Today was a good day. I got to meet with serious leaders of the Internet economy, think Big Thoughts, and push my understanding of the world a bit. In short, I spent the day with folks I’ll be interviewing onstage at Web 2 next month, but also, with people who run companies that in one way or another are key partners and players in the ecosystem I love and in which my company (FM) works.

I started with a private meeting with a fellow who is taking time off from Google. Can’t say much more than that, but it was a great conversation. From there, I met with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Now, I’ve got a lot more to say about Adobe, which recently purchased Omniture, but for now, trust me when I say, keep your eye on Adobe. Next, I met with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. And then, I met with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

I noted an anecdotal observation to Sheryl – that I would write something here, tweet a notification of my post on Twitter, and that notification would then update my Facebook status through an app.

Then, I’d watch what happens. And what happens, more often than not, is that I’ll get as many if not more comments on the Facebook status update – inside Facebook – as I do on this site or on Twitter. And more often than not, those comments on Facebook are as thoughtful if not more thoughtful than the ones here. On Twitter, responses to posts here are more likely than not retweets, which is great, but not the same as a comment.

I asked Sheryl if she thought I was an outlier, expecting her to agree that in fact I was. But instead, she said the opposite: people like to comment on links referred through friend networks, and for good reason. It’s one thing to comment on blogs like this one, in relative anonymity. It’s quite another to comment in the context of Facebook, where those comments are seen by a group of folks with whom you have a social relationship.

I’d like to close that loop – show the comments locked in the Facebook domain on the site here – and I’m looking into getting that done. Let me know if you have any insight on how I might automate it.

Regardless, the implications are rather vast. Facebook has become a defacto leader in distribution of attention – just as Google was back in 2004-6. And everyone – trust me, everyone – is paying attention. Twitter is also a major distributor of attention, but Facebook dwarfs Twitter in terms of social media sharing. I’ve got a lot more to say about this, but let me mark it this way: With search, we declared private intention, then chose our links to click.

With social media, we publicly declare our intentions and our links. It’s a shift of models that is very, very meaningful. More on that later.

And, by the way, Sheryl and I spoke about a lot more than closing the loops on comments. But for more on that, you’ll have to wait for Web 2!

The more I work closely with startups, the more I realize how easily have easily they built a notion of ‘elastic user’ into their product execution.

Especially those startups where founding teams have a strong geeky background or very strong design background (yes! the two extremes meet with some elasticity)

What is “Elastic User”?

One of the biggest challenge for any startup/small business is to understand the users – who they are, what they do, what product attributes will work for them etc. While you may not have a lot of money to conduct market research (most of the times, it’s not even worth it), the next best alternative is to make certain assumptions about the user and build product/features accordingly.

And if you belong to one of those two extremes (i.e. the founding team is either too geeky or design focused), one gets lost in the so called ‘self-referential design’, i.e.designer or developer may unconsciously enforce their own mental models on the product design which may be very different from that of the target user population (wikipedia).

The Elastic User – Stretch and Bend to suit one’s need

Basically, the elastic user is stretched to meet developer/designer’s implementation strategy (related: The Story of Hammer and Nail (and Startups)), a sort of comfort zone approach used by many founders to justify what they are doing.
Instead of bending the software to meet user demand, the user is stretched, pulled (in all directions) to meet the demand of the software!

So how do you kill the ‘elastic user’?

Best that you can do is to be-aware of the fact that you are working with an ‘elastic user’ in mind – most of the startups aren’t even aware of this. Infact, many of them do not even have a clear user definition in mind (typical process is to first implement, figure out the technology part and once you are done with the product, figure out how to market!).

What has been your experience? Did you ever realize the ‘elastic user’ that you are working with?

[A lot of the above will be discussed at the Product Strategy Workshop on Saturday. A few seats are left, so do get in touch with ashish at pluggd.in or sameer.shisodia at slicedbread.in ]

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Startups – Kill that “Elastic User’, before it Kills you!

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• Officials Fear New Mumbai-Style Attack by Group – NYTimes.com

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In a move that’s sure to please a few million Windows users and break the hearts of a handful of anti-virus companies, Microsoft has now finally made the non-beta version of its Security Essentials software available to the general public, and it’s not even asking that you throw a launch party to get it for free. For those not in on the beta or following Microsoft’s exciting forays into freeware, the software promises to cover all the security basics and fend off viruses, spyware and other malicious software, and Microsoft even assures us that it’ll “run quietly in the background” and only intrude on your life when an action is required. You’ll also, of course, get free updates on a regular basis, and it’ll work just fine whether you use Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 — hit up the link below to grab a copy.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Filed under: Software

Microsoft Security Essentials anti-virus software is now live and free originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

• Can Indian Search Engines Ever Tackle The Google Threat?

