The Power of 2

Using the ranking made by Alexa.com, I'd like to share with you some interesting bits of information on the world's most popular Internet and technology companies of today.

This is listed by global rank, company name, founder/s and the year their companies were founded/established:

• 1 Yahoo - David Filo and Jerry Yang, 1994
• 2 Youtube - Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, 2005
• 4 Google - Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 1995
• 5 Myspace - Brad Greenspan and Chris DeWolfe, 1999
• 7 Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg and Andrew McCollum, 2004
• 8 Hi5 - Ramu Yalamanchi and Akash Garg, 2003
• 9 Wikipedia - Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, 2000
• 17 Friendster - Jonathan Abrams, 2002
• 18 Microsoft - Bill Gates and Paul Allen, 1975
• 23 Ebay - Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll, 1995
• 39 Amazon - Jeff Bezos, 1994
• 51 Wordpress - Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, 2003
• 89 Apple - Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, 1974
• 162 Digg - Kevin Rose, 2004
• 196 Dell - Michael Dell, 1984
• 217 Linkedin - Reid Hoffman, 2002
• 233 HP - William Hewlett and David Packard, 1939
• 240 DoubleClick - Kevin O'Connor and Dwight Merriman, 1996
• 348 StumbleUpon - Gary Camp et. al, 2001
• 436 Skype - Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, 2003

Out of the list that I have compiled, we can see the following:

• 70% were founded by 2 persons
• 25% were founded by an individual
• 5% were founded by more than 3 persons
• 50% were established only from the year 2000 until 2005
• 30% were established from 1990 until 1999
• 5% were established in the 1980's
• 15% were established earlier than 1980
• 80% are Internet companies
• 40% are in the Global Top 20 Companies

Other interesting facts are:

• a handful of them started their companies in their early 20s
• a handful of them either started their companies in their garage or school dorm
• Youtube is one of the most successful startups in just less than 5 years of its existence
• Google is now the most dominant Internet company having more than 50% of the internet advertising market
• Myspace is the leading social networking site in the US, while Friendster is for the Filipinos
• Microsoft recently offered US $40B to buy Yahoo in its bid to compete with Google
• Apple made another wave because of its iPod line of products

How about our local technology companies? When can we see that we have some Filipino technology companies who will make it to the Global Top 500?

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Search > Google

In case you may be wondering how in the world did Google started, how it became one of the most success stories on the Internet and how will it continue to dominate the search technology, then check this brief history on how search technology evolved since the 1950s and the role Google played in it.

The history of document search dates back to the 1950s.

Search engines existed in those ancient times, but their primary use was to search a static collection of documents. In the early 60s, the research community gathered new data by digitizing abstracts of articles, enabling rapid progress in the field in the 60s and 70s. But by the late 80s, progress in this area had slowed down considerably.

In order to stimulate research in information retrieval, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) in 1992. TREC introduced new data in the form of full-text documents and used human judges to classify whether or not particular documents were relevant to a set of queries. They released a sample of this data to researchers, who used it to train and improve their systems to find the documents relevant to a new set of queries and compare their results to TREC's human judgments and other researchers' algorithms.

The TREC data revitalized research on information retrieval. Having a standard, widely available, and carefully constructed set of data laid the groundwork for further innovation in this field. The yearly TREC conference fostered collaboration, innovation, and a measured dose of competition (and bragging rights) that led to better information retrieval.

New ideas spread rapidly, and the algorithms improved. But with each new improvement, it became harder and harder to improve on last year's techniques, and progress eventually slowed down again.

And then came the web.

In its beginning stages, researchers used industry-standard algorithms based on the TREC research to find documents on the web. But the need for better search was apparent - now not just for researchers, but also for everyday users - and the web gave us lots of new data in the form of links that offered the possibility of new advances. There were developments on two fronts. On the commercial side, a few companies started offering web search engines, but no one was quite sure what business models would work. On the academic side, the National Science Foundation started a "Digital Library Project" which made grants to several universities.

Two Stanford grad students in computer science named Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on this project. Their insight was to recognize that existing search algorithms could be dramatically improved by using the special linking structure of web documents. Thus PageRank was born.

Larry and Sergey initially tried to license their algorithm to some of the newly formed web search engines, but none were interested. Since they couldn't sell their algorithm, they decided to start a search engine themselves. The rest of the story is well-known.

