I was scanning the news and saw that Google wanted to acquire daily deal site Groupon for about $6 billion. Apparently the two sides had been chatting over movies and popcorn before Groupon got up mid-way through the movie and left the cinema.

A further scan of the landscape reveals something that the media and venture capital guys just don’t see.

It’s there in your gut, your intuitive sense of what works and what doesn’t.

The reality is that advertising is dead. All ads. Like a big beached whale.

TV, radio, banner ads online, print and any other kind.  There’s $300 billion spent on advertising in the U.S. every year to try and convince all of us to buy a product.

It’s done in clever ways with funny stories, skits, online soap operas, etc. Companies huddle with agencies and try and dream up fantastic stories about how to get consumers to buy something. We end up laughing at the commercial and forgetting the product.

And none of it works.

When was the last time you saw an ad in ANY medium and responded to it? Bought the item based on the ad?

Next to never. Let’s look at the stats:

The click through rate for online ads is about 0.2% (way less than 1%). If we were measuring that in flea lengths then that’s fine. 2 clicks for every 1,000 banner ads served. On social networks like Facebook the click through is subterranean, about 400 clicks for every 1 million views.

It’s because advertising doesn’t work. It’s the big dead elephant in the room of every media company.

The U.S. Postal Service delivered more than 6 billion pieces of direct mail in the first quarter of this year. Of those direct mail pieces most ended up in the landfill or recycle bin. That’s a lot of printing, postage, handling, trucking, gasoline used, and boxing for something to end up in the trash or returned to a recycle plant.

When was the last time you received a direct mail piece and bought an item from it?

Now YouTube has ads. Overlays and Pre-roll. In fact, many online video have ads now, following in the footsteps of how TV ads are done. Which is to say, show as many ads as possible and hope someone notices. But are they clicking?

DoubleClick (part of Google) serves billions of video ads every year and reported that click through rates for online video ads are between 0.4 percent to 0.74 percent.

Like banner ads, nobody is clicking video ads. I don’t. I close the window anytime a video site wants me to endure their ad. I just don’t have time for that broadcast TV-era game any more.

The holy grail is supposed to be mobile ads. That’s why Google bought AdMob and Apple bought the company that became iAds. If you’ve used an iPhone or gPhone (Android) then you’ve seen these ads. They are similar to any Web banner ad. That is to say, most are general and have nothing to do with your intent, location or much else. The same folks that convinced the TV networks to create an ad for Axe about clean balls also sold them on the mobile ad.

And, you’ve likely ignored these ads also.

Let’s put this all in dollar terms.

If $300 billion is spent on ads every year and 0.5 percent are actually “hitting the target” then it’s safe to say advertising doesn’t work. $300 billion spent but only $1.5 billion (0.5 percent) was effective.

Let’s use some analogies to better understand this.

If you asked a rifle marksman how many times he hit a bullseye and he said 1 time for every 200 attempts you’d say he wasn’t a marksman and should find a day job.

If a restaurant had 2 paying customers for every 400 that walked into the door it would be out of business.

It’s like Hollywood generating 250,000 in ticket sales for a $50 million budget movie. Ticket sales @ $10 each would yield $2.5 million. Not enough to pay Angelina Jolie’s makeup and wardrobe bill.

If any other industry in the world generated as poor of returns as advertising then they wouldn’t exist.

The problem with advertising is that it operates according to the way it has for centuries: mass market. One size fits all. Even newer ways like “retargeting” which tracks your behavior over sites to make ads more effective are just building on that model. Bombard and submit.

Google opened the door to performance advertising with Ad Words and Ad Sense (of which I was an investor before Google acquired it). While those results are better “relative” to banner ads and other mediums they are still in single percentages in terms of effectiveness.

Now a company like Groupon exists precisely because other forms of advertising are so poor. Businesses desperate to bring in customers have given Groupon up to 50% of the sale because their advertising in other venues was not effective.

But giving away that much margin isn’t sustainable for any business over time. The fact is that if other mediums were delivering customers cheaply and reliably through advertising then Groupon wouldn’t even exist. And even Groupon isn’t the perfect ad model.

