Month: February 2007

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Upcoming Search Engine Investor Conference Presentations

I thought you’d like to be aware of these, it’s interesting that they announed these almost simultaneously.

Yahoo! to present at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference and
Thomas Weisel Partners Internet Digital Media Conference

Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO, and Susan Decker, Executive Vice
President, Head of Advertiser and Publisher Group and acting Chief Financial
Officer, will present at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference.  The
presentation will take place on Tuesday, March 6, 2007 at 12:30pm
Eastern Time / 9:30am Pacific Time.  

Jerry Yang, Co-Founder and Chief Yahoo!, will present at the Thomas
Weisel Partners Internet & Digital Media Conference.  The presentation
will take place on Wednesday, March 7, 2007 at 6:15pm Eastern Time /
3:15pm Pacific Time. 

A live webcast of both presentations will be available on the Investor
Relations website at
This link on Yahoo! Investor Relations website

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG)
announced today that Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer, will
present at the following investor events:

Morgan Stanley Technology Conference
Monday, March 5, 2007
3:15 p.m. ET / 12:15 p.m. PT

Bear Stearns 20th Annual Media Conference
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
8:45 a.m. ET / 5:45 a.m. PT

To access the audio webcasts of the presentations, please visit
This link on the Google Investor Relations website

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Questions Regarding Recent SEMPO Survey

At SES Chicago 2006, Tim Daly from SENTEC stated that it would be nice if “SEMPO became more than just a cocktail party” during a session on Search Arbitrage issues. It’s an interesting statement, but based on the recent election results for the board of directors it appears that Mr. Daly will not be influencing that opinion directly during 2007.  

Well apparently SEMPO actually is more than a cocktail party as they released a research report the other day. They did not send me the report referenced here, but I find the following to be interesting: 

  • Marketers are even more reluctant to pay for mobile search as almost half of the respondents said they would not pay a premium for that technology.
  • Almost 25 percent of respondents said they prefer to pay less for mobile search than for traditional search. About two-thirds said they were interested in contextually targeted advertising delivered to mobile search users.

Commentary: I recently used Linkedin Answers to ask the question,  “In your opinion, who are the emerging start up leaders in providing mobile search marketing and related services?” The result? Nobody answered the question publicly and I got a ton of private answers saying “that is a good question”, “I don’t know yet”, etc. How can one make a judgment about the pricing of a medium if they do not have the complete value proposition and in many cases do not even know who the alternatives to traditional search engines are and how they are unique yet? 

  • “The reluctance to hike budgets for video and mobile search reflects the industry’s trend toward an overall pricing plateau,” the survey said. Twenty-five percent of the respondents reported they had reached their pricing ceiling for paid placement. Of the remaining 75 percent, half said the most they could afford in a price increase was 30 percent.

Commentary: Frequently new mediums take revenue streams from other existing mediums. Business history has some dramatic examples of how organizations did not adapt to change because they were afraid of cannibalizing existing revenue streams and it ultimately led to obsolescence. It is just one of a long list of reasons that this period of time is extremely exciting to me.

I didn’t see the survey during the answer gathering. I’m curious to know if “I don’t have enough information to answer that yet” was an option for the mobile search questions? Thanks.

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Land of Link’in Association (LOLA) – Chicago Internet Leaders to Gather

Last week, I met with Jon Morris and some of his crew at the Internet Marketing Initiative about the return of an event called LOLA, with the goal of making it a premier event that will create a collaboration of resources that will enable Chicago Internet future success stories! We shared some potentially exciting ideas in this regard and I look forward to becoming an active participant in organizing and creating additional functions of value and deepening realtionships with all of you. I hope to see you at this event and many future events! Right now I guess I fit in the thought leader category, where will I fit in the month of March?

Here are the details:

Chicago Internet Leaders to Meet at LOLA

New Networking Event Brings Together

150 Chicago Powerhouse Execs
When:            February 22nd, 2007 (6-8 PM)
Who:              Land of Link’in Association (LOLA) will be attended by 150 of Chicago’s high-level professionals (Directors or above) in the interactive community.  Attendees will represent dot-coms, investors, Chicago-based Brick & Mortars with a large internet presence, as well as thought leaders and service providers (i.e. web development companies, interactive agencies, etc.).
What:             LOLA will hold its inaugural meeting to assemble the movers and shakers in Chicago’s interactive community.  LOLA is the brainchild of Jon Morris of Internet Marketing Initiative (IMI), whose goal is to create a meaningful interactive focused networking event that brings together people from different sectors, all related to the interactive industry.
LOLA will meet on the last Thursday of every month between 6 & 8 PM.  Guests will be treated to free drinks and appetizers.  .
Where:          Fulton’s on the River

315 N. LaSalle

Chicago, IL

(312) 822-0100 for directions
For more information regarding LOLA, please visit lolareturns.org (2009 dead domain)

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A Suggestion for Google Webmaster Central

During the past week, I had a server move internally and a moved to a server in new data center that required new nameservers. Both of these events caused several hours of downtime.

I found myself thinking, wouldn’t it be great if I could log into my Google WebMaster Tools and inform the Googlebot of these outages so that it a) wouldn’t send a Googlebot during this time period and b) would not draw conclusions based on the downtime. It’s an interesting idea, so I’ll invite Amanda Camp, Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox to consider this idea for a future release.