I would say the decision was made because of the latter as Photobucket is currently on the take for an estimated $300 – $400 million, this play may be an attempt by Fox to dilute Photobucket’s worth by distributing FUD with relation to the future of there Online Video offering and it’s actual value, possibly allowing them to pick up a bargain and expand there media powerhouse.

It looks like this has held up, TechCrunch are reporting Photobucket was acquired for 50m under what was expected, this shows again Murdoch’s ruthlessness, doing anything to secure a deal at the right price (or the best price).

My take on this deal is that Fox Interactive (part of News Corp) will acquire SimplyHired, they last year invested 13.5m in SimplyHired and use SimplyHired to power MySpace Careers (owned by Fox), even if Google do decide to acquire SimplyHired, Fox will put in a counter  bid to buy the rest of SimplyHired (which I am surprised they haven’t already done). In the event that Google try to pay an exorbitant price (YouTube anyone?) Fox will pull away or damage the MySpace distribution deal and leave Google holding a floundering Job Search engine they could of built themselves.

It really has to been seen, view it here on TechCrunch.

If you have never seen chasers war, some more of there videos can be seen here (a really good move for a show like this I think).

For branding purposes this type of display advertising works well as many eyes view your brand, but for most companies advertising is done to increase sales and with the constant pestering of marketing to show ROI on there advertising campaigns the newer CPC style of marketing makes sense as it puts the onus of finding interested customers onto the advertiser and means the advertiser only pays for those who are interested in there message they want to convey.

I have been intently watching the evolution of advertising and in the past few years two search engine giants in particular that have two very different strategies, these being Google and Yahoo.

Over the past few years Google have been cashing in on there multi-billion dollar Adsense cash cow while Yahoo have sat back with there floundering display advertising model until it became too much and announced there very Google like Panama product  last year, which would force these rivals into a head to head match.

While the panama project I think was a necessary and good move for Yahoo they will not knock Google off there perch for quite a while due to Google’s huge customer base that was created due to it’s first mover advantage in evangelising the CPC model.

Google, intent to hold onto there crown as web advertising king acquired DoubleClick for $3.1bn recently, putting them right into the thick of Yahoo’s display advertising territory, with an already large customer base DoubleClick was a good acquisition to enter Google into this market.

Yahoo however have taken a different approach, already owning a significant portion of the display advertising market they have brought the fight to Google by acquiring Right Media for $680m, whilst the size of this acquisition is dwarfed by Google’s DoubleClick acquisition in monetary value they have it seem decided to out-innovate Google in revolutionizing this market by allowing customers to bid on the ad space they want in real time and awarding the space to the highest bidder, eliminating negotiating costs and allowing more revenues to be passed on to the company supplying the ad space.

I believe this is a particularly good move by Yahoo as it allows them to out pace Google in innovation in this sector and allow them to grow there own advertising brand organically whereas Google will have separate branding under both DoubleClick and themselves not to mention they saved themselves a mint!

Saying this though I do not doubt Google and there ability to capitalise in the online advertising industry, they will probably even have something similar to Right Media’s functionality in the coming months but Yahoo look to be keeping Google on there toes, maybe even taking there eyes off there Adsense goldmine just a little bit while Panama swoops in.

With all these acquisitions it’s an exciting time in the online advertising world indeed!

The first thing that struck me as a particularly good feature in Joost (though an obvious one) is the ability to watch shows outside of the browser window, while the browser is an easy way to get to where you want to go when you are away from your PC it cannot compare to the experience you get from a full featured application, the interface is slick, easy to use and surprisingly fast, most technical people who would want to use this service and are comfortable viewing TV on a computer I think have a laptop anyway so this is sort of a moot point and a thick client makes sense.

The second thing I like about Joost is the ability to choose which episode you want to watch, again this is quite obvious especially with the availability of multimedia content on demand online but I honestly didn’t expect it, I thought Joost was another method to view normal TV online due to the complexity’s of getting content providers to dice up there content in order to allow users to choose which segment they want to watch.

The quality I think is acceptable for internet TV, I have no problems streaming it on my Cable connection though I would like to be able to display this content on my TV, I would be more than happy to fork out a monthly fee in order to be able to broadcast shows straight from the web onto my TV in a higher quality format.

