Tim Brocklehurst

10 or 20 years from now, we will remember this year as the year in which the world tipped towards digital innovations over and beyond their traditional oil-fed counterparts.

The papers today are filled with doom and gloom about the impending economic crisis, and the apparently endless oil price increases.

As I have reported before, this crisis is all the more extraordinary because for the first time, oil prices are driven by demand instead of scarecity. As China pulls its vast population out of poverty and into middle class, so more oil is being consumed there. And that means the price, for the rest of us, will increase.

One thing you can be sure of: Life as we know it is going to change.

Huge strides are being made in the delivery of battery-powered cars. more and more homes are turning to geo-thermal power, sucking their heating from the center of the earth instead of from burning fuel. The digital revolution, which has been so prominent with the rise of the internet and mobile phones, is also making up for our inability to afford oil any more.

So what does this mean if you work on the Internet?

It means opportunity, hope, promise, and an exciting future. Of course it does! - This is the time when every industry out there is seeking ways to avoid physical delivery of goods. Anything which can be delivered digitally, without adding to fuel costs, must be.

And unlike 8 years ago, when the bubble burst on those Internet pionneers because it was discovered that no one really knew how to monetize the Internet, the world knows better now, and the world has embraced the Internet. Well, to be precise, 1.3 billion of us are Internet users from a population of 6.3 billion. That’s 20%.

Moreover, 36% of those 1.3 billion say they use the Internet to make purchases.. that’s 468 Million buyers. And its growing all the time.

So have a think about your industry, if you’re not currently 100% online, and pay some thought to what you could convert to online delivery instead of off-. If you have an interesting case and would like some help developing a solution, let me know. Drop me a comment below, and I’ll get back to you. I read all my comments…

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Latest news in the saga for dominance of Yahoo!:

Carl Icahn has announced the nominees for his board of Yahoo!:

Mark Cuban - Sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! in 1999 for $8.1 billion in stock.

John Chapple - Former CEO of Nextel Partners, with a telecommunications investment fund.

Lucian Bebchuk - Harvard Law professor and director of Harvard’s program on corporate governance

Edward Meyer - Former CEO of Grey Global Group, the worldwide advertising agency.

Keith Meister - Icahn’s own vice chairman. He was also added to Motorola’s board last month as part of the agreement to avoid a proxy battle with Icahn.

Brian Posner - Former CEO of asset management firm, Clearbridge Advisors LLC.

Adam Dell - brother of Michael, the founder of Dell Computers. He was previously a major shareholder of HotJobs.com, which Yahoo! bought for $439 million in 2002.

Robert Shaye - founder of New Line Cinema and still co-CEO.

Frank Biondi Jr - Former CEO of Viacom Inc. Also a director of Amgen, Cablevision Systems, Hasbro, The Bank of New York Mellon and Seagate Technology.

And the tenth member: Carl Icahn himself - 72-year-old investor, and corporate shaker.

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As anticipated, Car Icahn has begun his proxy battle with Yahoo!

In an open letter to Yahoo chairman, Roy Bostock, Icahn said the board had “acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is obvious that Microsoft’s bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative than Yahoo’s prospects on a stand alone basis.”

He went on to urge Yahoo! to “move expeditiously to negotiate a merger with Microsoft, thereby making a proxy fight unnecessary.”

Alongside his support from Bill Miller, Icahn’s move has further support from at least one other major shareholder, Paulson & Co. with a 3.4 percent stake in Yahoo!

But Microsoft are showing no signs of returning to the table. Yesterday, Microsoft spokesman, Frank Shaw said simply “The company has moved on”.

Its final offer of $33 wasn’t enough to satisfy Yahoo!’s co-founder and Chief Executive Jery Yang, who wanted $37 per share, even though shares had been trading at around $19 prior to that.

For the current share price, and its movement over the last 5 days, see below.

HAVE YOUR SAY: What do you think the future holds for Yahoo!? Drop me a comment…

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Further to my post yesterday about the Yahoo! saga, I see that Bill Miller, who as portfolio manager at Legg Mason controls more than 6% of Yahoo!’s shares, welcomed Carl Icahn among the senior shareholders yesterday.

“To the extent he can get the parties back to the table I’d be all in favour of that”, he said.

Miller’s endorsement indicates a significant portion of Yahoo! is leaning towards the Microsoft deal.

It is one thing for a board to have pressure from its shareholders, yet another to have that pressure intensified by a rush of new shareholders.

