Google Instant and what it means for SEO

Google Instant turns search into a real-time stream of results which flow onto your screen as you type your query. With each letter you type, a whole new set of results flash by. This is important for several reasons. First and foremost, you will now see many more search results than you would have otherwise. Most people never click through to the second page of search results. If it is not in the first ten blue links (or really the first five or six), it might as well not exist for most people. With Google Instant search, instead of people seeing only ten results, they may now see 50 or 100 (depending on how many letters they type and how far they get through each search query).

It now means that we will need to now create pages that optimize for particular letter combinations, not just entire keywords. If you are focusing on Buy Cigars Online we will want to have a page optimized for “buy cig” and so on.

HTML 5

I like HTML 5.  Its not quite there functionally, but its has a lot of promise in saving costs and reducing time to market.

For years we have made apps for cell phones (Brew, J2ME, Palm, Apple, Blackberry, Android, etc).  For years our costs keep going up and the ROI is never as good as it should be.  For years the control of our future are in the hands of carriers and now handset companies.

While app stores will be great for certain kinds of apps such as games; there is no reason why we need to build a $100K app for a content site.

HTML5 would give us

• Richer apps that use local data
• Reduced need to download and install an app
• Reduce time to market
• Control over your content and more importantly over your financials
• Handsets that allow applications to access accelerometers and GPS, Camera,  SMS and other phone features.

Youtube and Google Voice are now HTLM5 destinations

Here are some interesting links on the topic.
http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/07/17/google-says-mobile-web-apps-will-win/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/01/html5-is-great-for-mobile.php

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-mantra-is-bullshit-adobe-is-lazy-apples-steve

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/01/steve_jobs_on_google/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/20/youtube-html5/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/02/adobe-cto-kevin-lynch-defends-flash/

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_content_and_app.html

The future of mobile will be always-on data

Data, structured or unstructured, is key all web apps.   One of the biggest problems I see today is that data is hard to obtain and manage.  The mobile device can be a great passive data capture device.  With features like the speaker, accelerometer, magnetic compass, proximity sensor, light sensor etc.

Some early ideas that are emerging

- Near-time traffic with apps like Waze

- Noise levels with apps like WideNoise

Other services that could be really great

- On the ground real-time weather sensors

- Real-time pollen allergy and pollution patterns

- Real time or windowed reviews

- Real time pricing discovery

Mobile Trends To 2020

Mobile-trends for the next 10 years

The next wave of search

Search is changing.  Here are some of the trends I keep reading about.  The blogs now talk about the idea of  “Serendipity” – the idea of search becoming more intuitive, more location centric, less pull and more push, less clutter, more relevant information,  more mobile.   New layers are going to be added to search engines.

- A location layer – not only within 250 ft, but 1 miles, 5  miles, 10  miles, etc.

- Local shopping – price, product and place ratings, and current deals are real time and instantaneous

- The phone camera, the speaker,  SMS are all input mechanisms

- Supplemented by answers and recommendations from your  social nework

- App content is visible so I know what is on Aloqa, Gowalla, Foursquare and any other app

- Information and web pages are optimized for the device

Beware of the administrative costs of text donations

Tonight I made a $10 donation to the earthquake victims in Haiti by Texting HAITI to 90999.    I started to wonder how much of the $10 donation was going to Haiti.

After some digging here is what i found.  According to CSCS (www.usshortcodes.com), the short code 90999 is owned by a company called Mobile Accord based in Denver, CO.   They have a division called mGive Mobile which handles the donations.

According to the terms on their web site there are two things that you should be aware of.

“The mGive Foundation collects donations paid by you from your wireless operator. In some instances, your donation will be deducted from your pre-paid balance with your wireless operator. The wireless operators remit 100% of your donation to The mGive Foundation. Within 30 days of The mGive Foundation’s receipt of collected donations from the wireless operator, The mGive Foundation grants 100% of the donation to the designated organization. (There may be some designated organizations that have permitted The mGive Foundation to grant 5-10% of each donation to The mGive Foundation to cover administrative costs associated with The mGive Foundation’s mission.)

1) The money will take some time to get to Haiti – 30 days after the carrier remits the money to mGive.   Realistically its more like 60-90 days before the money gets to victims.

2) While the carrier is passing thru the cost, it seems that some organizations allow mGive to keep  5-10% of the donation as administrative fees.    So that means that its possible they could be keeping up to $1 from my donation for administrative expenses.  For example if they get a $1M in donations, they could possibly make up to $100,000.  I believe Credit Card companies only charge 2-3%.

Next time, I will give money directly via the Red Cross web site.  More of it will get to victims faster.

Should Palm and Motorola merge?

Gigaom has written a piece on the idea of a Palm and Motorola getting together.  While this is one option to consider, I think there is another way to go that might create a lot more value for Palm.

My thesis is that the Palm should start offering additional services around the device.  In effect creating more revenue streams.   Some services that would make a lot of sense to me:

1) 411 – either free or freemium

2) Call tracking, call management – e.g Skydeck

3) Security – a subscription based service around security.  Encryption of SMS, email, voice mail etc.

