Hong Gao 's Web Log :

TechEd Beijing 2006 - 09/20/06

2006-11-08T09:44:00Z

I delivered two talks. Intro to Microsoft Local Search. This was my first time of presenting in Chinese. I am a native Chinese speaker and never doubted for a second about my own capability of speaking Chinese even after nearly 9 years in States. Oh, man, I was so wrong and it was so hard to present software releated topic in Chinese!

When I first started, it took me a hour just to work on a short presentation summary. I realized I never learned any computer terms in Chinese before. Thanks to Xi Wang and Frank Yu (EVANGELIST)'s help on my Chinese, I was able to delivery a successful talk in Chinese eventually. BTW, I thought it was cool to have my bio in Chinese!

高虹女士现就任于Windows Live Local Search部担任项目经理。她专门负责 Windows Live Local Search 的第一版本产品规划以及关键技术构想。高虹女士最先加盟微软产品支持部。在那段时间里, 她积累充足的经验充分理解用户以及怎样与用户打交道。在以后的五年时间里，她在产品开发部担任过各种职务，包括Visual Studio项目经理, 核心数据库引擎方面的测试，产品发布等等。高虹拥有核工学士，航空硕士以及计算机科学硕士学位。

Talk summary

您想知道什么是Local Search？您想知道这个市场有多大？有多少潜在的利润可被发掘？谁是这市场的竞争和胜利者。最总要的是究竟微软在作什么。

请参加这个演讲，听高虹给您介绍她的分析的见解。了解巨大的潜在市场和背后的推动力；体会微软Local Search产品各总惊舍前端功能；理解后端开发思想，以便帮组您探发潜在的商业机会。

TechED photoes at http://www.microsoft.com/china/technet/teched/introduction/teched2006.asp

Search Engine Strategy Conf Day 2 - 12/6/2005

2006-11-08T09:39:00Z

Session Notes

Session 1 - B2B Search Engines

This session has the B2B search engine representatives who shared briefly how they operate and their values compared to horizontal search engines.

Chris Sherman, Associate Editor, SearchEngineWatch.com

Mark Cordover, CEO, IT.com

- Consumer pulls instead of push

- Marketing is undergoing a fundamental revolution

- Demo of IT.com

Jeff Coyle, Search Guru, KnowledgeStorm

Jeff.coyle@knowledgestorm.com

- What impact does online content have on your vendor preferences and selections (89% say moderate to major impact)

You need a content strategy

Online content is clearly used and appreciated by the tech researcher

KnowledgeStorm Model

IT directory

Aggregated content from thousands of vendors

Over 2 million visits per month

Network of over 230 sites

Chris Hulse www.business.com

VP Strategic Sales & Business Development

NBC vs. cable TV as Google vs. vertical search

Dan Savage, CEO, SourceTool.com

Scott Virkler, Vice President, Business Development, GlobalSpec, Inc.

Good to find engineering specific detailed product catalog for industrial professionals and buyers

Erin Clift, Vertical Manager, Business & Industrial Markets, Google Inc.

- organize the world's information and make it accessible

- How does Google fit in the B2B?

Google is part of the eco-system when industry professionals and Buyers -> search engines, publishers, vendors’ sites, industry directories and search engines

Session 2 – Landing Page Testing & Tuning

This session looks at ways to test and tweak the landing pages to get that conversion. Getting someone to click on your search ad is only half the battle. Once visitors arrive, the landing pages you display to them are a crucial component in converting them into buyers.

I was so surprised to find out the test result when it comes of some content, arrangement of the web components.

Offermatica (hosted A/B testing and multivariate company)

Matthew Roche, CEO, Offermatica

Below are some interesting testing cases and results.

Owning the message click to close

Best: ad- Bid, word, offer, create

Best: Landing page

Test 1: Elements - free shipping

Test 1: Second Page Element

1. Free shipping (52%)

2. Ink text (2%)

3. Picture (46%)

Test 2:

Which Message was more appealing?

(38%) Indulge yourself

(62%) Hide from your kids

6% Text only

Tub (objects of desire)

45% Woman's face (indulge yourself)

17% Woman in towel (satisfy your dreams

Test 3: Elements

Call out popular searches

Key brands

33% Feedback+ shipping free

What is next?

Continuous champion

Investigate segments

Focus on key brands/items

Target to Ad group and keyword

Any idea is a test!

Category page

74% save $160

26% buy 2 or more and save an additional 10%

Category page optimization

14% Major Dickson’s blend- buy now

86% the world's Finest-browse blends

Lifestyle image/messaging

60% Promotion message

Simple

78% Cross selling on the cart

22% No cross selling on the cart

Call to Action

Strong call, soft slick instruction

Soft call, soft click

x strong call, strong click

strong call, soft click

New customer messaging

low price and easy credit

58% low price and promotion

What reinforced ad won?

Reinforcement - use your computer (better)

Reinforcement - internet fax service

hacker safe logo

54% Red

46% black

Session 3 – Google Print & The Copyright Debate

It was cancelled at the last min

Search Engine Strategy Conf Day 1 - 12/5/2005

2006-11-08T09:37:00Z

As some of you may know, I am attending Search Strategy Conference and help MSN Expo Booth. Today is my first day and I had opportunity to catch a couple of sessions I’d like to share with you. Tomorrow, I will help out MSN booth and may not have much opportunity to attend sessions. Let me know if you are particular interested in some sessions or would like to ask customers some questions.

