新浪科技讯 7月30日下午消息，易观国际今天下午就TOM在线2007第二季度财报发表分析，易观认为，TOM在线自2003年来首次出现亏损的原因在于运营开支费用增长，以及受运营商及政府政策的影响，并且还承担了TOM易趣292万美元的亏损。

　　易观建议，为摆脱这一亏损局面，TOM在线在无线增值业务上应挖掘新业务类型，如SMS移动搜索、移动支付等；同时在TOM易趣上采取平衡战略，调整对于用户流失和交易规模快速缩水的影响。

　　TOM在线上周公布了截至2007年6月30日的第二季度财报，净亏损为956万美元。

　　以下为易观国际分析报告全文：

　　新闻背景：

　　TOM在线有限公司公布了截至2007年6月30日的第二季度业绩财报，TOM在线Q2总收益达3，439万美元，比去年同期下降30.4%，比上一季度下降2.1%。本季度运营首次亏损594.3万美元，环比减少316.74%，同比减少153.8%，净亏损高达956万美元。

　　易观分析：

　　易观国际认为，2007年第2季度TOM在线的市场表现需要关注一下几点：

　　1，广告收入：TOM在线网络广告营收为338万美元，比上一季度增长了27.0%，但比去年同期下降了13.2%。网络广告占第二季度总营收的9.8%，而上一季度这一比例则为7.6%。主要原因是更加关注体育内容并寻求更多合作伙伴， 充分利用各项体育赛事的机会，尤其是在亚洲杯方面，TOM邀黄健翔解说“亚洲杯”， 为TOM在线的门户网站带来更多的商业机会。

　　2， 无线互联网服务：营收为3024万美元，比去年同期下降了32.9%，比上一季度下降了5.0%。无线互联网服务营收约占第二季度总收入的87.9%，而上一季度这一比例则为90.6%。主要原因是从今年5月开始，中国移动在用户尝试浏览WAP页面时放置了GRPS费用提醒。此外，中国移动开始在特定手机厂商提供的定制手机中只推广自己的无线增值服务产品，而此前曾推广移动梦网上所有的畅销产品，包括TOM的产品。中国移动的两项新政策给移动增值业务带来很大的影响。占总营收88%的移动增值业务与上季度相比缩水5%。因此TOM在线的彩信业务和WAP业务比上季度分别下降23%和27%。但是短信营收比上季度增长14%，占总营收的29%。主要增长来自于电视平台上的营销，互动类型的节目，以及益智类型的节目。

　　2007年第2季度是2003年以来TOM在线首次出现亏损，净亏损956.3万美元。易观国际认为，主要有以下几个原因：

　　1，今年二季度TOM在线运营开支费用增长。今年5月由中国移动实施的新运营规定对公司的整体无线互联网业务可能产生的负面影响而形成的无线互联网业务商誉亏损值达到了682万美元。今年第二季度销售及市场推广开支是210万美元，而上一季度则为56万美元；另外，与私有化相关的专业服务费用增加了83万美元也是运营开支费用增长的一个重要原因。

　　2，受到运营商和政府政策的影响。(1) 中国联通的4月份修改结算规则，原来3个月帐期变为5个月。(2)中国移动6月份修改，要求大家返还去年部分月的通道费用。

　　3，承担了TOM易趣292万美元的亏损。

　　易观建议：

　　1，对于移动增值业务：随着移动增值服务市场的竞争已经进入了新的以用户体验和产品为核心的发展阶段，应挖掘新业务类型，如SMS移动搜索业务，移动支付，LBS等新业务；对于MMS和WAP业务而言加强在垂直社区类互动产品，有效发挥其内容优势，使内容的差异化和丰富性能够作为其强化和增强用户体验的砝码。

　　2， 对于TOM易趣：需要平衡战略调整对于用户流失和交易规模快速缩水的影响。一方面加快服务平台重构速度，另一方面可以尝试通过一定的市场和促销活动逐步提升用户活跃度。

“无线营销的环境已经具备。移盟将为企业带来互动整合营销解决方案。手机将作为优惠券、会员卡、积分卡、电影票，构造移动生活圈。”广州移盟数字传媒科技有限公司（以下简称移盟传媒）董事长兼CEO李杰强昨日接受记者采访时表示。

