Google confirmed Google Chrome, a new open source web browser which is going to hit us today (beta version of Google Chrome on September 2^nd 2008 in more than 100 countries). Though rumors have been around, we got a confirmation when a 38 page comic book, drawn by Scott McCloud, which detailed Google’s Chrome web browser was reported and could be accessed.

I am going to be one of the early adopters and even if it fulfills 60-70% of its objectives, then it is going to be quickly grabbing the browser market share. Where does this leave Firefox/Mozilla?

Google accounts for most of the revenue for Mozilla. Google pays to be the default search engine in the Firefox search box on the top of the browser. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services, which provides affiliates fee as well but few do. As a result, Google accounts for 85 percent of Mozilla’s 2006 revenue of $66.8 million. Lot of people search for results using the Firefox search box as it is easily accessible and saves click/typing of the URL. This business model was very attractive and it’s no surprise that there were attempts to cash on this model - Flock.com has been trying to build user base by creating a “social browser”, basically a wrapper with value-added services (like bookmarking tools) on top of Firefox. They have not been able to create enough value to push mass adoption and hence have never threatened Firefox market share (also they share revenue with Firefox as well).

Hence, it is very crucial for Firefox to keep its market share to ensure continuity of revenue from Google. So, the success of Chrome Browser could be the first real threat to Firefox.

Majority of the enterprise companies would not have heard of Search Engine Optimization and even website optimization; especially optimization in terms of finding the relevant information quickly & representation of branding/products. Enterprise companies are more focused on direct lead generation marketing activities.

I would suggest that instead of Search Engine Optimization, they think of it as building their online credibility. Every enterprise needs to have a strong online credibility, as their potential buying decision makers are all online. Their decision cycle is long and not instantaneous as buying some product through checkout mechanism. Their decision process usually consists of researching the problem/pain point experience, various options available, product comparisons and benefits.

The decision makers’ research process includes a lot of searches on Google & other search engines, reading white papers, attending webinars, reading blogs, consuming analyst reports and others. Having a presence in all these potential research points represents a strong online credibility. Content plays an important role in credibility - regular blogging, publishing whitepapers once in 3 months, conducting at least 2 webinars per year by inviting industry subject experts are all good practices. Having more content on the website also provides good scope for Search Engine Optimization.

One easy test for online presence that I would recommend enterprise companies is to Google search on their own company/product. If you get back 3 pages of content from your website and external sites, which essentially have been created by your company, then time to pat your back and say “Job, well done!”.

For a few years now, the idea of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo has intermittently made news. For the first time in May 2006, the then Yahoo CEO Terry Semel denied reports of any probable acquisitions. His unflattering comments about Microsoft during the interview made an alliance between them seem unlikely. However, in Feb 2008, just after the Yahoo CEO Terry Semel stepped down as Chairman of the board, Microsoft made a bid to purchase the company, a deal potentially worth $45 billion. This news rocked the internet world and then the tug of war on the price/share between the two companies kept both the companies on headlines for a long time.

Industry experts poured their opinions about this great potential deal.

David Garrity, director of research with Dinosaur Securities in New York, said that a deal would be beneficial for both the companies to take on a common enemy, Google.

Marianne Wolk, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial said that a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo would give them a good chance against Google in the branded advertising business.

“Google likes to be arrogant but if this deal happened, they would have to sit up and take notice. Microsoft hasn’t shown much so far in online advertising but an acquisition of Yahoo would be a very good combination,” said Samir Patel, founder and CEO of SearchForce, a privately held software firm that lets advertisers manage keyword purchases on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

But contrary to all the experts’ opinions and thoughts Yahoo did not blink, as it felt they were worth much more than what Microsoft was offering. Dashing all further hopes of Microsoft, Yahoo on June 12, 2008, announced a nonexclusive partnership with Google, in which, Google will supply it with some search ads, a move that could increase Yahoo search revenue. The very next day, the companies went ahead and announced the agreement allowing Google to sell search ads on Yahoo’s Web site, making this Yahoo-Google saga. Microsoft expressed discontentment and contacted advocacy groups saying that the deal would limit choices for advertisers and publishers and destroy a competitive alternative.

