Apple's 10 Biggest Mistakes Since Steve Jobs Returned

Apple has made an almost perfect string of decisions since Steve Jobs returned to the company in the 90s. What are its 10 biggest mistakes over that time period?

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Why Apple Should Replace Google as the Default Search Engine on iPhone with Yahoo!

It's a matter of time before Apple drops Google as the default search engine on the iPhone.  However, here's why it's more likely that they'll replace it with Yahoo! search rather than Microsoft's Bing

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Why Google Struggles to Build Great Consumer Products

Google has a number of amazing strengths.  But why does it struggle building great consumer products?

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13 Tips for Starting An Arab Spring in Corporate America

The story behind my 2007 Yahoo! campaign and what new social media activists should do to start an Arab Spring in Corporate America.

Read the full post in Forbes

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More IPOs Are Needed

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor12/15/10 - 06:00 AM EST

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Last night, I watched the Charlie Rose interview with Groupon Founder and CEO Andrew Mason. It was the first time I've seen him speak and, aside from a bad sense of humor, I was impressed.

What grabs your attention is that these guys started a company and reportedly got a $6 billion buyout offer within two years -- in the wake of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Tony Robbins should make them a case study to pump up his audience at future motivational seminars.

Different reports circulated this past week that Groupon does annualized gross revenues of $2 billion before splitting profits with the merchants they refer business to. That kind of growth demonstrates how -- in an era of Facebook and Twitter -- good ideas and businesses can propagate like crazy.

What's more impressive about Groupon though is it's turning down Google's(GOOG_) generous buyout offer. Instead, it opted to go it alone and grow its business. Here's what Mason said about why it did that: "Here is what I can say. I think every choice we make in the company comes down to a core of this idea we have of what Groupon could be and the place it could play in the world and in the rest of the 21st century. And every choice we make is which option will it make it more possible for us to get there? " So I think whatever we decide to do with the company, the people that we hire, the deals we run, every itty-bitty choices, how do we build this company into something that transforms the way people buy from local businesses."

If the offer on the table for Groupon was $6 billion, Google was offering to pay four times what it paid for YouTube four years ago and double what it paid for DoubleClick three years ago.

We're just not used to people saying no to that kind of money.

Four years ago, Facebook turned down a reported $1 billion offer from Yahoo!(YHOO_)(YHOO). Eighteen months later, Microsoft(MSFT_) invested $240 million in the company at a $15 billion post-money valuation. There were calls at the time that the price was completely unrealistic and showed how desperate Microsoft was to stay relevant. Yet, today, most analysts say the company would be worth $30 billion to $50 billion if it went public.

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[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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China's YouTube IPO in Sweet Spot

By Eric Jackson, Senior Contributor11/24/10 - 06:00 AM EST

We have seen a barrage of new F-1 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the last couple of weeks for new Chinese-based IPOs which should hit our shores within the next month.

On Monday in RealMoney , I discussed a recent oneBitauto(BITA_), which went public last week and is still clinging to its offer price. That stock is positioning itself as the leader of automotive information on the Web in China.

I've also recently spoken about one of China's versions of YouTube, Tudou (TUDO), which filed earlier this month to go public. Last week, we saw Tudou's top competitor, Youku(YOKU), also file papers with the SEC to go public soon.

The more you follow Chinese companies, the more you see how American investors demand to understand a potential investment in simple comparisons to names they know stateside.Dangdang (DANG), which also filed for an IPO in the last few days, is called China's version ofAmazon(AMZN_). Baidu(BIDU_) used to be called China's Google(GOOG_) -- until Google retreated from the country earlier this year.

Now, with Tudou and Youku, we get the comparisons of both services to YouTube. Actually, both online video sites are more like China's version of YouTube and Hulu (because a majority of their content is licensed), if the U.S. had a much more fragmented online video market.

YouTube (owned by Google) commands 43% of the U.S, online video content market as of June. This is far ahead of Hulu at 3%, Microsoft(MSFT_) at 2% and Viacom(VIA_) at 1%.

In China, where remember that YouTube and Facebook are blocked by the Great Firewall, Youku is the online video leader with a 20% market share. Tudou has a 16% share. There are many other small players, including ku6.com which is 51% owned by Shanda Interactive(SNDA_) , with much a smaller share of the market. (Youku prefers to state in its IPO document that it holds a 40% market share for the time users spend viewing online videos, with Tudou at 23%.)

Some are concerned about these online video sites wondering if there will be sufficient demand for two similar companies which are not profitable. After all, remember the constant criticism Google took from Wall Street analysts about when YouTube was going to be profitable? Imagine if YouTube had gone public and had to face that criticism on its own. Isn't it natural to expect Youku to face withering criticism, resulting in a lackluster stock price? I don't think so.

