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.

When will Microsoft 2.0 be "released"?

MSN, Windows Live, Yahoo! wanna-buy...When will Microsoft make it for the Internet age? This is definitely a question to bother Mr. Steve Ballmer everyday (It's good to be retired and watching Olympics games in Beijing, Bill! :-D ). The recent MS reorganization has indicated that MS is trying their VERY BEST to catch up with Google. But, it's still very questionable if MS can make it as Google is so focused on the Internet business but MS main business is still very license-based. Tell me, who cares about Microsoft Advertising when you can make thousand dollars in Google AdSense?

The recent book "Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era" which was written by the famous MS observer, Mary Jo Foley, may be able to answer some of the above questions.

But, when will Microsoft 2.0 be finally "released"? No one knows, including Steve, even though they have finally released SQL 2008 6 months after the launch party.

First Blog Entry

Hello, World! This is the 1st blog entry of AllSerm Blog. This blog is ALL about Internet and hope you have an awesome (allserm!) surfing experience here!