Monthly Archives: November 2006

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Swopper Chair Review and Recommendation

November 29, 2006 1:01 am / 11 Comments /

specialedition-titanium.jpgProblogger Darren Rowse asks his readers for office chair recommendations. This is a subject that is somewhat unfortunately near and dear to my heart as I grew up in a family business selling office chairs and furniture, and my dad is an ergonomics expert.

All jokes aside, it is an important subject as people are spending an unnatural amount of time sitting while working on computers.

Without question, the chair my dad recommends to the majority of people working on computers with or without back pain, isn’t even technically a chair, it’s the Swopper Stool. I use the Swopper at home at my computer, and I should probably get one for work as well.

The reason a Swopper is better than standard ergonomic office chairs:

  • It forces you to sit with a proper posture instead of slumping in a chair with a back.
  • It bounces up and down and side to side, it allows you to move around and “sit in motion”. This keeps your spine lubricated and muscles moving throughout the day. It provides for better blood circulation as well as helping to strengthen your core muslces while sitting (abdomen and lower back).
  • It relieves back pain from sitting due to the posture and movement.
  • Sitting on a Swopper keeps you energized and alert due to the ability to move and proper posture.
  • It is a contemporary and stylish piece of furniture that is well made and looks good while being a conversation piece.

officegirl01.jpgMany people try to substitute an exercise ball to achieve some of these benefits. While it does promote healthy posture, it lacks many of the features of the Swopper. It can’t allow you to rock from side to side or front to back because you’ll roll off. It doesn’t raise or lower like the Swopper, meaning it can’t be used by people who need their seating position at a certain height. And it doesn’t grip as well as the seating material of the Swopper. It definitely doesn’t look as cool, as the Swopper also comes in multiple interesting colors.

While the Swopper isn’t cheap, healthy sitting and avoiding back pain is worth a very high price in my book. My dad sells them at his site Workchairs.com, and he’d be happy to answer any questions people have about the Swopper.

Posted in: Personal, Random

Google’s Display Advertising Network Is On The Loose

November 28, 2006 10:51 pm / 2 Comments /

Here it comes.

Being in the display ad business, I’ve long suspected that Google will make a bigger push into display advertising. Yes, they’ve had display advertising in the Adsense program for a couple of years now, but the results have never been very good for publishers or advertisers from what I’ve heard, and Google has never pushed it.

So as linked above, John Chow is reporting that he’s now part of what sounds like a beta invitation-only Google display network that is a negotiated CPM with Google and a year long contract. This is more interesting than it sounds for a couple of reasons:

1. A year long contract
It’d be nice to know more about what this means, but I’m guessing it may give Google some exclusive right to represent your inventory. This is really to Google’s advantage if that’s the case, and is definitely not a step towards what we preach at Right Media about competition and working with multiple parties being the most beneficial to the publisher. It is possible the contract just holds the rate you agree on to be steady, which may sound good on the surface to the publisher, but actually can hurt you. If you lock in with Google at a $5 CPM for a year, what happens if you have advertisers coming to you willing to pay much more but you’re allocating inventory to Google to fulfill some contract? While I need more details, I don’t like the idea of a year long contract from a publisher point of view.

2. A Flat CPM
This means Google would be doing a guaranteed buy. So again let’s say that’s a $5 CPM flat buy. That may again sound really nice to you as a publisher to have that guaranteed rate, but that allows Google to go sell your inventory at whatever price they want, and only give you a $5 CPM. What if they can sell it for a $10 CPM to the advertiser? Are you happy with a 50% revenue share? I wouldn’t be. It also goes against how Google has normally worked in advertising with their pay per click roots.

What does this really mean though? These moves aren’t surprising. Display is a part of online advertising where Google has been weakest, and they are butting in to all forms of advertising. It’ll be interesting to see if they make headway here, or if they fail like they have in some other areas outside of their core offerings (auctioning print ads). It does help explain them building up their New York offices and hiring more traditional media sales people. They also have a very large core of advertisers they work with through Adwords, so I don’t doubt they can get some advertisers on board.

It also moves them along in a trend we’re seeing with the bigger online companies starting to “rep” other companies. Yahoo’s sales team now sells ads for Ebay as well as all the Yahoo properties, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Yahoo sell inventory across other publishers and networks in the future with their strong display sales force. MSN also now sells ads for Facebook and they’ve openly said they’d like to start an advertising exchange.

