Nic Brisbourne’s view from London on venture capital and exploiting change in technology and media
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 [...]
Microsoft’s long rumoured aquisition of Powerset which finally completed today (rumoured value $100m) shows the potential importance of natural language query processing to the search process. This quote from a Techrunch interview with Naam, the founder and CEO of Powerset captures why:
Naam says 5% of searches contain elements of natural language that keyword based [...]
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 [...]
Like Everyclick users here in the UK Hotmail customers worldwide can now elect to join the i’m initiative and have part of the ad revenue generated by their usage of the service is given to charity (see Techcrunch).
In the case of Hotmail users who opt in get an i’m specific ad at the end of [...]
It seems every man and his dog is becoming an ad network these days. The latest to join this rather crowded party is Disney subsidiary SOAPnet.com. In the words of the Wall Street Journal (no link due to paywall):
The business of brokering ads across clusters of Web sites has become one of the [...]
It is starting to look like Microsoft is going to be successful in it’s bid for Yahoo!. I say that on the back of reports that Microsoft will ‘do what it takes’ to win and that Yahoo! is simply holding out for a higher price. Further, Yahoo!’s second largest institutional shareholder came out [...]
One of the things I like about blogging is that it forces me to think about a topic in detail every day, and often that takes me down paths I might otherwise never have found.
Today I started reading a Fred Wilson post on how well delicious search is doing. He doesn’t source the data [...]
This morning I read in my paper that advertising revenues at the New York Times had fallen 13% year on year and that Google disappointed in it’s latest quarter blaming the difficulty of advertising on social networks for it’s poor results.
It seemed that both new media and old media were suffering as audiences deserted their [...]
Techcrunch announced earlier this week that Google is launching Open Social (URL will apparently go live later today) - a new set of APIs that will facilitate the transfer of data in and out of of social networks. Specifically:
Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)
I think this is [...]
This is from the comments on a Fake Steve Jobs post about two hedge funds apparently investing $500m in Facebook at the same $15bn valuation Microsoft just paid. (Thanks to Alan for the pointer.)
Picture this: Zuckerberg’s got a big fish on the line for real money at a $15 Bill valuation. But is having trouble [...]
