For Mozilla, Google, group hugs get tricky

Below is a New York Times article that covers Firefox and it's presence in the marketplace. Enjoy - some quick facts from the article:

Current browser market share:
Chrome has just under 2% of the browser market
Firefox’s share has kept growing, to 22.5% from 19.5%.
Microsoft’s has continued to decline, to 66% from 72% - though it argues that most of that loss has been on computers that don’t readily support Internet Explorer, such as those from Apple.
Source:Net Applications

Google Search Deal Revenue numbers for Mozilla and Status:
Google-Mozilla search deal revenue accounted for 88% of Mozilla’s $75 million (Rs363 crore) in revenue in 2007, according to its most recent tax filings, and it was recently renewed through 2011.


Article in Full - below:

For Mozilla, Google, group hugs get tricky
The rise of Firefox, Mozilla’s browser, has unleashed a wave of innovation, competition among browser makers
Miguel Helft / NYT
Mountain View, California: Boxes lined the cubicles and hallways in the offices of Mozilla on a recent afternoon, and its chief executive, John Lilly, seemed a bit disoriented as he looked for a place to sit. Mozilla, which makes the Firefox Web browser, had just moved from one end of this city to the other, mainly to gain more space for its growing work force.
Yet it was hard not to read symbolism into the move. Mozilla’s old offices were next door to Google’s sprawling headquarters. For several years, Google has been Mozilla’s biggest ally and patron. But in September, it also became Mozilla’s competitor when it unveiled its own Web browser, Chrome.
Success story: Software engineers at Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s unusual success stories. Noah Berger / NYT
Success story: Software engineers at Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s unusual success stories. Noah Berger / NYT
So it seemed only natural for Mozilla to move out from under Google’s shadow.
“We’ve learnt how to compete with Microsoft and Apple,” says Lilly, a soft-spoken, earnest 38-year-old. “Google is a giant, of course, and competing with them means we are competing with another giant, which is a little tiring.”
Those big companies weren’t giving much thought to browsers when Firefox was released in 2004, and neither were most ordinary Web users. A browser was just a window onto the Web, and people often used whatever was already installed on a computer. Usually that meant Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Since then, Firefox has captured nearly a quarter of the browser market by focusing on speed, security and innovation. Its success is all the more remarkable because it was built and marketed by a far-flung community of programmers, testers and fans—mostly volunteers—coordinated by a non-profit foundation. It is a shining example of the potential of open source software, which anyone can modify and improve, and its ascent is one of Silicon Valley’s most unusual success stories.
In short, Mozilla showed the world that browsers matter. Now the challenge is to keep proving that Mozilla matters.
The rise of Firefox unleashed a new wave of innovation and competition among browser makers. Microsoft, which makes Internet Explorer, and Apple, which makes the Safari browser, have narrowed the gap with recent upgrades. That makes it less likely that people will take the trouble to seek out and install Firefox.
At the same time, the Web has been expanding accessibility from personal computers (PCs) to powerful mobile phones such as the iPhone. Firefox won’t have a mobile version ready until later this year.
And then there is Google. After introducing Chrome, a lightning-fast browser designed to run increasingly complex Web applications, Google upped the ante. This month it said it would put Chrome at the centre of a new operating system—the software that handles the most basic functions of a PC.
“Google, Apple and Microsoft can all throw a lot of resources toward improving their browsers. Mozilla, not so much,” says Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “When it was them against Microsoft, it wasn’t such a big problem. Now that there are other alternatives, it becomes harder for them to retain relevance.”
Despite Mozilla’s mighty and increasingly competitive rivals, the spread of Firefox has continued. Nearly 300 million people around the world use it, making Firefox not only the most successful open source consumer product, but also one of the most successful software programmes ever.
To a large extent, that success sprang from a disparate community that coalesced around Firefox and was harnessed by Mitchell Baker, Lilly’s predecessor. Baker, whom Lilly calls the “conscience” of Mozilla, remains its chairwoman and is actively involved in managing it.
Baker, 52, seems to embody Mozilla’s anti-corporate ethos. Unlike the clean-cut Lilly, Baker has a decidedly counterculture look. Her hair, dyed a reddish colour, is closely cropped on one side and shoulder-length on the other, and she is prone to wearing sandals with hiking socks.
She organized a recent meeting of non-profit groups at Mozilla that ended with what she called a “psychic group hug”—not a literal embrace, but a chance for everyone there to describe in one word how they were feeling.
For Mozilla and its millions of fans, Firefox is not just cool software but also a cause: to ensure that no company, whether Microsoft, Google or anyone else, can tilt the Web to its advantage by tweaking its browser to favour its products or applications. Microsoft appeared ready to use that tactic after its browser vanquished Netscape’s.
Baker envisioned Firefox as a counterweight to that possibility, and a way to make browsing safer. In the years after Netscape’s demise, Microsoft essentially stopped improving Internet Explorer, and the browser quickly became vulnerable to security threats, an explosion of pop-up ads and other annoyances.
