February 10, 2010
After more than a month of proverbial radio silence, news stories by the Associated Press are back on Google News.
The AP and Google have been in talks to establish a new agreement that would allow Google to continue to aggregate and host AP content, but because the AP has adopted a hawkish stance with regards to controlling its content online, Google stopped posting new AP stories in anticipation of a fall-through in talks.
Today the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog noticed that AP stories were again appearing on Google News. We have confirmed this as well.
When contacted for comment, Google released the following statement:
“We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. The licensing agreement is the subject of ongoing discussion so we won’t be commenting further at this time.”
The AP also responded, simply saying that it had nothing to add to Google’s statement.
Last year, AP CEO Tom Curley said of online news aggregators, “We will no longer tolerate the disconnect between people who devote themselves — at great human and economic cost, to gathering news of public interest and those who profit from it without supporting it.” He also said that he and other figures in the journalism industry “must quickly and decisively act to take back control of our content.”
That attitude is obviously in stark contrast to Google’s standard of openness for web content. Even though the AP and Yahoo struck a deal just over a week ago that allows Yahoo to keep posting AP content, we weren’t sure whether or not a Google/AP deal would follow because Google is known for fervently holding the free information line.
If you’re curious what the AP or Google gave up to make the deal happen, you’re out of luck — no details about the deal have been made public yet. Hopefully we’ll find out soon.
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February 10, 2010 12:35 AM
Today, Google’s social strategy took a big step with the launch of Google Buzz — a new FriendFeed-like feature that’s integrated into Gmail, mobile search, Maps, and more (you can see our live notes from the announcement here). Shortly after the event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin fielded questions backstage from members of the press. Our own Steve Gillmor was there to record the conversation (and ask a few questions himself). We’ve embedded the footage below, and have transcribed some of his answers.
In the video, Brin answers questions covering a broad array of topics, including Google Buzz, Google’s current situation in China, and the company’s research in clean energy. Among the revelations: Brin hopes to eventually remove the task of having to choose between Email, Buzz, and IM, so expect those to converge more in the future.
Note: The video starts off with some loud music in the background, but it gets turned down after a few minutes
Regarding the appeal and potential of Google Buzz, and the company’s ability to make it useful:
“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, it’s one of the key things we do in our web search product every day. And I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical.”
On getting relevant results, and internal use of Buzz before now:
“I think there is huge potential. Right now if you look on the recommendations, there is some ordering that we do that uses these signals. We’ve been testing this internally, and even there, there’s quite a lot of noise internally, you’d be surprised. But I think that to really get the algorithms large scale we needed to wait for today and we need to have noise, people using this. That’s when the relevance technology is really going to come into play… ” [On the signals Google will be paying attention to] “We’re going to see which articles you like, which ones you comment on, which posts you read, things like that. And I think we’ll be able to try to tailor things to you that you’re likely to be interested in.”
Brin says that he’d like to make the recommendation technology more transparent (as opposed to a black box) but hasn’t yet discussed those details with the Buzz team.
On integrating real-time into Buzz in an accessible way, and possibly working that into Wave:
“I think we want to see what the experience with Buzz is in the wild and then make decisions from there. I know we’ve learned a lot, we’re very happy with internal testing. Actually that’s why I am very excited for the Enterprise product. But before we make plans like that I want to see how Buzz gets used from today on out. I think the integration [into Gmail] has proved valuable, and that’s definitely something we’re going to be looking into for Wave.”
Why he thinks Google Buzz might work, when other social services integrated with Email haven’t made much of a splash:
“I think if you look at the history of technical products, there are a lot of details that matter. It’s not just the general idea, oh I have Email and social. And you know maybe, maybe we got the details right, maybe we didn’t, we’re going to see from today on out. Internally I’ve been very happy with the result. There are a lot of detailed things. If you look at the success of the world wide web, you look at Xanadu (an ongoing Hypertext project founded in 1960) for example by Ted Nelson that had a lot of these concepts yet it wasn’t so successful. There are a lot of details, perhaps chance and timing. I wouldn’t discount something because it’s similar to something in the past…”
On his experience using Buzz:
“It’s been internally, probably half a year I’ve been testing it internally, with an increasing number of other people, the whole company has been on it for a while now. It has really enabled me to communicate, you get far better information about what’s going on in the company. Now if I have a question about something I don’t have to dig up who is the person who is particularly responsible for this, I can just throw a question out there, I know there are enough people out there who pay attention to my posts, and also now with the recommendations it should get recommended to the right person anyway. And I don’t worry that I’m disrupting people because the social expectation on Buzz is different than on email.”
On users having to make the choice between Email, IM, and Buzz:
“I think it is stressful today to have to make those choices. And I’d like to move to a situation where people make that choice less. You have to decide what medium you’re using, you have to decide to whom you’re sending it to, and sometimes you have to decide what is the heading going to be? There are a lot of decisions you have to make. And Google Buzz at the very least you do have to choose Buzz as the medium today. Though I would like to simplify that in the future. But you don’t have to decide to whom to send it. You can always type an @reply in the mid stream. You don’t have to necessarily pick a heading. Those lower the barrier a lot. But I agree that there is definitely room left to further simplify it. Because the very act of choosing Buzz to do that is in itself a bit of work.”
The conversation then changed to the situation in China. Brin was asked about this topic repeatedly and directed reporters to read the company’s blog post on the matter (which he says reflects the consensus view of the company). Eventually he did explicitly say, “We have not pulled out of China”, going on to give a general timeline of Google’s initial steps to launch in China in 2006 and how things have progressed since then (you can see this start around 15:45).
Finally, the interview closes out with a few questions and answers about Google’s initiatives in energy, and how the economy is affecting the company.
February 10, 2010 12:30 AM
Today Google launched Google Buzz, a new service taking aim at social platforms like Facebook and Twitter by providing the ability to share links, photos and status updates directly from your Gmail account. And right off the bat Google has released the accompanying API:
We believe that the social web works best when it works like the rest of the web - many sites linked together by simple open standards. Rather than launching with a one-off API, we see Buzz as a tremendous opportunity to work with the community to create and support open protocols for the next generation of social web apps and websites. To kick things off, Buzz is launching with support for public activity feeds and offers users the option to connect their favorite sites to their Buzz activity feed using open protocols.
There are going to be many ways for developers to access Buzz: Atom, AtomPub, Activity Streams, PubSubHubbub, OAuth, MediaRSS, Salmon, the Social Graph API, PortableContacts, and WebFinger. It’s quite an open stack. Initially this is read-only, but read-write APIs are coming soon. We’ve setup a Google Buzz API profile to track these updates.
CSMonitor have posted a nice writeup explaining how Google Buzz works, and how it compares to similar services:
How is Google Buzz different from Facebook and Twitter? In many ways it’s very similar. Users can post new buzz by sharing links, photos, videos, and status updates. You can comment on and “like” friends’ postings just as on Facebook, and send @ messages to get specific users’ attention much like on Twitter.
Google Buzz’s algorithms are constantly analyzing users’ preferences - what they like and dislike, what their friends are sharing, and who they’re interacting with. If a bunch of your friends are passing around a link or talking with a person, Buzz will shoot you a recommendation.
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb notes how Google Buzz will use these open standards to try and build a broad social platform:
Google Buzz was presented as a destination site, but a look at its APIs and developer roadmap indicate that it may actually intend to be a platform - the central hub for a world of distributed social networking. “This is a downpayment on where we’re going with the open, social web,” Google Open Web Advocate Chris Messina told us.
People will build services on top of analyzing your public Buzz activity. They will build new applications for publishing to Buzz, just like the Twitter ecosystem has today. Planned support for things like the Salmon commenting standard mean that comments left on Buzz could appear out on blog posts around the web, and comments on blog posts could be viewed inside of Buzz when the post links are shared.
With its focus on open and existing standards, developers should find Google Buzz API fairly easy to get started with. There is also an opportunity to mould the API as it develops - Google are looking to work with the community, and encourage those with ideas and feedback to use the Google Buzz API discussion group.