移动生活圈不仅为商家与消费者间搭建高效沟通的平台，让商家找到目标客户，消费者得到所需要的信息和实实在在的好处，而且对于遭到破坏的生态平衡，还有积极的环保意义。

移盟传媒由以李杰强为首的一批资深业界人士于2005年12月成立，是业内领先的无线营销公司。李杰强在IT、电信增值和消费品领域有着近二十年深厚的业务与管理经验，曾在日航、耐克、雅芳等国际品牌公司工作，还曾是美国纳斯达克(NASDAQ)上市公司华友世纪(HRAY)股东和主要管理层成员。

无线营销环境成熟

近年来，继报刊、电台、电视、网络之后，手机以“第五媒体”的姿态风生水起，各种“无线”的理念、产品层出不穷。李杰强认为，早几年就提出了“无线营销”、 “互动营销”，现已具备了实施的环境。一是无线终端不断升级换代，在硬件上能够应用各种服务；二是无线传输正向“宽带”发展，我国即将上马的3G将使无线应用蓬勃发展；三是手机上网流量费包月的用户数已超过10%，而按照日韩的经验，当这个比例达到20%时，手机作为“第五媒体”就会出现爆炸性的增长。

由此，手机的性质也发生了新的变化。手机不仅是通信工具，而是多功能的手持移动终端，可以总结为五种核心功能：1，互动信息接受终端，24小时获取信息是手机基本的功能，其表现形式也非常丰富；2，自我传播终端，用户可以将内容原汁原味地转发分享传播，形成类似“病毒式”的二次营销；3，信息携带终端，手机二十四小时随身，可将获取的信息带到用户活动的每一个地方，这是传统媒体所不具备的；4，身份确认终端，结合二维码技术，手机可以验证用户的身份、行为；5，数据采集终端。

目前，中国的手机用户已达5.2亿，普及率达到每百人拥有40部，成为世界上手机用户最多的国家，手机上网用户也已超过1.2亿。无线营销的市场前景相当广阔。

打造促销型媒体

“手机是很适合做促销型的媒体。”李杰强认为，手机屏幕不大，不适合做大量的阅读。但它24小时随身，只要有需要，可以随时随地取出手机使用。如果把各种优惠券、消费卡、票据等都集中到手机上，将给生活带来很强的便利性、实用性。商家也希望把其最新消息通过手机发给其目标客户，实现点对点的传播。

移盟传媒提出了全新的互动营销解决方案，联合运营商、商家、消费者建立一个手机消费圈。移盟建立的WAP网站为商家开辟专区，配套的终端机摆设在商家店内。消费者可以使用手机登录网站或者发送信息下载二维码优惠券，在终端机上扫描打印出优惠券使用。这个过程不过十几秒钟。同样，各种会员卡、优惠卡、票据都可以二维码的形式下载保存到手机里，在终端机扫描确认即可。

记者在工作人员的指引下，使用手机发送“610321”到“061011”，隔了一两秒，手机收到绿茵阁优惠券的上网链接，点击下载优惠券，不一会便收到二维码的优惠券，将优惠券对准终端服务器的扫描仪，一张优惠券就打印出来了。

李杰强指出，商家怎样才能让消费者主动使用服务? 优惠券是一个很好的切入口。每个人都希望得到优惠，随时随地可以用的优惠券极具吸引力。商家通过下载优惠券的形式，聚集人气，找准客户。从目前的运营情况来看，商家非常欢迎移盟的解决方案。

移盟旗下的钱库网（www.checkoo.com）是全国最大的电子优惠券发布平台。记者在该网站发现，作为日常生活的各类优惠券已经具相当规模，按生活需求分为时尚购物、娱乐休闲、美容健康、数码通讯、旅游度假、家居房产、教育培训等。合作伙伴有绿茵阁、仙踪林、大地影院、7-Eleven、一茶一坐等等国际知名连锁企业。优惠券既可在网上打印，也可以下载到手机上。

“运营商、商家、消费者就形成了一个良性运作的闭环，最终要形成便利的移动生活圈。”李杰强透露，移盟的理念受到运营商的欢迎，其产品经常被运营商作为重点手机新应用来展示。

在广州，手机优惠券终端机已经分布在：五月花广场、光明广场、新光百货、天河娱乐广场、动漫星城、潮流站、必爱歌等城市购买热点。

精准营销净化运营环境

移盟传媒的企业互动营销解决方案还在于精准的用户数据库。消费者每一次使用手机的消费行为包括消费时间、地点、金额、购买产品等，都会被详细记录下来，加以分析，总结出消费者的品牌喜好、年龄、收入水平、消费周期等，形成精准的数据库。

