At Search Engine Watch, Gary Price provides a good overview of Yahoo Answers, a “new social networking/online community/search/question answering service” that “allows any registered Yahoo user to ask just about any question and hopefully get an answer from another member of the question answering community.”
As Michael Bazeley notes, Yahoo Answers is “not to be confused with Google Answers, which allows people to ask a pool of experts to research questions for them for a price. Yahoo Answers is all about leveraging the collective knowledge of the Yahoo community.”
In a second post, Price says “Yahoo Answers reminds me IN MANY WAYS of a web based Q&A community that has been online and growing for several years called Wondir.com.”
Like at Yahoo Answers, questions come from users all over the web and are organized into categories and searchable. RSS feeds are available and a scrolling ticker relays the latest asked questions, and personalization is available from MyWondir. The service officially launched in April and recently was acquired by the Revolution Health Group.
Turns out Revolution Health Group is controlled by Steve Case, whose assortment of recent investments are reviewed in this IPD post. When Revolution’s acquisition of Wondir was announced a few months ago, it was presented as one of multiple investments closely tied the healthcare industry. But the launch of Yahoo Answers (and Price’s post), serves as a reminder that Wondir has broader capabilities and potential applications. It makes one wonder if Case has bigger plans for Wondir.
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 7:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)
There’s been a lot of online discussion in the past two days about Yahoo’s move to upgrade the VoIP capabilities of its IM service, including low-priced dial-in and dial-out functionality (e.g., domestic U.S. calling at one cent per minute).
Michael Bazeley, Andy Abramson, Om Malik and John Paczkowski all see the news as potentially big trouble for Skype, which recently announced plans to market its service through Radio Shack.
Telephony’s Carol Wilson highlights the fact that Yahoo, unlike Skype, already has broadband partnerships with some of the nation’s leading pipe-owners, including AT&T/SBC, BellSouth and Verizon.
“We have been working with our broadband partners—AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth—and they are aware of this,” said Jeff Bonforte, product manager of voice for Yahoo! “They are both aware of and involved in this feature and functionality. They are encouraging Yahoo! to be aggressive and win in this space. Any market share gained by any other company in this space is not to their advantage.”…For Yahoo!’s part, the partnerships with the Bell companies “become more critical” as voice becomes a bigger piece of the Internet, Bonforte said. “It makes our partnerships tighter.”
Yahoo’s “tight” relationship with the dominant ILECs contrasts sharply with what Om Malik describes as “Skype’s risky retail strategy.” Bonforte’s comments suggest that Yahoo’s existing relationship with the RBOCs (which are believed to include some revenue sharing) could give it a significant advantage relative to Skype, especially if Congress does not impose strong and enforceable “net neutrality” requirements for access to local broadband networks.
Regarding the Yahoo VoIP announcement, Om says:
The ink on the $4.1 billion eBay-Skype deal is almost dry and already competitors are lining up to rain on Skype’s parade. If the regulatory/incumbent problems were not enough, here comes news that Yahoo will soon upgrade its Messenger’s dialout/dial in features to compete with SkypeIn/SkypeOut.
I am told it is a remarkable improvement over the previous version. While, the older Yahoo Messenger had dial-out/dial-in features through an arrangement with Net2Phone, the new messenger will be exclusively using the DialPad back-end to route calls to Yahoo partners such as SBC, Verizon and BellSouth. (That should keep them happy!) The prices of calls within US are almost half that of Skype, something to ponder about!
Yahoo is also planning to give away avatars and ringtones, which apparently were a big push for Skype in terms of monetizing its audience. Yahoo believes that it has a better profile of users - in US and Western Europe to monetize its efforts, in comparison to Skype, which is pretty strong in Asia and Eastern Europe.In a Mercury News piece, Bazely says “VoIP consultant Andy Abramson said that Yahoo’s deep pockets allow it to force Skype into a price war.” In his own blog post, Abramson elaborates on Yahoo’s advantages:
Yahoo is more of a progressive marketer than eBay. Yahoo has more content, greater service offerings and many more promotional partners. Their IM client also has lots more users on a daily basis and Yahoo Messenger is Enterprise friendly already. Skype isn’t. It will also take eBay 12-24 months to forge the kind of relationships Yahoo has in place today.
