Continue reading Retailers Lagging in Social Media Rush

Retailers Lagging in Social Media Rush originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Is it possible to run a business by giving away your stuff? It sounds counterintuitive. But hey, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) gives away much of its offerings, right? I'm actually using Google Docs to write this column, for example.

True, Google is perhaps an exception (it certainly helps to have a huge user base and brand name). But it is worth exploring the concept. In fact, there is an excellent book on the topic -- Free: The Future of a Radical Price-- which came out recently.

Continue reading Entrepreneur's Journal: Should your business start giving away stuff?

Entrepreneur's Journal: Should your business start giving away stuff? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Have you ever looked at your Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) Flickr account and thought, "Why am I doing this? I can just throw my pics up on Facebook"? If this has crossed your mind, you're not alone. In fact, many photo-sharing sites - Snapfish (NYSE: HPQ), Photobucket, Picasa (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Shutterfly, as well as Flickr - are asking the same questions. With the development and enhancement of photo management capabilities in major social networking websites, niche players need to find new ways to stay relevant.

The situation is still far from grim. Fed by traffic from their behemoth owners, the photo-sharing sites remain substantial forces, and they are currently home to more than 20 billion pictures. There's still plenty of interest in these environments ... which has been bolstered by specific features that make the likes of Flickr attractive to both professional photographers and amateur shooters. The ability to order prints and personalize portfolios, for example, still provides an edge over sites like Facebook and MySpace (NYSE: NEWS).

Nonetheless, the threats from the social networking space are quite real.

Continue reading Photo Sharing vs Social Media: Who Wins?

Photo Sharing vs Social Media: Who Wins? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Should political satire be censored by one of the largest photo-sharing websites on the planet? Although several political satires of a former president are easily findable, one was removed due to what Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) thinks is "copyright infringement." Regardless of your political stance, what does Yahoo! think it's doing by trying to be an information gatekeeper for material on its main photo site? Ever hear of fair use?

This irritated Valleywag's Ryan Tate, who said "a transformative political satire" should not be deleted by Flickr based on some loose understanding by Yahoo! and the folks who comb through Flickr's images looking for infringing and offending photos to delete from the site.

Continue reading Yahoo! plays favorites when it comes to political images on Flickr?

Yahoo! plays favorites when it comes to political images on Flickr? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 21 Aug 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading How Yahoo!'s Flickr helps, and hurts, photographers' rights

How Yahoo!'s Flickr helps, and hurts, photographers' rights originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Dallas lawsuit: Flickr photo cause headaches for ad execs, Virgin

Dallas lawsuit: Flickr photo cause headaches for ad execs, Virgin originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

New features for Google Maps originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 11 Jul 2007 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Web 2.0, a web for sharing content among individuals, attracted over a quarter of a billion worth of venture capital in the first half of 2006 alone.

Some Web 2.0 start ups have made serious money for their founders. YouTube's founders pocketed $1.65 billion in 2006 when they sold out to Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG); Flickr's founders took home an undisclosed amount -- estimated between $15 million and $35 million -- selling to Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) in 2005; and in 2005 MySpace's founders made $580 million selling to News Corp. (NYSE: NWS).

Here are some questions that came to my mind about Web 2.0:

• What is Web 2.0?
• How popular is it?
• Who is making money off it?
• How is it leaping the synapse from start-up to incumbent?
• What are its risks and opportunities for business?
• Where is it heading?

Click here for some thoughts on these questions. What am I missing? What do you think?

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned in this post.

Web 2.0: now and next originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Sun, 13 May 2007 13:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) figures it is not in enough businesses already, so it plans to offer a high-definition photo [subscription required] format to the world's camera industry. The old standard, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) compression format, has been around awhile and may not be able to break down photos into small files as well as Microsoft can.

The move by MSFT is not unlike the one that it made into the video world five years ago. It offered its Windows Media video compression in place of the old MPEG-2 standard for breaking down video files for transmission.

