Kaiyzen Group

Headin down to Scottsdale for a few days, going to catch 3 Giants games while down there.  I am hoping for some great weather for the weekend to get some AZ outdoor activities in.  Most likely will be on a blogging break till mid next week.., a couple things of interest today:

Ebay settles with MerExchange over an ongoing patent battle with “buy it now”.  Link is to Wall St. Journal.., subscription required.

Sprint seems to be on the ropes now more than ever.  Will be interesting to see how the rest of ‘08 goes while AT&T and Verizon charge ahead taking massive amounts of customers away from the slumping telco.

More sub prime fall out.., AIG writes down $11 billion.., this after people tied to them and General Reinsurance Corp were found guilty and will stand trial.

Nucomony who just closed a round of funding recently from WPP (a leading ad firm).., has a blog with a post talking about how Traffic is Dead, Hail the King.  In my post the other day about Microsoft, I talked about their continual ad push, and their anouncement regarding their “Engagement Mapping” technology they will be releasing.

Between the new analytics startups such as Nucomony, MS’s push, and the traffic palyers (comscore/neilsen, hitwise, etc) looking to move beyond the page view method of ranking sites, it appears that maybe the industry as a whole is ready to move beyond click throughs and page views as the primary means of web measurement.

I am happy to see things move towards this way.., not too sure if, or even how, engagement will be the new thing for major online marketers to grab hold of and embrace.  I do have a passionate disliking for the search market, even it generates boatloads of $$$.., I just dont believe in the fact that all those clicks are actually happening on the search engines.  My paranoia and conspiracy theory mind has me believing that waaaaaaay too many random, errant, and fraudulant clicks happen on the major search sites and through their affiliates.

I will be following the Nuconomy blog as well as my normal round of ad/marketing sites.., looking forward to see what other stories and write ups pop up regarding the subject of engagement and the death of the page view.

FusionOne just closed a “Series A-1″ of funding…, f’in rediculous.  These sacks better squeeze some value out of their asses for the $100+ million they have raised over the years.

I worked for Levient, a small wireless startup, before we were acquired by FusionOne.  They acquired us at the same time as two other companies, tried to do a bunch o integration which did not work and whent through two large layoff periods.

I still have stock and would love to see them get me some value…, at least enough cashish for like an x-large combo from round table or something.

I will be attending the YUI 2nd birthday bash at Yahoo! HQ tomorrow afternoon/night.  I attended last years and look forward to some great food, beer, good talks and maybe some guitar hero on the big projection screen.

For any of those unfortunate web developers out there that havent had the pleasure of experiencing the YUI library.., cant be too many of you left out there.., it is a fantastic user interface/experience library that Yahoo! created, maintains, and releases under a BSD license.

The library home page can be found here.

I highly recomend playing around with it.  With the flexible BSD license you can use it for whatever you want.., your own personal site.., a business site.., a product you release online, or even distribute to third parties.

With their acquisition of aQuantive last year, the proposed Yahoo! takeover, and their continual gluttoness spending on their online services division no one doubts that the folkal up in Redmond are damm serious about online adversiting.  A couple morsels in todays news.

First.., they are looking to hijack Fox Interactive from Google and take over ads on MySpace.  The G guys whined about the in-ability to monetize social network traffic during their quarterly reporting.  The TechCrunch guys point that fact out that the MySpace deal was made in haste and is not really working out for them.  I think that might be part of it.., but I also just think they were dropping some shit talking Google PR style towards Facebook basically saying that its really hard to make $$ on social networking traffic.  Any way you look at it, this would be HUGE for MS.  Snagging Fox Interactive and MySpace would be another great snag for them including Digg, and of course the Facebook deal.

Secondly MS annouced some ad technology they will be releasing pretty soon that aims to cause a change in the online ad sector to not focus entirely on click throughs.  They call this “Engagement Mapping”.  They havent provided too many details but it seems like its a combination of cookies and online authentication through various properties that will track the ads you view/click and utlimately act on to make purchases.  They will be providing some sort of score to gauge how the consumers are actually engaged in various touch points.  This could be great for the big ad players.., my friends at P&G and the rest of the CPG space should eat this up if MS can execute correctly.