The question I ask is “what if advertising was flipped around, if click through rates were 99.5%?” What if every ad was welcome to the user in ways no ad is today? What if there wasn’t an “ad” at all?

As an analyst with more than 20 years in media, and as an entrepreneur and investor, I’ve debated taking in ad revenue for my venture Taleee from banner ads/text ads vs. aiming for a superior experience that will benefit users. I don’t want to go for the old game of 0.5% click through by bombarding 100 million users with ads they don’t want and have no value to them.

Said another way, the entire $300 billion advertising industry is up for grabs since today’s advertising just doesn’t work.  It is my belief that a huge opportunity exists here – and one we’re working on – to give users something better than ads.

Beyond advertising.

steve <at> steveharmon.com

In the past 16 years I’ve analyzed thousands of companies and stock offerings, from Amazon to Yahoo and beyond. The one company that investors are looking at to go public is Facebook. So let’s see what Facebook could fetch if it went public.

My bet is that next year Facebook may file an initial public offering of its shares. If so, the big question is what could Facebook be valued at?
There was a lot of talk earlier this Spring about Facebook revenue being about $650 million in 2009. Estimates put this year’s revenue at about $1 billion, maybe $1.2 billion. For the sake of easy math let’s say revenue could be $1 billion.

To me the closest comparable in the stock marketplace is Google, even though Google isn’t a “social network” and Google revenue dwarfs Facebook. Google is like Facebook in that they both are global and widespread businesses based largely on advertising revenue. Google stock (GOOG) trades about 6x revenue and 20x earnings. So we have a potential comparable to look at.

Now to Facebook.

I don’t know if Facebook is profitable but let’s suppose its income margin could be around 20%. With Facebook annual revenue of $1 billion that implies net income of $200 million.

If we use Google’s trading multiples as a guide for Facebook’s potential trading value then Facebook would be valued at 6x revenue or $6 billion or 20x income or $4 billion. And that’s a problem, at least for all current Facebook investors who’ve invested at a much higher private valuation. However, if we factor in revenue and income growth rates it could indicate a valuation much higher. Investors buy growth.

On the private markets reports say Facebook is fetching around a $33 billion valuation. That suggests investors in the illiquid shares pay more than 30x revenue, a huge premium to any global technology stock.

Why the premium? Facebook boasts 500 million active users. Those users have shared personal data that marketers want to exploit, sell them stuff. The bet is that advertisers will step up in larger numbers and with more spending to reach those users. To date I don’t think Facebook has really nailed how to advertise or market on its platform, however.

I don’t think banner ads or most of its ads are that effective overall vs. the number of pages it serves. Let’s do the math:
Earlier this year — January — Facebook reportedly had 260 billion page views per month. Ad banner firm DoubleClick reports as of August 2010 that Facebook now has 690 billion page views per month. With annual revenue of $1 billion that breaks down into $83 million per month. If we divide the monthly revenue by monthly page views (690 billion) it yields $0.0001 or one/ten thousandths of a penny per page view. Not much.

Compare that to Google which generates $.02 3/10ths a penny per page, or 189x more per page than Facebook. In percentage terms that’s almost 19,000% more.

So, the challenge for Facebook is turning its massive page views into revenue of a magnitude that will support a lofty valuation of say, $100 billion+. If it went public general enthusiasm would probably influence the stock price dramatically. But the underlying fundamentals would have to start approaching Google-like revenue and earnings to sustain the valuation over time.

At this juncture and all hype aside, just looking at the balance sheet and possible revenue and earnings, Facebook has some serious work cut out for itself to turn its pages into income worthy of a stratospheric valuation. That value will depend on revenue and earnings growth.

Generation Mobile: Tap Tap Tap

Forget Generation Y, Z or X. It’s Generation M. Mobile.

Companies that made their mark in technology for the Web and PC industries are out of date and out of style.

Look at any kid between 8 to 18 using a mobile device (I won’t call it a phone since that’s like calling a car a horseless carriage). Bart Simpson may be the perfect example, despite the fact that Bart is technically over 25 years old he hasn’t aged a bit on TV.

