05.05.08
Posted in Advertising, Google, Microsoft, Search Engines, Yahoo at 10:26 am by Brandon Wirtz
I have to say that I thought buying Yahoo was the wrong move. Yahoo didn’t have an Adsense/Adwords product that was successful, their use of Adwords in order to raise their Search Engine Earnings is a testament to that. So what should Microsoft do?
1. Convert the Microsoft owned Building on Pear Street in Mountain View to be the first headquarters for Microsoft’s new Ad Product.
It has to be in Silicon Valley, and it would be better if it were NOT on the over crowded SVC campus, and there isn’t time to build a new campus. MSFT has this building and it is a nice size and walking distance to Microsoft SVC, and Google. Which is important because every time Google has a Blogger Event, or an Ad Expo, there needs to be one at Microsoft as well. Microsoft Culture doesn’t always merge well so finding a new home near, but not on an existing campus give the Acquisitions a better chance of bringing their expertise rather than being molded in to Microsofties too quickly.
2. Acquire Adsdaq. Adsdaq is the best non-Google banner ad company out there. There are bigger ones, but Adsdaq has a simple intuitive UI, that makes sense, and with MSFT behind it could achieve the necessary volume to be a true success. I don’t believe entirely in the name your own price ad serving model, but it would be a benefit to MSFT early on because it would allow the expectation that you would get less than 100% fill rate, which would allow time to grow ad inventory to meet demand.
3. Acquire Compete. I don’t even like Compete, but there are a lot of people who trust it more than Alexa for traffic analysis, and that is an important component. Microsoft is going to need to build a better than Google Analytics tools quickly, and it seems like Compete has the biggest jump in this space.
4. Acquire ISayhello.com . Microsoft needs a deep understanding of not just keywords, but keyword relationships, the ability to mine data quickly and efficiently, and ISayHello.com brings that to the table. Until there is an Ad for every keyword on the planet Microsoft will need to be able to do contextual matches against categories, content types, and working out those relationships will also allow Microsoft to do something Google doesn’t. Let you easily decide if you want to run ads on Pages that distinctly say your product sucks. With out the ability to determine the actual meaning of the words on the page you could very well be spending money to advertise on sites that are bashing your product, already selling your product, both of these scenarios should be up to the ad buyer.
5. Don’t Force Dev, on a Microsoft Platform. It should get moved eventually, but time is critical, and many of the companies that are going to need to get bought won’t be running ASP and MSSQL. Encourage Flexibility, and work on building API’s to connect what is out there to Microsoft Platforms. This will do do things, Shorten time to product, and make creation of tools for sale to end users easier. There will be a time in the near future when people will be ready Microsoft Ad Server, for managing their inventory of In House ads, and their ads provided by third parties. Knowing how to talk to anything and everything will be part of building that.
6. Get Scoble Back. You don’t even have to hire him full time, but Scoble brings legitimacy to bloggers. Microsoft needs to be the exclusive ad provider for all of Scoble’s projects. While they are at it, they need to get Dave Winer, Om Malik, Fake Steve Jobs, and Perez Hilton. And for good measure the Technorati Top 100 by Authority and by Favorites.
7. Be an Omnimedia Company. Create products that don’t exist now, that allow for Microsoft to be a "One Stop Shop" for advertising. Cut a deal with Clearchannel, along with other radio stations, PBS and NPR. Yes PBS. Every time there is a "This show sponsored in part by" there is an opportunity to advertise. And the Cost is cheap, and the ads are simple so they are easy to build. Every small town newspaper on the planet, even if it is just to sell classifieds. A reseller program for Adam’s outdoor. You get the picture. The idea should be that every mom and pop shop should be able to go to one place and get any type of ad they need.
8. Build an MCSE equivalent for Advertising. By creating lots of local experts Microsoft can create a partner network to off load support and make the ad buying experience more personal than any of the existing products. Many Graphic Designers would be happy to create ads and manage them, many companies that handle media buys would like to be able to say they were a certified partner. This helps customers know who to trust.
9. Offer payment as products from Microsoft and Partners. A lot of "small fish" will take all year to get $100 from Google. So why not let the Game Blogger get a game at the Microsoft Employee price every so often. Halo 3 for $20, and Blue Dragon for $20 is a great incentive to the High School Kid who wants to get in to Blogging, but is going to take 3 years to get a check from Google.
