If you have a child between the ages of 6-12, you probably are familiar with . Webkinz are basically “Beanie Babies meets Tamagotchi meets .
Manufactured by Canadian gift wholesaler and available largely through card and specialty stores, Webkinz are small stuffed animals that sell for $12.
95 each. They’re rather unremarkable, except each Webkinz comes with a unique security code that allows you to register it, providing access to the “Webkinz World” portal. The portal itself includes a number of games, quizzes and related areas, each of which earn you points (“KinzCash”).
KinzCash can be used to by virtual items for use by your virtual Webkinz in this virtual world.
Part of the user’s “job” is to keep each of their Webkinz satisfied in three areas: happiness, health and hunger. By “playing” with your virtual Webkinz, feeding them (using KinzCash to buy food and drinks) and providing exercise, you keep their scores high on all three counts.
There’s a modest social networking aspect to Webkinz, where users can “friend” each other or IM one another to invite them to compete at one of the games. All of this happens between anonymous users and there is no identifying information shared for safety reasons. You don't have to worry about in Webkinz World.
My eight-year old has five Webkinz, and colleagues tell me their children have ten or even twenty. The manufacturer has leveraged the high demand for Webkinz by requiring that Webkinz sellers also buy inventory of their other products. Much like the Beanie Baby craze of a few years ago, supply is kept fairly low, increasing demand.
Ganz has employed no advertising, relying solely on word-of-mouth marketing for their promotion. Launched in April, 2005, more than 1.5 million Webkinz pets have been sold, with over 700,000 registered users.
And a quick search of eBay found more than 10,000 Webkinz for sale, with 93 of them (rare or “retired”) selling for $250 or more each.
What’s interesting to me is how easily even the youngest Webkinz users pick up the system. While I’m still not a big believer in the concept of Second Life for the business community, it’s clear that virtual worlds are a big play in the gaming world And Webkinz, along with sites like and have shown that the market entry point for these types of products has quickly moved to the “tween” and elementary school market.
News broken by and confirmed by that TechCrunch has hired FoxInteractive SVP of M A Heather Harde as CEO. Founder Michael Arrington will focus on the editorial side of the rapidly growing business.
Over the past few years, TechCrunch has positioned itself as a serious offering, and has made strong inroads into the market that had been dominated by CNET.
For most in the technology community, TechCrunch is the first place to turn for reviews and info on Web 2.0 products.
It will be interesting to watch how the TechCrunch team builds out the business side of the blog.
What's the ROI on premium content?
For many organizations, that's a pretty tough question to answer. While workflow applications can generate metrics to show a positive ROI, the business value of the underlying content is often more difficult to measure.
has partnered with the (part of the Executive Education division of Babson College) in sponsoring a contest on Improving B2B Content ROI.
The contest - Improving Content ROI , will be used to collect and identify best practices for improving the ROI of b2b Content. The format of the contest entries will be stories describing how organizations have utilized external content to create business results.
That might include use of content to support traditional business decisions (product strategy, M A, etc.), use of wikis or collaborative tools to share content with colleagues, or more.
UPDATE: All who submit stories will also get a FREE copy of the Best Practices Report that comes out of this process.
The deadline is coming up soon, so submit your stories today.
Last week, released the 2007 edition of its .
The publication, available for , starts with a look back at 2006, then provides guidance for the trends they anticipate dominating 2007.
They note a coming shift in 2007, where the rise of social media and vertical search may begin to shift the balance of power slightly away from Google. No doubt Google will still be the dominant player, but these new entries create new opportunity.
Shore describes their Seven A's for 2007: Answers, Audience, Aggregation, APIs, Alternatives, Acceleration and Asia.
The Answers market has been building off the social media frenzy, with , and many others getting into the space, even as Google has left it. Shore describes the New Aggregation, where platforms that allow integration of internal, external and community-based content will find success, leveraging RSS and social media. APIs and Widgets will also be critical in that path as content providers who continue to force their users towards closed, proprietary platforms will find new markets closed to them.
John Blossom and the Shore team always do a great job of staying on top of (and in front of) the trends. The pace of change continues to increase, and some of the trends Shore talks about will certainly have bottom-line impact for content providers in 2007 and 2008.
This is a little off-topic for Content Matters, but every time I recruit for a position, I’m amazed at the responses that I get.
So consider this part online venting and part guidance.
Online services like , , and others have made job hunting easier. In many ways, though, it’s made the process more difficult.
Employers have too many resumes to screen and it’s difficult for candidates to stand out.
As a result, when screening resumes, most employers first look for ways to exclude, rather than include. If we can weed out all the bad ones, what’s left may be a manageable universe to go through.
Below are some tips that may seem fairly obvious, but I find that even when recruiting for the most senior positions, I get applicants who violate these rules. If you follow them, you’ll have a better chance of making it through the first cut.
5.
Check your profile, page, listing, page and anything on the first page of results; the employer most likely will.
4. Don’t name your resume sally_smith_projectmgr_resume.
doc. That makes me assume you’re not really a project manager, but have modified your resume to look like one. Yes, it’s OK to have multiple versions of your resume.
Just don’t name them that way. Instead, just name them all generically (sally_smith.doc) then use your directory tree to store different versions (e.
g. my documents\resume\project management\sally_smith.doc).
3. Write a real cover letter and take the time to make it relevant to the job that was posted. Don’t use a merge letter, where your first line ends up saying “I am seeking an opportunity as Director-Product Marketing-NYC.
” Take a few minutes to read the position description, then browse through the company’s website. Use what you learn to make your cover letter compelling. Contrary to popular opinion, job hunting is not a “numbers game”.
Applying online for thousands of positions for which you are not qualified will not get you hired. Identifying those where you have specific experiences that match the requirements, and clearly highlighting those experiences in a cover letter will get you an interview.
2.
