Microsoft to Google in Less Than Two Weeks

In an admittedly slow news day it is noteworthy to tell you that earlier in the week Google made a strategic hire if for no other reason than the hire was just at Microsoft less than two weeks ago.

Don Dodge was Microsoft’s “Ambassador to Start Ups” according to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. We say ‘was’ because Dodge was laid off by Microsoft earlier this month. Check out Arrington’s interview with Dodge here. I honestly didn’t think that people at this level or with this title got ‘laid off’. I thought that was reserved for the rank and file folks and the sales team. Guess you learn something new every day, right?

Back to the story. Dodge didn’t need to spend much time figuring out what to do next because Google saw the opportunity and swooped in. You gotta figure that there was no real ‘job opening’ available but when you sit on a pile of cash and you see a ‘name brand’ available why not make a spot for them?

TechCrunch continues

He’ll be working for another ex-Microsofter, Vic Gundotra. Gundotra worked 15 years at Microsoft as General Manager of Microsoft’s developer outreach efforts. He joined Google in 2007 as VP Engineering, responsible for mobile applications and developer evangelism.

Well, for you young folks out there here’s a lesson in making sure you are building a strong reputation and personal brand. In this world, those who can do that won’t be unemployed for long. At least, it’s a nice theory.

Anyway, hope you don’t have to figure out what’s next today!

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!

The Search for Twitter Search Continues

While talk swirls around Twitter on subjects ranging from video to revenue to biz plans and Biz’s plans, there is one that keeps coming up because it is pretty important. How do you search Twitter and mine it for the nuggets of wisdom amongst the wasteland of wackiness?

Last week we told you about the unholy alliance talks that Twitter was supposedly having with Microsoft and Google separately regarding the tsunami of 140 character pearls of wisdom that need to be gathered, catalogued and organized so the world can be a better place because of it. It really is the piece of the puzzle that everyone seems to be most interested in so we’re just waiting for Twitter to figure out how to best monetize it.

In the meantime there will be more ‘little start-ups that could’ like this one reported by TechCrunch, Searchtastic. Now, before I move on I have to say that this is an unfortunate choice for a company name because it will not be mentioned around MP without a smirk due to the use of another word, but I digress.

Like other Twitter search sites, Searchtastic lets you search Tweets for a particular keyword or hashtag. What makes the search engine interesting is the ability to pull up Tweets from weeks or months ago, which Twitter’s own search engine doesn’t allow you to do. Twitter’s search currently lets you see Tweets from a week and a half back which varies.

So the obvious question is “What are these guys doing that Twitter can’t seem to do on its own?” The other question that arises for me after searching for my own tweets is why am I wasting people’s time with my own version of what I feel is important? I need to listen to my own advice and make sure that when I tweet it’s neat and not well …. lame. My apologies to anyone subjected to it. I promise to get better .

As for the service, it looks interesting but needs some work. Heck, that can be said about a lot of things on the Internet, right? One recommendation to the Searchtastic crew is to at least put the total number of tweets you produce in a search result set.

So check it out along with other players like Collecta, Scoopler, One Riot and TwitterTroll and discover all of the fun you have missed on Twitter.

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Google Tries to Patch Its Talent Leak

Google is often a victim of its own success. While there is little cause to go out and throw a pity party for them, it is an interesting study to see what a Google does to manage the pains that come with getting so big so fast. The Wall Street Journal examines the continued problem of Google bleeding top talent as employees leave for start-ups, often taking with them the innovation that Google needs to expand beyond its King of Search status. It’s a good problem to have considering the times but one that is getting real attention from the C-level folks in the company (in between trips to Washington, DC, of course).

The gist of the problem is

The Mountain View, Calif., company famously lets its engineers spend one day a week on projects that aren’t part of their jobs. But Google has lacked a formal process for senior executives to review those efforts, and some ideas have languished. Others have slipped away when employees left the company.

“We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed,” said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in an interview.

While many might start to wonder if innovative thinking is slowing down at Google that’s not the case. It’s the process that handles this innovation that has suffered under the weight of going from a freewheeling, cool start-up itself to the 20,000 employee corporate behemoth it is now. There is a price to being the most recognized brand in the world after all.

So what is happening to slow this talent drain down?

Google has recently started internal “innovation reviews,” formal meetings where executives present product ideas bubbling up through their divisions to Mr. Schmidt, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other top executives.

