Where I — and some others — have found Klout deficient is in its consumer application. Aside from some real-world perks, a scoring system of my online reach doesn’t necessarily do me any good on a consistent basis.

“We weren’t letting people actually be influential,” Joe Fernandez, CEO of Klout, said in an interview.

Klout wants to change that perception, and it’s part of why the company is previewing its latest product, “Experts,” on Wednesday.

Experts is pretty simple. The premise: If you’ve garnered sufficient credibility on a certain topic based on your Klout score — say, gardening or hair styling or whatever — you should be qualified to answer questions on the area. Moreover, you’re likely more credible than some result in a Q&A thread on a site like Yahoo Answers or perhaps a Quora.

So to spur the knowledge base, Klout will drop in questions to some of its users during its preview period. Maybe they’ll answer, maybe they won’t. But, if so, those answers will show up in search results through Microsoft’s Bing — Klout’s official search partner — and potentially Google’s search engine (which Klout doesn’t have a partnership with — just as if it were another page on the Web.

“Think of a company like eBay. It works well because of its reputation layer,” Fernandez said. “We just built that layer first, and now for the first time we’re enabling a direct sense of consumer utility.”

If people actually use the product, it’s clever in a few ways. Yes, it could potentially give people more reason to consider Klout scores important and regard influence more highly. But pumping topic results pages into Bing and (maybe) Google search results is an easy way to stimulate outside activity and engagement, and perhaps increase signups to new users seeing the pages for the first time. I say “maybe” for Google because, honestly, it isn’t clear whether or not Google will surface those results. For now, Klout has only officially — though not exclusively — partnered with Microsoft on this.

If they do indeed show up, there’s still Google’s social recommendation layer to compete with here. Google sticks “+1” recommendations from people using its social network into its search results when applicable (and when users opt in to seeing it), which arguably may have more power than a Klout page. And of course there are existing knowledge bases online — the Wikipedias and Quoras of the Web.

The preview rolls out on Wednesday to a limited group of users, and there’s a waiting list to sign up for on the site, if you’re so inclined.

Facebook/Justin BieberJustin Bieber is 5’7″.

Singhal explained in a recent interview that Google has learned a basic understanding of what is known as pronoun and anaphora resolution. So the robot Android woman replies to him, understanding that the second question refers back to the first proper noun.

“Search has been, in the past, a one-shot deal. But for the first time, ‘he’ meant ‘Justin Bieber!’ No one else does that,” said Singhal.

(The Biebs measures 5'7", same as Tom Cruise and Al Pacino, which took me a third Google search.)

“Today I showed you a two-sentence conversation,” Singhal said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a year or two, we’ll see a much broader conversation happening within search” — where users can talk to a search engine as if they’re talking to a person.

More Than an Interface Problem

For years, online search has trained us to speak its odd and stilted language. Type a demand for information. Isolate the keywords. Start from scratch with every query. Use quotation marks to specify a phrase. It’s enough of a foreign language that some people call it “Searchese.”

One thing binding together much of the work Google and other companies are doing around search these days is that they’re making it more natural and conversational.

Conversational search is search that tries to understand context, that makes educated guesses, that takes voice input, that parses homonyms and adapts to mobile environments, and that understands the same user across multiple devices.

These ideas have been around since at least the 1990s, part of research projects like AT&T Labs’s Watson and MIT’s Jupiter, a phone service that could understand a wide range of queries about the weather.

While on the surface, making search conversational sounds like an interface problem — just figure out an easier way for people to access the same underlying information — in reality, it cuts deep into artificial intelligence and the world outside of computers.

Plus, it’s a descriptor that’s much more accessible than other recent search coinages, like Google’s “Knowledge Graph.”

Getting back to Singhal’s Bieber example, Bing search director Stefan Weitz said it’s true that Microsoft doesn’t yet handle many multipart queries, with the exception of structured search for content titles on Xbox.

But Bing is also working on many fronts to make search more natural and conversational — for instance, in its work to disambiguate queries, its semantic search effort Satori, and personalized apps like Local Scout.

“When you talk about conversational search, you’re really talking about machines being able to understand the last thing you said or the path you’re heading down,” Weitz said. “The real challenge is deconstructing the digital world using the Web as a very high-definition physical proxy.”

So, for instance, Bing can now answer queries like “the movie with Tom Cruise and a unicorn” or “the tallest mountain in the world,” even though they take a good bit of extrapolation, Weitz said. (The answers are “Legend” and Mount Everest.)

Unlearning Awkwardness

At Google, the first conversational search launch was probably Google Suggest, a “20 percent” project from way back in 2004 that auto-completes likely searches while a user is typing. It was the predecessor to Google Instant, which launched in 2010 and displays likely search results for those queries.

John Boyd, a research manager at Google, runs a team that brings in users to observe their experiences with new products, and designs studies to evaluate what they might want in the future.

John Boyd at work in the Google user experience research lab

Speaking in one of those one-way-mirror rooms containing a computer fitted with an eye tracker, Boyd said that one of the stranger parts of his job is that volunteers who are brought in to campus for studies and interviews often fail to notice whatever it is that Google is testing. When his team ran user tests on Google Instant, some lab rats guessed that what was new was an older navigation bar on the left side — not the results appearing smack-dab in front of their faces.

Without a before-and-after comparison, it’s hard to pick up on what’s new, even on a website you use every day.

But that’s not necessarily bad. One of the things about Google search that Boyd most wants to change is to subtly guide people away from learned behaviors and back to natural conversation.

“Google is magic,” said Boyd, who directed research at Yahoo for five years before joining Google five years ago. “But because we stay out of the way, it allows people to get into bad habits.”

What does he mean by that? Well, some people think search works better when you type in queries in all caps. ACTUALLY, it doesn’t.

This is an example of B.F. Skinner’s “superstitious learning,” Boyd said. For instance, some searchers tend to overuse double quotes to try to tell Google that we really want to find a set of words in the order we entered them. What’s the harm in that? Quotes are not always necessary, they’re extra work, and in some cases they exclude worthy results, Boyd said. You can tell that little bit of inefficiency actually gets under Boyd’s skin.

On a broader level, Google should have a better idea of what we want to know, Boyd said, so we don’t have to ask a question from scratch every time.

But What Do You Really Want to Know?

To that end, last year Google conducted a study of 150 participants by pinging them through a custom mobile app at multiple random points throughout the day to ask them what they wanted to know.

Boyd showed me the file of one female participant, whose information needs included “How do I get $200 in eight days?” “How long does state have to indict somebody before they get charged?” “What is string theory?” “What does a cuttlefish look like?” “How do I make my daughter leave me alone?” “How to make my tooth stop hurting?” “How do I find a bail bondsman?”

Meanwhile, another male participant said he had car problems, a dog that may have had fleas, a need for cash, a smoke detector that needed to be reset, and interest in buying a car for his granddaughter.

Monterey Bay Aquarium This is what a cuttlefish looks like.

Besides being fascinating slices of life, the list of questions large and small is helping Google think about how to better understand how it might be helpful to people.

For instance, the woman asked a whole bunch of questions around the theme of jail; Google could do a smoother job of helping her with that topic. And the man’s list of to-dos is pretty hectic; perhaps Google could help organize and execute them.

Two of Google’s main thrusts to help people in the moment are voice search — especially useful when you’re driving, or your hands are otherwise busy — and the Google Now smart personal assistant for Android.