February 10, 2010 12:07 AM
A new simplified approach for to do lists. Exposes only what you need to get done right now with the concept of “shifts.” Any incomplete items at the end of the day are also automatically shifted to the next day’s list. URL: Done.io
February 10, 2010 12:04 AM
February 09, 2010
Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you.
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Nobody is Geotagging Tweets - So Can Buzz Geolocation Succeed?
Twitter introduced its own geolocation API in August 2009, but while we were very excited about the possible applications of this API, very few users and developers actually use it today.
ReadWriteWeb's full coverage and analysis of
Google Buzz:
While location-based apps and services like Foursquare and Gowalla (which launched its own API today) have quickly grown in popularity, only
0.23% tweets currently include location data. Unlike Buzz, however, neither Twitter itself nor any of the popular Twitter client really put geolocation at the center of their applications.
Buzz's Advantage: It Already has the Users
Now, however, Google is releasing a product to millions of people that makes geolocation a major focus of the service. Already, you can bring up the Google Maps layer and find buzz messages in virtually every location. This quick adoption makes sense, given that Google is putting the colorful Buzz logo in a prominent place on its mobile interface.
The Google Buzz mobile site also makes it very easy to see messages from nearby users (including those you don't follow). The "nearby" button is very prominent and takes you right to a list of nearby messages, which feels a bit like BlockChalk (though without the anonymity of that service). Thanks to this, you can even get good use out of the service if none of your friends are Gmail users. You can, for example, just ask a Twitter-like question that's related to your location ("Where can I find good pizza around here?") and anybody on Buzz can see your message and post an answer.
Worries about Privacy.
By default, location sharing is turned on in Buzz, which raises concerns about privacy. Just today, as the European Union celebrates "Internet Safety Day," the E.U. warned users to turn off geolocation services whenever possible. Clearly, we do feel a lot more comfortable with sharing what we had for lunch than where we are right now. It would be nice, though, if Google allowed users to easily control the precision of this location data. A lot of people would be very comfortable with sharing what city they are in, for example, but don't necessarily want to disclose the exact coffee shop they are sitting in right now. On the other hand, that would also dilute the value of the information and it looks like Google opted to go for precise locations that are couple to Place Pages for this exact reason.
Geolocation: The Killer Feature for Buzz
By connecting Buzz to Google Maps Place Pages and by having a huge built-in user base, Google will be able to deliver a better location-aware social networking experience than any of its competitors. The question, of course, is if users are actually looking for this. The early reactions to Buzz are mostly positive, but we still have to wait and see if this will be another failed attempt by Google to create a social networking service, or if the tight Gmail integrations and Google's aggressive push to put Buzz front and center on its mobile services will be enough to convince users to use Buzz regularly.
Discuss
February 09, 2010 11:43 PM
While the rest of the world was caught up with Google Buzz, Apple was quietly granted a patent for a virtual reality App Store. The store patent encompasses details such as seasonal and time-based lighting, color schemes and a basic storefront representation. A few bloggers have already criticized the patent as a relic from SecondLife past, the store may have more use when we consider it in the context of the XBox Live marketplace.
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According to Patently Apple, the patent is one of several awarded to Apple today. First filed by David Koski in 2006, the abstract explains that a storefront representation is deployed, a store visitor is acknowledged and subsequent visitor shopping cart activity is shared with others.
Rather than thinking about this in the context of Second Life, it may be more appropriate to look at the XBox's emergence in the home entertainment space. Although primarily highlighted for its gaming features, XBox Live offers integration with Last.fm and Netflix, as well as social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Each user creates their own avatar and profile and then shops for games and videos within the XBox Live marketplace. Apple's attempt to move into this space may have interesting implications.
Someone who plays exercise-related games might receive a recommendation for a diet cookbook, a workout soundtrack, a yoga video, a calorie counting app and several portable devices to help you manage your routine. As well, the group shopping experiences may allow for virtual fitness groups, book clubs and even discounted group buying experiences. When we consider the time spent per user in games, this could be a lucrative business. While Koski may have simply filed the patent to receive his company patent bonus, there's also the chance that Apple is preparing for a more immersive future in entertainment.
Discuss
February 09, 2010 11:38 PM
As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmal and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! 
“
It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).
But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.
Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.
Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.
The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.
February 09, 2010 11:34 PM
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We learned earlier this morning that Google Buzz adds a shared social experience — very similar to FriendFeed and Facebook — to your Google contact circle via Gmail. Google also made it very clear that the mobile component, especially around location, is important to the product as a whole.
Location plays a big role in Buzz — we saw this with the introduction of the snap, Google’s answer to the check-in.
That one key feature demonstrates how right we were when we predicted late last year that “everything points towards Google taking big leaps on the location front in 2010,” and that “Google is interested in further assimilating the Latitude and Place Pages products into a more full-fledged location and recommendation service centered around places.”
The assimilation is Google Buzz for Mobile, and the ambitious endeavor is Google’s attempt to catch up to the likes of Foursquare, centralize the location-sharing experience around Place Pages and collect valuable place data. Here we’ll explore Google’s second attempt at getting the location-sharing formula right, and what it means in terms of the bigger picture.
Mobile Feature Run-Down
The mobile experience supports all the following features and functionalities:
Menu: From the Menu page you can search, select Following and Nearby stream options, navigate to My Posts, and view who you’re following as well as who is following you.
Snap to a location: Google Buzz’s version of the place check-in is a snap-to-location feature that lets you associate your physical location in place form with a buzz/status update.
Buzz: The “Share what you’re thinking” buzz box is located atop the My Posts, Following and Nearby tabs, and it’s the quickest possible route to snapping your location.
Once you start typing your buzz update, you’ll notice that a location is automatically associated with that post. If that location is inaccurate, you’ll want to click the light blue box and select the appropriate location from the list of nearby options. At the very bottom, you can also specify if the post is public or private. Once you select a post mode, your buzz is snapped to that location, and shared with Google Buzz users that are following you.
Replies: Right now the autocomplete reply feature supported in Google Buzz via Gmail doesn’t exactly carry over to the Google Buzz for Mobile experience, which means you won’t currently be able to type official replies from your mobile device just yet. You can, however, view replies as they were intended. Also, clicking on the associated user URL will direct you to the mobile version of the user’s Google Profile.
Streams: In the mobile application you have two stream types: Following and Nearby. Both are straightforward stream options.
Buzz Maps: In the Nearby stream, you can click “Buzz map” to view nearby buzz on a map.
Buzz Threads: Any item in your Following or Nearby streams has the potential to become a thread featuring comments and likes. You can moderate comments to your individual Buzz posts. What’s especially interesting about threads is that your check-ins, a.k.a. snaps, can become interactive conversations. That functionality doesn’t exist in location-sharing apps like Foursquare.
Buzz Permalinks: Each individual buzz and its associated conversation has a permalink, which means you can share individual items. If they’re public, anyone can comment on or like shared buzz items.
Place Pages: Every place in Buzz for Mobile is associated with a Google Place Page. Navigating to the Place Pages is a tad complicated at times, but there are a few ways to do it. If you’ve snapped to a location, you can select “Show map” from the specific buzz and click the link for the location. In the Nearby stream view, once you select a location, you can click “More info” to navigate to the Place Page.
Search: You can search all Buzz updates from the people you follow or just those nearby by selecting the search icon.
Is it Foursquare Re-imagined?
The answer to that question is not a simple yes or no, but Google was clearly inspired by the check-in model that Foursquare made popular. Here we will focus on the primary differences between the two approaches.
Snaps are conversations, check-ins are sport: Google’s approach is conversation-oriented. To snap to a location you need to post a buzz, and that buzz becomes the beginning of a potential conversation with friends. There are no points, no leaderboards, no mayorships and no rewards, but that doesn’t mean those elements won’t be added into the mix in the future. Buzz updates snapped to a location will also appear on Place Pages, which will expose them to a much wider audience.
Location-based deals are place-specific, but not tied to snaps: One of Foursquare’s finer features are the official location-based specials and mayor deals offered by businesses to Foursquare users that check in at their locale. While business owners have the ability to create mobile coupons for their Place Pages and promote them, the idea of snapping to a location and discovering nearby deals doesn’t seem to exist.
