If you look at top websites -- like Wikipedia and craigslist -- a common theme is user participation. It certainly can be a powerful thing.
Well, this is what Glassdoor.com is trying to do. Actually, this week the company announced a $6.5 million venture capital round (the total amount raised since its founding is $9.5 million). The investors include: Sutter Hill Ventures and Benchmark Capital.
So far, Glassdoor.com has attracted 115,000 contributions from its user base (the site launched in June). Basically, they have provided information about their employers, such as on salaries, culture and so on. There are even ratings of company CEOs.
All in all, it's a neat idea. After all, making the decision on a new job is critical -- but often fraught with uncertainty. So why now allow the community to help out?
"Now more than ever, people want to know what it's really like inside a company and more and more employees are sharing details about their jobs and work environments. With increased resources, employees and employers can improve upon the decisions they make for their career and for their company. In this environment, in particular, we think this investment sends a strong signal about the value of the information available on Glassdoor.com to people around the globe."
A big trend over the past few years has been Web 2.0 (despite the fact that I'm still not sure how to define this malleable thing). However, there haven't been any IPOs in the sector. What's more, the M&A transactions have been muted, except for some outliers, such as Time Warner Inc.'s (NYSE: TWX) $850 million deal for Bebo.
Despite all this, venture capitalists continue to pour money into Web 2.0 deals. According to a report from Dow Jones VentureSource, there was about $1.34 billion in investments last year (across 178 transactions). In fact, this was an 88% spike over 2006.
Sounds good, huh?
Perhaps not. If anything, we may be seeing a weeding out of the weaker players and a bigger focus on the winners. After all, Facebook snagged about $300 million in funding. There was also a $44 million infusion for Ning as well as a $49.25 million deal for MyStrands.
One of my favorite books is Patricia Seybold's Outside Innovation. Her main point is that much of a company's innovation will come outside its walls -- such as from employees, partners, investors, and so on.
In the case of Cisco, the company has established the I-Prize competition so as to find the next billion-dollar idea. The company says it may invest up to $10 million into the winning idea.
So what can your company do to benefit from other people's ideas? Let's take a look:
With investor interest high in China, this hasn't been lost on corporate investment. Companies must face the decision about how to address the Chinese juggernaut: essentially, to build, buy, or partner.
PaidContent.org has a story this morning that the Internet giant, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), is close to launching a joint venture to offer free music downloads in the Chinese market.
According to PaidContent, "Google is in the late planning stages of a JV with Chinese online music company Top100.cn, a Beijing-based site that currently sells licensed music downloads. The new service would permit Google's search engine in China to provide free and licensed music downloads, reports WSJ, citing sources."
This is significant in Google's push to counter leading Chinese search engine, Baidu.com (NASDAQ: BIDU), which already provides links to download sites.
This move may help Google position itself vis-a-vis locally-favored Baidu.
Zack Miller is the Managing Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund. Author owns a long-term position in Google stock.
Being a parent can certainly bring lots of joy. At the same time, it can be terrifying. But there's help: iParenting Media. The company operates websites like www.PregancyToday.com and yes, www.iParenting.com.
Now, the company has sold out to The Walt Disney Company (NYSE: DIS). No doubt, this looks like a great fit and should provide iParenting with much more distribution and content resources.
iParenting got its start in 1996, when the cofounders -- Alvin All and Elisa Ast All -- looked for a site to help with Elisa's pregnancy. Well, there weren't many good sites. So why not start one? Over time, they built a thriving community of more than 40 different sites, covering areas like teens.
iParenting will be a part of the The Walt Disney Internet Group, which already has a set of popular family websites like Family.com, FamilyFun.com and Wondertime.com.
Disney did not disclose the terms of the deal and in today's trading, the stock price is down 49 cents to $32.55.
The Wall Street Journal is out with a story today shedding a little more light on Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) online storage plans. The WSJ article claims hat the search giant is planning on launching an online storage service in the next few month to enable users to store documents, pictures, and music on Google's servers. Google already provides some level of storage via its image hosting service, Picasa, and Google Docs, Google's online stab at competing with Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office Suite.
