Nexidia’s senior vice president of media shows us how its system takes video, indexes it, makes it searchable, and also makes it possible to bring contextual advertising and place it next to the video.

Other posts from a year ago:
Making video searchable with Nexidia executive
Interview with CEO of Cogito, relationship network expert

Tags: Nexidia

Microsoft’s recent move to acquire Yahoo!, which began with a telephone call from Microsoft CEO Steven A. Ballmer to Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang (a call that Ballmer later claimed was “definitely not a courtesy call”) prompted us to revisit the Facebook/Microsoft relationship - what it means for Facebook, and what Microsoft might have been thinking last Fall.

As Facebook moves to launch versions in Spanish, with more languages coming soon, analysts are looking again at the juggernaut, guessing about whether breaking into languages will erode its power as a single network around the world. Meanwhile, widgets and applications continue to proliferate, and Microsoft’s role in aiding advertising at Facebook continues to be a work in progress.

Forrester Research senior analyst (and former host of PodTech’s own Web Strategy show) Jeremiah Owyang speaks with PodTech’s Jason Lopez about Facebook’s evolving business.

Tags: Microsoft, Facebook, Steven A. Ballmer, Jerry Yang, Web Strategy, Jeremiah Owyang, Jason Lopez

Tags: Jayant Kadambi, YuMe

Tags: Charlene Li, Forrester Research

Tags: Nancy Bhagat, Jennifer Jones, Upload Lounge, Fall IDF, social media messaging, social media strategy, integrated marketing, engagement, marketing budget

Tags: online videos, Podaddies, advertising network, Nate Pagel, Robert Boyle

In this podcast, Harish talks about what it takes to incubate small companies internally.

Harish, an engineering graduate in Computer Sciences, is a serial entrepreneur. prior to getting into Internet business, he built bullet proof cars.

Harish is considered a thought leader on the subjects of digital technology, interactive advertising, online travel, and entrepreneurship and is a regular speaker at various forums for the same.

He is an active member of NASSCOM and IAMAI and proactively represents the Indian internet community for addressing issues related to the growth and smooth functioning of the industry with various regulatory bodies.

Tags: Quasar, India, Tyroo, Yahoo, MakeMyTrip, NASSCOM, IAMAI

Sam was known in the blogosphere for the good coverage he did at TechCrunch UK. After a public split with Mike Arrington , he began Vecosys, and now BlogNation.

Sam has worked in the IT industry for over 18 years for companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Gateway Computers and CMGi, in a variety of senior technical and marketing roles. Sam has also experienced the joy and pain of running his own start-ups. Recently, Sam has been working as a freelance consultant with companies such as MSN (UK) and BT, helping develop their Web 2.0 strategies.

When not blogging, consulting or presenting, Sam loves nothing better than spending time with his wife & young family, running, drinking fine wine with his friends or watching his beloved Liverpool FC.

Oh, just a quick note to let you know that the audio quality isn’t the best. To make it easy, I have transcribed the conversation below and it will be a good supplement to the podcast.

Photo courtesy: Library House

Transcript:

Kiruba : Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Sethi: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Kiruba: Congratulations on the launch of BlogNation. That’s a very ambitious project you have started.

Sam Sethi: Yeah. It has started on a post I wrote on my own blog “Go Big or Go Home” which really was related to the fact that most Europeans were told by Americans that we don’t have enough ambition. Alright. OK. Let’s see how ambitious we can get and if we can cover most of the world’s Web 2.0 news and that’s what BlogNation will do.

Kiruba: Alright. If a person in the US were to listen to this and one of the obvious questions that would be asking is, “Are there enough innovation happening outside of the US?”. What would be your answer?

Sam Sethi: The answer would be Yes and No. Let me explain. Yes, there is a lot of innovation happening outside of the USA, outside of the Silicon Valley. Companies like Jaiku,Vimeo, get on the American radar very early. The answer, ‘I don’t know’ is because of the language barrier. Up until now, I’m trying to understand what’s happening in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Brazil, Japan, China. Its just impossible for us if we don’t know the language. BlogNation will be moving into 22 countries…there is a lot of activity in the Web 2.0 space and we’ll get to understand them better.

Kiruba: In countries like India and UK, obviously there is no problem because English is the main language but like you just said, in China, Bulgaria, Germany, a lot of blogging and coverage of technology happens in the local language. How are you going to overcome this barrier?

Sam Sethi: OK. What we have done is that BlogNation will be written in English only. We will rope in 22 very good bloggers from around the globe who live in their country, who are native speaking and who can write very good English. The idea is that they will write about what is going on in their country in English and hopefully we can use one common language on the Internet to appreciate what is going on in each country and learn quicker about the new startups rather than wait four to five months to learn about them.

