EightBlack.

The notion that Microsoft and Yahoo! should combine to tackle Google is nothing new. Industry pundits have been speculating around this very subject for the last 2 years.

Except for one thing.

Now the deal is in play. For real.

Redmond have really pulled out all the stops now and offered $31 bucks a share - thats $41 billion. Quite a sum even for Bill and Steve to swallow. Easily their biggest deal yet.
I actually hope the regulators let the deal through. You can bet your sweet Aunt Fannie that Dr. Schmidt et al will be protesting like a Greenpeace activist or Lindsay Lohan at an AA meeting.

Jerry Yang will have a fight on his hands. Yahoo! face some serious soul searching. The market isn’t happy with their performance (despite a revenue lift this last quarter), Panama hasn’t done what it was supposed to (and that was stem the AdWords tide), morale is low, the company faces a round of layoffs and wherever they look, another search company called Google beats them to punch. Deals have been scarce. And Yang hasn’t revitalised the once dominant web goliath since he took over from Terry Semel just over 6 months ago.

More importantly, Yang will have a hard time convincing long suffering Yahoo! shareholders to hold onto his stock, given that Microsoft is offering a 60% plus premium to the closing price of Yahoo! (currently trading at just over $19). Don’t expect Steve to play nice with the offer either - this is a hostile takeover bid. Nothing less.

But put Yahoo!’s assets together with Microsoft and now you’re talking. Combine this with the intellectual horsepower from FAST, the search company recently acquired by Microsoft, and Google suddenly has something to be concerned about.

Good. Innovation is likely to prevail. And Google needs to be put under the pump.

Just let us pray for commonsense on behalf of the ant-trust folks…

Singapore is a wonderful place. I should know. I lived there for 5 years. An innovation hothouse though it is not.

Apparently, a very eccentric arm of the all encompassing government - the Agency for Science, Technology & Research has offered a US$100K prize for the individual or team who can deliver the “mother of all algorithms” to the Lion City within 8 months.

The task is pretty simple really. From the agency website…

Contestants are required to create a search engine that can identify search terms found not only in text within websites, but in music and video files as well.

How hard could it be? You could probably even post the project on Elance or Rent-A-Coder.

What a croc.

Last week the Singapore Government just sent US$5 billion to Merrill Lynch to give them a bit of a hand with their balance sheet. That’s a gamble not even the most hard core punter in a casino would take now, given the blood on the floors of every trading room on the planet over the last 24 hours.

But it’s the sort of figure that would be needed in todays term to get anywhere near Mountain View.

If any government wants to get serious about the search space, $100 grand wont buy the meals and coke (ie the drink) that the programmers would need.

And anyway, after all of 13 people have submitted something, what the hell will the government do with the code? Look at it. Maybe play with it for a bit.

Lets be serious for a moment. The government (any government) has no business being in the search space. They cant possibly expect to compete. Or win.

If Singapore allowed free speech and had a free press, this would make great material for tomorrows comic strip.

In the meantime, I’m off to hire a group of coders from a small middle eastern country and a little town in India somewhere…I’ll let you know how I go.

I always get a chuckle when I look at Google’s annual compilation of “most searched topics” or most popular themes for the year. While the “zeitgeist” is far from representative of the global population, it just shows that there are way too many people with way too much time on their hands.

For example, I’m not sure why people are searching for the term “Chinese New Year” when it’s a safe assumption that it is exactly what it refers to. Anna Nicole Smith - (and I know we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead), but seriously, she was yet another small slice of what’s wrong with America.

It baffles me why people are searching for the “IRS”, the US equivalent of our ATO (Australian Tax Office) when in fact, all we try to do for most of our working lives, is avoid them altogether. It’s a bit like searching for “prostate exam”. You know it’s painful, why confirm it in writing?

