There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today.

The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust.

Jeff Bezos, who was ahead of the curve in creating a cloud data service, is pushing Amazon into digital media, book publishing, and, with his highly buzzed-about new line of Kindle tablets, including the $199 Fire, a direct assault on the iPad. Amazon almost doubled in size from 2008 to 2010, when it hit $34 billion in annual revenue; analysts expect it to reach $100 billion in annual revenue by 2015, faster than any company ever.

Facebook, meanwhile, is now more than just the world’s biggest social network; it is the world’s most expansive enabler of human communication. It has changed the ways in which we interact (witness its new Timeline interface); it has redefined the way we share–personal info, pictures (more than 250 million a day), and now news, music, TV, and movies. With access to the “Likes” of more than 800 million people, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an unequaled trove of data on individual consumer behavior that he can use to personalize both media and advertising.

1. The Road Map: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google do not talk about their plans. Coca-Cola would tweet its secret formula before any of them would even hint at what’s next. “That is a part of the magic of Apple,” says new CEO Tim Cook.

2. The Inevitable War: Hardware. Media. Data. With each company sharing a vision dependent on these three big ideas, conflict over pretty much every strategic move seems guaranteed. Amazon, for example, needs a better media tablet to drive more customers to its Kindle, MP3, and app stores. But how to avoid an HP-like disaster?

3. The Profit Game: Late in 2010, Jobs made a surprise visit to Apple’s quarterly earnings call. The purported reason was to celebrate Apple’s first $20 billion quarter, but Jobs clearly had something else on his mind: Android. At the time, Google’s free mobile operating system was beginning to eclipse the iPhone’s market share.

4. The Living Room: In the spring of 2010, Rishi Chandra, a Google product manager, took to the stage at the company’s developer conference to announce Google’s next victim: the TV business.

5. The Phone Barrier: One industry stands directly between the Fab Four and global domination. It’s an industry that frustrates you every day, one that consistently ranks at the bottom of consumer satisfaction surveys, that poster child for stifling innovation and creativity: your phone carrier. And your cable or DSL firm. For Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, the world’s wireless and broadband companies are a blessing and a curse.

Source: So, who will win in 2012?

First, they acknowledged that there had been a problem and let their customers know that they understood how much it affected them:

“Gmail’s Web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service.”

Next, they apologized for the outage — and did NOT try to minimize its impact:

“Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such.”

Then, they assured their customers that they had looked into the cause of the outage and were taking action based on what they’d learned:

“We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.”

And they provided some details that demonstrated their ability and commitment to resolve any technical glitch quickly:

“The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously).

“We brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail Web interface came back online.”

Finally, they explained what they were doing to prevent an outage in the future:

“We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation.

“We’ll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.”

This is a pretty good template for any business to use. It begins with a quick acknowledgement of the problem and its seriousness. It includes enough information to make the customer feel confident the business understands the problem and can fix it. Then it provides reassuring evidence that it won’t happen again.

Every business makes mistakes. Fair-minded customers know that.

If you respond to problems responsibly, the way Google did in this case, your customers will stick by you. But if you try to bury or minimize your mistakes, you will lose their faith in you. And that is the most valuable asset you have.

Google and Apple are increasingly squaring off over lucrative markets like the mobile computing field. And there are many examples of the competition between the two for the mobile market heating up.

Exhibit A is the launch of Android-based mobile phones. The first of Google’s Android-based mobile phones, the G1 from T-Mobile, has sold over 1 million handsets in the United States in the first six months after its launch. This compares to 1.75 million of Apple’s iPhones sold by AT&T in the first six months after its launch.

Exhibit B is Apple recently blocking a Goggle application – Google Voice – from working on its iPhone. Google Voice allows users to rout calls to multiple numbers to one phone. The software would also allow iPhone users to make free calls and text messages over the Internet, threatening revenues for iPhone carriers such as AT&T.

The battle for the “smart” mobile phone market between these two tech titans should be quite interesting and provide a profitable opportunity for investors.

Four Ways to Profit from China’s Smartphone Market

The rivalry between the two companies in the mobile computing field is occurring on a worldwide battlefield. And now this budding Apple-Google rivalry has spread to perhaps the most important mobile phone market in the world – China.

China is an incredible investment opportunity in many areas, including the mobile phone market.

It should be a titanic struggle in the smartphone market to win the hearts of China’s huge and rapidly growing middle class population. Here are the four main actors in this real-life drama that are poised to deliver profits to their investors as they gain share of the Chinese mobile phone market.

The first two companies are very familiar to most American investors – Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). The other two companies are somewhat less familiar to American investors.

China Mobile (NYSE:CHL) is the leading mobile services provider in China. The company also boasts the world’s largest mobile network and the world’s largest mobile subscriber base. China Mobile’s subscriber base is approaching 500 million subscribers. The company has a license to provide 3G mobile phone services in China.