The rumored Gdrive is one step closer to reality. This will probably be a two-tiered service with a free version and a premium version for which users will have to pony up some money. Don't look for this to provide short-term meaningful revenues for search behemoth. Something more important, though, is happening.
Technology insider blog, TechCrunch, ran a thought-provoking post yesterday about Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) entitled, The Google Set-Top Box. The article speculates that the search-engine giant may leverage its new open-source operating system, Android, to address TV advertising in a revolutionary way. Google is already testing a new ad platform for TV with Echostar (NASDAQ: DISH), being propped up with data provided by a recent deal with Nielsen. But this just addresses the way ads are bought and sold. According to TechCrunch, almighty Google's ambitions for television go way beyond just ad delivery.
In short, the article posits that Google's aspirations for the mobile phone can be applied to the set-top box, itself essentially a computer. Android's open-source application platform can be used to help promote and support new developments that would turn TV watching more like Internet browsing. "In many ways," says Google's head of TV development, Vincent Dureau, "we think that television is becoming like the Internet in that there is a multiplication of channels. This creates challenges for viewers, advertisers and creators."
In the consumer world, we are seeing a revolution in social technologies: blogs, wikis, video sharing, and so on. And some of the top properties, such as Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace, are becoming mega brands.
But there is another emerging trend: social media is making its way into the Corporate world.
I recently had a chance to talk to Reid Conrad, who is the cofounder and CEO of Near-Time. His company has a Web 2.0 platform geared mostly for corporate customers.
What are you hearing from business customers regarding Web 2.0? Is it becoming more of a priority? If so, why?
We are seeing businesses increasingly view Web 2.0 as their standard. They are quickly realizing the advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities over traditional, proprietary applications. I think the key to this has been the realization by businesses that they can deploy consumer platforms with unprecedented reach and flexibility.
In light of the mega deals from Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), IBM (NYSE: IBM), and SAP (NYSE: SAP), the buzz is that business software is dead. How can small- and mid-sized players compete?
Well, I think there's still life in the sector. Take a look at the on-demand operators, such as Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) and NetSuite. They are disrupting existing markets – and growing at break-neck speeds.
Basically, the company realizes that the MySpace/Facebook generations want a different approach to software. As a result, Huddle.net has a cool system that allows for online workspaces, which even allow for social networking.
True, I know many think that this is a fad. Ironically enough, that's probably good news for Huddle.net. It allows the company to build out its offerings and learn form customer interactions.
In fact, for the past six months, Huddle.net has seen 25% growth in new users per month.
If you want to check out other cool venture capital deals, visit DealProfiles.com.
Search engine marketing (or SEM) is about paying for traffic. By bidding on keywords, advertisers with Google or its competitors are paying to bring people to their websites. Once there, a website needs to convert traffic into sales. Not an easy thing to do and clearly, some traffic is more valuable than other traffic. The better Google gets at valuating the traffic and providing these metrics to their advertisers, the more profitable everyone becomes. Google makes more money because it optimizes the bidding on keywords by really valuating a click. Advertisers win because they have the tools to bid on the most profitable traffic. For an unbelievable treatise on why analytics are so important, check out Dave McClure's great work on the industry and why investors should take note (Warning: Dave uses some strong language).
Answers Corporation (NASDAQ: ANSW), parent of Answers.com, a Web 2.0 amalgamation of useful research info, announced yesterday that its newish service, WikiAnswers surpassed one million questions posted on its site. I don't know whether one million is a lot, but it's right up there with what my five children ask me in just a single day.
The service allows content to be generated completely by users. The Holy Grail of Web 2.0, User Generated Content (UGC), this type of service allows users to both post questions and answer others' questions in a wide variety of domains. Growth has been impressive. According to the company, for the first nine months of this year, WikiAnswers' unique monthly visitor count in the U.S. has grown 317%, to more than four million. This ranks WikiAnswers as the second-fastest growing domain of the top 1,500. Not too shabby.
