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Microsoft Office Online and Attacking The Innovator’s Dilemma

Posted by Michael Arrington under TechCrunch

Nick Carr has a lead on the story that we all knew was coming eventually: Key Microsoft applications, including Office, may be moving online, soon. Carr’s source says to look for enterprise applications to move online as web services with Salesforce-like usage fees, popular PC applications to move online with advertising support, and expansion of its data center network to provide storage for everything.

In short, they’re responding to Google Apps and Google Docs, which now account, according to analysts, for up to 2-3% of Google’s total revenue (call it $400m a year, up from $40m a year ago) (note: I can’t find a source for this, but it was quoted to me by a senior Google employee last week). That’s still pennies compared to Microsoft’s $16b or so in annual Office revenue, but the trend is pretty clear - users like free, and they like the ability to collaborate on documents. Today, Google offers what is in many ways a superior product to Office and they don’t charge users for it.

That’s created a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma for Microsoft. And the people up in Redmond are probably smart enough not to simply roll over and die.

The obvious time to do it is at the Mix conference later this week. Where, we hear, Microsoft may also be announcing an offline version of Silverlight to compete with Adobe Air. Would Microsoft release online versions of office via the Silverlight platform? Perhaps… Adobe has their own version, called Buzzword.

In the middle of this sits Salesforce, the king of software on demand. At some point Google or Microsoft will make a serious move to acquire them, and at that point the other will respond with a counter. That at least partially explains why Salesforce continues to be valued by the market at an absurd P/E ratio of over 600 (their continued revenue growth is another reason).

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Microsoft Office Online and Attacking The Innovator’s Dilemma

Posted by Michael Arrington under TechCrunch

Nick Carr has a lead on the story that we all knew was coming eventually: Key Microsoft applications, including Office, may be moving online, soon. Carr’s source says to look for enterprise applications to move online as web services with Salesforce-like usage fees, popular PC applications to move online with advertising support, and expansion of its data center network to provide storage for everything.

In short, they’re responding to Google Apps and Google Docs, which now account, according to analysts, for up to 2-3% of Google’s total revenue (call it $400m a year, up from $40m a year ago) (note: I can’t find a source for this, but it was quoted to me by a senior Google employee last week). That’s still pennies compared to Microsoft’s $16b or so in annual Office revenue, but the trend is pretty clear - users like free, and they like the ability to collaborate on documents. Today, Google offers what is in many ways a superior product to Office and they don’t charge users for it.

That’s created a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma for Microsoft. And the people up in Redmond are probably smart enough not to simply roll over and die.

The obvious time to do it is at the Mix conference later this week. Where, we hear, Microsoft may also be announcing an offline version of Silverlight to compete with Adobe Air. Would Microsoft release online versions of office via the Silverlight platform? Perhaps… Adobe has their own version, called Buzzword.

In the middle of this sits Salesforce, the king of software on demand. At some point Google or Microsoft will make a serious move to acquire them, and at that point the other will respond with a counter. That at least partially explains why Salesforce continues to be valued by the market at an absurd P/E ratio of over 600 (their continued revenue growth is another reason).

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SYNCY That Phone

Posted by Roi Carthy under TechCrunch

Companies are starting to figure out that the contact information on your mobile phone may be the most important social network you have - perhaps even better than the email inbox that Yahoo is targeting.

Danish startup ZYB started offering a service that simply backed up your mobile phone contacts to the web in mid-2006. A year later they turned all that data into a mobile social network. They’re one of the small startups with a real shot at mobile social network with critical mass. As of August 2007 they had 200,000 active users.

It’s no surprise, then, that ZYB is being emulated. Israeli startup NewACT, with $6.5 million in funding over two rounds from Cedar Fund, are launching a new service called SYNCY into beta today. The service lets users migrate contacts, calendars and media from a mobile phone to the web. It’s part ZYB, part Sharpcast.

While Syncy supports over 700 handset models, the iPhone isn’t one, so I took it out for a spin by installing it on a SonyEricsson phone. The feature that won me over was the ability to get immediate Web access to the photos and videos I’ve takes of our kids using the phone. Incidentally, the last time I had digital copies of such files was when I switched handsets. That’s when I had no choice but borrow a cable and install Nokia’s phone management application—by far, not a user-friendly proposition to access “everyday media”.