Kiruba: OK. Let’s go back in history. Now, Sam Sethi as a person came into prominence for a lot of bloggers because you were with TechCrunch UK and you did some real good work. So what happened after that and how did BlogNation came into being?

Sam Sethi: OK. TechCrunch UK was really a project with myself and several friends in London who organize events to try and realize how we can make the UK start up scene much more available around the world. We started on a project called unplugged London and we realized that it would be much simpler teaming up with Mike Arrington. Post Mike Arrington and Post TechCrunch, we started a blog called Vecosys which really was a knee jerk reaction to me leaving TechCrunch.

In the three months that we wrote Vecosys we realized that its not sustainable unless you build it big. Really, we were covering too small a market and not getting any revenues in.

BlogNation was born as a project that would be built from the ground up having an advertising network. The company Index is an important feature of the site. The company Index is really a lesson learnt in blogging. If you write ten posts they would appear on the homepage but once it drops off the homepage, its gone. The Company Index of BlogNation is a link between the post and the company. Every time there is an article written, it would be added to the company Index. Basically if you look at a particular company in the Index, you can access all articles relating to the company. If there’s one or more articles about the company, you will be able to see the history of the posts. So a great way to track a particular company, read news about the past and the current. BlogNation is a professional version of what we were doing at Vecosys.

Kiruba: Alright. Now, the scale of BlogNation is quite ambitious with 20 plus countries in the plans. So how are you funding the entire project.

Sam Sethi: The project is currently self funded and angel funded. We hope that we encourage startups who haven’t advertised before. So a lot of startups I know say they haven’t advertised on Google or Yahoo or other social networking sites because the advertising is very expensive. We are looking at providing a simple targeted advertising for entrepreneurs for a very reasonable CPM rate to encourage them. The other revenues will come from larger companies who fund BlogNation. More revenues will come from other activities that we be doing which I will be talking about later.

Kiruba: Alright. When you say other activities, would events also be in your business model just like how Rafat Ali is doing.

Sam Sethi: Events is certainly in the business model. When you have got 22 editors covering news around the world covering news, you have a very strong view of whats happening around the world and what technology we feel we will be able to attract people. Today, its just in the plans.

Kiruba: BlogNation typifies a startup company. And for a lot of startup companies the biggest hurdle they face is ‘How do I make myself known to a lot of people?” which is marketing basically. So, how are you planning to take care of that?

Sam Sethi: Like any startup we need other bloggers around the world to connect to us. We need people to talk about us. We need to provide quality relevant content which makes people want to come back to us and make BlogNation their destination site throughout the day or once a week or whatever is their frequency. I don’t think there is a quick way. I think we will take six months to build a good traffic or maybe longer.

We have very good people in our team who are well connected. The combination of writing well and sponsoring and reporting events around the world, linking to people, talking about interested things. Overtime, if we are the right thing, people will come to us.

Kiruba: Awesome. Your plans for the next year. One year down the line where do you anticipate BlogNation will be?

Sam Sethi: I would hope it is the river of news homepage which is all the world stories, will become the destination choice. Our page views, we have some figures in mind, which will make us one of the top blogs in the world hopefully. Outside of that we have a couple of other plans in mind. One is to create a TechMeme for the rest of the world. Again I feel, TechMeme is a US centric blog and cover mostly the valley and when they don’t have enough to cover, they occasionally look outside. I’d like to cover everything outside of the US . And we would be supporting a community of entrepreneurs.

Kiruba: Awesome. We were talking about Sam Sethi, the business guy. Let’s talk about Sam Sethi, the person. Tell us about your personal interests other than business. I know that now BlogNation would take more of your time but in your spare time what would you like doing.

Sam Sethi: I’m a family man with two children. So, that takes care of more of the free time. I like sports, running, rugby, football . I like socializing with friends..the thing that most family people tend to do. I don’t think I’m any different.

My interest before blogging was to learn all about learning, about what new and exciting things in technology is all about. I have a technical background. So, my natural extension is get into writing about exciting companies.

Kiruba: Alright. Fantastic. Sam, here’s wishing the very best for BlogNation.

Sam Sethi: Thank you.

Kiruba: Thank you, very much.

Tags: Sam Sethi, entrepreneur, BlogNation, Web 2.0, TechCrunch UK, Mike Arrington, Vecosys

Tags: Tod Sacerdoti, Brightroll, video advertising

Tags: Tod Sacerdoti, Brightroll

In the last two years he has also co-founded Tyroo.com, India’s second-largest fully self serve ad network, Zoomtra.com - a Travel meta search and incubating entreprenuers with ideas on digital business under the group name of Smile Interactive Technology Group.

