When the long-expected development of smartphones and handheld devices into primary computers reaches maturity, Google wants to make sure it occupies just as strong a position on the small screen as it does on the big one.
Google set the stage for that future Monday when it announced a $750 million all-stock deal to acquire AdMob, which is considered one of the strongest ad network providers for the mobile-computing world. It's a familiar strategy; just as Google bought DoubleClick in 2007 to blend search ad expertise with display ad expertise, so it plans to add AdMob's network of partners to its own mobile search ad efforts.
For all the work Google does in other areas--Google Apps, Android, Google Voice--advertising has always been, and will likely remain, its most important source of cash. It dominates the most lucrative segment of online advertising (search) and wants to expand its efforts in display advertising as well with a revamped DoubleClick Ad Exchange and increased efforts to court the major advertisers of the world.
But unlike the PC-based Internet, the mobile Internet-advertising business is still very small and very fragmented, with dozens of companies claiming to play a leading role. AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui said he had no idea how much market share his company had in the business of providing mobile ads to Web site publishers, although AdMob is considered by outsiders to be one of the strongest companies in this area due to its work with ad units for iPhone applications.
Google's AdMob deal is about blending the respective advertising strengths of the two companies in a fast-growing market.
(Credit: Google)Few doubt the staying power of mobile computing, however. Even with mobile advertising accounting for just a fraction of overall online advertising in 2009 ($416 million out of a total online spend of $24 billion according to eMarketer figures quoted by Google), AdMob has been cash-flow positive for about a year as advertisers show increasing interest in trying out mobile ads on smartphones like the iPhone and Android-based devices.
Google said it thought getting AdMob's 140-person team inside its company was "a pretty unique opportunity," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google, in an interview following the announcement of the deal. Gundotra and Hamoui both cited the cultural fits between the two companies as helping to streamline a deal; San Mateo, Calif.-based AdMob counts three Google veterans among the 10 executives listed on its management page.
It's not clear yet how Google will integrate AdMob into its existing structure. Google already operates DoubleClick Mobile, an ad delivery service that allows publishers to sell mobile ads directly to advertisers through a variety of ad networks, including AdMob's. What it doesn't have is its own display ad network with the reach and heft of AdMob's 15,000 and growing name-brand advertisers, which allows mobile publishers to essentially outsource their ad sales.
AdMob's success with iPhone ad sales has gotten it to this point.
(Credit: AdMob)It's also not clear whether AdMob will now become "the" ad network for DoubleClick Mobile customers, but that might exclude a lot of business: Google lists its own AdSense, the MBrand and Decktrade networks from Millennial Media, and AdMob as just some of the ad networks if offers for DoubleClick Mobile customers.
In addition, Hamoui said AdMob would continue to sell ads across many different types of phones, rather than focusing on Google's Android. The whole reason AdMob has grown to the level it has was because it was able to separate its technology from specific phones like the iPhone or Android, which gives advertisers a much broader reach than if the ad network focused on any one phone, he said.
Google is now positioned to offer a one-stop shopping experience for companies interested in online advertising, combining search and display ad possibilities on both regular Web sites and mobile sites and applications. As has been the case for so many Google products and initiatives this year, that will likely raise an eyebrow among federal regulators.
As such, Google said while it doesn't expect to encounter significant regulatory issues with the AdMob purchase, "closer scrutiny has been one consequence of our success. On that basis, we wouldn't be surprised if there were some regulatory review before the deal closes." Google said it hoped to wrap up the deal "in the next several months."
Google took great pains Monday to point out how small a deal this was in the grand scheme of the advertising market. It created a Web site devoted to the deal where it quoted competitors in support of its point that mobile-ad budgets are tiny at the moment compared to the overall amount of money spent on online ads.
But Google's willingness to cough up $750 million in stock--making this its third-largest acquisition once it's finalized--shows just how important it thinks this market will become over the next decade.
When asked how quickly Google might see a return on this deal, Gundotra emphasized the future possibilities over short-term financial concerns.
"Getting that group of talented people into our company is an unbelievable return," he said. "It's likely lead to products and innovations we haven't even thought of yet."