Yahoo!’s shareprice will start at $27.14 this morning. Interesting to see how it moves through the day…

This is how it stands currently, and a chart of the past 5 days (delayed 15 mins)…:

Although we’re told that Microsoft have given no indication that they will resume talks with Yahoo!, Icahn now has the power to replace the Yahoo! board with one which will be more open to the takeover bid.

Bill Miller’s endorsement means that few would stand in his way if he chose to do that, but he hasn’t got long.

The news over the next few days will be vital to the future of the whole Internet industry. Watch this space…

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If you’re here seeking ways to get a few hundred more visitors to your web business, great. You’ll find there are plenty of traffic, and list, building tips and techniques here. But spare a moment too, to put this Internet Industry into perspective. Something big is about to happen.

Many senior Internet Industry exectutives and investors are currently waiting to hear the decision of this man…

No matter how small or big you consider your online business to be - (it may be so small that you don’t even think you have one - or so big that you’re even involved in this latest saga I’m discussing here) - either way, I’ll be interested to hear what you think of Carl Icahn’s recent move on Yahoo!

In the 10 days since Microsoft pulled out of of its $47.3bn offer, which valued Yahoo! at $33-a-share, Carl Icahn has bought a stake of approximately 3.6%.

Considering his purchase price was somewhere around $25, a 3.6% stake will have cost him around $1.2 billion.

This is a man with a personal fortune of $14 billion or so, so pitting 1.2 of it on Yahoo! in its current crisis is bold. Perhaps we should expect nothing less from the real-life Gordon Gekko of Wall Street… Who remembers his infamous hostile takeover of TWA in 1985?

But there is something very significant about buying such a stake at this time: It gives him the option to launch a proxy battle and ultimately to remove members from Yahoo!’s board in favour of directors who support his own views.

And guess what they are…

To accept Microsoft’s offer.

If he can sell his Yahoo! shares for $33 then his personal gain will be around half a billion dollars. And it could all happen in a matter of days.

Perhaps its a shame he doesn’t have better intentions for the troubled pioneering search engine than to feed his bulging pockets.

Or perhaps we should just celebrate and cheer-on such flagrant capitalism…

Lets watch what happens over the coming days - if nothing else, his move is certain to bring the players back to the table, and it will make interesting viewing…

What’s your view? What have I missed? Leave your comment below…

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Here’s an interesting case for anyone looking to build a new service online…

Wayn, (Where Are You Now), is one of the UK hopefuls in the race for social networking dominance.

Founded by Peter Ward in 2005, it targets young single people with freedom to travel.

It is now gets 6.5 Million visitors each month, and has an Alexa rank of 835. It grew from nothing by using Google adwords to attract its initial signups, and by offering free international SMS texts.

In doing so, it was reaching out to its intended target audience by providing the very thing it knew they were looking for (even though they didn’t know what WAYN was yet).

Part of the difficulty it seems, with many web businesses, is that what they offer is a service no one thinks they need because they don’t know what it is.

Then, once they realise what the service is, and how useful it is, they begin to wonder what life can have been like without it.

So here’s a good answer to the question about how you attract people to your business when they don’t know what your service is, and when they can’t envisage what it will do for them:

Offer them something they need instead.

In WAYN’s case it was free international SMS texts.

Whether they needed WAYN or not, WAYN’s users definitely needed free international SMS texts. This, then, was the bait. Its what WAYN offered in its shop window knowing it would draw in people who would also like the service they were offering.

Now they’ve got to know what WAYN does, they realise they need it too.

WAYN.com recently changed its model from paid subscription to free (with VIP upgrade available), on the advice of Brent Hoberman, an investor in the business, and its current Chairman.

Like MVS and most Web 2.0 sites, WAYN’s growth is due in no small part to its use of automatic contact form signups. This is when you enter your username and password at the top email service providers and an email is sent to all your contacts inviting them to join too.

Sites vary on how they use this viral trigger and in Wayn’s case, the option not to use it is especially difficult to find.

A further point of interest, perhaps reflecting on the UK’s more relaxed Anti SPAM laws, is that no verification email is sent following signup.

Certainly a welcome message is sent, and an invitaion to download WAYN desktop - presumably a method of communication direct from WAYN without needing email -… but they never confirmed my email address to know that it is valid.

Perhaps we’re moving away from email contact - perhaps this is a sign of what is to come…

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