Just stumbled across (this) found it very very fascinating but would Google make such a purchase who knows but In my opinion don’t think so my reasons being the price tag is too big even for a company like Google with huge pile of cash and they can easily raise a bit more if needed to fund such a acquisition but will they be able to digest and integrate this into their offerings is what would be interesting to see if this does go through with the $54.13B price tag it can go more then that too.

Well with such an acquisition they would not just get a ready made hardware platform the blackberry but they also get a very important chunk of the corp clients who are users of the RIM platform so the only thing left for them would be integrating the hardware with their hosted applications for corporate domains and viola an enterprise class mobile collaboration suite and I guess that Google is bound to announce something huge since they have already taken their cash cow Adsense mobile so the Gphone is definitely on its way whether blackberry turns into a Gphone or there is another route Google will take only time will tell and their recent acquisition of zingku also shows their interest in the mobile space this is important for them in countries like India and China where the mobile penetration is more then PC penetration and they are definitely lagging in both this countries but so far Google’s mobile strategy has been a bit shaky am still wondering why they bought dodgeball some time back and their founders quit and left on an unhappy note with lot of media attention at their claims of how Google was not providing them with no resources to take the product further.

Yahoo has a product called pipes it is a neat little product built on top of plagger (read it somewhere cant remember where though) and YUI library for the nice ajax interface and the back end for interacting with RSS is based on plagger.

Microsoft has a similar product called popfly which is built on top of Microsoft web 2.0 framework which some people have called flash killer silverlight it is a nice little offering but the adoption is what is the worrying factor but with this framework going into some Microsoft products even the adoption of silverlight framework will pick up slowly and reach the main stream audience.

The latest entrant among the web trinity going for the gold pot in the online business is Google which is somewhat odd as Google is usually the first one to innovate the entry of Google also confuses because now it seems that Google can make money on monetizing this mashups with their latest purchase of feedburner as the other two in the game are giving this as just play toys to the developer communities of geeks who want a bit of extra power when dealing with their RSS feeds.

Well this trinity is after each others market share so it makes sense for them to launch copy cat products as soon as the others in the race do it as all are sitting on a talent on some smart engineers who can innovate as well as reverse engineer and improve upon.

Feedburner is a good buy and will help in spreading the reach of google publishers to RSS feeds and since now more attention in the web 2.0 era is given to syndication of content and RSS plays a key role in the syndication. my guess is the analytics part of feedburner will find its way into two of Google products Google Analytics and Google Reader. Google analytics for feed stats and analysis and Google Reader for showing the users the popularity of the feed if applicable that they want to subscribe to and also what no one realizes is the fact that feedburner is also huge huge repository of feeds both public or private so that naturally will form like a RSS directory for all the public feeds which are on Feedburner and Google Reader users can browse and subscribe to this Feeds.
so more options for the Feedburner users to reach a larger audience for their content now.

Panoramio is also a ok buy and fits well with Google Earth, Picasa and Google Maps strategy for Google and my guess is this technology , team that is acquired and user base will get diluted with the Google offerings and with talks about Google trying new advertising technology for adverts on geo tagged data this will fit well in that strategy.

Green border now this is the one buy that totally has me mesmerized (hahahaha) if you look at Google’s claim of acquiring technology or sites which deal with user generated content or ok companies with smart people whom Google want (now when will Google acquire us ) this buy might have smart people working on a good product but where does the product fit into Google’s offering unless they want to put that in google pack and throw norton and spyware doctor out from there ( might be ) or they might be worried about buying licenses of antivirus products for their internal users since their workforce is increasing at such a rapid pace now so it might make sense to have a antivirus company in house (hahahahahaha this is the lamest reason ever but you never know) with all the money which is piling up in Googles bank account
I am glad they are going for all this small buyouts and helping some small startups encash on their hard work.

So this leaves us with one very interesting question which is ……………….
Who is next on the list???????????????????

The last tech bubble was because of unrealistic and not sustainable business models for startups and lots of money was pumped into this startups by VC’s then but now the trend is for some of this web 2.0 startups the barrier of entry is not high (in terms of manpower,infrastructure etc) like how it was in the 90’s so this startups can go to market with limited resources but most of this startups are building their services or products to have a limited monetization options for them and if they don’t have any monetization option then just join an ad network. well there is nothing wrong with this model of using ads to monetize I remember reading one of the web 2.0 startups for sale on ebay the owner said that the money made from google adsense was sufficient to cover the basic server costs ya well good but then it is only enough and not more so for more money you need to get more users and more users mean more server costs and so the income coming in is in line with the growth graph of users and consumes 100% of the income if you follow this model the break even is reached but then you have to find other ways to take it to the next level.

