The hostile bid for Yahoo! by Microsoft is probably THE topic of the month, if not the year, so far. Google has responded aggressively asking regulators to block the deal on grounds of anti-competition and anti-monopoly grounds. (see NY Times article here).
It would seem ironic that Google with over 60% of the search marketshare would be worried about Yahoo! (14%) and MSN (3.5%). From my old post:
Is Google really that paranoid about a "MicroHoo?"
My opinion is "Yes" and "No".
"No", Google is not worried about the search business. Google still owns the PPC and SEO game. Yahoo!'s Panama platform is a step up but still very far away from the usability of Adwords. Microsoft's ad platform is a perpetual work in progress to put it mildly. Even if MicroHoo? can pull together a competitive advertising platform, their organic search technology is so far behind Google - who has something like 100,000 servers sweeping the internet every day and indexing everything in sight with the ultimate purpose of giving the users as relevant results as possible. MicroHoo? will still have to try to compete in this arena but they will be perpetually behind as Google continues to pump resources and research into this area. The search engine game is over. GOOGLE WON. Seriously, Google is locating itself next to power stations in order to ensure it has enough resources to power its needs!!!! That's forward planning.
But here's the "Yes". Google wants to be the default platform for all users: Gmail, Google Desktop, iGoogle, Google Documents, Google Checkout, Google Maps, YouTube, and many, many other "betas". So whatever you do, you can find it at Google - espcially in the future where we will always be online. And a Microsoft-Yahoo! merger would be a formidable competitor in THAT arena. Microsoft is already controlling 90% of users's operating systems, and Yahoo!, while it is not great in Search, knows how to build online communities and services (Y! Finance, Y! Mail, Y! Messenger, Flickr, Y! Travel, HotJobs, del.icio.us, Y! News, Y! Groups, Yada.. Yada... Yada.)
And Microsoft and Yahoo! together? What's the fit? Well, Yahoo could get quick distribution into the desktops (though this would still be considered MS anti-trust, no?). Yahoo users would also get MICROSOFT OFFICE ONLINE EDITION - Yahoo! has not entered that productivity suite arena yet. Microsoft is still printing money so it can finance a lot of expansion and development (including above mentioned organic search technology) and may be a power station or two! So while these two seem to have culture clash issues, there do seem to be some sort of synergy. Oops.. the dreadful "S" world. Maybe "marriage of (in)convenience" is a better description.
In any case, Google vs MicroHoo? is not about Search - it is about the future of "Consumer Computing Services". (Hahaha!!! "Consumer Computing Services" ... I just made that up! Sounds about right though.) You read it here first!
Monday, February 11, 2008
Google vs "MicroHoo?"
Sunday, February 10, 2008
'Facebook Fatigue' or rather Web 2.0 Fatigue...
The Register (UK) recently ran an article titled:
"'Facebook fatigue' kicks in as people tire of social networks"
This is what I have been saying about Facebook. There is no real business model that is worth USD 15 billion smackaroos. See Nov 20th, 2007 posting. Gartner was warning against the "Web 2.0 Hype" in December (my posting on this here).
The Reg: "The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007."
Yes people.. stop wasting your time on FaceBook during Q4. You have to work to make those earnings targets. Facebook and Myspace does not help with productivity.
Checkout these stats from ComScore (courtesy of Creative Capital):
So the total social network audience grew by about 5% YOY, but average time spent DECREASED by 23%.
The Reg: "That 'user engagement' is dropping off (page impression growth is merely slowing) should be of particular concern for the sales people struggling to turn these free services into profit-making businesses. In the age of tabbed browsing, how long people stick around is particularly key for 'interactive' sites, where people aren't attracted by useful information, but by time-wasting opportunities."
Dat's what I said.... 1) no business model, and 2) time waster
The only exception may be LinkedIn where I have been told to go to head hunt rather than use traditional methods. And it seems to be working! And I was told this by a Google staff and by a Bezurk.com staff (recently acquired by NewsCorp).
Anyway, do read the Register article. It's a fun read. The article ended by reminding readers to put things into perspective. Ford Motor Company is valued at less than USD 15 billion by Wall Street! Ford is worth less than FaceBook!
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAAHAH!!!!!! God does have a sense of humour.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
"How did they do this?" fun with Gizmoz
Ran across this site early in 2007. It reminded me of the Wedding Crashers movie trailer flash promo...
Me on my blades....
Me and the wife at the Royal Dance
Just for fun....
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Millennium & Copthorne Online Performance in 2008
Well 2007 has come and gone and we are well into 2008.
