Netizen: LinkedIn

Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Facebook Doldrums

Facebook's problem is very real. This is not like when Amazon's stock price nosedived after the dot com bubble burst in 2000. That was an industry wide event. This is a Facebook specific event. Compared to that LinkedIn is doing fine for now.

And this is about cold, hard cash.

Data mining is where the money is at for Facebook. More mobile usage is not bad news - quite the opposite - if data mining is the primary way you monetize. More engagement means more data.

Below $20 is the red zone. Facebook has already entered that.

How Facebook Could Save Its Shattered Share Price

Now as it plunges towards half its IPO value, it’s entering a state of emergency

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Flickr And Yahoo Mail

Those two need obvious work and are relatively easy to do.

Can Marissa Mayer turn Yahoo around?

Flickr

Make it free again. There should be no limit to how many pictures you can upload.

Give the option to embed. I should be able to embed a Flickr picture - not just mine, but of anyone who will allow it - into a blog post of mine.

Yahoo Mail

There is a need for cloud storage, like Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive. So all email attachments go to the cloud. Inboxes don't have space limits these days.

Yahoo Mail spam protection sucks. I can block email from an email address, and the next time I get an email from that address, it still gets delivered! Fix this.

Social Graph

Tap into them. Facebook has one. Twitter has one. LinkedIn has one. Google Plus has one.

Overlap these graphs onto my Flickr and Yahoo Mail.

Mobile

Go mobile on both.

Can You Taste It?

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

This kind of data mining might make Facebook a lot of money. LinkedIn is doing it, Facebook is not doing it.

Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds

Visitors to the new Lay’s Facebook app are asked to suggest new flavors and click an “I’d Eat That” button to register their preferences. So far, the results show that a beer-battered onion-ring flavor is popular in California and Ohio, while a churros flavor is a hit in New York. ..... sets up Facebook chats between engineers and customers to help refine products. “It’s amazing that we can get that kind of real feedback, as opposed to speculating” .... Wal-Mart acquired the social media company Kosmix last year for an estimated $300 million, chiefly because of Kosmix’s ability to extract trends from social media conversations. .... “There’s mountains and mountains of data being created in social media” ..... @WalmartLabs found that cake pops — small bites of cake on lollipop sticks — were becoming popular. “Starbucks had just started getting them in their cafes, and people were talking a lot about it” ..... @WalmartLabs found that enthusiasm for “The Avengers” and “The Dark Knight Rises” was surging before the movies were released, and suggested that stores increase their orders of related merchandise. And after Walmart started carrying a spicy chip called Takis, @WalmartLabs found that most of the positive chatter about it was coming from California and the Southwest. .... Frito-Lay has already run the contest overseas, resulting in chip flavors like hot and spicy crab in Thailand and pickled cucumber in Serbia. ..... “Data can’t tell you where the world is headed” ..... using data from social media said the ability to see what consumers do, want and are talking about on such a big scale, without consumers necessarily knowing the companies are listening in, was unprecedented. “This is like the biggest focus group someone could ever imagine”

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Outlook.com: Microsoft's New Attempt At Email

This move kind of surprised me. But it sure is a great move. It is a great attempt to bring the sexy back to the Microsoft brand name.

This quote below is from my first email in my Outlook.com inbox.

An experience with no compromises

Outlook.com is the first step in creating one complete experience for the next generation of communications. Email should be connected to your friends – whether they like to use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, or a combination. Email should let you get more done, faster – with immediate access to your inbox and tools that can automatically categorize, move, or delete messages you don't want. Email should be deeply integrated with other services – for Outlook.com, you'll find that Office Web Apps, SkyDrive, and, soon, Skype come built right in. And we hope you have already noticed our fast, beautiful user experience.

Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes

Webmail was first introduced with HoTMaiL in 1996. Back then, it was novel to have a personal email address you could keep for life - one that was totally independent from your business or internet service provider. Eight years later, Google introduced Gmail, which included 1 GB of storage and inbox search. And while Gmail and other webmail services like Hotmail have added some features since then, not much has fundamentally changed in webmail over the last 8 years ..... email represents 20% of the time we spend on smartphones, and is used extensively on tablets as well as PCs ..... the first email service that is connected to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, and soon, Skype, to bring relevant context and communications to your email. .... 50% of the email in a typical inbox is newsletters and another 20% is social network updates.

It does look clean. But then I only have one email in the inbox, one from Microsoft itself. I am more likely to come for Skype and SkyDrive, also the Office apps. For now I think I will stick to my Gmail.

This puts Marissa Mayer under additional pressure. Yahoo also needs to reimagine its email.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Facebook At $25: This Is Not A Glitch

Image via CrunchBase

Despite hitting its earning projections, Facebook stock falls to a new low at $25

UPDATE: Currently, the stock sits at $24.43, down 9% in after hours trading.

LinkedIn's earnings have doubled every quarter since it went IPO, and so its lofty valuation has held ground. Facebook's IPO was a nosedive, and part of it was blamed on some kind of a technical glitch, but that could not have been the full story.

For the size of its user base Facebook has lukewarm revenues, and there are no plans/signs of robust growth there. The revenue trajectory feels like a plateau, and hence the hammering.

This is what I said on May 23.