Place buzz and chatter: Lately we’ve seen Foursquare become a hub of curated content via its media partnerships, which bring in content from respected restaurant review sites (like Zagat), city tourism offices, reality stars, celebrities and fictional characters to serve as a dynamic and pocket-friendly city guide that travels with you. Right now, Google’s not attempting to separate the venue-related chatter from buzz updates that are meant to be recommendations or tips. Buzz for a particular place is mix of all location-shares and could be perceived as lacking the same value as Foursquare tips and to-dos. As a product that aims to reduce noise, this feature doesn’t deliver on that promise yet.
Place Page Significance
One way to look at the location features of Buzz for Mobile is to see as it another way to encourage business owners to claim their Place Pages. Google has been pushing Place Pages since their launch, and Buzz for Mobile extends the value of those pages. Now all Google Mobile and Gmail users are a few clicks away from Place Pages.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Google has finally found a way to support its own system for status updates and to tie those to physical locations in a potentially mainstream way. We’ve already seen that this data is incredibly valuable, especially to businesses and advertisers, and with every snap and its associated buzz, Google is learning more about what we’re doing and where we’re going.
Is Buzz for Mobile Too Ambitious?
While there are advantages to using the location-sharing functionality of Buzz, the mobile application is bloated with features and will be a challenge for the average mobile user to grasp.
The mobile application is certainly a nice complement to the Gmail experience, providing a convenient way to follow along and contribute to conversations. As a location service, however, Buzz for Mobile is overly complex. For those of you who have latched on to the location-sharing trend, the advantages to transitioning your check-ins from more niche apps with built-in rewards to Buzz are nonexistent at present.
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February 09, 2010 11:28 PM
GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable
So far, Google has failed to launch a successful social web product to U.S. Internet users. Orkut has taken off in including Brazil and India, but not in North America. Wave is a neat concept, but it has proven too abstract to catch on.
Is Buzz — Google’s new Twitter and Facebook-like social stream — the product that’s going to win Google a dominant — or at least prominent — place in the social web?
That all depends. Integration with existing social networks are critical for Buzz’s success — especially Facebook. I don’t believe Buzz can enjoy significant success without Facebook integration. When Google unveiled Buzz today, it announced that the app will share your Twitter updates with your Buzz followers. That’s great news, but you won’t be as thrilled to learn that (at least at launch) there will be no integration with Facebook at all.
We ought to consider the consequences of Buzz’s relationships with Twitter and Facebook. What are the relationships? Will Buzz, Twitter and Facebook co-exist elegantly or is this a zero sum game with a winner you can place your bets on?
Google Buzz and Twitter: Probable Peaceful Partners
When you post a new tweet using Twitter, Google can import that tweet and send it out to your Buzz followers with the rest of your Buzz updates. You won’t have to jump through any hoops or use any back-door methods to make it happen. Twitter is officially supported by Buzz — the same is true of Flickr, Picasa, Blogger and YouTube.
However, you won’t be able to publish out to Twitter using Buzz, which makes this all seem less useful. And since Buzz won’t aggregate tweets from your Twitter followers (unless you happen to be following them on Buzz and they also happen to be pushing their tweets into Buzz as described previously), you’ll still have to keep both Twitter and Buzz open to reach all your contacts across both networks.
That’s disappointing, but it’s no where near as disappointing as Buzz’s completely nonexistent relationship with Facebook.
Google Buzz and Facebook: Cold Shoulders
While Buzz and Twitter have some connectivity, there’s none at all between Buzz and Facebook. Buzz doesn’t import your Facebook status updates. It doesn’t post updates to your Facebook feed. It doesn’t display your friends’ feed updates. There’s no Facebook Connect integration at all. When asked about it this morning, Google said it has nothing to announce at this time.
Google is going to have a difficult time building a userbase when everyone who has a Facebook profile (that’s just about everyone who uses the social web at all now) is concerned that they can’t see their friends’ updates. They’ll have to keep using Facebook to stay in touch with their Facebook friends.
With more than 400 million users, Facebook is the world’s largest social network; Twitter by contrast has only 18 million or so. Gmail’s unique visitors numbered around 36 million as of last year. Clearly, Facebook is dominating. Google is attempting to challenge that dominance with Buzz, but Facebook is at the same time planning to move just as aggressively into Google’s territory.
It was recently discovered that Facebook will eventually launch its own webmail service. You can already send messages to e-mail addresses from Facebook, but the execution isn’t as smooth as it needs to be. The new e-mail plan would address that.
Codenamed Project Titan, the service would offer users e-mail addresses ending in @facebook.com. Facebook would become the largest webmail provider overnight. If the service is functional enough, it could threaten Google’s Gmail. People will be able to comfortably make the switch because they won’t lose the ability to e-mail their Gmail contacts — even if they move to another mail provider.
The Outlook: Buzz Won’t Win the Social Web Without Facebook Integration
I predicted at the end of last year that Facebook is well-poised to try to pry web dominance away from Google in 2010. Buzz doesn’t change my mind. Facebook is threatening Google, but Google isn’t threatening Facebook because it doesn’t offer any features so great that they incentivize people to leave behind their existing networks or spend their time updating and following yet another one when their friends are already all on Facebook or Twitter.
Facebook now dominates the social web so completely that it’s difficult to imagine an exodus to a competing service, unless that service offered some revolutionary new features that Facebook couldn’t possibly match — Buzz doesn’t.
I can picture one other success scenario, though: a service that aggregates other services’ features and content, and then offers up its own set of unique perks (like Buzz’s noise-control algorithms) that make the social web experience better. People would feel comfortable switching for the extra perks, because they wouldn’t have to leave their existing connections behind.
The outlook could change if Buzz integrates with Facebook the way it does with Twitter. Unless that happens, though, you’re better off keeping your bets on Facebook in the coming year or two — at least if your standard of success is something greater than niche appeal.
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[img credit: Drew Olanoff]
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February 09, 2010 10:59 PM
Baidu, the leading search engine operator in China, this afternoon reported blow-out financial results for the fourth quarter of 2009. The company’s Q4 profit rose 48.2% to 427.9 million yuan (approx. $62.7 million), or $1.80 a share. Revenue rose 40% to 1.26 billion yuan, or about $184.7 million, compared to the same period a year ago.
In the wake of Google’s stand against censorship of its search engine in China and its consideration to cease business operations in the country altogether, Baidu – to Wall Street’s surprise – raised its sales forecasts for the first quarter of 2010, projecting total revenues ranging from $176 million to $181 million, representing a 48% to 52% year-over-year increase.
In other words, Baidu expects to benefit directly from Google’s possible exit from China, although that dispute is far from resolved at this point.
Baidu has performed better than other Chinese Internet stocks this year on expectations that the company will gain sales from Google’s customers in China, the world’s largest Web market with an estimated 380 million users (according to eMarketer).
The Beijing-based firm holds about 64% of the country’s search market share, well ahead of Google.cn, which holds approximately 31%. Google stands to lose a large chunk of that share if it ends up exiting the Chinese market, which is not a made decision yet. The Mountain View, California company threatened to leave China after being hit with cyber attacks that originated from the country.
The reported financial results and the raised forecasts sent Baidu’s shares up 8.68% at $473 in after-hours trading. Clearly, investors don’t care much about the decision of both Baidu’s CTO and COO to quit the company for ‘personal reasons’ earlier this year.
February 09, 2010 10:43 PM
Entrepreneurship in Europe has a problem. A lot of their talent is "crossing the pond" to increase their chances of finding early-stage funding. A lot of venture firms in Europe tend to play the safer hands that they are dealt, investing in proven companies rather than new startups looking for seed funding. Though organizations like Seedcamp are doing what they can to reverse this trend, incubators in the U.S. like TechStars are still seeing an increase of international applications, many likely from Europe.
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In a recent blog post, TechStars Boston director Shawn Broderick shared statistics about the demographics of the companies which applied in both 2009 and 2010. The data showed an increase in the number of companies either wholly or partially international in nature - up from 14% in 2009 to 24% in 2010.