Session 1 - Introduction to Search Engine Marketing

This is a 1.5 hour introduction for the key concepts around search engines, search optimization. Most of concepts are not new to you, but I thought it was really cool to actually see Danny Sullivan, especially after I read 4 of his articles on local search. I was also surprised to find out how many people don’t know about basic terms. It was good to see people come and get education as search is such a buzz to a lot of non-technical folks.

Session 2 – Earning From Search & Contextual Ads

This session looks at the way publishers can generate revenue by carrying search results and contextual ads offered by major networks. This helps to learn about some programs out there and tips on getting more from the ads carried.

This is a panel discussion with folks from Yahoo(Will Johnson), Google(Satya patel), “master” Ad tester (Jennifer Slegg) etc. It was educational. I kind of liked the intro from Google. Adsense really tried win-win-win for all participants of this ad ecosystem (Advertiser, Publisher, User). They have 17 languages available. They system will offer contextual targeting, site targeting besides keyword targeting. The small shops are really pumped by the ad programs. Somehow I did not see MSN in this panel discussion. I thought at least we want to let the customers know we are about to offer the program as good as the competitors if not better. That made me wonder if local search could actually pilot MSN Adcenter earlier than its full launch.

Session 3 – Global Search Landscape

In this session, I had chance to learn some of the searching habits and popular search engines outside the United States. I also learned some top level tips to consider if focusing on a particular world region or country via search.

The potential of search markets outside US is just amazing judging from number of potential users. I don’t have the exact number noted down, but if assuming those countries in China, India and south America have the same broadband penetration rate, the market potential is huge. Google is not always number one outside of US. I view this as our opportunity. Below are some interesting tips when considering search optimization internationaly

plurals vs. Singulas
prepositions and particle issue
Accents
Alternate characters
Aggregations or not

Session 4– Vertical Search topic on book search

This is a panel discussion with folks from MSN(Thiru Anandanpillai), Google(Tom Turvey), Yahoo (Sumir Meghani) etc. I learned how MSN, Yahoo and Google work with publishers to submit books and makes the print content online. Do you know actually 80% of the published books are actually out-of-print and not accessible easily. Inspired by the session, I was thinking about how local search could benefit, wouldn’t be nice to local a book/Video/image locally to your library, bookstore, person for some un-answered queries that normal web search could not provide answer today? Below are the notes from each speaker.

---------------------------

Google Tom Turvey

Head, print partnershis 212-5898614

turvey@google.com

---------------------------

- The goal is to drive more book sales

- Publisher could generate additional revenue with contextual ads

- What does it offer?

o Reports on Partner's Progress

o Content is protected

o Page-level security

o Only a percentage of pages are available online

- Google Print- How it works

o Are publishers seeing results?

- Library projects

o Library partnership

- Vision

o Since 80% are out of print, make 20% In-Print (partner program) -> 60% or more (unclear copyright status Less than 20%.

- Three User Experiences

o Sample pages View, Snippet View, Full Book View

o Controversial Snippet View

- Full text of book is indexed

- Users can only view 3 snippets

- Links to buy this work and find it in a library

- categories of books treated differently

- Library Project Scanning Policy

o Only 12 month after its public release

---------------------------

Sumir Meghani, Yahoo!Search

Open content alliance

---------------------------

- Enable people to Find, Use, Share and Expand all human knowledge (FUSE)

o Find – local the contents

o Use - Search not for sake of serching, but to achieve a purpose

o Share - sharing knowledge with people you connect with and connecting to people who you share knoledge

o Expand - Provide book…

- The opportunity

o Free online content (blogs, CNN, eBay) -> Onine Content (Wall Street Journey, Le Monde, New York Times)-> All Content(Books, Spoken word archives as legal cases)

- How is OCA different than other perceived similar efforts?

o OCA is collaborative, around the world, digitized text and multimedia content

- OCA policies

o Content - Permission of copyright holder needed before content will be digitized and ade available online

o Accessibility

o content in repository will be crawlable by any search engine

o Metadata exposed through feeds(OAI, RSS)

- Example of MIT OpenCourseWare (Tried to digitize all course material online)

- Use - Third parties are encouraged to build service on top it

- Digitization - Existing digitized collections can be included in repository with permission of content provider

---------------------------

Thiru Anandanpillai

MSN Search

Thirua@microsoft.com

---------------------------

- Motivation

o The importance of book content

o A lot of very complex queries go unanswered

o Even if it is answered, it takes 7-11 min

- Approach MSN took

o talked to publisher because they understand the customers better

o digitization of 80% out-of-print book is not something easily solvable by just MSN search

o End user innovation (get to interactive with book as many ways as possible, new business model explored

Kelsey Group Conf - March 27, 2006

2006-11-08T09:33:00Z

Here is the first time I could catch up my blog after the move. I will update you with some conferences I attended first.

Kelsey Group Conf - March 27, 2006

Summary of day 1

This is my first time to attend Kelsey Group conference. Overall, I felt this conference is more advertiser targeted based on my first day experience. Maybe this is due to the fact that I attended more advertiser focused sessions. I learned about upcoming advertising opportunities in video space. How national advertiser think of local advertising opportunities. These info would be beneficial when thinking of the monetization piece of local search.

