Yahoo vs Google, battle Intensifies......

Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo. Up is down, and black is white. This spring has been very strange. Google, it seems, has jumped the shark. It has been overtaken, left standing, and not by some new startup of ultra smart MIT alumni or by the gazillions in the Microsoft development budget, but by the deeply unhip and previously discounted Yahoo.

Google's reputation comes from three things: the quality of its search results, the cutting-edge research and prototypes it produces, and the interfaces it provides for other programs to tap into, known as their application program interface (API). Search, up to a point, is a matter of brawn over brains - throw more money and machines at indexing the web, and you'll get a better result. So it was the last two that really set Google apart.

Google's Labs and API were held up as exemplars of a modern internet business, while Yahoo was seen as floundering in a sea of accountants, pop-up ads, and Britney Spears. But Yahoo has learned its lesson. Research.yahoo.com, launched last month, is the same idea as labs.google.com - a showcase for new and interesting projects - but it's better. Unlike Google, Yahoo publishes its papers, names its researchers and says what it is up to. One-nil to Yahoo.

Google's API was also a thing of beauty when it launched. For programmers, the ability to query Google from inside your own programs was immensely useful. And just as Amazon and eBay have done with their APIs, the Google API produced an ecosystem of applications and programming techniques that relied on, and fed, Google's success. It was unique.

But not now. Yahoo's own API is out, and it's better. It has more features, it's more complete, it's technically more elegant, and it's easier to use than Google's alternative. Two-nil to Yahoo.

How about products? Last month's launch of Google Maps was impressive, but not as cool as Yahoo's placing of live traffic conditions on its map this month. Google's webmail product, Gmail, caused a fuss by offering accounts capable of storing a gigabyte of mail, four times that of Yahoo Mail. No problem, said Yahoo last week, Yahoo mail users can have a gigabyte too. Google's purchase of Blogger gave them a place at the blogger's table, but it has done little with it. Yahoo's blogging tool, Yahoo 360, launches this month, allegedly fully integrated with the rest of the content they produce.

Google has an image organising application in Picasa, sure; but Yahoo just bought Flickr, perhaps the smartest and richest online application ever written. Yahoo has a rich site summary (RSS) aggregator, Google does not. Yahoo has a search engine for online movies, Google does not. Yahoo has quietly launched search.yahoo.com/cc, a search engine engineered to find and index Creative Commons material. To do this, Yahoo must be indexing the web for data called RDF - a highly advanced, potentially powerful technology that Google has said it isn't going to touch. Three-nil to Yahoo.

Yahoo isn't just back in the game - it's winning. How weird is that?

Source :http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1448381,00.html

Discovery Search Engine

Transparansee is a neat technology that lives on top of structured search. The model is to sell it to other sites as a custom install. Think of it as a smart layer of search on top of database-driven applications like dating, home or car buying.Transparansee's "Discovery Search Engine" seeks to address the "stupid computer" problems which plague most structured databases. You most likely have experienced some variant of this: you put in a set of parameters meant to find just what you are looking for - for example, on Fodor's, you want French bistros in Chelsea priced at $35 with a food rating of 20 or above - and you get no results, or only one or two. You have a sneaking suspicion that the results are missing an entire set of possibilities which are "close enough" to what you want, but you've been limited by the parameters you chose - if you open it up too much, you get a bunch of stuff you don't want. What to do?

Transparensee uses "fuzzy search" algorithms to scour a database and offer on the fly weighting based on any parameter you choose. Presto, what you want to see is at hand. It's hard to describe, but an "aha" when you see it in action. For example, there may be the perfect French bistro for you, but because it's one block away in another section of town, it does not get found. With Transparansee, you'd see it at the top of the list, because it matches on so many of the other weights.

It is a sort of filtering, but for more types of datasets. After all, it's hard to imagine a collaborative filtering application for home buying - "people who bought this home, also bought these homes...".

Is Transparensee trying to become the Swizerland of structured search? Too early to tell,because they are still in early startup mode. But this looks promising, and I hope the idea spreads.

Source : http://battellemedia.com/archives/001312.php

Developments in the content world

Digital content on both supply and demand side is going through lot of changes. Open media fans have launched Ourmedia.org. This throws new possibilities in terms of how you can produce derivative work, more power to the remixing culture.

