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Deal Radar 2008: Kayak Consolidates Travel

Posted on Thursday, Jan 3rd

As we have discussed, Online Travel is a large category, and active in entrepreneurship. Web 1.0 produced giant companies (Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Priceline), and in Web 2.0 we have a couple of vertical search engines that are pulling ahead. Kayak, the world’s largest travel search engine, receives more than 6 million unique visitors per month.

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Vertical Ad Networks: A Trend to Watch for 2008

Posted on Sunday, Dec 9th

I talked about Audience Fragmentation and the Rise of Ad Networks recently. At the moment, the Ad Networks are in the business of amassing large volumes of fragmented traffic, and offering a channel to advertisers to access the publishers who own this traffic. Expect, in 2008, a trend towards these “mass” Ad Networks gradually becoming

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Web 3.0 & Yahoo! (Part 5)

Posted on Friday, Nov 23rd

Conclusion Yahoo! Inc. is a leading Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide with 460 million worldwide unique visitors. About 88% of total revenues for the fiscal year 2006 came from marketing services. The largest segment of it comes from search advertising. Of late, Yahoo’s financial performance has been mediocre compared

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Web 3.0 & Yahoo! (Part 4)

Posted on Thursday, Nov 22nd

Acquisition Strategy Yahoo! has made several acquisitions this year, primarily in display advertising. The key acquisitions were MyBlogLog, Right Media, BuzzTracker, Rivals.com, Zimbra and BlueLithium. Of these, RightMedia and Blue Lithium are good moves to consolidate its Ad Networks position, but Zimbra, in my opinion, is not a good acquisition. I feel Yahoo! can improve

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Murdoch Gets Dow Jones, Now What?

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 31st

As expected, Rupert Murdoch has successfully negotiated for himself a position in the Business and Finance vertical with a crown jewel brand, The Wall Street Journal. Here’s my previous analysis on why this deal is a good one. I really like News Corp’s verticalization strategy. James Altucher asked Jim Cramer, “What’s the one thing the

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Facebook’s Monetization Strategy (Part 3)

Posted on Friday, Jul 27th

I’ll give you one more vertical, and then stop. You can figure out the rest yourselves. Travel is a great vertical for Facebook, and in fact, creating contextual services like Group Travel could be very cool. According to the latest data published by eMarketer, online travel sales zoomed to over $78.8 billion in 2006 in

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Expedia: Buyback of Shares

Posted on Tuesday, Jun 26th

Expedia (NASDAQ:EXPE) is the largest online travel content company, headquartered in Bellevue, WA. The Company through its portfolio of well-recognized brands like, Expedia.com, TripAdvisor.com, Hotwire.com, Hotels.com, Expedia Corporate Travel, Classic Vacations® and a range of other US-based and international businesses that provide travel products and services to leisure and corporate travelers. The Company is the

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Om Malik: Pioneering Blogs (Part 11)

Posted on Monday, Jun 11th

Here Om and I discuss some the challenges of operating a blog. The industry is in its infancy. In particular, there are difficulties with advertising networks and lack of analytics. SM: Are you following what Time Warner is doing with companies like Adify? OM: I have not. There are several reasons for that, mainly I

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