It seems personalization/social search such as reviews/rating is still a hot topic for this conference. I did not catch a dedicated session today, but Eric Chandler’s (a VZ VP) dedicated quite some time for this topic and I liked his keynote talk. Since VZ launched review last year 83% of review is service based. VZ is also struggling to figure out how to attract people to provide their reviews. Other interesting thing to know: VZ recently signed deal with Google to provide content.

Some detailed notes from sessions

Mass Media to MyMedia: Profiling the New ‘On-Demand’ Consumer

The Internet, on-demand video, wireless phones and iPods are creating a new global and local media universe which is highly personalized, customizable and not tied to time, place or even a single medium. The Kelsey Group presented the consumer research that outlines this emerging consumer paradigm and discuss the most significant implications for advertisers (national and local) as they try to reach these new, more empowered consumers.

Broadband usage increases

Proliferations of my media devices

Some stats

Broadband penetration 70% household

Broadband growth means the growth for news, video and some life Events: Job, Cars and Real Estate (2% in 95 vs 55% 2005)

Proliferations of “My Media” devices

Disruptive Devices

Slingbox

Mobile Phones (more mobile phones than land lines, 2.5b wireless subs globally, 400m in China)

Emergence of the “My Media” Generation

Research based on US 12-17 years old top online activities by time spent (reverse order)

Sports

Community

Gaming

Kids enter

Auction

Online gaming

Retail

Chat

Viacom (sports

Intuit

Wells Fargo

eBay

EA online

Facebook.com

MSN

Yahoo

My space

AOL

The new Media Universe

Multitasking during consuming TV, internet. Internet is competing with TV

Local Buying vs E-commerce (2.5% vs 75%)

The Broadband Juggernaut: Slowing Down or Speeding Up?

David Payne, Director, Development, EarthLink Municipal Networks

He thinks broadband growth is slowing down as we already have 60-70% penetration rate

Om Malik, Senior Writer, Business 2.0 Magazine

Constant connectivity is mislabeled as broadband. Though we will have infrastructure for WiFi in 5 years, will people actually have all things needed (e.g. laptops/computer) to use it? H He thinks the cell phone access is much easier than laptop using WiFi.

Brian Jurutka, Director, Marketing Solutions, comScore

Chuck Haas, CEO, MetroFI

It is an affordability, not availability issue. Are we going to have free Wi-Fi nationwide? It will be there in 5 years in major cities. It is a scalable solution.

Why do you think ads can sustain free WiFi.

1. The cost for WiFi is much less than broadband. The disruptive low cost is a enable factor

2. Just as free newspaper sustained itself

Who will gather the ads?

1. Local ads network

2. Google Yahoo

What will be impacted by Broadband?

1. Online virtual community

Keynote address from Safa Rashtchy, Senior Research Analyst - Internet Media & Marketing, Managing Director, Piper Jaffray

The world of advertising is changing

- Consume what they like

- Consume when they need it

- Consume where they want it – at work, at friend’s house, in the airplane

- Consume from the device of their choice – TV, ipod, laptop

Half of the advertising is wasted –

The new role of Search

- 9.6 billion worldwide in 2001, 19.5 billion worldwide in 2005

The Growth path of Search

- Google enters

- Overture enters

- Googling is a verb

- Search as a new Media users explore ideas through search

Search became the trusted Medium

The Growth path of Search from Advertiser

- The original 15k, the pioneer, small biz

- GM

- …

The Growth path of Search from Advertiser

- Google Maps and Yahoo Local were major forces, pushing local search further

- The current count of about 500K online advertises could reach 2-4 million with local search over the next 5 years

- The final phase will be addition of real-time inventory (RFID)

- Ultimately, local search could consume as much as 50% of all purchases online

- YP listing -> paid search->RFID

How local search could replace e-commerce

- Media is Fragmented

- Brand building is very difficult

- Advertisers are challenged on how to reach the young audiences

- The traditional/promotion ways are not working

Opportunities for search – Search will become the central element in a highly fragmented media mix

- The trusting role of search

- The efficiency of search

- Cross media application of search

Conclusions

- The role of search is changing, from a DM model to a full media platform

- We expect the best application of search to involve corso media campaigns

- Local search to become real and to change the advertising landscape.

Questions

- Next wave of local search is inventory-based. Will the transactions mostly be online or offline? _ offline

- How to deal with the offline sale after extensive research? _try to close the loop by call-tracking or something else

- What will be your advice for YP companies? _Search companies has better leverage due to its trust brand, it doesn’t mean no opportunities for YP companies.

- How do you find the small business and convince them? _Franchise will be the ones to move this first.

1,000,001 Channels: But Is Anybody Watching?

Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and Co-founder, Blinkx
Bradley Inman, Chairman and Founder, TurnHere, Inc.

May/Greg Demetriades, CEO, WhiteBlox

Boland

Tim Tuttle, VP, AOL Video, Co-founder Truveo.com

How do you generate revenue when video is so fragmented?

- Bring the emotion of the Hollywood into the conversion of transaction

- Provide local merchant low-production ads

Would the short-length be dominant or full-length?

- Short form will not replace the full-length film, but will change the way people consume the video.

