Kelsey Group puts on the Interactive Local Media conference every December.  While I’ve spoken at these events for Yahoo! in prior years, this time around I was happy to sit back and attend a few sessions.

It’s clear that local, mobile and social are coming together in very interesting ways.

Some takeaways from some of the panels and side conversations at the event:

• Facebook has over 900K fan pages for local merchants according to Backyard, a Facebook app provider that is set to launch.  While there are over 15mm local merchants domestically, many of these Fan Pages are concentrated in categories like restaurants and nightlife - so that coverage is actually pretty decent.  These pages are potentially disruptive to traditional “directory style” merchant profile pages.

• Kelsey Group estimates 9% of local businesses have a Twitter account.  It will be interesting to see what differences emerge for businesses as they build followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.  One potential differentiation - Twitter for truly real-time updates (something happening now - like open late today, perishable inventory, big crowd watching the game here now). Meanwhile, Facebook might be more on the community building side of things - what do my friends think and recommend, who’s planning to go there when, etc.   Building a direct marketing channel to customers is different than playing in a community-based sandbox that happens to be about your business.  Facebook already allows admins for Pages to cross-post to Twitter.

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  Related Links
  
  • Yahoo and Facebook Connect
  • ILM '09 Overview
  • SMB's Embracing Twitter

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I spoke about Maps and Local Search at SMX in early October.  SMX is the largest and highest profile event covering search marketing.  During the talk, I had a chance to discuss how Y! is driving more integrated consumer experiences between web search, local and maps.  In the past these  products acted like separate products.  In recent months, we have made some improvements towards converged experiences. 

A key example of this is the ability to see a map when you do a local search on Y! and then interact with business listings on that map.  For example, the user can select a business through the map markers and navigate through all the profile information, photos and reviews on the Map interface.  This happens without firing off a separate page or re-loading it.  On top of this, we add some powerful filtering options such as radial search, which allows a user to drag or alter the size of the search radius on a Map to sort results. 

There we some additional announcements in and around SMX like Google’s launch of fixed priced sponsored listings for Local queries.  Overall, this is a good development fo the market.  It reflects the simplicity that local and small businesses require in online marketing, as dynamic pricing and bidding are currently barriers for many local merchants.

Google spoke of its Local Business Center, which allow businesses to list their profiles on Google Maps at no cost — a service we’ve had for many years at Y!  Google also demonstrated Google Places, a way for users to add locations and POI’s.  Microsoft, which is making significant technical investment in the Maps area showed some bling bling - including high-res satellite imagery and 3D modeling on top of Maps.   Overall, the companies showed different but useful developments in location-based marketing and services.  We had everything from a consumer experience focus (Yahoo!) to real technology innovation (Microsoft) and user-generated content programs (Google).

There is indeed alot of ground still to cover in this sector of the web.  Some of our ideas at Y! at presented below.

Maps and Local Prezo at SMX

View more presentations from atifrafiq.

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• Google Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors
• Place Pages for Google Maps

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TC50 has been going on these last few days.  I attended on the final day of presentation which covered new apps in the Social Stream, News & Discovery and Commerce Marketplaces areas.

I love this event for the unbridled, youthful energy of the entrepreneurs and their followers.  For that rare and exciting idea, the momentum generating potential of success at the conference is huge.  Everyone here is networked and more important, willing to shout it out.  If something is compelling, it can catch fire quickly.

The hit rate on quality ideas appeared fairly low.  Are we nearing a trough for high impact web 2.0 ideas?  I think it’s a period for creating tactical businesses.  Those which fill a targeted need and do it well.  Ideas that leverage, or live within, the existing tidal waves — Twitter, Facebook and iPhone/mobile.  No game changers or companies who become verbs.   There are endless and growing number of opportunities in that domain.  I like concepts that package convenience around existing and emerging user behavior.  For example, there was a company that had a mobile app for ordering from concession stands in stadiums and venues.  The conference winner, Red Beacon, a referral and matching service for local services (plumber, personal trainer, contractor) intends to do exactly this albeit in a crowded space.  A related company that is launching which I think will do very well because of its market focus in Save Energy 123.  This site advises homeowners on energy-saving projects and matches them with local products and service providers.

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• TC50 Winners
• Participating Companies

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Yesterday I appeared on Jason Calacanis’s web TV show, This Week in Start-ups.  You may already know Jason from his current gig as Founder of Mahalo and his successful start-up Weblogs, which AOL purchased. 

TWiT is a recent project by Jason and yesterday was Episode 8.  Last week his guest was a Microsoft exec discussing Bing.   