If the position is based in New York City and your Monster posting says you are only exploring opportunities in Phoenix, don’t bother applying. In fact, if you are applying for any position where you would be interested in a relocation, use your cover letter to explain that. Say “For family reasons, I’m looking to return to the northeast” or whatever.
Otherwise, you won’t get consideration unless you have a very unique set of skills unavailable in the employer’s market.
1. The first thing I see when you send your resume is your email address.
What does that email address say about you?
If it’s an AOL address, it says you’re not a very sophisticated technology user. That’s fine for some positions, but if you’re applying for an e-Commerce role, you’ll be dead in the water.
Even a Yahoo or Hotmail address makes me think of a teenager rather than a serious business professional. If you have your own domain, that’s great. Otherwise, get a account.
It’s free and it looks professional.
Also, please keep your email address simple. Ideally, you should just have your name, such as barry.
graubart@gmail.com. I realize that’s not always possible, particularly with more common names than mine, but if you try using the underscore and perhaps a middle initial, you might have luck.
Regardless, avoid using things like deenalicious@hotmail.com or fratboy99@yahoo.com.
Will following these guidelines get you hired? No promises there. However, they will keep you from being automatically routed to my junk file.
Update: Derek Park at Former Slacker, has of his own...
This weekend's Sunday has an interesting article entitled BrewTube. The article profiles the new to be launched this Monday.
When you hear Bud.
TV, if you're thinking of Clydesdales and the Wassup guys, think again. That side of Bud will be shown during the Super Bowl. BudTV will have original programming leveraging talent from LivePlanet (Project Greenlight), writers from Da Ali G Show, Saturday Night Live and Howard Stern Show.
The initial shows will include Finish Our Film , where LivePlanet will shoot the first and last minutes of a short film and seek community participation to develop the plot of the middle and Happy Hour , a one-to-four minute episode created by a rotating group of comic writers.
Not all the material will be humor-based. One planned program is a 130-episode science fiction series called Afterworld .
Clearly, these are the early days of Internet television, and there is no clear direction for the model. Bud.TV is an ambitious first effort at what is likely to become a compelling model - advertisers creating original programming content.
The model is not new - in some ways it recalls the early days of soap operas. However, I think most people agree that the existing model of commercials will not be viable in an interactive environment. I may tolerate them in some instances (such as previews before a movie), but sitting through a 15 second advertisement before watching a YouTube clip is not going to fly.
When you think of the cost of television advertising (Anheuser Busch spent $287M in 2005), this initial foray into Internet TV programming is probably not a huge expense for Anheuser Busch. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Provocatively, Fred's topic was Should Content Be Free , particularly in that it immediately preceded a panel of companies in the DRM/content protection space.
You can see the streaming video of Fred's . Thanks to Peter Cervieri at and the SIIA for making this available.
The themes raised by Fred are not new, particularly to those of you who read regularly.
That said, it was a comprehensive view of where the content business is headed. Key takeaway: as information moves towards becoming free and the supply becomes near infinite, then the money is in attention . I don't typically watch 18 minute videos (Colbert and the Daily Show excepted), but this one is well worth making time for.
For those without the time to watch it, Fred reprised his post. Successful content providers need to:
Fred also of the business model. He also used a few of his portfolio companies as examples of things that are being done right.
I was pleased that a few Alacra products were included in the Q A discussion. (And who says board members don't add value?)
In closing, Fred believes that free will pay , quoting Stewart Brand in that .
..information in the right place and the right context changes your life .
But, the idea of DRM-cocooned subscription content will go away. Pay-per-view and advertising models will be the way to build content businesses going forward.
And, of course, since information wants to be free, you can grab a copy of Fred's slides over at the Union Square Ventures blog.
, the health portal announced 18 months ago by Steve Case, has now launched in preview mode.
The site is using a freemium model, by which the content will initially be available free, with premium services to be added as they move to launch. According to the , Case hopes that consumers will eventually pay around $100 per year for a subscription to the site.
The official launch date is planned for April.
So, who needs another health portal? Well, considering that healthcare remains among the fastest growing market segments and that there are only a few players (such as ) focused on the consumer segment, there's a lot of room for a new entrant.
Steve Case being, well, Steve Case, has aspirations higher than simply generating revenues. According to , Case aims to make this a Company that can change the world. He shares that his interest in the segment was born out of his brother Dan's being diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2001, and the challenges Dan and his family dealt with in simply dealing with the bureaucracies of today's health care environment.
Before you dismiss such aspirations, they're not that different from those Case had in the early days of AOL, before anyone had heard of the Internet.
The site has five main areas: Healthy Living, Conditions Treatments, Doctors Hospitals, Insurance and a Toolkit containing more than one hundred tools from simple weight loss calculators to a group of 115 assessments. There's an online health portfolio, which will allow users to store their health history and a health expense manager to track health care expense and insurance information.
RevolutionHealth also includes an offline component. There's a telephone-based support option to help you locate a physician, answer health questions or navigate medical bills and paperwork. Your personal health records may be accessed in multiple ways so you'll always have
access in emergency.
Users who sign up for the preview can have full access for free for the remainder of 2007.
The Health Care market is getting more and more complex (just look at the new Medicare drug programs as an example). There's a clear need for better tools to track and manage health care information.
Assuming that they can give users comfort with privacy and security issues, RevolutionHealth could be well-positioned to fill that need. Subscription models are risky in the consumer space, but if they can gain traction during the initial free period, I think they'll do well in conversion.
Meanwhile, WebMD is not sitting on their hands.
They also this week, including a Personal Health Record tool. Increased competition in this space should be good for all consumers.
I batted around .
500 on my ; here’s hoping I can do better with my predictions and themes in 07. A few of these are carryovers from last year.
Vertical Search: Google Co-op will make this attractive for many new entrants, while regular Google results continue to get worse, due to the spam pages out there.
