Guillaume Wolf

The social network market is very active these last days. Google recently decided to have their social network open to everyone. Facebook organized a developers summit last week, announcing a bunch of new neat features...

Now that Google Plus is live, there's a serious competitor to Facebook. Google Plus is great because I can use a single platform to share personal stuff with my friends and follow people of interest. However, the true value of Google Plus could be revealed as a social network for professionals. I'm not saying that Google Plus competes with LinkedIn... but it could be used with to connect with people who aren't really personal friends like coworker.

It doesn't seem to be the priority for Google as they decided to open a game platform before accepting to have people registering with Google Apps account. But I think it will soon come (>prediction). And when they do, they will probably be used in a lot of of companies...

How is Facebook reacting to this threat? Well, during the f8 summit Facebook announced a lot of great news. Some are direct reactions to Google Plus:

• Lists management has been enhanced to make it easier to share to limited circle.
• Users can now subscribe to follow anyone's public status...

But they were minor features compared to the rest:

• Facebook began to connect people with object with their like button. Now Facebook is going further... you can connect to anything the way you want. You can decide not to 'like' a book, but to 'read' it. You can share music you 'listen' and the one you 'like'. This way Facebook includes in your graphs not only people, but also object and the way you're connected with them.
• Timeline: Facebook will soon reveal a new way to show your personal information in a timeline from your birth to now. It looks quite promising!

Facebook is still way ahead of Google Plus. Today a direct competition with Facebook is to be excluded.

But there's another solution called Diaspora. It's still in alpha tests... but it looks promising. Diaspora is a federated social network. It means that you can use it for a limited circle (your school, your company...) and then your network can still be connected to another one.
The usage is very similar to Google Plus, but it's much safer for your privacy.

It's hard to see how things are going to evolve. I would say that Facebook will remain the king of personal social networks. Google Plus would be great to be used inside businesses. Diaspora would fit well with the way schools and universities are organized... Plus, there are more and more vertical social networks... these could have a great power in a few years...

Everything's possible, right?

Earthquake at Apple! Steve jobs left. It's always a nightmare for big companies when they see their charismatic CEO leave. The success of Apple was really connected with the image of their CEO.
You might know that Jobs already left Apple in 1984. As a results Apple's sales went down and they had to buy Jobs's new company (NeXT) in order to retrieve their CEO and therefore their success.

But this time, things are going to be different. As he mentioned on his resignation letter, Jobs is going to stay as chairman in Apple's board. I don't see Jobs resignation as a real threat to the company. I'm positive his leaving has been fully prepared and I suspect Apple will release a huge piece of news in order to prevent a drop of its shares.



There were an awful lot a rumors for the release of new devices before Jobs quit. The fifth generation of iPhones... the next generation of iPods...
My guess is that Apple needs a major announcement to make people forget about the charismatic former CEO. A product upgrade won't be enough: Apple will announce a real innovation in the next month.

So what could it be? I can see two problems to be tackled: the limited size of phones' screens and adding text on a touch device. Apple might release a touch screen with textures and reliefs in order to provide feedback to users or (let's be crazy) they could announce a bendable touch screen that connects with iPhones... I guess I'm more hoping than predicting...

This is a game changing announcement, since Google will produce hardware for the first time. It's often said that the main reason for this acquisition was Motorola's 20,000+ patents. Why not... I just don't see Google having any trouble paying for the licences (or court trials).

What I see in this acquisition is that Google will start to actually build its own devices. The competition with Apple and Microsoft will reach a new level! Now Google will build its own phones and tablet (Motorola Xoom is the greatest iPad competitor).



With Motorola, Google is now one of the biggest android phone manufacturer. Nonetheless, Google clearly announced that its existing partnerships will remain the same. And it seems that Google's partners aren't pissed at all. Therefore we can imagine how it will affect the market.

Google will be able to build phone the way they want. Motorola phones will not have any additional skin as android phone manufacturer use to add. They will also have automatic update. Great news for android phone users, because the other brand (Samsung, HTC...) will have to keep up.

I think this partnership is really exciting!

This is certainly the future of computers. With Chrome OS, I can easily login with my Google account on any computer and find all my applications and file directly. It's possible because everything is on the cloud.

It's great! But for a first hit, Google might have gone a little too far. Chrome OS is really disruptive and therefore not easy to use. For example, you can't easily open a file with these computers. Documents, videos... everything has to be on the Internet.

I don't think that these computers are going to be a hit since only a few tech-savvy would understand why it's designed this way. Plus, people would think that these computers have less features and therefore less value.

I wonder a long it will take for the world to change this way... Because it will!

Although I'm certain that Google can design an awesome platform, I doubt it could become mainstream. What makes the power of Facebook is that (almost) everybody is on Facebook. It will be hard to make them switch from on network to another. Even though many people are complaining about Facebook privacy issues... do you really thing that Google will be better?

In the main time, Google+ is focusing on mobile applications. That might help... but I don't believe it will be a huge success. Check out what people think on Beansight about Google+.

As you might know, Nicolas Sarkozy decided to set up a forum dedicated to the Internet just before the G8 summit. It's called the e-G8 forum.

As a young entrepreneur, I had the chance to be invited. Maurice Levy who was in charge of setting up the event did a great job in the organisation: attendees were offered food from LeNotre and there was no major problem which is rare in the kind of big events.

In his introducing speech, Nicolas Sarkozy war clear: the Internet is a great strength for our economy and its global approach changes the way things used to be (in a good way). But this revolution has to framed by the states and the governments in order to make sure that it stays fair and moral. As he doesn't want to slow down the evolution, he wants the main actors of the Internet to take part to the political discussion.

