A Huge Day for the Big Web Players

It's been a huge day for the major web companies, news pouring out every hour, so I thought I'd recap and offer some thoughts:

Music

• Facebook users will soon be able to gift each other songs, web-streaming copies for 10 cents or downloadable DRM free files for 90 cents, powered by lala.com (paid thru Facebook credits)
• Google is expected to unveil a music tie-in next week that lets users stream songs and potentially purchase them right from the search engine, powered by i-Like and lala.com
• MySpace will now be housing a full library of music videos from the major music labels, and also providing Artists with deeper analytics of how fans engage with their content

Clearly this all points to one thing - multimedia content is rapidly becoming available everywhere. The entertainment industry is learning the only way they can fight piracy to offer easy access at fair costs. Also, I think the ability to gift Facebook friends songs could be a huge money maker for all parties if it's easy for the user and the music is easily played back as a library. And I want to see if users buy their own songs to house on their own profile for easy listening. Also, its amazing a full mp3 is cheaper than the virtual gifts people can send now. Finally, it's impressive that Lala was able to get themselves into both the Facebook and Google music deals, taking them from relatively no-name to top-tier player in a matter of hours.

Myspace's announcement is them trying to hold onto their claim as the best place for Musicians to set up their home-base website as they watch more and more of the grassroots marketing move to Twitter & Facebook. They're doing a pretty good job as an Entertainment portal, but this helps them with actual artist relations.

Social Search

• Microsoft cut deals with Twitter and Facebook to incorporate their content streams in real-time into their Search index. Microsoft unveiled an early beta of their Twitter search engine at http://www.bing.com/twitter , which not only shows recent updates but popular links being shared around a search term
• Google announced a similar deal with Twitter (no Facebook for now), but hasn't yet incorporated the content fully, with more details expected in a few weeks
• Google announced a separate product called Social Search which will enable users to search their own social graph for content. Google will create a personal index of content for a user based on the social profiles attached to their Google profile, helping users surface content such as friend's Flickr photos and profile info

The social search space, also known as the real-time search space, is heating up big time. The major search engines Google and Bing are realizing that more and more users will start their web searches with their social graph and want the latest information that their social graph is highlighting as valuable. Microsoft's early search site shows how it will try to take on the memetrackers and the real-time search engines at once, a space that's currently being owned by new web start-ups Tweetmeme and OneRiot.

It's clear Google will jump into this space as well, but their personalized social search product is separately very interesting. Helping users to unearth their own personal information from their own individual social graph is potentially even more important than a broad real-time search engine. The key here though is what content Google will be able to index - given that Facebook especially is behind a wall. The great thing about FriendFeed was that you could add RSS feeds to supplement the content that was already being indexed, a way to overcome the Facebook walls. Will Google be able to do this?

Photos

• Flickr announced people tagging on their photos similar to Facebook's features, but with more privacy controls. Users can choose who exactly can tag them in photos.

This is a feature that's made sense for a long time, but I don't think by itself it will matter much. Not enough people have Flickr profiles for it to matter, and because of the upload caps not enough people will ever choose to upload to Flickr. If this was done through Facebook connect it would be totally different (similar to PolarRose's offering). Also I would really like to see some integration with Apple's iPhoto, since they are working on syncing their products already and I've invested the time in tagging my friends on my desktop computer. This would be a good rivalry to the sync'd tagging of Picasa and Picasaweb. Finally, since serious Flickr users have been stockpiling photos for years, Flickr really needs to integrate Facial recognition on the site - both to keep up to par with competitors, and to make tagging less daunting of a task.

Microsoft Envisions the World in 2019

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>
This is a pretty cool video that Microsoft pushed out showing how they envision our world in 2019. Some of this stuff you can see the seeds of now, or at least the discussion forming.

Why I like the new Microsoft ads

The new Microsoft ad campaign has been unfolding over the last few weeks, and it's seen its share of criticism. The campaign has come in two waves. The first set, a few odd early commercials showing Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates hanging out together, lasted only a week or so.



The second wave swapped Jerry Seinfeld out for a series of short snippets of a broad collection of people stating "I'm a PC" - everyone from a random teacher in a 3rd world country, to Eva Longoria.



The Gates / Seinfeld commercials were a bad start - for the most part, they weren't funny (although the last line when Seinfeld asks for a sign from Gates that there's something new coming to Windows could maybe have been funny packaged differently). Worse, though, they almost made it seem like Windows was for rich people that don't get the real world. They even said that they need to spend time with regular families to understand them. It's not that they are elitist, they're just out of touch.

The new commercials, however, to be me accomplish exactly what I think they need to - they take back ownership of the now common phrases that Apple coined "I'm a PC", and they position Apple as the company that has thinks too highly of itself. And that in a subtle sort of way hits home because I desperately want a Mac, every time I see someone at Starbucks that seems to have a cooler computer and looks like they're enjoying it more.
If it really is because they are better computers, that's one thing. But if it's because I am jealous of the image, the cool factor, the elite, the step up from the regular people who use PC's, then I've bought into the "I'm a Mac" image, the Apple culture, and I'm getting ready to pay a 50% mark up on a laptop just to have it.
If the new Windows commercials can make me feel like it's not wrong to be the every day person, if they start to make me turn a more critical eye towards the elitist Mac cult, then I'll start to second guess paying a premium for Mac products (which I am as of late). Breaking down this yearning for a Mac, reminding us that it's ok to be a PC user, is exactly waht the new Microsoft ads need to achieve.