Why no announcement though? Well, it could be because it’s so new. It could also be them sticking their toe in the water without jumping in and having it fail. Their was a lot of press about Google launching a beta CPA network months ago that shared some similar traits as this display network by being invitation only and publishers only getting email reports. There hasn’t been much said about that CPA network since. Was it a failure? Are they still building an interface? Why is Google beta testing the CPA network and the display network with no interface for publishers to use? Perhaps they aren’t so committed yet?

Directly repping premium inventory in this way can be a good business, but in some ways it would be a step back in advertising for Google. They created an automated machine with Adwords/Adsense that makes unbelievable profit, but repping premium inventory is a very manual business. Evidence of that would be negotiating CPMs with each publisher directly. Those types of things can make it harder to scale.

Spreading themselves in so many advertising areas could end up being genius for Google, or lead to their ultimate undoing. We just don’t know yet, and it will be interesting to watch.

Additional Update:
John Chow added in the comments on his post that “When there is no display or video ads to show, Google shows a normal AdSense ad. However I still get my contracted CPM for it – even if the AdSense ad is CPC.”

What this means, if true, is that Google is actually arbitraging here. They are buying at a flat CPM and hoping to sell inventory for more than they paid for it, so Google could actually be losing money on certain publishers if they can’t sell their inventory above the rates they’ve negotiated with the publishers. This is good for publishers, at least in the short term until Google has to renegotiate the CPM rate or just cut the publisher altogether if they can’t make it work.

Posted in: Advertising, Google, Random, Right Media, Yahoo

Yahoo and Newspapers – A Smart Media Move

November 27, 2006 11:55 am / Leave a Comment /

The following is a guest post from Right Media CTO Brian O’Kelley:

Feedback on the Yahoo newspaper deal has started to trickle in, and what’s surprising is the limited attention this deal has generated in context of its effects on other industry players. Before I start to opine, please note that I have no inside information about this deal (even though I do work closely with Yahoo) and that these are my opinions as a pundit, not as Right Media’s CTO.

Much has been made in the last few years about Tacoda and Revenue Science and their ability to create behavioral profiles on newspaper and other highly contextual sites. For quite a while, it seemed like these guys were going to define the space. However, because they relied on their clients to sell the behavioral concept to agencies, they had to retool as network businesses. Meanwhile, a number of companies, like Yahoo, built their own BT profiles using proprietary data. With deep credibility and an existing customer base to upsell, they took BT from the fringe to the mainstream.

But Yahoo still lacked the powerful contextual source of data that the other players already had: newspapers. Fortunately, they had the agency relationships and credibility to help the newspapers realize the potential locked inside their context and user base. Look at the recent announcement in this context. Yahoo grabs a new behavioral data source to mine – and perhaps access to the inventory to resell behaviorally. How can Tacoda compete?

Take it to the next level. Why wouldn’t these publishers think about plugging in Yahoo’s entire ad serving capability? They’d get world class behavioral, contextual, inventory forecasting, and other technologies. They have leverage and credibility. They understand how to work with an existing sales force. Doesn’t that threaten 24/7 in their core market? Doesn’t this make it that much harder for Google and other networks? And what about MSN, who’s still not really in market?

Why is the market bashing Yahoo? This is brilliant. I’m hesitant to even bring attention to it, because I’d rather see them just finish the play, but the market needs to recognize that they’re playing the media game better than anyone else. And you don’t have to be perfect on the technical side to win in media – you can partner for that, and leverage the best of breed where you can.

Just my 2 cents.

Posted in: Ad Networks, Advertising, Yahoo

More On The Success of Fast Loading Websites

November 24, 2006 2:22 pm / 1 Comment /

I covered Marissa Mayer’s talk at the Web 2.0 Summit that focused on how Google has really learned the value of speed in their web applications. It seems as if there was much more said about this topic years back when everyone was on dialup modems. However, Chris Beasley at the Website Publisher Blog talks about his quest for a quicker loading site and the positive effect it’s had on his forum registrations. He’s essentially seen a tripling of monthly registrations since doing tweaks and investing in a powerful server.

That seems extremely worthwhile. Even though many of us are on fast connections now, quicker sites are still noticeable, and I think they provide a better experience for users, maybe even at a subconscious level. It’s a good reminder to keep working at making your site as quick to load as possible. Of course this is something Fred Wilson is consciously choosing to ignore, but it’s his blog so he can deal with it as he wants. He does provide a stripped down version of his blog somewhere, but I can’t seem to find the link to it. Also, blogs can be read quickly through RSS, so it’s a little more understandable.

Regardless, I need to continue to audit RMX Direct and this blog to make sure we keep working for speed.