Keeping content distribution democratic and out of the conntrol of those who have deep pockets is another matter. Mark Cuban has decided to finance the legal case on behalf of Grokster in its fight against MGM. Mark's simple theory for getting into the content play :

When content went digital, the floodgates opened. Content could be delivered digitally in thousands of different ways, and the number of methods for distribution would only expand over time. To me this meant the power of the gatekeepers would diminish and the power of independent content creators and owners would increase. With the explosion of the internet and then broadband, not only did households explode with digital content replay devices, but more importantly, consumers became comfortable with the concept of what digital was and what it meant to them. From CDs to DVDs to cellphones to email to cameras to HDTVs, in all cases the move to digital represented an improvement in quality, availability, flexibility, mobility and more. Just as I knew that digital in TV would lead to an explosion in the acceptance of HDTV over time, which is why we started HDNet and HDNet Movies (www.hd.net) the same acceptance would change how consumers bought and used any and all content.

Very interesting point he made about Maverick being a content play -

I then added the Dallas Mavericks as a content play with digital implications.

Sports will be a good quality source of content for many years (Think Gladiator model !). His main point though is about how significant this Grokster Vs MGM case is.

Unless Grokster loses to MGM in front of the Supreme Court. If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only.
..
This isnt the big content companies against the technology companies. This is the big content companies, against me.

Sweeping precedent which can come out of this case is what worries everybody in the technology industry. That alone is a big reason why this should be carefully deliberated.

RFID Benefits

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can work on several levels. In the first wave of its enterprise adoption, the one prompted largely by the Wal-Mart mandate, RFID has been applied largely at the case and pallet level.
But RFID can be used to track individual items as well. This kind of RFID use isn't very popular yet because suppliers are still scrambling to meet the case- and pallet-level requirements of their retailers, but the value proposition will lure in the market, says Jeff Richards, CEO of RFID consultancy and systems integrator R4.

R4 and Intelligent Systems, a division of MeadWestvaco (and a RFID solutions provider to Tesco), recently conducted a study designed to measure the benefits of using item-level RFID.

The benefits break out as follows:

*A potential eightfold increase in employee productivity in the realm of inventory management. Here, item-level RFID saves a lot of employee time in looking for and retrieving inventory.

*A 50 to 60 percent reduction in out-of-stocks. The Tesco item-level RFID trial, for example, resulted in a 50 percent on-shelf availability increase.

*A 40 percent reduction in shrinkage.

Given that stocking and shrinkage problems represent billions of lost dollars for the retail industry, those are remarkably promising figures -- tempered, of course, by the limited sample space and the reliance on the Tesco experience.

If those numbers are in the ballpark, retailers will push suppliers to adopt item-level RFID in the near future; but, in this case at least, the business case makes a lot of sense for suppliers as well.

Think of it from the supplier's perspective. Spending millions of dollars on an RFID infrastructure to tag items that are seldom stolen or stocked out doesn't make much sense. But applying the same infrastructure to, say, higher-value, frequently filched, often stocked out items like DVDs makes a lot more sense.

FDA regulations are already pushing pharmaceutical companies to look into item-level RFID. The same thing is happening with the U.S. Department of Defense's weapons suppliers. The next constituency to give item-level RFID some thought if not active pursuit will be retail, Richards concludes. "You can make the case even with a $.50 RFID tag for fast-moving, high-shrink, high-cost items like pharmaceuticals, DVDs, video games, and CDs. But you won't see RFID tags on tuna cans any time soon."

Source : http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?articleID=6453&TopicID=2

iTunes for Movies

As if the content companies haven't already been making fools of themselves with some recent strategic decisions, things are only going to get worse. Sony is now saying that it wants to create an "iTunes for movies," saying it will "set business models, pricing models, distribution models like (Apple chief Steve) Jobs did for music, but for the film industry." First of all, that's simply not going to happen. Sony is in the content business itself -- so its competitors in the movie business probably aren't going to be thrilled about contributing to its movie store. However, even if they can set up business models, pricing models and distribution models just like iTunes, they've totally missed the point. That, alone, is not what made iTunes successful. It's the customer experience. Apple made the customer experience work. They made it easy. While some of their decisions have been less than user friendly concerning copy protection and the forced-iPod connection -- overall it's the user experience that makes iTunes work. That means, for the most part, not treating your customers like criminals. However, Sony's entertainment execs have made it clear that they already view their customers as criminals and will do everything they can to lock all their content down. Hell, just take a look at Sony's widely disparaged already existing iTunes clone for music to see how copying the business model isn't nearly enough.