Getting this content onto the TV I think would be a major advantage for Joost, it seems like they are getting interest by major corporations who want to get there content out there though as has been pointed out in many other people before, the mass market doesn’t want to watch TV on there PC, they want to be able to sit in there lounge room and enjoy there favorite show, by becoming a key provider with plenty of good content and partnering with major ISP’s Joost could mirror there content from these ISP’s saving there own bandwidth and that of there ISP while at the same time creating a lock in with that company for the consumer.

This is where I think Joost needs to head to penetrate most homes and to be honest I think I would pay for it, I currently pay $80 a month for my internet connection and another $99 for my Pay-TV, paying $150 for both would be very reasonable especially since I would be able to view international content.

I think I will continue to use Joost and am excited to see where it goes in the future though no matter whether it reaches my TV or not I would love to see some more Discovery and History type channels.

Google is obviously serious about taking on Microsoft’s lucrative office suite head on as they now have the four most important applications of Microsoft’s Office suite despite Schmidt’s nonsense comment “We don’t think it’s a competitor to Microsoft Office”.

There is no doubt in my mind that Google are on to a winner here and will gain significant adoption if the product is integrated effectively into there existing office line-up though pricing pressures that Google and other online office vendors are putting on online office products will ensure that Google will never reach anywhere near the profitability they treasure in the Advertising space.

I think that Google needs to stick to there previous and most important strength which is leveraging off other companies platforms to perform advertising which means they need to stop building there own solutions and start growing there partner network, by utilising partners Google can mitigate the risk of moving into emerging product spaces such as online office products and can focus on increasing there advertising revenues (Kudos to Google on there Double-Click purchase), continuing to create these products just means that Google moves further away from being an advertising company and more like a product company (without the fat product revenues of companies like Microsoft).

I think that Google are still a great company and I don’t doubt there ability to grow though I just don’t understand what Google are playing at by expanding into things like Google Office, they are making the right acquisitions in the mobile space and are in a good position to capitalize on this as it emerges alongside the now Microsoft owned TellMe though Google might need to focus on these winners and keep the blinders on things like Google Office, as I have mentioned before in order for Google to win they need to bring the fight to there competitors, out-innovating them at every opportunity while protecting both current and future revenue streams particularly in advertising.

Now according to GigaOM Skype will be making it’s first move into the enterprise space, this is an exciting but not unexpected move in order to expand from there current consumer focussed customer base into the enterprise as well, the deciding factor on how well they will fare in this already populated space is how serious they are about servicing these new customers as the feature set required by businesses will be much more demanding such as active directory integration for address books and users, legacy gateway connectivity (SIP/PSTN) and a flexible API for integration with business applications.

I think Skype can execute on this though they need to get the features out and commit themselves, they have the funding, they already have the infrastructure (a marked advantage over many ‘hosted’ providers) and they already have an excellent software application all it boils down to is execution.

I will be watching this to see how it develops but I think this is just what the SMB market needs, especially companies with many satellite offices and telecommuters as companies can give these users the functionality they need without having to pay the exorbitant rates currently charged by companies to use there hosted solutions.

In order to open up the doors to these entrepreneurs and investors I think Social Networking sites should adopt a model similar to that of the Salesforce.com Appexchange which allows companies to build products that sit on top of there platform in a controlled environment, by looking at salesforce.com I can see 5 key things that every social networking site should do in order to ensure both themselves and there widget companies prosper from a widget ecosystem:
1. Create a portal
Create a portal for companies to showcase there widgets they have built, these widgets should be free to post, view and try, possibly adding a voting or popularity feature to ensure the best widgets bubble up to the top to ensure users don’t need to dig around to find the best widgets
2. Create a development platform
By creating a development platform with site specific functionality companies can ensure widget providers will want to create widgets for there site as it is easy, code is easily manageable by the site owners and so that they can create a lock-in for there widget providers that cannot get the same functionality elsewhere.
3. Create a solid terms of use agreement
To ensure that widget providers don’t create something that violates copyright or infringes on a feature the site wishes to keep to themselves, a solid terms of use agreement should be decided upon so that widget providers know where they stand.
4. Acquire
Successfull widget companies that can enhance the companies platform should be acquired as is required, regular acquisitions will mean that budding entrepreneurs will spend there time and resources creating useful widgets in the hope they will be acquired.
5. Profit!
For companies that are not suitable for acquisition both the widget provider and the site can monetize there widgets, the site takes a cut off every sale and the widget provider takes the rest, this is direct profit and is not varied based on advertising.