Syncy’s handset client is simple to operate and once syncing is configured to run automatically, it’s smooth sailing from there onwards. There’s also an Outlook plug-in which synchronizes contacts and events (Exchange is not required). Google calendar integration will be available shortly.

NewACT claims that Syncy is the only service to offer cross-phone synchronization. Meaning, you can sync a Nokia phone then stick the SIM in a Motorola phone and Syncy’s server will reformat and readapt the data to fit the exact data structures of your new phone.

500 TechCrunch readers will receive access to Syncy’s limited Beta by requesting an account and entering “TechCrunch.”

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Twitxr - Like Twitter, With Pictures. Yeah, It’s Photoblogging.

Posted by Michael Arrington under TechCrunch

FON (better known for building a WiFi community) launched Twitxr today through their FON Labs group. Basically, it’s Twitter but allows picture uploads when sending a message (which makes it particularly useful for camera phones). FON founder Martin Varsavsky announced the product on his blog.

So, yeah, basically it’s a photoblog. You can easily set it up to automatically send your messages to Twitter and Facebook too, though, which is useful. My Twitxr account is here. Here’s an example of a message that was copied over to Twitter.

Varsavsky says it’s specially designed for the iPhone, and they’ve created software that makes uploading text and a photo from the iPhone very easy. As a third party application, though, it isn’t officially available for the iPhone. You have to “jailbreak” the phone before you can install their application. It looks like you can’t simply grab a photo that you’ve taken normally from the iPhone, either. You have to initiate the photo through the Twitxr application.

Twitxr is the upteenth variation of Twitter to appear (see Jaiku (acquired by Google), Pownce, etc. One clone has even gone to the deadpool. This isn’t even the first Twitter-variation to include photos - see Zannel . This is something Dave Winer has been working on with his FlickrtoTwitter project as well - which sends links of your new Flickr photos to your Twitter account. And photoblogging is nothing new. So as pretty as Twitxr is, perhaps FON should stick to wifi.

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News Corp. Scrambles To Bid For Yahoo

Posted by Michael Arrington under TechCrunch

The rumors keep on rolling around the surprise semi-hostile Microsoft bid for Yahoo this morning. Sillicon Alley Insider says they’ve heard that a couple of hedge funds were already preparing their own bids for Yahoo, and were (or perhaps still are) days away from making their move.

According to our source, other big private equity funds were busy today, too. Taking calls from News Corp., that is.

News Corp. and Yahoo have been mulling over a merger (of Yahoo and MySpace) since the middle of last year. But the deal back then had News Corp. selling off MySpace in exchange for 25% of Yahoo’s stock. Now the roles have been reversed. Today, News Corp. was supposedly making calls to put together a syndicate and make a counter offer to what Microsoft put on the table. No takers so far, we hear.

All of this is likely to come to nothing, though. I agree with Paul Kedrosky and Mathew Ingram - Microsoft has probably already won this deal, simply because they aren’t relying solely on spreadsheets in their valuation. Hedge funds don’t have that luxury.

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The Super-Awesome YouTube Room At Davos

Posted by Michael Arrington under TechCrunch

The World Economic Forum at Davos: 3,000 or so world leaders, celebrities and top CEOs (and a couple of bloggers) gather to discuss the major issues of the day.

At one end of the Congress Center is the main meeting hall. At another, private meeting rooms for the super-VIPs. And nestled right in the middle is the YouTube room.

Actually it isn’t called the YouTube room because there is no branding at Davos except for the WEF. But Google is a major partner to the conference, and this year the WEF added a new feature to reach out to attendees as well as non-attendees - the Davos Question. An entire room has been dedicated to this - five computers line the wall, all pointing to YouTube, where attendees can answer the question.

Between sessions this is clearly the place to be. Every few minutes another celebrity or leader walks through to leave a Davos Question response or go to a private meeting in the rooms beyond. The security detail comes first, giving everyone notice that someone interesting is coming. Then the person him/herself and their entourage.