10. Allow the use of Ad revenue to buy more Ads on the network. I hate having to take my Adsense dollars into my bank accounts so that I can put them back in Adwords. Save some money and just let me pull from one into the other.
11. Maintain Transparency. The most irksome thing about Google for ad buyers and ad sellers, is that you don’t know what commission Google is getting. So are you paying $1 for a click that cost 10 cents? Are you being paid a penny for a click that Google charge a quarter for? I’m confident Google moves the slider around based on the volume of your buy, and the volume of your sell. But it is hard to trust Google. You know you will get paid but it is hard to anticipate your income because the CPM’s seem to flux with where Google thinks it needs to get its earnings.
12. Remember the Little Guy. Google got to the size it is buy taking the big and the small. You can advertise with as little as a dollar, and you can get paid as little as $30 a year. Being a success means growing with your customers.
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05.02.08
Posted in Money, Responses at 11:44 am by Brandon Wirtz
Sprint is coming in at a disadvantage in the race to get WiMax out, because they are not in the Triple Play business. AT&T will role out WiMax first to places that are already on U-Verse. This means they will be in places they are already fibre heavy. Sprint doesn’t offer Television and Data Services so they are at a disadvantage not having Points of Presence in as many neighborhoods.
AT&T U-Verse, and Verizon’s Fios give them not only a set of customers to get addicted to fast Internet everywhere, but the foundation to build fast Internet everywhere. Consolidating customers on to a single bill, solves multiple problems for the companies.
Single bill customers are only going to be data junkies at one location at a time. You are likely home, or not, so you are self load balancing. Where as a customer base that is on Comcast’s 50meg Cable Modem, leave the house and start sucking up WiMax Data. This means Sprint has to have pipe enough for Peak times for "out of house" and Comcast has to have enough for in home peaks. Where as AT&T or Verizon get to share pipe for both times allowing them to have less peaky bandwidth usage, which will save them big.
Single bill customers aren’t as likely to jump ship, or not pay a bill. If you break a contract and get put in to collections on your phone it doesn’t really hit you until you go to buy a car, or a house, but if you don’t pay your phone bill and your TV and Internet go down as a result you are a lot more likely to pay the bill, rather than miss an episode of American Idol.
I agree with Om Malik, selling backhaul bandwidth to Cellular providers who don’t have Pop’s in a given neighborhood will be big business, and selling shovels to gold diggers is always a safe bet. But I think Sprint is the biggest player who is going to need this service, They just need to buy Comcast, or RCN or both, or the other way around.
As the TCP convergence happens, you are going to see that guy with the fattest pipe in the most places will win. The thing that worries me is the digital divide between people who live in wired neighborhoods and those who don’t. Soon the economic, and educational divide will widen between those who live in places that have the infrastructure and those who don’t. (and I live in a place that doesn’t).
This is a response to:
4G Backhaul: A Problem for All?
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05.01.08
Posted in Money, Responses at 5:16 pm by Brandon Wirtz
So it would seem that the people who were Entrepreneurs 10 years ago still are.
I still have my Field Guide to the Dot Com Yettie, which explained how all the 29 year old Entrepreneurs (Young Entrepreneurial Technocrats) were running things. 10 years later the entrepreneur age is 39. Seems the old crowd is the new crowd.
I’m 10 years to young, but I was 10 years too young last time, and with no college degree and 3000 miles from home I don’t fit the mold.
Dawn Kawamoto is insane…
So, if you’re going to attend college with the idea of starting a tech company later, consider an Ivy League school in a state where the cost of living is low because chances are good you’ll remain in the area upon graduating, and employees often are the greatest expense to operations. That’ll help with the profit margins, since going to an Ivy League school may mean your revenue will be higher.
Dawn, Ivy League Schools tend to be in New England, not the cheapest place to get tech workers, but more importantly, not where you are likely to have the best selection of Tech workers either.
Picking a place that is cheap often means a place where the education level is lower. I don’t de-value my home town, the people are great, but you aren’t going to find a PHP programmer in Reading, MI, and you aren’t going to find a SQL Server Cluster Admin with load balancing experience in places with lower costs of living.