Every book project is a series of deadlines. Google's faces an important one Monday.
Google and representatives for author and publisher groups are due to submit a revised Google Book Search settlement in New York federal court Monday. It's been a long year since they first reached a settlement they deemed "historic," which would have granted Google unique rights to continue scanning out-of-print yet copyright-protected books as it builds out a digital library containing more than 10 million books, which also includes public domain works as well as books scanned through partnerships with publishers.
However, opposition to the settlement grew in the months following its release, and the intervention of the Department of Justice in September forced the parties to rework the settlement. Google has sought to downplay the changes that are in the works, but the filing will showcase just how much Google and author groups have had to bend in order to satisfy the government.
It's not clear how widespread the changes will be. The Justice Department objected to several items it found "serious in isolation, and, taken together, raise cause for concern." The principal objection seemed to concern the Books Rights Registry, a nonprofit organization set up by Google and the author groups to distribute royalty payments from Google Book Search to authors. The group's directors will be picked by the parties, and while Google insists that anyone else who wants to scan out-of-print books can negotiate with the Registry, some objectors are concerned that they won't be able to get the same deal that Google has received.
The main problem, however, is that the settlement effectively sets copyright law precedent by affirming Google's position that it was, and is, allowed to scan books that are out of print but protected by copyright under fair-use rights. This does not sit well with many, and ahead of the revised settlement's release, Google's loudest opponents made their case that Google and author groups should defer to Congress on this issue.
"Congress must retain the exclusive authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to set copyright policy," declared the Open Book Alliance, a group that includes the Internet Archive, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo.
The revised settlement is expected to be filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late on Monday. It's believed that Judge Denny Chin will order some sort of waiting period for interested parties to review the settlement before holding a final hearing, perhaps in early 2010.
Updated at 9:53 a.m. PST with additional details. See subsequent story for more analysis on the buy.
Google's back on the acquisition front, spending $750 million in stock Monday to acquire mobile display ad company AdMob.
AdMob founder Omar Hamoui
(Credit: AdMob)AdMob is perhaps best known for serving display ads on iPhones, but it also recently started a business unit focused on ads for Android phones. The start-up would appear to fit well into Google's advertising business model, giving Google a leg up in the still-small but fast-growing world of mobile advertising.
"I'm excited because I believe this will be an important moment for everyone involved in producing, consuming, or monetizing engaging products on mobile," wrote AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui in a blog post Monday. "The truth is that the mobile industry has had no shortage of creative energy, amazing products, and talented entrepreneurs. But until now, it has always felt like those of us involved in this space played second fiddle to our online brethren. I believe that time is over."
AdMob was founded in 2006. The company runs its Mobile Advertising Network across thousands of Web sites, serving up ads from big names such as Ford and Coca-Cola. It also collects and publishes data on mobile trends gleaned from the traffic it manages.
"Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile Web is still in its early stages," wrote Google's Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management, and Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, in Google's own blog post. "We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That's what has us excited about this deal."
Representatives from Google and AdMob are expected to talk about the deal in greater detail later on Monday. This is a friendly takeover, as both companies have already approved the deal, they said in a press release.
It should come as no surprise that Google is back in a buying mood, after several weeks of talk from CEO Eric Schmidt and other company executives about Google's renewed prospects now that the company believes the worst of the advertising recession is past. At $750 million, the acquisition would rank as one of Google's largest deals, trailing DoubleClick at $3.1 billion and YouTube at $1.6 billion but edging out Postini's $625 million selling price.
Google's stock was up 1.81 percent to $561 on news of the deal.
Five years ago, Mozilla made it clear that the browser wars weren't over after all.
In the 1990s, Netscape had lost its dominance in the browser market to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and the Netscape-spawned open-source project called Mozilla had sunk into obscurity. Even a federal antitrust suit accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive practices with its browser and Windows was not enough to turn the tide.
But on November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 emerged to fight back again.
The project, originally named Phoenix to symbolize rebirth from Netscape's ashes, has now clawed its way back to account for nearly a quarter of the browser usage today. Microsoft may not be on the run, but it's on the defensive, gradually building its browser development effort back up into fighting form.