What media would proliferate most?

- Multi-tasking nature of the next generation seems to prove various media will grow together

Should I invest in this space?

- The barriers to upload the content are much lower compared to 12-18 months ago. E.g. Youtube.com

How do you deal with the user generated contents?

- As long as you have some control of what contents to be published on the site, this should be fine. Turnhere.com vs. myspace.com

Conclusion

- Keep your eyes on this space as there will be a lot of changes in this space

- The cost of entry for this space is not low enough yet

- Test and experiment the video

Local Search: Nationals Lead the Charge

This panel of national advertisers discussed their online and localization strategies and how their view of the advertising and marketing landscape has changed.

Roy L. Beatty, Vice President, YPMG (ServiceMaster)
Dan Martin, VP, Business Development, HomeGain, Inc.

Henry M. Vogel, Chief Revenue Officer, Quig

Todd Swickard, CEO, Auto Dealer Traffic Inc.

Sonia Carreno, General Manager, DAC Group Digital

How is local advertising changing?

- Geo-targeting is effective, but it is expensive

- Local search does not have enough volume. National search still drives 30% the traffic for homegain.

What is the most cost-effective ways for advertising?

- Internet YP, Printed YP, direct mail …

- Phone calls are more valuable. Customers from phone calls are more valuable.

- It is clear IYP perform

Do you see a lot of replacement of online ads for offline?

- Real Estate doesn’t see a huge shift, but the market could change

- You need to do both online and offline advertising.

- Carmax is an example which tried to completely replace offline print ads. But in general, it is incremental rather than substitution for online vs offline

Where is the mobile ad going? Where is it at?

- Rely on the publisher to carry the torch.

- For DAC group digital, not quite on national advertiser’s radar yet

- For real Estate, using SMS, mapped all neighborhoods.

What triggers the call?

- For Real Estate, it is the nice rebate of closing the transaction

Which one generates the best ROI?

- Google, Yahoo

- The total online volume is not that significant. IYP and PYP, direct mail are still the major mechanism.

Keynote Address

Eric Chandler, President - Internet Division, Verizon SuperPages.com

Verizon has 3.5 billion revenue. 2^nd largest YP provider globally.

The evolution of IYPs and Local search

- Co-opetition

- Create an interactive community/personalization

- Willingness to change/risk-tasking

Compare IYPs and Local search

IYP vs Local search

Search:

highly structured less structured

Categories Keywords

USPS-defined geo areas, neighborhoods, etc

Listing

Merchnat-based products, brands, services

Products

Fixed fee performance based

User Experience

Industry Growth Trends

Critical factors for growth

Local customer relationship

Quality Traffic

Robust Content

National Footprint

Full services (to non-tech savy customers)

What are we focusing on?

- Pay for calls

- Increase contents

- Leverage print distri. To drive calls to online PFC advertisers

- Patend-pending PFC print distribution network

Co-opertition – Take the competitive Advantage

- Fragmented Market

- Leverage strategic partnerships

- Improve search experience for users

- Bring greater ROI to advertisers

VZ just signed a deal with Google

Superpages.com+ google = more leads

Personalization: Industry View

Local reviews

- Yahoo Local

- AOL YP

- A9.com

- Insider Pages, Judy’s book, Zipinggo

- Citysearch

- Google Base

Verticals (mostly dining/entertainment)

- Dining

- Travel

- Editoral gayot.com, phantomgour.com

Personalization evolution

- How will personalization evolve?

- Reinventing ourselves (buying muffin in startbucks is not necessary about its muffin, but due to the convenience when buying coffee)

- Connecting buyers with sellers

What content do you provide to Google?

- push out pay per click

Summary of day 2

The 2^nd day seems more interesting. It actually inspired me, so I came up with some crazy ideas such as “how about collaborating with 1-800-411 for some mobile search users etc.” “How about serve Expo result at local.live?” etc.

A couple of other things to be noted

Dan Gillmore delivered a Q/A session around newspaper. He proposes adding blogs into the newspaper. Check out his comments and some of his interesting idea “An idea: Yahoo comes in to buy San Jose Mercury, then turn it into the lab of the future journalism.”
Livedeal.com partner with newspaper to do the online classifieds. Newspaper (Washington Post) has pioneered to sell leads, rather than ads in auto category. Ready to roll out to classified.
One directory companies (1-800-411) uses InfoUSA(another validation of our bet on InfoUSA), other directory companies uses carrier database (more shallow, but may have more fresh data compare to InfoUSA)
Let me know if you want to take a peek of the book from Dan Gillmore “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People”.

Detail Session Notes

The New ‘Purchase Funnel’: Online Shopping, Offline Conversions

Kendall Fargo, CEO, StepUp Commerce, Inc.

Rosen, ShopLocal.com
Catherine Kelly, Chief Technology Officer, HarvestINFO
John Melideo, CEO, Jambo
Rob Wight, CEO, Channel Intelligence

- Combine the online and offline solutions. Participation of big retailers

- Extended shopping session will drive this shopping model adoption

- Not all local merchant seem to see this change (shop online, conversion offline). A lot of merchants seem to be ignorant about such user behavior

- Local merchants seem to be disappointed on missing two waves 1. Building website in 90s. 2. Missing Google wave

- Shoplocal doesn’t believe we can get the inventory from small local retailers in the next couple of years. Relay the product inventory by phone is his prediction

- Another prediction to tackle this missing inventory issue is to obtain the info from manufacture rather than from retailer.

