Google: From a Garage to Torrence Boone

The quintessential garage business to NASDAQ success story, Google Inc. has long since become the world’s leading search engine. The addition of Torrence Boone in 2010 as Managing Director of Agency Development for North America signaled just how far the company had come. Once essentially a place for self-service ads, Google now seeks relationships with major ad agencies and the billions of advertising dollars they control. Torrence Boone came to the search-engine leader with an impressive resume that included serving as CEO of Enfatico, Dell’s integrated marketing agency; and as President of direct-marketing and digital agency Digitas.

Established in that proverbial garage in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergei Brin, who met at Stanford University and developed a precurser, BackRub, before generating more than $1million in seed money, Google answered more than 10,000 queries daily almost from the start. By the following year, the number had risen to 500,000 searches, enabling the partners to relocate the company to larger headquarters in Mountain View, California. By 2000, Google had become the provider on Yahoo! of supplementary searches. Garnering more than 50 percent of all online searches, the company maintains a reputation for speed, relevance, and reliability.

Hiring Torrence Boone makes perfecct sense in Google’s growth strategy from a simple search engine to an intuitive machine with added products such as Chrome, gmail, Nexus 7, and Nexus Q. While the platform may not have appealed to large agencies in the past, by 2010, the year Google brought on Mr. Boone, the technology was handling 3 billion searches per day. Even assuming many people conduct multiple searches, that’s a boatload of potential customers for ad agencies and their clients. And based on its record, Google should continue to expand its product portfolio, making future ad purchases even more inviting.

Songkick

Some of the most interesting businesses today are involved in music and Songkick is one of them. Songkick has achieved a remarkable feat in the industry; it has managed to buck the trend and post substantial profits in an industry that has been ravaged by piracy, music downloads, and online streaming services. The company shows that the internet can be used as an effective tool for growth rather than a threat to musicians and recording studios.

The concept behind Songkick is simple. It assembles concert information such as upcoming shows, ticket prices, and original reviews by fans. The site has an impressive community of people who want to talk about music and their concert experience. Aside from its 1-million-song database (which is enough reason for most people to hang around), the site also updates users about their favorite artists, festivals, and venues.

New information is always fed into Songkick by the major 29 ticketing companies. If you are a Windows Media Player or iTunes user, it can also analyze your collection and give you relevant information on upcoming shows, its venues, and access to videos. All these features have helped the company achieve phenomenal growth in just a few years.

It also helps that Songkick has attracted some of the best talents in the tech industry. Dan Crow, who co-founded three success Silicon Valley startups including Blurb, has decided to join the company. Crow has also worked for Google as the Team Lead for search and mobile. He was one of the proponents who helped developed Google’s search apps for the Android, Windows Phone 7, and Blackberry. 

Tubeify

Although Tubeify is still a relatively new company, it has already generated a lot of buzz around the web because of its innovative combination of Billboard, Last.fm, and YouTube. The website is founded by Tomas Isdal, who is a PhD student from the University of Washington. Currently, Tubeify is an invite-only service, but many expect it to be open to the public as soon as the infrastructure is in place.

Now, you may wonder, why use Tubeify when you can just go to YouTube? Well, it’s simple. This company provides on-demand service and streams your favorite music continuously. Some even call it the “better YouTube” for music-lovers. The company also uses the technology provided by Billboard. Essentially, current tracks can play without stopping as you search for more songs. There’s also no need to jump from one window to another.

If you still need more convincing, Tubeify actually has a “lazy” playlist. It is  basically created from your search results. The songs you compile can be shared to various social networks. At this stage though, this function has yet to be fully-operational. Improvements are still being made on the site but once it is launched to the public, you can definitely expect a top-quality music service that will make you forget all other music sites.

Tubeify clearly has a lot going for it. With some of the best music streaming services getting sued left and right, there’s room for a service like this.