Disney just announced the acquisition of Pixar for about $7.4 billion. 2.3 Disney shares will be exchanged for every Pixar share, including the shares of Pixar’s largest shareholder, Steve Jobs, who owns 50.6% of all outstanding shares. Jobs joins the Disney board of directors as part of the deal which is expected to close this summer.
UPN and WB merge to create CW network
UPN and The WB will launch a new network named CW this fall and shut down their existing channels. No word on how the change affects airing of Simpsons reruns.
Yahoo! CFO surrenders to Google
Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker recently told Bloomberg News Yahoo! does not intend to gain market share in the search space. “It’s not our goal to be #1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” (via Steve Rubel)
Decker says Yahoo! will instead improve advertising on its search results pages to bring in more revenue. The comment may have been made on Decker’s appearance on Bloomberg Morning Call last week, but I have not been able to find the video. Yahoo!’s stock price is up about 2% this morning after a 20% slide over the last week.
Perhaps Yahoo! is focused on providing a good enough service for its 450 million users that they will not notice Google’s services are better. The Yahoo! Search team must be pissed and embarrassed at their CFO who basically just killed their motivation to succeed and perhaps their budget as well.
The story of PriceGrabber part 3: Small ball
This post is part 3 of a series about the early days of shopping comparison site PriceGrabber.com. You may want to read part 1 and part 2 before continuing.
We’ve all seen the overconfident hitter come to the plate, take three home run swings, and look back at the catchers mitt every time he fails to connect. Given a small team with limited resources I prefer the BIlly Beane approach of playing small ball to bring in the wins. Landing small business development deals in succession can establish a small player and bring in the revenue needed to swing for the fences.
PriceGrabber took a few risks that brought in thousands of new users by delivering a targeted experience to their platform of choice. Marketing partnerships, mobile search, Spanish and Portuguese language options, and personalization drove many new users to the site and PriceGrabber.com became the service people used when first introduced to the online shopping comparison industry.
Partnerships have to scale well or you get caught up building one-offs for each partner and never getting any work done on the underlying service. We learned this the hard way by customizing for a few deals and our partner pipeline ground to a halt while the two people responsible for the custom templates were overwhelmed. We redesigned the site with cobranding and partner landing pages in mind, and adding new partners took only a few hours. When you are in a land grab with competition, being able to rollout a quick and easy revenue add-on to existing brands is a win-win for everyone involved. Popular brands such as Macworld and even Ask Jeeves became cobranded PriceGrabber sites driving thousands of daily visitors each.
New and emerging technologies can be green fields for integration and partnership. In the late 90s phone and web browser integration were two unexplored areas that ended up being big markets. PriceGrabber partnered with Opera Software and received a special “Price Comparison” search field in the Opera browser’s address bar. This integration happened before Sherlock and Mycroft popularized the idea of search plugins for the browser. The Opera shopping comparison feature was very popular, especially among geeks seeking the latest technology gear. PriceGrabber also spent months developing a mobile version of the site in WAP for use on all phones across all domestic carriers. The mobile development efforts of one engineer eventually led to a partnership with AT&T Wireless on their default start page and created a way for people to comparison shop online while they were at a brick and mortar retailer.
PrecioMania is a Spanish and Portuguese language version of the PriceGrabber website. Online commerce was booming but it seemed like the Latino population was being left behind while the industry focused only on English-speaking users. PriceGrabbber brought on a small team to build a version of the site in their own language with features targeting that specific market. PrecioMania was run as its own small company within PriceGrabber. Its differences and the challenges it faced helped redesign the company’s API and template systems, creating an infrastructure for growth and scalability.
Little things can add up and set a foundation for future growth. You don’t have to hit a home run to round the bases and score.
Tags: askjeeves, bizdev, mmode, opera, partnerships, pricegrabber, shoppingsearch
Search news around the world
On this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions Om and I discuss changes in the search industry over the past week and their implications for future business development around the world. This week’s session is titled search around the world as we cover the changing landscape in the United States, Europe, and Asia in about 20 minutes.
The DOJ paid Google a visit this week after the company refused to hand over search logs and information for its hundreds of millions of users. The long list of requested data made online users realize just how much personal information is in the hands of large Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, AOL, or Microsoft.
Governments and search engines in other countries were busy moving forward with their own search plans despite the distractions in Silicon Valley. France and Germany announced a collaborative effort to develop the Quaero project to counter the power of Google and Yahoo! over content in those two countries. The new search engine will receive around $2 billion from the French and German governments to develop new search technologies especially focused on audio and video.
In Korea NHN’s Naver.com continues its stellar growth with over 40% of the country’s search market. Google currently has only about 2% of the Korean market. Naver adds mashups and detailed information directly on search results pages assisted by efforts from its millions of subscribers. They even have blog search tab. The company has expanded into Japan and China behind the power of its gaming network and founded a U.S. subsidiary.
All these topics and more in this week’s podcast. The podcast is 21 minutes long, a 9.8 MB download.
