Here we go again with a new ‘all-in-one’ web browser concept, this time from a very big name?

Yahoo..? New?!?

Microsoft owns Yahoo right? So if Yahoo is releasing a new browser + a suite of browser plugins for people who refuse to switch browsers, what’s going on?

Well apparently giving people the option to ‘choose’ MSN/Bing/Yahoo wasn’t working out so well. Now you can run a browser or a plugin that removes that annoying hassle of choosing who’s search services you are using.

Y’know how Firefox and Chrome allow you to sign-in to your browser letting you seamlessly move from one location to the next? Yeah Axis is going to break ground and re-invent the web by also doing that same thing.

Y’know how Google is showing you previews of the sites you’re considering visiting within the search results? Yep Axis will finally let you do that, again.

Is this even a new browser or just IE9 with some ‘fluff’ and Yahoo branding? Tonight we will get a chance to try it hands-on and find out, but for now we have a few videos we can watch over on Yahoo Video.

One of the points my Economics teacher used to hammer home is to view each promotion as the promoter relating to their target audience.

If you have a good product with a smart client base, you can sell your product by focusing on real traits and strengths. Just demonstrate the product and avoid all pointless elements that distract the consumer from your product information.

Enjoy those videos and the clever/unique symbolism that hasn’t been copied too many times since Apple used it in 1984.

Does this mean Bing/Yahoo rankings will be important?

Who ever said they weren’t important? Okay, well expert opinions aside, you should never burn the Bing bridge, especially not with cell phones that default to Bing and new versions of Windows that also default to Bing.

It’s never wise to put all your eggs in one basket, and this is true of search engine placement/rankings as well as eggs.

Even if Yahoo Axis only manages a week of public attention, that’s one week of people around the planet searching Bing for a change.

If you rank really well on Google, we’re not going to suggest you intentionally tank your rankings for a short-term gain on Bing. The cost of recovering from such a move would probably be far more than simply paying for some pay-per-click coverage via Microsoft’s AdCenter.

There’s already folks worried about ‘Yahoo’ impressions vs. Bing impressions and the following advice has been posted in the AdCenter help forum:

1) You are currently bidding on broad match only, add phrase and exact match to your bidding structure.
2) Look at keywords with low quality score and optimize for those specifically.
3) Install the MAI tool and check on expected traffic for adCenter, you can also see what average bids are for specific positions.

Only 7 Days Left!

Talk about old news? I mentioned this just 2 days ago?!

We still have 7 days left in our Beanstalk Minecraft Map Competition! Check it out and even if you’re not entering, please let others know it’s coming to a close and we need all submissions by the 31st!

Sliding FB stock prices, Google finally taking over what was the mobility division of Motorola, SpaceX reaching the ISS, Wiki-leaks’ social media platform, and the Google Knowledge Graph.. and more!

If we looked at them from an SEO standpoint I would still have to struggle a bit to pick the most interesting/focused story, but it’s a great way to dive in so lets take a look at the weekends headlines from an SEO aspect.

Facepalm – FB IPO = Uh Oh

 
Dave’s nailed this one really well on Friday in this post:
Facebook IPO vs Ford (real world) Valuation Comparison

The image of money flushing down the toilet was very ‘apt’ since that’s exactly where I see the stock price going:
https://www.google.ca/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB

The current ‘low’ appears to be $31/share at the moment, with the price currently dancing around $32.50/share as I write this.

Google Mobility

Google already makes some cool hardware for their servers and other projects, but most people I know wouldn’t think of them as a manufacturer.

And yet here we are today, watching history unfold, as the mobile division of one of the worlds best handset manufacturers changes hands with a company that is at the head of the Android software alliance.

Google does a lot of things for free, even at a loss, because they see value in things that others would squander and ignore. Now that they have a hardware division to support this bad habit things are going to get very interesting.

