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SEMI Oral History Interview - Dennis Uchida

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SEMI Oral History Interview

Dennosuke Uchida

Interviewed by Craig Addison, SEMI

Dennosuke (Dennis) Uchida graduated from Kyoto University in 1958 and subsequently joined Sumitomo Corporation, where he was involved with the import and export of telecommunications and other equipment. His first overseas assignment was to Burma from 1961-62. Between 1969 and 1978, Uchida was assigned to the Sumitomo New York office where he was in charge of the electrical and electronics department, which included semiconductor manufacturing equipment. He was named president of Sumisho Electronic Systems in 1980, a Sumitomo subsidiary company dedicated to the import of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. In 1988, Uchida became responsible for the joint venture Sumitomo GCA Corporation, after which he was appointed president of General Signal Japan. Uchida joined SEMI as president of Japan operations in October 1994, and retired from that role in 2005. He currently serves as a senior advisor to the president and CEO, SEMI HQ.

CA: Could we start off with you talking about your early career? Where you were educated and your first job in the industry?

DU: After I graduated from Kyoto University in 1958 I joined Sumitomo Corporation, one of the major Japanese general trading firms. The primary reason for choosing Sumitomo Corporation was that I wanted to be involved in overseas business so that I would have a chance to go abroad. Right after I joined Sumitomo I was assigned to the electrical department, although I majored in jurisprudence in the university. This determined my future business career, since I became in charge of the import and export business, which was mainly telecommunications equipment at that time. Among the imported products from the USA was semiconductor manufacturing related equipment such as dotter machine or cut off machine, which were used to improve the yield of transistors and diodes. The IC, invented by Dr. Jack Kilby of TI in 1958 was still not yet in the Japan market, it was only the so-called discrete devices like FET or diodes.

CA: Do you remember the impact of the IC in Japan? Was it a big announcement, how did you find out about the IC?

DU: Japan at that time was very eager to learn from the United States, so when the IC was invented, Japan really wanted to learn everything related to the IC from the States.

CA: After the period you just talked about, I believe you went to Burma. Can you talk about that a little bit?

DU: I was assigned to the Sumitomo Rangoon office in Burma from early January 1961 to mid 1962. Now, you know, it is renamed the city of Yangon, and Burma is called Myanmar. My main job was to assist the Burmese local firms who had the license agreement from Nippon Electric Company to manufacture transistorized radios. I was also involved in the import of telecommunication equipment from Japan for the communication network in Burma. When I got my entry visa from Burma, my title was “semi-electronics engineer”. As I mentioned earlier, I majored jurisprudence in university and so they [Sumitomo] denoted my title as “semi-engineer”. This is my first encounter with the word “semi”, which is also SEMI. So I think I was destined to be involved with SEMI in my career afterwards [laughs].

CA: So the Nippon Electric company was NEC, right?

DU: Yes, NEC is one of the major group companies of the Sumitomo Group.

CA: And why was NEC manufacturing transistor radios in Burma? Was it because of lower labor costs?

DU: No, no, they [Burma] really wanted to manufacture by themselves. So at that time not only in Burma, but also in Philippines, in Thailand, in India, in Pakistan and in Egypt, NEC had contracts with the local firms to establish transistor radio manufacturing facilities. And NEC licensed manufacturing technologies to those local manufacturers.

CA: So the manufacturing company was Burmese, but they licensed the process from NEC?

DU: That’s right. They imported almost all the main parts from Japan and they assembled those components. The transistor radio was a big product at that time and instead of the plastic they used a Teak wood as covering case. Teak is very expensive wood but is abundant in Myanmar, [and] is mostly used for very expensive furniture.

CA: What was your role during that period?

DU: My specific duty was to import quite a few items, not only electrical equipment but also buses, trucks, and construction equipment. And even the batteries we imported from Japan. I was also in charge of chemical products such as dye stuff. They use a lot of dye stuff, especially for ladies clothes.

CA: So this particular assignment was fairly short…like a year and a half?

DU: Yes, that's right.

CA: Can you talk about the next phase after that?

DU: After I came back from Burma I became in charge of the export business of mainly telecommunication equipment to Asian and Middle East countries. We primarily exported NEC’s telecommunication equipment because NEC was one of the top manufacturers of those telecommunication systems in addition to a major Sumitomo group company. So we exported various telecommunication systems such as coaxial carrier systems, telephone exchanges to India and Pakistan, and very big scale microwave communication network systems to Iran and Indonesia and so on. And I also stayed in Kuwait for a while for the satellite earth station construction project.

CA: By this stage the IC was in wider use. So it was this telecommunications equipment all based on integrated circuits or it was still transistors?

DU: Still transistors primarily, transistors and diodes.

CA: Was there a particular reason why NEC was very strong in telecommunications?

DU: I think they saw the importance of export business and also they thought those Asian and Middle East countries were really in need of those communication infrastructures. And they put major force into those markets. NEC had quite a big export group in their organization.

CA: Now after your experience in the Middle East and the Asian countries, then I believe you went to New York for Sumitomo?

DU: In early 1969 I was assigned to the Sumitomo New York office. I stayed in New York up to the middle of 1978…quite a long time. During this time I was in charge of the electrical and electronic business of Sumitomo New York. And this business included not only import of communication equipment and consumer products, such as telephone exchanges (PABX), color TV, tape recorders, but also I was in charge of the export business for American-made equipment. And one of the major export items from the United States to Japan was the equipment from GCA Corporation. The main products were the so-called photomask repeater, pattern generator and pattern compiler. The pattern compiler is the forerunner of EDA equipment. It was a little bit too early. At that time GCA was also manufacturing ion implanter and sputtering machines, although that business was not so successful. Sumitomo was the distributor in Japan [for GCA], and that distributorship agreement was signed in the year of 1967.

CA: Do you know the story behind how Sumitomo became connected with GCA?

DU: Yes. There is a history. There was a very famous person, Dr. Hiroe Osafune in NEC. He was the top executive in charge of the semiconductor business in NEC. When Dr. Osafune traveled to the United States to find out about equipment or materials for semiconductor manufacturing he came to know about GCA. At that time GCA’s name was not the main one used. They used David W. Mann Company [a subsidiary of GCA]. And Osafune-san, as one of the Sumitomo group company representatives, introduced this company to Sumitomo Corporation. He suggested, “How about getting the distributorship of this new company, this company may grow because the semiconductor business will grow big very soon.” That's what Osafune-san told us. So Sumitomo tried hard to get this distributorship in Japan.

CA: This jumps ahead a little bit to SEMI, but SEMI was formed in 1970 and there was SEMICON East in the early ‘70s. Did you have any involvement in SEMICON East?

DU: Oh yes, I attended SEMICON East. And I also was coming to the west coast to attend SEMICON West every year which was held in San Mateo at that time.

CA: So you were an exhibitor at the show?

DU: GCA was an exhibitor at SEMICON West, but Sumitomo was supporting. Quite a few customers came from Japan to visit SEMICON West. And I was mainly in charge of introducing the GCA equipment to all those visitors from Japan.

CA: During that period from ‘69 to ‘78 when you were exporting the equipment to Japan, what kind of developments were happening in the semiconductor industry in Japan?

DU: During this time the Japanese semiconductor industry kept growing very rapidly. In 1976, I remember, the VLSI R&D Consortium was formed in Japan and it continued up to 1980, so it ran for five years. This consortium contributed greatly to the development of the semiconductor industry in Japan.

CA: Did you notice a surge in the sales of the equipment after the VLSI project was announced?

DU: The stepper was actually developed at GCA, I think, in the year 1976 to '77. The stepper was a kind of an extension of the photo repeater, adding the alignment features to the photo repeater. And in 1977 the stepper was first introduced into real production and I think IBM at that time was the first user of the GCA steppers. But right after that introduction in the United States, Japanese device manufacturers like Fujitsu, NEC, and Hitachi bought GCA steppers. So I think the first stepper machine in Japan was installed maybe in early 1978.

CA: Was it a hard sell? Did the companies realize the advantage of the stepper?

DU: At that time the memory chips being produced were still 16K to 64K DRAM. So the contact aligner, proximity aligner, and the projection aligner were the main lithographic systems. The stepper is a step-by-step process so the throughput was not so good. So yield was the very important sales feature, but up to the 64K DRAM fairly good yield could be realized even by using those conventional aligners. So it was hard for us to sell steppers in the initial stage because they said throughput is not good enough. But after the 64K DRAM, yield became more important and throughput [of the stepper] was very much improved. After the 256K DRAM the stepper became the main tool as the exposure system.

CA: I’ve heard that the stepper was very expensive when it was first introduced. Did the customers complain that it cost too much?

DU: Again, this is a matter of how effectively they can use it, an ROI issue. When they found out the stepper is really useful and also the throughput improved and the yield is very good compared to the conventional lithographic systems, the price became accepted. Of course, you know, if less expensive, the easier it is for us to sell. But anyway, price was not too big an issue.

CA: Besides the stepper, was there other American-made semiconductor equipment that was quite popular in Japan during that time?

DU: Yes, there were quite a few. GCA’s wafer tracks were also in big demand in Japan. The projection aligner of Perkin-Elmer was a very hot product. And of course various kinds of American-made testers, furnaces, implanters, probers etc. were there because at that time almost all major semiconductor-manufacturing equipment was still being imported from the States.

