November 23rd, 2009

What if the search-index was run by a non-profit? GOOG founders once supported that idea

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 1:04 pm

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Larry, Search, Tom Foremski

The recent debate about News Corp. threatening to leave the Google index, and Google’s problems in attempting to index out-of-print books are all related to its commercial status.

What if the search index were held by a non-profit? A lot of those probelms would go away.

It’s interesting to note that Google’s founders once believed that search should be non-profit. Take a look at page 39 “Inside Larry and Sergey’s Brain” by Richard Brandt (referral link).

Andrei Broder, who led the team that created the AltaVista search engine, the best of its time, talks about meeting Larry and Sergey. “When the discussion turned to the topic of making money from the technology, Broder found that Page had a profound difference of philosophy on the subject. “It was a very funny thing about Larry,” Broder recalls. “He was very adamant about search engines not being owned by commercial entities. He said it should all be done by a nonprofit. I guess Larry has changed his mind about that.”

Brian Lent, now CEO at Medio Systems, came across the same thing when he met with the Google duo.

“The problem with the Google search engine at the time, Lent recalls, is that Larry and Sergey didn’t want to commercialize it, and Lent was anxious to become an entrepreneur. Their mantra at the time was more socialistic than entrepreneurial. “Originally, ‘Don’t be evil’ was ‘Don’t go commercial,’” says Lent.

When he was at Stanford University, Sergey Brin wrote a paper: “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”

In that paper, he argued against an ad-supported service as a corrupting influence. “Advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” he wrote.

Could this be a possible future outcome? Could a non-profit search engine “out Google Google?” I think it could.

Read the rest of this entry »

November 19th, 2009

Techmeme's 6 editors signals potential trouble with Google PageRank

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 12:24 pm

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Algorithm, Google PageRank, Google Inc., TechMeme, Gabe, Engineering, Tom Foremski

Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, a popular news aggregator, yesterday announced he had doubled the number of editors to 6 people.

This is a very significant announcement because it shows that there is a problem in using search algorithms to discover new content. The problem is that there isn’t enough linking happening between web sites (except by spammers).

Techmeme has been a staple of the tech news scene for many years. Gabe Rivera ran it by himself, relying on his search algorithm that monitored a fixed number of influential blogs and news sites.

He told me that to get the best results within a sector, you needed a large enough pool of blog/news sites otherwise the results would be unreliable.

The Techmeme algorithm counts the links to other blog posts coming from this core pool of influential sites. And thus Techmeme could run fairly well all by itself with occasional tidying up by Gabe.

I noticed about a year ago that blogs were linking less and less to each other, they were becoming a lot like old media, which hated to link to other sites. I asked Gabe about this.

I ran into Gabe last week at an event at the St. Regis in San Francisco and asked him about the state of the blogosphere. I pointed out that there seem to be few “real” bloggers left. Original bloggers such as GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, etc now all seem to be just online news sites and they read like an “old media” news site.

Gabe agreed, he said:”Techcrunch and the others used to link to each other and now they don’t–they only link if they have to.”

…And with fewer links, that means he has had to continually tweak his algorithm.

“I get around the problem by looking in many places for links or references to news stories, in places you might not normally look.”

It looks as if Gabe ran out of places for his algorithm to look, because he has had to double his human editors to help find interesting new content.

Microcosm of search…

Techmeme is very much a microcosm of the search world. If Techmeme has had to go from 1 human editor (Gabe) and now to 6 in about a year, then this signals that all other search engine algorithms are in trouble, especially the biggest one of all: Google and its groundbreaking PageRank.
Read the rest of this entry »

November 18th, 2009

Wow! Top execs say they are influenced by social networks

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 1:36 am

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Social Networking, Network, Social Media, Survey, Tom Foremski

This new research study from the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is important because it shows that company executives are influenced by their online networks.

And the trend is growing. The influence on business decisions by online communities is at its highest in three years.

The research was conducted by Don Bulmer from SAP and Vanessa DiMauro.

Here are some key findings from this survey 365 business professionals:

Read the rest of this entry »

November 17th, 2009

Tibco: What's next? - moving beyond real-time IT

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 1:43 pm

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: TIBCO Software Inc., Business Process, Database, Information Technology, Predictive Analytics, Operational Planning, Strategy, Business Operations, Management, Tom Foremski

Vivek Ranadivé, CEO of Tibco Software is happy that there is a lot of talk about “real-time” these days, in terms of the web and IT systems. That’s because Tibco has been in the business of providing real-time IT technologies for a long time, for Wall Street financial systems and other large enterprises.

Real-time IT systems have moved beyond the trading floors and into the data centers of most large companies in many sectors. The focus for Tibco now is looking at what’s next after real-time, and that’s literally ‘what’s next?’

