Monthly Archives: December 2005

Online Advertising in 2006

Marcel Reichart asks how big the german online advertising market will be in 2006, citing a post by John Battelle that talks about a 32% increase in the US.
Interesting question that is, but I think one thing is important to note in relation to where the growth will come from. Some part of it will obviously be from bigger companies, but a lot of that will go the route of performance marketing budgets, not standard CPM bookings. There will be more creative solutions and more measured ones as this is just what is possible on the internet. A good part of the growth will come from new entrants in the advertising space though, again enabled by the internet allowing for new markets to be built and allowing for syndication and aggregation. This is the game we are playing with Ormigo. Enabling new players to enter this market is also what fueled a lot of growth with Google and the like. Suddenly Joe from around the corner can advertise, and sometimes even profitably. All this space will become more professional, and there will be more competition and the local players will have to improve how they manage things. It’s an interesting time to be in advertising as things are changing rapidly and accountability is increasing. Online advertising is sales they say, and I’d extend that to internet connected advertising, or advertising with a live backchannel is sales.

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Reuters Lab brings us cool stuff

This labs thing is starting to become a common thing to do and now Heiko pointed me to Reuters Labs, which have some interesting little apps for you to try out. There is for example an Apple Widget to get quotes and news, or podcasts, or a system to integrate a video feed from them on your site. Building your news site gets easier and easier.

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Feed Icons are out

Nico pointed me to Feed Icons which is being established as the standard icon for feeds and it looks nice. I suggest everyone using it because this will start to get noticed and people will understand what to do with it.

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DLD – Digital Lifestyle Day

Thanks to Heiko I now have a confirmed place at this years Digital Lifestyle Day 2006. The list of speakers is impressive and I am looking forward to some good discussions.

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About Knowledge Universe

I just finished an article in the newest issue of Brand Eins and this one was about Mike Milken, the guy that quasi invented the junk bond and made billions in the process. The interesting thing is that after having been to prison for insider-trading, market manipulation and the like, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, given 18 months to live and survived. This seems to have changed his life and he has since started several foundations. As the article pointed out, he is currently revolutionizing the medical research market and really speeding things up. FasterCures is one of his ventures, and The Milken Family Foundation is focusing both on medicine and on the other part, education.
I can totally relate to his idea that education will gain evermore importance in the future, but I have to admit that he is thinking big. He has founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, together with his brother and Larry Ellison, with a total of $500 million it seems! Ellison is said to be a silent partner that just has access to Milken for an hour a week … including his rolodex which is impressive to say the least.
This company was a $1.75 billion empire in 2001 and had 14k employees. You can take a look at this Forbes article on KU, because as you will have seen if you clicked the link, Knowledge Universe’s website has nothing but a contact eMail. They don’t really like publicity. For some people they are even starting to be too big. A report from the Arizona State University from April 2004 entitled Knowledge Universe and Virtual Schools: Educational Breakthrough or Digital RAid on the Public Treasury? goes a bit deeper into finding out how the company is structured. What Milken seems to be banking on is that human capital is both untapped enough and not included enough in the balance sheets of company, something my knowledge management tutors would love to hear.
If you want to read a bit more about KU quasi from their web site, check out this page from Luna Design who seem to have done an earlier relaunch and still have that in their portfolio. :)
All this gets really interesting if you take all the basic idea about web 2.0 into account, the basic idea that we have the internet now, that it can be used to connect things. KU is already using that via subsidiaries in tracking what children are learning and what their status is, updating the courses on a learning device on a regular basis with the most fitting learning material. This can be tracked through the lifetime of a person on this earth and learning will be a central part of life in the future. A billion and billion dollar industry. You can interconnect all those companies and really find out how people learn, how they improve, what they find, notice who the major intelligent ones are, even push them in the right direction if you are evil. But all in all knowledge about knowledge and knowledge creation is a very powerful knowledge.
It’s a business that is challenging enough for somebody who invented junk bonds and believes in technology. It should be something to take notice of.

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What Blogs can do for you

Ralf Beuker, my tutor for my strategy course for the MBA, has written a wonderful post entitledThank You for 2005!. If you ever wondered what Blogs can do for you, I suggest reading that one. We actually need more examples like this because what Blogs can do for you is very hard to explain sometimes. One thing that might nicely sum it up that Ralf very effectively built his Me Brand. I am looking forward to reading Ralf’s post for 2006.

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Google Employees Trusting

Checking out the GOOG insider transactions list gives you an interesting list of who is selling how much. Over 8% of the insider holding were sold in the last 6 months. Congratulations to all those selling. But look at who is selling (next to all the big guys who are selling in the millions.)
Building up trust funds seems to be the rave at Google at the moment. :)
Check this out:


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Steve Balmer Remixed

We all remember his Developers, Developers, Developers speach, and now it has been remixed. To be expected :)

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StructuredBlogging and the Classifieds Market

When I was at Les Blogs this month I talked a bit with Salim Ismail from PubSub about the now launched StructuredBlogging initiative and mentioned to him that this would be playing really well with an idea we are currently following with Ormigo. Now I see Jeff Clavier (didn’t manage to talk to him at Les Blogs, damn) posted about StructuredBlogging. This in itself isn’t too interesting, as I already mentioned that I believe in the general idea in my predictions for 2006, but … Read this part:
Mike Arrington from TechCrunch fame, and also Edgeio – the stealth project he and Keith Teare have been working on – briefly mentioned that supporting a forthcoming Classifieds micro-format will be part of the roadmap of the company. I should use this occasion to disclose that I am also involved in Edgeio – more on all this later.
This seems to be very close to what I talked about with Salim Ismail. In general what StructuredBlogging already hints at, is the option to describe divers things in a standard way and this can be applied to the classifieds market. If you then add something like the corporate structure that VISA is using, being open about performance, letting everyone add stuff, everyone code how they get their stuff out (e.g. my stuff first) and handle the billing on a lead basis (to remove the click fraud problem), then this gets amazingly interesting. Henning and me did already set up a very big performance marketing system in Germany in our previous positions, outbidding Google in several places, so we know what the publishers really are looking for and it is not all about money. An open service will add a whole new competitive layer that Google can’t possibly match, meaning that you don’t even have to have the best performance, just one that is close enough. We know that lots of companies and publishers out there will be amazingly interested in something like this. They all want an AdSense but they all don’t quite know how to build it and it actually doesn’t make sense for them to build it.
Adam Trachtenberg gives a similar hint by just thinking out loud about web services for classifieds pricing structures. The entire system is to a large part a challenge in corporate structure, especially as you need something above and beyond a technological edge. VISA is in my mind a very good example of such a structure. In the end it is about being open and about not being seen as the one making all the profit. Just enable others to make a profit, and make a tiny amount in processing fees. It will create a real market where only those that pay well and perform well will be able to survive. Tough market, but fair market, and one we believe Ormigo can survive and prosper in, which is why am starting to think out loud about this. We named the system AdCloud for now. :)
My fellow Corante Web Hub member Alex Banrett has some more thoughts on StructuredBlogging tying it in with AttentionTrust. Pete adds more thoughts of his own.

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Shipping real stuff

The stuff us software people do is really really simple if you look at it. I mean we are not shipping any physical stuff. Or build physical stuff. Just think about the people that build high speed trains, power stations, aircraft carriers, … . Ok, you get the idea. But this is all put in a totally new perspective when a software guy gets into the real world shipping business and cuts his packaging time down from 3 minutes to 35 seconds with fun software and hardware. Great stuff at How to Ship Anything by Joel on Software.

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