Our interview was focused on both my efforts at Yahoo as well my previous background in start-ups.  There were a few natural questions about the Local space like how we compare to Yelp and more broadly how Yahoo viewed Bing (short answer: it innovates and that’s good for industry).   We also touched on my experience as Founder and CEO of Covigna, an content mgmt start-up earlier in the decade (whew, time flies).   I enjoyed the few budding entrepreneurs who called in to ask questions.   People often ask me about working in a big company setting (I’ve spent time at AOL and Yahoo!) in comparison to start-ups.  Like I said on the show, entrepreneurship is a journey that might include various stops along the way.  It’s not a career path as much as it is a calling.  Besides that, you can find opportunity to innovate in big settings too. 

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It was great to attend the Kelsey Marketplaces Conference in L.A. earlier in March, where I presented for Yahoo! on a panel about Local Verticals.  Kelsey is the definitive conference for all things Local.  It’s a tremendous place to soak in sector knowledge and get networking done.

In the words of the conference organizers:  “Much of the opportunity in local marketplaces lies with the verticals that extend and energize traditional media.”  They’re referring to categories such as entertainment, news, auto, real estate, etc. where local content is important.

My take has long been that we need to put the “L” into the local market opportunity.  Think “L” versus the lower-case “l” that defines this category today.  User needs in the local market extend beyond the traditional scope of business listing and point-of-interest information (e.g., looking-up restaurant information and reviews).

Y! Local (the business I manage) is intended for this core use case and it’s a sizable in and of itself (one of Y!’s largest properties, BTW).  But it’s only part of the wider local opportunity.  We need to think about the horizontal opportunity and the cross-programming model behind it.  No portal has a done a good job of that yet.

In terms of serving vertical needs within the current scope of Y! Local, we make some attempt of that today.  But we don’t think the answer is to add more web sites to our product portfolio to enable this.  My primary message is that users don’t need more destination sites to visit.  The more convenient alternative is to add vertical content to existing services based on user intent.  Alot of what we do in Y! Local is focused on local search so to the extent we can understand what the user is searching for, we can add vertical content on a category by category basis.

Examples can include:

• Adding menu information when we know it’s a restaurant query
• Adding service records and reports when we know the search is for a plumber or contractor
• Adding reservation or booking information when we know it’s a search for a doctor / dentist, etc.

This takes a good understanding of explicit and implicit user intent, something Y! has unique capabilities to address given our search capabilities.

The presentation I gave is below.

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• Conference Overview
• Conference Blog
• Some press coverage

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If you’re an investor in Apple or just one of the many admirers of this iconic business, you may be closely following news about the health of Steve Jobs.  The cliché that people are a company’s greatest asset was literally demonstrated as this news surfaced — AAPL lost 5.7% of its value after his medical leave was announced.  Is this the beginning of the end for the company or just a period of transition during a time of continued leadership?  An opinion on the matter is vital to investors - should you be buying on unnecessary weakness or be gradually reducing your exposure?   To develop an informed opinion you’re going to have to do some diligence.

I’m going to offer an approach toward diligence that uses web connections to define key topics for your assessment.  Web connections are links between a story you’re following and the endless number of topics that exist in the world.  It may sound quite broad and unwieldy but there is a manageable structure we can put around the information possibilities.

Web connections allow us to explore these topics by the degree of their relatedness.  Think of it as swinging from vine to vine in a jungle of information.  You can build upon a topic of interest by knowing what else is connected to it rather than limit exploration by direct coverage of what you’re reading.”

What’s useful about these connections is they transcend the obvious information you will find collected in most articles or coverage about a story you’re following.   As I’ll explain later on, that’s not a knock on reporters but instead a natural limitation of what’s possible for any writer to cover in a single story.  Put another way, web connections extend our journey into and behind the story.

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They sent Yankee Stadium off with a great tribute to the team, it’s players and legacy. The greatest sports franchise of the 20th century - the Yankees - saying goodbye to the Cathedral they’ve called home for over 85 years. Why can’t a corporation evoke loyalty and following like a sports team? There are many great companies with a history of performance and amazing achievement. People drive this success. No doubt it’s hard to compare the glamour of sports achievements (e.g., clutch homeruns) with making big things happen in business. Knowledge work is not very visible and rarely public. But let’s not under-estimate the strong appeal and mystique of accomplishments in industry related to inventions, patents, product ideas, customer insights, sales, deals, etc.

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• Farewell to the Cathedral
• Massive Legacy and an Emotional Ending
• It's Gone! Goodbye!

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I attended the Web 2.0 Expo last week, where Jonathan Zittrain spoke about his latest book – The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. It’s a big idea about the future of tech with constitutional implications.