Welcome to the world of predictive IT, business systems that run in real-time and use predictive analytics to immediately respond to business events. Events such as customers using an ATM and being offered custom offers on loans; or a casino that tracks customer losses and can offer free tickets for a show to cheer them up; a cell phone company that responds to multiple dropped calls with free minutes.

“Companies need to move beyond real-time and start using predictive, rules-based business processes. This is what I call Enterprise 3.0,” says Mr Ranadivé.
Read the rest of this entry »

November 16th, 2009

GOOG could lose more than Murdoch

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:22 am

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Google Inc., Operational Accounting, Internet, Finance, Tom Foremski

The accepted wisdom is that if Rupert Murdoch and other newspapers block Google then they will suffer and die.

But is that really true?

These are some of the facts:

- The value of Google search traffic to the newspapers is low. Its loss wouldn’t make much difference to the newspapers’ already poor online revenues. They can’t monetize the traffic anyway so its loss makes no difference to their future.

- Wouldn’t the damage to Google be much greater?

If it is locked out from being able to index a large part of the Internet, it would be very bad for business. It would strike at its very core of its mission: “To index all the world’s information.”

Google users would question what else is missing?

Google’s index is its Achilles’ heel. It will do everything it needs to do to protect its ability to index content.

And itt doesn’t matter if the content is free or not. As Google’s Josh Cohen recently told SearchEngineLand: “…people will say … ‘I have to make this content free or Google won’t index it,’ and that’s not the case.”

So, who has the most to lose if News Corp and other large publishers block Google?

Newspaper online revenues won’t be affected much at all.

But Google’s reputation as having the best index would be seriously harmed. It would have a large hole in its index.

And that hole would be made up of missing content - new content - the most valuable thing for search engines. People search for new content. That’s what brings them back to Google.

Surely Google has far more to lose than the newspaper publishers from being blocked.

And that’s why it will do whatever it needs to do in order to preserve its index, including possibly paying for access.

Rupert Murdoch may have very well have found the weak spot in Google’s business plan..

November 16th, 2009

Rupert Murdoch's Google taunts are a bid to unite publishers - content will be king

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 12:31 am

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Revenue, Google Inc., Publisher, Rupert Murdoch, Operational Accounting, Search, Finance, Tom Foremski

Why has Rupert Murdoch and others at News Corp. spent so much time criticizing Google when there is a simple solution: post a robot.txt file that tells Google and others not to search and index their content?

Because criticizing Google results in a lot more publicity. Because Mr Murdoch has an agenda, he is most probably laying the groundwork to negotiate a deal with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others, where they will pay to index News Corp content and also content from other publishers allied with News Corp.

Take a look at these points:

- By collecting a package of other publishers, Mr Murdoch can avoid the problem caused by what I call “first mover disadvantage” in that the first publishers with paywalls, risk losing audience to rivals that wait to build their paywalls. That’s a much larger business risk than the traffic lost from blocking Google. That’s a risk all news publishers face not just News Corp. Better to be in a collective.

- Mr Murdoch is emerging as a champion for other news publishers in his criticism of Google. That’s an excellent opportunity to become the rallying point for the newspaper industry as a whole and to recruit publishers into a common basket of content.

- Mr Murdoch and his top executives are masters at using the media to manipulate others to get what they want — in this case Google is the target.

- Why would competitors join with Mr Murdoch? A better question is why wouldn’t they?

Read the rest of this entry »

November 13th, 2009

Public healthcare could spur Silicon Valley innovation and create jobs

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 2:54 pm

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Silicon Valley, Innovation, Job, Health Care, Small Business, Healthcare Cost, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Human Resources

I was looking at a survey of small businesses and whether they would cancel their healthcare plans if public healthcare were available.

VerticalResponse, which offers surveys and email marketing services, polled 831 small US businesses about the effect of public healthcare on their business.

Theron Kabrich the CEO of The San Francisco Art Exchange, was one of the small businesses surveyed. He made an interesting comment and it is one that is very applicable to Silicon Valley.

“A public offering of healthcare unburdens small businesses and entrepreneurs alike, as it allows them to focus on core parts of their business such as innovations and new products. It also removes an unfair competitive advantage for small businesses when trying to attract the best employees, and levels the playing field.”

Will Silicon Valley startups cut their current healthcare plans? They might.

High healthcare costs are a large burden for Silicon Valley startups. The availability of public healthcare should lead to lower costs for startup companies and make more capital available for investment in development.

VCs might demand a provision that their startups not offer healthcare plans. But would this harm recruitment?

Probably not because startups have fairly young staff and the attraction is not getting a safe job with benefits, but a chance to build a valuable business.

It’ll be interesting to see how the availability of public healthcare affects Silicon Valley businesses. If it helps them succeed by lowering their startup costs then this will lead to lots of new jobs.

