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Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be “the next chapter” for Google. Last Fall we were told by Google’s Brett Slatkin, lead developer on the PubSubHubbub (PuSH) real time syndication protocol, that he hoped Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years. Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said yesterday at Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California that the company plans to soon publish a standard way for site owners to participate in a program much like that. Sponsor How The System Might Work PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format where a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Subscribers then tell the Hub “when this Publisher posts new content, please deliver it to me right away.” So instead of the Subscriber checking back with the Publisher all the time to see if there’s new content, they just sit and wait to be told that there is by the Hub. The Publisher publishes something, then tells the Hub that it’s available, then the Hub goes and delivers it to all the Subscribers. This can take as little as a few seconds. If Google can implement an Indexing by PuSH program, it would ask every website to implement the technology and declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document, just like they declare where the RSS feeds they publish can be found. Then Google would subscribe to those PuSH feeds to discover new content when it’s published. PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index. As Danny Sullivan told us today, Google would have to implement some sort of spam control and not just let content be pushed live to the index unvetted. That was what happened in the earliest days of search and it was a real mess, he told us. The Advantages of a Real Time Google Index PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away. A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn’t be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google. “I am being told by my engineering bosses to openly promote this open aproach even to our competitors,” Slatkin says. That’s a very good sign. We expect this will be a very big deal and we’ll be covering it more extensively in the coming days, as well as whenever Google has something to announce more formally. Discuss
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Google Index to Go Real Time
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A ReadWriteWeb Guide For all of our startup friends from coast to coast and around the world, we look forward to seeing you at SXSW Interactive! More and more, we’re seeing good folks creating great products outside the SF Bay Area, and we love highlighting and showcasing vibrant startup communities in unexpected areas. As it turns out, we’re not the only ones who have a penchant for non-Valley startups! While you’re in Austin, check out these ten panels, parties and events focusing on entrepreneurialism outside Silicon Valley. Sponsor This is part of a series of ReadWriteWeb guides to SXSW Interactive 2010. If this guide isn’t your cup of tea, be sure to check back for more information soon!
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Never Mind the Valley: Here’s SXSW 2010
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Small cap hell is where you end up in about six months after your IPO, when all the high fives and champagne have receded into a distant memory. Unless your company is big enough. How big is big enough? According to Investopedia, small cap refers to companies with “a market capitalization of between $300 million and $2 billion.” That’s right, to escape small cap hell you need to have a market cap over $2 billion. Sponsor To put that in perspective, that describes one out of 14 publicly traded SaaS companies (Salesforce.com). So 13 out of 14 are in small cap hell. Actually, two out of the 14 are micro cap, i.e. below $300 million in market cap. This matters to all of us. A healthy public market for Web tech ventures ripples all the way down to seed level investing and drives the innovation economy. What Does It Feel Like To Be In Small Cap Hell? Lonely. Nobody cares about your little venture. To the team that endured blood, sweat, toil and tears to get to $50 million in revenues, and then go through all the SEC gyrations to become a public company, that is tough to accept. Here is what you can do. Hire a strong investors relations team and send out lots of press releases, be accessible to the press, go on road shows and speak at conferences for investors. Your IR team can take care of the mechanics, but this is also a big time-suck for the CEO and CFO. (And you cannot say, “Sorry we missed our numbers we were too busy schmoozing folks like you.”) The result is a lot of work and you have to do it – but the payoff is small. Every other small cap is doing the same thing. Buy back your own shares. That tells even the most dimwitted investor that you think the stock is undervalued, and as you run the company you probably know. This is fine if you personally are vastly wealthy or you have massive amounts of cash laying idle on the company balance sheet. In other words it is not an option for most companies Social Media IR Rides To The Rescue? Agoracom is a modern IR firm. They use online methods to tell your story. That may not sound like a big deal, but IR is a pretty conservative business, so just using a few tools like Twitter intelligently