CA: What about other products from GCA? You said the ion implanter and the sputtering system didn't really succeed. Did you try to export those to Japan?

DU: Yes, we talked about exporting [those systems] to the Japan market, but it was not successful. A couple of ion implanters were sold to the Japanese market, but that's all.

CA: During this period can you talk about the competition in Japan? Did Japanese companies develop similar equipment?

DU: Again, coming back to the VLSI Consortium, this was initially aimed at developing super LSI. But it turned out that the consortium really contributed to the development of manufacturing and testing equipment. And so through the effort of this consortium, which was participated in by major Japanese device manufacturers, as well as Japanese equipment manufacturers, I think the Japanese equipment industry really advanced.

CA: I've heard some stories about reverse engineering. That Nikon was asked to look at the GCA stepper and they produced something similar and Canon looked at the Perkin-Elmer projection aligner. Was there that kind of a plan to copy what the U.S. had done?

DU: No, I don’t think they tried to copy. But of course Nikon has been a prime manufacturer of the lens for lithography systems. And Canon was also in the business of optics. They had the high precision technology too. Of course, that [type of American] equipment was already in Japan, so they may have learned quite a bit from the U.S. equipment. But anyway, the consortium tried very hard to develop its own indigenous equipment from Japan.

CA: So the strength for Japan, or Nikon and Canon, were the lenses, right?

DU: Yes, primary strength was the lens. But also in Japan those equipment companies has quite a close relationship with device manufacturers. They could get very good advice from the device manufacturers. I think that contributed to the development of the equipment.

CA: Did Nikon and Canon very quickly become competitors and did that give GCA some problems?

DU: I think up to, maybe 1982 or '83, GCA was the dominant stepper manufacturer. Then Nikon and later on Canon came into this market. I think at one time GCA occupied more than 90 percent of the market share of the stepper.

CA: What is your view as to why Nikon and Canon caught up to GCA and GCA lost market share?

DU: I think the main reason is, again, the lens, because GCA imported its lens from Carl Zeiss in Germany. And this was almost the sole supplier of the lens for GCA until GCA bought the Tropel division from Coherent. And when the manufacturing quantity is not big, they could get enough lenses from Carl Zeiss, but when the mass production of the stepper itself became a necessity then the so-called lens uniformity becomes very important. And GCA had difficultly in getting good uniform quality lenses in quantity, at a very constant level.

CA: You said that you went back to Japan in 1978. Why did you move back to Japan at the time?

DU: There are usually standard periods of time for overseas duty, around five to seven years. So I stayed quite enough and that's why I came back to Japan.

CA: When you went back, can you describe the status of the Japanese semiconductor industry? Was there huge progress made during that period?

DU: Oh yes, I think that time was the real progress period of the Japanese semiconductor industry. So that’s why Sumitomo Corporation also decided to have a kind of dedicated subsidiary in 1980, which I became involved in…called Sumisho Electronic Systems Inc.

CA: Did you go back to set up that subsidiary or that happened after you went back?

DU: No, after I went back to Japan I again became in charge of the telecommunication equipment export business to Latin America and European countries. So I made quite a few trips to those countries. But because of the rapid growth of the semiconductor industry in Japan, as I mentioned, Sumitomo decided to establish a subsidiary company named Sumisho Electronic Systems Inc. And Sumitomo requested me to establish this company because I was involved in this equipment business for quite some time during my stay in the New York office.

CA: How did you identify what companies or what products to distribute? Was it just that U.S. companies would contact you, or you would go and visit the SEMICON shows?

DU: Yes, that's right, various ways. So we tried to find good suppliers from the States or sometimes the U.S. suppliers came to Sumitomo to be represented by Sumisho Electronic Systems.

CA: Did you try to pick equipment that was not available from Japanese companies, so there was less competition?

DU: Sumitomo Corporation was of course involved in the domestic business, and Sumisho Electronic Systems handled also domestic [Japanese made] products, but not semiconductor manufacturing equipment. That equipment was mainly from the States. But we handled new products just coming out to the market, such as the “all-in-one PC”, the copying blackboard from OKI Electric or data printers from Sharp and so on. So we handled quite a few [types of] equipment and products. But still the main products were semiconductor manufacturing equipment, which we were importing from the States.

CA: Of the companies that you represented at Sumisho Electronic Systems, were there any that you thought had outstanding products or technologies, any particular products that were really revolutionary?

DU: I think one of the products which was very well accepted in Japan was from Prometrix, which produced the so-called Litho Map, which was the critical dimension measuring system. And also they were producing the so-called Omni-map, which was the measuring equipment for ion dose quantities. And as you may know, Prometrix was bought out by Tencor and Tencor merged with KLA. So I think Prometrix is now a part of KLA-Tencor. We also handled Anicon CVD equipment and this was quite a unique CVD system and some people thought this might be very revolutionary. But because of some technical difficulty it didn’t turn out to be a real successful product. However at one time everyone thought this might be a revolutionary product.

CA: So what happened to Anicon?

DU: Anicon was bought out by SVG [Silicon Valley Group].

CA: What was the view of the Japanese device makers about the U.S. equipment? Did they think it was reliable or did they prefer to buy from Japanese suppliers?

DU: The difficulty of imported equipment was primarily the after sales service or maintenance, including the installation itself. When only imported equipment was available [from the U.S.], they have to buy. But when the competitive company is coming up in Japan, the real competition was in the areas of after sales service and maintenance. In that sense Japanese manufacturers had a big advantage.

CA: So it was quite difficult for you to sell U.S. equipment?

DU: It gradually became difficult to sell against those Japanese equipment manufacturers who had the real good capability for after sales service and maintenance. And also they could have quite a good relationship with those Japanese device engineers. They could talk of course in Japanese, so they could get a lot of good advice from Japanese device manufacturers.

CA: Was Tokyo Electron a competitor at that stage, a major competitor to Sumisho Electronic System?

DU: No. Not with Tokyo Electron. At one time Tokyo Electron tried to come into the stepper business but they couldn't succeed. I think the only major part of the equipment business which Tokyo Electron still does not have is in the lithography system area. Of course, the coater and developer is their main business, but they still do not have the real exposure system.

CA: As I understand it Tokyo Electron started out with a similar business model of importing U.S. equipment and then later they developed their own.

DU: Yes. They started to manufacture in Japan first under a licensing agreement or joint venture. But later on Tokyo Electron became the genuine manufacturer of all the equipment, which helped their growth tremendously.

CA: You talked about joint ventures. Did Sumisho Electronic or Sumitomo move into any joint ventures?

DU: Sumitomo Corporation thought that maintenance or service administration was very important…however, Sumisho Electronic, which is primarily a sales and marketing organization couldn’t meet those requirement. That's why Sumitomo decided to establish a joint venture corporation with GCA on a 50/50 basis. That was Sumitomo GCA Corporation. We called it SGCA. I was involved very much in the establishment of this joint venture. And while I was still president of Sumisho Electronic Systems I also became a director of Sumitomo GCA Corporation.

CA: Did the joint venture actually manufacture in Japan or was it just sales and service?

DU: Not equipment manufacturing, but we tried to make available some components or features in Japan. We could find some capable vendors for those components. SGCA also did R&D to some extent which we did under the cooperation of those vendors. For instance, Sumitomo GCA developed an “i-line” lens in Japan in cooperation with Olympus.

CA: Was that the first “i-line” lens?

DU: Yes, at that time. Of course GCA developed their own “i-line” lens with Carl Zeiss. But at the same time we tried to develop a Japanese “i-line” lens so we got together with Olympus who was not manufacturing a stepper. And we succeeded in developing an “i-line” lens totally made in Japan. So SGCA’s “i-line” steppers supplied to Japanese device manufacturers used the “i-line” lens made by Olympus. And we also exported this Olympus “i-line” lens in some quantity to the United States.

CA: You say in some notes here that you resigned from Sumisho Electronic Systems in 1987.

DU: Yes.

CA: Can you talk about how that came about, the reason, and then what you did afterwards?

DU: I was called back by Sumitomo headquarters to be in charge of the electrical and electronics department as general manager. And this headquarters department was in charge of those subsidiaries including Sumisho Electronic Systems and also Sumitomo GCA. So I became in charge of supervising those subsidiaries too. But because of the market situation and Sumitomo GCA was not doing well, they instructed me to go back to Sumitomo GCA to improve the company's operation. So I went back to Sumitomo GCA in 1988 but at that time already GCA's position in the market had really deteriorated and the company was almost in the final stage of withdrawing from the Japanese market.

CA: You later became the president of General Signal Japan. How did that come about?

DU: GCA was in trouble, so GCA wanted to join with another company or to be acquired or merged. And there were quite a few candidates for this. But finally General Signal bought GCA. At that time General Signal had the so-called General Signal Company Limited in Japan. And when this buying of GCA by General Signal occurred, Sumitomo decided to withdraw from this joint venture completely. So the capital which Sumitomo shared with GCA, which was 50 percent, was completely bought out by General Signal after two years. So I was pondering about whether to go back to Sumitomo or to stay with this operation. I decided to stay…so I became in charge of General Signal’s operation in Japan. Then we changed the name from General Signal KK to General Signal Japan.

