Live ID: Core of Microsoft's Online Services Push

Over the weekend, I read and re-read all the transcripts from Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2007. While few things stood out like focus on Software + Services, next era of Consumer Electronics, Microsoft Services Platform (see Ray Ozzie's presentation) etc, Kevin Johnson's talk on Online Services and Advertising, more particularly discussion on Live ID's took my attention. According to Kevin, Microsoft has 380 million active (user that signs in and uses one or more of our services every 30 days) Live IDs and these are driving the breadth of usage of Microsoft (Live) Services.

There are four key things that are important. Live IDs in these services are sticky. People sign on and they use these services because it's about contacts that are important to them, data that's important to them, information and their profile in services that they use that's important to individuals. So it's a very sticky service.

Number two, it's revenue monetization. We can drive what I call direct revenue per live ID, the display ads or the in-screen videos or the searches done from these services as well as indirect revenue for Live ID. Indirect revenue per Live ID is as they come into the network, our ability to route traffic and flow them to other services, other parts of the network creates another revenue monetization opportunity.

So you have two things, sticky users, and you've got revenue production. Direction revenue for Live ID, indirect revenue for Live ID. Third, it enables ad serving. This creates significant amount of opportunity for us to know more about the users when they are signed in versus just a cookie or an IP address. As users are signed in, we can do a better job of behavioral targeting or ad targeting to these particular users, which is good for the user, more relevant advertising, and it's good for the advertiser. It's more targeted at the audience they're trying to get after.

And we have some momentum coming out of fiscal year '07. We grew Live IDs in fiscal year '07 by over 20 percent to get to that 380 million. Where are we going in fiscal year '08? The next release of Windows Live will be coming out this fall. It is a suite of user services, a single suite of user services. A single download, single download and install to the PC that will enable users to use these services whether they're on the PC, on the phone, or just directly from browser to Internet. A very rich set of services.

This next release of Windows Live is the must-have free upgrade to the Windows experience. And so we're going to drive very hard on continuing to expand the number of users we have using these Windows Live services. Let me give you some perspective. We're at 380 million Live IDs. We're getting ready to release this next release of Windows Live in the fall. Yahoo is about 245 million active registered users; Google has approximately 75 million signed-in users.

Our ability as a company to better connect to the Windows experiences such as mail, Photo Gallery, as well as the experience on the phone and extend those into services experiences, I think, will enable us to expand Live IDs and really grow our reach in the network. So that's one key priority our engineering teams are focused on, our marketing teams, our field teams.

The core thing to note here would be more relevant advertising that Microsoft is targeting based on the knowledge of who the Live ID user is. This is where Microsoft has edge on Google. Google while having more number of users using it's Search services, have not really paid much heed to getting to know it's users and have relied on using IP address and search terms to target ads/services. Knowing Live ID user can open enormous opportunities for Microsoft to target ads to the users. Consider this fictitious (soon to be real) scenario, Your friend X bought a pair of Nike shoes and when you search for shoes on Live.com, Microsoft using Windows Live Contact services has identified your friend and will in return show you the same shoe telling you this is what your friend bought. You wanna buy that? :) How cool would that be.

Mobile + Internet in India

Contradictory to my blog post on number of Internet Subscribers on Mobile phones in India, a new TRAI report is suggesting that 31.30 million users in India are accessing Internet through their mobile handsets—GSM or CDMA—to read and reply to mails, download content and for online transactions. Now that means 1 in every 5 Mobile users (considering 165 Million Mobile subscribers in India) is accessing Internet using their Mobiles. That is a ridiculously high number, one that does not reflect in the ARPU reported by the Indian Telcos. For e.g. Airtel charges anything from Rs 100 to 250 under different plans for one month of Internet access.

Something's amiss from this report. I have a good enough techie circle of friends who have Internet capable phones too, but hardly 5-10% of these are accessing Internet. I wonder how the number of users were calculated.

Anyways, all in all good news for the Mobile Content developers in (or targeting) India.

According to Indian Cellular Association (ICA) president Pankaj Mohindroo: “India sold 65 million handsets in 2006, of which 35 million were Net-enabled. The propensity to use Net on the mobile is very high and the figures would be much higher if sufficient bandwidth (spectrum) is made available for high-end data services and more websites have mobile-friendly content.” ICA tracks handset sales and trends.

Another good set of news is for SmartPhone makers like Microsoft.

About 5% of handsets sold in 2006 were smartphones—sophisticated devices mostly bought by corporate users—that allow execs to stay connected to the Web and their office intranet.

Phones with Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform, which commanded a 17% share of the new smartphone additions in 2006, has seen volumes grow four times year-on-year and are projected to cross the 200,000-unit mark in 2007.