Through research and observation I’ve seen the number one use for kids ands mobile is games. Numero dos? texting. A recent study said teen girls text about 50 to 100 times per day. And what’s coming my faithful readers:  shopping. It’s here.

If you ask many who grew up with rotary phones or fax machines as the machina du jour they often scratch their head at why anyone would want to use a 3 x 5 inch screen to watch a movie, video, photo, game, or shop.

This is where habit and laziness show up. It’s not a generational thing as much as it’s a habit thing.

And the habit of the 8 to 18 year old is mobile. 100%.

The only time they sit down is to play a console like XBOX 360 or PS3, maybe a few TV shows on the LCD TV.

In 1994 when I did some of the first forecasts for the Web when there was no “Web industry”, no online ads, no Web video, no Web audio, no “ecommerce”, not much except for some research sites, FTP and Gopher, many scratched their heads and said the Web was the new CB Radio.

A few Amazon, Yahoo, Facebook and Googles later the Web did indeed turn into an “industry”. It’s still turning.

But mobile is now in its early years. Apple has the first lead in understanding the need for mobile data of all types. Google is trying to catch up with Android. The mobile carriers are wondering whether to play the software, commerce or hardware side or all three.

Everything is boiling down to a 3 x 5 screen with finger controls.

And in that 3 x 5 space is going to pass 95% of the world’s commerce at some point. As most commerce is “offline” (by which I mean “away from the PC”) the rest of commerce will be done “in person”. The see, touch, buy, take it home kind.

But that commerce will be enhanced by mobile services. One reason I founded Taleee is to bring the world’s opinion to the purchase to help buyers save money and time.

There will be many mobile services that will augment our everyday lives for shopping, health, education, government and more.

There are 4 billion mobile devices in the world today. That means over half of the world’s population uses one. And it’s only going to increase.

——–

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Get the Web-Wide opinion on things you want to buy and places you want to go or eat.

So you’ll know the consensus from millions of people across the Web to help you save time and money.  All with just a tap on your iPhone with the new Taleee app.

Get the Taleee app free, click here and download from Apple’s App Store

——–

At age 9 I had my first paper route and was introduced to the “news” business. News was printed on paper, once per day. Bundles of newspapers were dropped “hot off the press” at the local district manager’s house where a bunch of kids, their Schwinn Sting Rays, and canvas carrier bags gathered to fold, rubber band and pack.

Neighborhoods waited for us bicycling entrepreneurs to zoom in and toss with precision the world to their porch. I could hit a porch from 50 yards with an accuracy that John Elway may admire.

My route had about 75 homes, up and down hills, curves, houses large and small. The newspaper was the Riverside Press-Enterprise and was fairly hefty. The first Sunday morning I soon discovered that when, after having folded all the inserts and comics into the paper, that each weighed more than double the normal paper during the week.

Having put my carrier bag on the rack at the rear of the bike it immediately made my front wheel pop up off the ground — too much weight at the back, probably 60 pounds worth of newspapers. And Sunday was the only day I delivered in the morning, up before sunrise and pedaling around in the dark. How many kids would do that these days? Or parents would let them?

One of the highlights of delivering the Sunday paper was finishing the route and it still being early in the morning, about 7am. The reward was a ride over to the local Winchell’s donut shop where fresh baked donuts baked their sugary scent into the air. There’s nothing like the smell of fresh-baked donuts.

Recalling my intro to the news biz got me thinking about how news has and hasn’t changed. Here’s a quick comparison:

Old way: editors sit around a table with reporters and assign stories
New way: editors IM or text reporters and assign stories and may not even know them face to face at all

Old way: kids fold and deliver papers to homes via bicycle
new way: News is just delivered online.

Old way: tree pulp is mashed, bleached, pressed, dried, cut, delivered in 1-ton rolls to newspapers to load into their massive printing presses
New way: html

Old way: news was always a day old since by the time it was selected, assigned, written, edited, printed and delivered it just took time
New way: instant news as it happens play by play

Old way: place-based news: New York, Los Angeles, London, etc.
New way: global

Old way: one source per town
New way: the world is your town

Old way: all the news that fits
New way: no fitting required

One of the biggest things the old way gave kids like me was an entrepreneurial start. You had to go out, work, do, meet customers, collect payments. Do the math.

