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Free apps, mobile ad market aren’t adding up

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Many of today’s hot startups are banking on mobile ad dollars to make their business work, but it’s an incredibly small market that’s only likely to support a handful of breakaway winners.

The constraint was underscored late last week, when Pandora Media’s CEO told Bloomberg that the online radio service can’t find enough marketers to fill all the ad slots created by its many mobile users.

Pandora boasts around 35 million dedicated users, who do 60 percent of their listening over smart phones and tablets. The obvious question is: If the 11-year-old Oakland company can’t find enough marketers to make use of its ad inventory, who can?

Other popular companies like Foursquare, Instagram, Twitter and Flipboard are mostly or exclusively free mobile apps that will mostly or exclusively depend on advertising.

So just how much is there to go around?

Research firm eMarketer estimates that mobile advertising will reach only $1.1 billion this year. By way of comparison, Google reported $9 billion in revenue last quarter alone, almost entirely derived from the broader online advertising market.

Will more money move to mobile and will some of these companies emerge as big winners? Sure.

Shifting ad dollars

But new media don’t create new marketing dollars, they just draw them from somewhere else. Advertisers are famously reluctant to shift money from something that’s been proven to work, to an area that’s untested.

The truth is, it’s still unclear to many what ad types and formats will be most effective on small mobile devices – general brand builders, discounts as you walk by a restaurant, ads for other apps?

The one thing that does seem clear is that mobile users are incredibly touchy about ads, resenting anything that appropriates the limited real estate of their screen, arrives as a text that counts against their allotment or interrupts what they’re doing. So marketers are rightfully treading carefully.

Jack Gold, a technology analyst with J. Gold Associates, says mobile advertising is a promising sector that, for now, is just that: promising.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, whether it’s TV or tablets, the biggest outlets with the best return on ad dollars grab the lion’s share of marketing. Everyone else is left fighting for the scraps.

Gold said the phenomenon unfolding now is strikingly similar to the late 1990s, as hordes of companies marched onto the Internet, confident they could garner the traffic (back then they called it eyeballs) necessary to build businesses on ads alone. History demonstrated in brutal fashion that the vast majority could not.

“It’s almost certain that you’re going to see another shakeout,” Gold said. “That always happens. Always.”

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New Google+ social network starts off strong

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, FaceBook, google, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , on July 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Just three weeks after its launch, Google+ is off to a strong start.

Google Inc.’s latest attempt to break into social networking circles attracted more than 20 million visitors in its first 21 days, according to the Internet measurement service comScore Inc. And there is a report that Google+ now has 25 million members.

To be sure, those numbers still don’t place Google+ in the same league as the more established social media stars, especially the current king, Facebook Inc., which has 750 million active users.

But Facebook has made enough mistakes in the past to leave the window wide open for Google+, which is still in its experimental stages, to barge through and become a serious contender for the crown, said Sam Hamadeh, CEO and founder of a Privco, a New York firm that monitors private companies like Facebook.

Facebook may have a big lead now, but the two has-been kings of social networking – Friendster and Myspace – are reminders that there’s no such thing as invincibility in the world of technology.

“People used to be on Myspace chatting all day, updating their pages,” said Hamadeh. “And before that, people were on Friendster nonstop. Before you knew it, the winds had shifted and once the winds shift, they shift very quickly.”

Officially, Mountain View’s Google hasn’t issued any updated Google+ numbers beyond those that CEO Larry Page revealed during a July 14 earnings call – 10 million members, more than 1 billion items shared and received in one day and 2.3 billion clicks of the “+1 button,” Google’s answer to Facebook’s “Like” button.

‘Just the beginning’

“We’ve learned a tremendous amount having just gone to field trial three weeks ago,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president for social, said in a statement. “The team has been listening to users and moving really quickly to launch dozens of new features and updates to the product. We realize this is just the beginning. And while we’re thrilled with the reaction so far, we have a long, exciting road ahead of us.”

Hamadeh, citing sources inside Google, said the fledgling social network hit the milestone 25 million user mark Thursday night.