In this interview, Manish explains about Quasar’s business models, the advantage online media agencies have over tradtional advertising agencies and the challenges in advertising via blogs.

Tags: Manish Vij, Quasar Media

Tags: Revision3, David Prager, Hatfactory, Diggnation

More information at:
Symantec.com

(more…)

Tags: Symantec

Transcript:

Host: Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Guest: David Hornik - August Capital

David Hornik – August Capital
The reason I should care is that this is the new television. I just am absolutely convinced this isn’t a fad, no. There will be changes in the landscape. I do not think that it is a case that because MySpace is the winner now that it will always be the winner.

Announcer
This is PodTech.net. Welcome to MarketingVoices featuring the fresh perspectives of innovative marketing leaders and examining how social media is changing marketing throughout the world. Here is your host, Jennifer Jones.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Hi, this is Jennifer Jones and today on MarketingVoices I have a gentleman who I adore whose name is David Hornik. He is the leading VC in social media. He is here or I am here with him at August Capital. He is a partner, he is very well known for all of his work with his blog and he was just telling about video blog he does that I am going to let him talk about in a second but without anymore ado, David, welcome to MarketingVoices.

David Hornik – August Capital
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So tell me about Venture Investing in Social Media. That is basically who you are, what you do is, well, not all of what you do, but a lot of what you do and you are on a lot of boards, six to be exact, why and what is hot and what is not about Venture Investing today in Social Media?

David Hornik – August Capital
Sure. Well, it is abundantly clear that Social Media is hot and so the big question is, is there something hot in social media that is worth investing and those are very different questions and so there has been lots of discussions up and down Sand Hill Road what I refer to as the ‘VC Ghetto’. Lots of people trying to figure out “Okay, all these companies, lots of excitement, what is that excitement about?” And I think the answer is: the excitement is about hundreds of millions of users on social networks that are broad like MySpace, or are specific like a Dogster or a Flickster where huge numbers of likeminded people are getting together to engage in a conversation and that, to my mind, that is what is so exciting about this space and it is why marketers and advertisers and venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike should all take note because to my mind, the entire web is sort of migrating to two paradigms.

There is a search paradigm and there is a social networking paradigm and Google is showing that there is incredible money to be made, incredible opportunity in search because when people are looking for something, guess what, there are looking to do something and then there is a social networking piece which is people are interested in engaging with each other in some interesting way within the context of the Internet and these social networking companies, and I use that very broadly, then allow them the context to do that. And in some instances it is around a particular thing. I think that we will see increasingly specific social networks. Recently Maya’s Mom launched which is doing Moms and in particular not just moms but moms with young kids. That is the focus having been the dad of young kids when you are a mom or a dad of young kids, it is all you think about.

And suddenly, that is your social network and then guess what? When your kids are in middle school, I suspect there will be a social network of kids with middle schoolers because I am not so interested in the diapers any more, thankfully. I am now interested in Gee, hormones and my kids hating me these that — it did not seem relevant at that time so I think that that is what is interesting and that is what we are seeing and that is what I am trying to calibrate as I see all these companies being created and lots of energy and lots of users and lots of growth which are the meaningful businesses, which are the meaningful channels for marketers, which are — and what is interesting in the space?

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Okay, so taking off on that point, so what is interesting to marketers? So why should marketers care about this? I get this question about “Oh, it is a passing fad,” which I definitely do not think it is. Obviously neither do you, but help me help them understand why they should really care and what they should do about it.

David Hornik – August Capital
Well that is – I think the reason they should care is that this is the new television. I just am absolutely convinced – this is not a fad now. There will be changes in the landscape. I do not think that it is a case that because MySpace is the winner now that it always be the winner. That is not going to be the case and in the same way that ABC used to have a great Friday night line up that everybody watched and suddenly everybody watched CBS and ABC was in the dumps. I think we will see the same sorts of things in the social networking space and this new media space where different companies come and go, they are dominant — there is dominant platforms, they incorporate other things I mean I think that is what we are going to see but if you look at what is happening with people’s minds here, if you look at what kids in particular are spending their time on, they are spending their time on the web.

They are not spending their time watching television and so if you want to get at these people and if you want to get to the thirteen-year-olds who are going to be ones making their decisions about what toothpaste they have, what deodorant they wear, what clothing — how they are influenced? All of these things that are important marketing questions. You need to be in the social networks. It is where the kids are and it is not just where they are in the sense of okay, well, advertise cigarettes in the playground, I do not mean that. I just mean this is what people care about.

And so you get brand credibility by associating yourselves with things that are meaningful and reflect well upon your brand and what these social networks now represent are the things that kids, and increasingly adults, find meaningful and by associating your brand, or by focusing your brand on those sorts of experiences then you have a very high impact. I will give you one quick example to that fact. There is a company called Dogster. Dogster is a social network for your dogs, I mean literary you –-

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, you are not an investor in this, right?

