Month: April 2005

Internet Advertising

The Economist writes that “Google’s new advertising service could make the internet an even more valuable marketing medium.”

This year the combined advertising revenues of Google and Yahoo! will rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America’s three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, predicts Advertising Age. It will, says the trade magazine, represent a watershed moment in the evolution of the internet as an advertising medium. A 30-second prime-time TV ad was once considered the most effective form of advertising. But that was before the internet got going. This week, online advertising made another leap forward.

This latest innovation comes from Google, which has begun testing a new auction-based service for the more sophisticated advertising of brands, rather than of just individual products. Both Google and Yahoo! make most of their money from advertising. Auctioning keyword search-terms, which deliver, along with their own search results, sponsored links to advertisers’ websites, has proved to be very lucrative. Advertisers like these links because, unlike with TV ads, they pay only for directly measurable results. They are charged when someone clicks through to their own website.

If Google can prove that bidding for display ads works, then its rivals are bound to follow with similar services. This could shake the industry up even more.

Other innovations in online marketing are said to be in the pipeline. Local search and its associated advertising opportunities are one huge growth area. Sites such as eBay, the leading online auctioneer, and Craigslist, which hosts local sites, are soaking up large amounts of classified advertising for everything from used cars to job vacancies that once might have gone to newspapers. Yahoo! is expanding rapidly into entertainment, with film and video clips providing another avenue of advertising. This week, Yahoo! appointed another top executive to its media group, fuelling speculation that the website may start to produce its own entertainment content. That should seriously worry TV broadcasters, who are already losing viewers and ad revenue to the internet.

News.com writes that Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley is bullish on Interneta advertising:

“We think Internet advertising spending has nowhere to go but up,” Meeker said Monday during a keynote speech at the Ad:Tech industry conference here. Meeker added that the Web is the most underutilized advertising medium, garnering only 3 percent of total ad spending in the United States, according to estimates.

But with eBay as a benchmark, she said, the most successful companies could benefit from an ongoing shift online. After all, eBay is in the business of connecting buyers and sellers, much like search-advertising giant Google. And eBay commands 62 percent of the total classified ad market, according to Meeker.

Both eBay and Google “are about increasing the user experience and also increasing the ability of the ecosystem to handle growth,” she said. New tools to improve consumer usage and target ads will be the key to future expansion, she added.

“We’ve got 900 million global customers driving on the same highway,” Meeker said. The only differences in people, she said, are in their access speed, language and access device.

30 Must-Have PC Skills

Vnunet.com writes about “30 of the most useful tips and skills that, with a bit of practice, will transform a novice into an experienced computer user. ” Among them:

1. Move and copy files
2. Navigate using keyboard shortcuts
3. Use shortcuts in Word
4. Install and remove new hardware
5. Send image files as attachments
6. Search your hard disk
7. Hard disk maintenance (including disk cleanup and defragmenter)
8. System restore and backup
9. Update software online
10. Create desktop shortcuts

IT in Healthcare

The Economist writes about the “failure of the health-care industry worldwide to adopt modern information technology.”

The solution seems obvious: to get all the information about patients out of paper files and into electronic databases thatand this is the crucial pointcan connect to one another so that any doctor can access all the information that he needs to help any given patient at any time in any place. In other words, the solution is not merely to use computers, but to link the systems of doctors, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and insurers, thus making them, in the jargon, interoperable.

This may be obvious, but today it is also a very distant goal. According to David Bates, the head of general medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an expert on the use of IT in health care, the industry invests only about 2% of its revenues in IT, compared with 10% for other information-intensive industries. Superficially, there are big differences between countries. In Britain, 98% of general practitioners have computers somewhere in their offices, and 30% claim to be paperless, whereas in America 95% of small practices use only pen and paper. But, says Mr Bates, this obscures the larger point, which is that even the IT systems that do exist cannot talk to those of other providers, and so are not all that useful.

As the Markle Foundation puts it, the technology must be designed in such a way that decisions about linking and sharing are made at the edges of the network by patients in consultation with their doctors, and never inside the network. This goes to the very heart of the matter. For even though it is fine to start hoping for the day when interoperable electronic health records create vast pools of medical information that could be used to find new cures and battle epidemics in real time, their ultimate purpose is to make one simple and shockingly overdue change: to enable individuals, at last, to have access to, and possession of, information about their own health.

Buffett Talk

[via Yuvaraj] Warren Buffet addressing a group of students: “If there’s one thing that you leave here with today, it should be this: And I’ll start with a question to get to my point. If you could pick 10% of one person in this room to own or ‘go long’ for the next 30 years, who would it be? It wouldn’t be the person with the highest IQ; it wouldn’t be the star athlete; you would look for certain other qualities And if you had to pick one person to ‘short’ for the next 30 years, who would it be? Now ask yourself why you have made those selections. If you’ve considered these questions properly, the person you’ve gone long is probably someone who is honest, courageous, and dependable; the person you’ve shorted is probably someone who is egotistical and likes to take the credit. The point is that success is mostly dependent upon elective qualities, not anything with which you are born. You can choose to be dependable or not. And it’s not easy to change, so choose correctly now. Bertrand Russell once said, ‘The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.’ So ask yourself, ‘Who do I want to be?’ At the end of this process you should determine that the person you want to buy is yourself. You all are holding winning tickets.”