... Read more"Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that."
Those are the words I wrote on Friday to sum up a review of Flixster's movie app for BlackBerry phones. The trouble is, I goofed. I was apparently a day early, reviewing the previous Flixster for BlackBerry, which did deserve the critiques I dished out, and not the Flixster update that was set to release on Saturday (we still don't see it in the BlackBerry App World as of Sunday, but keep checking the store and this post for an update). A re-review--or rather, a preview of the forthcoming Movies app, version 1.1.6--is only fair.
The updated Movies app by Flixster for
(Credit: Flixster)Flixster's free Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry is a pronounced improvement over version 1.0, which served more as a shortcut to Flixster's mobile-optimized Web site than it did a native application. The movie app's navigation looks similar to the previous version, but is now stylized and fixed in place, with only the content refreshing as you move from tab to tab, not the entire screen as before.
As with many mobile apps that sync content from a master Web site, the application's speed is still contingent on the quality of your data connection. If you have a slow connection, the showtimes and theater lists will load slowly. This is especially true when it comes to launching previews. It appears that movie previews call on the browser to initiate a download, and then play on the BlackBerry's built-in media player--at least in the case of my test phone, the BlackBerry Bold 9700. An error message that the wireless connection broke appeared after each trailer finished playing. Pressing the phone's "back" arrow key twice restored Flixster's app.
While the guts of the Flixster app are identical to the previous version, and mostly still linked to the main Web site itself, the updated visual wrapper transforms the user experience from basic Web browsing to a cohesive launchpad where you can read reviews, scour showtimes, and buy tickets by way of Movietickets.com. Flixster's Movies app is one I'd now readily, not reluctantly, use on BlackBerry when that urge to stare at the silver screen sets in.
Updated 11/8/09 at 9:15 pm PT: This post evaluated Flixster's Movies 1.0 app for BlackBerry phones. It turns out, we got a little bit ahead of ourselves on this review--but here's the hands-on review for the update to the app described below, Flixster's Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry.
Flixster 1.0 sure didn't look this good on our BlackBerry Bold--but the next version will.
(Credit: Flixster)We were excited to hear that Flixster's popular iPhone movie app was making the jump to BlackBerry. Unfortunately, not all apps dive as elegantly into other mobile platforms. Flixster's Movies app is one of them.
The free Movies by Flixster app for BlackBerry has all the essentials: a tab for box office hits, an area to enter your Zip code to find movies near you, a list of upcoming titles, and movies that have come out on DVD. You can even purchase movies via movietickets.com. Yet this movie "app" is not so much a native application as it is a shortcut to a BlackBerry-optimized version of Flixster's mobile Web site.
While a nicely formatted mobile site routinely delivers a better experience than navigating the site through a browser, winding up with a not-app after downloading an application feels like a cheap trick. To top it off, Flixster Mobile looks like a mobile site on BlackBerry and reloads every screen as you navigate. In contrast, the iPhone version, pulls show times and theater information into a stylized interface that in no way resembles the Flixster.com site, apart from the information it downloads.
Users aren't fooled by the bait-and-switch, either. Flixster's movie app on BlackBerry rates 2.5 stars out of 129 votes at the time of writing. The program's average iPhone rating scores higher, with a 3.5-star average for the current version out of about 16,000 user reviews.
Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that.
It's been a few days since Opera unwrapped its latest beta browser for mobile phones, and we've had some more time to get acquainted. Opera Mobile 10 beta (download), which runs on certain Symbian Series 60 smartphones, adds some improvements to its password manager and has made a few tweaks under the hood. However, its most significant alterations are in its visual design. Bottom line: We like it, and we like how similar it is to Opera Mini 5 beta, a recent overhaul of the free Opera browser for Java phones.
There are some downsides with the version 10 beta browser that have cropped up--these go beyond the known issues and bugs. Opera's smartphone browser continues to struggle with accurately rendering complex pages. When zooming in on CNET Download.com on the Nokia N97, we saw text and graphics overlap. While Web sites often redirect to a URL optimized for mobile phones, we'd still like to see graphically rich pages rendered more faithfully in Opera Mobile on those that don't have specialized versions.
