Google vs. Murdoch
Google responds to Murdoch like they did before: If they tell us not to include [content], we do not; http://j.mp/3LgU1w
Updates from November, 2009 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
LinkedIn Goes Twitter
LinkedIn announced the future integration of Twitter: a bidirectional syndication of status updates; http://j.mp/14Hm8t
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Gerrit Eicker
LinkedIn: “Today we’re announcing a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter – and new features that we think are going to make both Twitter and LinkedIn more powerful for you. These new features will be rolling out gradually over the next couple of days. – The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.”
NYT: “Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s chief executive, said that he wants LinkedIn to be the hub for all professional conversation. Integrating tweets into LinkedIn will help them find a home where they will become part of someone’s professional identity, and conversations will develop around them, he said. – What does the partnership mean for Twitter? It will have broader reach, particularly in the professional sphere, which is important because Twitter plans to make money by helping businesses make the most of the service. But whether and how the partnership will be an immediate source of revenue for Twitter is unclear.”
TC: “Professional social network LinkedIn has long had a feature that lets users update their status on their profile. But it’s plainly obvious that LinkedIn users don’t nearly use the status feature for mass communication as frequently as they use Twitter or Facebook for the same purpose. In fact, I surveyed a sampling of LinkedIn users who avidly use the site for networking but never update their status on their profile. Many didn’t even know that LinkedIn had a status update feature.”
VB: “Sending status updates to LinkedIn also fits in with Twitter’s distribution strategy. Rather than trying to keep status updates within their network, they’ve syndicated them out to others like MySpace and AOL. (Twitter can also publish tweets into Facebook’s stream, but Facebook will not allow its status updates to go the other way into Twitter.)”
Mashable: “The deal makes sense for both sides; in fact, we’re surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Whether they’ll be able to expand upon this partnership, we have yet to see. However, the potential for lucrative business intelligence and data exchange is likely going to be too much for both companies to pass up.”
Gerrit Eicker
Kiva: Flannery Promises More Transperancy
Flannery, Kiva, outlines transparency issue, admits bad education, promises stronger feedback loop; http://j.mp/oW92z
Gerrit Eicker
Google Acquires AdMob
To enhance its expertise and technology in mobile advertising, Google acquires AdMob for US$ 750M; http://j.mp/4iQEYx
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “On November 9, 2009 Google announced an agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display ad technology provider, for $750 million. This acquisition will enhance Google’s existing expertise and technology in mobile advertising, while also giving advertisers and publishers more choice in this growing new area.”
Google (Blog): “Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That’s what has us excited about this deal. – For publishers of mobile websites and applications, this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content – allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue. – For advertisers who want to reach users when they are engaged with mobile content, this deal will bring better, more relevant ads and greater reach. It will also mean more interesting, engaging ad formats.”
NYT: “The all-stock deal is modest for Google, given its roughly $177 billion market value. But it is the third-largest in its history, behind the $3.1 billion deal for the advertising specialist DoubleClick and the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube. … Founded in 2006, AdMob calls itself the “world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace.” The company, which has received $47 million in financing from venture capitalists and other investors, refused to disclose its revenue.”
Mashable: “While one of the biggest deals we’ve seen come out of the Web space in some time, it’s not completely unexpected. When Google reported earnings last month, we noted that the company now has $22 billion in cash, and CEO Eric Schmidt said his company feels ‘confident about investing heavily in our future.’ That’s certainly the case here, as Google has just made a very big bet on mobile ads.”
SEL: “Postscript from Greg: I was able to speak to Google and AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui briefly today. The acquisition puts Google at the forefront of mobile display advertising and instantly brings Google a great deal of sophistication in the segment that it previously did not have. In fact that’s one of the things that Google emphasized in the discussion: they get a team that has been working the space and thinking about mobile display for four (or more) years. – Google also alluded to a potential for ‘holistic’ approaches to display advertising when I asked explicitly about whether there was going to be some future cross-platform ad buying capability.”
TC: “This is a big win for the company’s early investors, which include Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners (this is a huge day for Accel – they were also investors in Playfish, which was just acquired by EA). More recent investors include DFJ and Northgate Capital.”
