Raja Jasti’s Blog - Renaissance Thinking

April 3, 2009

Adsense for tweets

Filed under: Internet, Technology — Tags: , , , — Raja @ 7:32 am

Google is offering adsense units that display a company’s latest 5 tweets.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Twitter may still be tweaking its own business model, but Google has found a way to use the popular microblogging service to sell ads.

When a user clicks on an ad from Google, it takes them to TurboTax's Twitter page.

The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent “tweets” across the Google AdSense network. The first marketer to use the ad units is Intuit, whose TurboTax brand is trying to boost its Twitter followers. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop.

“It’s syndicating whatever the team that works on the TurboTax Twitter account [@turbotax] posts,” said Seth Greenberg, director of marketing at Intuit. When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.

That is an interesting idea from google.

April 2, 2009

Google in acquistion talks with twitter?

Filed under: Business, Internet — Tags: , — Raja @ 8:44 pm

Mike Arrington posts on a rumor that google in talsk again to acquire twitter.

Here’s a heck of a rumor that we’ve sourced from two separate people close to the negotiations: Google is in late stage negotiations to acquire Twitter. We don’t know the price but can assume its well, well north of the $250 million valuation that they saw in their recent funding.

If this is accurate, it’s a brilliant deal for Google - the value of Twitter is only going to go up over time. And it will be Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s second sale to Goolge - they sold Blogger to them just five years ago. But there’s one big question - where’s Microsoft in all this? Letting Twitter go to Google only hurts them, badly, in the long term search game. This is an asset they need to be competing for aggressively.

Updated: Yet another source says the acquisition discussions are still fairly early stage, and the two companies are also considering working together on a Google real time search engine.

A deal with google may be great for its founders, but as a user I hope this rumor is not true. I would like tos see twitter innovate as an independent company as I think it has a lot of potential. As part of google, the innovation at twitter will stagnate.

April 1, 2009

Google’s stuttering cross-platform advertising strategy

Filed under: Internet, Media — Tags: , — Raja @ 3:06 pm

Matt Marshall at venturebeat has a nice analysis of google’s stuttering cross-platform strategy.

A year or two ago, Google’s bold, sweeping advertising strategy seemed to be written in the stars: It was on a roll, and there was no stopping its algorithmic rigor from vanquishing old-economy advertising and industry titans. It was simply more efficient. But one by one, Google’s efforts proved much tougher than the company anticipated, and the economic contraction has only made things worse.

March 31, 2009

Google shuts down video adsense program

Filed under: Internet, Media — Tags: , , — Raja @ 2:23 pm

Monetizing video is a tricky one. Google tried to throw some of that adsense pixie dust on video, but apparently it doesn’t work. Paid COntent reports that google is shutting down its video adsense program.

Another Google (NSDQ: GOOG) advertising product bites the dust. For years, it was almost unheard of for Google to pull the plug on one of its advertising offerings. But lately, it’s been doing a lot of that. The search giant is dumping its Video AdSense program. By the end of April, publishers will no longer be able to sign up for the revenue-sharing service, and those with AdSense videos embedded on their page will have their videos replaced. Google was careful to note that publishers would still be able to embed YouTube videos onto their pages, but they would have to do it the old-fashioned way—by going directly to the site and pulling embed code from individual videos. The move follows Google’s jettisoning of its Radio Ads program—so that it can concentrate on a streaming audio ad product—last month. In January, Google said it was shuttering its Print Ads service for newspapers. The decisions reflect Google’s view that it can’t work miracles anymore as it struggles with the deteriorating economy.

Google worth more than GE?

Filed under: Business, Trends — Tags: , — Raja @ 8:21 am

Google has a bigger market cap than GE. This economic downturn is the reverse of dot com bust, where companies with real assets are devalued. It is more like during the time of dot com boom. Crazy times.

No matter how long or how deep a severe economic downturn, its residual effects can still be somewhat jarring, such as when a company with annual revenues of more than $182 billion is worth less on the stock market than one with $21.8 billion in annual sales. Over 100 years old, General Electric, long the vanguard of U.S. industrial might, ended today’s trading session with a market capitalization just a shade under $105 billion. That compares with the market cap of Google, which now stands at more than $108 billion. Granted, we’ve seen this movie before, during the last bubble, when Cisco Systems surpassed GE.