And Andrew Lipsman, a comScore vice president, said the 20 million visitors to Google+ in the first 21 days was “an extraordinary number.”

Of that total, 5.3 million were in the United States and 2.8 million in India. And people from the Bay Area and Austin, Texas, two of the most tech-savvy markets, were three times as likely to be on Google+, Lipsman said.

Right now, the main users are the tech-savvy crowd that is always at the forefront of new and emerging technology.

Of the total Google+ audience, 63 percent were men and 58 percent were between the ages of 18 and 34, comScore said.

“It has clearly captured the attention of the technorati and as usage incubates among this crowd it will likely continue to proliferate to a more general audience,” Lipsman wrote in a blog post.

High marks

That technorati has generally given Google+ high marks for its design and privacy protections, especially compared to Facebook. Analysts say Google+ can be compelling.

“My usage has subtly changed as more and more of my personal network joins, and I’m commenting as much privately as publicly,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a San Mateo technology research and consulting firm.

One major feature in Google+ is the ability to create specific, private groups, called “circles,” of friends or people being followed.

“Google+ has the advantage of not requiring that people be a member of the network in order to share with them. They just get updates via e-mail,” Li said in an e-mail. But whether Google+ becomes a hit with more mainstream audiences is still a question.”

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EBay’s Zong deal heats up mobile-payment battle

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Investments, Market research, mobile 2.0, Mobile Phone Usage, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 14, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“EBay Inc.’s purchase of mobile-payment startup Zong Inc. for $240 million is stepping up pressure on companies such as Google Inc. and American Express Co. to make their own acquisitions in the market.

Google has held exploratory discussions with mobile-payment startups, according to two people with knowledge of the meetings. Credit card companies, including American Express and Visa Inc., also are meeting with takeover candidates, though deals may not be imminent, people familiar with the talks said.

More consumers are looking to pay for things like movie tickets, apps and other items with their phones – rather than cards or cash. That’s pitting financial-service providers, which benefit from transactions, against technology companies like Google. Both sides aim to use mergers and acquisitions to shore up their positions, said Richard Crone, who runs Crone Consulting LLC, a firm focused on mobile banking and payments.

“There’re much more M&A and roll-ups to come in this space,” Crone said. “You will see the activity happening before the end of the year.”

The total value of mobile payments will reach $670 billion by 2015, up from $240 billion in 2011, according to Juniper Research. That includes transactions for digital and physical goods, money transfers and payments using near field communication – a wireless technology that lets users tap their phones against a reader to make a purchase.

Mainstream acceptance

Many companies are shopping for startups that help users charge purchases to their phone bills. Within a year, 40 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers will put items other than ring tones on wireless bills, according to Chetan Sharma, an industry analyst in Issaquah, Wash. That’s up from 30 percent now.

Potential acquisition targets include Boku Inc.; Payfone Inc.; BilltoMobile, which is majority-owned by Danal Co.; and Amdocs Ltd.’s OpenMarket Inc., Sharma said.

Syniverse Technologies Inc., MindMatics AG’s Mopay unit, Bango and Vindicia Inc. could be candidates as well, according to Crone. Acquisition targets will sell for 10 to 20 times their trailing 12-month sales, he said. It’s unclear how that measures up against the Zong deal because eBay didn’t disclose the startup’s revenue when it announced the purchase last week.

Still, some startups may struggle to attract a deep-pocketed suitor or land that kind of premium. And large technology and finance companies may choose to develop the capabilities themselves.

‘Pressure to act’

Representatives from Google, American Express and Visa declined to comment on any potential deals, as did Bango, Boku, Payfone, Syniverse and Vindicia. OpenMarket didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Ingo Lippert, CEO of Palo Alto’s Mopay, said the Zong deal will likely give rise to more acquisitions, though his company is “solely focused” on operations.

“We’ve been forecasting consolidation within the mobile-payments space for some time,” Lippert said in an e-mail. “With Zong’s acquisition, companies testing out solutions within the mobile-payments market will now feel increased pressure to act.”

