Category Archives: marketing

marketing in general including internet, web, tv etc

Microsoft offers 44.6 billion dollars for Yahoo

Posted on by
Reply

Microsoft is offering this staggering money for buying out Yahoo – 44.6 billion dollars in money and share. They hope for a bigger share of advertising market, and i hope that this deal will fail, we need more enterprises in the internet area and not 1 or 2 which control the market completely. Right now, there are 3 major players out there in the internet: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – and i see absolutely no reason for .

Last year there were rumors, that Google were considering into buying Yahoo – that is not a good thing either. I would welcome any company into competition with those 3 but not one of them buying out another one.

I know, that Microsoft’s offer is also about 62% premium on share price, but i hope for reason and greed (this one should work better then the first one in the major corporations) to resist this offer. I feel that if Microsoft will get their hands on Yahoo there will be nothing good for all of us: besides less competition i believe that Yahoo and all what it stands for will disappear in a couple of years.

New modules for Drupal

Posted on by
Reply

At the moment, in the spare time between projects (a very virtual thing – spare time, i have to say), i am writing 2 new modules for Drupal – one of them is a submodule for using Flash in a advertisement module and the other one is a directory module for Drupal. Both of this modules will be based on the 5th branch of Drupal.

First module was born out of the need for the current project i am doing, when i found out, that Advertisement module has had no support for flash-based ads. While smaller sites are basically using animated gifs (images), the bigger companies are using flash for advertisement. I was told by a couple of different people, that the “big firms” they are or were working for created the biggest the part of the online advertisement in flash. When i was responsible for one of the Fortune 100 sites in Portugal i saw a big percentage of their inner advertisement done in Flash as well. On a personal note, i would add that i do not like flash ads, and prefer the “normal” images – they are lighter and do not appear like a buddy-spam. After finishing this submodule or better “ad type”, i am thinking about submitting the code to the author of the Advertisement module, for his decision of inclusion into the “official package”.

The second module is being born for the other project, since it looks like there is no real directory module for Drupal, which seems to be quite a negative surprise. I am still in the phase of projecting it, but leaving the doubts behind, this module has to be implemented this year, because the website based on drupal, i am going to implement, is going to need it badly.

While the Flash Type submodule is virtually ready and being tested, the Directory module is likely to be finished in the second part of the 2008, mainly because of my newest personal project, which should go live in August this year.

The future of the CeBIT

Posted on by
1

CeBIT is still the greatest computer trade show in the world. I have been there for a couple of years, and i loved each and every minute of it, with a lot of people everywhere, a lot of confusion, but at the same time – a spirit of sharing the technological achievements and sharing the experience. It is a place, where you can learn the people from the informatics industry from all around the world, where you can see whats new in the world of technology will be available on the market tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

A lot of things were written about the future of the CeBIT, since in the past couple of years the number of the publishers and visitors has been decreased significantly. CeBIT has faced exactly the same problem as a lot of computer shows have faced in the past years – growing cost of the representation for the firms trying to appear there, and a growing price of the tickets, which makes quite expensive – and hence impossible for a lot of companies to send their teams to the show. One very big trade show which has faced exactly the same problem is E3 game show, a lot of big companies have announced last year, that this year they are going to ignore or make a very small presence at the E3 trade show, in favor of publishing their press releases on the net. After that announcements, the organization has decided of changing the format of the show from “open for everyone” to “invitation-only”. They are just optimizing the costs, for concentrating on the essential – the media, who will be invited for publishing the information for the rest of us, grunts. =)

I think that in the next couple of years, the CeBIT will face the same problem and will change their format, concentrating more on the specialists and not on everyone. The words like “Members of the media, retail, development and financial communities” will become the key for describing the attendees.

I believe that in the era of internet and computer technologies all of these shows have their fate decided; but i guess, i am going to miss the spirit of 90s and 200x’s at the CeBIT, which was a quite a fantastic feeling, of being able to talk directly to a lot of firms presenting their products and developers, who knew exactly what software was supposed to do, even if in a lot of cases some firms where sending just marketing personal.

