Now that is a good one! 2 hours ago Robert Scoble drove with Elon Musk in the first product Tesla and Jason Calacanis was trying to keep up in his Corvette. They streamed the entire fun on the Nokia N95 streaming live in Qik. Looking forward to chatting about stuff like that with Nokia mid next month, when I am in London to talk about the future mobile phone (3-5 years) that Nokia should bring out. Thanks for the invite Nokia. Looking forward to it.
Here is Robert’s Video:
http://qik.com/player.swf?streamname=343300a30f8145b5a807e69004b14645&vid=22264&playback=false&polling=false&user=scobleizer&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous
Here is Jason’s Video:
http://qik.com/player.swf?streamname=2e0be6376dcc4be0814746ea34d1d141&vid=22262&playback=false&polling=false&user=jasoncalacanis&userlock=true&islive=&username=anonymous
Monthly Archives: February 2008
Calacanis and Scoble Stream Tesla Test on QIK
Splitting up the Advertising Atom
I wrote about the ad market needing a change in July of last year, and now Emre Sokullu explained the idea very well in his post entitled Plan B for Microsoft: Split up the Advertising Atom.
He take the Microhoo deal as a starting point, thinking about how Microsoft can beat Google, but it’s not really something that is unique to Microhoo. The suggestion he has is something that is bigger than Google, bigger than any advertising system out there. Think VISA for advertising.
His idea is best explained via the picture below from his post:
The idea is that you split everything up, and create it around a standard so that the different silos can interact. The cool thing is that this is how our AdServer at Ormigo is structured, first because it makes for an amazingly efficient ad server that runs on Amazon’s Web Services Infrastructure, and it provides for some interesting new possibilities.
Our products that we advertise are within different objects stored on S3 (inventory silo) and the Placement Silo is really our AdServer that holds all the information about the Placements. The very cool thing about the above model is that you can have different inventories fill the same placement, or add on top of that different parameter silos that take care of optimization. Thing content match or behavioural targeting.
The cool thing is that you would enable Open Innovation. Of course there are lots of things still to be thought out to make it really open, meaning you make it a VISA model in which everybody can use everything and can do what they want with it but they will need to adhere to a set of rules and standards. This might make prices more transparent, and open up for real competition, which will not be good for everyone. But the thing is that it enables is a really open market place where different people can write a Placement Silo for TV ads that suddenly grab the right Ads from the Inventory Silo, optimized through a Facebook Parameter Silo to only show ads my Friends like. Who gets what? Who pays what? What about the wining and dining part of advertising? Lots of things not settled, but worth thinking about.
Blog Schnitzel Jagd
The guys from Hitflip started another Blogschnitzeljagd. I learned about it here. The idea is a little hunt for maps on different sites, which you then link to and can win prices. This of course leads to a very healthy page rank boost for the sites and it’s a fun little game. Based on the prizes you can win I of course need to participate. Here are the different maps:
There you go. That’s the list. 27″ would be nice 
The Borg Complain about Microhoo
The cries are going back and forth and it’s fun to watch. Of course we all know the offer done by Microsoft, being close to $45 billion for Yahoo! Google obviously couldn’t let it rest and now has an official response entitled: Yahoo! and the future of the internet.
Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC?
Like Michael I can more or less smile at that because with Google having a 40% market share of internet advertising revenues, something like Microhoo would only be good competition against Google, which they of course don’t like. The bigger question really is how to integrate all of them and there I am with John Battelle with the idea that Microsoft should become more like GE. They are already on their way but they can push it. Let’s see how this one will continue.
Of course now Microsoft already did their counterpounch just if you care 
The Cash Cow called Telebid
I will now try to explain to you the cash cow that is Telebid, a new company backed by Wellington Partners. For now, I do believe, that they are all very happy indeed, even though user churn is likely high, and there is a risk of being put into the gambling pot. But let me explain.
Telebid is a new kind of auction in that you can say “Bid”, meaning you pay 0.50 EURs and the bid on the product increases 0,10 EURs. So yes, each bid costs. The auctions are all timed, and when somebody bids, the remaining time increases a bit, meaning that an auction can run for a very long time. Then there are some special things like a “Fixed Price Auction”, meaning that the last bidder remaining, with nobody bidding again, will win, and get the product for a fixed price.
