CEO of Ask.com moves to Microsoft

By Charlene Li

Just in - Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask.com (acquired by InterActiveCorp last year) is moving to Microsoft to head up their MSN.com, search monetization, and new Live.com platform. Below is a copy of the email I received from Microsoft confirming the rumors that had been circulating around the Web.

Steve will specifically heading up MSN.com, MSNTV, MSN Internet Access, and most importantly, the business side of the new Live.com platform. Most of the reactions to the announcement have been "Wow". I thought I'd extend the discussion with a couple of quick thoughts:

- This is not necessarily a loss for Ask.com. It's recent gains in traffic (thanks to some nice interface innovation and neato technology in search refinement) shows that Steve is leaving on a high note. I don't think Ask.com is going to be at a loss without him, primarily because he's done such a good job there in building a team.

- This is a logical move for Steve, especially now that Ask.com is moving into a new role at IAC. He's built a solid team at Ask.com, but it is going to become more of a platform and technology base for IAC, in addition to its role as a search destination. What he did well at Ask.com is exactly what he needs to do at Microsoft -- come from behind and take on the big guys at Google and Yahoo. The big difference -- he'll have a MUCH bigger budget and talent pool at his disposal!

- This is a high visibility move for Microsoft, showing that it's investing in leadership for its search and portal products. MSN.com has languished for years, especially in its branding and positioning of the portal against Yahoo.com and AOL.com. Bringing in a high profile outside hire like Steve is going to further bolster MSN.com and Live.com's status within the Microsoft organization. It's a smart move -- it was expected that someone would be named soon since David Cole (who runs MSN.com) had announced that he was leaving for a year-long sabbatical. But by hiring someone with Steve's experience and status, rather than promoting from within, Microsoft is showing that it wants to do things differently.

- Most importantly, Microsoft is taking a very important step in putting ALL of the hot consumer products under one team. Live.com is at the core of Microsoft's turnaround -- it represents fast development cycles and a totally new approach to addressing the marketplace. At the same time, Microsoft can't turn its back on the advertising juggernaut of MSN.com. In the past year, there's been uncertainty about how MSN.com and Live.com will work together. Having them all come together under Steve will be a first step in addressing the concerns of the MSN.com group while maintaining Live.com's momentum.

So, what do you think? Was this a good move on Microsoft's part and will it make any difference to have Steve leading the charge?

Email from Microsoft's PR firm, Waggner Edstrom:

I am so sorry for the Friday afternoon fire-drill, but rumors are circulating about a new MSN hire and I wanted to get you accurate information as soon as possible.  Microsoft has hired Steve Berkowitz as SVP of the Online Business Group. He will be responsible for running the Online Business group, which includes include MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live.  This team’s mission is to deliver world-class go to market leadership, that wins customers to our services and builds a world leading advertising business.  The responsibility for the monetization of our Live Platform, MSN and Windows Live assets is owned by this team, and includes end-to-end management of the online P&L.

As you know, Steve is an accomplished senior executive with a rich skill set, including brand building, marketing operations, people management, finance and tech.  Please know that PressPass will be updated shortly with additional information, so please check back shortly.  Feel free to call if you have any questions. 

MAIL FROM KEVIN JOHNSON
I am pleased to announce that Steve Berkowitz will be joining the Platforms and Services Division (PSD) as Senior Vice President, Online Business Group, reporting to me. Steve succeeds David Cole, who will begin his leave of absence in May.

Most recently, Steve was the CEO of Ask.com, a division of IAC/InterActiveCorp. At Ask, Steve is credited with building the management team that orchestrated the turnaround of Ask.com, grew their user base, increased customer satisfaction, and gained share in the search market over the last year.

Steve is an accomplished senior executive with a rich skill set, including consumer brand building, media, marketing, operations, people management, finance, and technology. He also brings a great blend of start-up and high growth business experiences. Prior to joining Ask, Steve was the President and COO of IDG Books, where he successfully built a consumer brand by expanding the "Dummies" series of books to cover topics ranging from C++ to pet care.

Steve’s management experience, deep functional knowledge of the search and Internet space, and understanding of both the offline and online publishing worlds make him a great choice to lead the Online Business Group. He is a proven leader, and is excited by the opportunity to take the assets we’ve built in MSN and drive our software + services vision forward.

Steve will start this assignment on May 8^th. David Cole and I will work together to ensure a smooth transition to Steve.

Please join me in welcoming Steve to Microsoft, and thanking David for his contribution to the company and to MSN.

