Startup Diaries

The Search Wars Are Back

As many people noted today, most of the initial reactions to the new search engine from Microsoft, Bing, are quite good. In the past weeks we all read so many negative things about it, that I think we can all admit that we expected a complete failure. But surprisingly, Bing is actually very good.

The big question now is whether this is enough to compete with Google?

I think Microsoft was very smart in the way they developed Bing. They realised that they can't and should not try to fight Google over index size or even ranking of search results. Google are just too good there. But with the combination of their aquasition of Power set, and integration with some of their owned content sites like Farecast what they achived is something else - a more relevent way to display search results.

Search for example for "Lakers Results" in Bing and in Google and you will see the difference. WHile both point to the Lakers site as the first result, Bing also shows you the latest game results and the next games schedule, right in the search results.

Add to that some really useful new UI elements such as playing videos right in the search results, auto preview for sites and relates searches tab and you get a quite impressive search experience.

That said, this is still not enough to beat Google. The problem is that in order to beat Google, you actually need to break users' habit. And this is the hardest possible task. In order to do so, Microsoft needs one of the following:

• A "killer" feature - A feature that is so good that it will make people start to use it just for that.
• A "killer" marketing campaign - After the semi successful "I'm a PC" campaign, can Microsoft pull a winner for Bing?
• Use their "windows advantage" - Basically integrate Bing so hard into Windows 7 that users will just have to start and use it. This is unlikely as the last thing Microsoft needs right now is more anti trust issues.

Another very interesting scenario could be if Microsoft buys Twitter and integrate it into Bing... Twitter "real time" search is getting better and better and could potentially be this killer feature. Make the twitter search box to actually do Bing search, and you suddenly get millions of new users...

Art of Dying Industries

In the last few weeks I had some meetings with people from the print industry. There were a very depressing meetings. We that lives the Internet every day can easily forget how fast the Internet is changing complete industries and people lives. Reflecting back, I can still remember that just 10 years ago I was probably subscribed to 5 different magazines, and names like PC Mag and Mac World were creating the standards in our industry.

The Internet is not the first technology to kill and shift complete industries, but it is unique in the rapid fast pace it did it. Print was probably the first big victim, but music, TV and movies are just examples for other industries we already know will never be the same.
In fact, the pace of change today is so fast that we even see businesses who were born in the internet that have to already adopt to a new reality. Take Netflix as an example. The direct mail company changed the dvd industry, displacing giants like Blockbuster. But now Netflix themselves need to adopt to the new reality of video on demand, Tivo and online video streaming.

The big challenge of a dying business is not to figure out what you need to do next, but it is how to do the change soon enough. Most print magazines knew that the Internet requires them to change, and still they didn't move fast enough. What killed them was their inability to deliberately forgo their current money making machines in order to save their long term future. Instead of doing experiments with the web, while still maintaining focus on their print business that was still making tons of money, they should have moved all their focus into digital and kill the print business themselves, instead of waiting for all of us to do it for them.
By waiting and trying to milk their current business model to the end, they let new businesses born into the digital world to take their place as the leaders of the new medium.

Today we are on the verge of another big change that potentially will displace many businesses. The evolution of mobile computing is changing how people consume and use information. This time, the threat is not just for the old traditional businesses, but even to digital businesses which were born jut a couple of years ago.
Every big change has a tipping point. A point of no return. A point in which the pace of change becomes so rapid, that there is no way to stop it anymore. It took the Internet a lot of years to become what it is. There were many factors that got us to the tipping point, but probably one of the bigger ones was when broadband became a commodity.
It seems that the tipping point for mobile computing was around the introduction of the iPhone and also here, the large availability of 3G networks.

It's still too early to know how exactly the mobile revolution will change the way we do things on a day to day basis. It's still hard to guess who will be the new kings of this era. Companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have their full attention and resources, trying to make sure that no one will take their place in this new world. And still, it seems that the mobile landscape is still open enough for a new king to come and rule.

Like before, it's easy to say that we have been talking about mobile for years but it never really happened. It's easy to think that you still have time and you don't have to change things today. And this is the fetal mistake that most of us do. The best businesses knows to take the hard decision and displace themselves, instead of waiting for the market to do so.

