Archive: February, 2007

Internet visionary and Google evangelist Vint Cerf says cell phones are going to drive future growth of the Internet. As part of a much longer conversation with reporters in Bangalore India, Cerf suggested that mobile devices, primarily cell phones, will push programmers to design for handheld units. (source: CIO.com article, Feb21, 2007)

According to Cerf almost half the world’s population uses mobile communication devices of some sort or another. With 2.5 billion users globally and rapid growth in China and India, the mobile market is one of the fastest growing sectors in tech. Logic follows it is likely to become one of the hottest markets in search marketing.

Cerf said that one of the key benefits to the IP packet layer is that a packet is a unit of information that can be separated from the medium it is being displayed on. Unlike telephones connections and television transmission, Internet packets can be carried across multiple platforms and rapidly transferred in tiny byte-sized bits.

BusinessWeek.com reports on The Battle for Mobile Search in its Feb 20, 2007 edition suggesting that Google and Yahoo might face a run for the money when it comes to serving search on handheld devices. There is a lot of money to run for. According to BusinessWeek, by 2011 the mobile advertising market is expected to be worth $11.4 billion.

Aaron Stanton has a good idea. He has been working on it for several years, sort of fantasizing that it could be great enough to capture Google’s interest. One of the problems he had making his company grow was that every time he almost got around to pitching it to Google, he would chicken out.

Just before Christmas last year, Aaron’s father had a near death experience and Aaron had an epiphany. Learning that life is short, he decided to get Google’s attention come hell or high water.

On February 5, he bought a ticket to San Jose and posted the first of a series of videos designed to go viral. Once he had spent money on air fare and had an actual set date, he figured there would be no going back. He details his experience at CanGoogleHearMe.com/.

Aaron has a lot of tenacity. In 2003, he started Novel Projects Inc. while a sophomore student at the University of Idaho. He paid a roommate $10/hr to write code for the product while making only $7/hr himself. By his own admission, Aaron is not a business person.

Victoria British Columbia often looks, feels and acts like its great-grandparent, London England. If you closes your eyes on Government Street and listens to the pattern of traffic over cobblestone streets and the slightly clipped accent of surrounding voices, you can almost pretend you are 7674 km to the east on Kings Road in Chelsea. Almost.

Metamend founder and Enquisite CEO, Richard Zwicky is in London. So are hundreds of search marketing colleagues and thousands of interested webmasters. Search Engine Strategies London opened yesterday. The three day conference is the largest annual search marketing meeting held outside the United States and, as such gathers a great deal of interest and extremely strong speakers.

All good conferences have great keynote speakers. One of the features of Search Engine Strategies is the keynote conversations which tend to be relaxed interviews between Chris Sherman or Danny Sullivan and a whatever tech-leader they are speaking with. Sometimes controversial and always informative, the keynote conversations are highlights of any SES conference.

On Friday February 23, the staff at Metamend is getting together for a brain jam about Google Personalization. Over the next two weeks, we will each be running separate but coordinated experiments at work and in our spare time.

While I am not going to outline the exact specifications of our experiments until we have completed them, I believe the results will give the SEO team plenty to think and talk about.

It should be noted that we do not believe personalization will have a tremendous immediate impact. Therefore, this series of experiments will have to be conducted on a regular basis, likely every three months or so.

This is going to be the first brain-jam I have participated in since signing on with Metamend and I am very excited about it. We will release the results of our experiments and brain-jam session two weeks from now in this blog.  Stay tuned.