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[** This post is an excerpt of the full article, which is available on TheStreet.com by clicking here. Free Site.**]

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Why You Should Watch This Chinese IPO

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
11/12/2010 7:45 AM EST
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Earlier this week, a company that could be behind the next great Chinese Internet stock filed its F-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Tudou (its ticker post-IPO will be TUDO). You will want to watch it.

Tudou is one of the companies that are vying to be China's YouTube. Unlike here in the U.S., several companies in China are competing for that moniker. Tudou is currently No. 2 in China for market share in the video-sharing space, with 16% market share. It trails Youku, which has 20% of the market share in China.

Youku is still private. Tudou will be the first of these two giants to test the public markets. There are smaller video sites like Ku6.com or Ku6 Media (KUTV), which is owned by Shanda Interactive (SNDA - commentary - Trade Now), but Shanda is a much smaller player and has only a $150 million market capitalization.

In case you didn't know, neither YouTube nor Hulu is available in China because of the Great Firewall. Therefore, China's hometown video sites have a greenfield market to capture for themselves.

Tudou is seeking to raise $120 million in the IPO, with Credit Suisse (CS - commentary - Trade Now) and Deutsche Bank (DB - commentary - Trade Now) acting as lead underwriters on the deal. Some of the early Tudou investors who will get some of their money back -- after pouring in $135 million -- include IDG China, GGV Capital and Temasek Holdings, the state investment company for Singapore.

Growth in All Directions

What Tudou has going for it in spades is growth. It has over 70 million registered users in a country where 400 million of the population actively uses the Internet today. Tudou only had 16 million users in 2007.

As its users have grown, so have its revenues. Tudou has generated $33.8 million in revenue in the first nine months of this year, a 230% increase over the same period a year ago.

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[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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Google's Turning Point

By Eric Jackson
RealMoney Contributor
10/18/2010 5:30 PM EDT
Click here for more stories by Eric Jackson

Google (GOOG - commentary - Trade Now) earnings last Thursday were a turning point for the company. Even after Friday's big 10% bump up in price, the stock is still down 3% for the year. Negativity has surrounded the company for most of the year -- some of it deserved, in my view, because of missteps (like Google's awkward and ill-advised withdrawal from China in the spring), and some of it not.

The concern for investors for much of the year -- aside from the whole China kerfuffle -- has been whether Google is just a one-trick pony.

Sure, it's been a hell of a pony, but investors have been wondering if Google could leverage its dominance in text ads for search into other areas. The company has thrown a lot of pasta against the wall over the years -- everything from Google Wave to Orkut to its $1.6 billion acquisition of YouTube a few years back - but not a lot has stuck in terms of meaningful profits... at least, not yet.

So, what was so eye-catching about Thursday's earnings call was that Google decided to give some specific data on its key new areas of growth.

The key stats revealed by the company were that:

The mobile business is contributing more than $1 billion annually in revenue (calculated by taking the last quarter's revenues and annualizing them)

Display advertising (as a result of the Double-Click acquisition a couple of years ago and the YouTube display ads) is contributing more than $2.5 billion annually in revenue (calculated using the same methodology as mobile)

More than 2 billion YouTube videos are viewed each week

What also seemed to surprise analysts on the upside was a drop in Google's TAC (traffic acquisition costs) in the quarter. Google is no longer paying News Corp's (NWS - commentary - Trade Now) MySpace for traffic under a very lucrative (for MySpace) agreement, struck a number of years ago when MySpace was still the big dog of the social-networking space.

So, the market is starting to sit up and take notice of Google again in the last two days. And why not? These metrics are important indicators of the company's future success.

The area that intrigues me most -- as a long holder of GOOG -- is mobile. This $1 billion in revenue is all from mobile ads. Google is still in a land-grab mode with Android. It continues to give away the operating system for free to carriers in order to drive adoption. And that is certainly working, as Android has grown from nothing to major mobile player in the last year. Many expect it to surpass Apple (AAPL - commentary- Trade Now) in terms of mobile market share soon, as it is now part of so many devices.

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[*** This post is an excerpt of the full article, available by clicking here to go to RealMoney.com. Note: subscription required. ***]

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BloggingStocks: Hedge fund uses YouTube to get results

Posted Mar 4th 2008 1:00PM by Tom Taulli

Filed under: Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO)

Shareholder activists use a variety of tools to combat lagging companies, such as proxy fights, litigation and so on.

With the growth of social media, we are now seeing new approaches, and one of the innovators is Eric Jackson.

He is using Google (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s YouTube to confront a variety of companies, such as Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO). In fact, he was a key factor in the company's shareholder meeting last year (example here). Keep in mind that Yahoo's CEO, Terry Semel, soon left the company.

Well, according to a piece in FINalternatives.com, Jackson now has his own hedge fund, called Ironfire Capital.

