SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

September 15, 2006

AOL Offers 5 Gigabytes of Free Online Storage

In the not search-related but still useful category, AOL is now offering 5 gigabytes of free online storage through its Xdrive subsidiary. All you need is an AOL screen name—no other strings attached. It's an excellent service, very easy to use, and I highly recommend it for backups, extra storage, or just an extra locker for music, photos or other digital media. More info and free registration here.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:37 PM | Permalink

June 14, 2006

Yahoo, MapQuest Bring Where 2.0 Back to Earth

Excuse the pun, of sorts. Many of the speakers and panelists over the past couple of days at Where 2.0 demonstrated a range of cool technologies or whiz-bang features that probably don't have a hope of becoming breakout, mass market consumer applications. That doesn't mean they aren't interesting or useful. But the question is: where will these companies be in 5 years?

Presentations from Yahoo's Paul Levine and MapQuest's Jim Greiner today independently focused on practical issues like business models and mass consumer adoption.

Paul Levine, Local GM for Yahoo, had the unfortunate challenge of being in front of a hungry crowd before lunch and dealing with some technical glitches with his presentation. However he did an excellent job, given those challenges, presenting tons of information in a compressed 15 minutes. Levine raced through Yahoo's broader social media strategy, Local and Maps. He also announced the Yahoo Local & Maps Blog, which Yahoo sees as a communication tool for all its local constituencies (bloggers, press, merchants, consumer-influencers and developers).

Levine said, "Participation is guiding our strategy, for Yahoo broadly, for search and especially in Local." He reiterated the FUSE (find, use, share and extend) concept. "We want to tap into the amazing body of content that's out there broadly, whether it's online or in people's heads."

Levine identified three principal constituencies for Local and Maps: consumers, merchants and developers. Levine said that Yahoo's strategy is to build "a container" for consumers to provide content to Yahoo. He cited Answers and Local ratings and reviews as two of several examples. Merchants are the business model and developers help extend the value of Yahoo's platform and tools. Regarding monetization Levine asked the semi-rhetorical question: "Where's the business around all this; where's the value creation?"

That's a theme that MapQuest GM Jim Greiner echoed in his talk later in the afternoon. Greiner said that he wanted to impress upon the crowd "three simple truths" that MapQuest has learned in its more than 10 years in business: 1) focus on what's truly useful to consumers, 2) make it economically viable and 3) aim for the mass market.

He gave examples of each but pointed out that the dominant use case of mapping online is still driving directions. By his own admission, MapQuest is not the innovator it once was, but it is the market leader. He showed comScore traffic data reflecting MapQuest's leadership and continued growth, despite some of the "sexier" features being promoted by its competitors. But he acknowledged that some of those features would be added to MapQuest: personalization, aerial and satellite imagery and street-level photography.

Greiner stressed simplicity and utility and cited Wayfaring.com as a mashup tool that ordinary people could use without any technical knowledge. Ironically, however, the founders of Wayfaring.com haven't quit their day jobs because, according to hearsay, they don't yet have a business model that permits them to do that.

Indeed, there are only two or three business models online: subscription/licensing or some version of advertising. And with advertising you ideally have to offer targeting and some degree of reach. This is very difficult for most of the small consumer-facing sites at Where.

Effectively then these startups become labs and talent incubators for the search engines and portals. While most of these companies hold out hope of being the next Flickr or del.icio.us, both of which Yahoo acquired.

In contrast to Greiner's very pragmatic, "real-world" approach, Yahoo's Levine struck a balance between practical questions (i.e., monetization) and technological innovation. On the latter point he discussed the integration of Yahoo assets such as Flickr, Local and mapping and the work being done at the Yahoo Research Lab in Berkeley. As an example he discussed automatic geocoding of photographs from mobile phones using cell-tower triangulation.

Levine ended by seeking to differentiate Yahoo's Maps and API from its competitors. He went through a list of bullets but mentioned the Yahoo content API as part of the overall value proposition for developers: Flickr, Local content and traffic in addition to the underlying mapping platform.

Levine also pointed to branded online campaigns created by Baskin Robbins and Columbia Pictures utilizing Yahoo's mapping tools as evidence of its richness and adaptability.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 4:22 PM | Permalink

February 14, 2006

AOL Launches Test Chinese Portal For Americans

Reports from Reuters shows that AOL has launched a test portal for the "American Chinese" user at http://chinese.aol.com/. The portal is going to offer "full-length features and episodes of TV series from China" with up to 20-hours of video for download at any time. AOL made it clear that they are only focusing on the American Chinese market with this portal.

