What is Searchviews?

Searchviews is the company blog of Reprise Media. We impart daily insights on Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO. Read More...

Contact Us

Send us a message at searchviews@
reprisemedia.com


Search

Archives


MyBlogLog - Readers

ECommerce

« Previous Entries

Enterprise Web 2.0 Worth $4.6 Billion in 2013

Written By Drupad Sil | April 21, 2008 | Share This |

Forrester Research

Forrester Research today released a six-year Web 2.0 Market Forecast. From the report itself:

“Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share. In all, the market for enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be defined by commodization, eroding prices, and subsumption into other enterprise collaboration software over the next five years; it will eventually disappear into the fabric of the enterprise, despite the major impacts the technology will have on how businesses market their products and optimize their workforces.”

A definition before we jump into the discussion. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t include pure ad spending dollars spent on services like Facebook, Blogger, or Twitter, instead counting productivity tools based on Web 2.0 concepts. So, Facebook as a whole wouldn’t count, but money spent on the creation and syndication of a Facebook app or social network widget would.

According to the report, social networking spending will take up almost half of the total, coming in at about $2 billion, followed by mashups, RSS, and wikis, all three of which total approximately $1.6 billion. From Larry Dignan at Between the Lines:

“The top spending categories aren’t all that surprising. For instance, social networking is a decent substitute for knowledge management applications, a category that companies haven’t yet cracked. In other words, social networking could yield ROI. Mashups could also deliver faster time to market and it doesn’t hurt that giants like IBM are pushing them.”

So, what are some of the issues this developing market will face? Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb explains:

“For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:

1) I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as ‘consumer-grade’ technology

2) Ad-supported web tools generally have ‘free’ as the starting point

3) Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments”

There are even problems with the definition of Enterprise 2.0 itself. From Dennis Howlett at Irregular Enterprise:

“[Forrester’s definition is] an incredibly loose definition and one that could be applied to any number of technology components from CRM through to supply chain management and pretty much anything in between. The fact is that with so many definitions floating around, I’m of the view that Enterprise 2.0 does not exist except in the minds of those who are selling technology components. That’s not a recipe for success.”

What’s the bottom line? The big picture seems pretty clear: the flexible communication and networking tools created in the past few years will probably find paying customers in the form of big corporations looking to become more lightweight. The interesting questions are how quickly it’ll happen, how much internal resistance there will be, and how they’ll be integrated into existing internal applications.

EBay To Cut Jobs and Restructure

Written By Sepideh Saremi | March 20, 2008 | Share This |

ebay

Reuters reports today that eBay will be cutting some staff in what a company spokesperson calls a “globalization and centralization effort.” The number to be cut is less than 1% of eBay’s workforce, the spokesperson said, which could be as many as 150 people, as eBay has around 15,500 employees, according to Portfolio.com. With recent news that eBay dumped its partner ValueClick in favor of handling its affiliate network in-house, it looks like eBay is focused on making a lot of improvements in advance of its Q1 earnings call in April.

Despite a seller’s strike over increases in fee listings, Wired reports that eBay’s doing very well, though Don Reisinger at CNET’s News Blog argues that’s because eBay’s got no competition. Reisinger writes that eBay’s decisions over the last few years have made the company forget its core service as an auction site:

eBay is an auction site much like Christies is an auction house. Do you see “Buy it Now” features promoted at the Christies auction? Can people attending the auction make VoIP calls during it? Do they really want buying advice?

eBay has lost its way and the only reason it’s able to enjoy these profits is because there’s no company out there that’s willing to compete on such a grand scale. But why not? eBay is obviously worried about the future and auctions are still a viable way to buy products. If a company came along that finally revolutionized online auctions, the entire landscape of the business could be changed forever and eBay would be long forgotten.

EBay’s CEO Meg Whitman is leaving at the end of this month, and with eBay’s new focus reportedly being on platforms and distributing its content, I think that might be the revolutionary push the company needs to restore its past glory.