“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more than they do, indeed even farther; but not because our sight is better than theirs or because we are taller than they. Our sight is enhanced because they raise us up and increase our stature by their enormous height”
Bernard of Chartres – 12th Century Philosopher

If Fox were to come out and say they wish to have full control over the video’s displayed on MySpace due to issues with policing content, I would totally understand as this directly relates to Fox’s other lucrative media properties but the fact that they are directly targeting Photobucket and are leaving others in tact (namely Google’s YouTube Videos which are notorious for containing copyrighted content) means that this decision was in relation to something Photobucket has done or is planning to do.

I would say the decision was made because of the latter as Photobucket is currently on the take for an estimated $300 – $400 million, this play may be an attempt by Fox to dilute Photobucket’s worth by distributing FUD with relation to the future of there Online Video offering and it’s actual value, possibly allowing them to pick up a bargain and expand there media powerhouse.

Two of the biggest announcements in video advertising have come in the past fortnight with Yahoo announcing there online advertising partnership with Viacom and Google announcing there foray into Television advertising.

There is obviously a marked difference in these strategies, Google has gone off-line to pursue television advertising whereas Yahoo is staying online pushing there advertising out to third party advertisers.

Google are currently in a sticky situation, they have brought the Video sharing website YouTube for 1.65bn late last year and are currently trying to establish it as the go-to place for consumers to watch videos online so by Google executing a video advertising strategy that drives users away from YouTube and allows them to monetize content elsewhere this would be a serious conflict of interest with there current offering though the current lack of effective monetization on YouTube means that YouTube cannot offer content providers enough incentive to host there content at YouTube (see the Viacom v Google 1bn lawsuit), a sorry see-saw story indeed.

So what have Google done? They have started to move some of there advertising off-line, last week announcing they will be moving into television advertising, I have covered this off in my blog post Will Google succeed in the Television advertising space?, I believe this is a poor move by Google, as there focus is pulled off-line and any messaging they planned to communicate to advertisers that they believe in online video is heavily diluted.

In the other corner though we have Yahoo choosing to advertise on other companies media properties (see the Yahoo Viacom Deal) online while keeping it’s own pay for play offering that offers a clear monetization channel for media companies, not unlike Apple’s iTunes music store.

By keeping all of there advertising and media properties online Yahoo will be able to continue to focus on and expand it’s primary advertising stream while building connections with large media companies as the online media space grows.

As I have mentioned before I don’t think Google will achieve the same domination in television as it has in online advertising unless they continue to innovate while there online video offering YouTube is looking to be sinking as they are currently losing content providers due to there blatant disregard for copyright and unless they change there policies quick they may taint themselves, I feel Yahoo however is going in the right direction, maybe it won’t have the same short term success that Google may get out of there move into television advertising though at least it will be sustainable especially as more and more video content moves online.

This offering is great for Salesforce.com users as it will open up the door for greater integration with business data that is stored in offline documents but as Salesforce.com themselves are proving the enterprise is ready to move online so why not integrate with online document platforms and the potential 400lb gorilla and obvious choice Google.

Google acquired Writely in March 2006 and is currently building out there Google Office offerings merging Document, Spreadsheet and Email functionality into a single web based application.

Salesforce.com I think would do well by partnering with Google for 3 main reasons which I outline below:
1. Branding – Both companies want to get further into the enterprise software space and by partnering Salesforce.com would gain access to the branding of being an important partner of Google’s.
3. Compatibility – Moving CRM and documents online has the issue with integrating offline documents with online software, by keeping both online versioning of software no longer becomes an issue and streamlined processes are easier to achieve.
2. Shared customers – Both companies can cross sell into each others customers possibly using a seeding strategy were users of either piece of software get a number of free licenses of the other’s software, a perfect example of this working in the Enterprise space is Crystal Report’s being seeded into both Microsoft Visual Studio and SAP mySAP.

Now possibly either one of these companies may be planning to release there own version of there competitors products though without having any inside information I would say this would be unlikely, Salesforce.com doesn’t have the money to compete with Google in office and Google would move away from it’s focus of building mostly small applications though like most speculation we’ll have to wait and see.

And also (again a fault with Search Engine Land) if you are going to put these links down the bottom show the whole article, I don’t want to go onto Digg and see someone digg a story that they didn’t even read the whole way through!

Here is the footer I saw today on the Search Engine Land feed:

I think AUDA have it right when dealing with .au domains, requiring people to prove ownership of a business in a related field in order to register a domain name.

