Thursday, August 02, 2012

Odeo Should Have Stuck Around

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


I say bring back Odeo.

An Insider's History Of How A Podcasting Startup Pivoted To Become Twitter
it started out in 2005 as Odeo, a podcasting company founded by Evan Williams. When Apple iTunes moved into podcasting, Odeo found itself going nowhere fast, and so it needed to pivot..... Noah Glass, who came up with the name Twttr .... Odeo's team pivoted to fully embrace the 140-character side project. The rest, as they say, is history (in progress).


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VoiceGem

Image representing Odeo as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
I could not get it to work on first attempt, but the promise of the service is amazing. You'd think someone would have done something like this a long time ago. I want to be podcasting with equal ease. The Twitter folks had it, but then they moved on to Twitter. They should not have shuttered down Odeo.

YC-Backed VoiceGem Brings Communication Back To The Future With Asynchronous Voice Messages
It doesn’t cost any money. It doesn’t require special software. It doesn’t have you send or open any kind of attachment. It doesn’t require a special international calling plan or card — or even a phone number at all. It doesn’t need a high-quality microphone system

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Facebook Doldrums



Facebook's problem is very real. This is not like when Amazon's stock price nosedived after the dot com bubble burst in 2000. That was an industry wide event. This is a Facebook specific event. Compared to that LinkedIn is doing fine for now.

And this is about cold, hard cash.

Data mining is where the money is at for Facebook. More mobile usage is not bad news - quite the opposite - if data mining is the primary way you monetize. More engagement means more data.

Below $20 is the red zone. Facebook has already entered that.

How Facebook Could Save Its Shattered Share Price
Now as it plunges towards half its IPO value, it’s entering a state of emergency
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119 Billion Google Searches

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
I did not know that number. One would think it would approach infinity. But it's only 119 billion. Wait, that's a lot. That's a big, big number.

In many ways those searches are as if not more powerful than updates on Facebook and Twitter. These searches can be mined.

Search queries are real time. Google searches might be the biggest of Big Data.

Your 119 Billion Google Searches Now A Central Bank Tool
the Bank of Israel, which looks to searches like Sugarman’s to assess the state of the nation’s $243 billion economy..... The central bank stands at the forefront of the world’s hunt for new economic indicators, analyzing keyword counts for everything from aerobics classes to refrigerators -- reported by Google almost as soon as the queries take place -- to gauge consumer demand before official statistics are released. The Federal Reserve and the central banks of England, Italy, Spain and Chile have followed up with their own studies to see if search volumes track trends in the economies they oversee. .... “When central bankers were looking at traditional data, they were essentially looking out the rear-view mirror” ..... a 23-page paper he co-wrote in April 2009, demonstrating how data reported on the Google Trends service improved forecasts of auto and home sales and retail spending in the U.S. ...... Google makes its data available one to three days after users perform searches .... Using query volumes in place of government statistics that are not yet available ..... Searches predicted the inflow of British tourists into Spain with a lead of almost one month. ..... a “data revolution.” It’s “an enormous amount of information” that will better help “us understand in very real-time what’s going on.”
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Zynga Getting Hammered


Its IPO has not been good for Zynga, nor for Facebook. They have been hammered. Not long back Fred Wilson on the East Coast and John Doerr on the West Coast talked of Zynga as the fastest growing company they ever had in their portfolios. I guess there are ups and downs. Right now happens to be a down time. It is not that Zynga's user base has shrunk dramatically. This is more a case of Wall Street looking at cold, hard cash. If you don't have it, you don't have it.

Just like Facebook Zynga is also struggling with mobile.

Zynga COO Said To Lose Product Oversight As Growth Slows
Pincus embarked on the overhaul in early July, at the close of a quarter marked by slowing sales growth and a drop in demand for virtual goods. Schappert, lured away last year from Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) with a pay package worth $42.8 million, has lost support within the company and taken some of the blame for its underperformance ..... “The place is in utter meltdown mode” .... The stock has dropped 72 percent since the market debut. The decline accelerated last week after Zynga reported sales and profit that missed analysts’ predictions. ..... The reorganization was aimed in part at making mobile- software development more of a priority across Zynga

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