Amazon MP3 Sales at Youtube – Is there something deeper there ?

September 13, 2012 Leave a comment

Google Amazon MP3 @ Varun Mittal

I just saw that in spite of the Google negotiating all the contracts with music labels for its music solutions, it has probably decided to throw in the towel already. As seen in the screenshot above, Google’s Youtube is promoting Amazon MP3 sales through its videos. It is not a regular advertisement because it comes along with Google’s own artist search service.

Either it is a partial roll out or lead user testing or something else, much bigger than I can think off at the moment.

Implications of this deal if it really is a deal -
1) Apple now has to deal with combined marketing and outreach muscle of Amazon and Google. Apple can’t invoke anti trust rules since it is the bigger player and Google has highly limited success in MP3 sales area

2) It can be a pointer to what might happen between Amazon and Google in future , considering Google so wants to get access to content distribution powers of Amazon and Amazon wants Google’s support for so many other things

Interesting Read - Google, two labels spar on cloud music

Waiting with baited breath to see, is this is a one off deal or a real alliance between Bezos and Page !

Filed under Conspiracy theory, Marketing, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Why GOOGLE PLUS has finally arrived ?

February 26, 2012 2 Comments

A lot of marketing and social media experts keep on quoting numbers, statistics and all sorts of stuff about how successful Google Plus has been. The supporters say it is fastest growing social network.

Strengths quoted  -

1) API has not been released yet so there is immense potential left to be untapped

2) Google drive will and its SDK support to third party apps will give Google Plus more muscle. Hope to see the drive being released soon.

3) Google charges less commission from Game developers than facebook does leading so several gaming flag bearers like Zyga to launch games on Google Plus as well. In future we might be looking at Google plus only Games being developed, not to forget Google is an investor in Zynga.

Weakness quoted -

1) Lack of clarity on how much people are actually using Google Plus. No data on average user time spent on Google Plus is available. Considering most social networks have their revenues driven by ads, average time spent is very critical aspect

2) Facebook is believed to be too big to fail and with its impending IPO it will have access to huge amount of funds. These funds can help it rapidly acquire complementary companies and give the search giant a tough time

3) The Open Graph and time line have finally taken off. Publishers and vendors like Digg, Spotify, Yahoo News have witnessed massive upswings in their usage from their core target audience YOUTH.  Facebook has made lot of people stakeholders thereby having more than Zuck and team itself left to defend the FacebookVille.

4) Google which has no dearth of competitors, after ending its search deal with Twitter and driving it into arms of Yandex has one more fund rich company gunning at its turf.

Now coming back to the title of the post … it is inspired by what my 14 year old cousin sister told me when I saw that she added me to her circle in Google Plus. I just casually teased her saying Welcome to G+, now you finally made an account on G+

It was her reply to my question which got me thinking -

Bro, please don’t tell mom I am there in G+. She knows Facebook but it is tough to explain her G+. But you see I gotta be there on G+. It is this attitude which lead to demise of Myspace, Bebo and Orkut (almost) when the dominant player failed to understand the user sentiment and didn’t innovate fast enough and importantly were not COOL any longer. I was reading this article on MIT blog – Why dominant companies are vulnerable … and I could make a correlation , why Facebook is vulnerable and is being  seriously impacted by Google Plus.

Welcome Google Plus … if the youth has started moving who don’t understand the big tech wars and platform openness kind of nerd concepts, you have really arrived

 

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Google finally asking – Are you Lonely

February 23, 2012 Leave a comment

Interesting to see some different flavours of Google, long known an engineer’s bastion whose focus is only to solve the problems and deliver results

Google really doing great at being SOCIAL

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Contextual Advertising – Desperate for Innovation

February 4, 2012 1 Comment

Contextual advertising which is bread and butter of several big companies today but to my understanding is in desperate need to reinvent itself. Contextual advertising is loosing its relevance in current times.

