Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 3)

SM: What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? CL: When we started Travel Ad Network, Google AdSense had just launched its textlink product and everything was about textlinks and performance advertising. No one talked about users; it was all about clicks. And the terms “branding” and “online” weren’t used in the

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Vertical Travel Ad Network CEO Cree Lawson (Part 2)

SM: Where did you get the idea for your current venture? CL: When I wrote a business plan for online advertising on Fodors.com, I knew that Fodor’s had an affluent audience eager to spend thousands of dollars planning the best two weeks of their year. This is an appealing prospect to advertisers. But at Rough

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Deal Radar 2008: Kayak Consolidates Travel

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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Web 3.0 & Google (Part 4)

Acquisition Strategy Google has made several acquisitions this year. The key acquisitions were Adscape, Trendalyzer, Marratech, FeedBurner, PeakStream, GrandCentral, Postini and Jaiku. Google is yet to complete its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., a global leader in digital marketing technology and services. Google’s acquisition strategy is different from most other companies. Google has mostly

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Word of Mouth: Marketeers’ Delight and Nightmare

One of my absolute favorite sites on the web is TripAdvisor, which we reviewed a while ago. Let me use a screenshot from the TripAdvisor home page to demonstrate what Word-of-Mouth can do to a business:

Web 3.0 & MSN (Part 5)

Conclusion Microsoft has been reorganizing and rebranding its online properties. The Company has rebranded MSN Messenger and Hotmail as Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail. Microsoft is working on improving the underlying technology behind MSN and introducing new features but all this is yet to trickle down to the bottomline. There are rumors of

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Web 3.0 & MSN (Part 4)

Acquisition Strategy Microsoft acquired Medstory and aQuantive this year. Actually both were very good acquisitions. Online Health is a large segment with 31% of the total U.S. Internet users or 55.3 million U.S. Internet audience visiting health information sites each month during the first quarter of 2007. Buying aQuantive was a shrewd move. With the

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Web 3.0 & MSN (Part 3)

Web 3.0 Framework discussion Below is a quick overview of the Web 3.0 framework for the MSN sites. We have not gone into the details of all the properties, but you can review the Web 3.0 section of this site for detailed discussions on some of the vertical categories. Context MSN Astrology provides horoscopes and

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