Yahoo Ads: Partnership With Havas Digital; Video And Display On Walmart.com

Jun 7, 2008
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Yahoo Ads: Partnership With Havas Digital; Video And Display On Walmart.com

Centralized Document Management with Zoho Projects

Jun 7, 2008
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Centralized Document Management with Zoho Projects

Selling Performance Search Marketing

Apr 12, 2008
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4/02/2008 02:08:00 PM

Posted by Tom Phillips, Director, DoubleClick Integration

Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we’ve been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.

We plan to integrate the affiliate marketing business into existing Google operations, providing enhanced value and reach for our affiliate advertisers, and additional tools and monetization opportunities for our publishers. Together, we believe that we can continue to grow this business and deliver on the high expectations from partners.

Where it’s applicable in Europe, these plans and their implications for employees are subject to consultation with staff and employee representatives. During this transition, we will ensure that all affiliate and search marketing customers receive the same high level of service they have always experienced.

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Selling Performance Search Marketing

Apr 12, 2008
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4/02/2008 02:08:00 PM

Posted by Tom Phillips, Director, DoubleClick Integration

Since we closed the acquisition of DoubleClick on March 11, we’ve been immersed in integration planning for each of our products and business units. Recently we completed this process for the DoubleClick Performics businesses, and have decided to split them into two separately-run business units: Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing.

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.

We plan to integrate the affiliate marketing business into existing Google operations, providing enhanced value and reach for our affiliate advertisers, and additional tools and monetization opportunities for our publishers. Together, we believe that we can continue to grow this business and deliver on the high expectations from partners.

Where it’s applicable in Europe, these plans and their implications for employees are subject to consultation with staff and employee representatives. During this transition, we will ensure that all affiliate and search marketing customers receive the same high level of service they have always experienced.

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Amazon AWS, Google App Engine, Zoho Creator: A Continuum

Apr 12, 2008
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Sridhar April 9, 2008 06: 03 pm

As cloud-computing matures, we can see the emergence of various layers of web services, operating at different levels of abstraction, serving different market needs. Take the category of web application creation/hosting, for example.

Consider the EC2 service from AWS: it provides what may be called “virtualized hardware” as a web service. The fundamental virtualized hardware unit is an industry standard x86 server (with specified CPU/RAM/Disk capacity), capable of hosting a Linux binary image. The Linux image can include any kind of program, written in any language available on Linux. The “any kind of program” part is important, as you will see shortly. This provides the most flexibility for a professional programmer, but if your program goes into an infinite loop and occupies 100% of its virtual CPU, AWS will simply let it burn up the CPU-hours - after all, there is no way for them, even in theory, to know if your infinite loop is intentionally coded or a bug.

The second type of service is what Google App Engine announced yesterday. It provides what may be called a “hosted middleware framework”, with the middleware stack having only Python language bindings today, with other language bindings to follow in future. Even when multiple languages are eventually supported, this type of service is quite different from Amazon EC2, because the middleware framework imposes specific constraints on the kind of program that can run on the service. Specifically, Google App Engine service is limited to running what may be called “provably halting programs” (or it will simply be forcibly halted the environment!) - short-running web applications that support the “page oriented computing” model - i.e service a HTTP request with a response and stop. Stand alone programs using multiple threads, such as a web crawler, are not supported. The flexibility lost by the developer comes with a huge benefit. Because of the constraints imposed by the middleware framework, Google can make much stronger guarantees of your application availability than Amazon can - Amazon can guarantee the availability of their virtual CPU, but cannot guarantee your application availability. The service abstraction of App Engine still needs a skilled programmer to create applications, but the effort required is less than what Amazon would need, with the trade-off of a more restrictive programming model.