- 7 years, he thought it was simple: just get inventory from retailers. But it turns out no one has such system that contains the local promotion and inventory.

- Setting standards such as XML

- How to handle return? How to measure ROI when return happens? Fargo thinks the industry got some time because there were no leads without online channel. Taking a step forward online is important though it doesn’t solve this return issue.

- How do we track this? Tough issue for everyone. Some have spent years on this issue, Coupon, survey or provide building maps or driving direction to make such linkage

- Integrate the local and national sources into one search result and allow users to choose if they want to shop online or go to physical shop

Can You Hear Me Now: VoIP, Wi-Fi and Local Market Disruption

John Federman, CEO, eStara
Ari Jacoby, CEO, VoiceStar

Ted Morgan, President & Founder, Skyhook Wireless

Jim Smith, Senior Product Manager, Consumer VoIP & Video Services, Microsoft

What is your prediction on the application in this field for the next 12 months?

- Jim - Click to call, Video are the upcoming application

- Morgan – the cost of voice almost goes to zero, change the way people communicate. It is more than mins calls, but keep folks connected all day long

- IM application

What is the conversion rate on click2call?

- 20%-50% conversion rate increase from eStarra. Create end2end ROI tracking, create continuity of experience.

- Attract a whole new group of advertisers.

What is the revenue model for Skyhook Wireless in the future?

- Long term revenue model is through advertiser.

What other geo-based applications do you see?

- Mobile tour guide

- Connect to the right people at the right time. E.g. car breaks down in the middle of the road, type “flat tire” on your cell, return the nearest available merchant.

Vicinity is in mappoint. What does Microsoft do to integrate different pieces of technologies?

- We are definitely integrating the VOIP into other products.

As a platform provider, can you survive without advertiser? (eStara, VoiceStar)

- Provide the superior user experience

Mobile Ads That Work Today

Brendan Benzing, VP, Mobile Services, InfoSpace

Noah Elkin, Director, iCrossing.com

Mark Prioleau, VP, Marketing, Telcontar

Bill Reller, Sr. Director, Ad Platform, Medio Systems

Rick Szatkowski, VP, Business Development, NeoMedia Technologies
Zaw Thet, VP, Marketing & Product Strategy, 4Info

Where is the mobile market at? Infancy stage?

- Japan is about 2 years ahead. Following Japan is Europe.

- It is early, but ready to burst. The carriers are ready. We need to see the rate drop

- Not ready for Ad with SMS, but Ad on web browsing starts to take off

- Application starts to blend with advertising and we are still at infancy stage for this blending.

How do we get around the obstacles such as 40% of people will pay to get rid of SMS message?

- We need to have rich content. E.g. Apprentice show is good enough that people will tolerate the ad.

- The targeted/relevant ads are not necessary what people want to block.

- Free min

How could carrier help in this space?

- Cross carrier collaboration

- Make sure the infrastructure is there. Instead of working with the aggregators, we could work with directly with carriers

Keynote Address
Dan Gillmor, Blogger and Author, Founder and Director, The Center for Citizen Media

Do you think the newspaper business is in crisis?

- It is still very profitable business, but younger people become less interested in the printed newspaper

Why do you think newspaper is not at the front center of local search?

- Not able to cannibalize some piece and still maintain the high profit

- They are conservative by nature. It takes forever to make a feature change.

Do you agree newspaper needs to

- There is nothing wrong to snap the print content online. But newspaper now is more than just a read media. It is a read-write media.

- Relationship needs to change from 1-many to many-many

What scenario should newspaper strive to fulfill?

- Give users blog in newspaper. Offer open platform to let user to input review, pictures. Create community

- Allow user to input editorial section for all news provided

What if the brand of the newspaper is destroyed?

- Brands will become diminished

Yahoo’s recently release allows user to search local news. What is the impact?

- I am here to help journalism from bottom up. Hence better contents from local are good.

Greg highly doubts if Yahoo and Google would buy the newspaper publisher. Why do you think they should do so?

- An idea: Yahoo comes in to buy San Jose Mercury, then turn it into the lab of the future journalism.

What about the partnership between YP and newspaper

- They normally are perceived as competitor

Which company should newspaper partner with?

- It is impossible to answer this. You partner with someone who does something better than you. What does newspaper need to do? Better tools for the newspaper. Hyper local with newspaper could generate something powerful

Free DA: A Flawed Model or Mo-Lo Made Simple?

- Are there more people looking for category than business?

1. 3-5% is category based searching

2. It should increase in the future if people find category search useful

- The free DA is not necessary eating into the existing market share, but increase the pie by gaining more calls as user makes 4 times more calls from some stats

- User who has the multi-media phone makes more DA calls.

- People would like to listen to 15sec ads rather than $1.5/call

- http://www.411metro.com

- http://www.jinglenetworks.com/

- http://www.localmatters.com/

- http://www.pocketthis.com/

- The 411 inquiry could be very valuable.

