In the online industry a bad economy doesn't hold back big deals

While the the health of the overall economy is still uncertain, the health of the online industry seems healthy when looked at through the prism of mergers and acquisitions.

* Mail.ru had a successful IPO in London selling $912 million worth of shares and the share increasing 30 % on day one. Behind Mail.ru is a who's who of international Internet investors (DST, Naspers, Tencent) and the company operates the largest Russian and several of the largest Eastern European online services in addition to holding stakes in Facebook, Zynga and GroupOn.

* Amazon is supposedly going to acquire Diapers.com for $540 million tomorrow Monday. That is its largest acquisition since the acquisition of Zappos for more than $900 million in the summer of 2009.

* Google's head of mergers and acquisitions says Google is open to doing more billion dollar acquisitions like YouTube and Doubleclick.

Small UI changes can make big opportunities become reality

Often it is the seemingly small changes at major online services that catch my attention. Like Facebook's small change of the photo, status update and check-in buttons from the previous use of icons for photos and check-ins and a text field for status updates in its iPhone application.

It likely is a test, but I would be highly surprised if this version doesn't drive significantly more check-ins. The combination of Facebook's massive reach, targeting based on check-in data (among other things) and Facebook's self-service system could make the local online advertising sales billion dollar market opportunity become reality.

The combination of great reach and a self-service system could allow Facebook to sell to small and medium-size local businesses in a cost-efficient way, which historically has been a problem for Yelp, Citysearch and other new local advertising companies (Groupon seemingly an exception to that rule).

The problem for local online ad sales (in addition to high sales costs) has been the lack of great products that a lot of people use. With check-ins and maps there are now (or at least soon) two strong products that allows for local advertising at scale.