Google Calendar creates a platform for "time" applications

Like many working parents, I juggle multiple calendars – my work calendar, two kids, spouse, school, church, visiting relatives, and supposed, an exercise calendar. So keeping track of all of the bits and pieces of my life is the bane of my evenings – I spend WAY too much time managing all of the multiple calendars. Just last week, I spent three evenings scheduling playdates for my two lovely kids – not my idea of fun.

So in an effort to get organized, I’ve been trying a slew of the new AJAX calendar products that promise to be an improvement over my existing online calendar (I currently use Yahoo! Calendar, which has kept my private life buzzing along happily since 1998). Having trialed a half dozen of them (including Airset, CalendarHub, 30Boxes, Planzo, and SpongeCell), Google Calendar is truly a best of breed in terms of ease of use and functionality. Here’s a quick overview of what’s different about the new product:

-          Manage multiple calendars. I set up five different calendars on Google Calendar: my private calendar, a calendar for each of my two kids, a family calendar, and items from my husband’s calendar that we need to know about. With a check box, I can have all of these events appear or only one appear. This was a god send when I was trying to schedule playdates for one of my kids – I didn’t have other items on the screen cluttering the interface. On almost every other service I’ve tested, I could not do this. To me, this is a key acknowledgement by Google that we have many different layers to our schedules, ranging from our work calendars to weekend plans for the family.

-          Easy to use. My calendaring sessions look something like this today: Click on add an event (wait for refresh). Fill in lots of little fields with information and click on OK (wait for refresh). I think you get the idea. Google speeds up the process significantly with its “Quick Add” box that understands natural language – so I can simply type “Dinner with Mom next Wed at 6pm) and it gets automatically entered. There’s also lots of AJAX enabled functionality that emulates a software product – I can mouseover a time period and a new event form opens. I can also drag and drop events from one time period to another (heaven!). Even better, if I receive an email in Gmail with event information in it, the service will detect it and ask if I want to add it to Google Calendar (see the screenshot below).

-          Sharing. Many calendaring programs today allow you to share your calendar with others – but they usually require that the person needs to be using the same platform. With Google Calendar, sharing can take place on multiple levels. For example, I could publish a Web page with the “free/busy” schedule for my kids to help with playdate scheduling. I could also invite people to a dinner party, make the invite accessible as a Web page, and use the built-in discussion area to decide on the menu. And of course, RSS feeds for each calendar are also available.

-          Open platform. I think this is the most interesting aspect of Google’s calendar. The iCal standard along with RSS means that I will be able to synch my work calendar with my Google calendar. Although tie-ins with programs like Outlook aren’t yet available, Carl Sjogreen, Google Calendar’s product manager, said that such functionality will be coming “soon”. Google is also partnering with Trumba to enabled “one-click” addition of events to your calendar (Trumba already works with calendar products from Yahoo!, Outlook, MSN Hotmail, and Apple). Also promised are synching capabilities to mobile phones. Carl also said that an API was in the works, which would enable developers to create new products on top of Google Calendar.

This API is what I believe truly makes Google Calendar a platform and game changing product. Just as the Google Maps API enabled numerous mash-ups like housingmaps.com, the Google Calendar API will create a new ecosystem of applications around schedules. Here’s an example: a hair salon could use Google Calendar to handle online appointment scheduling. Each stylist would have their own calendar, and a script would match the requested services with various schedules (a service currently offered by companies like spasalon.com). The analogy to Maps is particularly poignant if you think that Maps helped us control “space”; now Calendar is helping us control “time”.

The major question I’ve been getting the past day from pre-release press calls is how Google plans to monetize Calendar. In two ways: First, it will tie in loyal Google users even closer to the Google brand. As long as I am using Yahoo! Calendar, Google risks me using services like search. Also, it’s another entry point for people to come into Google and set up an account, versus using search quickly and then leaving. Yes, Google is acting like a portal and creating sticky applications!

The second is advertising around events. Google has “no plans” to monetize Calendar at this time, but the opportunity is definitely there. Let’s take a girls’ night out – I could plan the event and then ask my girlfriends for suggestions on the restaurant. Guess what kind of ads will likely appear around the event? Evite.com already puts contextual ads around its invitations.

One tip if you are thinking of switching to Google Calendar (or any other calendaring product): After you export your existing calendar into a CSV file, go through and delete any events that are recurring as they are exported as individual events. If you, don’t, you’ll end up changing individual events in perpetuity.

I’ve attached screenshots of Calendar as provided by Google, and also of what the Gmail interface looks like.

So, would I switch over from my tried and true Yahoo! Calendar to Google Calendar? I have to say that even though I love the interface and functionality, the decision is not mine alone – my spouse, who depends on the calendar as much as I do, has to agree with the change. We’ll be testing it over the next week or so but in the early get go, I’m finding it difficult to adjust to a new view of my calendar – I’ve gotten pretty attached to that Yahoo! view over the past eight years! But I have a suspicion that we’ll probably be using Google Calendar in the long run.