Web Advertising: The adoption of will make advertising more complex in 2007. Page Views will no longer be the ultimate measure for advertisers. In addition to Ajax, the use of widgets will often mean the separation of content from its site.
I’m sure that the market will come up with better ways to monetize the user experience (and the metrics to support it), but in the near-term it will lead to more confusion among both advertisers and sites.
Further consolidation in the Content Industry: 2007 will bring more M A in the content industry. I think that there will be a few big names in the mix, with either or being acquired (or possibly merging with one another).
There will be a roll-up of blogging tools: With so many users, I’m shocked that bloggers till have to use a non-integrated set of tools for authoring, distributing, searching for and tracking posts. This segment is overdue for a rollup of say, , , and . Yes, I predicted this for 2006, so it’s long overdue.
Other acquisitions I’d like to see? How about buying , as part of an effort to provide a DRM-free competitor to iTunes?
MySpace usage plummets: The signs are on the wall.
First NewsCorp bought them, now Time recognizes them as part of the “ ” feature. Heck, even your mom has heard of it. That means your kids will soon be dumping their myspace page and moving to the next new thing.
Meanwhile, the long-rumored, still-to-be-named consortium-managed YouTube competitor, if it ever launches, will implode almost immediately for the obvious reasons (big egos + conflicting goals + power sharing among unequals = failure). That doesn’t equate to good news for YouTube, however; as media companies pull their content off YouTube, it becomes a home largely for fake porn and video spam.
RSS finally gains adoption: OK, so this one was on the 2006 list as well, but with RSS at the heart of Microsoft Vista and the new Yahoo Mail, the feeds will become ubiquitous even if the name and orange logo does not.
Widgets gain prominence: While many web 2.0 applications were made available as widgets in 2006, most of them were niche tools, such as , and standalone widgets such as . I think that 2007 will be the year that widgets are adopted for brand advertising and application development and go beyond the realm of .
For content providers this creates the opportunity (necessity?) to make your content portable as users continue to .
The drop in newspaper readership accelerates: Print circulation will continue to plummet as newspaper companies struggle to redefine their value proposition.
While some will continue to see a rise in online readers, it’s not enough to make up for the drop in print revenue. I’d expect to see ongoing M A in this segment, as private equity firms continue to believe they can drive cost out of the business, but valuations will plummet as compared to 2006.
and have introduced a new entry in the enterprise search market and the best part is, it's free.
The new is a downloadable software application that can be run on a server or standalone PC. The application utilizes Yahoo's search interface, on top of the IBM . The free version can index up to 500k documents (making it more like workgroup search than enterprise search) but you can expand the capabilities by upgrading to IBM's Enterprise Search Starter Edition.
Until recently, enterprise search remained an expensive and complex application. Only five years ago, a typical Verity (now ) search implementation might have cost $400-750k (including professional services) and require 3-6 months to implement.
Yahoo and are both going after the enterprise search market with a compelling message: why is enterprise search so complex and expensive, when Internet search works well for free?
Of course, there are differences between web search and enterprise search. The PageRank system assigns a value to pages based upon links to that page from other popular sites. For complex searching inside the enterprise, the most valuable documents might not be the most popular.
That being said, basic search can address the needs of most enterprise users. And with Yahoo joining Google in pursuing this market, the days of half-million dollar search implementations are long gone. And, as , the target of their efforts is not so much the Autonomy's of the world, but more Microsoft and hierarchical file organization.
You can download or learn more about the free IBM/Yahoo software .
To learn more, read posts from or or this via CNet.
Scott Karp has penned a thought-provoking post on his blog, entitled .
The basic premise of the post is that all of the recent content businesses which have scaled dramatically in recent years are content platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Google) and not creators of original content. Karp further notes that even the long tail of revenue tends to reward the aggregators in the head, with more modest benefits trickling down to the tail.
Factually, I think Scott's points are accurate.
My question, however, is whether scale matters in the content industry.
The content business has long been a market of small companies focused on niches. Interestingly, many niche content providers are profitable, particularly in the b2b space.
Many industries require scale to become profitable. For example, in the enterprise software space, a company really isn't considered viable without revenues of $80-100M. I can think of dozens of content businesses with revenues of $10-25M and 20% margins.
On the b2b side, most of the dominant traditional publishers, such as McGraw-Hill, Thomson, Primedia and Reed Elsevier, were built through the acquisition of small, niche players. With the possible exception of the newspaper industry, there are few content companies that scaled well, even in the old days.
Scale may matter in the consumer space, where you need millions of page views in order to compete for the mainstream advertising dollar.
However, in the b2b space, I believe that growth and profitability are the key metrics for content companies. A lot depends on the reason that you are building your business. Is your goal is to get page views high enough to be acquired or is it to build a profitable business with sustainable growth?
If it's the latter, then scale shouldn't be your key measure of success.
Wal-Mart yesterday that it was offering bundled versions of a DVD plus a downloadable copy of the new Superman Returns movie.
There are a few configurations available - high and low-resolution, depending upon whether you want to view it on a PC or handheld device.
The download adds between $1.97 and $3.97 to the price of the base DVD, depending upon the version you want.
The downloadable version uses the DRM system and is not compatible with iPods, so the initial audience may be somewhat limited. That said, this is a big step forward. The entertainment industry has been doing everything in its power to stave off the day of downloadable content.
Yet here is Wal-Mart, the most mainstream retailer in America, partnering with Warner Bros to offer this bundle.
These constraints have led some some to knock the offer, notably who anticipate that we’ll be filing this under Failed Movie Download Models in the near future. I think that misses the point.
With this effort, on top of recent announcements by Amazon and Apple, the genie is out of the bottle, and we can expect to see solid solutions for downloadable video in the near future. I don't expect to see those advances from Wal-Mart, and maybe not Amazon either, but with the licensing framework starting to take shape, innovators will quickly fill the space with better solutions.