Voice is a natural format for conversation, Boyd noted. “The conversational component opens up a dimension of ‘did you mean?’ or ‘have you thought about it this way?’” That tends to be a lot more awkward and slow in text, he said.

Meanwhile, the Google Now Android app rides along with users and takes note of their habits, showing things like sports scores and weather and traffic, based on their personal search history. Recent additions to the app trigger previously purchased movie tickets and boarding passes to pop up when a user enters the theater or the airport at the designated time.

“There are so many different situations when our users need help,” Google Now product manager Baris Gultekin recently told me. “My goal is to anticipate all your needs, and anticipate the right thing when you need it. It’s a huge undertaking. We are basically trying to focus on trying to get you information you need, when you need it, before you ask.”

For those who are okay with the privacy implications, these are significant and exciting leaps forward. But we are a long way from engaging in any old casual conversation with our computers. Google Now only understands a very few things in the world, and each new one is being added manually through partnerships with Fandango and United Airlines and the like.

And while voice recognition is much better than it used to be, I often find myself falling into a new sort of voice “Searchese,” where I carefully enunciate words in a monotone and speak out punctuation. It’s far from the most natural thing in the world.

Sterne Agee’s Arvind Bhatia upgraded Groupon to “buy” from “neutral” this morning, sending the company’s stock up 27 cents, or 5 percent, to $5.56 a share in afternoon trading. At one point in pre-market trading, the stock hit as much as $5.74.

While those gains are significant considering where the shares have been trading for the past few months, the stock overall is still down more than 70 percent since Groupon’s IPO in November.

Bhatia acknowledged how out of sync his upgrade is with the bigger picture: “This is an out-of-consensus upgrade predicated on a more constructive longer-term view of the company,” he wrote in a letter to investors. He also warned that the upgrade was not a reflection of the company’s fourth-quarter results, which are being released on Feb. 27. (Bhatia believes the stock can go as high as $9 over the next 12 months.)

Rather, his thesis is based on the belief that the Chicago company — and therefore its CEO and founder Andrew Mason — can execute on a number of fronts, by turning around its international business and leveraging its mobile commerce foothold. And, even more importantly, he believes that Groupon can evolve beyond its core push business of delivering offers by email to a model where consumers will discover deals on the site through search engines and direct traffic to the site.

In November, I wrote about this evolution to a marketplace approach, which Groupon was rolling out in Chicago and New York. At the time, Jeff Holden, the company’s SVP of Product, explained that Groupon had mastered serendipity by sending offers to people they thought might like them.

But now they are trying to become a destination where people shop for things they already know they are looking to buy. In a handful of markets, consumers can now browse and search a catalog of offers — they don’t disappear after one day. Categories span everything from local deals, including auto, restaurants and spas, to products, like bed linens and pet care.

At the time, Groupon said it had amassed 27,000 deals in North America as part of the company’s new direction. That will be a critical number to watch, since having a lot of inventory will be a crucial component to its success.

Bhatia claims that the benefit to this approach is that the deals can now be marketed effectively through search engines, like Google and Bing, as opposed to sending emails (which people are tiring of). “Currently less than 5 percent of Groupon’s revenue comes from search engine marketing,” he wrote. “In contrast, an estimated 25 percent of queries on search engines are local and 50 percent of mobile searches are for local, which suggests meaningful untapped opportunity.”

Rakesh Agrawal, a business consultant and outspoken critic on Groupon, disagreed with the company’s prospects of using Google and Bing to drive sales going forward. “Search marketing is a much more complicated sell,” he said. “Even if it were successful, the revenue they could generate pales in comparison with what daily deals were throwing off.”

Groupon is expecting fourth-quarter revenue ranging between $625 million and $675 million, an increase of 27 percent to 37 percent, compared with the same period a year earlier. It expects income from operations to be between breakeven and $20 million, compared with a loss of $15 million in the fourth-quarter 2011. Analysts are forecasting a loss of two cents a share.

Maybe they worked something out, after all: Sources say Google is set to begin running some of its AdSense display ads on Yahoo sites, and will become one of several ad networks Yahoo uses to fill some of its pages.

That means that the two companies will have a relationship similar to the one that Google has with publishers all over the Web: They give Google access to some of their unsold inventory, and Google inserts small ads it runs on behalf of its advertisers.

Last year, Google and Yahoo had lengthy discussions about a more involved ad tie up, including a scenario where Yahoo would essentially hand over its ad serving operations for all of its lower-priced ads directly to Google.

Those talks seemed to have petered out after interim CEO Ross Levinsohn was replaced by Marissa Mayer. But it’s worth noting that since then Mayer has hired former Google ad executive Henrique De Castro as her chief operating officer.

I’ve asked Google and Yahoo for comment. (Update: Here’s a blog post from Yahoo that confirms the move. Oddly, it has a publication time of 2:02 pm, which I assume is Pacific time, but is also in the future.)

It’s worth speculating whether the AdSense ads will lead to something bigger: Right now, Yahoo has a long-term deal with Microsoft to handle its large search ad business. And Mayer has publicly discussed her disappointment with the way that alliance has worked for Yahoo.

On the other hand, any truly significant tie-up between Yahoo and Google would certainly undergo a whole lot of regulatory scrutiny. Presumably the two companies think what they’re doing now won’t cause any problems in Washington or Brussels.

Your best options might be using video chat or screen-sharing, or working out an awkward routine where you tell the other person to advance to the next picture. But it’s not really like being in the same room sharing a physical photo album, where you can look at good quality images and flip pages forward and backward together.

To that end, DabKick today publicly launched a set of tools to help people share pictures with each other remotely — live.

“We actually don’t use the word ‘share’; it’s ‘show’ because it’s real-time,” said Balaji Krishnan, co-founder of DabKick.

Krishnan has put together a very small team — just three people — who have built an iOS app, Web site and bookmarklet tool to grab content from around the Web.

He said DabKick’s technology is similar to VoIP, rather than screen-sharing, which “is ridiculously slow, because it’s transferring pixel by pixel.” Instead, DabKick breaks photos into chunks for peer-to-peer streaming, while uploading each picture to the cloud so it can be more quickly accessed if it’s viewed again.

Krishnan may not be famous in tech circuits, but he has a knack for coming up with novel ways to handle online media. His last company was Snapstick, which helped stream Web content to the TV, and was bought by Rovi for $20 million in cash earlier this year.

This time around, DabKick is starting out with $200,000 backing from Gree, which Krishnan said is out of an interest by the game maker to have players brag to their friends about their moments of achievement within games.

Within the Dabkick app, which currently only supports one-to-one sharing of photos, either user can control the screen by adding new pictures or swiping between them. They can also use the Bing API to find public images.

If they send content to a friend who is offline or doesn’t have DabKick, it shows up like a voicemail message, and recipients can view the content on the Web without downloading the app.

Krishnan points out that the notion of temporary media sharing is a hot topic lately, with the self-destructing photo and video app Snapchat and its competitors. One benefit of DabKick is that photos are simply shown within a session, rather than shared permanently. And, unlike Snapchat, DabKick is live.

While, for me, DabKick seems to fill a pretty niche experience — c’mon, how many times are you scratching your head looking for a way to walk someone through your vacation albums, or look at random images from Bing — Krishnan said his ultimate goal is to open DabKick to other developers. He has visions of media sites like Shutterfly adding DabKick, or karaoke apps using DabKick to help people sing together.

