Archive for the ‘business development’ Category

Google’s Partnership Strategy Is Changing

Sunday, August 20th, 2006

Google has been getting very aggressive with some of their recent deals. Their willingness to throw some money around to partners and to do one-off deals is increasing (Dell, AOL, Fox Interactive/MySpace, and the Associated Press come to mind).

I ran across this on ZDnet. It sums up nicely why they’re beginning to do this.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, at last months Q2 earnings conference call, reconfirmed:

we are in the search business, so we need all of the information. We want to partner with people to get information so our search end users can see it.

We’re also in the advertising business, and we’d like to provide advertising services to people who have their own proprietary content. So depending on where we are in that spectrum, we either do an advertising deal or a content deal or a hybrid deal.

But ultimately our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all the world’s information, that’s part of our mission.

Google has finally realized that they’re going to have to share the wealth to acheive their vision. This is good news for those with valuable content. So hold out for the money.

Licensing Web-Based Applications

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Signal vs. Noise had a nice post about ways to make money with software. They discussed:

  • advertising
  • subscriptions
  • support fees
  • combination

They liked subscription fees the best. 

They conspicuously left out licensing to other companies. A few astute commenters pointed this out.

For web-based applications, licensing is a great way to make money through co-brand and private-label relationships. The partner might use any of the models listed above to make money from your application or they might use it as a draw to get people to buy related products or services of their own.

Partnership models can include

  • sharing revenue
  • paying per use
  • paying a fixed licensing fee

Avoid the temptation to do an exclusive deal with a major player. Exclusives are not the way to go because you’re stuck with one partner that may or may not continue to invest in the relationship. If you’re working with them on a revenue sharing or per-use arrangement, this will kill you.

Looking for companies with related products or services is a great place to start for seeking out these types of partnerships.  Don’t underestimate the value of business development.

Is Google Paying Syndication Fees For Google News?

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

John Battelle’s Searchblog: Is Google Paying Syndication Fees For Google News?

Hmmm, very interesting. How will this impact Google’s ability to continue to get free content from non-news partners?

Online Karaoke – TiVo needs to jump all over this.

Tuesday, August 1st, 2006

Om Malik wrote about Karaoke today. Online Karaoke is the perfect application to bring together the home entertainment center with the Internet. TiVo needs to jump on this. It could be a showcase application for what they’ve been trying to do with their boxes lately, though it is admittedly not a mainstream application in the US. This is a major improvement over hauling your Karaoke crap over to a friend’s house and buying overpriced Karaoke CDs. I think this is great! Are you listening SingShot?

Thoughts on the Future of Online Dating

Sunday, July 30th, 2006

Susan Mernit (Yahoo! Personals) responded to an overview of new online dating sites by Mike Arrington. She is asserting that personals sites will operate side-by-side with social networking sites. I’m a big believer in online personals, but I don’t agree with her. Heavy social networking users are not the same folks that are heavy personals users. Social networkers, who tend to be younger, are getting by without personals. As these folks age into what Susan refers to as a “lifestage event,” it remains to be seen whether or not these users will find the need to use personals sites. This is complicated even further by the likelihood that social networking sites will improve their dating functionality over time. The personals sites need to find a way to work with the social networking sites to get to these younger users. It will likely mean new revenue models and having to share a bigger piece of the pie.

Verizon SuperPages.com joins Google AdWords

Monday, March 27th, 2006

Nice to see something that I worked on come to fruition.

Verizon SuperPages.com Rolls Out Pay for Calls

Tuesday, August 9th, 2005

It’s a sweet product and I’m proud to have worked on it. It has a unique distribution mechanism – both online and offline. The ads are also integrated with SuperPages’ PPC ads which means that it launched with significant distribution built in. Very cool.