Posts Tagged ‘CNET’

All posts tagged CNET.

Posted: by carlacthompson on April 1st, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Categorized: Observations, Startups

It’s time for another look at the womenfolk and what makes them tick, technologically speaking. We return to this topic often on The Guidewire, most recently when Ask.com decided to paint their search engine pink and call it targeted. Women are a lucrative yet elusive demographic and the entrants in this space always seem to launch with the same messaging: We’re different! Women are complicated! We get that! In the end, though, the sites all seem pretty much the same – horoscopes, fashion tips, and recipes packaged in a magazine-style format that continues to look dated in the face of current design trends.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with Deborah Piscione, CEO and founder of BettyConfidential, a destination site targeted to women. I’d been contemplating my post about that site when the news broke yesterday of Yahoo’s foray into the space, Shine. (More on BettyConfidential momentarily.) Shine comes equipped with all the obligatory “We’re different!” messaging. According to their site, Shine wants “…to avoid all of the common categories that advertisers or marketers tend to put us in.” Great, I’m on board. But perhaps you could better achieve that by emblazoning your homepage with a headline other than, “Fancy lingerie you can actually afford.”

Epicenter‘s Betsy Schiffman hit the nail on the head in her review:

Shine… will cover parenting, sex and love, healthy living, food, career and money, entertainment, fashion, beauty, home life and astrology — pretty much everything we hate about women’s magazines.

Amy Iorio, general manager of Lifestyles at Yahoo, misses the head, the nail, and the entire carpenter’s bench in an interview with CNET:

This is really a key audience for Yahoo. We’ve been calling them ‘chief household officers’ internally.

This is the problem. You’re trying to recreate Good Housekeeping online. It will work for women who read Good Housekeeping. But it will not work for the rest of us. Most of the women I know don’t like women’s magazines. They’re fluffy, condescending, and poorly written . (Lip gloss reviews, anyone?) So the logical solution would be to build a site that strays as far from the magazine path as possible. Yahoo obviously doesn’t agree with this, as they’ve loaded Shine with content and advisors from Conde Nast and Hearts publications. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted: by chrisshipley on February 11th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Exits, Observations

Even as Yahoo! rebuffed Microsoft’s proposal this morning, Microsoft announced this morning that it would acquire mobile software and services provider Danger Inc. (and in the process nix Danger’s plans to go public).
In the press release, Microsoft said the “acquisition will align Danger’s nearly 10 years of expertise in the mobile consumer space with Microsoft’s vision to provide innovative andcompelling mobile experiences to a growing base of customers.”
We first met Danger in early 2000 when my colleague Jim Forbes and I were putting together the DEMOmobile events. Danger introduced the Sidekick at DEMOmobile 2001. Meeting the company in their scrappy offices on University Ave., in Palo Alto, it was clear

Danger logo

to us that the future value of Danger wasn’t the Sidekick device or even the operating environment; it’s the applications and services that the device connects to that matter most. Microsoft seems to get that, too.

So concerns voiced in a c|net post about how Microsoft will reconcile the incompatible operating systems seem moot to us. Microsoft Windows Mobile has focused on the device, to the neglect of the services the device connects with. Danger provides an end-to-end infrastructure to deliver data and Internet services to consumers. Whether Microsoft adopts Danger’s OS or kills it is of little consequence. It’s the service infrastructure that matters and in acquiring Danger, Microsoft is acquiring the architecture, IP, and experienced engineers to extend Windows Mobile – or for that matter the Xbox and other device-centric operating platforms — from the device to the service layer.
We hope Microsoft also recognizes the value of Danger’s consumer-smart marketing organization. Danger has been successful in creating a hip brand that appeals to the iPod generation, a substantial market segment that Microsoft can’t seem to crack.

Posted: by carlacthompson on February 7th, 2008 | No Comments »

Categorized: Observations, Startups

Sometimes, my ego gets the better of me when I read an article like this. I morph into an immature teenager and must resist the urge to whine, “But I said that first!” I suppose I’ll take the path of a modern adult and blog about it instead – the 21st century method of whining, if you will.

Back in July of 2007, I wrote a market analysis for The Guidewire Report, snappily titled “You Can’t Spell Internet Without an ‘I’.” In it, I posited that the growing sector of recommendation “might very well be Web 3.0,” that “the era of the one-size-fits-all Web page was over” and the current Internet was being transformed into “an individually customizable Web.” If I really wanted to feed my ego, I could tell it that the Guardian writer was inspired by my lyrical prose. But of course I wasn’t the first to hypothesize that Web 3.0 is about personalization and recommendation and I won’t be the last.

At the time, Aggregate Knowledge, Loomia, and VortexDNA received mention as movers in the space. Since then, Aggregate Knowledge seems to have dropped off the radar a bit, while companies like Matchmine and Seethroo have offered their own takes on recommendation, as well as a fascinating service called Strings. Read the rest of this entry »