Google, Yahoo Struggle with Technology Innovation

March 30, 2011

Google is taking a slice from Apple’s strategy, bringing back company co-founder Larry Page to ignite innovation at Google, where the stock has flatlined for the past year. Page is scheduled to take over next week as CEO from Eric Schmidt, who is reportedly under consideration for the Secretary of Commerce position in U.S. President Barack Obama’s cabinet.

It’s often difficult for mature companies to innovate the way startups do. For one thing, they lack the financial compulsion that drives entrepreneurs to market or die. Look at how News Corp. has shouldered losses at MySpace while Facebook restlessly innovates, or what happened to AOL after the merger with Time Warner, or what might happen to The Huffington Post now that it has been acquired by AOL. Google can afford to simply hold onto a company such as YouTube without the pace of self-improvement often seen in startups.

Amir Efrati, who covers the Internet for The Wall Street Journal, has been stirring things up in Silicon Valley this past week with fascinating reports on attempts by Google and Yahoo to stay innovative. In an article last Saturday, Efrati used unnamed sources to speculate that Larry Page is being called back to “speed up what [Page] says has been sluggish decision-making at Google’s top levels.”

One of Page’s new edicts, according to The Wall Street Journal, is face-to-face bullpen sessions:

… [E]very afternoon, [Page] and the company’s executive officers sit and work on small couches outside a boardroom in Building 43 at Google’s headquarters.

That might have worked when Page left the company in 2001, with 200 employees. Whether it will work 10 years later, with over 100 times as many people on the payroll, remains to be seen.

The difficulty of fostering innovation in mature companies is one of the main drivers behind the Minitrends project at Technology Futures, Inc., the Austin, Texas, technology forecasting firm and publisher of the book, MINITRENDS, and this blog. The authors devote a significant portion of the book to fostering innovation in large corporations:

Fewer than 30 percent of the companies listed on the Fortune 100 twenty-five years ago are still on the list today. Often the primary reason for the demise of such companies has been a failure to recognize and react to changing trends.

One of the ways that companies innovate is through acquisition rather than invention. Efrati generated a second round of buzz this week when he quoted Yahoo’s director of development, Steven Mitzenmacher, on The Wall Street Journal‘s Digits blog as saying Google’s investment in YouTube was “crazy.” It’s an odd comment, given YouTube’s burgeoning revenues and the fact that Yahoo is embarking on a buying binge to remain relevant.

Savvy institutional investing reporter, Riley McDermid, follows the fallout from Page’s return to Google in an insightful article at VentureBeat. Always one step ahead of the competition, McDermid managed to write about The Wall Street Journal‘s article a day before the article appeared. It’s hard to keep up with futurists!

So where do large corporations find the stimulation they need to stay at the forefront of technology trends? Among the resources mentioned in MINITRENDS are innovation competitions and working papers. Among the best examples of where to find both is the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), which held its version of “March Madness” — an innovation competition — in Washington, D.C., last Saturday.

The NCIIA competition is sponsored by companies that are working to stay competitive and rewarding innovation in education. The NCIIA has already published all the conference papers online, for free; they contain a treasure-trove of ideas for mature companies looking for a little stimulation or entrepreneurs looking for adventure.

If you prefer to watch rather than read, we recommend you screen the videos submitted to the NCIIA’s “Open Mind” Awards and nicely catalogued by David Orsman at Inventors Digest. It’s by doing research like this that you are likely to find the Larry Pages and Steve Jobs of tomorrow, who will set the technology trends that others follow.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Obama Nears Appointment Of Eric Schmidt As Commerce Secretary,” BusinessInsider, March 18, 2011
Source: “At Google, Page Aims to Clear Red Tape,” The Wall Street Journal,” March 26, 2011
Source: “Larry Page already cracking the whip at Google, a week before he takes the reins,” VentureBeat, March 25, 2011
Source: “Yahoo Executive Talks Acquisitions, Slams YouTube Buy,” The Wall Street Journal‘s Digits Blog, March 28, 2011
Source: “The Open Minds Awards: Taking Innovation off Campus & into Commercialization,” Inventors Digest, Feb. 18, 2011
Photo courtesy of Jeff Keyzer (mightyohm), used under its Creative Commons license.