RWW: “Now the iPhone rules. AdMob’s own numbers claimed that mobile traffic from the iPhone and iPod touch grew 19X over the last year. AdMob is making a strong play on the iPhone. TechCrunch reported this Spring that the company claims to be the biggest mobile app ad network on the iPhone and is working on a traffic exchange system for app promotion similar to what’s been done on Facebook. … Does Google want to see someone else leading the ad monetization on its own mobile OS just like it is now poised to do to Apple? No way. The answer? Buy AdMob. – It’s a very smart move. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google’s share price rose this morning to its highest point in almost 18 months.”
VB: “Google hadn’t focused much on the iPhone, in part because it had built a competing mobile phone system called the Android operating system. It’s now the basis of dozens of smartphones and is poised to come into its own over the next year with models like the Motorola Droid unveiled last week. – With AdMob’s exclusive focus on mobile, especially the iPhone and its exploding application ecosystem, the biggest treasure it offers Google is its know-how in terms of dealing with app publishers and advertisers.”
ClickZ: “Additionally, AdMob is one of a very small club of ad networks – catering to any channel – that Google has attempted to acquire. In 2007 it bought FeedBurner, an RSS feed management platform that also operated as an ad network.”
Forrester: “Big picture: mobile advertising remains a small fraction of the overall interactive marketing spend. Google, however, expects mobile to be a key growth driver in the coming years, and the acquisition of AdMob plays right into that strategy.”
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “Now, just at the point that those mobile ads are taking off, Google is getting into the game. With AdMob, it is not buying gee-whiz technology or a popular consumer destination. It is very clearly buying a future source of revenues. And Google is in a unique position to accelerate AdMob’s revenue growth by plugging it into its existing AdWords and DoubleClick systems and exposing it to the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who already use Google and might like to add mobile display ads to their campaigns. – AdMob’s current revenue run rate of $100 million is impressive, but Google’s purchase price tells us it thinks the opportunity for mobile display ads is in the billions of dollars, at the very least.“
Gerrit Eicker
EA Acquires Playfish
EA acquires social games startup Playfish, #2 behind Zynga, for US$ 300M, plus a US$ 100M earnout; http://j.mp/4gt4By
Gerrit Eicker
Cisco: Enterprise Social Software
Cisco announced broad product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio; http://j.mp/Bq1NR
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Navigation
Hersman on Twitter: Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge; http://j.mp/2IXCx7
Gerrit Eicker
News Corporation to Block Google
Murdoch: News Corporation will probably remove its sites from the Google index; http://j.mp/3PhND7 (via @jayzon277)
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Gerrit Eicker
Mashable: “Mr. Murdoch is not ready to accept any of the changes brought forth by the Internet and the social media movement. Moreover, he doesn’t seem to understand how some parts of it work. He’s got the manpower to announce a war, but I’m afraid his army will be fighting windmills.“
Gerrit Eicker
(New) Kiva Cycle
Kiva changed the cycle of loan disbursals: they can happen up to 30 days before a request is uploaded; http://j.mp/a5kC4
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Gerrit Eicker
Kiva: “Kiva provides the funds to our Field Partners by aggregating the loan funds from all contributing lenders. Most Field Partners then use the Kiva lender funds to backfill the loan they’ve already disbursed to the entrepreneur. Disbursals can happen up to 30 days before, or 30 days after a loan request is uploaded to the Kiva website.”
Roodman: “Kiva is the path-breaking, fast-growing person-to-person microlending site. It works this way: Kiva posts pictures and stories of people needing loans. You give your money to Kiva. Kiva sends it to a microlender. The lender makes the loan to a person you choose. He or she ordinarily repays. You get your money back with no interest. It’s like eBay for microcredit. – You knew that, right? Well guess what: you’re wrong, and so is Kiva’s diagram. Less that 5% of Kiva loans are disbursed after they are listed and funded on Kiva’s site. Just today, for example, Kiva listed a loan for Phong Mut in Cambodia and at this writing only $25 of the needed $800 has been raised. But you needn’t worry about whether Phong Mut will get the loan because it was disbursed last month. And if she defaults, you might not hear about it: the intermediating microlender Maxima might cover for her in order to keep its Kiva-listed repayment rate high. – In short, the person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections created by Kiva are partly fictional. I suspect that most Kiva users do not realize this. Yet Kiva prides itself on transparency.”
