JP's Clog

LinkedIn Stock Races Ahead 11%; Every New Idea Is Working

2015-02-09T20:34:00.003+08:00

by George Anders

Tech CEOs like LinkedIn boss Jeff Weiner operate almost like venture capitalists. They pump money into a host of internal growth ideas, periodically pruning their portfolio by burying the losers and hoping that the occasional big winners will make it all worthwhile. Hard stuff, but with LinkedIn stock up 11% Friday on the strength of its latest earnings report, Weiner right now is batting 1.000.

Just about everything on LinkedIn’s new-project list these days is working — and a lot of it is off to an explosive start. A push into China has yielded a doubling of members there, to 8 million, in the past year. A campaign to attract job advertisements has taken LinkedIn from a puny start to about three million listings, with more growth likely. When LinkedIn announced its fourth quarter earnings late Thursday, it ticked off wins in a half-dozen new or emerging areas.

Investors, naturally, are giddy with delight. Partway through today’s trading, LinkedIn shares leapt 14%, or $33 apiece, to a record high of $271, before finishing the day at $263.40, up 11%. Not only did the fourth quarter results top expectations; LinkedIn also laid out full year projections for 2015 that were noticeably above what Wall Street’s consensus had been.

Jeff Weiner

The impact of LinkedIn’s new initiatives is so striking that it’s changing the overall significance of LinkedIn’s biggest line of business, Talent Solutions. (That’s the part of LinkedIn that specializes in selling ultra-high-end tools to corporate recruiters, so they can comb through LinkedIn’s member databases and find exactly the sorts of people they might want to hire.) Ever since LinkedIn went public in 2011, Talent Solutions has been both the biggest and the fastest growing part of the company. It is the division that has functioned as the proverbial earnings locomotive.

Not anymore. Even though Talent Solutions’s revenue grew 41% in the latest quarter, it couldn’t keep pace with the company’s overall revenue growth rate of 44%. That’s because Marketing Solutions — the advertising-heavy business unit where some of LinkedIn’s fastest-growing new initiatives reside, grew 56%. The result: Talent Solutions is now a slightly smaller part of LinkedIn’s overall revenue mix than it was a year ago. The new kids are elbowing their way in.

In a conference call with investors late Thursday, Weiner highlighted a variety of growth initiatives in Marketing Solutions. Among them: rapid growth in “sponsored updates,” in which companies pay extra to show news, analysis or other content to likely job candidates. He said such material now accounts for about one-third of Marketing Solutions revenue. He also said that LinkedIn’s $170 million acquisition of Bizo last year now gives the company the tools needed to provide marketers with a more sophisticated and fully integrated way of reaching customers

LinkedIn chief financial officer Steve Sardello also drew attention to Sales Navigator, a relatively new LinkedIn product that aims to let salespeople comb through the site’s databases to search for potential customers — in much the same way that corporate recruiters already do. Sardello said that Sales Navigator now accounts for about 30% of all premium subscriptions, up from about 25% a quarter earlier. Weiner said he foresees a time when Sales Navigator will become its own separate business unit, giving LinkedIn four main sources of revenue, instead of the current three.

more...

Google acquires photo backup service Odysee

2015-02-09T20:20:00.002+08:00

Google has acquired mobile backup service Odysee for an undisclosed sum today. The company will join the Google+ team, and will likely use its expertise to boost Google’s photo management offerings.

Odysee allowed users to back up full quality photos and videos to local storage, sync them across devices and share them with followers — making what the company called an ‘endless camera roll’.

Odysee’s iOS and Android apps have been pulled from their respective stores, but the company says it will continue to offer the service until Febraury 23. It will then allow users to download an archive of their images.

Microsoft Buys Acompli, an Email Start-Up

2014-12-02T21:26:00.001+08:00

By NICK WINGFIELD

Microsoft once again is showing that it wants to meet mobile users where they are, not where the company hopes they will be one day.

The company said it had acquired Acompli, a young start-up that makes an email application for iOS and Android mobile devices. Microsoft is paying around $200 million for the company, according to someone briefed on the deal, who asked for anonymity because terms of the agreement were private.

Acompli, only 18 months old, was founded with the “vision of making the best mobile email application on any platform and across all services,” Javier Soltero, the chief executive of the company, said in a blog post on Monday. Basic email applications are already a core part of the software that comes with mobile devices, but that hasn’t stopped a number of start-ups from attempting to innovate in the category.

Acompli has received praise from reviewers, especially for a feature that attempts to intelligently organize incoming messages, creating a queue for the most important ones so people can be more efficient on their mobile devices.

The deal, though, is another sign of how completely Microsoft has shaken up its playbook in the mobile market since Satya Nadella took over as chief executive this year. Mr. Nadella has made the development of apps and services for the two highest volume mobile platforms — Android and Apple’s iOS — a top priority. Before Mr. Nadella took over, the company focused most of its energy on stealing market share for Windows Phone, its own mobile operating system, with disappointing results.

Mr. Nadella has released versions of Office, its cash cow applications, for Android and iOS. The company recently decided to make full-featured versions of the app free.

While it didn’t reveal its plans for Acompli, Microsoft said it would combine its efforts with work being done by the team responsible for Outlook, Microsoft’s email, calendar and contact management software for computers. Rajesh Jha, a Microsoft corporate vice president, said in a blog post that the deal “will expedite our work to deliver the full power of Office to mobile devices.” He promised more details in the coming months.

All make sense

2014-11-13T23:53:00.001+08:00

Why Monster.com Is Failing And Others Will Follow

2014-11-13T23:25:00.003+08:00

by Lisa Earle McLeod

In 2006 Monster.com was one of the 20 most visited websites in the world. By January of 2011, Monster was rated the worst stock of the year. Earlier this year, 2014, Monster launched a new strategy and global rebrand in an attempt to right their ship. It didn’t work. Earlier this week, Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi resigned, and as of this writing Monster shares are down 43% this year.

What went wrong?

A billion dollar organization once heralded as the industry innovator is on the verge of becoming irrelevant.

Industry analysts suggest that Monster’s demise is due to their inability to compete with newer, more nimble, more connected technologies like LinkedIn. The industry analysts are wrong. Lack of competitive differentiation and old technology are the symptoms of Monster’s decline. They’re not the cause.

The real reason for Monster’s freefall into oblivion is that they lost their Noble Purpose.

Monster was originally founded on the belief that helping people find jobs was a Noble endeavor. Their iconic “When I Grow Up” Super Bowl ad featuring kids saying, “When I grow up I want to be a yes man” or “I want to claw my way into middle management” made it clear, you deserve a better job, and Monster wants to help you find it. Founder Jeff Taylor’s mantra was, “It’s half about a better job, and half about a better life.”

Flash forward, recently departed CEO Iannuzzi’s leadership narrative was never about helping customers having a better life. He focused exclusively on earnings. During a Monster town hall earlier this year, he didn’t mention job seekers once. Instead, he told his entire organization that the goal of their new strategy was to increase the stock price. Not help customers, not improve the industry, just increase the earnings.

Like all CEO’s, Iannuzzi was under pressure to drive the numbers. He might not be a bad guy. Yet he made a classic, very common, leadership error. He focused on profit instead of purpose. And in doing so, he eroded the very thing that had made his company great. Their business was no longer about making people’s lives better; it was about making money, end of story.

Monster serves as a cautionary tale. The same scenario could have just as easily happened elsewhere. In fact, it has. Companies like Blackberry, Blockbuster, Sears, and Toys ‘R Us, who were once giants in their spaces, took gut-wrenching tumbles when they lost their sense of purpose. It wasn’t a loss of earnings that caused the loss of purpose; it was a loss of purpose that caused earnings to decline. In each of these organizations the leaders were so intent on making money from their existing business models, that they lost sight of the true purpose of their business, to improve life for their customers. With no lens on the customer’s world, they were out innovated, outsold, and out maneuvered. They became dinosaurs, because they focused on profit instead of purpose.

