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. Read more »

• 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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Microsoft or Google - what might be the Yahoo employee perspective? While guaranteed outcomes may trump the unknown for investors, a different logic seems to apply for Yahoo employees thus far. That’s understandable at this early stage of the process. It was assumed that Yahoo would occupy its current industry position for a long-time, fighting infinite rounds with Google. Being part of that battle within an independent Yahoo has carried a huge sense of purpose for employees. It’s only natural to want to see this set-up continue, especially since the web remains in its infancy and Yahoo is still the # 2 player. I’m not saying that the fight won’t continue as vigorously under new ownership. But it will be different.

The prevailing view on tradeoffs for employees has gone something like this — the ambiguity of a Google deal buys time and preserves the dream, whereas the Microsoft option brings certainty of the “not-so-fun” variety. I’m interested in opinions that dig into these assumptions and will offer ideas to kick-off that thread.

Teaming-up with Google on search buys independence but introduces unresolved issues about long-term positioning of the business. Yes, Yahoo would continue to operate an independent search product as well as it large web apps network such as email, jobs, movies, travel, personals, social bookmarking, photo sharing and finance, while better monetizing search through Google. That sounds great in theory because the only thing changing is that Google’s under the hood of search advertising. The user experience that we know as “Yahoo” would remain in-tact.

But two related issues surface as a result of such a partnership. Read more »

• The Letter Where Yahoo Makes Its Case to Shareholders
• Will Yahoo Feel the Love?
• Yahoo Weighs Outsourcing Search Ads to Google
• Yahoo Partisans Go Online with Buyout Opinions
• Murdoch's News Corp Negotiating Alliance with Yahoo
• A Media Buyer's Perspective

Filed under: Google, Online Advertising, Search Marketing, Web Apps | No Comments »

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Comcast has a fantastic marketing campaign these days that you’ve probably seen on television or billboards. Building on the “It’s Comcastic” theme, the company is having fun innovating on the English language in ways that speak to digital life.

This involves devising new buzz-phrases like “snurfing” (surfing the web instead of paying attention to your phone conversation) and “Wi-fiving” (instant messaging a friend to celebrate a specific part of a TV program) that represent a merging of different words into one. Comcast refers to it as triples language.

These buzz-phrases resonate with consumers because they speak to real scenarios that people now encounter in an era of digital living.

My favorite is an advertisement about “quizjacking” where a girl is watching a game show while her brother, sitting within earshot of the TV, is looking up answers to questions on his computer. He’s spitting out answers before she has a chance to take a guess.

Siblings annoying each other is always the basis of good humor and this example was sinisterly familiar. The big picture, of course, is Comcast demonstrating how television and Internet consumption go together in ways that are novel.

I think Comcast is touching the tip of the iceberg in this exercise of digitally inspired word-mashups. I’m no William Saffire, but I’d like to add a few of my own based on observations. Here’s one to start (and more down the line as ideas come to mind): SOFTSUMERISM.

Softsumerism —-> The cross-over influence of consumer applications on the design of enterprise technologies; innovation within enterprise systems addressing the convergence of personal and professional identity. Read more »

• Comcast Triples Language Site
• Interview with Head of Google Analytics
• IBM Teams With Second Life To Build Portable Avatars
• CTIA: Microsoft Touts Convergence

Filed under: Google, Web Apps, Innovation, Enterprise Technology | No Comments »

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Marc Andreessen recently wrote a useful post about web platforms. It’s a timely collection of thoughts that has spurred conversation amongst executives at several large technology companies, including Yahoo and Google, according to my sources. There’s a lot of ambiguity around this whole issue of platforms so I’m glad that Marc has taken the lead in throwing down a detailed perspective.

Part of the ambiguity stems from the fact that the word is totally hackneyed and over-played. What everyone seems to agree on is that in the distant future there will only be a few big IT companies – all of them with platforms at the core. Here we mean to say that current borders between layers of the technology stack – network, data center, web services, applications, etc. will fuse together to form platforms that challenge traditional lines. Understanding the nature of these platform opportunities, therefore, becomes an issue of survival. The issue has reach beyond traditional web companies, which are the focus of Marc’s ideas, affecting a spectrum of companies ranging from Cisco to IBM to Google. Read more »

• The Web is the Platform
• The Social Network Operating System
• Andreessen vs. Cisco: Web 2.0 platform competition heats up
• IBM Confirms: Google Poses NO Enterprise Threat

Filed under: Google, Web Apps, Innovation, Enterprise Technology | 3 Comments »

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Labs, research and incubation practices within large companies are growing in importance and influence. For this reason, I’m starting to pull together information on how innovation is being pursued by large technology and media companies, while raising some questions about these approaches in the process.

