Events at Yahoo! this week took me back to 2005 – the halcyon days web 2.0 days before popular social networks. If you are vaguely interested in the online sector, you will have noticed that Summly has been acquired by Yahoo!. The acquisition is interesting for a number of reasons:
It is a statement of Yahoo!’s mobile aspirations. Yahoo! has been in mobile for a good while, back to 2005 at least. Yahoo! Go tried to pull all the of the Yahoo! portal properties into an app-like experience and Yahoo! ZoneTag was an early experiment of attributing location to smartphone pictures well before the iPhone. Upload to Flickr was integrated into many SonyEricsson and Nokia phones (notably the bestselling Nokia N73) But none of these pioneering efforts were rewarded with market share
Yahoo! is looking to buy cool, like it did back in 2005 and 2006, acquiring web 2.0 businesses. Summly has had about one million downloads, mostly by early adopters of its news reader. It is not the mass-market audience that Yahoo! usually targets. Like Flickr and Delicious before it this is about cool. Whilst most of the focus has been on the media, Yahoo! has historically made these purchases to try and infuse some of the start-up get up and go DNA into the larger organisation
Summly makes some interesting technological choices that would appeal to Yahoo!. Firstly, surfacing content that consumers would find of interest; particularly interesting given that Google has abandoned RSS. Secondly, using analytical techniques to create abridged version of content could also be a differentiator in search in terms of both presentation and as a technique to improve relevance (if the abridged rather than full versions were indexed). However, Summly doesn’t own the technology itself, but is a mashup of underlying services
The 30 million dollar acquisition figure being bandied around mirrors the rumoured costs of buying both Flickr and Delicious back in 2005 and 2006. One of the key differences between Flickr and Delicious with Summly is the technology benefit that was brought to the table by the web 2.0 pioneers and in Flickr’s case the quality of the business on offer. Prior to being acquired Flickr was pretty close to breaking even with its freemium model
Summly is an interesting focus away from the traditional Silicon and Bay Area stomping grounds of Yahoo!
I had delayed writing about this as I had a busy run-up to Easter and just about everyone of note in the Bay Area seems to have weighed in on the Facebook Yahoo legal case over patents. Fred Wilson (aka A VC) channeled the concern that the start-up community in general over wide-ranging patents being a tax on innovation.
The new, new thing
There is a certain amount of prejudice inbuilt against incumbents going on; Silicon Valley doesn’t make big money from existing large businesses but the new, new thing – for example:
IBM vs. Apple, VisiCalc, Oracle and countless Boston corridor enterprise technology brands before them
Beckman Instruments vs.the traitorous eight who went on to found just about every other semiconductor company from the late 1950s through to the early 1970s: Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Intersil, AMD, National Semiconductor, LSI Logic and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins
Microsoft vs. Apple, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, the open source community
Google vs. Facebook and just about anybody else looking to make money from online advertising
Monomyth archetypes
I don’t necessarily hold this against them, it is the classic tale of David and Goliath that resonates at a deep level in the human psyche. It probably helped us move beyond being slightly smarter than the average ape and turn our use of tools into a decisive advantage with humans becoming the apex predator throughout the world.
What a lot of these arguments are failing to do is look at the underlying form in the Facebook Yahoo patent case:
Yes, the patent system is broken
Yes, Yahoo! has multiple business issues which would merit a series of posts in it’s own right
Yes, Yahoo! is unlikely to survive at least in its present form. Though for reasons that I have gone into previously I don’t think that Microsoft is a suitable suitor (just look at what has happened to its continued inability to match Yahoo!’s previous returns on search with Microsoft AdCenter) and more controversially I didn’t think that it was serious about its takeover bid first time around
Yes, Yahoo! is likely to be outmaneuvered by Facebook and be on a hiding to nothing
But for me, the story isn’t about Yahoo! or the inequitable nature of patent laws, but about Facebook and its business practices in relation to data.
