Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Carol Bartz has been gone from Yahoo for nearly two months and there has been spotty news on management other than Timothy Morse being named interim CEO and Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo remaining ‘chief Yahoos’. Wednesday of this week David Kenny resigned as president and director of Akamai Technologies. Mr. Kenny is already on the board of Yahoo and there is speculation that he could possibly be the next chief executive.

This all comes as a backdrop as Yahoo appears to be both on and off the market. Last week Jerry Yang Yahoo.com co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang said that while Yahoo’s board is famously exploring all its options, it’s not necessarily up for sale. “The intent going in is not to put ourselves up for sale. The intent is to look at all the options,” Yang said on stage at the AsiaD conference in Hong Kong. http://bit.ly/vGcKmQ

There are apparently many potential suitors interested in Yahoo and Yahoo’s still impressive reach. The list moves from AOL’s Tim Armstrong, to Microsoft, to Jack Ma of Alibaba.com (Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba.com, a stake that Jack Ma had been trying to buy back from Ms. Bartz before her departure).

The real question many people (including me) are asking is, (despite what Mr. Yang is saying) does Yahoo have an independent future? Or will it need to be part of another company’s platform? In the case of Microsoft (think Bing) – Yahoo and Bing would together comprise nearly 35% of the search market (the balance is nearly all Google) and would be a formidable player in the search marketplace. I don’t see as good a fit with AOL (two somewhat tried and tired brands) or Alibaba.com but they have their reasons for wanting a piece of more than 100 million Yahoo unique monthly users (includes email).

Right now the valuation to buy Yahoo is as much as US $20 billion. The three leaders as noted above all have the wherewithal to make it happen. And of course Mr. Yang is a potential buyer himself.

How will this play out?

I have been familiar with and have used Tim and Nina Zagat’s restaurant guide for more than twenty years. I’ve long since given up the printed books for an on-line subscription which offers me access to Zagat reviews for restaurants all over the world as opposed to one city, state or area in a printed book.

AdAge released a pretty thorough overview yesterday – http://bit.ly/o6Mdv1 noting that Google’s reasoning was that Zagat was truly local and this fits with Google’s desire to elevate Google Places to a higher value proposition. The New York Times called Google’s purchase of Zagat a ‘consolation prize’. I agree.

While Zagat has a good history of delivering solid user reviews I have become accustomed to Yelp’s easy to used location based application and am dubious that Zagat and Google can improve upon the user experience provided by Yelp – http://www.Yelp.com.

Zagat does not cover many places I visit and consequently it would be of no use to me in a small town that Zagat does not cover. However that’s not the case with Yelp. Yelp’s main drawback as far as I am concerned is the paucity of user reviews when it comes to individual restaurants. The sample reviews are often too small to trust.

When it comes to Yelp I do love the amount of choices that the location based service offers me – the distances to the locations are very helpful, and Yelp goes far beyond restaurants – bars, attractions, movies, museums and much more. Did I mention that the downloaded Yelp app is free?
Google did ‘try’ to buy Yelp a couple of years ago for $500 million. (The terms of the Zagat sale to Google were not released). The article in AdAge notes there are conflicting reasons why the sale did not go through. Rest assured if Google really had wanted to buy Yelp the deal would have happened.

I can see the deal making sense from the family owned perspective of the Zagat’s. It probably is exactly the right time for them to cash out and work on other things as the company they started 32 years ago is in a much different marketplace today. I am betting they would rather spend their time (and money) doing other things.

Google has made a lot of really smart moves (see YouTube and Google+ for instance). However I think they bet on the wrong horse in this race.

How do you find places to eat when you go to a new city – or want to try any new restaurant?

Most people know that Facebook (and vanishing MySpace) were conceived to appeal to college age and even pre-teen and teenagers respectively. It did not quite work out that way. For quite a while now the fastest growing segment of FB users (I could find no stats on Google+ on audience makeup) has been the age 35-50 set. Mom and Dad are flocking to social networking which for many teens and college age kids is totally NOT cool.

As one of those not cool Dads I have engaged quite a bit with social networks – primarily Facebook, LinkedIn and more recently Google+. There are drawbacks such as the great time suck that occurs when perusing people’s posts, photos and threads to videos and articles they suggest you read and feel are of interest.

The ability to connect with people you have not seen in many years, or people that live in faraway places is the obvious benefit of social networking. Over the weekend I attended a mini-reunion of people I went to high school with a long time ago (I’m talking late 1970’s). There were many interesting facets of how it all came together but social networking and Facebook in particular were integral to making it happen. There was no reunion company specialist arranging the get together (I posted in 2009 about those reunion companies possible extinction due to the advent of social media – http://bit.ly/piT6in ) and it was the work of a couple of cool people – thanks Barbara and Dave that made our event happen.

The invitations were made on Facebook, for those that paid attention there was a list of attendees and everything came together without a hitch and the evening was intimate and fun. Afterward there were photos that were posted and tagged (BTW – I don’t know about you but I don’t love being tagged in photos on FB).

