Motoko’s weblog

When I was speaking at SES London, I started to lose my voice after 5 min. or so in. Yes, it’s just my luck. I apologize to people came to the session, I didn’t sound good at all. While I was speaking, I couldn’t help myself but calling “riiiiicolaaaaa” in my head. Now, that’s the power of advertising and marketing, isn’t it? The search is great, and it’s going to be even better, but in my opinion, it will never replace TV ads. Through the search, the businesses can only connect to people if and when they happen to search what you offer. On the other hand, TV ads push what they want you to know, again and again. Then I was thinking, what would be the closest thing on Internet to TV ads… Perhaps it’s the banner ads, but we all know that many banner ads are ignored, people skip right over the ads and read what they want to read on the page. Continue Reading »

It’s been 3 weeks since Baidu officially opened its services in Japan after 10months of beta phase. While the news has been picked up by some search industry media, I haven’t heard any user side feedbacks. None of my friends in Japan have tried the search at Baidu, yet. So, the question is… “Will Baidu gain market share in Japan?

During the bata phase, Baidu’s robot crawled Japanese websites like crazy. It was so crazy that many site owners set a tag to avoid Baidu robot from crawling their sites. Since its official opening, they decreased the frequency of robot crawling, and some owners may already switched to let it crawl the site, but still Baidu’s index volume is probably far less than that of Yahoo Japan and Google Japan, which may be translated as “Baidu’s search results may be completely different from what you get from Yahoo or Google”. Continue Reading »

2 weeks after Google released its Google Social Graph API, Yahoo Japan opened “Yahoo Profile” service. The service integrates their Social Networking Service, Yahoo Days’ profile pages and Open ID user profiles. On Yahoo Profile page, you’ll see friends list, and feeds in addition to profile information. It looks much like SNS’s member top page.

Yahoo Days members aren’t as active as other popular SNSs in Japan such as mixi and Grree, and if and how many users they can maintain and hopefully gain in up coming months are Continue Reading »

Microsoft said that they made an acquisition offer to Yahoo, and Yahoo is willing to consider the option. Of course, Microsoft is hoping to beat Google by working with Yahoo as Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer said, “We can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers, and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online-services market”. Continue Reading »