Pandora Co-founder Tim Westergren gave a great talk today at Sloan.  Some of the highlights included his description of founding the company two weeks before the dotcom crash, the Music Genome Project, and the future of the music business. 

If you haven’t tried Pandora it will change the way you discover music.  Pandora rates songs on 400 characteristics.  When you add artists or songs to your playlist the system will play similar music.  This is dramatically different from other systems that primarily rely on ratings from other users.  The site is free so give it a try. 

 Tim will also be speaking tonight at a Town Hall meeting on BU campus.  Check out the Pandora blog for more info.

I am curious to know if anyone else has had positive experiences with tools to help for online marketing products and services. There are a ton of web 2.0 sites related to keywords, search engine rankings, analytics, leads, and other features useful in any modern marketing role. However, it seems that there are not many companies that have effectively tied these related services together. Please fill your recommendation in the comments and let me know what your experience has been.
(disclaimer - I am currently employed by HubSpot, an internet marketing company with a system that I think does a great job at tying together these different features for marketers, but I am curious to see what else is out there.)

Also, if anyone is interested in competing in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, let me know.

Thanks!

- Joseph

For all you Web 2.0 enthusiasts, there is “Office 2.0″ conference being held in San Francisco this week.

http://www.office20con.com/

There definitely is a lot of euphoria and hype around web-hosted office applications, i am personally a bit skeptical when it come to adoption of these in enterprise sector anytime soon because

a) Functionality - Can web-based app match the functionality available on the desktop application?

b) Connectivity - We are still atleast 3-5 years away from Ubiquitious Wireless broadband becoming a reality in major business cities.

c) Security/Mindset - Regardless of what the Office 2.0 startups quote about data theft (they claim that majority of data/information theft is done by insiders), how comfortable will an enterprise be in storing their financial, planning and various other documents on a remote server?

BTW, if you are looking for rationale for why you should use Office 2.0, look here:

http://itredux.com/blog/2006/01/16/rationale-for-office-20/

May be in my next post, i will cover why i am still not convinced

…and so, it’s finally happened, despite Mark Cuban quipping that only a ‘moron’ would buy YouTube and then later, that “Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime.” Google just acquired YouTube for $1.65b in an all-stock acquisition - quite a pretty penny for Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

What do you think? Smart move giving Google a corner on the Internet video market or stupid move, given the innumerable amount of piracy and copyright violations throughout YouTube’s video library? Post your comment here or discuss here.

Just recently I was on the web looking for a certain celebrity’s birthplace and age. The first hit was on a site I had not used before, so I checked out http://www.nndb.com. It is a biography site that is in beta testing mode. It has about 20,000 profiles and some pretty good info on old and new stars.

BTW: The Karate Kid, Ralph Macchio, was born on Long Island and is 44.

A couple months ago I posted about concerns similar to those raised by Eliz. I continue to believe that “success failures” exist only in TV commercials.

Think about it - the hard part about consumer Internet products is designing something millions of people want to use. Monetizing the billions of page views those millions of viewers generate is much easier than creating that product.

The recent agreement YouTube reached with Warner Music once again suggests that YouTube is too large to fail.

Having grown up in the Silicon Valley during the dot.com era, the internet is probably my favorite technology topic. And, despite the events of 2001, the internet is back! These days, people often cite web 2.0 businesses as an indicator of a rebounding internet-economy, businesses such as YouTube, but are these businesses truly successful?

http://www.businessweek.com/

I think this article brings to light some realities that web businesses face:

1. How do you create a business (and bring in revenue) when so many people are able and willing to produce content for free? Is ad revenue sufficient? Is it sustainable?

2. We normally think of high traffic as a good thing–more customers, right? But, with the high storage and bandwidth costs for some businesses, I was amazed to learn that YouTube’s costs are so high! How do you control your costs?

Ever visited http://chacha.com? Chances are that you haven’t, especially since the site just went live. ‘ChaCha’ is a new search engine founded by Scott Jones, commonly considered the inventor of voicemail.

In contrast to Google, a site that takes your search query and returns a list of ‘hits’, ChaCha puts you in direct contact with a live researcher. First, you submit your query and then you interact with the researcher or ‘guide’ who seeks and then refines results based upon your dialogue/chat. While the guide is looking for your results, you watch a video advertisement that pays for the service.

Here’s a recent story on USAToday.com…

This blog has a sample interaction between the searcher and the guide…

What do you think? Is ChaCha the future? Will people be willing to watch an ad and interact with a human searcher or is Google the tried-and-tested method. Post your comments here and discuss in our forum!

http://www.bizjournals.com/masshightech/stories/2006/04/03/story11.html

Mass High Tech has an article about an IM-based dating site that breaks a lot of the traditional molds for how dating sites should work. The premise is that women invite men to a flirtation round/game and that the rest is more or less a game of flirtation over IM.

And, of course, it comes from MIT - specifically brough to you by the hero of “Bringing down the House” - Semyon Dukach. I’ll tell you all how good it is, if I ever get invited that is.

–Anthony J.
scouring the internet at large for innovation

We’ve had some interesting news from the search world recently. We had the crack-induced MSFT-YHOO partnership rumors last week. We had Amazon dropping Google in favor of someone closer to home. Then we had the launch of MSFT’s adCenter (press release here) and more news of Yahoo’s new ads system. (Some more in the NYTimes piece.) I still need to do a more detailed investigation, and will keep an eye out for YHOO’s May 17th analyst presentation, but at first glance Yahoo’s system is more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Taking a step back, what’s going on in sponsored search? Here’s a very high level overview, especially for you students who might be interviewing with Internet firms in just a few months. Ten years ago, we saw the emergence of banner-ads and premium listings on portals. They were sold as campaigns in negotiated ad-buys. Overture (GoTo.com, now part of Yahoo) was one of the first to introduce an innovative keyword auction model. This opened up the keyword market to anyone who wished to bid on one, and it made keyword-based adverting far more efficient. But the early Overture model used first price auctions, which are neither stable nor efficient. First price auctions beget all sorts of “strategic” bidding that in turn produces a lot of price volatility.

Today, Google and Yahoo! appear to be using a “generalized second price” auction model for keyword sponsors. (There are some differences between the firms’ auction mechanisms. For example, Google incorporates historical ad click through rates into its calculation when it ranks bids for a particular keyword.) GSP auctions are more efficient and stable than first price auctions, but interesting there is still a theoretical auction model called Vickrey-Clarke-Groves that is more efficient than the today’s GSP-based search ads. The curious thing is that the cost of switching from GSP to VCG is huge for an incumbent. At the same time, the revenue gain an entrant could gain from VCG may not be sufficient to take on dominant players. (One interesting question is what mechanism is Redmond using with adCenter.)

One dominant trend today is a dramatic expansion of the keyword universe. Not only are the number of keywords (presumably) increasing, but the dimensionality of keywords is growing. Five years ago, if you were a Mom-and-Pop Chinese restaurant in the Mission, you’d have been crazy to advertise in “chinese food” searches. Soon, you will be able to pay money to advertise on “chinese food” searches from users in the 94110 zipcode at lunch time and in the evening. As search engines get to know their users, the ads they deliver to users are worth more to both the advertisers and the users. (I imagine that one day soon, my visits to Autoblog will be greeted with regular ads from Carlsen Porsche detailing recent additions to inventory in Midnight Blue Metallic.)

For those who want to know more about online search, I highly recommend Ben Edelman’s publications, especially “Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords” and “Strategic Bidder Behavior in Sponsored Search Auctions”.