Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

Microsoft Online Games

No, this is not about the X Box kind of games. It is about Microsoft ‘s tactical shift in the online space from going it alone, and building stuff itself, –to partnering, and sometimes investing and exiting business.

In Blogs- It recently announced a migration of MS Live Spaces to WordPress.com – It gives Automattic 30 million more users- no small change consider there were 26 million existing WP users.

Microsoft Messenger, which is the oldest online app in the suite, now provides instant messaging services to about 350 million users, and from now on Windows Live Writer works specifically with the WordPress.com blog service by default. Hopefully Skype, and Google Voice will show MS the way to monitize that business app yet.

Google buying blogger-blogspot seems to have done little, but given Biz Stone room to create another content disruption-Twitter.

With the round of lawsuits by proxy, in Android -Motorola, or for acquisitions – MS is just doing what Marc Anderseen (who’s apparently a better VC than Paul Allen was), Sun and co did to it in the nineties.

Google seems to be regretting putting a spade in the Yahoo acquisition- that would have tied up a big chunk of Idle MS cash- leaving it little room for niche investments (like the 250 mill that helped Facebook ramp up in time).

The real surprise here could be Apple- it has shown little interest in cloud computing- and it seems to be testing the waters with Ping. But Apple sure smells competition- and Android is doing to Iphone what Windows did to the Mac in the early 1990’s.

Google lacks presence in online gaming (despite it’s own Zynga investment)- and needs to start monetizing properties like Android OS (say 10$ for every phone license ??), Google Maps (as an app for GPS) and Google Voice. Indeed it may be time for the big G to start thinking of spinning off atleast some products- earning better returns, while retaining control (dual stock splits) and killing those anti trust lawyer fees forever.

As the Ancient Chinese said, May you live in interesting times. Fun to watch the online games people play.

 

 

IBM Business Analytics Forum

IBM Cognos is about to be launced next month, and Cognos Forum and SPSS Directions have merged to form Business Analytics Forum.

Cognos and SPSS bundled together is a formidable software package for business analysts.

See http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/2010-conference/business-analytics/

Cloudera and Aster Data partner up

Basically making it easier for data to move between the two systems Hadoop (Cloudera) and Aster’s Analytics (MapReduce/SQL)-

From the press release-http://goo.gl/vgsr

today announced an agreement that unites Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop (CDH) with Aster Data nCluster. The integration enables customers to leverage MPP platforms for large-scale data processing, management and analytics across structured and unstructured formats to analyze massive amounts of data for deeper business insight.

Cloudera is building a massively parallel, two-way connector for high-speed movement of data between CDH and Aster Data nCluster. The connector will be supported as part of Cloudera Enterprise.

Learning Hadoop

Curious on learning hadoop- a hot resume skill

Try

http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-training/#certification

Cloudera Certification for Hadoop

Cloudera Certification establishes you as a trusted and valuable resource for those working with Hadoop. Whether your company is just looking into the technology or your customers are asking for help, Cloudera Certification demonstrates your ability to solve problems using Hadoop.

  • Consultants, developers and technical leaders can use Cloudera Certification to demonstrate their experience with Hadoop.
  • Employers can use Cloudera Certification to identify candidates for new jobs or internal promotions, as well as ensure team members share a common knowledge base.
  • Customers can reduce risk by relying on contractors and suppliers who retain current Cloudera Certification for their personnel.

If you’d like to obtain Cloudera Certification for Developers or Administrators

http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-training/#certification

The auto-suggest link/tags for WP.com blogs

WordPress.com blogs have a great new option for generating tags, and links and thus improving their search engine optimization for posts.

Just go to Users-Personal Settings- and check the options shown. Thats it every time you write a post it suggests links and tags. Links are helpful for your readers (like Wikipedia links to understand dense technical jargon, or associated websites). Tags help to classify your contents so that all visitors to the web site including spiders ,search engines and your readers can search it better.

The bad thing is I need to go back to all 1025 posts on this site and auto generate tags for the archives ! Oh well. Great collaboration between zementa and Automattic for this new feature.

Google Instant could kill Black-Hat SEO

Google Instant is a relatively newer feature in Google Search Engine- it suggests websites at each type of keyword rather than wait for you to type the whole keyword.

The impact on user experience is incredible- rather than search or scroll through the results- you are more likely to click on the almost one of the ten websites you would have seen by the time you finished typing- or just clicking on the relevant ad (which probably changes on the right margin as fast as the websites below)

This spells a death for all those who indulged in black hat SEO– or link building, link exchanging- as these techniques pushed up your rank in search page only incrementally and rarely to the top 2-3 for a keyword.

Remember the size of the screen is such that each Google instant snapshot basically shows you or rather makes you focus on the top ranked search (and then presumably type on to get a newer result- rather than scroll down as the case was before).

It would be interesting to see or research the effect of keywords in the auction pricing, as well as compare those keyword pricing with Bing.com- Maybe there should be a website api tool for advertisers -like Adwords Instant that would show them the price instantly of keywords,comparison with Bing AND the search engine results for the keyword in a visual way.

Anyways- it is a incredible innovation and it is good Google is back to the math after the flings with being “Mad Men” of advertising.

and yes- I heard there is a new movie coming- it is called “The Search Engine” 🙂

An interesting web hack is Google Images Instant athttp://hartlabs.net/instant/images/