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Over at ars technica, theres talk of Jaiku users fleeing to Twitter due to the lack of any innovation since being acquired by Google.

"Google has allowed Jaiku to languish and is now suffering a backlash from frustrated users who are beginning to mass-migrate to Twitter, a competing microblogging service. Jaikus external feed servers, which are used by third-party Jaiku client applications, have been down frequently during the past week, often returning 504 gateway errors or nothing at all. During the brief stints when the feed servers are operational, they have been extremely slow and often out of sync with the actual content"typically lagging by between four and 13 hours."

I can attest to the poor performance of Jaiku. After the acquisition, I remembered that I had signed up for Jaiku many months before. I went back, logged in, and then added all of my social media feeds. Ten hours later, my Jaiku feed still hadnt updated"Ive not been back there since. I am however, very active on Twitter.

Jaiku founder Jyri Engestrom has tried to allay any fears that the service will follow in Dodgeballs footsteps and join the Google Sofa"the place where acquisitions disappear behind, never to be found again.

Are you a Jaiku user? Whats been your experience since the Google acquisition?

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...Front-Running Practice. As we reported yesterday, Network Solutions has been in a lot of deep-water after many people discovered the company...

...to Changewas guilty of "front-running""the practice of registering a domain name after someone has checked on its availability.

Today, CNET is reporting the company is reeling from the backlash and has announced they will make changes to their practice.

"One change is that the company will offer only an "under construction" page for sites that it has reservedAnother change coming soon is that Network Solutions will register domains only when people search for domains from the companys home page. No longer will it do so when people use the companys Whois search page."

It make you wonder what went through the minds of the executive that make these reputation-risky business decisions"probably just dollar signs.

Seriously, when you thing about the potential value to your bottom line, consider more than just the cash that comes in the door. A great reputation takes many, many years to build and trust is hard to gain, but easy to lose.

While NetSol might have fattened their revenues over the past couple of weeks, theyll now likely lose out in the long run. Of course, 95% of their customers will have no clue of the dirty tricks that just backfired, but those that did hear about it"marketers, webmasters, web designers"are the ones that can influence others.

Imagine the next time an ordinary business owner asks his web designer, "Where should I register my domain name?" Do you think that guy is going to recommend Network Solutions?

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Heather Hopkins over at the Hitwise Blog today wrote a very interesting post on how Google Maps is rapdily closing in on market leader Mapquest.

See the Hitwise trend graph below.




* US visits to Maps websites is up 10% year on year and MapQuest is still the leader, receiving more than half of all US visits to Maps websites last week. However, Google Maps is gaining fast.
* A year ago, MapQuest had more than five times (429%) more US visits than Google Maps. Last week, that gap was down to 126%. Google Maps is the #2 Maps website and attracted 22% of visits to Maps websites. Yahoo! Maps and MSN's Local Live stand 3rd and 4th.
* Traffic to MapQuest has remained flat year on year and is down 20% in the past 6 months. Google Maps traffic is up 135% year on year and is up 7% in the past 6 months. The growth for Google Maps is from traffic from the Google search engine.
* Google sends more of its own traffic to Google Maps than to Mapquest, a change that occurred last March. This can't really be attributed to an increase in consumers looking for Google Maps. We can measure this through Internet searches. Searches for "google maps" have increased but the term "mapquest" receives nearly 10x the search volume.

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Tag: Mapquest, Google Maps

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...Marginalization. The Yankee Group used CES to share an analysis showing two fundamental shifts are driving the music industry - digitization and...

...direct-to-consumer transactions. As a result, Yankee says, US recording revenue has plummeted 25% or more since peaking at $14.6 billion in 1999.

