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YouTube Slam

Eric Fader — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:43:54 +0000

YouTube just released a new featured called YouTube Slam where users can vote, in hot or not like fashion, for the video that wins that particular battle. Battles are currently restricted to Comedy, Music, Cute, Dance, and Bizarre videos. This is a great move on behalf of YouTube to add interaction beyond the view, comment, like, and share. So far there is a significant amount of activity and gamification was wisely deployed.

Then come play YouTube Slam—a video discovery experiment we cooked up with folks from Google Research. Each week a new crop of videos battles head-to-head in Comedy, Cute, Music, Bizarre and Dance Slams, where your votes determine who wins the Slam and gets featured on the leaderboard.

Google is using YouTube Slam as an experiment to bolster its algorithm based discovery of emerging talent. More details can be found here on Google’s research blog: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/discovering-talented-musicians-with.html Tweet

Microsoft Adopts NFC and QR

Eric Fader — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 03:02:08 +0000

A growing concern of connecting offline campaigns with online counterparts is the fragmentation of devices, apps, and methods. Notably QR codes and the burgeoning NFC approach. Microsoft is trying to fill the holes left by the disparate technologies by providing the support of both NFC and QR codes within their platform and app.
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Google Hipmunks Hipmunk

Eric Fader — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:48:23 +0000

Hipmunk was first to apply a significant change to the manner by which consumers scheduled travel online. However I think that with Google’s purchase of ITA and the rollout of Google Flights, Google has effectively Hipmunked Hipmunk. Take a look at the interface below.

Google Graphing Calculator

Eric Fader — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:16:36 +0000

Google’s search bar has always had significant utility ranging for ease of searching to being able to enter mathematical equations. They just enhanced the math component to include graphing equations.

Click this link to see it in action: Google Hearts Its Users Equation

Nothing says I love you like a graphed equation

Bing Dominates Google Search

Eric Fader — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 04:31:23 +0000

This is too funny amidst the war between Bing and Google.

When you conduct a search for the term “search” on Google, Bing is the number one result.

Try it yourself here.

Google Should Acquire Kickstarter

Eric Fader — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 03:52:12 +0000

Google should forget about Groupon and seriously consider acquiring Kickstarter. Kickstarter provides a way for them to get funding for creative projects ranging from iPod nano watches to independent movies. The concept is simple, users signup and submit their idea to the community with a funding goal and then the community and the creator’s connections can contribute money. The creator typically uploads a video, a written description, and establishes multiple tiers based rewards based on contributions by the people that funded the idea. If, within the set period of time, the idea does not meet its funding goal, no one will be charged and no goods will be exchanged. However, if the idea is funded, the contributors will receive the appropriate reward based on their level of funding. Kickstarter, in return takes 5% of all money contributed to the idea.

Kickstarter is brilliant because it facilitates creativity where typically money was a barrier. Additionally, it is another example of social commerce and funding that is disrupting the offline world. The true brilliance is that the average person cannot legally invest in a company as you have to be an accredited investor; only a small percentage of the population qualifies. The irony is that I feel that the qualifications of an accredited investor are flawed. Just because someone has a certain income over time and a certain amount of assets, does not mean that they are savvy. What if an accredited investor makes millions but spends millions and lives as if they made $100,000? Kickstarter circumvents the accredited investor laws by providing the people that fund the ideas with tangible products instead of equity.

If Kickstarter were able to scale and move beyond just creative projects, and Google were to adjust the commission I could see this becoming a billion dollar business that has an altruistic component to it.

Why should Google acquire Kickstarter?

It would increase adoption of Google Checkout, replacing Amazon payments currently used by Kickstarter
Notable funding includes ipod Nano Watch $624k, and Diaspora $200k
If Google doesn’t acquire Kickstarter, someone else will such as Amazon
It is a business that thrives on the network effect and margins are high
May parlay Google is evil movement and add human element to Google’s products

Google Launches In Page Analytics, Update to Overlay

Eric Fader — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:07:13 +0000

Within the content portion of Google Analytics you will notice that the traditional overlay report has been removed and replaced with a click patterns module that is currently in BETA. More information will be posted as we experiment with this new and exciting feature that surely will put more pressure on Omniture, Coremetrics, and startups like Clicktale, and CrazyEgg.

BREAKING: Just added video from Google further explaining this great feature:

Former MySpace Director Ulf Waschbusch Becomes Chief Product Officer at Gaming Startup ‘Garena’

Tim Schulz — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:12:04 +0000

Ulf Waschbursch, a former Director of Product at MySpace Mobile will be joining Singapore-based gaming startup Garena in March as Chief Product Officer. Prior to joining Myspace, Ulf was a Product Marketing Manager in Google’s mobile-product division after graduating from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB).