The book is focused on the form the web takes as a computing platform with increasingly centralized characteristics. Zittrain believes the current trajectory of the web has the potential to spawn a network of control that has major societal and political impact. He believes centralization in the form of cloud computing is a natural outgrowth of increased human reliance on computing coupled with the risk of things like viruses and security threats. Centralized services clearly help users protect themselves in the wild world of “tethered” computing. Users will prefer the benefits centralized information services against having to manage these services on their own, which would be required under “localized” (client-based) approaches. To simplify the point, think about installing anti-virus software on computers. If your services are in the cloud, then securing those services becomes someone else’s problem. The pull to tether every variant of computing is so significant, that people will crave the stability of centralization. This entrusts the livelihoods of users to the giant e-sponge in the sky that someone else controls.

Reliance carries two principal implications. First, it furthers lock-down potential, which is the ability of a service provider to dictate rules of engagement for users and the technology ecosystem. That in turn stymies innovation. Second, lock down introduces opportunity for regulation that favors government over the individual. This introduces the potential for violations of privacy and liberty. Zittrain provides several current examples of these violations.

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• Future of the Internet Site
• A Safe but Sterile Internet
• Lessig & Zittrain Talk
• Zittrain Bio
• Related Book - Network Power

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The NY Times was in the news yesterday – this time, a docile development related to its web site leadership. The Times was nominated for several Webby awards. In fact, the company has the largest presence of any organization with nine nominations, including the following categories: Best Visual Design, News, Newspaper, Best Copy and Best Practices.

Good news is a welcome relief at The Times. The “nation’s paper” is no stranger to front-page storylines. It is the center of several dramatic circumstances that involve controversy over future business direction. In a quick recap, there’s been shareholder discord over share price performance, governance structure (dual-class stock) and future strategy in response to the quickly vanishing newspaper business model. These issues are inter-related because different groups (broadly management vs. shareholders) hold different views on how the address the current industry climate and whether the corporate structure needs to be amended to respond decisively and effectively. Recently, hedge funds were successful in securing two seats on the company’s Board through a settlement with management.

With traditional offline revenue declining at a steady pace (January print revenues were down 9.8%), the foreseeable future does not look promising for overall financial performance. But is there light? In other words, as the core declines, how quickly is the revenue loss replaced by the digital business? Clearly this is a question of rates of change. Currently, the company does about $750mm a quarter in total revenue and about 90% is print. If the digital base, which is about $85mm per quarter, continues to grow at 15% annually while the core continues to decline at 10% annually, online will overtake offline 9 years from now. Can you say web 4.0? Even at 20% online revenue growth, we’re talking about 7.5 years for equivalency. Certainly a long way off and sufficient cause for shareholder anxiety.

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• 12th Annual Webby Award Nominees
• NY Times CEO - Bear Stearns 21st Annual Media Conference
• Shareholder Dissent Peaked Last Year
• Newspaper publishers skid painfully into 2008
• Michael Wolf on the The Times
• Boards Give Up Taming Act

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There are a number of tools available on the web that will take your documents and analyze the contents statistically to help you identify patterns. For the investment community, these technologies are not quite ready for prime time. In other words, the potential to glean insights is hit-or-miss. But, I’ve been impressed with a tool launched a year ago by IBM (IBM) called Many Eyes which does some simple stats on document contents and provides the output in various forms. Many Eyes is a visualization tool for data focused on natural language. When the data is words, as in a lengthy 10K form, I begin to wonder if some processing of these words can tell us something we don’t already know.

I’ve taken the contents of Google’s (GOOG) 2007 10K and loaded it as a data set in the visualization tool. Do you think any meaningful insights can be derived? Here’s a summary of my results in this simple experiment.

First, I loaded the Product Section of the document, which lists and discusses about 35 products within Google’s consumer portfolio. Enterprise products (Google Apps, Google Appliance) are covered under a separate section. I excluded terms/words like “Google”, “users”, “web” and others that don’t inform the analysis.

Click here or the image below to see the visualization results.

Some themes that standout include (based on term-frequency):

=> Mobile
=> Maps
=> Gmail
=> Groups
=> News

Nothing here is a surprise, as these are all product categories where Google has a significant product in the market.

Some other terms that stood out to me are “free” and [user] “experience”, two central aspects of Google’s focus and way of doing business.

One valuable thing I learned from these results is the lack of product focus on web 2.0 trends and drivers. There’s not a major role for “social networking” themes like “syndication”, “tagging”, “sharing”, “commenting”, etc. across the product portfolio. Could this speak to weakness in product breadth? Where’s the web 2.0 lingo and product focus?

Next, I upload the Risk Factors section on the hopes it would reveal patterns related to Google’s concerns.

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• One Month Retro on IBM's Many Eyes App
• IBM Wants Many Eyes on Visualization
• IBM's Many Eyes Project Seeks Stats Freaks

Filed under: Google, User Experiences, Web Apps, Innovation | No Comments »

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