Blackbaud Videos Reveal Trends in Nonprofit Technology

November 15, 2010

Last week, I broached the topic of how nonprofits are capitalizing on trends in technology to reach constituents through social networking. Today, I’m going to take the discussion up a notch and look at the fountainhead of many tech trends for nonprofits: Blackbaud, Inc.

Blackbaud was founded in 1981 with the purpose of providing technological support to nonprofit organizations. The company’s growth since has been phenomenal. Headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, Blackbaud now employs more than 2,000 people worldwide. The company went public in 2004 and is traded on the NASDAQ exchange under ticker symbol BLKB.

Shortly after going public, Blackbaud hired Marc Chardon, a former CFO for Microsoft and manager of Microsoft France, as the company’s new president and CEO. Just last week, Blackbaud was named one of Forbes 100 Best Small Companies in America, a ranking based largely on exceptional financial performance.

Blackbaud has become an enormous driver of technology trends in the nonprofit sector. Last month, the company held its annual conference on nonprofit technology, drawing more than 2,200 people to Washington, D.C., for an action-packed program dominated by seminars on social networking.

This month, Blackbaud has made many of these programs available for free viewing on its BlackbaudTV channel on YouTube. These videos are both inspiring and educational for anyone interested in technology trends. Here are some of the highlights:

Global Trends and What They Mean to You
Marc Chardon, President and CEO of Blackbaud

Becoming a Networked Nonprofit: The Road to Effective Use of Social Media
Allison Fine & Beth Kanter, authors of The Networked Nonprofit

Social Media for Nonprofits
Claire Williams Diaz, Social Innovation at Twitter
Noah Everett, Founder of TwitPic
Matthew Mahan, Vice President of Impact at Causes
Geoff Livingston, Co-Founder of Zoetica
Brian Dresher, Mashable (formerly with USA Today)

Social Media: Paint by the Numbers
Holly Ross, Executive Director, NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network

The Nonprofit Trust Agent
Chris Brogan, New York Times bestselling co-author of Trust Agents

Most of the videos are an hour long, except for the Chris Brogan interview, which is a five-minute ambush video in the hallway of the conference center. The first video with Marc Chardon is a panel that covers such trends as social media, radical transparency, and the need for nonprofits to demonstrate ROI. The panel on social media for nonprofits is terrific, with presenters limited to five minutes to take their best shots, followed by the audience Q&A.

For access to all the BlackbaudTV videos — including a five-minute interview with Mark Zuckerberg’s engaging and articulate sister, Randi, about five things nonprofits can do to supercharge their Facebook pages — visit the BlackbaudTV page on YouTube.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Blackbaud Conference 2010: 5 Must-See Presentations,” Social Media 4 Nonprofits, 10/24/10
Source: “Reflections from Independent Sector and Blackbaud Conferences,” Beth’s Blog, 10/26/10.

Nonprofits Take Social Networking to New Heights

November 12, 2010

Social networking is a megatrend that has been gaining momentum since bulletin boards first made it possible for people to schmooze online in the 1980s. Out of this megatrend have come numerous Minitrends that investors have profitably mined over the past five years, including social bookmarking, tagging, and location-based networks such as Foursquare.

Steve Monfort, a writer for NASDAQ.com, recently reported on the growing trend of small businesses hiring more people to handle social media:

A recent American Express survey shows that 40 percent of small businesses are using social networking to promote their offerings, up from 10 percent a year ago.

While small businesses are just warming-up to social networking, nonprofit organizations were among the earliest to embrace the trend. By now, everyone has heard about “text-to-give,” which was used by the American Red Cross to collect $30 million from cellphone users for earthquake relief in Haiti last year. According to nonprofit tech guru Tonia Zampieri, sales and marketing manager for LoyaltyClicks, a division of Smart Online, text-to-give is so 2009.

