Options? Great… Pick one!

The Microhoo situation has made some considerable developments since I last posted on the subject. Sadly though Jerry and his board haven’t made their minds up yet, but that’s justified to an extent now that so many interesting options have presented themselves. Next Tuesday we’ll get to see Yahoo’s earnings report which will (hopefully) give everyone a big clue as to where this is going. Of course other Q1 numbers that will prove interesting are those of AOL – rumoured to be down to the tune of 25-30%. Platform A is being streamlined, which has a short term cost cutting win and could be used to adjust the compatibility of the team for any longer term aspirations such as say a merger with Yahoo!

AOL’s moves as of late have been focused on turnaround. First Bebo was acquired for $850 million, allowing AOL to own a social network and have access to a lot of users. This huge jigsaw puzzle piece will give AOL what it needs over the next few years to allow it to compete with the big players on the Internet. Combined with Platform A, it means they can keep everything that’s ad revenue based in house which is much more respectable than just outsourcing to Google; aka admitting defeat or Yahoo’s great idea. Platform A has taken on Verizon’s web and mobile properties, offering AOL a real opportunity to lead innovation on how to target ads at the mobile internet and its ever increasing number of users. Ultimately whoever gets this right first will hit the jackpot, and the brain power Google has at its disposal makes competition high, so teaming with Verizon on this journey boosts AOL’s chances of success.

Next up, relationships have been built to boost usability and accessibility of AIM, but in this field allowing Google to merge GTalk contacts with AIM buddies is not admitting defeat to Google. It’s a sensible move because it keeps hold of those users that were slowly discovering that the switching costs of going to Google might actually be cheaper and more efficient; as well as being in line with the trend wave of opening up access for communication through web2.0’s like Meebo.

On April 15th, Sphere announced it had been bought buy AOL. Sphere started as a blog search engine that would compete directly with giants like Technorati and Google Blog Search, but it rapidly differentiated itself by becoming a related content engine. In short, it allowed blogging to link itself and search through the big news media sites, generating related stories from big news sites when viewing a blog. This acquisition will now sit squarely inside AOL’s content sites. AOL has been doing a good job of keeping these content sites fresh and relevant, with their recent launch of a women’s lifestyle site for example. There have been other acquisition moves that have made important differences to AOL’s sites and using Platform A ads on them, such as Goowy Media the widget makers and Perfiliate Technologies the Internet marketing specialists. The complete chain looks something like this:

AOL Content sites –> Bebo and public blogging of content –> Platform A ads generate revenue –> Back to start

As dumbed down as this might seem, it’s important to realise that AOL were lacking some of these critical elements (or components of these elements) only a few years ago; and that if they’ve got their heads sewn on properly, they’ll figure out how to make something of the mobile web. At least there’s a clear path that cash is flowing in, and it’s an encouraging direction. But it seems to me that there are two thought patterns or objectives at work inside the top management think-tank. The first objective shows us we have a company that’s trying to pull off this turn around and stand on its own two feet, whilst the opposing decision makers want to see AOL sold to Yahoo! (or anyone that will realistically buy them) to make some cash for TimeWarner.

Does no one else see the problem with this? Right now, having two objectives creates no conflict as they are both achieved by boosting the company’s size, revenue… essentially every method you have of measuring the success of a company. The problem arises when Yahoo! caves to M$’s persistence and leaves AOL out in the cold, or when something similarly devastating takes place in an environment outside of AOL’s control. We are going to see top management fighting it out over which path is right for them, with little or no consideration for the end user.

Digital Nomad… the conclusion

At the last LUG meet, I presented my findings from the Digital Nomad project I undertook, along with wifi encryption hacking (in theory). This project was started because of hard disk failure, complete paranoia at ever losing anything, and curiosity – can you JUST use a browser and some cunning Web2.0 offerings to run your life? (See Running your life and BACKUP posts) It has now officially concluded and I’m very proud to say the answer is YES! I gave myself bonus points for services that are free or dirt cheap.

Here’s the full list of services that come with the MLED “I like this” seal of approval:

Google Docs: If you have a Gmail account, utilise all the associated features to the fullest. You can put almost all your eggs in this one basket – Google provide blogging, reading, email, calendar, docs & spreads, photos, and they even have had a stab at social networking. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The best news is that Google Gears is being extended to include Google Docs, making this even more suited to serious and/or business needs. Gears lets you continue everything off-line, essentially your work is backed up and collaborated/shared as soon as you go online. Big thumbs up for Google.