Tom Arthur, CEO, PocketThis
Perry Evans, CEO, Local Matters

George Garrick CEO Jingle Networks
Michael Loftus, CEO, inFreeDA

2:45 pm – 3:00 pm
Refreshment Break

3:00 pm – 3:45 pm
The Ultimate Mashup: Classifieds, Local Listings and 'Social Search'
Michael Bazely, Senior Web Editor, San Jose Mercury News/Knight Ridder

Rajesh Navar, Founder and CEO, LiveDeal.com

Sarah Pate, President & CEO, AdMission

Henry Tam, Director, Local Product Development, WPNI

Keith Teare, CEO and Co-founder, Edgeio.com

Garry Wiseman, Product Unit Manager, Microsoft

- Classifieds are person2person service. Directory service is more commerce2person

- People use livedeal because they don’t have to pay YP to be listed

- Mash up the classifieds with shopping engine

- Needs to be careful about the relevance when mashing up national provider and local classifieds. It should not be the experience that all national providers show up first.

- Washington Post pilot collaboration with search engines for automotive category. In this case, newspaper is selling the leads, no longer the ads.

- What would brand do when everything is meshed up? – Some thinks brand should not matter as long as user gets what they are looking for.

Bye to Visual Studio, Moved to Search

2006-11-08T09:21:00Z

It has been nearly one year since I moved from Visual Studio team to Windows Live Local Search team. I am having great time. So much we could do in this space. It is simply exciting! Feel free to check out http://local.live.com and send me your feedback.

My second day at PDC05

2005-09-13T10:49:00Z

Today is still the pre-conference day which means I may still have trouble to get in (Microsoft puts the customer first and doesn't want its employees to compete the seats with its customers). I spent some time to help setting up code4fun lounge (my booth duty) today. I can’t believe so much cool applications were built using our VS tool! E.g. Voice controlled “smart” house, Finalizer, camera movement etc. from PhidgetsUSA, LEGO, FischerTechnik. Simply unbelievable!

After fulfilling my lounge duty, I somehow managed to sneak into some sessions. Below are some highlights.

VSTS introduction

People are excited! An customer just grabbed me for question about the VSTS features, licensing and pricing during the break (I think I was the only one with MS event blue shirt). Richard Hundhasen did a good job to introduce VSTS through some interesting demonstrations on 2 boxes (DT and AT were different boxes). Though I have been working on Burton DCR etc, this is actually the first time I got to explore the following in great details.

Work items
Documents
Reports
Team Build
Security

I can see how each of these features attracts various roles in the whole software development process. The reporting feature in VSTS is really neat. The reports such as bug fix rate, active count, trend prediction can be easily generated and published based on the data/work items stored in SQL server. The fact that you can switch between VSTS and different project management app such as Excel, Project makes the life so much easier.

Marc and the other Burton folks, you guys are building really awesome stuff. Customer (at least in pre-con) loves it!

Customer questions

How much will this cost and why should I pay that much? 10K?
Does doc have the version control? Not in VSTS. Maybe in SourceSafe
What is the difference between task and work items? Task is the instance. Work items is template
Does project manager need to publish his project doc twice? Once for Team Foundation server, once for project server? Yes

Framework Design Guideline

Adam Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina have done a great job to present the best practices for designing frameworks, which are re-usable object oriented libraries. These guidelines are applicable to framework ranging from large systems to small components. It coverd the design, background and motivation for naming conventions, namespaces, assemblies, type, members, designing for extensibility, error handling, memory management, usage guidelines and general library design principles.

Above all, this presentation was fun, fun, fun! I love those cartoon characters in the slides. This burned the image of those slides in my head.

SQL 2005

We know it is almost 6 years cycle for Yukon. I sometimes wonder “Does Microsoft still know how to build product after not shipping this baby for 5 years?” This doubt was just instantly removed when I saw the session about SQL 2005. Well, I always reserve a special spot in my heart for Yukon after myself worked on this for 3 years. Normally, each session’s slides are about 15-30 pages. Yukon slides are 123 pages. This gives an idea how many cool features we added for Yukon. A couple of them are my favorite.

Partitioning solves resource contention issue. It made SQL database scalable. I anticipate this will be used by Office sharepoint if WSS wants to scale out.
SQL CLR
Database mirroring
XML indexes
Bunch of T-SQL improvements
- Row_number, RANK, PIVOT, CROSS APPLY, error handling(TRY/CATCH), Event notification, Parameterized TOP
Index tuning advisor automatically suggests index creation for query perf optimization based on the workload
Snapshot isolation

I have no doubt Yukon is not only my number one database product, but also will be the favorite for our customers.

Thanks

Hong

My first day at PDC05

2005-09-12T12:22:00Z

I am very excited about PDC05. I arrived LA on Sat night. I heard PDC usually generates a lot of excitement in the developer community and I immediately felt the energy of this PDC from a dev lead from MS and an architectur from ISV as soon as landed LA airport. He is so passionate about PDC and .Net!

Getting into the pre-conference the next day was not an easy task as I did not know how to find $600 on spot to pay for it J. Somehow I managed to get into today’s session for .Net Framework 2.0: The smart client perspective by Billy Hollis and Rocky Lhotka. I heard most of the features already, but it was still very cool to see other developers got excited about the new Framework.

Some highlights

- Smart client emphasizes the intelligence in the UI and take full advantage of the client machine. It enables the device adapability.