David Hornik – August Capital
I am not an investor in Dogster

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Yeah, so (Voice Overlap).

David Hornik – August Capital
Right, absolutely. I am a big fan of Ted who started it and the team, I think they have done really smart things. They were very early. They understood that it is not just about a social network that you talk about where you are out looking for a girlfriend, it is a social network and maybe frankly through your dogs you are still out looking for a girlfriend and it is a social network about dog lovers. And so you are looking for a dog loving girlfriend, not just a generic girlfriend and that is what this stuff is all about. You go and you create your profile of your dog and then your dog makes dog friends and friends you know so it is my Schnauzer and look it is your (Inaudible) friend and over a million users, I believe it is over a million users.

But more importantly, if you are a dog-food company or a pet insurance company, or in fact Disney when they were re-launching Lady and the Tramp or may be it is Lady and the Tramp 2, or Lady and the Tramp 7, I do not know — when they went to Dogster and spent a lot of money advertising in Dogster because it was unambiguous what people on Dogster liked. They liked dogs, now they may like also Lexus, but they definitely like dogs. So if you are IMs, started Dogster. So that is what I think is exciting about this stuff.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Okay so you mentioned that if people do not get there then — well you did not quite say it this way, but I have talked to enough people that are sort of sensible, if you do not get social media then you are really being stupid. So how do you get people over their fear of social media – I mean you have been a blogger, since you were the first venture blogger and you have been a blogger for I do not know what — five years?

David Hornik – August Capital
A little over four years.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Okay so you are not afraid but how do you — I deal with a lot of CMOs, how do you get them over their fear and just say “Look, do it, I mean get into it.” Which is what I say, but I would love to hear your advice.

David Hornik – August Capital
Well, I think that there are two different messages and I think that one message is what is scaring everybody and is wrong-headed and then one message is how I approach social media. It is how I approached venture blog when I started and why I now have VentureCast; the Podcast and which from the — and just as an aside, from the venture capital industry, and four years ago, it was heresy. You do not talk about the venture capital industry and remain sort of mystifying to many of my brethren in and around the venture capital industry as to “What are you — are you talking about this stuff?” Like “How is that to your benefit?”

So the one camp of marketing to social media says “This is all about authenticity.” It is unfiltered, you just let it all flow and you will get lots of goodwill from saying whatever you say. I think that is a huge mistake. I think it is a complete misunderstanding. The other version is: be authentic and genuine but understand that this is a marketing channel and like any other message, you have to understand your market, you have to understand those to whom you are speaking and then you have to create the message to reflect that.

So, my Podcast and my blog are intended for entrepreneurs. It is intended for technologists and people on — so I am talking about things that they care about. I am not — yes, I periodically, inevitably talk about my children in the context to that or whatever, but at least in theory, it is about stuff that they care about and ways that they care about and explaining things they care about.

So I think as a marketer, you just have to focus on these things from that context. If you look at a MySpace, it is not the Wild West, I mean it is in a certain sense, you have not seen it before, on the other hand, when we went from broadcast television to cable television, it was not as if the History Channel was some new beast. It is just that when you advertise on the History Channel for something that might relate to that market, then you need to focus your advertising on the thing that those people are watching, that History Channel care about and the same thing for CNBC or the Disney Channel.

So I just think that what has happened is, we have created these incredible networks where we know a lot about the people who are using them and we can segment them incredibly accurately and then focus our message to those people and then the question is what message is effective, and I do think that a more genuine and a more natural message, over a more fun and entertaining kind of out there message works better in the social networks but that does not mean that you are just sort of going out on a limb. It just means learn from the past. You do not produce the corporate spokesperson on the social network.

That does not work. You do not lie about what you are doing or pretend you are someone you are not, that does not work either. In the web, they find out. This is a bad idea, so find the right spokesperson who makes sense in the context of those new social media and use that person to get across a message that makes sense in the context of that particular demographic so…

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
So, do you think of yourself in that way, that is August spokesperson that we know not really — but I mean — but really — you are talking for August…

David Hornik – August Capital
My partners are wincing, “My God, David as spokesperson, God help us.” No, I think I am very happy to represent August. It is a great firm and has a wonderful history and I often talked about, but I always talk about, “Well, my partner Dave was the only private investor. Microsoft still sits on that board. He is a really smart guy.” I do not pretend that I did Microsoft, I mean I have been — just have not been in the firm that long, but do I represent August a lot? Sure, I think that the work — that people know a lot about August and know a lot about the things that are interesting to us, probably by virtue of me having spent a lot of time writing and talking and focusing on getting out the word.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
And I know it is true. Okay, so what about the future of all this stuff? What do you as a soothsayer, as a fortuneteller sort of look ahead and say “Okay, what is going to happen?”