“My goal is for everyone to see a ‘Dab’ button next to every piece of media, and know you can immediately share it and show it to a friend,” Krishnan said.

Bing zings: “Don’t get Scroogled this holiday season.”

But as it turns out, Bing does the same thing.

“It’s a classic case of engineers not connecting with their ad center counterparts,” said Jorie Waterman, the SVP of performance channels and optimization at True Action, an eBay-owned company that helps online retailers with their search marketing strategies.

Waterman added that Bing has a partnership with Shopping.com, which offers higher visibility through paid listings. “The paid listings have always gotten better placement,” she said.

In general, the issue Bing is raising has to do with a change that Google made this summer, which has stayed fairly under the radar. While Microsoft is hoping to shine some light on the subject now through the splashy campaign, it likely has less to do with the holiday shopping season and more to do with Google’s political situation in Washington, D.C.

In a Bing blog post, and a separate Web site found at Scroogled.com, Microsoft summarizes its argument:

In the beginning, Google preached, “Don’t be evil”—but that changed on May 31, 2012. That’s when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads.

It’s true that Google has changed the way it displays products, and this is the first holiday season in which retailers will have to pay to be included in the Google Shopping results. Before, merchants were allowed to upload their entire product feed into the search engine for free.

In a statement, Google would not comment directly on Bing’s attack, but defended why it made the changes:

Google Shopping makes it easier for shoppers to quickly find what they’re looking for, compare different products and connect with merchants to make a purchase. With new 360-degree, interactive product images, social shopping lists and a fast growing inventory of more than a billion products worldwide, Google is a great resource for shoppers to find what they need, at great prices for their loved ones this holiday season.

Along with the paid requirement, Google completely overhauled the shopping experience, stressing product images over text and allowing consumers to easily conduct price comparisons across numerous sites. It is a radical change for retailers, who are still grappling with how much to spend on the paid listings to see a positive return. However, Waterman said the new product images that appear in Google’s search results are resulting in a tremendous lift in sales for True Action’s retailers, which include Toys “R” Us and Levi’s. “It’s blowing our minds,” she said.

But as you might imagine, not all retailers can afford to pay, which means being excluded from Google Shopping results. Other retailers, like Amazon, are choosing not to participate. (That does not mean that Amazon’s results would not show up in organic listings when a consumer searches for a product from the main search bar. However, Amazon does not appear in the “Shopping” tab.)

Bing tried clarifying its position on the matter in a statement, saying that while yes, merchants can pay to have their products listed in Bing, there’s no requirement. Bing’s senior director Stefan Weitz said:

Bing includes millions of free listings from merchants and rankings are determined entirely by which products are most relevant to your query. While merchants can pay fees for inclusion on our third party shopping sites and subsequently may appear in Bing Shopping through partnerships we have, we do not rank merchants higher based on who pays us, nor do we let merchants pay to have their product offers placed higher in Bing Shopping’s search results.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com, who has been covering this subject closely for the past few months, wrote today that Bing’s campaign would be great, “if it were true.” In several screenshots taken of both Bing and Google search, he compares each search engine’s results, concluding that, “Bing is hardly in a position to be lecturing Google about poor disclosure and charging for listings, when it has the same issues.”

An important question, however, is which method is better for the consumer — paid or free listings?

“It’s a question mark,” Waterman said. “When it was free on Google and on Bing, I don’t think companies paid enough attention to the data — because it was free, so the quality of the data and accuracy wasn’t as good to give consumers the best information possible. Now you are paying for it, there’s much more diligence being paid to the data and the accuracy.”

Clearly, Microsoft’s timing with the campaign is a little fishy. While it lines up with the holiday shopping season, it also probably has a lot to do with the 18-month-long investigation of Google’s search business, which is coming to an end. As a source told my colleague, Liz Gannes, it’s now a good time to try and land something on Google: “All these people who have wanted to kill Google, this is their chance. They will never have a better opportunity than the next 30 days.”

Better get your lumps in quick, Microsoft — time is running out.

The Chicago daily deals company, which once focused solely on selling coupons for restaurants and spas, has quickly morphed into an online retailer, selling physical goods that are shipped to your front door. In about a year’s time, the side business has grown to account for 11.4 percent of the company’s North American revenue, totaling $193.7 million in the first nine months of the year.

Yesterday, on Groupon’s quarterly conference call, CEO Andrew Mason defended the decision to expand into products, even though it means lower margins and going up against some mighty competitors, like Amazon.

“We built something that fits squarely into our core customer value proposition of the discovery of curated offers and carves out a unique space in the retail e-commerce sandbox,” said Mason, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call. “We neither need to nor do we want to try to out-Amazon Amazon. We’ll never be about comprehensive product selection, but our skills at curating unbeatable offers are clearly resonating with our customers.”

The public markets did not respond favorably to the company’s enthusiasm.

In after-hours trading yesterday, Groupon’s stock plunged 15 percent, or 59 cents a share, and in the morning the news was still bothering investors. Shares fell nearly 30 percent today, or $1.16, to trade at $2.77 a share, way below the company’s last 52-week low of $3.68 a share.

The company’s market value now totals $1.82 billion, regrettably far below Google’s $6 billion buyout offer.

Groupon Goods offers a handful of products daily, making it similar to Amazon-owned Woot, which offers discounted merchandise for a limited time. Some of the electronics are priced in the hundreds of dollars, but most products fall between $10 and $40, filling a deal-seeker’s sweet spot. For instance, as of today, only 190 refurbished Motorola Xoom tablets had been sold for $229, but more than 1,000 Netgear wireless routers had been sold for $32; and more than 1,000 packs of men’s underwear had sold for $12. In particular, Mason illustrated Groupon’s reach by saying it was able to help Garmin sell nearly 30,000 GPS units in 24 hours.

Add to that free shipping and free returns on any purchases over $15 and the offer appears even better. Groupon will also be opening special “stores” for the holidays, including Thanksgiving- and Christmas-themed events. This will expand consumer interest in Groupon this year, compared to last year, when the company’s holiday focus was on resolution-type offers, like weight loss or gym memberships.

So, will Goods be less profitable than its original deals business, and what can investors expect to happen to the company’s original business?

On the call yesterday, Groupon’s CFO Jason Child addressed the topic of profitability.

He said the two businesses are reported differently, according to standard accounting practices. But if they were to be compared on an apples-to-apples basis, a local deal’s operating margin is roughly 10 percent to 12 percent vs. the Goods business, where he hopes margins will end up in the high-single digit percentages. “It should be actually quite similar,” he reasoned.

Mason addressed how the two businesses will work together. Going forward, he said less of the real estate in the emails Groupon sends out will be dedicated to local offers, which will mean coming up with new ways for customers to find them. Two possibilities, he said, are to focus more on Google and Bing search and discoverability on the mobile phone.

“Goods has been the primary driver of our growth over the last two quarters and is now at an annual billings run rate of nearly $1.5 billion,” Mason said. “This begs the question, what does this mean for our local business? Has it reached the limit? To be clear, we continue to believe in the size of the local e-commerce opportunity in front of us.”

Lots of start-ups are telling marketers they can help them navigate social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But there’s still plenty of demand for companies that promise better results on Google and Bing.