All this sounds very weird indeed but if you do the math on a few products you will be utterly amazed. All the products in the system are made available by Telebid. So let’s do a little calculation.
A nice item is an LCD TV and Telebid might be giving that one away for a fixed price of 99 EURs, even though it would normally cost 1200 EURs. Guess what, that sounds like a very attractive deal and so lots of people start bidding on the TV. In the end, the final bid is 280 EURs. Still looks very attractive. But let’s do the math.
The final bidder now paid 99 EURs, plus his bids. As each bid increases the price by 10 cents and prices start at 0 EURs, 280 EURs final bid means 2800 bids. As each bid costs 0,50 EURs, that’s a total of 1400 EURs of bids. Of course not all of those come from the winner, so she might have gotten a deal, but in total, Telebid made 1499 EURs on a TV that costs 1200 EUR (and probably less) in a standard store.
The most amazing auction I have seen a short while ago was a fixed price auction for a nokia n95 black 8gb. The winner got it for 1 EUR. The phone costs 799 EURs. The final bid price was 1161.50 EURs, meaning 11615 bids, or 5807,50 EURs… for Telebid.
But based on the new law on lotteries, they probably need a license. The “Staatsvertrags zum Glücksspiel in Deutschland will give more detail in german.
Here is a quote: “Ein Glücksspiel liegt vor, wenn im Rahmen eines Spiels für den Erwerb einer Ge-
winnchance ein Entgelt verlangt wird und die Entscheidung über den Gewinn ganz o-
der überwiegend vom Zufall abhängt. Die Entscheidung über den Gewinn hängt in je-
dem Fall vom Zufall ab, wenn dafür der ungewisse Eintritt oder Ausgang zukünftiger
Ereignisse maßgeblich ist. Auch Wetten gegen Entgelt auf den Eintritt oder Ausgang
eines zukünftigen Ereignisses sind Glücksspiele.”
Translation: Gambling is when the chance to win requires paying a fee and winning is largely dependent on chance. Chance is given when events in the future that are uncertain decide if you win. That sounds very much like what Telebid does.
As they say, when something sounds too good to by true, it probably is.
P.S.: my brother just told me that we talked about something like this 5 years ago with two friends but came to the gambling bit back then already. damn.
Update 2009-08: Actually by now they have a new name called Swoopo and it seems to not be gambling because users decide when an auction ends, not chance alone, even though for you it might feel like chance
The Social Networking Implosion
Lots of social networking stuff happening in the last few days. First Christos Cotsakos, former CEO of E*Trade, has raised $29.6 million for Moli, a new social network, after having put in something like $20 million himself. The company is already at over 50 people plus more offshore. GigaOm has a good review online, with the biggest special thing of Moli being the option to have several profiles folded into one, meaning you have one for work and one for family, with different information shared within them. At the same time, Techcrunch posts that Lookery is offereing advertising runs on Facebook Apps for $0.125 CPM, which is awfully low. Then chatty Mark Zuckerberg talks about numbers at a company event, which leak: 2007 saw $150 million in revenue, 2008 will see $300-$350 of revenue with $50 million EBITDA but $200 million of CapEx (read buying servers and the like), so a loss of $50 million. If we take EBITDA like Earnings (just to make it easier because they will never buy stuff again … yeah right … never mind … let’s go on) then the $15 billion valuation would add up to a P/E ratio of 300! Forward P/E that is. Now that’s a valuation to look for!
The problem is that in the Google Earnings Conference Call, it just came out that monetization of social networks is really hard, advertising wise. Xing is in a very good spot here because they are monetizing via their users. Within our own platform, the social network is just a side effect that gets used. Pure play social networks will either have to become really really huge, or will most likely face a problem. At $12 cents cpm, even thinking a site is fully sold out, and gets 2 ads per page, that would result in $240 for a million site impressions, meaning $2.4 million of yearly revenues for a site like StudiVZ+SchuelerVZ. That is really nice, no questions asked, and a lot of nice things can come of it. The problem again might be that there is a social contract between the networks and it’s users so any new push to monetization in a new way might lead to a revolt of the users.
Facebook is surely on a good way, but it will be interesting to see their next investment round, in light of possibly further bad news, or an IPO to see what they are really worth. Microsoft couldn’t care less because the investment was more of an ad buy, but for the other investors, I don’t know.