My eLife Tools Review

After sucha long time without real blogging, I think it will be a good time to do a quick review of the digital tools I use on daily\weekly basis. Tools that makes life, a little more easy or fun:

• Netflix - Netflix is still my first choice for movies, especially for the ones I want to see on Blu-Ray. Still, since Hulu went live and you can basically see any TV you want on demand, I got to admit that my movies consumption went down.
• Twitter - No doubt the new rising star in my digital life. I never really had the time to play with it, but two wonderful applications made the use of twitter so easy and fun. Check out Twinkle for your hacked iPhone and Twhirl for your mac/pc.
  I would even go far and say that Twitter became almost a Facebook replacement for me.
• Amazon Prime - I still do 90% of my shopping just on Amazon.
• Hulu - No doubt Hulu became the first place I go to for all my TV needs. Not too many people noticed, but it actually has also a nice selection of old and cult movies.
• Snurl - if you blog/twitt a lot, you will love this small tool that shorten all the big and ugly URLs. There are many other services like this, but as this one is integrated into Twhirl I chose it.
• Safari - OK. For years I claimed that IE is better and a lot of the time faster. I was wrong. For many Ajax intensive sites, Safari performs much better. The built in spell checker, the great auto complete forms and bookmarklet capability is just a bonus.
• Netvibes - For a long time I tried to avoid start pages. But on Safari, Netvibes load time is really fast and I started to find it as a easy tool to get a quick look across social networks and blogs.
• Fring - Best kick ass iPhone application ever. Allows you to have a skype/messenger running in your iPhone while you are using other applications.
• iPhone - With the addition of Fring and Twinkle, suddenly the iPhone became a real social tool. My thoughts about replacing it are long gone. Now all is left is to wait for the 3G version

The Open Business Concept

Fred Wilson wrote this week about the need for an open social network, one where the users have complete control on their information.
Sean Ammirati wrote about the possible creation of an open ad network. An ad network where publishers get the all cake of the advertising budget (instead of the Google and rest of the ad networks way where they take a big cut of the advertising money).

It all brings me back to an old vision I had when I started my company NuConomy.
Back in the early days of 2006 when I just started to roll the idea in my head I thought about what was back then an absurd idea - do rev share with the end users. I thought about businesses like YouTube where millions of people are producing and uploading every day (basically doing all the work) and in the end Google (back then it was still YouTube) takes all the money.
It sounded very unfair in my head. I had a vision of a web where the people who produce the content gets not just the glory but also the money. I decided to develop a system that can measure the end user contribution to the business in order to decide how big his cut of the cake should be (I got to admit that today running incentives programs is just a feature in our system. The platform itself changed its focus to next gen analytics).

In my head I even envisioned totally new structure of business. Something I called "The Open Business" (taken from the concept of open source).
Imagine a business that his owned by its employees and ran completely by its employees. Everyone share of the business is decided by their direct contribution to the business.

Lets take for example the idea for an open social network.
You take an open source platform and start a new social network with a business model around advertising. Each user who joins the network gets a status of a virtual employee of the network and a shareholder of the company. How many shares does he gets? Depends on his exact contribution to the business.
Users that has more friends, upload and write more high rated content, invite more friends and drive more page views or clicks on ads gets bigger cut of the revenues every month.
It's that simple. In the open business the users are the shareholders. They are the employees. They not just own their information, they own the business itself.

I also gave a lot of thoughts about how this concept of open business can help drive the open source community.
Think of an ad based open source project, where all the developers that contributed to it gets a cut of its revenues. How you decide how much each developer will get? By their exact contribution the project. You can measure stuff like number of created/solved bugs, number of developed features, rating of features, spent hours, etc.
I know that most people who participate in open source are doing this for the community and not for profit, but can the open business be an open enough model that the community can actually embrace?

Technorati Tags: open business, open source, rev share, business, ad network

The Power of the New Media

Today there was one of my old time favorite movies on TV - Pump Up The Volume. It was great watching it again after so many years.
It's interesting to wonder how this 1990 movie would have looked like today, in the era of the Internet, blogs, podcasts anc vidcasts.

One of the strongest messages of the movie is that we need to speak our mind freely, to let our voice heard. As I look on the Internet and the revolution it brought to our lives, I can't think about exactly the same thing.
The promise of the web is not just of giving us an easier way to shop for stuff, hear music or get in touch with our friends.
The real promise of the web is the ability of our voice (and picture) to reach millions op people around the world in the speed of light.

But should we just get this amazing power as granted? I believe not.
Such power should come with great responsibility.
Should we use it just for uploading funny videos, images from our trips and music we like?
Should our MySpace/Facebook pages should be used just for self promotion?
For the first time in history each one of us really has the power to affect things. For the price of a meal in McDonald we can communicate our opinions across the globe. We can make people notice the stuff in the world that should change. We can really make a difference.

The real question today is not how to make people aware of things, but more of how to make people care about it.
How can we harness this amazing social networks phenomena to make our world a little better.

