Recently, I’ve found myself in a series of meetings in both the Silicon Valley and in Israel with technologists, media people, and venture capitalists – all of whom seem to be equally despondent about the state of the online advertising start-up. The online advertising industry is in the final stages of consolidation, they argue, technology [...]
Tagged Internet, Online AdvertisingThe Wall Street Journal offered extensive coverage today of Google’s decision back in February to exit the off-line radio advertising business. This isn’t the first time one of Google’s many growth initiatives has failed to achieve the hoped-for results, nor does this particular failure expose a fatal flaw in Google’s extraordinarily scalable business model. It [...]
Tagged Comscore, Dunnhumby, Google, Homescan, Internet, Nielsen, Online Advertising, Technology, yahooLast week, T-Mobile Germany made some waves by banning Skype for the iPhone. Some might read this as a long overdue reassertion of operator power, but I disagree. A few months ago, I learned from a reliable source that a major operator was deliberately not shipping a very popular mobile phone model that they knew [...]
Tagged Internet, Mobile, wifiI woke up this morning to a post on TechCrunch about an impending Google acquisition of Twitter. Jeff Pulver, a Twitter investor, offered his perspective on his blog, and Ouriel Ohayon wrote it up as well. It’s become very clear that Twitter is a runaway success. There are lots of reasons for this, but I [...]
Tagged Google, Internet, microsoft, twitter, wix, yahooA friend of mine sent me this blog post by Rafe Needleman about TimeBridge, an Israeli start-up backed by Mayfield and Norwest Venture Partners. TimeBridge offers a solution for meeting scheduling that integrates nicely with Outlook and Google Calendar. It allows users to share calendar information with each other and easily schedule meetings. I’ve downloaded, [...]
Tagged media, Online Advertising, TimeBridgeBack in November, I attended Ad:Tech New York, one of the key online advertising conferences. Back then, I wasn’t blogging, and now it’s too late for a detailed review of the conference to be meaningful. But I do want to share one insight because I often think about it when I’m meeting companies. I call [...]
Tagged 5min, advertising, CommissionVideos, Internet, kontera, Online Advertising, qoof, Video, Voxant NewsroomOn Monday, Levi Shapiro gave a great talk on mobile applications and advertising at a roundtable hosted by my firm, Genesis Partners. A few takeaways from the session at Genesis: Mobile 1.0 is over. Among US wireless subscribers, penetration of mobile games (6%), audio (12%), and premium SMS (5%) has been flat or down for [...]
Tagged Apple, AppStore, NokiaBack in September, Google announced that it was adding facial recognition to Picasa. That must have come as something of a blow to the facial recognition start-ups that are hoping to dominate that niche with superior technology. Last week, Google released Latitude, which is an upgrade for Google Maps for Mobile that includes social networking [...]
An amazing thing is about to happen – Barack Obama’s inauguration. But a (much smaller) amazing thing just happened to me and perhaps to millions of other Facebook/CNN users. I logged into CNN to watch some live coverage of the Obama inauration….and without doing anything, was logged in automatically to the CNN/Facebook joint inauguration experience. [...]
Tagged CNN, Facebook, Facebook Connect, Obama, Social Networking, VideoOccasionally, a company will come along with a product that shows us the way forward and prepares a market for a change that is coming. I think Xobni is one of those companies. Why? Because our social interactions on e-mail, social networks, twitter, IM, and mobile phones are rich with data that has yet [...]
Tagged delver, E-mail, Google, Nogacom, Outlook, Search, Sightix, TimeBridge, Xobni