I could go on. But I’m starting to lose the will to continue typing…

From the Google Zeitgeist home page:

Zeitgeist Explained

zeit·geist | Pronunciation: ‘tsIt-”gIst, ‘zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

The 2007 results must have put a smile on Steve Jobs face. The most popular search term, both in the US and globally was the ubiquitous “iPhone”.

Here’s the fastest rising list - both US and global.

The reference to social networking and video sites should be no surprise. But it should also prove to you that both mediums are no longer “fads”. Ignore at your peril.

As a parent, I can understand the “transformers” listing - and I reckon my 7 year old son was responsible for half the queries to come out of Australia alone!

You can check out the Zeitgeist in all it’s glory here. I’m actually writing to Google now as we speak, as I am convinced they’ve made a monumental error.

There was no reference to the Collingwood Football Club. Maybe they ran out of server space…

* All images courtesy Google 

I’ll let the video do the talking. I wish all guru’s were this passionate about their chosen field. And with Avinash, you know it’s genuine. No wonder Google are walking over broken glass trying to get him to come on board full time.

He’s the real deal. And one of a handful left.

Update: Here’s a hard copy of his presentation . I taped the session as well (54 minutes long), and worth every minute. It’ll be up on Google Video shortly. Make that Blip.tv

If you thought social networking was just a passing fad, you might want to think again. I haven’t got my head completely around Google’s recent announcement regarding Open Social quite yet, but here’s a good place to start if you want to sink your teeth into it.

According to Google;

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. Using standard JavaScript and HTML, they enable developers to create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Titled “Google Campfire One”, it’s hosted by Vic Gundotra, the new head of Google’s Developer Programs. Gundotra used to be a Microsoft Evangelist, but jumped ship around 18 months ago.

It’s just under an hour long, so best grab a glass of wine and wait until the kids are in bed…

Phew. That’s a relief. I bet Eric Schmidt and Larry and Sergey can breathe easy now.

After all, once they typed into Google Maps, just where Australia was, they probably called a special board meeting and said “Well fellas, that crazy old coot Graeme Samuel from downunder has given us the all clear to go ahead and spend US$3.1 billion on the DoubleClick deal. So we had better get on with it”. Or something like that.

Do you really think the deal would have been stopped by a tin pot regulator such as the ACCC? The very same regulator that in a world first, has decided in it’s wisdom, to take not Google Aus or Google Ireland to court, but Google Inc, USA. Because that’s just so much more logical.

I refuse even to link to the ACCC press release - but have a read of it at the ACCC website, in case you need something to brighten your day.

And just how were they planning on intervening anyway? Whatever course of action they might have been considering would have been about as useful as the 3 beer trucks and 44 blokes we sent to fight in Iraq. But thats for another day.

Here’s a quick access link to an MP3 of a call between Perry Marshall - the undisputed global authority on Google AdWords and Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google, plus the author of the best selling book “Web Analytics, An Hour A Day”.

In my humble opinion, 2 smarter guys you could not find. I am lucky to count both as friends and have had the pleasure of working alongside each one. Avinash’s book is a must read and Perry’s Renaissance Club is worth it’s weight in gold. Enjoy.

It was a deal Microsoft virtually had to win. (And I think they got off cheap).

Does it make sense? Not sure yet. Too early to tell. Apparently, negotiations were going on as late as Thursday/Friday last week when both Steve Ballmer and Mark Zuckerberg were in San Francisco attending the Web 2.0 Summit.

There is no doubt Ballmer would have gone “ballistic” if this deal had fallen into Google’s hands. It was probably the reason why he allegedly handled the final negotiations himself. They always had the upper hand in one sense, because of the existing ad relationship that was in place. That was always going to be a hurdle for Google to jump over.

And last week at Web 2.0, Mark Zuckerberg struck me as the sort of young man that wasn’t easily as influenced with the standard job spiel enticement from the Google HR folks (ie “Mark, dude, come to Google, free food, great facilities and technology and you get to work on the coolest shit in the world”). Zuckerberg’s response would most probably have been “but I already am…”

The cash injection of US$240 million for a 1.6% stake values the social networking at US$15 billion.