Lastly.., Avenue A/Razorfish.., which is now owned by MS through the aQuantive purchase released their Avenue A Razorfish 2008 Outlook Report.  You can read the report, a couple key pts were that vertical content and paid search were the biggest winners in the increased spending last year, online should be shielded from any economic downturn this year (which is mirrors what the Advertising Age folks are reporting), and the home page is becoming more and more devalued as users are landing deeper in a site through search and other means.

Just getting over some sickness from last week that caused a lack in the postings…., a quick roundup of some tidbits:

Of course there is the continued Microsoft/Yahoo! drama.  The latest being that MS is STILL sticking to their guns that their offer is fair.., impending proxy battle coming up as Yahoo!’s board comes up for re-election.  This should get interesting, or at least entertaining from a public perspective.  It has been more of like the cold war days recently with each side either publically stating things, or sending out internal communications that they know will be leaked to the press.  First was Yang and company’s move to setup crazy severance plans in the case of a take over and layoffs.., then came MS sending an internal email about how important the top performers are and that the deal will be mostly about the people and the best will be rewarded handsomly.

Funding, funding, and more funding.  Even with the economy technically being in the shitter VC activity doesnt seem to be slowing down.., handfull of new companies getting their $$$ on, as well as some later rounds to help through these possible tough times.  Some notables are:

New blog recomendation site Outbrain closes $5 Million.., do we really need another blog recomendation/search site?

Tiny Pictures nabs a $7 Million Series B to help consumers share and comment on eachothers camera phone pics.  Seems like an awefull lot o cashish for what their service is.  This brings their total funding to $11.2 Million.  Radar.., parent company, is claiming to serve up 15 million pics a month.

Glam finally gettin that HUGE funding they have been talking about for months.  This brings their total funding + debt to around $115 million.., frickin nuts, BUT, they are having projected revenues of $150 Million for the year with $40 Million in profit.., they have their glam.com site which is a HUGELY popular site among women.., and a handfull of offshoot site.., they claim around 1.1 Billion page vies.

Mixx.., the Digg clone + competitor, closes a “Series A1″, whatever that is, at $2 Million.  This seems like a good amount of cash for them to grab.  They have been getting some good press and seem to have some growth going.  They are run by Chris McGill who is the former GM of Yahoo! News.

TrialPay.., have a friend that works there.., supposedly kickin some arse and closing a $12.7 Million round bringing their total honey pot to around $16 Million.  David over at VentureBeat has a writeup on them with some screen shots.  Supposedly looking for around $20 Million in revenue this year which is great.  It would be nice to see how their expanding roster of merchants shapes out throughout this year.

Mobile mobile mobile.., thats what a lot of people have been touting for quite some time.  From mobile advertising, video streaming, downloads, games, and of course everyones favorite, the iphone and the device market.

In the next 12-18 months we will be seeing a good amount cool mobile devices from all manufacturers, as well as updates and new offerings from the folks at apple.

Nowdays everyone is buying laptops for their primary computers.  The tablet pc market has yet to take off, but that might change with this mobile craze.

Intel being the king of the chip space is going to stand on the sidelines waiting for AMD to make moves like they did in the 64 bit and server space.  Intel is working on a chipline for lowend devices…, $250 or less they say.  The product line is dubbed Diamondville right now.., actual name TBD later.  They say they plan on selling 10’s of millions of these new chips by 2011.  They are calling the target market for these new chips “Netbooks”…, these will primarily be really small devices that are somewhere between smart phone and tablet.

This sounds pretty exciting to me to finally see a handfull of small/mobile type devices come out at reasonable price points.  One of the biggest issues has been the high price tag.  After we see some nice devices in the $300 or less range we will start to really see things take off.

Start putting your dream mobile device on your wish list to santa for xmas ‘09