Micro-hoo rises from the dead

It seems that the "We're done" remark from Steve Ballmer WAS a ploy to get Yahoo! back at the table at a lower price after all. I reserve the right to use the phrase "I told you so" with all unbelievers. It walks!

This Wall Street Journal story was one of the most entertaining and informative I've read all week, and you'd do well to just invest 5 minutes into reading this article.

My favourite line was:

During the meeting, Mr. Ballmer, who prides himself on his math skills, wielded a long spreadsheet and questioned Mr. Yang and other Yahoo executives about their analysis of Yahoo's value and future prospects.

Mr. Karnitschnig does have a sense of humor.

Internet Explorer 8 and thoughts on web browsers

The browser wars are here again. With Firefox 3 just around the corner, Flock rolling out version 1.2 just weeks ago, Opera letting the world know 9.5 is "coming soon" and Safari...well, let's just say they are "in the running"; Microsoft's announcement earlier this week that Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 will come in August seems to indicate that the time has come yet again for the browser wars to ignite again. This time though, the audience has changed and the focus along with it.



In the last round, security issues took centre-stage and underdog Firefox scored big against Microsoft's Internet Explorer thanks to this.

This round, we're looking at kids who've grown up on the internet, are immersed in the new-fangled web 2.0 world and want, above anything, a powerful browser that puts all their favourite social networking tools at their fingertips.

Witness Flock, social web browser extraodinaire, whose key selling point is the built-in interfaces it has for social networks like Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, MySpace etc. Undoubtedly, Flock should be the winner, right? Err... no, not in my opinion. My brief test of Flock quickly showed me how having too many features and too much integration can be problematic in itself - the direct result being a cluttered interface.

So when I heard of the Microsoft announcement, I thought to myself "it's probably time to check out what the folks at MS have up their collective sleeves." And off I went to download my copy of Internet Explorer 8 beta 1.

Thoughts on IE8

Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 comes with two shiny new toys that more tightly integrate Web 2.0 activities into the browser. The first of these, which I happen to like very much is Web Slices. Essentially, a Web Slice is like a graphically enhanced RSS feed, or a frequently updated portion of a page, cleverly coded, so you can preview that portion of that page without actually surfing to said page.



So, for example, the above picture shows a small 'slice' of the StumbleUpon homepage (the 'internet buzz' section) without having you to surf over to StumbleUpon to check out what has recently been 'stumbled'. Quite intuitive. You could also cut a 'slice' of your Facebook homepage and have it update you on your friends' latest updates.

The second key feature is what Microsoft calls Activities. What it really means is "stuff you can do from the right click menu." Okay, so actually this feature isn't really new and you can already do many things off a right-click with the appropriate plugins in FireFox and / or Flock. And to be honest, most of the couple of Activites in Microsoft's current line-up are just boring stuff tied to their services which no one uses (Blog on Spaces anyone?) There are useful ones, like "Share link via Facebook", which lets you instantly share the page you're on by posting it up on your Facebook page.



But still, I applaud the inclusion of functionality like Activities into Internet Explorer 8 simply because it validates the shifting of the web towards iteration 2.0. It validates what all of Microsoft's competitors have been doing. Who are we kidding? Internet Explorer will probably still be the web browser the majority of people will use because it's the one they find installed on their PCs. And by integrating Web 2.0 functionality into IE8, soon web-behaviour will shift towards the Web 2.0 dream the geeks and geekettes have been having.

Future of the browser

It's clear that the new frontier for war on the browser front will be waged on how well web-browsers can integrate Web 2.0 functionality. Each combatant manages this differently. Firefox gives you very base functionality, but has a fantastic plug-in system that let's you customise almost indefiitely. IE8's slices and activities show's some innovative thinking from the software giant. Flock tells me too much of a good thing can be bad.

What people will soon have to consider though is how much more heavy these browsers will be thanks to this new functionalities. I've heard horror stories of FireFox 3, and even the latest release candidate 2 is considered bloatware by many. To the uninitiated, this simply means that your computer slows down every time you open up an internet browser. The more it slows down, the "heavier" your browser is.

Secondly, most of these "social" browsers will collect private and personal information about you and insist that it's stored on your computer. Of course, you have the option of keying in all the passwords to your GMail, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, MSNLive, and Yahoo! accounts again if you like. But I suspect not very many people would. The danger in this is obvious, as we pander for the convenience having a socially-integrated web browser brings, we put ourselves at the risk of having much of our security information stolen. Sure, it's already happening now with saved passwords and cookies, but imagine a single browser piecing together your multiple identities on the web and then having all that data stolen? Even more dangerous, how about passing your laptop to a colleague to use and when he / she pops open the browser, he / she gets greeted by some very private Facebook messages?