David Hornik – August Capital
What is going to happen? Well I have been saying for quite some time actually that social networks, this idea of social networks where you show up and experience and say “These people are my friends” or “these people are my family” or “these are people I care about” where you put yourself in a social context, so in MySpace it is –- and MySpace is actually very interesting because not only do you put yourself in the social context, these are my explicit friends - Jack, Jane, Sue whoever physical people, but what was interesting about MySpace and how it emerged was then you also created your friends, your “friends” that were Sony and Nokia and Bill Clinton and you name the experience - musicians and foods and those became your friends and they have really when and what is meant by that more than anything is this is part of my identity.

If you want to fully understand me then here are the people with whom I associate, here are the brands with which I resonate, here are the politicians for whom I would vote, here are the hair sprays that I would care to enjoy, you know, name it.

So I believe that that sort of infrastructure, this idea that you put, you contextualize yourself and — when you get to a web experience, will permeate everything, I just do not — I think that okay, maybe I do not want to be a absolute, but I think the vast majority of experiences you will come to and they will be better suited by having the context of your friends or your interests, or your likes and so social networking broadly speaking, will be the underpinnings of everything and maybe it is for picking movies and now you have Flickster which is a young person network of people talking about movies but frankly you know Netflix is trying to figure out this as well. Who recommends what movies, who are your friends and what are they like, so you can watch them.

So name the area. There are social networks now emerging around investing, there are social networks obviously the whole dating space has only been a social network, it just has not been described that way, so I think social networks are the underpinnings of all future experiences, non-search experiences and even search is becoming a social — there is social search.

So, I think that is the thing to look for as it emerges and then from a brand prospector or from a broad marketing perspective, then how does that impact your ability to spread the good word and does that mean you have to find the influencers or does that mean that you have to find the influential networks or does it mean that you have to create something so creative and fun that people embrace it and spread it themselves?

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Awesome. Okay, final question is — I know you are a busy guy, a Second Life –- what are your opinion as that? You have an Avatar of Second Life? Does August have a representation in Second Life? What do you think of Second Life?

David Hornik – August Capital
We are not investors. I do not — I have to admit I do not have an Avatar. It would be very interesting to see what happens in Second Life. I am still waiting to determine whether this is a mainstream experience. I mean, from an investor standpoint and from a marketer standpoint, the big question is one of either massive breadth where you can get to hundreds of millions of people and therefore the market is so large that getting a small fraction of it will be valuable, or you are reaching a vertical that is so valuable that you can get to a bigger chunk of it and extract more value from it and therefore it is worth chasing that vertical. I think it is an open question about Second Life. Is it a mass phenomenon? I do not — it is not yet, so there are indicators that maybe it will be and maybe you and I will have Avatars and maybe you do have an Avatar.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
No, not yet. I am looking at it though.

David Hornik – August Capital
Right. Well my mom has an Avatar and then we will say “Okay, look, I am going to go (Inaudible) with my mom and Second Life, fine, it shall track me down.” But has not got there yet. So, is it that it is incredibly valuable vertical because the people who do it are fanatical about it, therefore by marketing to those people in that environment, you will connect that much better with them that it is worth it? Or will it cross the chasm, become this mass experience and then we will have brands that need to be represented and I say brands loosely but any marketer if you look at Larry Lessig is a law professor, he — who studies and focuses on digital media, he is very interested in Second Life and he has lectures in Second Life and he experiences — recently that have the Creative Commons Party and he was in Germany but he participated in Second Life.

So he missed the First Life but he was there in Second Life. If there are more Larry Lessigs out there then it could be an incredible emerging phenomenon. I will not opine, I am a big fan of the guys who are building it and that would be great for them if it happened and in many ways it would be great for all of us because it would give us another channel, another interesting way to interact both as people and as products and brands and marketers.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Very good, okay, so this has been David Hornik of August Capital partner and I want to make sure that he gives you his blog and his video blog addresses, so go for it.

David Hornik – August Capital
All right, well the blog is ventureblog.com. I have to admit it is still only audio. I have an ongoing debate. My podcast is called VentureCast and if you go to iTunes, you can search for VentureCast and find us or if you go to gruntmedia.com, you can find it as well. Craig Syverson who is my co-host on VentureCast is at Grunt Media and let me know if you like — give me feedback. This media is about feedback, so folks who are listening have things they want me to talk about or they want me to write about, let me know.

Jennifer Jones - PodTech
Yeah, know it is great because I — the only way that I have really been able to get feedback is through a survey that I have done instead of the old technology survey and it is really hard. I am always asking for feedback too, so again, thank you, David Hornik of August Capital and this has been Jennifer Jones and so until next week may all the voices you hear be MarketingVoices.

