Mobile
Skype Announces Unlimited Long-Distance Calls to 34 Countries
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Written By Drupad Sil | April 21, 2008 | Share This
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A big announcement today by VoIP services provider Skype. The eBay-owned company unveiled unlimited calling to 34 countries including
Skype is one of eBay’s biggest divisions and caused the online auction company to take a $1.4 billion writedown last year when it purchased Skype for $4.3 billion. The issue was an inability to monetize largely free Internet calling. However, with 309 million users, there’s plenty to be optimistic about. Mark Evans has more to say:
“Consider Skype’s first-quarter results: another 33 million users came on board…year-over-year revenue climbed 61% to $126 million and Skype-to-Skype minutes rose 30% to 14.2 billion. So, what you’ve got is a high-growth business that will likely have sales of $500-million in 2008.”
With those growth prospects and owner eBay looking to recoup some of last year’s losses, there’s growing speculation that a Skype spin-off or telecom acquisition could be in the works. From iLocus:
“In the meantime, which direction should Skype pursue and what should be the eBay criteria in deciding the future of this business unit? I think the criterion should be future growth of Skype itself…So I think the first choice should be to spin off Skype as an independent company rather than selling the asset at a substantial loss to some other company. If, however, selling Skype to another company is the only choice, I think a telco acquisition could make sense for Skype…Through Skype acquisition, not only does a telco get the most popular telephony interface on the Internet, it also inherits a large pool of developer partners that a telco could only dream of.”
We’ll keep a close eye on Skype and its tremendous growth. This could be the year that it all pays off.
Search and Social Media: 2007 in Review
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 20, 2007 | Share This
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The year’s almost over, which means it’s time to look back on search and social media in 2007 and take stock of what happened and what it all means. It was a big year in search and a pretty big year for us at Reprise Media, too: OMMA deemed us Best Search Agency for 2006, we turned four years old, we joined IPG, and we started giving back.
Way back in January 2007, Searchviews predicted quite a few things that came to fruition, among them that Google would keep growing (okay, that was an easy one) and that Panama would be good for Yahoo. The key theme this year was media convergence, with an emphasis on acquisitions and blurring the lines between search and social media. You’ll have to come back tomorrow for our 2008 predictions, but to refresh your memory, here are the big developments of 2007 that we’ll keep close to our hearts… until next year’s big stories overshadow them.
Yahoo
It was a tough year to be #2, especially for the ever-beleaguered Yahoo, which kicked off 2007 with some bad press courtesy of Wired. The magazine skewered the company’s spotty strategy and its then-CEO Terry Semel. No big surprise, first quarter earnings were disappointing, and Semel was replaced with Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang over the summer. Yahoo released some interesting 2.0 tools and bought some others, but this year it mostly floundered when it came time to pull together a cohesive social network strategy that would truly leverage its existing gajillion or so users.
On the search front, Yahoo had a slightly better year: its introduction of Panama was a great move (here’s our full report), America said it loved Yahoo the most, and improvements to its search engine were a step in the right direction. Now Yahoo’s signing up publishers to serve contextual ads in PDFs, and the company also bought Right Media and BlueLithium to expand its ad network. Here’s to putting the ! back into Yahoo! in 2008 - in a good way.
Google
Every year we ask Google, is it possible to be so successful? Really? If it wasn’t for everyone’s favorite upstart-in-shower-slides, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the press and industry upheaval Facebook inspired, I’d say this was Google’s year.
Unlike in 2006, though, Google’s growth didn’t come without costs — 2007 saw the rise of Google as a true world power, wherein Google became everyone’s best Frenemy - i.e., the company we all hate to love (though Zuckerberg seems to be gunning for top spot in the frenemy category for next year). Google managed to get sued for $1 billion over YouTube, had some antitrust trouble over its acquisition of DoubleClick (apparently now resolved), inspired the ire of both librarians and newspapers, served us some questionable ads, introduced shady “preferred cost bidding,”and without really launching it in a meaningful way, introduced OpenSocial, a consortium that looks like its sole aim is to take down Facebook.
On the other hand, Google also created a super-cool mobile platform/operating system (maybe cooler than the iPhone, maybe not), kept monetizing everything (this could maybe also go in the list of bad things, but we’re all marketers here), and got its hands dirty with TV (not yet a smashing success). Not to mention, Google also continually improved its already supremely useful services (Gmail, Analytics, Reader, etc.), bought and integrated Feedburner, launched iGoogle, and kept us sated with free versions of expensive stuff. Probably in his 20% time, Google co-founder Larry Page even came up with a plan to save the planet and Google funded it. All in all, not bad for a year’s work. Plus, of the top 3 engines, Google’s social network efforts seem most promising and logical. We’ll be watching you, Google, and we know you’ll probably be watching us.
Microsoft
Microsoft was on the defensive (or is that the offensive?) much of this year, especially because Google beat them out for DoubleClick and surpassed it in site traffic. MSFT paid a whopping $6 billion for online ad company aQuantive to help nurse its wounds and then drove Facebook’s valuation to $15 billion by paying $240 million for a small stake - exemplifying its strategy this year, which was to buy or partner up wherever it made sense. Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, launched with much fanfare but also to mixed reviews. We’ll have to wait and see with this one.