FREE MEDIA STREAMING - ORB

Orb Networks, Inc., a developer of streaming media software and services, announced the company’s groundbreaking streaming media software, Orb Media, will now be FREE to all users. Orb’s software and service gives consumers the ability to spontaneously access their live TV, music, photos, videos, and other digital content located on their home PC from virtually any Internet-enabled device, from anywhere in the world, and now provides that service without adding any new monthly fees for new and current customers. Additionally, Orb has added a new Photo Sharing service to its solution allowing customers to share all of their selected photos with friends and family at any time.

“By eliminating subscription fees, Orb eliminates the final barrier between consumers and their digital media,” said Jim Behrens, CEO, Orb Networks. “The allure of ‘anytime, anywhere’ access to one’s digital world has proven to be exceptionally compelling to Orb subscribers thus far. In our view, a free Orb service will exponentially increase our value proposition for those customers -- and millions of new customers as well.”

“Digital environment technology is a competitive field, and one that is ripe for growth,” said Tim Bajarin, Principal Analyst, Creative Strategies. “That said, vendors need to focus not only on the viability and innovation of their technology, but on fostering a consumer-friendly business model, as well. Companies that can master both worlds stand the greatest chance for early customer growth and long-term success.”

Xerox strategy focuses on colour products

Xerox Corp is betting its future on a more colourful business world.

The Stamford-based maker of printers and copiers is launching new products geared at allowing small- and medium-sized businesses to produce photo-quality colour documents.It's part of what the company calls the second phase of its colour strategy.

'Colour is no longer a 'nice to have',' Xerox chief executive Anne Mulcahy said ahead of Wednesday's launch in San Francisco. 'It's a smarter, more effective way to communicate and add value to information.'
Xerox struggled with mounting debt and competition a few years ago but has since returned to profitability, led in large part with sales of colour products.

The move intensifies Xerox's competition in the office market, one of the last bastions of black-and-white printing. Xerox is hoping its new products will help increase the number of pages printed in colour by businesses from three per cent to 10 per cent in the next three years.

Companies such as Xerox generate five times as much cash per page with colour compared to black and white.

As part of its strategy, Xerox is counting on the use of its patented solid ink technology, which eliminates traditional printer cartridges. The process involves loading a colour crayon-like substance into a printer, which changes from solid to liquid and then again to solid when it hits the paper.

Xerox on Wednesday planned to announce the first use of the solid ink technology on an office multifunctional device that copies, prints, scans and faxes documents.The product is aimed at smaller and medium-sized businesses, a segment Xerox has historically had trouble reaching.

This strategy makes sense, but they could face substantial competition from companies such as Canon, Ricoh and Hewlett-Packard puts pressure on the prices Xerox can charge. Shannon Cross, principle of Cross Research in New Jersey, cautioned that there could be a backlash by businesses that don't want to spend so much on producing colourful documents.

When it comes to selling to corporate America, there's good news and bad news for small and midsize companies. The good news is that today's corporate buyers are less likely to select vendors based on prior relationships or reputation alone -- meaning that more suitors are allowed into the dance. The bad news is that the dance has become a lot more formal.

Where there's formality in corporate purchasing, the request for proposal, or RFP, can't be far behind. RFPs have long been used by government agencies seeking vendors. But in today's era of strict corporate governance standards, RFPs are being issued more frequently for private-sector contracts, as well.

As anyone who has responded to an RFP knows, the process can be exhausting, and a 33% success rate is considered excellent. There are three main challenges to any RFP response: getting invited to take part in the first place; gathering the data to answer the issuer's questions; and writing, packaging, and presenting the proposal itself.

Unlike government contracts, private-sector RFPs don't have to be publicly listed. The only way to hear about them is to spend a lot of time networking with people who will tell you when they arise.

