Aqute Research Blog

New blog for Google competitor intelligence

I have started a new blog for competitor intelligence focused on Google. Competitor intelligence is what I know best and love doing the most. Although there are many excellent blogs about Google and the internet industry already, I have not yet found one that covers my fetish for 100% coverage of everything Google. Things like:

• All the news. Even good aggregators like Google News, Factiva and Moreover do not cover everything. I do not know why, since they monitor thousands of sources, but they still have gaps.
• Facts you just cannot get elsewhere. I have the details of thousands of Google employees, dozens of Google datacentres, many international and departmental revenue breakouts, various team org charts and so on, that I have collected over time. This blog will be a good focal point around which to aggregate all that kind of information.
• Standardised coverage of secondary sources. Some things are not difficult to find - for example, Google's official blog posts, or the videos it uploads to YouTube. But there is no single place where you can get all this. You still need collect all the information manually. Probably there is only a small audience for such meticulous attention to complete coverage, but it matters to me.
• Events. Again, I have not yet found one comprehensive source of all the upcoming events at which Google will be speaking, or which it will be sponsoring. This new blog will have that kind of detail.
• Job details. Interesting new jobs, job counts, etc.
• Anything else under the general premise of bringing all the facts about Google into one location.

The blog will also support a new competitor intelligence subscription service we have started, again aimed at people to whom monitoring Google really matters, which includes more detail, analysis and primary research than I can put on the new blog.

What the blog will not really do, will be to break stories about Google (especially since I do not live in Silicon Valley). And we will only occasionally have detailed analysis of Google's strategy. For both those things, there are many brilliant blogs already, which of course I read.

You can visit the new blog here, and subscribe to the feed here. I hope to see you there!

YouTube and iTunes partner for song downloads

I think this is new: you can now download songs from YouTube via a link to iTunes. This could well be the way that YouTube finally makes money. Like many others, I use YouTube mainly to listen to music, and having no desire to steal music, will be using this feature often. There are dozens of songs on my YouTube favourites list alone that I can now download from iTunes, so that's maybe £50 of revenues from me right there. Well...assuming the iTunes link is available for all videos, which is far from being the case. Still, a first step in an excellent direction.

As an interesting aside, the implied weakness in iTunes is discoverability, meaning that Google has again proven its strength at search, and its weakness at monetisation.

On a more tactical note, YouTube should allow users to listen to videos without watching them, saving itself a lot of bandwidth costs.

Turning the real world into a database

I was going to write about the compass on the Google mobile phone but Seamus has already done so (another of his very perceptive posts).

This is a big deal, as they say in the land of the free.

Other phones will have compasses; the interface itself may come and go. But this is another step by Google towards integration of the real and virtual worlds. Ten, twenty years from now, we will perceive the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds much less distinctly than we do now (it's no longer all that rare to find people who equate looking at pictures of a place on Google Images or Flickr with visiting it physically; and Eric Schmidt was only half joking when he said he didn't have to travel to see the Himalayas because he can see them on Google Earth). And suddenly, mobile advertising becomes orders of magnitude more significant than today's text links.

Adding a compass to a mobile phone may not be all that difficult. But few companies other than Google have the vision to work towards this half-virtual-half-real world (Microsoft, maybe Nokia). Apple may have the imagination but is likely to partner with Google. At this stage, only Google can pull together the data, the consumer-generated content, the mapping, the search elements, the devices and whatever else you need. And by the time it becomes obvious to other companies just how important this will be, Google will have a decade's head start. When the physical world becomes a platform on which Google can build, having fought over the desktop operating system will seem childish in comparison.

The Telegraph online book serialisation: Victorians updated

The Daily Telegraph is serialising a new book by Alexander McCall Smith. Full serialisation has never completely gone away, and even online serialisation has what could almost be called a long history. The original feature of this new serialisation is its interactivity - podcasts, RSS, Google Maps, character profiles and reader comments. As an analyst, I think this is a great idea; as a normal person (the two are exclusive), I wouldn't read a straightforward book serialisation on my computer ... but the interactivity makes the online format much more appealing. I wonder what Dickens would make of all this.

Does localisation to developing countries cost Google money?

Google's proposed satellite coverage for developing countries makes me wonder what Google's economics are in localising for the poorer countries. The big advertisers are in the developed countries, as are their customers. For example, US advertisers will target consumers located in the US; but they will also:

• ...target global consumers who visit google.com - which will be of interest to brands such as Nike. Take a Zambian consumer clicking on a Nike ad. If this Nike ad is on Google Zambia, the click will cost Nike a minimal amount, as there are few other advertisers with whom to compete. If the click comes from the same Zambian consumer, but on google.com, Nike will have paid a lot more. So Google loses revenue by directing that google.com traffic to its Zambian website.
• ...forget to geo-target at all, and therefore reach all consumers who visit google.com. In this case, Zambians visiting google.com will click on ads for a US company that did not want to target them. If this Zambian had stayed on Google Zambia, Google would not have earned that revenue (or almost any revenue, given the paucity of ads on Google Zambia). Google would argue that serving irrelevant ads to consumers is bad for business, but I am not sure if that applies in developing countries where the revenues to be lost are so small and where consumers may not have many useful alternatives anyway.

These are inefficient situations, but inefficiencies are an important contributor to Google revenues (hence the lack of a cost-per-action product, for example; or the lack of AdSense revenue split transparency; and so on).

The calculation will not be this simple (other factors include, for example, the need for overflow websites as google.com has amassed more advertisers than it can serve), but localisation to the developing world may well cost Google money.