Last week The Globes’ Noa Parag interviewed ex-Yahoo CEO Terry Semel (he resigned in June 2007) Shimon Peres’ “President’s Conference” in Israel. Also on the panel was Sergey Brin, Susan Decker, Rupert Murdoch and Yossi Vardi.
Parag dug to try to get something juicy out of Semel on the Microsoft/Yahoo battle (this was right as Carl Icahn was making his effort to replace the Yahoo board public). The original interview is in Hebrew, but here are some of the translated highlights:
Parag: But you personally believe that Yahoo is worth more than $44B?
Semel: That question should be directed at Yahoo’s new managers. To Jerry Yang. They seem to think it’s worth more.
Parag: What’s your opinion about Icahn? It is an attempt to coup the Board of Directors?
Semel: I read about that as well. Icahn is very talented and intelligent, but I don’t know what intentions stand behind the stock buying.
At this point Semel requests to stop the interview for a moment. All these questions about Microsoft are making him feel uncomfortable, and he announces: “I’m not going to talk about the deal. Who should be talking about it is Yang or Susan Decker, the president. Certainly not me.”
Semel also says his departure was based on personal reasons:
Semel: When I began working in Yahoo, my family moved with me. Despite our efforts, our kids wanted to study in Los Angele, and I was forced to see my family and friends only on weekends. In the beginning I even enjoyed it, but knew that at some stage I’d want to go back home. At the time, the people that founded it wanted to get back to it, and that was the right opportunity to go back home and look for new opportunities.
On speculation that his exit was forced:
Semel: These rumors are not true. I told the Board several months in advance that I was going to announce my departure soon, and that I want to set out in a new direction. They offered that I stay as Chairman, and I did agree for a certain time, but at the end felt that I prefer to be an active player than a mentor. It was the right time for me to leave.
On Facebook’s valuation:
Parag: Is Facebook in your opinion worth $15 billion? Are these prices even logical?
Semel: I have no opinion about it. This is something Microsoft needs to decide on.
On future plans:
Parag: So what is Semel doing these days?
Semel: I’m busy mostly with in searching for interesting companies in order to purchase and invest in, and I’m certain that they’ll be heard of in the coming years. I also have time to play golf and do some sports.
This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.
MeeMix keeps plugging along on its journey to attract more users to its personalized Internet radio service. Today the company is adding a new feature which complements users’ radio stations with “twin” music video channels.
While Last.fm introduced video recommendations exactly a year ago, MeeMix thinks this will help make its service more attractive. The company has always felt its taste prediction technology is not strictly limited to audio, so from its perspective offering taste predictions for video is somewhat of a logical next step.
Enabling MeeMix’s video mode requires no setup at all. The feature leans on the taste selections existing users have already made when setting up their existing radio stations (i.e., music genres, artists and songs). Relevant music videos are then fetched from YouTube. Editing radio stations, for example adding a new artist, impacts the video selection immediately.
MeeMix fetches a wide range of videos—from official music videos, to very amateur material. Some users will find this quite entertaining. I for example had to stop writing this post mid-way to enjoy a vintage video of John Coltrane playing Naima.
The video sound quality falls below the audio stations’ 128 Kbps and that MeeMix cannot perform volume leveling on the YouTube videos.
MeeMix is trying to keep users engaged while circumventing licensing issues, royalty fees, and bandwidth costs. Since all the videos are streamed from YouTube, it is Google’s problem if any copyright issues arise. (This is a similar approach taken by music search engine Songza, which streams the audio from YouTube videos to create music playlists).
Will the video channels help MeeMix attract more users, or is it too much a a MeeToo service?
This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.
Visual search and image recognition is one of the holy grails of consumer Internet technologies. Picitup is jumping into the deep end of this space by announcing the launch of its public beta.
Unlike Like.com (formerly Riya) which focuses on likeness, Picitup focuses on attaining matching images. This differentiation is important as it sets the company on a completely different trajectory in terms of both offering quantifiable value to users, as well as delivering a business model at the end of the day.
An image search on Picitup beings with a textual search actually queried on Google or Yahoo. Picitup will display a set of results only from one of the two—the basis of the decision is the speed and quality of the results. The user can then select which image Picitup should fetch similar images for, or filter the results by Faces, Products, Landscapes and Color. The analysis is made in real time and is based on 100+ parameters including a propriety color space the company developed.
Erick recently wrote that:
It’s hard to compete in the search engine market, but one approach taken by several startups is to sit on top of the big search engines and try to improve their results or interface. Why reinvent the wheel when you can simply add new spokes?
From a practicality point-of-view, relying on the likes of Google and Yahoo makes sense, but it should be noted that they forbid the reordering of their results, a sticking point that surely has a negative effect on the quality of results Picitup ultimately delivers.
Picitup claims it shortens the number of pages needed for an image search from 10 to 2. However, from my experimentation its engine’s match reliability was shaky. Results were pretty good for Ford Focus, but not even close for this Running Shoe. Note that all images should theoretically correspond to the top left-hand image.
Another issue that left a sour taste in my mouth was CelebrityMatchUp, an attempt to add some light-hearted fun to the beta interface. The idea here is that users upload photos of individuals and have Picitup produce results of people they resemble. This doesn’t exactly work. For instance, consider that Michael Arrington’s photo brought back results that he resembles both Barack Obama and John McCain. Huh?
Erick Schonfeld’s photo results are also somewhat curious, although the bright side is that Erick’s wife should be delighted to know she married a Kevin Costner look-alike. For a company claiming its forté is in image matching, Picitup should not have opened this door.