Bono has been by twice. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf came by so many times that people stopped noticing (he was in the background of this CNN report, I had to point him out to get the cameras to pan over). Rupert Murdoch strolled in, as did Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai (recording his YouTube video), UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and former PM Tony Blair, Howard Dean, Michael Dell, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Chad Hurley, Henry Kissinger and Shimon Peres (the winner of the most intimidating-looking security detail at Davos). All stopped politely for interviews and photos with Forbes, CNN and others (here I am with Peres and Brin, here’s Robert Scoble interviewing Michael Dell).

The entire Forbes team has camped out here for the duration of the event, and editor Carl Lavin wrote his own thoughts about this being the power center of the event. As I sit here now there are no less than four camera crews and a score of journalists milling around.

It didn’t take me long to find the YouTube room, and I’ve spent more time here than anywhere else. This conference is exceptional, and this room is the center of it all. Brilliant move, Google.

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China Close To Becoming World’s Largest Internet Market By Users

Posted by Duncan Riley under TechCrunch

New statistics released by the Chinese Government show that China is due to surpass the United States as the nation with the most internet users in the coming months.

The state-owned China Internet Network Information Center said that China’s total number of Internet users rose 53% to 210 million at the end of 2007 up from 137 million at the end of 2006 and 162 million in June 2007. According to the WSJ, China is now just five million users shy of surpassing the United States as the world’s largest Internet market.

Chinese internet stocks listed in the United States and elsewhere soared in 2007 has the market continued to grow at massive rates. Notably though most Chinese access the internet via internet cafe’s, although home or business internet use is also rapidly growing.

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Yahoo Implements OpenID; Massive Win For The Project

Posted by Michael Arrington under TechCrunch

The rumor last week was that Google (as well as Verisign and IBM) were mulling over the idea of joining the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. But the real news comes today, as Yahoo and its roughly 250 million user IDs officially jump on the bandwagon. Today, there are only approximately 120 million valid OpenID accounts. In one move, Yahoo more than triples that number.

The service will be available in public beta on January 30, says Yahoo, and will allow users to log in to more than 9,000 OpenId compliant websites with their Yahoo IDs. Yahoo will also be integrating their Sign-In Seal feature, meaning users can view an uploaded image before giving over credentials - the feature is widely used by financial institutions and is designed to reduce the effectiveness of phishing attempts.

Yahoo is also announcing that both Plaxo and JanRain will allow Yahoo OpenID sign-ins from January 30.

“This is just the first step in working with OpenID,” Yahoo Director of Membership and Registration Raj Patel said to me on a phone interview yesterday. But he would not confirm when (or if) Yahoo would also allow become what is called a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to Yahoo). He did say that the goal was to move in that direction, but gave no further guidance.

More information can be found at openid.yahoo.com. Screen shots are below.

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Yahoo Implements OpenID; Massive Win For The Project

Posted by Michael Arrington under TechCrunch

The rumor last week was that Google (as well as Verisign and IBM) were mulling over the idea of joining the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. But the real news comes today, as Yahoo and its roughly 250 million user IDs officially jump on the bandwagon. Today, there are only approximately 120 million valid OpenID accounts. In one move, Yahoo more than triples that number.

The service will be available in public beta on January 30, says Yahoo, and will allow users to log in to more than 9,000 OpenId compliant websites with their Yahoo IDs. Yahoo will also be integrating their Sign-In Seal feature, meaning users can view an uploaded image before giving over credentials - the feature is widely used by financial institutions and is designed to reduce the effectiveness of phishing attempts.

Yahoo is also announcing that both Plaxo and JanRain will allow Yahoo OpenID sign-ins from January 30.

“This is just the first step in working with OpenID,” Yahoo Director of Membership and Registration Raj Patel said to me on a phone interview yesterday. But he would not confirm when (or if) Yahoo would also allow become what is called a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to Yahoo). He did say that the goal was to move in that direction, but gave no further guidance.

More information can be found at openid.yahoo.com. Screen shots are below.

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Triggit: Edit Any Page Where Java Script Is Accepted

Posted by Nick Gonzalez under TechCrunch

HTML code and CSS is easy enough for most, but not everyone. There’s an obvious need for simple editing solutions as more people become amateur webmasters. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen a host of simple web page editors cropping up around the web (Jimdo, Weebly, Typeroom).