Last week's NY Times article, “ ” described how some old media companies have become the darlings of private equity firms.
That comes as no surprise to anyone who has watched the private equity dollars flow to the content space in recent years.
While much of the article focused on ClearChannel Communications and the antitrust hurdles it will have to clear, it also discusses the recent $1.6 Bn (plus $0.
7bn in debt) deal to take Reader’s Digest private. Ripplewood investor Robert Berner describes how he likes old media businesses, which tend to have strong cash flow and low multiples (Reader’s Digest sold for about 11x estimated 2007 EBITDA). According to the article, “Private equity firms believe they can unlock value by selling off pieces or making drastic operational changes, in that they can sell off pieces and reduce operational expenses.
”
I have no doubt that you can take a company like Reader’s Digest private, shed some unproductive assets, cut out some costs and improve short-term profitability. So, I understand why this model makes sense to the private equity firms. In a fairly short timeframe (24-30 months) you can “clean up” a company and flip it to a larger private equity firm or, depending upon market conditions, take it public again.
What’s less obvious to me is whether this is in the long-term interests of the Company. Companies like Reader’s Digest are not going to build a sustainable business model simply by cutting costs. I know – I’ve been places where they’ve tried.
For companies where growth has been flat or negative for more than a couple of years, the only way to reinvigorate the brand is to turn the model on its head.
If I were running a company with strong brand recognition and substantial but declining subscription revenue, I’d look to capitalize on the brand by aggressively changing the business model. One obvious switch move in the content industry is from subscription to advertising, but you could also explore lead generation and freemium approaches.
The transition would be slightly uncomfortable and probably wouldn’t be feasible for a publicly traded company, but if you’re going to go private (or are already privately held), you can sustain the short-term turmoil in return for creating long-term, sustainable value.
Via , summarizes some of the findings of a new analyst report by Merrill Lynch analyst .
The theme of the Editor Publisher article is that it will take 30 years for online revenues to equal print advertising revenue for newspapers.
Fine comes to this conclusion, doing a back of the envelope calculation using double-digit increases in online ad revenue through 2012, then 5% annual growth thereafter.
The basic premise of the calculation makes no sense to me. Does anyone really expect the newspaper business to gradually evolve from its current model over the next 30 years?
I see three trends that tell me that a gradual shift from print to online ad model for newspapers won't happen:
- Newspaper and Media companies are diversifying their properties, leveraging new forms of traffic to gain eyeballs for their content.
- The separation of news from the newspaper opens up this market to many new competitors. Today that includes companies like and with many new entrants to come.
Meanwhile, local search is evolving and seems poised to make further inroads into what has traditionally been the purview of the newspaper industry.
- Young people entering the workforce today don't read printed newspapers. While the demographic shift may not happen overnight, a large portion of the traditional newspaper market will go away sooner, rather than later.
Others will cling to their old models and see their market share and revenues erode quickly. At the same time, new entrants will disseminate news information in compelling new ways.
A slow, 30-year transition from print to online?
I doubt it.
Dow Jones has that it has purchased the remaining 50% ownership of Factiva from Reuters for $160M. The purchase price reflects a value of slight more than 1x 2006 estimated revenue of $290M, an increase of just 3% over 2005.
According to Dow Jones CEO Rich Zannino, the acquisition will shift Dow Jones revenue mix by dropping the print segment from 70% to 60%.
Clare Hart, who led much of Factiva's growth through the years and now heads the Dow Jones Enterprise Group, will now have oversight of the entire Factiva business.
Joint ventures, by definition, are difficult to build and manage.
Getting two companies with frequently conflicting goals and cultures to agree on anything is a challenge. Putting Factiva solely under the Dow Jones umbrella should make it easier for them to reinvigorate Factiva's growth.
this week published the“ ”, a ranking of the most overused meaningless hype terms included in press releases.
David first surveyed PR execs and journalists to compile the master list, then turned to Factiva to mine their news content to see which terms were most overused.
In the analysis, he found that roughly 20% of the nearly 400,000 press releases analyzed used at least one of the phrases. Leading the list was “next generation” with almost 10,000 mentions, followed closely by “flexible”, “robust”, “world-class” and “scalable”.
The term “groundbreaking” was used more than 2,700 it’s a wonder that there’s any ground left to break.
We’ve all been guilty of using these types of buzz words in our marketing communications over the years. In many cases it’s out of laziness.
When trying to describe a product or solution, the gut reaction is probably to add a few adjectives. Instead of simply using an adjective like “scalable”, we should provide quantifiable examples, such as “supports 10,000 concurrent users on a single server.”
In the meantime, if you’re concerned that your press releases have too much substance, and are looking to add more unsubstantiated hype and buzz, try the .
It helped me create the headline for this post.
Business Week is that startup has received $3M in funding from Inflexion Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Village Ventures.
The scam business model behind PayPerPost is pretty simple.
Advertisers can pay bloggers to post (positive) comments about their company or product. And, there's no disclosure requirement for the bloggers that they've been paid to write these nice things. Put best by Jon Fine in a , shilling without disclosure is a bad idea.
Of course, the folks at PayPerPost spin it somewhat differently, comparing it to product placement on television or a movie. But I don't see that. Instead, it looks more like radio shill host Armstrong Williams, celebrating the No Child Left Behind policy without disclosing that he was on the Department of Education payroll.
Or, the Cato Institute fellow who wrote positive editorials and columns, in return for funds paid by Jack Abramoff.
For years, investor relations consulting firms offered to write pseudo investment research reports, funded by the company being written on. At the same time, various IT consulting firms will write a white paper touting various technology for a fee.
Similarly, online seeding and other online word of mouth marketing efforts were used to launch the career of Christina Aguilera, among others.