Alon Atsmon, co-founder & CEO, believes the company’s technology is compelling enough to drive revenue both from ads and through licensing a white label version of the engine for integration into ecommerce sites.
True, my initial impressions of Picitup are not necessarily positive ones. However, considering Atsmon is a serial entrepreneur I’ll remain optimistic and wait for Picitup to iterate a couple of more times before I cement my judgment.
This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.
Many of us think we know what’s going to happen to the stock market. Few of us actually do. MarketGuru enables the more talented investors to reap the benefits of their predictive capacities and help others along the way.
While many social investment sites rank members almost entirely on their portfolio yields, the MarketGuru experience centers on trust. Your goal is to establish yourself as a “guru” - a member that other investors will turn to for advice. Gurus post their trade activity and motivations, which are then relayed to their followers through email. These followers can pay a premium of $30 per month to have messages from a maximum of three gurus delivered to them so they can execute their own transactions under similar market conditions.
The site currently offers no options for actual trading - instead, everything is carried out in a self-reported portfolio. MarketGuru hopes to implement real trading at some point in the future but it is still a long ways off.
Gurus are paid $5 per month for each follower they have, providing an incentive for them to attract and take care of their supporters. This meager bonus seems pretty lousy when compared to the vast sums of money that stand to be lost or gained on the market. I suspect that a few all-star gurus who collect hundreds of followers will do quite well for themselves, but most people will be left with just some additional pocket change.
MarketGuru’s concept has promise but the site is entering a space with a number competitors who provide very similar offerings. These include Covestor, CakeFinancial, SocialPicks, and Mint, which has just introducing investment tracking. That said, the social investment space can certainly support more than a few competitors, so MarketGuru has a fighting chance (especially with people who don’t actually want to play with real money).
This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.
Part III of DH Consulting’s business plan series is now available.
In this installment, Doron discusses what topics should be covered under the Market Analysis section of the business plan.
Quick update on the Meetup being organized by DH Consulting… The panel of experts has been finalized–here it is:
- Doron Habshush – Group leader and CEO of DHConsulting
- Joeri Kreisberg, ADV. Yigal Arnon & Co.
- Ron Porat, Hacktics CEO. Security Panelist
- Roi Carthy - Internet Investment Principal, L Capital Partners
- Technology panelist, Shlomy Gantz, BlueBrick Inc CEO
- Financial panelist, Tal S. Karmon- KarmonTax CEO
For more info, go here.
Hey all you iPhone owners… Looks like an iPhone consumer network is launching… Check out: TheBlackApp.com
The ease of comparing prices on the Internet has done a lot to do away with major price differences between individual items at retailers, whether online or off. But where they still get you is when you buy many items from the same store and you throw in the high-margin coffee with the cut-rate shampoo. Higher-priced single items, such as a digital camera or an MP3 player, lend themselves more to online research. Finding the best deal is just a matter of selecting your preferred comparison shopping site (Shopping.com, mySimon, etc.). But what happens when you want to compare an entire cart of groceries across several merchants? Put simply, you are out of luck. Unless of course you happen to be living in the UK and making good use of mySupermarket.
mySupermarket, which has been around since 2006, claims to be the first comparison service that allows users to compare a cart of multiple items across retailers—in its case, groceries, across British supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s Ocado & ASDA.
It can compare not only identical items (a one-liter bottle of Coke), but also similar non-identical items, such one-liter bottles of mineral water from two separate brands. To accomplish this, mySupermarket classified 100,000 grocery products sold online in the UK according to multiple criteria and sub-criteria. The rules, weightings and relationships between different sub-criteria are incorporated into the company’s algorithms.
Up-to-date pricing is achieved using a combination of proprietary crawlers and manual validation processes to access real time prices from the supermarkets’ own sites. MySupermarket marries those prices with its own image database. It obtains products from the manufacturers and retailers and then uses in-house image production combined with post-processing facilities in Thailand.
The company claims an average online grocery cart includes approximately 50 items, with a total cost of 80-110 English pounds ($160-$220). By finding savings for consumers that average 20 percent per cart, and consumers accepting about half those recommendations, the actual savings average around 10 pounds ($20) per cart.
The way mySupermarket works is that users login to mySupermarket and fill-up a “trolley” (British for “shopping cart”). They are then presented with three types of recommendations:
- Potential savings from switching the entire cart to another supermarket.
- Potential savings from swapping items in the cart to alternatives from within the same supermarket.
- Health conscious recommendations (calories, saturates, fat, salt, sugar) for swapping items to healthier alternatives.
The final step—payment—is actually performed on the desired supermarket’s own payment page. It should be noted that the service is absolutely free to consumers.
So where does mySupermarket derive its revenue from? Two sources: The first, targeted advertising based on the cart’s contents.
The second, a data service provided to the retailers and merchants which includes price listings, inventory listings (by zipcode), as well as comparison and analysis of products sold within the UK grocery sector. These days mySupermarket is focusing on expanding its UK business, as well as adding features, ad/promotion services and data reporting capabilities.
They are also considering requests to license their technology for non-grocery multi-item comparison shopping.
Head over to DH Consulting for Part II of the series outlining the process of writing an effective business plan.
In Part II, Doron discusses what an investor expects to learn about the product/service after having read through the business plan.
Start-up consultant, Doron Habshush, is launching a new Meetup next month. The gathering is aimed at entrepreneurs seeking the input and feedback of industry experts.
More info here.
