Last Call – SMX West in Silicon Valley Starts Next Tuesday

It’s time. Search Marketing Expo – SMX West begins next Tuesday March 2nd at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Register now to reserve your place.
Your investment in coming to SMX West will pay off many times. You’ll be satisfied; we guarantee it.
Check out the agenda. Conference chairs Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, and the all-star [...]

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SMX West Next Week in Silicon Valley – Register Today!

There’s still time, but not much. Register now for Search Marketing Expo – SMX West and you’ll save $200 off on site rate!
SMX West happens March 2-4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Here’s what’s in store:
Exceptional Content: More than 50 sessions for search marketers of every skill level will be presented. Sessions will [...]

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Microsoft’s Ballmer, Google’s Norvig Keynoting SMX West: See You in Silicon Valley March 2-4!

There’s a fantastic search engine marketing conference in your future. In less than two weeks, the editors of Search Engine Land present Search Marketing Expo – SMX West in Silicon Valley at the Santa Clara Convention Center, March 2-4!
SMX West kicks off on March 2 with an exclusive: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s first conversation [...]

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Twitter Adds to Its Ranks

It looks like Twitter is gearing up for a big year as they announce several (as in around 10) new hires to start the new year. While official numbers of total employees are tough to come by (last I saw put it in the range of 150 but I will not stand by the accuracy of that number) it is obvious that Twitter is looking to have a big year. Let’s call it Twitter’s “Year of Revenue”. That’s usually what we talk about when it comes to the service anyway right?

Louis Gray tells about these hires and specifically of one that is very strategic. Anytime Twitter brings on a former Google lawyer then you know they are up to something.

Twitter’s pedigree is getting increasingly rich at the expense of Google and other Silicon Valley tech titans. With the holidays behind us, the microblogging powerhouse is starting the new year with more new faces at its San Francisco headquarters. Among them is Bakari Brock, most recently an in house lawyer for YouTube and Google focused on music, video and syndication.

Brock, whose LinkedIn profile shows him as corporate counsel at Google, starting in 2007, was heavily quoted in late 2008 when the video service introduced e-commerce capabilities enabling customers to purchase from partners including iTunes and Amazon, and his comments were included in publications such as the New York Times and GigaOM site NewTeeVee.

Last year Google was the ‘victim’ of Twitter’s need for legal expertise as well. While probably flattered one would think that losing high profile, likely high dollar and highly visible legal talent is not how Google would like to get the new year started.

Some of the background of new hires on the Twitter team include another former Googler, a ex-ning staffer and folks from Cloudera, TiVo, Bebo and VMWare. Add this to an expansion of the Twitter family tree following the acquisition of MixerLabs before Christmas and one would think that “It’s beginning to look a lot like business” (sing that to the tune of “It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas” for those wishing the holidays were still here).

So let’s go a step further on this one and see what the bold prognosticators among MP readers are predicting for Twitter in 2010. What does the need for more legal firepower say about what might be next?

Google and Privacy: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Leave it to Eric Schmidt to stir up a hornet’s nest more often than not. Of course, he is a favorite target of everyone since he is the CEO of the most recognizable brand on the planet. Whether by design or not though, he is often saying something or other that is getting people in a tizzy. Admittedly, it takes A LOT less these days to get people into this state and that is one of the downsides of this new digital age. Despite the sensitivity threshold being much lower when Schmidt appears to downplay the notion of online privacy, there will be blood.

As cnet reports

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the latest Silicon Valley CEO to draw ire after suggesting that folks seeking privacy might not want to look to the Internet to find it.

“I think judgment matters,” Schmidt said, appearing on CNBC . “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

What has really drawn attention to this whole thing is the point of view of Mozilla. It has gotten under Mozilla’s skin so badly the suggestion is even made to go to bing because their privacy policy is better. Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Yikes. maybe this whole Chrome thing is making Mozilla a little more adversarial.

“That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy,” Mozilla Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler said on his personal blog, referring to the CNBC comments. “There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here. Watch the video.”

Watch the video? What a great idea!

Isn’t it interesting that this whole discussion is brought up on the heels of Google’s widening of the personalization of search results to everyone? In essence, that means that the vast majority of people will be completely unaware of the amount of data that Google is gathering on them anyway. Privacy is for the opt-out crowd only!

Ok, Pilgrims, is privacy something that we should expect online or has that gone the way of the dinosaur. If you do expect it, to what level do you expect it? Let us know your private thoughts in this very public forum .