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Tags: David Hornik, August Capital, Six Apart, social media

Tags: Ecast, David Schmidt, Joshua Pollack

Transcript:
Host: Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Guest: Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Welcome to this edition of Thought Leaders, where we bring you candid conversations with the people whose research and writing are guiding both the buyers and suppliers of IT Solution. I’m Jim Leach. Today we are joined by Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder of Tier 1 Research. Andy is unique in market research field in that he is part Wall Street analyst and part IT Industry analyst. He applies his experience on Wall Street through his research and how IT companies are turning customer solution into shareholder value. Thanks for joining us on Thought Leaders Andy.

Andrew Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Hey, happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Can you put on your Wall Street Analyst hat first and give our listeners your view on the hosting industry? How big is it? How do you segment it? Where are the growth areas?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Sure. Well, from the Wall Street perspective, there were a ton of people that got burned back in the Internet bubble that looked at Exodus as the be-all-end-all company in the hosting sector and then there was Acomi and all these other companies that had monstrous billion dollar valuations, and obviously those all came down in fact, to zero to something probably above zero.

So, in a couple of years that ensued since then, it was tough for people to really understand why would I go back to that industry, it was part of the bubble. And fortunately now, we’ve had a five year - half a decade separation to where people can come back and revisit these.

So, that’s because of the Web 2.0 movement that gives a lot of prospects. BusinessWeek article from a couple of weeks ago; we have a $12 billion industry in hosting that people still don’t necessarily know how to look at. There is two ways to look at it. One is the old way which is the — there is data centers, and that’s a co-location business. There’s people with dedicated hosting that actually own the gear and it’s actually a single device or multiple single devices for specific a client. Then there is shared infrastructure; shared infrastructure used to just be defined as shared hosting, but now as you look, it includes utility computing and virtualized hosting. That’s the old way to look at it.

The form factor — way to look at it is not how we believe investors would want anyone to look at it. The new way should be, who is the buyer of the services that are being sold in this $12 billion hosting industry; it’s the consumer which buys blog services, media publishing, and sharing tools; it’s the small business that buys different software, the service applications, or host their own version of an appliance as an application. Then there’s large enterprises that have big needs for disaster recovery, big needs for facilities, for lots of their analyst applications.

So, the right way to look at it is by customer type that’s buying; and that’s how we are starting to segment our industry at least, in our revenue view of this $12 billion sector. But now that’s the right way to look at it, as people are starting to understand that and understand how these business models are working. The investors have started to come back, and most of the stocks in this sector that are public, and what we’ve seen are doubling over the last year, or at least they are more formalization in how their capital structures worked. So, I think investors have more of a reason to come back to this sector as well as a healthier sector to come back to.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Very interesting; so let’s dig into those buyer segments a little bit, the consumers, small business and large enterprises. Where are the growth areas in those segments, are they all growing at about the same rate or are some of the areas hotter than others?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
The consumer sector interestingly, is actually being driven by free services, which are advertising based. So, it’s actually a different revenue model than people buying actually for the services whether it’s a blog service, whether it’s a shared hosting account, whether it’s an email account.

So that business model is completely different and there’s tremendous growth in online advertising because of the benefits that you can have from better targeting who you are trying to reach with your ad. As you get into the small business, those companies are finally understanding that they can take advantage of the applications that larger enterprises have used because they can buy them in a ‘software as a service’ delivery model, which gives it a per user, per seat, per month, pricing structure, and lets it be approachable by both the user as well as the buyer from the small business.

So that’s the biggest growth area as it relates to hosting. The large enterprise has already decided whether they’re going to do something in-house or whether they are going to do it on an outsourced basis. That usually has a five year cyclical nature and I think we are coming back to the marketplace — we are coming back to the part in that cycle, where the enterprises want to be outsourcing more. And interestingly the dynamic that’s hitting at the same time now is the availability of so many enterprise applications through this ‘software as a service’ model, which is causing enterprises to need less data center space in some cases, or if their delivery model is to be a ‘software as a service’ company, a lot of these companies are taking on more infrastructure.

So there’s as many companies growing huge in a large enterprise as it relates to their hosting needs, as there are companies who have a significantly less need. So a good large enterprise is probably the slowest growth sector but it’s more about who you’re targeting that large enterprise group.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
So the buyers of Web hosting services are starting to segment themselves into these different categories of consumer and small business, large enterprises. Are you also seeing a similar type of segmentation in the Web hosting providers? Are they trying to deliver different types of services and to meet the needs of these different segments?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yes, that’s a great question. It’s been the changeover from the seller having the power to the buyer having the power; and there’s equally as many companies that get this change, to the companies that don’t. So, the companies that get this change are offering so many services on a needed basis, or on a pre-user basis; that’s how the buyers are interested in buying right now. As you go down across those different segments from large enterprise down to consumer, the consumer is becoming so used to having free services, and they are happy to understand that advertisements are what’s allowing them to get that service for free.