Compare Iannuzzi’s earnings message with these leaders, who are our clients:

Ryan Holmes, the founder of Hootsuite, the social media firm exploding globally, kicks off his town halls saying, “We’re more than a social media company. We empower our clients to turn their messages into meaningful relationships.”
Rick Russell, Chief Commercial officer for Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, drove double-digit growth rallying employees around the Noble Purpose, “We bring health and hope into the lives of patients.”
Bruce Poon Tip, the founder of Toronto based G Adventures, who has become the leader in adventure travel says they owe much of their consistent thirtyfive percent plus growth to the clarity of their Noble Purpose, “We help people discover more passion, purpose, and happiness.”
As you read these statements, ask yourself, who would you rather work for? A boss who tells you that your purpose is to deliver earnings to shareholders? Or a boss who tells you that your true and noble purpose is to make a difference in the lives of your customers?

Monster and the other failed, and failing, organizations are not unique. The same thing happens in conference and boardrooms every single day. The narrative of profit, earnings and bonuses that was supposed to improve employee performance has had the opposite effect. It stripped the joy and meaning from work in ways that have a chilling effect on company performance, customer service, and employee morale.

The idea that a leader’s primary purpose is to drive earnings is pervasive in many, if not most, organizations.

Unfortunately, it’s also wrong.

2014-11-13T23:14:00.001+08:00

by STEVE KOVACH

A smaller percentage of new iPhone buyers made the switch from an Android device this year compared to last year, according to a survey from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP).

The survey polled people who bought an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus within the first 30 days and compared it to the first 30 days of the iPhone 5S and 5C launch last year.

In 2013, 23% of new iPhone buyers were switching from Android. This year, only 12% said they were switching from Android. Everyone else was upgrading from an older iPhone model.

Here's the chart from CIRP:

CIRP

Apple has reported record sales for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus so far. It sold 10 million units opening weekend alone. That should be further bolstered now that the phones are on sale in China and several other countries.

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

2014-11-12T00:26:00.000+08:00

Illustration By Julian Garcia

Two years ago, Rich Terrile appeared on Through the Wormhole, the Science Channel’s show about the mysteries of life and the universe. He was invited onto the program to discuss the theory that the human experience can be boiled down to something like an incredibly advanced, metaphysical version of The Sims.

It’s an idea that every college student with a gravity bong and The Matrix on DVD has thought of before, but Rich is a well-regarded scientist, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is currently writing an as-yet-untitled book about the subject, so we’re going to go ahead and take him seriously.

The essence of Rich’s theory is that a “programmer” from the future designed our reality to simulate the course of what the programmer considers to be ancient history—for whatever reason, maybe because he’s bored.

According to Moore’s Law, which states that computing power doubles roughly every two years, all of this will be theoretically possible in the future. Sooner or later, we’ll get to a place where simulating a few billion people—and making them believe they are sentient beings with the ability to control their own destinies—will be as easy as sending a stranger a picture of your genitals on your phone.

This hypothesis—versions of which have been kicked around for centuries—is becoming the trippy notion of the moment for philosophers, with people like Nick Bostrom, the director of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, seriously considering the premise.

Until recently, the simulation argument hadn’t really attracted traditional researchers. That’s not to say he is the first scientist to predict our ability to run realistic simulations (among others, Ray Kurzweil did that in his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines), but he is one of the first to argue we might already be living inside one. Rich has even gone one step further by attempting to prove his theories through physics, citing things like the observable pixelation of the tiniest matter and the eerie similarities between quantum mechanics, the mathematical rules that govern our universe, and the creation of video game environments.

Just think: Whenever you fuck up there could be the intergalactic version of an overweight 13-year-old Korean boy controlling you and screaming “Shit!” into an Xbox headset. It sort of takes the edge off things.

More...

3D interaction - house design

2014-11-11T23:51:00.002+08:00

Real-Time Bidding Is Taking Over The Digital Ad Market

2014-11-11T23:46:00.001+08:00

Automated ad buying and selling tools are increasingly driving digital ad sales in the U.S. That means less human-mediated, manual sales, and more opportunities for ad tech specialists to gain a share of ad spend.

A new report from BI Intelligence finds that real-time bidding (RTB), a key piece of the programmatic ecosystem, will account for over 33% of U.S. digital ad sales, or $18.2 billion in 2018, up from just $3.1 billion in 2013.

Complementarity

2014-11-04T23:26:00.001+08:00

Bohr summarized the principle as follows:

...however far the [quantum physical] phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is simply that by the word "experiment" we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangements and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics.

This crucial point...implies the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear.... Consequently, evidence obtained under different experimental conditions cannot be comprehended within a single picture, but must be regarded as complementary in the sense that only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects.^[2]

More...

Just when I thought I was out,

2014-10-28T22:56:00.001+08:00

Sudoku, Linear Optimization, and the Ten Cent Diet

2014-10-09T10:07:00.001+08:00

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

(cross-posted on the Google Apps Developer blog, and the Google Developers blog)

In 1945, future Nobel laureate George Stigler wrote an essay in the Journal of Farm Economics titled The Cost of Subsistence about a seemingly simple problem: how could a soldier be fed for as little money as possible?

The “Stigler Diet” became a classic problem in the then-new field of linear optimization, which is used today in many areas of science and engineering. Any time you have a set of linear constraints such as “at least 50 square meters of solar panels” or “the amount of paint should equal the amount of primer” along with a linear goal (e.g., “minimize cost” or “maximize customers served”), that’s a linear optimization problem.

At Google, our engineers work on plenty of optimization problems. One example is our YouTube video stabilization system, which uses linear optimization to eliminate the shakiness of handheld cameras. A more lighthearted example is in the Google Docs Sudoku add-on, which instantaneously generates and solves Sudoku puzzles inside a Google Sheet, using the SCIP mixed integer programming solver to compute the solution.

Today we’re proud to announce two new ways for everyone to solve linear optimization problems. First, you can now solve linear optimization problems in Google Sheets with the Linear Optimization add-on written by Google Software Engineer Mihai Amarandei-Stavila. The add-on uses Google Apps Script to send optimization problems to Google servers. The solutions are displayed inside the spreadsheet. For developers who want to create their own applications on top of Google Apps, we also provide an API to let you call our linear solver directly.

Second, we’re open-sourcing the linear solver underlying the add-on: Glop (the Google Linear Optimization Package), created by Bruno de Backer with other members of the Google Optimization team. It’s available as part of the or-tools suite and we provide a few examples to get you started. On that page, you’ll find the Glop solution to the Stigler diet problem. (A Google Sheets file that uses Glop and the Linear Optimization add-on to solve the Stigler diet problem is available here. You’ll need to install the add-on first.)

Stigler posed his problem as follows: given nine nutrients (calories, protein, Vitamin C, and so on) and 77 candidate foods, find the foods that could sustain soldiers at minimum cost.

The Simplex algorithm for linear optimization was two years away from being invented, so Stigler had to do his best, arriving at a diet that cost $39.93 per year (in 1939 dollars), or just over ten cents per day. Even that wasn’t the cheapest diet. In 1947, Jack Laderman used Simplex, nine calculator-wielding clerks, and 120 person-days to arrive at the optimal solution.

Glop’s Simplex implementation solves the problem in 300 milliseconds. Unfortunately, Stigler didn’t include taste as a constraint, and so the poor hypothetical soldiers will eat nothing but the following, ever:

Enriched wheat flour
Liver
Cabbage
Spinach
Navy beans

Is it possible to create an appealing dish out of these five ingredients? Google Chef Anthony Marco took it as a challenge, and we’re calling the result Foie Linéaire à la Stigler:

This optimal meal consists of seared calf liver dredged in flour, atop a navy bean purée with marinated cabbage and a spinach pesto.

