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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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 

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

“We have listened to your feedback during the MSN® adCenter pilot, and we are excited to announce an upcoming update of the tool, with some new features that will offer you a better, easier, and more productive customer experience.

With these new features, you will be able to:

• Add multiple keywords when creating campaigns, rather than manually typing each keyword.
• Sign up for MSN adMail with the new Communication Preferences checklist.
• Print billing statements through our updated Billing tab.
• Estimate bids to help reach position one ad ranking through our improved price estimation tool.
• Insert text dynamically into an ad title or ad text (formerly known as parameters).

Please note that MSN adCenter will be down briefly while it’s being updated on the afternoon of April 18. This should have no effect on your existing data or campaigns, which will remain live during this time. However, you will not be able to access your account or its features while we update adCenter, so we encourage you to make any needed immediate changes to your account beforehand.

To get more information about MSN Search, or to review frequently asked questions about MSN adCenter, check out our FAQ and Troubleshooting sections in the MSN adCenter Learning Center.

Sincerely,

The MSN adCenter team”

These modifications will be very beneficial to adCenter advertisers, with my favorite being the ability to add lists of keywords as opposed to the previous time consuming way of typing each keyword in one at a time.

The other key benefit of the upgrade will be the addition of the bid estimation tool. This will be helpful to advertisers who are targeting a specific ranking positions.

The newest and most unexplained upgrade is the new MSN adMail. I would guess that this will be a way for MSN to communicate the latest news and changes to adCenter in an easy fashion. I will contact Jaun and see if that is the case and update the blog as soon as I know,
Jack Spirko

Recently CNN Reported that both Yahoo and Microsoft were in the process of purchasing land in Quincy Washington. The reasons given were many and no intent by MicroSoft to buy Yahoo was mentioned or even implied but I think perhaps there is something to be considered here.

1. Yahoo is definitely an under achiever in the market. Despite being number 2 in total revenue between Google and MSN they really seem to make a ton of mistakes. They never seem to promote their features the way Google does, they fail to add simple things like a direct way to use their blog search (come on this would take like 10 seconds to do in fact someone actually wrote a bit of code for this) and as a result their stock sits at 10% of what Google trades for.

2. For years MSN has had access to huge amounts of data in using Overture ads on MSN. They know what bidders are paying, click through rate data, etc. They know more then you and I could ever know about Yahoo’s ad program. In fact they must know due to shear volume alone more about the program then any one else other then people inside Yahoo. With the ability of MicroSoft to analyze and process data they may in fact know more about some areas then Yahoo knows.

3. Why would these two giants both choose to buy land for data centers in a small place like Quincy, WA at the same time. The article on CNN reports that low cost land, a cheap work force, plenty of room to expand, etc are driving the decisions. Well, I am sure that is the case but the same can be said for countless small towns across rural America. 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.

4. MicroSoft has the money! This is huge alone with Yahoo stock at mid 30’s MicroSoft could easily afford to purchase the majority share. I am sure it would be termed a merger but lets face it Microsoft is a much bigger fish.

5. It fits with MicroSoft philosophy. Windows was not created by Bill Gates it was purchased. It makes sense MSN is working hard to gain market share, yahoo has it, so buy it. Further with the new adCenter model applied to the open bid system of Yahoo a real upside could be produced by displaying more relevant ads higher (Something else Yahoo has refused to do). In short MSN would gain market share, all the neat Yahoo programs (that Yahoo has done a lousy job promoting) then put Microsoft’s marketing machine behind it.

6. The time is right to get it past legal channels. Right now Google is hovering around 47% of the market share, Yahoo and MSN would combined hold onto about 40% so no case for a monopoly being formed could be made. If 40% is a monopoly then Google is sitting on one. Plus with Ask.com making a new push and tons of others (Chitika, Kontera, Miva) now in the publisher side as well there would be little from the anti trust world that could stop the merger.

7. True solidification of the demographic targeting market. Right now despite the bugs in MSN adCenter they are clearly ahead in the demographic targeting market. Googles attempt to match this with a modified site targeting approach on the content side doesn’t come close to the capability MSN is developing. Now if you were to add the demographic data that Yahoo has access to but fails to use (think about the user data from yahoo mail accounts alone), to the approach MSN is developing their ability to target demographically would be beyond any current expectations.