Moving photos around the internet is a big business. Companies like PhotoBucket and Flickr would not exist if photos could not be broken down digitally and sent over IP. The Microsoft product offers the opportunity to do this with less bandwidth usage than the JPEG format.

There is a lot at stake. Research firm NPD Group said that digital camera sales hit $6.9 billion in 2006. The new software could be a blessing for that industry.

Microsoft does not want money for the new technology; it is part of Vista. The world's largest software company thinks this might drive consumers to adopt Vista faster. It may be right.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

Microsoft wants to take your picture originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

With Vista, has Windows reached its pinnacle? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yahoo! makes a (small) move -- buys MyBlogLog originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 09 Jan 2007 10:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Several years ago when Web 2.0 companies such as Flickr.com and MySpace hit the market there was lots of talk of how there would great growth opportunities.

Well it's still hard to find highly profitable companies in the Web 2.0 world.

Perhaps, the business model is how these companies are able to capture venture capital?

This week, Dow Jones' VentureOne released a new study on Web 2.0 fundings. So far this year there have been 49 financings for a total of $262.3 million. Keep in mind that for 2005 there were 51 deals, amounting to $199.1 million.

It's kind of tough to define Web 2.0. But VentureOne has a definition: a company with "a business model that revolves around a dynamic interface facilitating participation through such methods as user-created content, networking, and collaboration." This usually means using things like tagging, blogs, social networking, mashups, podcasting, and wikis. Oh, it also means using such cool technologies as RSS and AJAX.

Compared to other sectors, Web 2.0 financings are still a small part of the VC landscape. In 2006, VCs have invested about $13 billion. However, Web 2.0 has managed to get a tremendous amount of PR. So, the space looks a lot bigger than it really is.

Looking at this, we can see Web 2.0 is still in the early stages. But if Facebook does sell for a high price tag to Yahoo, expect the fundings in the Web 2.0 space to go wild.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

Web 2.0 Money Still Gushing originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 22 Sep 2006 11:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

People power is driving real growth on the Web, according to a recent report from Nielsen//NetRatings. That is, five out of the ten fastest growing Web brands rely primarily on user-generated content - which is an amalgam of things like videos, pictures, and blog posts.

There are the usual suspects. Yea, MySpace is on the list, which had an 183% year-over-year surge in growth (in terms of unique visitors). Actually, this is an amazing feat, given the fact the site already had a huge base. Hmmm....maybe Google's decision to plunk down $900 million was a good thing.

Another barn-burner was Wikipedia. It clocked a 181% annual explosion in unique visitors. Yahoo's Flickr was a standout, with 201% annual growth (the site now has 6.3 million unique visitors).

There are also some not-so-well known companies, like ImageShack (233% growth) and Heavy.com (213%).

Hey, but it's not just scrappy and cool Web 2.0 firms that are benefiting from this trend.

Continue reading Fastest-growing web brands? It's 'people' content

Fastest-growing web brands? It's 'people' content originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 11 Aug 2006 11:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

After listening to a talk by the brilliant and peppy Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr and now-Yahoo! employee, on Friday, I was intrigued to see an interview with Yahoo!'s VP for product strategy (the guy who makes the deals), Bradley Horowitz, about what the entrepreneurial tech firm is looking to buy next [WSJ subscription required].

He mentioned that his team looks at hundreds of pitches each week, while he ends up seeing only "dozens" of them and still so many of the products have the same pitch: "it's the next Flickr!" they all say. He's surprised at the number of "Computer Science 101 projects" that come across his desk -- i.e., companies that are both obvious and simplistic.

He's looking for people ("in it for the right reason" and "passionate about their product") more than he is product, but he's unclear as to what sort of product he might invest in. When you think about it, Yahoo! already had photo sharing before it bought Flickr. The next big thing for Yahoo!? Just might be more of the same, but with really cool folks attached to it. After all, haven't all the really great ideas already been invented?