The bigger question is will Calendar be a “hit” for Google or just another so-so product. I do think it’s an advanced user service, in much the same way that Gmail attracts a more sophisticated email user. In that way, it’s a great fit with Google’s target audience of early adopters. I suspect that Yahoo! and Microsoft have AJAX calendars in development as well, which will go a long way toward keeping their core users happy and less eager to switch to an advanced product like Google Calendar. But for us “power” calendar user, Google Calendar is potentially the answer to our schedulilng prayers.

What about you? I’d love to hear how you use online calendars and how new services like Google Calendar will make a difference.

 

Yahoo! adds satellite imagery, making it (almost) a commodity

After a long wait, Yahoo! now has satellite imagery available on its maps beta at maps.yahoo.com/beta (more details are available on their blog post). I’ve written about Yahoo’s maps beta previously, and a major feature that I just love is the multi-point directions. Now honestly, I don’t use satellite imagery very often – it’s usually to understand the geography for new locations so that I can recognize landmarks. But it is really darn helpful in those instances and now Yahoo! gives its users a choice. A few details that Yahoo! provided in a briefing prior to their launch:

-          There is high resolution imagery within the lower 48 states in the US

-          There is medium resolution for the rest of the world

-          The imagery is a seamless, blended view unavailable with other satellite maps

So I put Yahoo’s service to the test against Google Maps and Windows Live Local. Below are the images from our new Foster City office from each of these services. I also tested these services to view my childhood home in suburban Detroit and my former residence in the Boston area. The result: in all three cases, Yahoo’s satellite imagery (which is provided by Aeriels Express and icubed) was not as detailed as the others.

On the suggestion of the Yahoo! team, I also took a look at Redding, California, which they said would show their differentiation (my search was for a Starbucks in Redding). Sure enough, Yahoo! Maps had just as good detail as Windows Live (whose maps was black and white) and blew Google Maps away.

In the end, Google got a lot of the glory for having satellite maps first and continues to entertain us for hours on end with Google Earth. But satellite imagery is to some degree now a commodity within a mapping service – each of the services will continue to add greater detail over time, but it’s become another check box on the feature list.

My take: Microsoft’s heritage in mapping (it’s been the long time provider of maps for businesses via its MapPoint division) will make a difference in the long run. Its wonderful bird’s eye view provides much greater detail than satellite imagery (albeit, it's a little confusing to navigate). Microsoft is also experimenting with street-level views. I’m sure Yahoo! and Google have neat things cooking in their labs as well (and don't forget A9's cool block view), but it doesn’t appear that these players have the depth of resources or the experiences to build new mapping experiences.

I’d love to hear how you use maps – do you switch mapping/local search services because of the imaging features, or does functionality like multi-point driving, saved addresses, and personalization matter more?

Upcoming Forrester events on blogging

I’ll be leading two upcoming Forrester events on blogging in the next month, a Webinar on Monday, April 24^th and a boot camp in Cambridge, MA on Thursday, May 11th. Details are below for both events.

So in a shameless plug for these events, I hope you’ll tell others whom you believe would benefit from the events – or even attend them yourself! I’d also love feedback on how what you think these events should cover, or how they could be improved.

Blogging Webinar, April 24^th, 1-2 pm EST. This one hour Webinar will address the following questions, and will also leave plenty of time for questions from the audience.

·          How are companies using blogs today, both for internal collaboration as well as for external marketing?

·          What best practices should companies be following?

·          How should companies get started?

·          How should companies measure the impact of blogs?

Blogging Fundamentals: Building A Business Strategy Boot Camp, Thursday, May 11th, Cambridge, MA. This full-day, hands-on session will take a deep dive into blogging for business. It will focus on the fundamentals of blogging from a corporate perspective, helping companies develop a blog strategy and implementation plan, including discussion of policy, technology, and process. It will have a heavy focus on hands-on exercises that will complement in-depth presentations on these issues. We intentionally keep these boot camps small so that we can discuss specific issues from each participant.

Attendees will:

·          Understand the current state of the blogosphere from corporate and consumer perspectives.

·          Build sound, consistent business cases for blogs within your organization.

·          Learn how to set up and manage a blog.

·          Identify the top blogging vendors.

·          Craft the elements of a corporate blogging policy.

A full agenda is also available.