Chef Marco reported that the most difficult constraint was making the dish tasty without butter or cream. That said, I had the opportunity to taste our linear optimization solution, and it was delicious.

To Reach China, LinkedIn Plays by Local Rules

2014-10-07T10:18:00.000+08:00

By PAUL MOZUR and VINDU GOEL

Smartphone-using commuters in Beijing. Western social media are often blocked in China.Andy Wong/Associated Press

HONG KONG — For American technology companies from Microsoft to Facebook to Google, China is a difficult, even impossible, place to operate.

But one company, the social network LinkedIn, has found a way to do business — by being willing to compromise on the free expression that is the backbone of life on the Western Internet.

LinkedIn’s experience provides a blueprint, and perhaps a cautionary lesson, for Silicon Valley as it tries to crack the vast Chinese market. Other American tech companies are watching with great interest, wondering whether LinkedIn will find an equilibrium between free speech and Chinese law that it can live with.

“Over the next five years, things will continue to progress in a positive fashion over there, so it’s important to be there today,” said Kerry Rice, an Internet analyst at Needham, a brokerage firm. “If LinkedIn figures out how to navigate the operating environment in China, clearly other companies will try to imitate that.”

LinkedIn’s global English-language site has attracted four million Chinese members without gaining much attention from the Chinese government. But the company wanted to reach more of China’s estimated 140 million professional workers, and so in February it introduced a Chinese-language version.

The Chinese-language site has attracted about a million new members and seems to have the tacit approval of the government. It is functioning without blockages even though the authorities have cracked down on other Internet services, including Instagram and Yahoo, in reaction to the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

The secret to LinkedIn’s seeming success? Aside from its willingness to play by Chinese rules on expression, the company has relinquished 7 percent of its local operation to two well-connected Chinese venture capital firms. Having such a relationship with homegrown firms is crucial for foreign web companies seeking to operate in China, experts say.

“The government needs to know who they can call, and as a foreign company you need to know before your site gets shut down so you have a chance to do something about it,” said Duncan Clark, founder of BDA China, a consulting firm that advises foreign companies on China’s tech sector. “That’s worth a lot, to have that channel.”

A spokesman for LinkedIn, Hani Durzy, said the company opened a Chinese-language site because of its “belief that the creation of economic opportunity can have a profound impact on the lives of Chinese individuals, much as it has elsewhere in the world.”

“While we strongly support freedom of expression,” he added, “we recognized when we launched that we would need to adhere to the requirements of the Chinese government in order to operate in China. So the decision to proceed in China was one that we weighed heavily.”

On the Chinese- and English-language sites in China, the company censors content that the authorities consider politically sensitive, using a combination of software algorithms and human reviewers. People whose posts are blocked get an emailed form letter advising them that a posted item contains “content prohibited in China” and “will not be seen by LinkedIn members located in China.”

LinkedIn also does not provide Chinese-language users certain important tools — like the ability to create or join groups or to post long essays — that allow people elsewhere to have public discussions and form communities.

Although LinkedIn’s strategy has given it access to Chinese speakers, analysts say it poses risks for the company’s reputation and growth strategy.

Like many American tech companies, LinkedIn, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has promoted itself as dedicated to free-market principles. Too much censorship could cause users to flee.

What’s more, if LinkedIn’s business grows larger in China, that could give the government more leverage to make demands about what type of content is permissible globally.

The company has already stumbled a bit in its entry into the Chinese market. It angered some non-Chinese customers, who found that posts they made in English while in China were blocked globally as part of the company’s effort to protect its Chinese users from anything that could attract unwanted government scrutiny. LinkedIn moved to loosen its policy last month, allowing posts blocked in China to be seen elsewhere.

Some also say LinkedIn has not communicated clearly how and why it is censoring content.

For example, Bill Bishop, a media commentator and tech investor in China, said content he posted about China from a connection in the United States was blocked by the service. When he inquired why, the company inaccurately responded that it was because he had posted the item from China, when the real problem was that he had listed China as his work location.

Other tech companies have weighed the risks of trying to satisfy the Chinese government and taken a different approach.

Google, which once acceded to China’s demands to censor content in the country, noisily reversed course in 2010, moving to deliver uncensored results to Chinese users from servers in Hong Kong and souring its relationship with the authorities to this day.

Twitter has been blocked in China for years and says it will not censor posts because to do so would “sacrifice the principles of the platform,” according to Colin Crowell, the company’s vice president for global public policy.

Vine, a short-video service owned by Twitter, operates freely in China without “any special arrangement,” Mr. Crowell said.

Although Facebook — the world’s largest social network, with about 1.3 billion monthly users worldwide — is blocked in China, it hasn’t given up on getting in the country. But it is trying to use commerce to pry open the door, selling ads to Chinese companies and government organizations that want to reach consumers outside China.

Facebook is also studying the experience of Instagram, its separately operated photo-sharing app, which is growing quickly with only occasional blockages by the Chinese government.

“We think this is an exciting opportunity,” Dan Neary, the company’s vice president for Asia and the Pacific, said in a statement.

Analysts say LinkedIn is well positioned to be acceptable to Beijing because it can argue that it makes the employment market more efficient, ultimately spurring the economy. China’s Internet regulators often argue that the main goal of development of the Internet should be to bolster economic growth.

China’s closed markets have given a huge head start to four homegrown companies, which dominate the Internet there: Alibaba in e-commerce, Baidu in search, Tencent in video gaming and instant messaging and Sina in social networking.

LinkedIn itself faces competition from local rivals like Zhaopin and 51Jobs.com, which both have more users than it does in China.

LinkedIn’s partnership with two local players — China Broadband Capital and a Chinese affiliate of Sequoia Capital, an American venture capital firm — has helped it manage its relationship with government officials.

C.B.C. was founded by Edward Tian, a well-connected investor and former entrepreneur who once ran a telecommunications company with the son of a former Chinese president, Jiang Zemin. The company has helped bring at least one other Silicon Valley company, Evernote, into China.

“There have been a lot of problems with companies like Facebook and Twitter,” said Kevin Wang, a C.B.C. spokesman. “We think one of the key reasons is the lack of communication, even the absence of communication, between these companies and the Chinese government.”

The local partners have a strong incentive to help LinkedIn succeed. Under the partnership agreement, they can buy an additional 21 percent of the joint venture for $20 million if certain conditions are met.

LinkedIn does retain control of the venture, securing the bulk of the profit as well as the risk.

Under Chinese law, the joint venture will eventually need to obtain an Internet content provider’s license to keep operating. The license has some benefits, but also some downsides; once granted, the company will be required to store information about its Chinese users in China.

Doing so would make it much easier for the government to demand information on, say, dissidents who use the service — a conundrum that tripped up Yahoo nearly a decade ago and prompted that company to essentially pull out of the country.

Despite the challenges, LinkedIn is optimistic about its efforts in China.

“In the end, the most important consideration for us was providing an opportunity for millions of Chinese professionals to significantly expand their economic opportunities,” said Mr. Durzy, the LinkedIn spokesman. “We want to get it right in China, so we will continue to listen and learn."

Cloud Revenue Jumps, Led by Microsoft and IBM - NYTimes.com

2014-08-05T15:17:00.000+08:00

By STEVE LOHR

Microsoft cloud servers in Quincy, Wash. The company’s cloud-computing revenue grew 164 percent in the second quarter. Richard Duvall

The virtue of fear as a source of animating energy has long been recognized in the quicksilver tech industry. “Only the paranoid survive,” as Andrew S. Grove, Intel’s longtime leader, put it — a guiding principle that was also the title of his 1996 book on management.