Over the course of the next several years, Yankee Group anticipates that music industry revenue will begin to stabilize in the US, though at a lower level than previously seen. By the end of 2007, digital music revenue in the US grew to $1.98billion, and will reach $5.34 billion by 2012. However, artists will increasingly keep the lion's share of this revenue as record labels become marginalized. The report offers solutions:

* Abandon DRM; embrace watermarking: Record labels can't escape DRM, but by embracing watermarking, they will make it completely transparent to consumers.
* Leverage Anywhere Consumers: Record labels should encourage consumers to become legitimate distribution channels themselves and enable them to profit from it.
* Promote PC, not the phone: Wireless carriers must aggressively push the PC rather than the phone as the digital music distribution channel. The PC dominates music downloads.

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Tag: digital music sale

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Microsoft made its last big purchase in 2007, see: Microsoft Joins Bandwagon, Buys Aquantive For $649 Million! It's latest acquisition is going...

...to be the Norwegian enterprise search solutions provider, Fast Search & Transfer. The announcement came from the Redmond giant on Tuesday. This move by Microsoft highlights the face off between the search engine giants Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft to be number one in search and advertising platforms.

Fast Search & Transfer is presently valued at $1.2 billion and Microsoft proposes to purchase its share at 19.00 Norwegian Kroner (NOK). The deal is pretty much done as the shareholders holding 37 percent of outstanding shares have already accepted the offer. The deal should be completed with in the second quarter of 2008.

The core business of Fast Search & Transfer was enterprise search till about a year back, but in the year 2007 they ventured into online advertising and search monetization as well. Once the news about the acquisition broke the Fast Search & Transfer's stocks showed an appreciation.

There are reactions from both the companies. Robert Keith one of the Fast's board member remarked "This is a sad day, but Fast is in good hands and I think the company will flourish more with Microsoft than it would alone," to a news site E24.

Fast CEO Jon Markus Lervik said "This is very exciting for us. We will now have the combination of the worlds best [search] technology and the worlds largest software company," as reported on Dagens IT.

From Microsoft it's Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division who comments that "Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people find, use and share critical business information quickly. The combination of Microsoft and Fast gives customers a new choice: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs."

Via Forbes

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...Still for Suckers? In my professional day life I'm an investment advisor. By way of disclaimer, this post is not intended as investment advice...

...in any way shape or form. Past performance is not indicative of future success, blah, blah, blah, etc.

"Ive said a lot of this before. The stock market is by definition a ponzi scheme. As long as money keeps on coming in, then there is someone to take the stocks from the sellers. If the amount of money coming in is reduced, the stocks, indexes, et al go down. What if, for who knows whatever reason, the amount of money going into stocks declined significantly ? Who would buy stock from the sellers. I mean goodness gracious, you could see something disastrous happen. Like the Nasdaq dropping from 5000, to under 2000 in just a few years. Its happened before, it can happen again."

Mark Cuban, January 3, 2006

Two years ago in post titled "The Stock Market is for Suckers," Mark Cuban responded to comments I'd made suggesting that over long periods of time the stock market was a superior investment to cash equivalents. 100% of my long-term retirement plan assets are invested in buy and hold equities.

More from Cuban: "Wall Street has done an AMAZING job of creating conventional wisdom . "Buy and Hold " is the 2nd most misleading marketing slogan ever, after the brilliant "rinse and repeat" message on every shampoo bottle. We as a country have fallen for it. Every message from every marketer of stocks tell us. Young or old, if you can hold for the long term, things will work out for you.

That is total bullshit. Its for suckers."

So in the spirit of agreeing to disagree, two years ago I decided to keep track of how two investors who followed Cuban's advice or didn't follow his advice would have faired. Each year I'm going to continue doing a recap of how a hypothetical $100,000 investment would have faired between Cuban's advised cash investing vs. investing your money in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, a low cost no load equity mutual fund.

Mark, if you don't think the stock market is for suckers anymore let me know.

Last year was my first annual recap. For last year I tracked how a 100,000 investment would have faired in the Vanguard Prime Money Market fund vs. The Vanguard Total Stock Market Index. The results for 2006? 100,000 invested in cash (as Cuban advised) would have grown to $104,882.60. $100,000 invested in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index would have grown to $113,890.00.

So what happened in 2007?

