Yahoo CEO and co-Founder Jerry Yang stepped down as top dog on November 17. The move does not come as a surpise to anyone, amid plummeting Yahoo! stock prices, a failed acquisition by Microsoft, and the demise of a possible advertising deal with Google.
A Yahoo! insider says that while they didn't find out about Yang's departure until about 5:00pm this afternoon, the mood around the Sunnyvale office was "pretty damn good." He admits that "[w]e're all pretty used to bad news by now, so we're all just saying 'what now?'" However, he does say that he likes the open direction that Yahoo! has been taking, arguing that because of som
e repeated setbacks for the company, it has been willing to try new things.
"As an employee, I feel as though this is one of the best times to be working for Yahoo! When you're in second place, you're more willing to try new things and experiment. It's a great time for young people with good ideas to be recognized and excel. Yahoo! is full of opportunity and resources just waiting to be tapped.
"A little fear goes a long way," he grins.
Yang will remaion on the Board, and will return to his old role of Chief Yahoo! Shares are expected to rally a little bit tomorrow on the news - shareholder value has dipped by almost $31 billion since the failure of a huge acquisition offer from Microsoft in the spring.
"Over the past year and a half, despite extraordinary challenges and distractions, Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! on an open platform model as well as the improved alignment of costs and revenues," says Chairman Roy Bostock. "Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board."
Founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang, Yahoo! began as a hobby and has evolved into a leading global brand that has... [more]
Lyal Avery of Vancouver's OutCome3 is a Techvibes Guest Contributor.
With capital access and first-round raises frozen solid, it's tough to be a startup. On October 9th, Sequoia Capital gathered their portfolio companies, stating that now is the time to slow the startup burn and do everything possible to stay afloat - a far cry from the chants of "grow! grow! grow!" heard a year ago. However, all is not lost, as a new breed of startup moves to excel: businesses based on cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-action (CPA) advertising.
Cost-per-click and cost-per-action advertising lets companies create immediate revenue streams, free from account receivables. When revenue flows from day one, it's easier for startups to adapt to challenges. Naysayers cry that online advertising budgets are being slashed left and right, but Google's recent earnings show that CPC and CPA are still thriving. (However, second-tier providers aren't doing as well, which may be due to a need for consolidation in market.) The answer is simple; with shrinking advertising budgets, marketers are moving away from 'spray-and-pray' advertising to venues with measurable returns, such as CPC and CPA. Time for that sweet, sweet radio money to start flowing in our direction. And this is far from the banner glut of the early 2000's; these two types of advertising are based on real sales.
Suite101.com, a startup monetized through cost-per-click advertising, is a great example. Peter Berger, President of Suite101.com, said, "Overall monetization per impression is down a few percent [...] but to a much lesser degree to CPC." Berger continues, stating that overall revenues were increasing due to growth in traffic.
When compared with most startups in these times, Suite101.com is accomplishing something incredible; revenue growth! While consumer trends may push online purchases down, increased budgets for CPC and CPA advertising could create higher margins for advertisers fighting for the remaining sales. Vigilant startups are poised to reap great rewards, so long as they build business models that funnel remaining interested users into sales.
Outcome3 is a Vancouver-based, online marketing company that specializes in search engine optimization, paid search advertising, site analytics,... [more]
Video of last week's Third Tuesday presentation is now online thanks to Bruce Sharpe of Singular Software. Mhairi Petrovic of Out-Smarts Internet Marketing talked candidly about overcoming the challenges of marketing new media to traditional decision makers. Petrovic's discussed the common objections old-school marketers have to new media and how you can use the basic principles of traditional marketing to educate them on new-school trends.
Petrovic is Chief Marketing Orchestrator and Founder of Out-Smarts Internet Marketing - a company dedicated to working with small to medium-sized businesses to maximize their Internet exposure. Passionate about social media, Petrovic blogs and podcasts regularly and puts her knowledge of the Internet to good use to develop and implement innovative Internet marketing campaigns.
Mhairi's presentation and the audience discussion were live-blogged by Raul of Hummingbird604.
Smart strategies and services for outstanding Internet marketing. [more]
Last night's Ideas On Tap event had a huge turnout, packing the Yaletown Brew Pub under ambience of the Canucks vs Red Wings (4-3 Canucks in overtime). The lively crowd only had to pay attention for ten minutes as five presenters gave 60 second pitches. By vote of applause and cheering, the winning pitch was PhoneGap, presented by Andre Charland of Nitobi.
For those looking to write an iPhone app but don't have the time or resources to climb the learning curve of Objective-C and the iPhone API, PhoneGap offers a capable compromise. While created by Nitobi employees, it's a free, open source project under an MIT License (meaning free for commercial or non-commercial use). PhoneGap acts as a wrapper of sorts, allowing one to write a web app that packages as a native iPhone app. PhoneGap provides JavaScript access to phone functions like GPS, camera, accelerometer, local data storage, background processing, and push notification, all features that aren't accessible by a web app running in Safari. While still in early development, there is at least one PhoneGap app in the App Store (Inside Trader). There are future plans to extend it's functionality to Blackberry and Android. Write once, run on any smartphone? Ambitious, but naturally appealing.