Here’s one: Conductor, a New York-based firm that has raised a $20 million funding round led by Investor Growth Capital. Existing investors like FirstMark Capital and Matrix Partners reupped as well.

CEO Seth Besmertnik describes his company as a search engine optimization company, not a search engine marketing company. The difference: He’ll tell clients how to tweak their sites for Google, et al, but doesn’t buy Google search ads for them.

Besmertnik says Conductor grew 300 percent in the last year, and is now approaching “low double-digit millions” in revenue. He says he’s added 45 employees in the last year, and now has a staff of 85.

Conductor, which has raised $35 million to date, also qualifies as a pivot, since it started out life as a link-building company, which promised to boost clients’ search ranking via a strategy Google no longer allows. Now it sells customers “software as a service,” where they pay a monthly fee in exchange for a dashboard and other analytic tools.

Yahoo turned in a meh third quarter, which came as no surprise to anyone. But none of it matters, since all eyes were on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer would say on the investor call today.

Here we go! It is Mayer’s first outing as a public company CEO. She’s been an exec at Google her whole career and, while she has been a prominent public figure in Silicon Valley, she has never run the whole show herself.

Until today, that is!

2:01 pm: Finally, we are hearing from Mayer, who arrived from Google in July.

She is “thrilled to be at Yahoo” and the first 100 days at the company have been a lot of fun.

She’s apparently been a fan since her undergraduate days at Stanford University.

Finally, she tries to answer the big question: “Why did I in particular come to Yahoo?”

Why, indeed, given she and others at Google have spent those years since college putting Yahoo directly into the ground. (Did you know Yahoo gave Google its first big search break, a deal engineered by Mayer and others?)

But, says Mayer, Yahoo is “tailor-made for me,” ticking off arenas such as “search, mail, advertising, home page.”

It’s what she built her career on, apparently — yes, in kicking Yahoo’s behind — but now she wants to help the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant “grow and help redefine” itself.

Still, she stresses, trying to buy as much time as possible from investors: “It will take multiple years to get to where I want the company to be.”

2:08 pm: Mayer, of course, touts her Apple iPhone-and-free-food spending to make the life of Yahoos better (and on parity with the rest of the digital sector).

To be fair, given the past two CEOs, anyone who did not come in and kick the employees where it counts was going to get some claps.

Mayer’s goals are “simple,” she says, “to execute fast, attract the best talent and make Yahoo the best place to work.”

She says she has assembled a stellar world class exec team to accomplish that.

2:11 pm: Now we get to meet one of that team and a Yahoo newbie — CFO Ken Goldman (pictured here). It’s his first day.

He repeats the results that Yahoo has already put in its press release, which is why I usually zone out here and focus on superficial stuff.

Like how much he sounds like former and ousted Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson. Eek!

Goldman touts Yahoo’s recent Alibaba Group deal in China (done not by Goldman, but by outgoing — jacked by Mayer, really — CFO Tim Morse) and notes a $765 million credit facility that Yahoo apparently got this month.

That’s more dough to add to Mayer’s ever-growing pile to spend on fixing Yahoo.

2:23 pm: Mayer is back — Goldman is nice enough, but everyone wants to hear from the former Google wunderkind.

She makes an obvious statement: Yahoo has to “grow at the same pace as the market we are in.” Yep. Yahoo’s growth has been practically non-existent, while the industry has seen robust increases for years.

Mayer is now hitting all the high points on what needs to be fixed.

Search, communications, a desperate need to invest in mobile. “Our top priority is a focused, coherent” mobile strategy, she says. It’s everybody and their mother’s top priority in the Internet space, but it’s gotta be said.

So Mayer says it again: “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company.”

She also name-checks “delighting users,” improving advertising and personalization.

2:27 pm: She also underscores that Yahoo will now hold onto its ad tech business.

“No one wants Yahoo to grow more than the people who work here,” says Mayer, who says she is going back to Yahoo’s roots. “We believe Yahoo’s best days lie ahead … and we intend to win.”

It sounds very good, but Mayer has been relatively unspecific overall.

Now to Q&A to see if she will drill down more.

2:30 pm: The first question is about Mayer’s vision as compared to others.

Apparently, it does not mean a “pivot” into different and new businesses. It does mean improving what Yahoo has done well.

“I don’t think this is a situation where there’s a giant pivot and we go into a completely different business,” Mayer says flatly. In other words, no string of Yahoo diners in the offing.

In addition, Mayer says that Yahoo occupies a unique spot that does not put it into “channel conflict” with other rivals and, presumably, can be a better partners.

Also asked about search versus display, she’ll take both, but found display “more compelling.”

The next question is about international markets and the local ones.

Growth, says Mayer, although Yahoo will be narrowing the offerings to be more compelling.

She refers to the recent closing of Yahoo operations in Korea. “We had a very hard time finding a growth story moving forward,” says Mayer.

As to local, which Mayer worked on at Google right before she left, Yahoo’s efforts are merely “good” and it’s not slated for investment going forward.

The next question is about metrics to judge progress. Yahoo left out user numbers it has usually provided in the past and Mayer is not giving up any data now either.

Instead, she is going to rely on internal data and not use third-party data any longer. (It makes some sense since the numbers have been not so pretty over time.)

2:37 pm: Mayer did not want to go into acquisition strategy, which came in a question about its giant pile of dough.

No billion-dollar buys for her, she claims, so cancel that Tesla order for Foursquare, Dennis Crowley!

Mayer noted that most acquisitions will be smaller scale and under $100 million. She noted she had done about 20 of those in her career at Google.

A question about Microsoft.

While there has been “disappointment,” Mayer says the goal is to work with the software giant. In other words, she’s not calling her old pals at Google quite yet (she hasn’t yet, in fact).

The next question is about mobile, with Mayer noting once again that the company has to be primarily mobile-focused going forward.

She’s going to hire as many mobile peeps as possible, especially via smaller-scale acquisitions.

2:44 pm: Goldman gets a little awkward in noting that his young-adult kids think Yahoo is all happening. Hmm, I suppose since he comes from the deservedly defunct Excite@Home and the successful but security-dull Fortinet, that makes sense.

In fact, getting back the young folks is one of Mayer’s top challenges.

A very good question — these are all good ones on the call — is how Yahoo can compete without a mobile operating system, such as Google Android and Amazon Kindle and Apple iOS.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has compelling content that others do not.

Another question on search and, specifically, on mobile search.

Mayer is unspecific, except to note that Yahoo has the ability to be pertinent and competitive.

She is a little more clear on the issues with the Microsoft Bing search relationship. Mayer does know this stuff well, and it is clear there is some serious low-hanging fruit to be plucked by someone who knows what they are doing.

Mayer knows search, to be sure, so I am thinking she will make some bank here.

A question about “overmonetizing” the Yahoo site — i.e. cluttering it up with icky ad units that drive consumers nuts.

Mayer notes that cutbacks in ads to improve user experience will only be done to increase traffic, which is a dicey proposition as it can also kill revenue.

A question about content and where that us going.

Mayer touts the Olympics programming — hat tip to former interim CEO Ross Levinsohn — as something unique to Yahoo. Interestingly, the media folks at Yahoo are still wary of pro-engineering Mayer.

2:55 pm: Another question about her interest in content and investment focus in ad tech.

“I am very product focused,” says Mayer, who uses the term “low latency,” a term that no media person ever would use as a hallmark of success.