And finally some good news for CDMA operators too.

After a year of declining average revenue per user (ARPU) per month for mobile services, signs of reversal are on the horizon. However, this is so far limited to operators offering services based on the CDMA technology. Blended ARPU for CDMA operators for January-March 2007 increased by 3.08% over the previous quarter to Rs 202 per month.
GSM service providers, on the other hand, maintained a declining trend, with blended ARPU falling from Rs 316 in the December 2006 quarter to Rs 298 in the three months ended March 2007, according to a survey by telecom regulator Trai.

Nearly 73% of subscribers use GSM technology in India and the rest are on the CDMA platform.

Related News:

Advertisers prepare to go mobile to catch eyeballs

Yahoo gets smart by targeting "You"

Yahoo is launching a new display advertising product called SmartAds, which allows marketers to offer ads that are customized according to the user's demographics and online activities.

The product, Yahoo SmartAds, would help marketers create custom advertisements on the fly, using information on individual buyers and information on real prices and availability from the vendors. For example, a person who had recently searched for information about blenders might see an ad from Target that gives the prices for the blenders that are on the shelves in the store closest to that person’s home.

While the news look straightforward, the technology I presume powering SmartAds will be quite complex. From the same NYTimes article:

This is how Yahoo’s new system works: the advertiser (or its agency) would provide Yahoo with the components of its display ads — including the logos, tag lines and images. The retailer would share information from its inventory databases that track the items on the shelves in each of its stores. Next, Yahoo would combine that data with the information it has about its users’ demographics and actions online to create a product-specific advertisement.


For airlines, SmartAds uses Yahoo’s information about its Web surfers to create display advertisements for each person that feature ticket offers with actual prices listed. In time, Yahoo plans to offer rich media advertisements where users can buy the ticket at that price right within the ad unit, rather than having to click through to another Web site.


Yahoo is not the only one targeting user demographics and online activities. Similar thing is being experimented in Microsoft adCenter. Check out the Demographics Prediction and Local Ads by PC Address Tools from Microsoft adCenter Labs.

Demographics Prediction: You can use adCenter technology to predict a customer's age, gender, and other demographic information according to his or her online behavior-that is, from search queries and webpage views. General Distribution is the breakdown by age of MSN Search users-based on a one-month MSN Search log-regardless of search query used. Predicted Distribution is the predicted breakdown by age of MSN Search users for a single search query, based on the adLabs predictive model.
and

Local Ads by PC Address: Microsoft adCenter technologies can detect customer's location by his or her computer's IP address and then list relevant local ads based on this location.


More on Yahoo SmartAds.

Yahoo!'s New "SmartAds" Meld Brand and Direct Response Advertising

Apple iPhone to Generate more than 50 % Margins

Businessweek is reporting that according to Portelligent, a firm specializing in product teardowns and reporting, the cost of the materials used in the iPhone add up to about $200 for the 4-gigabyte version, which sells for $499 and about $220 for the 8-gigabyte version, which sells for $599. Thus Apple is making more than 50% is margins.

Portelligent estimates that the cost of the materials used in the iPhone add up to about $200 for the 4-gigabyte version, which sells for $499 and about $220 for the 8-gigabyte version, which sells for $599. Their estimate doesn't include costs of final assembly, but it does give some insight into the gross margin on the device. Historically Apple's gross margins have run ball park of 50% plus or minus a few points. "We had taken a speculative stab at what the costs would be back in January, when the phone was first announced and we were pretty close to the mark," Carey says (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/20/06, "The Skinny on Apple's New nanos").


This report is in line with what iSuppli reported in Jan 2007.
“iSuppli estimates the 4Gbyte version of the Apple iPhone will carry a $229.85 hardware BoM and manufacturing cost and a $245.83 total expense, yielding a 50.7 percent margin on each unit sold at the $499 retail price,” said Andrew Rassweiler, teardown services manager and senior analyst for iSuppli. “Meanwhile, the 8GByte Apple iPhone will sport a $264.85 hardware cost and a $280.83 total expense, amounting to a 53.1 percent margin at the $599 retail price.”
This kind of high margins although nothing new to Apple may well be offsetting the margin pressures on it's iPod business.

Consumerization of IT

This weekend I have been reading a lot about Consumerization of IT, a term coined by Gartner. It all started by my reading of a Gartner report titled, Consumerization of IT in Retail: Be Ready When Employees Come to Buy Corporate Technology in Your Store. This consumerization is going to affect a lot of industries and companies. According to the report, this will have a great impact on Retail industry and how companies make purchases. Some companies are allowing their companies to purchase their own technology, such as laptops and mobile phones and these employees will purchase only from those retailers who are ready with corporate class products and services. Gartner report is predicting that this can cause a shift in purchases from value-added resellers to retailers. Retailers will need to make changes to their stores, staff and merchandise mix if they want to secure part of this new market.

