Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
Online advertising continues to grow fast fueled by increasing consumption of entertainment online and growth in ecommerce (up 38% YoY according to NMA).
That is the good news.
The bad news is that outside of search the existing models are coming under strain due to banner blindness and lack of tolerance for interrupt advertising. The industry [...]
Amongst all the doom and gloom I’ve felt like slitting my wrists at points over the last couple of weeks so it was good to hear the positive sentiment coming from Google, IBM and Nokia yesterday.
Google’s earnings fell short of expectations, but that was due to increased expenses and reduced investment income and is therefore [...]
As we know Google has a history of acquiring companies which then seem to disappear into the abyss - Dodgeball, Measuremap and Jaiku fall into that category and other services like Blogger, GrandCentral and Feedburner don’t seem to have progressed since they moved to new ownership.
There are a couple of exceptions - Youtube being the [...]
Details on Justin Hileman’s blog here.
I think this is smart. Search results could be improved a lot by feeding in intelligence of what other searchers have found useful.
Google has long been rumoured to be working on something in the virtual world space - I think for a year or more now people have been telling me that their friends have been sucked into a top-secret project at the GooglePlex.
Yesterday they announced the release of Lively, reported here Techcrunch.
The video below gives you [...]
Techcrunch reports today on Yahoo!’s facelift for MyYahoo, and in the article they give user numbers for both MyYahoo and iGoogle. Neither company is going to be overjoyed with this performance:
The interface has been in need of a facelift for some time, as Yahoo has watched its userbase dwindle from 56.9 million users last November [...]
Executives at a conference in Cannes have been discussing the future of advertising. As reported in the New York Times:
executives harshly criticized Google’s recent agreement to place ads next to Yahoo search results. The move could strengthen Google’s dominance over the most lucrative portion of the fast-growing online advertising field.
Fair enough. I think [...]
Facebook is open sourcing its application platform and calling it FBOpen. From Techcrunch:
Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications [...]
There has been a flurry of announcements recently on the theme of data portability and making the web more social - Google yesterday announced Friend Connect, and that is on top of Facebook’s Connect and MySpace Data Availability launch, and Yahoo!’s move to a single profile.
These are all steps in the right direction, for me [...]
A couple of weeks ago I wrote that Facebook is maturing as a platform - a post I wrote in response to uproar from the developer community about how Facebook was making life difficult for them. My point was that Facebook was right to make life more difficult for application spammers, and the uproar [...]