Smart Online recently conducted a survey into technology trends for nonprofit organizations. The results were reported on NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, just a few days ago. They indicate that over 90% of nonprofits actively use social networking (compared with only 40% of small businesses, according to American Express). The breakdown: 91% use Facebook, 63% use Twitter, 45% use YouTube, and 35% use LinkedIn.

You would think that level of penetration would be cheered by the nonprofit experts at LoyaltyClicks. But Zampieri has found a weakness in charity tech: mobile myopia. She writes:

[O]nly 16% of the surveyed nonprofits plan on having mobile websites in 2011, while 19% plan on having smartphone applications.

Zampieri cites a Nielson study that almost one-quarter of the time people are online is spent using social networks — and that half of that social networking is done with mobile devices. Then she provides “compelling reasons why a mobile website or a mobile application might work better for your organization” than, for example, old-fashioned text-to-give:

• donations aren’t limited to $5 or $10
• donations are received immediately
• you capture and control crucial data about your donors
• any size charity can use this technology, not just giants
• it’s a permanent tool, not just a one-shot appeal

For inspiring examples about the way nonprofit organizations are innovating with social networking, we recommend a recent Mashable story on “5 Must-Follow Non-Profits Making a Difference With Social Media.” The article is a run-up to the annual Mashable Awards which will be held January 6, 2011, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

I was particularly impressed by the way the Brooklyn Museum has made use of a wide variety of social networking Minitrends to engage visitors and benefactors both online and in person. The museum has a dedicated mobile site (LoyaltyClicks would approve) that allows browsers to tag the museum’s 94,000 piece collection, making it easier for visitors to locate must-see art based on other patrons’ comments. They also use Foursquare to provide restaurant suggestions and other ideas to fill out a trip to the museum.

If you have any other examples of nonprofits who are making innovative uses of social networking applications, we’d like to hear about them. And so would Mashable! The Mashable Awards are open for nomination until November 29.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Job growth anticipated in cloud computing, apps, social media,” NASDAQ.com News, 10/15/10
Source: “Technology Trends for Nonprofits in 2011,” NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, 11/08/10
Source: “5 Must-Follow Non-Profits Making a Difference With Social Media,” Mashable, 11/06/10
Image courtesy of Lisa Brewster, used under its Creative Commons license.

Trends in Food: Healthy, Local, Mini?

November 4, 2010

Technology trends aren’t the only Minitrends we cover on this blog. Today, we’ll look at some trends in food. You might want to grab a snack while you’re reading this.

Let’s start with some of the megatrends: the desire of consumers to eat healthy and eat locally-sourced foods. In a previous post on this blog, we advised entrepreneurs to eat healthy, because “exceptionally good health” is just about the only common characteristic of successful entrepreneurs.

Despite his or her increasing waistline, the average American is still very interested in a healthier diet. So say the speakers at a recent conference on food innovation at the Guelph Food Technology Centre in Mississauga, Ontario.

Food policy expert Lori Stahlbrand, president of the nonprofit organization Local Food Plus, discussed the need for a sustainability certification program so that consumers could more readily determine which foods are grown, harvested, and processed using environmentally sound practices.

In a video posted on YouTube last week, Stahlbrand describes a program launching in Vancouver, British Columbia, that within one year will enable consumers to see sustainability labeling in food stores and restaurants. Between food manufacturers who want to showcase their environmental efforts and food consumers who seek more knowledge about the products they buy and use, there are many Minitrends waiting to be harvested.

Meanwhile, the Nation’s Restaurant News reports on top food trends for the upcoming year, including more Mom & Pop eateries. Why? Dropping real estate prices have made opening a restaurant more affordable for entrepreneurs. Restaurant marketing consultant Andrew Freeman says:

There are a lot of people out there who still want to open up restaurants, and it’s a good opportunity to look at real estate in a down economy.

Freeman discusses many other food trends in the article, including the growing use of “dirt” (dry, crumbled spices) instead of sauces, and a greater number of single-dish restaurants. Following on the heels of cupcake restaurants, the San Francisco-based consultant expects to see pie stores popping up all over the country.

