Finishing off and moving on

Posting (my sparetime hobby more frequently accomplished in Hungarian) has been even rarer recently than before. Needless to say, not because search, or search related activities were getting lukewarm in Hungary. Quite on the contrary.

So why the silence? Partly because of our wedding. My biotech geek blogger boyfriend popped the question, and “I popped the answer yes” so we had our wedding ceremony last Saturday.

Although we have prepared with a 5-minute keynote presentation (including a short macbook recorded scene of how we were trying to prepare for the whole family event), technology let us down, and we resorted to our last weapon, the first dance. It seems we have brought the house down.

As we are both bloggers, and not very much keen on highly staged wedding photos, we were really glad to have another photo blogger friend to take some shots of the party. Some of which are:

I am also keen on restructuring the several different blogs I have been managing and/or participating in, so after one year of regular postings, and active reading and commenting on other blogs, I will sit down and think through how to keep on blogging. I’m afraid, I will not be able to keep gugli alive, although it has been a source of pleasure, excitement (and, let’s admit, meaningful networking) for me. I’m planning to have my last post on where and how I will continue for the next blogospell. So this is my penultimate post before saying goodbye, and reappearing in my new English blog.

Google tribute to Virginia Tech

Without words, videoshots and slideshows mixed:

“Tribute to the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. A night of remembrance, and celebration of the lives lost in the tragic incident on the morning of April 16th, 2007.” /The Official Google Channel on YouTube/

- just hung my head.

Google Hungary gets country representative

One, if one is very skeptical indeed, may have thought that the scenario was like in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Google Godot. The Long-long-long tail is waiting for the Head to have a look at the tail. Hungary with its 2-3 million users waiting for Google Kft. to get a real face, and become a source of communication - in Hungarian of course, as sadly enough, we are still struggling with the long-lasting language use effects of the post-iron curtain era where learning western languages was not really encouraged and facilitated. So, yes, it means a lot, an awful lot for companies interested in Hungary if they are able to communicate in Hungarian or not (including search marketers). For another 10 years maybe.

Google Kft. (Google Hungary Ltd.) got a head to its body at last. The single staff member and head  of all staff members is Zoltán Peresztegi. There are already several positions advertised for the Hungarian exploratory crew, so the Hungarian division will soon get bigger.

What Zoltán is doing currently is studying the country and making a report for Google on the Hungarian market relevant for Google’s strategies (similarly to what took place as an initial step in other emerging markets like Egypt). And, needless to say, he is also working on strengthening Google’s brand in Hungary (see his previous work experience at Hungarian T-Mobile brand building), and attracting more potential customers for Google AdWords and AdSense programs. (I also hope that there will be excellent educational programs, and kids as well as (young) adults will be more search-savvy through such projects). In short, the mission for the first part of the year appears to be quite complex in itself, the focus being on mapping Hungary from primarily a technological-business aspect, and also from a cultural one.

Zoltán’s reply to the question ‘Why did Google decide to come to Hungary?’ was the following:

• the internet penetration has reached the threshold level of 30% in Hungary
• broad band access is extraordinarily high in Hungary
• besides using the web for searching, the internet is a medium of entertainment (according to the stats used by Google Hungary Kft.  approx. 80% of users use the internet for search, while about 70% for e-mail communication and for reading news)

When the conversation turned to the online media and marketing chapter (how much is the market share of search marketing within online marketing), Zoltán said that we do not have precise data for that, and referred to the stats of the TNS Market Intelligence, which concludes that advertising on the internet is the most dynamically growing sector within advertising with 70% in Hungary, and according to Google’s estimates, its share from the total is between 2-4%.

(Now add that the share of search marketing spend from the total internet ad spend is estimated by major market players at about 5-8%. No official data yet.)

More about the press conference in my Hungarian webtrends blog (feel free to ask in the comments if you wish to know more)

ps: There is a great interest (from the public, not only from journalists and professionals) on Google statistics concerning the Hungarian search/ paid search landscape. However, such statistics seem to come later on, when the market becomes even more mature and self-reflective - on a consensual basis on behalf of all market players concerned.

ps2: I hope this post is going to be my personal record for writing about a piece of news that had novelty back in February, but better later than never.

Numenta working on the future: human computer memory system

Erick Schonfeld from Business 2.0 has recently written an article on Numenta made by Jeff Hawkins (PalmPilot, Treo), whose vision is ‘hacking the human brain’ i.e. making a computer software that imitates a child’s trial and error learning style based upon the actual ways human use a computer: each interaction serves as an input in the database and the algorithm to be developed. My question on Erick’s blog:

Google is also using search patterns to learn from users and they have an enormous database daily expanding on the largest scale at present. And as Marissa Mayer said at DLD07 conference, the future, Google’s future, is personalized search - but I think we all expect the future to be personalized + online + bionic everything.
So Numenta could logically be a start-up potentially bought up by Google, if the software is learning quickly enough and has a large enough database for that + plus a business model to monetize on building that database (as Google’s AdWords is).
How is Numenta going to solve that very challenging task (i.e. building world-scale database _while_ generating revenue)?