“数据库能够帮助商家做到精准营销。”李杰强举例说，根据消费周期与消费习惯，某位消费者习惯周末下午到天河城买衣服，那么天河城或者正佳广场的商家，就可以在这个时间段把相关的促销信息发送到这名消费者的手机上，加大吸引其前来消费的几率。运动品牌商会选择曾经消费过体育用品的人群，卖护肤品商会重点挑选女性白领。而消费者则能及时得到其需要的信息，节省了时间、精力、金钱，得到实实在在的优惠。消费者也可以根据自己的需求定制信息，拒绝某类信息，占据消费的主动权。商家与消费者间形成良性的互动关系。

业内人士指出，每个人对信息都有需求。信息是否有价值，关键在于是否符合个人的需求。垃圾信息侵扰是当前手机用户投诉的焦点之一，因为这些信息是人们不需要的。如果是用户所需要的，那么就是有价值的，受欢迎的。无线营销的一个关键点就在于准确找到目标客户，用合适的手段为其带来有价值的信息。移盟为商家与消费者间搭建了高效的沟通平台，其精准营销将净化当前运营环境，推动无线业务的发展。

移动生活圈还具有现实环保意义。环境污染、生态不平衡已经对社会发展构成了威胁，治理环境是构建和谐社会的重要部分。移动生活圈将各类信息集中到手机里，商家减少纸质宣传单张，从而降低纸浆的使用量，减少对大自然的索取，为建设和谐社会贡献一份力量。

Today's Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information is stuck inside HTML pages, formatted in esoteric ways that are difficult for machines to process. The so called Web 3.0, which is likely to be a pre-cursor of the real semantic web, is going to change this. What we mean by 'Web 3.0' is that major web sites are going to be transformed into web services - and will effectively expose their information to the world.

The transformation will happen in one of two ways. Some web sites will follow the example of Amazon, del.icio.us and Flickr and will offer their information via a REST API. Others will try to keep their information proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that unstructured information will give way to structured information - paving the road to more intelligent computing. In this post we will look at how this important transformation is taking place already and how it is likely to evolve.

The Amazon E-Commerce API - open access to Amazon's catalog

We have written here before about Amazon's visionary WebOS strategy. The Seattle web giant is reinventing itself by exposing its own infrastructure via a set of elegant APIs. One of the first web services opened up by Amazon was the E-Commerce service. This service opens access to the majority of items in Amazon's product catalog. The API is quite rich, allowing manipulation of users, wish lists and shopping carts. However its essence is the ability to lookup Amazon's products.

Why has Amazon offered this service completely free? Because most applications built on top of this service drive traffic back to Amazon (each item returned by the service contains the Amazon URL). In other words, with the E-Commerce service Amazon enabled others to build ways to access Amazon's inventory. As a result many companies have come up with creative ways of leveraging Amazon's information - you can read about these successes in one of our previous posts.

The rise of the API culture

The web 2.0 poster child, del.icio.us, is also famous as one of the first companies to open a subset of its web site functionality via an API. Many services followed, giving rise to a true API culture. John Musser over at programmableweb has been tirelessly cataloging APIs and Mashups that use them. This page shows almost 400 APIs organized by category, which is an impressive number. However, only a fraction of those APIs are opening up information - most focus on manipulating the service itself. This is an important distinction to understand in the context of this article.

The del.icio.us API offering today is different from Amazon's one, because it does not open the del.icio.us database to the world. What it does do is allow authorized mashups to manipulate the user information stored in del.icio.us. For example, an application may add a post, or update a tag, programmatically. However, there is no way to ask del.icio.us, via API, what URLs have been posted to it or what has been tagged with the tag web 2.0 across the entire del.icio.us database. These questions are easy to answer via the web site, but not via current API.

Standardized URLs - the API without an API

Despite the fact that there is no direct API (into the database), many companies have managed to leverage the information stored in del.icio.us. Here are some examples... 

Delexa is an interesting and useful mashup that uses del.icio.us to categorize Alexa sites. For example, here are the popular sites tagged with the word book: 

Another web site called similicio.us uses del.icio.us to recommend similar sites. For example, here are the sites that it thinks are related to Read/WriteWeb.

So how do these services get around the fact that there is no API? The answer is that they leverage standardized URLs and a technique called Web scraping. Let's understand how this works. In del.icio.us, for example, all URLs that have the tag book can be found under the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/book; all URLs tagged with the tag movie are at http://del.icio.us/tag/movie; and so on. The structure of this URL is always the same: http://del.icio.us/tag[TAG]. So given any tag, a computer program can fetch the page that contains the list of sites tagged with it. Once the page is fetched, the program can now perform the scraping - the extraction of the necessary information from the page.

