The Microsoft adCenter Code Blog

Microsoft made an announcement on August 14th that it has acquired MotionBridge , a provider of search technology geared specifically for mobile devices currently based in Paris France.

Microsoft made the official announcment of the acquisition at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. MotionBridge technology, which is sold to carriers, looks to solve the tedious process of finding and retrieving data on a mobile phone by reducing the amount of information users have to input through keypads.

Besides mobile-focused search, MotionBridge also brings customers to Microsoft, including Orange and O2 Ltd. in the United Kingdom and Sprint Nextel, based in Reston, Va. Microsoft also hopes the acquisition will help it expand its Windows Live initiative beyond the PC to any device attached to the Web. Windows Live is the company’s strategy of eventually making all its software available as a Web service.As current market trends indicate the battle for web search traffic and the revenue that goes along with it will move more and more into the mobile realm. Time will tell if Microsoft’s new buy was worth the investment but at least they are working in the right direction.

~ Jack

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, MotionBridge, adcenter, mobile search, search engines, msn search

In their quest to move more into online media and services Microsoft is looking to capture more users by giving away a full web suite to small to medium size business customers. The product which launched about a month ago is called, Microsoft Office Live Beta.

The Service provides the following features for free…

• Easy-to-use Web site design tool
• Free domain name and hosting
• 5 personalized e-mail accounts
• Storage and data transfer
• Web site traffic analysis and reporting tools
• Online Support Help Center

This service has some issues but it is in Beta and it is free. I have started to play around with simple little site about the African House Snake just to fully evaluate it. I did a fairly indepth initial review of this new product at Comtech News you can read that post here….

Microsoft Offers a Bribe - Free Website and Domain and Email

~ Jack

Technorati Tags: Comtech News, microsoft, website, hosting, site builder, office live

Microsoft just unveiled a patent application that may be the inspiration for Windows Live QnA, the patent describes a process for removing unlinked documents from a search engine’s index along with an approach for presenting relevant snippets with search results, a means of using cached search results for queries with relevant advertising results, and a query refinement process based upon past user behavior.

With the success enjoyed by Yahoo Answers and similar services it is no surprise that Microsoft has developed this service.

I would surmise that as Microsoft is clearly leading the way with demographic targeting options that QnA will become yet another source of demographic targeting information. While Microsoft seems to get to most of the niches in search marketing later then Google and Yahoo it does seem that they have the best understanding of the value these services represent when the information gathered with them is made available for specific targeting by advertisors.

Here is the abstract from the patent,

“Documents are intelligently deleted from an index of crawled documents based on link and parent node information recorded from the crawl. A document visited during a first crawl may not be navigated to during a second crawl because of an error and the present invention verifies whether the document has been deleted. The present invention also prevents the document from being deleted when it is referenced by another document, indicating that the document is still a valid document.”

Jack

Microsoft adCenter has a new release launching Saturday, August 5th, and one of the upgrades includes the long awaited Firefox browser support.

Which makes a lot of sense because many SEO types and Internet Marketers who work in advertising agencies or internaly for large advertisors prefer the FireFox browser both for the security it offers and the large assortment of Extensions Offered for the open source browser.

We recently recieved an email from Adcenter Support with the following features noted for the comming upgrade:

• Now, use Microsoft adCenter with the Firefox 1.5 browser!
• Daily, weekly and monthly data will be updated every hour to help you view results and optimize campaigns in real-time.
• Select the time frame for which you want your campaign and order summaries to show, instead of viewing them in the life-to-date format.
• User-interface changes to the reporting tab will make usability simpler.
• API customers will now have access to more procedure calls. Detailed API communications will be sent to API customers.

These are some great upgrades to adCenter and the added support for FireFox was a smart move all be it a bit late,

Jack

Microsoft is beginning to plan new ventures into offline media, and is getting ready to deploy a system that would extend its online search advertising model to additional outlets, Joanne Bradford, Microsoft’s chief media revenue officer, revealed Wednesday during an American Business Media conference in New York.

Like arch-rival Google, MSN hopes to extend its paid search platform, adCenter, to a wide variety of outlets, Bradford said. “Our goal with adCenter is to advertise into any medium,” she said, adding that Microsoft’s purchase of in-game ad firm Massive Incorporated and its development of IPTV, a broadband television technology, will further that goal. “This marketplace is begging for some efficiency in the media buying process.”