But the prediction that caught my attention is the trend toward, well, the mini: “This year mini is the new buzz word,” Freeman says. “Mini everything: mini portions, mini desserts.”

It seems the market for Minitrends has never been better.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Guelph Food Technology Centre Keynote Speaker Says Healthy and Local Trends Continue to Be Strong Market Drivers,” GRAINNET, 10/29/10
Source: “Lori Stahlbrand of Local Food Plus,” Museum of Vancouver, 10/14/10
Source: “Pies top 2011 restaurant trend list,” Nation’s Restaurant News, 10/21/10
Image by cotaroba, used under its Creative Commons license.

Google’s Surge Highlights Minitrends in Online Advertising

October 15, 2010

Yesterday, Google Inc. announced an amazing 23% jump in year-to-year revenue, from $5.95 billion in third quarter 2009 to $7.29 billion in third quarter 2010. The print and broadcast media, who compete with Google for advertising budgets, must have choked reporting those numbers. That is a stunning amount of growth in a non-essential service while much of the globe claws its way out of recession.

Google derives most of its revenue from online advertising, a megatrend that began 16 years ago with the release of the first Web browser. As the Internet penetrates into more homes and workplaces around the world, the Internet advertising market will continue to boom. Advances in technology promise to reduce the costs of serving ads while generating a variety of Minitrends in the online advertising market.

One of the brilliant Minitrends pioneered by Google is the ability to put fresh ads into stale content. If you have a DVD with preview trailers on it, you know those ads get stale in a matter of weeks. What if every time you watched the DVD, fresh trailers appeared? That’s what Google achieved with YouTube advertising. Now, when you watch an old Perry Mason clip on YouTube, you get an up-to-date ad. In the screen capture of this clip, shown on the right, the ad is rather hilarious. It’s from Google’s rival, Bing, trying to get you to watch videos at Bing instead of YouTube.

Another Minitrend in online advertising is being able to quickly profile a browser and adjust the ads accordingly. Now you not only get fresh ads, you also get targeted ads based on what the ad server knows about you. That’s why if you clicked on the YouTube video above, you most likely saw a different ad completely, based on your past Web history and search patterns.

Part of the online advertising megatrend is display advertising, which is on pace to generate $2.5 billion out of Google’s projected $30 billion in 2010 revenue. Henry Blodget, one of the most astute analysts of Internet stocks and the editor-in-chief of Business Insider, which runs on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s SFGate site, isn’t impressed with the trend in Google’s display advertising revenues:

The reason Google is so amazingly profitable is that it keeps 100% of the revenue for AdWords — the sponsored search results that appear on Google’s search pages.

Since Google has not yet stooped so low as to serve display and video ads on its own pages, however, it has to share display revenue with content partners. The average split for this display revenue is probably on the order of 70% to the partner and 30% for Google. The same goes for YouTube: Google does not produce videos itself, so it has to share revenue with partners.

One promising Minitrend in display advertising — technology to serve video ads into YouTube videos instead of the text ads that currently appear — could dramatically increase the display ad revenue generated by YouTube. Video ads are dynamically inserted into streaming video at NBC, Comedy Central, and many other television websites, although it does not yet appear they are customized for individual browsers.

Another megatrend that Google is benefiting from is the mobile advertising market, where searches on Google have grown 500% in the last two years. Google’s mobile advertising revenue is expected to total $1 billion in 2010. One of the Minitrends within that megatrend? The ability to put ads into Google Maps. Recently, while searching for a Walgreens on my iPhone, I was presented with logo pins for every RiteAid in the area.

Congratulations, Google, on milking the megatrends like no one else. And congratulations to all the entrepreneurs who have fueled that growth by pursuing the Minitrends that make it possible.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Sorry, But Google’s Still A One-Trick Pony — That ‘$2.5 Billion Of Display Revenue’ Is Not As Impressive As It Sounds (GOOG),” San Francisco Chronicle, Business Insider, 10/15/10
Screen capture from video at YouTube is used under Fair Use: Commentary.
Screen capture from Google Maps is used under Fair Use: Commentary..