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7 stories to read this weekend

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Market research, tagged , , , , , on October 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

By Om Mailk at GigaOM.

Wow! Was that week chock-full of news or what? Frankly, sometimes it was hard to remember what was happening. Nevertheless, here are some good and mind-nourishing pieces for the weekend that you can actually enjoy and learn from.

  • The noise during the past week is the reason why I enjoyed reading this piece by George Dyson – Information is cheap, meaning is expensive. This will blow your mind.
  • How Instagram might be changing photography. I love the service and almost prefer photos on Instagram more than anything else. But should we be worried as Naomi Zeichner argues in The Fader?
  • Plagues of the new millennium are not about diseases of the body alone. They are about the rot of the human brain and body. This is an ironic but excellent list from McSweeney’s.
  • How to measure a company’s most elusive element: culture. Somewhat of a large corporate perspective but full of lessons nonetheless.
  • Voice wars: Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft. This is in light of the Siri explosion.
  • Rise of the machines. Charles Schwab’s chief investment strategist Liz Ann Sonders is an excellent writer. Too bad her views are buried on the company’s terrible website. In this piece she writes about the domination of high-frequency trading and its impact on the markets.
  • Spacewar. My ex-boss David Churbuck reminded me of this piece about the early days of computer hackers. And it is by Steward Brand and that alone makes it worth reading, not to mention the historical context it gives to our modern tech industry. The passing of our industry’s seniors over the last few days makes this an appropriate piece to share.

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Google sales beat estimates amid online ad growth

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, google, Intellectual capital, Market research, Microsoft, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , on October 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Google reported sales that beat estimates Thursday as businesses spent more on advertising to online consumers.

Third-quarter sales, excluding revenue passed on to partner sites, rose to $7.51 billion, Google said on its website. That topped the $7.23 billion average of analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg. Net income climbed 26 percent to $2.73 billion ($8.33 per share) from $2.17 billion ($6.72) a year earlier.

Google, despite concerns about the economy, is benefiting from growing demand for online advertising, including search-based marketing that makes up most of its sales. Search-based advertising should reach $37.7 billion this year globally, up 23 percent, while total Internet ad spending should climb 20 percent, according to media researcher MagnaGlobal.

“Search is good,” said Kerry Rice, an analyst at Needham & Co. in San Francisco who rates the stock a buy and doesn’t own shares. “Paid search is still the biggest component of online advertising, and Google’s obviously going to win the vast majority of that dollar.”

Google rose 1.9 percent to close at $558.99 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have dropped 5.9 percent this year.

Third-quarter profit, excluding some items, was $9.72 a share, exceeding the $8.76 average of analysts’ estimates.

Even with more competition from Microsoft, Google picked up market share in the United States, according to Efficient Frontier Inc., which helps companies promote products online. Google had 82 percent of spending on search advertising in the third quarter, up from 81 percent in the two previous quarters.

Microsoft, which provides search and ad services for Yahoo’s U.S. websites under a new agreement, had 18 percent, down from 19 percent in the previous two quarters, according to Efficient Frontier.”

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Top Sequoia Partner’s Advice To Startups: SHUT UP

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , on September 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from Business Insider.

“Douglas Leone of Sequoia Partners just finished on stage at TechCrunchDisrupt, and he had some interesting advice for young founders: stop talking.

On stage with Mike Arrington, he gave the following advice for small startups:

Little companies have really 2 advantages: stealth and speed. You [Arrington] come from the world of speed and no stealth.

The best thing for little companies do is to stay away from the cocktail circuit….We at Sequoia have never released a press release in 35 years….Then run like a son-of-a- gun. Don’t say anything to anybody.

Leone contrasted the startups from when he started in 1988 with the companies he sees today. Back then, startups were building infrastructure — like chips — and that took an older founder with some experience at a big company, then a team 15 or 20 people who would lock themselves in a building and spend 12 and 15 months building “fundamental IP.”

Now, a couple of young smart people can create a beta Web site over a weekend and iterate from there. A lot of younger founders “don’t know what they don’t know,” and that creates the temptation to talk too much.