Facebook Yahoo case similar to 1990s Microsoft practices
In the 1990s file formats: .doc, .xls, .ppt and others were used by Microsoft to leverage a competitive advantage. Competitor applications couldn’t open them; so your information was locked into using Microsoft Office software. This was one of the reasons why the web was so transformational; HTML opened up publishing of documents that had been previously locked into Microsoft Office – electronic versions of scientific papers, price lists etc.
Data portability is the document format of web 2.0 (or social web). During my time at Yahoo! we introduced the requirement to sign into Flickr using a Yahoo! ID, Stewart Butterfield and the team at Flickr worked hard to ensure that existing Flickr customers who didn’t want to have a Yahoo! ID could move their pictures off the service.
The idea was that the customer’s data was their property and allowing them to freely move was as American as apple pie, capitalism and the free market. Allowing customer’s data to be portable fitted in with the web being free as in speech ethic that had predominated up until then. Portable customer data kept you honest and encouraged you to innovate as losing a customer was only one export click away.
In the case of Facebook; the data that really matters is your address book. Whilst Facebook eventually allowed consumers to download their profile information (after it had gained hegemony in the US social network sector), it holds on fast to your address book. Om Malk over at GigaOM wrote a really good post on how Facebook leeched off Yahoo! user’s address book to build its business, but didn’t allow Yahoo! users to transfer data back the other way.
This had a detrimental effect Yahoo!’s already weakened business. It wasn’t only Yahoo!, Facebook did the same on Plaxo and has been in conflict with Google over the same issue. In the Yahoo! patent case; Yahoo! is in the position of shooter and patsy – but like the dreams of conspiracy theorists looking for a dark hand moving the pieces around the board – Facebook is responsible.
So consumers and some companies got screwed on their address book; but what the great and good of the start-up community who criticised Yahoo! forget is where Yahoo!, Plaxo and Google have gone before their start-ups could be tomorrow. The problem is the over-reliance on Facebook Connect as a federated ID and as a marketing tool using consumer news feeds in their word-of-mouth marketing campaign strategies.
Federated identities
Federated IDs are not a new concept, Microsoft tried to have their Passport technology adopted in a similar way some ten years ago and it was stymied because of early adopter and technology sector mistrust.
Like Facebook, the businesses adopting Facebook Connect usually rely on some sort of advertising-related business model, either for their revenue, or for garnering customers; yet with Facebook Connect – Facebook holds all the cards on targeting information that means:
Your advertising platform will always be worse than Facebook’s because they have a better customer view – as we’ve seen in search this is likely to turn into a zero-sum game
For more e-commerce-based businesses, Facebook data could be used by rivals to directly target your customers – because Facebook already has your customer list. By using Facebook Connect you already gave it to them and they could even infer a good estimate of customer engagement were by how often and how long they logged in
It has the potential to be digital equivalent of the way Standard Oil used its dominant position as a buyer of railroad transportation to screw over rivals. By supporting Facebook in the Yahoo! patents case; I believe that leading players within the start-up community inadvertently darkened their own futures.
What Microsoft was like back in the day
It is hard to imagine now, but in the mid-1990s Silicon Valley was genuinely afraid of Microsoft:
Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a technology company, the next thought would have been that Microsoft would crush them.
It’s hard for anyone much younger than me to understand the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if they tried to be the next Netscape, they’d suffer the same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be Microsoft’s last victim?
That was Y Combinator’s Paul Graham on Microsoft back in the day and how fear of it partly sewed the seeds of failure at Yahoo! Great ideas couldn’t get funded if they where considered to fall anywhere near the purview of Microsoft – and Microsoft wanted everything, at that time the company mission statement was:
A computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software
Now the vision uses softer language that also takes into account technological change with Steve Ballmer describing it as:
…enabling people and businesses to realize their full potential
Microsoft still isn’t a cuddly business by any means. Let me show you: Some six years ago I spent a weekend in San Francisco on the dime of the agency I worked with at the time. The reason why I had a free weekend was that I was originally going out there to pitch an international brief for an enterprise technology company – and the weekend should have been very busy and productive in preparation fo the pitch early the following week.
The US folks had checked the substantial non-compete list that we had been provided with by Redmond and senior clients had been checked in with and they were ok with it.
