and is recruiting a senior wine buyer, to furnish a "massive new product selection” for the site. Selling wine over the web is not new and many have failed due to regulatory complexities.
Amazon previously invested $30m in Wineshopper.com which folded a year later. Presently, Wine.com, is the largest US online wine seller. The site sells gift baskets on Amazon, but not wine.
According to a recent survey by the Internet is now the most frequent used source of news in the U.S. outweighing newspapers, television and radio. Internet news sites were also cited as being more trustworthy sources, with almost a third (32%) saying they were the most trusted followed by newspapers (22%), television (21%) and radio (15%).
Those aged between 18 and 29 - were even more likely to turn to the Internet for news than older age groups. Over half (55%) get their news and information online, compared with just 35% of those aged 65 and over, some of whom continue to stick with print (17%).
“We see clearly the generational shift of digital natives from traditional to online news - so the challenge for traditional news companies is complex,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS. More>
Sheryl Sandberg is leaving her position as Google's Vice President of Global Online Sales to become the new chief operating officer at Facebook. Sheryl is replacing Owen Van Netta who is leaving to pursue other opportunities. She will begin her new job on March 24.
Harper's Magazine featured story "Keyword Evil: Google's addiction to cheap electricity" is about Google's infrastructure buildup in Oregon's Columbia River and how it has triggered an arms race. Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask are also building data centers on the Columbia River. As they compete to offer software, music and movies over the web in the coming era of of "Cloud Computing." Among other details, it points out that the plant is expected to use 103 megawatts of electricity by 2011 or enough to power a city the size of Tacoma. More>>
Wow! is this the same company that was sitting idle which Google reached US$200 Billion in market cap. Yesterday, there was the semi open sourcing of code for Windows and related applications and today SkyDrive. SkyDrive is Microsoft's online storage service. Microsoft launched the product last year giving user 500MB of free storage. Today the company announced that it is increasing that by 10 times to 5 G of free storage. Previously SkyDrive was only available in the U.S., U.K. and India. Today the service is being rolled out to 38 other countries.
SkyDrive competes with XDrive (AOL), Box.net, Twango (Nokia), Gmail (Google) and S3 (Amazon). Microsoft is eager to stem the tide of defections from Hotmail to Gmail, S3 and other online services. However, I feel the company is moving fast to stem this trend and make an announcement before Google comes out with GDrive and starts making noise.
Bungee Labs has released a service called Bungee Connect an on-demand service that helps developers build rich internet applications that can be hosted by Bungee.
The service includes wizards to simplify specific workflows for developers and it supports the ability to import code from different projects, style sheets and APIs. The service aims to slash the time and costs associated with the entire application life cycle.
"It's time to stop developing 'here' and running 'there.' Today, most applications are coded in one environment, then tested in another, and redeployed to yet another for production," said David Mitchell, Bungee's Founder and CTO.
Developers can use Bungee without charge to develop software, to collaborate with colleagues and to test applications. They are charged only when end users run an application that was built using Bungee. Charges range $2 to $5 per month per user for a heavily used business productivity application or fractions of a cent per e-commerce transaction.
Google's share of the U.S. online advertising market dropped to 23.7% from 24.2% in the third quarter reports IDC.
Online advertising is made up of primarily display and paid. Google still maintains a dominant position in paid advertising. However, display advertising is experiencing tremendous growth as brand advertisers are shifting their ad spend from traditional media to the web because that's where the audience is.
That is why Google is busy releasing applications and services daily, partnering and acquiring properties that engage audiences so that they can get a bigger share of the display ad dollars.
The New Yorker has a great but lengthy article on Google's expanding lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C. and why it has become a necessity. According to Alan Davidson, Google’s senior policy counsel, “The political brand was very weak. Because we were not here to define it, it was being defined by our enemies.” He paused a moment, and added, “ ‘Enemy’ is a strong word. It was being defined by our competitors.” More >>
LongJump has just launched an online database service called Database as a Service (DaaS). DaaS enables you to quickly provision an online database for your web site very much like how you provision your hosting or storage.
LongJump hopes to eliminate the hassles of installing MySql on your server, reduce infrastructure management and administration expenses. DaaS is geared to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and developers who would otherwise have to purchase a database server, provision it, address data access and availability issues, manage backup and replication issues, and tackle security and data protection.
