cameron peron

Remember 2005?  Choosing between Yahoo, Alta Vista and google for search?  Using Priceline to find good travel deals?  Excited that you finally have broad band connection to download tracks from Napster and Imesh?  It was a time when new players in the internet were starting to change the rules of the game, like Google did for search, or when big players strengthened there position, like Amzon did in e-commerce.

It feels a lot like those times are back.  With Google suddenly not seeming as cool as they once were, names like Groupon turning a business plan on napkin to mere billion dollar M&A discussions in just a few years, and new business new sources of commerce and business seemingly jumping from all over the place.

It is a lot like 2005, when a company that no one ever heard of (like Google once was), will more than likely make destroy a current player’s market and business model, and change the rules of the game for say… 5-10 years.  GroupOn is doing it right now in e-commerce.  SalesForce is doing it in database and sales administration.  So are first to market players in mobile payment processing, mobile advertising and other niche verticals.

This is a time when market standard players like Nokia, Apple and Yahoo, and even Google are going to have to transform strategic thinking into tactical execution or get quietly blindsided by a younger, a time when more open minded and savvier competition, and when new comers will start making their mark on history.

This article was originally published on TechCrunch by Roi Carthy.

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GeoSurf Is A Must-Have For Every Media Buyer’s Tool Belt

I have a thing for money-making, simple solutions to obvious problems, and GeoSurf sure is one of those.

This may come as a surprise to some, but even though it’s 2011, if you’re a media buyer, you pretty much work in the dark. I mean this in the sense of media buyers’ ability to actually see their ads on the properties they bought digital real estate on, as well as the ability to see which advertisers are bidding against them.

To tackle this issue—a paradox caused by IP and geo-targeting employed by media professionals themselves—proxies have to be used. These, however, tend to be tricky to use and are often plain unreliable. GeoSurf’s solution fills this void.

Launched in 2009, GeoSurf provides a browser add-on (IE & Firefox), VPN client and iPhone/Android solution that allows media buyers to view ads and web content with a local perspective in 60 countries and 20 US metros. The range of products is currently used to view who is bidding on ads in a variety on mediums, such as: display, affiliate, video, in-game, in-text, mobile and even desktop applications.

If you’re in the media-buying business, the benefits are pretty obvious: new advertisers can be discovered, campaigns can be optimized, better analysis can be performed prior to launching a test campaign, and campaign deployment can be executed in real-time.

To make this happen, BI Science, the company behind GeoSurf, deployed a network of servers around the world that runs an infrastructure that dynamically allocates bandwidth based on real-time analysis, historical demand and physical proximity. This allows the company to provide a fast and secure browsing experience for media buyers.

Co-founder Cameron Peron explained to me that usage of GeoSurf is dynamically priced depending on consumption and type of channels used. For example, ‘light usage’ (checking ads on PPC or affiliate channels) will be more priced lower than ‘heavy usage’ (performing business intelligence and spot checks over video, in-text or Facebook apps).


Tablets like the ipad and kindle will slowly do books, magazines and other printed materials what Steve Jobs did to music: destroy the business of selling music as goods and the value behind it

What’s interesting isn’t so much books, but magazines and newspapers that you can pick up at the newsstand or read online. This content comes  old school  business sense, mass audience appeal and brand leverage behind it,  for instance the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The New Yorker, Maxim, etc.  Moreover, printed newspapers and magazines have been struggling for the past 5 years to be generally profitable with their existing business, let alone try to jump into new channels.

What makes it more interesting is jumping into the market, taking an exceptionally low fraction of the revenue, thereby dominating over competition.

How?

• Enter mass market as they did with Gmail, Analytics and other products
• Cut margins so ridiculous low that no one can compete as they achieved with Adwords (Yahoo and MSN still can’t compete on PPC margins)
• Use position as a source of traffic for your own products promote internally throughout publisher network as they have been doing with chrome.

In the end using the massive position that Google has may not only save large publishers, but also readjust value in their favor.  Using its breadth in traffic and depth in targeting, offering publishers 70% + rev-share, Google could save the publishing industry by loading their revenue streams and meeting consumer demand in the middle.

This is the best infographic that visualizes the complete ecosystem of display advertising between an advertiser and publisher. How will this change in the next 12 months?