Investments in payment startups began picking up several months ago. In February, Visa agreed to spend about $190 million, plus performance incentives, to purchase PlaySpan Inc. The company handles purchases of virtual goods in online games and social networks. In April, American Express led a $19 million funding round in Payfone, a developer of a mobile-payment service.

EBay’s buying spree

Last year, eBay acquired Red Laser and Milo, two comparison-shopping applications that allow users to scan product barcodes and read reviews. With Zong, the company will get a bigger foothold for its PayPal payment service on phones, especially in developing countries.

Zong lets people pay for things by putting them on their mobile-phone bills. That’s attractive in emerging markets, where credit card adoption is low.

“The phone is ubiquitous, and credit cards are not,” Rodger Desai, CEO of Payfone, said.

U.S. carriers lets third-party services such as BilltoMobile operate on their networks. Verizon Wireless, for instance, allows charges of as much as $25 a month. BilltoMobile also declined to comment on whether it was a takeover target.

Carrier bills contained $3 billion worth of charges for virtual goods last year, and these charges are rising at 38 percent annually, Crone estimates. Those purchases can include ring tones, dating-site subscriptions and weapons for mobile video games.

Purchases of apps charged to wireless bills reached $5 billion last year and are growing at 68 percent a year, Crone said. Consumers in countries such as South Korea are increasingly charging physical goods to carrier bills as well.

“We are seeing very rapid growth,” said Jim Greenwell, CEO of BilltoMobile.”

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Facebook partners with Skype to provide video chat

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Community, FaceBook, internet, Market research, Microsoft, Social Networks, Strategy, tagged , , , , , on July 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SF Gate.

“Facebook began bringing video calling to the masses Wednesday, partnering with Skype to provide the free chat service to its 750 million members.

Video calling comes to the world’s largest social network as part of a larger overhaul of Facebook’s chat features. The updated service will allow users to create group text chats by adding multiple friends into the same window. The chat window also becomes more prominent, taking up the right side of the screen by default.

Speaking at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the updates marked a shift for the company away from simply adding users at an ever-faster clip.

“The driving narrative for the next five years or so is not going to be about wiring up the world, because a lot of the interesting stuff has actually been done,” he said. “It’s about what kind of cool stuff you’re going to be able to build, and what kind of new social apps you’re going to be able to build, now that you have this wiring in place.”

Zuckerberg said the shift was prompted in part by a surging demand for sharing information. Facebook users share twice as much today as they did a year ago, as measured by photos posted, comments written and other items.

Facebook’s announcements come on the heels of Google rolling out a new social offering, Google+, that duplicates many of the sharing functions found in Facebook. Google+ also includes a feature called Hangouts that enables group video chatting.

For starters, the Facebook-Skype partnership will only allow one-on-one chatting. Group video chat could be forthcoming, executives said, although on Skype’s stand-alone product, that feature costs money to use.

Zuckerberg said Google’s new product validated Facebook’s own works, and that in the future social features would become an expected part of every application.

The question is which Internet company will prove better at retaining users. Google has more unique users, but they spend less time on the site than Facebook users do. The more time users spend on a site, the more valuable it is to advertisers.

Susan Etlinger, an analyst at Altimeter Group, said Facebook’s large user base would make its video-calling feature instantly competitive with Google’s and other video chat services.

She said the company’s plans to build new services on top of their platform signaled a newfound maturity for the 7-year-old company.

“What I heard Mark say today is that Facebook is starting to focus more on the social aspect of social networking, whereas in the past they focused more on the networking and engineering,” she said. “It’s a really healthy shift.”

Executives at Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft in May for $8.5 billion, said the acquisition would introduce them to an enormous new audience and sell add-on services to them.

“We think this makes a lot of business sense as well,” Skype CEO Tony Bates said. “We get huge reach. In the future we’re talking about potentially also having Skype paid products available within the Web format that we saw here today, so we’re very excited about it.”