Interesting concept but in my opinion MySql is fairly stable and upgrades are fairly easy. LongJump hopes to serve the increasing numbers of small businesses that are web enabling their businesses. Recently, Amazon launched a similar service called, SimpleDB, which has more of a data storage focus. SimpleDB is a database feature that allows web sites to leverage Amazon's computing environment.
The web is about pushing boundaries and first movers usually have the advantage. Recently, I was fortunate to meet with Lord British aka "Game God", the creator of Tabula Rasa.
Tabula Rasa is a MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) about humanity's last stand against an alien race called "The Bane". Massively multiplayer online games have exploded with the growth of broadband internet access. Hundreds of thousands of players can play the same game together over the web. Sound like a social network? Indeed. The next generation of social networks will be inspired by the likes of Tabula Rasa.
Online gaming communities are turning a social activity into big business. The rising popularity of rich web applications, streaming video, audio and access to broadband is making on-demand entertainment available to anyone with an internet connection.
Lord British is not only pushing the boundaries on the web but he is also pushing the boundaries so you and I can one day go to outer space. He funded the Russian space program to explore private flights to outer space and paid $30 million to buy the first seat to become the world’s first private astronaut.
Network Solutions has come up with a clever way to promote your web site to 30 million visitors a month for a $1.
The service enables you to place an ad inside your own whois record. Instead of just displaying contact information and your address you can now place whatever text you want inside the record. The service called “Enhanced Business Listing” allows website owners to place more descriptive text inside their whois record. When anyone looked up the whois record they would see your opening sales pitch before they even approach you about buying your domain.
Enhanced Business Listing is the complete opposite of their Whois Privacy service which is designed to protect your website information from anyone looking up your whois record.
What would be a more valuable service would be if they verified information about your company and put that in the whois. Such as, Registered Doctor in New York City. If the registrar could authenticate claims I can guarantee Search Engines would use those authenticated claims and boost the sites in their index based on those claims. Now that would be an enhanced whois service", said Jay Westerdal of DomainTool.
Tim Berners-Lee, the closest thing we have to an “inventor” of the web as we know it today, is calling for more integrated, broad studies of the internet rather than the mostly piecemeal academic work being done now.
He’s absolutely right of course. The internet is arguably the most profound change in human communication in history, and it’s just getting started. As social networking explodes into the dominant socializing mechanism for humans we are experiencing many new opportunities and many challenges, especially as the online environments create new relationships between people, generations, and cultures.
Universities would be well advised to heed this call from Berners-Lee and offer more “web centric” courses and degrees. More importantly academics should be spending a lot more time studying the complex, changing structure of the web. The technical aspects of the internet are fairly well studied in commercial circles. The sociological side is poorly and rarely studied in academia while the commercial sector is still struggling to understand the implications of the massive shift of human activity online.
Mashable is reporting that Intuit, the company behind QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax software, has acquired Homestead Technologies for about $170 million. Homestead offers website creation tools and other e-commerce and marketing products made for online use, the combination of Intuit and Homestead will present opportunities for Homestead’s technologies to be used for small businesses both internally and with direct interaction with customers.
The plan is to basically offer a suite of solutions for companies looking for an integrated option to extend their businesses into the online sector, reach out to customers and retain them as well. Intuit had already been making some moves towards offering more self-administrative tools for business owners with the launch of services like their involvement with the online service for Quicken.
The company also already has a partnership with Google, which should be another advantage for the web-based tools and Google’s ongoing initiative. With the combination of Intuit and Homestead, these web-based tools move even further into the realm of Salesforce, but could present another level of competition for services like Upspring that are using the social networking angle for the promotion of businesses online.
Yahoo! Small Business the service for powering shopping carts for small businesses is down and closed for business. The services is suffering from intermittent outages today as shoppers flock to e-commerce sites on company time. “Cyber Monday” is an important day for e-tailers, and such an outage is quite embarrassing for Yahoo.
Last Wednesday, the WebGuild held its monthly event on the "Next Generation of Social Networking" featuring Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO of Socializr & Freindster fame, Jia Shen, CTO of Rock You, and Sundeep Ahuja, Founder of Appfuels. It was a highly social event - well attended and high energy.
If you missed it, the video of this event will be available in about a week. View photos.