We already know from looking through project glass’s details that Google will be needing a very skilled manufacturer with assets in micro mobility and wireless. HTC has always been very willing to participate with Google’s projects, but they are a vastly successful hardware manufacturer with no visible brand loyalty.

I personally had Android running on a HTC Windows Mobile so why can’t I run Windows Mobile on a Google subsidized Android HTC phone? I probably could, which is why it’d be very silly for Google to subsidize HTC hardware.

If Google can produce the hardware and find ways to keep 90%+ of the owners using Google services, it’s a much safer bet, and it appears to be exactly what they are doing. Heck if they make the hardware they might not even care what OS you use if they are allowed to sniff the data and still learn about users from the data they are using.

The only part of the puzzle that’s missing is deployment of Google owned, Motorola equipped, cell-towers so that Google can offer hardware, software, and services on their terms, in a model that makes sense to them, which would likely mean no caps on network use for Google products?

Yeah I could be dreaming but if I was a competitive cellular provider I’d be strongly considering opening my arms to Google before it’s an arms race against Google.

Google Knowledge Graph

While the bearing on SEO for this news item is rather debatable and curious. The feature itself is incredibly handy and something Google has the unique opportunity to provide.

By taking key points of knowledge and building some hard links to relate that knowledge to other data points Google has developed a Wikipedia of it’s own design.

Knowing the struggles that Wikipedia has faced in terms of moderation and updating content, it will be anyone’s guess how Google is going to maintain it’s knowledge graph without someone manipulating the results, but kudos to Google for trying?

Right now the coverage on this is going to be all the same because the content in Google KG is still being built up, but you can expect further discussion as the service grows.

FoWL – Wiki-Leaks’ Social Media Service

Since this service claims to be private and encrypted, it would be very foul of me to really spend much of your time discussing it.

As it can’t be officially crawled by Google it’s probably going to have a very low effect on SEO and rankings in general. The only real bearing I could see it having is using it as a traffic tool for sites that are in-line with the Wiki-leaks mantra of public information. So if you can pretend that your services are so good the FBI doesn’t want you talking about them..??

SpaceX reaches ISS

This isn’t search engine related at all. I suppose you could point to the success of Google vs. government run indexes, and then point to the success of SpaceX vs. NASA with a bunch of startling similarities, but that’s some serious reaching.

At the same time, posting this on the same day the first private effort has docked with the International Space Station? I am obligated as a nerd to at least tuck this into the tail of the post. It’s pretty cool!

9 Days Left!

We still have 9 days left in our Beanstalk Minecraft Map Competition! Check it out and even if you’re not entering, please let others know it’s coming to a close and we need all submissions by the 31st!

Good Luck!

About 10 minutes ago (as I start writing this blog post at least) investors were able to buy into Facebook.  At opening the price was estimated at $38/share which gives Facebook an overall value of $107 billion.  Wait … let me say that again.  That’s one hundred and seven BILLION dollars (insert into your brains if you will an image of Dr. Evil laughing).

So, what’s obvious is that money in the real world has no connection to money in the tech realm.  Here’s just a few statistics about Facebook:

Q1 revenue – $1.058 billion
Q1 net earnings – $205 million
Members – 835,525,280

So let’s think about this for just a second.  This means that each member is worth $128.06 if things go Facebook’s way and the value at the end of the day reaches $107 billion.  Now if we look at what they earned from their members in Q1 (and I’m talking about profit here, not revenue) they earned $0.25 off each one in the quarter.  Essentially this means that at the current rate they’ll make roughly $1 off each user per year so simple math tells us that the company is being valued at 128 years of profit.  That’s right … 128 years.

Now let’s take a different approach in valuation and look at it from revenue instead of profit.  You shouldn’t … but lets.  If Facebook’s Q1 earnings hold through the rest of the year that would give them an annual revenue of $4.232 billion but let’s be nice, let’s say that over Q3 and 4 their revenue spikes for the holidays and they earn a cool $5 billion; they’re still being valued at 21.4 years of revenue.  Not profit … revenue.

