Sergey Brin on the Microsoft-facebook deal – “Some of our competitors might be willing to spend very large amounts of money…and we’re really interested in doing sustainable economic deals so we would rather not participate in those sorts of transactions.”

Coming from the company that drove inflation into web company valuations (on the back of strong free cash flow/stock) to keep Yahoo! and numerous other web players out of the acquisition ring on numerous occasions. Ouch, must hurt!

To quote another Googler, the views expressed here are mine alone, and not those of my employer.

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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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Powered by Yahoo! Pipes
—

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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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 world’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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Before that, check http://in.maps.yahoo.com

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Last week Yahoo introduced their oneSearch mobile search experience for the majority of cell phones which offer Internet access. This week, Yahoo is working to fortify its innovative hold on the mobile search market with a suite of services which enable publishers to increase the discovery, distribution and monetization of their content via oneSearch; Yahoo Mobile Publisher Services.

Read on…

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Quality of Video is directly proportionate to volume of Streams.
TV Programming is high quality. (NBC + News Corp produce adequate content globally to keep every demographic entertained)
Y! + MSN + AOL = Huge Captive Audience (30% of online video is viewed on Y! alone)
Y! (and the others) have a lot of respect for rights & IP …
UGC quality still lags commercially produced content. (I illustrated this point in my post titled….the funniest phone review EVER)
A certain portion of the USD 1.65BN bid for youtube was premium to prevent the competition from getting their hands on a portion of it… a huge portion of this was for audience (since google video had poor adoption)
So Gootube now has a USD 1BN Viacom lawsuit to deal with (obviously factored in during acquisition), NBC + NewsCorp + Y! + MSN + AOL, Joost, Apple TV (will eventually converge), Grouper and the rest of the long tail of online video.

Excess pride in a nascent, evolutionary and shifting mediascape is dangerous.

I must add…all views on my blog are mine alone….i am not a spokesperson for any of the companies listed above…and as much as i’d like to believe i know enough, there’s still a long long long way to go

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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 – 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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GO GET ‘EM TIGER!

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http://messenger.yahoo.com/hiddenemoticons.php

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Instead of using the convulated route of managing search engines / adding new providers etc etc etc, all you have to do is visit http://mycroft.mozdev.org/quick/yahoo.html. Listed are about a 120 different Y! Search services which can be activated extremely easily.

Happy Searching!

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Yahoo!’s dedication to social media and variety of offerings to its users is well known. Many webmasters and bloggers miss the opportunity to drive boats of traffic from the biggest portal on the internet by using these tools effectively enough.

Given below are a list of tools, what they offer and relevant URLs
blo.gs – a pinging service to broadcast updates

del.icio.us – social bookmarking site that allows users to attach tags to saved entries. These tags allow users to attach keywords to their bookmarks. Since no webmaster, blogger can cover every relevant keyword in his description of his page in meta content and reflect them well enough in his keyword density, delicious tags are a useful way of allowing users to generate content on your behalf and thus drive more relevant traffic organically. Especially useful for niche topics. You can include an ‘Add to del.icio.us’ button to the bottom of every post thus turning your users to evangelists.

Save to MyWeb 2.0 – Allows users to save, share and re-visit your sites pages. MyWeb Tools are numerous and consist of everything from buttons to save to myweb which you can include at the bottom of your post to Badges & APIs.

Y!Q: Sounds like IQ and allows you to provide related searches and information to your users at the mouseover! Users love sites that provide them the worlds information in the easiest manner. Y!Q allows you to offer your visitors a more wholesome experience. Recommended for advanced bloggers as the install is a more complex.

Add to My Yahoo!: My Yahoo! is amongst the most popular services that keeps Yahoo!s users engaged. The ‘Add to My Yahoo!‘ button allows your RSS feed to be integrated into a users personalised page thus allowing him to find you in his daily dashboard of online updates. Whenever your blog gets updated he is automatically notified on his next login to My Yahoo!

Similarly you can add buttons for users to post your content and on their 360 Pages, and get them to build buzz around your content. Similarly you can upload your podcasts onto the popular Yahoo! Podcasts and display what users think of your podcasts on your own site thus adding to the credibility of your content.