With all this activity going in the online advertising space makes me really wonder is online advertising business as lucrative and sustainable as it looks look at me on an average I think I have atleast 20 queries on google every day but I never click on the sponsored links I only go to the natural search results but then again I think many many people will be there like me who dont click on the sponsored links but still google makes billions in revenue only from advertisers money yes I know they can actually help you track your campaigns  with better tools to track the ROI on your campaign but still I dont think it is for long time sustainable business for others because google has one thing till now that makes them rake in the ad revenues and that is their search technology all the ad networks sprouting around addressing niche markets or being restricted to just a small geographic section etc etc personally I dont think most of them stand a chance unless they can identify the next google killer and associate with them but then there is good hope because of the other wannabes in the ad space Microsoft, yahoo, aol and others are on the look out for them. Recent buy out of aquantive by microsoft, google buying out doubleclick, aol acquirring two firms one for the mobile ad space and one for online ads. WPP acquiring 24/7 real media, yahoo picking up stakes in ad companies etc etc.

The deals have been huge and sure the space is booming(only because more people are coming online) but then again the online ad biz makes sense only if you have publishers who have huge huge  number of users and this is where the fight in the future will be interesting as the publishers will become more demanding and the advertisers become more choosy over their spendings once this happen I think the mad rush to buy ad companies for huge sum of money just to justify competing with google will go and sanity will return again. I just hope it is not a bubble and some sanity returns in the online ad space.

Looking at Yahoos latest financial standings that looks like a good price for financial details see the following

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=yhoo http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=msft http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=Goog

According to the latest updates Microsoft has a cash reserve of 25.48 billion at their disposal so if they go with the valuation of 50 billion and yahoo decides to accept it then they still have to raise another 25 billion more which I don’t think will be a problem for them and google also has 11.94 billion dollars in cash( I am also looking out to see who is going to be googles next acquisition target)

Yahoo also has cash reserves of 2.35 billion but then again the other two giants are debt free where as yahoo has a debt of  749.76 million
well I would guess that bigger question is does yahoo want to sell to microsoft??
or the other way around does microsoft want to buy yahoo??

Both the parties have not yet confirmed any sort of negotiations but then again this is not the sort of deal u want to put it out in the market before anything concrete happens.

But if microsoft is willing to buy yahoo then the questions that need to be answered are

1)How much will they pay??

2)What will they do with yahoo (brand yahoo is one of the most recognised brands in cyberspace)??

3)Which of yahoo offerings will survive and which ones will vanish??

4)Will their shareholders be happy with this deal (since yahoo is almost in a coma state at present)??

5)The mother of all questions would be will be combine entity be able to take on google (otherwise microsoft shareholders will not see any benefit of this deal)?

If this rumor is true then I guess Microsoft’s concern is not the price tag or the debt or the usefulness of yahoo brand and access to its loyal users but the fact that integrating yahoo’s assets (IP and web properties) into Microsoft’s family of products will be a gigantic task and all the issues faced while integrating and migrating hotmail into the msn family will come back to haunt them and also the open source movement will lose one of its champions yahoo is the user of many open source offerings like php, mysql, apache etc etc

Well only time will tell whether this is true or false but overall I dont think the merged entity will be able to give Google a decent fight why you ask? well because google does one thing well and that is search unless someone else comes up with a better search engine google will remain in the limelight (yes I have tried Microsoft search engine and it is good but then again it is not part of Firefox  and also it does not make you come back looking for more information the way Google does)

The my bar which they have for accessing your favs,subscriptions etc is very cool and does a lot of difference to the web real estate.

Overall looks ok lets see what they have in store for the next update now since they have access to all the googlers holidng Phd’s.

I am wondering what this is all about since they are saying that it is a service I am guessing something in lines of a code repository OR a search engine that finds source code of open source projects

well we just have to wait and watch what this new service is all about
also it has got me wondering how will yahoo react to this bit of news

if anyone has any idea as to what this might be or would like to take a guess leave a comment

update: i know what it is now if you dont goto http://code.google.com/hosting/ this service is not ultra cool but cool none the less

What I was expecting the candidate was to hear the name of another search engine liek say Yahoo,Altavista,Teoma etc since there are so many of them out there but the candidate could not go past Google and suggest any other one.

My point here is Google has become like a doorway for people to navigate the wild wild web which is a good thing but is it smart just to rely on one service to get what you want. when I first started using the net the search engine that I used extensively was altavista. but one day I came across a mail from one of my chat buddies to try out this new search engine called Google and once I used Google and saw that the results were relevant and the interface was so clean, good and usable and it didnt take much time to load on my dialup connection changed my homepage from altavista to Google and it stayed as my home page till recently when I shifted to firefox and the small Google search box on top makes everyones life so easy now my homepage is shifted to news.com.com this is very I get my daily dose of technology news.

Google is good with all the services it is offering now and all the do no evil corporate tagline but is it good to have your view of the net limited to what Google says it is I definitely think not so go out there and start surfing and encourage all the good stuff you find out there