This is an excerpt from "Why Data Matters" by Hal Varian, Chief Economist of Google.

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Innovation in the Philippines

"Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower." Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.

When we decided to focus on promoting our local innovations through the web last year, we believed that this will allow us to reach more people and share that there are so many things that our researchers, inventors and innovators have already created or developed.

Personally, in the many technology-focused events that we have initiated since 2000, I have observed that many of our partners such as research institutions and universities can do compete internationally, despite their limited funds.

Institutions and organizations have the following:

• DOST - Advanced Science and Technology Institute has Bayanihan Linux
• Philippine Carabao Center has started cloning researches on our buffalos
• CLIERDEC has research collaborations among its member-institutions
• DLSU - College of Computing Studies has some advanced researches like robotics
• Technological University of the Philippines has outputs ready for patents

Other developments that can push innovation to a new level:

• The national government, along with some partners, have launched the fist National Innovation Summit last November, 2007
• Cebu, for one, will stage the Cebu Business Month ICT Conference this June and will include the first Cebu International Open Source Summit with the objective of catapulting Cebu as an “Innovation Island”

In the coming months, we will feature our local innovators from different sectors such as academe, ICT, agriculture, government research, energy, telecommunications, etc.

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Carefully and Promptly

This is just the start of the year, yet, the atmosphere is already heating up.

In the online advertising market, in particular, it is growing at a very fast pace from over $40 billion in 2007 to a projected $80 billion by 2010. Expectedly, advertisers around the world will double their spending on the Internet during the next three years as more people get their news and entertainment on the Web and mobile devices instead of television, radio, newspapers and magazine.

But there is another recent story which can probably change the technology landscape of the future - Microsoft and Yahoo! versus Google.

With the recent $44.6 billion unsolicited takeover bid of Yahoo! by Microsoft, both icons in the technology world but are losing much in the arena of online search, it is indeed a bold step to challenge Google in the Internet universe with more than 50% global leadership and market share.

As stated by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in his letter to Yahoo! last January 31, "We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!'s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers".

Sure, they can maximize all the benefits of this merger or I would rather say an acquisition, but this sort of urgency on the part of Microsoft seems to indicate that the once-puny online search engine called Google, is still unbeatable and taking more profits than what they both can generate from Internet search and advertising.

In terms of figures, Microsoft had online revenue of $863 million, compared with $4.8 billion at Google. Yahoo and Microsoft together had more than $2.6 billion in revenue, still trailing well behind Google but in a far stronger competitive position.

On the part of Yahoo, "it has been struggling to attract more advertising for quite some time eventhough its Web site attracts one of the biggest audiences, and will have to cut 1,000 jobs early this year." A clear development that co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang really needs to do more and not just to catch up with Google, especially with the reported 23 percent drop in its fourth-quarter profit and a tepid outlook for 2008.

Their reply last February 1 was that they will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!'s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders. It did not specify, however, how long the review process would take and vaguely said “it can take quite a bit of time.”

If this deal will be consummated, it would be by far the largest acquisition in Microsoft's history, eclipsing last year's $6 billion purchase of online ad service aQuantive.

Whether Microsoft with Yahoo! will be successful or not, only time can tell. In the meantime, many believe that Google will continue to dominate the Internet and possibly even in the mobile world with the introduction of their OpenSocial and Android technologies last year.

For me, this will still be an exciting development especially if this will push through. It will also be one of the biggest stories for 2008.

But what's more important is if it will be achieve the following:

• something that will create more innovation and not limiting the competition
• provide better service and competitive to what the others are offering
• lower their costs and integrating their processes, and
• if it will greatly benefit their respective shareholders, employees, partners and clients

So like what an old adage would say, "if you can't beat them, join them."

Expect more developments of this story in the coming weeks...

Sources: Yahoo!, Associated Press, Information Week and NY Times.

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Creative Thinking

In today's competitive world of starting an entrepreneurial idea, it is not just having the common traits (such as vision, passion, time management and investment) which an aspiring entrepreneur must have like you, but you must also possess that creative juice especially when you first conceived and dreamed of it.