CA: Was the presence in Japan of the General Signal products very strong?

DU: At that time not so strong in Japan. Although they owned major equipment companies in the United States, each of them were called a “Unit of General Signal”. Those independent entities included Ultratech, a 1X stepper company, Drytech, an etcher company, Kayex, a silicon puller company, Electroglas, a prober company and so on.

CA: How long were you with General Signal Japan?

DU: I joined General Signal in 1989, but in late 1992 very suddenly General Signal headquarters decided to divest all of its semiconductor equipment businesses. It was truly a big surprise because we were just starting to construct new facilities for General Signal Japan which would have high grade clean rooms, demo-facilities and so on. So this announcement was really a big shock for us. But anyway a decision is a decision. I had to dissolve the operation in Japan, so I started to close the GS Japan operation. Since we supplied equipment to many customers in Japan, it was not possible just to shut down. What about the maintenance of the systems installed? How to continue spare parts supply? What is our legal obligation to keep that equipment in operation? And so on. And those [issues] became quite a big task for us.

So for instance, for GCA steppers, we arranged a kind of engineer buyout scheme and we established a new company called SOL. We established another engineer buyout company for GCA wafer tracks and SGCA’s indigenous equipment company called Lithotech Japan. On the other hand, in the United States many of the General Signal units became independent. Electroglas became independent and Neal Bonke became the president. GS sold Ultratech to Arthur Zafiropoulo who became the president of the company. And Kayex became independent. Tropel also became independent, bought out by Dr. John Bruning. So there were quite a few management buyouts. We established Electroglas Japan and those people who were engaged in the Electroglas business were transferred to this new company. Drytek was bought by Lam Research, so our people who were engaged in the Drytek business were transferred to Lam Research Japan. Ultratech became represented by Innotech Japan who absorbed the people in charge of Ultratech businesses at General Signal Japan, but later on Ultratech established their own Ultratech KK in Japan.

CA: After General Signal was dismantled or closed down, how did you become involved with SEMI?

DU: Ever since we established Sumisho Electronic Systems Inc in 1980, I became involved in SEMI activities in Japan. From the early ‘80s I became one of the SEMICON Japan show advisory committee members. And when I moved to Sumitomo GCA Corporation in 1988, I also became one of the ITPC advisory committee members. And after SEMI Japan was established in 1985, I was more involved in those SEMI activities. So I got know Bill Reed very well, who was the president of SEMI in those years.

CA: Did Bill Reed offer you the job of SEMI Japan president?

DU: Yes.

CA: Were you surprised?

DU: Yes. When I was president of General Signal Japan, of course there was no such talk. But when Bill Reed and some of the Japanese [SEMI] directors like Takayama-san found out I was in charge of closing down General Signal operations in Japan, they started to consider me as one of the candidates for president of SEMI Japan. I was thinking [about it] and I thought I may be able to contribute at least to some extent to the SEMI operation and so I accepted this offer.

CA: I wanted to ask you about the silicon cycles in Japan. Did Japan have the cycles the same as the U.S. during the '70s and '80s?

DU: Yes.

CA: What was your experience of how the Japanese industry adapted to the violent ups and downs?

DU: It was always a big problem for the semiconductor industry. However in Japan those device manufacturers like NEC, Hitachi, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Fujitsu and Matsushita are not only in the semiconductor business but also in the very versatile electronic and electrical equipment, consumer product, and heavy electrical machine businesses. Matsushita has consumer products, NEC has communications, Hitachi has heavy electrical machines and consumer products. So they were relatively strong against those cycles because they could compensate with their other businesses. But in the United States, most of the semiconductor manufacturers are solely involved in the silicon device business and this pattern is mostly the same with the equipment manufacturers. The silicon cycle impact to those dedicated manufacturers in the States is much more severe than the impact to those versatile operations of the Japanese manufacturers. However, if we talk about just the semiconductor division of NEC or Hitachi or Mitsubishi, they really suffered seriously from those silicon cycles, just like U.S. manufacturers.

CA: What about the trade friction between the U.S. and Japan during the 1980s. What is your view on how that came about and how that was solved?

DU: I think trade friction came out because the Japanese manufacturers’ capital investment kept growing and the market share was overtaking that of the U.S. They could do that because they are more able to endure against the silicon cycles. Capital investment is the key element of device manufacturing, and especially memory production in Japan became very successful. I remember at one time, 80 or 90 percent of the world market share of DRAM was occupied by Japanese memory manufacturers. Intel stopped manufacturing memory chips, instead focusing on the microprocessor which was a tremendous success later on. But at that time it was a very blunt move forced by the success of Japanese memory manufacturers. Many other U.S. manufacturers also retired from the memory business except TI and Micron. Later TI also retired from memory and concentrated on the digital signal processor which also became a big success. Motorola and quite a few device manufacturers stopped manufacturing memories.

And that became a real issue. There were a number of talks between both countries not only in the industries but more seriously between the U.S. government and the Japanese government. The SIA sued Japan…based on the U.S. Trade Act Article 301 on dumping. Then finally the U.S.-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement was signed in 1986. In the agreement there was a clause that Japan must import more than 20 percent of their consumption of those chips from the United States. Nowadays we are far over 20 percent that we import from the States but at that time I think maybe around 10 percent was imported from the United States. The world semiconductor industry really changed beyond our imagination.

CA: OK Dennis, that probably wraps up the interview. Thank you very much.

DU: Thank you very much, Craig.

Uchida was interviewed April 22, 2005 by Craig Addison of SEMI.


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Flash, LED, and MEMS Investments in Japan

Flash, LED, and MEMS Investments in Japan

--- Stay Informed!---

World Fab Forecast database

 Fab-by-fab analysis of capacity and capital expenditures.

Order today!

An examination of the installed fab capacity base in Japan shows that total capacity expansion has stalled in recent years due to the consolidation and closures of facilities. The closure and consolidation of 27 facilities between 2009 and 2012 reduced the installed fab capacity in Japan by at least 350,000 200mm equivalent wafers per month. With that said, investments continued in some industry segments, and from 2010 to 2012 total front-end equipment spending totaled $11.3 billion in Japan (and total equipment, including packaging and test equipment, spending reached $13.7 billion over that same three years).

As noted in the August SEMI Global Update (www.semi.org/en/node/46496), Flash Alliance, the joint-venture between Toshiba and Sandisk, has the largest, on-going investment activity in Japan. Flash capacity in Japan grew by 14 percent in 2011, though level-off to 4 percent growth in 2012 and estimated same increase for this year.  A boost in the Flash Alliance investment will result in a forecast 7 percent expansion in Flash capacity for 2014.

Fab Capacity in Japan

While on a much smaller scale in terms of wafer size, LED epi fab capacity in Japan continues to multiply. The above graph shows the growth of LED epi fab capacity, and while the rate of capacity expansion is slowing, LED epi capacity is expect to expand 20 percent and 16 percent in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Nicha Corp. is leading the LED investment activity in Japan followed by Toyoda Gosei, Show Denko, and Toshiba.

In addition, device manufacturers in Japan are also active in the MEMS and sensor markets. Early on in 2013, Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. announced a 13.5 billion yen plan for the fiscal year that included its MEMS business. In April, it announced the construction of a new facility for the development and mass production of MOEMS-based opto-semiconductor devices and modules at its Solid State Division, targeting automotive, smartphone and other applications.

In June, Seiko Epson issued a release about its 16 billion yen investment for two new production lines in Japan to “manufacture next-generation print heads for use in business and industrial printing systems to come to market in the latter part of the 2013 fiscal year.” The investment began in Fiscal year 2011, and the new lines will be at the Epson Suwa-Minami Plant in Nagano Prefecture and at its Sakata Plant in Yamagata Prefecture.  Front-end manufacturing will be at the Suwa-Minami plant and back-end processes at the Sakata plant.

To support the above investments, equipment spending is expected to increase in Japan in 2013 and again in 2014. These investments will result in the production of next generation Flash, new MEMS, and advanced LED devices by Japanese semiconductor manufacturers.

SEMICON Japan Connects You with the Japan Semiconductor Supply Chain

SEMICON Japan 2013 will be held on December 4- 6, at the Makuhari Messe, Japan. Find the latest products and innovations from exhibiting companies that enable key technologies for the future including 450mm, EUV, TSV, power devices, and HB-LEDs to name a few.  In addition to the exhibits, SEMICON also will bring more than 100 hours of programs over the three days to provide visitors additional in-depth information about the industry.

SEMICON Japan 2013 visitor registration is open. The show is admission free. Plan your visit today.

For more information, including exhibition and sponsorship, visit www.semiconjapan.org/en.

October 1, 2013

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By Kathleen Parker

EASTON, Md. -- It's been a long while since South Carolina could look down upon its neighbor to the North.

Thanks to North Carolina's anti-LGBT legislation (HB2), also referred to as the "bathroom bill," the state effectively has begun redefining itself from its long-popular characterization as a "valley of humility between two mountains of conceit" (South Carolina and Virginia).