For Millennium & Copthorne Hotels' eCommerce initiative, the results speaks for themselves:
Region: Change Booking Revenue (2007 vs 2006)
=====================
USA: +43.2%
Asia Pacific: +85.9%
Europe & M.E.: +47.2%
New Zealand: +93.2%
=====================
Global Total: +49.6%
This is for our direct to brand website bookings and does not include any OTA or TPI internet bookings. Graphed to scale, the monthly revenues for 2006 vs 2007 looks like this:
Needless to say (but I am saying it anyway), we are very please with the results. This was a very eventful year for us with extensive PPC campaigns, major initiatives in SEO, and a huge ecommerce platform upgrade (along with a redesign!). We are still trawling through the data to figure out which part contributed to the increase and by how much.
2008 is going to be an eventful year as well since we have many plans that we want to execute. Hopefully we will get a good increase this year as well over 2007!
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Hotels.com Launches iPhone App
This is not new news as the application was first launched on 10th December '08 (see here). But it seems to be getting picked up by hotelmarketing.com and others (and now me!).
It's not big news, but it is at least interesting to me since I have my own hacked iPhone. With the iPhone's browser being the one of the fastest and most popular mobile browsers, this is certainly interesting. It is getting almost 0.1% which is a big deal:
| View Trend Windows XP | 78.37% |
| View Trend Windows Vista | 9.19% |
| View Trend MacIntel | 3.59% |
| View Trend Mac OS | 3.22% |
| View Trend Windows 2000 | 2.97% |
| View Trend Windows 98 | 0.76% |
| View Trend Windows NT | 0.63% |
| View Trend Linux | 0.57% |
| View Trend Windows ME | 0.43% |
| View Trend iPhone | 0.09% |
| View Trend Windows CE | 0.06% |
| View Trend Hiptop | 0.02% |
| View Trend Windows 95 | 0.02% |
| View Trend Web TV | 0.01% |
I tried to access http://www.hotels.com/iphone from my iPhone but I get redirected to an Asian page of hotels.com.... sigh....
Anyhow, mobile access for hotel bookings is a tricky one. I have a proposal from a vendor to take my millenniumhotels.com site and build an interface for mobile. I just can't get an ROI calculation for it. How many bookings do I have to do to get my money back? OR should this be mostly for branding? Would it help for SEO as well?
Well those questions don't have any immediate answers, but at least for now, my investment my iPhone seems to be ok (despite hotels.com not letting me view their iphone app... yet!).
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Kayak Buys Sidestep (part 2)
So within a few hours of my last post in which I mentioned I thought the meta search market was small when you look at the revenue and the players, hotelmarketing.com puts out a positive spin on this news:
"The combined company will be profitable with $3.5 billion in transaction volumes and will be the fifth-largest online travel operator."
This echos Kayak's own release: "This transaction combines the two biggest brands in travel search, which would make Kayak.com and its affiliate sites the fifth largest travel brand, with more monthly unique visitors than Priceline, every airline except Southwest, and every hotel and rental car brand"
See full article here.
My first thought was "Wow! They do that much volume? I must really have misread this industry. I need to rethink what I said in my last post." But the more I thought about it, the more I stand by my initial opinion...
Yes the Kayak.com and Sidestep.com merged entity will have USD 3.5 billion in volume through their site per year. But their business model is primarily pay-per-click advertising plus some commission sharing deals with OTAs and travel suppliers. You can not compare that model to an "online travel operator". It is NOT an "apples-to-apples" comparison.
If you were to do that, then Google should also be an "online travel operator". Yes THE Google. The same Google that handles 60% of ALL searches worldwide. So that would mean Google would have transaction volumes in the travel industry of something like USD 500 BILLION. That's one hell of an online travel operator!
Monday, January 7, 2008
Kayak Buys Sidestep!
Alright so this not new news but it did happen just before Christmas when most of us have "turned off" for the holidays. Quick summary: Kayak raised $196 million from a bunch of vulture caps then used the money to buy Sidestep for something like $180 million. See here on TechCrunch.
What's interesting to me is this:
Kayak's revenues is supposed to be around $50million a year and that of Sidestep is $35million. They are the two largest metasearch engines and are followed distantly by Mobissimo and Yahoo's Farecast. What does this tell you?
1) The meta search engine market is not that large. Right now it must be around $120million a year. Compare this to other OTAs like Expedia and Orbitz with billions of dollars in revenue each, this industry is but a small sliver of the pie.
2) And this sliver of a pie is actually consolidating with the two LARGEST players merging. So what is going to happen to the smaller players?
3) Get acquired or die is what it means. The smaller guys want to get bought. The larger guys also want to get bought. So Kayak-Sidestep's new investors are hoping that they can sell their $100million revenue beast to the likes of Expedia, Orbitz or InteractiveCorp for something like $1.5billion (15 times earnings). Or perhaps Google might decide to get in the game.
4) But these guys are google's clients as they buy a lot of PPC keyword ads. Google may not want to be seen as a monopoly if they own both the advertiser and the medium.
Anyhow, good luck to all the smaller travel meta search engines out there like bezurk.com and sprice.com and qunar.com....