Happy days, I was put on a Thursday flight from Heathrow to San Francisco with British Airways. I deplaned, got through immigration and got a taxi into town. I went to the hotel first; dropped by bags off and washed my face and then got a taxi to our San Francisco office down near the ball park.
As I walked in the door, I could see of the office general manager getting off the phone. Apparently my trip was a waste of time; someone at head office had a call with someone at Microsoft who asked us to withdraw at the last minute as the company operated in a space that Microsoft would like to enter in the next five years.
I ended up spending the Martin Luther King day weekend at the Hotel Monaco close to Union Square and spent much of the Saturday exploring the Asian Art Museum, the then Sony Metreon centre and shopping off Haight.
The point I am trying to make is that fear is relative, Microsoft is a changed but still fiercely ambitious and competitive business.
Facebook power
Facebook is much more than Microsoft. If we look at address books as an example; Facebook bought and closed down Malaysian start-up Octazen to close the door on others using their technology to import contact lists in February 2010.
Facebook is keenly competitive in the way that Microsoft has been, but it has learned from Microsoft’s mistakes; it has lawyered and lobbied-up much earlier in its development, so with Facebook there will be no humiliating Judge Jackson trial which gifted the start-up culture of Silicon Valley a second chance.
I believe that in the medium-to-long-term Facebook will have a neutron bomb effect on the Bay Area start-up finance community and at the moment they only have themselves to blame.
Although it may seem counter-intuitive to the start-up community at the moment, fueling Yahoo!’s patent duel with Facebook may make more sense in the long run.
Advertising Age has a case study of the Yahoo Found campaign that ran in London.The Yahoo Found campaign was interesting because it used the environment as an interaction with the poster executions to give it an experiential feel.
The Yahoo Found campaign reasonated for a long time with consumers and we took found arrows on to the streets long after the poster campaign had finished to hijack the Dukes of Hazzard UK fillm premiere, SES London (with the help of Vegas showgirl outfits) and a Harry Potter book launch.
Running a brand building campaign like Yahoo Found on a sustained basis takes a lot of cojones, especially in a corporate environment. Its a pity that Yahoo Found wasn’t exploited to its full potential.The problem that marketers now face is that brand activating tactics Google Adwords provide a safer option with PowerPoint friendly data that can be dropped into pivot tables and used like a crutch to support their decision-making in the face of a hostile management.
What this doesn’t capture is brand equity through salience and mental availability which provides more diffuse benefits of preference over time.
Influential analyst houses
Interesting survey over at Duncan Chapple’s blog over which analyst houses have the most influence.Whilst the split may may change depending on what tech sector your client is in, its an interesting piece of research; particularly when you see the dominance of US focused players.
And the fact that a good third of the most influential analysts are in the other category indicating a large amount of fragmented trusted expertise.
EU roaming charges
Meanwhile the GSM Association have a handy site that allows you to compare roaming charges when you visit different countries in Europe.
I tried it using Orange post paid as my settings to have a look at different carriers. What I found interesting was that in the countries that I sampled (Germany, Ireland, Spain, France) there was not price differential between the carriers. Of course this was an unscientific test isn’t at all indicative of price fixing is it?
Yahoo! Answers was one of the last projects that I worked on when I was inhouse, I will hold my hand up and admit that I was a hawk in the Yahoo! Answers team. The reasons for my Yahoo! Answers hawk status in terms of the product being a ‘killer application’ was mainly because it failed my own ‘test’ of how is this relevant to my online life. It also suffered from the Yahoo! services problem of an off-putting onboarding process. If you weren’t put off by the sign-up then would be greeted by a product that would be familiar to business online support services. The prototypes that I saw internally reminded me of the self service customer solutions offered by the likes of RightNow Technologies and Transversal and the support forums provided by Apple for users.
I thought that the opportunity may be in sponsored channels: Microsoft sponsoring an XBox channel, or Sainsbury’s sponsoring a recipe channel. But this was poo-pooed as an idea by my immediate director.
