The latest from TechCrunch
- Steve Ballmer's Memo To Microsoft Staff: "We Must Move At Cloud Speed"
- With 100 Million Comments, Topix Has Quietly Become The Local Watering Hole
- Yahoo CEO Calls AOL A "Mini Yahoo," Defines Patchwork Strategy For Success
| Steve Ballmer's Memo To Microsoft Staff: "We Must Move At Cloud Speed" | Top |
| Earlier today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a speech at the University of Washington where he said that the company was going “all in” with its strategy to move Microsoft products to the cloud. We’ve gotten our hands on an all-staff email sent out by Ballmer (printed below), which appears to be legitimate. The email reiterates many of the points Ballmer said during his speech this morning, urging employees to embrace the cloud. It also notes that Microsoft will launch an ad campaign today focused on its commercial and government businesses, which stand to benefit from cloud services. Today, I spoke to a group of students and faculty at the University of Washington to discuss how cloud computing will change the way people and businesses use technology. My goal was to challenge people to look at the cloud more broadly and understand the multidimensional nature of the cloud transformation happening today. Other companies have defined the cloud in a narrow, one-dimensional way. Although these companies provide some interesting components, Microsoft is uniquely delivering on a wide range of cloud capabilities that bring increasingly more value to our customers. In my speech, I outlined the five dimensions that define the way people use and realize value in the cloud: • The cloud creates opportunities and responsibilities • The cloud learns and helps you learn, decide and take action • The cloud enhances your social and professional interactions • The cloud wants smarter devices • The cloud drives server advances that drive the cloud This view fuels our investments across the entire company, from datacenters to cloud platform technologies to cloud-based development tools and applications. Today, nearly every one of our products has, or is developing, features or services that support the cloud. As I said today, when it comes to the cloud, we are all in. We are all in across every product line we have and across every dimension of the cloud. Of course, this is not news to any of you. We have been making huge investments in the cloud for the past decade. Nearly five years ago, Ray's "Services Disruption" memo provided the outline for what we needed to do as a company, and with the delivery of Windows Azure at the recent PDC, we have made huge strides in making this vision real. To keep our momentum, it is critical that every Microsoft employee works to deliver the full benefits of the cloud to our customers. As a part of this, I request that you do the following: • Watch the speech on demand here • Learn more about our cloud offerings and how they relate to our overarching software plus services strategy here • Review your commitments to ensure you are landing our vision with customers and partners. Of course, there is more work to do. We have strong competitors. We need to be (and are) willing to change our business models to take advantage of the cloud. We must move at "cloud speed," especially in our consumer offerings. And we need to be crystal clear about the value we provide to all our customers. To drive our message home even further, today you will see an ad campaign in the U.S. focused on our commercial and government businesses, a new website with consolidated content and case studies, and ongoing emphasis on the cloud from me and other members of the SLT in our upcoming speeches and presentations. We have an enormous opportunity in front of us. We have great products and services in the market today and a range of new ones on their way. All of our products make the cloud better, and the cloud makes our products better. Thanks, Steve CrunchBase Information Microsoft Steve Ballmer Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| With 100 Million Comments, Topix Has Quietly Become The Local Watering Hole | Top |
| I’m from a relatively small city in Ohio called Pepper Pike. If I want to find out news about it, the easiest thing for me to do is Google “ Pepper Pike News .” The number one result is quite useful: Topix . In fact, Topix is the number one result for a ton of small towns across the country. That’s what happens when you’ve been aggregating local news for six years. But the site has never garnered much attention in the startup scene because back in 2005 (before TechCrunch even existed — our initial coverage was in 2007 ), it took a majority equity investment from three of the largest media firms in the U.S., Knight Ridder, Tribune and Gannett. Since then, the focus has been all about getting the business to work. And while Topix has been through some permutations throughout the years, the focus has always been on local and yes, topics. Aggregation was the key to all of this for a while, but in recent years, the community that uses the site has been largely responsible for a lot of the content. And that’s more clear than ever as the site is about to cross 100 million posts (comments). The milestone should be hit at some point today, as the site is getting about 125,000 comments a day now. That’s on top of 120 million average monthly pageviews from 8.8 million unique visitors. All huge numbers for a site that hardly anyone talks about. But that’s the thing, people are talking about it, you just may not realize it unless you’re in one of these smaller towns. For these people, Topix is a gathering spot to discuss the local