Following is an example of weird ads being displayed for dating / porn sites when I am watching a Punjabi Song  which is hailing the glory of culture in a specific province in India.  I don’t understand how does context for these two things match up.  Perhaps the algorithms for rendering ads have not kept pace with the surge in possible scenarios.

From Blog References

Facebook, the recent darling of stock markets because of filing if its IPO is no behind and actually at some points leaves behind Google in proving my statement.

Two examples of wasting ad dollars of advertisers in the image -

1) A student of NUS MBA ( information which they have by my willing disclosure) being served advertisements of another business school. What does Facebook expect me to do – leave my course and join course of another school midway my course at current school.

2) A person living in Singapore being served ads for renting a car in Punjab ( a province in India) when I don’t have that place ever checked in or in place of my belonging. At no place in my profile that place is present, yet cars for rent in that province. The place is several thousand miles from my current place.

From Blog References

I hope contextual advertising evolves before it gets obsolete.  Several years ago a start up made by 2 PhD students revolutionized the way information of world is organized. Looks like time is coming for another revolution to take place. Amen.

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Google Acquires Motorola : The Sucker Punch

August 15, 2011 4 Comments

It has been just few minutes since the news has been broken that Google has decided to acquire Motorola Mobility for 12.5 Billion $.

Why this acquisation makes so much sense ?

1) Motorola Mobility has 24500 patents awarded and pending. Such a huge patent portfolio and mainly related to telecommunication and phones will help Google defend its turf and protect Android OEM‘s from patent litigations by the cabal of Apple , Microsoft , Sony and RIM. Read the press declaration when Motorola Mobility was found as an independent company which tells this patent count here

2) Motorola Mobility has some very very crucial patents which can help Google take aim at Microsoft X-Box. Microsoft has already sued Motorola ( you are reading right, keep reading) for overcharging royalties for Motorola’s system critical patents being used by it in X-BOX.  Everyone saw how HTC was paying Microsoft $15 for every Android handset hold but Motorola was not. Such is the strength of these X box related patents. Read more about them here  and here

3) Google can now address the issue of fragmentation in the Android market by providing the much needed base standard phones for the app developers.

4) Motorola has a huge sales network and has experience in producing low cost phones. Google can leverage this and enter the low cost phone market to enter the market  territory still uncharted. This factor is being discounted by many but Google knows the real market lies in the sub 100$ phones which are used in Asia , Latin America and Africa. Google has got a brand new solid vehicle to enter these markets.

5)  Google can now control the end to end user experience for Android and prove the capabilities of Android to be the genuine iOS competitor. The kind of commitment from Google would ensure other OEM that Google is really serious about Android and would not leave them hanging in between. As Google guys have promised, Android will continue to be open and all partner OEM will be able a new realm of user experience.

6) In line with Google announcements in Google I/O about having Android on all household devices, Motorola experience will be invaluable input. Motorola has strong history of communication devices and can help Google kick start the process without waiting for partners to match Google’s agility and pace.

7) Motorola having deep interests in set-top boxes and modems is a perfect fit for the sagging Google TV venture which has left Logitech bleeding badly. Google realizes in order to make Google TV success it has to come to the field itself.  Providing content and software is not enough to take on the competitors in the TV space

Why other OEM don’t need to worry about this acquisition ?

1. Samsung, HTC and Acer have a lot of investment done in the Android ecosystem. All of them might chose to work with Windows 7 platform as well but there doesn’t seem to

2. Now Google is more equipped to safegaurd their Android Vendors against patent lawsuits and ensure all the OEM that their interests will be protected.

3. Google doesn’t gain anything by alienating their Android partners else they all might move to be Windows only OEM like Nokia. The more partners they have more markets Google has for its core businesses. Google has more interest in keeping the vendors on board Android lest the party be spoiled.

Update at 11:04 PM SGT – Google got top 5 Android OEM into confidence before announcing the deal. Read their reactions here

Next in Series: What will happen next in the Phone wars !!!