Finally, Zoho Creator. This provides a service which lets users develop database driven web applications, with the service being accessible to regular users, as opposed to only trained programmers. It starts with a easy-to-use form/view builder interface, and then for more complicated logic, eases the user into the Deluge scripting environment. This scripting environment is intentionally kept very simple, so as to make the system accessible to a large number of users. Much like Google App Engine, Zoho Creator sits on a specific middleware stack, along with its constrained programming model, and its associated benefits/constraints for the application. But rather than exposing the middleware stack as an API only, Zoho Creator provides a higher level of abstraction through a development environment that is accessible to the casual non-programmer - so creating complex views, plugging in validation logic etc. are much simpler. As an aside, I want to mention that, in principle, it would be possible to layer Zoho Creator on top of Google App Engine on top of Amazon EC2.

I hope this post has demonstrated how the cloud-services market is increasingly becoming sophisticated with various kinds of tiered services serving different needs. Each type of service brings with it a different abstraction, a different programming model, and of course, its benefits and constraints.

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Google hopes to house Web software on App Engine

Apr 9, 2008
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Google plans to launch a service called App Engine Monday evening that the company hopes will attract programmers and eventually companies needing an expandable foundation for online applications.

App Engine, free to the first 10,000 people who sign up, offers a combination of several online Google services for those who want a place to host software, said Pete Koomen, a product manager on the Google developer team. Those include the BigTable service for data storage and processing--as expected--along with authentication to let people sign on to services and e-mail to let the system handle communications, he said.

At an event called Campfire One Monday night, Google plans to show off some internally developed Web applications written with the service. One of them lets people sign up for carpools, joining the service, declaring whether and when they want to drive or be driven, and then being matched to likely partners.

The company is pitching App Engine as an easy way for programmers to build software without having to worry about rebuilding it once it gets too big for its original hardware or software britches.

"We've seen cases where developers have had to rearchitect systems every six to nine months because of the load of increasing traffic," Koomen said. Using Google's App Engine sidesteps those issues by distributing software across Google's own servers, automatically handling larger-scale use, he said.

It looks to me like the move could put some competitive pressure on other online services such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Salesforce.com's AppExchange.

But Stephen Arnold, author of "Google Version 2," sees grander ambitions in the App Engine plan. Google's BigTable software and accompanying Sawzall technology for analyzing huge quantities of data offers big companies a way to tackle data-mining tasks they currently can't manage, such as American Express plumbing five years' worth of credit-card transactions to determine the merits of Father's Day promotions.

"This is a real zinger for the banks and credit-card agencies," he said.

App Engine programs can be written in the Python programming language, Koomen said, though Google is seeking advice on what other languages to support. With App Engine, programmers can use a Google software development kit to write the software on their own computer, then upload it to App Engine when desired.

Google's App Engine initially will have limits of 500MB of storage, 10GB of daily data transfer bandwidth, and 200 million daily cycles of processor use. That should be enough to power a Web site with about 5 million page views per month, Koomen said.

After the preview period ends, all comers will be able to use that amount of capacity for free, and using more will cost pay-as-you-go fees that Google isn't yet announcing.

Google expects to generate some revenue from the service and from AdSense if developers incorporate that service into their Web applications, said Tom Stocky, another Google product manager. But the real payback from the service is indirect, Koomen said.

"The primary motivation is to enable the Web as a platform and move it forward," Koomen said. "If it's easier for developers to build Web applications, (that) means more applications. That attracts more users to the Web and helps Google as well."

Future features will include mechanisms for storing files larger than 1MB, billing users for computer use, and support for offline applications, Koomen added.

Google engineers also will discuss the site at the Google I/O developer conference in May.

Update 8:15 a.m. PDT March 8: All the early spots appear to be taken, but you can sign up for the waiting list at Google's Web site. Some more links for the project include a thorough overall App Engine description; source code for the project, under the open-source Apache 2.0 license, available for download; a gallery of applications; and Google's App Engine blog. Also, I removed a potentially erroneous reference to a the database in Amazon's EC2 service; Amazon hasn't described what its SimpleDB service uses.