While this is one view, another view is that Consumerization of IT will pose a major threat to security in Enterprises.

One of the most-significant threats to enterprise security is the consumerization of IT, and as more consumer technologies enter the enterprise, security managers must prepare for, and manage, the security risks, according to Gartner, Inc. Employees expect to use more of their personal equipment and services at work, and enterprises are simultaneously adopting more consumer technologies in business operations.

Some more links you can follow to read more on Consumerization of IT are given below:

Gartner: Ability to leverage consumerization of IT will make or break businesses

Consumerization Gains Momentum: The IT Civil War

No Surprise, Google at Forefront of Consumerization of IT

Importance of Search Engines on Tourism

Couple of days back while driving to office, I was listening to the local Radio station jockey asking a guest (some govt official) on what will be the impact if Taj Mahal is not included in the new seven wonders of the world. I was quite surprised by the answer. The government official who was being interviewed answered, "this is the age of search engines and if Taj Mahal is not included in the new seven wonders, there is a possibility that people may very soon forget about Taj. When they will search for the next place to visit, possibly Search engines will not display Taj Mahal thus impacting Indian tourism industry". Well the answer was very apt and demonstrated what impact Google, Yahoo, MSN (or Live), Ask.com are having on any nation's tourism and thus economies. According to a Yahoo Search Marketing research nearly 87% people who go on high end vacations use the Internet to shop for travel.

NEARLY NINE IN 10 CONSUMERS--OR 87 percent--who go on high-end vacations use the Internet to shop for travel, according to a study released Wednesday by Yahoo Search Marketing.

The majority of luxury travelers--57 percent--sought information from general search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com. More than half--54 percent--also reported visiting online travel agencies to research airfares, hotels, and the like, while 44 percent went to online travel suppliers. The other major online sources of information were travel review chatboards and blogs--frequented by 10 percent of luxury travelers.

 Also as per another report from Dec, 2005 from TIA,

Among the 64 million online travelers cited in the TIA survey, 66 percent use online travel agency sites (such as Expedia, Travelocity, or Priceline), 67 percent use Search Engines, and 55 percent use destination Web site.  This one statistic underscores the vital importance of search engine compliance and search engine ranking to destination marketing organizations.

This makes me think, why are governments not tying with these Search engines or learning SEO for a direct impact on increase in tourism.

BTW, do cast your vote for Taj Mahal, for more details, visit votefortaj.com.

More links:

Search- Luxury travelers don’t leave home without it

Live Search for Mobile and Eskimos

Almost all TV stations in India are playing this great new commercial of Eskimos coming to India. The commercial shows a person searching for Eskimos using guess what, Live Search for Mobile. Now Hutch has tied up with Microsoft Live Search sometime back and this commercial is great in the sense that this is the first time I am seeing Microsoft Live Search in India. The ad makes it look all very simple thus perhaps this will encourage more people to use GPRS services and add to Hutch's ARPU which at Rs 390 is now second to Airtel's Rs 406 (Data as of Mar 31, 2007). Brand wise I feel Microsoft has scored well this time. The Live Search logo is positioned at the top of search box and then on top of search results (saying Powered by Live Search).

You can see the Commercial by clicking here or demo of the service at Hutch web site.

Google has already joined the party by having a partnership with Bharti Airtel (No.1 service provider in India, >40 Million Mobile Customers) in Dec 2006. Well, I could not find data on GPRS usage in India and closest I could get was this blog post at Startup Dunia and another blog post at WATblog.  From WATblog:

Indian GSM mobile phone service providers signed up a record 6.1 million customers in March, taking total users to 121.4 million. (Via: Financial Express)
121.4 million GSM users, that is pretty massive! That’s a lot of handsets around!
During yesterday’s panel discussion one got some nice figures…
50-60 million of these 121.4 million GSM users have data capable phones.
10-15 million of these users actually know what is GPRS and have at some point used their phone to access data.
2-3 million of these have used it more than once and use it predominantly to download wallpapers, ringtones etc.
0.2 million of these use GPRS to regularly access Email on their mobiles and can be termed as active users of GPRS.
So from 121.4 million we are down to 0.2 million. That is pretty pathetic.

Figure of 0.2 Million looks pretty low to believe it but even if we increase the number to 1-2 Million, it is still around 1 % of the total mobile base in India. So what are Google and Microsoft hunting for? In my view, they are right now just riding with the Service Providers who are more concerned as against MSFT/GOOG and want to increase the ARPU while managing the churn.

