Posts Tagged ‘news’
Queen of the Net
Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker stole the show last week with her “State of the Web” presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Crowned “The Queen of the Net” in 1998 by Barron’s Magazine, Meeker started covering the nascent tech sector in the mid-eighties as an analyst with Solomon Brothers. Throughout the years, she has published a long list of research reports and leading insights into the future of technology — most notably, a 322 page tome titled “The Internet Report” Co-authored with Chris DePuy in 1995.
Successful stocks Meeker championed early on included Dell, Microsoft, Intuit, Netscape, AOL, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay and Google. Failed picks included AOL after its takeover of Time Warner, Excite@Home and drugstore.com. In 2004, Morgan Stanley (with Meeker as research analyst) served as lead manager for the initial public offering of Google. Recently named one of the 10 smartest people in tech by Fortune Magazine, Meeker is currently a managing director at Morgan Stanley and serves as head of the investment bank’s global technology research team.
The land grab for Internet access
Slide #10 suggests that Smartphones will pass PCs in 2012.
The topline data point shows that smartphone sales will outpace those of PC’s — both notebook and desktop computers combined — in two years, with more than 450 million smartphones projected to ship in 2012.
Apple iOS devices “ramping faster than any new thing”
The report shows that usage of Apple iOS devices — the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with 120 million users — has ramped up faster than any previous technology including NTT Docomos’s imode Web phones, the Netscape browser and AOL’s early dial-up Internet service.
The report also points to Apple and Google’s Android platform driving “excitement and momentum” in mobile, with their respective smartphone platforms together accounting for 37% share of the market.
It’s a Smartphone future
It’s increasingly clear that smartphones are here to stay as mainstream devices and the research underscores the necessity for organizations to understand essentials of the brave new mobile world. Fundamental themes of mobile application development, mobile advertising, mobile commerce and mobile website optimization should all be part of the mobile innovation strategy as the gap between PC’s and mobile closes over the next 12-24 months.
9/21/09 Google officially announces that meta keywords don’t impact ranking in Google
Matt Cutts just officially stated that Google does not use meta keywords to impact web sites’ rankings in Google. It has been widely known for a long time that meta keywords did next to nothing, if anything in Google. Cutts decided to make it official. I have always recommended to not use meta keyword tags on web sites because they are a waste of time and competitors can then see what keywords you are targeting. Purposely using meta keywords to trick your competitors into thinking you are targeting certain keywords is still an option I guess, but that seems like a waste of time as well. Any good competitor will be able to figure out the truth anyway, especially with tools like compete.com around.
9/17/09 Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz changes stance on paid links
After a lengthy period of pushing paid link services all over the SEOMoz web site, Rand Fishkin has decided to change his stance on paid links. That is, of course, paid links that are not properly deemed as advertisements and actually pass along PageRank. John Chow’s blog was targeted by Google for this practice awhile ago. As a result, he did not rank for his own name in Google for a long period of time. Google received a lot a negative response for this move from well-known bloggers and recently removed the punishment, allowing Chow to rank for his own name again.
Aaron Wall of SEOBook had some interesting thoughts on this move by Fishkin. Wall recently stated on his blog “If you philosophically didn’t believe in buying links then why would you spend $1,000,000+ building a web graph of link data? What good is researching all the link data if you take link buying off the table as one of the options? Most of the competing links that you can replicate will require some level of payment.”
7/29/09 Yahoo gives up on search, makes deal with Bing
While most of you already know about this, it is a major news item for the SEO industry in particular. This means no longer trying to rank in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Now there are only two major search engine you have to focus your SEO efforts on. I do not know how to feel about this at this time. I am curious however, to see what kind of market share Bing has in a year or so.
QuadsZilla at SEO Black Hat seems to be very excited about Bing. He recently wrote a post stating “We want Bing to succeed: we need a real challenger to Google’s monopoly” and even goes as far as to get a contact at Bing in order to “negotiate a deal to bring upwards of 10,000,000 new searchers per year to Bing.com.”