- New data feature

There are plenty of new features and I particularly like the new data binding enhancements. The data sources window is so cool that it displays the schema of these objects and provides the

ability to drag and drop tables and columns onto a Windows form. I also appreciate the work from the dataset designer. We can double click to get the code for the data set and intercept the event for row change, column change etc.

Parent-child relationships for strongly-typed datasets is automatically understood by VS. e.g. all visits are loaded when click on each patient.

- New language features

There are plenty of language and IDE new features. I really like "My" addition in VB. What a speedy dial to Framework for VB!

- ClickOnce

Vision – bring the easy and reliability of web application deployment to client applications. It handles the install, updates and uninstall of the smart applications
Design Goals
1. Safety of web application deployement
2. Easy to install
3. Easy to update
Visual Studio Support is neat. It has integrated VS support as it doesn’t need a separate MSI or installer project. The publish Wizard auto creates deployment directory.
ClickOnce vs. Alternatives
1. Vs. No-touch

Richer, applies to broader range of apps

Complete replacemetn

Complementary installation technology

Could use both

App updater component/block

Can be tweaked, more control

Use BITS background transfer

An alternative for certain type of apps

Other blog entry

I am very glad to see the excitement around .Net Framework new features

A couple of random, but interesting observations

People made fun of reboots caused by Framework when discussing the bootstrapping in ClickOnce. I cannot wait to see the impact of reboot improvement work our team did for Whidbey based on the Watson data.
There were actually more than one woman(3 in total) in this room that holds 120 people.
The first question people ask about ClickOnce during the presentation is how do I deploy Framework? I bet Brian is going to have some interesting findings about Framework deployment session with customers in the next few days.

This was just pre-session. I cannot wait till the keynote session on Tues. Stay tuned.

Thanks
Hong

VC++ Express couples with Half-Life 2

2005-09-05T22:26:00Z

I could not help to share this great news from Brian Keller with you.

Microsoft issued a joint press release on 08/31with Valve Software, the makers of the hugely popular Half-Life 2 PC game, in which Valve has endorsed Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition as the preferred tool for creating customizations to, and completely new games around, their Half-Life 2 engine. Customizing game engines (or ‘modding’) is a popular way for hobbyist and professional developers alike to develop games since it gives them a professional-grade engine to build on top of.

Help us to have a better Framework deployment story

2005-08-30T06:50:00Z

Microsoft is now planning the next wave of its development tools and platforms. We acknowledge the impact that runtime deployment has on the ability to develop applications and are interested in hearing more about ISVs needs. For those of you who are going to attend PDC 2005 in Los Angeles, you will also have an option of meeting our planning team in person and sound your voice directly. Please take this survey to help us understand your needs.

Thanks

Hong

Manually remove Framework 1.0 and 1.1

2005-08-11T05:20:00Z

Please see Aaron's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/04/08/406671.aspx

Manual Uninstall using MSIZAP

2005-08-01T03:27:00Z

Sometimes the VS component may not appear in the add/remove program list, but VS setup thinks it is installed. Below are some steps you could try to perform manual clean up if the uninstall fails either by using the uninstall tool or uninstalling through the add/remove program entries.

Visit VS uninstall instructions at http://blogs.msdn.com/hgao/archive/2005/07/30/445224.aspx to get a list of components to be uninstalled.
Download msiinv.exe from www.huydao.net/setup/msiinv.zip (You need to unzip it to get msiinv.exe).
Run msiinv.exe on the targeted box and save the output into a text file. This output gives you the current installed products/components.
Compare the output of msiinv.exe to the list of VS components that need to be uninstalled and identify what components are left behind.
Download msizap.zip from www.huydao.net/setup/msizap.zip (You need to unzip it to get msizap.exe) or get it from http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;290301
Run msizap.exe for each product code to manually uninstall the components left on the box. Examples below
- msizap.exe {D0FD5369-C4AC-4F9A-BB20-C8458F2EE5C2}
- msizap.exe {085DF72B-2571-4099-8D3C-699E9E163C5F}
- msizap.exe {BFDFE03F-B24E-422A-8AC0-BC51B6A128DE}

Thanks

Hong

VS 2005 Diagnostic and Uninstall Tool

2005-08-01T03:08:00Z

We have VS 2005 uninstall tool here. This tool is to help automating the VS 2005 uninstall instructions here .

We also plan to post a troubleshoot tool soon. Please stay tuned and check Aaron's blog or my blog. The diagnostic and uninstall tool offers the following feature.

1. Automates VS2005 uninstall instructions here . This uninstalls all VS2005 Beta and CTPs.

2. Auto diagnostic known issue (current 6 known issues are authored)

3. Faster tool/application development using common search/diagnostic framework

Thanks to Andrey Zvyagilskiy, Aaron Stebner, Peter Giffin, Bret Grinslade, Brian Moore, Samir Shergill and June Low who made this possible.

Note:

Uninstall utility uninstalls all editions such as Express, Profession, Standard, Team system client (not server piece), SQL Express and WinFX (only Beta1) together.
Don't run this tool on the machine where RTM SQL 2005 is installed as it will uninstall RTM SQL components shared between SQL Express and Enterprise edition.
There is no plan to make diagnostic tool as an officially supported Microsoft tool at this point.