As I've , one of the great challenges in the world of user-generated content is how to keep ratings trustworthy. While those questions may not be easily answered, requiring disclosure any time a blogger is being paid for their post would be a good starting point.
For more on PayPerPost, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's TechCrunch post, .
Disclosure: I have not been paid for writing this post.
Today came the that startup will be launching shortly as a financial portal and online broker.
Zecco's key is that they plan to provide trading with zero commission fees.
Zecco is well-backed, with funding from industry leaders Morten Lund (early investor in Skype), Pier Baarsma (former CEO of Dutch Coca-Cola) and Soren Kenner, former Chairman of McCann Erickson Europe, and is led by founder , a former Merrill Lynch VP.
Veth's plan is to keep costs low by relying upon word-of-mouth and guerilla marketing, as opposed to the millions the big boys spend on advertising.
With zero commissions, the site will be funded by advertising. According to Zecco, they plan to be at “the intersection where online brokerage meets Yahoo Finance and Myspace”. They will offer social applications such as blogs and message boards.
Will this be enough to compete? I'm not so sure. For most investors (including active traders), execution is more important than price.
The $10 per share it costs to trade today really isn't a big issue for most.
Free trading based on advertising sounds like a throwback to the good old pre-bubble days. Could free delivery on dog food be far behind?
For more details on Zecco, see .
UPDATE: See for more information on Zecco's efforts. He notes that we use the same trading platform end the same settlement and clearance That being said, I still see a hard road ahead against well-funded competitors but they are likely to be somewhat of a disruptive force and will put pressure on eTrade, TD, Schwab and others.
It will be interesting to see how the big guys react - will they reduce commission rates, add more services or both?
Watching the this week between the Senate Armed Services Committee and the White House on methods for interrogating and trying terror suspects reminds me of one of the basic tenets of partnership agreements: make it mutual.
Early in my career, when discussing whether certain partnership terms we were proposing were fair , a colleague taught me a simple test: make it mutual .
If we wanted to have the right to terminate after 90 days, were we comfortable allowing the partner to do the same? If not, it's a pretty good indication that we're trying to carve out specific advantages for our side.
That seems to be the issue that John McCain, John Warner, Lindsay Graham and Colin Powell are espousing: if it's fair for us to convict someone without presenting the evidence to the defendant, would we feel comfortable having a foreign government convict one of our citizens without doing so?
Next time you sit down to negotiate a potential partnership and find yourself stuck on an issue, ask your partner if they'd be willing to make it mutual.
Apple is scheduled to announce today the launch of a new product in the area of movies. Being Apple, there's a lot of hype and not much information in advance of the official announcement.
While it could be something simple, like the addition of movies to iTunes, rumors are flying that it could be something bigger. While an updated iTunes is clearly part of the announcement (see the black screen below which shows up on the iTunes store this morning), one idea that is more intriguing would be a better way to play those movies through existing technology (i.e.
televisions). In essence, a video version of their AirTunes product, providing wireless delivery of movies from your PC to a receiver connected to your television.
For more rumors about the Apple announcement, take a look at the following blogs:
The Apple announcement is taking much of the air out of an announcement coming from Redmond today, that of the beta label coming off of Microsoft Windows Live Search.
Windows Live Search will replace the floundering MSN Search, which barely appears on the search engine radar these days.
According to Microsoft, Windows Live Search will allow for refined queries and presenting results on a new user-friendly interface . Yawn.
Remember when new Microsoft announcements used to generate excitement? The most interesting thing I can say about this one is that it could create some short-term revenue opportunies for SEO consultants, to tweak e-commerce sites a bit.
For more info, take a look at and
Update: is a little more excited than I am about Windows Live Search.
This morning, I received an email from Verizon, concerning my DSL service.
The email alerted me to the fact that the federal tax known as FUSF (Federal Universal Service Fund) was no longer to be collected. Depending upon your level of service, this was a fee of $1.
25 or $2.83 per month. This was part of a decision last year by the FCC to stop regulating DSL, therefore eliminating the need for the FUSF fee to be collected.
Based upon this, consumers should have expected to see a modest reduction in their monthly bills, due to the elimination of the FUSF.
However, in reading my Verizon DSL email, it appears that they couldn't bear to pass that reduction on to their customers. Instead, they indicate that Starting August 26, 2006, Verizon Online will begin charging a Supplier Surcharge for all new DSL customers, existing customers with a DSL monthly or bundle package, and existing DSL annual plan customers at the time their current annual plan expires.
This surcharge is not a government imposed fee or a tax; however, it is intended to help offset costs we incur from our network supplier in providing Verizon Online DSL service. The Supplier Surcharge will initially be set at $1.20 a month for Verizon Online DSL customers with service up to 768Kbps and $2.
70 per month for customers with DSL service at higher speeds. In essence, they've taken the amount of the tax (which they had to remit to the government) and shifted it into a new line item as a fee.
Now, I have no problem with Verizon charging whatever they want for DSL.
I believe in competitive markets, and with cable and other competitors entering the market, Verizon should determine its pricing. But, I think its disingenuous to position this as a fee rather than part of the service price. It lets them continue to advertise a lower monthly rate than their customers can expect to actually pay.
The big telcos have already been the recipients of huge tax credits to help them build up the Internet infrastructure (as more effectively than I can). If people can't understand why we need , this is just another example of how the telcos operate and why we can't let them change the playing field.
Update: with Verizon and BellSouth efforts to mask price increases as fees.
Also see on the matter.
When I heard the news this morning that was shutting its doors as it declared bankruptcy for the second time in two years, my heart sank. Tower had been a huge part of my music life for many years.
The Greenwich Village Tower, on West 4th and Broadway, in particular had been a place to go, not only to buy CD’s, but to discover new bands and even meet new people. Prior to Tower’s opening the Village store in 1983, boutiques like Second Hand Rose and Bleecker Bob’s were my primary sources of music. Then came Tower, with its vastness and diverse collections, and it became my top music source.
