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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Sep. 14, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of September 10, 2007

1371 - Sep. 13, 2007 - 12.57 PM EST

Google Gears? Wow!

Google recently hosted its annual Google Developer Day (GDD) that took place in ten countries where the company has offices. The event is intended to showcase its Google Gears and the company's various application programing interfaces (API).

The one held in California was moved from Google's Mountain View headquarters to the San Jose Convention Center to accommodate a growing crowd of programmers and developers that rely on Google's API.

Google's Gears initiative is about developing an open standard to help turn the Internet browser into an improved and better-performing programming platform, while enabling applications to work offline when there's an inconsistent, slow or non-existent Internet connection.

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google said at the event that one of the main purpose of the GDD is to respond to user feedback in rolling out Google Gears.

Brin added that there had been a growing interest in Google Docs and that users wanted the ability to work with these API tools offline. Fundamentally, it bridges the current gap between the browser and desktop software.

Brin also said "people want access to their data and don't want to have to worry about devices or operating systems, with everything in between."

There were two opposite cases that kept coming up: the developing world and business travelers on airplanes. The ability to access applications such as Google Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Gmail on an airplane (where there is no Internet connection) will make these tools more useful to enterprise users.

Google Reader is currently available, but these and a few more applications have yet to be rolled out for Google Gears.

The availability of these Google applications offline address one barrier to adoption by business users in particular. Contrary to what some industry observers had initially believed, they won't take market share away from Microsoft Office any time soon.

In fact, a small segment of Internet users may find Gears-enabled Google Apps to be a reasonable alternative in certain specific cases.

Brin added that Google's initiative wasn't just about access to applications but also their performance and responsiveness. He said "we started to fix the browser with Google Gears but there are still other problems to be solved at this point."

Developing countries with limited, slow or unreliable Internet access will be able to use Google Apps, or any third party applications built on Google Gears.

Other Google representatives at the table made the point that this was less about Google than creating a richer browser development platform for others.

In that sense this is a logical extension of what the company already started by releasing its Google Maps API to the world. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1370 - Sep. 12, 2007 - 2.54 PM EST

Yahoo inks deal with U.K. site

Yahoo has signed a multi-year agreement with a major social networking property in the U.K. and in Ireland for display and video advertising.

Bebo is a popular social networking site that targets more than one demographic. Overall, Yahoo-Europe will help search advertisers and Internet marketers reach a British audience of over 11 million Web users. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed at this time.

The transaction is said to involve certain revenue guarantees, an approach reportedly made by Google in a deal that got them MySpace advertising, and possibly part of Microsoft’s recent Facebook transaction. More here...

Posted on Businessblog™

1369 - Sep. 10, 2007 - 3.35 PM EST

Advertising revenue up on social Web sites

It has become very apparent today that social networking sites are increasingly being noticed and are now gaining a lot of traction as to their overall popularity. Internet surfers as well as the advertising industry as a whole are now taking notes, and many are expecting this could have some important changes in the way Internet advertising will onfold in the near term and what to expect next.

This phenomenon has the potential to drastically change today's advertising on many Internet sites, as new marketing ideas are being created almost every day.

To many search marketers and industry analysts observing the future of Internet advertising, when Fox Interactive Media reported its first annual profit earlier in 2007, a very clear message was sent to skeptics everywhere.

This industry is changing rapidly and has the potential of causing significant changes in the way advertising on the Web is perceived by large publishers and Madison Street itself. To ignore these changes would be a great mistake.

Overall, the increasing growth in advertising and search revenue at sites such as MySpace is responsible for the unit's general profitability. Additionally, the numbers were far from many skeptics' concerns that advertising on social networking sites would never amount to anything significant. Now, all of this is changing very rapidly...

Social networking site (SNS) MySpace accounts today for about 80.8 percent of overall SNS traffic. According to eMarketer, in terms of advertising revenue, on any given day this accounts for approximately 57.9 percent of all SNS advertising revenues.

On MySpace, overall advertising spending in the United States has increased rapidly from $190 million in 2006 to approximately $525 million in 2007. If SNS site MySpace can make this work, it would seem more likely that competing sites would too.

Andrew Frank, research v.p. at Gartner said "overall monthly page views have reached about 39 to 44 billion at MySpace. Even if the average CPM (cost per thousand viewers) is only about a dollar, you're still talking about millions in ad revenue every month, and this is a very conservative estimate.

He added "a very small percentage of a very large number is still a big number, even by any standards used today." Average assessments of today's market potential are increasingly optimistic to most observers.

Debra Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer says "if anything, we may be raising our estimates for SNS site ad spending, based on the increasingly growing results at Fox Interactive, and also the growing popularity of Facebook, which is clearly becoming one of most popular SNS sites on the Web today."

Williamson added "all those SNS users translate into additional page views, and advertisers are obviously very interested in that sort of thing."

On average, companies with a global market will spend about $1.2 billion in advertising on SNS sites in 2007. This estimate is a lot higher than the mere $445 million generated last year. In just less than four years from now, the numbers are expected to be about $3.6 billion, according to eMarketer.

In the U.S. alone, overall advertising spending on social networks as a proportion of total online ad spending is expected to increase from about 2.14 percent last year to 6.82 percent in 2011. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

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