Jack Ma Wants to Buy Yahoo! What's the Marketing Plan, Now?

Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr
How would you market your company if this was happening?

TechCrunch reports that at a conference in San Francisco, Jack Ma, CEO of China Yahoo! subsidiary Alibaba, revealed that he has a strong interest in buying Yahoo! and spinning off its core assets. Most likely this is to protect himself and to rescue an ailing company.

There is not much more to add to this story, other than to say that it now has legs, as they say in the news business.

About a week ago, a report at Hexun, a Chinese media site said that Ma was serious about at buying Yahoo!. The purchase would allow Ma more control over Alibaba and it would also enable him to take some of the core features of the Yahoo! e-commerce infrastructure and use it for his own venture, Alipay. The stories on the recent Alipay fiasco are many but in short, Ma took the liberty of using his interest in Alipay to spin that company off from Yahoo!. In fact, Yahoo! didn't know it was coming.

I think that there's a strong likelihood that social e-commerce is the next giant wave of building web companies in China. All the major social networks are doing something about it. Web companies in China are buying properties that they can tie onto the back of a social media camel, and they are whipping their networks into shape and building strong e-commerce capabilities.

So, you are Yahoo!. You have a very large Chinese suitor. What is your marketing and innovation plan for this content engine that was once the darling of the Internet world?

#Infographic: Facebook and Twitter Stepping on Student's First Amendment Rights?

Here's a good one. Are Facebook and Twitter infringing upon First Amendment rights in the classroom? In effect, are they putting the smack down on your student's fundamental pursuit of liberty? Apparently not, according to the Knight Foundation.

Even though teachers cringe at the idea of using social media in the classroom, it appears that using social media (or at least learning since the advent of social media) has pushed students to a more fundamental appreciation for freedom of speech.

Check out this infographic:

What Would Make Facebook Lose Relevancy in the Fight Against #Google+

Facebook changed the way its navigation bar operates yesterday, in a capitulation to Google+ and Twitter. it's a sign that Facebook's biggest issue now is relevancy and sorting out signal from noise for its 700 million plus user base.

We saw the Google+ mimicry with the release of the subscribe button and smart lists this week. The scrolling nav bar will keep people updated about their updates and reduce the likelihood they will travel to other sites outside of Facebook.

It should also help people manage the new barrage of information from all the new subscribers as friends, and friends of friends start searching out and connecting to people for new social information.

Barry Schuler, former chairman and CEO of AOL, told me on Twitter today that "Facebook has to deal with Twitter from below and Google+ from above. Their biggest strength, friend-friend, becoming a weakness."

This is exactly right. Some suspect that Facebook will reveal at f8 next week a scrolling news feed, a version of which they rolled out in a test earlier this summer.

The new barrage of increased network information makes relevancy an incredibly important issue for anyone with a Facebook profile, and it has now become Facebook's central issue.

With new subscriptions and subscribers going public, updates will begin to come to these users' feeds at a faster rate. As people have subscribed to my feeds, I have noticed that I am barraged with more and more signals. This has made Facebook management an almost all-day affair.

I feel like I am dealing with the news ticker on the bottom of a cable tv news channel.
This is the problem of news feed relevance, which we have written about before.

Microsoft Disrupting School Model by Putting App Building into Curriculum

Microsoft is working with a school district in Ohio to teach students how to buid and market apps, according to Ben Lower, Sr. Product Manager, Developer Experience, Windows Phone Apps.

Lower, who writes for the Windows 7 Phone Developer blog, told us in an interview this afternoon that Microsoft recently began working on a partnership with a non-profit (501-3c Corporation) he didn't name whose charter is supporting the Chagrin Falls, OH school district. "The goal of this partnership will be to develop coursework around building and marketing Windows Phone applications," says Lower.

The pilot session of this program will be a group of roughly 40 students who will be led through the creative, technical and tactical aspects of Windows Phone app development.

Microsoft has been working more closely with schools and students as it has become apparent that programming and apps are becoming a significant portion of future careers.

Recently, Lower's developer group worked with eight student finalists -- one of them a high school student -- this summer in a competition to build new apps for the new Mango phone out this Fall.

One of this year's winners in a was a local high school student named Tara Balakrishnan.

Tara used the new Mango phone and the Hawaii app building platform to create Pictionary, a multi-player mobile version of the popular draw and guess game. Tara is senior at Redmond High School and was an intern in the Research Connections team where she evaluated the Hawaii tools for High School students and got some experience with the Windows Phone. She had only been programming (.NET) and using a Windows Phone for a month, says Lower.

This could be a boon for Microsoft. Everyone from school district heads to education reformers have been clamoring to get kids to learn more of a 21st century curriculum. We've already seen apps that mobilize and socialize textbooks to link them to the Internet. If most people are moving to mobile, this will be the way students of today do business and have social lives tomorrow.

Microsoft is launching more of these open app competitions, and you find application material at Lower's blog. High school students, or any other students, can fill out the form and Microsoft will send them a phone and the tools they need to make their own apps.

The XAPfest Tara won is one example of how Microsoft is investing in educating and supporting current and prospective Windows Phone student developers. In June, the company wrapped Imagine Cup 2011, where student developers solved world problems with Windows Phone apps.

This year's third place finalist, LifeLens, created an app that uses a microscopic lens attached to a Windows Phone to digitally characterize anemia, visualize blood cell rupture, parasites and malaria.

Be the Entrepreneur Who Will Create Jobs in this Market

Jeremy Johnson, CMO of 2Tor.com, talks about the employment prospects for young entrepreneurs and encourages people to get out there and do it on their own, because the traditional hiring process does not work anymore.