China Unicom (NYSE:CHU) is China’s second largest mobile phone operator with over 140 million subscribers. In October 2008, the company merged another Chinese telecom company – China Netcom. In January 2009, the company was granted a license to offer 3G mobile services.

China’s Mobile Phone Market

China is the world’s largest mobile phone market, with 700 million subscribers. However, China has only recently launched third generation services, which offer broadband-speed data connections.

Smartphone penetration in China is running at 10 percent of all handsets sold. But the smartphones are expected to generate higher revenues as subscribers access features such as music and games downloads.

China Mobile will fire the opening shot in the battle for high-value subscribers over the next couple of months with the launch of the 3G OPhone, which runs on Google’s Android operating system. China Mobile had held discussions with Apple about potential iPhone distribution, but these discussions broke down as the two firms could not agree on how to share the revenues.

China Mobile’s OPhone will offer customized applications for high-value-added services such as music downloads and mobile TV. China Mobile will make a very aggressive push to sell the OPhone, with plans to subsidize these high-end handsets for customers up to 50 percent off the retail price.

The launch of the OPhone by China Mobile comes as China Unicom is nearing a three-year exclusive agreement with Apple to sell the iPhone in China. The company is expected to offer the iPhone when it launches its countrywide 3G services this autumn. China Unicom is hoping to use the iPhone as a powerful tool to lure some of the lucrative young mobile users from China Mobile.

Source: Tony Daltorio, The Investment U Research Team

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1-Keywords in narrow silos
2-Peel and stick your top 20 keywords
3-Relentless split testing of ads
4-Thorough list of negative keywords
5-Good quality scores
6-Landing pages that match the ads and keywords
7-Savvy geo targeting
8-Nailing the #1 unmet need in your market
9-Separating search from content
10-Conversion tracking

Every time you check one more of these things off your list of
refinements, you jump ahead of 1/3 of your competitors. If
you’ve got zero items checked off, you’re superior to 0% of your
competitors. If you’ve got all 10, you’re superior to 98% of
your competitors.

If you’ve got all 10, rare is the market you can’t penetrate.

To know more advance details, well, my colleague Perry Marshall has written a very helpful e-course that you can find out about it here: 2010 Definitive Guide to Google AdWords

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web.

In 1994, Amazon.com is launched. It is a store that sells everything, personalized for its users, that can even offer suggestions.

In 1998, Google is unleashed by two Stanford University students, promising a faster, more effective way to search.

In 1999, Blogger is founded. Google comes out with Google News, a service unique in that it requires no human intervention.

In 2002, Friendster is released.

In 2003, Google buys Blogger.

In 2004, the rise of Gmail gives competition to Microsoft’s Hotmail. Microsoft’s Newsbotster comes as a response to Google News. Picasa and A9 are also released this year. In August, Google goes public, acquires Keyhole (now Google Earth), a company that maps the world, and begins digitizing and indexing world libraries. Reason Magazine sends its subscribers satellite photos of their homes, with information tailored to them inside.

From this point EPIC passes into the realm of fiction.

In 2005, Microsoft buys Friendster in response to Google’s action. Apple Computer comes out with WifiPod, which allows users to “send and receive messages on the go”. Then, Google unveils the Google Grid, a universal platform offering an unlimited amount of space and bandwidth that can be used to store anything. It allows users to manage their information two ways: store it privately or publish it to the entire grid.

In 2007, Microsoft Newsbotster, a social news network, ranks and sorts news. It allows everyone to comment on what they see.
Screenshot from EPIC 2014, depicting the logo of the fictional Googlezon corporation.

In 2008, Google and Amazon merge to form Googlezon. Google supplies Google Grid, Amazon supplies their personalized recommendations. Googlezon is a system that automatically searches all content sources and splices together stories to cater to the interests of each individual user.

When explaining how Googlezon profiles its users, the identification card of a man named Winston Smith appears on screen. Smith is the main character in George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a dystopian society is ruled by a media-distorting government.[2] The photograph on the identification card depicts Robin Sloan.

In 2010, the news wars rage between Microsoft and Googlezon. These “News Wars of 2010″ are notable in that they involve no actual news organizations.

In 2011, the slumbering Fourth Estate awakens to make its first and final stand. The New York Times sues Googlezon, “claiming the fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law”, but the Supreme Court rules in favor of Googlezon.

In 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct, which pays users to contribute any information they know into a central grid, allowing the system to automatically create news tailored to individuals, entirely without journalists. The word “EPIC” is an amalgam of three fundamental physical and mathematical constants; e (Euler’s number), pi (?) and c (the speed of light in a vacuum). These are depicted in the shadow of the EPIC logo.

EPIC stores and categorizes not only news, but the demographics, political beliefs, and consumption habits of every user. At its best, EPIC is “a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before … but at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue.” EPIC is so popular that it triggers the downfall of the New York Times, which goes offline and becomes “a print newsletter for the elite and the elderly.”

The narration ends with the statement: “Perhaps there was another way.”

Source:
Google Controversy
Googlezon Effect