http://gautham.maediratta.com » Web 2.0

Engagement: Google Gadgets a Yahoo! killer?

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 21:47:31 +0000

The last week has been fantastic. Between the IAB Mixx & Expo and other events associated with Advertising Week, i’ve learned much more than i imagined.

I attended this session by Google on Ad-Innovation, where they spoke extensively about Gadgets and other innovation on Youtube etc. If Google Docs is Google’s attempt at hitting at Microsoft (albeit a VERY long shot), Gadgets (IMHO) is aimed square at Yahoo! by hurting their biggest stronghold (rich media & innovation) by adding longevity (users can save ads) and no hosting/serving costs in a bidded marketplace.

Engagement is clearly the new benchmark. The Live platform is rife with gadgets developed for it and given that these can integrate across the platform on Spaces or Messenger or any other catchment area owned by Microsoft…the only person missing this party is Yahoo!

Given their dependance on rich media (and the possible impact), it will be interesting to see how they comeback.

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Eric Schmidt on Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 13:25:27 +0000

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Now handing out Spock Invites

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 06:38:55 +0000

Discovered Spock last week but didn’t have an opportunity to spend much time on it. To quote their site, “Spock is the online leader in personal search, helping users find and discover people. With over one hundred million people already indexed and millions added every day, Spock is building the broadest and deepest people specific search engine.”

What i like is the fresh look at image/people search and novel means of user participation such as users rated ‘tags’ to increase/decrease relevance.

In true internet spirit…am just trying to spread the love …. Let me know if you want an invite.

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Distribution 2.0 – Talking without voice!

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 15:12:57 +0000

Call this Distribution 2.0 …. toys that talk to each other: Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Widgetbox & Netvibes.

What do I use and what does it do?
Wordpress: An open source blogging platform that publishes RSS feeds and allows hyper personalization using plugins.
Facebook: A popular social (networking) platform that publishes RSS feeds and allows publishing on its own platform.
Twitter: A simple but brilliant micro-blogging solution.
Pings: Hello World! Automatic updates from my blog to over 70 sites such as Technorati, Icerocket & Pingomatic
Twitterfeed: Updates my latest blog entry automatically into my Twitter Status
Twitter Facebook App: Automatically updates the twitter badge on my facebook profile.
Widgetbox: Updates Blog Widgets with my latest posts (aka blidgets) on a couple of friends blogs and social networking profiles.
Wordbook: Publishes new post notification into Facebook Minifeed.
MyRSS (Facebook app): Updates my feed on the Facebook RSS directory for new users to find.
Share This (Wordpress Plugin by Alex King): User initiated bookmarking, voting (digg it, fave on technorati) and send via email.
Digital Fingerprint – Enables you to easily and quickly search the web for potential cases of plagiarism and content theft. It works by adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts that you select (or all posts if you wish). You can then easily monitor the blogosphere for your digital fingerprint in the hopes of finding potential content thieves and scrapers abusing your content
Netvibes: An RSS aggregator that I spend almost half my life on. In addition to getting updates from all my news sources, i now get my email and facebook feeds as well. Netvibes – very very cool!

Gotta get back to the real world now….happy blogging!

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The Long tail, in short!

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 10:38:58 +0000

The single critical success factor of any new startup (including any 2.0 idea) lies in its ability to leverage the ‘Long Tail’. Though the long tail is not exclusive to the internet, it is almost synonymous with the wealth creation we have seen over the last couple of years… here is a very brief attempt to demistify the fundamentals.

To put it simply (in internet terms), the sum total of all PageViews/Visits/Monetization Opportunities in the so-called ‘Tail’ is more than the popular consumer hangouts (read: portals). A new blog born every second and brings with it another potential influencer, voice and opinion sets.
As we’ve evolved from an era of Mass Media (the days of Doordarshan) to My Media (cable television, early internet) to We Media (Wikipedia, Y! Answers, Facebook….), choice has become a whole new reality …. and human beings can’t get enough of it. For traditional media, the Internet is the paradigm shift….the rate of evolution – the checkmate.

Consumerism isn’t merely limited to owning physical objects…we’re now (thankfully) seeing it in the ever increasing need to know .. (refer Quaero Quero Ergo Sum). It is the Long Tail that drove usage/adoption/popularity of Search Engines… people wanted to find new sites, new information, new applications. However, search merely connected people to long tail… and the next wave of wealth creation (popularly known as Web 2.0) came when technology allowed bits of the Long Tail to connect with other bits …. in the seamless aggregation and distribution of Content (Text/Photos/Videos/Other) & Advertising.

The Long tail is here to stay, and the rules to build a viable business model are no different from a traditional one. Affinity (in cyberspace/blogosphere) is a function of niche; media spend is a function of affinity, reach and relevance.