And for that I am forever thankful we had a world where I got a start as an entrepreneur at age 9.

Could we be seeing this sort of search box from Facebook soon? Let me discuss an idea I had that Facebook could actually do: launch a search engine for the web. Outrageous? Maybe. Possible? Read on for my strategy for how Facebook could do this.

I remember when Friendster was the social network that could do no wrong. Then MySpace was the cool place to be. Now Facebook is the social network of the day, claiming almost 500 million users or 7% of the world’s population. That’s a lot. 28% of Facebook users are from the U.S., meaning that it’s a global service (not just one country). This is important when launching a general search engine.

Here’s the Facebook usage by country chart:

500 million is a large number. But not all of them use the service. Regardless of the exact number of users the bottom line is Facebook is popular. The 6-year old company has raised a ton of capital and is used by grandmas, grandkids and people in between. What began as a cool way to hookup at Harvard has turned into a new kind of directory: people and their interests.
The people web.

It is this people web that is beating Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others who think the web is only about broadcasting information to people rather than connecting people to information and each other. In 1995 I first met Jerry Yang, the founder of Yahoo. I discussed with him and his executive team the media revenue models and how Yahoo was in many ways like broadcast TV. It published content for an audience to consume. This is largely what sites such as Twitter do also, a one-way information flow.

AOL in its early days was a “people web” also: chat was its #1 use before it lost its way.

The big question is what’s next for Facebook and can it win long term?

As it becomes more mainstream Facebook is now at the point where its popularity is a strength and a weakness. I’ve seen this many times before with companies who get the spotlight and then fade. Facebook has been adding features such as status updates, mobile applications, location services and more in order to absorb where the social web is going. It also has the issue of user privacy that’s becoming a problem for some very vocal users. The service itself could use a lot more features, etc.

But the big item most people seemed to have missed is that Facebook is actually a real threat to Google not as a social network but more than that: Facebook as search engine.

Imagine that Facebook decides to launch its own web search engine and make it the default on every Facebook page. Facebook already serves more pages than 260 BILLION page views per month, more than Google or any other site. In the time it took you to read this Facebook has served more than 7 million page views. 50 percent of users log on any given day, 35 million users update status, and users share more than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news, blog posts, videos, photos, music and more) – every day.

Now that it’s passed Google in page views the next target may be Google search.

With over 30,000 web servers humming day and night and more being added, Facebook could now have the scale and processing power needed to be able to dethrone Google in web search.

The 3-point strategy for how Facebook Could Challenge Google in web search:

1)      Facebook users have already share billions of web links and do so all the time. In effect, this is a “social page rank” algorithm that makes creating a search index of the web a natural step. And since 200 million people login and use Facebook daily it’s a much more timely real-time search than a plain search engine’s slower weekly or monthly crawl.

2)      Facebook knows its users’ interests, friends, age, sex, educational level, affiliations, workplace, and more – all valuable in creating services such as dating, job hunting, banking, gaming and more. Google lacks that overall knowledge of its users who type in a box and leave Google’s site for the web. That’s why Google launched Google Buzz. But Buzz is way behind Facebook on many levels, mainly users.

3)      Facebook opened up its platform to developers with the Facebook API program. This spawned companies such as Zynga (#1 video gaming) and also paved the way for Facebook Connect, a single sign-on service being used by hundreds of thousands of websites now. Having an API like this creates a multiplier effect expanding Facebook as a platform into all parts of the web. This web “awareness” is another key to search.

All Facebook has to do now is commit to the idea of launching a web search engine and do it. If it does then it’s the only real threat Google has in global search so far. And it could very well win.

People often look for the “tipping point” before understanding changes in an industry. The tipping point for TV was in the 1980s when cable television began to become popular vs. the free broadcast TV.

Why?
Channels like HBO and others got the attention of viewers. They wanted HBO.

But the real tipping point was much earlier. The real tipping points are the early signs, like mist rising from a lake. The butterfly wings that cause the hurricane later on.

In the online advertising industry I’ve seen several butterfly wing moments, starting with the Web before there were any ads.