Kudos to Chevy Tahoe: It takes guts to brand with social computing

I've got to applaud Chevy Tahoe's recent foray into social computing with http://www.chevyapprentice.com/. On the site, users can create their own customized video commercial, complete with text and background music. Chevy's intent was to tie into a recent appearance of the Tahoe on "The Apprentice" and give users an opportunity to be in the director's chair.

But then, what could be politely construed as a product manager's nightmare happened --environmentalists used the opportunity to deliver a very different kind of message than what you would normally expect. You can see the results here and here on YouTube.

So were the Chevy brand managers foolish to put out chevyapprentice.com in the first place? Or were they super smart because any buzz is better than no buzz? Well, we get some insight from a post by Ed Peper, Chevrolet's general manager, on Fastlane - here's an excerpt:

A contest of this sort doesn't come without risks. As we expected, people who are opposed to SUVs for a variety of reasons quickly discovered that they were also welcome to participate.

Early on we made the decision that if we were to hold this contest, in which we invite anyone to create an ad, in an open forum, that we would be summarily destroyed in the blogosphere if we censored the ads based on their viewpoint. So, we adopted a position of openness and transparency, and decided that we would welcome the debate.

Ed goes on in the blog post to explain that they understood that there were some people who would never purchase an SUV, and stresses that Chevy tries to make their large trucks as fuel efficient as possible.

Wow. Here is a company that understood going into the campaign the risk of negative publicity and still went ahead with it. Now you can debate whether this is all back-fill, publicity management, but having talked with the folks at GM previously about their approach to social computing initiatives like Fastlane, I think they had a pretty good idea what was going on.

While some people point to this campaign as an example of the failure of viral marketing and social computing, I think it points to a great success. Our definition of social computing is when technology results in power shifting from institutions (like Chevy) to communities (like customers). By losing that control over the brand experience, Chevy actually brought more people into it -- witness the debate over the campaign itself. The environmental and SUV fuel economy debate has always existed outside of the Chevy experience, but by bringing it into chevyapprentice.com, Chevy has harnessed it into a promotional benefit.

So final take away and then a question. If you're going to participate as a marketer in the social computing arena, you've got to have thick skin and be ready to engage in the messy world of your customer's opinions. Marketers that have the guts to turn over their brand to the public will in the end win over their customers.

And now my question(s): Put yourself in Ed Peper's shoes. What would you have done differently, and more importantly, what should marketers eager to tap into social computing techniques take away from this campaign?

Forrester's new RSS feeds

Just a quick note to let you know about Forrester's new RSS feeds. Previously, we had three feeds (which are still available): All of our research, just IT-oriented research, and just business-oriented strategy research.

Users now can create their own customized feeds, based not only on specific, pre-determined categories but also by keywords (so you can choose a technology, company name, or even analyst). The benefit: You'll get exactly what you want in your RSS feed.

I think this is the future of RSS feeds -- instead of subscribing to multiple feeds from the same company (for example, NYTimes.com has a half dozen feeds I'd like to subscribe to, but the content often overlaps and duplicates) I'd have a single feed that I can customize. Apple has a great iTunes Music Store customized RSS feed generator and VMWare's news feed (provided by SimpleFeed) combines different types of content together into one feed.

One thing to watch: each of these feeds could be potentially picked up by feed search engines like Bloglines. One solution is the proposed "no index" flag that was proposed at a RSS roundtable last December.  This will become a bigger and bigger issue as marketing services providers like Silverpop bring along their email marketing clients into the RSS world. In a recent discussion with Silverpop, they made the wise suggestion that marketers should start with delivering individualized feeds from the start, even if those feeds all contain the same information. The rationale is you can actually track and measure individual feeds, an approach advocated by Syndicate IQ.

If you have ideas or examples of customized RSS feeds, please send them along to me or post as a comment below.

Google integrates classifieds into search results

Google took the next step in it's entry into the classifieds space by integrating real estate and auto search into its general search. On Google's home page, conduct a search for "jobs", "house for sale", "apartment for rent", or "used car" and you'll receive a "Refine your search" box at the above the organic search results.  You can get the same results if you go into Google Base.

What I find so interesting is that Google is using Base results to help refine these very general queries that take place in the general search engine. But when I type in "apartments for rent San Francisco", or another other type of refinement in the query, I don't see results from Google Base. I suspect that Google is still testing to see how effective Base is for those general queries and will eventually add those search boxes into more specific queries.

What this means: if you're an auto dealer or real estate agent, get your listings into Google Base. It will be a great way to make them visible to another viable audience. Note that the Google refinement box appears above Realtor.com when you search for "houses for sale" and all the major auto sites like AutoTrader.com and Cars.com. Cars.com and ZipRealty are already uploading their listings into Google Base, as is CareerBuilder.com -- they're smart to leverage this free distribution channel. Let's see if the others follow suit.

