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Under the Zillow Advertising Network agreement, the consortium’s advertisers can tap into Zillow’s user base of more than 5 million unique monthly visitors, while Zillow’s advertisers will have access to readers of the newspapers’ online real-estate content.

The launch of the advertising network comes at a time when the real-estate industry is facing a steep decline in home prices, driven by a tightening credit crunch.

Zillow.com, which in November 2007 teamed up with a consortium of newspapers to carry their listings on its real-estate site, has now expanded that deal to include the sale of ads on each other’s sites.

“This partnership allows advertisers with our papers to reach not only local real-estate consumers who live in particular markets, but also consumers who may be moving to particular markets, via their searches on Zillow.com,” Lincoln Millstein, a Hearst Newspapers senior vice president, said in a statement.

The newspaper consortium includes 11 major newspaper companies, including the Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, and E.W. Scripps.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Some Facebook users freaked out over its News Feed in 2006, and its Beacon advertising program last year. But the concerns voiced there dealt with privacy, not user interface. That was something that could’ve resulted in much more PR damage than a design that a slim percentage of users vehemently dislike (and which most, it seems, don’t really care much about).

In response to some Facebook users who asked if they could have the option to use the old design instead of the new one, Zuckerberg said it wasn’t possible for technical reasons. “It’s tempting to say that we should just support both designs, but this isn’t as simple as it sounds,” he wrote. “Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work for our small team, and it would mean that going forward we would have to build everything twice. If we did that then neither version would get our full attention.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has caught on to the fact that a sizeable handful of his 100-million-plus users say they aren’t too thrilled with the site’s new redesign. But he won’t change anything, as Facebook occasionally has in the face of user revolt.

And as for the members who have banded together to form Facebook groups protesting the new design (a bit meta, yes), Zuckerberg claims he’s not offended. “We appreciate the thousands of you who have written in to give us feedback,” the post read. “Even if you’re joining a group to express things you don’t like about the new design, you’re giving us important feedback and you’re sharing your voice, which is what Facebook is all about.”

“In the last four years, we’ve built new products that help people share more, such as photos, videos, groups, events, wall posts, status updates and so on,” the post read. “As people share more, sometimes we need to change the site to accommodate how much information people are posting.”

“Many people disliked News Feed at first because it changed their home page and how they shared information,” Zuckerberg’s post read. (”How they share information” is putting it lightly.) “Now it’s one of the most important parts of Facebook. We think the new design can have the same effect.” He added the company had gone through months of a “feedback” stage and that the final product was shaped largely in part by users’ input.

Facebook’s team isn’t exactly tiny–they have said they hope to hit 800 employees by the end of 2008–but running two Web sites that run the same property differently probably is a pain in the neck. Kind of analogous to Microsoft’s dealing with those holdouts who are still using Windows 98.

A post on the company blog, authored by Zuckerberg, wrote that the site’s new focus–which emphasizes the sharing of media and information–is “an important step for us.”

We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today, that we’ll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer, and that we can pursue without that. It involves breakthrough engineering. We think that the combination with Yahoo would accelerate things in a very exciting way, because they do have great engineers, they have done a lot of great work. So, if you combine their work and our work, the speed at which you can innovate and get things done is just dramatically more rapid. So, it’s really about the people there that want to join in and create a better search, better portal for a very broad set of customers. That’s the vision that’s behind saying, hey, wouldn’t this be a great combination.

When Yahoo played too hard to get, Ballmer came to realize that swallowing Yahoo whole perhaps wasn’t as good a strategy for Microsoft as it was for Yahoo shareholders. Doing anything to stop the fast-growing Google, which will generate about half the revenue Microsoft does this year, is the strategy. Hence, pursuing Yahoo’s search business on one end and Facebook on another front to create more inventory and ride the social-networking wave.

If Yahoo was never the strategy, what was the last three-and-a-half-month pursuit of Yahoo for nearly $50 billion? It makes Ballmer look like a flip-flopper, distancing himself from his previous hot pursuit of the Internet portal. In his initial letter to Yahoo’s board on January 31, which was clearly not a love note but a business solicitation, Ballmer wrote:

The money must be burning a hole is his pocket, given how ready he was to hand it to Yahoo, when he now says that the combination was “never the strategy.”

Perhaps Ballmer’s remarks in Moscow could be construed as a way to avoid uttering the “Google” word. Yahoo may not be the grand ultimate strategy, but preventing Google from getting in bed with Jerry Yang and company is–hence, Ballmer’s continued pursuit of Yahoo’s search business.

