Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
You can also read the blog via Twitter or your phone via wap.abiro.com. See the left menu for more news.
Comments on blog entries are moderated, but I'm rather liberal as long as it's not blatant advertising.
For general comments, advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form.
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".