Well, assuming you continued using the same two funds (i.e. buy and hold). The ending value from January 2, 2006 to December 21, 2007 using the Vanguard Prime Money Market Fund (VMMXX) would have returned $110,280. Not a bad return for your $100,000 in two years... perhaps....

Had you invested the same $100,000 in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VITSX) over the same time period you would have grown your $100,000 into $122,130.

So the question is, if for the last two years you'd dismissed Cuban's "stock market is for suckers" advice and netted an extra $11,850 on your investment does that still make you a sucker?

Cuban says that by skipping the stock market you'd have slept like a baby. But at what cost? Is it worth $11,850 over the past two years to have slept like a baby. Personally 100% of my retirement assets are in stocks (I'm 39 and have a long time until retirement) and I slept just fine the past two years.

Another part of Cuban's argument seems to rest on the fact that investing is confusing and Wall Street only makes it more so. But following a simple strategy of buying low cost diversified index funds does not have to be confusing at all.

Will 2008 be the year that vindicates Cuban in his great "stock market is for suckers" post of 2006? Who knows. But let's come back here in January 2009 and check it out. Between now and then with a historically low P/E ratio on the Standard and Poor's 500 of 17.53, I'm sticking with my long term buy and hold strategy.

Of course what do I know, Mark Cuban's a billionaire and I'm not.

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Tag: Stock Market

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comScores results from last years holiday season are in: the US spent over $29 billion in online holiday shopping. This is up 19%...

...over last years total.

Monday, December 10 stayed the highest single day total, keeping its Green Monday title. However, unlike last year, the trend wasnt successively higher-spending Mondays starting with Cyber Monday and ending with Green Monday. This years top ten highest single-day totals:

Day Dollars Spent (Millions)
Monday, December 10 (Green Monday) $881
Tuesday, December 11 $819
Thursday, December 6 $803
Wednesday, December 5 $798
Tuesday, December 4 $776
Wednesday, December 12 $754
Monday, December 3 $753
Friday, December 7 $734
Monday, November 26 (Cyber Monday) $733
Thursday, November 29 $733

While three of the top ten days are Mondays, there are also two Tuesdays, two Wednesdays, two Thursdays and a Friday. It doesnt look like day of the week is extremely predictive of the spending for that day.

Another interesting note: the latest day in the list, December 11, is two weeks before Christmas. Im betting (as I always have) that most of us are not willing to risk our gifts arriving too late when shopping online.

Despite the fact that no single day from 2006 could make this years top 10 list, its not all good news. Chicken-Little"types will eagerly note that, while this years holiday spending is up 19% over last years, this is slower than 2006s growth over 2005 (26%). Look out, the eCommerce sky is falling. Again.

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Recently, John Jackson wrote: After reading your posts for the last ~1 year, I am wondering why you are on an open source forum....

...It seems to me that you dont understand the point that comparing the newer model of open source software (technical and business models) to the models of the proprietary companies is not the be-all-end-all of the comparisons. Specifically the revenues and profit margins of the two models. They are different, and will be different.

John, I completely agree with you that OSS is different. But one of two things happen to a successful OSS vendor. They get purchased or IPO. For simplicity sake, lets assume that the acquiring vendor is a public company. Once we begin to add public investors into the fold, I believe that focusing on OSS is different is a losing business strategy. Investors dont really care about different. They care about revenue, profit, share growth and dividends. OSS proponents can ignore investors and Wall St. if they wish, but Id suggest against it. Individual investors and Wall St. make it possible for public OSS vendors to access capital that may be necessary to fund the vendors growth. (Cheap) Capital allows (OSS) vendors to make acquisitions, build out a larger WW sales force, develop new products, etc. [Heresy_On] The value of development effort received by an OSS vendor, around a single-vendor-controlled OSS project, is much lower than youve been led to believe. Building (OSS) products is expensive [Heresy_Off]. I think we can agree that most leading OSS vendor would be much better off if they had more capital at their disposal.