The meetings are designed to “force management to focus” on promising ideas at an early stage, Mr. Schmidt said.

Whenever you see the word ‘force’ used to describe a technique it looks like some of the fun may be leaving Google along with its talent. Once again, is this kind of thing avoidable when a company becomes the size, scope and influence of Google? Few have enough experience to even know this especially in a company that has gone from 0 to world leader in such a short amount of time.

Recent new product introductions like Wave and the ability to integrate Google platforms with Outlook (which is another story in itself considering the finger pointing from Microsoft around initial troubles with the offering) have gone through a new process to help the innovative products / features actually see the light of day.

Here’s where it is actually tough to be Google as well. We have often noted how disappointed people can get with double-digit growth numbers that Google has turned out. The Journal’s article does it again

Google needs new products to jumpstart its growth. While it remains a juggernaut with one-third of all U.S. advertising dollars spent online, its year-over-year revenue growth has slowed from 56% in 2007 to 31% in 2008 and was just 6% in the first quarter of this year.

In a day and age company performance is flat year over year most are thrilled, Google gets bit because it isn’t doing what it did several years ago in a ‘healthy’ economy and a rapidly expanding new industry. This kind of unreasonable scrutiny may be influencing how Google handles their internal innovation process. Pressure, whether it is valid or not, can make people do silly things.

Google is trying to make sure this exodus is at least slowed.

Google has taken cracks in the past at the retention problem. In March, it repriced millions of employee stock options whose value had been wiped out as Google’s share price has fallen over the past two years. The company has also begun testing a mathematical formula to try to predict which employees are most likely to leave, based on factors like employee reviews.

What Google experiences, however, is still very different than most of the rest of the world. Just one look into the thought process of a former employee will tell the story

Sean Knapp, a former Google engineer, left the company in 2007 and started Ooyala Inc., a start-up that distributes and manages advertising around online video.

Mr. Knapp said Google managers offered him the chance to start the project within the company, but he declined. He worried he wouldn’t feel the same pressure to succeed. “If you’re really aggressive, you want that sink or swim environment,” he said.

Most companies have to figure out how to motivate employees just to do the jobs their job description outlines. Having a company full of alpha dog, intellectual talent can present unique situations. Google CEO Eric Schmidt wants to foster that young company feel as the company tries to make it possible to be “part of a start-up within Google.”

Good luck. Here’s to innovation!

Flickr Founder Has a Hunch that Bing Will Help Her Start-Up

What do smart companies do when they know they can’t compete with the #1 company in market? They create a new market!

After years of making claims of being the "next Google killer" it appears that today’s crop of start-ups are keen to distance themselves from the search engine giant–and any "search engine" tag–WolframAlpha and Bing are just two recent examples.

Now the LA Times reports that Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s new start-up Hunch.com, will take the exact same "unsearch" route–and piggyback off the millions being spent by Microsoft!

"We’re nothing like a search engine," Fake said in an interview from New York. "We’re more related to the answers sites."

"Bing is kind of doing us a big favor by popularizing the idea that people go online to make decisions. But I don’t think we’re competitive with them."

Hunch launches Monday and will require users to complete a personality test so it can then provide results that it has a "hunch" will be relevant to you.

So the next time you need a answer, you’ll have to decide if you want to search, compute, go on a hunch, or get a decision!

Want more marketing news & views? Follow Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal on Twitter!

OpenX Raises Another $10M to Help in Its Efforts to Bring Down Google

It seems that OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan is doing something that he struggled to do at Yahoo–compete with Google.

The ad technology provider and marketplace has just announced a third round of venture capital with $10.4 million being added to the war chest, courtesy of DAG Ventures.

The company is certainly doing well to fend off Google’s own Ad Manager product–claiming an impressive 300 billion ads monthly on more than 150,000 websites across the web. The money will help OpenX further expand both the downloadable and hosted versions of its ad server, while continuing to grow its recently launched OpenX Market.

So, how is this small start-up able to stand head-to-head with the search giant? Simple. OpenX isn’t trying to fight Google on its strengths.

The threat of Google’s entry into the sector has prompted OpenX to tout its independence, neutrality and openness as distinguishing features, although Cadogan stressed that its ad server product is also more customizable than Google’s. “We couldn’t outspend them, so we’re trying to create a different value proposition,” he said.

Sounds like a good plan. In fact, with more and more start-ups taking the same approach, it makes you wonder if Google could end up the way of Gulliver.