Posts from VC & Technology

Well I finally got the new Microsoft search to work for me.

So I ran some comparisons.  Naturally I typed in "Fred Wilson".

The results are pretty much the same across the big three; Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

There are four Fred Wilsons who seem to always be at or near the top of any Internet search; my blog, the artist Fred Wilson, the Chess teacher Fred Wilson (who is right around the corner from me here in NYC), and (yes!) the LA rock band Fred Wilson. 

Google has my blog first, probably because of the large number of incoming links.  Second is the artist, then the chess teacheer, then the rock band.

Microsoft has the chess teacher at the top.  My blog is second.  The rock band is third.  Strangely, the artist barely makes the first page.

Yahoo! also has the chess teacher at the top with my blog second and the artist third and the rock band fourth.

This doesn’t really tell me much, but I did find the experience interesting.  I think in this one example Yahoo!’s results are the best, followed by Google, with Microsoft in third largely because they didn’t get the artist high enough.

Another thing I noticed was that Google was able to show six links "above the fold", whereas Yahoo! was only able to show three, and Microsoft was only able to show two.  That is because both Yahoo! and Microsoft choose to take up valuable screen real estate with sponsored results.  My guess is that choice will hurt them with users in the long run.

I tried some more complicated multi-phrase searches like Bittorrent + Flaming Lips and Open Source + Investment Research.  The results were not particularly similar between the three search engines and I consistently found that Google had better results.

This is not to say that Yahoo! and Microsoft don’t have good search services.  I think they’ve both come a long way in a short time and are now offering something quite competitive with Google.

But at this time, Google is still the first search engine I’ll go to when I need to find something quickly.

I’ve posted about Google’s Desktop Search a number of times.  In my most recent post, I listed all the issues I’ve got with this service and stated that I’d try Microsoft’s desktop search product when it comes out in December.

Well, I’ve slowly but surely begun to rely more and more on Google Desktop Search.  In the past couple days, I couldn’t have done everything I needed to get done without it.

The biggest issue, beyond the initial indexing experience which was horrible, and the ongoing indexing and battery life issues which are real, was teaching myself to use it instead of the search that’s built into Outlook.

That’s slowly happening and as it does, I am learning to like and use it a lot more.

And that’s making it less likely that I’ll switch to Microsoft’s desktop search when it comes out next month.

During this summer I posted a bit about Gmail.

I started with the assertion that Gmail wasn’t going to kill Yahoo! mail or Hotmail.  I think email addresses are pretty sticky for most people, like phone numbers are.

Well we’ve got some data, thanks to our portfolio company Return Path, and it looks like it confirms my instincts on this one.

Gmail is adding email users at about 1/20th the rate that Yahoo! and Hotmail add accounts and they are not taking that many accounts away from these two email giants.

Matt Blumberg, CEO of Reurn Path, blogged the details earlier this week.

The Open Source model is clearly having an effect on software.  Take a look at the browser market share post for an example of what’s going on.

Clearly the open source model could be applied to many other businesses.  Blogging is partially about an "open source" approach to media.

One that I am watching is the wall street research area.  Could traditional research be suplemented, or possibly even replaced, by an open source model.

It’s too early to tell.  We need tools for distribution, collaboration, rating, reputation, commerce (just because its open doesn’t mean it has to be free), and communication to make this work.  And for the most part, they don’t exist.

Wikis and blogs are some of the tools that are discussed when people talk about this stuff.  They are a possibilities, but I am not sure they are the entire answer.

An early effort to watch is the Mosaic Equity Research initiative coming out of Babson University.  I hope to get on their distribution list to see what they put out into the market, how easy it is to modify and enhance, and how useful the results are.

It’s in all the papers.  Microsoft is unveiling their new search product today.

So I went to try it out this morning.

And they tell me that "the site is temporarily unavailable, please check back soon"

Yeah right

Jeff Jarvis is wrong in his recent exploding radio post.  He says:

This got me wondering about what I would do if I were in Viacom’s shoes. I hope they don’t pluck the nearest Stern clone. It’s hard to call that the "safe" choice but it is; it’s the obvious and dull choice. They need to reinvent radio.

But then I thought about the man with the Sirius badge. It’s so much easier for him to reinvent radio. And for you, you podcasters, you.

That’s the obvious view from the outside looking in.  But it’s wrong.  Radio is re-inventing radio.  But they need new technology to do that.  They are getting that new technology.  It’s called HD Radio and its coming.