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An Open Letter to Marc Zuckerberg @ Facebook

July 17, 2011 1 Comment

Hello Marc,

Good Morning,

I want to ask you a couple of questions about your facebook strategies as I couldn’t understand why are you so determined to downplay its best features and break the things which are working fine in an ordinate zeal to fix them.

Q1. Why the ‘friend list’ and selective post visibility by removing friend list is never talked about in privacy settings. ?

I have about 15 overlapping friend lists giving me nice privacy controls deciding what to show to whom and it works much better than groups.  The suggested approach of GROUPS just doesn’t work . Simple example – I am part of 4 groups and have 15 friend lists.
Facebook Groups don’t solve even 1% of my privacy concerns but the facebook freind list solves 95% of them

Facebook Groups are  akin to communities which Orkut and such sites had.  For all practical purposes , it is the friend lists which are of best use in granular control of one’s privacy.

I am assuming none ever told you about these power of Friend List  feature,  as to why else you won’t talk about them and promote the stupid groups. I am attaching some screen shot so that you can show your PR team to showcase the real feature of platform

These are the friend list under which a user can classify his friends . Exactly the same thing to which Google has woken up just recently.

From Blog References

Whenever you want to share something, you can decide which lists you want the update to see or which lists you don’t want it to see and you are fine with all other friends having a look at it. For example you don’t want to update a news X to your family or Y to your colleagues.

From Blog References

This is the real killed part Marc, which I don’t know facebook wants to keep hidden and not publicize. You can actually chose which friend lists or people should not see the update. The setting can be made default too. Now don’t ask why you will want to permanently block a person from seeing your updates but still not unfriending him/her.

From Blog References

Q2. Zuck ,The new facebook chat is totally screwed. Who done this ???

Issue 1 : I am forced to see only those friends online which facebook wants me to. Why can’t I see all my friends online. Why facebook has to force the visibility on its users

Issue 2: Unlike earlier chat, I can’t click a person’s pic or name and see their profile while chatting. I have to manually open another tab and type the person name there to open his/her profile. A lot of time during the chat user needs contextual information about the person and removing of that functionality is big pain point

Issue 3: INVISIBLE option. This one has been my long time wish. A lot of time user wishes to be invisible to all his chat list while being able to see who all are online.  User wants to talk to some specific friends of his. Why can’t I be invisible on facebook chat like I can be on any other chat like gtalk, skype, etc.   Please don’t suggest putting such friends in a specific friend list and making me visible to them, because those preference change according to time and mood.  Is bringing the invisible functionality soo tough … Being a computer research myself I beg to differ but user’s unfortunately drive the road map at facebook.

Best Regards

Most Disloyal Social Media Enthusiast

Varun Mittal

Filed under Brand Talk, Conspiracy theory, Opinion Uncensored, Reviews, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The Myths of Innovation

July 10, 2011 Leave a comment

Google Tech Talks
May 14, 2007

ABSTRACT

Much of what we know about innovation is wrong. That’s the bet this talk takes, as it romps through the history of innovation, dispelling the mythologies we’ve constructed about how we got here. This talk, loosely based on the upcoming O’Reilly book (May 2007), will help you to recognize the myths, understand why they’re popular (even if you don’t believe in them), and how to use the truth to help you innovate today.

Speaker: Scott Berkun Credits: Speaker:Scott Berkun

PS : I don’t own any rights to this video or text above. I am only sharing it.

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Groupon – The Titanic 2.0

July 7, 2011 Leave a comment

Groupon led the frenzy for coupons and deal making seats. At its height it even commanded a valuation of as much as 6 billion $ when Google offered to acquire it.  At a closer analysis we can see that so called business model is really fragile and can come down crumbling like pack of cards.

We will not discuss about the issues of Groupon founders selling out just before the scheduled the IPO. We will also not talk about the controversies regarding user data leak from Groupon India acquisation http://www.sosasta.com. Groupon got a much bigger mess on hand.