I would be much happier living back in Indianapolis, with my rent being 1/3 for a place twice the size. But I would not be recruiting top tier employees, and I’d have much harder time finding VC’s.
This is a response to:
Study: A profile of the U.S. tech entrepreneur
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04.29.08
Posted in Technology News at 12:19 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Several people canceled appointments with me today. While it is possible they all came down with rare 24 hour bugs, that struck at 10am… I think it more likely that these people scored a copy of GTA4 at the last minute and are racing home to earn some achievements.
A quick visit to the Xbox Dashboard confirms this for the ones on my friends list… and 360voice.com provides incriminating evidence for the others… If you are going to use the same Screen name on Yahoo, and Xbox you might think to go offline when you are "Sick".
If you can’t beat them, join them. I’m off to conquer Liberty City. Since it is hard to do real work with everyone "Out of Office". Grand Theft Auto 4, stealing productivity across the nation.
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04.25.08
Posted in Search Engines at 1:01 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point? Yes. I made a post a few days earlier about the problem with Keyword search is that people aren’t all of the same background.
The example I use is what happens if Oprah Winfrey gets pushed infront of the L in Chicago?
What would you search for? Oprah Pushed By Fan? Winfrey killed by Train? Oprah murdered on the L? They are all valid searches that should return the results, but they won’t all work if you type them in to Dmoz, Mahalo.com, Wikia, Wikipedia, or Ask.com, certainly not if you type them in, in the first hour of the event.
A Search engine needs to know "what" a thing is. And it needs to adapt to what you are trying to search or at least give you the tools to find what you are searching for.
I think the intelligent web is closer than the 2020 that is quoted in the TechCrunch Article. The processing power required isn’t as insane as many believe because 80% of searches are for 20% of topics. But it is not the searching that is hard… It is the finding. How will we know the "Right" answer to a question?
Is it true that Brandon Wirtz is the Greatest Living American ? Or is Stephen Colbert? Which truth has more truthiness?
When a story breaks is New York Times a better result or the Chicago Tribune?
Once you get over the technological hurdle of dissecting a query into what does the user want, you need to get over the hurdle of determining which result has the most authority on the subject.
Imagine the following queries happen on the same day and the reasons for them being asked.
In the morning: a pre-recorded showing of Oprah’s Favorite things airs, and she gives everyone in the Audience iPhone 2.0.
Mid-day: a sextape of Stedman and Lindsey Lohan is released with photos on TMZ
Afternoon: Oprah remarks to her new assistant that she wishes someone would just push her in front of the L, and the assistant does just that.
So the queries come in…
Oprah iPhone
Oprah boyfriend sex tape
Oprah train
The Oprah iPhone query should get a result from Wired about the iPhone 2.0, or the Apple iPhone Page, and the Oprah website about today’s show, but shouldn’t return the 3 month old result about the Oprah Website now being iPhone "Safari compatible" which was the top hit the day before.
While Wired is the place for all things "Tech" TMZ should have authority for Sex Tape… But an interview in the Chicago Tribune says that Oprah’s assistant helped with her suicide because of the Stedman Sex tape.
And the search for Oprah Train ? Well the tribune didn’t SEO their article because it was written for print, and so it refers to the "L" and Chicagoe Transit authority, but never uses the word train… So the right result would be the fore-mentioned Tribune Article, but because NYT headlined "Oprah killed in Train Accident" search results would normally go to this article, but an intelligent search would know that the "L" is a train and would respond accordingly.
Where do I come in? HUGE lists. If you can build a classification of everything in to lots of categories you can start to build the relationships that we humans take for granted. I don’t have to write complex rules, I can use lots of simple rules to determine that things are related. A Spike in Oprah traffic means that something news worthy happened there.
Some of the rules I’m building are obvious, some of the rules are only obvious after you point them out. Like knowing the TV schedule, so that you know that a search for Grey’s Anatomy Contest is not looking for the illustration in a book but, people looking for information about how Meredith won the Glitter Pager.
Edit:
Hacking Cough is right about you having to know what needle you are looking for.
Words are there for themselves
Also thanks Jordan for pointing out the misspelling of Knell… This is what happens when you blog while Coding.