Apparently, the funds will be used for infrastructure, hire more super geeks, make acquisitions (of more super geeks) and help with international expansion, which is where the growth lies for the barely 3 year old company.

From today’s Facebook-Microsoft conference call with reporters: Microsoft needs the international ad agreement because Facebook says nearly 60 percent of its 50 million active users are based outside of the US. Facebook also claims to be gaining 200,000 new users per day, worldwide.

The deeper issue here is not that Microsoft won and Google didn’t - although its psychologically important. The bigger issue is that Facebook may have cracked the “AdCode” and found a very viable alternative to the absolute market dominance of Adwords and Adsense.

If, as is reported at VentureBeat -

Yesterday, reports also surfaced a new Facebook ad product, apparently trademarked “SocialAds,” will be previewed November 6 to some of Facebook’s closest advertisers. Conde Nast, Nike, Apple, Sony, General Motors, Coke, CBS, Chase and Verizon have paid $300,000 each to be “Landmark Partners,” meaning they are the first advertisers to try SocialAds, according to these reports, none confirmed by Facebook. When asked for comment, a Facebook spokeswoman responded: “Facebook does not comment on speculation or rumor.”

The idea of the deal is to focus on “demand fulfillment” by taking advantage of Facebook users’ high engagement with each other, Facebook VP of product marketing and operations Chamath Palihapitiya was quoted telling FastCompany.

Facebook has a unique set of data about users that may be able to provide more relevant targeting, more often, possibly putting Facebook in competition with Google’s Adwords and AdSense programs.

You can be sure that the “courting” has only just begun. Microsoft’s deal simply gets them a seat at the table. Sort of like a rich uncle coming to dinner.

Google will scramble to push MySpace as quickly as they can now and the sooner MySpace opens up its API so the world’s development community can get to work, the better. Momentum has shifted to Facebook of late, but I for one, wouldn’t write off Murdoch and DeWolfe over at MySpace just yet.

According to this chart (courtesy Commscore and WSJ), MySpace still have more than double the unique visitors, but the percentage change with Facebook’s numbers is what should be worrying Murdoch.

One things for sure, the social networking “fad” as many people were referring to is no longer one of fiction. It’s here to stay.

And Microsoft, to their credit, are now a serious player.

Round One to Microsoft.

I wrote a little while ago about my disappointment with Marissa Mayer’s session on the pending launch of Google Health.

Criticising Google makes me wince a little. And later today, I’m about to drive down to the Googleplex for a meeting…

It’s not that I think they’re infallible. They’re not. But I do have a huge respect for what they have achieved and their single minded focus on where they’re heading. The “don’t be evil” thing is going to bite them in the arse one day, but that is for another time to discuss…

I for one minute don’t doubt that Google couldn’t (or won’t) revolutionise the way the US medical system accesses information. If there’s one company that could apply their search and indexing intelligence to a train wreck of an industry - it’s Google. And while I’m not an American - I am married to one and we spent 3 years living here. Even by the time I left, I still couldn’t figure out how the goofy system works.

So, back to Marissa’s session.

Presenting to the Web 2.0 Summit constituency must be no walk in the park. There are some seriously smart bastards in the audience, who drink way too much Red Bull and who would not pass a radiation test due to the sheer amount of wi-fi saturated into their system. Or something like that.

But Marissa’s no slouch. She’s a pro at the “seminar session” and talking to 1200 odd technology geeks - well, she eats this stuff for breakfast.

Google made their intent known with “health” 2 weeks after Microsoft announced it was making a play in the space. It was no secret. The blogosphere is full of Google Health posts and screen shots have already leaked (see below).

From her session today…

“If you look at health care, there’s already a huge user need, people are already using Google more than any other tool on the Web to find health information,” Mayer said. “And the health care industry generates a huge amount of information every year. It’s a natural core competency for us, to understand how to organize all that data.”