Thirdly, with the rise of mobile devices, more and more emphasis will be placed on the "content" of the site and not the webpage itself. Sure, the browser will be relevant for a long time coming, but what about those mobile devices that basically let you browse what you want on the web without having to actually browse? For example, my client Nokia, has been developing some pretty cool S60 apps like Share Online which allows you to check out and comment on your own or your contacts Flickr photos without actually logging onto Flickr through a browser. Or Twibble, which I use as my main means of staying connected to Twitter without actually browsing over to Twitter. In fact, a lot of the integration of Web 2.0 functionality straight into the browser actually helps you get around actually "browsing" the page.

Just some thoughts to think about as we move into the next wave of Internetting. :)

Human-powered search?

Nearly a decade ago, Google brought innovation to the words "internet search" by using pigeons to sort out good search results from the bad ones.

Fast-forward to this decade, and pigeons have evolved to human beings. Enter human-powered search by Mahalo. Though I've known about Mahalo for a while now (thanks to Buzz Out Loud and Jason Calacanis appearing on TWIT every so often!), I've only recently begun to actually start using it, and I'm quite, quite loving it.




Let me start by saying, Mahalo isn't Google. Yes, they are both search services, but Google's a bit more "engine" and Mahalo is a bit more "service."

You see, Mahalo actually pays human beings to write up search entries, and still relies on aggregating search engine results from Google, Yahoo!, del.icio.us and more to give you results for any searches they don't have entries for.

So, say, if you were searching for "Barack Obama" you'd end up with a great looking page full of links, video and information on Mr. Obama like this:



But let's say you were looking for a lesser known somebody, oh say... davidlian... you'd just get a bunch of google links like this:



Of course, if i was a bit hardsell, I could put in a request for Mahalo to write an article about my search topic. This is a bit of interesting interaction that I really found to be unique about Mahalo. Teams of real people would be putting together pages for specific topics and so it ends up becoming a little bit of a cross between Wikipedia and Google. And, if you wanted to be one of those people, its pretty easy to sign up here and get paid.

If you just wanted to get casually involved with the search community at Mahalo, you could alternatively sign up as a member and volunteer links. Each search page entry gives you the option to volunteer links that are relevant to the topic and will be vetted through by Mahalo's team to ensure a better search result for everyone.

I still use Google an awful lot (though I'm more and more going back to Yahoo! now), but Mahalo is also one of the great sites I check out on a daily basis to see the pulse of the internet. The front page changes everyday and though it's a far cry from the minimalistic design of Google, Mahalo manages to deliver important topics on its front page without the clutter of sites like Yahoo!.

More interestingly, I love how Mahalo tries to be more than just a search engine. Stuff like the Mahalo Daily Show by Veronica Belmont means there'll always be meaningful content to discover on Mahalo.

The only drawback is, I can't get over how everytime I punch in David Lian, this dude called David Binn keeps popping up.

To Microsoft: forget Yahoo! and buy Motorola's handset division

This post is inspired by this post. See this cartoon.

So Yahoo decides to play wait-and-see with Microsoft, rejecting the initial offer and waiting for US$40 per share. Meantime, the Redmond money men must be calculating if that amount of money is worth spending for a company with so many similar technology assets.

Here, I present, another acquisition option: Motorola! Well, it's handset division.

Moto's all but hinted that they've thrown in the towel in the mobile phone industry and are "exploring ways" to accelerate the recovery of its handset business. Most analysts are reading this as "please buy us out."

And so the names have been spun around - LG could chomp and instantly make itself number 3 in this market. So could Samsung or even Huawei. My take is... what about Microsoft?

Sure, Microsoft can make great devices. Witness the XBOX 360 and all the Microsoft Mice and Keyboards. But it can just as easily flop (Zune?). Purchasing Motorola would give MS a leg into the mobile space and put it smack dab into the centre of the convergence space - internet + computers + mobile.

Serious.

The one thing that Motorola has consistently been unable to get right has been its operating system. In fact, personally, I think the best Moto phones are those that ship with Windows Mobile 6, which (surprise surprise), is a Microsoft product.

Services is the other thing that Motorola haven't really communicated a gameplan on. Microsoft does services. Doesn't take a genius to put two-and-two together.

The only problem would be integrating a hardware division into Microsoft. But, it's not like this something that Microsoft hasn't gone and done before. Moto's handphone division could still continue operating independently whilst integration could take a step by step process.

The bottomline is, MS has money to spend. Yahoo's probably a fair acquisition. But, in my books, Motorola's handset business looks prime.

Microsoft / Yahoo - it's about the users

The Micro-hoo deal has been talked to death, but it does raise an interesting point on the direction that these big tech companies are heading at the moment, which is perhaps indicative of the overall trend.

Every big tech company seems to be converging into a space that's going to be about software + hardware + internet + search + advertising. And advertising seems to be the most important area for all these companies - Microsoft, Yahoo, Google (yes, throw in Apple and Nokia too) to get their act together.

