Tag Archives: mashup

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Hot Inside the Perimeter

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So many of my friends ask me – what the hell is that foursquare/gowalla/brightkite thing I see popping up on your Facebook, Twitter or blog feeds. Well, for those not in the know, it’s possibly the next big thing (or possibly just annoying). Anyway, these are all so-called LBS or Location-Based Services. These services are all variations on the idea of ‘checking in’ to physical locations via a GPS-enabled mobile device to let your friends know what you are up to. Some, like Gowalla, involve a game of sorts, where virtual objects are available for pickup when you check in, rather like a virtual version of Geocaching. Gowalla ran a scavenger hunt in December for actual prizes – t-shirts, $10 iTunes gift cards etc – and I managed to find an iTunes card on my last trip to NYC, although I’m still waiting for the card to arrive. Anyway, as seen above, there is this spiffy site Wheredoyougo that creates a heatmap of your check-ins by using the Foursquare APIs along with Google maps. No surprise there that I pretty much stay ITP (or at the airport, ahem). There’s also a cluster of activity up on Buford Highway where I drag the family to get our ethnic on as frequently as possible ;-).

mashup, work

Now it gets interesting…

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Having been focused on various parts of the ad serving and operations industry for the past ten or more years, and now focused on it pretty much 100% of the time, I find it tremendously exciting to see that one of the largest investments in the post-bubble Internet boom comes to my little corner of the industry – ad serving.

Google’s $3.1 billion all-cash purchase of privately-held DoubleClick announced after trading today (DCLK was bought in 2005 by equity firm Hellman and Friedman for $1.1B) makes their ‘earth-shattering’ purchase price for YouTube pale by comparison for a paltry $1.65B in stock. And this company has actual profit (reportedly $300M last year) built on a core aspect of a large share of the internet publishing sector. Check pretty much any web site business plan these days – and you’ll see online advertising as the lion’s share of projected revenue for the foreseeable future. And while some have scoffed that old-skool ‘display’ advertising is failing to deliver like the contextual advertising that Google built it’s empire on, this purchase is clear validation that display advertising – and more importantly video advertising – are important aspects of the new Internet economy.
In a flash, Google now gains relationships with one of if not the largest aggregation of both publisher and agency business in the digital media space, essentially consolidating the largest player in text-based advertising with their peer in the display ad space. And in a flash, the online advertising business gets a massive validation across the board as the foundation for the next wave (call it Web 2.0 or whatever you’d like) of online activity and as a real business model.

One has to wonder how many publishers who are already at odds with Google (Viacom’s YouTube lawsuit anyone?) may have some level of discomfort with their advertising data residing in Google-owned database like DFP – DoubleClick’s hosted ad serving solution for publishers.

Google now gains a major foothold in the relationship-based world of Madison Avenue in addition to their tremendous reach in the CPA-focused world of search advertising.
It’s not difficult to see how DoubleClick’s announcement last week of their Advertising Exchange may have sweetened this deal significantly, and further demonstrated how the two companies roadmaps were converging. Now having lived through mergers myself, executing on the synergies (shudder, shudder) between these two companies will be an interesting thing to watch. Also interesting will be what happens to other players in the space – like Acquantive, 24/7RealMedia and others.

And will Google follow the model they set when they have acquired other companies? Picasa used to be a pay product. Same with Google Earth (keyhole). As well as Google Analytics (Urchin). Will DoubleClick become a free product one day? Hard to imagine, given the dollars involved today from hundreds of publishers and agencies, but you never know…

It’s interesting to see Google close this deal when only two weeks ago the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft was very close to being the buyer; but as an analyst mentioned in the NYTimes story on the purchase, keeping DoubleClick out of Microsoft’s hands was ‘worth billions to Google’ – and that’s what they paid.

Note: My employer is a current customer of DoubleClick and my opinions do not necessarily represent those of TBS Inc. and are my own.

Gadgets, mashup, technology

Gushing for the Mac

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I think they’ve outdone themselves – the new iPhone (despite the Cisco product by the same name) looks absolutely killer – taking a completely fresh approach to the UI of the mobile phone, and creating a true mashup of relevant technologies. Apple has posted a great walkthrough of the features including their interesting approach to many of these features at http://apple.com/iphone/ – check it out.
Although I need to see it to really understand and confirm, Jobs keynote speech seemed to describe the new phone as less a touchscreen and more of a ‘proximity’ screen – where your gestures, not ham-handed mashing of buttons triggers responses. So from unlocking it (a side to side gesture over an on-screen ‘slider’) to zooming in on webpages or images by ‘pinching’ the area of interest, this sounds like an amazing step forward. It’s super slim – 11.6mm thick, about the width of the Uniball pen I carry around. It’s running some flavor of OSX, so development of applications will hopefully be straightforward. And it includes some very tight integration with Cingular (exclusive in the domestic market for some time to come) in regards to a visual form of voice mail – where each message can be accessed independently, rather than the typical wading through obscure menus. And it includes robust Wifi and Bluetooth 2.0, with some very smart widget integration from Google Maps (GPS of some sort active here), to Weather (location aware), to Stock Quotes. No RSS shown, but I suspect that’s probably not hard to pull off either. Anyway, at a price of most other ‘smartphones’ like by Verizon PPC6700, this is a strong contender. Too bad it doesn’t include an expansion card slot. My only hesitations here are that although it supports IMAP or POP email, getting to my corporate Exchange server is my top priority, as well as the fact that it’s on Cingular, when I’ve recently moved over to Verizon. I may still be drawn to try this out come June. Price is not bad either, at $499 for the 4gb or $599 for 8gb.

Also announced to day was the shipping date (February) and the final name (Apple TV) of the ITV product mentioned here previously. No big surprises there, although it’s now confirmed to include a hard drive (40gb) as well as 802.11n, the speediest of the current close-to-standard Wifi technologies. These features were both rumored over the last few months.
Not mentioned in the Stevenote was the addition of a new Airport Extreme Base Station, shaped to fit squarely below or above your brand-new Apple TV box. See picture at right. The unit is prices at $179, and includes a USB port for shared devices, as well as a hub to connect other Ethernet devices. Obviously, this is also an 802.11n device. Apple has a new feature built in here to provide extended network storage as well. You can connect an external USB hard drive to your network via the USB port, or attach a USB hub to connect multiple devices. Ideal for network-attached storage of large video, image or music libraries or simply for backups.