Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 18 May 2008 17:49:00 GMT
Just returned from a great week in Tel-Aviv (sadly, my bags are still in De-Gaullle 
), where me and a ‘small’ group of 11 people overcame the Relegence office in Tel-Aviv. So if you think I’ve been quiet last week thats why.
One of the most memorable parts was seeing a Irishman have a drink in a Irish pub, which is unheard of. I think we have a photo to proove it. It helped that it was right across the street from the hotel, and it closed @2am, when the others closed at 11pm.
On the business side, I think having these multi-office meetings are great, as you hardly get to see the people on the other end of the mailing list/conf call. Both sides now have a greater appreciation of what each other can do, and a couple of interesting uses of relegence’s technologies were dreamed up that wouldn’t have been possible without having the experts from both sides being in the same room.
Some of the interesting things that we heard this week:
Yahoo’s Geo-location ID (WOEID) – http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/ is an amazing thing that we will be looking at using if we can.
AOL’s money and finance channel (http://finance.aol.com/quotes/time-warner-inc/twx/nys) is now the #1 one ranked by comscore. Thanks to Relegence it has HUGE return visits and page views it’s related news widget gave!
Tags aol, relegence | no comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:57:00 GMT
locallucene, a Geographical searching plugin to lucene and solr is now powering our yellowpages site.
all the props should go to patrick, locallucene is his brainchild. .. if you use locallucene you can always send him a pizza.. as thanks
Posted in Development | Tags aol, locallucene, solr, yellowpages | 2 comments
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:33:00 GMT
AOL just released an internal performance tool called Pagetest.
It’s a IE plugin which breaks down how long the individual components take. very similar to ItScales stuff I did years ago. (but much better).
Gratz Dave, Carson, & Pat!
Posted in monitoring | Tags aol, performance | 1 comment
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 17 Nov 2005 04:40:00 GMT
AOL has just added 2 ‘buddies’ to my default group. a ‘shopping’ buddy, and a ‘movie’ buddy.
I can now type in the name of a movie (or a product like a printer) and AOL will give me some details about them.
Great Idea. I’d love to find out how many leads they generate by doing this.
Let’s hope the IM providers don’t get too excited/spammy and fill my buddy list with 100’s of bots.
Posted in Business Related | Tags aol, businessmodels, im | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:36:00 GMT
What was Microsoft thinking when it announced this deal?
If you belive the AOL buyout rumour where microsoft and Google+Comcast and potentially Yahoo are all vying to buy it this announcement makes no sense.
AOL currently has a 50m IM subscriber base, where both Yahoo and MSN has ve 25m a piece, and Google has 1m if it’s lucky.
So let’s imagine your a Google exec. you have a nice ad-revenue stream, and this GTalk thing is going to be a nice little earner if it could get some legs (user base)
Then on the grapevine you hear that AOL is up for sale, and MSN is interested.
now.. you think to yourself.. ok I could lose a bit of revenue, and the gtalk thing will be a bit harder now (Metcalfe’s network effect and all) but it is still doable…
and geess.. if we partner up with comcast we could make a offer as well, and get those 50m IM subscribers over to the ‘good’ side and they wouldn’t hurt our email user base either.. (and we can give the content stuff over to comcast who could make good use out of it). These users would make our dream come true.
So they make a matching bid. and the stories fly.
Now.. Imagine this exec’s horror when he finds that Yahoo + MSN are going to co-operate with IM.. He is seeing all his gtalk dream sink.. No one would be interested in it if Micrsoft buys AOL. They will all be using the other guys IM service and whatever VOIP solution they come up with..
All of a sudden this AOL deal got a lot more important for him. now it isn’t just a matter of losing 2.5-10% of it’s revenue base.. It is threatening it’s entry into the telco market. It NEEDS AOL even more now.. and it going to fight tooth and nail to get it.
If you were Microsoft why in heavens name would you want the other potential bidder to want AOL even more than it currently does?
Unless of course Microsoft + Yahoo don’t really want AOL in the first place, and are trying to get Google+Comcast to buy a really large lemon for a even bigger price.
Posted in Business Related | Tags aol, comcast, economics, google, microsoft, yahoo | no comments | no trackbacks