Including Everything Blog

Archive for the ‘Business & Economy’ Category

Google announced today on its blog that it has acquired AdMob (www.admob.com), a popular mobile display ad company, for $750 million. Google has already built their own platform for AdSense on Mobile devices, but this acquisition gives Google access to AdMob’s more than 15,000 mobile websites and applications.

Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That’s what has us excited about this deal.

Though perhaps the most visible, AdMob is not the largest mobile ad network. According to an August compilation of Nielsen data by Mobile Marketer, here’s the reach of each of the top mobile ad networks (monthly unique users):

1. Millennial Media: 45.6 million
2. Yahoo!: 36.1 million
3. Google: 31.9 million
4. AOL/Platform-A’s Third Screen Media: 28.6 million
5. AdMob: 25.7 million
6. Microsoft: 25.4 million (doesn’t include the new Verizon deal)
7. Jumptap: 23.4 million
8. Quattro Wireless: 23 million

You can find more information about this acquisition at google.com/press/admob

In a debate going back a while, Google was told recently by Rupert Murdoch that he has been blocking Google from indexing its websites, essentially making them invisible to Google’s crawlers. Google doesn’t seem to mind.

Sky News political editor David Speers talks to News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch about paywalls, politics, and more. Murdoch wants to charge users for access to its news services.

This is already being done on the Wall Street Journal, with plans for other Murdoch properties to soon follow. Ultimately, Murdoch feels that Google has been stealing this news and doesn’t care if they’ll be losing traffic to their websites as the news source by blocking Google.

“The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, and steal our stories. We say they steal our stories — they just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, Ask.com … there’s a whole lot of people.”

Google chosen to respond today, telling the Telegraph that they don’t care if Murdoch wants to block its sites from being found via search and/or Google News.

A spokesman for the search giant said: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.”

“Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

Google’s response is essentially using tactics like robots.txt and meta tags to block its search engine from crawling the news results.

This argument isn’t over and may continue for some time. I see Google as being the chosen option by users over paid news for the foreseeable future, however, wonder how the tables will turn (or rather, how Google will evolve) if larger news sources such as CNN start to opt out of search results.

Working on an application today, I noticed errors posting to Rackspace’s Cloud Files system was spitting back read-only errors. Upon investigation, I noticed it was their service that had the issue and not my application.

The status page Rackspace has put up for Cloud Files has up confirms there’s an issue with the service today. I contacted support and they confirmed that “the backend is experiencing no problems” and that “this was simply an unanticipated load on the system so we’re adding more hardware to handle the increased traffic”.

My thoughts are consistent with my other posts. The entire point of “cloud” is that your data’s receiving the highest level of uptime possible out there. This hasn’t been proven yet. I’m shocked that the response was that of “we didn’t know about the load we would receive”. This service’s sole existence is so that your data can be under heavy load. That’s why we choose a cloud service over a single point of failure.

Instead, Rackspace has in effect created their own single point of failure. They took a service out of  “beta” prior to scaling their systems up to speed to handle “live” traffic. With the media attention they’ve been attempting to drum up against competitor Amazon (AMZN), a wise business owner would be ready to handle a surge of usage traffic upon the successful launch of a competing product.  You don’t launch a system, and then say: “Whoops. We  got our  competition’s business. Time to scale up”. By then you’re positioned to lose those new clients back to your competitor again.

I’ve said it before. I’m a huge fan of Rackspace as a brand, their technical support ideals and values, etc. But these types of performance issues are amaturish for a company of their age and place in this world. They’re a tech leader in their space and better than this.

Their speeds may be twice that of Amazon S3, but I think Amazon has a more stable service. All of the big ones have been hit at one time or another, that’s not the complaint. I have been using Rackspace’s Cloud Sites service for 6+ months and it’s had many issues with their supposedly stable cloud. Every time I think a vendor has nailed it, something like this goes and happens to have me questioning “cloud” and what it means again.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ve made it yet. At best my data is safe. But uptime isn’t something I’d bet my life savings on if you’re shopping for it on Cloud. It’s overpriced data storage and has never proven itself to be as “stable” as any of my cPanel linux builds to this day.

Am I the only one out there that feels this way? I’m not mad. I’m disappointed.

Recently the United States Postal Service announced that it was considering cutting another delivery day from six down to 5 days per week. This would enable the USPS to maintain staff associated to a more reasonable delivery schedule.

With the widespread use of email and online streaming becoming common use, will this affect businesses in the U.S. severely in this dark economic time? Services like Netflix and Blockbuster run services that rely primarily on the U.S. mail system in order to reach its subscribers and deliver new content. With one less day available for delivery, this could potentially drive the costs of doing business up for these services, translating to higher subscription fees for the consumer.