Free link exchanges and then banner ads were introduced.

Banner ads are sold on what’s known as a CPM basis. Cost per thousand.
This was the first wave of Web ads. How many eyeballs did you reach? More like the TV model, viewership and audience size mattered. TVs assume someone is watching. It’s how TV continues to be sold, even cable carriage.

Let’s see how paid search ads evolved and then go from there. In 1998 a friend of mine, Bill Gross (founder of idealab) met up with me to show me something new he invented. We sat down in the lobby of a hotel and he opened his laptop computer and on the screen was his pay for click search engine idea. Advertisers pay more for the top click.

He asked my thoughts on it and I said it looked like a good idea. I shared some suggestions. Paid search (the old goto.com) was born. Paid search today is a $25 billion industry and what every search engine relies on for most of its revenue. It is the lion share of Google’s revenue by far.

Now 12 years later I think search is evolving again to an even better model: I’ll call it the Jerry Maguire model: show me the money.

What exactly is the Jerry Maguire paid search model? In online industry terms it’s CPA, cost per action. In other words, in a search an advertiser would only pay if the user actually does a completed action such as buy a product.

Now this idea isn’t entirely new. CPA has existed in the affiliate marketing world. But the model is new if you consider what if ALL ADVERTISING worked this way.

The advertiser only pays when a product gets sold. Another name for this is performance marketing. But I like the Jerry Maguire tag better.

I recently met up with a colleague in the ecommerce and ad space, Eric Best. Eric was one of the early guys at Amazon. He is now CEO of ecommerce services provider Mercent. Mercent has about 130 customers including PETCO and REI.

Mercent helps a retailer optimize their sales across many websites. As an optimizer Eric delivers to Amazon, search and others. He is seeing a few trends: even large search engines are embracing the CPA approach.
Part of this is Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick and its affiliate network that clearly opened Google’s eyes to pure performance advertising. (By the way, Google had to pay Bill Gross a sizeable sum for taking his paid search bidding model).

Also, click fraud is making advertisers leery of the cost per click model. The Maguire method makes that go away and it works with every industry, some better than others.

Leads (cars, homes, mortgages, credit cards, any sort of membership).
The advertiser pays only when the user provides their contact information. When I helped build the largest independent classifieds service on the Web leads is one area we used to generate revenue from car dealers.

Sales is the other main Maguire method. If the user buys a product then the referrer gets a portion of the sales price. Again, affiliate marketing is full of these but paid search isn’t (yet). Pay per click still dominates paid search.

In the big picture some of the larger advertisers on search engines have been using the CPA approach for years. For example, eBay pays hundreds of millions per year to search engines for new user registrations.

For each new sign up on eBay the search engine gets paid $x. The optimization is usually handled by independent keyword optimizers who arbitrage the wholesale cost on the search engine and sell it to eBay based on sign ups. Middlemen. Cheaper for eBay and more efficient. eBay pays on CPA while the middlemen pay on clicks and pocket the arbitrage.

This is how CPA advertising works today and it is limited to the Web and some mobile.

But I envision a future for advertising in every medium: TV, radio, print, billboards, direct mail, yellow pages, and more that is 100% based on sales and results rather than audience reached.

In other words, advertisers would only pay for actual predetermined results for every campaign.

No more CPM.

No more CPC.

No more general purpose non-accountable advertising.

It doesn’t matter if you reach 7 billion people on the planet as an advertiser if that ad doesn’t yield sales that not only pay for the ad but keep the company growing.

Advertising and marketing is going to enter a new phase and advertisers will be chanting: “show me the results”.

Or, as Cuba Gooding Jr. would say: “the kwon”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Maguire

The history of the Web until now has been about the blocking and tackling of information. Porting offline to online. Yada yada yada.
Social web is kind of a self psycho-analysis sharing of id, ego and super ego.

But what we all really want is this: The Relevant Web. It’s coming now. What you NEED to know.

But let’s see where we’ve been before we get to the future.

