Gmail: Steaming forward on unlimited memory and Apps bundles!

Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million visitors for AOL (comScore estimates). This puts Gmail in sight of the No 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. Yahoo leads the field with an impresive 106 million monthly unique visitors. For once the Google Yahoo Microsoft rankings change tags (Google leads the Search market shares over the other two by a heavy margin).

Over the last 6 months, Google’s unique visitors count increased 25% compared to Yahoo’s 16% increase and Hotmail’s 8% increase. AOL lost out the race because of a 22% decline in its Monthly unique visitor count!

While one of the primary lures of Gmail has been its unlimited memory, the race ahead for Google will be decidedly mainly on its ability to keep pumping new enhancements through Google Labs!

Earlier, in the month of July 2009, Google finally took off the beta label off Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and GTalk. Gmail which was launcheed on April, 2004 has become Google’s most popular non search application.The reason for Google to take off the beta label is primarily marketing, since it sells these Google Apps bundled together for businesses for $50/per user/per year. While the removal of the Beta tag doesnot impact individual consumers, the presence of Beta Tag was certainly an issue with business consumers!

Google Apps are now used by nearly 2 million businesses and they account for hundreds of dollars in revenues for Google. For the enterprise customers, Google is also adding two new features: The ability to delegate access to an email account to another person such as an administraative assistant and enhanced retention features for compliance purposes.

Yahoo: The road forward?

A new era at Yahoo began the minute when Carol Bartz signed the agreement with Microsoft, giving the right to conduct searches on Yahoo’s huge network of Web sites to Microsoft in exchange for 88 percent of the revenue generated by Microsoft’s Bing. Having finally offloaded its search business to Microsoft; all Yahoo has to do is figure out what comes next.
Yahoo is first and foremost a media company and is in the business of attracting as many people to its properties in hopes of selling lucrative ad deals on those pages. While Google is has the best combined relevant search results and efficient advertising, the ads on pages model has not always worked on the internet.
The tie up with Microsoft Yahoo seems to signal that Yahoo doesn’t have the ability or the will to take on Google directly. Carol Bartz has been arguing that the company should focus on what it does best and leave the technology to others.”We’re not a search company,” Bartz had said earlier, discussing how Yahoo is a different company than Google or Microsoft. Now that she’s made that distinction official, what is Yahoo?

It’s where people find relevant and contextual information.”It’s news, it’s sports…home page, mail. It’s a fabulous place.” (The definition thus being very diffused). That’s a content company, turning the focus to how Yahoo should produce the kind of content and services that will keep existing users coming back for more and attract new ones to the site. One wonders if Yahoo just turned itself into a bigger version of AOL.
On the services side, some areas, like Yahoo Mail, Flickr, and Messenger, are clearly where Yahoo is unlikely to take its foot off the gas pedal. Same for Yahoo’s mobile strategy, a part of the Internet that is very much up for grabs, unlike the more mature PC-oriented Internet experience.
So Yahoo isn’t getting out of the technology business entirely. Yahoo will continue to need ways to keep its new home page hooked into the wider world of social networking, real-time communication, and things not even thought of yet, and that will require smart, savvy engineering.On the content side, Yahoo will have to figure out whether it needs to expand its current offerings, pare down some of the less frequently used products, or tap the outsourcing strategy in this area as well. There’s been quite a lot of turnover in recent years at Yahoo, but there are probably enough people left who remember that the last time Yahoo tried to play a prominent role in designing its own content, it didn’t end well.
Is Yahoo on a path to becoming the world’s biggest content aggregation site?There’s enough guaranteed revenue in the deal to keep things quiet for a while, but it’s going to take two years–at minimum–for it to substantially shape the company. What will Yahoo look like then?
Ref: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10299313-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Towards energy saving searches: Yahoo!

Google and Yahoo! are the two most prolific search machines in the world. Whenever someone looks up at something online, each click of the mouse makes the backend data centre slightly busier. These data centres index and reference the internet and are the engines of internet. However, every activity at the data centre also emits greenhouse gases.

Both Google and Yahoo! are actively trying to reduce their carbon footprints. Google has Blackle, the all black energy saving user page. By reducing the use of colour (white) into Black, the energy consumption is eased off! In fact, Blackle has a meter that shows the energy saved by using the Blackle.