–

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A peek into my inbox! :)

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 10:13:22 +0000

If you thought this would bring you all sorts of juicy gossip….i’ll just say that’s not my style .. this is a Jai RSS (Really Simple Syndication) post .. and the inbox in question is the one i use on Netvibes.
Stumbled across this Yahoo! Messenger plugin which led me to the developers page… which then me thinking about whether i could export all my feeds from netvibes and get Y! Pipes to parse them into the script.
This is an attempt to show you what i’m possibly reading at any given time and aims to add some level of dynamic content to my otherwise static blog.

Update 1:
This refuses to work….so i’m going retro and pointing you to my pipes page…
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=yGumNJP92xGUOqbZlfXiAA
Update 2:
Just for my friends from Russia (the largest non-english/hindi speaking country on my blog) here is a translated version in Russian.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=qjQ3ot0n3BGtrf_a6kjTQA

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Democracy – A Consumer Insight

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 07:30:56 +0000

Many of you have written/mentioned in passing that I hardly ever talk about Y! and what’s next, and only mention press releases/coverage from time to time about Y!…i’ll just say that the multiple Y! blogs (starting with http://yodel.yahoo.com) would do a much better job of describing what Y! is upto…also, this is a personal blog…and alot of the content here are thoughts about how the space is evolving…yeah, so on with my post…

The internet is the world’s biggest democracy…i first came up with that line back in 2004 when i was writing my SoP for an eBusiness Management course for a school in england…i didn’t go due to a multitude of reasons, but the SoP really helped me crystallize my thoughts…and this was my opening statement…

The Internet has no parallel, it is the world biggest community (11.5% of world population)*, the worldâ€™s biggest marketplace (740 million users), and is growing and evolving everyday. We have witnessed the social implications it has had on our lives and how it has revolutionised the way we do business. Today, we are witnessing the second Internet revolution, the era of Wireless Networking. This will increase the reach and growth of the Internet making it a more central part of how we live and operate. I am driven by my passion for the Internet, and am decided on being a part of this global movement, that continues to add value to our lives.

That was 2004, 3 years in a conventional landscape (30 in cyberspace)…those numbers have already clawed up to a billion users globally (15% of global population…growing at 10% a year)…media moguls across the globe are now watching the wireless revolution evolve and attain critical mass…wi-fi and wi-lan are available in india, mobile access continues to grow at 5MM new users in india alone, mobile VAS revenues exceed P2P… we are all witnessing faster evolution of our species thanks to the ever widening proliferation of media and technology…the key trend we’re seeing is, the company that builds the best ecosystem, that allows for the fairest democracy, and that allows the user to be the real winner will eventually win…
Google made online advertising democratic when they first launched ad-sense…they weren’t the first online ad-network, but were the first the allow virtually everyone to run ads on their site and make money of it…in retrospect, the manner in which fastclick, advertising.com and the other networks treated small webmasters was pathetic, and thats why they paid the price…Google continues to grow, and in no small part due to the number of webmasters across the globe that run their ads, swear by their practices and, how their system allows advertiser, webmaster & user to win… the online ecosystem is built (and continues to grow)…Google is not aiming to be a destination….Google wants to be the platform…and has done everything it needs to do, to be the center of the world’s biggest ecosystem…
Don’t for a moment write Microsoft out of this game…they’re still very rich (USD 30BN in cash, billions in profit every quarter) and if you read between the lines of last weeks $3 windows student license announcement for developing economies…you find that they are the only company on earth that could aim at doubling the number of PC owners in the next 8 years… almost all of us use Windows, and alot of their products across the productivity (windows, office 2007, mobile) and entertainment axis (mediacenter, xbox360) are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition… we’re only too used to personalising our computing experience…the key here is we can personalise it because MS has built the ecosystem… even though some of their tactics can be mildly termed aggressive, that’s just business right? …. in the words of kevin kelly, the infinite game is played to keep playing, and to win at every level you play at….

Today we can install almost anything we find on the internet on a windows machine…and thats what affords us options, choices, freedoms which in turn empower us….we can now share our ideas with the world (this blog being a classic case), get feedback, collaborate and jointly evolve…this is the role that technology & media combined are playing in the evolution of mankind… technology was always supposed to be open, to be free, shared, transparent…and media today makes it viable… web 2.0 is the biggest attempt and success story ever towards socialization of media & technology … its anyones guess about which company will eventually prevail… but the one thing i can say with absolutely no hesitation is that the consumer will win (and is already winning) … we’re really really really lucky to live in this day and age… subsidised by media, empowered by technology… democratic, free and liberated!

