Netizen

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Marissa Mayer: Captain Of The Ship

Marissa Mayer (Photo credit: jdlasica)

Everyone and their cousin is giving her advice. I might be running late by about 12 hours, but here goes.

Go slim by 5,000 to 10,000. The faster it is done, better for morale. Cut jobs. Slice and dice. Be done with it.
If you are not number one or two, exit the category. This is coming straight from Jack Welch. He knew.
Take Yahoo Mail to a whole new level. Reimagine it.
Yahoo News is good news. Build community around it.
Go big on mobile. Go big on local. You would know.
Yahoo has a big future in Big Data, the next big thing. This might be one rare way to bring sexiness back to Yahoo. It has hundreds of millions of loyal monthly users, and it collects data on them. Make use of it. This is the oil beneath the sand.
PR is important. Show up for the key events in the industry and talk your talk. You can be a good mascot. Marissa Mayer's got the sexy down pat. Infuse Yahoo with it, inside and out.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Mayer Shoots For Yahoo, Google Stock Drops

Marissa Mayer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It has been heard over the grapevine that Google CEO Larry Page - who is not in the habit of reading news four times a day like the rest of us - was taken aback when he received a text alert on his Google Nexus phone - yeah, he is still on Nexus 1.0 - that the Google stock had nosedived. At first he thought the market was reacting to his long sick leave. But that was days ago, he said to Sergey Brin.

When Sergey Brin - who does read news four times a day - gently apprised him that maybe it was something to do with Marissa Mayer.

"What did Marissa do?" Larry Page asked.

Sergey Brin found himself at a loss for words. He did not quite know how to put it. But before Page took wild guesses, Brin volunteered.

"She left," he whispered.

"To launch a startup? How could she? Who did she take with her? What space is she looking at? I hope not local.... Did she tell you? How long have you known this?"

"It is all over TechMeme, Larry," Sergey whispered.

Yahoo appointed Mayer CEO, and a lot of people googled up her name. Some of them were lead to a 2010 blog post of mine on Mayer. And this blog got a spike in traffic.

Mayer As Chief Yahoo: Surprising And Exciting

SAN FRANCISCO - SEPTEMBER 08: Google Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer speaks during an announcement September 8, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Google announced the launch of Google Instant, a faster version of Google search that streams results live as you type your query. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

New York Times: Google’s Marissa Mayer Tapped as Yahoo’s Chief

This is surprising and exciting. I guess Yahoo does not have to pretend it is a media company and it can now go back to being a technology company. Yahoo still has a lot of visitors that come back month after month. At some level it never really went away.

It can play for a strong number two position in some key areas. And with its resources it should be able to attract the talent to innovate.

Education For The 99%

Ruchit Garg: Why you need to go to good college?

“What is the value add of a college/school in the era where you have almost everything available on web, free or paid?” Answer is “World works on relationships and there are no better alternatives to learn, experience and make them work for you, than going to meet and interact with real people”.

Forbes: M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All

the success of M.I.T.x, OCW, and Academic Earth may push dramatic technological innovation at for-profits, so that they can maintain a unique selling proposition versus their free competitors .... against this country’s sizable need for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) graduates, M.I.T.x is nothing short of revolutionary. This is especially true if you aren’t a credential freak and, like me, just want to improve your chops in a marketable subject area

I am a big believer. I think online education is the way to go if the masses are to be served.

Google Glass

CNet: How Google is becoming an extension of your mind

an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it ..... Or Google taking over your car when it concludes based on your steering response time and blink rate that you're no longer fit to drive. Or your Google glasses automatically beaming audio and video to the police when you say a phrase that indicates you're being mugged. ...... some of those sci-fi possibilities I just described could be real within three to five years ...... the more types of work computers do on your behalf to make your life easier, the more access you must grant them to the intimacies of your personal life ...... Brin said Project Glass repackages much of the same technology that's in a mobile phone today ....... Its self-driving cars could give commuters another hour or two a day to be checking e-mail, watching video, and performing searches. ...... Project Glass glasses present a small screen at the top of your ordinary field of view, not a layer between you and whoever you're talking to.

They could make it look less in your face. The frame could go light, super light, thin, ultra thin, and transparent.

Google's Got It All: Phone, Tablet, Laptop

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

The Chromebook is great except for the price point. The Nexus phones have been great from the get go. And now with Nexus 7 Google has nailed the tablet also. Suddenly Motorola Mobility makes so much sense. It goes beyond patents and what have you. A company that has already mastered the three fundamental form factors in hardware deserves to be able to do hardware in house, don't you think? Google making Apple want to play catch up in the hardware space? This has got to be the first time that happened. But it has happened.

Podcasting Should Be Easier

The logo used by Apple to represent Podcasting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It just occurred to me that there are no easy, obvious podcasting tools. For text blogging (and photos) you have platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr. Granted you can embed audio files into your tumblog posts, but that is not what I have in mind.

Video blogging is easy. You can use something like YouTube.

And I don't count iTunes. It is a walled garden. I don't consider it part of the web experience.

The last podcasting platform that I used and liked for its ease of use was created by people who brought us Twitter. Too bad they shut it down. They should perhaps revive it.

There is tremendous opportunity with audio. For one, language barriers are less of an issue. It is less pressure than video blogging, and yet there is more emotional connection than in text blogging.

Quora: What Are The Best Podcasting Tools?
Podcasting With SoundCloud
Audacity

I'd have liked the SoundCloud option, if only because it is so easy to embed a SoundCloud file into a blog post. But there seem to be hoops to podcasting on SoundCloud.

Do you know of good options?

English: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Facebook, at the press conference about the e-G8 forum during the 37th G8 summit in Deauville, France. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fred Wilson: July 1: Mobile Is Where The Growth Is

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.

User experience is not the only big change/challenge for companies trying to navigate this transition. Monetization is different too.

Approaches like display advertising don't work as well on mobile as they do on the web. And they don't work that well on the web. ARPUs (avg revenue per user) on mobile are lower for display based revenue models on mobile across the board.

On the other hand, commerce works great on mobile if you have a well integrated (one click) purchase experience. The freemium model (whether it is virtual goods in games, in app upgrades, or something else) works very well on mobile.

Mark Zuckerberg: July 13: Zuckerberg Says Mobile Shift Is His Biggest Challenge

Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said his hardest job right now is figuring out how to adapt the world’s largest social network to mobile devices.

Bringing Facebook’s features to handheld gadgets is difficult because the user experience is so different than on desktop computers......