Lot’s of great stuff around the web this morning.
Obviously, I start my day with The Blogging Times . Sorry Trader Mike :) .
Today, Minic launched his version of The Markets It is a differnet view at what I read and look at to keep up with the markets. I think it is a great start and has something for everybody. I would love to get your feedback or send it directly to Minic.
Duncan Riley offers up a great post on Web 3.0 . Read it! I totally agree on this one with Duncan (other than calling Web 2.0 a bubble) w.r.t. voice recognition. Like Broadband, this has been overpromised and underdelivered.
UPDATE – Duncan does not look at web 2.0 as a bubble – actually he is spot on .
If he is correct, I just may have to keep my eyes on Microsoft stock. In fact, I will. It is the reason I own some stock in Nuance (NUAN) and have written frequently about it.
Donna Bogatin has had some great recent posts over at ZDNet .
First, she takes a “Lindzon” like view on Web 2.0 not being a bubble – Congrats :) .
Next, she tackles the “Google Fear” opportunity I was discussing last week when I said that Yahoo and Ebay can only kill themselves – it won’t be done by Google – with her piece on Google checkout . From my point of view, the point is the hype has died and all that is left now is a lot of blocking and tackling and an unlikely death of PayPal at the hands of Google checkout.
Marco – from CoComment sent me this great link to Umair at BubbleGeneration:
This is not a bubble (=inflow of capital dependent on irrational expectations, or the like). This is a Long Boom. There’s a big difference: Long Booms are characterized by an ongoing and fairly ruthless winnowing of winners from losers. They are marked, in other words, by the opposite of what happens in bubbles: relative market efficiency. Think railways in the 1800s, and then consider that P&G getting 2.0 and making real money from doing so is vastly more Long Boom than bubble.
To the 2.0 crowd, because no correction has happened for a year or two, it looks like a bubble. Of course, they’re ignoring the massive, persistent, and thoroughly rational transfer of value from traditional media/IT/entertainment to new media.
Have a good Monday :)
Couple of thougts;
1) it’s unfortunate that goog released checkout without process QA (techies are not operators), BUT know that checkout is a far larger play than merely a paypal-competitor. In fact there’s little overlap – Paypal works best for P2P payments where checkout is primarily a b2c solution. What most analysts miss is that with checkout, goog now own the entire e-commerce funnel – from advertising to transacting. Once they get beyond the kinks adoption will be huge because for merchants this is the worlds cheapest payment method and for consumers, goog is the most trusted internet brand. Goog will be the 1st US company to build a generic e-commece payment gateway much like dokomo di in JP. Given the way froogle is evolving and the checkout incentives for adsense customers, it’s AMZN and GSIC that should be most worried about checkout. GOOG had just better employ a few old-school retailers to fix ops.
2) Don’t go rushing in on MS just because they can move a mouse by speaking – VR is hard for a reason – its massive limitation is that the machine must first know what you’re going to say before it can recognize it (few folks realize this, hence the hype). This constraint hasn’t changed and while matching and error handling has improved and MS have written a few cool vista apps to show VR off (like the mouse grid), what you see in that demo is no different to the speech rec apple’s offered in OSX for a few years now – and nothing cool or useful has done built with that yet.
cant argue just think the fear creates opportunity and probably why the average internet investor should own some google