is a big step forward. Agoracom’s pitch is that they can “tell your story”. For a while there will be an opportunity to use modern methods while your competitors are stuck with their buggy whips. But that advantage will erode really fast. So this is where the new Finance 2.0 sites like Seeking Alpha , Stocktwits , Kaching and Covestor may have the key. I decided to test this on the 14 publicly traded SaaS companies. Finance 2.0 For Small Cap: It is Too Early To Tell Select a classic small cap stock in the SaaS Index. For example: RightNow Technologies (RNOW). At time of writing, they have a market cap of $525 million. It is a cool company that is growing fast and delivering good results for customers. So how much coverage do they get on these new sites? In my test I looked at RNOW for the period Jan. 1 to March 1. StockTwits : There were nine tweets about RNOW, and many of them mentioned RNOW among a list of other stocks. Some are not very helpful, such as: “Does anyone know the future of $rnow ?” SeekingAlpha : This has two posts that were specific to RNOW and they seemed high quality. That is better than nine tweets that don’t say much. Covestor : This is interesting to play around in. You can see the last 10 trades done by Covestor members in RNOW. But you cannot drill from that to any rationale into RNOW. The system is set up to do that, but there is just nothing there yet. Kaching : This gave good news aggregation on RNOW. It looked better than YahooFinance (still the starting point for lots of investors) but seemed to lack depth. Nor did it have any fundamental new information. So, from the limited perspective of one small cap, these sites are at this time not the answer. What about “ye olde stock forum” on Yahoo Finance? Their message board for RNOW for the same period of time has 28 posts, not including the threaded replies. That puts them way ahead of the newcomers.What about quality you ask? What is the use of a lot of noise from anonymous posters pushing the stocks they own (or panning the ones they short)? That seems to be the problem with all these sources. Wanted: Patient, Long-Term Investors Found: Momentum-chasing day traders. You want investors who will buy into the quality of your technology, understand your value proposition, like the market you are in and think you are doing a reasonable job managing the business. In other words, you want Warren Buffett. That is not what these new sites are delivering. They do not seem to be the key to escape from small cap hell. Let Your Story Surface The evolution seems to be: 1.0 Tell Your Story. This is standard investor relations. The updated version of IR is to be present where investors hang out, which today means online. But it is still the old broadcast model. 2.0 Let The Crowd Tell Your Story. This is classic social media – and it suffers from classic social media problems. You might trust a user-generated review on Yelp before going to a diner, but you are likely to be a bit more nervous before investing your kid’s college fund in a company. What we need is something that reverses the flow, that lets investors discover you, that lets your story surface. This is where XBRL may help. (For a basic intro to XBRL read our earlier coverage .) The Current XBRL Disconnect For Small Cap Is Temporary XBRL was not any help when I was compiling the data for the 14 companies in the SaaS Index for the Saas Insights Report (a paid report for investors available from CapitalMarkets.com . Disclosure: The guest author wrote this report). The reason is simple. Only one out of 14 reported to the SEC in XBRL format. That company is Salesforce.com (CRM). The reason for that is also simple: The SEC currently mandates that companies with a market cap higher than $ billion report using XBRL. That is what creates the disconnect: 1. XBRL will enable the good investments from small cap companies to surface, but, 2. Only big cap companies report using XBRL (and they have no trouble reaching investors). The good news is that disconnect is temporary. The second wave of new XBRL filers in 2010 is estimated to include 1,500 – 2,000 reporting companies, and the final wave in 2011 is for about 10,000 additional companies. Imagine the Information Discovery Tools When I go to my local wine store, the owner asks me what I want and we have fun with my standard reply that I want something “incredibly delicious and ridiculously cheap”. Investors want the same. Warren Buffett got to be one of the richest men in the world by finding a few of those. When all companies file in XBRL (and some geeks have created some neat tools to help sip more effectively from that firehose), ordinary investors will be able to create really powerful filters to find those “incredibly valuable and ridiculously cheap” companies. They won’t find them among the big cap companies. They will find them among the thousands of small cap, micro cap (and yes, even nano cap) companies. When the value surfaces, they can reach out to IR who can them tell their story. Of course, when all this pans out, the opportunity to find the bargains will disappear. That is the price of an efficient market. But the value to all the companies trapped in small cap hell will be immense. They can focus on building value knowing that the value they create will surface. And that will have a great impact on the innovation economy. Photo credit: Chris Whiteside Discuss
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Is XBRL The Key To Escaping Small Cap Hell?