news. Many of these cities (like Pepper Pike) may not have a daily local newspaper or website that makes it easy to discuss issues. That’s exactly what Topix does. And perhaps even a little too easy as the site has to remove some 45,000 comments a month due to things like hate speech, CEO and co-founder Chris Tolles tells us. Not just that, Topix gets about 10 subpoenas a week due to comments, Tolles says. That’s a pain, but it’s the price you pay for having such an active community. Why not ban anonymous commenting? Tolles has thought about this a lot, and done internal studies. But all conclude that it wouldn’t be good for the site. For example, while you’re 50% more likely to get a crappy comment from anonymous commenter, you’re also going to get five times the number of comments when you allow for anonymous ones. And if there’s a situation where a person feels the need to call out a local official, doing so anonymously allows them to feel protected, Tolles says. So, Topix has all these comments, and all this content — but the challenge has been how to monetize it. While Topix has deals with seveal big players, including CNN, the real money remains in advertising. So Tolles has spent much of the past year building up an ad sales team. And following the ad collapse last year, it’s finally starting to pay off. Topix is seeing $4 eCPMs, Tolles says. If that keeps up, he thinks the site can turn a profit relatively soon. Something else interesting about Topix: mobile usage is huge. While the service has had (what Tolles considers to be currently a sub-par) iPhone app for a while, it’s the mobile web that people seem to be taking to to use the site. And something like 75% of the people who are actively commenting on a mobile device are visiting from an iPhone. That may seem somewhat surprising given Topix’s focus on small towns and communities, but it seems to speak to the iPhone’s appeal to the masses. The big time commenting numbers also apparently speak to Topix’s appeal to the masses. CrunchBase Information Topix Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Yahoo CEO Calls AOL A "Mini Yahoo," Defines Patchwork Strategy For Success | Top |
| Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz continued the to talk about Yahoo’s regrouping strategy at an advertising industry conference earlier this week. She touched on the topics we covered in our post last week, The Steady, Efficient Decline Of Yahoo. Specifically, she’s counting on an improvement in the economy to drive Yahoo growth, and she claims to have made significant advances in display advertising tools, targeting and analytics. “People still have to display their brand in a more descriptive way than just keywords,” she told Advertising Age. When asked if Yahoo was any different from AOL, she responded “Generally it’s not different, we’re just a lot bigger. The fact of the matter is, what they’re trying to do at AOL — and I shouldn’t speak for AOL, they’re very capable of speaking for themselves — but I think it’s like a mini Yahoo.” AOL draws 110 million monthly unique U.S. visitors, says Comscore, compared to 164 million for Yahoo (January 2010). Bartz also says Yahoo will be making acquisitions to drive content. “This year it’s about what technologies: Do we need to fill in the blanks, what analytics, what tools?” she said. She added “Well just imagine whether it’s acquiring an audience — a group of female bloggers, or whether it’s acquiring some better analytics tools that help us guide campaigns with our partners, or whether it’s technology.” And “social” says Bartz, doesn’t begin and end with Facebook: “You know, social is a word that has almost become too narrow. And I think with Facebook’s immense success, all of the sudden that’s the only definition of social. But if you think back to the finance chat rooms, [those] were the beginning of social and people could actually interact. … As we look at social we want people to be on the Yahoo site and have tweets come in and have their Facebook postings come in, so that it’s a very personal place to be that helps them understand what’s going on in their social world.” In Bartz’s social world, it seems, people are reading Twitter and Facebook messages on Yahoo. But this patchwork strategy of taking a little of this, a little of that isn’t going to excite users and encourage them to spend much time on Yahoo. Despite their massive reach, time on site isn’t going anywhere. But at least we know where Yahoo stands on things. Little or no product innovation, little or no risk taking. And like I said before, a long, slow, steady decline. And despite Bartz’s last words in the interview, copied below, there is nothing exciting or crazy going on at Yahoo. For an industry that’s based on creativity and inspiring people, I don’t know why it’s so afraid. I don’t think it should be afraid to just try some crazy new stuff. But when I talk to people about online marketing, they just seem to freeze. … I thought this was going to be a much racier industry that wore black and got out there and rock and rolled and I see it being a little shier. I mean, I’m the crazy lady. CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Carol Bartz Information provided by CrunchBase | |
CREATE MORE ALERTS:
Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted
Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope
Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more
News - Only the news you want, delivered!
Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more
Weather - Get today's weather conditions
| You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089. |
No comments:
Post a Comment