Sarah Gilbert has a Wharton MBA and worked in investment banking for several years, then at a series of increasingly edgy startups before finding her calling, producing blogs for AOL. She doesn't own stock in Yahoo!.

Photo courtesy Horowitz' colleague Stewart Butterfield.

Yahoo! interview: what's the next Flickr? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 01 Aug 2006 13:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I'm attending the 2006 Blogher Conference in San Jose, California, and many of the net femarati are here. I just finished listening to an enlightening talk by the co-founder of Blogger (now owned by Google), Meg Hourihan, and the co-founder of flickr (now owned by Yahoo!), Caterina Fake. Moderator Marnie Webb pointed out that both of the products for which the two speakers are famous, were accidental by-products of their respective companies' original mission.

Fake was working with her co-founders on a role-playing game, while Hourihan was working on project management software. Declaring the concept of a stealth period "dead," the flickr co-founder mentioned that user feedback was central in determining how the photo sharing software would be shaped; and Hourihan echoed that sentiment with regards to the very useful blogging software her company, Pyra, developed just for fun. "If we had started out to create a photo sharing site, it never would have happened," said Fake. "We would have done market research, and discovered that all the money was in on-demand printing, and that took too much capital investment, and we'd never make money. We would have decided it wasn't worth it."

It's quite an interesting detail of product history and it's amazing to think how many great, world-changing products were accidental. What's more, it's worth considering from a management strategy point of view: how does a company encourage its employees to invest time in offshoots of the central strategy, and then fail to analyze those happy accidents to death? Are big companies forever destined to buy these providential mistakes simply because they never would have made sense, had they been "product developed"? Even Google, king of the entrepreneurial, "throw it up against the wall and see what sticks" spirit, had to buy Blogger. Which companies are best positioned to find and care for accidental successes?

Flickr, Blogger: some of the net's favorite products were accidental originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I recently wrote a BloggingStocks post about Yahoo's recent deal with Zillow, an online real estate company. My take was that the deal was a sign that Yahoo is getting serious about mining its huge amount of data. The data, in fact, is getting much more interesting with such new social networking properties as Flickr, Del.icio.us and so on.

Well, this week, Yahoo hired Dr. Raghu Ramakrishnan, who will become a vice president and Yahoo research fellow. He is certainly a brain, having worked as a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin and co-founded the Data Mining Institute. There is also a scholarly paper trail, with over 150 technical papers, as well as a definitive book on data mining, Database Management Systems.

Although, he does venture into the real world. In the late 1990s, for example, he co-founded a collaborative software company, called QUIQ.

You can get more detail on him at his web site.

Basically, his mandate will be to push "social search." Think of this as leveraging the "wisdom of crowds."

That is, as user-generated-content grows - with things like videos, blogging and even Yahoo Answers - search is ready for major change. True, Google's PageRank is solid, but it will probably not be the method for the long haul.

So, while Microsoft and Yahoo greatly lag Google in the search game, there is still hope. And, it probably lies in academics who are pioneering data mining.

Yahoo! mines for data originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Tue, 25 Jul 2006 18:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Today, Shutterfly filed to go public. Founded in 1999, the company is now a leader in Web-based publishing of digital photos for consumers (allowing such things as editing, sharing, and printing).

Shutterfly's revenue model is to sell high-quality prints. In fact, to ensure quality control, the company has its own manufacturing facility in Hayward, California.

Another key advantage of the Shutterfly model is that content costs are practically nothing (the company's users create the content by uploading pictures).  Also, because people want to share photos with others, Shutterfly has a viral distribution model.  In May, the site attracted 4.1 million unique visitors.

Up until now, online photo companies have been selling out to major companies, like Yahoo! (bought Flickr) and Google (bought Picasa). In other words, Shutterfly faces intense competition.

