The latest from TechCrunch
- Google Saw One Million Percent Increase In Searches For 'Bin Laden' On May 1
- Google Dissolves Search Group Internally, Now Called "Knowledge"
- Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: In Ten Years, "We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home"
- Susan Wojcicki Defends Google's Social DNA
- Two Years Later, GoPlanit Is Reborn With Travel-Focused Deals
- Responsibly Matches Your Gifting With A Donation To Education
- EA Acquires Australian Mobile And Online Games Developer Firemint
| Google Saw One Million Percent Increase In Searches For 'Bin Laden' On May 1 | Top |
| We heard yesterday that Sunday night's announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death drew the highest sustained rate of tweets ever according to Twitter and Google has revealed an impressive stat showing the impact of the event on Google search. Google says that between 7:30 and 8:30 pm PST (which was right around the time the news broke over Twitter), Google saw an one million percent increase in searches for the term ‘bin laden.’ For basis of comparison, you can see a chart below comparing searches for the Royal Wedding on Google Trends . The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton also drew massive amounts of web traffic from around the world, but clearly the search volume for news and information around Bin Laden’s death came in at a much higher scale. | |
| Google Dissolves Search Group Internally, Now Called "Knowledge" | Top |
| Google has eight major product groups. Advertising, Commerce & Local, Mobile (Android), Social, Chrome, YouTube and Search. Search is, of course, Google’s first and most important product. But that group actually no longer exists internally. As of April, when Larry Page took over as CEO of the company, the search group was renamed the “knowledge group” internally. Google confirms the change. And, they point out, it was actually publicly announced in an SEC filing made on April 11. Nobody seems to have noticed that someone was named the SVP of a Google product group that previously hadn’t existed. Why the change? That’s a longer story. Leadership of Google search, like most other Google products, was previously split between Marissa Mayer as product lead and Udi Manber as engineering lead. Late last year Mayer moved over to run Local. Alan Eustace now runs the group, and Manber reports to him. There’s a single leader of the group, and he reports to Page. Page, say our sources, has for a long while been thinking of search as much more than Google’s original mission to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” His goal is about more than organizing that information, though. It’s also about enhancing people’s understanding and facilitating the creation of knowledge. The problem is, “search” still means “search.” And as Google has expanded that product over the years, first bringing in results from Google’s vertical search engines via Universal Search in 2007, and later via Google Squared , which structures information on the Internet. And there have been other experiments as well. Google Base , for example, as well as Google Knol . In fact, look back at this 2007 Google blog post about Knol, where Manber says “The challenge posed to us by Larry, Sergey and Eric was to find a way to help people share their knowledge. This is our main goal.” These product efforts have generally been led by Manber in the past. And they remain in the search/knowledge group today. Here’s how Google currently views the group. Remember that previously they split it up between Mayer (product) and Manber (engineering). But today Eustace is the overall lead. Manber reports to Eustace and focuses on finding ways to improve the knowledge out there and to encourage more high quality content creation, whether it’s on Google’s servers (Knol) or not. Amit Singhal , Manber’s peer, focuses on the more traditional goals of search, such as the recent algorithm changes called Panda targeting content farms. One way of thinking of this, says a source with knowledge of the group, is this. Singhal does the weeding (removing and pushing down low quality content in search), and Manber is focused on the seeding (encouraging “good stuff” to grow). This isn’t supposed to be information that helps outsiders understand how Google operates, which is probably why Google made the SEC statement in as few words as possible and didn’t publicize it at all. Instead, it’s to make sure that the team inside Google understands that they aren’t just working on search. It’s not just about organization, it’s about enhancement of knowledge. Other than confirming the creation of the Knowledge group to supplant the Search group, Google won’t comment on the personnel changes or the subtle shifts in strategy. For now, says one source, all Google wants to do is align everyone internally. When, and if, Google talks about this more publicly is a mystery. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: In Ten Years, "We Will All Have A Gigabit To The Home" | Top |