Internet Summit Gives Strong Sophomore Effort

Living in the Research Triangle Park (aka The Triangle) area of North Carolina is a good deal. The weather is great because you get 4 seasons but winter is just a taste of what most of the area’s Northeastern US transplants are accustomed to. There is also a very vibrant technology and new media scene as the area has even been considered a threat (albeit a minor one in my opinion to Silicon Valley because of the education focus of the area and a reasonable cost of living. What has been missing, however, is an Internet industry event that was worthy of the area’s reputation.

Looks like we may be on the way to curing that ill. Today was the programming portion of the 2nd Internet Summit that is put on by TechJournal South and Southern Capitol Ventures. The site for the event states simply

The Internet Summit supports web oriented entrepreneurial activity, innovation, and the resultant economic development of the southeast region.

While I did not attend last year it is apparent that there was no evidence of a sophomore slump. In fact, the brand spanking new Raleigh Convention Center as a setting made it very comfortable and that was before any presentations were given.

As for the content it was well presented in moderated sessions with some pretty serious titles on the various panels. There was Rick Klau, product manager for Google’s Blogger platform, John Kosner, SVP of ESPN Digital Media, Richard Jalichandra, President and CEO of Technorati and Joe Kennedy, President and CEO of Pandora to name a few. Oh and of course the organizers had the good sense to make sure that MP’s own Andy Beal was on a panel talking about, you guessed it, New Media and Personal Branding.

A rather cool feature included a demo hall where area technology start-ups, as chosen by the Summit’s team, displayed their offerings. This included a wide variety of early stage companies that had a chance to show off their offerings to a tech savvy crowd.

This is the fourth event I attended this year and it was by far the best of the bunch. While I could give you some of the highlights all you need to do is search Twitter for #isum09 and you’ll get the gist. Better yet plan to attend next year. The Triangle would love to have you!

How Many Ads Make $1 Billion?

Now that Twitter has been able to convince some pretty wealthy folks that their little ol’ 140 character deal is worth in the range of $1 billion it’s time to get down to brass tacks. What does that mean? Since people now have this huge number in their head there will be continued and likely more vocal calls for Twitter to at least reveal some plan to generate revenue worthy of that valuation number. Hey, it’s the Internet though so maybe not!

AdAge is pretty convinced that this is something that needs to be addressed sooner than later.

With the funding, Silicon Valley and the venture community are once again setting their sites on the marketing budgets of American business to support another free “cloud” web service, in this case 140-word bursts of text. Indeed, they’re counting on the exponential growth of advertising revenue in a flat market for a company that — while certainly useful to marketers — has yet to earn its first dollar.

“I think they can build some kind of ad business, but the more relevant question is can they build an ad business worth a billion plus dollars,” said Warren Lee, VC at Canaan Partners. “That would require tremendous volumes of impressions and reasonable conversions. Lots of execution will be needed. Not impossible but unlikely.”

So we have a detractor here. Well, not completely but certainly not thinking that advertising alone will get Twitter from Point A to $1 billion. The trouble is tow fold. First, Biz and the boys have no plans to make any advertising model moves in 2009. As a result there will be more and more time for people to figure out how to use the service for free and then there could be some resistance to having to pay for anything related to Twitter. Twitter is establishing a bit of a mindset that may be harder to break than people think. (Check out Andy Beal’s thoughts on this via BlogTalkRadio).

So what’s next? AdAge’s take is

Mr. Stone said that ads won’t come before 2010 and Twitter’s early-stage venture backers have told Ad Age the ad business, narrowly defined, isn’t that interesting to them. On its site, Twitter touts marketing success stories from Pepsi, Jetblue and Dell, which consist of the brands using the service to connect with fans.

The cash could allow Twitter to make some acquisitions; perhaps one of the URL shorteners like Bit.ly, one or more of the Twitter applications, or one of the many, many firms now making dashboards to manage Twitter for corporate clients.

With a valuation of $1 billion, Twitter’s investors believe one or more of the following outcomes are likely: an IPO or an acquisition at a healthy price.

So can they do it, Pilgrims? If they can do it how will they do it? Put on your Twitter business model cap yet again and tell the world exactly what these folks have hit or miss regarding the future of the world in 140 character chunks.

AOL Still Lurking About and Hiring Big Names

AOL has made some waves this year that have mostly centered on the people that are coming on board rather than services that will turn the companies fortunes to the plus side. Tim Armstrong has come over from Google and injected a sense of purpose and urgency (one would guess) as the unit of Time Warner speeds towards its spin off which occur later this year.