Then, I thought about the last time I was actually in a Tower Records store. It was probably about three or four years ago, and then was simply to kill time before meeting a colleague for drinks nearby. I realized that, while I still buy some CDs, I’ve bought them almost exclusively from Amazon for the past 10 years.
And today, I’m more likely to download music from or than to buy a CD, unless I know that I want the whole thing.
And while Tower once seemed a great place to discover music, that discovery process was mostly serendipitous. No one there knew my tastes, and they certainly didn’t store my listening patterns.
Today, I’m much more apt to use or the music blogs via to identify new music. While I might have been able to find Smile playing at Tower, it’s much easier to browse the blogs, listen to a few samples, then download a track or two.
While someone is likely to buy the Tower name, it’s unlikely that any buyer will retain their brick and mortar stores.
And, while part of me wishes they could survive, I also realize that I'll hardly notice it when they're gone.
Content industry analysts announced today that they'd acquired ( EPS ) of London.
EPS has a 20 year history, providing market intelligence and consulting services, typically for large, international publishers.
They publish a Market Intelligence and Advisory Service that crosses STM, education and business information. Founder and Chairman leads a team of 14.
Outsell has a team of more than 35 analysts (including those in its extended network), serving sellers and buyers of content, as well as those in the investment community.
According to Outsell CEO , the merged company will serve more than 300 clients globally and have a team of nearly 60 people. The company will maintain offices in London and San Francisco. David Worlock will join the merged company, serving as Chief Research Fellow.
Update: Read comments, as well as the official press release from Outsell.
As more and more sites allowing transactions between individuals, buyer and seller reputations become a valuable currency. Your reputation on sites like or is critical if you want strangers to trust you enough to do business.
Those buyer and seller histories are one of the stronger assets of auction and classified sites. It also becomes a huge switching cost for those who might want to move to a different platform. If I have a strong eBay rating, I would be unlikely to switch to a different auction site, where I would have to start building that reputation again.
This concept, of “transactional trust” was the focus of a recent study, commissioned by Rapleaf, developer of a portable reputation system. The survey was developed and run by , author of the , and focused on how transactional trust is developed between strangers in virtual markets.
The survey included both online buyers and sellers and focused on what factors each used to assess the trustworthiness of potential sellers or buyers.
Not surprisingly, buyers indicated that the posted ratings of the seller were the top criteria in determining trustworthiness. Second was “reputation of the site or publication”, followed by “payment method you are using”.
For sellers, the number one criteria was payment method.
Paypal and credit card users are considered fairly safe by most. Sellers indicated that “posted ratings of buyers” was second, perhaps surprising as these are often less comprehensive than ratings for sellers. Other criteria with a strong showing were the reputation of the site, intuition and email or phone interaction with the buyer.
The survey makes it clear that both buyers and sellers are still struggling to assess trustworthiness of those whom they buy, sell or trade with.
, sponsor of the survey, has developed a portable reputation system for e-commerce transactions. Rapleaf’s aim is to become the independent database of transactional reputation.
The concept of portable reputation is compelling. The challenge for a company like Rapleaf is that it will be difficult to develop a large enough database to make it a trusted source. Ratings are the crown jewels of e-commerce companies like eBay and Amazon and they make it easy for buyers and sellers to rate their counterparts and will surely resist efforts by outsiders to play in their space.
Last night, celebrated its tenth anniversary.
At a time when many investors focus only on the next quarter, and most startups don’t make it past their first year, ten years is quite an accomplishment. Many contributed to that success – the employees who’ve worked so hard, the early adopters who were willing to trust a startup with their business and the content partners without whom we’d have no products.
While the business has had to adapt to changes in customer needs and market conditions, Alacra’s core vision of delivering content in support of a user’s workflow, backed by exceptional customer service, remains unchanged.
Last night, many of those partners and customers joined our employees in celebration of these ten years. We thank you for your support and look forward to many more years of working together.
Twice this week I received simply awful telesales calls. The two were remarkably similar, but seemed to come from different companies. Both callers were calling from an overseas (Indian) call centre.
Both were pitching professional services (one for development of web 2.0 solutions, the other for outsourced QA) and the purpose of the call was to get me to commit to a subsequent call with a sales rep. In both cases, the telesales rep threw a bunch of buzzwords at me, without being able to explain what they were trying to sell.
In neither case did they last beyond 30 seconds (and, no, I did not agree to the subsequent call).
Unfortunately, most of us get calls like that all the time. Despite the many lessons learned about selling and lead generation, it seems that most companies still think it's simply dialing for dollars and a numbers game.
This week, , in conjunction with , distributed the results of a of buyers of IT products and services. The paper, entitled Demand Creation: the Prospect's View, was a summary version of a recent webcast they had done, and compiled results from surveying about 1,000 respondents.
Considering the state of telesales, it was not surprising that when asked which delivery mechanism they most often responded to, cold-calling got the lowest score, behind email and direct mail.
In fact, when asked which delivery mechanism vendors most get wrong, a whopping 61% of the respondents said cold-calling, with email and direct mail each getting about 10%.
When asked for their most trusted sources, 29% indicated industry analysts, followed by peers and internal groups at 22% and 16%, respectively. Search followed at 14%, seemingly low for the IT community.
The bottom of the list was comprised of vendors, VARs and Partners. Well, those three are hardly independent voices, though many would argue that the IT analysts are not as independent as some might perceive.
Perhaps the most interesting results in the survey, as shown in this table, are how they map the sources used at different stages of the buying cycle.
Early in the cycle, webinars, white papers and industry analysts are the leading source, as users are seeking to learn more about a general solution. During the middle stage, as prospects are doing further analysis, demos and trials join white papers as key sources, while webinars begin to decline. At the later stages, when users are making final vendor decisions, trials, along with analyst reports are the key elements.