She is much more comfy talking tech and that’s an area she knows better. Still, she says little about possible investments.

Mayer is then asked about goals for growth at Yahoo. She does not just want to grow at industry rate, but beyond that! But she’ll take industry rate for now (actually, that would be a huge accomplishment).

Goldman says little on the stock buyback, using the Alibaba dough, except they are buying.

3:01 pm: There are a lot of questions today for Mayer — which is no surprise — but now they are beginning to repeat.

(Plus, I have LOLcat’s Ben Huh waiting for me in the ATD Global HQ lobby — and you all know how I feel about them cats!)

Ah, the last question: It’s about data and personalization and what’s been lacking at Yahoo in not taking advantage about the pile of data it has about .

Yes, that should happen and it will under the regime of Marissa Mayer.

Mayer ends by noting, “It’s time for Yahoo to execute and bring our results back to growth.”

So it is written, so it shall be done.

Apple’s decision to remove Google Maps from the iPhone 5 and its latest software (iOS 6) in favor of its own fledgling Maps app has resulted in a black eye for the company, normally known for putting out pristine products. Sure, the new app includes fancy “flyover” images and turn-by-turn voice navigation. But some of the maps’ errors and the lack of basic public transit data have left some new iPhone owners feeling lost.

Fortunately, while Apple is improving Maps, there are other map apps available for iPhone users, whether they’re using an iPhone 5 or an older phone model upgraded to iOS 6.



For the past several days, I’ve been finding my way with Waze, made by a company of the same name; Scout by Telenav; and Fullpower’s MotionX GPS Drive. I mostly tested these on the iPhone 5 while driving a rented car, though I also tested some apps while walking around Manhattan. A lot of consumers use their map apps to search for addresses, or for local places — like the coffee shop, movie theater or pizza place — but I focused primarily on the overall user experience and the turn-by-turn navigation features of these apps.

All three apps I tested offer turn-by-turn voice guidance. The Waze app, which turns the road into a kind of social network, is free. So is Scout, which currently comes with one year of free voice guidance through an app upgrade called Scout Plus. MotionX GPS Drive costs 99 cents for the app download, and three dollars a month or $10 a year for the voice-navigation services. 


It’s worth noting that there are many other ways to get good directions. Microsoft’s Bing search app has a Maps section that offers (voice-free) turn-by-turn walking, transit and driving directions. AOL’s MapQuest app offers voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation. Those who still want to use Google Maps on the new iPhone can do so from a mobile Web browser, though only Google Android phone users get the full features of Google’s Maps app. Nokia’s maps are available through a Web browser, too.

Apps from nav makers Garmin, Navigon (which is owned by Garmin) and TomTom are more expensive — ranging from $40 to $50 for the U.S. maps alone. While they include dozens of downloadable maps that work offline, and more closely mimic the experience you might get from a portable navigation device, other apps tested just as well as these did, and cost a lot less.

I should also note that my experience with Apple Maps really wasn’t that bad. When I first typed in my home address, Apple Maps directed me to New Jersey instead of midtown Manhattan. But most other times the app worked fine, whether I was driving across Long Island, through the complicated matrix of New York and New Jersey highways, or on dirt roads in sparsely populated areas of Pennsylvania.



But it’s Waze, which became available in the U.S. in 2010, that might become my new favorite navigation app.

Waze offers offers turn-by-turn voice navigation, 3-D views of the road and voice commands. The unique thing about Waze is that it has, over time, created a network in which Waze users can warn each other of oncoming traffic, hazardous objects and hidden speed traps. There’s also a gaming element to the app: You win points for sending in reports, and the more mileage you rack up the more features you unlock. Occasionally, a local deal will pop up on the Waze map, like a soda for 75 cents at the gas station you’re approaching.

In my experience, almost every report of a police officer or a car parked on the shoulder of the highway was accurate. If the report was inaccurate, I could say the cop or the car was no longer there, or I could send a report of my own.

Since all of this activity can be distracting, Waze has taken steps to keep users from typing while driving. It wouldn’t let me enter in an address unless I indicated I was a passenger (although, technically, a driver could easily lie and tap the button that says they’re a passenger).

The app has a motion-controlled input feature as well. By hovering my hand over the app’s screen, I could activate voice command and search for directions that way.

Even as I tested other apps, I wanted to go back to Waze to see what other users had to report.

MotionX GPS Drive is made by California-based Fullpower. The company’s nav app, geared towards drivers, packs a lot of features and personality for a small price. Like Waze, MotionX GPS Drive has 3-D maps and voice-command options through the Siri button on the iPhone 5’s virtual keyboard. Unlike Waze, MotionX’s voice guidance is free only for the first 30 days, and after that requires a monthly ($3) or annual ($10) subscription.

A couple of voice options come with that subscription: Heather, a synthesized voice, and the natural-sounding Karen. The fun human-voice options, like the London East-Ender and the Cougar (“You win points for creativity,” the Cougar purred when I rerouted) are 99 cents each.

This app has a slightly confusing interface. In order to change my destination while in map view, I had to go from the map to Menu to Search to a wheel of options that separated “Search” from “Address” and included a tab for Wikipedia and my social networks. If I was in a real jam while driving, it wasn’t the best option for getting directions. 


Scout, made by Telenav, has a more straightforward interface, with big, bold lettering. A single search bar and a “Places” section pops up whenever you open the app, for quick access to local food stops or gas stations. The app was also super fast when it came to search results. It accurately auto-filled some of the addresses I typed in the search bar, and within a couple seconds, I had directions.

As much as I liked Scout’s design, I wouldn’t use it without Scout Plus. For now, the company is offering the $10 Scout Plus subscription for free, trying to lure in customers.

Scout Plus enables turn-by-turn voice directions and other features (after using Scout Plus, though, I kind of wished I wasn’t getting the voice directions: Scout’s combination of a human voice with a synthesized voice can be jarring.) Scout Plus also offers regional, downloadable maps, so even if I lost my data connection and took a wrong turn, Scout would adjust and send me in the right direction.

Many navigation apps promise offline directions, which means they’ll still show a map when your phone has lost its data connection. But that usually depends on whether you’ve preloaded the map before you lost your connection. Others will continue to guide you using your smartphone’s built-in GPS if you stay the course, but if you make a wrong turn, you’re out of luck.

One drawback of these apps is that they’ll drain your iPhone’s battery, as I quickly learned, so for long trips it’s essential to bring a car charger or an iPhone power pack. Otherwise, you might end up doing what I did — relying on a laptop for backup power, or stopping somewhere to ask a real, live human being whether you’re headed the right way.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121001/with-apples-maps-misstep-other-nav-apps-get-their-turn/feed/ 13 http://allthingsd.com/20120928/apple-here-are-some-map-apps-that-actually-work/ http://allthingsd.com/20120928/apple-here-are-some-map-apps-that-actually-work/#comments Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:24:43 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=255337 When Tim Cook said this morning that Apple is doing everything it can to make its not-quite-ready-for-primetime Maps app better, he took the unusual step of directing frustrated users to alternative applications and Web-based services from the company’s rivals. Now the company has gone a step further and begun promoting those alternatives on the iTunes App Store.

This morning, a new “Featured” category appeared in the App Store: “Find maps for your iPhone/iPad.” It showcases mapping apps from MapQuest, Microsoft’s Bing, Waze and TeleNav, among others, and it’s being promoted on the front page of the storefront. Apple has also posted a new page on its Web site explaining how to add Web site icons for Google and Nokia maps to an iOS device.

