Peter Yared's Musings

I have blogged in the past about how Google's PageRank algorithm is providing decreasingly useful search results, and how vertical search is much more targeted and useful. The main issue here is that most searches are context-driven, for example when you type in a word and hit search, are you looking to buy something, a definition, or a review? The vast majority of my searches are vertical searches from the Firefox search toolbar. I have installed the following search engines into the dropdown: Amazon Dictionary.com EBay Facebook Google Maps IMDb LinkedIn MySpace Songza TheFind.com Thesaurus.com WhoIs Lookup Wikipedia Yelp YouTube Mycroft (to find more search engines to add!) For example, if I hear of a new artist on the radio and want to check out more tracks, I select Songza. If I want to check out their fan presence I select MySpace. And if I want to buy tracks or the album, I select Amazon. Picking the search vertical and then typing the search term is much more efficient ...

A thought occurred to me today while reading Virginia Hefferman's latest The Medium column in the Sunday New York Times, one of the best columns covering transitions in the media industry. Her article Content and Its Discontents laments how old media is becoming decimated. Yes, clearly reading a magazine or newspaper cover-to-cover is very old school, or as Jon Stewart poignantly nailed it with a joke newspaper entitled "Cincinnati Dump Accompaniment". But does it necessarily mean that content is dead just because newspapers and magazines are effectively dead? A newspaper column is to a newspaper as a track is to an album. The music industry has gone through a very similar transition as newspapers and magazines. Albums are definitely dead. Labels are pretty much dead. But music is flourishing! Fans can purchase tracks for a $1. A band of two like Ghostland Observatory or Trifonic can create amazing music that used to take bands of at least four.  Distributing a music vi...

Apple's next move occurred to me while I was walking by my local Apple store: Apple iTV, which will be:     Wall-mountable 37", 42", 50", 60+" LCD screens Look cool, with a hip Apple logo Stream iTunes video and audio content from the web and from your Mac Have special apps on the appstore that run on your TV (sports scores, etc.) Cable card compatible so you won't need a cable box Wirelessly display your MacBook's video feed iPhone-like touch screen remote control Include a browser controllable by above remote control's keyboard Built-in DVR So a very cool looking TV that is plug-and-play capable of showing video rentals and playing music. This will do to Sharp/Sony/Samsung/Comcast what the iPhone did to the Blackberry and AT&T: cost more, eviscerate the market, and bypass the network operator. Sweeeet.

I have posted a few times about how I often can go an entire day without going to a website, and instead spend my day in Google Reader to read content, iGoogle to see headlines and realtime information like stock quotes and weather, and Facebook for social information. Apparently I am not the only one spending most of my web time on these widget-oriented sites. Alexa 3 year usage graphs for top brands that I picked out at random all show decreasing or flat usage. Brands like FedEx and McDonalds are beginning to realize that their web presence is being increasingly ignored. Banner ad campaigns are increasingly expensive due to CPM price increases as ad placement competition increases. And to top it off, users hate banner ads more and more, so clickthrough rates (CTRs) are going down! Banner ad buyers now pay more for less! People don't go to brand web sites anymore, banner ads cost more, and people are not clicking on banner ads. These are trends that are not going to rever...

This post was also published in BusinessWeek . Widgets: The Future of Online Ads Look to the evolution of television advertising to understand the necessity of widgets in today's online world The sheer volume of Web sites has grown so overwhelming that an increasing number of consumers—not just those in their 20s—are adopting multipurpose tools to help them manage and personalize the vast amount of data thrown at them every day. The mainstream adoption of online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace and personalized home pages such as iGoogle and Netvibes reflects attempts by consumers to make the Web more manageable. This new mindset, not surprisingly, also holds for the way in which the audience is willing to engage with ads. Advertisers, many of which have only just begun shoveling more of their marketing dollars into promotional banners and boxes on Web sites, had better heed this shift sooner than later. Some Web trends prove to be fads, of course. But when hordes o...

This post was the source of a BusinessWeek article by Rachael King . There is a remarkable difference in the method and cost of startup infrastructure between when I started ActiveGrid in 2003 and wdgtbldr in 2007. Back in 2003, we still had to buy our own servers and hire IT people to get some basic services. This mindset prevailed into 2007, where to upgrade our Wiki into something much more functional, I learned that IT had physically installed two iterations of wikis on our servers. It was beyond me what features we would get from our own installation vs. a hosted one, so I suggested a policy of only using hosted infrastructure moving forwards. This led to a suggestion of having some meetings to discuss the concept, which in my experience means "not going to happen." :) Starting with a clean slate at wdgtbldr, there is definitely an "everything must be hosted" policy, and I am amazed at how cheaply and easily all of the functions of a small business can be se...

Lately I have noticed that an entire day can go by without "surfing" the web. Instead, the web comes to me. I scroll through all of the news and information that I am interested in using Google Reader, and sometime dig into the things that people are linking. My iGoogle home page tracks stocks, weather, top newsfeeds, and other just-in-time information. About the only actual website I go to nowadays is Facebook, mainly because there isn't a widget that shows me the friend updates, especially about what apps they are checking out (which is of particular interest to me nowadays). When I want to find out about something, I use vertical search in the Firefox toolbar to select Wikipedia, IMDB, LinkedIn, Dictionary.com, etc. I very rarely use Google search unless I am looking for something obscure. Net net, I never see any advertising, especially with Adblock Plus. Nielson is cluing in to this, they just came out and said that pageviews don't matter . For exampl...

The number one job of a startup CEO is to secure funding for his or her company. Most early stage startups need external investment to cover costs, so without funding, there is no company. The number one question a startup CEO needs to be able to answer is "how are you going to get to the next round of funding?" If there is no credible answer to that question, there is going to be a very unpleasant road ahead. I ran out of money at JRad, and didn't run out of money at ActiveGrid, and believe me, there's a big difference! Following are the three variables at the disposal of a CEO in order to secure the next round of funding: timing, traction, and positioning. Timing - Startups generally have 12-18 months of cash between funding rounds. You have to raise money while you still have 6 months of cash in the bank or you are going to get tooled as potential investors wait you out in order to increase their leverage. The math is simple: if there is 12 months of mone...

Raising venture capital for a new business is not easy, but fortunately the process is very predictable. First time entrepreneurs often do not understand the process, or think that they are above it, which leads to a lot of frustration, and in the end, no venture financing. If your business doesn't meet these criteria, it doesn't mean it is a bad business, just that it probably isn't going to be venture backed. If you want to raise venture capital, get out of your own way and navigate the following process. Domain Expert - The most important thing for a startup to have is a domain expert. When people start a company in a business that they know nothing about, you end up with disasters like Pets.com. So it is critical that a startup has an expert in the market it is trying to penetrate. There is no such thing as a "visionary," just people who know a market very well and can therefore make a much more educated guess as to where it is going to go next than...

In my blog post "Startup 101: Sell to Users" I emphasized the need to focus on the product before scaling up a company. Marc Andreeson has recently started a new blog and he has a great term for this concept, "Product/Market Fit". Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit -- and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful. Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board -- heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding p...