The Real World

So let’s put this in real world terms.  Let’s look at the valuation of a brick-and-mortar company, a little company called Ford.  Here’s their statistics:

Q1 revenue – $30.5 billion
Q1 net earnings – $1.4 billion
Members – NA

So, with the math noted above on Facebook’s evaluation Ford is worth 2.6108 trillion dollars (note: this is higher than the total US deficit for 2011).

So what is Ford worth?  $38.34 billion.  You heard me … the value of a company that shows over a billion dollars in real-world profit each quarter and generates $30.5 billion in revenue in a single quarter is valued at 1.257 times quarterly revenue or 27.39 times quarterly net earnings.

Let’s Do Some Math

As an SEO I love math so I won’t make you do it.  Let’s look at what Facebook should be valued at if the tech world was ruled by the same general laws of reality that the real world is.

If we base Facebook’s valuation on their Q1 revenue and subscribed to the notion that a company should be valued by some reasonable measure of what they earn (it’s crazy I know) and used Ford as the benchmark they would be valued at $1.33 billion dollars (that’s about $0.48 per share).  If we go the route of valuing them based on net earnings and use Ford again, they would be valued at $5.615 billion, a healthier $2.05 per share.

But Investors Are Apparently Detached …

from reality.  During just the time of my writing this blog post (about 30 minutes) share prices have gone from $38.00 (a low after opening at $45) back up to $41.16 valuing the company at $112.73 billion dollars.

Can anyone else see the pin coming that’s going to pop this bubble?

</rant>

Update: 3 Hours Later …

Poor Facebook, back down at $38.01.  personally I think it’s not dropping below $38 simply because there’s noone who’ll sell for less right now.  Don’t worry, if you want to grab a deal on FB stocks just wait … they will go down once people get beaten down.

Other social media properties have been tanking throughout the day.  Some speculate that’s due to investors pulling their money out to buy Facebook shares.  Zynga (game maker, you’re probably familiar with many of their products … I for one am addicted to Words With Friends) dropped 16.2% as of the time of this writing.  But let’s take a look at their financials:

Q1 revenue – $321 million
Q1 net earnings – $47 million
Members – NA

Their company value is currently $1.425 billion.  If we assume Q1 revenue will continue (which is unlikely – Zynga is likely to increase in revenue in Q3 and Q4) their annual revenue would be $1.284 billion.  So what I’m seeing is investors valuing Facebook at over 21 times yearly revenue and bailing on Zynga to the point where the stock was frozen earlier today based on a multiplier of a virtually 1 to 1 annual revenue vs company valuation.  I think I’ll just go scratch my head and wonder at the state of the economy for a while.  While I’m doing that you can wonder at why companies like Zynga and LinkedIn are tanking.  Groupon is too (down 6.57% as of this writing) but that just makes sense to me as I viewed it as over-valued and then there’s that issue of unusually heavy trading just hours before a favorable earnings announcement (just a titch suspicious – you can read more on that on the Wall street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303879604577410503063634984.html).  Not so favorable (in my opinion) as to warrant their market value of over $7 billion ($559.3 million in Q1).

Note: I may find it overvalued however I do think their pricing is far more realistic than … say … Facebook.  But then, they actually provide a real-world deliverable so they can’t be worth as much right?

I can just picture the sales team at Google are sitting around thinking about how knowing their users, via analysis of email/search/etc.., drives their product, and how people using their services via video/audio are escaping that analysis.

And yet, doesn’t Google own the most sophisticated voice analysis system on the planet? Wouldn’t it be really easy to compress audio/video data, upload it to a Google server, and process it for relevance?

 
Let’s say you kept the NKOTB concert a complete secret because it’s your anniversary gift to your wife, and Google realizes you’re at the concert by the audio in the background of a phone call + your general location? If that means that Google now includes ‘Download NKOTB live at xyz concert’ adverts in your ad stream for a few days following, wouldn’t that be great?