Firefox was faster, safer and blocked pop-ups. It also offered some compelling innovations, such as tabs, which allowed users to have multiple pages open inside a single browser window. Word of its virtues spread quickly, first in the technology world, then through a rapidly expanding fan base.
Today the model remains the same. Only a small fraction of the people involved in building Firefox are paid employees at Mozilla, which has about 250 workers. An additional 1,000 or so programmers contributed code for the most recent Firefox release. There are also tens of thousands of other volunteers who help test and promote Firefox, write add-ons and help translate it into more than 70 languages.
“We succeeded because more people got engaged, helped us build a better product and helped us get the product into the hands of people,” Baker says. “We succeeded because of the mission.”
That community’s fervour was heard in a recent weekly conference call for engineers who build Firefox. The call, moderated but open to anyone, had 30 participants, some in Mozilla offices and others scattered worldwide.
The conversation bounced from one technical topic to another: user interfaces, bug tracking, security. Then someone interrupted to announce that in just a few hours, one million people had downloaded the new Firefox 3.5. The group erupted in cheers. (By the next afternoon, the number had topped six million.)
“Mozilla is about a community coming together and saying it can compete with the largest software company in the world,” says Sandeep Krishnamurthy, director of the business administration programme at the University of Washington at Bothell, who recently wrote a paper on Firefox’s success. “There really is nothing like it.”
Across the globe, Vineel Reddy, 21, an engineering student in Hyderabad, India, basks in the satisfaction of having contributed to that success. Drawn to the Firefox mission, but not particularly good at programming, he decided to work on promoting Firefox. He rallied some friends who were skilled at video editing, rented a camera and produced a flashy clip that compares Firefox to a slick sports car.
The video has been seen more than 33,000 times, and Reddy says he gets daily email messages thanking him. “This is the best experience I have had,” he says.
Lilly says it was that kind of dedication from volunteers that enticed him to move from a career in venture capital and to join Mozilla in 2005.
“As Americans we’ve lost the sort of civic engagement, the participation in making the world what we want and what we think it should be,” says Lilly, who became chief executive last year. “That, as a mission and as a product ethos, resonated with me.”
Lilly readily acknowledges that Google’s entrance into the browser market rocked the Mozilla boat. “Life was simpler before they did this,” he says.
That said, Chrome’s release does not signal a return to the browser wars of the 1990s, when Microsoft poured resources into crushing the upstart Netscape.
For starters, Mozilla and Google have long had an agreement that makes Google the standard home page when people start Firefox, and sends them to Google when they type something into the search box at the top of the browser.
The deal accounted for 88% of Mozilla’s $75 million (Rs363 crore) in revenue in 2007, according to its most recent tax filings, and it was recently renewed through 2011. (The gusher of income from Google prompted the non-profit Mozilla Foundation to set up a taxpaying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corp., in 2005.)
The deal has helped Google gain market share in search. But Google has also been among the biggest beneficiaries of Firefox’s success in other ways.
Google’s fortunes are tied to the advancement of the Web. As browsers become faster, more standardized, more secure and more capable of running complex Web applications, Google’s services, such as search, Gmail, maps and office software, become easier to use and more popular, and Google earns more money. Firefox’s innovations have helped with this.
“Mozilla has done an amazing job,” says Sundar Pichai, a vice-president of engineering at Google who heads the development of Chrome.
Pichai says that because of Mozilla’s vital role, the company thought long and hard about the impact Chrome would have on Firefox. Google eventually came to believe that it could help spur even more innovation in browsers by building its own, he says. And it made Chrome open source, so any advances it makes could be adopted by others, including Mozilla.
“We were all very clear that if the outcome was that somehow Mozilla lost share to Google, and everything else remained the same, internally, we would have been seen as having failed,” Pichai says.
So far, Chrome doesn’t appear to have hurt Firefox. Chrome has grabbed just under 2% of the browser market, according to Net Applications, a company that tracks browser use. During the same period, Firefox’s share has kept growing, to 22.5% from 19.5%. Microsoft’s has continued to decline, to 66% from 72%, though it argues that most of that loss has been on computers that don’t readily support Internet Explorer, such as those from Apple.
In many ways, Google and Mozilla are fighting the same battle, albeit not with the same objectives. They both contend that the Web should be open and based on common standards—Mozilla because it is its mission, Google because it is good for its business.
“Most days we are aligned with them,” Lilly says. “Their focus on the open Web is pretty amazing.”
But he says financial pressures may someday push Google to start using Chrome to favour its own services. That danger, he says, “clarifies for me how important it is for independent organizations like Mozilla to exist”.
©2009/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Corporations Lag On Adopting Social Media

