Posted on December 20th, 2009 by Atif
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. Read more »
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Posted on June 27th, 2009 by Atif
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. Read more »
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Posted on March 30th, 2009 by Atif
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.
Read more »
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Posted on May 2nd, 2008 by Atif
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. Read more »
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Posted on January 10th, 2008 by Atif
The new year brings some management changes at Cisco. Charlie Giancarlo recently retired from the company to join tech buyout firm, Silver Lake Partners. Charlie spent 14 years at Cisco and was most recently the Chief Development Officer, effectively the #2 executive and possible successor to CEO, John Chambers.
I had the pleasure of meeting Charlie for the first time during his going-away event, where he chatted openly and generously with the rank-and-file. A Cisco employee carrying an iPhone was kind enough to snap a picture for me.
From the Cisco press release:
“After joining Cisco through the acquisition of Kalpana, a pioneer in ethernet switching, Giancarlo started Cisco’s business development organization and developed Cisco’s successful M&A strategy. He initiated and then led Cisco’s Small and Medium business activities including contributing to the development of Cisco’s channel strategy. Giancarlo also initiated and led a large number of Cisco’s advanced and emerging technologies including Unified Communications, home networking, wireless networking, security, video, and TelePresence among many others.”
I’ve been at Cisco for a few months, working as a consultant and advising on new market strategy. We’re looking at whitespaces that might be considered non-traditional for the company but which leverage my background in the web, software and digital media.
Another senior executive, Dave Leonard, also transitioned recently (to start a clean-tech business). Dave has been the General Manager and top dog running the company’s $5bn cash cow switching business unit. I’ve been working for Dave and his group. It goes without saying that Cisco’s ability to branch out and experiment into new markets is in part due to domination in switching. So, new things you find the company successful with (TelePresence, etc.) are tied to this core even while there remains lots of potential for these existing businesses to pioneer new spaces too.
This is my third large company experience (AOL and Goldman Sachs are the other two places I’ve spent time). I’ve always found it somewhat impossible for a big company to send off a long-time employee or major contributor (such as a senior executive) in the right way despite their best attempts. The farewells, thank you’s and recognition don’t quite reflect the humanity of what is essentially a parting of ways between people. Life meets reality. Read more »
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Posted on July 14th, 2007 by Atif
Fortune held its high-profile iMeme conference last week, which is billed as venue to bring together the “Thinkers of Tech.”
I found the substance of the conference lived up to its aspirational billing. Many factors influence the utility of an event including the speaker line-up, topics, format and quality of the audience. This event rated highly among those criteria. One additional consideration was the moderation style, lead by Fortune reporters, who often didn’t refrain from asking tough questions and probing into sensitive but relevant issues. Fortune played to its strength by leveraging the journalistic voices of its staff to drive meaningful dialogue amongst panelists.
This approach made for a very lively session on the search business, where rival companies were assembled to speak about business strategy. The search panel included Sheryl Sandberg (Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations) from Google, Jeff Weiner (Executive Vice President) from Yahoo, Yusuf Mehdi (Senior Vice President and Chief Advertising Strategist) from Microsoft and Jim Lanzone (CEO) from Ask. Herding the first three companies onto the same stage in the current market environment is as close as you can come in business to pure theater. While these executives are too polished and experienced to draw direct comparisons to each other’s businesses, it’s not too difficult to read between the lines and get a glimpse into how these companies are framing high-stakes competitive dynamics.
Each company discussed current initiatives. Google didn’t share much new perspective, except to say that users still only receive a small portion of their daily information from Google despite it’s dominance, meaning more of the world’s information needs to be brought onto the web. “We think there is a long way for us to go,” said Sheryl Sandberg.
While Yahoo and Microsoft may have conceded this round of the battle, they have several initiatives in the works, some of which were explained. Read more »
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Posted on June 22nd, 2007 by Atif
I was on-site at Supernova today. David Weinberger, author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the recently published Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke during an afternoon panel. His new book is a thought-provoking work about how we need to get comfortable with the disorder of information spawned by the web. David covers a lot of ground in the book but I’d like to focus on the observation he makes about information overload. He says that the way to solve the overload problem (think 13bn web pages and growing) is to feed more information to the user. It’s a powerful, yet counter intuitive, idea to which I’d like to add a branch or extension.My extension is that users face a different kind of information selection problem depending upon where they stand in the consumption lifecycle. Specifically, that the overload problem is much more acute later on in the lifecycle than in the beginning.Since lifecycles have a front-end and a back-end, we’ll break down consumption into those two spaces, recognizing that gray area exists. By front-end, I mean the user’s objective starting from the “point of inspiration”. There’s always something that motivates a user to seek out information to begin with. This inspiration can be casual or deliberate. A casual intent includes the desire to kill time or have fun…info-snacking, as they say. Deliberate intent is usually task-oriented but as I’ll demonstrate later, the distinction may not matter when it comes to overload.You might ask why information management would more challenging for users in the midst of consumption (versus at the start) when they face the same problem scope on the front-end as they do on the back-end (13bn pages to wrestle with no matter which end you’re into). To answer that you’d have to look at the “what and how” of content consumption from the “point of inspiration” to the “point of resolution.” Let me break that down. Read more »
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Posted on May 31st, 2007 by Atif
Vertical search is not a new area of web apps but I learned something new about it recently. I attended a panel of CTO’s from the space yesterday at the Silicon Valley Web Builder event. Participating companies included Simply Hired, Spock, MEDgle and Riya. Each representative took a couple of minutes to conduct a product demonstration. Spock is still in a private beta, so it was neat to see it in action . My first impressions were very positive.
What’s interesting is that even though these are all search companies, none of the products are competitive. You might think this a very natural dynamic. After all, each vertical is necessarily focused on different slices of web content. But there’s more that makes search a different app as you move from vertical to vertical. It’s not simply a matter of different information. For me, the dividing line between these apps is rooted in how users interact with that information. The way the search process is organized to help users negotiate that interaction can vary widely from app to app. Read more »
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Posted on May 25th, 2007 by Atif
I attended The Semantic Conference this week in San Jose. One of the most interesting talks was given by Mills Davis, who is a recognized expert in this area. Mills spoke about his Semantic Wave project and research. One part of the research hypothesizes an adoption cycle for different phases of the web. In other words, different paradigms for the organization and use of web content. They shift over time as the industry and technology matures. I will post this slide of his presentation soon.
The framework looks at two dimensions for the advancement of the web. First, there is the strength of the semantics. That refers to the degree of knowledge representation in the way information is defined for computers. You can have weak or strong semantics surrounding the same given piece of data (say, my contact information). The other dimension is the degree of reasoning capability of tools and applications. This is a smart way of framing the opportunity because it highlights essential trade-offs. Read more »
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Posted on April 24th, 2007 by Atif
I’m onsite this week at ad tech (the well-known technology meets interatcive marketing conference). Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners moderated a panel here entitled “Internet Economy: Start-ups, Bubbles and Buyouts.” Roger is known as one of the most versatile technology investors around and that made him a really good choice to manage this discussion.
The very last question from audience related to possible alternatives to Google. Roger provided some of his own take on the matter. He appeared very resolute that better techniques for organizing web content will surface to challenge Google. They way he looked at it, Google falls short when it comes to handling any type of user needs that don’t involve keywords (to paraphrase, “Google doesn’t work well when you give it a few words or a sentence”). His takeaway — editorial is a really important layer which explains the value of Wikipedia and other forms of aggregation that will emerge based on wiki and collaboration tools. Read more »
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