This week Yahoo! also released some easy-to-plug-in (interactive) Social Media Optimisation Tools for anyone who creates content on the internet (publishers, podcasters and bloggers) making it extremely easy for users to share, save, recieve updates and blog about your content. These tools are in multiple formats and can be customized to the look and feel of your site.
Feel free to email me on ‘gautham at maediratta dot com’ if you have any questions.

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Thanks to Capitalism, Democracy AND the Internet we live in an age of opportunity, in an age where doubt is something you address on a Search Engine.
IMHO the assurance that the answer exists out there somewhere further fuels curiousity (doubt). Living in an age as complex/connected as ours, multiple cycles of doubt, resolution, discussion, further doubt, further investigation….leaves little time for existential concerns. While cogito still holds water, quaero quero holds the key to success.

PS – So much for my $0.02, De coined ‘cogito ergo tum’ – ‘I think therefore you are’ years ago! The latin-hindi probably has Descartes turning in his grave but i don’t think De ‘thought’ about it!

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What’s more, Yahoo’s large audience should be a plus when it comes to drawing marketing budgets, according to Merrill Lynch. “Yahoo has a best-of-breed Web user base,” states the report. “The company is well positioned for all online advertising growth opportunities, including branded, search, mobile and video.”

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This video is about life at Sunnyvale, features David Filo, Jerry Yang, a walkthrough the data center & NOC operations, the fitness center, the Guiness record and buzz marketing promos. A must see if you want to understand the ethic @ Yahoo! Videos of the life @ Yahoo! India would soon be uploaded on Timecapsule.

YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

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If you go to Yahoo.com & click on the exclamation mark in the Yahoo! logo, you can hear the yahoo yodel. Just make sure you speakers aren’t turned too high. And if you may want to save the Shockwave file used.

If you go to Yahoo.com & click on the exclamation mark in the Yahoo! logo, you can hear the yahoo yodel. Just make sure you speakers aren’t turned too high. Rocking Stuff!

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Attached above is a sample of the new Yahoo! Finance Badges. Essentially, syndicated charts and quotes, these allow you to display charts/quotes on your site/blog.

More at http://finance.yahoo.com/badges/

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I now work for Yahoo! India as a Strategist! Expect a detailed update soon! Am off to yodel now!

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No mention of FIFA, no mention of WC.  Don’t underestimate the power of user generated content from soccer maniacs, Nike’s player portfolio and the social networking hook!

1-0 Joga!

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I didn’t stop there (check the post titled 2019 for the abridged version) but the rest was more wishlist and not what i’d need to be seamlessly integrated with my online oxygen.

For the blissfully ignorant, IPv6 is short for “Internet Protocol version 6”. A replacement for the aging IPv4, which was released in the early 80s, IPv6 will exponentially increase the number of available Internet addresses or IPs (from 32 to 128 bits) and consequently the number of devices attached to the Internet. It would serve as a base for data delivery from everything from telecom to television. There are a host of resources which talk about the benefits and features of IPv6, some of which can be found here and here!

Combine IPv6 with Wimax/WiFi, the growth of embedded systems and AI and you find yourself in wireless paradise where all your devices i.e. car, fridge, camera, phone, tablet, TV talk to each other! Sound like sci-fi fiction? Opera already has a dedicated division which builds internet browsers for devices! Still sound like Star Wars? Before i give you a host of other reasons about why its not, i’ll give you some background on where the web is headed and the concepts behind Web 2.0.

To quote wikipedia “Web 2.0 is a term popularized by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International as the name for a series of web development conferences that started in October 2004. It has since come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).“

This IBM Page (courtesy De) is a great resource for developers.

To put it simply, the next wave is server based & collaborative computing, limitless bandwidth and seamless connectivity. Any analysis of M&A activity by Internet heavyweights will give you a good idea about Web 2.0 products and why they’re where any netrepreneur needs to be focussing his attention. There is already a long list of products from companies like 37signals, Salesforce.com, Trumba, Adventnet (Zoho) which deal with life management systems ranging from CRM to online collaboration. Flickr & Live.com are Web 2.0 products that need no introduction.