The new law, which ludicrously requires transgender people to use the restroom consistent with the sex on their birth certificates, has liberated South Carolina from its persistent place as the brunt of late-night jokes. Remarking on the law, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said her state doesn't have "that problem." Brava.

The law in question was hurriedly passed last month and signed by North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory in response to what one state official called a restroom free-for-all, referring to sudden hysteria over the possibility of transgender individuals using the "wrong" restroom. How would anyone know? Will officials now post monitors at public restrooms to check birth certificates and human bladder-evacuation portals?

This would be riotously funny if it weren't so patently discriminatory.

Many bad deeds go unpunished, but not this one. The economic fallout from the law already is being felt, and the price of not doing business is about to go up. Bruce Springsteen recently canceled a concert in Greensboro, and Deutsche Bank has frozen a planned 250-job expansion in the state.

But the real showdown will be this weekend when not nearly as many buyers and designers as usual will attend the biannual High Point furniture market -- the largest in the nation and the state's biggest economic event.

A recent study by Duke University placed the annual economic impact of the High Point market at $5.38 billion. The furnishings industry also generates more than 600,000 visitor days to the state each year and accounts for 37,000 jobs.

If there were a Darwin Award for states, North Carolina would win, hands down. Already the High Point Market Authority reports that hundreds or thousands of the 75,000 retailers and designers who annually attend the market won't be visiting this year because of HB2, which, come to think of it, sounds appropriately like a disease.

Many of those who plan to attend have expressed deep reservations amid likely plans to go to the relatively new Las Vegas furniture market next go-round. Among these is Don Wooters, interior designer and co-owner of Easton's Dwelling and Design, who told me he feels guilt about going to North Carolina.

"I feel like a traitor going to High Point, putting capitalism before human rights," he said. "I don't feel good about that, and I know it's wrong."

Wooters isn't baffled only by the bigotry of the legislation but also by whatever generates the fear behind it. "Why do people feel they have to be afraid? It's a big sign of how uneducated America is."

Another local designer, Jamie Merida, owner of Bountiful, told me he decided to go if only to make his case to vendors that they have six months to straighten out this mess or he, too, will be off to Las Vegas next time.

Although North Carolina has been noted in recent years for its increasingly hard-right politics, it is still shocking that a state that boasts several of the nation's top colleges and universities and is home to the famed Research Triangle could codify what is so plainly a discriminatory law. In comments Tuesday, McCrory, feeling the pressure, softened his defense of the law but stopped short of opposing the provision on bathroom use by transsexual people.

As in all other times when bigotry raises its hideous head, better angels will prevail. Either the courts will overturn the law or the state will come to its senses, if only for economic reasons.

As to that valley of humility? In 1900, when Mary Oates Spratt Van Landingham, a cultural leader and author, first conjured the image in a speech, she was bemoaning her state's then-lesser "native literature."

"Could it be that being located between Virginia and South Carolina, our people for so long have been furnished such conspicuous illustrations of self-appreciation that they have, by contrast, learned modesty and silence?" she said. "Where there are mountains of conceit, there are apt to be valleys of humility."

Today, those mountains have good reason for self-appreciation by comparison. And North Carolina has proved itself a valley of ignorance, whose legislators and governor could use a moment of silence to consider their ill-conceived conceit.

Kathleen Parker's email address is


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By Peter Lucas

They don't make political junkets like they used to.

In fact, they don't even call them junkets any more, but "fact finding" missions or climate change summits.

Only last week it was announced that state Senate President Stan Rosenberg is participating in a weeklong climate change swing through northern Europe looking at wind farms.

He is accompanied by Sen. Marc Pacheco of Taunton, who is chairman of the Senate's Global Warning and Climate Change Committee, a committee that nobody knew even existed until now.

The trip is sponsored by the Barr Foundation, and it includes such climate change warriors as Boston City Council President Michelle Wu and City Councilor Sal LaMattina, among others.

The trip to Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden comes on the heels of Boston Mayor Marty Walsh's cameo visit to Beijing last week for another climate change conference, a trip that was over before anyone knew it had begun.

The mayor arrived in Beijing on Monday and was back in Boston on Wednesday. He spent 44 hours in Beijing and almost the same amount of time on a plane or in an airport.

But he did get to hear Secretary of State John F. Kerry announce in Beijing that the next summit on climate change for urban leaders will be held in Boston in 2017, something Kerry could have told him by phone.

This reminded me of something, the point of which is if you are mayor of Boston and are going go all the way from Boston to China, then GO TO CHINA and don't fool around and be shy about it.

Be bold, the way the late Boston Mayor Kevin H. White was when he went to Beijing 34 years ago, a time when the People's Republic of China was still mysterious and closed off to most Americans.

He did not travel alone, of course, but with an entourage, including press aides, and television and print reporters. And he did not go for 44 hours. He went for three weeks, first class, which included a side trip to Hawaii. He knew how to travel.

I was supposed to be one of the reporters covering the historic China trip. I was the political columnist at the Boston Herald at the time. But the mayor had me removed from the list. I complained. He blamed the Chinese. The Chinese said it was him. It was him, and the reason was that he was upset with me and was getting even. He was like that.

I had dubbed him Kevin De Luxe, the imperial mayor, because he always went first class, at taxpayers' expense, of course. I also referred to him as the Mayor of America, because of his swaggering political self-importance.

But he was always good copy, even though he took great pleasure when he screwed me.

Hardly had he arrived in Beijing than reporters were falling all over him about a report that he was carrying "a message" from President Ronald Reagan to the Chinese leaders. "Is it true, Mr. Mayor?" the reporters asked. "What does the message say?"

It was absurd, of course. There was no message. The phony story had been planted by the mayor and his press aides. But the mayor got a lot of press and television exposure denying the story that he had concocted in the first place. And the reporters were happy because they had a story that resonated back in Boston.

That was the way of the world back then.

Back in Boston, there were mounting stories that the main reason White went on his extended trip was to get away from a mounting series of City Hall political corruption scandals and investigations.

One was a State Ethics Commission investigation into a fundraising birthday party of White's wife, Kathryn, at which City Hall employees were expected to attend. Reporters called it the mayor's "shakedown ball." And there were others.

There was also a probe by the U.S. attorney that was going on into certain questionable real estate deals that took place.

My favorite scandal was "Quartergate," where seven city parking meter collectors were arrested and charged with regularly skimming and taking home bags of quarters. It was estimated that some $700,000 in quarters were clipped and went missing.

It was after that -- and not out of pique at being purged from the China trip, mind you -- that I began referring to the mayor as The China Clipper.

Later on, when he did not seek re-election to a fifth term, he got the last laugh.

But that's another story.

Peter Lucas' political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at


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Focus on The Business Model

Google's Take on Search Plus Your World

A few weeks ago Google announced the launch of Search Plus Your World, which deeply integrates social sites (especially Google+) into the Google search experience to make it more personalized.

While Google claimed that the socialization was rather broad-based, the lack of inclusion of Facebook & Twitter along with the excessive promotion of Google+ raised eyebrows. While the launch was claimed to be social for personalizing results, the Google+ promotions appeared on queries where they were clearly not the most relevant result even when users are not logged into a Google account.

Google+ Over-promotion

A couple weeks ago when Google announced Google Search Plus Your World competitors collectively complained about Google over-promoting their own affiliated websites.

Twitter was perhaps the loudest complainer, highlighting how Google basically eats all the above-the-fold real estate with self promotion on this @WWE search.

It is no surprise that folks like Ben Edelman, Scott Cleland & Fair Search chimed in with complaints, as this is just a continuation of Google's path. But the complaints came from a far wider cast of characters on this move: the mainstream press like CNN, free market evangalists like the Economist, Google worshipers indoctrinated in their culture who wrote a book on Google & even ex-Googlers now call into question Google's transparently self serving nature:

I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.

Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves, I'd rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion.

The FTC's Google antitrust probe is to expand to include a review of Google+ integration in the search results.

Facebook & Twitter launched a don't be evil plugin named Focus On The User, which replaces Google+ promotion with promotion of profiles from Facebook& Twitter.

For the top tier broad social networks framing the idea of integrating promotion of their networks directly in the search results is a natural & desirable conclusion, but is that just a convenient answer to the wrong question?

  • Whether Google ranks any particular organic result above the corresponding Bing ranking in Google's now below-the-fold organic results is a bit irrelevant when the above the fold results are almost entirely But is the core problem that we are under-representing social media in the search results? According to, Facebook & YouTube combine to capture about 16% of all downstream Google clicks. Do we really need to increase that number until the web has a total of 5 websites on it? What benefit do we get out of a web that is just a couple big walled gardens?
  • If Facebook is already getting something like 20% of US pageviews & users are still looking for information elsewhere, doesn't that indicate that they probably desire something else? Absolutely Facebook should rank for Facebook navigational queries, but given all their notes spam, I don't like seeing them in the search results much more than seeing a site like eHow.
  • The he said / she said data deals are also highly irrelevant. What is really needed is further context. Before Google inserted Google+ in their search results the Google+ social network was far less successful than MySpace (which recently sold for only $35 million). If social media is added as an annotation to other 3rd party listings then I think that has the opportunity to add valuable context, but where a thin "me too" styled social media post replaces the publisher content it lowers the utility of the search results & wastes searcher's time. Further, when those social media results are little more than human-powered content scrapers it also destroys the business models of legitimate online publishers.