SearchForce or SpamForce?

Written By Peter Hershberg | September 26, 2007 | Share This |

I generally wouldn’t give something like this a second of my time, but it’s already been a long week (even though it’s only mid-day Wednesday) and I might as well take my frustration out on SearchForce, the fine folks who sent me the email below:

searchforce.jpg

Now, there are a number of things about this message that I have a problem with, including the feature in the left-hand column that lists three reasons why SearchForce is “different” from other search firms”. None of their claims are actually true (far from it), but we’re used to competing against companies who mislead prospects about their history, capabilities, etc, so I can live with this.

What I’m not willing to overlook is the fact that this email was completely unsolicited – I’ve never signed up for anything through SearchForce and there’s no reason why they should be contacting me. Not only that, but I received three copies of the same message, which means they not only sent it to my personal email address, but a couple of “aliases” that I’m included on as well. I’m pretty certain that the “press” alias at my company, for instance, never registered for anything with SearchForce.

Now, I should be able to definitively say which email addresses SearchForce contacted me at, but the fact that there are no listed recipients in the “To” field makes that an impossibility. As a result, I’m not sure what I need to do to unsubscribe from their mailing list. Yes, I could follow their instructions and put “REMOVE” in the subject line, but that would only take one of the three email addresses they have on file off their mailing list, leaving two others to continuously be spammed by SearchForce.

But what’s most confusing about SearchForce’s ambitious sales effort is the disclaimer at the bottom of the message:

“Disclaimer: This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named. If you are not the named addressee you should not disseminate, distribute or copy this e-mail.”

Named individual? I wish there was one – or three, for that matter. Hey, SearchForce, feel free to let me know who those named individuals are and then unsubscribe them all from your mailing list.

Social Media Sites Speeding Democratization of Music Industry

Written By Drupad Sil | July 31, 2007 | Share This |

EMRLogo.gif

A survey released today by Entertainment Media Research correlates social media sites to the growth of illegal music downloading.

The 2007 Digital Media Survey credits social networking sites like MySpace and Bebo for allowing more people to discover music online rather than via television or the radio. The report polled 1,700 people between the ages of 13 and 60. One key finding is that the percentage of people who use a social networking site has increased from 74% to 86%, and that 40% of those who do have music embedded in their profile pages. This number increases to 65% among teenagers. According to Ben Bland at the Telegraph, the CEO of Entertainment Media Research explains this phenomenon as follows:

“Social networks are fundamentally changing the way we discover, purchase and use music. The dynamics of democratisation, word of mouth recommendation and instant purchase challenge the established order and offer huge opportunities to forward-thinking businesses.”

The key words there are ‘forward-thinking’. (more…)

eBay: Taking on Craigslist with Kijiji?

Written By Emily Koh | July 5, 2007 | Share This |

kijiji.gif

Yesterday eBay quietly launched its international online classifieds site, Kijiji, in the U.S.

Kijiji — which means “village” in Swahili — is currently the market leader in Canada, Germany, Italy and Taiwan, and is now available in 220 cities across the United States, according to the New York Times.

Kijiji’s primary competitor is Craigslist, the leading classified ads site in the U.S. Though Kijiji listings are currently free, it may follow Craigslist’s example and offer premium listings in the future. Kijiji will also have ads provided by Yahoo, as part of Yahoo and eBay’s existing U.S. partnership.
(more…)

LinkedIn Hires New Managers, Gears up for IPO

Written By Drupad Sil | June 27, 2007 | Share This |

images

Business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn is preparing for its IPO by reloading some key management positions, Reuters reports.

On Tuesday, it announced the hiring of three new executives, including ex-Tivo and AskJeeves CFO Steve Sordello. Expected to join Sordello is Yahoo Inc. advertising executive Patrick Crane, who will lead the company’s first general marketing campaign. The duo will work with recent hire Anil Khatri, a former vice president of engineering at Yahoo. LinkedIn is hoping that the new leadership can lead the charge against increasingly stiff competition, most notably from Facebook.com.