I'm not sure what is the answer to that. But I'm sure she is out there, waiting to be found.

Technorati Tags: Media, social networks, podcasts

Do Advertisers Don't Know How to Learn?

I'm sitting in a supernova session about the future of advertising. The panel keeps talking about the fact that as everything is so new, most advertisers still don't know how to view the Internet.

I just have to pop up a question - Everything so new???
In an age where every business book talks about the need to be agile, how can we look at the Internet as something new?

The Internet is here for more than 10 years (in its large commercial sense).
Web 2.0 is already here for more than 2 years.
Video is here for almost two years.
Online shopping is here for years.
So what do we mean by saying everything is still new??

Technorati Tags: supernova2007

The New Journalism

One of the amazing things in being here in supernova is the background noise in the rooms - the noise of constant laptop keyboard clicked.
It seems that almost everyone here is blogging/twittering/vodcasting at the same time. You can really feel how the media landscape of our world has changed just by looking around you.
It will take at least a day for major newspaper or old media companies to report what is happening here. But less than a minute someone here will say something on stage it will already appear in the blogs.

Technorati Tags: supernova2007

Welcome to the future - Microsoft Photosynth

I still can't imagine or believe it will ever be possible to really use it, but Microsoft new preview of Photosynth is still one of the coolest thing I saw recently.

Basically what Photosynth does, is taking tens or hundreds of photos of the same place, examine them, and build a 3D model of the place.
Now you can browse the photos in a really cool way, letting you explore the place and get the feel of how it really looks in reality.

You need a good video accelerator (and good bandwidth) in order to enjoy it, but I really recommend you checking it out.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Building a Community

Iv' e ran into an old article/interview with Catrina Fake and Meg Hourihan the founders of Flickr and Blogger. This is a short article that I really liked because it talks about how both projects were never meant to actually see daylight.

I particularly loved what Catrina said about the early days of trying to build the Flickr Community:

The Flickr team spent a lot of time greeting every user that came to the site, offering them help on how to get engaged with the rest of the community. Through this, they discovered that online community-building is just like being the host of the party - if guests come to a party, and they don't know anyone, and no one shows up to take their coats and introduce them around, they'll leave

This is exactly what I've been saying for some time. In the end of the day, the people behind social networks are the same people that goes to bars and clubs hoping to meet other cool people. The Internet just give them a different way to do their socializing.
This has profound effect on the future of social networks. I still believe that we will see two new themes in this world:

• Localization - Yes, it's very cool that I can meet with people from all around the world and discover new cultures via the net. But in the end of the day, most of us still want friends that we can meet, see and touch. Social networks that will succeed in bringing local communities together with thrive.
• Private parties - Most social networks were built behind the notion of trying to bring together as much people as possible, but I think this will change over time, and we will start see communities goes back to the old Facebook model of closed communities.
  Think of the life line of a new bar in your city. In the first week just the people who were invited knows about it and comes. Than, if they enjoy it, the start telling about it to their friends, and they start to show up.
  If it started with the right crowed, the bar now hosts the "cool" people, so everyone starts to hear about it and want to also come there. After a few months, everyone is going there. Suddenly your crowed is mixed with all ages and kinds. The original crowed feels it's not special any more, so they start to look for the next thing. After a year the bar closes down.
  The bars that actually survive the second year are the ones that were able to keep a closed loyal community. A bar that when you will go to, you will know exactly what kind of people you will see there.
  People prefer to go to a invitation only party than a open to all, no selection, all ages parties.
  So why not doing the same also in social networks?

Google - Be More Evil!

No one can stand and call me a "Google" lover. I wrote a couple of harsh posts about them in the past, and I publicly state my disagreement with many things they do.
still, I find that I got to stand up for their defense after reading another attack on the way they integrate their services into their search results.

Why shouldn't Google embed YouTube and Google Video videos into the search results? Why shouldn't they promote their own services over others (in a clear manner of course)?
It's their search engine. They spend a lot of money to make make it work, why they are not allowed to enjoy it?
It's their business. They are a public company. They need to earn money. This is their purpose in life(they lost the right to any other objective when they became public). Why shouldn't they use their own services to do it?
Common people, don't you think we all became a little too sensitive??

The only company that got the same reactions is Microsoft. Everyone said that putting Live search the default search engine in IE7 would be an unfair advantage to Microsoft.

But there is one big difference between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft was declared a Monopoly in court. Google didn't.
So yes... Maybe this is what we should do. Maybe we should declare Google a monopoly in the search business. And then they will not be allowed to use their search engine to promote other Google services. But until than... Hey. Stop crying foul all the time and simply fight them back.