Here are some additional screenshots:

Forrester podcasting report - just 1% use podcasts

We just released some new data on podcasting, in a brief “Podcasting Hits The Charts” (available only to clients). Here’s the summary:

Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use. One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels. Companies that are interested in using podcasts for their audio should focus not only on downloads but also on streaming audio as a means to get their content and ads to consumers.

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn’t as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there’s lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

Here’s my personal experience/confession. I subscribe to several podcasts, but eventually winnowed them down to just one, NPR’s On The Media. And frankly, it takes a back seat to my audiobooks which I get from Audible.com. Oh, and I happen to be downloading the NPR podcast on two computers synched to two iPods (a 20GB biggie and my Mini), which is why counting podcast downloads is a dubious way to measure usage.

Which leads me to my skepticism about the adoption and breadth of podcasting – measurement is still really hard to do (there's some light at the end of the tunnel from firms like Podtrac and Podbridge, the latter of which has a way to track listens as well as downloads).  Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the US in 2006 will use podcasting, and that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the US by 2010. (See Forrester's  "The Future Of Digital Audio" report). Just to give you some context, we expect MP3 adoption to be almost 11 million households in the US this year, and grow to 34.5 million households by 2010. So that means in four years, about a third of those MP3 owners will be listening to podcasts on those devices. Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.

So should companies be putting podcasting on the backburner? Hardly. Content that already exists – such as earning calls, training updates, and executive presentations are all excellent fodder for podcasts. Think of us poor analysts who must listen to streamed quarterly calls while chained to our laptops! My caution is that companies shouldn’t be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience – unless they gain value from being seen as innovative.

Aside: Here's a great use of podcasts: language instruction. There's a series of Chinese language podcasts at www.chinesepod.com that I've just downloaded (not subscribed to yet) to try out as I'm hoping to brush up my very poor Mandarin. If I like it, I'll probably subscribe to the podcast so that I can get my regular Chinese lesson.

Forrester podcasting report - just 1% use podcasts

We just released some new data on podcasting, in a brief “Podcasting Hits The Charts” (available only to clients). Here’s the summary:

Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use. One-quarter of online consumers express interest in podcasts, with most interested in time-shifting existing radio and Internet radio channels. Companies that are interested in using podcasts for their audio should focus not only on downloads but also on streaming audio as a means to get their content and ads to consumers.

Our survey showed that only 1% of online households in

North America

regularly download and listen to podcasts. And when you include all of the people who are just interested or have used podcasts, they strongly favor listening to existing content like Internet radio or broadcast radio, not necessarily new content. (And for newspapers thinking about podcasting, putting print stories into audio format just ranked ahead of original content from bloggers) I think this has something to do with 1) original content just isn’t as well known; and 2) existing content benefits from users that simply want to time shift it. (Shameless plug: there’s lots of other demographic and measurement data about podcasting in the brief).

Here’s my personal experience/confession. I subscribe to several podcasts, but eventually winnowed them down to just one, NPR’s On The Media. And frankly, it takes a back seat to my audiobooks which I get from Audible.com. Oh, and I happen to be downloading the NPR podcast on two computers synched to two iPods (a 20GB biggie and my Mini), which is why counting podcast downloads is a dubious way to measure usage.

Which leads me to my skepticism about the adoption and breadth of podcasting – measurement is still really hard to do (there's some light at the end of the tunnel from firms like Podtrac and Podbridge, the latter of which has a way to track listens as well as downloads).  Forrester projects that just 700,000 households in the

US

in 2006 will use podcasting, and that it will grow to 12.3 million households in the

US

by 2010. (See Forrester's  "The Future Of Digital Audio" report). Just to give you some context, we expect MP3 adoption to be almost 11 million households in the

US

this year, and grow to 34.5 million households by 2010. So that means in four years, about a third of those MP3 owners will be listening to podcasts on those devices. Podcasting will get easier and the content will get better, but it will all take time.

So should companies be putting podcasting on the backburner? Hardly. Content that already exists – such as earning calls, training updates, and executive presentations are all excellent fodder for podcasts. Think of us poor analysts who must listen to streamed quarterly calls while chained to our laptops! My caution is that companies shouldn’t be dashing out to create expensive original content for a small audience – unless they gain value from being seen as innovative.

Aside: Here's a great use of podcasts: language instruction. There's a series of Chinese language podcasts at www.chinesepod.com that I've just downloaded (not subscribed to yet) to try out as I'm hoping to brush up my very poor Mandarin. If I like it, I'll probably subscribe to the podcast so that I can get my regular Chinese lesson.