Randy Weber

Let’s cut to the chase - No, it is not bad for small guys to partner with big guys.

Bronte Media references a post from Albert Wenger about small companies partnering with big Internet companies - Avoid David and Goliath Partnerships. The rationale:

Partnering with the biggest of the big on the other hand tends to be problematic because they are unlikely to be sufficiently responsive. […] So whenever possible, as a startup you should rely on mid size well established companies when it comes to strategic partnerships.

OK, I have lots of experience with this on both sides of the equation. All I can say is that there is some truth to this, but in general this is bad advice. At Verizon we worked with a few small companies and ended up essentially building their businesses and keeping them from dying during the dot.com bust. But I’ve also seen Verizon treat small partners poorly and likewise for other big companies that I’ve worked for. The key for the small player is to have a good contract that lays out how the relationship is to work and has sufficient penalties for not playing nice. Having an extremely responsive account management team also makes a huge difference.

Of course getting a solid contract is easier said than done. I didn’t like giving other companies much power over us when I was at Verizon. Likewise, the guys that were bigger than us didn’t like giving us much power. But if you can focus on win-win and genuinely add value to the bigger player, you can get to a place that works for both parties.

It’s worth noting that big companies in general don’t like doing deals with smaller players because of the risk that they won’t be around to fulfill their obligations. I was the guy that had the unfortunate task of delivering the bad news to hundreds of small guys that we wouldn’t do business with them and often the reason was that they weren’t established enough. Big guys tend to want to go with established players.

The thing that I think is most overlooked is that if the small guy can work a good deal with the big guy, it can make their business. It makes them a legitimate player and opens things up for additional deals with other large players and additional funding. This far outweighs the risk of the partnership not working out.

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.

Looks like Netflix has done some thinking. Profiles feature NOT going away. Nice to see that companies can get it right sometimes.

Yes, Yahoo lost out on search and PPC advertising to Google, but they’re beating everyone else. I’ve always been told that there’s room in the market for 2 dominant players. Yahoo is number 2.

But more to the point, there’s more going on at Yahoo than just search and PPC advertising. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has written a great piece on where Yahoo stands as a whole.

Kick-Ass Properties: Yahoo has fantastic properties. Time magazine this week awarded Yahoo two of the 10 picks for its “10 Essential Sites” special feature. Yahoo Finance and Flickr both got nods. No other company got recognized more than once (for the record, the others were Wikipedia, Craigslist, ESPN, Yelp, Facebook, Digg, Google, and TMZ. And yeah, I know, some of those hardly seem essential. And hey Time, next time give me one frakking page listing everyone. Geez!).

Let me add to Time’s picks a few more properties that do well for Yahoo. Delicious. Yahoo Answers. Yahoo Mail. Yahoo News. Oh, Yahoo Search. All of these are either the leaders or strong players in their categories.

There’s more, so click over to the article to see what else Yahoo has going for it.

Dare Obasanjo posted a great article on how “Early Adopters are not the Mass Market”.

If you work in the technology industry it pays to be familiar with the ideas from Geoffrey Moore’s insightful book Crossing the Chasm. In the book he takes a look at the classic marketing bell curve that segments customers into Early Adopters, Pragmatists, Conservatives and Laggards then points out that there is a large chasm to cross when it comes to becoming popular beyond an initial set of early adopters.

Folks out on the West Coast seem to have a real hard time with this concept. Every little company that I’ve ever tried to do business with that had gotten a little press from TechCrunch or one of the other A-List bloggers seem to think that they’ve hit the big time and expect you to bend over backwards to do business with them. Then 12 months later, they’re no where to be seen.

The Kelsey Group wrote about something that was best left dead: the CueCat. In Quick Response Bar Codes Invade Yellow Pages the concept is that small bar codes can be inserted into print ads and scanned by mobile phones to link users to information over the Internet. The problem is that this has been tried and failed. I still have an old CueCat lying around the house. My former employer, Verizon Directories, actually participated in the CueCat debacle.

Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb posted “A Guide to Business Development 2.0.” Of course I have a complaint or I wouldn’t be writing this. Alex thinks that “cold calling is dead.” He discusses Linkedin, APIs, and Twitter as alternatives.

Yep, Linkedin is great. APIs are nice if you have them, but biz dev folks aren’t in charge of such things. And outside of the early adopters and tech saavy folks of the Bay Area, not everyone uses Twitter.

Sometimes you have to cold call. No one ever answers their phone, so you’ve got 30 seconds to make your pitch. Most folks get far fewer voicemails than e-mails, so the likelihood that your message will be received is much higher. Even if you’re using Linkedin, you still have to rely on e-mail. In reality I almost always end up calling and e-mailing and that’s what most folks do to me. If their e-mail doesn’t interest me, then I don’t respond. I always return voicemail. If my employers took away the phone, I wouldn’t be able to do my job using nothing but Web 2.0 technology.

Om Malik at GigaOM discusses the new game consoles and the contribution they might make to Internet browsing. He refers to it as the “sofa web.” It’s good reading.

He also discusses how Opera has been good at recognizing opportunities in the mobile market and is now going after the game console market.

As much as I like to see Om talk about this, it makes me sad that TiVo is not even considered in the conversation, not that they deserve to. I feel that TiVo has really dropped the ball when it comes to being the box that integrates the Internet, PCs, Audio, Video, DVR, and TV in the living room. Everything was there from the head start in the living room to the easily customizable linux-based platform on which TiVo software sits.

Perhaps TiVo and Opera need to be talking.

Techcrunch digs into a new feature launched by Yahoo Personals. The feature allows users to customize the way search queries are returned to them. It’s about time. I love this feature. I wish more players would do this. While it could go much further, it’s a step in the right direction. It will make my time on YP much more efficient.

Another point made in the article involves physical attraction and is a dig on eHarmony. For the record - looks matter and eHarmony sucks.

Certainly this stuff helps some people find a match. But basic human nature seems to be more visual when it comes to attraction. People don’t necessarily want to fill out an excrutiatingly long personality profile to help them sort through potential matches, then to find out there’s no physical attraction.

Kudos to Yahoo. If we get those users off of eHarmony and onto Yahoo and Match, the matchmaking world will be a much better place.

Collaboradate.com posted about businesses building themselves up using MySpace. He suggests that “they should continue to phase out competing widgets, or charge companies to have their widgets be compatible with the site.” I’d do this if I were MySpace. So I’ll say it again - be careful when attaching your fortunes to other businesses without some kind of contractual relationship.