Ask.com
Ask.com is tiny but worked hard this year, introducing contextual ads and getting props for its proactive privacy policy. Its parent company, IAC, decided to be less confusing by breaking up its holdings into a few smaller companies, which should benefit the search engine, and Ask also secured $3.5 billion deal with Google.
Facebook, Social Media
Arguably the leader of the social media pack, Facebook’s high value as a communication vehicle became clear when, after shootings at Virginia Tech, students used the site to share information faster than the news networks could. That paradigm shift continued when the site opened up its API to allow outside development of applications - a move that made VCs sit up and that forced direct competitors and even other industries, like notoriously draconian mobile providers, to follow (in rhetoric, at least).
Thanks to Facebook, it’s not enough to have a site, you’ve got to have a platform. Applications became microcosmic indicators of Facebook’s massive success, and the site made its first acquisition in July. But the social network was also plagued by a some missteps this year. Users of the site are resistant to overt advertising and Facebook bungled the launch of its newest ad program, Beacon, shaking the faith of its advertisers and causing some (minimal) unrest among users, though it continues to secure funding.
Media Convergence, Money, and Ad-Model Growing Pains
ComScore introduced new engagement metrics this year, and social networks added search-like, CPC ad structures. A rash of acquisitions made it clear that everyone was eager to get into the social media game, even if they didn’t know quite how: Ebay bought StumbleUpon, and CBS snagged online video show Wallstrip and music service Last.fm.
This year’s housing market crisis had many worried that the economy’s headed for downturn, but we didn’t think online advertising would be drastically affected, and so far, we’re right. Traditional offline industries (music, TV, and newspapers) continued struggling with web monetization. Steve Jobs railed against DRM, and Radiohead practically gave away their new album as an experiment. The New York Times got rid of paid content online, successfully, but the rest of the newspaper industry seems not to have figured out how to make enough money. In TV, the writers’ strike is still underway because networks aren’t giving writers a cut of online profits, while networks experiment with ways to distribute content online.
And Other Top Stories Worth Remembering…
- For the third year in a row, we evaluated big advertisers for their search-savvy in our Super Bowl Search Marketing Scorecard. The winners made search an integral part of their campaigns, ensuring that millions of dollars spent on TV campaigns didn’t get lost when it came to the search box. Here are parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of that feature.
- Taco Bell, dirty as their restaurants may have been, proved they know how to leverage search to make the best of a horrible health and PR nightmare.
In sum, a lot of growth for the search industry, the emergence of social media as a real force, and still some hobbling by traditional media companies to catch up or keep up - 2008 will definitely be interesting. What stories do you think will still matter next year? What would you add to this list?
Google Maps Mobile Adds “You Are Here” Function
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | November 28, 2007 | Share This
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Google Maps has been busy this week. First, they added a new terrain view option that shows users topography, and today Google Maps for mobile added a beta “My Location” feature, which is basically “You are here” functionality that shows you where you are on the map. The best part is that it doesn’t require a GPS-enabled phone, because it uses cell phone towers to figure it out. From Google Maps, here’s how to use it:
Press “0″ and look for the blue dot… If you have a GPS-enabled device, this blue dot corresponds to your GPS location. At times, or if you do not have a GPS-enabled phone, you might see the blue dot surrounded by a light blue circle (as shown on the right) to indicate uncertainty about your location…
The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map - it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average).
And here is a short video that explains it.
Google Buys Twitter-like Jaiku
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | October 9, 2007 | Share This
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Google has just purchased Jaiku, a Finnish “activity stream”/microblogging service similar to Twitter, for an undisclosed sum. This follows rumors late last month that Google will reveal a Facebook-killing social media service on November 5. From the Jaiku Q&A:
While it’s too soon to comment on specific products and development plans, we’ll be working with the Jaiku team over the coming months to expand their technology in ways we hope you’ll find interesting and useful. Check back in a few months to see what we’ve developed.
Twitter was co-founded by Evan Williams, one of the creators of Google-purchased Blogger, and some bloggers are wondering why Google didn’t buy Twitter instead. I haven’t used Twitter very much, but the “channels” feature in Jaiku makes it seem more intuitively network-y. It’s still hard to imagine Google’s current social network, Orkut, as a Facebook killer because it’s just so hard to look at, though according to a recent BusinessWeek article, Orkut continues to pick up steam internationally:
Though MySpace still gets four times as much traffic globally, Orkut recently pushed past the News Corp. (NWS) subsidiary in the Asia Pacific region. Orkut’s following in that market, which includes China and Japan, has nearly tripled, to roughly 11 million visitors a month, over the past year, according to the consultancy comScore (SCOR). MySpace, by contrast, has been drawing between 9 million and 10 million visitors in recent months.
Meanwhile, Orkut’s usage in Latin America has continued to climb: In August, it received 12.4 million unique visitors from that region, double the Latin American traffic of MySpace and Facebook combined. “Now everybody’s got Orkut, even people who don’t have their own computer,” says 15-year-old Ian Quinonez Gaspar, who lives in São Paulo, Brazil, and has more than 700 friends links.
Perhaps working with Jaiku to build something “interesting and useful” will give Google’s Orkut the edge to convince more people to join up stateside. And if it doesn’t become a Facebook killer, may Google instead become a Twitter killer?
Incidentally, reports that Twitter may be testing ads also emerged yesterday.