Joshua Saunders

Gmail Labs is supposed to open to the public tonight, actually a few hours ago, but I don’t see it yet.  Gmail Labs is an attempt to open up development of email apps, by allowing Google developers to use the general public as beta testers.  You will be able to play around and provide feedback on which ones you like and ultimately Google will decide which ones to implement.  Be on the lookout, should be coming to a Gmail screen near you very soon!

People are finally realizing that the results coming out of Google’s Search Engine for paid placements are low quality advertisements.  An article by Henry Blodget and the announcement by comScore of Google’s awful growth in paid clicks, should have investors worried.

U.S. paid-click growth in March was as bad as in February — up only 2.7% — rounding out a violent deceleration in Q1, says comScore (per Mark Mahaney at Citi). In all of Q1, Google’s U.S. paid clicks rose only 2% year-over-year versus 25% in Q4 and 48% in Q3.

According to Mark Mahaney at Citi, two factors are at play:

Potential Causes - Assuming the data is accurate, we could see two factors behind the Coverage Ratio decline:

1. Google’s ongoing efforts to improve both lead quality for advertisers and the user experience for searches.
2. A macroeconomic dampening of commercial queries by searchers [uh oh].

Deceleration Drivers - Consistent with 2 prior months, Paid Click growth deceleration to under 3% Y/Y was driven by another month of low-teens decline in Google’s Coverage Ratio and a low double-digit decline in Google’s Click Thru Rate offsetting the 33% Y/Y growth in March searches on Google’s U.S. Websites (an acceleration vs. roughly 30% Y/Y growth in February).

Facebook is deciding to give one to all facebook users.  for years we have relied on AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, or more recently GTalk.  Instant messenging applications have been available on facebook through the use of their open API, but facebook coming out with their own product effectively kills these other apps, some of which are VC funded startups.

Something I always say… every business has competition.  If you don’t have competition, maybe there is no market for it.  If there is a market, the competition is the status quo.  As basic microeconomics theory states, as firms see a profit in a given field, they will enter that field until no more economic profit exists.  This is a simple case of this.  Did these startups not expect facebook to enter the instant messenging realm?  I guess so.

Modu made big headlines today as they revealed their product, which has been top secret for months!  What’s the product you are asking?  It is actually really cool.  Imagine customizing your cell phone however you want.  Adding whatever features you want.  Changing the cover with the season, or adding a new music player.

The product is a tiny modular cell phone.  Smaller than an iPod Nano, but still has an LCD screen.  The Modu module comes with basic cell features to make calls, but users slip on “jackets” to give it the look, feel and function they want.  Three cell carriers have agreed to sell it in Israel, Italy and Russia.  No providers in the U.S. have been approchaed yet by the Israeli startup.

To me it appears to be a great feature, allowing people to personalize their cell phone even more.  Providers like the idea too.  Instead of coming to their store every two years when you renew their contract, you can now come in every three months to get a new jacket.

Modu founder Dov Moran talks about the company and the concept:

Michael Arrington was on Happy Hour (Fox Business Channel) yesterday talking about the Yahoo layoffs, upcoming recession and it’s affects on online advertising revenue, and availability of venture capital for new startups.  Interesting segment (he claims he was taken off guard on the topic because he was there to talk about the election, but he did alright).

It’s been speculated for months, the only thing in debate was the number.  Today Yahoo finally announced their layoffs… 1000.  This accounts for approximately 7% of the 14,300 employees at the Sunnyvale company.  The layoffs were announced after Yahoo reported a 23% drop in profit for the fourth quarter.  In turn, Yahoo shares dropped 10% in extended trading (announcement was made after the market closed).  Profit for all of 2007 fell 12% to $660mm.

I’m not going to lie, I am a big fan of Obama.  And whether you agree with me or not, it is clearly evident his supporters are using the net more than any other candidate.  Over the last few years, the role of bloggers and grassroots supporters has opened up a new medium for political campaigning.

A few days ago, Christopher Pedregal and Eric Park, two Stanford grad students, started the website YouBama.com.  The website allows users to upload videos talking about why they support Obama.  Viewers can rate videos up or down.  Nice and simple concept!

Semantic search companies have been clawing at the major engines and niche engines on sites related to travel.  Websites such as Semantinet.com, Powerset.com, TrueKnowledge.com, and now Circos.com try to provide more valuable information.

How they work:  The semantic engines browse the web for more in-depth information than regular search engines.  For instance, Circos has just come out in the hotel and restaurant categories, where you can search for places in a given location that have certain attributes.  I searched Chicago for trendy and cheap restaurants with a good ambience.  The first result is Quartino, which is a place I actually like (good work Circos!).  They take reviews from all over the web, aggregate the information into their own ratings and spit out the results.

I think semantic search is great, especially for finding restaurants.  But what these engines need to do is integrate with strategic partners that can find these useful.  Who is going to leave Orbitz or Travelocity or Hotels.com to go to another search engine?  Semantic search needs to be integrated into these sites, or places like OpenTable, if they really plan on getting the traffic they need and deserve.

It was revealed today that German entrepreneurs Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer have made an investment in facebook’s $15 billion valuation round.

Facebook has recently closed investments from Microsoft ($240 million) and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing ($60 million).  The funding round is still open, as confirmed by Techcrunch.  Facebook’s total funding to date is $338.2 million.

DocStoc is a startup that blends the same web 2.0 concepts we all love: social networking, user generated materials, and sharing… all around the niche of business documents and templates.

I recently signed up and have browsed around the site.  I must say, there are some very helpful resources on the website.  Everything from legal documents (incorporating, NDA’s, etc…) to sales documents, technology docs, and much, much more.  If you are looking for any type of document or template, this is a much more convenient method than using google and searching through crappy websites that make them look free and then ask you to pay at the last second.

As a business model, I’m not sure where I see this going; how will this be monetized?  It has a similiar feeling to LinkedIn, which is doing well, but is the target market here nearly as big?  What is going to encourage users to contribute material?  Will this just become a big repository of garbage documents (it almost already is in certain categories), making it impossible to find anything useful?