The other four pitches were:
For more coverage, check the liveblog transcript, or browse photos. The next Ideas on Tap is tentatively scheduled for January. Watch their blog or join the Facebook page to keep in the loop.
Since 1997, Nitobi (formerly eBusiness Applications) has been providing Enterprise Solutions and web-based software components. With a focus on... [more]
Bellevue-based Eyealike recently introduced VisualAd, an image and video-based contextual ad platform--Eyealike VisualAd recognizes facial features, skin colour, gender, and age, and discerns logos or product images. This gives them a means to offer highly-targeted ads by indexing, filtering and classifying images and videos rather than using keywords for the targeting purposes. Admittedly, this concept makes me feel slightly uneasy, but posting pictures to social networking sites is done so at the expense of the user's privacy anyway.
Using this type of “dual serving” technology offers these sites twice the impact on ad relevancy. Eyealike President Greg Heuss calls the technology "dual serving"--he insists that social networking sites are interested in what types of images you post, what you look at, and what they tell the SNS about you. I was curious about how VisualAd will infer information about a user based on photos that will undoubtedly feature other people. CEO John Hafen argues that Eyealike first "tells" the technology what given photos are. Then the software "gets smarter with time and with more and more images to view. After a while, it becomes self aware"--learning and then self-teaching, presumably, as it learns to cluster images based on content.
Eyealike may have an early advantage through the accuracy of their recognition algorithms, which are apparently at 90% according to Hafen. VisualAd uses data from all of a user's profile on their user-generated content site. It extracts a certain probability that a target object is in each individual photo, and then if that target object (or objects) are in multiple photos the probability increases that the user has that object (or is at least in close proximity). This will work the same whether the object is a baby, a Golden Retriever, a Subaru, or Mount Rushmore.
Hafen attests that "What will put us ahead of the pack is our accuracy, how we apply it, and the basic scalability of the system. We built it from scratch with super-scalability in mind." Scalability will be important, because Eyealike is looking to market directly to social networking sites. Sites like Facebook and MySpace will likely be eager to monetize user-generated photos.
Eyealike, an innovator of visual-based search, fills a gap in the text-dominated search world, both for image intensive Web sites and enterprise... [more]
The Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way Campus is running a weekend web marketing workshop entitled "Web Impact: Master Your Domain". It happens the weekend of October 24-26, 2008, Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. The slick lineup of speakers include Darren Barefoot (NowPublic's #1 most visible Vancouverite on the Web), Oonie Chase and Michael Smit of Blast Radius, and Amber Bezahler and Marty Yaskowich of Tribal DDB Canada.
Experts in Advertising, User Experience and Design, Analytics and Social Media will instruct individuals and businesses on the fundamentals of online promotion, marketing and advertising. Participants will learn how to harness the power of Search Engine Optimization, Google Analytics, Facebook, and a variety of Page Ranking and Web Analysis tools to help optimize and drive traffic to their websites.
For more information or to register, visit the Masters of Digital Media site.
The Masters of Digital Media (MDM) Program is a 20-month professional graduate degree offered at the Centre for Digital Media at Great Northern Way... [more]
TechCrunch managed to post another incorrect story over the weekend. Serkan Toto made it to the last paragraph before he misspoke, calling Cambrian House “now-defunct”. Let me tidy up some facts: VenCorps, for those who follow these things, is a site built by the not-defunct Cambrian House.
Luckily, the “not-defunct at all” Cambrian House team was on top of the situation and released this blog post to combat the misinformation. This post contains an official letter from their counsel, a detailed FAQ, and the wit and humor we have come to expect from the Calgary company.
Thanks for clearing things up... again!
Launched in 2006, Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology... [more]
Partnering up with Amazon.com and Apple's iTunes Music Store, Google has announced their YouTube video sharing property will soon provide online shopping opportunities tied into the video content they display. Located just below the video clips, the purchasing options will link to a variety of products related to the video displayed from movies and music to concert tickets or clothing and accessories. Outside of adwords this will be one of Google's first attempts to monetize the site they paid $1.65 billiion for in 2006, a site that boasts 330,000,000 monthly visitors and almost 13 hours of uploaded video every minute.
The move comes amidst calls from investors to begin raising revenues earned from the popular site after Piper Jaffrey Research predicted only $200 million of Google's estimated $27 billion 2009 revenue would come from the site. YouTube further indicated that more options were forthcoming. "There'll be lots of different solutions for lots of different problems," Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube director of product management, said in an interview. "We've tested a lot of things already, and we're going to be testing more in the future. Some will work, some won't. Some of the options mentioned in the Reuters article included ads along the bottom of the streaming videos, advertiser contests, sponsored homepage videos, and short ads before and/or after uploaded videos.
Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. As a first step to fulfilling that mission,... [more]