"My a priori expectations were that the number of [Massachusetts]-based companies had increased 2009 to 2010, but clearly I was incorrect," writes Broderick. "I did not expect the big change in international applicants."
Massachusetts-based applications held steady, dipping slightly to 31% from 32% the previous year, while exclusively U.S.-based applications as a whole dropped from 89% in 2009 to 80% in 2010. While these aren't drastic changes, they do imply a significant trend and echo the state of early-stage startups outside of the U.S. ecosystem.
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham would likely say that these numbers need to be higher. Graham was one of the first proponents of the so-called "Startup Visa" program which would provide a special visa for international entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to the States.
"The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US is not tax policy or employment law or even Sarbanes-Oxley," Graham wrote last April. "It's that we won't let the people who want to start them into the country."
A program like the Startup Visa would give even more incentive to international startups that are already tempted by the Silicon Valley culture and the numerous opportunities presented by American incubators. Startups are one of the few industries successfully creating jobs in America during a difficult period of economic struggle.
Just today, Yelp announced it would be expanding its company to the Phoenix area and hiring 200 employees, increasing its workforce by nearly 60%. The stats from TechStars are another indication that international entrepreneurs are increasingly looking to America to get their companies off the ground - companies which could play a significant role in creating American jobs.
Discuss
February 09, 2010 10:40 PM
With 400 million users, Facebook is seeing 2.5 billion photos uploaded every month. Scrapblog, a startup that allows you to make beautiful Flash-based online scrapbooks, is hoping to help Facebook users make pretty collages of their photos via a new Facebook app, Share the Love.
When you first start using Share the Love, the app will employ Scrapblog’s recently launched QuickMix technology to instantly generate a photo collage with up to ten Facebook photos. The photos will be automatically arranged with a set theme, which you can change easily (Valentines themes appear to be set at the moment). Similar to Scrapblog’s online site, the app offers users coordinated stickers, backgrounds and captions. And users can easily change photos from the photos they are tagged in and from their personal albums. You can also bypass Scrapblog’s technology and start from scratch by picking a theme and choosing the photos to feature. Once you are finished designing your collage, you can publish the scrapbook to your Facebook page and photo albums.
Scrapblog is monetizing the app by offering premium content, which you can purchase through Scrapblog credits. On their first visit, new users are granted 100 credits to spend in Scrapblog’s Share the Love Marketplace, which features stickers, backgrounds and text. You can buy credits through a credit card or PayPal. And users can earn extra credits for free if they use mobile payment platform BOKU’s system. Additionally, users can earn credits by simple using the application and creating collages. The startup is also trying its hand at creating a gaming atmosphere with the app by employing a points system. By using the application and sharing collages, you can unlock various levels of the app. Each level promised exclusive content, such as premium stickers and backgrounds, with which users can customize their photo collages.
It’s wise for Scrapblog to begin to leverage the power of Facebook photos; especially considering that the startup provides a compelling technology to users. Of course, Facebook just rolled out their own slideshow feature and there are other Facebook apps, such as Photo Books, that allow users to create scrapbooks and collages from their photos.
Scrapblog, which recently brought on Jill Braff as CEO, just raised $2.5 million in series B funding from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, bringing the startup’s total funding to $10 million. The company was first introduced back in 2006, briefly went offline, and relaunched in March 2007. The site has grown to over 2 million registered users who have created over 4.4 million Scrapblog pages.
February 09, 2010 10:35 PM
Bummed because you don’t have the time to salivate in front of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition Ustream? Well, now you can get plenty of SI content sent directly to your cell: All you need is a physical issue of the mag and a camera phone.
Once you pick up your issue (available on stands today), simply search through the pages for the JAGTAGs — or 2D barcodes — featuring a black and white image of what they’re calling a “mobile beauty.” Snap a photo of the JAGTAG and send it via MMS in order to get behind-the-scenes videos of the models sent directly to your phone.
As the web becomes more and more ubiquitous, encroaching on print’s territory (iPad, anyone?), magazines continue to try to find new and different ways to convince people to buy the physical copy (especially as newsstand sales are on the decline).
Back in November, Esquire launched its augmented reality issue, a neat little edition that gave one more content when one held a page up to a webcam. Back then, editor-in-chief David Granger told The Wall Street Journal that the issue was a gimmick, but one that allowed for a more interesting reader experience and cross-platform ad sales.
SI’s efforts with the Swimsuit Edition could be considered a horse of a very similar color. Although mobile technology such as this is far from new, and even though SI has used it in the past (in various articles last summer and in recent marketing materials), the swimsuit issue has a certain cache with SI fans (i.e.: It features girls in swimsuits, and dudes like that).
“The 2010 Swimsuit Edition is a mass media event and JAGTAG is the only 2D barcode solution capable of reaching a mass mobile audience,” said Charlie Saunders, executive director of integrated marketing for Sports Illustrated. Saunders is referring to the fact that you don’t need a smartphone to yoink this content, which opens it up to a wider audience.
Have you picked up the latest Sports Illustrated yet? How’s the view from inside?
[img credit: SI Vault]
Tags: MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, pop culture, software, sports, video
February 09, 2010 10:08 PM
We are in our third week here at ReadWriteCloud. One of the weekly features we do is a poll about an issue related to cloud computing or virtualization.
Last week we asked if you plan to invest in virtualization. This week we are asking: Is a private cloud just a glorified data center? You'll see the poll in the right sidebar of the main ReadWriteCloud page.
We had a pretty small sample to work with last week but the results show that virtualization is living up to its promise as one of the most important IT investments being made in the enterprise.
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This week, the question turns to an issue that gets its fair share of debate. For detractors, private cloud computing is not cloud computing at all. It's virtualization applied to a data center. It does not have the capacity that you get with a public cloud infrastructure.
Is a private cloud just a glorified data center?(answers)
From Andre Ye:
"And, the cost to expand that variability means additional capital expense for the company. That seems to run counter to some of the inherent benefits of cloud computing."
Proponents, like Gartner's Thomas Bittman, say the debate is a foolish one.
"There's an argument over whether the term "cloud" can be used to describe the changes taking place in internal IT architectures. How silly! Regardless of the term, there is a major trend playing out over the next few years where internal IT providers want to make fundamental changes so that they behave and provide similar benefits (on smaller scale) as cloud computing providers."
What do you think? Is private cloud computing for real?
Discuss
February 09, 2010 10:00 PM
Apple recently made headlines here on TC for depriving an individual of 16 .com domain names that contained some of the company’s brand names, including MacBook and iPod.
Microsoft saw that move and then played an even better hand: the company was granted no less than 23 .com domain names in one fell swoop earlier this month.
Of those, 22 relate to the software giant’s desktop operating system, Windows, while one contained the trademark-protected term ‘XBOX’.
The website addresses were all registered in June 2008 by a person with the peculiar name nonamo c/o nonamo nonamo from Puerto Rico, according to public UDRP complaint documents.
The full list of domain names that are soon going to be transfered to Redmond:
- windows7addon.com
- windows7antivirus.com
- windows7compatible.com
- windows7features.com
- windows7firewall.com
- windows7freeware.com
- windows7hardware.com
- windows7patch.com
- windows7place.com
- windows7plus.com
- windows7portable.com
- windows7recover.com
- windows7reviews.com
- windows7screensaver.com
- windows7security.com
- windows7servicepack.com
- windows7stuff.com
- windows7virus.com
- windowsforgamers.com
- windowsforgames.com
- windowsvistaplace.com
- windowsvistavirus.com
- xbox362.com
Apple, ball’s in your court again.
Update: attorney at law Douglas Isenberg checks in to tell us we should mention that he won the largest domain name dispute ever – 1,542 domain names – on behalf of his client, InterContinental Hotels Group last year. OK, Isenberg, you win.
February 09, 2010 09:58 PM
GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable
Earlier this afternoon, Google announced Google Buzz, a semantic approach to social status updates that live inside Gmail. The demonstration video showed off some of what you can do with Buzz on your desktop — but what seems really exciting is what Buzz can do in your pocket.