From that letter, it would appear that Yahoo was a strategy, and it went beyond just search.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News.com)

• Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

Steve Ballmer

• Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

In speaking with CNET News.com on February 20, Chairman Bill Gates laid bare the Yahoo bride, revealing Microsoft’s real strategy (as opposed to “the” strategy) around Yahoo, which it is now pursuing:

While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

• Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

It all sounds a bit desperate. Perhaps it should be looked upon as an “evolving” strategy. What’s clear is that Ballmer and Yang never had the kind of relationship that could lead to a marriage. In the end, emotion trumped “the” strategy.

Steve Ballmer is changing the script in the Microhoo saga.

• Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

During a speech Ballmer made Friday at a tech conference in Moscow, Reuters reported him as saying, “Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business…We will spend money on some acquisitions. You can do a whole lot of things with 50 billion dollars.”

The company said Thursday that William Roper had resigned as of Monday. Roper, who had served as CEO for just more than a year, has been replaced on an interim basis by VeriSign’s founder and chairman, Jim Bidzos.

VeriSign, which runs the master database for the .com and .net domains, has replaced its CEO and president, who resigned suddenly earlier this week.

“VeriSign remains committed to our strategy of focusing the company on its core businesses while continuing the divestiture of all non-core operations, which will proceed as planned,” Bidzos said in a statement. “We appreciate Bill’s contributions in implementing this divestiture strategy, which the board and the company are fully committed to continuing.”

Jim Bidzos

(Credit:
VeriSign)

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Roper’s decision to leave right now was voluntary, so to speak. “I don’t think it was fair to have him around while we were looking for a replacement, so he chose to leave,” Bidzos told analysts on a conference call.

Bidzos, who founded the Mountain View, Calif.-based company in 1995, has served as either chairman or vice chairman of the board of directors since its start. He was also the company’s first CEO.

Roper had been working on whittling VeriSign down to its core Internet-services businesses.

Wheeler said that the “low-hanging fruit” feedstock for cellulosic ethanol is wood chips and other agriculture wastes. But to get to one-third of demand, long-promised ethanol feedstocks such as fast-growing grasses need to enter the ethanol picture.

After pretreating incoming trash, the company’s concentrated acid hydrolysis process sprays the trash with sulfuric acid which turns the starchy materials into sugars that are then fermented into ethanol.

The remaining lignin material is burned to partly fuel the operation, meeting 100 percent of its steam requirements and 70 percent of its electricity needs, according to Klann. Using landfill also reduces landfill methane, a potent greenhouse gas, he added.

Multiple technology paths

Right now, most ethanol production is going to the pumps in the form of a 10 percent blend with gasoline. Flex-fuel
cars can run E85, a mix of 85 percent ethanol and gasoline, which is available at only about 1 percent of U.S. filling stations.

Ceres’ first sorghum and switchgrass seed products, sold under the Blade Bioenergy Crops brand, will be available this fall and planted next spring, he said. They are bred to be drought-resistant and grow rapidly.

Although these panel speakers were bullish on the future of biofuels, the question of whether the U.S. could grow enough biomass to make one-third of its fuel is still not completely resolved.

After a rash of negative publicity, biofuels backers say that advanced technologies will reshape the industry, making ethanol from sustainably grown sources cost-effective within a few years.

“To really get a significant impact…you are going to have to use purposely grown energy crops,” she said. “It’s really a timing issue. With improvements in technology and economics, these things will be real in the very near future.”

Mascoma, spun out of Dartmouth College, is designing an ethanol-producing microbe that it says will lower the cost of ethanol production by cutting out the traditional step of using enzymes to make sugars.

An oft-cited 2005 Department of Energy and Department of Agriculture study, nicknamed the “billion ton study” (PDF), concluded that 1.3 billion tons of biomass could be harvested sustainably each year in the U.S. by midcentury, which would meet about one-third of U.S. fuel consumption.

However, cellulosic ethanol has yet to be produced on a commercial scale at competitive prices.

Another GM investment is Coskata, which uses a combination of gasification and microbes to turn carbon-carrying feedstocks, including agricultural and forestry wastes or even trash, into ethanol at $1 a gallon.

Also, corn ethanol emits roughly the same amount of greenhouse gases as gasoline, according to studies. Ethanol’s impact on air quality is being studied by academics. GM has commissioned a study on this issue as well, Wheeler said.

Municipal waste can produce 20 billion of gallons of ethanol per year near city centers where the fuel is consumed, said Arnold Klann, CEO of BlueFire Ethanol, who spoke on the conference call. Earlier this year, an executive from Coskata estimated that municipal solid waste could yield about 8 billion gallons per year.

Company representatives on the conference call said that they need continued supportive government policies, notably loan guarantees, to scale up their operations.

Researchers say that cellulosic ethanol can lower greenhouse gas emissions significantly and that grasses, such as miscanthus and switchgrass, can be used to make ethanol on marginal crop lands.

