George Favvas » Search Results » brickhouse http://www.favvas.com fintech, social media and entrepreneurship Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:16:09 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 What Yahoo! Pipes teaches us about entrepreneurship http://www.favvas.com/2007/02/20/what-yahoo-pipes-teaches-us-about-entrepreneurship/ http://www.favvas.com/2007/02/20/what-yahoo-pipes-teaches-us-about-entrepreneurship/#comments Wed, 21 Feb 2007 03:10:47 +0000 George Favvas http://www.favvas.com/2007/02/20/what-yahoo-pipes-teaches-us-about-entrepreneurship/ Almost as interesting as the launch of Yahoo!’s Pipes service — which lets users create their own feeds by combining and processing multiple RSS feeds – is the way in which the project came about. A quick look at the Pipes site and it’s easy to miss the association with Yahoo! The site uses Yahoo! accounts for user management, and sports a tiny “this is Yahoo!” icon at the bottom of the home page, but otherwise does not fit the typical model of what a Yahoo! property looks like, what is does, nor how it integrates with its Yahoo! siblings.

The major web properties have a history of maintaining distinct brands for popular web properties. Yahoo’s Flickr and Google’s Youtube are prime examples. But these are all properties which were launched independantly and managed to build strong brand awareness before being acquired by their parent.

Pipes, on the other hand, is a Yahoo! baby from the start. It was incubated within Yahoo!’s new Brickhouse division, physically located away from the Yahoo! campus, where teams are given more freedom to think outside the box and experiment.

An article by BusinessWeek, points out how Yahoo! has acknowledged the risks that come with being big:

Yahoo’s brand is another challenge. People associate the company and its trademark yodel with one of the Web’s prime destinations for mail, news, entertainment, and search. But Yahoo’s status as an established, family-oriented, commercial brand can turn away some cutting-edge users.

The article goes on to state that Yahoo! plans to launch additional products off-brand.

Google is known for allowing their staff to spend 20% of their time on personal projects, but the projects that even see the light tend often languish on the Google Labs page.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, is demonstrating a real commitment to allowing innovation to not only take place internally, but also to launch. They are getting edgier and taking more risks. They’re getting traction with new uses of community and social networking concepts — witness the early popularity of Yahoo! Answers, launched as as Google pulled the plug on its equivalent. In short, they are being entrepreneurial. This is great news for Yahoo! and entrepreneurs everywhere who can take a page from their book. Where they go from here will be fun to watch.

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