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Posts Tagged ‘quite-different’

Not too long ago, Google added voice recognition to their iPhone search application. Not one to be behind the times, Yahoo! has gone and immediately done the same.

Well, that’s what we should have been able to say. Instead, Yahoo’s voice recognition add-on comes nearly 6 months after Google’s. Of course, Yahoo’s application is a bit more complex than Google’s, being that it also handles news, aggregates various social sites, and a good amount more beyond search. But search is Yahoo’s main gig. Combined with the fact that everyone hates typing, Yahoo should have done this ages ago.

Yahoo’s implementation is quite different than Googles - for better or worse.

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Michael Sheridan has resigned as CFO of music startup Project Playlist, we’ve confirmed. This comes just a couple of weeks after CEO Owen Van Natta resigned to take the top spot at MySpace.

Sheridan is a former News Corp. executive and was also previously the CFO of Facebook. One source says he walked out yesterday after a dispute over the acquisition of Total Music. Another source says the departure isn’t nearly as dramatic, and that Sheridan was simply part of the restructuring announced as part of that acquisition. This source says that new CEO John Sykes, who took over after Van Natta’s abrupt departure, is simply putting his own exec team in place. “Sheridan was one of Van Natta’s guys” says the source.

Playlist has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Whatever the true story is, Sheridan is yet another casualty of Van Natta’s abrupt departure from Playlist, a company he ran for just five months. He left Playlist in a shambles, and Skyes is left to clean up the mess.

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Biz Stone, in a blog post today, gave us a little insight into Twitter’s stance on advertising. There’s been a lot of speculation on how Twitter should and could advertise but Stone lays out a few ways where Twitter could monetize via ads and other methods and notes that the micro-blogging service would prefer to stay away from relying too much on ads, at least initially.

First, Stone says that Twitter sees the inherent value of commercial use of twitter, noting that Twitter is providing enterprises and individuals with viable uses that could be enhanced. Last summer, Twitter CEO Evan Williams said he thought Twitter’s strongest revenue potential would come from charging for commercial use by brands. Other initial ideas for ways to commercialize Twitter include “account authentication, management tools, and discovery mechanisms.” Stone doesn’t find the idea of selling banner ads on Twitter very compelling, but acknowledges the marketing value of twitter in connecting businesses to consumers and is looking to explore this particular avenue.

The best discovery mechanism is search and the obvious business model in search is advertising. But Twitter doesn’t have to make money yet, so it is not ready to commit to a revenue model and clearly wants to take the time find its own way and strategy. The startup knows that it can make money with advertising if it needs to but continues to experiment with different advertising strategies to find the model that’s the best fit. Some of these “tests” include text advertisements on the home page, ads in the stream, and text footer ads. Twitter also serves ads in the small box on profile pages for third-party Twitter apps, but doesn’t seem to charge the apps for the promotion.

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