Garena Software is a gaming-platform company that was founded by another Standford GSB graduate and has grown to over 25-million registered users across 200 countries — making Garena one of the largest international-gaming communities in the world. The company has a strong foothold in cybercafes across Asia, Europe and South America, and they’re beginning to move up the value chain by partnering with companies like MTV to build rich entertainment experiences for users. As Chief Product Officer, Ulf will be based in Singapore and will be responsible for extending the product into new feature areas and countries.

Based on what we see from the company’s worldwide user distribution map, it looks like he’ll be earning quite a few frequent-flier miles. Best of luck to you Ulf!

More about the company here.

Garena's worldwide user distribution

Seesmic Beats Twitter to Google’s Nexus One Campaign (a sign of things to come?)

Eric Fader — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:46:42 +0000

Google has chosen Seesmic as one of six featured applications in its new Nexus One campaign. This comes just days after CNET’s favorable review of Seesmic’s Blackberry app. While the news is very interesting, this partnership may indicate a much bigger plan that Google has for Seesmic.

Seesmic launched in 2008 as a “video for Twitter” product, but after that approach didn’t gain enough traction they quickly pivoted in 2009 and became a solution to help users aggregate their various social-networking accounts (similar to what Tweetdeck and Brizzly are doing).

What is interesting is that Seesmic has been quietly gaining traction and they are now a company that everyone in the social-networking space should be watching very closely — for three reasons. The first is their recent acquisition of ping.fm. This acquisition not only gives users the ability to update multiple social networks through a single Seesmic application, but also provides Seesmic with a wealth of user data. The second is their significant investment in the mobile space. User acquisition for social networks used to begin at the computer and the mobile app was merely an extension of that experience. That model is slowly shifting, and in the future users will decide which apps to use on other platforms based on what they experience on mobile devices. Finally, there are rumors that as Twitter continues to have uptime-performance issues, applications like Tweetdeck and Seesmic will fill that gap and provide a service that allows users to continue communicating when Twitter is down. This is interesting because if Seesmic adds more infrastructure to their service, they are in a position to rival Twitter as a stand-alone, realtime application.

These trends are still emerging and who really knows whether they will position Seesmic for success anytime soon. Nevertheless, with lots of user data, a growing foothold in the mobile space, and the need for an infrastructure partner, I’d have to wonder whether Google is considering Seesmic as an acquisition target. If that is the case, is Seesmic’s inclusion in the Nexus One Campaign actually Google’s initial pilot for something much, much bigger?

Time will tell, but in the meantime, congrats to the Seesmic team on a great month thus far.

Google and Facebook Work Together to Resolve FriendFeed and Feedburner Issue

Eric Fader — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:02:28 +0000

Much has been said over the last few months about the competition brewing between Facebook & Google. Wired Magazine even ran a story on the topic and framed it as a race over the future of the internet. And the blogosphere became even more heated up about this subject last month when Facebook acquired FriendFeed in an effort to strengthen their position within the emerging real-time web.

But with all that’s been said about the competition, its interesting to see that there are actually times when Facebook and Google collaborate behind the scenes. One recent example is the unexpected exclusion of FriendFeed subscriber counts from FeedBurner analytics (a feature that rolled out in June). It sounds minor, but a blog that reported 10,000 RSS-feed subscribers last week woke up this morning to find that number 20-30% lower. We at TrendSlate also noticed that our RSS subscribers decreased, even though our overall traffic has grown by 3-4x. Bloggers were immediately voicing their concern over the issue on Twitter, and several “Google vs. Facebook” conspiracy theories began to grow.

Checking Google’s Feedburner blog this evening, it seems that they are aware of the issue and have worked with FriendFeed to resolve it:

Issue: We are working with FriendFeed to determine why subscriber totals from this service are not available in the most recent daily subscriber counts reported for FeedBurner feeds. We will update this post with any status changes and resolution.

Updated: We have resolved the issue with FriendFeed, and you should see updated stats from FriendFeed in the 24 hours after your feed is polled by FriendFeed.

Its good to see Google & Facebook engineers working together to solve this collaboratively. It makes you wonder about the interconnected tech community in areas like Silicon Valley, and how relationships between these developers manifest themselves to create great results throughout the product-development process.

FriendFeed Unique Visitors courtesy of Compete.com
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