Yahoo 1994 when it was hosted at Stanford's server

In 1994 when Yahoo debuted the Web was easy to tally. So many sites all fit nicely into a directory of links. It’s what made Yahoo king. The Web was a hobby, its directory hosted at akebono.stanford.edu where Jerry and David played hooky from their electrical engineering studies. The Web according to Jerry Yang and David Filo was 23,836 links. Here’s Yahoo in 1994:

And it worked. This was before spam. Before advertising. There was nothing to sell and no Viagra to take. I remember it was a great time for the Web, neat and orderly, like a library. In fact, Jerry and David were basically librarians. They used to be speakers at librarian conferences.

By the time Yahoo went public in April 1996 it was the Web to most people. AOL was still a proprietary online service, closed garden, and hadn’t yet discovered mass mailing disks to every home in America. America, and the world, was not online to any large degree.

This was round about the time Apple decided it wanted to be AOL and launched its own closed online service called eWorld. I was one of the first to subscribe and the joke soon became that the ‘e’ in eWorld stood for “empty” since nobody used it. You’d enter the town square and talk to yourself. Echo.

eWorld 1994 - Apple's early online service

By 1996 AOL began mass mailing sign up disks (3.5″ floppy) to every home in America, prompting a surge in its sign ups and boost in its stock. Yes, floppy disks ruled the day, as did 9600 baud dial up modems.

AOL floppy sign up disk

Just 3 years later AOL would go on to acquire Time Warner and proclaim itself  “king of all media”, dethroning Howard Stern.

Other early rockets were Pointcast which was more popular than any other single service online. You installed it and it sent you news all day on topics of your choice. Its launch was standing-room only and most IT manager hated it since it hogged their bandwidth. Pointcast was the Twitter of 1996.

Ten years away from profits here’s how Amazon looked when it first debuted:

Amazon's first home page

There are many more examples. Most of the above are no longer the “hottest” or most used sites or services on the Web today. Amazon is a notable exception, based on its customer service and expansion.

So today as Google rules, Twitter tweets, Facebook fawns the fact is that these companies may not be the winners tomorrow. I’d say we’re at another turning point when the big Web is just too cluttered, Google results aren’t very accurate as they were in 2003, Twitter is being overcome by spam, and Facebook has been invaded by gaming ads disguised as “status updates”.

We are at a turning point in the Web and digital media. Bigger than before. The next Web is about relevance. And few companies today deliver anything close to that.

Evolution of the Web:

The World Wide Web (1993-1995)

The Professional Content Web (1996-2003)

The Social Web (2003-20??)

The Relevant Web (20??-20??)

Web, media, retail and other companies today are going to have to make major adjustments to become part of the “relevant Web”. There’s simply too much information flow and clutter for people to digest any more. It’s beyond semantics, it’s awareness of information and data.

Less is more and less means relevance is key. Especially with mobile. Nobody has time to filter through status updates on who’s having what for lunch. Nobody has time for an inbox of spam. Nobody has time for uploading photos of their front yard. Nobody has time for wondering how to keep their message under 140k. Nobody has time for buzz. It’s all the rattle and hum of information without relevance attached.

u2 Rattle and Hum movie poster

One reason I’m building my company Taleee on summarizing information is exactly because information ABOUT information is the future. Veins of gold in the hillsides of earthen dust.

The relevant Web is here and growing… first a trickle and then a downpour.

Been a busy week in Silicon Valley and I wanted to catch you up on what’s going on and provide my spin on it—

Google launched its wannabe Facebook and Twitter killer: Buzz. It takes advantage of the 187 million Gmail users worldwide to jumpstart itself into a “social network”.

Having been in the Web industry since 1994 I’ve seen a lot of attempts by companies to copy others. Bottom line here: Google Buzz is actually pretty good. It will do two things:

1)   Stop Twitter from growing as fast at it wanted to

2)   Stop Facebook from being the only “conversation/friend hub” for over 300 million people online using Facebook

Meanwhile, my friend Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga, the leading social gaming company on Facebook and other sites) agreed to acquire a smaller social gaming company called ‘Serious Business’. Good name for a gaming company. Zynga now counts several hundred million users playing a raft of its games. Some of the more popular are Mafia Wars, Farmville, etc. Zynga has raised more than $200 million in venture capital so far. The irony is Mark founded one of the first social networks, Tribe.net, which never really took off… now Zynga has ridden Facebook’s phenomenal growth to become the leader in social gaming.