As mentioned by Carolyn Campbell, a home-office veteran entrepreneur and writer:

• that initial electric charge of creativity is often followed by bursts of energy that help you complete vital tasks and spur you on to make your business ideas become realities
• rather than being a personality trait, creativity is a way of thinking that aspiring and veteran entrepreneurs can take advantage of to build their businesses in innovative and profitable ways

So whatever business idea that you may have, be it in the field of technology, retail, service, manufacturing or education, you can try applying the following techniques:

• explore creative thinking methods - don't just rely on time-tested means to think creatively, but also to discover areas such as blind alleys to maximize your general maneuverability.
• think like an artist to make friends with failure - like an artist, an entrepreneur can begin a business with different starting methods, thinking of each different version as a different incarnation rather than as a failure.
• let creativity help your business evolve - to realize the strengths that you have and to improve on your weaknesses, an entrepreneur must be receptive to the validity of each of the stages of his own creativity.
• choose a creative theme to help launch and grow your business - this will help you attract attention and create awareness right out of your chute, and continue to expand and reinforce your original idea as your business grows.
• cross-pollinate your creativity - other ideas can sometimes become the greatest enhancers of creativity, where you need to expose yourself to new ideas and thoughts of others for cross-pollination of their own creativity.
• break away from work so your ideas can marinate - sometimes, you can change your environment to spur you on to want to return to your artwork with fresh ideas; that when you sometimes expect it the least, that's the time when you can have breakthrough ideas

So go ahead, think and express whatever creative idea that you have right now, we may never know, this could be a success story in the years to come.

Excerpt from Business Start-ups magazine, March 1997.

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A New Direction in 2008

This year, we have prepared to renew and change the name of our startup, from being Convergex Asia Expositions Management to Convergex Asia Web Services, to reflect the new direction and vision which we intend to achieve for the startup for the long-term.

A new perspective of being purely an events management startup for the last 6 years to becoming an information technology services startup.

Unexpectedly, what the Department of Trade and Industry (Nueva Ecija) did approve recently was the business name Daph and Dale Web Services.

With this new development, we will be officially using the name Daph and Dale Web Services in all of our transactions and communications. (The names Daph and Dale pertains to our children, Daphnee Gail and Dale Samuel.)

We will, on the other hand, prepares to apply the names as trademarks or brand names of the Daph and Dale Web Services with the Intellectual Property Office. Moving forward, this will be our identity:

• Daph and Dale Web Services will be our legal name
• Convergex Asia will be our venture into the web services such as video blogging
• Daph and Dale will be our venture into internet cafe and related services
• Central Plains will be our venture into technology events and educational shows

With this new direction, we are optimistic that we'll be able to achieve more starting this year.

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trends and developments

Here are some of the excerpts on the recent news, issues, trends and developments in the Philippine innovation sector:

"Engr. Diosdado Banatao was cheered during the 2007 UP Alumni Association in America (UPAAA) General Assembly and Convention Gala Dinner held on September 2 at the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton in San Francisco, California when UP President Emerlinda Roman announced that he and his wife Maria had pledged USD$500,000.00 to the UP College of Engineering (COE).

Banatao talked about the pressing need for technology development in the Philippines. He said that technology development is necessary for economic development as they yield high value products that have an almost limitless demand in the global market. He cited neighboring Asian economies of Taiwan, Korea and Japan as examples. Banatao said that the challenge for a developing economy such as the Philippines is “to identify products and services that create a competitive advantage in growth sectors of the global economy.”

However, Banatao stated that the Philippines’ current technology infrastructure is not ready to take on such a task, as it requires sustaining technologies transferred from foreign investments. The problem may be traced back to the shortage of research scientists and engineers in the country due to flaws in the higher educational system, such as the predominant use of teachers with only bachelor’s degrees. He also cited the lack of cutting-edge research laboratories in the country as a problem.

For Banatao, the country’s only sources for research and development are science and engineering schools. Unfortunately, they too have their own problems, namely the lack of support from both the public and private sectors. He said the public and privates sectors, as well as academe, need to develop a culture that respects and rewards people who choose to go into the fields of Science, Technology, and Engineering, especially in advanced research." (Francis Paolo M. Quina, "Entrepreneur calls for Eng’g R&D, pledges $500,000", www.upd.edu.ph)

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