That combination at the end makes me think that people, while legitimately testing out the software, also feel like they want to have a magic quadrant to hide behind if the implementation blows up on them.
In developing marketing materials for your website and to support direct sales efforts, it's critical to provide different content to support prospects' needs as they move through the buying cycle. This study reinforces that idea that white papers and webinars are among the most effective part of the marking mix early in the sales stage.
A couple of months ago, Fred Wilson blogged about his , where web companies provide free use of their basic service, then offer premium versions and add-ons, available for a fee. As Fred pointed out, many successful companies have adopted this model (Skype, Flickr and Trillian, among others). Fred closed his post asking if there was a name for this model, and if not, what might be a good name.
Alacra's proposed the name Freemium . And, from the looks of it, it seems to have stuck.
Tom Evslin , in describing the Feedblitz business model.
Feedblitz is familiar to those of you who read Content Matters via email. It takes my RSS feed and wraps it into an email and sends it to users who don't want to deal with RSS. It performs its job admirably, while costing me nothing.
Under the Freemium model, Feedblitz charges for personalization of the emails and a frequency of more than once per day.
This week's issue of Wired Magazine also includes a reference to the Freemium model, in its article, .
This chart, from Technorati, shows how the term Freemium has expanded throughout the blogosphere.
Its first appearance was in a from Fred and was subject of a flurry of link love in the two weeks that followed. Since then, it's appeared on blogs 223 times, and that doesn't include the mainstream press like Wired or other websites.
The Freemium model has been around for a while, but seems to be flourishing in the Web 2.
0 world. And, it's interesting to see the language spreading as virally as the applications themselves.
USA Today that Yahoo and eBay have formed an advertising alliance.
The basics are that Yahoo will be the exclusive provider of third party display ads to eBay, while also committing to accept (eBay-owned) PayPal payments for Yahoo services. With eBay as the 9th most visited site, Yahoo gains a huge number of additional page views to serve its ads to.
One of the more interesting aspects of the announcement is the comment that the two companies intend to jointly explore “click-to-call” technologies on their respective websites.
Click-to-call technology has begun to take hold for certain buyers’ guides and directories, led by companies such as Ingenio and eStara.
Click-to-call technology can help close the loop between buyers and sellers, turning leads into transactions. It will be interesting to see how these two leaders utilize click-to-call to offer new solutions to internet advertisers.
As I’ve indicated in the past, while Google gets most of the attention in the world of search, Yahoo’s diverse revenue base creates many more lucrative opportunities. While Google’s growth is tied to the number of searches users do (and the ratio of searches to ad clicks), Yahoo’s model lets them monetize general Internet traffic more effectively.
UPDATE: Rafat Ali provides a to the alliance.
All fairly bullish on the partnership. Mark May of Needham does a better job than I do of outlining the strengths of Yahoo's diversified businesses: We believe this deal also highlights YHOO strengths over GOOG and MSFT capabilities, to enhance EBAY’s revenue streams (MSFT is also strong, GOOG in development); 2) strong search market share, to enable EBAY to number of premium services and e-commerce properties, in order to power Much of the debate the past week or two over the NSA data mining activities seems to be misdirected.
Critics of the program talk about how the Government should not be allowed to use data mining tools to monitor activities of the public.
Meanwhile, defenders of the program fall back on the old “if you don’t allow us to do this, you’re just helping the terrorists”. Like many debates in Washington these days, this one is unlikely to result in meaningful results unless the focus is shifted.
Data mining is a technology that’s been around for more than two decades.
Ever since the early business intelligence software providers made the “beer and diapers” argument, companies have used data mining to understand customer behavior. In fact, some of my favorite companies use data mining to improve my customer experience. For example, uses data mining to recommend products to me, based upon past purchases.
The law enforcement community has only recently begun to use data mining. Sophisticated investigators use link analysis tools such as to help identify connections between people, places and activities. During the past five years, the intelligence community has begun to explore use of data and text mining applications to improve their results.
In my view, use of data mining tools is a good thing. Whether you’re a company trying to understand your customers, or a law enforcement agency trying to identify potential terrorists, leveraging technology to automate manual processes is a natural. But, with these expanded capabilities come new responsibilities.
For corporate citizens, that means transparency. I allow Amazon to use my purchase and browsing history to make suggestions because they publish their and seem to live up to them. If it were to come out that Amazon were not abiding by their privacy policies (perhaps selling my purchase history to other companies), they would lose the trust of customers and I, for one, would stop shopping there.
In the public sector, transparency is more difficult. It’s hard to come out publicly and state that we intend to monitor phone traffic to see who’s calling whom. That could certainly tip off the bad guys (though from everything I have read, the bad guys have long ago begun using internet calling and web tools like the anonymizer to mask their trail).
Rather than absolute transparency, I think that the government needs to demonstrate that it can be trusted. And, that’s where the problems lie for this administration. It has been the most secretive of any administration in my lifetime (more Nixonian than Nixon), reclassifying 50-year old documents that were in the public domain, using the courts to keep from disclosing the members of the Vice President’s energy task force and threatening criminal charges against the media.
It also has shown a willingness to violate privacy and national security for political purposes, most notably in the Valerie Plame affair.
I support use of data mining technologies to improve our intelligence. But, the process requires oversight and, where feasible, transparency.
There’s a similar lesson in here for business. Your customers will often be willing to share significant information with your company, provided that there are benefits to doing so (either to themselves or to the community as a whole) and that they trust you not to use that information for any other purpose. Transparency and honesty remain the building blocks of successful information-based businesses.