Android and iPhone Optimized Sites
If you visit http://buzz.google.com on your iPhone or Android device, you’ll be taken to a WebKit-optimized interface for using and connecting with Google Buzz.
When you do that, you’ll either be asked to log in to your Google account or, if you’re already logged in, you’ll be taken straight into the main Buzz screen. Here you can see Buzz from the people you follow and from nearby locations, view your own posts, and find other people.
The web-based interface fits in perfectly with the Gmail-optimized webpages that iPhone users are accustomed to using — Buzz is merely a new tab in the interface.
Sharing with Friends
You can view Buzz surrounding your followers in a real-time stream. The concept is very similar to something like FriendFeed or Cliqset, in that each status update can become its own conversation.
You can also share and view photographs via Buzz.
The Buzz About Location
One of the most compelling aspects of Google Buzz is its integration with Google’s Latitude service. Using your device’s GPS or Wi-Fi connection, Buzz will find your location (or show you nearby locations) and you can send an update and pin yourself to that location. Unlike Foursquare, where you can just check in to a location, if you want to indicate that you are someplace currently (or leave an opinion about an establishment), you have to send a Buzz message.
The Nearby tab is pretty cool because it shows you information from the public stream about what’s going on nearby. If you’re in a new city or simply trying to find out what’s going on in your neighborhood, this could potentially work like Gowalla or Loopt Mix.
Overall
Like Buzz in general, Buzz Mobile is still very much in development. The web app, while well-designed, doesn’t let you actively manage any of your accounts or connections. It’s also somewhat limited, for the time being, in what you can do — based on what type of access you or your followers have been given.
Once everyone has Google Buzz in Gmail, we’re sure that the mobile options will become a bit more well-rounded. As it stands now, there’s lots of potential, but not a ton of substance.
Have you used Google Buzz for your iPhone or Android device? Let us know!
Reviews:
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iPhoneTags: buzz, geolocation, google buzz, web applications
February 09, 2010 09:31 PM
GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable
It’s no shocker that the web is buzzing about Google Buzz (terrible pun intended), Google’s most aggressive push into social media yet.
The new social updating and aggregation feature integrates with your mobile and your Gmail, providing a service that seems like a hybrid of Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp.
People are already taking sides, including some of Google’s competitors. Yahoo struck first, putting out an e-mail about its own previous (and similar) social media efforts before Google even finished its announcement. Microsoft didn’t take long to make its thoughts heard, either.
Here are some choice reactions from web experts and Google’s rivals:
Microsoft
Microsoft’s statement can be distilled into one very simple phrase: Nobody should care about Google Buzz.
Here’s the actual statement in its entirety:
“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”
In three sentences, Microsoft manages to rip Google for building yet another social network, claim the social innovation crown, and promote its social integrations with its popular Hotmail product.
In reality, Buzz is far more advanced than anything Google has ever put out. However, Microsoft does own a piece of something that directly compete with Google Buzz: Facebook.
Google Buzz has the most potential yet to give Facebook and Microsoft trouble in the social space.
Yahoo
The Internet giant did not explicitly react to Google Buzz, but it did time an e-mail titled “Latest on Yahoo!’s social updates” with the intent of reminding people about its social features in the face of Google’s newest social media monster.
Choice quotes:
“There are now more than 200 Yahoo! and third-party sites that feed into Yahoo! Updates – like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Yahoo! Buzz – allowing people to see and share updates such as when they’ve uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story or posted a new restaurant review, all from Yahoo!”
“Yahoo! Updates now appear throughout the Yahoo! network, in popular sites and services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo.com, and Yahoo! Messenger and across our content properties, meaning people can always keep up to date with their friends’ latest activities”
“Yahoo! Updates are featured prominently on the “What’s New” section of Yahoo! Mail, which is used by more than 300M people worldwide. People can also update their status and share it with friends and family directly from the “What’s New” tab”
Clearly Yahoo feels threatened by Google’s product and, perhaps just as importantly, the buzz it is receiving. Yahoo is quickly becoming the oft-forgotten “other guy” despite being first with some of the features that Google is touting.
Forrester Research
Forrester Research’s Augie Ray had this to say:
“While bringing relevance filtering to the noisy social media world could prove a significant advantage, this doesn’t (yet) seem to be enough to pull people away from the networks they’ve already created elsewhere. Buzz doesn’t update user’s Twitter or Facebook feeds, so I expect experimentation but not wholesale switching in the foreseeable future. Buzz could end up supplementing rather than replacing users’ other social networks for now.”
We agree with Forrester’s initial reaction: Google Buzz isn’t compelling enough to pull people away from Foursquare, Facebook or Twitter — at least, yet. Google is putting a lot of resources into this project, and it won’t give up the fight for social easily.
You
Now it’s your turn. What do you think of Google Buzz? Do you think it has the potential to challenge Facebook or Twitter, or is this going to end up being another Orkut or Google Knol (remember that thing?).
Let us know in the comments.
Reviews:
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Orkut,
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YouTubeTags: Google, google buzz, microsoft, Yahoo
February 09, 2010 09:17 PM
Yesterday, we pushed an update to Campfire that added some new functionality to the transcripts screen. You can read the details in this post on our product blog, but I wanted to share the thought process on a small change we made as part of the update.
While working on the “Files, Transcripts and Search” tab in Campfire we noticed that the heading for each transcript day was kind of a mess. Here’s what it looked like before the update (the image has been reduced, click to see it full size):
The design has essentially four elements using 3 font sizes, 4 colors, and 2 font weights. It certainly gets the job done, but it adds a lot of noise to the screen and can only make scanning the page slower than it needs to be. Contrast is essential to differentiating elements of a design, but here everything is unnecessarily different from everything else.
As we looked more critically we also felt like the link to read the transcript could be more obvious and that the link to delete a transcript was far too prominent for a feature that is rarely needed.
Here is what it looks like today:
The redesigned header reduces the contrast between the date and room name to just the weight of the font — a good example of least effective difference. The link to read the transcript is now explicit, reducing confusion, and the delete transcript link it subdued. Aligning it to the right keeps it out of the way where it is less likely to be accidentally clicked. Finally, a heavy black rule decidedly separates each day while giving each entry some visual weight.
The new design retains the same four elements as the original but by reducing unnecessary contrast, and refining the arrangement makes it feel like fewer to the eye. This results in less clutter and better scanability. It’s a small change that we think makes the whole page better.
February 09, 2010 08:56 PM
Let me say upfront: I have never been to TED, mostly because I have never been invited and I can’t imagine a world where I justify paying $6,000 for a conference. But I live in Silicon Valley so every year leading up to the star-studded event, I have to hear about it from nearly everyone I know: People who love it and people who hate it.
For the last few years, these conversations have gotten ugly. What I’ve seen and heard from the outside depicts the sad transition from what used to be an inventive, elite industry conference that cross-pollinated experts from the worlds of technology, entertainment and design to a $6,000, always-sold-out-unless-you-“matter” invitation to rub shoulders with celebrities and talk about how compassionate of a millionaire you really are.
I don’t really blame the attendees. Truth be told, if I had $6,000 that my mortgage or a worthy charity didn’t need and was important enough to be courted by the organizers, I’d probably be a TED-head too. But a few years ago, I’d heard so many ugly stories about treatment of the people who aren’t quite-important-enough that I finally had to call the fawned-over conference out in one of my highest-read BusinessWeek columns ever, all but guaranteeing I’ll never be let in its hallowed doors. Full rant here. Sour grapes? Probably. But then again, there are tons of conferences I’m not allowed to attend that I have no issue with at all.
Since that rant, I’d grudgingly given TED some credit for opening up a bit. A move to Long Beach gave the conference a bigger venue and more people who really wanted to go seemed to be able to get tickets. TEDTalks are now posted for free online, and some are even streamed from the conference. TED has also expanded its events to the emerging world, even sponsoring some locals who can’t afford the ticket price.