A fair fee for a domain name I would see as being around $30 and you need to have a registered business that trades under that name (an additional cost here in Australia of around $100 if you don’t own that trading name).
This would raise the barrier to entry for spammers and make people think before registering domains as well as having a clear legal channel for prosecution in the case of business practices being breached.

I would be in favour though of charging a minimal fee (say $10) for personal domain names for non commercial use, this would allow access for people to share there thoughts online and would not persecute these people with requirements they should not have to satisfy.

Something I have come to learn though is that in business rational decisions need to be made and this includes taking due diligence in deciding on the best language to use for a particular project.

Now it should be noted that I am not speaking about programming for pleasure, if the application is being written for personal development or fun using a new or more challenging language may be the right option but I am talking about large business projects here.

I don’t think there is any magic formula or a cut and dry way for deciding what language to use but by answering a list of questions for each language (or worst case thinking about each in your head) it will force you to think about it more rationally and allow you to make a better decision, if I had to have 5 questions that I would ask about each language they would be:
1. Timeframe – Can the be completed within the required timeframe (Be pessimistic)?
2. Budget – Will the budget allow for the cost of development in the timeframe?
3. Trade-off’s – Are there certain features that cannot be implemented?
4. Experience – Does the team hold the experience to implement?
5. Maintainability – Will it be easy to maintain after it is created?

This is probably a bit of overkill and this may be in your project plan already but at least (especially if you have a manager) you have covered your ass and can justify your decision

We’ll see how it goes but I am very excited about this!

I think that Google’s success or failure will lie in there ability to deliver true contextual advertising based on the users viewing history and there location with no interruptions to the users viewing experience, if they could execute on this it would be revolutionary.

Google I’m sure already has much of the data crunching required, it serves out there contextual web advertisements, it is just a matter of applying these systems to Television as well.

The ideal user scenario for Google would be that advertisers upload there spots to Google, specify there target demographics & geographies, there budget and the duration of there campaign and Google does the rest, Google finds users who match the advertisers criteria and Google delivers content based on the individual user, not just the time and the average viewer like is currently done on Television.
Using this system the Advertisers no longer need to worry about filling there ad spaces and the advertisers hit only the people that relate to there message.

The largest barrier for Google in implementing this strategy is the lack of accurate tracking of what a user is doing, when a user is online they click links to interact and there specific interests can be identified but with Television it cannot be known if they are just waiting for a 5 minute spot in the Television program to come on or worse yet they could have there Television off but there Cable box still on!

Despite these problems I think Google are in an excellent position to capitalise on this new space especially against new players as they have proven to be a trustworthy company when it comes to tracking advertisements and can use there already dominant advertising presence online and bridge some of there online advertising customers into Television advertising.

Will Google succeed in the Television advertising space?
Only time will tell, I think they have the ability to dominate another advertising market but they need to really shake it up through innovation and use there existing resources to put up a barrier for entry to new players, I might re-visit this in 6 months time when the hype has settled and the products are out in the market.

After last nights post I have been thinking a lot about twitter and what they could do to enhance twitter and make it a viable business , I still think it is not going to become anywhere near as influential as other mediums such as blogging and social networking due to it’s simplicity but it defiantly defines a new category of sites that I would categorize as Group Instant Messaging.
I have put down some ideas on some revenue models, uses and enhancements that might make there way into twitter that haven’t been announced yet but could enhance the usability of twitter and allow it to reach a larger audience.

Uses for Twitter
As I was saying in my post yesterday twitter needs to expand past simply being a place for popular people to put down what they are currently doing in order to gain mainstream adoption.
The character limit imposes some restrictions for users that they simply do not have when they use other services such as blogs though I can see twitter being used for a few things other things rather than what you ate for breakfast, these are listed below:
Sport commenting
While watching a sports match people can comment on how there team is going or keep tabs on the score.
Event Commenting
Keep tabs on what is happening at a conferences (SXSW proved this as a good use)
Ask <celebrity>
Allow fans to ask questions to there favourite stars in real time rather than going to another portal
Answers
Have people ask there questions and have them answered immediately.

