Written on 28th May 2009
19 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
The world is abuzz with the news that Microsoft is about to launch a serious Google competitor somewhere in the next days. Unfortunately Microsoft has gotten such a bad rep when it comes to launching, and growing, web services that it is hard to find an optimistic blogger out there.
Is there anyone in the world who thinks that Microsoft’s new Search Engine, named Bing, will seriously compete with Google?
Of course they have a 100 million dollar ad budgets to inject their new service into our brains but that only sets expectations higher. Because no matter what their ad budget is, no one will ever consider leaving Google unless Bing’s results are substantially better than Google’s.
Peter Drucker famously said that “For new technology to replace old, it has to have at least ten
times the benefit.”
That means that Bing doesn’t have to be twice as good as Google but more than 10 times as good before people will switch. Somehow I just don’t see that happening.
It does make me very anxious to try out Bing. Somehow I can’t imagine Microsoft going through all this trouble for a mediocre product. The must have SOMETHING that makes them this optimistic.
If they don’t, all Bing will be known for in a few months will be it’s acronym: “But It’s Not Google”
Written on 28th September 2008
14 COMMENTS
Guest blogger, sharing views on The Next Web
Written by Mircea Goia
It seems it’s the end of the road for Entrecard…or maybe not. It depends on who is buying it and what it does after that, since the site is listed on sale on Sitepoint Marketplace since September 25.
Entrecard was basically founded as a traffic exchange service for bloggers (English language only). It launched 11 months ago and now it has about 20,000 blogs in its network delivering about 80 million impressions a month. The core product is the widget network, which serves 125×125 advertising across 56 vertical channels in the blogosphere. They also developed a Firefox toolbar used by our bloggers/publishers to visit other sites, purchase advertising, and pack the power of the site into the browser. This toolbar is used by 7000 bloggers so they claim.
According to Sitepoint’s post Entrecard has about 85,000 unique visitors a month (growing at a rate of 18%/month – no marketing) and 3,25 million pageviews/month. But Compete.com shows something else.
Entrecard has over 1 million visitors a month – and that’s only from USA. Now, I wonder who’s right, knowing that Compete or Alexa numbers are not that accurate.
The 11th hour
Entrecard founder Graham Langdon mentions the reason he sells on Sitepoint:
I am selling because I have come to a stalemate. Entrecard is growing fast, but I do not have the resources to put behind it. I recently met extensively with Venture Capitalists who were going to make a 700k seed investment and a 2-5m follow on Series A investment in 6 months. The deal fell through in the 11th hour, right before the terms sheet, because they lost faith in my ability to execute the plan after a series of tests in which I did not know I was being tested. The valuation we were discussing was 8 million. We were going to open a headquarters, hire 10 people, and go straight to the top. Then it fell apart, and after getting my hopes up, I just haven’t been able to get back on my feet. I’m a wreck and feeling like a failure to come so close only to drop it due to my idiocy.
I also received an Angel investment several months ago at a valuation of $500,000. The network has more than tripled in size since I received that small investment. Month after month the growth rate just increases.
The sale price is a minimum $100,000 and the bid ends soon. Any takers? (auction ends in 16 hours after the time of writing this article)
Publicity stunt?
I am not sure why the founder couldn’t find another investor for the site. I mean, if Compete is correct, some investors have to be interested. Maybe Langdon should give it another chance and not have his hopes ruined after one failure (although he has family problems as well, says his blog). He also founded the Million Dollar Wiki project (buy a wiki page for $100), an Alex Tew’s MillionDollarHomepage copycat. He obviously knows how to work the media, so this could be a publicity stunt (saying to sell the site, media talks, he gets a publicity boost and then he changes his mind).
Graham managed to make $123,000 from MillionDollarWiki so far and he wanted also to sell this site on Sitepoint to finance his new project, Entrecard. But it seems he wasn’t lucky. The price he wanted wasn’t met so probably he didn’t sell.
Update: I just spoke with Langdon and he told me he changed his mind and won’t sell. That’s good because Entrecard has a future and he should be the one who should fullfill it. I always agreed that who started something (a company in this case) should finish it (head it to success). Hopefully, he will be up to this task and I wish him all the best.
Written on 19th February 2008
12 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Could it be? Could Live.com become a bigger web destination than Google.com? If you look at Alexa (Reach: Percentage of Internet users who visit Google and Live.com) it certainly seems so. Just recently Google had to give up its second place on the top 10 list of websites to Youtube but now it has been surpassed in rank even by Live.com and is currently number 4 on the list. As you can see I used a very unscientific method to predict the daily reach for both Google.com and Live.com and Live is clearly on the rise.
Not all data on Compete shows Live.com as the winner but this one (pages per visit) certainly does:
I know these numbers are debatable and are more indications of web traffic and usage but even so, this would have been unthinkable in November 2005 when Live.com launched. Google has long been considered the only viable search destination. My guess is that in 2008 more and more people will start considering alternatives such as Live.com, Yahoo.com and maybe even new players like ManagedQ which we profiled here earlier.
The world is abuzz with the news that Microsoft is about to launch a serious Google competitor somewhere in the next days. Unfortunately Microsoft has gotten such a bad rep when it comes to launching, and growing, web services that it is hard to find an optimistic blogger out there.
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