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Chances are, if you’ve called customer service to enough companies, you’ve come across a representative who works for a call-center which has been contracted to handle a comapany’s account. Large corporations that don’t want to employ their own agents and maintain their own facilities will often outsource customer service to a third party, which at times can mean a company in another part of the world. Bangalore, India was famously portrayed for its role in call-center outsourcing in the Thomas Friedman book The World Is Flat , servicing many large American companies. But tools like outsourcing or crowdsourcing are not always beneficial to every breed of company. Sponsor A recent post on crowdsourcing from the startup blog Plugged.in , and a Forbes article about outsourcing have both warned startups of the possible complications of both. Crowdsourcing is similar to outsourcing in that a task normally conducted by an employee is shifted to a third party, but in this case the job is performed by numerous people, not just one. If I wanted to outsource the web design of my new site, I might hire a graphic designer, but if I wanted to crowdsource, I could use a service like crowdSPRING to host a competition and pick from a whole slew of designs and designers. While crowdsourcing and outsourcing are fundamentally different, they share similar risks, especially for startups and small businesses. As the Plugged.in article suggests, more mature companies might be better candidates for this type of work. “Startups do not fit the ‘business case’ that could garner qualified social feedback for its product from the crowd,” the article argues. “The product engagement within the market has not been long enough, and more often than not the sample size of [the] crowd may not be representative at all.” The idea here is that crowdsourcing works better when the audience participating is more aware of the product in the market. With startups, crowds may not have the most accurate sense of the best direction for an idea, especially one that is new and innovative. That’s what you, the entrepreneur, are for. The article warns startups to not rely too heavily on information gathered from the crowd in terms of which features to keep, which to throw away, which to add, or any other kind of information. Startups should always listen to their users, but work with them, not for them. Along the lines of do-it-yourself, the Forbes article chronicles an unfortunate tale of outsourcing gone wrong. In my interview this week with Danny Wong of Blank Label , he pointed me to this article based on an interview with his co-founder, Fan Bi. In it, Bi warns startups looking to outsource design and development to cheaper labor pools should think twice before doing so. “It was too good of an opportunity to pass up when we were trying to bootstrap our business. Getting the work done for a quarter of the price was tempting,” says Bi. “The team abroad wanted quick and dirty projects that can be turned around quickly and get them paid. They had no real ownership.” The outsourced work came back looking “terrible”, he says. The designers and coders they had outsourced had no passion or personal investment in the work they were doing, and it showed in the quality. For startups, it seems that finding a partner or employee who is just as passionate about the company and its vision is well worth the extra money for the quality they bring with them. Entrepreneurs are highly motivated and driven people, and companies succeed when a group of passionate people set their sights on one goal. Outsourcing and crowdsourcing seem to go against that mantra, and one could argue that these are lazy roads to go down for a startup. But are crowdsourcing and outsourcing a pair of techniques that should be avoided outright by startups? Or are there times when a startup can employ one of these tactics? Let us know how you feel about this issue in the comments. Photo by Flickr user Vilma.com . Discuss
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Are Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing No-Nos For Startups?
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In the kids book “George Saves the World by Lunchtime”, George saves the world through recycling. His four tips are reduce, repair, reuse and recycle. When Toyota decided to build Toyota Conversations Powered by Tweetmeme , they applied the same approach. The collaboration is about more than simply utilizing a social media tool to reach out to customers. It also allows Toyota to meet business objectives like reducing resources, while at the same supporting customer-friendly initiatives such as transparency and engagement. Sponsor Reduce Simply by automating the collection of content, Toyota minimizes the number of people, time and level of effort required to run a highly engaging website. No one is needed to create content, no complicated workflow and approval process – no manual push to live. The content is published for the most part by fans and nay-sayers of Toyota alike. This means Toyota staff can concentrate on curation, conversation and engagement. Reuse The entire site, from front to back, is reusing existing resources. The hardware, software and interface design is developed and delivered by Tweetmeme. The platform existed – Toyota is just tweaked existing data to deliver relevant, real-time content to the press, its customers, its employees – and let’s not forget the competition. Recycle Instead of building from scratch, Toyota is recycling an existing idea and repurposing it for its own needs. As such, the solution was most likely delivered in a quarter of the time (or less) that it would have taken Toyota to build a similar solution. And even if Toyota tried to create the experience from scratch, it most likely couldn’t replicate the Tweetmeme model as it also gained the brains, years of research and development and data management skills of Tweetmeme. Management is RELATIVELY happy as the solution is inexpensive, quick to market, and from a development perspective, generally risk free as it is a proven solution that Tweetmeme will continue to evolve. The data geeks are happy because they have a new toy to play with, while the marketing team is thrilled because they have a platform to view real-time what customers are saying, and respond accordingly. These concepts of reuse, reuse and recycle on the Web are not new , however Tweetmeme example is a solid case study that demonstrates these concepts well. Discuss
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Reusing and Recycling With Toyota Conversations by Tweetmeme
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