Author Archives for DT

Mobile Search – The 2 Percent … uh no … The 2 Inch Solution

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March 30, 2007 5:27 pm

It’s a truism, but like them all it’s of course true. Search has transformed our use of the web, and thereby just about everything in modern life. But that transformation has been slow in getting to my pocket or my belt-clip. A recent survey by the 10 year-old San Francisco-based research firm Media-Screen finds that, although more than 60 percent of U.S. broadband users now own an internet-enabled mobile device, only five percent of them actually use the mobile internet. When I’m at my desk I get it completely. Key in a word or two in the search box and I’m quickly presented with a whole list of links to which I can go, all... Continue ...

AT&T Lets its Fingers do the Walking – All Over Yahoo!

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March 23, 2007 4:26 pm

The mainstream media have been fixating, unsurprisingly, on Viacom’s effort to get $1 billion from Google, almost two-thirds of what the search engine giant paid for YouTube, as copyright damages caused (allegedly) by the still pretty fledgling video-sharing upstart. But another Old Media versus New Media struggle is also worth reporting on. Google’s struggling search rival – Yahoo! – has found its efforts to stage a big revival being seriously dented by its interaction with AT&T, now the world’s biggest telecom company once again. Yahoo shares fell by a worrying 5% recently when word got about that AT&T wanted to alter the terms of their partnering venture for delivering digital subscriber lines (DSL) for high-speed... Continue ...

800 lb Gorillas vs. 200 lb Gorillas – Google Picks its Battles

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March 17, 2007 10:22 am

What would you do if you were Google? (Imagine that thought for an instance!) I don’t mean in size or capitalization, but just as the newish owner of a social networking website that specializes in video. I mean of course the difficult newly-adopted child, YouTube. Consider that you’d purchased, for $1.65 billion, the upwardly rocketing newcomer, only to find that with all the added commercial scrutiny your jaw-droppingly enormous deal attracted, it turned out that video – the absolute mainstay of your new possession’s identity – was freshly the subject of ugly copyright disputes with some real BIG guys. And by big guys I mean enormous media outfits like Viacom and NBC Universal. The trouble... Continue ...

Top Search for 2006 – Reading the Tea Leaves

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January 9, 2007 2:54 pm

The last thing I want to do, as I’m sure it’s the last thing any reader wants, is to review the year. It seems required of just about everybody who’s a regular media contributor. But one aspect of the year has prompted me to override my own reluctance, since it’s brought up by factual reporting (though we’ll come to how fully factual it might be, later) not by opinionated reviewing. We all know that online searching has become the key to how we consume our media now – even though the time-honored notion of simply (did I hear “idyllically”) surfing the web has not exactly gone away, no matter how antiquated it sounds. So just... Continue ...