In some ways I was wrong about Yahoo! Answers success (and I am happy to be wrong in this case).Windows Live QnA doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, Lycos IQ: though superior in terms of design and features doesn’t seem to have got that much traction so far.
According to Hitwise (via SearchEngineWatch), Yahoo! Answers is now the third most popular reference site online, however its 2.94 per cent market share is puny in comparision to the 16.76 per cent marketshare of Wikipedia which has a Googlesque sector dominance.
Steve Rubel has talked about Yahoo! Answers on his MicroPersuasion blog Marketers will Answer to Yahoo! and sees the opportunity for sponsored sections, which kind of squares the circle in the way that I viewed the product.
It offers yet another opportunity for direct interaction with consumers and a channel for cummunications, but not a full-on dialogue.
Where it gets interesting is when you look at the Google Trends data on the service, most of the search enquiries for Yahoo! Answers seems to be coming out of India, rather than the US or Europe. This will alter the services attraction for advertisers in terms of the net worth of the consumer, whether they can capitalise on the clicks through presence in the marketplace and the quality of answers given for a global audience – quality control will be a critical ongoing issue.
A post on AI sovereignty came out of one of those times when a casual conversation suddenly has you seeing the theme in your news feeds. I was having one of them conversations with a friend over a paper cup of coffee, mentioned I’d been embedded at Google and they said ‘we can’t trust the Americans with AI, the way we did with social’.
That opens opportunities. Chinese open source models are working in Singapore government data centres, Korean cloud computing company Naver is looking beyond its own country for clients who want an alternative to US big technology. France has gone it alone with its own defence AI – as the ultimate expression of AI sovereignty.
The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026 | ChinaTalk – Interesting discussions on China based AI platforms on their successes and challenges. By their nature, the give China defacto AI sovereignty. Risk taking and GPUs or TPUs performance seem to be the main sources of concern. A good deal of focus on squeezing out the maximum intelligence per watt rather than scaling to infinity and beyond. Tonality wise it’s refreshing down to earth in comparison to Altman et al.
‘South Korea’s Google’ pitches AI alternative to US and China | FT – Korea has built up positive relations in the Middle East since the 1970s when they helped on major construction and engineering projects. They would be viewed positively and as a good hedge to both the US and China from a technology dependency point-of-view. Their offer is greater AI sovereignty for Middle Eastern countries in particular, you might also winning business in Central Asia as well.
It comes as a growing number of brands are moving into the children’s, teenage and young adult skincare market. In October, the first skincare brand developed for under-14s, Ever-eden, launched in the US. Superdrug has just created a range for those aged between 13 and 28.
A number of brands have surged in popularity among very young social-media users, creating a phenomenon known as “Sephora kids”. These children share videos showcasing beauty products from Drunk Elephant, Bubble, Sol de Janeiro and similar brands.
A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling? | Intelligencer – a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.
Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’” The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.
How Hustle Culture Got America Addicted to Work – Business Insider – in America, the long, steady march toward a more leisurely future came to an abrupt halt. Today, according to the international economic database Penn World Table, the German work year is an astonishing 380 hours shorter than ours — which means that Germans work almost 10 weeks less than we do every year.
Even stranger, Americans began to glamorize their lack of free time. As the boomer generation reshaped society in its own image, it brought its ’60s, countercultural ethos to the workplace — transforming the staid, conformist office into a vessel of self-expression. Work became the central means by which you undertook to live your best life, follow your passion, and change the world. As Goldman bankers and Google idealists alike began to toil through the nights and weekends that previous generations had fought so hard to secure for them, mental-health professionals bemoaned the rise of what became known as “hustle culture.” Working long hours was suddenly the ultimate status symbol, a peculiarly American form of humblebrag. In 2017, a clever marketing study found that if you told an American you worked long hours, they assumed you were rich. If you told an Italian the same thing, they assumed you were poor.
Waymo Has Come for the Kids in Los Angeles – The New York Times – “Here, it is not unusual for families to have multiple children attending different schools far from home. School buses, if you are deemed eligible, are limited to dropping off and picking up children at locations and times that are often unhelpful. The city bus, if there is somehow a direct route to school, comes with its own set of risks that can make parents uneasy.