Over-promotion vs "Search Spam"

At any point Google can promote one of their new verticals in a prominent location in the search results & if they are anywhere near as good as the market leader eventually they can beat them out of nothing more than the combination of superior search placement, monopoly search marketshare, account bundling & user laziness. What's more, they can make paid products free and/or partner with competitors 2 through x in an attempt to destroy the business model of anyone they couldn't acquire (talk to Groupon).

Amit Singhal is obviously a brilliant guy, but I thought some of the answers he gave during a recent interview by Danny Sullivan were quite evasive & perhaps a bit inauthentic. In particular, ...

  • "The overall takeaway that I have in my mind is that people are judging a product and an overall direction that we have in the first two weeks of a launch, where we are producing a product for the long term." If the product wasn't ready for prime time you were not required to mix it directly into the organic search results right off the bat. It could have been placed at the bottom of the search results, like the "Ask on Google" links were. Bing has been working on social search for 18 months & describes their moves as "being very conservative."
  • "The user feedback we have been getting has been almost the other side of the reaction we’ve seen in the blogosphere." Of course publishers who see their content getting scraped & see the scraped copy outranking the original have a financial incentive to care about a free & automated scraper site displacing their work. They don't get those pageviews, they don't get that referrer data, and they don't get those ad impressions. Google's PR team is anything but impressed when another company dares do that to Google.
  • "The users who have seen this in the wild are liking it, and our initial data analysis is showing the same." Much like the Google Webmaster Tools shows that pages with a +1 in the search results get a higher CTR, this Google+ social stuff also suffers from the same type of sampling bias & giving the listings a larger and more graphical stand out further help them pull in much more clicks. Any form of visual highlighting & listing differentiation can lift CTR. I might be likely to click on some of my own results more, but when I do so you might just be grabbing a slice of navigational searches I was going to do anyway where I was looking for something else I posted on Google+ or my Google+ account or the account of a friend & so on. Further, aggregate data hides many data points that are counter to the general trend. I have seen instances of branded searches where the #1 organic site was getting a CTR above 70% (it even had organic sitelinks, further indicating it was a navigational search) and for such a search in some cases there were 2 Adwords ads above the organic results & then the Google+ page for a brand outranked the associated brand in the SERPs for those who followed it! That is a terrible user experience, particularly since the + page hasn't even had any activity for months.
  • "Every time a real user is getting those results, they really are delighted. Given how personal this product is, you can only judge it based on personal experiences or by aggregate numbers you can observe through click-through." First, publishers are not fake users. Secondly, as mentioned above, there is a sampling bias & the + listings stand out with larger & more graphical listings. If they didn't get a higher CTR that would mean they were *really* irrelevant.
  • "out of the gate, whereas we had limited users to train this system with, I’m actually very happy with the outcome of the personal results." They could have been placed at the bottom of the search results or off to the side or some such until there was greater confidence in the training set.
  • "People are coming to a conclusion about the product today, within the first two weeks, and they’re not fully seeing the potential where we can build this product around real identities and real relationships." If a publisher promotes a site to the top of the search results & then says something like 'we will improve quality later' they are branded as spammers. In the past Google has justified penalizing a site based on its old content that no longer exists on the site. Investing in depth, quality & volume is a cycle. If others get prohibited from evolving through the cycles due to algorithms like Panda then it becomes quite hard to compete as a new start up when Google can just insert whatever it wants right near the top & then work on quality after the fact.
  • "We don’t think of this as a promotional unit now. This is a place that you would find people with real identities who would be interesting for your queries." If this is the case then why does it only promote Google+?
  • "We’re very open to incorporating information from other services, but that needs to be done on terms that wouldn’t change in a short period of time and make our products vanish." The problem is, if a company builds a reputation as a secretive one that clones the work of its partners & customers then people don't want to do open-ended transparent relationships. Naive folks might need to see the blood and tears 3 or 4 times to pick up on the trend, but even the slowest of the slow notice it after a dozen such moves.
  • "I’m just very wary of building a product where the terms can be changed." Considering Google's lack of transparency & self-promotional bias on the social networking front, would you be fully transparent and open with Google? If so, then aren't the search algorithms complex enough that it would make sense to make those transparent as well? How can you ask other social networks to increase transparency at the same time Google is locking down their search data on claims of protecting user privacy?
  • "It’s not just about content. It’s about identity, and when you start talking about these things and what it takes to build this, the data needed is much more than we can publicly crawl." This is where being trustworthy is so crucial. Past interactions with Yelp, TripAdvisor & Groupon likely make future potential partners more risk adverse & cautious. Outrageous "accidents" like those that happened with Mocality & Open Street Map from playing fast and loose further erode credibility. And even when Google hosts the media & has full access to user data they still rank inferior stuff sometimes (like the recent Santorum YouTube cartoon fiasco), even on widely searched core/head keywords.

The big issue is that if people feel the game is rigged they won't have much incentive to share on Google+. I largely only share stuff that is irrelevant to tangentially relevant to our business interests & won't share stuff that is directly relevant, because I don't want to be forced to compete against an inferior version of my own work when the deck is stacked so the inferior version wins simply because it is hosted on Google.

As we move into the information age a lot of physical stores are shutting down. Borders went bust last year. Sears announced the closure of many stores. And many of the people shopping in the physical stores that remain are using cell phones for price comparisons. Given Google's mobile OS share this is another area where they can build trust or burn it. A friend today mentioned how their online prices on Google Product search almost always show a lower price near the header than the lowest price available in the list - sometimes by a substantial margin.

Identity vs Anonymous Contractors

In the past we have mentioned that transparency is often a self-serving & hypocritical policy by those atop power systems who want to limit the power of those whom they aim to control.

When Google was caught promoting illegal drug ads there was no individual who took the blame for it. When the Mocality scraping & the Open Street Map vandalism issues happened, all that we were told was that Google "was mortified" and it was "a contractor." If people who did hit jobs could just place all the blame on "the contractor" then the world would be a pretty crappy place!

Eric Schmidt warned that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." That sage advice came from the same Eric Schmidt that blackballed cNet for positing personal information about him. Around the same time Eric offered the above quote, Google was engaged in secret & illegal backdoor deals with direct competitors to harm their own employees.

What happened to Google recruiters who dared to go against the illegal pact? They were fired on the hour:

"Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening?" Schmidt wrote.

Google's staffing director responded that the employee who contacted the Apple engineer "will be terminated within the hour."

When Google+ launched they demanded that you use your real name or don't use the product. They later claimed that you can use a nickname on your account as well, but there is a difference between a nickname and pseudonyms.

What is so outrageous about the claims for this need for real identities is that past studies have shown that pseudonymous comments are best & Bruce Schneier highlighted how we lose our individuality if we are under an ever-watchful eye:

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

In many markets ads and content are blended in a way that is hard to distingush between them. Whenever Google wants to enter they can demand greater transparency to participate (and then use the standard formatted data from that transparency to create a meta-competitor in the market.)

Increasingly Google is placing more of their search data & their webmaster-related functions behind a registration wall. If you are rich & powerful they will sell you the data. If you are the wrong type of webmaster that aggregate data can be used in *exceptionally* personal ways.

User Privacy

Ahead of Google updating their privacy policy Google has directed a large portion of their ad budget toward ads about how they protect users online.

What better way to ensure user privacy than to allow them to register their accounts under psydonyms? The real name policy on Google+ was part of what made Google want to stop providing referrer data for logged in users who search on Google. This has had a knock on effect where other social sites are framing everything, requiring registration to read more of public user generated content & sending outbound traffic through redirects.

Google's new privacy policy allows them to blend your user data from one service into refining the experience (and ads) on another:

If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. We’ll better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for and get you those results faster.

Google & Facebook's war (against) user privacy is catching media and governmental attention. Microsoft highlighted some of Google's issues in their "putting people first" ad campaign & the blowback has caused Google not only to publish PR-spin "get the facts" styled blog posts, but to launch yet another ad campaign.

EU regulators have asked Google to pause their privacy policy changes.

Bogus Testimonials & Social Payola

Is social media a cleaner signal than links? If search engines put the same weight on social media that they put on links it would get spammed to bits. It won't be long until a firm like offers sponsored Google+ posts.

Some have suggested that you won't be able to buy Google+ followers however Google already includes user pictures on AdWords ads (even when they desire not to be & even when they didn't endorse the product that Google suggests they endorsed). In due time I expect Google will indeed sell followers & other user interactions as ad units (just like Twitter & Facebook do).

Further, celebrities sell Tweets to advertisers. When they are hot their rates go up:

When introduced self-destructing Charlie Sheen to Twitter, he was paid about $50,000 per tweet. It was worth it. Sheen’s tweet for generated 95,333 clicks in the first hour and 450,000 clicks in 48 hours, created a worldwide trending topic out of #tigerbloodintern, attracted 82,148 internship applications from 181 countries, and added 1 million additional visits to

Search engines might consider these to be clean signals if those same search engines were not busy buying the manipulation of said "relevancy" signals.