So far most of these editors let you modify web pages on their terms by hosting sites on their servers (Typeroom is the exception and lets you edit a file and copy it to your server). However, a new startup Triggit lets you make WYSIWYG edits on any site where you can post their Javascript tag, most likely your own. The tag is used to load their editing functionality and to insert the modifications you make to the site, such as added images, videos, and links. When you want to edit your site, you simply click on your Triggit button and are given the option to insert new photos and links. When you’re done, you save the changes where you want them, and Triggit will serve the changes whenever someone visits your page.

The current editing options are currently very basic. You can use Triggit to add images (Flickr), videos (YouTube), and a bunch of affiliate links to your site (Amazon, Commision Junction, Shopping.com, Snooth, Wine Searcher, and Wine Zap). The service is so heavily weighted to affiliate linking because Trigit fell into the web editing business after developing a tool to help web un-savvy customers add advertising links and widgets (specifically wineries, if you couldn’t guess). What they ended up with was a more general tool than they realized could help more people who have trouble making tiny changes to their sites.

Naturally serving content through javascript causes problems for creating a search engine readable site, which causes webcrawlers to not see your content when they calculate rankings. However, most affiliate linkers don’t want search engines to see their links. Amateur editors probably don’t care.

The service is only in private beta, but has provided us with 300 invites to TechCrunch readers that enter the code “techcrunch” during signup.

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Triggit: Edit Any Page Where Java Script Is Accepted

Posted by Nick Gonzalez under TechCrunch

HTML code and CSS is easy enough for most, but not everyone. There’s an obvious need for simple editing solutions as more people become amateur webmasters. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen a host of simple web page editors cropping up around the web (Jimdo, Weebly, Typeroom).

So far most of these editors let you modify web pages on their terms by hosting sites on their servers (Typeroom is the exception and lets you edit a file and copy it to your server). However, a new startup Triggit lets you make WYSIWYG edits on any site where you can post their Javascript tag, most likely your own. The tag is used to load their editing functionality and to insert the modifications you make to the site, such as added images, videos, and links. When you want to edit your site, you simply click on your Triggit button and are given the option to insert new photos and links. When you’re done, you save the changes where you want them, and Triggit will serve the changes whenever someone visits your page.

The current editing options are currently very basic. You can use Triggit to add images (Flickr), videos (YouTube), and a bunch of affiliate links to your site (Amazon, Commision Junction, Shopping.com, Snooth, Wine Searcher, and Wine Zap). The service is so heavily weighted to affiliate linking because Trigit fell into the web editing business after developing a tool to help web un-savvy customers add advertising links and widgets (specifically wineries, if you couldn’t guess). What they ended up with was a more general tool than they realized could help more people who have trouble making tiny changes to their sites.

Naturally serving content through javascript causes problems for creating a search engine readable site, which causes webcrawlers to not see your content when they calculate rankings. However, most affiliate linkers don’t want search engines to see their links. Amateur editors probably don’t care.

The service is only in private beta, but has provided us with 300 invites to TechCrunch readers that enter the code “techcrunch” during signup.

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MySpace May Still Dominate in the U.S., But (Surprise!) Facebook is Catching Up Fast Worldwide

Posted by Erick Schonfeld under TechCrunch

Here’s a little anti-spin on the Hitwise numbers that just came out showing that MySpace still rules social networking in the U.S. (See Duncan’s earlier post). Hitwise says that MySpace commands a 72 percent market share of visits to the top ten social networking sites, while Facebook has only gained a 16 percent market share. I find the way Hitwise discloses its data to be confusing—72 percent of what exactly? Why don’t they just tell us how many people they think visited the site? We can do our own math.

Any way you slice it, the numbers are surprising. Isn’t Facebook supposed to be on a rocket ride? So I decided to look at what comScore has to say on the matter of MySpace versus Facebook (not that they are perfect, but at least they give an actual estimate of how many people they think visited a particular site).

The numbers on comScore corroborate that Facebook is still lagging MySpace, but not by as much as Hitwise would have you think. In December, comScore reports that MySpace had 69 million unique visitors compared to 35 million for Facebook. That would give Facebook about half the market share of Facebook, not one fifth.

Maybe by”visits,” Hitwise means page views. Again, the comScore numbers confirm that MySpace is trouncing Facebook in the U.S. with 38 billion page views in December 2007, versus 13 billion for Facebook. Even so, that gives Facebook a third as much “market share” as MySpace. Of course, Hitwise data and comScore data are apples and oranges because they’ve been collected using different methods and different sources. I offer this more as a gut check.