Well those salespeople managed to convince someone at Google it’d be wise to at the very least patent such a method so that in the coming years they aren’t licensing it from their competition. Seems smart right?

Not with all the FUD – (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that is lingering on-line, no sir, this is war with the tin-foil beanie brigade.

 
Even Google Trends shows us how trust is at an all time low:
trust 

 
First of all, patenting a technology doesn’t guarantee it will happen; How long have we had flying car patents and still nothing feasible?

Secondly, what are the odds Google is going to force nervous users to flee to competing products by snooping on conversations without consent?

And finally, in several key locations around the planet, it’s technically illegal to record someone without their consent. Since a cell phone could pick-up a background conversation, it would be legal suicide to try and implement ‘eavesdropping’ technology without a boatload of safeguards, warnings, and disclaimers.

Nerds are Still Cool However..

We’ll need to talk about this more ‘in depth’ at a later stage in it’s development, but Google’s Knowledge Graph is very exciting.

Have a look at the Knowledge Graph video released yesterday by Google:

 
I’m sure Bing and competing search engines will just claim Google is evil and trying to keep you on their pages by giving you the answers you need instantly, but if that’s their idea of evil then slap on the horns and poke me with a trident.

The Canadian government has imposed a limit on Parliamentary debate for Bill C-11: The Copyright Modernization Act which will completely change the way that Canadians interact with web content.

While the bill’s proponents state that there are many benefits to the act, opponents state that the bill’s "digital lock" provisions are excessively restrictive and feel that they are the result of increasing pressure from US corporations.

Opponents state that these provisions will lock down content that has previously been available to consumers and must be immediately revised. In effect Canadians will not have the right to take material they purchase (music, movies etc) and transfer it onto different devices. If the proposed bill passes without amendment, any circumvention would be a crime; regardless if you have legally purchased the material you want to view on another platform.

The Stephen Harper conservative government has decided to defeat all proposed amendments to the bill from the Liberal and NDP parties. The Speaker of the House has selected 18 proposed amendments from Green Party Leader Elizabeth May for debate in the House of Commons.

In an email newsletter sent to constituents and in a video release, May contends that this is Canadians last chance to make any changes to the act:

"These amendments represent sensible changes that will ensure this bill does in fact modernize our copyright law, rather than unfairly undermine our rights as consumers – They will remove digital lock provisions and allow for exceptions, while addressing creators’ concerns about the possible effects of the addition of ‘education’ to the list of fair dealing categories."

The Liberal party has also launched a petition calling for amendments to Bill C-11’s digital lock rules which would make it illegal to copy a DVD so that you can watch it on your tablet device even if you are not infringing on the copyright.

They also state that "If the Bill passes without amendment, any circumvention will become a crime, even if it is only done to enjoy material you have legally purchased on the platform you want to view it on."

Following in the footfalls of the SOPA and PIPA controversies the ongoing debate for a fair and equitable balance between the copyright infringement and legitimate fair public usage is far from being resolved.

In a piracy case that’s been sitting around since 2010, a Finnish Court^{(*Ylivieskan käräjäoikeus)} has officially sided with the defendant, stating that she is not liable for her open WiFi connection.

The details of this particular case were very unique in that the timing of the infringement, a 12-minute period of piracy, occurred shortly after the woman in question hosted a public play with an audience of over 100 people in her home, which used to be a school until she purchased it.

Since there’s clearly no way to prove the home owner committed the act of piracy the court moved on to deliberate if the woman could be liable for ‘copyright infringement’ simply for not applying password protection to her WiFi connection.

After some deliberation the court concluded that an owner of open WiFi cannot be held responsible for the acts of third parties. Had this not been the final decision the legal status of all other open WiFi units, and wireless devices in general would have suddenly become questionable.

Personally, when I consider the frightening implications of assigning blame to someone who is partially a victim in a crime is horrible.

