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Who Sells Your Personal Information?

December 11th, 2009

money-target-sell-advertisingDo you know who sells your private information to advertisers out there??
As someone who has been deep into the analytics and advertising business in the last few years, the fact that web sites out there are trading on our personal information is not a big surprise. Still, sometimes even I get abit of a shock seeing how efficient this trading can become.

Yesterday I decided to check on prices fro flights from San Francisco to Cancun Mexico. I did a search in 3 sites: Kayak, Priceline (through Kayak) and Delta.com.
Just two hours later I got the following text message from AT&T on my personal cell phone: “Now roam in Mexico for just 25 cents per minute standard time…”.

It’s one thing that companies are trading your email address for quick profits. I long time got used to that and I always use my “junk” email adress. But when it happens with my cell number, I start to feel a lot more sensitive. Unfortunately both Kayak (a service which I love) and Delta has my cell number, so I dont know who to blame here.

Personal feeling aside, I think this is a great example of how targeted behavioral advertising can be so much more effective than normal one. First, as this is very relevant to me there are much higher chances that I will actually buy the product. Second, if I would see this ad as a banner or Hulu, I would actually pay attention to it and not treat it just as disturbance.
With the advancement of targeting technologies and behavioral exchanges form Google and Yahoo, we will start to see many more ads like this in the coming years. What we need to make sure is to define where the line corss between better more relevant ads and the complete dismiss of our privacy.

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Posted in Advertising, Internet

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The Facebook Twitter War

August 22nd, 2009

FacetterIn the last few months it seems that Facebook is trying to go after and in many ways copy Twitter. Starting from changing how your status messages are shared to the new search capabilities and of course the acquisition of FriendFeed.
Many bloggers and news papers wrote about this race after Twitter, but not enough actually stopped to ask whether going after Twitter is the right thing to do.

Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand why Facebook is trying to go after Twitter. Advertising on social networks still hasn’t proved itself as a huge business and real time search promise to be the next Google.

But I fear that in this race, Facebook might lose many of the things that still makes it much more dominant than Twitter (Facebook just became the 4th largest site in the world, way ahead of Twitter).

Try to think how you use Twitter and how you use Facebook today. Look at how your friends are using these services. Although sometimes these services looks very similar (distributed messaging system), in reality people use them in a very different way.
While Twitter became the number one option for self (or brand) promotion and getting in touch with your fans or customer, Facebook is still all about your connecting with your friends.
Look even at the terminology both services use. To “Follow” someone is something much less personal than to “Ask to be a friend”. While most people (exclude celebrities) follow sometime hundreds or thousands of people in Twitter, in Facebook they still connect with just tens or low hundreds of people.
I also noticed that I see a lot more conversations formed in Facebook comments than on Twitter (using @mentions). Not to mention that people are still sharing many more pictures and videos on Facebook than on Twitter.

All these facts makes it much easier to filter the noise and connect with your friends on Facebook than on Twitter. The risk Facebook are taking is that by duplicating Twitter functionality, they will actually change the way people are using it – letting brands, consultants and self promotion take hold of it. And when it happens, there is no way back.

So what should Facebook do? Should they keep going after Twitter or should the focus on inventing advertising solutions that work on their current platform.
Or maybe the can they try and do both? What do you think?

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Posted in Internet, Social Media

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The Search Wars Are Back

June 1st, 2009

As many people noted today, most of the initial reactions to the new search engine from Microsoft, Bing, are quite good. In the past weeks we all read so many negative things about it, that I think we can all admit that we expected a complete failure. But surprisingly, Bing is actually very good.

The big question now is whether this is enough to compete with Google?

I think Microsoft was very smart in the way they developed Bing. They realised that they can't and should not try to fight Google over index size or even ranking of search results. Google are just too good there. But with the combination of their aquasition of Power set, and integration with some of their owned content sites like Farecast what they achived is something else – a more relevent way to display search results.

Search for example for "Lakers Results" in Bing and in Google and you will see the difference. WHile both point to the Lakers site as the first result, Bing also shows you the latest game results and the next games schedule, right in the search results.

Add to that some really useful new UI elements such as playing videos right in the search results, auto preview for sites and relates searches tab and you get a quite impressive search experience.

That said, this is still not enough to beat Google. The problem is that in order to beat Google, you actually need to break users' habit. And this is the hardest possible task. In order to do so, Microsoft needs one of the following:

  • A "killer" feature – A feature that is so good that it will make people start to use it just for that.
  • A "killer" marketing campaign – After the semi successful "I'm a PC" campaign, can Microsoft pull a winner for Bing?
  • Use their "windows advantage" – Basically integrate Bing so hard into Windows 7 that users will just have to start and use it. This is unlikely as the last thing Microsoft needs right now is more anti trust issues.