| Netflix is blowing the doors off its business , with $3 billion in annualized revenue and a $12 billion market cap driven by the transition to streaming online video. In terms of hours watched, streaming surpassed DVDs for Netflix in the fourth quarter, but CEO Reed Hastings has been preparing for this moment for more than decade. The name Netflix itself always held the promise of movies delivered over the Internet. The problem, says Hastings in an interview today at the Wired business conference , was that back then they couldn’t stream movies over 56K modems. But there was Moore’s Law and improvements in bandwidth which could be plotted, and that is exactly what Hastings did. “We took out our spreadsheets and we figured we’d get 14 megabits/sec to the home by 2012, which turns out is about what we will get.” So what does his spreadsheet tell him about the next ten years? “If you drag it out to 2021, we will all have a gigabit to the home.” One advantage consumers will see with streaming over cable settop boxes or DVD players is that upgrades to the quality can happen much faster because they are not dependent on switching out boxes in everyone’s home. While streaming is just now catching up with high-definition streams, that progress should keep advancing and even leapfrog hardware solutions that really only change every ten years or so. Streaming Netflix movies to multiple high-def screens is only a matter of time. As it turned out, however, the DVD business was not just a way to bide time while the network caught up. It laid the economic groundwork for the streaming business to become established because of the need to license content, which it doesn’t have to do with DVD rentals. “If we had tried to launch streaming in the beginning,” says Hastings, “I'm sure it wouldn't have worked because we couldn't have written big checks. Now we can write a $50 million or $100 million check which gets the content flowing. As we get more subscribers, we can write bigger checks.” Asked whether Netflix threatened the cable companies, Hastings was careful to say that he doesn’t want to replace cable. That is why Netflix continus to focus on older movies rather than new releases, sports, or news. “We have consistently said that would not be profitable for us,” he says. “It would start an Armageddon battle, and we would not emerge alive from that battle. So we are concentrating on our niche.” And yet, Netflix is experimenting with licensing better programming and even original series . You can bet those experiments will continue. CrunchBase Information Reed Hastings Netflix Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Susan Wojcicki Defends Google's Social DNA | Top |
| Google Ad chief Susan Wojcicki has some advice for Web companies wondering if their products will be a success. Reminiscing about the early days of AdSense to Steven Levy at Wired’s business conference here in New York City, she says: “You know really soon if your product is going to be successful. That is what I love about the Web. When we turned on AdSense, within the first hour we had people signing up every other minute. We were shocked, there was so much demand.” And this was after a colleague told her it could never come anywhere close to AdWords. He was right in terms of bottom line profitability, but AdSense is part and parcel of the Web at this point. Why did AdSense take off so quickly. “I know this is obvious,” says Wojcicki, “but most people don't get this. There are more people who want to be paid than actually pay.” In other words, AdSense was a product that promised any Website owner a way to get paid. Levy mostly lobbed softballs at her, but he did ask one question about Google’s social ambitions. He noted that many people think that social is simply not in Google’s DNA . “I've heard that before,” replied Wojcicki. “I've heard that advertising is not in our DNA. That was not true. Or that display advertising is not in our DNA. That is not true either. This is such a fast moving market that every company has to be able to learn quickly and adapt, and we will.” Maybe, but it is obvious that Google is still thinking of social as one more factor to add to its all-encompassing algorithm (Google’s hammer that it applies to every problem). “Social is an important signal,” she notes. “There is an opportunity for us to incorporate that to serve more relevant and useful ads.” So far, it is difficult to determine whether that approach is yielding better results. Wojcick, a Google veteran, is one of the SVP’s who is part of Larry Page’s new executive team . CrunchBase Information Susan Wojcicki Google Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Two Years Later, GoPlanit Is Reborn With Travel-Focused Deals | Top |