Posted in: Blogging, Publishing

TechCrunch NY Party Results

November 17, 2006 8:05 am / 2 Comments /

TechCrunch PartyWe sponsored the TechCrunch 8 Party in New York last night, so I had the pleasure of trying to have meaningful business conversations over loud music provided by partyStrands.

Actually, the partyStrands system was one of the highlights of the evening, as the interactive system that allows users to search and select music on the projected on the wall interface, as well as send text and photo messages to the same interface was very cool. People not at the party could also see that screen in action through the web.

Another sponsor I got to check out in detail was Gotuit Media, which has a cool form of metatagging video content which makes it easy to both jump around video playlists extremely fast without all the rebuffering, as well as allowing for search within video content and to jump to specific spots in videos.

The scene was pretty good, it was crowded for a while but not as crowded as I expected, and I talked to an interesting mix of entrepreneurs, tech observers, established companies, and quite a few venture capitalists. We’re not looking for venture capital, but I still got a lot of brain picking from them asking me numerous questions about advertising and where it’s headed. It actually made for some decent conversations.

Perhaps the highlight/lowlight of the evening was when Mike Arrington took the microphone to thank people and do a little presentation. As he started to talk, many people continued their conversations. After a couple of attempts to ask people to be quiet so he could speak, he said “You know, the crowds in Palo Alto are a lot more polite.” This was met with a round of boos and “Screw you!” comments. I’m sure Arrington was partially kidding, but the whole incident came off as funny, yet uncomfortable.

Overall I feel it was worth the sponsorship, but there wasn’t really anything revolutionary about it either.

Posted in: Right Media, Web 2.0

Top 10 Things I Learned at the Web 2.0 Summit

November 14, 2006 1:02 am / 3 Comments /

After a weekend to reflect, I’ve come up with the Top 10 Things I Learned at the Web 2.0 Summit that was put on by O’Reilly and hosted by John Battelle.

1. Google likes it fast.
While the results and point of her talk wasn’t surprising, Marissa Mayer did an efficient 10 minute talk with great examples proving that the speed of a web application is one of the most important things to users, and it often has a very direct correlation to traffic and revenue.

2. Everybody is chasing Google.
Essentially every interview and session I attended featured a question along the lines of “How can you/we beat/compete with Google?”. Again, not really groundbreaking, but when you see numerous CEOs and powerful people at all the major web companies trying to answer that question without really having a great answer, it makes it all too clear that nobody knows yet how to deal with the 800-lb gorilla.

3. Jeff Bezos is on to something.
Amazon’s recent move into web services has befuddled analysts on Wall St., but after listening to the energetic Bezos talk about their new initiatives on this area you can see that it is a good opportunity for Amazon, and one they intend on dominating at. I like the move.

4. Advertising is being thrown on it’s head.
The Advertising 2.0 session, as well as other sessions and talks helped show that advertising online is far from being set in stone. Ideas are still coming from everywhere, and many large players are still not yet embracing some of the new and better ideas. Video advertising is a big opportunity that’s being attacked from many different angles, and nobody knows what the right one is yet.

5. There aren’t as many innovative startups as I thought, at least not there.
After hearing that there were over 250 companies that applied to be part of the Launchpad 13 where startups got to launch themselves with a 5-minute presentation, and after seeing who the panel of judges were, I thought we were in for an exciting set of companies. I was underwhelmed, and a bit bored by the presentations. One-quarter of them seemed useless, one-quarter of them didn’t seem very innovative, one-quarter were actually interesting and promising, and I’d read/used about one-quarter of them long ago (how is that a launch?).

6. It feels like a bubble.
It was a really nice venue, very crowded, the parties were pretty lavish, and it seemed like a lot of people were walking around hoping to get bought by the big few in the industry. Just had a bubble vibe.

7. You can hack a conference.
Recently-launched Mashery hacked the conference by booking a conference room for a party right in the middle of the action. It was cheaper than sponsoring the event, and may have gotten them more attention.

8. Basic problems still need fixing.
About 40% of talks and sessions seemed to have problems with the wireless connection, computers screwing up or crashing, or power not working. And the conference wireless connections were hit and miss all week. It’s ironic we’re all trying to build these new revolutionary web applications, when we still suffer from such basic infrastructure problems.

9. Talking to random people you don’t know is still socially awkward.
I’ve been to many business conferences, I feel confident about myself and my employer, and I feel I’m a social person. Yet, there’s still something very socially awkward having conversations with people at these events. They’re either trying to sell me something, I’m trying to sell them something, or you’re both generally not interested but still are in a situation where a conversation needs to exist. Sure, every once in a while a common ground is formed and a real conversation ensues, but it’s still pretty strange.