Apps for Mobiles

Mary Hodder writes: “I had an idea the other night, at the 106 miles meeting, that we should develop applications for cell phones that creatively route around the carriers. And we most definitely should not use their framing of the customer situation: ‘consumers’ and ‘enterprise’, to describe the possible user markets. I think what’s key to breaking the cellular provider stranglehold is developing cool apps that can sit on phones, but that only require users to download these apps in simple ways (not through carriers but through web access and SMS messages sending them the link to the web download). That way carriers will lose the monopoly they have on users access to applications. Because the phone IS the platform, not PC’s.”

Web 2.0 for Events

pc4media writes:

The cool event web 2.0 application may be how we put a listing of events into a calendar for the purpose of discovery. BUT, I’d bet that a cooler web 2.0 application for events is how we combine other information that is important to the event, into one interface for the purpose of event marketing and sharing experiences.

what should be integrated into an event website?

Who’s talking/blogging about this event? powered by technorati, feedster, blogpulse
What blog posts are related to this event? powered by waypath
What images were taken at this event? Powered by flickr
What books should I buy before attending this event? Powered by Amazon
Is this event an auction? Can I bid online? Powered by ebaylive.
Are there other events happening around the same time in the same city? Powered by upcoming.org, evdb
Who’s bookmarked this event? Powered by delicious, spurl.
What music is playing at this event? powered by iTunes, purevolume (maybe not yet)
Who’s coming to this event? Powered by WhizSpark, FOAF, evite, upcoming.org, EVDB (maybe not yet)

What else?

After our own identity aggregation, and our own reading habits aggregation, events are the glue that brings us all together. Events are the next big aggregation puzzle.

Social Tools

WorldChanging has a post by Dina Mehta discussing:

Blogs – building bridges and communities
Voice over IP via Skype a new communications lifestyle
Social Networking Services (SNS’s)
Tagging – creating new language and shared meaning

Running Your Company on Web Apps

Evan Williams has some suggestions

* Basecamp – project/task management (much is moving to FogBugz, though)

* JotSpot – internal information management (haven’t fully committed, but looks good)

* Blogger – for, ya know, the blog

* Gmail – I think nearly everyone here uses it as their client. We just forward our @odeo.com mail there.

* FogBugz – Awesome bug and customer email management (although we haven’t tried the email yet). We were using something I think called BugTrack, which comes with Textdrive, but it was a little sparse in features. (FogBugz also has discussion forums, which we’re not sure if we’re using either.)

* Google Groups – internal and external mailing lists

* Kayako – a really intersting customer support app. Haven’t decided how to use it yet or its relationship with FogBugz.

TECH TALK: Good Books: What Great Managers Do

Rounding off the trio of recently published good books on management is The One Thing You Need to Know : … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success by Marcus Buckingham. This is Buckinghams third book, after First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently and Now, Discover Your Strengths.

The March 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review has an article by Buckingham based on the book. Buckingham writes: Great leaders tap into the needs and fears we all share. Great managers, by contrast, perform their magic by discovering, developing, and celebrating whats different about each person who works for them. This is the central premise of the book.

Brand Autopsy has a few excerpts from the HBR article:

Great managers play chess, not checkers
Average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess. The difference? In checkers, all the pieces are uniform and move in the same way; they are interchangeable. You need to plan and coordinate their movements, certainly, but they all move at the same pace, on parallel paths. In chess, each type of piece moves in a different way, and you cant play if you dont know how each piece moves.

Great managers know and value the unique abilities and even the eccentricities of their employees, and they learn how best to integrate them into a coordinated plan of attack.

Identifying a persons strengths
To identify a persons strengths, first ask, What was the best day at work youve had in the past three months? Find out what the person was doing and why he enjoyed it so much.

Remember: A strength is not merely something you are good at. In fact, it might be something you arent good at yet. It might be just a predilection, something you find so intrinsically satisfying that you look forward to doing it again and again and getting better at it over time. This question will prompt your employee to start thinking about his interests and abilities from this perspective.

Great Managers find ways to amplify a persons style
Great managers dont try to change a persons style. They never try to push a knight to move in the same way as a bishop.

They know that their employees will differ in how they think, how they build relationships, how altruistic they are, how patient they can be, how much of an expert they need to be, how prepared they need to feel, what drives them, what challenges them, and what their goals are. These differences of trait and talent are like blood types: They cut across the superficial variations of race, sex, and age and capture the essential uniqueness of each individual.

ManyWorlds adds: To become a great manager, Buckingham says, you need to know three things about each of your person: their strengths, so that you can focus on those while helping them overcome their weaknesses; the triggers that activate those strengths recognition being the primary recommendation; and how they learn so you can tailor your management style to fit those who analyze, those who do, and those who watch.

Next Week: Good Books (continued)

Continue reading TECH TALK: Good Books: What Great Managers Do

LAMP alternative to J2EE or .Net

InfoWorld writes:

The first three letters in LAMP stand for Linux, Apache, and MySQL, which comprise the OS, Web server, and database management system, respectively. Some developers dispute that Linux should be part of the equation; the same stack runs on Mac OS X, Unix, and even Windows. Linux, however, has the advantage of offering the same low cost and access to source code that the other components provide. The P in LAMP is a matter of preference; it stands for either Perl, PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), or Python, although some would argue that other scripting languages, such as Ruby, deserve a place at the table as well.

Whereas J2EE and .Net development extend classic systems programming techniques and technologies to the Web, LAMP can be seen as a more direct descendent of the CGI programming model from the early days of Web development. The PHP scripting language, in particular, evolved with Web development squarely in mind, including numerous features designed to eliminate the drudgery of CGI programming. Whats more, the process overhead associated with traditional CGI has been all but eliminated in the modern LAMP platform. By loading either Perl, PHP, or Python as an Apache module, Web applications can execute quickly and efficiently.