California-based LinkedIn was founded in 2003, but only began turning a profit in April 2006. Designed as a site where corporate professionals can maintain a list of business contacts, it has experienced rapid growth of late, with membership doubling to about 12 million in the last nine months. Indeed, LinkedIn Chief Executive Dan Nye is projecting revenues around the $100 million mark for 2008. The site makes money from a premium subscription service, transaction fees from recruiters, and online advertisements, but distinguishes itself from other online networking sites with its all-business attitude in functionality. While MySpace and Facebook are social networking tools, LinkedIn users are expected to accomplish tasks and move on. Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped Facebook from taking a significant bite out of LinkedIn’s audience.

Despite LinkedIn’s focus on the business world, Facebook has been steadily attracting more users from the corporate world. While Nye differentiates the two by claiming Facebook’s appeal is social, not professional, there are plans for a LinkedIn application to be released on Facebook. It would appear that such a precise distinction doesn’t make a difference for most users, however. Eric Savitz over at Tech Trader Daily notes:

“I’m registered with LinkedIn, and I can appreciate how some people find it useful. But I would note here that there is an interesting thing happening among the Silicon Valley elite, which LinkedIn ought to be worrying about: venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, PR people, reporters, bloggers and the rest of the digerati are moving onto Facebook in what seems like a giant hurry.”

We’ll have to wait and see if the new LinkedIn team can make up ground on Facebook. If they can’t close the gap, an IPO may be out of the question.

eBay and Google play nice… for now

Written By Emily Koh | June 26, 2007 | Share This |

ebaygoogle.jpg

Just a few days after their dramatic withdrawal from Google Adwords, eBay will resume paid search advertising on Google. But, “in a much more limited way than before,” reports eBay spokesman Hani Durzy.

Last week, eBay announced that it was “experimenting” with paid search providers outside of Google — a move that many people interpreted as an abject response to escalating competition between Google Checkout and eBay’s PayPal.
(more…)

PdF Keynote: Eric Schmidt and Tom Friedman on “How Technology is Changing Politics”

Written By Sepideh Saremi | May 21, 2007 | Share This |

monk-cell-phone.gif

Thomas Friedman and Google CEO Eric Schmidt kicked off the Personal Democracy Forum, a day-long conference about how “technology is changing politics”. The bulk of their discussion touched on personal privacy in the era of search, networked media, and government censorship, with an emphasis on Google’s role in all of these. Tom Friedman, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The World is Flat, did a really great job of leading the conversation and setting the tone for the rest of the morning’s “flat world” talks.

I was especially interested in Schmidt’s comments on personalized search in the context of the “network effect”. As more and more people add information to a network, he said, it makes that network more valuable. Schmidt attested,

“If you use a personal version of Google, we learn more about you and can tailor the results more and more. A little creepy sometimes, but it’s a powerful notion that a computer could understand you.”

Creepy, indeed, though it seems to me that Google’s personalized search is less about building a network (which implicitly includes other people) than about creating a framework for a single user.

Schmidt also talked about the political impact of instant access and the ability to author, search and globalize content. He pointed out that social media allows small groups of people to amplify typically inconsequential details. During a political campaign, for example, a politician’s minor error is easily snowballed into an enormous reputation management nightmare. But, he said, the Internet also functions as a “truth detector” (formerly known as a “lie detector”?) and that as voters become more search savvy, they are less likely to believe everything published online. In the meantime, search engines do a better job of helping people sort out verifiable content.