4) Advertising – Google is going to get a large % of the ad revenue from the web pages views on Palm devices, because of the Admob deal.  Can palm offer advertising on the home screen in a non-intrusive manner?

5) Storage – pictures, video, sms, email

Investing in mobile – where are the opportunities?

Mobile remains a huge opportunity for venture capital.  In the first wave (the Soviet Era as some would call it), the money was made from ringtone platforms like Dwango, Thumbplay, Jamba, mobile publishers like Vindigo, Zingy, Jamdat etc., SMS platform provider like mQube, 365 etc..  In the Soviet Era, content was king, but distribution was the queen (aka the carrier) and even more powerful than the king.

Now we have entered a new era where mobile is the internet on your phone;  the next set of businesses are all about removing the carrier from the business model as much as possible.  Google has already started doing this by attacking all major components of the carrier business model such as SMS directory with Goog 411, Call management with Google Talk, Yellowpages and additional content revenue with Admob and now with open devices such as the Nexus One.

Here are some of the areas where I see interesting opportunities: some of these areas certainly have a lot of competition.

1) Payment platforms – We all know virtual goods is a growing business and carriers will want a piece of that action.  Can virtual payments platforms replace carrier billing and carrier revenue sharing so that publisher can survive for the long haul- existing players include Boku, Zong, Obopay, HeyZap, Jambool, Surfpin

2) P-2-P SMS Ads.  Admob and Quatro Wireless are just the tip of the iceberg.  There are over 1.36T annualized SMS messages according to the CTIA.  90% of those messages are person to person; furthermore the profit margins to the carrier is very high on a per message basis.  Given that there is just not enough ad space on a mobile web page compare to an HTML web page, some of those ads need to move to voice based or SMS based solutions.  I wonder what impact Twitter is having on SMS traffic?

3) Social App Discovery – Mplayit, GetJar, Chomp, Envio Networks, and others – there are no easy answers to this, Apple’s genius bar, technical solutions, vertical search.  This may not get solved easily.  One answer might be social.

4) Mash up of location – there is a lot of stuff happening around location in apps.  The problem is that its all siloed.  You can find stuff in Foursquare, Goawalla, Dopplr, Metro and a hundred more app.

5) Augmented Reality/ Image Tagging/ Image recognition – i think Google Googles is cool,  we need more way to make images lead to action; buy something, do something, tag something.

6) Mobile Search – As Google says – the phone has ears (voice), eyes (camera) and has touch (screen).  We need to put these features to work.  If you pull up Google search on your phone, you see links for stuff that is not even optimized for the phone.  Mobile search should be a lot more useful and interactive, and extract relevant information from an app or a Tweet so I can find intelligent information.

7) Mobile security – Encrypting your SMS, your email, your twitter, your web pages, your address book, remote tracking (Apple’s Mobile Me),

8) A 411 Directory service for mobile – can we please just fix this; can we make a Linkedin for mobile phone numbers? What a pain it is to find someone’s mobile number.

More and more it seems like the handset guys (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Palm, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia) are going to have to buy companies that give them a chance to be like a carrier w/o the baggage of being a carrier.  If Sprint was smart they would just become the pipe and get rid of the headaches of customer service, billing, marketing etc.

Top 5 things to be aware of when going mobile

App downloads seem to be picking up steam.  Apple announced 2 billion downloads of their 85K apps at the end of September 2009.  On Jan 5, 2010, Apple says over 3 billion iphone/itouch apps have been downloaded from over 100K apps.   While this is great news, I have been thinking a bit about what this means for the average media company.

1) Cost – I recently spoke to a US developer who wanted between $60-100K to build an app.  Creating a content management system is a big part of the cost.  You will also need to think about supporting Android, Blackberry and Palm.

2) Discovery – This will be a challenge without word of mouth marketing – buying ads to drive traffic to your web page or to your download is going to be more critical when you have 100K plus apps to compete with.  One idea is to expose the content being created within apps on your web site.  This way the search engines can pick it up.

3) Free ad supported with upsell (if needed) – Free apps are downloaded more often than paid apps.  Last check it was 10:1.  I think the upsell feature that Apple is about to launch will help developers monetize apps.

4) Cannibalization - What happens if people use your app more than your web site?  One media company, ESPN, a division of Disney,  has over 8.9 million unique users to their free mobile site.  Its the 8th most trafficked mobile site, according to Nielsen Mobile.  Those eyeballs going to the mobile site are not going to the web site where there certainly will be more ad and e-commerce opportunities. This may not be an issue today but it will be in the future, there is just not enough space on a small screen to put all the ads.

5) On-going maintenance -  New generations of devices are launching every few months, generally these are great new features (e.g magnetic compass, better camera, location).  These will mean planning new versions of your apps.

Open vs. Reality

Lately it seems that the carriers talking about Open but still acting very Closed.

Both ATT Mobile and Sprint has reduced their game deck to 250 titles and 13 or so publishers.  All others must now go thru a company called the Wireless Developer Agency and others.

It seems to me outsourcing services to 3rd parties just makes these channels more closed and creates more friction in the market.  If further reduces time to market, increases costs and you are one-step further away from the market.