Another very interesting scenario could be if Microsoft buys Twitter and integrate it into Bing… Twitter "real time" search is getting better and better and could potentially be this killer feature. Make the twitter search box to actually do Bing search, and you suddenly get millions of new users…

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Posted in Bing, Google, Internet, Microsoft, Search

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Art of Dying Industries

November 25th, 2008

In the last few weeks I had some meetings with people from the print industry. There were a very depressing meetings. We that lives the Internet every day can easily forget how fast the Internet is changing complete industries and people lives. Reflecting back, I can still remember that just 10 years ago I was probably subscribed to 5 different magazines, and names like PC Mag and Mac World were creating the standards in our industry.

The Internet is not the first technology to kill and shift complete industries, but it is unique in the rapid fast pace it did it. Print was probably the first big victim, but music, TV and movies are just examples for other industries we already know will never be the same.
In fact, the pace of change today is so fast that we even see businesses who were born in the internet that have to already adopt to a new reality. Take Netflix as an example. The direct mail company changed the dvd industry, displacing giants like Blockbuster. But now Netflix themselves need to adopt to the new reality of video on demand, Tivo and online video streaming.

The big challenge of a dying business is not to figure out what you need to do next, but it is how to do the change soon enough. Most print magazines knew that the Internet requires them to change, and still they didn't move fast enough. What killed them was their inability to deliberately forgo their current money making machines in order to save their long term future. Instead of doing experiments with the web, while still maintaining focus on their print business that was still making tons of money, they should have moved all their focus into digital and kill the print business themselves, instead of waiting for all of us to do it for them.
By waiting and trying to milk their current business model to the end, they let new businesses born into the digital world to take their place as the leaders of the new medium.

Today we are on the verge of another big change that potentially will displace many businesses. The evolution of mobile computing is changing how people consume and use information. This time, the threat is not just for the old traditional businesses, but even to digital businesses which were born jut a couple of years ago.
Every big change has a tipping point. A point of no return. A point in which the pace of change becomes so rapid, that there is no way to stop it anymore. It took the Internet a lot of years to become what it is. There were many factors that got us to the tipping point, but probably one of the bigger ones was when broadband became a commodity.
It seems that the tipping point for mobile computing was around the introduction of the iPhone and also here, the large availability of 3G networks.

It's still too early to know how exactly the mobile revolution will change the way we do things on a day to day basis. It's still hard to guess who will be the new kings of this era. Companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have their full attention and resources, trying to make sure that no one will take their place in this new world. And still, it seems that the mobile landscape is still open enough for a new king to come and rule.

Like before, it's easy to say that we have been talking about mobile for years but it never really happened. It's easy to think that you still have time and you don't have to change things today. And this is the fetal mistake that most of us do. The best businesses knows to take the hard decision and displace themselves, instead of waiting for the market to do so.

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Posted in Apple, Internet, Music, iPhone

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My eLife Tools Review

May 10th, 2008

After sucha long time without real blogging, I think it will be a good time to do a quick review of the digital tools I use on daily\weekly basis. Tools that makes life, a little more easy or fun:

  • Netflix – Netflix is still my first choice for movies, especially for the ones I want to see on Blu-Ray. Still, since Hulu went live and you can basically see any TV you want on demand, I got to admit that my movies consumption went down.
  • Twitter – No doubt the new rising star in my digital life. I never really had the time to play with it, but two wonderful applications made the use of twitter so easy and fun. Check out Twinkle for your hacked iPhone and Twhirl for your mac/pc.
    I would even go far and say that Twitter became almost a Facebook replacement for me.
  • Amazon Prime – I still do 90% of my shopping just on Amazon.
  • Hulu – No doubt Hulu became the first place I go to for all my TV needs. Not too many people noticed, but it actually has also a nice selection of old and cult movies.
  • Snurl – if you blog/twitt a lot, you will love this small tool that shorten all the big and ugly URLs. There are many other services like this, but as this one is integrated into Twhirl I chose it.
  • Safari – OK. For years I claimed that IE is better and a lot of the time faster. I was wrong. For many Ajax intensive sites, Safari performs much better. The built in spell checker, the great auto complete forms and bookmarklet capability is just a bonus.
  • Netvibes – For a long time I tried to avoid start pages. But on Safari, Netvibes load time is really fast and I started to find it as a easy tool to get a quick look across social networks and blogs.
  • Fring – Best kick ass iPhone application ever. Allows you to have a skype/messenger running in your iPhone while you are using other applications.
  • iPhone – With the addition of Fring and Twinkle, suddenly the iPhone became a real social tool. My thoughts about replacing it are long gone. Now all is left is to wait for the 3G version

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Posted in Internet

The Open Business Concept

August 6th, 2007

Fred Wilson wrote this week about the need for an open social network, one where the users have complete control on their information.
Sean Ammirati wrote about the possible creation of an open ad network. An ad network where publishers get the all cake of the advertising budget (instead of the Google and rest of the ad networks way where they take a big cut of the advertising money).