September 23, 2009

• LinkedIn Looks To Setup Shop In India – Scouts For Country Manager – Interview With Deep Nishar – VP Products LinkedIn

September 24, 2009

• Google AdWords now personalized

September 11, 2009

• Report: Google chief says recession ending, looks to Mamp;A

September 23, 2009

• Google Sites Get Liberated By New API

September 24, 2009

• We Hold Twitter Ransom For $100 Billion Dollars

September 25, 2009

• Hotmail Co-founder’s New Firm Acquires A Second VoIP Startup: Mobivox

September 25, 2009

• Let’s Kill The CPM

September 25, 2009

• Google AdWords now personalized

September 11, 2009

• Report: Google chief says recession ending, looks to Mamp;A

September 23, 2009

• Google Sites Get Liberated By New API

September 24, 2009

• We Hold Twitter Ransom For $100 Billion Dollars

September 25, 2009

• Hotmail Co-founder’s New Firm Acquires A Second VoIP Startup: Mobivox

September 25, 2009

• Let’s Kill The CPM

September 25, 2009

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Shelby Bonnie, the CEO of Whiskey Media. He co-founded CNET in 1993 and was the Chairman and CEO from 2000 to 2006. He served as Chairman of the IAB from 2001 to 2003. Whiskey Media is a content platform with three sites, giantbomb.com, comicvine.com, and animevice.com lots more to come.

OK, Advertising Week just ended… does anyone else feel like the online advertising industry is the orchestra, playing on while the Titanic is sinking?

We have a problem, folks. And I, for one, think we should start to fix it by killing off the CPM, once and for all.

I have been in the Internet media space for 16 years and will start by stating the obvious: The CPM has done more to stunt innovation and drag down quality products than any single thing on the Internet. Maybe it works in other mediums, but it sure as hell doesn’t work on the Internet. Having been both a small and big publisher (now small again), it’s been my experience that the collective focus on CPMs and counting eyeballs by marketers, agencies, and publishers has led to a whole mess of unintended consequences that have produced a series of “solutions” that work for none of those parties. And perhaps more importantly, it’s been terrible for users.

All campaigns start with the best of intentions: “let’s do something creative, engaging, and unique!” But unless someone really senior from the agency or client side intervenes, the road for a campaign always leads to the media buyer and the dreaded spreadsheet, where the two most important columns are impressions and cost. Ironically, there’s usually some good stuff in campaigns, but they are thrown in for free as “value adds.” At some point, publishers decide that if all clients care about is impressions, then OK, we’ll give them impressions. The output is an industry that overproduces shallow, superficial, commoditized impressions. Why do we have so many bad sites that republish the same junky content–content that’s often made by machines or $1-per-post contractors? Why do sites intentionally try to get us to turn lots of pages with tons of top 10 lists, photo galleries, or single-paragraph summaries of someone else’s story?

In 2002, my first full year as Chairman of the IAB, we made a decision as an industry to kill the original small banner (468×60). Though it was the only unit that many of our partners accepted, if we didn’t kill it, the industry would have had a very difficult time moving past it. We had to be bold and take some risk, but at that time we ushered in the move towards larger ad units, a move that all agree was a big improvement. We are at a similar point today. The focus on CPM is causing a bunch of behavior that is bad for publishers, marketers, and users. Only by killing it do we have the opportunity to invent our new future.

Why is the CPM such a problem?