The Washington Examiner quotes an AOL spokesperson as saying; "We're not entering the Chinese market...Right now it's a domestic initiative serving a domestic audience." The Chinese portal also features "Web search capabilities, blogs, e-mail and news from North America, Europe and Asia."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:00 AM | Permalink

January 29, 2006

AOL's "(Quick) Answer" Feature On Web Results Pages

Although we've blogged many times about search engines becoming answer engines for some types of queries with a variety of tools and services including Google "Q&A", MSN "Instant Answers", Ask Jeeves "Smart Answers", and Yahoo Wikipedia shortcuts, we haven't mentioned AOL's (quick) answer feature found at the top of some web results pages.

An AOL (quick) answer should not be confused with AOL "Snapshot" that provides facts, stats, links, etc. to related content from other web sites (including Time Warner properties) that have been assembled by human editors. Here's an example of an AOL Snapshot.

A (quick) answer comes from material autonomously mined from open web sources like Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook, IMDB, and other sites delivered at the very top of a web results page.

Examples: + President of Harvard University + Capital of France + Director of Spiderman

(quick) answer is powered by technology from Teragram based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their website offers info on the specific technology that AOL users to power (quick) answer (called Direct Answer) along info about other categorization and taxonomy technology they market.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:57 PM | Permalink

January 4, 2006

Access Event Information with New IM Bot from Eventful

Access to various kinds of information via instant messaging will continue to grow in 2006. John recently blogged about Makebot and I'm a regular user of Yahoo Alerts delivered via Yahoo Messenger. These are just a couple of many services that offer "bot" generated info via IM. Today, word that Eventful (powered by the the Events and Venues Database) with access to info thousands of events submitted by users and others, can be accessed via AOL Instant Messenger.

You can learn more about the new Eventful Bot and how to use it, here.

You can find other AIM bots listed here including one that provides access to MovieFone and another that offers Major League Baseball info.

Finally, AIM, Yahoo Instant Messenger (look for a search box at the bottom of a chat box) and MSN Messenger allow searchig of their web databases directly from the IM client.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:03 PM | Permalink

November 26, 2005

AOL High Quality Video Downloads, AOL Triton IM Gets Search Box & Sharing MSNBC Articles Via MSN Messenger

AOL is running an new trial of "high quality" video you can download, AOL's Triton IM tool has a new search box and MSNBC news articles can now be shared via MSN Messenger. More below on these features:

+ AOL Hi-Q? Video Video Trial First, a new beta from AOL that I've been using for about a week without running into any problems or concerns. It uses a Windows client (sorry Mac users) that downloads "High Quality" video content (in terms of video quality) directly to your computer. They're calling it the AOL® Hi-Q? Video Trial. Videos can be viewed on-demand or downloaded automatically in the background when your system is idle. You can even subscribe to certain content types and have the files delivered/downloaded automatically. Presently, the available content consists of movie previews, celebrity interviews, music videos, games tips and original AOL programming but I would be willing to bet will see much more content delivered using this approach in the future. This just might be the way (at least in concept) that will see (no pun intended) high quality video content will be delivered to computers in the future.

+ AOL IM AOL IM Triton Released Along with a bunch of new features, the new AOL Triton IM release has a search box built into the IM box. MSN Messenger offers a shared search option (along with a search box in the client) while Yahoo Instant Messenger also provides a search box built into the IM client.

+ MSNBC News Articles via IM Most MSNBC news posts now have a link at the bottom of each article that allow you to share the item via MSN Messenger. You'll need to use IE. More in this blog post.

Posted by Gary Price at 4:59 PM | Permalink

March 14, 2005

More Mobile Search and Info News

I'm starting to wonder if we'll soon need a blog that only focuses on mobile search and info retrieval. (-: Three news items from the mobile front today.

+ Yahoo and AOL have both announced deals that will provide Blackberry users with preinstalled versions of Yahoo Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger clients on their devices. Versions of Yahoo Messenger and AIM are already available from several wireless providers.

+ More about other mobile services AOL plans to release in the Infoworld article: AOL unveils set of new mobile services.

+ FAST Search and Transfer has launched a new mobile product called Fast mSearch that can intergrate a variety of mobile content. More info here.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:32 AM | Permalink

March 7, 2005

Are VoIP Services on the Horizon for Search Providers?

In January, Danny blogged about speculation (at a fever pitch for a few days) about Google launching a VoIP telephone service. Today, Jim Hu at News.com calmly discusses what Google, Yahoo, and MSN are or are not up to in the article: Search giants hear voices.

+ Google has not announced plans to offer VoIP service, and declined to comment for this story.

+ "We are definitely looking at the space closely," Yahoo spokeswoman Terrell Karlsten said. "We're figuring out how to enhance and expand into the voice space by leveraging those properties." Yahoo has already launched a PC-based voice service in the United Kingdom. Microsoft plans to embed voice calling into its enterprise instant-messaging software.

+ AOL plans to launch an Internet phone service this month.

Postscritpt: See also Google window-shops for VoIP.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:06 AM | Permalink

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