Google acquired social search startup Aardvark (vark.com) for $50 million. These are the guys who published a research paper about social search last week. They used to work at Google and now get to return albeit $50 million richer. How’s that for incentive bonus to leave Google, start your own thing, and then sell it to Google? Aardvark lets you ask your friends questions and tries to find the best person to answer it. Sounds kind of annoying to me. Imagine getting asked all these questions by friends? This looks more like a defensive move by Google rather than a killer application they needed. I tend to email friends a question direct rather than try and let a service do that for me without any context.

It was the king of social just 2 years ago but now MySpace is Lost In Space as its CEO was let go after 9 months on the job. Problem? No growth in past 9 months. MySpace seems to have lost its soul, its mission, to me as Facebook stole its thunder and passed it by. In the US grandmas and grandkids use Facebook. MySpace is not that widespread, probably because it looks like a disaster, the design and layouts are a mess. Not sure fired CEO Owen Van Netta is 100% to blame here. MySpace blew its chance in 2007/8 to really clean up the site and make it more useful. Best shot it has now is to try and appeal to kids 12-18 since how many kids want to be on Facebook with their grandmas?

What Apple, Google & Microsoft Have To Do In 2010

Two things:

1) mobile

2) acquire

Economically I think 2010 could be a much stronger year than 2009. And 2009 was a fairly strong year if you look at the stock markets worldwide and some companies that paved the way. Let’s take a look.

Glass is half full if NASDAQ is any indicator. That’s how far the stock index is up this year, up 45%. In China the glass is even fuller, with the Shanghai index up 79% year to date. London is up 23%. Hong Kong 49%. Japan, 19%.

Who’s leading the charge? What’s their outlook for 2010?

Apple – Apple makes stuff people want to use that makes their lives more productive. It’s that simple. I’ve been in tech since 1984 and sold the first Apple computers back when nobody had a computer, or a reason for one. The centerpiece of Apple is the iPhone, essentially a mobile computer in your pocket. The platform and abundance of apps make iPhone a breakthrough product.

The weakness in Apple’s approach though is signing exclusive deals with one carrier per country. It leaves an opening for a rival to come in with a wannbe iPhone (like Android) and try and satisfy the wider market.

Imagine if Dell said you could only access the Web using one particular ISP. How many Dell PCs would it sell? Now imagine if Apple allowed any carrier to sell its phone, it would have sold 10 times more iPhones and locked out any competitor.

Apple is leaving a gap that Google will try and fill. Apple needs to make iPhone available to all carriers and lock in the market completely.

—

Google – Google search has become the default for many people. It has become synonymous with search. Every other area Google has tried to become the market leader it has failed so far. It ends up acquiring market leaders such as YouTube (which still isn’t a great business to be in, video streaming is expensive). Google’s strength relies on search and the more it moves away from search the more rivals can come in and compete. Google Docs, etc. are small weapons against the Microsoft Office giant and necessary. As is Gmail for enterprise, another stab at Microsoft email solution Exchange.

But imagine if Google thought more like Wikipedia and became open source for everything. Not open source as in ‘adopt my open standard’ monkey drip.

What Google needs to do in 2010: Buy anything that moves in search, mobile and advertising. The venture firms aren’t investing so Google has a great shelf full of snappy startups to look at.

—

Yahoo – Yahoo was the Google of 2000. Market cap over $150 billion, great name, cool vibe. Fun place to work. The ‘could do no wrong’ company. And then it slowly lost its lead, like putting on body fat by eating one candy bar a day and forgetting how you got fit.

Yahoo’s 10% of what it was then. The user base is still large but the “need to use” factor is low. Yahoo wasted a decade not acquiring anything that moved in Web, mobile and ads. Google even shopped itself to Yahoo very early on as the team didn’t want to build a company vs. a technology.

Yahoo in 2010 needs to buy startups and companies to help it scale and regain footing, especially in mobile, ads and commerce areas. It needs an aggressive deal team to swoop in and buy, buy, buy while things are cheap. Towards the end of 2010 startup valuations and deals will probably be more expensive. Buy early.