Lets put this in another context:

How would you feel if someone used a sophisticated cordless phone to attach themselves to your mom’s old cordless base station, ran some credit card fraud with her phone line, and she went to jail/was fined because she didn’t have enough security on her cordless phone?

It’d be like charging someone with a robbery because the suspects eluded the police by driving through someone’s property. You can’t say someone’s guilty of a crime because they didn’t lock their driveway gate.

While these examples aren’t exactly the same thing, this case opens the door to all sorts of concerns where we can’t hold people accountable for unwittingly providing an avenue for crime.

Google Glass Design is Patented

Not only does this show some further commitment to ‘finishing’ the Google Glass project, it also gives us a ‘sneak peak’ at a bit more of the design of the hardware.

 
In particular I found the ‘behind the ear’ data module really interesting and it answers a few questions I had about how expensive it would be to get the needed circuitry down to a compact enough scale to fit into this product design.

I’m guessing that the top area near the ‘eyebrow’ with the ‘hashing’ marks is touch sensitive, allowing you to trigger things like photo capture or toggle an option that you need to be triggered explicitly.

I don’t need to tell readers that I’m personally excited about wearing my cell phone ‘inside’ the glasses I already wear every day. People who worry about the weight clearly don’t know much about eye-wear and balance.

The only thing I can see in this design that worries me is that it might have a tendency to be ‘right side heavy’ and I’m sure they could resolve that by moving something like the battery over to the other side and wire it via the frame.

You have undoubtedly heard about the Penguin algorithm update from Google and the effects it has already to have on rankings. There is increasing speculation around the Google webmaster forums that another update has just been rolled out.

Scattered communications from Google seem to indicate that this is not a new update being rolled out, and that it is not a Panda refresh either.

Regardless, there have been many reports in the forums discussing major ranking fluctuations during the last 24 hours. One user details the steps he took to recover after being hit by the latest update stating:

"I had around 30 sites hit by Penguin on the 24/4, yesterday the first one resurfaced back to number 2 for its keywords which is encouraging."

"What did I do – the site was just 15 pages, the inner pages were all thin content boiler plate stuff, so I deleted them all to see what would happen and left the home page which is 500 words of original content."

"Links – did i touch incoming links, no I am going to try anchor text dilution on some other sites where I suspect this problem but did not create any more links on the recovered site."

Barry Schwartz is in the process of contacting Google for clarification on weather this is an isolated incident related to Mother’s Day search skewing traffic and rankings or is it a legitimate algorithm change.

As with the Panda updates, several more iterations of the Penguin algorithm are inevitable and will certainly cry havoc on many sites over the coming months.

While Google retains its standoffish approach to divulging information to the public, it is comforting to have someone like Mr. Schwartz advocating on behalf of the confused millions left to the mercies of the Google gods.

We could have ‘spun’ the information that it’s very unlikely we’ll see competing browsers in ARM edition of Windows 8, explaining that the difficulties make it the same as a ‘ban’…

…But we respect the fact that all (3?) of our readers come here for the truth on these topics, and only dirty laundry needs a spin cycle.

Where else is FireFox ‘banned’?

ChromeOS ? Yep!

iOS ? Yessir!

So why would Firefox/Mozilla come out today and only complain there’s a ‘ban’ on Firefox for Windows 8 ARM Edition?

Well from what I can tell, they never did, and the ‘b-word’ was all ‘spin’ by a very annoying technology news site that keeps amazing us with bad headlines and horribly inaccurate publications.

The TRUTH is that it will be VERY hard for any company to get approval for a browser running in Windows 8 ARM Edition because it’s not just ‘another version’ of Windows, it’s a Mobile OS with very clear goals that make it unique.

First of all is memory handling and battery use. By now we should all understand that you can’t deploy programs coded for x86 operating systems and expect them to sip carefully on resources like batteries and memory without some major changes.