As further evidence that Armstrong is trying to get the right people on the bus he has hired Brad Garlinghouse to head up the Internet and Mobile Communications operations of AOL’s business. According to Om Malik of GigaOm, Garlinghouse will have some pretty serious responsibilities especially when one considers that this is the once might AOL being talked about here.

Brad Garlinghouse, formerly a senior vice president at Yahoo, is joining AOL as its president of Internet and Mobile Communications, which includes AOL’s e-mail and instant messaging. He will be heading up AOL’s Silicon Valley operations in Mountain View and will be responsible for AOL Ventures in California.

It doesn’t take much to connect the dots regarding Garlinghouse’s responsibilities to see that acquisition will be part of this plan to move AOL back into the realm of relevance. Garlinghouse certainly has the pedigree including his now famous “Peanut Butter Manifesto” that hit the Wall Street Journal back in 2006 which revealed some of the ills that still impact Yahoo’s business today.

Garlinghouse pointed out that with the growing popularity of services such as Twitter and Facebook, the entire communications arena is ripe for disruption. AOL has an opportunity to capitalize on that disruption. The company is going to either partner with or acquire startups in order to make over its communications business and capitalize on this disruption, he said.

Garlinghouse’s past also includes working at Internet telephony start-up DialPad which eventually produced the founders of Grand Central. Grand Central is now more well known as Google Voice.

So the Internet space keeps looking more and more like the sports world in my opinion. There are some teams / companies that can afford to sign the high dollar, high profile players / employees. It makes for interesting reading and a lot of press recognition but the results will have to speak for the success or failure of the venture. All one needs to do is look at how many times a sports team has spent a fortune to have the names on the roster but produce more frustration than wins (note of transparency here: I am a New York Mets fan so I know what I am talking about here).

Hopefully, AOL does bounce back and create a more competitive environment to keep the other big guys in the Internet space on their toes. If it doesn’t then the investors will decide whether AOL has an extended time to live or just more time to make headlines.

The Young Bail on Facebook, but Over 55s Soar 500% and Bring Their Checkbooks!

The demographic has shifted dramatically over at Facebook and that change could lead to billions in revenue, according to one prominent board member.

iStrategyLabs spent the last six months collecting user demographic data and discovered the number of users over the age of 55 soared from 1 million to nearly 6 million. During the same 6 month period, high school and college users dropped by as much as 22%!

Here’s the breakdown:

At the same time Facebook continues to gray, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Andreessen–a Facebook board member–suggests the social network could realize revenue of $1 billion if it would only push harder with its advertising.

"This calendar year they’ll do over $500 million..If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year…There’s every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now," Andreessen said.

What’s interesting is that the 15-24 year olds are the ones that helped Facebook become the juggernaut it is today, but when you have champagne revenue goals while your audience has a beer budget, you need those with established incomes to pay the bills–or in this case, click on the ads.

Perhaps the key question is can Facebook continue to grow while losing its vocal youth? Arguably, high school and college users were the ones that evangelized Facebook to their older friends and family. Without them, will Facebook’s growth–and revenue–stall?

Facebook’s New Incubator fbFund REV Announces Winners

You have to give Facebook credit. They get in the news more a lot. Maybe it’s investment. Maybe it’s a look at their numbers. Maybe it’s someone on the executive team has a hang nail. You name it they are there.

That’s why this news seemed more interesting than just the usual talk. TechCrunch reports that Facebook has announced the 20 winners of a competition to be included in a program to help them develop their platforms with a combination of money and other benefits.

Twenty companies, which include two nonprofits, will take part in a program headed by Founders Fund’s Dave McClure, and will have the chance to work with Facebook engineers and a range of Silicon Valley veterans. Facebook intends to keep us posted on the startups’ progress throughout the session, and will be holding a demo day at the end of the summer to help expose the companies to investors and press.

The list of companies are focused primarily in companies that are either social networking platforms like MyChurch.org or RunThere which is a social platform for runners and cyclists or other applications and services that facilitate online social interaction. McClure is interested in helping these folks get to business with this program.

it will emphasize getting the companies to release and iterate their products quickly, rather than spending a long time on the development cycle.

While there are two non-profits on the roster the fund is not operating as such. In other words they aren’t doing this for free. McClure says

The average amount of investment is $25,000, with over $500,000 being distributed in total (the non-profits are excluded from receiving funding, but are invited to the program for free). Investments are being made as a convertible note, with a discount for future priced rounds. fbFund is taking roughly a 1-5% stake in each company (around 2% for most of them), which is in line with what other incubators have been doing.

No word on any other Incubalooza events in the future but it might be a good time for aspiring social networking companies to set up camp in Facebook town. As we have noted recently, they do have the money.

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