Continue reading Shutterfly Wants to Print Money on Nasdaq

Shutterfly Wants to Print Money on Nasdaq originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 29 Jun 2006 11:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I think it is generally recognized that the Web 2.0 world loves flickr, with its viral, community-focused fun and its AJAXerrific cool. But a recent report from Hitwise shows that flickr is a distant sixth in terms of market share, at just less than 6%, beaten handily by 44% dominator PhotoBucket (the company's competitive strategy: be a storage backend for users who wish to post photos to MySpace), and even by the far less sexy service of flickr's parent, Yahoo! Photos, at 18% (in second place). Webshots Community, Kodakgallery.com (formerly Ofoto.com), and ImageShack all rank ahead of flickr in terms of market share.

There's a story here, that flickr may seem cool but it's not even a big deal in the traffic big dogs. I don't know if I buy it. LeAnn Prescott, who blogs the market share charts, notes the MySpace strategy of PhotoBucket and mentions that three photo sharing sites in the top 10 are getting the vast majority of their traffic from the teen-centric social network, including Imageshack and Slide.

It's all about the growth of the platform, and the longevity of the business strategy. As a hard-core photo enthusiast who lives and breathes Web 2.0, I've used most of the non-MySpace services. I did Webshots Community, then I switched to Ofoto, and when Kodak bought it I was using Yahoo! Pictures and my own web site. And then I discovered flickr. Now I have 1,859 photos uploaded there. I think that I -- an early adopter who has already convinced any number of friends, family, and colleagues to switch to flickr -- am a fair indicator that the prospects for flickr are good. I have to wonder if PhotoBucket and others who rely so much on one source of traffic.

There it is: the real question. Is that one source a long-term play? Will MySpace still be rocking and rolling in three, five, 10 years? I doubt it. I'd put my money on the technology and monetization potential of flickr anyday.

Flickr not even as popular as Yahoo! Photos? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Yahoo! and Netscape, oh my! Both are diving head first into the concept of "social search," integrating the mysterious ranking systems of the search engine with the cool democratic nature of the social bookmarking site. As Time Warner was preparing to launch its beta version of the new Netscape, Yahoo! was talking about integrating del.icio.us and flickr, two very very grassroots-y and user-driven properties, with the unknowable algorithms behind its search engine.

Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! says his social search will "tap the untapped authority of users" while Jonathan Miller of Netscape says "We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better."

These ideas are good and pretty but I have to wonder: how is this any different from how Google has given more weight to blogs in its search engines? How is this different from giving weight to incoming links (which are the most democratic of all democracies)? Yahoo! thinks I am the untapped authority, but really, I'm quite respectably tapped with some 8000 visitors a day to my personal blog: all through the power of my content. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg, other bloggers who fit the category are cashing checks from Google every month.

It's all lovely, and fun, and a good idea. But social search is just a new way of creating a network effect, and the end result will be no different whether you're getting popular through votes or links from your ever-expanding group of friends.

Everybody altogether now: social search! originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Thu, 15 Jun 2006 07:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I was working from Portland, Ore.'s City Hall this morning, as I was representing my neighborhood on a right-of-way matter. I wanted to show my neighborhood buddy a photo of the landmark we were fighting for on flickr. But zoinks! I was stopped by the government's free wifi filters. Flickr, the firewall said, was a site for hackers. I tried to argue (there's a button to do so on the security company's site) and it turned out that they'd confirmed, yes, flickr is for hackers.

The only mention I could find of "hackers" and "flickr" together was the friendly and entirely non-dangerous "Flickr Hacks" group on flickr. It's a way for users to get together and share their flickr workarounds.

But being banned by government can't be good for flickr's parent, Yahoo!. Flickr lives and dies on its viral nature, and if government officials near and far can't take place in the market, well, that's got to be tough for the longterm strategy. Yahoo! was down three cents to $29.62 today on average volume.

Yahoo! after the bell 06-14-06: is flickr for hackrs? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Wed, 14 Jun 2006 16:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.