For #Education Innovation, It's Less Push and More Pull (Listening)

If you want a good lesson in how the education world can be a laggard in terms of systemic change and, as the software people call it, iteration, look at this example from a good company I've encountered recently, MasteryConnect.  I'm writing this post today in reaction to a great post by Mick Hewitt about his experience with a teacher and her view of how the vendor-teacher relationship operates.

I've argued for a long time that what is missing in education is a media platform that actually allows teachers to speak for themselves about the experiences they have as educators, professionals, even as parents or individuals with their own lives. All of the mainstream media that reports on education or attempts to provide information about education as an industry takes their information from the top levels of education governance, or from policy makers whose decisions decide how education works.

The only two groups of people who have any real contact with what is actually happening in classrooms and with education products are the vendors and the teachers. But until recently, most of the vendors were not tech companies. They were publishers, curriculum providers, supplies providers. As tech and the web created platforms for different types of teaching products, mostly cloud-based and delivered on the web, we've begun to see an interesting trend.

Vendors who did not exist before are taking the natural step and writing about their experiences in the teacher world. And teachers are contributing their thoughts on blogs and in their discussions with vendors. This conversation is making itself on to the web. You'd be surprised at how much of a gap there is between:

Vendors and teachers
Teachers and the 21st Century workforce
Classrooms and real life

We are beginning to see this, and we are beginning to see why. The traditional vendors had a lot to gain by "disrupting" the classroom framework and providing solutions to teachers and students, but they didn't have much to gain by forming relationships. that's because the traditional way of providing system architecture or solutions was Vendor --->  District level admin ---> schools. No need for a teacher to vendor relationship, except for face-time.

That is changing.

My friend Mick Hewitt had a remarkable educational experience with a teacher he calls Miss Jones recently as he sat with her and figured out her needs in the classroom.

It's a long piece, but it's worth the read if you are in the edtech space. Miss Jones has a strong opinion about what it's been like to work with vendors in the current school framework.

To use Bob Moesta's Job to be done framework, vendors have hired school to push their products. Teachers have hired vendors because they have no choice. Influenced by demands from on-high, it's a zero sum game for them. they must take on "solutions" that sometimes run counter to their best practice experiences with students. You see how that could be a problem.

This leaves teachers feeling "left out" of discussions and creation of tools that have, in the end, often led not to learning, but to frustration with the school experience.  Mick was able to document this with: Teachers are not second class citizens.

Here's the core problem, according to his experience with Miss Jones:

We’ve all seen that there is often a giant gap between educators and “solutions providers”. I’ve seen many an engineer come into this market having “the answer.” As many non-educators come into the market trying to solve problems in education, it’s easy to take an attitude of “we know how to solve your problem” without taking the time to really listen and connect with teachers with the spirit and understanding that these are professionals that care about kids and know a lot about solving these problems and doing their jobs. We need to find more ways to bridge the gap of the solutions that we can provide to improve student achievement and what happens on the ground at the classroom level. When we first started MasteryConnect, we worked with a 17-year veteran educator (Trenton, who you see writing on this blog) and we immediately found a gap between his understanding of what was possible technologically and our understanding of the real-world classroom. It has been a great journey as we’ve worked and continue to work to bridge that gap. 

Unlocking #Innovation and Supporting Small Circles by Un-Tethering from Institutions

Fred Wilson hammered the nail straight on the head with an insightful post last week about innovation and the fact that innovation is no longer a location-specific trait. Silicon Valley is now competing with the rest of the world for talent, because the rest of the world has the internet. The new innovations are going to be applications on top of the Internet.

Here are Wilson's finer points in this post:

The Internet has made this so, and there's no going back. We will see Apples and Facebooks get built in China, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and plenty of other places.

New York City has benefited enormously in the past decade from this trend. In technology, it has become the second most active start-up market in the U.S. Sadly, this is not yet true for biotech and energy tech start-ups.

Until recently, "technology" was largely about "moving electrons on wires." Now, "technology" is about building all kinds of interesting applications on top of the Internet. An increasing number of engineers and entrepreneurs are applying their ideas and energy to creating compelling services on the Internet.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but I think innovation is becoming more the standard in more places because the Internet is big, but it also creates hyper local and smaller communities. The future of the Internet depends on people forming micro-communities of talent, conversation style, culture and practical problem solving.

I wrote about this recently when I pointed out that the future is getting bigger and smaller all the time, especially in areas of talent searching, jobs searching and creating disruptive moments for entrepreneurs.

Internet intuition looks like this: The more access people have to information and sources for information, and the more efficiently things like search and network-forming function, the less often they have to cast wide nets, or use broadly based language or calls to action to get things done. They can focus on particular conversations, granular approaches to big data, and intimate social circles.

I mean, look at Google+, right?

This entrepreneur mentions the same thing: put people in smaller circles to attack specific problems in innovation-needing industries, and you will have Clay Christensen style disruption. He writes:

expand the invitation list to the ball. Firms can find a way to bring in more innovative start-ups perhaps by providing smaller courts for the newer players to compete — parallel to whatever is happening at center court — giving them an opportunity to start small, grow bigger from there, aspiring to eventually making it to the big show.

To expand on Wilson's point, it's not just that no city has a lock on innovation. It's that innovation has more opportunities to see itself realized. I think innovation and being innovative is a natural state. In a world where we needed strong and very powerful organizations to move and create change it made sense that we would look to specific geographical areas for innovation, or at superior companies and corporations for the next big thing.

But people are able to unlock innovation and de-tether themselves from these static points now. They can reach out and fill out their gaps in knowledge and technique, tools and trade with other people they might not even know.

This is a very healthy future.