There’s no doubt the sourcing, development and scaling of innovation will become a way of life for the company of the future. Consider the following statistics which speak to the significance of the matter for large companies:

• A recent study revealed that 72% of corporate executives believe their primary source of competition in 5 years will not be the company which is currently the main competitor, according to Bain & Company and the Economist.
• The well-known author Chris Zook, also of Bain, published data predicting that 10 years from now only 1 out of 3 companies will resemble what it looks like today (one of three will be acquired/bankrupt and the other third will redefine the core business).
• By 2000, the average tenure of a firm in the S&P 500 had declined to 10 years from its historical level of 66 years.
  

Yes, the half-life of market leaders is headed in a clear direction and that’s downward.

Since the nineties, a lot of growth has been predicated on acquisition strategies, but even that is beginning to fade as the fail-safe vehicle for entering new markets. Zook studied the success rates of different strategies when the rules of the core business are in flux (business turbulence). Large/transformative mergers yielded a 5-10% success rate in contrast to a 30%-40% for initiatives where companies re-positioned around new platforms. These are defined as hidden, internal assets which are developed into market-facing platforms. That’s a humbling or encouraging comparison depending upon how you look at it.

We’re living in a time where traditional disruption has become more manageable through known and repeatable business processes. Today’s anxiety is being driven instead by the Black Swans, who lurk without prior knowledge, waiting to upset industrial economics before you know it.

So what the models for innovation and the trade-offs between them? I’m starting to look at some current examples and attempt to glean the best practices. Read more »

• Yahoo Research Homepage
• Cisco Reinvents the Corporate Incubator
• Microsoft's adLabs
• Delivering Innovation at BT

Filed under: Google, Innovation, Traditional Media | 1 Comment »

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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 »

• Fortune iMeme - What Next For The Internet Media Giants?
• Search Leaders Get Defensive
• iMeme Fa So La Ti Do
• Web Leaders - Search is Just the Beginning
• What's Right and Wrong with Yahoo

Filed under: Events, Google, Search Technology, Innovation | 1 Comment »

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I’ll admit to being schizophrenic in my web usage. This explains why plain-vanilla Google is set as my default browser homepage. On the one hand, I don’t want anything pre-defined for me when I start web browsing. The idea of a personalized page with feeds from sources tailored to my interests feels limiting to me. That may sound counter-intuitive because the point of such personalization is to save me time and effort by aggregating what I’ve defined as important. But it just doesn’t work for me precisely because it’s pre-defined. I prefer to start knowing that the whole web is my oyster.Google’s simple search box respects this sentiment. It stares back at me, daring me to query. It’s a much better starting companion on a journey into the web because it allows me to start anywhere I want.

For example, I often use it to type in the URL for a favorite sports site. I use Google’s box like a keystroke command. I find that easier than navigating to the address bar on the toolbar and mucking around with the entire address. Of course, I can just enter some query terms in the event I ‘m casually or seriously looking for new information. Like you, curiosity strikes me about a half dozen times a day and having Google there as my homepage is my zero latency strategy.

Another way to frame the issue is to say that web schizophrenia comes from the fact that I want nothing and everything at the same time. Google is the only product that offers that to me right now. Read more »

• Google Ramps Up Personalized Search
• Google Blog on Personalization
• Homepage for NetVibes
• Homepage for PageFlakes
• Yahoo Says Search is History!

Filed under: Google, Search Technology, User Experiences, Web Apps, Innovation | 1 Comment »

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Video is getting a lot of attention on the web today and rightfully so. But what does this mean for the text-web (you know, information produced in plain-old written form)?

Some Internet analysts are predicting that video will dominate the web content within 5 years.

I don’t agree with that statement despite being very bullish on video web apps.

Video has a huge and growing place in media consumption. No big revelation. One testament to its growing influence on the web is Google Universal Search, which subtly integrates video (along with map, book, blog and image) content into traditional search results. But it’s simplistic to believe that anything produced in text today can be better consumed in video. The written word is and will remain the optimal form for a lot of content. Yes, the same news story can be transformed into news video. But the relevance of one over the other is a function of user needs. Read more »

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

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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 »

Filed under: Events, Google, People | No Comments »

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Eric Schmidt headlined the Web 2.0 Expo today in San Francisco. He was queried in a punchy and intimate manner by the moderator, John Battelle, in an on-stage interview. John is no stranger to Google, of course. Though several books have been written about the company, John’s is the definitive work. Not your run of the mill corporate biography, John’s account is a more ambitious effort to bubble-up a level and put the company within an industry and societal perspective. He also follows the company via Searchblog http://battellemedia.com/ and is a mainstay of the Google ecosystem through editorial events like the Expo where he is often paired with the Google triumvirate.

Read more »

Filed under: Events, Google, People | No Comments »

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