If we put aside the dogma of OSS is different, so dont compare it and realize that at some point, it WILL be compared, could we as a community make it easier for OSS vendors to succeed in the market? Recognizing that OSS vendors will be compared to commercial vendors might lead some of us to get past the OSS purity debate (as I did with whether JBoss was open enough - see my next post). It may lead some of us to accept a leading OSS vendor giving away 90% of its products and offering gated access to 10% of its products. But you cant get to this conclusion if you always end the discussion at OSS is different, duh.

I would rather see an OSS vendor valued at $20B with 90% OSS products and 10% gated access products vs. that same vendor valued at $250M with 100% OSS products. I am pragmatic. Not everyone will share these views about OSS being used to generate revenue from products that may not be completely open. Im not suggesting that others have to change their views on OSS purity. I am putting forward a view that says, mostly open and big (i.e. Google) does more good for the largest set of users, than fully open and small.

PS: I have been a little tardy on replying to comments here at InfoWorld. I apologize. I am in the middle of an executive mba while working full-time.which may explain my capitalist views here ;-) I do appreciate your comments and read them all. Please keep telling me when you think Im off base! I will try harder to reply.

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Tag: Open Source

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and Transfer. Microsoft offered $1.2 billion, a 42% premium over market valuation, for Fast Search and Transfer. Fast Search and Transfer is largely...

...an enterprise search solution. As an example web index to showcase their technology years ago they created AllTheWeb. In early 2003 Overture bought AllTheWeb, and Fast's web search unit for $70 cash. Yahoo bought Overture the same year for $1.63 billion.

In 2005 Fast again appeared on the web search scene when they started powering organic search results for Miva, but they do not have their own search destination. Earlier this year Fast made noise about creating an independent ad network that allowed publishers to keep the bulk of the profits, but OpenAds already exists, and I have not heard much of Fast's proposed AdMomentum after the initial hype.

Fast recently missed quarterly numbers and changed their accounting practices. They do not have a great business model compared to Google (enterprise search is nowhere near as profitable as web search). If general web search relevancy moves beyond measuring links and more toward user feedback perhaps owning Fast would help Microsoft increase their core relevancy algorithms, and enterprise relationships can probably help them cross sell web ads too.

Potential search plays later this year:

* IAC is only worth about $7.2 billion. Earlier this year they announced that they are planning on spinning off into 5 major companies. Perhaps when that is done Microsoft, eBay, or Amazon.com should try to buy Ask.
* Why there is no money in second tier search stocks. They are all losing marketshare and money. CNET passed on buying Looksmart for a nominal sum while purchasing FindArticles.
* Perhaps search engines will start buying more major content sites. AOL is wasting away, and what else is out there?

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Tag: Microsoft, Fastsearch


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Can Ian Rogers " who left grad school to tour with The Beastie Boys, and then later helped to run the company behind Winamp...

...turn Yahoo Music into something worth paying attention to? A tough assignment, but Im keeping my fingers crossed, based on the presentation he gave at a music-industry confab in Aspen. The Yahoo Music executive has already made it clear that he has big ideas, and Mike Arrington says that he thinks something big could be coming from Yahoo.

If you read the entire post, however " and I encourage you to do so if you care about music online, even though it is fairly long " it becomes obvious that Rogers is talking about something more than just making Yahoo Music suck a little less (something he wrote about fairly eloquently in an earlier post, also based on a presentation he gave). Its clear that he envisions a kind of open-source approach to music standards online, and that means not just doing away with DRM, but making it easier for music to be found and identified " and sold " wherever it exists.

In that context, Ian mentions a guy I have recently gotten to know: David Gratton, a Vancouver entrepreneur who founded Project Opus, a social-media venture that is working on an open music-identification standard called JAMM. (David is also the guy behind the MixxMaker music-sharing app for Facebook, which I wrote about yesterday). Davids vision seems to be the same as Ians: in a nutshell, make music of all kinds easier to find, tag and share online. Heres hoping that one or the other (or both) of them succeed.

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Tag: Ian Rogers, Yahoo Music

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