On the other hand over the past few weeks I was opted into a group (without my consent) of people from my hometown under the ‘you know you are from…if’. The flood of posts from people I did not know about things I did not care about or relate to became a deluge. I reset some my notification settings but even that only stemmed the tide a bit. I finally left the group entirely – perhaps prematurely since my guess is the initial creation of the group prompted seemingly constant updates that would eventually (hopefully?) die down.

It did make me shake my head on how much time people have to spend reading and responding to social media posts. And while there are mobile social media applications my sense is these people were working from a tablet, desktop or laptop computer.

We tell our children to be careful about what they post on social networking sites – photos, comments etc. since what’s posted lives on the web forever. What we don’t tell them is how much is too much – is that because nobody really knows? At least until it becomes too much. And I bet you know will when that happens.

Although I was not a charter invitee to the Google+ trial universe I have been playing around with it now for about a week. Google+ is throwing the gauntlet down at Facebook offering its version of a social network. It’s easy to get started and to use. My question is will it make an impact on people in choosing Google+ over Facebook or considering switching to Google+ from Facebook?

The current field trial of Google+ allows Google to hear the noise and then tweak what they feel needs tweaking. The crash and burn of Google Buzz has learned Google a few things as the saying goes. Katie Boehret of the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday did a nice job of laying out her viewpoint on Google+ and I agree with many of her observations here – http://on.wsj.com/qnCmdR and an accompanying video here http://on.wsj.com/qTnaFB.

One of the most attractive features of Google+ is the ‘Circles’ aspect. I like the way you can organize friends, colleagues, family, enemies, or whatever into their own circles. Nobody can see what circle or circles you’ve put them in but it offers you the categorization of relationships that continues to be lacking on Facebook.

I am sure there have been many times when some obscure professional or work acquaintance ‘friend requested’ you on Facebook. The normal reaction is to shake your head and then click ‘Ignore’. But what if your boss sends a ‘Friend Request’ on Facebook? With Google+ you can share what you want to share with any particular circle. Or not. BIG +.

I haven’t used the Google+ ‘Sparks’ feature as yet, nor have I used the group video chat module called ‘Hangouts’. I can see the value of both and the Hangouts group chat (up to 10 people) could become popular among some users (but probably not me). The Google+ mobile feature offers group texting (it’s called Huddle) and I can see that being useful and another separator from Facebook.

So overall I feel Google+ has done a good job of taking the things I like about Facebook and enhancing them. But unless the people I interact with (my friends and family) on Facebook migrate en masse over to Google+ I personally don’t see myself giving up my Facebook account nor do I anticipate many other people doing that either. And the thought of having to manage two social network profiles will be a non-starter don’t you think?

I will continue to use Google+ for a while at least. If you’d like to be invited to try it, just send me a note and I will invite you to try it as well. But if you do I’d love for you to come back here to my blog and let everyone know what you thought. It’s all about the conversation isn’t it?

The news last week was that Zynga has planned an IPO filing for $1 billion (it hopes to raise $1.5 to $2 billion with an overall company valuation as much as $20 billion). The move http://bit.ly/qq9yzv took nobody by surprise. ”’Tis the season of IPO company over-valuation after all.” Full disclosure – I have never played Farmville, Mafia Wars, Frontierville, or Cityville, or any other of Zynga’s free online games for that matter. I’ve also not had occasion to play AngryBirds (from Rovio) either.

It appears Zynga is counting on growth in the mobile marketing channel to further fuel its meteoric rise to prominence. I think that is a smart thing since I can’t help but feel that the backbone of Zynga’s past growth – Facebook users, will ultimately tire of the popular online game. And when people tire the user number fall will be fast and steep. But there are several interesting reasons that suggest Zynga might be undervalued http://bit.ly/oaFCqu.

A mobile Zynga platform offers more value since when a user is in a waiting room or stuck someplace he or she can jump on to kill some time populating a farm, frontier or whatever it is that people like to do while playing those time-killing games. And that’s what they are, time killing games right? Is there any other possible redeeming factor or benefit to playing a Zynga based game? C’mon people, this is your chance to give me reasons as to what I am missing!

I never was tempted to even sign up for a trial of any of the games although I received a multitude of invitations to join in Mafia Wars and Farmville. I pass quite a bit of my day already staring at a computer terminal and I haven’t the time or desire to play virtual games especially when I don’t have enough time to play the real ones I’d like to play more often.

The interesting part of Zynga’s development in the mobile space will be the uncoupling from Facebook. I champion Zynga’s realization that in order to stand more firmly on its own they will have to develop game delivery platforms outside of Facebook (or Google+ for that matter should it become a true competitor to Facebook).

Mobile payments are poised to become ubiquitous and the sale of virtual items in games is already gaining serious traction. So a future revenue model is there but a $1 billion kick start surely would help get things going.

$1 billion is still a lot of money (to me at least). Do you think Zynga has legs to stand for the long haul?