So imagine my surprise when I started to hear rumblings from the Valley TED faithful that the relocation to Long Beach has ruined what was great about the conference, making it even more elitist. TED has always been an expensive clique, but once you were in, you were in. Like the World Economic Forum in Davos, there wasn’t much more to do in TED’s old home of Monterey so everyone mixed and mingled. It was a rare place you could hang out with Al Gore and Meg Ryan at the same dinner and, come on, that’s kind of cool, right?
No more. Now when the day’s sessions are done there’s a hierarchy of parties throughout the LA-area with strict lists and security. Cliques within cliques, if you will. One friend I spoke with yesterday told me it was so bad last year he couldn’t even hang out with his friends much of the time. Because that’s what you want when you’ve paid $6,000 to attend an event—to be told your friends are still better than you.
Now, to be fair, these aren’t necessarily official TED events. But it’s still striking to hear the TED faithful complaining about the TED clique.
February 09, 2010 08:33 PM
“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.” – Microsoft statement on Google Buzz.
When one of the big guys launches a new product, competitors generally just sit it out and let the press do its thing. But Microsoft made a point of reaching out today with the quote above, criticizing Google Buzz as “another social network” and noting that Hotmail has aggregated Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and other services since 2008.
Of course Microsoft also owns a chunk of, and has a search deal with, Facebook. So they’re being threatened on a number of fronts. Still, just the fact that Microsoft is speaking on the record about Buzz shows that the guys in Redmond are a little worried. And they are not the only ones.
February 09, 2010 08:20 PM
Google just launched Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service which will be tightly integrated with Gmail. There can be little doubt that Google Buzz looks a lot like FriendFeed, the social aggregation service that was acquired by Facebook in August 2009. Today, FriendFeed's developers are Facebook employees and aren't likely to continue to improve the service in any meaningful way, while the active user community on FriendFeed continues to shrink rapidly. Given the similarities between the two services, we can't help but wonder if Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn't.
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Google Buzz:
As Louis Gray points out, Google Buzz validates FriendFeed's ideas, but it also marginalizes the service even more. While some will look at Buzz as a Facebook/Twitter competitor, it also represents the final nail in FriendFeed's coffin. We will surely see a lot of FriendFeed's features appear on Facebook in the future, but FriendFeed as a stand-alone service has now lost its relevancy before it ever got a chance to go mainstream.
The real question, though, is whether Google Buzz will be able to succeed where FriendFeed couldn't. FriendFeed never made it out of the early-adopter phase and slowly became a self-referential community that was never quite accessible enough for a larger audience.
Looks Familiar?
If you are not familiar with FriendFeed, just have a look at these two screenshots:
Google's Advantage: Lifting FriendFeed's Best Ideas and a Huge Built-In User Base
Google Buzz has a number of advantages over FriendFeed. While FriendFeed tried to attract early adopters and mostly catered to their tastes, Buzz has a built-in audience already. While FriendFeed had to work hard on building a thriving community and never managed to attract a large mainstream audience, Gmail is one of the world's most popular email services and thanks to this, Buzz has millions of potential users from day one.
Also, while FriendFeed tried to allow users to connect to as many social services as possible, Google Buzz is just starting out with a few core Google and third-party services for now (Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader and Twitter). This will make it far more accessible than FriendFeed ever was.
Google is also putting a lot of emphasis on location-based and mobile services here, which is something FriendFeed never did. FriendFeed, for example, never offered a mobile app, while mobile apps and sites are one of the areas where Google is focusing on with Buzz.
The Buzz team has also been able to lift some of the best ideas from FriendFeed. You can "like" items, comment on them, you can see who liked a post (which looks identical to FriendFeed's implementation of this feature) and Buzz will recommend items that it thinks will be interesting to you because your friends also liked them or commented on them.
What do you Think?
Do you think Buzz's built-in mainstream user base help it to succeed where FriendFeed failed?
Discuss
February 09, 2010 08:20 PM
Google officially unveiled Buzz, their major step into social statuses through Gmail today at an event held at 10 AM PT. Within the hour, Yahoo PR was set in motion to let everyone know that they actually did this first, almost a year ago.
Here’s the humorous email that was sent out:
It’s been almost a year and a half since we first launched Yahoo! Updates – a social feature that lets people share their status, content and online activities and stay connected to what their friends and family are doing on Yahoo! and across the Web – and we wanted to share the latest on what’s happening with Updates:
- There are now more than 200 Yahoo! and third-party sites that feed into Yahoo! Updates – like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Yahoo! Buzz – allowing people to see and share updates such as when they’ve uploaded photos, changed their status, buzzed up a news story or posted a new restaurant review, all from Yahoo!
- Yahoo! Updates now appear throughout the Yahoo! network, in popular sites and services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo.com, and Yahoo! Messenger and across our content properties, meaning people can always keep up to date with their friends’ latest activities
- Yahoo! Updates are featured prominently on the “What’s New” section of Yahoo! Mail, which is used by more than 300M people worldwide. People can also update their status and share it with friends and family directly from the “What’s New” tab
- Yahoo! Updates are now available globally
- Additionally, Yahoo! recently announced an expanded integration with Facebook that will allow people to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content with Facebook friends as well
- Ultimately, Yahoo! sees social as an enabler and as a dimension that is part of everything we do—and everything people do online.
Let us know if you have any questions or would like to hear more about Yahoo!’s social features.
That’s all true, but all that really highlights is that Yahoo’s offering has failed to catch on in any meaningful way in the past year. It’s hard to say if Google or Yahoo have a worse track record when it comes to the social web. But at least Google is still pushing hard, while Yahoo recently gave up and announced it would outsource the majority of its work to Facebook. With Buzz, Google is going right after Facebook (and Twitter, and Foursquare, and yadda, yadda…).
But Yahoo wasn’t done take shots at Google Buzz with its PR blitz. The official Yahoo account on Twitter also chimed in noting that Yahoo Buzz, a product with the same name but completely unrelated, launched two years ago. Yahoo has an event tomorrow to talk about something. This could get ugly.
February 09, 2010 08:18 PM
Shashank Nigam is the CEO of SimpliFlying.com, an award-winning blog on airline branding. He tweets at @simpliflying.
Social media is no longer the “new” thing, especially for airlines. JetBlue has over one an a half million followers on Twitter. Lufthansa allows passengers to update their Twitter or Facebook status about where they are in the sky. AirAsia drives buzz about its new destinations through custom micro-sites. However, most airlines (and airports and hotels) are still struggling to earn direct revenue from their social media efforts.
Yet if Dell can make $6.5 million from Twitter, why can’t airlines? Here are five ways that social media can directly drive dollars for airlines (and other travel companies, like hotels).
1. Clear Distressed Inventory on Twitter
Running an airline or hotel is much like running a cinema. It costs about the same to operate the hall (and the plane/hotel) no matter how many seats or rooms are filled up. Any unsold seats or rooms at the last minute are called “distressed inventory.” Combine the last-minute nature of such seat/room availability with the real-time features of tools like Twitter and you create the opportunity for airlines and hotels to generate cold, hard cash.
United Airlines recently launched Twares, where it clears off seats for the upcoming weekend every Wednesday and Thursday. JetBlue’s Cheeps program works along similar lines. All it takes is to create a separate fare category in the revenue management system for such deals and have one person put them out on Twitter, once or twice each week, after looking at how full the flights are.
Of course, you have to set clear expectations with your followers that the account will only be sending out deals, and is not a customer service vehicle.
Ultimately, using real-time platforms like Twitter helps the airline circulate cheap fares and get people to fly more often, or even for the first time. Hotels could similarly post unfilled room inventory on Twitter. Ultimately this fills up the planes and hotels and drives more revenue.
2. Infuse Social Media Reviews Into the Booking Engine
Done correctly, ratings and reviews deliver a significant increase in sales. One third of retailers reported an 11-20% or more overall increase in conversions as a result of adding reviews to their sites, while consumers are willing to pay up to 22-49% more for a 5-star rated product than for a 4-star rated product in the hospitality and travel industries.
