Netizen

Monday, October 22, 2012

Twitter In Saudi Arabia

King Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz in 2002 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As someone who would like to see an Egypt style uprising also in Saudi Arabia - I could live with a constitutional monarchy there - I read this with great interest.

Twitter Gives Saudi Arabia a Revolution of Its Own

Open criticism of this country’s royal family, once unheard-of, has become commonplace in recent months. Prominent judges and lawyers issue fierce public broadsides about large-scale government corruption and social neglect. Women deride the clerics who limit their freedoms. Even the king has come under attack. All this dissent is taking place on the same forum: Twitter.

In its early days Twitter was often derided as the place where people posted things like, so I had coffee.

Sales And Marketing Are Important

English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

LinkedIn has taught us sales is really important. Pinterest is saying marketing is key. I believe.

The Secret Behind Pinterest’s Growth Was Marketing, Not Engineering, Says CEO Ben Silbermann

now the third-largest source of referral traffic on the Internet .... The way Pinterest grew had little to do with Silicon Valley wisdom. It was about marketing — mostly grassroots marketing — not better algorithms. ..... In 2010, three months after Pinterest launched, the site had only 3,000 users. ..... So Pinterest started to have meet-ups at local boutiques, and to take fun pictures of people who attended them, and to engage with bloggers to do invitation campaigns like “Pin It Forward,” where bloggers got more invites to the site by spreading the world. ....... Fundamentally, the future is unwritten ..... he himself thought for a while that the secret to Pinterest’s growth woes would be finding some undiscovered Stanford grad student to build a better algorithm.

Bill Gates On Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 And Surface

Source: TechNet

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Is Google Anti-Competitive?

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

I have not made up my mind. But Google gets the benefit of doubt from me.

FTC moving closer to Google antitrust case

The majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Trade Commission believe that an antitrust case should be brought against Google Inc, meaning the search giant could soon be headed into tough negotiations ..... Google illegally used its dominance of the search market to hurt its rivals ..... Google rivals specializing in travel, shopping and entertainment have accused Google, the world's No. 1 search engine, of unfairly giving their web sites low quality rankings in search results to steer Internet users away from their websites and toward Google products that provide similar services. ..... Google refuses to share data that would allow advertisers and developers to create software to compare the value they get on Google to advertising spending on Microsoft's Bing or Yahoo. ..... the FTC is looking at Google's handling of valuable patents, which are determined to be essential to smartphones. The agency is trying to determine if they are licensed fairly and whether patent infringement lawsuits are used to hamper innovation.

To say right now we are in the mobile era is to state the obvious. It is like in the 1980s AIDS became big news. But people are still figuring out AIDS. I have a feeling mobile is something like that. Tech giants might spend the rest of this decade trying to figure out mobile.

Mobile first companies have a leg up in that sense. But then they are going to have to figure out the web in due time.

Mobile is not the Internet as we knew it, just like the Internet was not computers as we knew them. Mobile is a new beast with its own particulars.

A child is not a small adult. Mobile is not a smaller version of the web, it is not MiniMe. Mobile is no child.

Fred Wilson, Mark Zuckerberg And Mobile
Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Instagram
2011-2015: A Mobile Stretch
Netizen Has Arrived: A Link From AVC
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies

Mobile revolution, economy trip up tech giants

consumers' waning love affair with the stalwart PC and infatuation with mobile -- the most significant tectonic shift in the industry since the advent of the Internet ...... raging mobile hardware demand .... About 800,000 shoppers made their first-ever eBay purchase through a mobile device. ..... "Mobile is not proving to be as straightforward as people thought." ...... a worsening macroeconomic environment. ..... The biggest stunner was perhaps Google, which shed more than $20 billion of market value after it reported that its core advertising business had slowed. ....... Click prices declined for the fourth consecutive quarter .... Zynga, the poster child for mobile transition woes ..... the evolution of mobile Internet, social networking is usually the first to spread around the world, followed by games and then advertising ...... Perhaps hardest-hit are Intel and others closely tied to the PC chain .. While Intel dominated that space in its prime, in smartphones its market share is less than 1 percent

But Of Course

Analysis: Yahoo CEO's comeback plan homes in on technology, not media

Her hires, acquisition musings, and other early moves hint at an ambitious, technology-driven comeback plan designed to revitalize aging but well-trafficked properties such as Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports..... Mayer, 37, wants to make Yahoo's properties much more interactive, on PCs and on mobile devices, using social media tools to personalize the user experience and new technology to boost advertising sales. Her well-known focus on user design is expected to result in a simpler, less-cluttered email and home page .... positions Yahoo squarely against Facebook Inc and Google .... Two types of deals are under consideration: companies that will increase user engagement, including on mobile, and those that will boost advertising returns ..... She's spending almost all her time with the product folks ..... Yahoo's advertising technology products, headed for the auction block before Mayer's arrival, are back in favor. De Castro, her highest-profile hire, is known for a deep-understanding of the complex advertising landscape, where dozens of businesses and technology providers are interlinked. ..... Right Media, an automated exchange that allows marketers to blast ads across a network of websites. ..... Roughly 700 million users visit a Yahoo website every month - putting it in the top ranks globally. But the amount of activity people engage in on many sites is steadily declining, and its smartphone offerings are deemed lackluster. .... "The largest change is to be deadly serious about mobile" ..... Facebook and Google, two companies that have taken consumers' time, engineering talent and market value from Yahoo. They are also trying to make the transition to mobile, but it has been difficult

Her mere appointment told me Yahoo now means to do technology, it will no longer aspire to be some kind of a media property. This writer has taken a few months to come to the same conclusion.