Another unusual move. Unprecedented, too. But it’s a very savvy one from a PR standpoint. It reinforces the idea that the company cares about the user experience and makes Cook’s apology that much more genuine. It also might go a long way toward stanching defections to alternative platforms with strong mapping solutions. And while it doesn’t make the pain of this particular debacle any easier to bear for Apple, the fact that the company is taking a cut of the sales on the mapping apps it’s recommending certainly doesn’t hurt any.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120928/apple-here-are-some-map-apps-that-actually-work/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120928/tim-cook-on-apple-maps-we-are-extremely-sorry/ http://allthingsd.com/20120928/tim-cook-on-apple-maps-we-are-extremely-sorry/#comments Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:53:02 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=255206 Here’s how seriously Apple is taking criticism of MappleGate: Via a public statement on the company’s Web site, an incredibly rare admission of fallibility from CEO Tim Cook, which includes an apology:

To our customers,
At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

We launched Maps initially with the first version of iOS. As time progressed, we wanted to provide our customers with even better Maps including features such as turn-by-turn directions, voice integration, Flyover and vector-based maps. In order to do this, we had to create a new version of Maps from the ground up.

There are already more than 100 million iOS devices using the new Apple Maps, with more and more joining us every day. In just over a week, iOS users with the new Maps have already searched for nearly half a billion locations. The more our customers use our Maps the better it will get and we greatly appreciate all of the feedback we have received from you.

While we’re improving Maps, you can try alternatives by downloading map apps from the App Store like Bing, MapQuest and Waze, or use Google or Nokia maps by going to their websites and creating an icon on your home screen to their web app.

Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.

Tim Cook Apple’s CEO

Note that Cook doesn’t blame Google for any of his problems. But he does recommend Google’s Web-based version of its maps service as one of several alternatives iPhone users could try, along with Microsoft’s Bing and AOL’s MapQuest.

In some ways this is comparable to Apple’s response to AntennaGate two years ago, when then-CEO Steve Jobs held a rare press conference to address complaints about the iPhone 4’s performance.

That time around, Apple also admitted that its phone was not perfect, and offered to give iPhone 4 owners $15 each, or a free case. But Jobs also argued every phone maker suffered from similar problems, and that the company really hadn’t heard many complaints, anyway. This time around, Cook is much more contrite.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120928/tim-cook-on-apple-maps-we-are-extremely-sorry/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120927/microsoft-aligns-with-klout-makes-strategic-investment-and-integrates-into-bing/ http://allthingsd.com/20120927/microsoft-aligns-with-klout-makes-strategic-investment-and-integrates-into-bing/#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2012 19:37:31 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=254998 Starting today, Bing will use Klout to sort through which people to highlight in its social search offerings. Microsoft has made a strategic investment in Klout and signed a “multi-year agreement” to integrate the two services. Klout said it will also factor in the number of times a person has been searched for on Bing when it measures online influence.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120927/microsoft-aligns-with-klout-makes-strategic-investment-and-integrates-into-bing/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120921/what-will-marissa-do-yahoo-ceo-zeroes-in-on-search-while-her-ad-team-eyes-tech-upgrade-options/ http://allthingsd.com/20120921/what-will-marissa-do-yahoo-ceo-zeroes-in-on-search-while-her-ad-team-eyes-tech-upgrade-options/#comments Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:27:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=252684

It’s been nice to see all the euphoria at Yahoo about free food and Apple iPhones kicking it up a notch.

But, purple people, guess what? Them’s just your basic table stakes in Silicon Valley these days and pretty much everyone else has had such perks for a long while now.

Thus, as nice as it is to drink your coconut water gratis, after two months in charge, it’s long past time to focus on what new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is up to besides making much-needed but obvious cultural changes at the troubled Internet giant.

She’s been busy with the expected listening tour of employees and also outside tech players — such as former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel — which is a textbook stop in the turnaround playbook.

Now comes the hard part: Actually beginning to make the significant decisions about how she’s going to turn around Yahoo and what the key issues of strategic focus need to be.

In a series of recent meetings, according to numerous sources inside the company, Mayer has begun to outline what those are to top staff.

Not surprisingly, they are many of the same thorny issues that Yahoo has been facing for a long time and which center primarily on making the company relevant again in a wide number of ways.

I’ll get to many of them over the next week in a series of What Will Marissa Do? posts — including looking closely at her new hires, when and how Mayer will deal with inevitable layoff decisions facing the company, where the sale of Yahoo! Japan stands and, finally, what she’s cooking up for key Yahoo products.

But the focus has to fall first of all on search and advertising, the two arenas that Mayer has been studying most closely, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

That has included a recent meeting and numerous discussions with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about improving Yahoo’s search advertising partnership, said sources at both companies.

That deal has been largely disappointing since it was struck under the regime of ousted CEO Carol Bartz several years ago.

Many reasons are given for the poor performance of the entire arrangement, including lack of improvement of cost per click and share growth for both parties. That means bid density and numbers of advertisers remain too low, especially compared to Google’s offering of access to a larger, more active and lucrative market.

Simply put, despite massive spending by Microsoft on search, users and advertisers get significantly better results overall with the search leader Google.

(You can read a great piece by Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan from last year, which exhaustively looked at the issues until then.)

The irony abounds that it’s up to Mayer to fix this problem of improving revenue per search with Ballmer, since she has been among the executives who have made Google the search behemoth it has become.

Her particular expertise has been on search experience for consumers, which is just the area that Yahoo desperately needs to improve after handing over technology duties to Microsoft.

That move was controversial at the time and some feel it was a big mistake. But, most also think there is no going back at this point, given the enormous cost of running a serious search enterprise.

Such an idea is still being raised inside Yahoo, although it seems more nostalgic than a realistic possibility, given the enormous price and, more importantly, the departure of the company’s core search engineers in recent years.

That doesn’t mean Yahoo under Mayer can’t be key to helping solve Microsoft’s search tech problems. She certainly knows the entire arena, which has already given Yahoo increased credibility among Microsoft’s search engineers.

“None of Yahoo’s many CEOs knew anything about search technology and that’s certainly not the case here with Mayer,” said one person close to the situation at Microsoft. “When she walks in, she instantly has status among the geeks as someone who knows what she’s talking about.”

It still may be a losing battle, due to Google’s overwhelming dominance, but if anyone at Yahoo can spot areas of even small improvement — which can yield big returns — it could be Mayer.

In addition, she can spearhead Yahoo’s own efforts to reverse — or perhaps simply stop — search market share declines via delivering a better consumer offering.

That’s still heavy lifting, no matter the exec, since both Microsoft’s Bing and Google are better equipped to win here, too.

“It hard to imagine we are going to slow down in any way,” said one former colleague of Mayer’s at Google to me recently in a rather ominous tone. “We’re only going to get more competitive.”

Pressure much?

And more: Mayer is under a time limit, since guaranteed payments Microsoft agreed to pay Yahoo for the shortfalls on what was promised will be running out next year. The pair has renegotiated that deal before, and it will likely have to do so again.

Of course, Mayer could try to walk and threaten to take Yahoo’s search business elsewhere, a move that former CEO Scott Thompson was mulling before his ouster.