LiveJournal XSS attack
A group of crackers named Bantown claims to have hijacked 46% of LiveJournal’s active accounts, over 900,000 total, via a cross-site scripting attack according to Brian Krebs of The Washington Post. The group was able to steal the cookies of LiveJournal users clicking on links created by the group on their hundreds of automated journal accounts. LiveJournal altered their URL structure last night to allow each user to have their own private cookie domain.
The Bantown group continues looking for sites to BBQ, or swap user profiles for something a bit more sexual, often involving farm animals. Some of the exploit code has been released as open source, allowing others to build upon the holes found at LiveJournal.
LiveJournal users were alerted to the problem when McAfee Internet Security Suite installed on their machines threw up warning messages about a possible exploit.
Tags: livejournal, xss
Entrepreneurial sellout podcast
The latest episode of OnPodSessions, When to sell out, is now available for download. This week Om and I talk about large companies acquiring startups, what they are looking for, and how various startups position themselves. The selling out podcast is 23 minutes long and a 10.6 MB download.
Last week I read a blog post and PowerPoint presentation by Joel Toledano of Yahoo! Search’s business development team. The presentation and blog post was a follow-up to an entrepreneurial event organized by CalTech and MIT. I felt like the presentation suggested small companies need approach Yahoo! about being acquired and created a very one-sided relationship to entrepreneurs and their companies/projects. I think any relationship between companies should appreciate the talent and passions of both sides and trivialize either side’s dedication to their work and building a great product. Large companies may have a lot of users and hold a lot of sway in the marketplace, but I am a big believer in building independent businesses that can survive on their own and work with the right company as a partner or acquisition if visions and environment are a good match.
A few things we did not touch on in the podcast are IPOs and creating a company (or blog) explicitly to get the attention of a company you would like to work with. Given the reporting and compliance requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 going public involves a lot of work, investment, and tightening corporate policies such as who has access to what information. These laws lead to less IPOs in the United States. Creating a smart product or blog to attract the attention of a potential employer can make sense, especially if it is something quick you can crank out in a few weekends. There are so many r#233;sum#233;s entered into corporate job databases every day anything you can do to differentiate certainly helps the right candidate get noticed.
This week’s podcast was the first time we used fancy microphones and a mixer. I’m still getting used to the new gear but the audio does sound a lot better.
Reminder: These are my own views and are not necessarily the views of my current employer, family, or friends. You are reading and listening to the opinions of an individual.
Tags: entrepreneur, startups, selling
MSN Spaces adds World Cup stars
I just noticed MSN’s Road to the World Cup site in the UK. Soccer stars such as Michael Owen, Edgar Davids, and Gianluigi Buffon are now representing their national soccer teams with individual blogs. It looks like the players are just well-known front-men who contribute quotes to a team staff member each day.
I wanted to have player or team blogs for the San Jose Clash and Los Angeles Galaxy six years ago but the tools were nowhere as advanced as they are now. Many more teams now have access to a variety of software for fan marketing.
The new site also includes the top soccer queries from MSN Search.
Tags: germany06, worldcup, worldcup06
WhuffieTracker
Yesterday afternoon I collaborated with Caterina Fake, Chris Ratcliff, and Josh Kinberg to create WhuffieTracker. WhuffieTracker is an Web application that tracks your ego and citations from a variety of online sources. Our team’s idea was to combine all of the ways someone might be talking about you online, regardless of the discovery or publishing source, into one package you install on your own server to track your whuffie over time. The collaboration was part of a hackfest called Mash Pit.
WhuffieTracker prefers to consume information using RSS feeds corresponding to activity around a certain URL or, in a future version, could track the permalinks of individual entries.
The system would tabulate whuffie points for each area of possible input (blog whuffie, link whuffie, etc.) and also display a cumulative whuffie score.
In less than four hours yesterday afternoon our team brainstormed the product features, designed a site and a logo, researched possible sources of data, registered a domain name, setup and configured a database and server, created database schema, and wrote some PHP. We took some time away from our jobs at Technorati, Yahoo!, Fireant, and EVDB and applied our individual skills towards something we thought would benefit a large amount of people. The team will work on making the vision a reality in time for Mashup Camp next month.
Yahoo! took quick action to acquire WhuffieTracker for $20 and a latte but we turned down the offer. We expect our valuation will double after we add some JavaScript to the site. Just kidding. The code will eventually be set free for anyone to hack, tweak, and build upon when there is something more to show.
Whuffie sources
Blogs
- Technorati
- Google Blog Search
- Bloglines citations
- Yahoo! Blog Search
Tag/Flag sites
- Del.icio.us
- Digg
- Furl
- Yahoo! My Web
Other numerics
- Subscriber numbers (FeedBurner, online aggregators)
- Alexa
- Google PageRank
WhuffieTracker logo by Caterina Fake. Team photo by Chris Radcliff.
Python event on the 25th in Santa Clara
SD Forum is hosting a half-day session all about Python on Wednesday, January 25 from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. in Santa Clara. For just $25 you can spend your morning learning about Python from Guido van Rossum, Greg Stein, Bram Cohen, Alex Martelli, and active startups using Python.
$25 for all that and $10 less if you are already a SD Forum member.