Attention is purchased to create demand. It isn't comfortable to put it this way, but we are trained to obey authority & to like what others like:

The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which equates with four degrees of separation to thousands of people, Mr. Fischer said. Metrics like that led him to believe that if Facebook could figure out a way to capitalize on "social endorsements," it would be like creating a word-of-mouth campaign that could reach millions of people simultaneously. Since the campaigns would come from a friend, they would theoretically be taken more seriously than, say, a TV commercial, he said.

On an individual basis reviews and ratings get faked everywhere. Even stodgy old slow-moving institutions like colleges game their ranking systems.

There recently was a question raised about how Google's rating systems skewed high on the underlying data. Surely Overstock (the same Overstock Google penalized earlier this year) wouldn't promote Google's trusted stores aggressively on their own site if it made their business appear worse than it actually is, thus a positive bias must be baked in to the system.

Entire categories of demand are created by those tied in with power cost shifting to create bubbles. The federal reserve helped spark a real estate bubble with low interest rates. FBI warnings of mortgage fraud were ignored. Consumers were constantly fed propaganda about "real estate only goes up." Then when that bubble popped, the US government bailed out those who caused it & burned trillions of Dollars propping up home prices. The government even bailed out a company that is now shorting the housing market (when that company was about to get bailed out the secretary of treasury leaked that material non-public information to some of his criminal investor buddies).

Does all the above sound circular, conflicting, corrupt & confusing? It should, because that is how power works & comes off as seeming semi-legitimate when acting in illigitimate ways. The perception of reality is warped to create profitable opportunties that are monetized on the way up and the way down.

Millions of kids take drugs that address the symptoms of being a child full of energy, imagination & entusiasm. In some cases they may need them, but in most cases they probably don't. The solution with the highest economic return gets the largest ad budget, even if it only treats symptoms.

Web Scrape Plus+ (Now With More Scraping)

When the +1 button & Google+ launched, Google highlighted how they would use the + button usage as a "relevancy" signal. Google recently started inserting + pages directly into the search results for brands & right from the very start they were using it as a scraper website that would outrank the original content source.

Google used the buy in from their promised relevancy signal to create a badge-based incentivized system which acts as a glorified PageRank funnel to further juice the rankings of these new pages on a domain name that already had a PageRank 10.

I recently read a blog post about how anyone could do the above & the opportunity is open to everyone. But the truth is, I can't state that something will become a relevancy signal that manipulates the search results in order to get buy in. Or, if I did something which actually had the same net effect, Google would likely chop my legs off for promoting a link scheme.

Recently the topic of Google+ as a scraper site came up yet again via Read Write Web & on Hacker News a Googler stated that it was "childish" to place any of the blame on Google!!!!!!

Google determines how much information is shown near each listing & can create "relevancy" signals in ways that things tied to Google get over-represented (look at the +1 count here). When they do that & it destroys other business models *of course* Google deserves 100% of the blame.

Thin Content & Scraper Sites

Remember the whole justification for Panda was that thin content was a poor user experience?

In spite of sites like eHow getting hit, Google is still pre-paying them to upload content to Youtube.

Now that the (non-Google hosted) thin content has been disappeared (and the % of downstream traffic from Google to Youtube has more then doubled in the past year) it is time for Google to take another slice of the search traffic stream with Search Plus Your World:

The Google vs Facebook locked down walled garden contest will retard innovation. As the corporate internet silos grow larger the independent web withers. Them going after each other may leave room for Twitter, but it doesn't leave lots of room is left for others, as the economics of publishing have to work or the publishers die.

Start ups that were on a successful trajectory were killed by Panda:

The startup had been on a roll up until last February when Google altered its ranking algorithm with the release of “Panda.” The changes decimated TeachStreet’s traffic, and the company never quite recovered.

“We lost a lot of our traffic, and overnight we started talking to partners for biz dev, not for acquisition,” he said. However, many of the potential partners wanted to know about an outright acquisition. was also smoked by Google:

The biggest worry, though, is that the decline of itself may be irreversible. Fewer people are clicking on About ads placed by Google and the site’s own display ads have dropped in value.

The company has attributed this decline in value to Google’s decision last year to downgrade About pages in its search results. With more than 80% of traffic coming from search, the Google denigration was indeed a blow but About’s problems may be rooted in something deeper.

Keep in mind that the reason these websites were hit was that they were claimed to be thin & thus a poor user experience. When the NYT bought one of the top competing bidders was Google!

Now that the "thin content" has been demoted in the search results Google can integrate deep content silos from Google+, like this one:

That is an 8-word Google+ post about how short another blog post is. I like Todd & do like to read his writings, but here Google is clearly favoring the same sort of content they would have torched if it was done on an independent webmaster's website.

How Google has raters view other websites that redirect traffic is based upon those sites having a substantial value add. Clearly in the above example there was nothing added to the interaction beyond sharing a bookmark with a punchy tagline.

If Google wants to use the + notation to pull up that other referenced page then perhaps that can make sense, but to list an 8-word Google+ page in the search results nearly a year after the Panda algorithm is outrageous. This sort of casual mention integration in the search results occurs on expensive keywords as well. Not only do they list your own Google+ posts...

...but they also list them from anyone you follow...

In addition to information pollution, the other big issue here is time. Google wants to make forms more standardized to make filling them out faster & they give regular sermons on the importance of fast search results. Yet when I do a navigational search, Google delivers two AdWords ads, a huge Google+ promotion, and then the navigational search result barely above the fold.*

*Since I thought the above was obnoxious, I renamed our Google+ company page to S_E_O Book to help Google fix their relevancy problems.

Can anyone explain how Google's speed bias is aligned with putting plus junk right at the top, even on brand searches? Yahoo! has been pretty aggressive with putting shopping ads in the search results, but their implementation is still a better user experience than what Google did above.

And Bing offers an even cleaner experience than that.

Due to how Google integrates Google+ in such a parasitic way I see no incentive for participating on their network except when I have something that is outside of my domain of expertise, something that I am not targeting commercially, something that is thin, or something irrelevant to say! That incentive structure combined with Google's photo meme feature will ensure that content marketers will help plenty of people see Star Wars stuff ranking for mortgage loan search queries.

When you own search/navigation you own language. that position can easily be extended into any other direction/market in a way a social graph can not:

"The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English," McNealy said. "All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business."

Further, Google can chose at any point to respond to or ignore market regulations in accordance with whatever makes them the most money. They can also fund 3rd parties doing the same (like undermining copyright) to force others to strike an official deal with Google to be "open."

A lot of businesses live on small profit margins, so Google's ability to insert itself & fund criminal 3rd parties aligned with Google's internal longterm interests is a big big big deal. Companies will learn that you either work with Google on Google's terms or you die.

When a public relations issue brews they can quickly change their approach and again position themselves as the white knight.

Brand Equity & Forcing the Brand Buy

Yahoo! put out a research paper highlighting activity bias, stating that the efficacy of online advertising is often over-stated because people who see ads about a topic were already more closely tied in with that particular network & that particular topic before they even saw the ad. As an example, any person who sees an AdWords ad for hemorrhoid treatment was already searching for hemorrhoid-related topics before they saw your ad (thus they were in the subset of individuals that might have came across your site in some way if you were in the search ad ecosystem or not).

This sort of activity bias-driven selection bias (homophily) exists on social networks online & offline.

Google did research on incrementality of ads & they came to the opposite conclusion as Yahoo! did. Google suggested you should buy, buy, buy, even on your own branded keywords. They suggested that testing was expensive (no mention that the only reason it is expensive is because Google chooses not to make such tools easily accessible to advertisers) & that the clicks were so cheap on branded keywords that you should buy, buy, buy. Many advertisers who mix brand & non-brand keywords together don't realize that they are using the "returns" from bidding on their own brand to subsidize over-paying for other keywords.

Google Analytics is the leading & most widely used web analytics program. They can share whatever metrics help them sell more ads (defaulting to crediting the last click for conversions, even if it was on a navigational search to your site) & pull back on features that are not aligned with their business interests (SEO referral data anyone?)

This goes back to Scott McNealy's quote: "The only technology I’d rather own than Windows would be English. All of those who use English would have to pay me a couple hundred dollars a year just for the right to speak English. And then I can charge you upgrades when I add new alphabet characters like ‘n’ and ‘t.’ It would be a wonderful business."

Analysts didn't understand why Google CPC rates were down 8% last quarter while overall search clicks were up 34%. The biggest single reason was likely more clicks on adlinks on branded AdWords ads. While a brand buying its own keyword typically pays far less per click than what some of the biggest keywords go for, the branded keywords typically have an exceptionally high CTR. Those additional clicks dragged down Google's average CPC, but the extra revenue they offered was a big par of the reason why Google was about to grow at 25% even though their display network only grew at 15%.

That slow growth of display is in spite of Youtube now serving over 4 billion video streams per day & Google adding display ads to log out pages.

Online views are not the same as TV views. A comScore study found that 31% of display ads are never seen. In spite of that, US online advertising will reach nearly $40 billion this year.

Google wants to insert itself as a needed cost of business in the same way credit card companies have.

On Google Maps they put an ad inside your location box.

Even if most people don't participate on Google+, Google can still force advertiser buy in through over-promotion of the network in the search results. On your branded keywords they may drive your organic listing below the fold & put Google+ front & center.

