Zynga Delays IPO
Zynga is not likely to IPO on time, mostly due to the dicey market situation (though why they didn’t announce this during the diciness is a mystery). Dan Primack argues that it’s not a big deal.
Is Google+ an Identity Service?
According to BoingBoing, Eric Schmidt thinks so. If so, this is a more direct attack on Facebook rather than Twitter. Google doesn’t need to be “social” so much as they need a consistent identity across different user interactions.
How Spotify Stays “Free”
Geekwire has a piece on, among other things, how Spotify uses peer-to-peer technology to minimize their costs. Understandable. User acquisition cost is a big variable for Spotify, and the cost of pathological users—people who will do basically anything to avoid spending money—is high, too.
Enterprise Search is Older Than the Web
LexisNexis has signed a search deal with the NYT. Per the press release, “The agreement extends a three-decade relationship between LexisNexis and The New York Times…” It’s interesting to speculate on why Google hasn’t addressed some of these search engines. It looks like a very “enterprise” kind of deal: the right price point is either very low (so it gets automatic approval) or very, very high (to pay for a high-touch sales process).
DreamWorks: Pricing Against Piracy?
DreamWorks has a distribution deal with Chinese video site Youku. Since Youku has benefited massively from pirated content, it’s interesting that DreamWorks is both breaking ranks with other studios and trying to sell to someone who profits from ripping off similar content.
Youtube ended up using a fairly similar model (grow thanks in part due to rampant piracy—some of which Youtube filtered out, but which generally didn’t hurt them regardless—and then create a business model based on licensing and distributing content, including some of the same content that your users pirated in the first place). Youtube had to express contrition and fight some legal battles, though.
Meanwhile, PaidContent has a nice piece on the “Chinese video war.” 1.3 billion potential consumers, basically zero copyright enforcement… It will be interesting to see who wins, but the more interesting question is whether or not it’s worth it.
Facebook’s New Mobile Web Framework
Facebook is up to something. They’re building a mobile framework that will make apps that look strikingly similar to iPhone apps (but can be accessed from a browser, and from non-Apple devices). Apple has expressed some frank views about Facebook. Facebook is probably aware that, in order to get what they want, they need mobile platforms to be more open. This puts them on the same side as Google and most app developers, which is a pretty unusual alliance.
If this Kickstarter project to develop an iOS emulator is legit, that fits Facebook’s plans exactly.
“AdWords for Resumes”?
TechCrunch describes this startup as Adwords for job apps, but it’s a little more like an affiliate network: no fees for usage, but fees for connections. Like lots of affiliate networks, it’s going to select for a certain kind of product—the kind whose brand-related markup or deception-related markup justifies the economics of a one-time fee for revenue-generating action.
Yelp Pulls Back from Daily Deals
Just days after Facebook did the same, Yelp is withdrawing some employees from its daily deal product. This is another data point in favor of the notion that daily deals are a tough market. Oddly enough, the failure rate among daily deal pure plays seems lower than the failure rate among sites that add daily deals to their existing model. Perhaps this is an industry that takes more focus than most people think.
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