This is just ONE more reason why i LOVE the internet…

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Yahoo! Offers Best Mobile Web Experience

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 09:21:12 +0000

Boston, MA – March 12, 2007 – The newly launched Strategy Analytics Wireless Media Lab service has released, “Yahoo! Offers Best Mobile Web Experience as Interest in Web 2.0 Outstrips Media Industry Content,” which concludes that Yahoo! has the leading mobile web experience, based on evaluation of leading mobile web offerings by a Strategy Analytics Wireless User Panel.

Yahoo! beat Google, Napster, YouTube and MySpace, after participants carried out a set number of tasks specific to each provider on both a laptop PC and a wireless device.

“Yahoo! Mobile achieved the highest rating, primarily due to the fact that it represented the best replication of the full website on the Third (mobile) screen,” according to Paul Brown, User Experience Analyst at Strategy Analytics. “However, mobile implementation of these brands is tangibly inferior to the fixed user experience across a range of metrics.” Mobile implementations of these brands are tangibly inferior to fixed with user experience ratings ranging form -12 to â€“ 34 index points. MapQuest is the most sought-after web location on mobile followed by Google.

David Kerr, VP of the Global Wireless Practice, added, “Many users, especially among digital enthusiasts, show a preference for web search, web mail and web 2.0, user generated content and social networking content over branded content. However ease of access and discoverability of content on mobile handsets continue to be a huge pain point which is directly limiting content consumption”

Benchmarking Key Brands: Fixed and Mobile Experience

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Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 21:46:38 +0000

This has to be the best UGC video i’ve seen this year…thanks Rajit, this is absolutely brilliant!

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The real implications of Web 2.0

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 17:36:58 +0000

Over the last couple of months, i’ve been bombared by questions about social media (or web 2.0 products) and my responses have been consistently varied on the real implications for users, brands and communities. I finally managed to cut myself out of tech explanations and put down the real, simple, business / marketing implications:
1) Marketers, brace yourself for the handover of power; large corporations & brands to individuals & communities.
(We consumers now officially rock )
2) Webpreneurs, the value-store (read VC valuation) is not in content but in shaping & delivering a unique experience seamlessly across digitally converged devices. (read computers, mobile phones and other devices. The other devices are where the next wave of innovation is going to be led, and the best thing is
3) The barrier to entry, and time to market, in innovation is a thing of the past. Due to the permutations/combinations, and constant evolution of the platform itself, it is much harder for innovation to be driven top-down. The sheer nature of experience, demands it be built bottom-up.

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Is ‘Web 2.0′ Another Bubble?

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 13:54:24 +0000

The Wall Street Journal Online invited two technology venture capitalists, who were active in the dot-com days and have invested in the current crop of startups, to debate the topic. Todd Dagres spent nearly a decade at Battery Ventures before starting Spark Capital last year. David Hornik, a partner at August Capital and a former Silicon Valley attorney, writes the popular VentureBlog. Their conversation, carried out over email, can be found here

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YouTube vs. MySpace?

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:02:17 +0000

Just a few months ago, News Corp. (NWS) landed a crucial deal with Internet leader Google (GOOG). News Corp. designated Google as the search engine for MySpace, the social networking leader that News Corp. acquired last year for $580 million. The Google deal guaranteed $900 million in revenue for MySpace over a three-year period, more than
enough to recoup News Corp.’s cost of acquiring MySpace, plus a tidy profit.

Today, YouTube doesn’t compete directly with MySpace, where members keep home pages loaded with photos, videos, music and messages. But YouTube has a social networking component, because its users can share playlists and other information. That could be the foundation for more YouTube social networking features that would put it into more direct competition with MySpace.

Read on…

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The Rise of Social Networking

Gautham Gauruv Maediratta — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 03:27:49 +0000

Social Networking is one of those many buzzwords you hear flying around the place. While Myspace dominates
discussions and headlines, the silent mover / dark horse is Google’s Orkut. Its not easy to spot Google’s
revenue model in Orkut, but this is as close as i can get to it. Search Quality!!! Google aims to provide more
relevant results on the basis of social networks, associations, interests and skew of geographic inputs.I’ve been using Orkut for over 4 years now, and must add that stickiness is high. While the scrapbook ensures
you login, the Recent Visitors tool ensures you keep adding folks in.

Appended below is a sneak peak of my Dashboard

Welcome, Gautham

Invite your friends and grow your network now!You are connected to 24,184,827 people through 75 friends. You have 1 fans. 90 scrapsYour profile views:
Since Feb ‘06: 714, Last week: 35, Yesterday: 8
Recent visitors:
srujana murali, Adnan Farooqui, Arunita Phukan, kanchan sharma, Nitin NayyarNext steps:
Have a great friend? Write a testimonial and let people know!Today’s fortune:
You never hesitate to tackle the most difficult problems

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