Will Kumo.com kill Google?

I have read today that Microsoft will soon launch a new semantic search engine called kumo.com that will probably substitute live.com

After many years trying to compete with Google with the same technology, it seems that Microsoft will give priority to the semantic search. In an attempt to take the leading position in the new paradigm of the Internet, the semantic web, Microsoft's new search engine will in theory be able to answer your questions rather than interpret your keywords. For example, if you want to know the name of the team who won the last Champions League, in Google you would write something like Champions League winner 2008, whereas in kumo.com you would ask directly who won last Champions League? 

Although it doesn't seem a huge change from the user prospective, the technology used to interpret your query is completely different. The outcome of this new battlefield is still very uncertain. Semantic search is superior in theory, but it is also much more complex to implement so results might not be as good as the ones you get with Google. Askjeeves.com was a pioneer in this field and was never able to compete with regular search engines. It will be exciting to see if Kumo.com (which means cloud in Japanese) will do better. If it does, then Google dominance in ad search will be threaten too, because Kumo would be able to interpret better the intention of your search (buying, gathering information, listening a podcast, ...) and therefore choose more relevant ads for you.

 

Future of semantic web

When I first heard about the semantic web in class I was intrigued by the power of this concept. It’s interesting to think about the possibility of organizing the information of the Internet in such a way that the web can interpret its own content.

In the beginning, I thought that the idea of an intelligent Internet would be sort of science fiction, but if you think about it, there are some versions of this idea already implemented. Communications intelligence has been there for some years and its objective is to monitor all sort of communications and identify those emails, telephone conversations, faxes, … that can represent a threat. These are completely automated mechanisms and the algorithms that make this happen are becoming more and more sophisticated.

Semantic web would make these algorithms more efficient given that the information is organized and therefore easier to understand. This will represent in my opinion a revolution in IT, some sort of “web 3.0” The number of applications can be endless.
For example, many traders use momentum strategy to invest. They read the newspapers and interpret signals before earning announcements to buy long or sell sort a particular stock. Say now, that you can subscribe to a news feeder and run an algorithm to know if the news are very positive, relatively positive, neutral, relatively negative or very negative. The algorithm would invest accordingly. Investment strategy is far more complicated than this, but you can get the idea.

Think about the applications in search (asking questions instead of writing keywords), marketing (interpreting what users write about your products), …

What can I sell online ?

Now that it is so complicated to find a job some people are considering to start up an online retail company. You don't need too much capital, you can do it from home and you don't need to be a tech savvy to implement it yourself. 

The real challenge is to find a niche where you can make enough money to survive. There are e-tailers specialized in every single product you can imagine!! I came across this shaving brushes online shop, this scarves shop , this wallets shop , ... there are online shops for everything!!!

However, there is one online retailer that really caught my attention these days. My Adwords challenge group (Team 5) is making a marketing campaign for a Spanish winery and while I was researching some competitors, potential keywords, strategy, ... I came across with what I think is a really exciting idea. 

The company is calcedoni.com and was started up by the famous Spanish chef Ferrán Adriá (maybe you remember him from our strategy exam). He is selling parts of a winery so that you become the owner of that small parcel that can produce up to 42 bottles of wine per year. You can participate in the decision making process as to when to water the grapes, which method use for the production of the wines, ... it's the dream of every wine lover!!!

Nowadays, wineries are full of sensors that measure soil moisture, temperature, wind, .... and decisions are made remotely, which means that an important percentage of the wine production process can be done online. I love the idea of producing my own wine!!! 

Let me know if you come across other interesting online retailers!

Free wireless access to Internet

I read some days ago in the Spanish press that Avilés (Asturias) was going to be the first Spanish city to provide free wireless access to Internet. The project will be fully financed through advertising. It will provide around 200 kbps which is not great, but enough to read emails and visit some "light websites". 

Given the importance of the Internet for our everyday lives, it sounds amazing that maybe one day we can all access it for free. I don't now yet to what extent this business model can work. This sort of test in a small city is highly regulated. If it works maybe we can think of the same thing implemented in a larger scale in cities like Madrid, London, ...  

I was living for some time in Leiden (The Netherlands), where there was free public WiFi access to the Internet, fully financed by the local government. This makes me wonder what is most important: government financing public WiFi network in most important cities or broadband access to every corner of the country as the British Government announced weeks ago?

I really hope this sort of experiment in Aviles spreads through the rest of Spain and Europe!

    

Traditional Media and the Internet

Content is the king! Or at least that’s what media experts say! Good content generates a larger audience, which brings advertisers that help to finance new good content.

If we think about the content that the Internet is providing, I can only think that traditional marketing (TV, Radio, printed media,…) is about to face really challenging times. Let’s have a look into traditional media and Internet:

- Radio: last.fm is a perfect example of the Internet potential: no radio ads, personalized music, updated personalized information on their site. Compelling, isn’t it?

- TV: It’s obvious that it’s becoming easier to access the same content that TV channels offer through Youtube, P2P Sw,… even some TV channels are posting programs on the web without ads (i.e from ABC website you can watch episodes of some of the channel’s series).

-Newspapers and magazines: they are probably the ones that have been most damaged by the Internet, or at least those who have not been able to adapt to this media.

If we also consider that Internet will soon be available everywhere either through public wireless networks or 3G, it seems clear to me that the marketing landscape will be quite different from what we see now in only some years.

I think we are about to live an explosion of creativity in online advertising that nobody would have thought of only years ago: ads in virtual worlds (i.e. Second Life), ads geographically relevant (i.e Google Maps).

Searchme.com and other search engines

 Last Moday Mr Gallacher mentioned in class that companies are shifting resources from banner-like ads to search ads. This is great news for Google, since they have 73% of world market share (much higher in Europe) in ads search.

It seems that nobody is threatening Google’s future in the short term. Google’s reputation as one of the best employers makes the company attract some of the best engineers from all over the world. The company devotes 70% of its resources to the search business, which is making its search algorithms more and more sophisticated. This is creating huge entry barriers for other companies. Try to compete heads on with Google is something almost no one will probably dare to do soon.

 
However, economics theory explains that if an industry generates profits, new companies will flourish and capture part of the stake. I’ve been looking to different strategies that try to capture part of the value that search is adding.

 
- Localization: some companies have decided to target only certain countries. This seems to work better in countries where the language or alphabet is very different from ours. For example Beidu has around 62% market share in China.

 
- Vertical search or domain-specific search: they specialize in a particular sort of content. For example http://ahzing.com/ has several engines targeting categories.

- User interface: who said search innovation is dead? Have a look into this website in beta version: www.searchme.com Really cool, isn’t it?

Viral Online Marketing

I have a friend who started up an e-commerce company some months ago. 

When asked about his marketing strategy he mentioned what it seems to be some sort of new silver bullet: VIRAL MARKETING!! This is a magical tool you can use to dramatically increase the traffic of your website for free!! 

There are obviously many different ways to use viral marketing and they are not all for free, but the one he is using is just like that: fast, efficient and free.

My friend used to work for another online startup, and for what I know, they pioneered in using this technique some years ago.

The technique is quite simple: when you order something, you have to accept the terms and conditions of the company, which includes a point that allows them to pull up your contacts emails from a gmail or hotmail account. Don't ask me how but they can do it! The rest is easy to imagine: they send an email to all your contacts letting them know that you bought item X in his website. 

There are obviously some people who didn't like what they did, so they lost some customers along the way but the surprising thing is that the number of customers that they gained was much higher.

Can you imagine the effects of implementing this on a large scale? Millions of websites doing the same!! Thank goodness that our email accounts are not packed with job offers otherwise we would receive hundreds of emails per day!