Here we go again...

So, after almost three years I am blogging again from WebJives domain. This time on WebJives.org instead of WebJives.com. You may ask why? That's a long story, some goof ups from my side and a whole lot more from the hosting provider and I lose the domain name. The domain rests now with Afternic.com and they are asking a hell lot more then I am emotionally attached with WebJives.com domain. So for now, I will start blogging on WebJives.org.

For people who missed reading about us, you can catch the old archives at http://webjives.blogspot.com. Also, if you guys have been following us (you guys won't give up, huh), I have been blogging at some more places notable being:
http://weblogs.asp.net/dsharma
http://retail-tech.blogspot.com

Stay tuned for some great content coming here.

Scott McNealy's Xmas dream

Scott McNealy's Xmas dream
Next up on the Big Guy's lap is Paul Otellini of Intel. "Santa, can't I please, please have a 64-bit processor that works?"

Santa puts on a very stern face. "Paul, last year you wished for that and I gave you Itanium. Now you can't just throw it in the trash because you're fed up with it. You've got to find a way to make it work."

"Aw, Santa. You know it'll never work. Our engineers know it'll never work. Only HP believes it'll work - and those guys believe in fairies and elves." Paul trudges off sullenly.

Next up is a parent without her son. She looks out of breath and flustered, and I realize that her Timmy is one of the kids who have been ricocheting around the mall like a pinball. As she rushes by, she stops for a second to say to Santa: "Can I please have something that lets me keep track of my youngest son Timmy? How come you can track a present halfway around the world in real-time, and I can't find my son halfway across the mall?"

Santa pats her on the arm and says, "I have just the thing. Use it to track the reindeer and the Claus kids myself. It's called an RFID locator and I'll put one under the tree for you."

"Make it two," said the mom over her shoulder as she spotted Timmy on the second floor crosswalk. "Half the time I can't find his father Bob either."

Alternative to MS Powerpoint

Eric Meyer and gang has released a very useful alternative to Microsoft Powerpoint called S5. It uses XHTML, CSS and Javascript and thus is very usable and accessible. The feature I like most is that it is very printer friendly. Check it out.
S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

Webnote - Another Collaboration tool

Webnote is a tool for taking notes on your computer. It allows you to quickly write something down during a meeting, class, or any other time that you have a web browser(IE 6, Mozilla/Firefox, Safari supported) available. You start by creating a workspace and creating notes in the workspace. You can save your workspace at any time and return to them from the same computer or any other computer. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.

The best part, you can create RSS feed of any workspace (consisiting of one or multiple notes). Check it out.

GMail Drive shell extension

Noticed many blogs talking about GMail Drive. Way too cool. More information below:

GMail Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Google GMail account, allowing you to use GMail as a storage medium.
GMail Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Google GMail account and enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your GMail account directly from inside Windows Explorer. GMail Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.

Ever since Google started to offer users a GMail e-mail account, which includes storage space of a 1000 megabytes, you have had plenty of storage space but not a lot to fill it up with. With GMail Drive you can easily copy files to your GMail account and retrieve them again.
When you create a new file using GMail Drive, it generates an e-mail and posts it to your account. The e-mail appears in your normal Inbox folder, and the file is attached as an e-mail attachment. GMail Drive periodically checks your mail account (using the GMail search function) to see if new files have arrived and to rebuild the directory structures. But basically GMail Drive acts as any other hard-drive installed on your computer.
You can copy files to and from the GMail Drive folder simply by using drag'n'drop like you're used to with the normal Explorer folders.

Tata Infotech joins Mainframe Migration Alliance

One of the things I was involved in the last few weeks was partnering with Microsoft in the Mainframe Migration Alliance. The Mainframe Migration Alliance (MMA) is a group of companies that are working together to help customers migrate workloads off of the mainframe and onto the Microsoft platform. The Alliance represents a group of companies that have their interests aligned in making Mainframe Migrations easier and more efficient for customers. Tata Infotech (company I work for) has a long history of successful Mainframe Migration projects. Many of these migrations have been to the Wintel (MS Windows + Intel) platform (using .NET/Java technologies), so it was but obvious for us to join this alliance. I look forward to working with Microsoft and other alliance partners in helping our Customers move from Mainframe platforms to Windows.

Press Releases
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/sep04/09-28MainFrameMigrationPR.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2004/sep04/09-28MigrationAlliance.asp

Where have I been, Where am I going?

Last few months have been very hectic for me on the work front and whatever time I could take out (very minimal), I tried to spend it with my wife. The result being, it left very little time to blog (both read and write) and other things I love to do. Hopefully, the long work hours will subside and I will get good time to blog.