Directly related to this are Yahoo’s other assets-Groups, Music, Video, Messaging, Email, 360, Photos and More. Many are free services that convert to paying service offerings for Voice. They are all platforms Skype and eBay don’t have…What Skype will need to license (at a premium cost) Yahoo already has promotional rights to and can leverage those rights starting now. Yahoo’s Entertainment Group in L.A. is very savvy and as they expand their Hollywood content asset rights, the ability to blend them in to new voice service offerings are also something Skype doesn’t have and will have to spend time to acquire, if they want to match Yahoo stride for stride.Bazeley quotes Bonforte on Yahoo’s VoIP pricing and margins:
Bonforte, president of SIPphone before joining Yahoo earlier this year, said that even with the low pricing, Yahoo should enjoy a nice profit margin. Because of its size, Yahoo was able to negotiate appealing prices for the calling minutes it needs to buy from phone companies.Abramson also discusses network costs and their competitive implications:
Yahoo has very serious relationships with multiple carriers, telco partners and tons of inbound traffic that create a war chest of credits. I have discussed this point now twice with AOL’s Voice Team leadership as they too are in a position to wage price war based on OPM (other people’s money) as it’s the nature of the Internet. Get lots of inbound traffic because your a destination and have your own “network” and you have lots of credit. For PC-to-PC calling on net you can leverage a lot. Terminate via the Dialpad deals already in place and Yahoo takes a 1+1 = lots more approach that Skype can’t offer. They don’t have the other assets in place (yet).Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 5:22 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Speaking at UBS’ Global Media Conference today, two of Comcast’s top executives confirmed that the company is no longer joined with Google as the search giant negotiates with AOL. (The webcast is here.) But, co-CFO John Alchin and EVP of Operations Dave Watson said that Comcast is interested in partnering with Google in other areas.
“In terms of looking at innovative ideas with a partner like Google, it makes a lot of sense,” Alchin said. “They could well become a partner with which we do business.”
One area of particular interest to Watson is Google’s ability to support video search, an intriguing concept given that Comcast owns a joint share in a interactive programming guide venture with Gemstar. Some marriage of the two technologies could be quite interesting. “We think video search could become a great opportunity,” Watson said.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:33 PM | Print | Comments (0)The hot topic du jour is the contest between Microsoft and Google for some kind of a deal with AOL. And Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons affirmed today during a talk at CSFB’s Global Media Conference (webcast can be found here) that the company is not going to sell either Internet giant a share of AOL.
“We’re not sellers of the asset,” he said. What’s on the table right now is which company can provide the better technological underpinnings to help AOL maximize its ad sales revenues. “If we had more robust technology sitting under our portal to monetize eyeballs, that would be a plus. And two we need to throw more traffic at that aol.com portal because we were late to the party.”
“How all these discussions work out will depend on how we see ourselves achieving those two objectives,” Parsons said, although reading between the lines it sounds like Microsoft might, in fact, have an edge over Google, as press reports have indicated.
Later, when discussing whether Time Warner will thread its vast set of online properties — from CNN.com to turner.com — together to form one potent online advertising vehicle, Parsons said “whether we leverage it through our relationship with Google or we use something else, that’s one of the reasons we’re having these discussions.”
On the cable side of the business, Parsons returned to his usual bullish attitude. “We believe that our cable business will grow both top and bottom-line double-digits throughout our business planning cycle [five years]. Our guys are shooting the lights out” in terms of basic, digital, high-speed and voice service growth.
Parsons danced a little bit when asked whether, like Disney’s Bob Iger, he believes that the movie DVD release window will shorten to the point that it coincides with the theatrical release window. Ever the diplomat, Parsons nodded to Time Warner’s retail affiliates, such as Walmart, that generate heaps of revenues from DVDs, clearly wanting to be as non-confrontational as possible.
But he did ultimately concede that at some point, the windows will shorten dramatically. “I think these various channels of distribution will live together for a while and over time it will be that these windows will shorten over time and eventually they will come together.”