A peek at Google’s portfolio of products and services and Google’s acquisitions all point in one direction – Owning the Web 2.0 platform. Microsoft is what it is because it owns the PC platform. And that’s just what Google has aimed to do.

Yahoo! isn’t a stranger to 2.0 either, the new Yahoo! Mail, Live Words and Widgets are all 2.0 products. In addition to that, their acquisitions include Oddpost, Flickr & del.icio.us

While it’s easy to lose yourself admiring Google, you could very easily lost sight of Microsoft and be fooled into believing that they’re not very active on the 2.0 front. Ever wonder why the rumoured MS acquiring Macromedia didn’t work out? Maybe, for Vista to be a success, it had to be more nimble. A little digging into MS Investments & Acquisitions throws light on my humble 2cent theory. Sharepoint, Windows/Office Live, Origami, Windows Mobile 5.0 are not just concepts! MS publicly can now be in every room of the house & Windows has long been associated with BMW. Origami is WiFi enabled, it does have a tablet version of XP running on it (and should be able to run Vista). There are no limitations on the browser, the connectivity, the OS. Whats there to stop them?

It’s hard to imagine that something as big and wide as the Internet, can evolve so fast! While i still haven’t been able to identify any opportunities that the Semantic Web will present, i’m sure i’d be just as amazed, just as curious and just as ignorant as i am now.

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Am downloading Preview 2 of Opera 9 as i type this…..expect it to more intuitive. In addition to the general bugfix and rendering improvements there’s supposedly a host of new features such as x-platform type widgets, better content blocking, support for bittorrent (yipeeeeeeeee ), thumbnail preview of tabs etc etc.

To quote slashdot “Improved functionality also comes in the fact that a good lot of the scripts from userscripts.org will now work, advanced settings have improved in opera:config, and more browser customization is available at the opera community. However, some clear indications that this is still an alpha release is the experimental support for NTLM which breaks the proxy functionality for some users, and the fact that widgets are always on top.”

Opera’s Ambassador to India has his head high . It’s stuff like this that has him smiling, making him feel like a schoolboy in tomorrowland waiting for his trip to the moon!)

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I’ve finally decided to start blogging. On the advice of the wise Govind Menon, i’ve adopted the open source WordPress. Though a slight convulated install, feels good to be powered by the most powerful open source editing tool available .
What can we look forward to in 2006?

Loads actually….from Redmond, we can hope to get our hands on Vista, a peek at MSN Biz Apps, pay-per-go Office, MSN (India) Rich Media and India specific Ad-Center, Growth and evolution of Windows and Office Live! IE7, upgraded newsbot and personalised search are other areas we can expect activity on….

From Google we can expect pay-per-call advertising, Google Wallet, increased activity on Google Base (which would result in a showdown of sorts between eBay and Google), a more accurate analytics software (currently google analytics has inconsistent data) and more tie-in between AOL/Google. Another thing that would keep the attention of industry watchers are Google’s plans of Wi-Fi, their investment in black fibre and internet over power grid.
Jobbs and Co. have technophiles all excited with more powerful and affordable Intel processors powering Apple computers…can’t wait to get my hands on one of those….

The gods of open source should hopefully beef up OpenOffice and if all goes well an integrated Google Linux could be with us soon…..the only question being when….also Mozilla, we want a MS Outlook killer soon…..thunderbird falls way short….

All that i’m looking forward to from the Yahoo! stable this year is the new Yahoo! Mail Beta….am already on the wait list….and will be posting a detailed review as soon as i get onto it….

As far as the Indian Internet scene goes….with PC and Internet access costs spiralling southward we should continue to witness growth like we have in the last couple of years…with marketeers understanding that the Internet is a necessary part of the media mix, we should find newer and more interesting advertising solutions….expect some great ideas from mOne this year….we’re ready to rock the market!

I’m lucky to be a part of this revolution thats already changed the way millions of people work, live and function across the globe. It’s the same platform, accessible to everyone…a land of equal opportunity, the world’s biggest democracy, the world’s biggest community, the world’s biggest playground…with nothing to limit you, except yourself….have fun people…while the cyberwars of 2006 have netro-sexuals like me enthralled, it’s never been better for the end-user!

Go, Play!

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