Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Saturday, October 13, 2007
The New Economy is real, kind of
There was a lot of talk about The New Economy before the IT crash a couple of years ago, but I sense there's something close to it still floating around.
Primarily Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and News Corp are fighting about getting the most advertizing money from web services. This is strictly controlled by the amount of users clicking on ads (voluntarily or in many cases by mistake). The services themselves are typically free of charge except for premium upgrades of the accounts.
That's the foundation.
Around these companies and around the world are 1000s of companies that provide Web 2.0 / UGC services hoping that one day, like fish in a pond, they will be caught by the acquisition hook.
So what reason do the big guys have for acquiring these often in practice not-for-profit services?
To stay on top of the user volume and advertizing revenue pile of course.
So what do they get:
Primarily Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and News Corp are fighting about getting the most advertizing money from web services. This is strictly controlled by the amount of users clicking on ads (voluntarily or in many cases by mistake). The services themselves are typically free of charge except for premium upgrades of the accounts.
That's the foundation.
Around these companies and around the world are 1000s of companies that provide Web 2.0 / UGC services hoping that one day, like fish in a pond, they will be caught by the acquisition hook.
So what reason do the big guys have for acquiring these often in practice not-for-profit services?
To stay on top of the user volume and advertizing revenue pile of course.
So what do they get:
- users (no profit doesn't mean no users; often the most popular services have millions of users)
- service types (even Google is starting to become a dinosaur in terms of innovation, and don't get me started on Microsoft, AOL and News Corp)
Of course if you are the thousandth company that's made a Youtube clone, your chance of being acquired is absolutely zero, but there are other fish to fry in service areas yet unexploited, and it might spell "mobile".