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Microsoft – The challenge for Microsoft is one of bureaucracy. How can a whale move like a shark? Too many people stirring the soup and not enough getting done. The problem is what I call the “residual” one. Once a company becomes a market leader in any area it sits back and thinks sales will continue forever, like an annuity. Upgrades to the installed base. And for 14 years that’s what happened, since Windows 95 and Office 95. That era is over and the new one is network based solutions. Streamlined, essential functions, not bloatware.

Microsoft in 2010: Bing is a good move and I’ve been using it some of the time. It has superior results in some areas vs. rivals. However, the search game is changing and Microsoft needs more of a “game changer” in the field to dislodge Google. Some of that are deals such as Yahoo, Facebook, etc. But, again, Microsoft needs to buy and be in every network area and scale search by a huge factor. Secret weapon: cash. Has to break out and truly go global in opportunity.

Facebook – the key for it in 2010 is going to be how does it shift from being “nice to have” to “need to have?” The firm claims 350 million registered users but how many could live without Facebook if it went away? What is the “utility” factor for Facebook? What is the “must use” factor? Light reading still, nothing to compel the average person to login. Surely it’s not to play raise a pig?

Ditto for Twitter. Company has lots of press but what is the “need to use” factor? Media companies love it and the self promotion angle is popular. Twitter’s goal is 1 billion users and it’s about 3% there…Even Google doesn’t have 1 billion users after 11 years and billions of dollars spent. Twitter still feels nebulous, unsure of its genus/species. What does it do for an encore after being on Oprah?
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Above and beyond any of the above, I think we’re going to see innovation from smaller companies on stage in 2010 and the bigger names in tech will be swooping in to get their edge…!

While the media have focused on housing, TARP and other things, the NASDAQ has gained more than 30 percent in the past six months. Technology has been growing rapidly, with companies like Baidu (largest search engine in China) up more than 86% since May. Apple shares have rocketed up 72%.

I wanted to share with you what to look at in a business and investment opportunity.

I have measured many investment opportunities since my career began in 1994 and all of the winners in my historic portfolio have a commonality…they hold up well to the questions I ask about the company and its concepts. I consider key criteria before making an investment decision that I wanted to share with you…it may help you when making investment decisions. Answer the questions below for your company or investment consideration.

Who are the key people behind the company?
Is the company focused on its core strength?
Is anyone using the technology and is their customer base growing?
Are there any competitors in the arena?
Does the company provide “real” value?
Does the company have a competitive advantage?

I put my new venture Taleee to the scrutiny of the questions and I am very happy to say the Taleee meets all of the criteria of a
successful company. Try doing this with your company and companies you are considering investing in.

Taleee answers:

Who are the key people behind the company?
Taleee’s team includes top veterans of the web with proven track records in their fields. Our team and angel investors include executives from EBay and Reuters and technology team members that have built web services for millions of users worldwide.
Is the company focused on its core strength?
Taleee does one thing really well – we sum up consumer opinion from across the web and syndicate that information to consumers through retailers and manufacturers.
Is anyone using the technology and is their customer base growing?
Taleee has syndicated its web-wide ratings to more than 3 dozen major ecommerce sites, including Amazon, Walmart, DELL, Staples and Costco and continues to sign
clients on our way to becoming the defacto for product and services ratings.
Are there any competitors in the arena?
There are several companies aggregating ratings/reviews but none that offer a “Web-Wide” final score as Taleee does.
Does the company provide “real” value?
Consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising (Nielsen). Taleee brings the sum of the consumer voice to the point of sale on the web and in store.
Does the company have a competitive advantage?
Taleee is the first and the largest provider of web-wide consumer opinion with more than 500 million ratings/reviews indexed. Our Taleee algorithms employ proprietary advanced intelligence programming. Taleee’s customer base includes many of the world’s leading technology and electronics manufacturers such as Microsoft and Cisco.

Keeping these questions in mind when considering an investment opportunity can help you make a better decision. If you want to hear more about what Taleee is doing, drop me an email as we are expanding. biz <at> taleee <dot> com.

Happy investing and company building.

Steve