Its responsiveness was also an issue on the Nokia N97 test phone, but we suspect this has more to do with the device than with Opera. CNET reviewers dinged the Nokia N97 for its choice of an inconsistently responsive resistive touch screen instead of the capacitive touch screen that's found on the iPhone.
Even if you don't have a compatible Nokia, Samsung, or Sony Ericsson phone to test Opera Mobile 10 beta with yourself, you can watch our First Look video to see the new browser beta's features--its new tabs interface shines.
... Read more
Real-time satellite imagery of lunch at the Googleplex would be "creepy," according to CEO Eric Schmidt.
(Credit: Screenshot by Tom Krazit/CNET)Google is trying not to be creepy.
That's according to CEO Eric Schmidt, who told Fox Business Thursday that "we're trying not to cross what we call the creepy line" when it comes to the data it gathers. As an example, Schmidt said Google only publishes satellite data that is a month old, indicating that Google would consider it creepy to publish real-time satellite data.
Google is quite used to facing charges that it has become a little too Big Brotherish in its conquest of the Internet search market. In response, it emphasizes that Google users have control over the data the company collects on them, most recently introducing Google Dashboard as a way of letting users see all the personal data the company has assembled in a single Web page.
That will likely never be enough to satisfy the hardcore privacy advocates of the world, but the general public--and the government--are also starting to get a little uneasy about Google's unparalleled reach across the Internet.
In the interview, Schmidt also said that Google had to avoid the "mistakes" made by Microsoft that led to its prosecution by the U.S. government. But Google also has to be wary about how aggressively it courts favor with the Obama administration, he said: Schmidt is a technology adviser to the administration.
"You don't want to be too close to any particular administration, and they don't want to be too close particularly to you," Schmidt said. That drew a dry retort from Fox Business' Neil Cavuto, who said, "Well, take it from us here at Fox, that's not a worry."
Don't forget, CNET is scheduled to interview Schmidt next week, and if you have questions for the CEO, leave them in the comments below or on this page.
Retweeting has become such an important part of Twitter use that the social network announced on its blog late Thursday that its rollout of integrated retweeting has finally begun.
"We've just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the blog. "Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy. In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know."
Right now, Twitter users are forced to manually retweet items they care about by inputting "RT" at the beginning of a message. Some sites use Tweetmeme's Retweet Button to make it a little easier for users to retweet stories they like. Earlier this year, Twitter shared the mechanics behind the new feature with third-party Twitter developers to see how they could integrate it in their own apps. It's about time that it's coming to Twitter.
In essence, the new retweet button will work much in the same way the "reply" option works on the site already. Users will need only to click the retweet button and their status-update box will be populated with the desired tweet. Those who have access to the feature are saying that a new icon is displayed before the message, rather than the typical RT, but since I don't have access to it yet, I can't confirm its existence.
Twitter plans to test the retweet option on a small number of accounts at first. If all goes well, it will "proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100 percent."
If you have access to the new feature, let us know what you think in the comments below.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--For almost all of its existence, Mozilla Messaging has been known for Thunderbird--e-mail software with the traditional view that a person's PC is the center of their computing existence.
Now, though, the Mozilla Foundation subsidiary's scope is expanding beyond the confines of the computer under your desk or on your lap. In the near term, the new Thunderbird 3 is becoming more integrated with the Web. And in the longer term, the Raindrop project has the potential to lift your inbox all the way to the cloud.
"For us it's really important to have Thunderbird. It's also important to not stay in the blinders of that scenario," Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said in an interview at the company's headquarters here. With Raindrop, "We're focusing on best experience for messaging in a Web application."
Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)The change reflects the changing nature of computing. Where Thunderbird's chief competition once was now software such as Microsoft's Outlook, it's now also got to reckon with Google's Web-based Gmail service and its ilk, Ascher said.
Thunderbird is still a priority. Thunderbird 3 is set to arrive next week in near-final form--though nearly a year later than had been planned--but Mozilla Messaging has high hopes the new version will be faster, easier to use, and more versatile through the addition of third-party extensions.