• You always get what you pay for. I believe in basic economics. If you pay for impressions, you get impressions. Is that, in the end, what marketers really want? How about engagement? How about impact? How about actually selling product? A glut of impressions has helped no one.
• All impressions are not created equally. There’s a big difference between seeing an ad on a page of content that contains one uninteresting paragraph and twelve ads, and seeing a single ad on a page that is relevant to the ad and covers a topic for which the user is highly passionate and engaged. The differences between social network and content inventory is another example–how do you put those items on the same spreadsheet?
• There is no natural constraint . TV, print, and radio can only put so many ads within their product. But on the Internet, that is not the case. We can continually increase the number of ads per page or manipulate users’ behavior to goose our impression numbers. Can’t you see some publisher saying “if they just want impressions, why don’t we go from four ads on a page to eight” or “couldn’t we turn a new ad every time someone loaded up a new e-mail?”
• It doesn’t mean anything anymore. With such a glut of impressions from all media and the number of impressions with which people are bombarded with every day, it just doesn’t matter anymore. It’s an arcane notion that’s a holdover from a time when there wasn’t as much media. As I said, TV, radio, and print had natural constraints and there was a lot less of it. So just seeing an ad was, by definition, unique and impactful. Those days are no longer.
• Senior marketers get it, but there is a whole infrastructure built around the CPM. The process is built up around how ads are bought and sold, based around a media plan, and asked for in RFPs. All the good, creative thoughts get boiled down into spreadsheets, that are for the most part owned by folks that are not that far removed from their last college class. Even senior folks have to try to fight their own system to keep the ideas that they like.
• This is not a win for marketers. In a world of over-produced impressions, even great work by marketers is ignored at best and more commonly not even seen.
• The ultimate losers are the users. They get a lot of bad content and bad ads.  They are literally overrun by ads all day.

What will a new solution need?

• Simple. In the end, I realize that to make the business of marketing work it can’t all be art. You have to have a way to create a streamlined process. Everyone wants and needs a way to compare campaigns and metrics to determine success. Simplicity can lead to scalability, which allows for more efficiency for publishers, agencies, and marketers. Having said that, the simplicity we now have has led to a model that doesn’t work.
• The metrics should be more closely aligned with what you want. Whatever you pay for is what publishers will start mass producing. If you want engagement, pay for engagement. It is unclear whether there is one metric or many. A starting point might be to start with uniques, actions (like sharing, contributing, and engaging), and time.

What about the CPA or CPC?

• CPA and CPC have their appropriate time and place, but let’s recognize that those situations are limited. Yes, they work great when people know exactly what they are looking for, but how do you convince them to buy something they don’t know they need? Pure click performance just emphasizes the status quo of what I already know and already buy. Yes, it’s an action… but so is a video view, a wiki contribution, a contest sign up, a tweet about a product, and so on. We also know that a singular focus on these items would create as crazy a set of unintended consequences as we’re currently dealing with today.

Where do we start?

• First, just stop using the CPM. Yes, it will break every model and process that the industry holds dear, but we need to get rid of the crutch. The ensuing turmoil will bring creative thinking, new ideas, and entrepreneurial passion.
• Let it be a movement, not a task force or sub-committee. Create room and dollars for entrepreneurs to experiment and try new things. They all might not work, but we will collectively learn. A bunch of task forces by industry associations will only make it worse.
• Think open source. This should not be proprietary or an individual company’s technology, it needs to be an effort on everyone’s part to do this together with the benefit accruing to us all.
• Realize that we all share a common need to fix this. The fight is with the system, not each other.

I certainly don’t have all the answers myself, but as a veteran of this space and someone who deeply cares about the medium, it is about time we all make a concerted effort to change our direction. I would love to hear your thoughts (shelbyb [at] whiskeymedia [dot] com).

Photo credit: Flickr/SuperFantastic

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

VoIP services company Sabse Technologies has acquired Canadian Internet voice startup MobiVox for an undisclosed amount. The fledgling company provides VoIP calling via existing landlines and cellphones and also enables its users to do conferencing, make group calls, and transfer calls to their home phone from their cell phone.

The young company had raised a single round of funding that amounted up to $11 million nearly two years ago from high-profile investors like Flybridge Capital, IDG Ventures and Brightspark Ventures.

In a statement, Sabse Technologies says it wil integrate Mobivox’s solution into its own offering and retain most if not all employees:

The Mobivox platform and patent portfolio adds to Sabse’s offering by providing a proven voice-interface-programming language, in-the-cloud contact book storage along with network-agnostic telephony integration. Additionally, Mobivox brings a very deep team of speech developers that combined bring more than 100 years of expertise.

The news comes just three month after Sabse, which was founded by well-known entrepreneurs Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail co-founder) and Yogesh Patel, agreed to acquire VC-funded Jaxtr, also without disclosing the amount it had paid for the startup. That means the serial entrepreneurs’ newest venture, which as far as we know has raised no institutional venture funding to date, has significant cash in the bank and aims to move fast in the VoIP calling and conference market by picking up strategic assets left and right.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.