From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road

Google Got YouTube Cheap

There is a lot out there on the big news of the day, Google acquiring YouTube.  Most imply that Google paid up and that the deal was fairly priced.  I am contrarian on this one.  I think Google got a really good deal.

Compare Google to YouTube.  YouTube does 100M views a day, most of those are through links people put on blogs and send to each other but some of them are search results from YouTube's page.  Actually all views can be considered search results even though what orignated them many not be actual searches.  They serve the result, effectively.  So each view on YouTube is the analog of a search on Google.  What does Google do per day?  Google does a little less than 100M searches per day, see here.  So Google is doubling their daily searches with this acquisition.

And they have the potential to be higher quality searches. They may not be monetized today, but tomorrow they can be, and arguably there are better ways to put ads in video and get much higher CPMs (TV is $10-20 vs. <$1 on the Internet) So clearly video ads are worth more.

And here is the best part in my view.  Google gave up a little more than 1% of their company to get as many 'searches' as they have today with better monetization potential.

That's sounds like a great deal for both sides.  Congrats to all involved.

Naked Conversations

Naked Conversations is a book written by bloggers about blogging. Therein lies the both the best and worst aspects of the book.  It's about blogging by bloggers.  I recommend the book to anybody who has a blog or interested in the subject.  There are some great insights as to how Microsoft and Sun changed their image by allowing employees to express a more personal side of the company.  The blogging phenomenon is just getting started and one should be aware of it.

There is also great advice, some do's and don'ts about blogging. How to use Technorati, how to increase your "Google juice" etc.  These are also very useful.

Finally, the book also captures the essence of a good blog: "passion and authority".  Blogging takes time, so you have to be passionate about what you are writing and you have to have some authority on what you are writing so that you don't get lost among the tens of millions of blogs.  The book claims, one blog is created every second and one is shut down every two seconds.

What was lacking in the book?  Again, like I said, it is a book written by bloggers.  So the whole thing doesn't seem like a book but more like a blog entry.  When you open a hardcover book you do expect to see some writing standards that are far above a blog post.  This is where the authors fail.

Chapter 9 is a about blogs that fail, but it is a chapter that fails.  There is some real Pulitzer material in that chapter.  There is a section called "Who Should Not Blog", the answer, you guessed it, is Saddam Hussein.  The authors insightfully claim that Saddam shouldn't blog.  Wow, that's true insight.  It gets better.  The same section also says that "Cheesy companies with cheesy products... should not blog"  You'd better write that down before you forget.  They also continue saying that "the dull should not blog".  "The Dull" here almost sounds like a racial slur.

Anyway, if you forego eloquence, and just focus on the practical aspects of blogging you may enjoy this book.  If you are looking for some literary insights, don't be fooled by the hardcover, this is more blog than book.

naked conversations

Who Is Your Family Historian?

Do you ever wonder how your father’s life was like when he was your age?  How about your grandfather?  What were the things on their mind?  What were their hopes for their families, what were their worries, concerns?  What did they do for fun?  How about your great grandfather and his father?  Do you know anything about them?

Sometimes I wish they had left a diary, something where I can go back to and read, something that captures their emotions when they were going through a similar stage of their life.  There were hardly any pictures, let alone videos back then.

Today, in the age of digital media, we have chance to leave something lasting behind.  Something our grandkids could look at one day many years from now.  I believe the answer is a tool some of use every day.  But first here is a quiz:  Which of the following is most likely to be your family historian?

a)     Your collection of digital images

b)     Your collection of videos

c)      Your emails

d)     Your personal finance tool, a la Quicken, or Microsoft Money

I strongly believe that the answer is, d) Your personal finance tool, and by a long shot. As cold an unemotional as it appears, you can learn a lot about someone’s life by looking at his finances.  Actually, you can know more about that peson then you can ever do looking at his pictures and videos.  I’ve come to this conclusion after using Microsoft Money for more than 10 years.

First and foremost, pictures and videos mainly capture notable events, as such they are snapshot of ones life.  Your financials capture your routines, what you do over and over again, in a continuous way.  It is not the one off events that define you, it is your routines, things you do over and over again.  Emails are good too, but unlike financials that focus on specific events, email are inefficient since one sends so many of them, hard to get to the essence of your life through email.

Microsoft Money would capture, where you worked, how much you made, how your salary grew over time, when you got a big bonus, what you spent it on, where you lived, what you did for vacation, where you went on vacation, what hobbies you spent your money, what school you sent your children and what activities they did there.  Since most transactions you enter in the system has a memo field, you can enter a little blurb about the transaction.  So, in my case, every time I go to dinner I write down who I went with.  It even keeps track of your social life.

It doesn’t spell out the emotions but they can be gleaned.  Your children can know whether you saved money or lived month to month.  They can know what kinds of health problems you and from what you spent to cure them. It can tell them whether you were able to spend money for events that made you happy.  I would have loved to know what my grandfather did for fun on a random Friday night, wouldn’t you?

None of this data is captured in the video of a birthday party, or in vacation pictures.  It is loud an clear in your financials.  Gordon Bell at Microsoft has a “My Life Bits” project and your spending habits are a small but key part of your life bits.  The 40MB file I accumulated in over 10 years, says far far more about my life then any video I can ever make (an hour of video is 13GB by the way).   

So what I bought as a personal finance tool, ended up being my family historian.  I bet the designers of the program didn’t think it would morpth this way, but it has.  It is bar none the second most important application on my PC after the browser.  That is why I recommend everybody to use one.  One day your children will love to look at it.  It is one of the best gifts you can give them.