Below find an article about the early adoption of Social Media for consumer/personal purposes, and information about how corporations should look to adopt the medium and where it is going.

Corporations Lag On Adopting Social Media

By Mike Sachoff - Mon, 06/29/2009 - 06:45

Just starting to understand potential

Social networking has increasingly become more visible in the workplace, and its functionality is being leveraged by companies globally, according to a new survey from Frost & Sullivan.

A majority (80%) of respondents said they personally use Web 2.0 technologies to connect and share with friends and family while at work. More than half (54%) said they use social media for professional purposes such as connecting with colleagues, generating leads, and working on projects.
Vanessa Alvarez
Vanessa Alvarez

"However, despite the current hype of social sites such as Facebook and Twitter, social networking platforms are still perceived as being used only for social purposes," said Vanessa Alvarez, Industry Analyst with Frost & Sullivan's Unified Communications practice.

"Enterprises, both big and small, are still just beginning to understand the potential of Web 2.0 tools and public and private social networking platforms. The next level of productivity will occur when enterprises can use these tools to go beyond the social aspect, and harness the unlimited potential of these tools to more effectively manage workflows and drive business."

Social networking sites are the most used Web 2.0 tool. Nearly three-fourths of respondents report using social networking sites for personal use within an organization. Besides social networking sites, other tools used include, blogs, wikis, and teamspaces.

The majority of respondents indicated that their organizations have written policies concerning the use and access of social networking sites. Among those individuals working at companies without a written policy, 80 percent work in organizations that allow access to such sites, despite no formal policies.

The survey also found client relations, advertising, marketing, and other business communications are not part of most organizations' use of social media. The majority of respondents said their organizations use social media primarily for internal use, staff relations and training.

"Social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies are literally changing the way people think about collaboration, and how willing they are to share information," says Melanie Turek, Industry Principal with Frost & Sullivan's Unified Communications practice.

"Organizations have always looked for ways to make their employees more collaborative; today, they need to look for ways to make their collaborative employees more effective."

Comparing Google to Bing? New Cool Tool!

Check out this cool new tool created to see Google results next to the new MSN Search Bing results - google vs bing compare for your self!

Zach Hoffman
www.SEO.cc - CEO
866-999-4SEO

Bing - The New Search Engine Being Released by Microsoft

Preview for the new search engine developed by Microsoft called Bing - check it out:

http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html

Communication Overload - The New Social World

Check out this site ThatsNotCool.com, it is a great campaign!

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Google Analytics - Lollapalooza Tracks Social Media Campaigns with Google Analytics

Below is a great article from the Google Analytics blog about tracking Social Media Campaigns using Google Analytics.


