Category: Media/Tech Business Models

…has filed. That makes yet another net advertising-based filing – Marchex clearly helped. Story here, S-1 here(re req’d). Goldman will lead with Deutsche and Piper holding the wedding train.

Some very smart thinking in here about how Google is a massively distributed platform with its own OS, and how that has given Google the competitive edge to roll out cool stuff like Gmail. Very Web 2.0 stuff here – the Platform Web.

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

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Methinks.

The Guardian:

As it is, Google’s plans to embrace the public market and all that entails seem to have slipped. Too late for the pre-summer flotation window, there are also no jungle drums beating for an autumn offering. It is as if the search engine’s owners have tested market receptivity, found it to be OK in principle but now have to make the hard decisions about the merits of a listing before they even get to the issue of its timing.

A portent: The Marchex IPO, first reported here, priced yesterday and the book was oversold, according to the Seattle PI.

MCHX went out at $6.50 today and is now trading at $8.90. That’s damn good for any IPO. The company plays in the paid inclusion ad space and was founded by the execs behind Go2Net.

Marchex – Hoovers

That’s what this NY Daily News story claims. Now that would be something. I think the Time Warner guys would sooner run AOL into the ground than give it back to Case and risk his turning it around, and making them look hapless twice.

Last Friday I had a chance to stop by the Palo Alto offices of Topix, in many ways a classic internet start up – Valley-based, run by a serial entrepreneur, good buzz – but it didn’t take long for me to sense that something was different this time. Before I get into that, let me first give you a few thoughts on the service itself, and the broader role it plays in the search business.

Background: Topix was founded by six guys, four of whom went to high school together in Pittsburgh. No, I’m not making that up. Most of them are IT/Valley vets, CEO Rich Skrenta founded NewHoo and sold it to Netscape a mere six months afterwards, then morphed it into the now famous Open Directory Project. But Netscape was sold to AOL, and after a while Rich got bored (I assume) and left with the intent of starting a company he could “work into my 40s on.” I like the sound of that.

Topix is an internet media play. More specifically, it’s a local advertising media play. The service takes a crawl-and-index approach to a vast array of internet news sources, then runs the resultant stew through a metadata engine which tags every news story with location and subject data. Topix then builds more than 150,000 topic- and location-specific pages, pages that live comfortably between the great gunky mass of search results, on the one hand, and the impersonal morass of most news sites on the other.

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Long profile of Yahoo CEO Terry Semel with integrated Yahoo back story and prediction that Yahoo will make it to the Fortune 500 list in five years or less. One intersting note: Yahoo used to be driven by the engineers, but has outgrown that approach. Sound familiar?

I believe the article may be behind a sub wall, if so, here are a few excerpts:

“Everyone talks about what he did with movies and entertainment,” Yang says, “but what he really did was pioneer how to take a piece of content and get it out there. He has a distribution mentality, which at the end of the day is what Yahoo does on the Internet. And so when we started talking about Yahoo generically as a distribution company, we both just went, ‘Gosh, this is going to be really cool.’ “…

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Good to see major papers getting on board with the “broadcast is dead” meme: Media Giants Need To Learn to Sing A New Tune (reg req’d).

Excerpt:

….it is only a matter of time before millions of consumers will be doing things like creating custom concert videos of their favorite artists. They’ll mix and match video from TV shows and DVD recordings which they (hopefully) will have acquired legally — much as music fans have been creating custom music discs and tapes for years.

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Dan Rosensweig (COO Yahoo, at far left) and Jonathan Miller (head of AOL, near left) have joined Eric onstage. A pretty lengthy discussion of the role of social networking in their businesses, including Orkut. Eric acknowledge that Orkut was strategic to Google’s ability to know more about its users so as to provide better service to them, and when it comes out of beta, it’ll be integrated in some way into Google. Miller says he sees social networking as not having its own business model, but rather as BASF – making other businesses better. Dan (and later Eric agreed) said that social networking is a way to make sense of a world that has 10-20 billion pages that are all indexed and available – providing a context for better and more intelligently filtered information. The entire conversation is pitched in the context – provided by Esther, who is very engaged this year so far – that these companies are playing in a market that is several orders of magnitude larger than the IT business – what Eric called the information/media business. Architecting the information space is their main product, they agreed, and that is a huge business which is in the early innings.