Ms. Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, is stuck at work until 6 p.m. most days, while her husband, who installs and repairs glass, comes home even later.
The couple struggles to coordinate their jobs and their three children. They tried Uber, and Lyft, but found that those drivers tended to cancel after discovering their riders were minors. They turned to HopSkipDrive, a service geared toward students, but the drivers had to be scheduled in advance, and would leave if children were late.
Then, a few months ago, Ms. Rivera and Alexis did a test run with Waymo.
“It was the only option where I was like, ‘Oh my God, she can order a car, nobody’s in there, she can unlock it with her phone,’” Ms. Rivera, 42, said. “I know she’s going to be safe and she’s going to get home.” – interesting use case
Chinese luxury goes local | WARC – High-end Chinese brands are stealing a march on their Western rivals with homegrown labels that appeal to more discerning local consumers who are looking for luxury items that feel tailored to them. China’s $49bn luxury market is “changing fast”: ecommerce sales at jeweller Lapou Gold, for instance, have surged more than 1000% in the first three quarters of this year compared with two years ago. Songmont, a Chinese brand that claims to have ‘experiential’ designer bags, has grown its online sales 90% while Gucci online bag sales in China have fallen 50%, according to the Business Times. – This was inevitable when you had so many talented (and a number of mediocre) Chinese people being brought through the likes of Central St Martins.
Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on WPP, AI and a new era for media | The Drum – Coca-Cola’s marketing ecosystem was sprawling and complex. The business was working with approximately 6,000 agency partners globally, while the majority of its multi-billion-dollar media budget was allocated to traditional channels. Arroyo wanted fewer partners, deeper integration and a shift towards digital-first execution at scale.
That ambition led to the consolidation of Coca-Cola’s global advertising account into WPP and the creation of Open X, a bespoke unit designed to manage the brand across markets and disciplines. Nine studios were established in key regions, housing a mix of Coca-Cola employees, WPP staff and specialist partners.
“It’s a marketing factory,” says Arroyo. “There are more than 2,000 employees of Coca-Cola and more than 2,000 employees of WPP […] and ultimately it’s enabled us to move from a company that in 2019 was investing close to 75% of our paid media on traditional TV, to a company that’s going to end up this year putting 70% of all our paid media on digital, particularly social and influencer led, marketing. For us, it’s our new TV.”
Outcry after French army chief’s ‘prepared to lose children’ warning | Le Monde – “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime from trying its luck by going further,” said Mandon. “What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of spirit to accept suffering in order to protect who we are.”
Paying tribute to French forces deployed worldwide, he added: “If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defense production will take precedence, then we are at risk.” – I don’t think that the west is ready or able to face Russia or China because of this. The war is lost before its fought
SOF, AI, and Changing Western Conceptions of War | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University – Each generational shift in technology impacts military operations. Consequently, a shift in military training, command, and promotion structure should follow. Much of the conversation surrounding AI makes it seem like an unprecedented esoteric concept. While this is partly true, the same was said about steam engines during the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, AI is the next technological breakthrough and there will be more after it. As Clausewitz stated, the character of war changes, not the nature of war. A willingness to adapt while following strategic tenets will enable us to weather the storm and thrive in AI generation warfare. Failure to do so will only bring obsolescence while America’s adversaries gain global hegemonic status. Proper implementation of AI will result in faster decision making, more accurate intelligence, improved resource allocation, better spatial awareness, more effective messaging, and more impactful strategies. The key to reaching this level of success is SOF. SOF is uniquely equipped and trained to implement AI quickly and effectively, delivering results that can be scaled to the rest of the military.
A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code | WIRED – Phreeli, the phone carrier startup is designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
Waking the Sleeping European Giant – by Matthew C. Klein | The Overshoot – “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).
Bending Spoons raids the digital graveyard for paranormal returns | FT – businesses in the Bending Spoons stable: AOL, the dial-up internet service that had been most recently attached to Yahoo, and Evernote, the virtual scratch pad. – alongside Vimeo and Brightcove with Eventbrite due to join them