The fear factor is clearly at work now in the fast-growing market for cloud computing. The latest quarterly reports from technology companies and market research show that two of the fastest movers in the emergent cloud business are the incumbent giants of traditional software, Microsoft and IBM. Their business is most at risk from the shift to computing delivered over the Internet from distant data centers, with the business model of a pay-for-use service rather than a product.

Microsoft’s cloud revenue jumped 164 percent in the second quarter, while IBM’s surged 86 percent, according to a report last week by the Synergy Research Group. Amazon is still way ahead, with $962 million in cloud revenue, compared with $370 million for Microsoft, and IBM’s $259 million, Synergy estimates. But Amazon’s growth rate, at 49 percent, was only slightly ahead of the torrid 45 percent pace of the cloud market as a whole.

Cloud Services in Second Quarter

While Amazon has been on a level of its own, Microsoft and IBM experienced extremely strong growth in businesses dedicated to cloud infrastructure services in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago.

Company	Second Quarter Revenue	Annual Growth
Amazon	$962 million	49%
Microsoft	$370	164%
IBM	$259	86%
Salesforce	$203	38%
Google	$169	47%

Source: Synergy Research Group

The progress by Microsoft and IBM was emphasized in the companies’ quarterly financial reports and conference calls with analysts. “It’s not just talk — they are backing it up with a lot of investment,” said John Dinsdale, an analyst at Synergy.

The so-called magic quadrant reports by Gartner, a technology research firm, are closely followed by tech suppliers and their corporate customers. The reports include assessments of tech companies’ strengths and weaknesses as well as a graphic plotting companies on two axes. Left-to-right placement in the graphic is based on “completeness of vision,” and bottom-to-top placement shows “ability to execute.” “Leaders” are in the upper-right quadrant of the graphic, while “niche players” are consigned to the lower left.

In Gartner’s report last year on basic cloud services, IBM was among the niche players (and in 2012, it wasn’t even included as a player at all). This year, helped by the acquisition of SoftLayer, a cloud start-up, and its own internal investment, it has moved sharply to the right, and higher, though it is not yet in the leaders area — the vision is strong, according to Gartner, but the execution still lags a bit.

Microsoft has moved up and to the right this year, into the leaders area. Last year, Gartner positioned Microsoft about where IBM is this year.

Amazon is still the star in Gartner’s chart of the cloud industry, some distance above Microsoft, the only other company in the leaders quadrant, among 15 companies Gartner included in the report.

Measurements in the cloud marketplace are tricky. Companies define their cloud businesses differently. And the big companies do not report their cloud revenue or profit separately, although they do occasionally make statements.

The Old Guard Moves Ahead in the New World

The research firm Gartner plotted the current landscape of companies offering cloud infrastructure services compared with last year. Notable among the shifts are moves by legacy technology companies. A $2 billion deal for SoftLayer in 2013 has helped IBM move from a position of needing to catch up to one of increasing leadership in the market. MICROSOFT, meanwhile, has been trying to turn itself around and has recently emphasized its cloud offerings, a strategy that is appearing to pay off. Last month, the company estimated thatannual revenue from its cloud business would be $4.4 billion.

Note: Charts via Gartner.

When Microsoft announced its quarterly results last month, it declared that its cloud revenue was running at a $4.4 billion annual rate. IBM said its cloud business was 50 percent higher so far this year, but did not supply a dollar figure. In its annual report, IBM said that its cloud revenue in 2013 was $4.4 billion. So this year would appear to be on track to be well north of $6 billion. Amazon’s cloud revenue, according to a recent estimate by Pacific Crest Securities, will reach $5 billion this year.

Yet the Microsoft and IBM numbers include things not in the Amazon estimates. Amazon’s cloud offers computing, storage and basic software tools used by engineers. But Microsoft and IBM add the software delivered to customers over the cloud, from spreadsheets to data-analysis applications. IBM’s revenue total, analysts say, also includes cloud-related services and even hardware used in setting up cloud computing environments that companies own themselves, so-called private clouds.

So comparing Microsoft and IBM’s cloud revenue to Amazon’s is not an apples-to-apples exercise. “For Microsoft, it is apples, oranges and pears,” said Lydia Leong, a Gartner analyst. “For IBM, it’s apples, oranges, pears, and the kitchen sink.”

Yet it is the business beyond basic cloud computing — beyond the apples, to continue the analogy — that is most strategic to Microsoft and IBM. They have to convert their lucrative traditional software products to cloud offerings, and both companies are doing that aggressively.

Microsoft and IBM may lose licensing revenue in the shift to the lower-cost cloud model, selling services rather than products. But if they don’t make the transition quickly, they will lose their most valuable asset — their long-term corporate customers.

The cloud business today represents a tiny slice of the overall information technology market, but it is where the market is headed. Microsoft and IBM are eager to make that transition, and so are their clients. “In the past year, we’re seeing customers take the incumbents with them into the cloud,” said Robert P. Mahowald, an analyst at IDC.

For tech suppliers, big changes in the models of computing delivery and economics can be brutal or beautiful. In the 1980s and 1990s, the shift away from mainframes and minicomputers to personal computers tethered to corporate servers — known as client-server computing — nearly killed IBM, and it made Microsoft the dominant company of that era.

Adidas Scores Big In Sales And Social Media Growth During The World Cup - Forbes

2014-07-16T13:21:00.001+08:00

by Alicia Jessop

Ahead of the World Cup, adidas America’s director of soccer, Ernesto Bruce,noted that the 2014 FIFA World Cup would be the “…largest marketing campaign in the history of adidas soccer.” In discussing adidas’ retail, marketing and social media strategy, Bruce made one thing clear: adidas not only expected the teams and players it outfits to win on the field, but for the company to also win on the bottom line. Germany’s nail biting 1-0 finish over Argentina in the World Cup finals meant more to adidas than seeing every player on the pitch outfitted in its gear, as both Germany and Argentina are adidas federations. Rather, the match-up between Germany and Argentina was the perfect punctuation for a month of extreme growth both on the pitch and bottom line for adidas.

While debate has raged throughout the World Cup as to which sporting apparel company would see the greatest impact, one thing is certain: adidas experienced significant growth. In particular, four federations–Germany, Argentina, Colombia and Mexico–saw significant jersey sales growth.

According to Bruce, adidas has seen sales growth of 45-percent for 2014 over 2013 for Mexico’s jerseys. He notes that this is significant, as adidas “had retailers who wanted to cancel orders” when the team almost didn’t qualify for the World Cup. However, he notes that adidas “held strong and didn’t cancel orders or stop production.” To Bruce, the growth Mexico has seen in its jersey sales is attributed to its “fans still supporting the team, no matter what.”

Although Colombia was not an adidas team for the 2010 World Cup, adidas is happy with the growth of its jersey sales. ”Colombia has been a huge surprise. The way we measure their sales is by comparing them to France, which is a team we had in 2010 that we no longer have. We’ve sold 60-percent more Colombia jersey sales than we did with France in 2010. France is a global superpower in the sport and Colombia is relatively unknown, so for them to come in and perform the way they did and sell 60-percent more jerseys is huge,” Bruce said.

While both Mexico and Colombia out-performed adidas’ expectations in jersey sales, Germany and Argentina put up jersey sales numbers that has adidas celebrating. Since 2010, Argentina’s jersey sales have increased by 60-percent. ”If we were getting 20-percent growth, we would be very happy,” Bruce noted. That being said, adidas has to be even more jubilant over Germany’s jersey sales numbers. Bruce notes that adidas will sell 70-percent more Germany jerseys in the United States than it did during the 2010 World Cup. ”Germany winning the finals is huge for us. We are breaking records in sales in terms of Germany jerseys,” Bruce said.