Since ARM is aimed at ‘portable’ we can also expect people to seek more privacy and security on these devices. Allowing any-old-app onto the OS won’t happen. You’ve had to have a certificate to publish your apps on Microsoft’s mobile operating systems since the very first days of Windows Mobile, and that will not change any time soon.

If Microsoft wants to protect the quality and end user experience of their mobile products, locking down risky third party software clearly is one of the best ways for them to do it.

This is in no way a ‘ban’ on applications, and Microsoft admits that they are willing to help developers reach a quality standard that will permit them to publish to this new mobile platform.

On the plus side, I was tossing out some rather negative feelings about Microsoft’s investments in technical news sites, and this latest fumble leaves me with some doubts as to who’s invested in whom. Either that or this oft mentioned news source is chock full of people who not only don’t know what’s going on but they don’t even know the hand that feeds them? Crazy.

SEOmoz wants to develop software to add to their existing toolset available to subscribers on their website to aid in determining if their own website or a competitor’s website appears to be spammy in nature.

If SEOmoz has developed a method to analysis signals that can be used to determine if a site is spammy, it is safe to assume that Google is viewing the page or site in question in the same light. Links that are determined to be spammy will pass little link juice and could potentially incur a penalty from Google. Fishkin summed it the process by saying that if they (SEOmoz) classifies a site or page as having spammy backlinks, “we’re pretty sure Google would call it webspam.”
Some in the SEO community are angered at Rand Fishkin’s policy of “outing” SEOs for spamming practices, so this time, Rand has enlisted the public to answer whether or not he should do so.

Some of our team members, though, do have concerns about whether SEOs will be angry that we’re “exposing” spam. My feeling is that it’s better to have the knowledge out there (and that anything we can catch, Google/Bing can surely better catch and discount) then to keep it hidden. I’m also hopeful this can help a lot of marketers who are trying to decide whether to acquire certain links or who have to dig themselves out of a penalty (or reverse what might have caused it).

Preliminary results show that most are in favor of Rand’s reporting of other SEOs for spammy practices. Certainly the reporting of offenders will help Google to combat the unwanted webspam that has permeated search results since the inception of the Internet into mainstream society. It is the new mantra of the modern web; you need to follow the rules and guidelines established by Google for fear of serious reprisal – whether or not you agree with it. Ultimately, what benefits the search results, benefits the searcher.

On a slighlty related note, I would like to suggest Feathers McGraw as the new face for the Penguin algorithm update from Google…

 
Google can now legally send it’s self driving cars out solo, with nobody inside.

I had to say that to myself to fully appreciate how impressive this moment is in history.

Sure this puts a twist on Driving Miss Daisy 2 – Drive Harder, but overall I’m very excited about the countless ways this will improve our lives, save gasoline, time, money, and most of all, lives.

Hopefully Mr.Freeman won’t mind?

Why Buy Facebook Stock?

Lets say you had money that isn’t already invested in proven winners like Google, HTC, Intel, etc.., and you wanted to invest in something a bit different, and for some reason wanted to gamble on something as fickle as social media (remember MySpace?).

Personally, even with that list of caveats, I wouldn’t be looking at buying FB stocks, and Reddit’s co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, agrees.

In an interview that is circulating the web like mad, Mr.Ohanian explains why he wouldn’t invest anything in Facebook, citing their support of CISPA as a primary reason. While I agree that the CISPA support is horrible, my list of concerns is a bit longer.

For my needs I’d want to pick a business with a clear path forward, not one with heavy investments from Microsoft, yet promote’s the competition’s browser :

This is taken from the Power Editor tool in FB

 
I also wouldn’t invest in a company that’s decided it’s crucial to place privacy so far behind promotion.

These ‘login to view this story’ roadblocks are a bane of FB and recent studies back up my own findings: people will not login to FB to read something. It’s much easier to highlight the title and right-click it for a Google search and that’s what users are doing.

When you stop listening to your users, and usher them to the competition, you really can’t be shocked when people don’t struggle to get their wallets out for a chance to buy some stock.