On June 24, 2008, again there were reports of Microsoft exploring a possible deal with Yahoo, by increasing the price offer. This on-going saga leaves us pondering over what it would be like if they merged and not. We don’t like bullies, only one strong player in any field. We want competition. There is a good chance for competition to flourish if MSN & Yahoo merge to take on Google. But over the years there have been several acquisitions such as Borland acquiring Ashton-Tate, HP taking over Compaq. These acquisitions can hardly be described as successful. If Microsoft does acquire Yahoo, will this be another such failing acquisition? Should Microsoft rather spend that huge amount of money in bettering their services than buying a sinking company? It’s for time to tell.

Tracking friend’s activities across social sites like Bebo, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Hi5, imeem, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pandora, Slide, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live Spaces, Yelp, and YouTube, is of course another sign that we are all social and our social life is increasingly getting shifted to internet. Spokeo and FriendFeed are the two main social network aggregation services doing the heavy lifting task of tracking. The question I have is that do they simplify our online life by pulling all of the content into one centralized monitor or it adds to the complexity

Here are some comparisons points:-

• Spokeo is little harder than FriendFeed to bring friends accounts together if friends sign up for online services using multiple email addresses. FriendFeed has also this nice feature of setting FriendFeed RSS feed which can then be handed to all contacts.

• Spokeo is also largely a one-way tool - you can reply to and share updates, but only via email to the contacts. FriendFeed lets you share content from 28 different services via a single stream, and subscribe to the streams of your friends.

• Spokeo is very simple to set up- it can take in directly all of the contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail, and then go out to the 30+ sites it monitors and bring back any new content from people in your address book. In comparison, FriendFeed is more complex- it takes in Facebook friends, but only the ones who are also FriendFeed users, plus each member must specify which sites he wants to expose to others.

• FriendFeed publishes all of the activities in an endless stream which includes all of friends’ (including those who decide to make their content public) content-bookmarks, blog posts, status updates, pics, and videos. Spokeo’s appeal is to keep track of interesting friends who are prolific across the Web.

OuterJoin is big believer of OpenId and perhaps understandably, given our Yodlee background. The OpenID Foundation formed in June 2007 has a good early start- as of July 2007, over 120 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 4,500 sites OpenID integration was reported. Membership has cut across the industry- individuals, students, non-profits, startups and industry giants.

A brief definition- OpenID is free technology that simplifies the online user experience by eliminating the need for multiple user names across Internet sites, enabling individuals to take more control and ownership of their digital identities. This user-centric digital identity technology helps users reduce the pain of managing dozens, even hundreds of usernames and passwords, and provides more control over what personal information they share with Websites when they sign-in using an OpenID.

I also see, OpenID concept promoting the decentralized, free and open standard in terms of personal information. The latest update I found was more than 10,000 Websites support OpenID log-ins, and an estimated 350 million OpenID enabled URLs currently exist. February 7, 2008 was historic day for OpenID as Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! joined as first corporate board members. Also adding credibility is the news that integrated OpenID support has been made a high priority in Firefox 3 and OpenID can be used with Windows CardSpace.

By end of 2008, I think much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla, OpenID will also see acceptance internationally and hopefully ecommerce websites will also enter mainstream in terms of adoption, though concerns on phishing attacks and user identity theft will continue to persist.

MOLI.com is a recently launched social-networking site and our client. We have learnt what team work can achieve- they blazed trail at eTrade and are doing again at MOLI.

You might wonder – another social networking site???? But… there is method behind every madness. Unlike most social networking sites, which allow only one user profile, MOLI allows multiple profiles for the same person or entity. Now attached to these are all the different groups one is associated with. It also gives the ability to link any e-commerce endeavor. That’s powerful proposition. That’s not all, throw in original content- video, blogs, competition and events; entertainment aspect is also covered. MOLI caters to the under-served market age range of 18 and above - users, who do not want chaos, spam and have developed sophisticated tastes (who do not want to be poked).

Social Network might be perceived as saturated space but if anybody has a good chance to crack it, MOLI has to be the front runner. If you think about it- every new service/startup has social component to it, so that challenge is global and not just limited to pure ’social network’. This is the first social network with built-in ‘e-commerce’ which makes a lot of sense, since when you first start any enterprise (store or anything else); you approach your social contacts (friends & families) first.

Registration is free with a slight charge for some premium commerce tools. Check it out and get connected with me!

Google introduced Google App Engine as a way to simplify the job of creating, running and scaling web applications at Campfire One on April 7th, 2008. Google App Engine lets developers run web applications on Google’s infrastructure. The idea is to simplify the infrastructure needed to build, to maintain (no servers to maintain), and to scale with traffic & data storage needs.

Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python programming language. The runtime environment includes the full Python language and most of the Python standard library. Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App Engine, I am sure Google is pulling out all stops to push more languages shortly to increase developer adoption of this new platform.

This was a preview release; it’s not feature complete and there is a quota system, a set of limits in terms of storage, CPU and bandwidth that applications can use during the preview period, right now for free. Once the preview period is over, that quota will remain free, but developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed. The cost at this moment has not been disclosed.

The quotas in the preview release included: 3 apps per developer, 500MB storage per app, and per day (rolling 24 hour) quotas of 2000 emails, 10 GB bandwidth in, 10 GB bandwidth out, 200M CPU Megacycles, 650k HTTP Requests, 2.5M datastore API calls and 160k URLFetch API calls.

I have been tracking reactions and there are interesting mixed opinions:

• For some the free 500MB worth of storage was attractive.
• Almost everybody wants more languages supported.
• Business owners are contemplating the dependency factor on Google. This means that early adopters would be independent developers and startups.
• Farhan Mashraqi said that this gives the Python language “a big boost”; so also did blist.
• A Digg comment by Fuzzmeister suggests that this could have a strong impact, “this could evolve into something that fundamentally changes the way websites are hosted and run”.
• Wayne Pan believes that the ‘free’ angle is the biggest news, and that App Engine needs other languages and an external service model to really gain traction.
• Few people see some important privacy and security concerns here.
• Few think this as a very clever move by Google for more domination.

I think last is an interesting angle. Also it will be interesting to see how this will play in Google app framework and Google’s enterprise play. Stay tuned, the story in not over yet.

I came across this paid ad and found it interesting and contrasting. Now Google Analytics is a ‘free’ tool as advertised in the ad and as we all know, but why is Google checkout button next to the ad? Possible reasons:

1. Google wants to draw attention to this ad and feels that the button will direct people’s attention

2. There is a checkout process in Google Analytics, which has been discontinued, but Google Checkout is not able to determine.

Anyways, one of the small bugs, I guess

Last week on April 3, 2008 one of the big news items was Seesmic acquiring Twhirl, an Adobe AIR based Twitter client. Now both are very small companies and I am really wondering how it can be an acquisition? Both came together in a quest to offer consumers a more complete product. One of the web 2.0 problems is that there are few companies which are product features rather than a complete product itself.

Seesmic is a video micro blogging web application developed by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur. Twhirl is a very popular Twitter application; it accounts for 7 percent of the traffic on Twitter.

Seesmic plus Twhirl, powered by XMPP (Twitter supports XMPP messaging) is going to be power- Instant text and video communication and presence status, which is a more complete product than earlier and hence more attractive to consumers. Video blogging has had limited success compared to text blogging and this is a way for Seesmic to shift its focus from video to overall ‘microblogging.’ Despite Twhirl’s importance in the Twitter ecosystem, it is not a huge app by normal software standards. A combined service will provide a more compelling way of communication factoring in user’s broadcasting & time preferences.

Overall, Twhirl will benefit the Seesmic community in the following ways:

• Getting in touch with your friends using microblogging is much easier using a client than through your browser.
• Twhirl works on Mac AND PC, soon on Linux too.
• Twhirl lets you easily use all the advanced messaging options of Twitter (replies, direct messages)
• Twhirl allows you to have multiple Twitter accounts opened simultaneously.

Of course, adding video to Twhirl will be a plus to the Twhirl community. Maybe I need to shift from WordPress comfort zone to the Seesmic world?

The major search players are trying to use the semantic web angle to improve search. Google had introduced secondary search earlier this month to facilitate users deep searching but looks like retailers do not like users to bypass the website’s search box.

Yahoo is now planning to support semantic web initiatives. Yahoo is reportedly feeling that the benefits of a data web have not reached the mainstream consumer, despite the remarkable progress in understanding the semantics of web content. Yahoo! Search intends to support semantic web standards by supporting a number of microformats including hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom, and XFN. Perhaps Yahoo’s perspective is that semantic web technology can make searches more fruitful if the search results go beyond containing the keywords and actually mean what users are looking for.

Interesting new development is of Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe, which is just starting to send invitations to their private beta launched last week. More players means more innovation and with the growing internet content clutter, semantic web might be the answer for some organizations.