Gone are the days when Microsoft was all about DOS or Windows. Today, think XBOX and the Windows Live services. Similarly Google isn't just search anymore, but nifty tricksy apps like Google Maps and Google Apps. We've not yet seen hardware from Google, but it's ANDROID project seems like a nod in that direction. Don't forget that Nokia has bought NavTEQ, launched OVI and is readying N-Gage whilst Apple's iTunes is still going places and .mac still survives.

Detractors have said that Microsoft already have its share of web products and buying Yahoo would create conflict and confusion. Yet, the Microsoft-Yahoo deal sounds like perfect sense to me. Because whilst techology, products and company assets are the big and obvious factors (see other deals), this deal highlights an asset that's often overlooked and which is painfully important - users.

Yes, it's obvious that Microsoft have loads of competing products in the same space as Yahoo - think Yahoo! Messenger vs. the Windows Live Messenger, Hotmail vs. Yahoo!Mail, Yahoo! 360 vs. Windows Live Spaces (does anyone use this anymore?) and the loads of other social networking tools and net apps available.

But the real dealmaker behind this deal is not the apps or services or technology (though there might be some of that in there somewhere), it's the user-base that Yahoo! has amassed that's making this deal so attractive.

A cursory web-trawl didn't help me find any numbers for this but anectdotally, virtually everyone I speak to has used a Yahoo! service at one point or another and most are still actively using them.

But won't users jump ship post acquisition?

Granted, users can even jump ship pre-acquisition. Or just about whenever. But the fact that Yahoo! has maintained a relatively steady visibility and user-base (even after Google's Meteoric rise, and let's face it, Yahoo apps aren't half-bad), indicates to me that users will more likely stay (especially if I've got all my lovely photos uploaded on my Flickr pro account).

Also the trend towards open social networks, means users are more and more looking or interoperability from the networks, services and apps they use and probably won't mind the merging of competing Microsoft - Yahoo services into one app (like finally collapsing Hotmail into Yahoo! Mail.)
Why users, though?
Because users translate into revenue in terms of an advertising sense, and that's really what its about isn't it, really?

I think the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal will shed more light on what the future will become (on the convergence track) and how deals are made. If technology was the Number 1 asset previously, it's time for companies to take stock and look at how they can acquire users instead of just technology.

Your next ad agency - Google?

*Disclosure - I work for Text 100 on the Nokia account. This blog posting is purely my viewpoint, taken from my knowledge of the industry, without any confidential information.*

"There's money to be made in online advertising," - [random internet company exec]

There was an interesting article today in The Business Times (yes, I read NST) about how Google was seeing a real rosy future in mobile phone advertising. (read it here) Well, this isn't exactly new news per se, but I just really liked the article as it presented a real concise picture of the next step in the convergence of mobility, communications, technology, services and content.

You see, the first problem companies really had with the internet was how to monetize it. Why? Because the internet is used mainly by a bunch of freeloaders who expect and want everything to be free. Yet, even if you're generating be best content in the world, the moment you ask people to pay for it online, you can expect your readership, listenership or viewership to drop to about 10% of what you've got. Wonder how many people would watch YouTube if you had to pay US$1.00 per clip? Uh-huh.

So, advertising has been the way forward for making money on the Internet, and this one company, Google, has gotten pretty good at it. Indeed, when the then leader Yahoo! was floundering, along came Google with AdSense and voila! we discovered the first truly workable internet advertising model. Of course, it helped that AdSense was really Web 2.0-savvy (simple bloggers could just add AdSense and make money) and the blogosphere was in the middle of its boom.

So now, as we're moving on to the next great phase of technology - the mobile internet - it suddenly makes sense that Google would want in on bringing advertising to the fourth screen - your mobile phone (or device or multimedia computer). Tom Merritt once said on Buzz Out Loud (though I forget which episode), that "Google's goal is to advertise to you wherever you are with whatever means possible." Fantastic plan, actually.

However, Google's probably not the only one moving in this direction this time. Microsoft, via its Live services hopes to attract a couple of eyeballs and sell some advertising as well. Yahoo! is shaping up its own internet advertising offering. Both have solid partnerships with handset manufacturers and are developing application suites that may (and I am heavily speculating here) include advertising in the future. Nokia (and this I know for a fact) has already acquired mobile advertising firm Enpocket and a bunch of other services companies like Twango, and more recently Navteq - so you can expect some innovative new ideas on advertising soon. Do you think Apple might consider moving into advertising too?

So here's the big picture, you now have several big companies steeped in devices, software, or services, all moving towards one zone of competition - advertising. As the internet becomes a more powerful medium, this little niche in advertising may one day become the mainstream mode of reaching people (if it hasn't already). What, then, do you call companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Nokia? Ad agencies?