Flannery: “A main focus of the article has to do with the fact that most of Kiva’s loans are disbursed before they are funded on the Kiva site, which is true. The article points out, rather accurately, that most lenders on the site do not understand this. It goes on to imply that Kiva is taking an active role in perpetuating this misperception. – My response to this critique is two-fold. First, I believe that allowing pre-disbursal is necessary for the success of this model. Second, I think we can do better at educating our users about how and why this is the case. … As Kiva grew, and millions of dollars poured in through the website, we began to work with larger MFIs who could handle the sums of debt capital that the Kiva Lender community was able to offer. As loans began to fund quickly, MFIs began to expect and depend on Kiva loans being funded. Instead of waiting, MFIs began to disburse these loans in advance, assuming that the funding by Kiva Lenders on the website would take place. Good MFIs are client-driven. To make their clients wait unnecessarily would have been bad customer service. So, for many of our Field Partners, pre-disbursal became the norm. – Rather than outlaw this practice, which allowed MFIs to be more efficient and better serve their clients, Kiva decided to just make the practice transparent on the website, and to let the lenders decide whether to fund a pre-disbursed loan or to withhold. Hence, we created a system whereby MFIs were required to list the disbursal date on each and every ‘Make a loan’ page, beside the rest of the information we considered important for lenders before making the decision to lend. … The article also claimed that “Kiva charges 2%” on loans made through the platform, to our MFI partners. This is not true. In fact, Kiva does not charge any interest to its MFI partners, and passes along 100% of the loan funds raised on the site to its MFI partners. That was just an innocent mistake on the part of the author. … We don’t need to be playwrights on the Internet. We are going to do our best to avoid that trap, but certainly value the ongoing help of a critical and engaged user base along the way.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Flannery: “As I originally posted a month ago, I believe that 1) pre-disbursal, our policy to allow MFIs to disburse loans to entrepreneurs before they are fully funded on the site, is necessary for the success of this model, and 2) that we can do better at educating our users about how and why this is the case. … Online philanthropy is already much more real-time, connected, transparent and data-rich than philanthropy 10 years ago, but there’s still a long way to go. At Kiva, you see an entrepreneur profile for every dollar raised on the site. In addition, you see repayment data and can get your money back. As a small nonprofit, we continually seek to increase the quantity and quality of this data. … We will continue to strengthen the feedback loop between our users and our staff so that we can address confusion and criticism, and continue to focus on our mission to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.“
Gerrit Eicker
Qualitätsjournalismus
Mediendisput-Analyse [PDF]: 10 Faktoren, die Qualitätsjournalismus beeinflussen; http://j.mp/4kSjnE
Gerrit Eicker 11:19 on 10. November 2009 Permalink |
Telegraph: “A spokesman for the search giant said: ‘Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute. – Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.‘”
Hitwise: “Rupert Murdoch made an interesting statement in a Sky News interview today, when asked about news content available through search engines such as Google, Murdoch says he would consider blocking Google from indexing News Corp.’s news websites such as the Wall Street Journal. Of course it would naturally follow that I would immediately chart the amount of traffic that Google drives to Murdoch’s flagship news site. … In fact, on a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days.”
SEL: “Google is referring, of course, to using robots.txt or a similar protocol to keep content from being indexed. Danny Sullivan wondered aloud why Google’s critics in journalism weren’t already doing that, especially after the Wall Street Journal recently accused Google of ‘encouraging promiscuity’ online by allowing searchers to bounce from one news site to the next with no loyalty. Danny also sat down recently with Google CEO Eric Schmidt for a lengthy conversation about Google and journalism. – The debate/battle is far from over. The question now, at least where Google and Murdoch are concerned is: Who’ll blink first?“