Lollapalooza Tracks Social Media Campaigns with Google Analytics
Friday, May 15, 2009

Let’s face it: Social media is here to stay, and day by day it continues to encroach on nearly every aspect of our online lives. But to publishers, promoters, advertisers and site owners, there’s one essential question left hanging in the air long after the race to join the social media crowd: “Is it working?”

This year’s Lollapalooza Music Festival is using Event Tracking and Google Analytics to find out.

Social Media Applications

There may not be a more perfect application of social media than promoting a music festival, and C3 Presents, (the folks behind Lollapalooza) came up with some good ways to capitalize. This year’s lineup page alone features a Facebook Connect application to maintain and share personal lineups, MySpace blog, bulletin and site postings, Twitter updates and email sharing, and AddThis social bookmarking.
“You don’t find anyone who thinks social media is a bad idea, but the questions on our minds are, ‘what is this doing for our fans and what kind of return are we getting back on this investment?’” says Michael Feferman of C3 Presents.

Questions to Answer

As with any successful web analytics strategy, this one started out by posing the questions that Google Analytics should answer. Specifically:

* Who’s using these sharing and social media outlets? Are they benefiting?
* Which ones are being used the most and what are their applications?
* Does social media make a visitor more likely to buy a ticket?
* Are we driving more traffic to our site as a result? Are we driving more sales and revenue?

WebShare, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant, was brought in to help implement and configure Google Analytics to help answer these questions. Measuring the impact of social media for Lollapalooza has two sides:

* The impact on those who use social media applications while on the site
* The impact of those who arrive at the site as a result of social media

The Implementation

Event Tracking and Campaign Tagging were employed in order to provide the data required to answer these questions.

Event Tracking

While a user is on the site, events “fire” as the visitor interacts with the various social media applications. Lollapalooza tracks when sharing applications are clicked, when users log into Facebook accounts via Facebook Connect and perform various actions, and when visitors register or log into their Lollapalooza accounts.


*Actual values have been modified

Drilling down into the event categories, actions and labels reveals even more about user behavior, and coupled with the secondary dimensions and pivot tables that were recently announced, we can answer some very detailed questions, like:

How much revenue and how many transactions resulted from visitors in Chicago that used Facebook Connect and found the site via the keyword “lollapalooza 2009”?

*Actual values have been modified

Campaign Tagging

In order to track visitors arriving at the site as a result of social media, links that are generated and shared are tagged with unique values to define campaign parameters. The reports and segmentation options of Analytics then help us understand these visitors and their value in terms of Goal and Ecommerce conversions.

When visitors share via Twitter, for example, a pre-populated message with a bit.ly compressed link is used that includes Google Analytics campaign tag parameters:


When followers of this user click on the link, Google Analytics attributes the visit to a source of “twitter” and a medium of “share”. This data is then available in our reports, and we can answer questions like:

What kind of revenue and ticket sales resulted from Twitter sharing yesterday?

*Actual values have been modified

The Results

The data continues to roll in, but some impressive insights have been gained so far:

* Over 2/3 of the traffic referred from Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is a result of sharing applications and Lollapalooza’s messaging to its fans on those platforms.
* Users of the social media applications on Lollapalooza.com spend twice as much as users that don’t.
* “Fan Engagement” metrics such as time on site, bounce rate, page views per visit and interaction have seen significant boosts across the board as a result of social media applications.

More details and findings are available on C3's digital marketing blog.

“This kind of data is fantastic,” says Michael. “Not only does it help us give our fans what they want, it let’s us know how they respond to it and tells us that these efforts are worth it.”

Other Resources

To learn more about the reports, configurations and features highlighted in this post, take a look at the following resources:

* Event Tracking with Google Analytics
* Campaign Tagging and tracking traffic sources
* Secondary Dimensions and Pivot Tables

Posted by David Booth of WebShare, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant

Hulu Video Content - Adds Another Publisher

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Ad Inventory Increases Across the Web

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Health Related Triggers for Baby Boomers

68 percent of boomers go online after seeing a health-related TV commercial. 80 percent click health-related ads.

Source: Marketing to Baby Boomers

Demographic and Their Differences in Web Behavior

This article Men Want It Fast, Women Want It All by Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews covers ideas as to how e-tailers and all website owners in general can learn to market better to different sexes through slight web design changes.