This is not the first time Microsoft has expressed designs on traditional media. It launched MSNBC with NBC more than a decade ago, and owns a significant minority stake in cable TV giant Comcast Corp.

Microsoft, Bradford said, is looking to make advertising one of its major new revenue streams–possibly even larger than its core operating system business–and the market is ready for a competitor to Google’s AdWords. “The advertising community wants an alternative to Google,” she said, adding that “prices are being driven up way too fast.”

Google started selling print ads earlier this year, but said last week that the initial results were disappointing.

Bradford Wednesday said Google’s print magazine advertising initiative faltered because the search giant “didn’t respect a lot of things about the medium.”

Bradford also indicated that Microsoft was gearing up to compete with Google for employees. She said Microsoft hopes to lure staff from Google when the company’s stock options begin vesting next year.

I just read and interesting article at MediaPost.  The article was titled Why MSN Will Move Up and was a pretty good read.  Here are some interesting points made by the author, Bill Wise.

1.  Ad Targeting - MSNs ad targeting has gotten a lot of press but many are quick to point out that the traffic at MSN is still a lot less then Google and Yahoo meaning less traffic for advertisers to buy.  However, with targeting advertisers get better results so even if traffic does not go up a tremendous ammount in time MSN should be able to sell most of its inventory at a premium because it will convert better.

2.  Money -  If you can’t win buy your victory.  While that may not work well in some areas of life in business it is a proven method.  Microsoft spent more on R&D last year then Googles gross revenues!  That says something about their buying and development power.

3.  Content -  The MSN portal is very useful and does a good job of creating sticky visitors, and MSN is constantly investing to make it even better. It’s got lots of content–some that’s created specifically for MSN, some that’s offered via partnerships with other sites, and still other content that’s user-generated. That content features the MSN searchbar–which drives searchers eyeballs to adCenter ads.

These are all issues we have raised here before at “The adCenter Code”  but the author sheds some new insite on their impact.  You may want to read the full article.

He also touched on the concept of integrating adCenter with Xbox but I think it is a bigger deal then that.

WPF/E, or Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere is positioned to play for dominance in the RIA market. They’re making sure that developers who build applications on WPF can deploy those applications almost anywhere, on any device or OS. Similarly, the Flash Player has rebranded itself since the dark days of skip intro buttons and has become a full fledged development environment with players that will be put on everything from PlayStation Portables to regular desktop computers. Building an RIA and being able to deploy that RIA on a PSP is a compelling notion. Imagine being able to “link” your PSP to your XBox360 and your computer. It opens up the living room in exciting ways.  It will also open up a totaly new advertising opportunity and the ability to begin building demographic data based on users view habits that Nielson can only dream of,

~ Jack

Microsoft really appears to be taking the search marketing world seriously in an effort to ensure it can effectively compete with Google and Yahoo. Late last year Google released Google Analytics and if you have been lucky enough to get a copy (the program has a waiting list) you know it is an excellent way to view you web site data and metrics. Google rolled out this service after purching Urchin Software who was of course in the web site tracking business.

Microsoft has followed suit by announcing a “significant investment” in DeepMetrix, a privately held Canadian company that develops web analytics and business intelligence tools for online marketers and publishers.

Having used DeepMetrix products in the past I can state they are very good and quite capable or doing a few things even better then the Urchin Based Google Analytics. Smart marketers tend to use more then one tracking software though and I hope soon to be able to look at stats side by side from what ever MSN rolls out along side Google Stats. The more views into your data the better.

I would say based on past timelines we should expect to see some level of an Microsoft Stats product by fall of this year but that is just my guess. There are two key questions we will be waiting to have MS answer.

1. Will this product be like Google Analytics and be available to anyone not just people that purchase advertising?

and

2. Will Microsoft do a better job of allocation of resources so they can open the product to everyone and not have a closed waiting list? Right now the average wait to get an Analytics Invation from Google is several month.

For those answers we will have to wait. The real question is when will Yahoo snap to needing a good analytics platform?

Jack Spirko

That’s the news today as Microsoft has taken adCenter live and opened it to all commers they have also changed the name. Visitors to our blog my note that we have followed suit changing our name from “The MSN adCenter Code Blog” to “The Microsoft adCenter Code Blog”.