You no longer have people interested in buying a software package at ‘Best Buy’ or ‘Circuit City’ or having them download software from the Web, you’re wanting them to just be able to drive right in and use the service and pay for it; then again, as you go up into the small business and large enterprise to be able to use that and pay for that on a pre-user basis, and above and beyond that the ones who really get this change that’s happened, understand that you are personalizing and verticalizing their offerings; so, not just offering a utility computing platform but tailoring it towards a particular vertical market such as financial services or retail or healthcare.

Whatever the application is that’s going to reside on top of an infrastructure, it’s going to have a better growth story behind it and a better traction and adoption if it’s tailored towards this specific vertical market. Those are the companies who really get what’s going on right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Or in a sense that the consumer segment is driving the business segment; and from an IT supplier perspective, a number of the biggest hosting companies, firms like IBM, EDS, big telcos like AT&T and Verizon, they grew up in the business sector. Are firms like those big traditional outsourcers going to have trouble surviving in this new market? Do they have to regroup?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
They definitely need to regroup. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they have a problem surviving. I hope a lot of these mega-companies lay off a lot of people that hopefully go and start a lot of new interesting entrepreneurial companies. The entire reason that the consumer is driving the innovations in the enterprise services world is that it’s easier to adopt something that’s free. I mean you can get mass adoption of something that’s free, and you get a lot of people that battle-test different applications that are online.

So is Microsoft ready to offer their entire Office suite in an online format yet? Sure they’re probably ready, but will they? They won’t until they have to. Unfortunately, there’s companies from Google all the way on down to the companies like Zoho that are launching spreadsheets and word processing documents online, and making that something that Microsoft will have to react to; same thing can be said for the outsourcers on your question. If these services are geared towards being tuned with expensive consultants and expensive engagements, it’s not necessary that that’s wrong, there’s the need for that personalization.

They’re using the tools that have been battle-tested in the consumer world. You are able to more quickly and easily adopt, customize, personalize, and verticalize all these applications and the enterprises outside do think that IBM is at a disadvantage as a company, but hopefully the IBMs, EDSs, the CSEs will use to their advantage the divisions that are focused on looking at those technologies to their advantage for their enterprise accounts. So again, I wouldn’t go as far as to say they’re in trouble; I would go as far as to say they are disadvantaged relative to companies that do get to work closer to both the cutting edge consumer side as well as the small business side.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Let’s talk a little about the startups that you alluded to, that it might start emerging over time. I know you keep an eye on that part of the marketplace. Have you seen anything interesting with the startups that you think could have a big impact on the broader Web hosting industry?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yeah, I think social networking is essentially the heart of what the Web 2.0 movement stands for; it’s the ability for anyone to interact with any content and share it with anyone that they want to, in any format that they want to. Whatever website you might go to, whatever application you might interact with, it should afford you the opportunity to use that in a community fashion whether it’s reading a news article online, whether it’s buying a product online, whether it’s writing a blog entry online; everything that you might do is something that should be something that can exist in a social network.

So, whether it’s the social network software makers themselves that actually pioneer this into all of the enterprise applications is yet to be seen - kind of like business analytics, that’s the sector that still exists today with business objects and a lot of mega companies still – essentially analytics need to be applied to every application. We think social networking is the latest thing out of the startup movement and needs to be applied to almost every website, every application that exists.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
It’s always a pleasure to get a chance to spend some time and talk with you Andy, I really appreciate you being a part of Thought Leaders. Let me asked you one last question.

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
Sure.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
There has been a lot of press coverage recently about an impending battle between Microsoft and Google. Are the battle lines really being drawn between these two companies, and if they are, who’s going to win and what will it mean for the IT industry?

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
When the company is afforded evaluation like Google has, and is simultaneously able to spend increasingly mega amounts of money and be rewarded for that, that’s a hard monster for anyone to compete with. Fortunately, there are a couple players in the world like Microsoft that have dollars that they can go and compete.

So, Microsoft committed a couple billion extra dollars in this current year to go build the platform to compete. But what’s really happening is, who can build up a complete platform that anyone in the world can plug an application into and be able to like Google, help monetize that in return for access to this monster platform. Microsoft, I think is going to do the same thing; so, I guess, I do believe they are at battle completely and wholly. Do I think Microsoft has the ability to win? They have the chance to win, but this is Google’s game to lose at this point. The longer the market continues to afford Google, evaluation, to the extent that they have it for putting together this monstrosity of the computing platform, it will become almost untouchable.

