Australia's Seek acquires 10% of Jobstreet for Asia Pac expansion

Australia's no. 1 job site, Seek, announced that it has acquired 10% stake in Jobstreet this week.

Seek also owns 25% of its equivalent, Zhaopin, in China.

The impact is huge as all these companies can actually work on forming an online job alliance or network that dominating the major market share in the region. "We will now seek to enter a dialogue with management to explore how we might provide our support and expertise," A personnel from Seek has actually indicated that they have already had such intention.

"Coincidentally", Jobstreet also announced yesterday that it has joined The Network which is a unique partnership of career sites worldwide co-founded by leading European job sites, StepStone and Totaljobs.

According to the company's press release, "the members of The Network, primarily from 21 countries in Europe, will market JobStreet’s job postings in their respective geographical region" with this partnership.

It's interesting to see what will happen next 12 months in the regional online job market.

Korean 'Blogger.com' for Google

Google has acquired Korean blogging software company Tatter and Company (TNC) last week. This is considered as "a push to expand into a market where Google remains a relatively small player".

Google would never become a content owner and publishers. The logic is simple -- you don't need to own any content when you own 60-70% of the searches worldwide.

The acquisition of TNC can be seen as a duplicate of their acquisition of Blogger.com few years back. If you use Blogger.com (like me here), you will know how easy you can integrate Google Adsence with your blog and just try to imagine how many bloggers are blogging and generating contents for Google everyday? And, TNC will be Google's bet in Korean market which is dominated by local players like Naver.

But it's not an easy fight for Google in Korea. Just look at how Google China has been working very hard to gain market share but Baidu still rules in China.

Behind Google Chrome

Talk about war in the previous posting, the real war started now is the 'good old' browser war. How many Web browsers are available out there now? IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari... now came another one -- Google Chrome.

I always share with my friends and colleagues that the smartest thing Google has done is its strategy of trying not to go head-to-head with Microsoft; hence they can avoid the mistake made by Netscape many years ago when it tried to go into the servers market which Microsoft had a strong presence. What happened to Netscape later has already been part of the Internet history and indeed Netscape is already a history.

So, Google launched an online office tool, Google Apps, which is not another OpenOffice.org, Google launched Android when Windows Mobile is not a main player in the mobile OS landscape, Google OS is still a rumor...and finally Google released Google Chrome.

Why Google has to develop its own browser while its main business is mainly relied on online services? There was blog mentioning that Google can save more than 100 million dollars every year if they don't need to pay Firefox for its start page with Google Search box...I think this could be one of the reasons but it's only a small part of the whole picture. BTW what are 100 million dollars to a 200 billion dollars worth company?

I think Google Chrome is important to Google because:

• Having its own browser is no longer a market share fight. It's an ownership of the Web platform. As Microsoft has been dominating the OS market and transforming it as an unprecedented platform, the Web is the next platform that Google is capable to fight for. This was the reason why Google launched its offline Web application initiative, Google Gears, which has been renamed as Gears to show its 'neutrality'. Obviously, Google surely hope Chrome can help to drive Gears and help it to own the Web as a platform like Windows to Microsoft
  
• Notice the combination of the address bar and the search box? This will bring more revenues to Google as more searches can be conducted potentially
• Google can collect more data about online user behaviors
• The list is continually developed in the minds of the Google trio...
  

War of job sites

While JobStreet, JobsDB, Star-Jobs Online, ST701, JenJobs are fighting for a bigger piece of cake in the online job market in Malaysia and Singapore, there are more job-related sites being launched recently.

The recent one is JobO3.

Another online job market is gearing towards freelancer market. The recent launch is YourPartTime.com which was a young start-up.

Needless to say US based Monster has also launched its Malaysian site.

The war of job sites can never end as recruitment ads are moving from traditional media to online media slowly in Asia, following what has been happening in North America when Craigslist has created a big impact to recruitment ad business.

After all, employees are getting busier as they have more sites to post their resumes. Mmm... doesn't this sound like a 'probelm' that can inspire another new business idea?

Why Jobstreet acquires stake in Innity

Asian leading job portal, Jobstreet acquired a 20.07% stake in Malaysia-based digital ad service provider, Innity, in early of July. The announcement was unexpected and it has created lots of discussions in the Internet industry in Malaysia.

Why did Jobstreet acquire stake in Innity? Why Innity? Why online ad? Below are few of my observations:

1. Jobstreet has always been trying to go beyond online job market. LinaAlert is a online classifieds service they launched few years back but it was not a big hit such as Mudah.com.my which was lately launched. Jobstreet is very "hungry" for expansion.
   
2. Innity has been expanding their online ad business regionally while entering to the markets such as Vietnam, Singapore etc. This is "in sync" with the regional strategy Jobstreet is always practicing.
3. Jobstreet's growth may have hit to the ceiling with the existing businesses. They can gain further growth via Innity's deal as they are entering to a new business.
4. Being a not-so-small shareholder of Innity, Jobstreet could work closely with Innity to provide an end-to-end online solution to their existing enterprise clients such as Intel, Shell etc. What they can provide is not only an online/offline recruitment solution but also bundle with online ad solution for their clients.

We should see what will happen in near future.