Hong

VS 2005 Uninstall Instructions (updated version)

2005-07-30T04:48:00Z

If you decide to manually uninstall without using the tool, be sure to uninstall the .NET Framework 2.0 last.

Note: The tool will uninstall ALL pre-release Visual Studio 2005 editions such as Visual Studio Express, Visual Studio Team System, Professional and Standard edition.

Uninstalling Previous Versions of Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions

Go to the Control Panel and launch Add/Remove Programs
Remove "DMA Transport Update for VS 2005 Beta2"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Tools Express Edition"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Native Client"
Remove "Microsoft MSDN Express Library 2005 Beta"
Remove all Microsoft Visual Studio Express Editions (such as Visual C# 2005 Express Edition Beta)
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Remote Debugger Light"
Remove "Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable 2.0 Beta Language Pack" (This step is not needed if you have only the English Edition)
Remove "Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package 2.0 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta Language Pack" (This step is not needed if you have only the English Edition)
Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta"

Uninstalling Previous Versions of Visual Studio 2005

Go to the Control Panel and launch Add/Remove Programs
Remove "DMA Transport Update for VS 2005 Beta2"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Tools Express Edition"
Remove "Microsoft SQL Native Client"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office System 2005 Runtime Language Pack" (This step is not needed if you have only the English Edition)
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office System 2005 Runtime Beta"
Remove "Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 1.0"
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional" or other related installs (such as Visual Studio Professional/Standard/Enterprise Architect/Team Suite, etc.)
Remove "Microsoft Document Explorer 2005 Language Pack" (This step is not needed if you have only the English Edition)
Remove "Microsoft Document Explorer 2005" (This step is needed for post-Beta2 builds)
Remove "Microsoft SQL Mobile 2005 Development Tools"
Remove "Microsoft 64-bit SDK" (This step is only needed if Visual Studio is installed on a 64-bit machine)
Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Remote Debugger (x64)" (This step is only needed if Visual Studio is installed on a 64-bit machine)
Remove "Microsoft MDAC 2.8 SP1" (This step is needed only if you are running Windows 2000)
Remove "Microsoft MSXML 6 SDK and Parser"
Remove "Microsoft Visual J# .NET Redistributable 2.0 Beta Language Pack" (This step is not needed if you have only the English Edition)
Remove "Microsoft Visual J# Redistributable Package 2.0 Beta"
Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta Language pack" (This step is not needed if you only have the English Edition)
Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta"

Your feedback on Beta2 install experience

2005-06-13T01:12:00Z

We released Beta 2 Visual Studio Express products 6 weeks ago. We have been listening to your feedback through forums, Watson feedback data (you can opt-in such program at the beginning of the setup) etc. We published a tool to help uninstalling Beta/CTP program. I appreciated your feedback to make VS 2005 better. I am wondering your experience/thoughts in a few areas after Beta 2 release.

Did the download and install succeed the first time? If not, how many times did it take?
Did you come across a situation where you decided to cancel the download or install? If so, why?
What do you like/hate about Express? (It could be setup specific or not related to Express setup)?
What do you wish to see in Express that is not there (It could be setup specific or not related to setup)?
What do you think of the uninstall tool http://mscomapps/fwlink/edit.asp?linkid=47065

The cancel one is particularly interesting to me, since we can see occurrences of this in the Watson data, but don't get a lot of visibility into why this happened and whether the setup is broken somehow. I looking forward to hearing what folks experienced.

Thanks, Hong Gao

Avalanche - an efficient P2P file transfer technology from Cambridge

2005-06-10T22:30:00Z

Will you be interested in the technology that could potentially save $$$ and speed our download, especially for the big files? Please read on if yes.

As we notice download is more error prone when there is a download surge. The download center’s package success rate grows much lower as the package size grows bigger. This imposes the big challenge for downloading big VS SKUs. I think we should look into the P2P content distribution technology Avalanche.

Avalanche is a research project that provides faster and more cost effective distribution of data files to large user populations (e.g. software download such as Express, VS products, software updates etc.) This is achieved by allowing clients simultaneously obtain different pieces of files from multiple nodes on internet than just MS download center servers. Avalanche uses a similar architecture but with an improved protocol that removes some limitations of the BitTorrent protocol.

Avalanche is expected of the following

1. Avalanche is more resilient to peer leaving the network: Avalanche combines chunks (like a XOR) before sending them, you don’t need to have a specific chunk A, you only need enough combination that you can extract chunk A out

2. Avalanche imposes less load on the servers: BitTorrent servers needs to track which clients have chunk A, but Avalanche doesn’t.

3. Avalanche added feature for security reasons. It restricts to only distribute MS signed package

4. Avalanche could provide about 2-3 times faster downloads than BitTorrent and about half the server requirements (Based on http://www.pam2004.org/papers/148.pdf, BitTorrent was used to distribute the Linux RedHat 9 ISO (1.77 GB) to more than 180,000 clients (over 5 months) using two servers with not super high end links (I have heard 5Mbps, needs to be confirmed).

Other resource:

Pablo Rodriguez Rodriguez and Julien Couvreur have done great work for describing the technologies in details in their URL at http://blog.monstuff.com/archives/000201.html http://research.microsoft.com/~pablo/avalanche.htm and

Avalanche: http://research.microsoft.com/~pablo/avalanche.htm

BitTorrent http://www.bittorrent.com/