Filed under: Industry news | Tags: auction, digital marketing, engine, Europe, Google, Internet, losses, Lycos, Search, strategy
Lycos Europe, one of the dominating search giants of the 90s, is now up for auction. Unable to compete with Google’s power, the search engine ran into net losses of EUR 5.9 million for the first quarter this year, according to PaidContent.
Dresdner Kleinwort is now Lycos’ advisor in its bid to find a new strategy – which should clearly start with trimming their fat. They don’t need to be so big to be competitive. Small and flexible teams are really successful today, because they can react quickly to the frequent changes in the Internet world – something that Lycos has not done.
However, this may be difficult for Lycos. There have already been a number of cost-cutting measures undertaken at Lycos Europe recently, eliminating around EUR 6.2 million. But there were still losses.
Good luck to whoever takes Lycos on…
Filed under: Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: applications, blog, digital marketing, growing pains, hi5, Mashable, members, platform, social network, success
This week has seen hi5 become a victim of their own success, as their runaway growth has come with some some growing pains.
Over the last month, third-party developers have launched over 400 OpenSocial apps on hi5’s network. These apps have has faster adoption rates than those on any other social network. The hi5 platform has averaged at around a million application installs every day and around half of hi5’s 80 million members have engaged with three or more installed apps.
Mashable spoke to hi5 developers to find out the secrets to their success – the short version being that they just put together a really solid service and happened to quickly tap into a broad cross-section of countries. Their really impressive application statistics are continually attributed to their uniquely international userbase.
However, their success has come with some growing pains and Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has told Mashable: “Hi5 for a brief period turned off all platform notifications. However, Hi5 has since restored platform notification service to developers by making some changes to the way notifications work. Specifically, notifications are now processed asynchronously. Hi5 will be continuing conversations with developers that are using notifications the most.”
See the full Mashable blog and hear their conversation at: http://mashable.com/2008/04/29/hi5-growth/