10. Eric Schmidt talks through an API.
Read the link for more details, but it was fascinating listening to Schmidt talk intelligently, dance around tough questions, and jab his competitors without explicitly doing so. Very well done.

Posted in: Advertising, Blogging, Conferences, Google, Web 2.0

TechCrunch Party This Week

November 13, 2006 9:39 pm / 2 Comments /

Techcrunch NYI’ll be representing Right Media at the TechCrunch Party in New York this Thursday night. I’ll be giving live demos of RMX Direct, as well as socializing and having a good time.

If you’re attending the party, be sure to stop by the Right Media demo table and say hello.

Posted in: Direct Media Exchange, Right Media

What Marissa Mayer and Google Knows: It’s Speed

November 9, 2006 2:38 pm / 5 Comments /

images1.jpgMarissa Mayer from Google was up next at the Web 2.0 Summit to talk about a key point Google has learned.

She started off telling us about an internal email list called Googlers, and they discuss things like the latest things in the snack kitchen, and if anyone can get Tivo Series 3 to work with Comcast.

In 1999 there was a ton of discussion about the Google Results page. What color the links should be, how many results should there be, and other things.

She was picked because she had no design experience to improve the results page

She set up A/B tests on the results page.

The first test showed that the more results they added to the results page, the less searches those people would do. There was a 20% drop in searches when they showed more than 10 results. Since their revenue has a strong relationship to traffic and search queries, this was bad.

The first theory was the paradox of choice. That users were getting frozen by too much choice. They found out that people who would get 10 results would get their results in 0.4 seconds. The experiment of more results took 0.9 seconds to get their results.

If you tracked how fast a search took, it hit 300 to 700 machines before getting back to the user. So Google learned very quickly that speed was important, and this is one of the reasons why they’ve done so much more in AJAX.

One of the product managers came to her to talk about Gmail, and said they wanted to do it in Javascript. Marissa thought they were crazy because it was buggy, slow, client side, etc. The product manager said she was right about all of it except it being slow. They moved on to really focus on speed with Gmail.

They did a similar thing with Google Maps. It was bloated at first, and they put it on a code diet and managed to trim it down and speed it up. They saw traffic results rise in direct correlation.

She pointed out that instant feedback leads to a steeper learning curve. She pointed to digital photography as an example. People are becoming better photographers because they can get feedback on their photos so much faster. They can look right after they take them, they can post them to the web quickly and get feedback from others, and improve their work. In the old days, it took much longer to see your pictures, so photographers improved slower.

This theory holds true for Adwords as well as users could get their ads approved and running right away, which was a key reason they gained market share vs. Overture which had to approve ads that often took days.

A negative example for Google was Google Video. Which initially took 24-48 hours after you uploaded a video for it to show up. YouTube on the other hand posted it instantly. Which one rocketed in growth? YouTube!

She pointed out the mobile space is suffering a bit because applications on mobile are still too slow. After we see more advanced in mobile hardware we’ll get more usage.

It was a really fascinating 10-minute talk from Mayer. Man she’s efficient!

Posted in: Google, Random, Web 2.0

What Kevin Rose and Digg Knows

November 9, 2006 2:25 pm / Leave a Comment /

ft2-kevin-rose-small.jpgKevin Rose got a brief ten minutes to talk at the Web 2.0 Summit about what Digg knows and has learned in the last year of their amazing growth as a darling of the Web 2.0 world.

Some Digg Stats
Kevin started out by mentioning that the 100,000th story to reach the front page of Digg occurred with the story about Rumsfeld stepping down. It hit the AP Wire, and three minutes later was submitted to Digg. Four minutes later, it had hit the front page. In contrast, it took 25 minutes after it hit the wire before it hit the front page of Google News, which is an automated process. Humans were faster than machines in this case.

Another interesting fact was that 37% of diggs came from the Digg Swarm and Digg Stack tools. They are now working to give these tools to web publishers to see the data for their site in this format, so you can see through Swarm or Stack how stories on your site are being Dugg.

They are also releasing a Flash toolkit to allow developers to create similar tools with flash interfaces. He showed a funny (and admittedly lame) example of stories being flowers in a field, where honeybees as Digg users come and land on the flowers when a Digg occurs.

Gaming Digg
Another big effort is fighting the gaming of the system. They have one full time employee who is in charge of this, and they are trying to build more tools that allow the community to flag and get rid of the spam.