Jackson 's approach isn't completely hostile. In the early stages, he tries to work with a target, but if that doesn't work, he mobilizes the forces of the Internet. And as we've seen lately, that can be quite powerful.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.

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Google, YouTube, Shona Brown, and Galaxy

What does the Google acquisition of YouTube have to do with the Galaxy? If you thought it’s going to be a way that a new feature from Google Earth will be integrated into Google Video post-YouTube, you’re wrong. The YouTube acquisition is Google's Second Act; the first product that, although similar and adjacent to Search, will be a category-killer for Google within a second distinct realm from Search. It also is Google's and Shona Brown's answer to how the company can avoid becoming another 'Galaxy.'

Shona Brown is Google's SVP of Business Operations (and some call her GOOG’s ‘chief chaos officer'). I had intended to write this blog posting profiling Shona as one of the top unsung heroes in business today. Then, Adam Lashinsky of Fortune beat me to the punch with a fantastic profile last week. (Nice to see that one of the off-shoots of the recent GOOG – AOL advertising deal is that the Fortune reporters are able to get some great access to Google execs.)

When you think of Google, you think of the Brin-Page-Schmidt triumvirate. Then, you probably think of Omid Kordestani (head of sales); then, coming on strong – especially in the pages of Valleywag – Marissa Mayer. Left out of the discussion, until Adam’s piece, was Shona Brown.

Shona is someone who it’s easy to feel intellectually inferior to, once you understand her background: Rhodes Scholar, Ph.D. in Strategic Management from Stanford under one of the best management scholars in the world today (Kathy Eisenhardt – who has been studying fast-growth Silicon Valley firms for over 20 years), McKinsey partner, Business Best-Selling Co-Author, and pre-IPO member of Google’s management team. In other words, just another brilliant Google employee; they pride themselves on their intellect. However, she’s also someone who is very down-to-earth and helpful.

At Google, she’s responsible for optimizing Google’s internal structure. She decided to take her main findings of her dissertation, which led to the book “Competing on the Edge,” and apply them to Google. (Who says consultants can't practice what they preach.) She found that the optimal organizational design is not too much formality/structure and not too fast-and-loose. (There is new research my firm has done that has found further empirical proof for this assumption. Some details are contained here.) The process by which she does this is partly described in the Fortune article. However, there’s another aspect to Brown’s job described in the article. And, not to put too strong a point on it, it is to solve the greatest challenge facing Google today: how to avoid the fate of being a one-trick-pony.

Google does Search. And it does it better than anyone else on the planet. Remember all the talk around the IPO and even up until about a year ago about how Microsoft was going to come after them? You don’t hear that talk any longer. Google’s won Search. Their multi-billion dollar empire is paid for by search advertisements. Though this preeminent position has given them the ability to develop a cadre of new products (and some, even within Google, think they created too many products), none has been a category-killer in the way that Search has. Much has been written about Google using its Search position to decouple users from the desktop and MFST’s control; yet, this is all still talk today. They have been a very successful one-trick-pony.

That’s where Shona Brown comes in. In her qualitative, case-study approach dissertation, she studied – over 10 years ago – a curious Silicon Valley company that experienced explosive growth and lots of bright young college kids, but had difficulty moving beyond their initial hit product to a 2nd product of similar success. In the end, their core product faced competitive pressures and they were not able to continue. She doesn’t name the company, but calls it “Galaxy.” As Lashinsky points out in his article from Fortune, Google and Galaxy share several interesting common traits. The question you are left to ponder is will Google find a Second Act?

The other night, I was ironically on YouTube and watched the now somewhat dated 60 Minutes glowing segment on their success. Lesly Stahl gushes about how she can text-message Google on her mobile phone to find the nearest pharmacy on the Upper-West Side. Although this is a “nice to have,” along with other Google products like Froogle, Google Earth, and Google Talk, none is yet a “must have.”

There’s always going to be another competitor coming along to challenge Google in search (for the current darling of Silicon Valley in this category, read this TechCrunch posting), even though their lead seems insurmountable today. So, they do need a Second Act. What will it be? Shona Brown and others at Google have been working hard to solve that question and yesterday we got the answer: YouTube.

The YouTube acquisition will be the transformative for Google. They immediately vault to the lead of controlling the search for video on the web. However, more than search alone, they control content in the format that will be increasingly be the preferred way for viewing. But this deal gives Google the first global brand beyond Google. It also allows Google users to interact in a way that hasn't been possible to date.

It's breath-taking to see how quickly YouTube has grown to dominate a space that was not a space more than 5 months ago. It is a wonderful day for their founders and backers, but this is a landmark day for Google and Shona Brown. She wasn't part of the conference call announcing the deal. But her hands are all over this. The analysts can discuss the synergies and do their projections. Shona can simply turn to her colleagues and say that "Google will be no Galaxy; this is our Second Act."

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