Google isn’t a doctor but people come to us with a lot of health needs…

According to Information Week,

“Google has developed a prototype online platform for its health offering that incorporates personal medical records, health care-related search features, diet and exercise regimens, a localized “find a doctor” application, and other elements, Mayer confirmed. The company has shown the prototype to unspecified partners and is having both Google employees and “trusted testers” beta-test the system.

While the focus will be on improving health care and making records more accessible and portable for patients, Google will also improve life for physicians, Mayer noted.

“The goal for a lot of doctors is how many patients can they see in a day,” Mayer said. “That means their minutes per patient has got to go down, and the less time they have to spend finding and going over patient records the better. Ultimately we will design a product that’s useful for users, and also helps doctors do their job more quickly and more efficiently.”

Given that in the US alone, in excess of 2 billion x-rays are taken each year, the digitising of this data in itself must scare even the most resilient IT Manager at Google. We’re talking terrabytes and petabytes of storage required.

The thing I noticed after the session was people were wanting more from the presentation. In fact, they sort of expected it. There was nothing within her brief 20 minute stint that revealed anything new. And if ever there was an audience who you shouldn’t “bait”, this is it.

It was almost like the “Top 10″ list that she presented as a sort of tongue in cheek scenario, was a fill in because she had nothing else that she either didn’t want to (or couldn’t) say.

Most people expected more from this session. I know I did.

I wanted to see Google lift the lid off the application and interface they’ve built. I wanted them to actually show us. Even just a little bit.
In many respects, the Web 2.0 audience is pretty safe. They’re well connected and are probably, collectively, a decent PR machine.

One things for sure though. Ballmer and his team won’t be caught out with this “play”. There’s way too much at stake and for once, Microsoft made the first move with their entry into the game.

Google Health is slated to launch early 2008. Interesting times ahead for sure…

Ok, I’m a bit behind with posting. Man, there’s a lot going on. Here’s a quick snapshot and I’ll elaborate in more detail later.

Straight after Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Marissa Mayer from Google gave us an overview on Google Health. This brief session was disappointing - and I’m a big fan of Google as readers will know. I’m also totally convinced that Marissa is a great presenter (and apparently not a harder worker you will find within Google). However, this wasn’t her best day.

Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia was up next. He was one cool customer and a serious heavy weight within Nokia (Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multi-Media). There’s something about the finnish accent that enables you to listen to them all day.

In many respects, Nokia had to be given ample opportunity to pitch their product and their company, given that they were the Platinum sponsor of the Web 2.0 event. Vanjoki talked about the mobile phone needing to be “context aware”. Can you imagine that Nokia have shipped over 1 billion phones already. In typical Nordic understatement, Vanjoki regarded this massive number as only just the beginning…

Next Evan Williams, the founder and CEO of Twitter. I don’t quite get this mini social networking phenomenan yet, but I reckon it’s here to stay.
Questions he posed to the audience, “What can we add to make something better?” and “What can we take away to create something new?”
Twitter in many ways, is a blogging app.

Evan is ex Google, worked on Blogger. Very smart. Very unassuming. Key message: “What can you create by taking something away?”

Mike Moritz, Sequoia Capital (and Mike was one of the early investors in Google, along with John Doerr) and a Google Board Member for many years. Key quote, when talking about the search behemoth.

“I wish that every company that we had been involved with had made the mistakes that Google had…”

When asked “What makes them great?”.

He responded with…”The leaders of the company worry all the time – and this is one of the great things about the company. This is not a complacent group of people. They never rest”.

Quotes I’ll remember and use for a while…

“We’re going online because that’s where our customers are…” Philippe Dauman, CEO, Viacom

“The Platform race is over. The internet has already won”. Jeff Huber, VP Engineering, Google.

More to come as soon as I dissect everything. One thing I have noticed since the start of the year, the corporate giants are starting to wake up to the internet and Web 2.0. Nokia, HP, Viacom, NBC, and a whole host of other Fortune 500 companies are all here. And apparently, all now listening.