Another product whose sales growth adidas is pleased with is the official match ball of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, brazuca. For starters, the Twitter following of @brazuca grew by 603-percent over the course of the World Cup, leaving the ball with an impressive Twitter following of 2.98 million people by the tournament’s end. ”It’s crazy for a ball to have that many followers. It took fans into unique places around Brazil that they otherwise couldn’t go. From a marketing standpoint, it was great,” Bruce noted.

Yet, while adidas celebrates the social media feats of the brazuca, perhaps what it is most excited about is sales of the ball. According to Bruce, adidas exceeded its financial target for the brazuca and will sell over 14 million brazucas worldwide in 2014. ”Our U.S. goal was to have around a 15-percent growth from the last World Cup. We are doubling that with over 30-percent growth on the brazuca. It’s a huge highlight for us,” Bruce said.

As the debate wages on over which sports apparel company felt the greatest footwear impact during the World Cup, adidas focuses its argument on the performance of its Battle Pack cleats. When asked how its footwear sales were impacted, Bruce noted, “Things like jersey sales, brazuca sales and the presence of the federations and our players, like Messi, in games lead to footwear sales.” Adidas also points to the fact that players wearing the F50 scored 46 goals during the World Cup to argue that it was the highest scoring cleat in the tournament. ”We are still tracking our overall sales. We don’t have anything to compare it to from 2010 as during the last World Cup, we didn’t have a World Cup inspired product. Now that the World Cup is over, we are going to commercialize our footwear. Fans can expect relentless footwear launches,” Bruce explained.

Along with a series of footwear launches lining the rest of 2014, adidas is well under way in strategizing for 2015. Much of the strategy surrounds how to build and expand upon the ground that the company gained during the World Cup. The company’s conversations range from how to move forward with the brazuca to how to activate around next year’s Women’s World Cup. ”We are going to look to continue our momentum. From a U.S. standpoint, we are going to continue celebrating the World Cup in a huge way. We are going to capitalize upon that,” Bruce said.

Messi never dives - the beauty of soccer.

2014-07-09T23:28:00.001+08:00

Neymar knows how to dive for a win.

CR7 knows how to dive for a win.

Of course, Robben knows it very well.

Messi shows people soccer is not just about winning, but how it should be played...

Mobile Calls Are The New Conversions: 7 Tips For SEMs

2014-07-01T10:19:00.001+08:00

by Susan Waldes

Are you seeing depressing plateaus, or even declines, in your year-over-year conversion numbers?

The fact is that a huge portion of search activity is moving to mobile. Soon, mobile activity will account for over 50% of searches. The problem is that the mobile conversions don’t follow the mobile searches.

For many SEM accounts, this means that year-over-year conversion volumes may be stagnating, or even look like they are declining. They probably aren’t; it’s just less trackable as people jump devices in their journey. People grab the device at hand and execute conversions in non-linear ways.

They are diverting our carefully tested funnels. This creates a mobile problem for SEM programs. Users click, they accrue cost. We all know there is some value — recognition, top-funnel and cross device things happening. But, our industry is obsessed with trackable ROI.

So what do we do about the issue? Larry Kim buried a nugget of gold in his post on Unicorn Ads with Great CTRs. He says:

When you’re testing mobile ads, you need to base your findings on call rate, not CTR or conversion rates.

Did you catch that? The way to use mobile paid search is to send phone calls. I wholeheartedly agree. I asked Larry to go into more depth on what he’s seeing at WordStream. He says:

The typical conversion rate of a click to a desktop landing page is around 4%. It’s brutal. Calls from click-to-call extension ads provide a way to short-circuit that leaky bucket entirely by having people call directly from the search engine results page without ever even having to go to your landing page! Wow. It’s not often that you can completely eliminate a stage in the conversion funnel like this. Our internal research shows that calls from ads are worth on average a whopping 3x more than clicks to your web page, yet cost around 20-30% less than desktop clicks on average!
So the goal should be to get the phone to ring as much as possible, because they’re the hottest leads you’ll ever get. The people who want to buy now will be the ones that call you. It’s like the call extensions are sucking the commercial intent out of the search engine results page. I had one client even extend their call center hours to take more orders by phone. So far, the vast majority of advertisers don’t seem to recognize this yet, but I suspect that it won’t be long before more catch on.

So, are you sold on calls yet? The only barrier to entry is that the world of phone calls is pretty new territory to most paid search professionals. So, let’s break down the barriers and get those phones ringing.

1. Get Over The Mental Hurdle

Call-based conversion optimization is very much like landing page and funnel optimization, only a bit more scary to the SEM because it’s real people talking in the real world. Don’t panic — there is still rich data to drive your decisions.

2. Prepare To Interface With A New Team

When you implement a serious call strategy for your mobile campaigns, you are going to be sending calls to some sort of sales team. This could mean agents in insurance, admissions counselors in education, or customer service for e-commerce — but essentially, sales.

The sales department is usually far removed from the marketing department. (Odd, isn’t it?) You probably are going to need to reach out to a new team to get your phone numbers and any internal data on the quality and outcome of the calls. What you are proposing is sending highly qualified inbound calls.

You are looking for the person that handles that. If it’s an organization that does lots of TV, direct mail or radio advertising, they probably have everything you need already in place. Did you know those guys were A/B testing creative 20 years ago via phone number tracking?

3. Get Versed In The IVR

To properly route and qualify the quality of your calls, you will probably be using an IVR — that is, an “Interactive Voice Response” system. You will recognize this as “Press 1 for AdWords, Press 2 for Analytics…”

Aside from routing and verifying quality, an IVR creates a barrier to entry that saves the costs of phone staff-time for users who don’t know what they want or don’t have the patience to qualify themselves.

Think of the IVR as your landing page — and, like landing pages, know that IVRs themselves, can be optimized.

4. Get Used To Some New Conversion Metrics

In AdWords, by using Google forwarding numbers, you can track phone calls as conversions based on their duration. Think of this duration as your “thank you page.”

The time it takes to get past the IVR (if you have one) is a good duration to start with. The right length will vary by business, but it’s worth putting some thought and analysis to it, because if you change the “right” duration for a conversion, you will break the historical continuity of your data.

Some companies will have rich call reporting systems that track call outcomes in more depth. Be prepared to analyze this data and be the person that makes sure it gets tied back to the source properly — ideally, down to the keyword level.

5. Rethink Your Campaigns

If you are serious about sending calls, the right call-to-action might be “call now” for your mobile-preferred ads. (It goes without saying that you’ll be implementing mobile-preferred ads.) If you are all-in to this call thing, you may want to set your call extension to “force” calls (phone only) and divert a landing page entirely.

If you give users a click or call choice in your ads, you can also track on-page calls on mobile now in AdWords and tie that back to your keywords via on-click tracking and a dynamically generated phone number on your page.

Call details reporting (on the dimensions tab) which shows the duration, area code and other valuable individual call data, only goes to the ad group level. If you need details at a keyword level for your most important keywords, consider single-keyword ad groups for them.

(Click to enlarge.)

In any case, prepare to put some deep thought into your campaign and ad structure to maximize the success of your mobile call strategy.

6. Get Ready For Some New Data Patterns

When analyzing call data, we are adding a second human (who answered the phone) to our analysis. This means there are some new, different data patterns to look out for.

First, look for missed calls during business hours. Are they happening around lunch? Do the numbers look bad on Friday afternoons? The call team may be tired and ready for the weekend. Terrible week you can’t figure out – a bunch of new hires at the call center? Is the best sales person on vacation that week?

In any case, just remember that with a new set of people in the equation, better or poor performance does not always quantifiably tie with the time-of-day, day of week or any other factors you are analyzing. Don’t assume the leads are poorer quality without first examining the call center itself.