How Web Scraping Works

Web Scraping is essentially reverse engineering of HTML pages. It can also be thought of as parsing out chunks of information from a page. Web pages are coded in HTML, which uses a tree-like structure to represent the information. The actual data is mingled with layout and rendering information and is not readily available to a computer. Scrapers are the programs that "know" how to get the data back from a given HTML page. They work by learning the details of the particular markup and figuring out where the actual data is. For example, in the illustration below the scraper extracts URLs from the del.icio.us page. By applying such a scraper, it is possible to discover what URLs are tagged with any given tag.

Dapper, Teqlo, Yahoo! Pipes - the upcoming scraping technologies

We recently covered Yahoo! Pipes, a new app from Yahoo! focused on remixing RSS feeds. Another similar technology, Teqlo, has recently launched. It focuses on letting people create mashups and widgets from web services and rss. Before both of these, Dapper launched a generic scraping service for any web site. Dapper is an interesting technology that facilitates the scraping of the web pages, using a visual interface.

It works by letting the developer define a few sample pages and then helping her denote similar information using a marker. This looks simple, but behind the scenes Dapper uses a non-trivial tree-matching algorithm to accomplish this task. Once the user defines similar pieces of information on the page, Dapper allows the user to make it into a field. By repeating the process with other information on the page, the developer is able to effectively define a query that turns an unstructured page into a set of structured records.

The net effect - Web Sites become Web Services

Here is an illustration of the net effect of apps like Dapper and Teqlo:

So bringing together Open APIs (like the Amazon E-Commerce service) and scraping/mashup technologies, gives us a way to treat any web site as a web service that exposes its information. The information, or to be more exact the data, becomes open. In turn, this enables software to take advantage of this information collectively. With that, the Web truly becomes a database that can be queried and remixed.

This sounds great, but is this legal?

Scraping technologies are actually fairly questionable. In a way, they can be perceived as stealing the information owned by a web site. The whole issue is complicated because it is unclear where copy/paste ends and scraping begins. It is okay for people to copy and save the information from web pages, but it might not be legal to have software do this automatically. But scraping of the page and then offering a service that leverages the information without crediting the original source, is unlikely to be legal.

But it does not seem that scraping is going to stop. Just like legal issues with Napster did not stop people from writing peer-to-peer sharing software, or the more recent YouTube lawsuit is not likely to stop people from posting copyrighted videos. Information that seems to be free is perceived as being free. 

The opportunities that will come after the web has been turned into a database are just too exciting to pass up. So if conversion is going to take place anyway, would it not be better to rethink how to do this in a consistent way?

Why Web Sites should offer Web Services

There are several good reasons why Web Sites (online retailers in particular), should think about offering an API. The most important reason is control. Having an API will make scrapers unnecessary, but it will also allow tracking of who is using the data - as well as how and why. Like Amazon, sites can do this in a way that fosters affiliates and drives the traffic back to their sites.

The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage. The likely solution then is to stop worrying about protecting information and instead start charging for it, by offering an API. Having a small fee per API call (think Amazon Web Services) is likely to be acceptable, since the cost for any given subscriber of the service is not going to be high. But there is a big opportunity to make money on volume. This is what Amazon is betting on with their Web Services strategy and it is probably a good bet.

Conclusion

As more and more of the Web is becoming remixable, the entire system is turning into both a platform and the database. Yet, such transformations are never smooth. For one, scalability is a big issue. And of course legal aspects are never simple. 

But it is not a question of if web sites become web services, but when and how. APIs are a more controlled, cleaner and altogether preferred way of becoming a web service. However, when APIs are not avaliable or sufficient, scraping is bound to continue and expand. As always, time will be best judge; but in the meanwhile we turn to you for feedback and stories about how your businesses are preparing for 'web 3.0'.

　早前Simeon Simeonov所发表的关于Google Phone的预测，再次使得Google Phone这个传闻中的产品成为世界关注的焦点。人们对于Google传闻中的产品的关注度甚至超出了Simeon Simeonov自己的预料。那么到底Google Phone将能实现哪些现有手机无法实现的功能呢？Google如何才能令自己的搜索服务在Google Phone上更进一步呢？有时候，这些问题的答案可以在Google所获得的众多专利中找到。