HP has just announced that it will be making it easy for you to print your customized content from the web. This is part of HP's Print 2.0 Strategy to offer internet users new and enhanced printing options to control what they print and how they print it. HP has partnered with high traffic sites like Facebook, Flickr, Windows Live Spaces, and Disney.com to offer this improved print capability. HP plans to deliver this via Web 2.0 technologies such as those developed through an acquisition of web-based app, Tabblo, and others.
"People are frustrated with printing from the web – it’s often wasteful and rarely do the pages print with the information laid out on the page the way you want," said Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president, Imaging and Printing Group, HP.
On Facebook, users can use a Graffiti widget to draw on or decorate their own and friend's profiles and print their real-world artwork. With Flickr, it's a similar feature. The HP technology will power a blog printing feature on Microsoft Live Spaces.
Microsoft launched a free web site for managing personal health and medical information called HealthVault. The site search will be powered by Live.com and the web site will be ad supported.
HealthVault enables users to search and find information about health care and provides users a repository to store health-related data such as medical histories, immunizations and records from the doctor's office and hospital visits as well as measurements from devices like heart rate monitors.
The web site enables users to invite and share their information with doctors and family members and other people they trust.
There isn't a standardized solution in the health care industry and Microsoft is seeking to capitalize on that. Microsoft purchased MedStory earlier this year.
The American Heart Association, American Lung Association, Johnson & Johnson and others are developing applications that will enable users to sync their data with HealthVault. The goal is to create a web based medical platform for hospitals, doctors and insurance companies.
Microsoft said CapMed and Kryptiq have already created applications for HealthVault that help doctors send and receive information without having to switch from technology they already use.
UC Berkeley has joined the internet revolution and is making available courses for free via YouTube.
University officials announced that over 300 hours of UC Berkeley classes and events are available online at the web address www.youtube.com/ucberkeley. The classes include lectures on peace and conflict studies, bioengineering, sciences, technology and computer programming.
UC Berkeley was one of the first major universities to embrace webcasting and podcasting and now YouTube.
The latest issue of The Economist has an article on the rising power of Google (NASQ: GOOG). The article makes the case that the internet giant is more like JP Morgan than Microsoft. The article is harsh at times as when quoting Eric Schmidt "Our goal is “not to make money”, as its boss, Eric Schmidt, puts it, but “to change the world”.
Google is the white knight that rescued silicon valley after the dot com bomb and prevented it from becoming death valley. Google ignited the next evolution of the web, made silicon valley the online advertising capital of the world, overnight, and has empowered millions by making information universally accessible and not the domain of a priviledged few. Yes, Google has changed the world. Click here for the article>>.
It was another jam packed event at the Googleplex, with tonnes of great food, great companies and fantastic panel on "The Future of Online Platforms". Before the speakers talked about the future, Ismail Ghalini, focused on the definition of the platform. Twenty years ago, we all understood what a platform is. It's essentially an OS, and you had three options: MS-DOS if you want the large market, Mac OS if you're edgy, and UNIX if you're really technical. They all did pretty much the same thing, had fairly similar business models, and people built applications that could be ported from one to the other (somehow). What is a platform today? What is it made of? How do you use to build not only applications but real businesses on top of it? What are thebusiness models? Can I build for multiple of them at the same time? What do the ecosystems look like? Who do I talk to in order to getstarted? That kind of thing. Does it make sense? It was a controversial and fun event and we will have to video soon for all to view.
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According to Harvard associate professor Anita Elberse the The Long Tail popularized by Chris Anderson is flawed. It was a compelling idea: In the digitized world, there’s more money to be made in niche offerings than in blockbusters. The data tell a different story. The report analyzes the implications for retailers and marketers and how they can prosper from the phenomenon.
Time Inc. is 
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Google has befriended Salesforce.com and 
Google just 
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eBay (EBAY) unveiled the 
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Mashable is reporting that 
![[From left to right] Jia Shen, CTO, Rock You; Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO, Socializr & Friendster; Daya Baran, President, WebGuild; Sundeep Ahuja, Founder, Appfuels](http://www.webguild.org/images/social-network5.jpg)
Last Wednesday, the WebGuild held its monthly event on the "
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Google has plans of its own. Recently, 
The latest issue of 
