Social media adoption

We did a viral campaign in Denmark. It actually got nice press coverage and gave us signal about which social network was really used. Check the result by your self....
Facebook is not a surprise but the fact that tweeter is lagging behind LinkedIn voice of share was for me unexpected.

And now Chrome...

What to say about this new Google initiative? Chrome is mainly build on the Mozilla basements and they (accidentally?) launched Chrome one week after announcing the sponsoring of the Mozilla foundation for about 57mio USD. I don't believe Google wanted to kick ass in the browser field, the trends is much more deepth than that. They are launching more and more SaaS applications and the browser is becoming the new operating system for the google native generation. Chrome sounds to me like a cement in a strategy to lock user on the "Google Operating System". We'll see what the future will looks like and surely how the hardware will evolve because today google is launching a browser for aPC, tomorrow I don't know what google will launch on a PSP like device :-).

While Google is on the spotlight, Yahoo release it's own desktop

ps: the image was found on rue89

Copyrighting and Google News Services

I didn't elaborate on this before but you all have read elsewhere that a court in Belgium has upheld an earlier ruling against Google that prevents the search provider from copying newspaper headlines in its Google News service and search index. The case was introduced by Copiepress, an association of 18 Belgian newspapers. The sentence is confirmed but the penalties are reduced to 25.000€/day, which provide me material to estimate the revenue generated by Google on the Belgian market. In the US Google can refer to a fair usage to populate their service, in Belgium it will not be the case any more.

Google must remove all citations to newspaper article from his search index and from his cache because that can be subject to copyright. OK but.. By doing that, it's not only the search indexing that is sentenced, Any reference to cached content is considered : the formatted cached version but also the relevance ranking, Keyword in context, ... It's also funny to see that the publishers know the rules of the game. if you don't want to be indexed, fill in the robot.txt file. Have a look at one of the newspaper member of copiepress, le soir... lesoir.be/robot.txt is quite empty. Go to the homepage of this site and guess what tool they use for their statistic :-)

The beta syndrome - When does startup cross the chasm ?

Have you read Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the chasm ? To move from a technology driven to a customer driven model you have to cross the chasm of an early adopter community to a model where you address the "mass market". In short to move from R&D to a real product in operation.
For the web2.0 is often the time where thing goes wrong for Entrepreneurs and they tend to extend the happy days where they served geek without too much consideration of operational excellence, even if the product is already adopted and often top of mind. Google is a good example, did you notice that Gmail is still in beta ? I call it the beta syndrome of the web2.0, check in your own startup list and you'll notice how much are in beta mode... Why do I care ? Well the blog platform you are reading this post from just cross the chasm ! Congratulation Blogger...

Search Engines Trends

Panelists discussed the evolution of the major players in the search engine world.
Google :
Move from the search field to the advertising industry, with a nice quote "Google is not a Search Engine Company anymore". To improve revenue they are building a portal engine, a lot of new services from the google account (calendar, gmail, video, ...) but without strong intergration either amongs those services or through a portal website. The R&D budget was not mentionned but 70% of the R&D are devoted to search projects, 20% cover so called user pain point project wher ao; they are working on improving relationship between the end user and any e-commerce environment, the remaining 10% are pure blue sky.
Yahoo:
Yahoo is working on differential with google. They are moving in the media industry and they invest in the social web. Look at Yahoo Answer as an example.
Microsoft:
We all know that Live.com (the brand) will be rolled out globally within the next 6 months and will replace the good old MSN. Now as usual with Microsoft, Live will offer a lot of nice new features but developped as individual pieces and once you integrate them togheter, you'll have to wait version 2.0 to work correctly. Fyi, we are only at version 1.3 there... the road is long