That’s not a surprising ploy, except it is probably impossible to pull off, a fact acknowledged by top Yahoo execs.

“It might feel good to say we have options in search,” said one person close to the situation. “But that ship sailed years ago.”

Indeed, especially since Google is the only choice of possible alternate partners and such a move is rife with major obstacles.

There is the issue of the contract with Microsoft, which could lead to a potentially explosive legal struggle Yahoo can ill afford.

“They can try to get out of the deal,” said one high-ranking person at the software giant. “But that’s a lot easier threatened than done.”

And, there is the clear regulatory hairball any search hook-up between Google and Yahoo would lead to.

That’s happened before, which Mayer knows well since she was a top exec in Google’s business when it tried to partner with Yahoo as a way to prevent Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for the company.

While times might have changed, Google is currently facing a likely battle with the Federal Trade Commission over its powerful search business, and trying to get Yahoo’s business now is a non-starter.

Thus, finally fixing the Microsoft partnership is key to Mayer’s success since it represents a little over one-third of revenue of Yahoo (see the chart below).

The bigger part of Yahoo’s business, as you can also see from the chart, has been display revenues. And that, too, has been a sorry tale of declines and ever more disappointing results.

A report by eMarketer on display market share had this depressing chart for Yahoo:

As is clear, the march downward for one-time leader Yahoo has been swift, and the prospects for the future are worse as Google and Facebook vie for leadership.

The reasons for this have been myriad, but Mayer has apparently decided that it’s been due in large part to the broken Yahoo ad tech platforms and their ever weaker performance.

As we have previously reported, she has determined that it’s now time to invest in improving them, both by funding internally and external acquisitions.

For that, she has formed a tight group of execs to scan the landscape for tasty and innovative treats for Yahoo to gobble up.

That includes: Scott Burke, SVP of Yahoo’s advertising and data platforms; Brian Silver, who runs the company’s Right Media Exchange; Xuhui Shao, a key engineering VP under Burke; and Mark Morrissey, the longtime tech exec who previously ran the company’s search business and was key to integrating the Microsoft search deal into place.

The cerebral Burke especially has been pushing ad platform improvement for a while and finally seems to have won the battle against detractors of the big and possibly grandiose plan by appealing to Mayer’s interest in not giving up.

Thus, the tabling of plans by Thompson, as well as interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, to outsource some of the automated parts of the display business to Google.

Those talks were very serious, as well as others to sell off Right Media, but they are done for now.

One major issue — the people in charge of the ad platform turnaround could also be seen (and most definitely are) as mired in Yahoo’s legacy of lackluster results and poor performance.

“It is kind of funny that the guys responsible for the decline now have the responsibility for fixing it,” said one source at Yahoo.

It’s a fair point to be made.

But that’s water under the bridge, apparently, since the group has been making the rounds, helped by Yahoo’s M&A execs, with a wide range of companies in many different ad tech area being considered (and some dismissed), including: Mediaocean, Turn, Criteo, PubMatic and Millennial Media.

Millennial is the most interesting, because it is a mobile ad play, where Yahoo is exactly nowhere (to be fair, less than nowhere) after years of botched efforts.

As with other companies, this is a critical arena for Yahoo, and yet one more that Mayer needs to focus on.

Lastly, Mayer has to make sure Yahoo’s premium display business remains strong. This is much more based on relationships with large advertisers than on major sponsorship and branding offerings, as well as creating consumer products and content that is appealing to marketers.

This area is now headed up by former Google exec Michael Barrett, who has publicly said he was staying put for now at Yahoo as its chief of revenue.

In fact, because he is in charge of all sales, he occupies the second slot under Mayer on Yahoo’s now strangely configured, punctuation-impaired and information-free management page.

But numerous sources inside and outside Yahoo said Barrett has also told many people that he is still not fully committed to staying in the role for the long haul.

If he eventually gets a lucrative exit package — something the new boss is not being very generous with overall, said sources — that will mean Mayer will need a high-profile and well-regarded ad exec to replace him; sources said Mayer has already begun reaching out to some candidates.

The pickings are slim, with only a few names on the list of those capable of taking on such a job. That includes: Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford, who was also a former top Yahoo exec; Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi; OWN’s Kathleen Kayse; MLB.com’s Bob Bowman; and any number of Google execs.

In that regard, as with all the other search and advertising overhaul efforts at Yahoo, it is a matter of attracting serious talent into the company going forward.

More on that — and more — to come.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120921/what-will-marissa-do-yahoo-ceo-zeroes-in-on-search-while-her-ad-team-eyes-tech-upgrade-options/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120908/bing-not-google-will-power-search-on-amazons-new-kindle-fires/ http://allthingsd.com/20120908/bing-not-google-will-power-search-on-amazons-new-kindle-fires/#comments Sat, 08 Sep 2012 15:00:09 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=248834 Google’s Android mobile operating system might power Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablets, but that’s no guarantee that Google will be the default search provider on those devices.

Because for its new Kindle Fires — all of them — Amazon confirmed to AllThingsD that it has opted to go with Microsoft’s Bing as a default search engine, ousting Google from the spot it claimed on the first-generation Fire. Users can still switch their device’s default search to another provider, but the first search brand they’ll see is Bing.

And that’s a significant victory for Microsoft.

Remember, the Fire HD is not only Amazon’s marquee hardware offering, it’s a marquee service as well. And given the aggressive pricing the retailer has brought to its next generation tablets, it’s likely to sell quite a few of them this holiday season.

Which means Bing, Microsoft’s upstart search engine, stands to gain a fair bit of exposure in the months ahead. And while Microsoft is almost certainly paying for that privilege — indeed, the search deal it inked with Amazon may even play a role in the Kindle HD’s aggressive pricing — that will be money well spent if Bing sees a decent boost in market share from it. More so, if other hardware makers follow Amazon’s lead.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120908/bing-not-google-will-power-search-on-amazons-new-kindle-fires/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120822/bing-integrates-quora-questions-into-social-sidebar/ http://allthingsd.com/20120822/bing-integrates-quora-questions-into-social-sidebar/#comments Wed, 22 Aug 2012 19:13:42 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=244066 Bing, Microsoft’s search engine product, is integrating with question-and-answer site Quora, Microsoft announced on Wednesday. The partnership features results from top Quora users in Bing’s social sidebar search results. Bing also recently integrated Foursquare results into its social sidebar, and already has deep Facebook integration.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120822/bing-integrates-quora-questions-into-social-sidebar/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120718/bing-deepens-social-ties-with-foursquare-tips-integration/ http://allthingsd.com/20120718/bing-deepens-social-ties-with-foursquare-tips-integration/#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2012 19:50:22 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=231518 Two months after launching a more social version of its Bing search engine, Microsoft on Wednesday added Foursquare integration. Now after completing a Bing search for a particular business or place of interest, any tips and recommendations posted on Foursquare will appear in Bing’s social sidebar. The update comes after Google’s recent similar Zagat integration with search and its relaunch of Places, now dubbed Google+ Local.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120718/bing-deepens-social-ties-with-foursquare-tips-integration/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120713/microsoft-launches-bing-fund-names-rahul-sood-to-run-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20120713/microsoft-launches-bing-fund-names-rahul-sood-to-run-it/#comments Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:39:28 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=229876 Software giant Microsoft today launched an angel investment and business incubator. It will be called the Bing Fund, named, obviously, for its search engine.