For airlines, leveraging reviews correctly requires integrating them into the booking path when a person is searching for flights, especially at the point when the potential customer is most likely to convert into a sale — similar to how many airlines integrate selling travel insurance.
The critical factor here is to be transparent about where the reviews are coming from. They shouldn’t look made-up at all. Stating that reviews come from a source like TripAdvisor or Skytrax only further establishes trust.
3. Integrate with Social Media Travel Applications
People around the world are using applications like TripIt and Dopplr to announce their travel intentions and plans to their friends well before the journey actually takes place. I personally share my plans up to two months in advance.
These status updates are also often integrated with generic social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, allowing a whole network of friends to find out where the person intends to travel to.
As an executive at a travel company, what more could you ask for than the intentions of a prospective customer to travel to a destination you serve? Because most of these applications have open APIs, airlines and hotels can pull the data being submitted and build custom applications using it.
For example, an airline could integrate TripIt data with their frequent flier database to create a list of their loyal customers and the destinations those customers are planning to visit. The airline could then reach out to them with a custom-tailored travel deal.
4. Create Private Online Communities
The social web offers a great opportunity for travel companies to create private online communities to give some of their loyal customers an exclusive experience. By targeting socially influential customers, these frequent travelers could be nudged toward becoming true brand ambassadors.
Creating an experience that offers exclusivity and privilege doesn’t have to cost big bucks — companies could start with basic white-label social networking tools like Ning. Offering that experience to select customers will increase their loyalty and the likelihood that those customers will evangelize the brand to fellow travelers.
5. Remember: Social Media is About Relationships
Imagine going to a cookout, only to see one of the guests waving a CD for some new software program, and shouting “new release, buy today!” That person would be completely out of place, and probably ignored by most of the other attendees.
It’s important to remember that social media is always about relationships first.
A good example of relationship building is Lufthansa’s MySkyStatus, which allows you to share your location with your Facebook and Twitter friends during the flight. Right now, it’s not generating any revenue for Lufthansa, but if they integrate a field to input a passenger’s frequent flyer number, they might be able to mine the data for some unique insights. However, right now, they’re concentrating on building a relationship with passengers through social media, not hammering them with ads.
It is important to always set the right expectations with your fans or followers on what you’re going to be doing. If you’re only selling seats or rooms, let them know. If you’re providing customer service, let them know that, too.
More business resources from Mashable:
- Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right
- How Social Media Helps One Small Business Connect with Fans
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, craftvision, pidjoe, Barghest, gchutka
Reviews:
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Facebook,
LinkedIn,
TripIt,
Twitter,
iStockphotoTags: airline, Airlines, business, Flying, hospitality, Hotel, hotels, List, Lists, MARKETING, small business, social media, travel
February 09, 2010 08:18 PM
During the Q&A session today following the Google Buzz event, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed something both humorous and interesting. When asked a question about practical uses for Google Buzz, Brin noted that he actually used the service to help him write his op-ed about Google Books that ran in the New York Times last year.
Brin noted that he was having difficulty with the article because it’s just his one point of view. So he put out his draft on Google Buzz (which Google was testing out internally within the company at the time), and quickly got dozens of comments. Brin then used this feedback to edit his article.
What’s interesting here beyond Brin crowd-sourcing the writing of his important article, is that they’re apparently using Google Buzz internally in much the way that Google Wave has been set up: As a realtime collaboration tool. Of course, other Googler’s couldn’t edit Brin’s article within Buzz, but instead could comment on it in realtime. This goes along with what I wrote earlier, that Google seems to be positioning Buzz as a step towards Wave. In fact, when asked specifically about Wave, Google VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz noted that Buzz was actually “inspired” by Wave.
February 09, 2010 07:54 PM
Stack Overflow, the innovative and popular programming question and answer service, is planning to open an API. In keeping with their community-centric approach, they are asking developers for input on what features should be included in their API. This recent blog post from Jeff Atwood has the details:
We are now gearing up to build the first official Stack Overflow API.
Now, what do you want to build that uses the API? The perfect API for this task, called from your preferred programming language, would do … what, exactly? What’s clean? What’s simple? What’s supportable and scalable?
A lot of comments have been submitted on the blog post and the same issue posted as a Stack Overflow question. Mobile apps have been a popular request, along with a number of other interesting ideas:
- Visual Studio extension. I picture a v1 that lets you find questions/answers and a v2 that lets you ask questions and post code from within VS.
- How about supporting Microsoft’s OData format http://www.odata.org/(billed as ODBC for the web)? With Office 2010 supporting OData, this would make it very easy to pull StackOverflow data into Excel for analysis. It would also open it up for easy ad-hoc queries from tools like LinqPad (http://www.linqpad.net/).
- I would definitely like to see a real-time feed similar to the Twitter Streaming API (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streaming-API-Documentation), including the “firehose” option.
- Basically a stackoverflow version of TweetDeck.
If you have a great idea on how Stack Overflow could be extended and want to influence the future API of this popular web service post your thoughts to the discussion thread. Alternatively you can get more details on the existing, unofficial Stack Overflow API here.
February 09, 2010 07:48 PM
Google rolled out a social stream service today called Buzz. It looks on the surface like Facebook, FriendFeed and other stream reading and writing services. It will compete with Facebook and Twitter. Under the covers, though, this major product was built by a team of people taking a radical new approach to online publishing: Buzz is all about open, standardized user data.
Google Buzz data can be syndicated out to other services using the standard data formats called Atom, Activity Streams, MediaRSS and PubSubHubbub. That couldn't be more different from Facebook. Google has taken open data standards to battle against a marketplace of competitors that are closed and proprietary to varying degrees. This is a very big deal.
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ReadWriteWeb's full coverage and analysis of
Google Buzz:
Google Buzz was presented as a destination site, but a look at its APIs and developer roadmap indicate that it may actually intend to be a platform - the central hub for a world of distributed social networking. "This is a downpayment on where we're going with the open, social web," Google Open Web Advocate Chris Messina told us.
It's tempting to recoil at the thought of Google powering one more part of our lives online, and our friends' activity streams are a very important part of the online experience now. But if the growing number of data portability and open web advocates the company has hired can do their jobs well - then Google Buzz could be a big force for good.
People will build services on top of analyzing your public Buzz activity. They will build new applications for publishing to Buzz, just like the Twitter ecosystem has today. Planned support for things like the Salmon commenting standard mean that comments left on Buzz could appear out on blog posts around the web, and comments on blog posts could be viewed inside of Buzz when the post links are shared.
The use of full email addresses in @ public replies demonstrated today seems to indicate that it will be a cross-platform messaging service. Facebook users can only message other Facebook users but Buzz users may be able to reply to people using email IDs from other networks. That's hot stuff.
Once Activity Streams consumption, @ messages that look like Webfinger profiles to me and Salmon are in place then Buzz users should be able to read, comment on and message to conversations with people who have never seen Buzz in their lives, simply by subscribing to their feeds. There's huge potential for interoperability here.
Facebook and Twitter will face renewed pressure to publish and consume standardized data feeds as well now. If Buzz is big enough, it could break the dam holding back a flood of standardized data. Where there is standized data, there is scalable network effects, consumer choice, competition and thus innovation.
Buzz's embrace of the open web could make it a very important player in the development of the future.
Update: One critique to take into consideration is this. Google has scooped up a substantial number of formerly independent open web advocates - most recently Chris Messina, who was the leading spokesperson for the Activity Streams standard. See How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google. In that article we included the following argument from Yahoo's Eran Hammer-Lahav, the best-known technologist working to develop and support open login standard OAuth. This perspective is important to consider in thinking about the Buzz announcement and standards.
"This is clearly a big win for Google," Hammer-Lahav told us.
"Messina and Smarr are huge assets in the social web space. My concern is specific to Google. With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. A week ago, you would have to get at least Google, Plaxo, and Messina (representing the independent voice) to collaborate. This week it's just Google.
"While I am certain that Messina and Smarr will keep their independent voices, and am not suggesting they will 'sell out' or alter their principles, they no longer need to surface many of their ideas out to the community. They can just have an quick internal meeting and ship products."