Once you're in the game, research is key. In January 2004, Yamamoto Moss, a Minneapolis marketing firm, responded to an RFP issued by a major financial services firm for a contract worth about $250,000. In response to a general question about the issues facing the brokerage industry, one of its staffers spent several days at a local firm observing brokers. "It went a long way toward winning us the business," says Shelly Regan, the firm's president. The client has since turned into Yamamoto Moss' largest.

Before cobbling together a proposal -- which usually runs from 20 to 50 pages with a three- or four-page executive summary -- expect to spend long hours debating, writing, and proofreading. It can get expensive. A response can take several weeks to complete (a typical RFP comes with a deadline of between four and eight weeks). That's a lot of potential billable time left on the table.

A company has to have completed a project similar in scope," says Dean LaForest, a senior planning engineer. "It also doesn't hurt to have a human being who can come in and be able to answer questions and address issues." Indeed, while the paperwork involved in responding to RFPs can be daunting, many competitions hinge on the presentation phase, in which potential vendors must back up their rhetoric by showcasing their teams in a high-pressure boardroom environment.

That adds up to a lot of pressure -- enough to make one long for the simpler days of the handshake deal. But for those firms that don't bump into the right people often enough, an RFP can be a great equalizer.

Amazon.com Knows, Predicts Shopping Habits

Amazon.com Inc. has one potentially big advantage over its rival online retailers: It knows things about you that you may not know yourself.

Though plenty of companies have detailed systems for tracking customer habits, critics and boosters alike say Amazon is the trailblazer, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. It even received a patent recently on technology aimed at tracking information about the people for whom its customers buy gifts.

Amazon sees such data-gathering as the best way to keep customers happy and loyal, a relationship-building technique that analysts consider potentially crucial to besting other online competitors.

But some privacy advocates believe Amazon is getting dangerously close to becoming Big Brother with your credit card number.It has built ever-more sophisticated tools to recommend more purchases, direct your searches toward products it thinks you're most likely to want, or even stop the forgetful among us from buying the same book we purchased five years ago.

More recently, the Seattle-based virtual retailer has launched a Web search engine, called A9, that can remember everything you've ever searched for - and the site reserves the right to share that information with its retailing arm.

Amazon also funds a Web site called 43 Things.com. It seeks to link people with similar goals, such as getting out of debt.Technology that can accurately anticipate a customer's greatest desires is going to be crucial in the growing competition with Internet-based upstarts and traditional retailers moving online.

A9 ranked 41st in popularity among search engines in February, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, attracting only a fraction of visitors to Google or Yahoo.

A9 has no current plans to link customers' Web searches with their Amazon shopping habits, even though data from both sites are stored using the same customer log-in.

Amazon's backing of 43 Things potentially gives it an opening into social networking. At the site, people list personal goals and find out who else shares their ambitions.

Many companies, including Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc., also are investing in technology that seeks to build communities, and Garrity said Amazon has a clear interest in cultivating that same feeling around its sales site.

But for now, it's unclear how 43 Things might eventually relate to Amazon's grander plans

iPod Phone

It seemed like a sure thing: the iPod mobile phone. What could be more irresistible than a device combining the digital-music prowess of Apple Computer with the wireless expertise of Motorola ?

Motorola and Apple want to hold off until the phone is closer to hitting store shelves. But three industry sources say a lack of support from such giant cellular operators as Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless was instrumental in delaying the unveiling. So far, the wireless companies are reluctant to promote the Motorola-Apple phone.

Behind the clash are two very different views of the future of music on mobile phones. Motorola and Apple would let customers put any digital tune they already own on their phones for free. That would help Motorola sell more phones, and it would help Apple expand its dominance of digital music.

Verizon, Cingular, and other wireless operators want customers to pay to put music on phones. They think getting a full song should be like getting a ring tone, snippets for which customers now pay from 99¢ to $3. The carriers have no interest in conceding the booming digital-music market to the tech players.

At issue is whether Apple and Motorola leave room for carriers to benefit. Their phone could be loaded with songs simply by dropping it into a cradle attached to a PC, so that music wouldn't have to travel over carriers' airwaves. There's not a whole lot of profit to share, either. When customers buy songs from Apple's iTunes music store, they pay 99¢ a tune. But Apple only gets about 4¢ of that, after paying the record company and others, says researcher Strategy Analytics. Apple says iTunes is only a breakeven business.