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Posted in Site News at 11:53 am by Brandon Wirtz
I like Lists, Archives, Collections… It is great when things sort nicely in to piles. www.iSayHello.com just had data from the CIA Fact Book Added, If you search for an abbreviation which is used in the CIA fact book, we now return what that abbreviation stands for. Which can be interesting because I don’t think of AU as African Union, I think Astronomical Unit, or the Periodic Symbol for Gold (the periodic table will be added shortly as well).
I also added 12k prescription medicines and their generics, along with a link to more information on the drug. Here is one Example…
This adds nearly 30k entries to the search results.
Today or early tomorrow, 15k game cheats are being added. Mostly PC first, then Console games in the coming days, 35k in all across 16 platforms.
Recipes are in the works, and I’m working to find a provider of Videos to go with the recipes, but at least very nice pictures.
What is the point you ask? To create pages that present you with the information you are most likely looking for and more choices if it wasn’t.
I also updated the site’s logo some. Not great but I only spent 20 minutes minutes on it.
Lastly, I fixed the bug where if there was no Video or images for a result I don’t try and return blank results.
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Posted in Money, Responses at 11:13 am by Brandon Wirtz
37signals has an article Why I love working with family people, which talks about why you want more family people in your startup. I don’t entirely disagree, just mostly.
Family people have a family… The right team becomes family. I’m not saying you shouldn’t hire the married guy with 6 kids, who goes to church every Sunday, but you need balance in a group. You need people who can work on Thanksgiving, others that can lead and advise lend a paternal role to your group.
I am a 20 something and I can put 100 hours in during a week, hit a deadline and then take a day recover and come back and not miss a beat. You can’t do that to a "family person". I have no problem with working with family people and I appreciate having them on a team, but don’t compensate them the same way. I really like Hourly jobs, or performance pay, because when I work 100 hour week I get compensated. If I work 100 hours and someone else takes time to pick up their kids from soccer, go to Church and takes 3 days to go see Grandma at Thanksgiving, don’t pay them the same.
David says he can get things done when the objectives are clear and the work has meaning. Well David, I think it is more important to be able to define objectives and find meaning in the work. Often there are things that need to get done which don’t have clear objectives, and are menial. But the still need to get done.
David is writing a Bitch-meme likely because some whipper-snapper like me beat him out for something recently. David when company becomes your family the company succeeds. When your Team becomes your Family the Team Succeeds.
Managers that understand building a balanced team, build teams that not only succeed but grow, and stay together even as the members go to other jobs.
Having team members who work twice as hard, accomplish twice as much and only make the same amount or a little less, because when they signed on they had fewer years of experience only serves to create a chasm on your team.
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04.24.08
Posted in Yahoo at 2:36 pm by Brandon Wirtz
Yahoo Pipes announced today that they are offering PHP Serialized Output. This means rather than parsing an RSS feed to get results you can get the results back as an array. This makes programming with Pipes faster, and easier.
I’m still uncertain how Yahoo is going to monetize this, but it is great for anyone who wants to display results a very specific way.
What I think would be even cooler, is a Pipes to PHP solution that let you use Pipes as a GUI for creating PHP that has the same functionality… I know I build things in Pipe and then after I get them tweaked spend a good deal of time recreating the same solution on my own server.
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04.22.08
Posted in Site News, Technology News at 11:45 pm by Brandon Wirtz
I’m obviously biased, so when I win don’t be surprised…but I’m going to try and skew the results in favor of the other guys because well, if my product sucks I want to fix it.
The Test:
I’m going to search for Jason Calacanis on each of the services. I haven’t hand modified my results for Jason Calacanis on my engine so it should be a reasonable test.
Speed:
Wikia: And I thought the 800ms ISayHello.com’s search results took was too long. You can go get a Starbuck’s in the time it takes for Wikia to return results. I clocked 14 seconds, for most results a few came in at 8 some at 20, but 14 seemed to be both the Mean and the Mode.
Mahalo: Blazing fast. It aint Google fast, but it is fast.
ISayHello.com: It feels slow especially compared to Google, but on par with Live.com maybe a tiny bit slower than Yahoo. I think I take a hit from Youtube and Metacafe loading.
Stumpedia: Reasonably fast, doesn’t take long to load 3 results.