He’s worth listening to: Leone claims that Sequoia has never lost money on a fund, and has returned between $15 and $20 billion to its limited partners on an estimated total investment of between $5 and $7 billion. The company’s early investments include Yahoo, Google, and YouTube.”

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Here Comes Apple’s Real TV

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, tagged , , , , , , on September 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

By Ben Kunz

A bold, new Apple TV set would replace today’s cable systems, game consoles, and 3D goggles—and launch a war with cable providers.

Get ready, America, because by Christmas 2012 you will have an Apple TV in your living room. I don’t mean the cute little box now called “Apple TV” that plugs into your set to stream Netflix (NFLX), but the real deal—a flat-panel Apple (AAPL) television set tied to the company’s online ecosystem and designed as only Apple can do it.

There’s a $14 billion rationale for this prediction but first, let’s explore the rumors. This summer Piper Jaffray (PJC) analyst Gene Munster dug through component suppliers and found evidence that Apple is gearing up to produce a real TV set by late 2012. Venture capitalist Stewart Alsop, a former board member at TiVo (TIVO), has published rumors that Apple has a television coming. And Steve Jobs himself hinted last year that Apple might build a real television unit.

“The television industry … pretty much undermines innovation in the sector,” Jobs said at the All Things Digital Conference in July 2010. “The only way this is going to change is if you start from scratch, tear up the box, redesign, and get it to the consumer in a way that they want to buy it.”
Jobs’s quote is good advice for his successor as chief executive officer, Tim Cook, who needs a hit. The TV industry is changing more than at any time in the past 50 years, and billions of dollars are going into play for the winners. As Apple crests in the phone and tablet markets, its investors will want a new frontier.

TV is the future because it remains king of all media. While handsets get hyped, the typical U.S. consumer watches 5 hours and 9 minutes of TV a day, according to Nielsen (NLSN), and even younger adults 18 to 24 years old—the supposed digital generation—view 3 hours and 30 minutes on televisions daily, vs. only 49 minutes on the Web and 20 minutes on mobile. We all love to lean back. With so much of the consumer’s time, TV has become bloated with waste. The average U.S. home receives 130 cable channels but “tunes to”—or punches in the exact channel number on the remote—just 18 channels a year. Channel surfing has died. A whopping 86% of available channels are never used by an individual viewer.
Lots of Disenchanted TV Subscribers

Consumers pay a lot for all this video waste and they don’t like it. The average cable bill is $75 per month, which means that each year 83 million households pay $74 billion to the top eight TV-subscription services. This is why so-called “cord cutting,” by which consumers drop cable to watch videos on Roku, Hulu, or the Xbox 360 from Microsoft is (MSFT) accelerating; Comcast (CMCSA), the leading U.S. cable system, lost 238,000 subscribers in the second quarter. If Apple were to offer a better service, people might pay up for it.

A second lure for Apple is TV advertising. Unlike U.S. mobile-ad spending, which EMarketer says will barely break $1 billion in 2010 despite years of hype, the TV ad spend in the U.S. totaled $70 billion in 2010 and is forecast by Forrester Research (FORR) to reach $84 billion by 2015. If Apple could gain just 10% of the $74 billion in current video subscription fees and $70 billion in television ad media, it would take in more than $14 billion in additional annual, recurring revenue.

Apple faces plenty of hurdles. For one thing, TV sets are an infrequent purchase. Apple likes to sell products with built-in obsolescence that you “need” to replace every 18 months—iPhone 5, anyone?—and a flashy TV set doesn’t call for an aluminum upgrade next year. Apple also has struggled to get content providers to embrace its current Apple TV box. In August, Apple stopped renting TV shows for 99¢ on the gadget, claiming that consumers overwhelmingly prefer to buy TV shows. But it could be that Apple’s media partners considered 99¢ far too cheap. With billions of dollars at stake, media producers and cable giants will fiercely defend their video-distribution modes.

Apple noted this risk in its 2010 annual report, in which it said it “relies on third party digital content, which may not be available to the Company on commercially reasonable terms or at all.” Bear in mind that the record labels were losing to digital pirates when Apple’s iTunes came along to save them; the video giants have no similar motive to play along now.