It all brings me back to an old vision I had when I started my company NuConomy.
Back in the early days of 2006 when I just started to roll the idea in my head I thought about what was back then an absurd idea – do rev share with the end users. I thought about businesses like YouTube where millions of people are producing and uploading every day (basically doing all the work) and in the end Google (back then it was still YouTube) takes all the money.
It sounded very unfair in my head. I had a vision of a web where the people who produce the content gets not just the glory but also the money. I decided to develop a system that can measure the end user contribution to the business in order to decide how big his cut of the cake should be (I got to admit that today running incentives programs is just a feature in our system. The platform itself changed its focus to next gen analytics).

In my head I even envisioned totally new structure of business. Something I called “The Open Business” (taken from the concept of open source).
Imagine a business that his owned by its employees and ran completely by its employees. Everyone share of the business is decided by their direct contribution to the business.

Lets take for example the idea for an open social network.
You take an open source platform and start a new social network with a business model around advertising. Each user who joins the network gets a status of a virtual employee of the network and a shareholder of the company. How many shares does he gets? Depends on his exact contribution to the business.
Users that has more friends, upload and write more high rated content, invite more friends and drive more page views or clicks on ads gets bigger cut of the revenues every month.
It’s that simple. In the open business the users are the shareholders. They are the employees. They not just own their information, they own the business itself.

I also gave a lot of thoughts about how this concept of open business can help drive the open source community.
Think of an ad based open source project, where all the developers that contributed to it gets a cut of its revenues. How you decide how much each developer will get? By their exact contribution the project. You can measure stuff like number of created/solved bugs, number of developed features, rating of features, spent hours, etc.
I know that most people who participate in open source are doing this for the community and not for profit, but can the open business be an open enough model that the community can actually embrace?

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Posted in Internet, Programming, Start ups

The Power of the New Media

July 4th, 2007

Today there was one of my old time favorite movies on TV – Pump Up The Volume. It was great watching it again after so many years.
It’s interesting to wonder how this 1990 movie would have looked like today, in the era of the Internet, blogs, podcasts anc vidcasts.

One of the strongest messages of the movie is that we need to speak our mind freely, to let our voice heard. As I look on the Internet and the revolution it brought to our lives, I can’t think about exactly the same thing.
The promise of the web is not just of giving us an easier way to shop for stuff, hear music or get in touch with our friends.
The real promise of the web is the ability of our voice (and picture) to reach millions op people around the world in the speed of light.

But should we just get this amazing power as granted? I believe not.
Such power should come with great responsibility.
Should we use it just for uploading funny videos, images from our trips and music we like?
Should our MySpace/Facebook pages should be used just for self promotion?
For the first time in history each one of us really has the power to affect things. For the price of a meal in McDonald we can communicate our opinions across the globe. We can make people notice the stuff in the world that should change. We can really make a difference.

The real question today is not how to make people aware of things, but more of how to make people care about it.
How can we harness this amazing social networks phenomena to make our world a little better.

I’m not sure what is the answer to that. But I’m sure she is out there, waiting to be found.

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Posted in Blogging, Internet, Web 2.0

Do Advertisers Don’t Know How to Learn?

June 20th, 2007

I’m sitting in a supernova session about the future of advertising. The panel keeps talking about the fact that as everything is so new, most advertisers still don’t know how to view the Internet.

I just have to pop up a question – Everything so new???
In an age where every business book talks about the need to be agile, how can we look at the Internet as something new?

The Internet is here for more than 10 years (in its large commercial sense).
Web 2.0 is already here for more than 2 years.
Video is here for almost two years.
Online shopping is here for years.
So what do we mean by saying everything is still new??

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Posted in Internet, Marketing, supernova2007

The New Journalism

June 20th, 2007

One of the amazing things in being here in supernova is the background noise in the rooms – the noise of constant laptop keyboard clicked.
It seems that almost everyone here is blogging/twittering/vodcasting at the same time. You can really feel how the media landscape of our world has changed just by looking around you.
It will take at least a day for major newspaper or old media companies to report what is happening here. But less than a minute someone here will say something on stage it will already appear in the blogs.

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Posted in Blogging, Internet, Web 2.0, Weblogs, supernova2007

Welcome to the future – Microsoft Photosynth

May 14th, 2007

I still can’t imagine or believe it will ever be possible to really use it, but Microsoft new preview of Photosynth is still one of the coolest thing I saw recently.

Basically what Photosynth does, is taking tens or hundreds of photos of the same place, examine them, and build a 3D model of the place.
Now you can browse the photos in a really cool way, letting you explore the place and get the feel of how it really looks in reality.

You need a good video accelerator (and good bandwidth) in order to enjoy it, but I really recommend you checking it out.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

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Posted in Internet, Microsoft