So what does this big change mean? Not that much, oh Microsoft is announcing a lot with the change such as…

• Ads Being Displayed on MS Live Mail
• Ads on Office Live
• Ads on Office Online
• Ads on Windows Live
• Ads on the Safety Center and of course
• Ads on the Xbox

None of this is really all that new we have reported on it quite a bit in specualtion as to where MSN was headed with its ad program. I think the name change is just meant to give a nice buzz to the new ad program which has been in the works and clearly what was comming for a very long time.

The bigger news is still the Forbes Article about a possible merger or partnership with Yahoo but this seems to be what everyone is talking about anyway. It is going to be interesting to see how much revenue can be created with this new program and opening up these additional traffic channels to Microsoft adCenter advertisers and how it will effect or impact the timing of the release of Microsoft Content Ads which will be the Google adWords / Yahoo Publisher competitior due out from the big MS later this year,
~ Jack

On April 7 I posted Could Microsoft By Yahoo? - 7 Reasons It Could Happen I was pretty clear that it was just my theory and 100% speculation to boot. Now today we seem to have a second (more informed) source confiming that my prediction is not only possible but that talks have been going on for more then a year.

Who is this second source? Another blogger? Nope the source is Forbes.com in their story Microsoft, Yahoo! In Possible Partnership Talks.

One of my key points in my orginal article was that Yahoo and Microsoft both bought large ammounts of land to develop just down the street from each other in Rural Quincy Washington (hundreds of miles from any existing point of presense for either company). I stated in fact,

“The fact is either the city of Quincy has one of the best public relations departments in the world that just landed two of the biggest global companies at the same time solely on their ability or the two companies have something going on behind closed doors. You tell me which one seems more likely“.

If Forbes or another source can in time fully confirm these talks I think perhaps that indeed this partnership talk may have driven the decision of the two giants to both select the same tiny small town for major development.

As we look into the future of search mergers and acquisitions are going to become a common thing that drives growth of market presense. Yet for the second and third largest players to have any type of merger will have a massive long term effect on the market.
~ Jack Spirko

Recently I was checking out some sites I have given links to from some of my personal sites. A few I had used rel=”nofollow” on which is supposed to tell spiders to not follow a link. Part of this is to help link spam like in blog comments so you are not pirated for your page rank by spammers.

In any event I found myself being shown as a back link on MSN Search. Both Google and Yahoo appeared to respect the nofollow tag but not MSN. I will post more about this as I dig deeper just for right now it is clear doing a rel=”nofollow” doesn’t seem to effect msn search,

Jack

“On Friday MicroSoft announced that it has hired away InterActive Corp search head Steve Berkowitz to lead its Online Business division, which includes MSN and Windows Live.

Berkowitz will replace David Cole on May 8, who announced he would be taking a leave of absence in March. In an e-mail to the Microsoft Platforms and Services Division Friday, Berkowitz’s new boss Kevin Johnson told employees that he had the right mix of experience and a “deep functional knowledge of the search.”

Read the entire story at BetaNews 

A few days ago I posted

Could Microsoft Buy Yahoo? - Seven Reasons it Could Happen!

I posted about it at The Search Engine Watch Forum and this was the response one poster had.  I found it interesting and from a clearly informed party so I though I would share it here.

“MSFT could easily buy Yahoo. Yahoo has a market cap of roughly 45 bil. and MSFT has 34 bil. in cash.

Give YHOO a 50 percent premium and you have roughly 67 bil. price tag.
MSFT will not give up all their cash to secure YHOO but they could easily put up 20 bil. and float some stock to secure a deal.

They would approach 30 percent of search and would have enough cash left to outbid Google by giving 100 percent of publisher share on content search.

In a protracted war Google would lose. Their share price would fall, institutions would pull their investments and Google would be forced to issue more shares just to keep itself funded.

That being said I don’t think Gates has another war in him.”

The poster identified himself only by the handle “webvisitor” so at this time I can’t credit him any better then I have done here.  I found two things to be the most interesting about his commentary.

1.  The math behind the fact that the buyout could happen.  I mentioned this in my post, however he broke it down to specifics to demonstrait exactly how it could be done for above par market value.

2.  More interesting his comments on the effect it would have on Google.  I of course had thought of how it would effect the search landscape but what I really had not pondered is the effect it would have on Google stock, given how high it is currently trading.

On his last comment, “That being said I don’t think Gates has another war in him”, I personaly don’t feel that while he may be right that it has too much of an influence on if there will be a “war” or not.  Bill has plenty of Generals and Soliders to fight any wars for him.  Besides if Microsoft didn’t want a search market share war they wouldn’t be in the game at all.

Jack Spirko