Quality of Results:
Wikia: Not too bad, but not great. Calacanis.com, Searchenginewatch,ReadWriteTalk, Mahalo, Twitter, Webpro news, TechCrunch, WebanalyticsBook, WebProNews, Beet.tv…. No Photo even though that is supported.
Mahalo.com: Calacanis.com, Twitter, Wikipedia,Weblogs Inc, Forbes, Jensense, TechCrunch. A picture of Gallery of Jason from Flickr, links to a Google Video and Jason’s Ustream
ISayHello.com: Calacanis.com, Wikipedia, TechCrunch, Twitter, Valleywag. Youtube of Jason Calacanis at his home, MetaCafe of someone talking about Jason’s Keynote at Affiliate Summit, 3 good Flickr Photos of Jason, and one odd one.
Stumpedia: Tinpig, Calcanis.com, Wikipedia. No Pics, no video, nothing of note.
Summing the Jason Search Up:
None of these results sucked except for Stumpedia. Mahalo Kicked ass with its hand edited results for its CEO. And it should. Wikia was slow but didn’t suck, Stumpedia just plain fails. 3 Results? I mean Jason is not Britney Spears but he isn’t a nobody, and you would expect that anyone in the search engine business should have something for him. (Matt Cutts only got 2 results)
But lets say you dislike Jason. I don’t dislike Jason, I think he is a smart guy, and he left a comment on my blog or someone using his name did, so hey, I’d buy him a drink, or a dinner, but lets say you didn’t like him. His start up crushed yours or something like that…
So you search for Jason Calacanis Sucks, because lets face it sometimes you aren’t looking for "Happy" search results.
Stumpedia: Zero Results
Mahalo: You get google results, and they all say Calacanis and Sucks but none of them are about how Jason Sucks.
iSayHello: Digg-Why it Sucks to be Friends with Jason Calacanis. That counts as a "hit"
Wikia: Jason Calacanis Sucks by MorningCoffeeNotes.com that Counts as a "Hit"
So what does that say….
Wikia doesn’t suck. It is slow but there is promise, I don’t think it offers any improvements over Google, but maybe someday.
Stumpedia, yeah it sucks. Too Few entries 4500 or so.
Mahalo, Good but only if you search the way it expects. You can’t get hits on a lot of phrases. I actually got better results doing a site:mahalo.com search in Google than I did using their search bar.
ISayHello: You knew I was going to declare victory, it’s my site. Mahalo is faster. And if you are the CEO you definitely get better results than my Generic Template can give. But I also had results for Jason and his level of Suck which I count as a victory because you aren’t always looking for "encyclopedic" results.
This is a Response to:
Venturebeat - Search Wikia takes a step closer to the promise of ’search meets Wikipedia’
Mathew Ingram - Wikia Search: Edit anything and everything
CenterNetworks - Wikia Search Launches Major Enhancements to Search Alpha
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Posted in Money, Responses, Technology News at 3:15 pm by Brandon Wirtz
The problem with entirely human powered results is the amount of time it takes to build a library of results. At www.ISayHello.com we are focusing on finding the best places for categories of results, and then working to categorize every search term so that you get good results. We are also creating content for top results. This allows us to be relevant for everything, and great on the most popular results.
Granted with only 48 hours of being live we don’t have a huge assortment of customized results, but we are able to move much faster than most, because we aren’t focusing on re-writing 300 words from Wikipedia for every result, we are instead focusing on finding the best results on the web for large categories of data, and so tomorrow when we add 24k results for prescription medications those 24k results will be much better than they were today. And unlike Mahalo or Stumpedia the improvements to those 24k results didn’t cost us even a dollar an entry.
The model is in a lot of ways like Google’s where you "tune" the algorithm, except that we will also be tuning the layout of results, what items are on the page, and how we present data.
It is our goal that you could use ISayHello.com as your primary search engine. You can’t do that with ChaCha or Stumpedia, or Wikipedia.
This is a response to:
TechCrunch: Miss Tormenting ChaCha Operators? Let Me Introduce You To Stumpedia
Edit: Stumpedia has 3,981 links - 803 members - over 4,500 search terms… We launched with 108k tuned results, 1million links, and I have no idea how many search terms… and I expect to add 10k a day.
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