update on 20th of march 2007:
In this PC World article, it was written, that CeBIT 2007 in the first 3 days has got more visitors then at the 2006 edition, but still i attribute this rise to the fact that a lot of stuff was written about CeBIT, and that even a negative marketing still can bring the positive results. Having above 200.000 visitors may be a result for short period of time, cause as long as firms like Apple do not plan to announce products, like iPhone, at CeBIT – there is not much space for growing. Not many firms would wait until CeBIT or any other trade show to present a new product, since the concurrence is always pushing to advance, it is a good option though to play with a technology that was announced before, like if Apple Inc would participate at CeBIT, a lot of people would be more then excited to take a look at the iPhone or a new iPod.
The words, that CeBIT is going to grow are spoken at the same time when it was announced that CeBIT 2008 will run only for seven days (instead of usual 8), and that it is just one of the step of the CeBIT reorganization. For me, it is clear signal, that CeBIT is not having a lot of successes, and that in the next couple of years they need to review the trade show format in order to survive the technological progress.

Google Zeitgeist – no results for Portugal and Austria

Posted on by
1

I am really disappointed with Google Zeitgeist, since they continue to ignore several major european countries by not including results in the reports. Portugal, Austria, Belgium are all major european countries and they are not at the list but at the same time Greece is present (i don’t think greek economy is up to compete with austrian or belgian), so i am thinking that may be the reason for this ignorance is the population. But after checking that Czech Republic has almost the same population as Portugal or Belgium, i really see no reason at all of ignoring those countries. I do not see any sequence in including one countries and excluding other ones. Also notable is the absence of Romania, with more 22 Millions of population, surely they deserve their place at Zeitgeist.
Two local search engines that i have used for years are Google Austria and Google Portugal, and since Google shows in Zeitgeist the results of other local search engines, i think it would be easy to include Portugal and Austria as well.

From programmers point of view, there is no reason at all of not doing it. From internet marketing point of view, its a terrible situation, for webmasters being excluded for quite some time, with apparently no reason at all. For example, for me the really interesting public is the portuguese at the moment, so without data from Google Zeitgeist about most popular searches i can feel a kind of ignored.

Google sitemap links

Posted on by
Reply

Finally, after much deliberation Google has finally allowed the webmasters to see which links it really indexes. As it was written today in “Discover your links” and “Google provides backlink tool for site owners” posts, Google has finally added this so much requested functionality to their Sitemaps tool. I know a couple of guys who went to register in Yahoo SiteExplorer just because Google’s link: has not worked properly for ages, and Google Sitemaps has not provided anything close to this functionality, but finally we seem to have it working. Still far from being perfect and even not reaching 80% in my opinion, but it is a major improvement.

There is an interesting fact, written twice with bold on the same page by Matt Cutts – “Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight”, and it makes a lot of sense for me, since for some of the sites i know there are quite a number of links but judging by the pagerank number – the most of them are still far from being counted. At the same time it is a kind of a protection for search engines against those who build thousands links by robot programs, because once the link carries no relation or significant connection, it should not be counted.

Now we have a possibility to trace all those who link to us, and it is a quite an important information. Of course one can always trace from which pages the visits are coming from, but there are a lot of pages, from which you wont get a click, but you might have a link, which could help you improving your pagerank at Google and final ranking in all major search engines, and in the end effect this is what all webmasters are looking for – to be at number one of the search results in all important keywords combinations.

I am looking forward of getting more information from the Google Sitemaps, especially since i can compare it with the one from Yahoo’s SiteExplorer and see which one sees which links.

Ten Predictions for 2007 from eMarketer

Posted on by
Reply

A very interesting article has appeared on eMarketer some time ago, making 10 predictions for this current 2007 and some of them i have found particularly interesting, spending some time analyzing and thinking on their subject, that i even came so far as putting my thoughts on them here :

1. Online Ad Spending Will Hit $20 Billion – i do not see any point of believing that the growth of the internet advertisement is going to slow down in the next couple of years, at least until 2010 or 2011, or if some global economical change is going to influence it. Referring that in the last 4 years the growth was about 30%, it is hard to believe that this year it is going to slow down to 19%.

2. Some Money and Lots of Hype for Online Video Advertising – this one is really very interesting, especially since Google has “splashed” 1.7 billions of dollars into YouTube. Also the number of digital video recording devices, internet connection speed etc are the factors making it more probable, but:
I. all the money going to this market are just making 4% of the total share.
II.i do not really see how to maintain the number of users on a site full of visual advertisement, with moving pictures, toys and so on – it is more appropriate for kids. I think that visual advertisement is something that have to be based on word of mouth, with a reference as a Youtube, so the people would share the link for funny advertisement and not be obliged to face on everyday basis. Visual advertisement is something almost “alien” for the business environment, you know, for men with long ties etc …
III.Google and others will have to invent a new way to put the video advertising into the search results. Google has had its share of success because of doing what people were needing – fast search with no web directories or other bull crap. None of the typical 90s yahoo links (counting to 100′s on their front page at that time), no fancy Clippy’s taking different forms completely annoying the user – just doing strictly what was needed – so now here is one million dollar question – how to insert video advertising into the search results without annoying 99 percent of the customers ???