One more thing, to quote from the full article the part that deals with Numenta’s financial aspects:
‘Targeted at research scientists and hard-core programmers, the license will allow people to play around with the software for free until they’re ready to create a commercial product. “We want as many people experimenting with the technology as possible,” Hawkins says’ and ‘He knows that he needs to build a community of developers around Numenta with financial incentives to help his technology succeed,’

a, I don’t think that people would play around for free, if they do not get sth very very useful in exchange (Google search works, Google Maps work, so people ‘play around with it’)
b, ‘building a community of developers’ is essential, but ‘building a community of developers’ where developers is defined as all people who contribute with their patterns of use is equally important.

3 moments at DLD07: Linda Stone

To continue the series of top moments at Digital Life Design conference, Munich, here’s Linda’s choice:

1. Sitting next to Jeff Pulver while Pablos (the hacker) was hacking his phone.  Listening to Jeff say, “Oh my G-d,” over and over and sweating as Pablos played his voicemail.  Since Pablos had tried (and FAILED!) to hack into my voicemail earlier that morning, I was both relieved and sympathetic.
2. Wonderful talks and times with Yossi Vardi, Walt Mossberg, John Naisbitt, Caterina Fake, Jean-Paul Schmetz and many others…
3. It was an honor to be the opening keynote. (watch Linda’s presentation on video at the DLD site).

my comment: I must conclude that Master Pablos seems to have made a long-lasting impression on many of us. I wonder when Pixar is coming out with a cartoon about a hacker dual - see magician dual in Prestige.

Information wants to be free. How to inject profitability in the info flow?

Growing free information - less and less physical, but there is a scarcity of attention. “Figuring out how to capture the attention of the right people and focus them on important information is extremely viable and only getting more so.”

Fred Wilson’s opening keynote at the Software and Information Industry’s January 2007 summit in New York City can be watched at ScribeMedia.

I strongly suggest his keynote focusing on the question ‘Where are the places where you can make money?’

• What are critical points? Discovery, navigation, trust etc.
• The key: the data about data.
• Future: micro-chunking the content, freeing it (I want you to have it), syndicating it, and then monetizing it.
• And the most important part for me from the keynote: “I want to know how my info is consumed.” and “All through RSS”

PS: Fred is a fan of Umair Haque.

3 moments at DLD07: Jeff Pulver

A mini interview with Jeff asking what his top 3 moments were at DLD07.

What would be your choice for the top 3 moments?

1. The Hacker, Inc. Presentation when Pablos Holman announced and demonstrated to everyone in the room that he was able to hack into my mobile phone. [lots of witnesses, no exaggeration]
2. Swimming in the pool and playing Water Polo during the BUNTE DLD NIGHTCAP. [need for proof and illustration]
3. Playing Poker during the BUNTE DLD NIGHTCAP Afterparty. Also - meeting some of the people whom I’ve had an email relationship with over the years but never before met in person. [so typical of web-based friendships. I wonder when we will first read about a Second Life virtual friendship getting 'real' in this way and conveyed in a Finnish SMS novel] Together with sitting in the sessions and being inspired by the talks and the opportunities and the collective vision. [I simply needed to put this in bold]

What comes into your mind first?

Amazing people. A “Pre-Davos Gathering of Leaders effecting the worlds of Digital, Life and Design.

…and at the same time has a long lasting effect on you?

The relationships and bonding that took place during the various ad hoc meetings. [likewise, compulsion to highlight them in bold]

I’m happy to post this but please feel free to. I blogged a lot about
DLD07 during the past week.

Thanks, Jeff. Great replies. I am sorry I have missed the pool scene… Next time.

3 moments at DLD07: Magdalena Böttger, a geek girl’s choices

No 1: That’s easy. Brainstorming with Tariq [Krim, founder and CEO of Netvibes] about cool new features for netvibes. Really funny.

No 2: Ranting with Martin about hip and crazy people. Trying to feel much more morally straight. Kind of failed.

No 3: Anshe Chung real life husband talking about how the character developed and got a life of its own. Cute and amazing at the same time.

[Wow, I would be pretty interested in hearing more about it, Magdalena!]

[And about networking:]

I also felt that newcomers who knew noone would have a hard time. People seemed just to be talking to people they already knew. Fortunately there was a very down-to-earth but equally crowded blogger meeting on sunday evening. There you could really get in touch with new people.

[note: blogger meeting was primarily for German bloggers but anyone could attend the pub-conference. Does anybody have an English summary of the meet-up?]

Earn money on YouTube

Goo(g)d news. Soon you will start generating money on YouTube.

