Letting Google and Bing get your feeds is the same mistake that Yahoo and others did in late nineties by letting Google become their default search engine. Realize that your value (and thus the power) is not in the tweets but in what the tweets are “about”.
Build a real-time search engine and an efficient business model around it or else be ready to be gobbled up by one of these giants in the next couple of years!
In my opinion, people typically search under these conditions:
1. Exploratory, discovery type of search
For example: Like last night as I was helping out my daughter with her science project, I really needed to look things up! This is the type of search where the results from Google, Bing, Kosmix, etc are of great help.
2. Real time search
For example: When I need to know what people are currently talking about Kanye West, or the latest LCD TV. For this, search engines focusing on Twitter feeds are perfect.
And now, we are talking about combining both of them!
I may not need to see the tweets of all internet junkies every time I search, especially not when I am searching for topics of my daughter’s science project. My needs are similar to a visit to the good old library!
I will definitely need to see the tweets of all internet junkies every time I search for which laptop or TV to buy. My needs are similar to asking around for feedback and understanding general trends.
The point, I am trying to make is, what I search for, my needs, my expected results are all different all the time – and search engines should respect that, understand that and offer me appropriate results.
While analyzing the historical trends, relevancy and popularity from tweets and incorporating them in search results might be good, displaying search results sprinkled with tweets may not be required all the time.
I think, it should be upto the users to decide and inform the search engine what they expect out of it – and the search engines should behave accordingly.
If I asked for the tweets in my results, only then give it to me – else its spam for me!
Today as celebrate the 140th birthday anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, his preachings seem more relevant than ever! That’s the reason why he has become a global legend and is on the home page of Google today. Every search you make will remind you of him and his greatness.
For a great read about his life…click here
I have been following some conversations on TechCrunch about the relevancy of the CPM model in today’s world. – Let’s Kill the CPM
And I don’t agree to that call and here’s why:
CPM has been and always will be the most commonly used mechanism for advertisers to generate brand awareness. Those full-page ads in newspapers (funny how no one talks about newspaper ads these days, at all!), billboards on the freeways, banner ads on any portal, relate to something more fundamental as to how human beings think and make decisions – to buy or not to buy; if to buy, then when to buy and for how much.
But yes, the technology for delivering ads on a CPM basis will definitely change and make this an effective mechanism for advertisers.
To illustrate my point, consider this example: If you are on a page reading about Kanye West’s latest blockbuster release, you really do not care about (and thus your brain would automatically tune out) the ad for reducing your mortgage payments. On the other hand, if you see an ad for the latest lineup of shoes by him, you would look at it and if the message were sharp enough, you would probably click on it too! Agreed that clicking on an ad and landing on a page does not mean a sale, but atleast it served the purpose of generating awareness about that specific brand in your mind.
Thus, advertisers should set their expectations as to what they can possibly achieve from a CPM campaign – Generating brand awareness with a possibility of some sales.
Now, the main point that I am making in my example was that the CPM model worked – but only because of its contextual relevancy. Now, in addition to the page relevancy, add a toping of site visitor’s interest relevancy, so that in our example above, the ads were about the latest lineup of shoes only because the visitor at some point in the past on some other site, had indicated an interest in buying shoes – then we have a model that really works.
And today in this digital world of the Internet, we can rely on technology to give us this mechanism of providing contextual relevancy – both for the page the visitor is currently reading (viewing) and the interests that the visitor had expressed in the past
While this is NOT a shameless act of promoting my own company, MyContextualAds.com, is exactly on this mission and so had to mention about it.
All in all, models that have worked in the past, super charged with sophisticated technologies will herald the new age of advertising models – whereby the ads generated will be relevant to YOU, the buyer – the center of the ad world!
Startups – as and when they were born ALWAYS dream of changing the world! Ask any entrepreneur who is painstakingly tinkering away in his/her garage at the wee hours of the night. They are not thinking that their startup is only providing an incremental value or is really extending a well formed service or is more of a feature than a business .
But what pans out in the real world can be a whole different story! For every Twitter that grows to indeed change the way we communicate today, hundred others just do not do so.
Thus in my opinion, Startups indeed are changing the world – they intent to and indeed some do.
The hype around cloud computing has many wondering – what does it mean to me? How will it fit into my current infrastructure? Will the cloud based solutions work with my current applications? What about vendor lock-in?
To a large extent, these concerns are very valid and real. Businesses need practical solutions which demonstrate the advantages of the cloud computing in their own home turf, for their own unique requirements and in their own unique infrastructure.
And vendors have started to hear these business demands and are coming up with solutions that just makes the perfect business sense. A complete win-win!
RightScale announced this week their new business intelligence (BI) solution. The public-cloud management company has teamed with Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica to deliver a push-button BI offering that leverages Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. BI is very important – so important, in fact, that many companies would be hesitant about migrating their BI processes to the cloud. However, because the RightScale offering is self-service and pay-by-the-drink, companies can run ad hoc BI jobs without investing in new infrastructure or overloading existing resources.
See the excellent demo video here which demonstrates how quick and easy it is to launch a full fledged BI solution using the RightScale’s package.
Microsoft perfected the art of selling packaged solutions with Office – RightScale may very well perfect the art of selling packaged Cloud Computing solutions.
Businesses demand, Vendors fulfill – the cycle of business world moves on…
This announcement from Google heralds the advent of an Operating System meant for today’s computing needs. About time! Much still remains to be seen how exactly it plays out in the business battlefield but if I were Microsoft, I would be quite nervous and really working hard to give a fitting reply with Windows 7 release.
But for now, Advantage Google!
An excellent article by Stacey Higginbotham at GiagaOm.com
Google Chrome OS & What It Means For Future of Computing
This is sad, very very sad. My deepest sympathies and condolences to his whole family. This is not only their loss but a loss for all of us too, whom he touched in his own special way many times over the years.
I remember meeting him at the TIECON 2009 (May 15th 2009) where he was sporting a FbFund T-Shirt and proudly talking about it. The last time I saw him was as he walked, hand-in-hand with his wife Asha & all dressed up, towards the TIECON 2009 Dinner Hall.
Though I never had the opportunity to work with/for him, we did meet several times. The first time was in August 2003, when I was pitching my Email Management Outlook based product Zytes Mail. We have been in touch ever since.
I always saw his as a great visionary, a simple honest man always willing to advise, help and mentor in every possible manner. A simple saint of knowledge.
His passing way will leave a void which will be impossible to fill up.
Rajeev Motwani – We will miss you…very very much.
This is an annual event that is worth watching! Liked it this time as they got the audience involved in the selections. Maybe next year, they would let audiences all over the world pitch in using the web.
Check this article on the WSJ today…
——————————————————————————–
Acquirers Back In The Game, But VCs Advised To Tread Carefully
While venture capitalists search for a way to jumpstart the market for initial public offerings, corporate acquirers appear to be coming back on their own and giving investors a way to reap returns – if they can survive the negotiations, according to an investment banker.
The M&A market has slowed down considerably since last September when the financial markets tumbled in the wake of Wall Street’s collapse. The fourth quarter saw just 65 M&A deals involving venture-backed companies, the lowest on record for a quarter, while the first quarter didn’t fare much better at 68 deals, according to industry tracker VentureSource.
Follow the rest of the story at :
Acquirers Back In The Game, But VCs Advised To Tread Carefully