Is Google centralizing too much of the decision making about the future of an ostensibly decentralized web? Time will tell, but this may be the heart of the battle for the future of the social web.
Discuss
February 09, 2010 07:31 PM
Last week, we were at the mHealth initiative conference in Washington D.C. The keynotes were all about the impact mobile health applications are having in shaping the future of the health care system. Nothing demonstrates that more than the iPhone. In the 18 months since it was released, it has been perhaps the biggest thing to happen to health care electronic records, which has seen billions of dollars worth of investment in past decades.
Mobile and wireless health applications directly impact the individual's health and have the promise of ensuring that when a patient leaves a doctor visit, they don't become "lost" in the system. It allows consumers to be engaged with health and wellness in their daily lives and connect back to their health care provider.
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For citizens in the United States, this movement could offer a future where there is allocated wireless spectrum that brings a wealth of health information into our homes and to our personal devices. This could be in the form of streaming health record transactions and content targeted to us where we consume our daily media and social interactions.
Dr. Mohit Kaushal, health care director for the National Broadband Taskforce, gave a summary of the issues surrounding health care and mobile health in a keynote today. We had a chance to catch up with him afterwords and dig in deeper to a few the key considerations of health IT as part of FCC investment.
Barriers
First, he described a few barriers that have existed in the past.
- Connectivity between systems is a major issue and challenge in health care.
- Adoption of electronic health has been slowed by reimbursement incentives and regulatory issues.
- Data utilization is growing to become a part of the mobile spectrum and also is being driven by intensive applications such as video and imaging.
Key Challenges
Next, Dr. Kaushel shared a few of the hurdles to overcome with a national broadband policy to support health applications.
- The US needs to invest in infrastructure to meet the growing needs of a mobile-enabled population.
- Spectrum must be allocated (or reallocated) to meet the needs and the right areas of growth
- Regulations need to be designed to maximize incentives for innovation in care delivery.
- There must be reimbursement incentives and viable business models for companies to succeed in delivering profitable services. In the health care system, we know that fee for service doesn't work nearly as well as an outcome based approach for delivery of health, rather than more procedures.
The question is how we can take this learning and apply it to spectrum or infrastructure that is allocated to consumer facing health care solutions. Should the U.S. include mobile health care in its considerations for the next phase of allocation of spectrum?
Discuss
February 09, 2010 07:30 PM
Foursquare has come out strong in recent weeks with partnership deals that look to put it at the top of the location-based app game. Last week, it announced a partnership with Bravo, the style and fashion-centric television network, and today it has come out with a partnership with Zagat, the restaurant guide, and the New York Times.
As we wrote last week, Foursquare is competing in an increasingly crowded space. These partnerships may help it attract a whole new audience and remain competitive against other services like Yelp that are just joining in the location-based arena.
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According to the New York Times' Bits Blog, the partnership will provide Foursquare users with new "Foodie" badges when they check in to Zagat rated restaurants. The service will also provide restaurant ratings and reviews from Zagat. Just as with last week's deal with Bravo, the high profile connection is likely to draw attention to Foursquare in more than the bar-hopping techie crowd where it found its initial popularity.
In addition to its partnership with Zagat, Foursquare just announced this afternoon a partnership with the New York Times, which will start this Friday. Working together, Foursquare and the Times will put out special badges and features for the Winter Olympics. One such new feature will be "recommendations for visitors and local residents on restaurants, popular attractions, shopping and nightlife in Vancouver, Whistler and the town of Squamish ... The tips will be pulled from the Times' travel and entertainment coverage on the cities."
We have to say, with partners like these, Foursquare seems like its not only here to stay, but it won't be long before you hear even your less techie friends and family talking about this app.
Discuss
February 09, 2010 07:17 PM
This morning, Google is announcing some exciting new features for two of its most popular applications.
Team Red, as we affectionately call ourselves, is present at the Googleplex in Mountain View, and we'll be live blogging the event, giving you, dear reader, a fascinating play-by-play. Stay tuned for updates!
The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific (UTC -8). Just refresh this post to see new content as events unfold.
Additional on-the-fly research and images from RWW journalist Frederic Lardinois.
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Google Buzz:
11:11: The event is over! Time to chase people down and ask some more pointed questions. Stay tuned to RWW for ongoing analysis.
11:08: Developers, here's the Google Code page for Buzz's APIs.
11:06: Will Buzz results appear high in Google search results? They're not doing anything special to promote those results, but users can search within Buzz. And all posts are indexed in real time.
11:04: Buzz is live.
11:02: Buzz will pull in tweets, and will publish to Twitter as a Twitter client in a later version. The team has put a lot of spam controls in place.
10:58: Will Google's social products succeed? Brin says he's seen a lot more productivity from using Google Buzz internally. Horowitz says the approach - creating something useful, not just entertaining - is different from "anything else I've tried."
10:56: Buzz user feeds will be available via PubSubHubBub/XML. Google will be releasing APIs. Google intends to make it as open as possible. They also want to integrate Buzz with other Google products such as the homepage.
10:52: Sergei Brin takes the stage. Fangirl here is very excited. Q&A starts. Buzz could integrate with Wave - a lot of functionality is inspired by Wave.
10:51: Buzz will launch at 11 a.m., when it will begin to roll out to Gmail users. Journos here will get it first. For the rest of Gmail users, they'll get Buzz within a few days.
10:50: Google is launching Buzz as an enterprise product soon, as well. "It will change the way businesses work around the world." Wasn't Wave supposed to do that?
10:45: Mobile Buzz will have a "nearby" setting to see posts and pics from folks around you. Makes the product a bit of a Foursquare/Yelp competitor?
10:42: Buzz allows for mobile posting by voice. The user speaks, and Google transcribes the audio into a geotagged text post.
10:40: You can use Buzz from Google's mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms. These apps will translate latitude and longitude into "real locations." Buzz will take its best guess and ask for confirmation. It's tied in with Place Pages.
10:39: You can use Buzz from Google's mobile homepage, mobile apps, and from a new Google Maps app for the major platforms.
10:37: Location is a powerful signal for relevancy. In the digital world we have not yet elevated location as a powerful signal. Computers speak latitude and longitude, but humans have a hard time interpreting this information.
10:35: Mobile: "You are going to love the new product experiences we will launch today." Consume and use Buzz on your mobile. One of Google's great insights was pagerank, which gave websites relevancy. Now, we need to find relevancy in social expressions on Twitter and other social networks. "It's easy to start drowning in this." How do we find relevancy in the real world? What signals do we use?
10:32: Google Buzz will have @replies with auto-complete. Users who are @ replied will receive inbox notifications.
10:29: When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile, or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user's inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time.
10:25: The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. Gmail will "know" who your friends are. The social stream features Yahoo! Meme-like content previews and will play nicely with Flickr and YouTube. Pictures will open in a lightbox-type UI. Shared links will feature headlines and thumbnails.
10:22: Buzz will surface your social graph by having you auto-follow the people you email and IM with the most. It will have a rich and fast-sharing experience for multimedia sharing. Sharing will be public and Google-indexed, or private - just depending on how users choose to share. It'll be integrated with your inbox in a way that goes beyond normal email. Finally, it will filter out the garbage and leave "just the good stuff."
10:20: Google is launching Google Buzz, a Google approach to sharing. Todd Jackson is the product manager, and he reveals that it's built into Gmail.
10:15: Google VP Product Marketing Bradley Horowitz kicks off the event: "I've got something exciting... We're going to talk about sharing." He's talking about finding the right audience for your content, real-time sharing and tools for attention management.
10:13: Wondering how much trouble I'd get in for casually paging through the slide preso on the podium laptop before the event starts... Probably not worth the scoop.
10:00: The event's a wee bit late kicking off, but Dodge is chatting about his work with Google Apps. He says the product range is already quite broad; they're working now to create a deeper set of features.
9:48: The music is pumping and the luminaries are trickling in and getting caffeinated. I'm sitting next to Jeremiah Owyang and Don Dodge.
Discuss
February 09, 2010 07:11 PM