Universal inbox
Raindrop is something of an ultimate inbox in the company's vision, a Web application that draws not just from e-mail but from other communication conduits such as Twitter, Facebook mail, and instant messaging. Its goal isn't just to consolidate today's overabundance of communications channels, it's to help prioritize what's important and put off what's optional until a more convenient time.
"We're breaking the notion of one list coming in, in chronological order," he said. What just arrived isn't necessarily the most important thing to do, though human minds are prone to thinking it is.
Some aspects of Raindrop's future are more certain than others. It's way to early to say when the company might release its first version of the actual software, but one thing that's settled is that Raindrop won't be a service Mozilla offers. Instead, the software will run on others' servers--at Internet service providers, for example.
"Hosting a messaging system for the world is not something we can afford right now," Ascher said. Still, it's revealing that the company chose to create Raindrop as a server-based technology accessible through a Web browser rather than as PC-based software.
Will Raindrop rule the roost?
In the longer term--say 2015--might Raindrop replace Thunderbird as people's messaging interface of choice? Perhaps.
"I suspect some people will and some people won't," he said. "I think desktop software still has a bunch of user benefits that will last for quite awhile."
Persuading everybody to freely cooperate with Raindrop could be tough. Sites like Facebook like their central positions in people's electronic lives and like to serve ads next to their content. In time, though, Ascher believes they'll come aboard.
"I think in the long term, openness wins," he said.
Even without Raindrop, Thunderbird 3 will integrate with the Web. It's got Firefox's engine built in for displaying Web pages, a fact that means the software can display Web content.
That ability means Thunderbird can, for example, show Yahoo and Google calendars in separate tabs. There's little in the way of integration with those services today, but it can be added, Ascher said. He expects plenty more add-ons will bring it closer to the cloud, too. He didn't mention it, but even Raindrop could be added in its own compartment.
Mozilla Messaging smells money
Mozilla Messaging is part of a peculiar organizational structure. In the beginning the non-profit Mozilla Foundation oversaw the open-source software that was the core of Netscape Communicator. Eventually, that software split into two main components: the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird e-mail software.
The foundation set up two subsidiaries to oversee the two projects, first Mozilla Corp. for Firefox in 2005 and second Mozilla Messaging for Thunderbird in 2007. Ascher has since 2007 led the latter, which employs six engineers and nine others.
It also draws on the expertise of many volunteers in the open-source world who translate the software, write add-ons, and help debug it. Because of this help, Mozilla Messaging gets by with only one quality assurance employee and one marketing employee, and Thunderbird 3 will arrive in more than 40 languages.
The subsidiary today gets its funding from its nonprofit Mozilla Foundation parent, which in turn receives the lion's share of revenue from search advertising revenue that results from searches Firefox sends Google's way. Ultimately, Ascher wants Mozilla Messaging to be financially self-sustaining. But how?
"I'm not sure yet. I think what we're looking for are rev models like Firefox--revenue models where the user benefits and doesn't have to pay anything, and somehow enough money flows into Mozilla Messaging to fund development long-term," Ascher said.
That may sound like a lot of hand-waving, but Ascher points out he has no investors looking for a big and quick return on the money they invested, so Mozilla Messaging is a relatively cheap operation to run.
Ads? No thanks
One route the company won't take is advertising, the approach that's vital to Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail, as well as to Firefox.
"I don't think people benefit from advertising in mail," he said. "One reason it works for search engines is people often are searching to buy. They're happy to see ads. It helps them. I don't think that works in e-mail."
Today, there are probably somewhere between 10 million and 20 million Thunderbird users, said Rafael Ebron, Mozilla Messaging's director of marketing. That's a far cry from Firefox, whose users total more than 300 million, Mozilla says.
But both projects can punch above their weight. Just being a freely available alternative--whether with Thunderbird or with Raindrop--can steer other products and services, Ascher believes.
"Firefox had an influence over people greater than its market share," Ascher said. "I don't think we'd need to manage everybody's e-mail servers for us to have an influence over the e-mail landscape and make sure everybody has a better experience."
