Microsoft and Yahoo have announced the merge of their search engines (Yahoo! and Bing) to take on the world’s leading search engine Google.
Microsoft will be powering the Yahoo search capability with their more sophisticated Bing engine, and Yahoo will become the sales force for both companies’ paid search advertisers. The partnership is a 10 year deal, where Yahoo will use Bing’s search technology on its sites, and Microsoft will give Yahoo a percentage of the revenues generated from the paid search results.
Currently Bing is only powering the Yahoo search results in the U.S and Canada, however plans are in the works for other countries.
In June this year, comScare Inc reported the current percentage share of each of the 3 main search engines as follows:
- 64% Google
- 18% Yahoo!
- 12% Bing
With the merge of Yahoo! and Bing, they still will only have less than a third of the search market, so there will be a lot of work and time involved before they stand a chance of toppling Google.
Google have announced they will be launching a new commercial platform, the Google Chrome Web Store, to target the casual online gaming and web application market.
According to Google, it is very difficult to find quality and entertaining web products amongst the thousands of applications and games available across the Internet. Its new Web Store aims to solve this consumer problem.
Unlike the Apple App Store, Android Market and other mobile application stores which take 30% of developer’s revenue, the Google platform will only charge a 5% processing fee from each transaction. The Web Store will charge a onetime $5 registration fee, and offer free trials and subscriptions to certain games.
The interface will allow users to leave reviews and comments on games, to allow others to judge for themselves before making the commitment to purchase. As with the App Store, some applications will be free.
The apps available (either free of paid) will come in several varieties to suit a range of users. Some will be accessible through websites for smartphone users with full HTML browsers. Others will be specifically tailored for the Google Chrome browser (the Web Store is a Google product, after all). Yet others will be modified web apps that can be downloaded onto a user’s computer or mobile device.
The Chrome Web Store is planning to launch later this year, but developers are able to upload apps now for preview by the Google team. With the company’s traditional emphasis on quality over quantity, we can hope that those which are successful will be truly the best of the web.
Rumour has it that Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, plans to tap into the growing mobile tablet market that is currently dominated by Apple’s iPad. According to a source said to be familiar with the company’s plans, RIM will launch their as yet unnamed tablet during November of this year.
With Apple’s tablet selling more than 3 million units within the first two months of its launch, RIM is under pressure to bring out a rival product before Apple releases the next generation iPad, and so claiming an even larger market share.
Rumour has it that RIM’s tablet will be named the ‘Blackpad’, have roughly the same dimensions as the iPad, and be priced from $499 USD.
As for differences, apparently the system will not be able to connect directly to mobile networks, while many iPads can. And the Blackpad will feature a front and back facing camera for easy to use video conferencing.
RIM hopes that this product will capitalise on the BlackBerry’s email capabilities and its enduring popularity with corporate users.
However, given the disparity of Apple and RIM’s target demographics, it’s doubtful whether November will see crazed fans waiting in a line all night for the Blackpad to go on sale.
Google announced last week they have re-named and created a new “umbrella name” for the previously known AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising stream, the Content Network, to the Display Network.
The Display Network will incorporate Google’s Adsense, Ad Exchange, You Tube, Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps and Blogger properties under the new ad platform name. It will also compromise millions of Web video, gaming and mobile display partners. The Display Network on Google differs from the Search Network in Google Adwords, are the options to have text, image, rich media and video ads on various sites, compared to the text ads present on the Google Search Results Pages.
The beauty with Display Ads, is that it allows the advertiser to be creative with the Ads they wish to present.
Google have said the Adwords interface will be changing over the next couple of weeks to reflect the new branding, however the way the Content Network Ads were previously worked runs the same way. It had also been revealed moving forward that they will be testing and adding new features on the Google Display Network to help “reach your advertising goals”.
It will be interesting to see how these new features affect the current Adwords platform and this blogger would love to hear your thoughts on how you think these changes will affect your ads.
It has been announced last week that Google has purchased Metaweb in an aim to further improve search, with efforts for rich snippets and search answer such as fact-finding search query answers.
An example provided is if you search [Barack Obama birthday] in the search box. The answer of his birth date is presented at the top of the search results.
Ideally Google would like to see the longer tail search query questions to be generating the relevant answer and information in the above manner.
Metaweb was originally founded in 2005 with the aim for websites to have “richer and more engaging” content and website interaction. Metaweb have an extremely large database with information on over 11 million topics/things such as celebrities, companies, movies, holiday destination providing site owners with third party content access, with theinformation being pulled from a wide variety of content sources.
What is so different to this database of information, is the way it is collaborates and ties together the information.
The idea and utilisation of Metaweb on your website could be extremely beneficial and make the search and collection of available data to present on your site easier and more interactive.