Or would it? I question whether services like this would be affected as heavily with the new streaming options with iTunes and Netflix. Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and the new Blu-ray and DVD players have cutting edge support for streaming movies and television episodes from these services. Will this ultimately replace the need for the mailed discs when a subscriber could just pull up a movie on-demand…without waiting for something via postal mail?

The streaming services will have lower overhead in the end for the business leasing the content, getting rid of the need for warehouses full of discs, postage fees and lost or damaged discs. The cost of doing business actually goes down by leaving the postal service model.

The next consideration is alienating your subscribers who cannot afford or do not qualify for high speed internet service yet. Not everybody has high speed access yet and that may put people off. So would the loss of another day really hurt these services? Will it annoy the subscribers? Would the ability to pay a slightly higher rate on postage be worth it?

Other news:
USPS asks for 5-day delivery, office closings
USPS 5-Day Delivery Week Could Hurt E-Commerce
USPS Wants Flexibility to Move to 5-Day Delivery Week

Right now, top lawmakers are predicting that Washington would approve a bailout for U.S. automakers.  The idea was that the automakers (Ford Motor Co, General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC) would submit survival plans that depicted their strategy for coming out of this financial slump with sales.

Both General Motors Corp and Chrysler LLC said that unless they received an immediate infusion of cash they would fail soon.  It is being said that Washington will have little choice but to offer this help to the U.S. automakers, as they account for 1/10 of American jobs.  Bankruptcy is not an option and an intervention is likely to happen either legislatively or from the administration.

My question to the public is simple.  If the bailout money had not shown its face, what would these automaker executives have done, then?  Just died off?  Hundreds of thousands of jobs lost to the United States?  Where does this responsibility fall onto the U.S. government to “bail out” companies that fail to sell?  Honda, Toyota and Kia seem alive and somewhat well…they’re even good for the economy too.

Should my own business concepts fail, would I be entitled to a reimbursement check from the feds as well?  What makes these companies (other than the fact that they’ve been around for decades) worthy of bailout when the American way is commerce and healthy competition?  By doing this, the U.S. government is enabling immunity from the economy to these larger automakers, yet stifling the ability for younger/smarter companies to move up the ladder in terms of marketshare.

While I understand the impact not helping the automakers would have on jobs, I don’t feel the top executives at the automakers are responsibly planning for the money’s use.  The Big Three automakers asked for a combined $34 billion in loans and credit lines on a day when they reported that in November they suffered a further dramatic slump in sales.  General Motors asked for $18 billion in loans and credit lines from the federal government, saying it urgently needs $4 billion of the money by the end of December to pay its bills.

Chrysler LLC, the smallest and most financially fragile of the Detroit automakers, requested $7 billion by the end of this month, saying that without the aid its cash could fall below the minimum level needed to operate in the first quarter of next year.

To pay its bills.  For one month.  Seriously?  I cannot believe we’re entertaining spending that much money (money we don’t actually have, remember…it’s borrowed) on jobs for americans that would last a period of 30 days.  We’re better off not granting that money to the automakers, and instead using it for reform within our economy to replace the jobs lost from the automakers.  Not only would it strengthen the economy, but it would help replace jobs lost.

The “bailout” money was intended to be a cushion for the financial industry, which are the lifeblood of our economy.  They need the help to stay afloat so that the financial infrastructure does not collapse.  It wasn’t until they announced the bailout options for AIG that I first heard about the automakers asking for hand outs.

One idea a friend of mine had was to allow the American public to “buy out” their mortgages at ten cents on the dollar (or whatever the appropriate fraction is), which would not only help to stabilize the finaicial institutions, but at the same time provide a better safety net for the American homeowners who are losing their pensions, 401K, IRA, etc.  This would give them a bargaining chip for finance management going forward.

Another person I’ve talked to recently stated that the U.S. government would be better off giving each american $100k, as opposed to giving the money to automakers as a band-aid that would only help in the short term.  Once the money is give, then the automakers crumble anyways…the money’s gone and cannot be recovered.  All for a temporary solution.

So what’s going to actually help our economy?  Continuously bailing out companies that do poor business, fly expensive jets with golden parachutes and bonuses galore?  I think not.

Additional insight:

Putting the Brakes on the Automaker Bailout
Deal Journal – WSJ.com : Automaker Bailout? Sure. Bank Bailout
Debating the American automakers bailout | Tampa | News | Word