Facebook earnings are still growing much faster than Google's & Facebook encourages advertisers to advertise their Facebook pages, so even when you pay for the click Facebook still keeps the user. Facebook is adding apps to the timeline & is trying to win VEVO music video hosting from YouTube.

While Google is primarily known as a search company, it is getting harder to get off of Google though any channel other than a toll booth. Google keeps driving the organic search results downward, while Google verticals fill up many of the organic results that remain. Many companies already buy Google ads on their own YouTube content. Some buy ads on Google to drive them to their Youtube videos & then buy ads on their own Youtube video to promote their websites. Soon Google will try to push you to buy them on your Google+ page as well. Google is becoming a walled garden:

Google wants to control more elements of your social world now. They don’t just want to be a search engine.

Is that so bad? Maybe not. It’s certainly no different from how other companies, from AOL, to Microsoft, to Apple, to Disney, to Facebook, have viewed the world — as ideally a walled garden, an all-consuming platform that most people use for pretty much every form of entertainment and social interaction.

A lot of people thought that Google was somehow different. They were, of course, wrong.
To move forward either as the old Google or Google+, Google needs to be capable of making fair deals with the partner ecosystem. It needs to curb its instinct to kill competing media companies that were actually producing great content that Google helped you find.

I suspect there will be plenty of bloodshed before Google figures that one out.

"This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else." - Larry Page

Google no longer believes in the concept of the open web. Blame it on Larry Page becoming the CEO, blame it on him talking to Steve Jobs & Steve telling him to make fewer and tighter products, blame it on Google funding eHow, or blame it on basically anything. But if you go back far enough, much of the stuff that is going on now was clearly envisioned a decade ago:

I was lucky enough to chat with Larry one-to- one about his expectations for Google back in 2002. He laid out far-reaching views that had nothing to do with short-term revenue goals, but raised questions about how Google would anticipate the day sensors and memory became so cheap that individuals would record every moment of their lives. He wondered how Google could become like a better version of the RIAA - not just a mediator of digital music licensing - but a marketplace for fair distribution of all forms of digitized content. I left that meeting with a sense that Larry was thinking far more deeply about the future than I was, and I was convinced he would play a large role in shaping it. I would rather jump on board that bullet train than ride a local that never missed a revenue stop but never." - Douglas Edwards

What happens when the Google+ version of your content outranks the version on your own site? And what happens when your branded channel and/or your fans become a vertical ad silo Google sells to your competitors?

I tested submitting a couple posts to Google+ with a Wordtracker top keywords list & valuable keywords (on a cpc*traffic) basis in posts about top keywords. Those posts rank #2 or #3 in Google for many people that follows me. No harm to me since those posts were irrelevant to this site, but if they were about my theme & topic I just would have out-competed myself. When Google outranks you (even with a copy of your content) they get to taste the data again and sell off the attention another time. You only get a slice of that monetization, even when it is your work that is being monetized. Maybe it is great for stuff that is somewhat less relevant and/or keywords that are so competitive that you otherwise wouldn't score for them, but we have to be really careful we don't out-compete ourselves. Though if Googke keeps this up they won't be the only ones monetizing it. Give it a few months and celebrities will be selling sponsored Google+ posts based on some metric created by multiplying search volume, CPC & how many followers they have.

Is Bing Better? Will Enough People Ask That Question to Matter?

For years Google built their reputation as being the search engine that offered the cleanest & fastest search results. They were known for monetizing less aggressively than the competition. But over the past couple years Google has dialed up their ads to where they now send a greater ratio of ad traffic than organic search traffic. One Google engineer recently described the ability to rank highly in Google without buying their ads as being a bug that was getting fixed!

Google's big risk in their coupling of aggressive monetization, aggressive self-promotion & changing how users feel about user privacy is that they can create the perception that users should go elsewhere for for an honest or trustworthy search. This not only builds momentum for smaller search services like DuckDuckGo & Blekko, but has also won praise for Bing from Gizmodo, Dave Winer & The Next Web.

Kill The Bugs!

You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one:

Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That's a good thing because SEO can't scale, and SEO isn't good for users or the Internet at large.

If you look at the Google experience from the standpoint of customers, it's pretty good. Users get relevant search results and ads. Advertisers get their content on top of everything else. It's a good compromise between advertising and usability, and it works really well. It's a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug. Manipulating Google results shouldn't be something you feel entitled to be able to do. If you want to rank highly in Google, be relevant for the user currently searching. Engage him in social media or email, provide relevant information about what you're selling, and, generally, be a "good match" for what the user wants. - Googley Jon Rockway

Would love to hear someone more senior confirm this as the official Google company position, however they are too skilled at public relations to make that blunder (at least outside of foreign AdWords ads that tell you to "forget SEO").

Is Google Selling Investors Private Search Data?

This is an interesting play:

BBVA, Spain’s second-largest bank by assets, is teaming up with Google to use its search engine results to provide advanced forecasts of hotel and tourism demand in the country, part of a plan to market real-time economic indicators to its clients.

The bank and internet group will announce on Monday a scheme called the “BBVA-Google tourism activity in Spain indicator”. The first pilot project has focused on measuring advance demand for hotel stays and tourism interest in Spain by using search engine data.

Private investors get to see that search data before anyone else does. If you have a retirement plan invested in stocks, then you are at an asymmetrical information disadvantage because Google is providing an in-depth look at that search data to competing investors who can trade on the information before it is public.

Is search traffic a big deal? Is there enough signal there to matter? Yes. And yes.

I read an investment report earlier today about a company where the hedge fund's rating & valuation was largely based on / justified by the SEO strategy of the underlying company & their current Google rankings...the report even had keyword ranking charts in it!

Was Google paid for giving BBVA access to the above data? Or was it thrown in as a freebie in exchange for getting over 100,000 BBVA workers to switch to the cloud & go Google on the enterprise software front?

If Google has over 90% search marketshare in many EU countries & is willing to leverage proprietary search data to win contracts in other fields, how does anyone compete against that data bundling?

Further, think of all the damage hedge funds & huge banks have done to societies the globe over this past decade & now Google is directly helping the bad guys.

That is Google's approach to their proprietary information: if you invest in their ecosystem and use their analytics tools you can't get your own analytics data (as they have to protect "user privacy"), but they will gladly sell that same data off to someone else.

If there is no public outrage at this "test" then the data units will start getting more granular. Rather than measuring categories Google may sell data on a per-site or per-company basis. Looking at how Google has consistently disintermediated "partners" everywhere else, if Google is feeling bold they may suggest that selling the data to others also permits Google to trade on the data as well.

What's far scarier than an angry search engineer looking at your large paid link buy or a rogue Google "contractor" hacking up your site? A Google hedge fund with a substantial short position on your stock. :D

Recall that Eric Schmidt has stated:

"One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market..." Eric Schmidt continues, "and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that."

Based on Mr. Schmidt's above comment, is it reasonable that Google now profits off leveraging their data for securities analysis? What made the above clearly illegal & what is going on now above board? What's the difference between them? Perhaps a "contractor" layer?

At the same time Google runs sweeping ad campaigns reminding people how Google protects them online, while hosting banking data in the cloud & making themselves a juicier hacking target.

Google warns publishers against using paywalls because it is a poor user experience while wiping out competing lead aggreagtors with new guidelines that are likely impossible to comply with. Sites like Highbeam Research get smoked by algorithms like Panda & the Google works with the folks who already have the legislature in their pocket to get them more data. The lesson here from Google is to provide a clean front end user experience and then sell the data back out the other end.

Everything is fine. Keep shopping (on + your Android phone)...Google will ensure the data is monetized to its full potential.

Was Google Caught in a Sting Operation in Kenya?

Wow...this is

According to this post, Google was caught scraping Mocality, calling the listed businesses, soliciting that they move to Google "Get Your Business Online", disparaged the directory they were scraping in the client call, and then lied about having the permission of the directory they were scraping to try to con businesses into working with Google.

A few select quotes:

There are absolutely no costs, and this will be agreed on before it’s put on… No one will come and tell you like Mocality used to do, someone tells you it’s free and then they come to ask for money. You know that Google doesn’t fool around here.
Mocality used to charge people and many of the people who used to be in Mocality we have taken them and transferred them here. Didn’t we also find you on Mocality?
Ai…they used to…but some people didn’t used to pay. They [Mocality] used to go and ask people to pay them around Ksh. 20,000 and people refused. It was things like that.)

Google's business model *is* buying or building things that are free and then later pulling back features and/or sneaking costs in on them. Whether it be clubbing Android carriers with compatibility, saying search ads are evil then placing them everywhere, Google Maps API terms changes, terms changes on the Google AdWords API, Google hotel place listings with endless price ads, or keyword (not provided) in web analytics while trying to force you to register in Google Webmaster Tools to get any keyword data at all!

As if that wasn't bad enough, when the fake business asked Google if Mocality was ok with this, this was the exchange:

My question is does Mocality know that you’re getting their con…our contacts from their directory?
Yah. They know. They know that very well. They have agreed with Google when they were on that thing.

I have long stated that the difference between spam and quality content is who is spamming. With the recent widely criticized over-promotion of Google+ in the search results and this sort of scrape, lie & disintermediate the source Google's true character is shining through.