Every month, Skype’s users spend 300 million minutes making video calls, Bates said. At peak times, video represents more than half the company’s traffic. (Skype has 170 million regular users.)

Video chat should be available to everyone within a week, Skype product manager Mike Barnes said. Making calls requires users to download a small Java application through the browser.

At first, users will not be able to link their Facebook and Skype accounts. But that integration is in the works, Barnes said. Users who have microphones but not webcams will be able to make voice-only calls on Facebook, he said.”

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Zynga S-1 highlights cloud as competitive advantage

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, FaceBook, internet, IPO news, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 4, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOm.

“In some cases, cloud computing is merely a means to avoid investing in “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” but when done right, it actually can be a source of significant competitive advantage. So says Zynga, at least, which highlighted its unique cloud infrastructure, as well as its advanced analytics efforts, as part of its core strengths in the S-1 statementit filed this morning.

According to the form, Zynga views its “scalable technology infrastructure” as a core strength, stating, “We have created a scalable cloud-based server and network infrastructure that enables us to deliver games to millions of players simultaneously with high levels of performance and reliability.” In describing its cloud infrastructure as an important aspect of its business, Zynga’s S-1 says:

Our physical network infrastructure utilizes a mixture of our own datacenters and public cloud datacenters linked with high-speed networking. We utilize commodity hardware, and our architecture is designed for high availability and fault tolerance while accommodating the demands of social game play.

We have developed our architecture to work effectively in a flexible cloud environment that has a high degree of elasticity. For example, our automatic provisioning tools have enabled us to add up to 1,000 servers in a 24-hour period in response to game demand. We operate at a scale that routinely delivers more than one petabyte of content per day. We intend to invest in and use more of our own infrastructure going forward, which we believe will provide us with an even better cost profile and position us to further drive operating leverage.

Zynga has been touting its Z Cloud infrastructure for more than a year, which reverses the conventional approach to hybrid cloud computing. Whereas many analysts initially assumed companies would use private clouds as a gateway to public clouds, Zynga uses Amazon EC2 as a staging ground before ultimately moving games onto private cloud resources. Essentially, Amazon’s cloud lets Zynga scale elastically and determine average traffic load and other metrics, so that it can optimize its internal infrastructure for each game’s specific needs.

The goal of this strategy is efficiency: Zynga doesn’t have to invest in more resources than necessary upfront, nor does it have to worry about underprovisioning resources or otherwise inadequately configuring them when it brings games onto its private cloud. In many cases, private clouds can cost less than public clouds for applications with fairly stable usage patterns, and they help companies meet various requirements around security and compliance. Zynga uses Cloud.com for its private cloud infrastructure, as well as RightScale as a management layer that makes for a uniform experience in terms of managing both public and private resources.

As is the case with every leading web company, Zynga also highlights its big data strategy as a key differentiator. Describing its “sophisticated data analytics,” the S-1 notes, “The extensive engagement of our players provides over 15 terabytes of game data per day that we use to enhance our games by designing, testing and releasing new features on an ongoing basis. We believe that combining data analytics with creative game design enables us to create a superior player experience.”

Cloud computing and advanced analytics are double-edged swords, though. As Zynga’s S-1 acknowledges, relying on publicly hosted cloud computing resources makes it vulnerable to service outages like Amazon Web Services’ infamous April 2011 outage, which temporarily downed both FarmVille and CityVille. “If a particular game is unavailable when players attempt to access it or navigation through a game is slower than they expect, players may stop playing the game and may be less likely to return to the game as often, if at all,” the form states.

Relying on advanced infrastructures and analytics also means competing with companies such as Facebook, Google and others for employees skilled enough to keep Zynga’s operations on the cutting edge. Specifically, the company acknowledges, “game designers, product managers and engineers” are in high demand, making attracting and retaining them a resource-intensive process. In some cases, this has meant offering particularly attractive employees lucrative stock options, which could come back to bite the company. As it notes in the S-1, “[W]e expect that this [IPO] will create disparities in wealth among our employees, which may harm our culture and relations among employees.”

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