March 30, 2009

Google launches mp3 search and free downloads in china

Filed under: Entertainment, Internet, Media — Tags: , , — Raja @ 8:53 am

Google today launched free music download service in china.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Google Inc on Monday launched free downloads of licensed songs in China, while sharing advertising revenue with major music labels in a market rife with online piracy.

Lee Kai-Fu, president of Google in greater China, said one reason Google lagged in the mainland search market was because it did not offer music downloads, the missing piece to its strategy in a market where it trails leader Baidu.com Inc.

“We are offering free, high quality and legal downloads,” Lee told reporters. “We were missing one piece … we didn’t have music.”

Hmm, when will we see such a service, legally ofcurse, in the US and the rest of the world?

March 24, 2009

Youtube blocked in China?

Filed under: Internet, Media — Tags: , , — Raja @ 11:25 am

Google says Youtube is being blocked in China.

The company said it first noticed traffic from China had decreased dramatically late Monday. By early Tuesday, it had dropped to nearly zero, the company said.

“We don’t know the reason for the block,” a YouTube spokesman, Scott Rubin, said. “Our government relations people are trying to resolve it.”

China routinely filters Internet content and blocks material that is critical of its policies. It selectively blocks videos from YouTube.

According to Reuters, Chinese government officials said Tuesday that they did not know about YouTube being blocked, but said that China was not afraid of the Internet.

“Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite,” a foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters, according to Reuters.

Access to YouTube had been intermittent earlier in March, on the first anniversary of protests by Tibetans against Chinese rule.

Last week, the Tibetan government in exile in Dharamsala, India, released a seven-minute video, which is being shown on YouTube, that purports to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans last March following the riots in Lhasa. There has been no independent confirmation that the footage is authentic.

Google tweaks its search results page

Filed under: Internet, Trends — Tags: , — Raja @ 11:20 am

Google has announced some changes to how the search results are displayed.

Today we’re rolling out two new improvements to Google search. The first offers an expanded list of useful related searches and the second is the addition of longer search result descriptions — both of which help guide users more effectively to the information they need.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land reports that these changes result from the integration of orion technology which google acquired earlier. Readwriteweb says these changes are intended to keep the users on google longer and may result in fewer downstrream traffic.

March 12, 2009

Google Voice Noticeboard for India

Filed under: India, Internet, Mobile — Tags: , — Raja @ 7:40 am

As it launches google voice in the US, google is expermineting with vilalge noticeboard a voice service for indian village communiites that share a computer.

An administrator sets up a noticeboard on a shared computer in a village or Internet cafe. Then the applications acts as public noticeboard, where anyone can record a voice message. Text can also be added, but it is designed to work in places where literacy rates are low. People from the village can check for new group messages on any shared village computer with the software installed. It works as a Firefox add-on for Windows only. Google India describes the purpose of the service:

Communities with access to shared computers can use the Noticeboard for exchanging messages related to community announcements, social interactions, local buying and selling, and information that is of wider interest to the community. The Noticeboard may also be used for the community to engage in a dialog with benefactors, public servants, and other service providers who are geographically distant.

Voice applications have a lot of potential in countris such as India where computer and interenet penetration is relatively low, but most people have mobile phones.

March 11, 2009

Google behavioral targeting

Filed under: Internet, Technology, Trends — Tags: , — Raja @ 7:21 am

Google announced support for behavioral targeting of ads where it serves ads based on people’s online activity history or interests.

Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.

This type of behavioral targeting technology is not new. However google owns the most amount of user behavior data comapred to anyone else, so this move will be greatly scruitinized as it should be.

Google’s mission of organizing world’s information and making it accessible and useful means that they also have access to ALL the world’s information. I wrote about this here. They know your search history (via its search site and toolbar), your email and other activity (via gmail, calendar, google apps etc), social activity (via google opensocial), health activity (google health), commerce activity (via google checkout), your power usage (google powermeter) etc. You get the picture.

Why is google entering this fray NOW? Is it because of eroding advertisning revenues? It is probably part of the answer.

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