Facebook & Twitter are smart not to leave the barn door open for Google.

All information wants to be free and wrapped in Google's ads. Or so the saying goes. But until they can be trusted it won't be. They have done A LOT of brand damage to themselves in the past couple months.

Update: Google was mortified that they got caught doing this:

We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved.

This Post is Sponsored by Google

That is what they say, typically at the bottom of the posts, in blog posts that equate Google Chrome to being the Internet & spread misinformation about how Chrome is good for small business.

  • some of those sites are paid posts and have live links in them to Google Chrome without using nofollow & talk about SEO in the same post as well!
  • some of those posts link to the example businesses Google was paying to have covered
  • and all the posts are effectively "buying YouTube video views" for this video

You can say they didn't require the links, that the links were incidental, that leaving nofollow off was an accident, etc. ... but does Google presume the same level of innocence when torching webmasters? They certainly did not to the bloggers who reviewed K-Mart & the Google reconsideration request form states:

“In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.”

The Orwellian things about Google using the above strategy to market Chrome are:

  • Google has a clear pro-corporate big brand bias to their algorithms & layout (Vince & Panda updates + the part near the top of the SERPs for some searches that says "brands" as a filter type).
  • The more usage data Google collects the more stupid hoops it forces smaller businesses to jump through in order to compete, thereby further driving them under. (If small business owners didn't have enough time & resources for SEO, do they now also have time to get reviews, get local citations, deal with social stuff on Twitter + Facebook + Youtube + Google+ and a bit of SEO?)
  • Google polices how small businesses can even make income online. When K-Mart paid some small business bloggers to do sponsored posts Matt Cutts wrote a post ( about how he torched those small bloggers (while doing nothing to K-Mart) & equated that exercise to selling links that promote bogus brain cancer solutions. Yet Google Japan was already dinged for this sort of paid post activity & now Google is doing the same thing again.

The fact that Google is paying to spread that sort of misinformation about how their browser is helping small businesses is sort of like BP buying ads about doing tourism in the gulf. Only since Google destroying smaller businesses is something more abstract on virtual lands the PR propaganda campaign is much more effective, because (unlike oil washing ashore) people do not see what is not there. (The birds still die, but the black oil covered carcass isn't rotting on the beach).

Should you follow Google & buy ads on these sites? Are they christened & beyond reproach? I would sort of be afraid to buy exposure on the blogs where Google is buying coverage...if that latent public relations disaster eventually blows up in their face, they may assume others are as guilty as Google is & burn down the whole forest.

Google the dictator meet Google the marketer. You guys are going to get on well together!

Update: Danny highlighted how Google's Chrome ad buy created a lot of the low-quality filler pablum content that the Panda update was alleged to discourage.

The Decline of Organic Links Infographic

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How Google Hit Organic Links.

For many years it was true that SEO = links, but due to the rise of rel=nofollow, fearmongering & social media, organic links have lost much of their relative importance in many verticals.

Links are still valuable in some areas of course, but where the search results are full of listings from, pushed below the fold from larger AdWords ads and/or heavily skewed by things like brand bias there is much less value in link building in numerous big money markets. After all, few care who ranks #1 if #1 is below the fold!

Google Biz Dev Beats the Google Engineers Again

Since Panda has happened I (and others) have highlighted how brands have ranked doorway pages, ranked scraped 3rd party content, padded out crap "content farm" content to suck in search traffic, took their market leading position & used it to deliver inferior experiences, bought out bankrupt competitors & redirected the PageRank, engaged in off-topic affiliate extension (Barnes & Noble, Overstock, Overstock AND Barnes & Noble), etc etc etc

At the same time, independent webmasters face greater uncertainty than ever (legal, personal property rights, and from alleged "quality" algorithms like Panda & editorial crackdowns from Google engineers).

If you are not operating at scale, you are an inefficiency which must be expunged from the marketplace.

I have maintained that Panda was a joke & a diversion to re-frame the quality debate as Google dialed up on inserting their own vertical results in the search results, allowing them to monetize the "organic" search results.

Such a view may have been seen as cynical, but it is something that more people are realizing as true. Read this great article from Tom Foremski on ZDNet.

Google's percent of downstream traffic to YouTube has more than doubled since Panda.

You know how John Stewart or George Carlin have to present reality as a joke to express it? Well watch the above video & then read this article:

“Every single leading company is waiting for user-generated content or is licensing content” in order to reach advertisers, Rosenblatt said. “YouTube was tired of waiting. They told us that they needed a home and garden channel, a pets channel and a health/Livestrong channel. They are paying us up front, plus a rev share. This is the beginning of them funding professional content creators.”

I have mentioned Demand Media's video "efforts" before.

But my opinion doesn't matter.

As a monopoly, only Google's does.

And they decided to subsidize Demand Media while torching your site.

Google Longtail Keywords Infographic

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How Google Killed the Longtail Infographic.

The Walmartization of the Web (Literally)

Walmart is getting much more aggressive with their online strategy:

With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart's world is about as large as the state of Maine. That's massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it's not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, that the earth's largest employer is taking greater measures to motivate and mobilize its people -- and opening up more opportunities for consumer brands to also reach them along the way.

These brands can not only leverage internal resources to further build off the boost Google offers them, but they can then take that attention and sell it back off to the highest bidder:

It's not clear how much ad revenue Walmart World has made or whether will become a profit center. But the former already takes in millions of dollars annually in ads from vendors seeking an audience with Walmart employees, according to people familiar with the matter.

If Google consolidates markets too aggressively then ultimately they create competition for themselves through vertical ad networks. In some cases (say travel) Google can buy out the market plumbing & then reassert control:

Wertheimer drew some criticism when he explained that “our airline partners were very clear” that they wouldn’t participate in Google Flight Search if online travel agency booking links were included in the core flight-search results.

But Google doesn't have that same influence over retail & each time they put the big brands front and center the more they reinforce that 3rd party dominance.

In addition to leveraging their workforce, it is also quite easy for these brands to use customer incentives to dominate social media. is also carrying far more ads these days & they sell ads on 3rd party sites.

The above is another reason why Google is pushing so hard to control the second click. If they can taste the traffic again they add efficiency to their own model while introducing another layer of friction to other retailers.

When users finally manage to leave the Google click circus, Google tries to pull them back into Google with the Google Related toolbar

In the above quoted AdAge article there is some skepticism around how much a company like Walmart can get out of underpaid wage slaves:

"It's really hard when you're a person making poverty-level wages, just had your health-care premiums raised 60%, and you can only get part-time hours, to be a good ambassador for the brand, no matter how much you love it," said Jennifer Stapleton, spokeswoman for Making Change at Walmart.

However I think that skepticism is misplaced, as the less a person has the more thankful they tend to be for the little bits they do have. Most people who have nothing do not realize how systems are engineered to screw them over.

It is only when you have free time to think & are not clouded by arbitrary short-term stress that you can ponder the bigger & more uncomfortable questions in life. As long as you don't consider those uncomfortable questions it is far easier to push anything, because you don't know any better.

"The entire web has become full of garbage. The web has become almost a digital Detroit." - Roger McNamee.

If Walmart's strategy works then this ultimately will be why Google's brand-only approach to search will fall flat on its face. If this is successful I would then expect Google to put out some public relations drivel about celebrating the diversity of the web & move away from brand in the next 2 or 3 years.

In the meantime, I expect Google to keep increasing search complexity such that it's prohibitively expensive to make & market a small independent commercial website. That will force many smaller companies to live inside the Google ecosystem, with Google ranking the Google-hosted pages/products/locations for those companies, so that they can serve ads against them and get a bigger slice of the revenues.

Google's ad network is far more profitable than even the lowest waged employee, as it doesn't need to be fed & is designed to be an agnostic & amoral yield optimization tool. And it is effective enough that the biggest retailers are now becoming ad networks.

Average products for average people - with ads everywhere.

Welcome to the WorldWideMart. ;)

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 Interesting Resources | Basic SEO Guide - SEO Voices

Interesting Resources

The resources below refer to sites that have very useful information about optimizing and marketing your site. Although there are thousands of sites with (free) SEO information, the selection below is a reflection of the major key players in the SEO industry.

SEOBook.com is a leading SEO blog by Aaron Wall covering the search space. It offers marketing tips, search analysis, and whatever random rants come to mind. Over 100 training modules, covering topics like: keyword research, link building, site architecture, website monetization, pay per click ads, tracking results, and more. And not to forget, a great members forum with years of experiences in the SEO/SEM world.

Google resources:

SEO services and Information:

  • SEO Nightmares: A site with information, explanations and tips about all SEO and web design practices which you better should avoid.

  • The 101 SEO/SEM Glossary
    All abbreviations, definitions and terms explained related to SEO, SEM and web design.

  • Bruce Clay, Internet business Consultants.
    His site offers accurate, in-depth information presented in a way that makes it really accessible to anyone interested in SEO, Bruce Clay is key player in the SEO en SEM business.

  • Search Engine Watch
    Provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines. Free newsletter!

  • Search Engine Guide
    Information about search engines, free articles

  • Webmaster Link Exchange – Free Web Link Exchange Directory. Where Webmasters go to trade links with other webmasters

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