From the category archives:
Aol. starts life as a new public company this Wednesday. Not as the once all conquering AOL, but as the newly re-branded, seemingly apologetic Aol. As it departs from the Time Warner stable, I can imagine the TW sentiment is somewhere on the harsh side of “good riddance to bad rubbish”. It would be impossible [...]
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Over the weekend I was thinking about what the core requirements are to force a change in a consumer’s behavior. For instance, how could Microsoft get someone to not just try Bing, but become a regular user, when Google is more than good enough for most users and searches. Or, could Fox Business materially disrupt [...]
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Last Friday, CKX-TV in Brandon, Manitoba (population 51,000) signed off after the 6PM newscast. Dark, for good. CTVGlobemedia, who owned the station, stated that a deal to sell it to Bluepoint Investments for $1 Cdn. had collapsed when Bluepoint walked away from the deal. CKX-TV had been on the air since 1955, and was the [...]
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MediaNet officially announced their new API Platform yesterday. You can see the release here. The team has been working on this platform for a number of months, and it’s great to see it in the market. In addition to Intertech, Mog, iLike there are some large portals not mentioned in the release, who are launching products [...]
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There’s a palpable change in the air this month. A year after Lehman’s collapse, it feels like the market forces have finally pushed Play, taking us out of our prolonged Pause. The steady stream of acquisitions (Disney/Marvel, Adobe/Omniture) as companies seek to broaden their businesses, the Dow and NASDAQ at highs not seen since last October, [...]
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Two long-established brands recently took the tack of dropping the nouns from their names: Pizza Hut and RadioShack – which are now known as The Hut and The Shack. Here’s why one find success through the name change and derivative market opportunities, and one won’t.
By morphing from Pizza Hut to The Hut, the new brand [...]
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From leaks last evening, it is sounding like the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal is done, as I’d suggested in an earlier post. Combined, the Yahoo and Microsoft search business will command 30% market share of search – a credible number 2. There is still, what I would term, a lack of clarity around core product focus [...]
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Was this Microsoft’s bing strategy all along:
Hire Yahoo Search braintrust
Rebrand Live Search
Focus on algorithms, presentation tweaks and tools.
Throw the Kitchen Sink at it. Somewhere between 50 and 100 million into a scorched earth launch and marketing strategy to see if it moves the market share the needle. Try and buy users through cashback incentives.
If yes – [...]
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