Social media and iPhone apps have arrived on the Australian and New Zealand slopes this winter, providing the skiing and boarding enthusiast options to track the ‘air time’ from a jump, or the newbie skier or boarder to track their way around the mountain if lost on a run.
Snow resorts such as Perisher, Falls Creek and Mount Bulla have launched mini sites, iPhone apps, e-news subscriptions and text messages for snow bunnies to track their ski miles, find a friend on the slope, access the snow reports and find a warm food or drink spot on the slope or in the village.
An online community, snowtweeters.com, collates all snow-related tweets for your chosen ski or ride destination.
For the diehard skier or boarder, there are two fun iPhone apps:
Ski-o-meter: tracks your downhill speed, distance covered, and provides a diagram of the slopes height profile and speed over time.
Hangtimer : records how much time you spend in the air when making a ski hump in terrain park and where in the world you did it.
For a little over a year, Google has been testing out a new service for users known as ‘Google Voice’. The preliminary success of the service has lead to it recently being released to the public.
With the complexity of modern day phone and mobile communications, many people have various numbers such as work, home and mobile. This can cause headaches when trying to contact someone, as you may need to call all three numbers and leave three different voicemails.
Google has claimed that Google Voice is the solution to this sort of problem. The service’s major benefit is all your different phone numbers can be combined under one umbrella “Google number”, so anyone trying to contact you does not need to bother with remembering and calling different numbers.
Other Features include:
Do not disturb function
SMS to email
Block or screen various callers
Free text reply to phone calls
Shared voicemail linking all phone numbers
Great mobile applications
Conference calling
Google Voice is currently only available in U.S. and Canada. However if the service proves successful there, we can expect to see it being expanded to other locations.
An article on The New York Times, ‘Known Faces are Displacing the Amateurs in Online Videos’, talked about it how it is becoming more prevalent for celebrities to participate in various online ‘Web Series’, mostly in the form of small video clips sponsoring various products and services.
Using a famous face who represents the qualities of a company’s promoted products/services has the benefit of keeping advertising fun and interesting for web users. The presence of a celebrity and has been shown to have a positive influence on targeting current and potential consumers.
For example, Kraft Foods brought on a famous American TV cook who embodied the personality traits and qualities of the customers the company was trying to reach. The campaign aimed to encourage housewives to upload video clips of them cooking their favourite recipes. The great responses lead to over 5,000 videos being uploaded and shared.
Ideas for online video promotions for your business:
Testimonial or case study
Product demonstrations
Promotional offers or sales
Company Profile- who you are, what you do, meet the team
Good online video content should create trust in your brand by putting faces to names in the minds of your website visitors. Dynamic web videos also give others a chance to promote themselves on your website, which will have a positive effect for all involved. They also advance your SEO objectives by creating back links and buzz about your website and company.
The most important things to keep in mind when creating an online video: keep it short, make it fun and interesting, mention who you are and what you do, and describe the benefits of your products/services.
A new social media company Syncapse has released a report on their research on the true value of a Facebook fan, by asking 4,000 social media fans of top brands such as Coca Cola, Red Bull, McDonald’s and PlayStation.
The objective of the report was to try and put a monetary figure on the value of a Facebook Fan. In summary, the main points found:
An average fan is worth about $136.38
On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.
Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.
With social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the number of fans and followers have become a big numbers game, and almost a competition between businesses. However with almost anything, quality over quantity will trump.
How can you measure the quality of fans or followers?
Updating and evaluating fans on Facebook by looking into their user information such as demographics and like can help you determine if they are in the same industry as you, or would be interested in your products or service.
Ask questions and feedback from fans and followers. You not only are actively engaging with your current/potential clients, this will help you determine how active and eager they are.
Google Analytics is also a great way to track the number of users coming through the referring sites of Facebook/Twitter. If you are an e-commere store, specific tracking on your shopping cart system can be set up so you can specifically track sales from social media sites.
Yahoo Inc is currently undergoing a revamp to its layout in an its attempt to establish itself as a social network hub. With Yahoo Inc partnering up with Facebook in December 09, personal updates from the social network, known as their ‘news feed’, will be available throughout the Yahoo’s website in the coming days. The new interface will only require a simple click of a link by Yahoo users to activate.
Other tools are also in the pipeline such as Twitter ‘tweets’, and features of popular Zynga games such as ‘Farmville’ and ‘Mafia Wars’, all intended to be incorporated on the Yahoo Inc site. Its aim is to retain its status as a popular social hub and encourage users to stay on the site longer.
Yahoo already has large share of the internet audience, with many of its millions of monthly visitors using the site to access information through search, read world news or check emails. With the rise of market share competitors like Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo wants to keep and grow its existing user base by providing integration through various social media networks. Net increases in site visitor time equals more opportunities for Yahoo to sell online ads to grow its revenue.
With the current concerns of various social media security issues, Yahoo has said they will simplify its privacy controls and encourage users to review the privacy settings.