Again this article is purely speculative and I have no hard data to back up the possibility but looking at this from a forecasting perspective all the pieces seem to be in place for at least the real possibility to exist. It is certainly something worth considering and keeping an eye on,

Jack Spirko

If nothing changes over the next 4 years, Google and Yahoo would each take their share of an online ad market that could be worth $55 billion by 2010 according to some analyists. Even the more conservative estimates, such as one from Forrester, put it at about $26 billion in 2009. That is a lot of market share for two players to gain unopposed by any third party. Whatever the growth figure is, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has made it clear he wants a lot of it and there are plenty of Google and Yahoo customers who want to see Microsoft succeed. “Our customers are telling us they really want a third valid choice with real market reach,” says Mark Barrera, an Internet Marketing Expert with MasterLink Search Engine Marketing Services in Dallas Texas.

Some analists state that as MSN only generated $1.4 billion in online ad revenue in 2005 this all may be to little to late but to me I have a very hard time using the word billion and only in the same sentence! MSN is indeed poised to become a major force in PPC. One additional thing people seem to fail to realize is how much of that 1.4 billion went to Yahoo via the agreement between the two companies. Simply by going on their own they will at once take a signifigant piece of what has been Yahoo market share.

Of course Google is still the dominant player and they won’t just sit back and let MSN take business away from them. Yet I also feel what some are calling a smart move by Google was just tipping their hand that they are afraid of MSN’s long term success potential. Back in March right after the release of MSN adCenter Beta 3.0 Google announced with much excitement the launch of Google Demographic Targeting which seemed to offer direct competition with MSN’s demographic targeting. Once again Google seemed to be “on the ball”.

Marketers soon found out though that Google’s version was not like MSN’s at all. With MSN you can target users who are say female from the age of 30-45 and bid higher when a user who is known to fit that demographic is running a search. With Google’s version you simply do content ads on a website that is known to serve the target demographic. To me this was a quick slap together approach just so they could have demographic targeting too. I am not the only one that thinks this way, this post called

The truth About Google’s Demographics Targeting by Anvil Media is worth a read.

In any event when a major player like Microsoft makes a 100 million dollar investment into a new business unit it is wise not to underestimate them.

Jack Spirko

There are several impacts of note here.

1. If your currently in the adCenter Beta program this is good news because you now are going to be given more impressions.

2. If you are a Yahoo advertiser your traffic from that source may be going down if you are not off setting it as MSN continues to reduce their showing of Yahoo ads.

3. This is a good sign that we are getting closer to a MSN publisher program.

~ Jack Spirko

Acording to Microsoft initial testing of Windows Live ads is being done in Australia and Italy, while Windows Live Mail ads are being tested in markets around the world, including in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the U.S.

The Office Live ads are being tested only in the U.S. for now. Microsoft reported that this service sold out of space very soon after its launch. Tests will continue throughout 2006, Microsoft said, with research conducted among some 100 advertisers in nine markets to identify advertisers’ needs more effectively.

Microsoft said it will continue to invest heavily in MSN.com as well as test advertising opportunities on the Xbox Live service, on mobile devices, and on other company properties.If you are wondering why you did not get an invatition to advertise on this new platform, rest assured you budget probally is what disqualified you. Among those buying space under the current Beta Tests are Coca-Cola Brazil, JC Penney, and Monster Worldwide. So at least for now this adspace is reserved for the big boys of the Fortune 500 arena.

According to Microsoft, the objective of the new advertising model is to use the ad revenue to subsidize free and low-cost online services so perhaps there will be a benifit in this for the small business owner as well in time. Perhaps they could use it to fix the Help and Support Issues reported by Mark Barrera at MasterLink Search Engine Marketing.

~ Jack Spirko

“Hussain said future integration of Windows Live services and Spaces would allow him to “aggregate things that I’m posting in different places, whether it’s a restaurant review, whether its photos from my holiday, whether its my favorite video clips and movies — all of those things I can aggregate and share with the world.”

This is an interesting development that I think is not yet fully understood.  Honestly I think MSN is doing all of these things to increase places to display their ads displays.

Currently if you go to Google Video you won’t see anything equivlent to a “sponsored link”, don’t expect the same from Microsoft.  I predict that MSN will be selling adspace on their video site with in 60 days of launch max (perhaps from day one) in one form or another.  It may be “sponsored video” or simple text ads but you can bet your bottom dollar they are not just doing it to be “like google”,
~ Jack Spirko