November 11th, 2009

Rupert Murdoch and the dirty little secret about Google traffic...

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 12:27 am

Categories: Business strategy, Mediawatch

Tags: Google Inc., Traffic, Rupert Murdoch, Novelty, Tom Foremski

Every time Rupert Murdoch complains about Google and says he will cut off access, a mass of Twitterati, Digerati, and Diggerati think the old man has lost his marbles and doesn’t “get it.”

Surely, they chorus, all that traffic that Google sends to the Wall Street Journal is the equivalent of sending a fire hose of cash straight into his pocket. Why would he want to turn off that traffic?!

The answer is that he wouldn’t, if that were indeed the case.

The ugly truth is that Google traffic is hard to monetize. It’s not the bonanza that people think it is.

Google traffic is low quality, it is people who stumbled upon the article. Usually, about one-half is new to the site, it had never been there before. The other half already knows who you are. For well established brands this offers incremental value.

More importantly, Google traffic doesn’t help the newspaper advertisers much because they are trying to buy a specific sector, a specific readership. Read the rest of this entry »

November 10th, 2009

Intel tries again with electronic products despite a very poor track record

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 3:19 pm

Categories: Business strategy, Intel

Tags: Intel Corp., Intel Reader, Vertical Industries, Benefits, Healthcare, Product Development, Semiconductors, Strategy, Human Resources, Research & Development

Intel today launched a portable $1500 e-book reader designed to help people with a broad array of vision problems including dyslexia.

The Intel Reader features a camera with built-in text-to voice software for reading out loud any text placed under the device. [About the Intel Reader]

The form factor of the Intel Reader is very close to that of Mobile Internet Devices, which offer similar size screens, an Atom microprocessor, a camera, and wireless connectivity for about $500. The Intel Reader does not have any wireless connectivity yet costs 3 times more.

I attended a briefing on the device yesterday and Intel said it did a lot of research into usability. It has also partnered with organizations that are active in helping the visually-impaired such as Lighthouse International.

The product comes out of a relatively new Intel business group focused on developing healthcare related products and technologies. The goal is to aid people to deal with health and aging issues in their homes.

The potential market size for the Intel Reader is 55m people just in the US. Next week it is being launched in the UK and Intel says it will be easy to produce versions for other languages.

Is this the right strategy?

Intel is a good technology evangelist for product sectors because it makes the chips, chipsets, and flash memory that are used to create a huge number of digital devices, PCs, mobile devices, smart phones, and servers.

Yet in this case, it is developing and selling products rather than seeking to seed markets and let other companies deal with product development, marketing, and all the other aspects of selling products to consumers.

Intel has a terrible track record in producing consumer products. It has tried several times and pulled out. It used to sell MP3 players, kids toys, and it announced it would sell large screen TVs. [Commentary: Intel gears up in consumer electronics push - CNET News - January 2001]

Intel’s work in healthcare is commendable but puzzling why it wants to be in a business that isn’t about making chips. It would seem it could achieve just as much by developing FDA approved reference designs and licensing its technologies to others with specialist experience in manufacturing, design, distribution, and after-sales support.

Intel is very sensitive to its investors and boosting its share price is a very important goal. This is a very important category of products. It would be tragic if it were forced to pull out because Wall Street didn’t like the profit margins, which by the way are much lower than for its core business.
(I am a member of the “Intel Insiders” advisory group.)

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Please see: Intel introduces a digital book reader that reads aloud to the blind | VentureBeat

November 10th, 2009

Is MySQL an "albatross" around the neck of Larry Ellison?

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 12:33 am

Categories: Business strategy

Tags: Oracle Corp., MySQL, Sun Microsystems Inc., Larry Ellison, Open Source, Databases, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, Tom Foremski

European regulators have held up the Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems because MySQL will give Oracle an unfair position in database markets.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle has blamed the delay on large losses at Sun.

Therese Poletti, writing at MarketWatch, says that “Sun Micro’s folly is now Ellison’s albatross.”

“MySQL, which Sun described in its fiscal 2009 annual report as “not material,” is a big thorn in Oracle Corp.’s side.

Should Mr Ellison sell MySQL so that the deal can go through? He has said that he won’t. And the losses at Sun will keep growing and competitors will continue to take advantage of market uncertainty over Sun.

Is MySQL worth keeping?

Heath Winter, an analyst with Think20/20 Research believes that MySQL may not be worth the fight.

“It does seem like a lot to go through for something that does not pay off very well,” Winter said. While Sun does not disclose MySQL’s revenue, Winter estimated its annual revenue at about $300 million. It could be even lower. At the time of the merger in January, 2008, MySQL’s 2007 revenue was $50 million.