Today's Most popular News

Source:Mashable!

This is a guest post written by Bernard Moon, Vice President of the Lunsford Group, a private holding company consisting of entities in technology, media, research & consulting, health care, investment boutique, and real estate. Bernard blogs at Silicon Moon.

The recent announcement of Google’s Lively product has created a stir in some circles, but for me it’s a yawner. Why? It’s another Google product not related to their bread and butter of search and ads. The company was built on a philosophy that products should sell themselves, so their marketing efforts are minuscule and their product development process seems undeveloped. Also “products” are not really great design but great engineering. While this approach has been wondrous for Google’s core search business and related profit margins, it has created misguided results with possibly billions of dollars left on the table.

Similar to Lively, Google’s social networking service, Orkut, was built by Orkut Büyükkökten on his 20% time. In typical fashion, Orkut was launched with little marketing strategy and received some initial fanfare.

When Google finally opened Orkut up and allowed anyone to join in 2006, it randomly became the leading social network in Brazil. While Alexa rankings are inaccurate, Orkut recently became the 11th most trafficked site in the world. In most situations, this would be a wild success, but imagine if they actually targeted specific segments in the U.S. instead of throwing dice? Orkut strategically targeted India, which has led to its leadership position there, but what other markets has Google missed?

I’m not fond of “what if” scenarios, but what if they opened up earlier and targeted the college market in 2004 as Facebook was slowly spreading through the Ivy League schools? Or if they tailored it to the teen market in the U.K.? It seems Google is now paying attention to Orkut’s growth and development, but they already missed several larger opportunities.

Google Product Search service (formerly Froogle) was another missed opportunity. Officially launched in 2002, it wallowed in mediocrity for years. I don’t know if this was a 20% project, but it seems like another engineering project not coupled with a product manager and little marketing guidance. If there is one area that has been a consistent startup goldmine from the first boom to today, it is shopping comparison engines.

CNET acquired mySimon for $700 million (2000), Yahoo acquired Kelkoo for $640 million (2004), eBay acquired Shopping.com for $620 million (2005), Shopzilla sold for $525 million (2005), and several others including Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Jellyfish.com for $50 million (2007). Shopping search engines generate great revenue and accumulate an incredible amount of valuable user data. What has Google done with Froogle? How much revenue has it generated since 2002? How many millions have been left at the doorsteps of its competitors?

Gmail’s invitation-only beta release began in April 2004. I remember receiving an invite from my friend at Google that month and testing it out. I quickly fell in love with Gmail. I loved how it grouped email conversations, the label function and the clean user interface. Over the next couple years I ran into more fans of Gmail, so I kept wondering when it would open up. It finally did in February 2007, but I questioned the rationale of this decision. What if they opened it up sooner? What if they promoted it beyond a link off its homepage?

Today, there are approximately 262 million Yahoo! email users, 256 million Live Hotmail users, 87 million Gmail users and 49 million AOL users worldwide. With my biases, I have to ask why is the best free email service a distant third?

This leads me to question Google’s approach to product development and marketing beyond their core services. While it seeks to organize the world’s information, there are products on its periphery where design and marketing can be factors towards success and untapped revenues. Google’s engineering driven culture that has doubtingly created enormous growth and shareholder value, but great engineering and design is not mutually exclusive.

Looking at Apple, their company culture is driven by design and user experience. Engineering supports the creation of Apple’s designs, and this consistent approach has served the company well in its new era.

I believe Google can learn a little from Apple and its obsessive design culture and incredible marketing machine. While I believe Google should always be an engineering driven culture and company, some room should be left for the design freaks and marketing geniuses to optimize the value of their treasure chest of innovation.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:No Sex in Lively? Yeah, Right!Is Google Building a Media Empire Based on Your Searches? Of Course.Google Launches Lively to Create a Virtual World Across Social NetworksVirtual Worlds: 20+ Tools for Creating 3D Graphics and EnvironmentsGoogle To Launch Google WikiGoogle Maps Hangs Up on Click-to-CallGoogle Checkout Trends Knows Your Shopping Habits

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion in “The Startup Review” series, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Moblyng

20 word description: Moblyng can detect and mobilize photo and slideshow widgets and online video from any social media page or URL.