Yahoo! on the other hand, had rendered itself carbon neutral in 2007 by buying offsets against its footprint. Now Yahoo! is working towards zeroing out carbon offsets. The goal is to reduce 40% in carbon intensity in data centres in 2014.More and more widespread use of the internet will increase the CO2 output. As of today, Yahoo! services 500 million users worldwide. The energy consumption from data centres only in US was 60 billion Kilowatt hour and is expected to become 100 billion Kilowatt hour in the next 5 years. Thus emission from this electronic form is a real problem and reduction a real time issue.

Yahoo is using innovations like cloud computing and virtualization to eliminate the extra and unrequired usage. Thus it is a system that is efficient, more reliable and reduces wastage in the systems.

The other small and efficient way to get cut energy usage is to use the ambient temperature of surroundings and use colder places to increase on the free cooling and reduce the electricity consumption on cooling. All things together: Smarter computers using less electricity smart buildings and smart grid, smart location and Cloud computing and virtualization can help make a difference in reducing carbon emissions.

Measuring Success: Microsoft Bing

Microsoft Bing has been on air for some time now. It has created some flutter and some clutter as well. This post examines how successful has Bing been in its long term approach in its quest to break from third place behind Google and Yahoo!

June is the first full month the Bing “decision engine” has been live. Microsoft positioned the Bing as Decision engines meaning that its search results would allow depth of knowledge and information rather than width.Microsoft said Bing is aimed at online shoppers and will initially focus on helping people make buying decisions, plan trips, research health matters, or find local businesses.

Microsoft is reportedly spending 80 to 100 million dollars marketing Bing but has not publicly disclosed its promotional budget.

Achievement till date: The number of people that used Bing in June for online searches was eight percent higher than the number that used its predecessor, MSN Live, in the same month last year, according to Microsoft. Google’s share of the US online search market was approximately 74 percent.Yahoo! remains the second most popular search engine with about 16 percent of the US market, and Bing is third with 6.5 percent, according to Compete. Figures released in recent weeks by industry analytics firms reveal mixed data, leaving it unclear whether Bing is doing much to close the gaps with Yahoo! and Internet search king Google. Other Internet-tracking firms report different figures, with the ranking remaining constant but conflicts emerging as to whether Bing is gaining, holding, or losing ground.

It’s really too early to tell how Bing is doing; the numbers are really mixed. Microsoft does deserve to pat itself on its back a bit. Bing seems to have had some lift but it is not an extraordinary amount. An increase in visitors is not surprising given the marketing they are doing.

Analysts believe Bing is more likely to lure users away from Yahoo! than Google, which is woven into people’s lives so thoroughly that the company’s name is used as a verb to express the act of searching the Internet.

The next big goal for Bing is not to beat Google, but to beat Yahoo! If they can’t get to number two, then getting past there is much harder.

Is Bing the sound of Search? (Part III)

Taking on Google

Talking to the Journal, Mr Ballmer conceded that the new name and new look would not be enough to immediately tip the scales: "To make our 8% grow significantly we don't have to capture the imagination of everybody, but we have to capture the imagination of some. We have to grow our brand equity." It will take years to chase down Google, Mr Ballmer told the paper.

Steve Ballmer also acknowledges: “There is no way to change the whole game in one step.” But search “deserves a good feature war.” And Bing will be rolling out new features as it goes forward. But is it enough to get people to switch? Bing is certainly not a game-changer, but it does cut out a lot of the back and forth that happens with so many searches today. If Bing can help people find what they are looking for faster, it will put pressure on Google to keep advancing the ball as well.

Microsoft's research suggests that up to 60 per cent of queries are not answered by current search engines, and that 50 per cent of all searches are in fact repeats of previous questions. Bing aims to be better at working out what users are really looking for. A search for the website Facebook, for example, would display just one result linking to the site itself, but give users the option of displaying further results about the site.

After a botched up attempt to acquire Yahoo, Bing, it appears to be taking no chances. Ad Age reported the company plans to spend as much as $100 million advertising the search engine.

Mike Nichols, a general manager in the Microsoft search group, said the company isn't banking on beating Google but does want to transform its also-ran search image.'We want to capture a unique position in consumers' minds. They need to know why is it that they should use this product.As opposed to saying, we're a new search engine, we do everything a little bit better than the other guys.'

Matt Rosoff, an analyst for the independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said he thinks Microsoft's search results are usually on a par with Google's and combined with the extensive ad campaign, Microsoft has a chance to increase its share.

In the final part of this post, we would analyze on the Search Market and Google Dominance and whether or not will Bing be able to buy in some Traction.