| Way back at TechCrunch 50 2008 we saw the launch of GoPlanIt , a startup that looked to help you generate a travel itinerary in just a few clicks. The company was addressing a problem that everyone has, and while it was entering a crowded space, it looked like it had some potential. And then the market went to hell , startup funding dried up, and people stopped traveling. So founder Steve Chen (not the one who founded YouTube) and the rest of the team decided to put the company — which they’d largely funded using their own money — on the back burner. Now GoPlanIt is back for round two, and it’s tweaking its monetization strategy to be ever-so-2011. That’s right, they’re getting into group deals. But unlike the countless deal site clones, they’re taking a slightly modified approach that might just work — they’re catering primarily to travelers. Chen explains that most of the existing deal sites are focused on the city you live in. But there’s a big opportunity to help people save on the attractions, restaurants, tours, spas, and other things they’d do while traveling. Currently tourist-oriented businesses can have a tough time reaching customers — they have to rely on classifieds, pamphlets, and hotel concierges. Chen adds that he’s faced this problem himself as co-owner of 5A5 Steak Lounge, a popular San Francisco restaurant that draws plenty of locals but has a hard time targeting tourists. With GoPlanIt’s deals, these businesses gain another channel optimized for reaching people who are only in town for a short stay. GoPlanIt isn’t scrapping the one-click itinerary generation that it originally launched with. Instead, these deals can be integrated as part of a suggested itinerary (you can also browse through available deals in the city you’re visiting). Each deal will offer a 35-70% discount. At this point deals are only available in San Francisco and NYC, though the company hopes to ramp this up over time. GoPlanIt isn’t sourcing all the deals itself — it’s currently working with HomeRun (which does a rev share) and is in talks with the other daily deal providers. Chen says that the company now has a team of five and that its founders have infused more of their own capital — they’re currently looking to raise a round of outside funding. Also see Trip Alertz , which is a ‘Group for Travel’, but focuses primarily on hotel and resort deals. CrunchBase Information GoPlanit Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Responsibly Matches Your Gifting With A Donation To Education | Top |
| Just in time for Mother’s Day, co-founders Antoine Grant and Stuart Felkner are launching responsibly , a gift giving platform with a social good component. responsibly is basically a daily deals site that lets you to donate 100% of an item’s purchase price to US public schools in need of project supplies and funds. responsibly (yes, small “r”) allows you to choose the specific education project you’d like to donate to, and 50% of the original proceeds of every gift purchased will go to the school, matched by another 50% of corporate sponsorship via Donor’s Choose . The responsibly website integrates with Facebook, and you can send a message announcing the gift via Facebook or through email. Right now both its inventory and its project offerings are sparse (currently you can only gift aromatic Stone Candles) but the co-founders are working on building up its offerings during the beta. "The education system is in dire need of our help, and we want to start a movement that spreads awareness, brings people on board with our mission and gives them a really easy way to help directly and contribute to saving America's education," said Grant on the motivation behind the startup’s for profit mission (they take a cut of sales). The co-founders are committed to the cause, and actually turned an old school bus into a home office, outfitting it with solar panels and makeshift beds in order to take a 15 city tour all around the US in April. The responsibly tour visited schools and leaders from the KIPP, Greendot, Teach for America programs across America, getting a better idea of the issues faced by US educators in order to figure out the best way responsibly could help (watch the video above for an in-depth on-the-bus interview). The bus’ return home to LA coincides with the company’s beta launch. "Our goal is to be more than a simple commerce platform – we want to connect consumers and companies with charitable giving in an easy and cost-effective way that benefits everyone," said Felkner. Interested TechCrunch readers can join the beta here. CrunchBase Information Responsibly Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| EA Acquires Australian Mobile And Online Games Developer Firemint | Top |
| Electronic Arts (EA) has acquired Firemint , a privately held mobile development studio based in Melbourne, Australia. Firemint is the 60-people strong company behind games like Flight Control (see video below) and Real Racing . EA says the deal is not material to the company, overall. Terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close within four weeks, were not disclosed. Firemint was founded in 1999 (as "ndWare") by CEO Robert Murray, and will now become part of EA Interactive (EAi), a division of Electronic Arts focused on digital business that includes EA Mobile, Pogo and social gaming outfits like Playfish . The deal follows in the footsteps of EA’s purchase of Mobile Post Production , a specialist in cross-platform development and porting of games for smartphones. EA also recently bought Angry Birds publisher Chillingo for $20 million in cash . CrunchBase Information Firemint Electronic Arts Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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