TV as Bold as the IPhone

That’s not an insurmountable obstacle. Apple has some $76 billion in cash and a history of entering unexpected partnerships. AT&T (T) and Verizon helping to sell iPhones? Who’d have thought? The biggest fight may be with new video competitors that are emerging everywhere. Netflix has embedded itself in scores of hardware devices, including TV sets and the Wii from Sony (SNE). Google (GOOG) also has a TV service and its acquisition of Motorola shows that it also wants to own related hardware devices. To win the living room, Apple will need an innovation comparable to that of its iPhone—something that changes TV sets in a fundamental way.

What about 3D? In 2010, Apple won a patent for a revolutionary new 3D screen system that would not require glasses and could be viewed by multiple people at the same time. The patent went so far as to slam current 3D systems, noting that most people dislike goggles and dismissing current non-glasses systems as “essentially unworkable for projecting a 3D image … to an entire audience.”

What solution did Apple propose? An “unobstructed 3D viewing device” that would give each viewer a different line of sight for both left and right eye, perfecting a stereoscopic image for a group of viewers watching one giant screen. The Apple patent even had a cool name for the result: a hologram. Could Apple put holograms in every home, break the stranglehold of cable companies, and unlock a $14 billion TV revenue stream? It’s an audacious and perhaps crazy idea.

Tim Cook, I like the way you think.”

Ben Kunz is director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, a media planning and Internet strategy firm. He is author of the advertising strategy blog ThoughtGadgets.com.

 

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U.S. Facebook users clock in 53.5 billion mins.

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, internet, LinkedIn, Market research, Social Networks, Twitter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Here’s a mind-numbing stat: Americans spent a total of 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May, according to a new Nielsen study released Monday.

In fact, the media-measurement firm’s new report on social networking found that Americans spent more time on Facebook than on any other website – and it wasn’t even close. Yahoo was second with 17.2 billion minutes in May and Google ranked third at 12.5 billion minutes.

With Americans now spending nearly one-quarter of their overall Internet time on social networks and blogs, Nielsen said the results show “how powerful this influence is on consumer behavior, both online and off.”

“Whether it’s a brand icon inviting consumers to connect with a company on LinkedIn, a news ticker promoting an anchor’s Twitter handle or an advertisement asking a consumer to ‘Like’ a product on Facebook, people are constantly being driven to social media,” said Nielsen’s first-ever State of the Media report to focus on social networking.

The report took a snapshot of online activity during May and found nearly 4 of every 5 active U.S. Internet users went to social-networking and blogging sites, accounting for 22.5 percent of the total amount of minutes people spent online. Online gaming was next with 9.8 percent, followed by e-mail at 7.6 percent.

In the social-networking and blogging category, Palo Alto’s Facebook was the runaway leader with 140 million unique visitors during the month, with Google’s Blogger blogging platform a distant second with 50 million unique visitors spending about 723 million minutes.

But the up-and-coming blogging platform Tumblr was third with 623 million minutes, edging out both San Francisco microblogging service Twitter Inc. with 565 million minutes and the professional social network LinkedIn Corp. of Mountain View, which had 325 million. Nielsen said New York’s Tumblr Inc. has nearly tripled its audience since May 2010 and is now “an emerging player in social media.”

Also, the report said 70 percent of all adult social-network users shop online. But 60 percent of social-network denizens create reviews of products or services, making them more likely to be influential for online and offline purchases.

And compared with average Internet users, social networkers are 26 percent more likely to post their political opinions, 33 percent more likely to say what they like or don’t like on television and 75 percent more likely to spend heavily on music.

Other Nielsen findings include:

— The profile of the most active social-network user is of a woman of Asian/Pacific Islander descent between the ages of 18 and 34. The majority of social-network users are women, but men are more likely to visit LinkedIn.

— About 31 million people watched nearly 157 video streams on social networks or blogs in May. More women than men watched video this way, but men spent 9 percent more time watching those streams.

— While almost all social-media users access their networks by computer, a growing segment – about 37 percent – now do so with their mobile phones. More than twice the number of Internet users age 55 and older accessed social media on their phones than a year ago.”

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