In fact, if you see anything odd in your data, start by calling the numbers – call them a lot. Make sure the calls actually connect and that somebody answers them. I’ve had several clients where they say they aren’t getting quality calls, but it turns out the line is dead air, an answering machine picks up at 2 p.m., or a jaded employee answers with a threatening “what!?”

7. Optimize & Schedule

First, scheduling is your friend. An answering machine message is a way less-qualified leadthan a sales person answering the phone. In the absence of data, you probably don’t want to drive phone calls when there is nobody to answer them. You may want to go dark altogether on your campaigns, or perhaps just schedule the call extension to run when the phones are open.

I do suggest actually analyzing this for your business if you have the money and resources, but if not, err on the side of going dark when the answering machine picks up.

Get The Edge On Your Competition

It’s time to get that mobile search activity back in your conversion-data-filled arms and a mobile call strategy is the way to do it. It does take getting used to some new practices, but SEM doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You probably already mastered navigating LPO (landing page optimization) and CRO (conversion rate optimization), so jump over those hurdles and master phone calls to get the edge on your competition.

FIFA World Cup Sponsorship: Is it Worth It? - Analytic Partners

2014-07-01T10:16:00.001+08:00

Tom Wiesman, Senior Director, runs down the field of World Cup sponsorship and discusses its ROI success - or lack thereof - for the players involved.

For one month this summer, 32 footballing nations and a global audience will focus their attention on Brazil for the 20th edition of the FIFA World Cup. With so many eyes and ears concentrated on one place for an extended period of time, the desire to cash in on the event is strong – but it will come at a cost.

FIFA is expected to generate $4 billion in revenue for the upcoming tournament, with $1.4 billion coming from sponsorship revenue from 22 companies ($2.6 billion will be generated by TV rights to the matches). Since the 2006 Word Cup, sponsorship revenue increased 33% for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, and is expected to increase another 10% for the 2014 edition.

So is sponsoring the World Cup worth it? Will the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the sponsoring organizations be returned in sales growth? The answer is a bit complicated and requires a deeper look at the marketing affiliate structure within FIFA, as well as the uniqueness of each of the industries.

The New Strategy Paying Dividends (at Least for FIFA)

Beginning in 2006 after the World Cup in Germany, FIFA created a new commercial strategy with the cornerstone consisting of three Sponsorship Tiers:

FIFA Partners

Estimated to spend $730 million combined for the rights in 2014, the six FIFA Partners have the highest level of association with FIFA. Their relationship with soccer’s governing body extends beyond the World Cup, covering all major events, and supporting football globally.

FIFA World Cup Sponsors

With an aggregate spend estimated at $500 million, the eight FIFA World Cup Sponsors have rights to the FIFA Confederations Cup and the FIFA World Cup on a global basis.

National Supporters

This level will spend about $170 million combined in 2014 with rights limited to the host country (Brazil) only.

Return on Investment Likely to Vary Significantly

While ROI can be difficult to measure for major Sports Marketing investments, some directional results can be surmised.

FIFA partners such as Coke, with immense scale and global presence, likely benefit both in the short term (through incremental sales) and long term (building equity and brand loyalty).

Budweiser (INBEV), sponsoring its eighth consecutive World Cup, has secured pouring rights for all World Cup venues, and will likely score points off the field due to their role in getting the Brazilian government to temporarily lift the ban of alcohol sales at stadiums. Driving trial at matches being attended by fans from around the world may help break down the barriers American beers have faced – often being criticized as ‘watered down’ versions of ‘real’ beer.

Even some large, global companies will struggle to generate decent returns, however. Adidas has long been a FIFA sponsor, and although Adidas will have exclusive rights to World Cup events, there is built-in competition simply from the nations competing on the pitch. The host country, Brazil – in addition to traditional powers England, France, and Portugal - is sponsored by Nike.

Nike has managed to gain significant ground on Adidas in the football gear and outfitting business and launched a major ambush campaign during the 2010 World Cup that generated a larger buzz than any of the official sponsors.

The smaller, local organizations will likely find strong returns harder to attain due to scale and competition. Some local companies do not have the scale to drive the sales necessary to recoup their investment, and far too many competitors to official sponsors are able to market themselves aggressively in the World Cup environment without breaking any rules (or at least being caught breaking the rules).

Digital Strategy: Maximize Owned and Capitalize on Earned Media

Regardless of the sponsors’ likelihood to achieve a strong ROI, a key area on which to focus is the Digital and Social space. Owned properties such as brand website and Facebook pages generate engagement and online interaction that enhance sales from paid activities.

Analytic Partners studies have shown that Owned and Earned engagement has boosted incremental sales from Paid marketing an additional 2%-6%. So for every $1 billion in revenue (assuming a 50% organic base), a strong digital and social program could generate an additional $10-$30 million in sales enhancement.

That will certainly help close that gap between an unprofitable and profitable Sports Marketing investment!

While the world’s top footballing nations battle it out on the pitch, corporate sponsors of the World Cup will be battling each other, themselves, and the high cost of World Cup sponsorship to win victories in the marketplace.

Russian giant Mail.ru launches in the US as My.com, with free email and IM apps subsidized by mobile gaming - The Next Web

2013-11-19T22:49:00.001+08:00

OS and Android email client that loosely resembles Google’s native Gmail app crossed with the latest version of Tweetbot. It supports multiple email providers, including Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com, but promises realtime push notifications for all emails you receive, something most email clients (at least on iOS) don’t offer. To cut down on noise, users can opt to switch off push notifications for emails from the likes of social networks and marketers.

Meanwhile, My.com hopes to use myChat get a foothold in the US ‘SMS replacement’ IM app market before the likes of Asia’s Line make a big push there. The Whatsapp-style app offers VoIP and voice calling in addition to IM, and there’s the now almost compulsory inclusion of stickers that users can send to each other.

Both apps are free and (third-party) ad-free, relying on promotion of My.com’s mobile games to generate revenue. myGames currently offers three games; Jungle Heat, Poker Arena, and Lucky Fields. The company says that since a recent soft launch, Jungle Heat has already received 1.5 million downloads on iOS and 6 million downloads on Android, while Lucky Fields has been installed 1.2 million times on Android since August.

“Communitainment”

In a briefing call last week, Mail.Ru CEO and Chairman, Dmitry Grishin, described My.com’s focus as “communitainment” – offering communication products subsidized by entertainment. He noted that a photo sharing app, myCamera, would be launched in the near future.

The challenge for Mail.ru with My.com is that it’s entering a competitive market with little experience of American consumers’ tastes. Grishin is obviously bullish about the company’s chances. He explains that marketing and market research for My.com will be handled from an office in Mountain View, Silicon Valley, although all development will take place in Russia.

Fellow Russian titan Yandex struggled in its initial experiment with the American market but Mail.ru is going in much bigger here with a far more mainstream brand and range of products. We’ll be watching closely to see how it fares

➤ My.com

Announcing LinkedIn Showcase Pages | Official LinkedIn Blog

2013-11-19T22:47:00.001+08:00

Aviad Pinkovezky

Millions of companies use their LinkedIn Company Pages to share content and opportunities. For our members, the best way to stay up to date with those updates is to follow the companies they’re interested in. However, some companies have a variety of brands and products. How can you tell Cisco you are particularly interested in their Enterprise Network Solutions, Security Products, or in their Internet of Things initiative?

Starting today, LinkedIn members will be able to follow the specific brands and products they care most about that have Showcase Pages.

Showcase Pages are dedicated pages that allow companies to highlight different aspects of their business and build relationships with the right community. Whether it’s a brand, a business unit, or an initiative, following a Showcase Page will provide you the updates you are most interested in.

Interacting with Showcase Pages is easy. These pages are all about content, so by visiting a Showcase Page you can quickly get up to speed on the latest updates. Like any Company Page on LinkedIn, if you want to make sure you see future updates in your feed, just click the “Follow” button.