Footnote: Beer and Diapers
For those unfamiliar with the beer and diapers story, it was the primary example used by sales reps from BI companies for many years. The premise is that, by mining transaction logs, a convenience store was able to see that on Saturday nights after 10pm, there was a strong correlation between sales of diapers and beer. In essence, families running out of diapers late on a Saturday night inevitably sent dad out to buy more, and he grabbed a six-pack to go.
In leveraging this information, the convenience store could decide whether to place beer next to diapers (to sell more beer to the diaper dads) or to place them further apart, requiring the dads to go through other aisles, perhaps adding a bag of chips to their purchase. While the “beer and diapers” story is so oft-told (with many variations) that it has taken on the appearance of an urban legend, it’s origin seems to be based in a true study on behalf of Osco Drugs in 1992.
Rafat Ali is that TechTarget has acquired .
2020 is a software comparison and demo site, primarily targeting the SMB market.
This acquisition would complement TechTarget's current offerings, with BitPipe focused on the higher end, and 2020 for smaller businesses.
According to VentureWire, via Rafat, TechTarget paid in the eight figure range .
VentureWire also adds that TechTarget CEO Greg Strakosch said that they would likely file for an IPO within the year.
The lead generation market , with KnowledgeStorm and TechTarget vying for the IT market. I would anticipate seeing rollups among lead gen companies in other market segments as well.
Alacra is currently seeking a graduate or undergraduate summer intern.
The intern will be involved in several projects, including the development of a vertical wiki.
Applicants should have strong research and web skills and have an interest in content development.
This is a paid (stipend) internship.
If interested, please contact jarid.lukin@alacra.
com for more details.
At Google Press Day, Google announced four new products.
Google Trends is a new visualization application that creates a trend map comparing searches and mentions of various terms over time.
Google Trends builds on Google Zeitgeist to give you a sense of what users have been searching. It could be very useful for developing SEM strategies.
Google Co-op is a beta of an application that will allow content providers to tag/annotate web pages.
This metadata can be used by users who subscribe to that content. One example Google provides would be that a doctor can label web pages related to arthritis, and treatment, symptoms, or for health professionals when they enter a relevant query.
Google Co-op is supposed to be available at google.com/coop, but right now that page doesn't produce any results. According to , the might be tied in to Google Co-op.
From the sound of it, Google Coop could be a -like application, enabling you to create custom, vertical searches, but with the addition of tagging as well. Until the info from Google becomes a bit more clear, it's hard to tell how they envision it being used.
Google also announced version 4 of Google Desktop.
This version adds , along with an API for development of new gadgets. Initial gadgets include things like clocks, weather maps and games.
Announced, though not available until next week is Google Notebook.
Google Notebook is an online notebook where users can paste text, images or links from sites they are visiting into a personal notebook. The notebook can be shared with other users. Beginning next week, it will be available at .
For more details and insights from Google Media Day, read:
Philipp Lensen's
Steve Rubel's
Nicholas Carr's
Matt Cutts'
Official Google press release is
Chevy recently launched an advertising campaign designed to become fodder for viral marketing, as detailed in . Instead, the campaign is quickly becoming fodder for late night hosts.
In the campaign, tied to television’s The Apprentice, users are provided a set of tools to storyboard a pseudo commercial for the Chevy Tahoe. Users can string together choices from a selection of short video segments, adding text and background music. The resulting “commercial” is saved, and links can be emailed to friends or colleagues.
Clearly, Chevy did not understand the dynamics of the market most likely to use the application – teenagers and young adults. While Chevy may have envisioned users creating ads touting the Tahoe’s spacious interior, ample seating or rugged looks, that’s not what most of the users were thinking about. Instead, they leveraged the desert scenes, ice capped mountains and waterfall imagery to drive satirical snippets focused on the war in Iraq and global warming.
For an example of how this works, .
The good (or bad) news is that, as designed, these commercials have spread virally, as users share their creativity with friends. Unfortunately, most of them do not contain the mom, apple pie and Chevrolet message that might have been originally intended.
This should not have come as a surprise to Chevy. All it would take is a 15-minute tour of to see that satire and parodies (along with way too much lip-synching) are the core elements of this genre.
Perhaps Chevy will claim that all publicity is good publicity, but I disagree.
While You Tube parodies like may have provided benign publicity to the underlying film, the Tahoe commercial parodies will not cast a positive light on Chevy.
The clear message here is that it’s critical for business professionals to use and understandnew innovations in technology. Spend an hour watching You Tube, create a page on MySpace, set up an RSS reader and begin to read blogs.
It’s not enough to simply understand the capabilities of these tools. It’s critical that you understand how they are being used, the culture of the users and the potential implications of your efforts. I’m guessing that few within Chevy’s advertising and marketing team had done so.
P.S. If you'd like to create your own Tahoe ad (or parody), you have until Monday to do so at the .
This seems to be the time of year for predictions. My past prognostications have not always been on target, otherwise we’d have President Kerry, the Super Bowl Champ Jets and Karl Rove indicted (well, that one’s still a possibility for 2006), so I’ll stick to themes that I think will play heavily in the content and technology space in 2006.
Some of these are themes I’ve written about in recent months, while others will be fodder for commentary in the weeks and months to come.
Lead Generation sites will continue to grow as the online world seeks ROI for their marketing dollars. The founder of Wanamaker Department Stores was famously quoted saying “I know that half my advertising works, I just don't know which half.
” Web advertising has helped marketers be more effective in tracking their marketing campaigns. That will spill over into lead generation for sales operations and those companies that can deliver qualified leads will be richly rewarded.
Yahoo will continue to position itself as the media company of the future, with a few eyebrow-raising acquisitions of content-related companies in order to have more pages to serve up its ad inventory. I would expect them to have a large presence in digital media delivery.
Where Microsoft is trying to ride XBox, perhaps Netflix or Tivo will be Yahoo's key acquisition. This will further delineate the lines of distinction between the technology-driven Google and media-driven Yahoo.
News RSS