That's the theory. Because in the end the discussion panels were more focusing on how to defend or promote their own services than elaborating a real discussion on what role the governments should have.
Finally it was a way to clearly shows that our leaders feel concerned about the Internet. It's a very visible event, but there won't be any effective decision concluded.

Obviously people from the Internet industry took the opportunity to network and meet some interesting people. We even had on open Mike Butcher session to introduce "real" startup. It was basically startupers shouting what they were doing to who ever wanted to listen....

It's been a while I haven't posted anything on my blog... I still haven't spoken about my own startup. What a shame! Now, let me correct that.

Beansight is a social network that enables its users to post and share predictions on the future. The community is invited to talk about prediction and give their point of view (will it happen?). When a prediction becomes true, credibility points are attributed to those who correctly forecasted it. A ranking allows you to track the best experts. You can also challenge your friends to see who's got skills.
If you like the idea, why not give it a try?


Beansight is born in May 2011 at the Startup Weekend Paris, an event which makes attendees launch their own startups in 54h. Then, the project evolved slowly till january 2011. At the point we entered the accelerator Le Camping. This means that we work in the prestigious Palais Brongniart in Paris. We also have access to a great panel of mentors.

Beansight is quite popular in the French Tech universe. The Startup has been featured on great blogs like TechCrunch and FrenchWeb (articles in French).

If you want to follow Beansight's news you can:

• sign up on Beansight
• follow Beansight Blog
• like us on Facebook
• follow us on Twitter

Let's take an example. John is visiting Yahoo.com. As the home page loads, Yahoo sends an ad request to its server:

• Users are only served ads that fit best with them.
• Publishers can increase there prices because the value of each ad is greater.
• Advertisers have a better impact on their target and increase their return on investments.

The ad ecosystem evolved. DSP, SSP, Ad exchanges, data suppliers... all those platforms are designed to make advertisers buy on the audience instead of on the context.

Google is very profitable today because they make money on a wide ad space with many publishers. Facebook could do just the same and differentiate from Google thanks to a great targeting tool using the ad network data (gender, age, likes...).


That would be great because small publisher would have the choice between Google and Facebook to monetize their ad spaces. This would probably increase the selling price (which is incredibly low today).

I only fear that Facebook and Google will lower the market advertising prices. Their platforms would be very efficient thanks to the targeting. But they would sell it for a low price because they don't use sales people but an automatic bid platform. We can only hope that advertisers will have to bid higher in order to have a sufficient scale for their campaigns.

EDIT:

You sure have noticed that Google enhanced its search engine with Google Instant. If not, you can see this article. This feature allows web surfers to have an faster and easier access to their information.

The question was: how would it impact the sponsored links? It seems obvious, that Google would generate more ad spaces, and that these spaces would have a lower CTR (Click through rate).

Now thanks to Marine Software, we have the data, to truly understand the benefit from Google Instant.

Apple's mobile advertising platform, iAd is only at an early stage of its development. They recently release a video of their first customer case with Nissan.

The results are quite promising, since they succeed to gain a lot of attention to the brand. Click through rates are said to be 5 time higher on iAd than on a regular browser. The average interaction lasted about 90 seconds. Quite a good start!

But to achieve these results, the advertiser has to deal with Apple's standards. Sure the results are great as you'll see in the video, but it increases the delay to set up a campaign (up to 10 weeks!). Plus not every advertiser could stand it till the end.






Apple's prices to advertise on iAd are incredibly high! In addition to a $ 1 million entry fee, you have to pay both for each impression served (CPM $10) and for each interaction (CPC $2). This is the cost for Nissan's smooth and beautiful ad.

There's also a cheaper offer for standard banners (CPC $0.25). This offer is designed for developers who wants to promote their applications. But it seems that AdMob (Google's mobile advertising platform)  is doing better for these kinds of campaigns (cheaper and better CTR).

So we might have two complementary platforms. One helps you to increase your traffic or online sales, the other makes people recall your name and drives off-line sales.

AdMob for direct response marketers and iAd for brand marketers.

Since September 14th, Google has changed its brand protection policy in Europe. Now you can bid on a brand you don't own.

This could lead to insane behavior. If Pepsi want to steal customer away from Coca-Cola, they can just bid a high price on the words "Coke" or "Coca-Cola"... Of course you don't want your customers to receive deceiving results as they google your name. So you'll have to bid high prices too.

As a result prices for brands will probably increase. Great move from Google. Advertisers are upset but they have no other choice. They can try to go on court, but I doubt they'll win their case.

This move could change the way advertisers use Adwords. I guess smart and malicious Adwords users could definitely turn the game to their advantage.

After the failure of Google Wave, Google is still trying to find a way to improve on-line communication. They understood that emails are too used to be replaced. Therefore they have to focus on their great tool Gmail in order to be successful.

Gmail is already a great tool for emails. Its core advantage is to enable the user to follow their emails by threads. This means that if there are answers to a mail, you can easily read the whole conversation.

Yet it still very easy to get overwhelmed by an increasing number of received emails. That's why Google has decided to organize them in two categories according to their importance.



Let watch Google's presentation video:



That's a really smart move from Google. The idea is very simple and I am confident that Google will succeed in making this filter efficient for all of us. It will help users to run their inbox faster.

My only concern is how people will deal with their "less important" mails. Emails coming from a new contact will obviously appear in the second inbox and might not be noticed by the user. Therefore we will still have to check the secondary inbox and we won't save that much time.

Once again, the success of this feature relies on the effective use of it. Will people find an interest in it if it either doesn't let them save time (but prioritizes their attention to the most important) or could mislead them and make them miss important mails? Are Gmail users able to use this priority inbox so that it will be efficient?
Wait and see...