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Photosynth Turns Photos Into Immersive Environments

This week, one of Microsoft’s impressive lab products Photosynth was finally opened for personal use after 2 years of being only a technology demo.  Honestly even after two years I never expected it for public use given it’s seeming unheard of photo analysis technology, but this weekend I was able to dive in and start using Photosynth for myself.

Photosynth takes batches of photos (20+ photos at bare minimum) and analyzes them for overlapping content and views, and then builds them into a 3D environment where you can click into photos and see the objects within from different views, as well as to continue to move around environments as if all of the pictures are one. 

It’s hard to really comprehend until you start to use it, so I’ve embedded a photosynth above that I built of Mirror Lake in the Wallowa Mountain Range in Oregon (pictures and more from my recent backpacking trip).  When you upload pictures, Microsoft Photosynth tells you how “synthy” they are, which basically reflects how well your photos really connect with each other to build an environment.  You can see my Wallowa photosynth is 59% synthy, so it’s actually a pretty good collection of 44 pictures, but they split out into a few seperate groups and a few pictures can’t be connected.

One thing to note – Microsoft Photosynth is very buggy.  You may have to install it numerous times, and often when I return to the site it cannot detect  that I’ve already installed the plug-ins.  At any given time, either Firefox or IE doesn’t allow me to actually view the photosynths.  Hopefully over time the site will become much more stable, which is necessary for it to scale.

I’ve also built one from pictures I took of the Taj Mahal on my trip to India, see both of my photosynths here.

A lot of Windows 7 Eye Candy but is it enough?

This week saw the unveiling of a handful of early screenshots of Windows 7, the next-gen Microsoft Windows that should replace Windows Vista by 2010. My first reaction is that the new Windows looks beautiful, a significant jump towards an operating system that is actually enjoyable to use. But I'm sure that my initial reaction to Vista was the same thing, and a lot of what what was meant to be in Vista never happened. Additionally, much of Vista that exists is slow and unfriendly, so in the end it didn't turn out to be much of a revolutionary step for Microsoft Windows. At this point, another potentially false promise of a powerful Windows operating system probably won't keep me from finally purchasing a Mac as my next computer.

How much would Google help Yahoo if they worked together

You've probably lost interest by now in the Yahoo-Microsoft-AOL-Google dealings (if you were following it at all), but here's an interesting projection - look at the financial estimates of increased revenue of Yahoo outsourcing their search advertising to Google - 25%...50%...100%... that's how much better everyone thinks Google does search advertising than the rest of the market - give them your inventory, and you will make your money back in multiples. Personally, I hope no one buys or merges with Yahoo- its more fun to have several players in the market vying for market share, more products come out, more interesting moves get made. Now Yahoo and AOL just have to start committing to some of their products, improving and supporting them, and we'll be getting somewhere.

Yahoo Puts All The Chips On The Table. Time For Somebody To Fold: "Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney previously said that a Yahoo-Google search deal could boost cash flows by 25%. Experts we talked to estimated that could boost Yahoo’s market valuation by $7 billion or so, less than half the premium Microsoft offered on February 1.

That Mahaney estimate of increased cash flow from a Yahoo-Google deal is now “more than $1 billion a year,” a 50% gain in cash flow from 2007. That puts the offers roughly on par, give or take a few billion. And it gives Yahoo a potentially viable alternative to the Microsoft deal."

Google Spurs Change

Google Operating System has an interesting post called "winning even when you lose" where they discuss how Google spurs change in industries regardless of if it loses the apparent arms race.  The few examples given, of which there are likely many more, are:

Email - 2004 - Gmail launches with 1GB of free storage compared to Yahoo's 4MB of free storage.  In response, Yahoo grew to 100MB, then 1GB a year later, and finally, is now uncapped, while Google is only at 6GB for free (although it's growing at all times)

Instant Messaging - 2005 - Google Talk launches as an open standards chat program meant to exchange IMs with all open IM clients (although at the time that meant none of the big 3 competitors - AIM, Y! Messenger, or MSN Messenger).  In response Yahoo and Microsoft teamed up to link their IM services later that year.

Mobile Phones - 2007 - Google announced that it would bid for the 700MHz spectrum in the US, declaring four conditions of open applications and devices.  Later that year Verizon Wireless finally announces that it will open its wireless network to 3rd party devices and software.

Social Networks - 2007 - Google launches OpenSocial, an open widget application platform, and a month later Facebook announces it will open it's widget application platform for use on other social networks.

How Much Microsoft Makes in Profits

Think Microsoft is losing ground to Google? Think they're hurting from pirated versions of Windows floating around? Maybe, but they made $14.4 billion dollars last quarter, including a net income of $4.93 billion. That's a hell of a lot of money, but to put it fully in perspective, see how it stacks up against other major earners. It takes Microsoft only about...:

• 10 hours or so to exceed Red Hat’s quarterly net income of $20.5 million.
• four days to exceed Research In Motion’s quarterly net income of $187.9 million.
• four days to exceed Starbucks’ quarterly net income of $205 million.
• one week to exceed Nike’s quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
• two weeks to exceed McDonalds’ quarterly net income of $762 million.
• two weeks to exceed Apple’s quarterly net income of $770 million.
• 18 days to exceed Google’s quarterly net income of $1 billion.
• 23 days to exceed Coca-Cola’s quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
• five weeks to exceed IBM’s quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
• 10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart’s quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.

That puts it well ahead of the hugely profitable names you'd think of.

[via techiqmag.com]

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