Randy Weber

The Kelsey Group Blogs discusses a Citysearch Mashup that combines Citysearch data with Google Maps. It looks nice, but there’s no content. Try a search for pizza in north Dallas. There’s nothing there. Google Maps, Yahoo, and the IYP sites have more/better content. But the UI is nice.

From shmula » Google’s Acquisitions: A Timeline : Business, Technology, and Stuff in Between comes a review of Google’s acquisitions. It’s interesting to see how many aquisitions have accounted for new products at Google. I had forgotten most of these.

PVR Wire wrote an interesting post on Who will buy TiVo? Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?

Let me start this with the fact that I LOVE TiVo. However, the lack of a viable HD product has led me to use the PVR in the set-top box from Time Warner. I hate it, but I have no choice. None-the-less, I still have my TiVo which I use as a music server to get my tunes from my PC to my entertainment system. It’s slicker than anything else out there, trust me, I’ve tried them.

Now, on with my point. I want TiVo to survive. I think it has major opportunities that it has not been able to capitalize on:

1. The set-top box that integrates audio, video, PCs, and the Internet in the living room.
2. It could change the way that audio and video is monetized by content owners and distributors.
3. It could change they way that audio and video is distributed by content owners - pay-per-view, video on demand, stored content that can be moved to various devices, etc.

I want this device BAD. PVR Wire has their arguments on who is most likely to buy TiVo - they believe it will be Yahoo or Google. I want it to be Yahoo or Apple. Yahoo seems to be able to integrate a variety of Internet content and could really use TiVo rather than screwing around with their own vaporware product. Apple would be great because they’d be able to avoid screwing up TiVo’s incredible UI (they might even be able to improve it) and they have done very well with integrating various types of content on various devices.

Whether it’s Yahoo or Apple, please let it happen.

Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures wrote a piece about Business Development 2.0 which he pretty much defines as biz dev via APIs. It sounds good, but isn’t a viable long-term solution.

Using the strategy put forth by the author, a start-up would be building a business around content and traffic from third parties and monetizing everything via Google AdWords or some other advertising network. Examples cited by the author include:

* YouTube makes it flash video player available via embed code on MySpace and their traffic takes off.
* TripAdvisor search engine optimizes its service and becomes one of the most popular travel services.
* Technorati hits delicious’ api for its tags and builds the web’s most succesful tag search service.
* Indeed crawls the Internet for jobs and builds a popular job service overnight.
* Kayak crawls the Internet for flights, hotes, and cars, and builds a popular travel service overnight.
* Qoop takes Flickr’s API and builds a Flickr printing service without ever engaging with Flickr’s team.
* Netvibes takes a few RSS feeds and builds a start page that looks as complete as MyYahoo overnight.

Nice for a business that has a handful of employees and no expenses, but it isn’t sustainable. Here’s the problem:

1.     No barriers to entry. Anyone can copy your business. Think about the example of the start page. Netvibes is competing with every major portal, as well as start-ups like Pageflakes, webwag, and protopage, with more popping up every day.
2.     No barriers to exit. Users can easily leave your business for the next big thing. Remember Friendster?
3.     Nothing of value is owned. You don’t own the content, nor do you own the advertisers. The eyeballs are yours, but without the content the eyeballs will go away. Without the advertisers, the money will go away.
4.     No control over your own destiny. Being completely dependent on “partners” (I use this term loosely) that have no contractual obligations to each other is dangerous. Content, traffic, or advertising “partners” could cut you off at anytime for any reason, like being acquired by a competitor, entering into an exclusive partnership with a competitor, suddenly viewing you as a competitor, or simply getting mad about something you’re doing with their content. Recent examples include YouTube entering into competition with Facebook, MySpace threatening YouTube, and Craigslist getting pissed at Oodle. If you’ve ever read Google or Yahoo’s terms of service for their advertising distribution programs, you know that they can pretty much change how their program works or cut you off at any time.

Biz Dev Classic may be slower, but it affords much more protection and stability for your business.

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.

Why does googlesux.com redirect to the Boston Red Sox’s home page? Is there some inside joke that I’m missing?

Am I the only one that saw the Travelpod tent and thought of Larry Page and Sergey Brin? I can see them taking their new 767 to Burning Man and staying in something like this.  Of course, they’ll need to upgrade the bed.

According to Hitwise, Google has reached 60% market share for US search in July. This gets scarier by the day. While I think that Google is the best search engine, they are not that much better than everyone else. No one should own that much of the market. Would someone please step up to the plate and take back some market share.

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?

1,000 pizzas at Google