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) pulled a competing service last year after boring results. Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), on the other hand, with Yahoo! Answers, has proven the model that users enjoy using this type of service. Yahoo has seen tremendous growth and according to TechCrunch, "one of Yahoo's most successful product launches in recent years has been Yahoo! Answers, which is showing more than 50% year-over-year growth in pageviews, according to comScore. Yahoo! keeps pushing the crowd-sourcing property, which lets 95 million registered members around the world answer each others' questions."
After all the ink spilled last week over Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)'s investment in social-phenomFacebook (see Peter Cohan's interesting piece on Facebook's valuation), search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is countering today with an interesting announcement: It is creating a distribution network for social networking tools.
You ask: A what?
Part of what makes Facebook's social networking environment interesting is that it's become a platform for software development. Like Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM)'s developer network, Facebook provides a platform, complete with tools, that allows third-party applications to be deployed within the Facebook milieu. Applications like iLike (with over 6 million registered users, 300,000 news users per day and a management team that rivals the U.S. Olympic basketball team) allow software developers to reach and interact (and eventually make some bling) with Facebook users within the Facebook environment.
Google also has third-party tools, deftly describes as "widgets." Like Facebook, Google provides a platform for third-party developers to build applications that reside within users' personalized homepages (iGoogle pages in Google parlance) and -- just announced recently -- on those publisher sites that work with Google's cash cow advertising platform, AdSense.
In this Bloggingstockcast, I review Mint, a new web 2.0 application that will let you take your bank accounts and bring them all together into one neat place, as well as let you see your spending trends.
Several years ago, I had a chance to talk to Satish Dharmaraj, the CEO and cofounder of Zimbra. He told me that the company spent two years building a sophisticated email system (in stealth mode) – and was using some cool Web 2.0 capabilities.
Well, the hard work has paid off; that is, Zimbra has fetched $350 million in a buyout from Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO).
No doubt, Zimbra's messaging platform has some slick features. But it's also sturdy enough for intense enterprise environments. For example, Zimbra allows for archiving and on-site deployment – which are essential capabilities in the Sarbanes-Oxley world.
Yahoo is a dominant player in email, with about 250 million registered users. Now, with the power of Zimbra, Yahoo can expand into corporate environments. In other words, there will be even more pressure on Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s Office franchise.
A couple years ago, Suranga Chandratillake started Blinkx. The goal was to make it easier to search for online videos. Interestingly enough, he got a lot of pushback.
Of course, things are a lot different now -- especially with Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) purchase of YouTube.
Well, this week, Blinkx took another important step: The company went public on the London-based AIM exchange and raised about $50 million.
On the first day of trading, the stock price surged 40% to 65 pence, and the company has a market cap of roughly $355 million.
So far, Blinkx has deals with 130 media partners and has indexed more than 12 million hours of videos.
Because of the "quiet period," I can't talk to Suranga. But when it expires, it will definitely be interesting to get his observations on the process.
If you look at top websites -- like Wikipedia and craigslist -- a common theme is user participation. It certainly can be a powerful thing.
A big trend over the past few years has been Web 2.0 (despite the fact that I'm still not sure how to define this malleable thing). However, there haven't been any IPOs in the sector. What's more, the M&A transactions have been muted, except for some outliers, such as 
One of my favorite books is Patricia Seybold's 
. Her main point is that much of a company's innovation will come outside its walls -- such as from employees, partners, investors, and so on.
Being a parent can certainly bring lots of joy. At the same time, it can be terrifying. But there's help: iParenting Media. The company operates websites like 
and 
. He also operates 
In the consumer world, we are seeing a revolution in social technologies: blogs, wikis, video sharing, and so on. And some of the top properties, such as Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace, are becoming mega brands.
In light of the mega deals from 
.
After all the ink spilled last week over 
Part of what makes Facebook's social networking environment interesting is that it's become a platform for software development. Like 
A couple years ago, Suranga Chandratillake started 
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