How soon? We don’t know. But Chad Hurley announced at World Economic Forum, Davos on 27 Jan that they would reward users for self-generated content, saying “We are getting an audience large enough where we have an opportunity to support creativity, to foster creativity through sharing revenue with our users.”

The idea is great, and I think it is a strong response to video sharing site Metacafé’s challenge, where revenue sharing already started 3 months ago. Eyal Herzog, co-founder talked about it Digital Life Design conference (DLD07) on Jan 22, so it was only 5 days ago that I aired my criticism “How come YouTube seems to be unresponsive? Can they really be that comfortable in the stregthening competition? Lots of national video sites are mushrooming suddenly. Not only is GooTube lagging behind in building communities, and financially rewarding producers, it is also painfully low-performer regarding technology.”

Of course, it may have been originally timed to be announced at Davos forum, but it may also have been that many of the people at DLD07 in Munich also participated in Davos, and realized that Metacafé is very competitive, and is threatening to take away those precious eyeballs (already boasting 500.000.000 video downloads a month!)

How are they going to define self-generated? What will be the business model?

Will they copy Metacafé in the CPM based earnings? (5 USD/ thousand views) or will it be a more complex calculation including (on top of CPM or CPC)

• viral effect: loads of inbound links from other blogs, and web pages
• number of comments
• number of video responses
• number of shares (CPA)
• number of times favorited
• number of subscriptions, or the monthly growth on it

There are several factors that could be included potentially. How to make it simple?

Metacafé simplified it in the following way:

“Producers get 5 USD/ CPM (a thousand views) if the total number of views go over 20.000 (Are you a producer? Just log in, and see how much you have earned. ” (Eyal Hertzog)

For YouTube, the good news is that Google AdSense payment model makes it easier to switch into the new business model and send money to content providers. Or even better, that they can count on the excellent technology of YouTube, (pardon my French) Google.

PS: the top earner on Metacafé, is not a simple user but a company: Reel Stunts Action Team, with several candidate films, but only one that generated all that 25.000 USD.

Update: Thanks to Philipp Lenssen and Tony Ruscoe for posting it on Google Blogoscoped.

How is Google generating revenue on YouTube?

Marissa Mayer’s answer is ‘we don’t know, we are still experimenting.’ (Digital, Life, Design conference, Munich: DLD07)

On Jan 25 2006 the first step towards actually integrating YouTube into Google’s products was taken: if you make a search query on Google Video, you’ll see loads of YouTube shots.

Liz Gannes on NewTeeVee is asking why is it worth running two video sites? (”why take a sidetrip to a search engine when you’ll end up on YouTube anyway?”)

In my opinion, that’s why:

As for running two sites (one for YouTube and one for Google video search): I think it is totally reasonable and profitable.

• Reason 1: they have different profiles, roles, images as defined by Google (as Salar Kamangar put it, one for content the other for search – the options in AdWords)
• Reason 2: with two brands you have more scope for experimenting
• Reason 3: the combination of the above two

From the user’s point of view:

On YouTube you accidentally ‘stumble upon’ and interact

On Google video search you purposefully search and spend no time on socializing

From the media point of view:

YouTube functions as a content site of Google’s content network with a distinct community and with more scope for applying, testing various ad formats. And these tests, mind you, will be less affecting Google brand, as YouTube is separate. So video shots interrupted by an ad on YouTube will not clash with Google’s aim to ‘enhance user experience,’ because it is not Google. Being intrusive on YouTube while ‘finding out how to reduce being intrusive to the minimum’ works on the YouTube brand better and safer.

How they are carrying out video ads is absolutely an exciting question. When Marissa Mayer was asked about it at Digital Life Design conference (DLD07) in Munich, she said they are experimenting and gathering data, feedback, etc. on what works best. See: http://videos.dld-conference.com/ (day: Jan 23, The Billion Dollar Bubble). “There are lots of different business models… Maybe it means the user needs pay directly for the service, maybe it means advertisers will pay more…advertisers are good at valuing those eyeballs.” i.e. Advertisers will say how much it is worth them (even bidding?)

It is baffling though why haven’t they improved the searches (awful results pages, no need to describe them). Also, why haven’t they tried to experiment with dividing YouTube into two main columns as they do on Google search results pages: one column for organic video search and one for sponsored videos with bid management - based on similar principles to search algorithm.

But maybe this division is coming on Google video search – which, as a separate site, is of course worth being kept, if it works as an aggregator, and it will work as an aggregator indexing all sources they can/ are allowed to - with no social networking features, focusing on search, and potentially, with a differentiated method of generating ad revenue. One thing is sure, however, based on Google’s policy, I think it is out of question that Google could afford to be a biased video search engine - users’ trust is their biggest asset (besides lava lamps). So there is no way that they could push YouTube videos ahead of videos hosted on other sites.