CEO’s 100 word description: Since our launch this May, Moblyng has seen tremendous traffic in the tens of thousands of users. Moblyng’s groundbreaking technology allows consumers to mobilize existing social media and also create new media. Moblyng technology automatically converts Flash-based content to images or video for mobile distribution. We provide a cool, fun, free and easy way for consumers to express themselves and share media with friends, both on the Web and on mobile phones. We also provide advertising and branding space in online and mobile Web pages, mobile text messages and pre/post-roll video, providing a real revenue business model.

Mashable’s Take: Slideshow creator fliptrack is going mobile with a new stand alone service called Moblyng. With this tool, you can import existing images, videos and slideshows from across the Web and turn them into custom mobile content that you can send to your phone or your friends’ phones.

Moblyng automatically detects the media on any given URL, and converts Flash-based slideshows into content that can be shared on your phone. Moblyng will work on just about any phone that supports photos, so there’s no short list of devices that will work for the service. The networks supported for easy import is a decent size list as well, ranging from Photobucket slideshows to your Facebook and MySpace albums. Since Moblyng is a product of fliptrack, you can always create a mobile slideshow from scratch directly on the Moblyng site by uploading your content.

While integration with popular social networks certainly makes mobile media-sharing much easier, a browser add-on that lets you create mobile slideshows and send content to your mobile phone as you browse the Web would be a really nifty feature, increasing the ease with which media is sent to users’ phones. This could encourage even more activity across the board. Even a bookmarking tool with the ability to aggregate content that users might later be interested in mobilizing could encourage some activity on that front.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

evite is one of those companies that’s been around for ages, and is sometimes considered prehistoric when compared to the slew of newer event planning sites like Renkoo, SetDot and MyPunchBowl. But as we saw last year with the emergence of evite’s mobile support, the old relic is still ready for a fight.

Earlier this week I had a long chat with several members of the evite team to hear about the things the company has been working on in the past year, as well as what evite is reaching for in the future. And let’s just say that this may be one of the largest pushes evite has done to update its site. evite is officially stepping into the realm of web 2.0. With a new development team in place, which includes GM Rosanna McCollough and new head tech guy, Erik Kellener, evite realizes that an update was long overdue.

After spending the better part of the past year identifying problem spots and resolving to completely rewrite the evite platform, the first phase of this major revamp takes effect today. One of the biggest concerns in such an undertaking was ensuring that things still run smoothly while changes were under way. As Kellener puts it, “we had to figure out the best way to support our existing 18 million users, and essentially change out the car engine while driving.”

The biggest highlights of this new vision for evite include easier navigation with the introduction of a highly improved user interface and several new custom options for the ways in which hosts and attendees interact amongst each other. evite has opened up the site to some degree in regards to designs used for invites, supporting more custom options for invite designs, and the ability to share user-generated designs with the rest of evite’s members. There are also several social media import and embed options for customized invites, allowing hosts to pull photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, and playlists from Imeem.

This approach is certainly more open than what evite has presented for custom options in the past, and the idea behind this approach is that evite needs to focus on its core competencies and “outsource” the perks to companies that do these additional features better. This minimizes the amount of money evite itself spends on developing individual features in-house, and is more appealing to users as much of their shareable content used for customization purposes resides elsewhere on the Web.

One particular partnership for evite that’s quite interesting is a new deal forged between evite and JS-Kit, which will be powering evite’s invitation message boards and polls. While all of the partnerships and media imports/embeds make invites more interactive for attendees, JS-Kit’s message boards and polls make them especially so. This partnership also takes full advantage of some of the new JS-Kit features that were rolled out in recent weeks, leveraging attendee interaction on evite and other network sites (based on user participation) for indirect promotional purposes, extending evite’s overall reach.

Will this make evite more competitive with the likes of Renkoo? Seeing as evite has kept its dominating position for the past 10 years, I’d say the competition was more of a nagging threat to the capabilities of evite, in the face of Renkoo’s potential. But maintaining a leadership position is a key objective for the long-established event-creation service, and the new updates will make such maintenance an easier task.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Socializr-Evite Row ContinueseVite Takes Cues from Renkoo: Mobile QuickVite for Parties on the GoEvite.com to Relaunch…FinallyIAC Shows 40 Percent Growth in Search and Advertising BusinessOpen Web Awards Finalists: Places and EventsEvite Threatens Socializr with LawsuitiWon’s Relaunch: Does it Need a Social Network?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 4:53 pm and is filed under News, web 2.0, web, social media, Evite, relaunch, event, event management, invitations, online invitations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.