I believe that next year there will be HD Radios on the market for less than $300.  The following year, they should be less than $200.  You’ll start seeing them in cars, starting at the high end and moving to all cars pretty quickly.  You can get this cool Boston Acoustics HD Radio for your office soon.

The radio industry is already rolling out the new digital HD signal and they are going to get more agressive shortly as the new radios hit the market.

This digital platform will do for radio what the digital cable plant is now doing for cable.

Satellite radio is not the next big thing in radio.  It’s a head fake just like satellite TV was in the TV world.  Satellite TV can’t do what digital cable can do.  And satellite radio can’t do what digital radio can do.

Just think about this for a second.  HD Radios will be adressable and provide conditional access.  That means radio programming can be provided on a subsription basis and the programming and the ads can be targeted.  A typical FM station will be able to broadcast at least five audio streams on a given frequency.  And you’ll have tivo-like store and replay.

It’s going to take time for all of this to become a reality.  But with this kind of technology platform, the local franchises, and the exisiting base of listeners and advertisers, I wouldn’t be writing off broadcast radio so quickly. 

I think the broadcasters will be the ones to re-invent radio in the end.  If you don’t agree, go buy XM and Sirius at 36 to 150 times sales (there are no earnings).  If you do, you can buy Clear Channel today at 2 times sales and 11 times EBITDA.

I think I’ll take my shot with Clear Channel at those odds.

I’ve been blogging for almost 15 months now and one of the things I’ve been thinking about is where is my traffic/audience is coming from.

My partner Brad and I were talking about this today in the context of RSS and its role in the world of content/media. Although RSS is important, its not by any means the only source of my traffic.

If I am representative, and I sure hope I am since my blog is one big petri dish, then here are the primary sources of blog traffic.

1) Google and the other search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, etc). In particular, if someone types in a search term that has multiple search terms (ie "The Clash" + "email" or "Modest Mouse" + "Bit Torrent"), a blog (my blog!) will be at the top or near the top of the results page. That generates a lot of traffic. I estimate that at least 20% and possibly as much as 30% of my traffic results from these search engines.

2) Subscriptions – RSS and email generate a lot of traffic to my weblog. I have about 500 to 600 RSS subscribers and about 400 email subscribers (via Bloglet). This is the most reliable source of traffic to my blog. I am sure I get at least 1/3 of my traffic this way.

3) Links – Blogging is about links. I linlk to other bloggers and they link to me. When someone big (Jarvis, Scoble, etc) link to me, I get a boatload of traffic. And some of this traffic is repeatable. They subscribe via RSS or Bloglet.

Between these three sources, I get about 80+% of my traffic. The rest is bookmarks, browsing, word of mouth etc.

So RSS is important, but its by no means the majority of my traffic and I suspect that the same is true of most weblogs.

The Internet is a fantastic environment for delivering communication, commerce, and content services.  It’s also an incredibly efficient way for users to access these services. 

But its also a place where a lot of bad stuff exits.  My Internet axis of evil list has viruses, spam, spyware, and phishing on it.  I can confidently predict that there will be other maladies joining that list.

So it’s the best and the worst.  And as a result of that, there is a new class of web services being built called reputation services.  Some of these have existed for years. eBay’s reputation ratings were a key component of the success of that platform.  Amazon’s rating system for reviewers is another excellent example.  But in many ways, these are web 1.0 implementations of the idea of a reputation service.  I think we’ll see a lot of innovation and development around this concept over the next five years.

Here is my list of things a reputation service needs to do:

1)      Identify things you can trust.  It’s not just about people, but people are an important subset.

2)      Identify things you can’t trust.

3)      Incorporate user feedback.

4)      Incorporate other data that is relevant.

5)      Allow users to set their own standards.  For example my idea of a bad review may be very different than yours.

6)      Provide for syndication.   I might want to take your reputation and make it my own and add more user feedback into it.

7)      Provide for extensibility.   I might want to take your reputation service and add my own layer of reputation service on top of it.

I’d be interested in hearing what you all think of this list and please let me know what I missed.

I’ve said in prior posts that Wall Street is changing and blogs are going to be a big part of the changing landscape.

There were some interesting posts this week from Om Malik and James Enck of Daiwa Securities that shed some more light on this subject. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend you read them.

And here are three more posts that I just found on this topic.

Steve Castellano

Seeking Alpha

Chris Harrie