If you’re a Company Page administrator, you can easily create your company’s own Showcase Page. First, identify the business areas of your company that need a Showcase Page. Then go to the “Edit” dropdown menu and select “Create a Showcase Page.” Once created, you can start sharing content from your page. You will also be able to monitor the performance of your Showcase Page through our analytic tools.
Please note that we’ll be rolling out this new product globally in the next few days, so if you don’t see the Showcase Page option right now, please look for it in the coming days.

We hope you’ll find these pages useful. To see the kind of content you might get from Showcase Pages, check out Microsoft Office, Adobe Marketing Cloud, and HP Converged Infrastructure. If you’re interested in LinkedIn’s business solutions, follow our Showcase Pages for LinkedIn Talent Solutions, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, and LinkedIn Sales Solutions.

Which is better?

2013-10-01T22:11:00.000+08:00

Time value

2013-09-04T21:37:00.000+08:00

On August 15, 2011, Google Inc. announced that it had agreed to acquire Motorola for US$12.5 billion.

On 2 September 2013, Microsoft announced its intent to purchase Nokia's mobile phone business unit as part of an overall deal totaling €5.44 billion (US$7.17 billion)

Yahoo Is Bigger Than Google, And That Should Mean Something To Your Business | WebProNews

2013-08-22T23:23:00.000+08:00

By Chris Crum

I bet you didn’t see this coming after years of Google domination. Yahoo is back as the top web property (in the U.S.). This comes from comScore Media Metrix, which releases monthly lists of the top 50 U.S. web properties. They just put out July’s report, and there sits Yahoo right on top.

Are you surprised that Yahoo is ranking over Google? Do you believe Yahoo offers significant value to businesses? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Yahoo hasn’t been at the top of the list for two years (yeah, it seems like even longer than that), but there it is, and guess what. It doesn’t even include Tumblr traffic.

Yahoo properties, even without that, saw 196.6 million unique U.S. visitors during the month, compared to Google’ s 192.3 million, even as Google continues do dominate the search market by a much wider margin. If you want to count Tumblr, you can add another 38.3 million unique users.

Just look at that chart for a moment, and take it in. Look at how much higher Yahoo is than Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, etc. Twitter is all the way down at 30, below even Tumblr. Suffice it to say, Yahoo is huge.

Greg Sterling at Marketing Land shares this statement from a comScore spokesperson: “Tumblr is not currently included in the Yahoo! Sites roll-up. Seems there are other factors at play, and given how close Yahoo Sites and Google have been in recent months it can likely just be normal seasonal/month-to-month fluctuations.”

Regardless of whether or not this is simply month-to-month, the fact that it’s even in a constant race with Google should say something.

It’s certainly worth noting that these numbers don’t take mobile traffic into account, but mobile is exactly where Yahoo has been focusing the majority of its efforts since former Googler Marissa Mayer took over as CEO last year.

In fact, it’s hard not to assume that Mayer’s presence has been a key contributor to Yahoo’s rise back to the top. I don’t think many would argue that Yahoo’s properties were generally stagnant for quite a while before Mayer arrived. Since she arrived, Yahoo has been rolling out major redesigns of its key products, like search, its homepage, Yahoo Mail and Flickr.

Some of these redesigns have been more popular than others. Even after two months, we still continue to see a great deal of negative commentary from Yahoo Mail users about the redesign, though the fact that it has inspired so much passionate outrage should say something itself. Users care about Yahoo Mail.

On the email side of things, Yahoo is doing even more to get users interested, offering up old out-of-use addresses and Yahoo IDs to users, so they can get better names. This move, however, has been controversial, as security experts have taken issue with it.

Apart from all the redesigns, Yahoo has been acquiring properties left and right, even at a higher pace than Google, who has historically been very acquisition-happy. Many of these acquisitions should only translate to more users, and Tumblr is the big one.

Obviously a great deal of Google’s users come from search, and Google has the advantage of its Chrome browser’s address bar (or omnibox, if you will) pointing users directly to Google properties every time they get on the Internet. Add YouTube into the mix, and Yahoo’s presence on the list ahead of Google is all the more impressive, even without the high search market share Google holds.

Still, Yahoo hopes to snag a little bit of that Chrome search usage, as just last week, the companylaunched a revamped toolbar, making it available for Chrome for the first time. Of course, that doesn’t only take people to Yahoo search, but also to other popular Yahoo properties.

If mobile traffic were included in the numbers, Google would likely see a significant bump in its rankings, though I wonder how mobile Google+ use stacks up to mobile Tumblr use. YouTube is another story.

Yahoo is on a mission to emerge from the perception that it is a dinosaur of the Internet. The above numbers are a good sign, as is the the Tumblr acquisition, but the company is also undergoing a rebranding process. We’re currently in the middle of a period in which Yahoo is testing out a different logo every day before it assesses feedback and ultimately chooses a fresh look.

A regular point of criticism against the company is that that they have the traffic, but aren’t monetizing it well enough. Well, they’re working on it. It didn’t take long for more ads to hit Tumblr, for example.

A quarter of a million new blogs are being set up each day on Tumblr, Mayer said on a recent earnings call. She also hinted at pending Tumblr integrations into Yahoo products. Daily active users were up 120% across mail applications, she said.

The company recently announced new ad formats – stream ads in the Yahoo News stream, and a billboard ad on the homepage. Yahoo has also been increasing its content partnerships with brands like ABC News, CNBC, Condé Nast, Broadway Video, and NBC.

Yahoo’s lead as the top U.S. web property should be considered a big deal to advertisers, plain and simple.

Businesses in general should also take note, and consider ways to reach this enormous audience. Google certainly has the search market share, but there are still a lot of people searching with Yahoo/Bing. Yahoo Mail is clearly still a big portion of the email market, and Google is only making it harder for marketers to get their messages seen in Gmail.

196.6 million people (remember, that’s just the U.S. audience) is a lot of traffic, and traffic on the web flows. Not all of it, but some of that is going to flow to other businesses like yours if you make the efforts to take advantage of the opportunities where they’re presented, whether that be search, mail, shopping, or wherever.

You might want to take a look at what Yahoo offers at its Yahoo Small Business site, which includes domains, email, hosting, ecommerce, advertising tools, APIs and other resources. Here’sa list of Yahoo’s sites and services. When was the last time you considered how you could take advantage of what Yahoo has to offer on the web? The fact that Yahoo is the top web property should be a wake up call.

The Free Market Plan To Save Detroit - Forbes

2013-07-30T22:35:00.000+08:00

Adam Ozimek

The bankruptcy of Detroit has brought renewed focus on plans to turn the city around. Unfortunately, I think free market types are going to struggle for any ideas in their existing policy platforms that are up to the task. Cut taxes and make the government as lean as you want, this isn’t going to turn Detroit around. The city suffers from a population crisis, and taxes simply can’t go low enough to lure enough people in. According to the U.S Census, there are currently 99,000 vacant housing units in the city right now. To make a serious dent in this tax rates would need to be below the zero lower bound, if you will. For liberals this isn’t a problem. There are a variety of big government ideas to get people to move into Detroit. But we should be skeptical of the government’s ability and willingness to commit enough subsidies to convince enough people to move that it turns Detroit around in any significant way.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. The good news is that unlike other areas of the world that are struggling to reverse a development decline, there are millions of people who would love a chance to move to Detroit: immigrants. Rather than focus on the sisyphean task of convincing people who currently don’t want to move to Detroit, we should focus on how to allow in those who do. This is a far easier task for the government, even if it too requires significant policy change. What’s more, letting people from around the world move to where they want also happens to be the closest thing to a free market plan that could actually make a big difference.