Video distribution over the Internet is also inevitable, but the business models are still very unclear, Parsons said. “The opportunity to mess around in that online space and find the right combination of both content and availability funded through advertising revenues…there will be opportunities that we can’t put our finger on.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:56 PM | Print | Comments (0)The MPAA has developed a proposed new law for New York state that would crack down on film bootleggers. Legislators, film industry executives and lawyers met in NYC yesterday to hash out the details of draft legislation would make operating recording equipment inside a theater a criminal misdemeanor, raising the maxium punishment to a $1,000 fine (up from a $250 fine) and a year in jail.
According to press reports, making the crime a misdemeanor would give police the authority to arrest violators on the spot rather than just issue a summons. Violators caught a second time would be subject to felony prosecution. New York is supposedly the origin of about half of the world’s bootlegged films.
I hope this doesn’t lead to the round-up of dozens of teenagers with their video cell phones taking photos and short videos of their latest screen crushes.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:24 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Wall Street Journal pays attention to a little-discussed but potentially huge problem for Time Warner and Comcast: regulators are giving the two companies a hard time in reviewing their joint bid to buy bankrupt Adelphia. DC attorneys have been talking about this for a while, and now this piece by Peter Grant and Amy Schatz contends that the FCC is asking for an inordinate amount of data related to the transaction.
The FCC has asked, for example, how Comcast and Time Warner make programming decisions on a system-by-system basis. In previous big cable mergers, such as Comcast’s acquisition of the former AT&T Corp.’s cable unit, the FCC asked how programming decisions were made on a national level. The FCC’s information request also focuses on several delicate areas, including agreements for regional sports programming and “net neutrality” rights — essentially preventing companies from discriminating against Internet traffic. The latter request is notable because FCC Chairman Kevin Martin wasn’t particularly concerned about net neutrality in two recent Bell mergers.
Another official, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, issued civil subpoenas to all three companies yesterday asking for documents related to the deal.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:54 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The Wall Street Journal today fronts an article about new devices designed to store music from satellite radio services, and the record companies are none too happy. The piece, written by Sarah McBride, talks about portable music players, such as the Sirius’s S50, which retails for about $330, which can store up to 750 songs much the way an iPod can. XM Satellite Radio will come out with a comparable device, called the Nexus, next year.
Unfortunately for the record companies, which charge lower licensing fees to satellite radio than other media, the law isn’t on their side, allowing recording of radio music for personal purposes and permitting time-shifting of media content. Still, the record companies don’t like what they see and a fight is no doubt in the works.
To the music industry, the devices blur the lines between radios and recorders. “It’s a morphing of radio into something they’re not,” says Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, the industry trade group. “The presumption you can turn radio into a Napster-To-Go subscription service under the old terms is not accurate,” he adds, referring to a service that allows consumers access to all the music they want for a flat monthly fee.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:43 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Podcasting perhaps deserves its “word of the year” status judging by the incredible surge in content made available via this new medium. The latest example, courtesy of Micropersuasion, is a series of HBO audio broadcasts of its high-profile programs. Snippets or full audio content of Rome, Curb Your Enthusiasm, RealTime with Bill Maher, Extras, Entourage and more can be found here (note you need to have an iTunes player installed.)
Will HBO video programs follow now that the video iPod craze has taken hold?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:58 AM | Print | Comments (0)According to David Hatch at the National Journal’s Tech Daily, two new names have surfaced as candidates for the empty Republican slot at the FCC. The first, Robert McDowell, is SVP and General Counsel at CompTel, the trade association that represents competitors to the Bell companies. At CompTel, McDowell works for a former top aide to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK). The other, William Crispin, is a communications attorney who heads up his own firm, Crispin and Associates, which represents wireless carrier including Qualcomm, NextWave Telecom and Nextel Communications.
Meanwhile the Senate Commerce Committee has scheduled a confirmation hearing for December 13 for the remaining nominated Commissioner, Tennessee regulator Deborah Tate. At that hearing, the Committee will also consider the renomination of Michael Copps – one of two Democrats on the FCC
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:54 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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