Why Groupon will be the probably the first casualty of second dot com crash ?

1. Google with massive control over search engines out in the market offering much better revenue share to the merchants.

2. Google paying merchants for paid but unused coupons unlike Groupon. Now if Groupon matches Google it goes deeper in red, if it doesn’t it loses merchants. The  BI Report explains this Google assault in depth.

3. Host of competitors like  Google, Facebook, Amazon ( via Livingsocial) with very very deep pockets and their other operations firmly in command to give them enough ammunition to cause serious damage to Groupon

4. Very very low entry barriers and now and now in a country like India there are already over a 100 competitors already each vying for a part of the pie.

5 . Stories going around on internet about how small business have been hurt badly after joining Groupon deals and how they were harassed for as much as 50% revenue cut by Groupon sales guys.  Example Story

6. Groupon is still in RED. It had some $117m on revenues of $645m in the first quarter.  Hardly a pleasant picture … I am not sure how the I bankers selling Groupon shares at assumed valuation of 20 Billion $ feel people will buy their long tale of lies and castles of dreams.

It took 11 years for the IT industry to come out of the shock of First dot com crash and story appears to start repeating all over again. I expect Groupon to be the Titanic of this area and unless they realize that they need to deliver value  before expecting such absurd valuation , it is going to be blood shed on the Wall Street again.

I hope good sense prevails in bankers and investors and economy which is just coming back on track after the recession is not pushed off the rails again.

HOPE HOPE HOPE  …  Any One selling discount coupons for selling HOPE ?

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Why Google Plus is not a Facebook Killer today

July 1, 2011 5 Comments

I am an avid social networking user and got on board Google Plus on the first day of Launch through the help of my dear friend Aditya Sharma . This post is my feedback to what I felt about Google Plus. Google is shouting from roofs about better privacy options in Plus but only those who don’t  know how to use Facebook Privacy settings can agree to it.

Statuary Warning : The post might sound greek to normal users and all those are not Privacy Freaks.

 

Nice things -

1) User Interface

2) Ability to see updates of only a specific Circle ,  Facebook fanatics will shout Facebook Groups , but they also know their state. I had 20 friends of mine adding me a group ny name of my university and it is too frustrating until I turned off all those Groups. This was one real nice feature I feel Facebook can learn from.

3) Heard a lot about Video chat stuff, not tested it out , still  Hopeful

Things I didn’t like ( this one is a longer list)

1) No way to import friends from Google contact to Circles on a category basis. I know it sounds confusing let me explain.

I have X friends from my University in my contact list of Google which I have maintained very religiously as the central repository of my friends. I have a Contact list called JIIT ( my university Name)  with 600 members and when I come to Google Plus I want all of them as and when they come to stay in a Circle called JIIT.

Now Google expects me to drag and drop 600 contacts … wow …  Even Facebook allows me to Import a CSV file and it goes into a specified Friend List. Why can’t Google give such a simple option and it has to make it miserable for people to bring in their friends

2) No way to selectively remove circles or groups from viewing your activity.

Google only provides for adding names of Circles who should view it. What if I want something to be visible to everyone except one/two Circle.   The MINUS sign  Google pioneered in search box and Facebook nicely copied allowing you to selectively remove people of friend list from watching your activity.

Google, You just can’t make a horse cart with light reflectors at back and say like your car we also got Tail Lights.

3) No way to ensure spammers don’t add me to their circles. WTH. Google on its forums has replied that you have the right to block them. Why in first place I should get them . Why can’t I chose not be sent random invites.

 

I have not taken a Technical or Creative View on Google Plus,  It was just the pure truthful frustrations of a Dedicated Google Bhakt who expected Google to do it better or at least now I hope they fix it ASAP

 

 

Filed under Brand Talk, Opinion Uncensored, Reviews, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Daniel Pink – Surprising Science of Motivation

June 26, 2011 Leave a comment

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

All the rights to content in this post belong to www.ted.com. I am only sharing the content I liked

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