Kaiyzen Group

I will be attending the Net Neutrality event at USF tomorrow.  I receieved word from Christina Gagnier that there will be a wireless connection so I will do my best to post throughout the day as the speakers are doing their thing.

The event materials are also supposed to be posted after the event, I will post some links to them when they are up.

A video here of a clip from the DLD Conference going in Deutchland (Munich), damm I wish I was there right now. Hopefully will be attending next year. For those of you who dont know I am a trade show whore.., I will pretty much attend any trade show or conference in any business sector.

So back to the post…, the most popular solutions and sites out there on the web are in their position for one main reason.., branding. Dont get me wrong, you have to have a good or decent product and solid team working with you, but ultimately, it comes down to having a good brand, with good design, that clicks with people.

Of course with my passionate disliking for all things Google, I have the stance.., and know for a fact that they are in their position b/c of branding and the they have made their name synonymous with search amongst the drones out there. This has become very apparent recently with my continued efforts to educate, and brainwash, individuals on search alternatives. I cant tell you how many times I will talk about a service to someone, and they just say.., “oh you mean they do that too.., I just go to Google and search xyz”.

In the video there is Mahalo and Wikia founders talking about human powered search and how Yahoo! and Google have great search solutions that are algorithm based, but for general searches their human powered sites will best them. They go on to talk about how everyone things Google is so great just because of the branding and perception of their results.., when in fact people are not so happy and trustworthy with search results.

Search aside.., branding and design is where it is at. You give a user a choice between the exact same service, with the exact same feature set, with one having a lame name and lame design, and the other having the opposite, people are going to choose branding and design every time.

Unfortunately this post marks my first occasion of embedding a youtube clip on the site.., tis a sad day, but enjoy the video none the less:

TechCrunch has a late night posting about Meg Whitman stepping down as the long time CEO of eBay.

People have been giving her a hard time of late about how she should step down for the sake of the company and investors, and noting a change of guard being needed with Amazon doing so well, and Google breathing down their necks with Google Checkout.

I have been a been fan of hers and thought that ultimately she has done a fantastic job with the company with only a couple exceptions.  Two things that have bugged me about eBay as far as misteps is the price they paid for Skype, and their uber annoying tv ads they started showing the past couple years.

Meg still serves on the boards of P&G and Dream Works Animation.  Maybe with increased free time she will do some more advisor and board work.., besides relaxing of course.

Between being an eBay fan, and of course P&G, and Megs load of free time now, I will toss her on the list of people I would like to spend an afternoon with.  Tops on the list questionwise would what it was like when she left her nice job at Hasbro to move to a small tech startup with just 29 people.

I have written before about the growing traffic of the CPG players web properties as they start to embrace digital ad solutions more.

AdAge has an article about OfficeMax and their digital site they launched for the holiday season in ‘06.  The site ElfYourself attracted an astounding 26.5 Million visitors during the holidys.  The site enables you to upload a pic your selfself and paste your face on a dancing elf body.

According to Anne Bologna, president of the agency that created the campaign, in its second year of existence the site had a 10x increase in traffic and 123 Million elves created.

These are pretty remarkable numbers.  Just as with the CPG guys, its impressive to see big brands be able to leverage their vast audience and drive what adds up to a TON of traffic when measured against the average consumer site.

When they are valued, especially in VC/investment scenarios, consumer internet sites typically garner most or all of their evaluation on the number of unique monthly users.  If you have created a site that is getting 500K-1 Million visitors, and have ANY sort of revenue model, including the dreaded AdSense only even.., you have a site that is worth some moula.

This brings up two questions in my mind.

1) If a consumer site with 1 Million monthly visitors is worth, lets say a $10 Million evalutation, and they are providing some random service like videos, address book, calendar, whatever…, what is a product/brand site worth that has the same amount of traffic?

2) Given the rediculous aggregate traffic that product/brand sites are starting to generate, what are some new business opportunities for these companies to leverage their audience and make increased side income through their web properties.