The plan is to offer U.S.-based early-stage companies an opportunity to work at a Microsoft building in Bellevue, Wash., for at least four months. In addition to an investment, the selected start-up will get access to a lot of Microsoft technology. Here’s the nut graf on that subject from Microsoft’s announcement:

As a startup in Bing Fund, you will receive subsidized usage of unique APIs from Bing’s data ecosystem and the opportunity to access certain technology assets developed by Microsoft Research. Bing Fund team members who specialize in design, engineering, marketing, and building businesses will be on hand to support every step of the way, and if you have a particular technical or business challenge, we’ll connect you with the right Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). Additionally, we’ll help with funding, by offering a convertible note and making introductions to strategic investors. Your IP and product, of course, remain yours, even if we give input and assistance.

The other big news is that Rahul Sood, the founder of VooDooPC, the small Canadian maker of super-tricked-out gaming PCs, is joining Microsoft specifically to work at the Bing Fund. Sood announced the move on his personal blog today:

Raising money is easy — the amount of time and energy we’re going to dedicate to each startup in our program is worth more than any dollar amount we could throw at them, which is why we’re choosing to incubate fewer than a dozen startups at a time. When one graduates we’ll take on another.

So now I’m working as an entrepreneur inside a company that has tremendous resources and impact. We get the best of both worlds. Our program is tapping the creative energy of startups, small and agile risk takers and we’re backing that creative energy with the vast experience Microsoft employees have in design, technology development, and business strategy. Many great things will happen.

Sood sold VooDooPC to Hewlett-Packard around the time that other small gaming PC outfits were being acquired. Another similar deal that comes to mind is Dell’s purchase of Alienware. Sood stayed on at HP as CTO of global gaming, and also served as something of an evangelist for webOS after HP’s acquisition of Palm, until he resigned suddenly late in 2010. He later explained why: He realized that HP “wasn’t the right place for me.” It will be interesting to see if Sood can be happy inside another big company.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120713/microsoft-launches-bing-fund-names-rahul-sood-to-run-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120702/microsoft-writing-off-nearly-all-of-the-6-3-billion-it-paid-for-aquantive/ http://allthingsd.com/20120702/microsoft-writing-off-nearly-all-of-the-6-3-billion-it-paid-for-aquantive/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 20:43:07 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=226936

Image via ARENA Creative

Microsoft said on Monday that it is taking a $6.2 billion non-cash charge to account for its disappointing 2007 acquisition of Internet advertising firm aQuantive.

That’s a huge charge — but even more significant when one considers what Microsoft paid for aQuantive: $6.3 billion.

“While the aQuantive acquisition continues to provide tools for Microsoft’s online advertising efforts, the acquisition did not accelerate growth to the degree anticipated, contributing to the write down,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft noted that its Bing market share has been growing as has the amount of revenue it gets per search. Nonetheless, Microsoft said that “while the Online Services Division business has been improving, the company’s expectations for future growth and profitability are lower than previous estimates.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120702/microsoft-writing-off-nearly-all-of-the-6-3-billion-it-paid-for-aquantive/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120612/remember-qwiki-it-will-now-appear-on-millions-of-bing-search-results/ http://allthingsd.com/20120612/remember-qwiki-it-will-now-appear-on-millions-of-bing-search-results/#comments Tue, 12 Jun 2012 14:00:18 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=219183 Qwiki, the start-up that turns reference materials into interactive videos, has scored a deal to be featured in Bing search results.

You’ll be forgiven if you forgot about Qwiki — after launching as a somewhat hard-to-categorize start-up more than a year ago, the company had gone quiet. This Bing deal has been in the works for more than a year, said Qwiki CEO Doug Imbruce, and it just took a long while to come to fruition.

The Bing partnership is similar to the Qwiki you may remember: Listen to Wikipedia entries read out loud while you look at related pictures and videos and clickable maps. Playable Qwikis will show up below millions of Wikipedia entries in Bing search results. Eventually, they may appear more broadly. For now, they are English-only and will play on some mobile devices.

Qwiki is also branching out in a couple more directions, with its interactive story-creation tools as the common element. First, it just announced a deal with ABC News to feature Qwikis created by the news team within stories. And second, it is giving everyone access to its Web-based Qwiki creation tool, encouraging them to create how-to guides and other content.

On the Web, the original Qwiki is now shelved away at a separate page, qwiki.com/reference.

Qwiki has raised $10.5 million, mostly from individuals like Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin; last year, it relocated to New York from San Francisco.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120612/remember-qwiki-it-will-now-appear-on-millions-of-bing-search-results/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120531/in-an-age-of-digital-identity-ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-calls-for-privacy-by-design/ http://allthingsd.com/20120531/in-an-age-of-digital-identity-ftc-chairman-jon-leibowitz-calls-for-privacy-by-design/#comments Thu, 31 May 2012 17:31:33 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=213591

Jon Leibowitz is no newcomer to Washington. He has been at the Federal Trade Commission since 2004, dealing with antitrust issues at a national level.

But his job looks much different today than it did eight years ago. Facebook and Google have grown into juggernauts of the Internet — Facebook holds your years of status updates, location data and photos; Google has your trove of Google account data, including years of search queries. They’re two of a few Silicon Valley giants who have singularly formed the concept of identity in the digital age. And it’s Leibowitz’s job to make sure these big boys are playing by the rules.

Leibowitz discussed a few of his organization’s stances on privacy, market competition and other topics in conversation with Walt Mossberg at our D: All Things Digital conference on Thursday.

There’s the good news: Leibowitz says that inside the Beltway, issues surrounding privacy aren’t divided between the red and the blue. “The FTC is about as bipartisan as you can get,” he said. “It happens to be a small oasis of bipartisanship in Washington.”

And, for the most part, the FTC under Leibowitz has made it clear at a high level what privacy norms it expects from Internet companies: Transparency, easily digestable privacy statements and general product design that takes privacy into account from the get-go.

Take EULAs and privacy policies, for instance. They’ve got to get better, less bogged down with pages upon pages of legalese, and more pointed in their stance. “They should be sort of like a nutrition guide on the side of a cereal box at the supermarket,” Leibowitz said.

There’s also privacy by design, which includes a better, more upfront position from companies on “do not track” — the feature that allows users to opt out of allowing companies to track their information across Web sites. As the FTC called for this feature in a recent report, and more online movements from organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation support the notion, it is gaining some traction — Microsoft, Mozilla and Google have all reconfigured their browsers to support the DNT header. And companies like Twitter are trumpeting their own participation in the DNT initiatives.

Leibowitz argues that this isn’t something that the private sector should be worried about — it may even strengthen the online economy. “The more protection these consumers have, the more they trust it, and the more commerce they do,” Leibowitz said.

But there’s a rub for these Internet companies: “There’s a feeling of ‘I want to do the right thing but don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage,’” Leibowitz said.

Leibowitz also touched on the other half of his job — policing the Valley giants on anticompetitive actions — though he danced around some of the more sensitive, timely issues. The FTC’s ongoing investigation of Google was an untouchable topic, as the agency is in a quiet period. But, as an audience member noted, the FTC’s recent high-profile hire of star litigator Beth Wilkinson could signal impending legal action against Google.

“It just means that we have very competent counsel that can go toe to toe with their very competent counsel,” Leibowitz said.

Full D10 Conference Coverage

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