3. Social Networks Are Set for a $1 Billion Windfall – this is according to the research is the most progressive area, doubling its spending from 448 millions. International expansion should help it a lot, but now there is a question, which until now i have not seen a reasonable answer on – how to interlink two or three persons speaking different languages and having none in common. We all could dream about everyone speaking english fluently, but the truth is – you gotta spend some time finding someone in Europe for example talking reasonably good english. No, it is not that hard, but i am referring the percentage of all population, and even when based only on digital age generation, i know way too many people knowing only “hello”, “yes”, “no” and “good-bye”.
Once i was working with someone who has had a great idea about how to do this “interconnection”, and it is one of the greatest sorrows that i have, that the project we have had dream about for years since middle of the 90s, have not been implemented until now.

4. Downloadable Games Will Get Hotter – yes, no doubt about it. Online games are getting hotter and hotter, with all those Eve, Everquest, World of Warcraft, Second Life and others there is a big niche to be played on, also such systems as Half-Life’s own Steam engine, making it possible to play only when online or downloading the patches with a direct internet connection…
Also more people are starting using credit cards online, and even some big stores are offering an alternative way to pay for games, and mobile phone games are getting better and better and more popular – there is still a lot of market to be conquered. Even in Portugal i know of one firm hiring a lot of developers to ensure their success on the mobile phone game market.

5. Thirty-Seven Million Strong: A ‘Minority’ Bigger than Canada – wait for Brazil and China to come in and then the internet will be more “international”

6. Mobile TV Arrives – it is a prediction for 2007 ? Germany’s World Cup was a very different event, in a very special very well developed country, for others it should become a reality beyond 2010 in my opinion.

7. US B2C E-Commerce Will Cruise Past $200 Billion – “132 billion of this will be online retail sales and $91 billion will be online travel.”, it is interesting to see, that online traveling is occupying 35% of the whole share alone, surely it is a very special market to watch out. =O)

8. The Retail Power of Word of Mouth – at the moment i am reading a book called “Word of mouth marketing”, written by Andy Sernovitz, i found this book on the wonderful blog of Presentation Zen, and i am completely agree with the statement of the eMarketer – the future is with “word of mouth”, as the traditional marketing is dead.

9. Broadband Services Will Matter as Much as Speed – this one is focused on VoIP and its growth for about 6.2% this year, i do agree with that, thinking about all the friends who has “upgraded” their international communications and even more about those friends who has not yet. =O)

10.DVRs Pump Up TV Viewing – i agree with this one so much! People are not going simply to drop watching TV, a lot of people need it to relax their brain after working day – otherwise why do we have so many “stupid” soap operas in the evening (and their number is growing year after year, not only in the evening). What is happening now – watching TV, will be changed for watching on computer, but only in the next 5-7 years (if not later), at least here in Portugal.

Overall i agree with the most of the predictions, but as the online marketing is growing and starting overtaking the real world marketing share i expect to see a lot of changes already this year.

Advertisement in Internet

Posted on by
Reply

Last night i read a very interesting article about internet advertisement growth in Germany in the past year – companies spent 45% more on traditional internet advertisement then in the 2005. 480 millions € were spent just in one European country, these numbers impressing me much, i have to say, because the traditional way of publicizing is spending money on Google Adwords services or their concurrence like Yahoo or Microsoft, but lately people are investing more and more in companies who are specializing on optimizing results of the search engines.

Between top 5 spenders i am quite surprised to see media only on the fourth place with 40 millions € spent, because as it seems, they are not understanding, that they are facing some very serious changes in the way the things are going to work in the very next couple of years – traditional model for their business is fading away, but as Guy Kawasaki has referred in one of his books – rare are example when some industry is capable of maintaining their success (or even existence) when something new appears, because they are not ready for changes, they just continue to enjoy and live in “good old times”.

I am expecting this trend to continue this year, as more and more people are realizing the importance and the power of our age – the age of the internet.