Friedman pointed out that George Bush would probably never have been elected president if his every move at Yale was recorded by a cell phone camera. Schmidt jokingly responded, “By age 21, it should be acceptable to change your name and essentially start over” - this would be the antidote, he said, to “too much sharing at a young age” proffered by blogs and social media. Though Schmidt wasn’t being serious, I would argue that rather than needing an ‘antidote’, the MySpace/Facebook generation is shifting the paradigms of acceptable behavior; perhaps the transparency created by Internet media is making everyone (including future employers, etc.) inured to photos of people playing beer pong. Schmidt argued that we’re going to have to learn how to “live with historical records” and that this will change what people “offer of themselves” publicly on blogs and other media.

On that note, Schmidt discussed Google’s increasing role in government. Schmidt said that the company deals with issues of government pressure on a case-by-case basis. The cost of censorship, he said, is often an even bigger problem for governments than the censored issue itself. In Bahrain, for example, the government blocked Google Earth because Bahrainis could see how much land was held by the royal family. But in doing so, the Bahraini Government undermined their authority on the national land issue.

On the topic of censorship, Schmit discussed Google’s experiences with the “great firewall” of China. Google’s compromise on censorship is to omit censored search results, but tell the user that there are results being censored. Schmidt argued that this transparency prompts the user to find the information via alternative means (namely, getting around that firewall).

In sum, the internet is creating huge issues for governments that are used to being in control of public information. In the United States, politicians not present in search and social media results could find themselves with huge reputation management problems. Despite this, the increased activity of users online is creating a wealth of information that helps search engines better perform. When search engines do a better job of filtering results, people have better access to information. The spread of information empowers individuals to make smarter choices, which in turn, makes the community stronger.

Facebook Launching Free Classifieds Network

Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 11, 2007 | Share This |

classifieds.gif

The New York Times reports that Facebook will soon offer free classified ads through a future network called the Facebook Marketplace. This leap into classifieds could “deal another blow to newspapers” that depend heavily on classified advertising for revenue. Local and college papers will be most affected, says the NYT, because the majority of Facebook users are college students.

The Marketplace will take advantage of the trust-value of Facebook’s closed social network,

“Facebook users who create classifieds can choose to show them only to their designated friends on the service, or to anyone in one of their “networks” — their high school, college, company or geographic region. They can choose to make the listings appear on their profile pages, and send them out on “news feeds,” the automatic updates that appear when users log in to the site.”

This ‘network’ angle gives Facebook a huge competitive advantage over newspapers and other online classified sites, notably Craigslist, that don’t have social filters for ads. Writes Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0,

” Neither Craigslist nor newspapers can compete with prospective roommates being able to size each other up based on their Facebook profiles. Facebook could achieve a Google-like disruption by offering the ads for free to increase Facebook usage and monetizing that usage in other ways.”

There’s certainly a huge opportunity for Facebook to parlay free classifieds into some kind of e-commerce revenue stream. As Josh Catone on Read/Write Web writes,

“The Marketplace means that Facebook, which has rebuffed a billion dollar take over offer from Yahoo!, is serious about diversifying its revenue stream, even though it will be a free service for now. Social networks are ripe for ecommerce…There is a large piece of the $211.4 billion/year online shopping pie that social sites like Facebook could potentially be dipping into.”

Further Reading

Ebay “in Advanced Talks” for StumbleUpon

Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 9, 2007 | Share This |

stumbleupon.gif

The Wall Street Journal reports that eBay is “in advanced talks” to acquire StumbleUpon for as much as $75 million. The website recommendation service had, as of April, 2.1 million users and 4+ million sites “stumbled” daily (via Techcrunch).

In light of eBay’s other recent acquisitions, Skype and Paypal, the roll of StumbleUpon within eBay’s core business is a little unclear. Om Malik suggests that the StumbleUpon toolbar could be reconfigured as a Skype client that would give eBay an “end run around Google’s dominance of the search business.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, StumbleUpon and eBay have been talking since November. Techcrunch was the first to report word of a potential acquisition back in April. Since then, however, both eBay CEO Meg Whitman and StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp have dismissed the blog buzz as “just rumors.”

« Previous Entries