Zoho: Google’s offerings have this superb competitor. They seem to be leading the way on some of their innovations, I’ve not found better or an alternative. This is very seriously geared towards businesses, and they do charge for heavy usage. Features that look particularly note worthy are Invoice, Projects, CRM and DB & Reports products. I have stopped using this suite because Google is too convenient and easy for me, but if you’re seriously looking to undertake a shift to the web-centric domain, do NOT ignore Zoho.

Scribd: The YouTube of documents. At the end of this year, I’ll probably upload some of my notes to actually participate in the sharing. This site has a great store of docs, white papers and articles and uses ads to monetise. I have found it immensely helpful as a resource so far, but it’s not quite like Wikipedia in terms of quick access to general knowledge. It’s the opposite angle to document making Web2.0 suites – it wants you to upload all your old notes and documents for sharing in the cloud, rather than providing you with a way to make new ones. They have an API and some interesting ways of embedding documents, presumably aimed more at journalists. I could see some potential uses for this as documents backup and hosting technical manuals.

Seeqpod: If my mp3 player is not pumping beats into my brain, then Seeqpod is how I now get at music. It’s superb. You can build playlists or just randomly search/stumble your way around tunes.

Flickr: Yahoo! did good. I absolutely love Flickr, and it is serves as a backup as well as a way of publicly displaying photos for me. I have forked out for a pro account so that I can freely display and store as much as I dare. A lot of people use Facebook for photos, but I’m not in favour of this as it cuts down images, doesn’t quite have the same freedom as “sets” and “collections”. But lets face it, Flickr is designed specifically for photos, whereas Facebook is now something of a joke where I now get spammed by silly application invitations.

Liquid Planner: Worth a click if you’re a manager. As the title might suggest, it makes planning easy and fluid. I have yet to properly start using this, so I can’t really give too much feedback on how it handles, but the account I have, the interface, and the feature list are all very impressive. A lot of people talk, blog about, and use Basecamp for business, and based on its popularity alone I recommend it in the same breath. I’ve not tried it though, so it’s not properly featuring in this list.

Jungle Disk: Storage and backup pleasure. Uses Amazon S3 at the moment, and should another company like M$ or Google release an alternative then I’m sure the company will explore using those as a back-end. They’re working on version 2.0 of the software which is already cross platform and superb. They’ve just taken on a new worker and announced a bundle of features that they plan on adding.

Meebo: Messaging made easy. I have messaging accounts on Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Jabber and I’m looking into AIM now that they’ve partnered with Meebo and started to crawl back into the spotlight. Before I used Pidgin to unite all those accounts in one window, but now I use Meebo because it does the same but inside a browser. As a bonus, they have some products that they’re constantly adding to and updating, my favourite so far being the Meebo Me blog plugin —->

Netvibes: Homepage 2.0 and they’re French! This makes the perfect home page as you can literally put anything in a widget, so I no longer have to visit MySpace and wade through ads to check my messages, nor do I have to visit online comic pages. I’m probably missing out on half the features they have because I honestly haven’t found time to explore, but it’s certainly very powerful and worth looking at.

Blist: I got an email from them yesterday saying they’ve added social features – i.e. proper collaboration and sharing with permissions. This is a superb place to work on and collaborate on databases, and more specialised than Zoho’s offering I think.

Remember the Milk!: A reminders plugin for Gmail that sits where relevant text ads would normally be in the right hand column. This is incredibly useful for both simple and comprehensive to do lists. There’s also a plugin for Google Calendar that I haven’t explored because it provides text message reminders just like Google Calendar does, and I was worried that I’d get the two confused or conflicting.

I Want Sandy: My new PA! Remember the Milk! has passed by for me now because I Want Sandy acts fairly human and allows you to add entries to task lists and a calendar via text message, texting you back with reminders. UK residents need to communicate with the service via Twitter at the moment because it doesn’t have phone support for networks other than O2 UK and T-Mobile UK (I think). Twitter is the future, so even if your phone network is supported out of the box, grab a Twitter account anyway.

The concept of Digital Nomad is something I’ve come to both enjoy and rely upon, but with the good comes some disadvantages. Whilst you have a free (£/$/€) set of apps that you can access on literally any internet connected device, it limits you to such devices. Being permanently connected can prove costly in certain areas of the world! Additionally, I think it’ll be a long while yet before professional and specialist tools such as video, music and photo editing suites reach the internet platform. So don’t throw out your computer and bulky software suites yet, there’s still a few years of life needed from them. But what this project has shown is that being on a public terminal or a friend’s laptop shouldn’t slow you down if you’ve got the right service accounts.

For Kluggers: here is the link to the wifi hacking tutorial I discussed at the meet.