That approach doesn't sit well with the megacarriers -- and they can hamper the sale of any cell phone. Verizon and others typically subsidize the phones they sell to customers, often charging $200 less for handsets at retail than what they pay Motorola and others

Apple and Motorola have options, too. One insider says that even if Cingular and Verizon, the two largest wireless players, won't sell the Motorola-Apple phone, smaller rivals, such as T-Mobile, may peddle it to gain ground on the industry leaders. Motorola says it's working out ways for carriers to profit from digital music, and it expects to launch the phone with that support this summer. Motorola and Apple could also bypass carriers altogether and sell the phone via retail stores or their own Web sites.

Trouble is, that would mean no carrier subsidy on the handsets. So customers would have to foot the music phone's entire bill, expected to be around $500. "Who wants the $500 iPod phone when you could buy a phone and an iPod for that much?


Seems to be an interesting battle ahead........

Flickr Phenomenon

Flickr.com is a new online photo management and sharing application. Founders have told Fastompany, Flickr has grown from 0 to 150,000 users while still in beta and with zero dollars ($0.00) in marketing investment. This growth has been entirely organic, based on word of mouth, blog postings and positive press. We have quickly created the largest and best-organized online photo library in existence with 1.8 million images, of which 81% are public, and 85% have some human added metadata. What this means is you can find photographs of anything that strikes your fancy. Vintage cars, butterflies, Parisian graffiti, Halloween costumes – you can get lost for hours exploring Flickr. Flickr has also provided a place for people to both express themselves and be a part of a larger community by creating self-organizing photo albums that they can share privately with friends or family, or with the world; they can curate collections of other member photos, and create dynamically assembled galleries. People all over the world upload photos from the war in Iraq, from the middle of the Florida hurricanes, from the polling booth, from the midst of the revolution in the Ukraine. Flickr is infinitely shareable and easily searchable. As Paul Allen points out, Fastest Growth Sites Are Built on User Generated Content. Paul writes,one of the most powerful ways to develop web site traffic is to enable users to share their content through your web site with others-to create community around user generated content.Many of the fastest growing web sites of all time did this (or do it now): MyFamily.com, eBay, GeoCities, Xoom, Homestead, MySpace, Epinions, Hotshots, LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, Friendster, and more.If sites are uses to get customers to blog, use message boards, upload photos or reviews, the effect shall be dazzling.With open source software (for message boards, blogs, uploading photos, and more) and with the cost of hard drive storage a tiny fraction of what it was five years ago, the time has never been better to try a user generated content strategy.

New Web sites to store public's digital content

Tapping into a growing interest in so-called grass-roots media, two Web sites launched this week that aim to become repositories and clearinghouses for a wide variety of digital content created by the public.

Ourmedia, started by Pleasanton writer J.D. Lasica and Walnut Creek technologist Marc Canter, is offering a central place for people to upload and store any digital media they want to share with the world, including video, audio, images and text files. The service is free.

The founders say their service could help content producers find new audiences for their work. And it could become a cultural archive for researchers and future generations of Internet users that want to view history through an alternative media lens, say Ourmedia's founders.

Grassroots media has enjoyed an explosion of interest in the past year, fueled by the increased credibility of bloggers and the growing popularity of video and audio tools such as camcorders and editing software.

Content is proliferating. A video blogging Internet discussion board -- which had only about 50 members in December -- now has about 5,500. On the audio side, a new trend called podcasting has spawned thousands of amateur Internet radio shows.

The organization eventually plans to release the source code of its Web site, potentially spawning an array of similar Web sites and media repositories, he said.

The group also is talking with companies such as Yahoo and Google about hosting media files on their own servers. It wants third-party developers to build their own interfaces to its content. And the group is exploring peer-to-peer technology that would allow Ourmedia to become a gateway to media files stored on individual personal computers.

Much of Ourmedia's vision is shared by another site called NowPublic (www.nowpublic.com) that launched this week. Based in Vancouver, B.C., the site allows everyday people to act as editors, reporters and photographers. A user submits ``assignments'' requesting information about a particular topic or event, and others upload video, photos or text to complete the story.

``It's not replacing regular media,'' founder Michael Tippett said. ``It's augmenting it. It's kind of a clearinghouse for news media.''