So, everyone in the world that wants to have an application — and again, this comes back to the hosting sector and say, if I wanted — do I want to go build my own complete resource, or do I want to potentially tap that into a Microsoft platform or a Google platform or a Yahoo platform or an Amazon - eBay could, on down the line. Fortunately, the hosting companies that get this, again are offering utility computing, so you can hopefully tap into an unlimited amount of resource, so you can serve all of the people that want to come visit your site. But specific to Google and Microsoft if I had to pick a winner, I’m still picking Google at this point, but if you had to compete against anybody - if I’m Google, I don’t want to compete against Microsoft, if I’m Microsoft I don’t want to compete against Google; its going to be an interesting battle. Google’s my pick for the winner right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Thanks again to Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder, Tier 1 Research, and thanks to you, our listeners for joining us on this edition of Thought Leaders.

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Tags: Thought Leaders, SAVVIS, Andy Schroepfer, Tier 1 Research

Tags: first amendment, KSFO, free speech, Inside Digital Media, Phil Leigh, David Wittenstein, Dow Lohnes

Tags: Intel, CES 2007, John Furrier, Sean Maloney

Veer wanted me to talk about podcasting, not the nuts and bolts, but where it’s at and its relevance to the radio paradigm. That’s a juicy opportunity, I thought to myself, and so found myself making the difficult journey to North Mumbai (needs planning and a sort of instinctive feel for which combination of segments and modes of transport make it the least painful overall). (more…)

Tags: Control Room, Live 8

Tags: Wallop

Here are the actors in this Billion Dollar Baby:

“Our partnership with Google underscores News Corp’s continued evolution to become a powerful force in the digital media marketplace. To have come this far and gained this much momentum in just over a year is truly remarkable,” said Peter Chernin, President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation. “This is an exciting time in our history as a forward thinking media company and this is just the first of many steps we plan to take with Google. We look forward to expanding our relationship into many new areas over years to come.”

“We believe that our innovative technologies will be of real benefit to Fox Interactive Media’s growing number of users,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “MySpace.com is a widely acknowledged leader in user-generated content and incorporating search and advertising furthers our mission of making the world’s information universally accessible and useful.”

“This deal is the next step in our evolution as a significant interactive player,” said Ross Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media. “Forming a strategic partnership with one of the most innovative companies in the world to expand our business together, monetize our platforms effectively and leverage our combined scale will provide substantial growth for our businesses.”

“This agreement demonstrates our commitment to bring the same innovation to monetizing user-generated content that we brought to search advertising,” said Omid Kordestani, Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Business Development of Google. “We look forward to other opportunities to partner with News Corp. to the benefit of its community.”

Danny Sullivan, the original authority on “Search” reports the following …

“I’m at our Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose at the moment, so I don’t have time to do a long post on the news, which I’m still digesting. I’ve taken a number of phone calls on it already, so I’ll provided what I’ve given to some other reporters who have asked.

Big win for Google? Sure. Lots of traditional players are worried about MySpace, even if the site itself isn’t earning that much now, from what I understand. This gets Google in, keeps Yahoo and Microsoft out, and might be a cheap payment to protect Google’s front in the social networking wars. In other words, even if Google doesn’t make a net profit off of MySpace, the intangibles could be worth the cost. The closer ties also give Google deeper insight into the MySpace traffic, since it will soon see everyone going to these pages. That will be very helpful for Google if it wants to do a renewed social networking effort of its own.

Big loss for Microsoft and Yahoo? Maybe, maybe not. If social networking is hot, both of them — unlike Google — have very healthy communities in several international markets. In fact, that potentially could have been an issue in trying to win MySpace. Revenue-wise, Yahoo indirectly provides ads to MySpace, but current revenue doesn’t appear to be substantial, plus Yahoo already would have been giving a big chunk of this to whomever is the unknown middleman. ”

Look for more from John Battle - he wrote the book about Google called Search. Of course there will be something from Mike Arrington from Techcrunch.com

The Google / Viacom deal is good news for PodTech.net and all the emerging new video content developers.

Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks has agreed to distribute clips from its cable networks over Google Inc.’s advertising network, in a test of what could become a new economic model for Web-based video delivery, the companies said on Sunday.

From the respected Ad Age magazine…”A study is about to give Madison Avenue a fresh pummeling: McKinsey & Co. is telling a host of major marketers that by 2010, traditional TV advertising will be one-third as effective as it was in 1990.”

I agree but I think they are off by 5 years. Fact TV isn’t as effective as the net. New media: blogs, podcasting, and videoblogs will lead the way toward a new ad model.

See also:
AlwaysOn

Tags: YouTube, AlwaysOn, Stanford