Google Remain Focused

In 2006, Eric Schmidt Google’s CEO foresaw a day when Google would have more than 1,000 employees serving a radio advertising business. This week, three years later, Google Audio Ads had failed to live up to expectations and left the radio advertising business.

The move also demonstrates Google’s efforts to cut costs and focus on fewer and safer projects as its core search advertising business has slowed sharply during the recession.

Only three ago, Google ended its Print Ads program, which sold spots in newspapers. Today Google has had some success in TV advertising and has not thrown in that towel especially give its potential to support YouTube.

Google Audio Ads had faced challenges since it began in 2006, when Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a radio advertising technology company. Google paid $102 million in cash for dMarc, but the agreement included additional payments of up to $1.1 billion based on performance targets.

Google’s cull is not just restricted to advertising. Last year they cut Lively, Google’s answer to Second Life. Other culls include; Dodgeball, a mobile service aimed at connecting young bar-hoppers, Catalogue Search, which indexed paper catalogues to offer online search, Notebook, a tool to allow users to take notes as they visited web sites and Jaiku, their answer to Twitter.

Google has proved that when it comes to investment, they may pump money and effort in but they projects have to deliver. It would be interesting to understand what they see as their targets for Book Search but unlike Microsoft, it’s highly unlikely that they will walk away from it in a hurry.

Google to Close Lively

It appears that not everything that Google does turns to gold and less than six months after its launch their answer to the virtual worlds of Second Life, Google's ‘Lively’ will close. This may be down to the slow down in the economy and resultant focusing on core activity and revenues.

Lively’ allowed anyone to set up virtual spaces, such as rooms, that could be embedded onto blogs or Facebook pages and was squarely aimed at Linden Lab’s Second Life but failed to take off.

Google say its on official blog "It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business." Google is completely shutting down the service by the end of the year and is encouraging "all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms."



The speed at which these companies can change their direction and know when to cut and run is what makes them what they are. We have already seen how quickly Microsoft exited its Live Book Search program earlier this year. We have to recognize what drives one business is different to that which drives another or even a sector and when times get tough the tough literally get going.

Google Goes Lively

Reuters reports that Google yesterday launched, ‘Lively’, a ‘three-dimensional virtual experience website’ to match the virtual world Linden Lab's Second Life. So we face more avatars, three-dimensional graphics and virtual rooms.

Lively plays YouTube videos in virtual TVs and displays photos in virtual picture frames inside the rooms.

It’s certainly new with little there today but Google obviously see the potential and the trick will be using the Google brand to leverage the footfall. Who knows we may well soon see another animated signing from the publisher Snowbooks but this time in Lively.