So how can we selectively allow in immigrants to Detroit? I and others have argued for regional visas. This would give states or regions their own visas to issue how they see fit. The state of Michigan could issue tens of thousands of worker visas for Detroit. The demand is there, all the government needs to do is find a way to let them in.

Importantly, immigrants who located in Detroit under this visa should be able to choose any employer in Detroit. This would provide compensating flexibility relative to existing employment visas that tie workers to a specific employer. Yes, an immigrant is made worse off by forcing them to go to Detroit rather than anywhere in the U.S. they want. But right now visas already only allow immigrants to go places where they can find an employer prior to moving here, and then they are effectively tied to that employer. And you don’t have to actually restrict the movement of these immigrants; they should be free to travel throughout the country. They will simply be restricted to working in Detroit. Again, visa holders are already effectively tied to working in a particular city as a result of being tied to an employer within that city. Paired with a plan to help regional visa workers who prove themselves get normal green cards also should help reduce concern about limiting mobility.

Many will think this is a radical experiment in “foreignizing” a city, but this is not the case. Detroit will not become Beijing or some radical experiment of a wholly foreign U.S. city. In fact it can help make Detroit more similar to successful U.S. cities. Right now, the population of New York City is 36.8% foreign born. In comparison, Detroit is only 5.1%. foreign born. This means Detroit would have to let in around 360,000 immigrants just to reach the percent foreign born of New York City. However many immigrants they let in, it’s not likely to approach this. But even if it did, it would not be unprecedented by U.S. city standards. More modestly, increasing the foreign born population to 20% would fall far short of New York City standards, but would still mean 133,000 new immigrants. This would go a long way towards sopping up the 99,000 vacant homes that are plaguing the city.

Even for the city of Detroit itself, a large increase in the immigrant population wouldn’t be a huge departure from history. While the percent foreign born is very low in the city now, it wasn’t always this way. The 20th century wasn’t just a period of declining population for Detroit, it was also a period of declining immigrant influence. The following graph shows that Detroit is near the historical bottom in terms of the percent foreign born. Even while it represented a drop as a percent of population, the period from 1910 to 1930 saw the immigrant population of Detroit increase by 248,348.

Detroit is a city that has had a healthy immigrant population before, and it could be again. If it returned to it’s 1960 foreign born percent it would mean an increase of 57,000 immigrants. This would help make it more similar to economically successful cities like New York City.

Immigration is an economic development policy that is currently largely ignored. A city like Detroit could be a symbol and demonstration project to show other cities the huge potential for this. If this works, it will mean more political demand for immigrants and ultimately raising our overall immigration levels, which is an important goal in and of itself. A regional visas should be created that let’s cities experiment and choose their own path in this way. It’s the only free market plan out there with any chance of making a serious impact in Detroit, and it’s consistent with America’s spirit of federalism. And unlike just about every other plan you see, like bailouts or tax cuts, this has the advantage that it doesn’t require other people’s money.

These 10 Tech Startups Attract Insane Interest On LinkedIn - Forbes

2013-07-24T20:08:00.001+08:00

by George Anders

So which startups are attracting insane interest on LinkedIn this year? Here’s Raybould’s latest top-10 list, working from the bottom upward.Last year’s standouts — such as Arista, Box, Splunk, Square and Palantir – have grown rapidly, attracting valuations of at least $1 billion, and in some cases as much as $5 billion in their latest financing rounds. Another 2012 leader Nicera, which specialized in software-defined networking, was acquired byVMWare for $1.26 billion.

Each year, thousands of tech startups in Silicon Valley compete to be what author Michael Lewis famously dubbed “The New, New Thing.” Eventually an elite group of winners emerges, ready to be crowned the next Googles, Facebooks or whatever. But in the early days of this battle for supremacy, is there any reliable way to tell which newcomers are gaining the most traction?

LinkedIn data-insight specialist James Raybould has come up with an ingenious answer. In a blog post this week, Raybould analyzes the ways that 287,000 LinkedIn members in Silicon Valley’s tech sector engage with various early-stage companies (defined as outfits with fewer than 500 employees on LinkedIn.) If everyone is clicking on these startups’ job ads, or choosing to follow such companies, that’s a strong signal such new enterprises have won respect — or awe — from their peers.

In essence, LinkedIn is calling on its users to deliver a crowd-sourcedreputation score for everyone in the startup sector. Raybould has already tried this once before, with an earlier version of the list that was published in May 2012. By and large, the startups with the best peer reputations in 2012 have gone on to do extremely well in intervening 14 months.

10. Nutanix, a San Jose, Calif., company that develops virtual computing platforms.

9. Pinterest, the San Francisco-based creator of wildly popular online pages where people can collect, share and organize items of personal interest.

8. Big Switch Networks, a Mountain View, Calif., company that’s rolling out software-defined networks.

7. Jawbone, the San Francisco-based maker of Bluetooth headsets and more. Where else can you get Noise Assassin gear, based on what the company calls “military-grade noise-eliminating technology”?

6. GoPro, the San Mateo, Calif., based maker of small, wearable cameras that have become must-have gear for outdoor enthusiasts of all sorts. FORBES profiled GoPro founder Nick Woodmanearlier this year.

5. Hortonworks, a Palo Alto, Calif., company that develops and distributes Apache Hadoop: open-source software that helps companies handle huge data sets across clusters of computers.

4. Nimble Storage, a San Jose data storage company that blends high-performance flash technology with cheaper disk drives.

3. Violin Memory, a Mountain View company that makes enterprise flash memory arrays.

2. Dropbox, the San Francisco champion of cloud-based storage, providing more than 100 million people with free or low-cost places to stash more gigabytes of digital memorabilia than anyone can count. This FORBES cover story explains Dropbox’s rapid rise .

1. Cloudera, based in Palo Alto: the self-proclaimed leader in Apache Hadoop.

What are these startups doing right? There’s no substitute for world-class products and smart strategic visions. But once those are in place, executives at these top-10 startups say it helps to get current employees to spread the word — and to build the company’s brand online. LinkedIn collected some of their pointers in this additional blog post.

JP's Clog

LinkedIn Stock Races Ahead 11%; Every New Idea Is Working

Google acquires photo backup service Odysee

Microsoft Buys Acompli, an Email Start-Up

All make sense

Why Monster.com Is Failing And Others Will Follow

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

3D interaction - house design

Real-Time Bidding Is Taking Over The Digital Ad Market

Complementarity

Just when I thought I was out,

Sudoku, Linear Optimization, and the Ten Cent Diet

To Reach China, LinkedIn Plays by Local Rules

Cloud Revenue Jumps, Led by Microsoft and IBM - NYTimes.com

Cloud Services in Second Quarter

The Old Guard Moves Ahead in the New World

Adidas Scores Big In Sales And Social Media Growth During The World Cup - Forbes

Related articles

Messi never dives - the beauty of soccer.

Mobile Calls Are The New Conversions: 7 Tips For SEMs

1. Get Over The Mental Hurdle

2. Prepare To Interface With A New Team

3. Get Versed In The IVR

4. Get Used To Some New Conversion Metrics

5. Rethink Your Campaigns

6. Get Ready For Some New Data Patterns

7. Optimize & Schedule

Get The Edge On Your Competition

Related articles

FIFA World Cup Sponsorship: Is it Worth It? - Analytic Partners

Russian giant Mail.ru launches in the US as My.com, with free email and IM apps subsidized by mobile gaming - The Next Web

“Communitainment”

Related articles

Announcing LinkedIn Showcase Pages | Official LinkedIn Blog

Aviad Pinkovezky

Related articles

Which is better?

Time value

Related articles

Yahoo Is Bigger Than Google, And That Should Mean Something To Your Business | WebProNews

Related articles

The Free Market Plan To Save Detroit - Forbes

These 10 Tech Startups Attract Insane Interest On LinkedIn - Forbes

Related articles