BlueFire recently received permits to begin construction of a trash-to-ethanol plant in Lancaster, Calif., that is expected to produce ethanol at $1 per gallon by September, Klann said. Its plans call for a 17 million-gallon-per-year facility next year and then 55 million-gallon-per-year plants after that.

Backlash

After a period of government support and rapid investment, a biofuels backlash kicked into gear last year, with people questioning the environmental and economic benefits.

Wheeler said GM-commissioned research done at the University of Toronto reached similar conclusions. She added that the author of the billion-ton study plans to do a follow-on report with updated data.

“We need energy crops to get the industry to scale,” Hamilton said during the conference call of panel speakers. “Within the next years, we are going to see competitive production costs. Cellulosic biofuels will be very cost-competitive with oil or other sources of biofuels.”

The near-term projection is that, once ongoing plant construction is completed, ethanol will supply almost 10 percent of the U.S. gasoline demand, according to the Renewable Fuels Association. Nearly all of that will come from corn.

General Motors on Friday convened a panel of experts from cutting-edge ethanol companies that described different technologies–acid hydrolysis, specialty microbes, and genetically engineered energy crops–which they say will bring back biofuels’ faded luster.

GM has committed to making half of its fleet flex-fuel capable by 2012. To prime the pump for E85, it has invested in two ethanol start-ups which are among the most favored to bring cellulosic ethanol to market.

The key technology transition, already under way, is shifting from corn to other feedstocks for making ethanol from plant cellulose. With the right technologies and policies in place, the U.S. could meet one-third of its transportation fuel needs by 2030, said Candace Wheeler, a technical fellow at GM’s research and development center.

One concern is that farmland diverted to grow energy crops has contributed to higher food prices. Some U.S. senators, including John McCain, have called for repealing the existing biofuels mandates; European political leaders have also reconsidered its policies.

That will change once genetically optimized energy crops begin to be harvested, predicted Richard Hamilton, CEO of Ceres. The company uses genomics to analyze plant genes and breed grasses and fast-growing trees like poplar, willow, and eucalyptus.

There’s a conference coming up that focuses on measuring and improving the user experience: Startonomics, October 2 in San Francisco. The conference will be run by Dave McClure, an entrepreneur, investor, and familiar face to Web 2.0 conference goers.

Here’s McClure’s five-minute start-up pirate talk. He says this is the pitch that has morphed into the day-long conference.

McClure’s main point is that when you’re building a new service, you want to think about “conversion events,” in other words, moving users from one state to the next (from browsing to exploring, exploring to buying, etc.). That has nothing to do with releasing features.

I’ve worked a little with Dave at various conferences, as well as with the Startonomics conference producer, Debbie Landa. (Her company runs the Under the Radar conferences where I often moderate start-up pitch presentations.) I like what these people are doing with this conference, and I think more entrepreneurs should pay attention to the message.

One of the things that impressed me most during my interview with Mint CEO Aaron Patzer was his focus on iterative development and rigorously testing new features before they are rolled out. As I’ve said, most of the Web 2.0 companies I see focus on building new features more than they do on analyzing what their users are actually doing with them. It’s crazy. It’s like they all work at Microsoft in 1996.

However, you can’t overthink things or dawdle. Release early, watch the right metrics, and revise. McClure points to Slideshare and Teachstreet as companies that are working this way. (He’s invested in both companies.) Who’s doing it wrong? “Anyone who takes longer than a year to ship,” he says. Examples of this include Chandler and Trillian’s Astra. By being late, they are missing their market windows. The world’s moved past them.

Have you ever spent a long, happy evening with a new effects pedal and a pair of headphones? Do you have an
Apple iPhone and $3.99 to spare? If so, open the iTunes Store and download Bloom immediately.

Once you’ve built a pattern, they repeat at an interval, which you can control with a slider. It’s polyphonic, so you can add additional notes each time you go through the sequence.

I’ll see you in a few hours.

Released last Thursday by Brian Eno, who more or less invented ambient music, and fellow traveler Peter Chilvers, Bloom is like discovering a seashell you’ve never seen before–beautifully simple yet infinitely complicated.

If you take your hands off the screen entirely, it’ll improvise on what you’ve created. Check out the YouTube demo.

The hypnotic Bloom application for iPhone.

It displays a pastel multicolored screen. You hit different spots on the screen to play different notes–bass notes at the bottom, treble at the top. The notes are arranged in modal intervals so you can’t play a wrong note.

The low notes aren’t very clear through the iPhone’s built-in speakers, so use headphones or plug it into a stereo. Or guitar amp. With a delay pedal.

It’s the perfect iPhone app because it takes full advantage of its most salient feature, the beautiful, bright touch screen. Hopefully, it’ll take advantage of another great iPhone feature, the ability to update applications, and add new sounds–some Frippertronic guitar distortion would be lovely.