There are services like the SpikeTheVote coming out to try and game Digg in organized ways, but Kevin says that they don’t know what they’re doing behind the scenes to identify these things and defeat them. He showed a few internal tools that graph what a healthy story looks like compared to unhealthy ones that have suspicious behavior. They’ve created baselines that make it easy to find the trash.

Where They Are Going
Digg is making a strong effort to bring more features together that suggest and recommend stories you may like as well as introducing you to people on the site who share your interests.

Also some efforts are being made to show upcoming stories and make them more obvious to people early on.

They have 20 new features coming out next in the next week or two, their biggest release since their version three launch.

Posted in: Random, Web 2.0

Update From Entrepreneurs at Web 2.0 Summit

November 9, 2006 11:54 am / Leave a Comment /

This session at the Web 2.0 Summit was a visit with four entrepreneurs who launched in the last year and had involvement in the last Web 2.0 Summit.

Zimbra – Satish Dharmaraj
Launched the Zimbra Collobration Suite last year, and they started selling the suite in March. They just passed 4 million accounts.

Today they are launching the Zimbra offline AJAX client. It works just like Zimbra online, and basically sent messages just stay in the Outbox. When you get back online, you just hit the synchronization button and it syncs up and sells your email.

They are also starting to sell a white label solution. Satish gave a funny demo where they skinned and made Zimbra into an exact replica of the Gmail interface.

Zimbra raised $15 million and hasn’t really touched it. They are trying to disruptive stuff and thought it’d be necessary, but they’re doing pretty well.

Zimbra knew a bunch of developers, so it hasn’t been a big challenge.

Their biggest mistake was asking for an all or nothing on their product suite.

Veoh Networks – Dmitry Shapiro
It’s a peer to peer network, but uses the Netflix queue idea combined with an Internet Tivo. They’ve started dealing with long form high resolution video, and think it changes the way TV work.

They got a Series B round of $12 million, and are doing over 3 million unique visitors. Initially they raised $2 million in a Series A, and they haven’t used much of the Series B yet. They feel they need a warchest because this is a big opportunity and aren’t planning on a quick exit. Their business is very capital expensive.

Finding good developers has been a challenge for them.

One problem they’ve seen is knowing where to stop with features and opportunities. They get presented with many opportunities to extend their video platform and white label things, and they need to keep in control.

Wink – Michael Tanne
A social search engine that launched late last year. They feel that the web is getting more social (no kidding!), and they take user input and help turn those into relevant search results. They put an early beta out earlier in the year, and a month ago they did a major upgrade to the product to take into account all the feedback they got. They also added “collections”, which allows people to put links together that belong in the same community. He gave a nice demo of a Ramones collection.

You can also do an Advanced People Search across social networks, which is pretty cool, and also probably makes for a great stalker tool. You can search social networks for specific interests, filter by gender, filter by age, and filter by dating status.

He thinks people should start with an angel investment for a consumer web application, and see where it goes from there. They took $6 million and have only used $1 million of that.

He thought their biggest mistake was probably releasing their product too early before it was ready.

Weblogs Inc./Netscape – Jason Calacanis
It’s been a big year, they sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, and have now integrated that into AOL. He’s still running Weblogs Inc, but when he got to AOL they were wanting to do something different with Netscape.com since it had been stangnant for a few years. Jason liked what was going on with Digg, del.icio.us, and other sites like that and rolled with the Digg model with an added editorial layer and did meta-journalism.

He thinks they had a rocky start, but things are going well now. He thinks they are less susceptible to gaming, and have vastly different demographics. Digg is 94% male, and Netscape is split pretty evenly between male and female, and they have a more balanced audience. So while tech stories dominate Digg, Netscape sees a mix of general news, politics, and family stories.

To start Weblogs Inc. Jason and Brian Alvey put in their own money, and Mark Cuban then invested low six figures which they didn’t touch.

Finding developers has not been a challenge for them because Jason feels that you just need to have something they believe in, and to find them working at jobs. He said good developers have jobs, so you just need to recruit them away.

He’s felt his biggest mistake is probably six or seven blog posts he’d like to take back. He was used to a transparency and fast acting style, and many in AOL were uncomfortable with that. But they’ve found a good balance and he and other new companies in AOL like Userplane our working with the old guard to push AOL forward.

He also mentioned one problem was parallel entrepreneurs who take on too many projects or get too wide on their main project. Mark Cuban always told him “remember what got us here”, which was a reminder to focus on their profitable blogs and don’t move out into all the other opportunties that were popping up.

Posted in: Blogging, Conferences, Web 2.0

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