Twitter Enhancements
I think that there are a few enhancements that could be made to twitter to make it a better user experience, the simplicity is currently good but I think it needs to be filled out so that it is more flexible, maybe some of these will be fulfilled using the API though.
If any of these are already done please tell me in the comments and I will amend.
Twitter via email
Send and receive your twits via email rather than logging in online or using SMS, this would be especially good for office workers who are blocked at work.
[Update: Elliot has commented that this has already been done, the application can be found at EmailTwitter.com]
Twitter Multimedia
Allow users to upload Images, Video and audio to the site so that people can interact using there chosen medium, maybe allow users to call in to a message type system and add an audio twit.
Private/Public Messaging
Users can choose to have there messages cast out into the public eye, kept between friends or sent out to a specified group
allowing certain twits to be kept private.

Revenue Models
Twitters revenue model is something that is yet to surface, here are some ways I think that twitter may use to monetize there service:
Advertising
People can choose to put contextual advertisements at the bottom of every twit made with twitter and the poster shares revenues with twitter, the user does not need to do anything but tick the box that says “display advertising in my twits” and when they reach a certain amount of revenue they can cash out.
Pay Per Twit
When someone reaches a certain amount of subscribers they need to pay per twit, or pay for every message that gets sent to a phone, ideally business and personal would be separated so that popular people aren’t having to shell out to pay for there twits but the amount of administration required would be huge due to the amount of twits made every minute.
Answers
Allow people to post a bounty for a simple question they wish to ask and have approved answerers to answer there questions in real time.
Premium Accounts
Some Ideas for possible incentives could be they can make posts with more characters (say 200), they can have unlimited subscribers or can make audio/video/picture twits or all of the above.

Also anyone who is interested and hasn’t already seen it, Jason Calacanis has a great Interview with Evan Williams the Co-founder of Twitter on the founding and the future of twitter, this can be found here.

These users are current bloggers or web celebrity’s that have gained a certain amount of notoriety (i.e. A list for the jaded bloggers), these people are often looked up to by others and can therefore do with conveying simple objective thoughts or tell us about whats happening in there lives, people might want to know what Jason Calacanis had for dinner though they don’t care that you had lunch with one of your workmates, not to mention the fact that you and your workmate probably don’t want the whole world knowing this and if you wish to convey an idea (and aren’t at the point where you can benefit by simply being objective) then 140 characters just doesn’t cut it.

For basic social and business commenting I think twitter will be very useful and I am sure it will continue to grow and gain popularity but I don’t feel it is a tool that will take-off in the mainstream because no-one cares about what you had for dinner.

Now I understand that the DRM free music is of a higher quality but couldn’t they have just made it simple and sold all of the music for 99c?

I think this just adds too much confusion to consumers especially people who are not in the know, I would like to see all of EMI’s DRM music replaced with DRM free content, the consumer doesn’t care (in fact it is better for them) and it eliminates the confusion around DRM for these consumers.

Companies like Kapow are going the right way with regards to making it easy to get content from websites though they are still restricted to only getting the content that is available on there website, in almost every case metadata that is used by sites that are being aggregated is not available and so a full user experience cannot be offered not to mention the fact that the data is not available ‘now’.

I think there is certainly an opening in the market for a company to exist that would provide data to these web mash-ups, providing a single source for all the sites they wish to mash up that both contains the raw data as well as cleansed data.

Data would be sourced either directly from the content provider (preferred) or from scraping the website, either way it would allow easier access to the content for the mash-ups and would reduce the providers Server load by reducing the amount of spiders crawling there site, allow a greater viewership of there content due to it’s ease of use and possibly even provide them with an opportunity to sell ‘premium’ data services that provide either additional content, deliver more timely content or provide better data access (e.g. direct database access instead of XML feeds) all without needing to manage advertising, security and maintenance of these services.

For entrepreneurs creating a new web mash up they would normally need to identify what data is available, where it is coming from, how they are going to get it and find out the frequency of updates, often this is a guessing game without spending many hours analyzing the data or doing data extracts, with an aggregated content company they can see exactly what data is available, the frequency of updates and other important data without any more effort than firing up a web browser and searching for the data they want with an online web preview available.
Having the data available from an easy to use single source helps reduce the hassle of maintaining these services and can speed up the time to market for the addition of additional data sources or the initial launch.

With regards to monetization of this service, it could use the aforementioned idea of having ‘premium’ services for paying customers or simply requiring all sites that use the data to display a small icon down the bottom of there website possibly linking to affiliate websites or other consumer based services specializing in this area.

Anywhere the idea is there, I wonder if anyone will take it…