For #1 who knows.., a handfull of the valutations on startups are B.S. in my book, so who knows what a product/brand site is worth, but it has to be something.  For #2 I think there is HUGE potential for these companies to make incremental income per customer/user on an anual basis.

Lets say I am a company with a brand website that gets the 1 Million users per month.  If I can figure out how to garner an incremental 10 cents per user/year…, which is absolutely nothing, than that means another $1.2 Million in revenue for just conducting business as usual while putting some together to generate that 10 cents on average.  It could be banner ads (ughhh), PPC links (meerrgghghg).., affiliate solutions (not too bad).., or something new where I provide something of value for free in exchange for the opportunity for direct marketing maybe.

Something to keep an eye on this year as more companies increase their digital budgets to move more campaigns and efforts online.

There is lots of stuff going on in the world of patents.  The USPTO under the onslaught of technology, and specifically software patents, is drowning in getting patents reviewed and approved or rejected.  People are complaining that the USPTO is hastily granting patents that are obvious and should be rejected.  Most notable and public of the obvious patents is the continued case of Amazon and their One-Click patent.

The Amazon story has been going on for some time.  A re-examination was filed by blogger Peter Calveley. If you search on Yahoo! for “amazon one click patent” you will get a ton o hits.

I am kind of torn on this subject.

In one area I am all for patents.  I am currently working on a couple and thinking about filing them.  I view them as a great value add and protection when entering a market where large players can easily steal and mimick your ideas and put you out of business before you can even get going.  This day in age.., especially in the tech sector, patents dont seem to provide too much protection.  It seems that companies will just infringe on your IP until you sue them.  By that time they will usually just slap you with some $$$ and continue on their way.  I recently had a couple friends work on a project with a handfull of patents filed.  They had a big tech company signed up as a beta and consulting project.  The customer declined to fully sign up to use their technology at the end of the project.., then turned around and re-engineered everything they had done and release a product as their own.  Its scenarios like this that make you think.., “why should I be wasting my time and $$ on this if someone is just going to rip me off anyways?”

On the other side of the fence.., I cannot stand patent trolls that just file patents, or acquire IP that they are never going to use and go around forcing people to pay them stupid sums of cash.  I equate these bastards to the squaters that take domain names, dont use them, then try to sell them for $10,000.  This practice needs to be stopped and I hope some of the patent reform will help out in this area.

The next few years are going to be interesting once some of these cases like Amazons are finalized and we are getting some more precedence from the reform act.  There are also some new companies and concepts around IP creation, valuation, and monetization.

One very cool company is Ocean Tomo.  These guys are doing some pretty cool things around IP portfolios.  From valuation, to testimony, to helping out during M&A actvities they have built up a fantastic suite of services.  The most interesting to me right now is their three trading indexes around patent value and growth.

Another new project that has started up that I just came across.., actually what prompted me to write this story, is Peer to Patent.  This is a fantastic project that I hope can get some traction and lots of exposure.  This project approaches patents in a similar manner that medical research is done.  It focuses on peer review as part of the filing process.  The notion is that you submit your patent, it is reviewed by a community of peers that are experts or pretty knowledgable in your field the patent covers.  The community can than comment and submit prior art regarding the IP.

Scientists have been given the green light to do “hybrid research”.  They will be merging human cells with animal eggs.  This story from the BBC has a bit more details.., I guess they will destroy the embyro tests after 14 days in an effort to ease peoples fears and objects.

This can help put us one step closer to Island of Dr. Moreau style science.

AdAge has a story about the Writers Guild of America tightening the screws on writers from participating in the Grammy’s.

A spokesman for the WGA said that a writers exemption will not be granted to the Grammy’s.  Also the WGA is lobbying a handfull of music artists who also have their Writers affiliation as well.

All of this sits pretty well with me.., besides not liking to see the writers get screwed over, I really do not like award shows.  Although I will be a little sad to miss TOOL hopefully win another Grammy for best rock performance.., they got nominated for The Pot.

No Queen Latifah para tu