Regardless of what data better reflects who is winning the social-networking race in the U.S., the real story is happening elsewhere. A peak at the global comScore numbers (as of November 2007) produces this doozy: Facebook has nearly caught up to MySpace with 93 million unique visitors worldwide versus MySpace’s 105 million. And in minutes spent on the site, it has actually surpassed MySpace with 21 billion minutes for Facebook versus 17 billion minutes for MySpace. (Although, it is still lagging in page views, 42 billion to 48 billion). The Web is a global game, and MySpace might be about to lose it.

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Facebook Up, But MySpace Still Leads By A Very, Very, Very Long Way

Posted by Duncan Riley under TechCrunch

New figures release by Hitwise show that despite Facebook’s rising traffic, MySpace still dominates US social networking traffic.

Facebook’s traffic grew 51% from December 2006 to December 2007, taking its share of social networking traffic to 16.03%. MySpace’s traffic declined 8% over the same period, to 72.32%, down from 78.89% in December 2006.

To have a little fun with these figures, if Facebook is worth $15 billion, on traffic ratios alone MySpace would be worth $67.67 billion, a nice earn on the $580 million News Corp acquired the site for. Of course it doesn’t work like that, but given the gap in traffic between MySpace and Facebook, and more recently the $15 billion valuation for Facebook, MySpace would likely be worth more today that the $12 billion figure floated in June 2007.

The other notable feature from the figures is that there would appear to be causality between MySpace traffic dropping and Facebook traffic growing indicating that at least some users are switching to Facebook exclusively. Having said that though it’s not at any rate that will see Facebook become the dominant social networking site (traffic wise) in the market any time soon.

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OK, Now This Is A Little Scary: Microsoft Biometrics

Posted by Duncan Riley under TechCrunch

Microsoft has lodged a new patent for a system that can track a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

According to The Times, who has seen the patent:

[the patent is for] a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

The Microsoft patent details a “unique monitoring system” that includes wireless sensors that read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure.” Further, the system would “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that the employee needed help.

The Times refers to the system as being “Big-Brother like” and the Orwellian reference is correct. Imagine a world where those who went to work were constantly monitored by their employers, where getting excited privately by an attractive fellow employee could end up in a sexual harassment claim, or even privately being unhappy by someone in management may automatically result in intervention and retraining. I can’t speak for everyone, but at least in my own case: Don’t Want.

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OK, Now This Is A Little Scary: Microsoft Biometrics

Posted by Duncan Riley under TechCrunch

Microsoft has lodged a new patent for a system that can track a worker’s productivity, physical wellbeing and competence.

According to The Times, who has seen the patent:

[the patent is for] a computer system that links workers to their computers via wireless sensors that measure their metabolism. The system would allow managers to monitor employees’ performance by measuring their heart rate, body temperature, movement, facial expression and blood pressure. Unions said they fear that employees could be dismissed on the basis of a computer’s assessment of their physiological state.

The Microsoft patent details a “unique monitoring system” that includes wireless sensors that read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure.” Further, the system would “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that the employee needed help.

The Times refers to the system as being “Big-Brother like” and the Orwellian reference is correct. Imagine a world where those who went to work were constantly monitored by their employers, where getting excited privately by an attractive fellow employee could end up in a sexual harassment claim, or even privately being unhappy by someone in management may automatically result in intervention and retraining. I can’t speak for everyone, but at least in my own case: Don’t Want.

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Flickr Takes Historical Imagery To The Masses

Posted by Duncan Riley under TechCrunch

A new project from Flickr will see the photo sharing site showcasing historical imagery from public resources.

“The Commons” is a pilot project between Flickr and the Library of Congress that will tap into the Library’s rich historical footage and allow it to be viewed from Flickr. The first two sets in the pilot are American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression, color photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection include scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression and The George Grantham Bain Collection, “Photos produced and gathered by George Grantham Bain for his news photo service, including portraits and worldwide news events, but with special emphasis on life in New York City.

Flickr said that as well as bringing these historical photographs to the masses, the project will also “facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search,” in other words, they want to tap into Flickr users to tag these images.

The Library of Congress has more here.

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