Proximity

More US Consumers Choosing Smartphones as Apple Closes the Gap on Android

2012-02-10T17:24:00.002-05:00

January 18, 2012

from nielsenwire

According to the latest research from Nielsen, the high-profile launch of Apple’s iPhone 4S in the Fall had an enormous impact on the proportion of smartphone owners who chose an Apple iPhone. Among recent acquirers, meaning those who said they got a new device within the past three months, 44.5 percent of those surveyed in December said they chose an iPhone, compared to just 25.1 percent in October. Furthermore, 57 percent of new iPhone owners surveyed in December said they got an iPhone 4S.

Android continues to hold the lead among all smartphone users, with 46.3 percent of all smartphone owners surveyed in Q42011 reporting they have an Android-based mobile phone. As of Q42011, 46 percent of US mobile consumers had smartphones, and that figure is growing quickly. In fact, 60 percent of those who said they got a new device within the last three months chose a smartphone over a feature phone.

see Nielsen’s Mobile Media Report.

How Americans are Spending their Media Time… and Money

2012-02-10T17:08:00.001-05:00

February 9, 2012

from nielsenwire

Americans spend more than 33 hours per week watching video across the screens, according to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report. But how they’re consuming content—traditional TV and otherwise—is changing. Demonstrating that consumers are increasingly making Internet connectivity a priority, 75.3 percent pay for broadband Internet (up from 70.9% last year); 90.4 percent pay for cable, telephone company-provided TV or satellite. Homes with both paid TV and broadband increased 5.5 percent since last year.

Changes are afoot, however, as consumers seek out the entertainment option that makes the most sense for them. The number of homes subscribing to wired cable has decreased 4.1 percent in the past year at the same time that telephone company-provided and satellite TV have seen increases of 21.1 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively.

Broadcast-Only/Broadband Homes in Focus

Though less than 5 percent of TV households, homes with broadband Internet and free, broadcast TV are on the rise—growing 22.8 percent over last year. These households are also found to exhibit interesting video behaviors: they stream video twice as much as the general population and watch half as much TV.

Whether they’re cord-cutters or former broadcast-only homes that upgraded to Internet service, these homes represent a very small but growing group of U.S. consumers. Interestingly, roughly the same percentage of consumers in broadcast-only/broadband homes watch traditional TV, stream or use the Internet as in all cross-platform homes; the difference between these groups falls to time spent on these activities. Even broadcast-only/broadband homes spend the majority of their video time watching traditional TV: 122.6 minutes, compared to 11.2 for streaming on average each day.

Amazon and Viacom close to Web video deal

2012-02-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc is about to announce a Web video deal with Viacom Inc in what sources said was one of the last steps in a plan to launch a standalone subscription service to compete with Netflix Inc.

The online retailer will unveil the deal as soon as this week, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Viacom, which owns TV shows and movies from MTV Networks, Nickelodeon and Paramount Studios, would be the latest of several partners Amazon has made deals with for its Prime Instant Video service. So far, major studios such as CBS Corp, Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros, News Corp's Fox, Sony Corp, Comcast Corp's NBC Universal and Walt Disney Co have licensed programming to the retailer.

read the whole story

Nokia Goes All In with Windows Phone

2012-02-09T17:24:00.002-05:00

Nokia: We’ve nowhere to go but Windows Phone

Chris Davies, Feb 8th 2012

Nokia has reiterated that it has no second strategy should its partnership with Microsoft around Windows Phone fail, with VP Victor Saeijes insisting that”Plan B is that Plan A must succeed.” Although Nokia pushed out a Symbian update earlier this week, bringing its old platform up to speed with the latest Nokia Belle iteration, the only way forward is Windows Phone, Saeijes told Swedish paper Dagens Industri, even if that means playing catch-up in the smartphone industry.

read the whole post at Slash Gear

China Laces Up Its Chuck Taylors

2012-02-09T08:09:00.000-05:00

Chuck Taylor All Stars are common on the streets of Shanghai.
Xuan Zhihui, 62, a retiree from a state-owned factory, wears her daughters' hand-me-down sneakers, which are 15 years old. She says they're really comfortable.

from NPR

February 9, 2012

Stroll along a street in downtown Shanghai for very long and you're likely to run into someone wearing Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars. One recent afternoon a woman named Xu Jing, was heading back from lunch to her job at an ad company in a pair of raspberry-colored Chuck Taylors.

"They have a young image, upbeat and outdoorsy, sporty," said Xu, 27, explaining the appeal. "Young people with an artistic sense prefer Converse."

Xu was accompanied by Chen Xiaolei, a co-worker who owns three pairs of Chuck Taylor high-tops. "The shoes are pretty light, good looking, they go with skinny jeans," said Chen. "Nowadays, young people like these shoes because they're fashionable."
. . . .

Until relatively recently, Converse licensed its brand here to a Taiwanese company that marketed the shoes as sportswear. In 2007, Converse took the brand back and began emphasizing a more casual, youthful image.

Steve Parker, vice president and general manager for Converse Asia Pacific, says the company partnered with street artists and built on existing, influential customers like Yang. Converse underwrote a tour for PK-14 and another Chinese band, Queen Sea Big Shark.

"We put them on a bus. I think they traveled through nine different provinces. And it ended up in a big party in a show in Beijing right at the time of the Olympics," Parker says.

Social Commerce Summit

2012-02-07T17:07:00.000-05:00

About Social Commerce Summit

The melding of social media with digital commerce has opened an incredible breadth of opportunities for retailers and e-tailers, from catalyzing sales, to surfacing new populations and markets, to tracking the effectiveness of promotions and social strategy, and beyond. Yet social commerce comes with its own unique challenges. The market is crowded, noisy, and always changing.

Social Commerce Summit presents today's and tomorrow's best practices. You'll hear about emerging cutting-edge trends and established, mega-successful Fortune 500 strategies.

The agenda follows the purchase funnel from product discovery to click-and-buy, in sectors including consumer goods, social-good marketing, e-commerce, fashion, real-time deals, geo-local deals and offers, and more.

The one-day event takes place February 7, 2012, in New York City.

9:00am: Opening Remarks

Business Insider Intelligence: The Future Of Social Commerce
A special report from BI's research team, with market data about and insight into digital shopping, social media and their convergence
Henry Blodget, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, Business Insider

9:15am: The Brand Perspective

Keynote Interview: Social Commerce, Big Brands + Startups
How does a major retail brand leverage social media and interactivity, from early involvement to today? How does MSLO work with OpenSky? How has OpenSky scored mega-celebrities for its social commerce platform & what's next?
Henry Blodget, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, Business Insider
John Caplan, Founder & CEO, OpenSky
Lisa Gersh, Director, President & COO, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia

9:35am: Product Discovery + Demand Generation

From Blah, Blah, Blah To Ka-Ching! : Cracking The Product-Discovery Code Distinguishing your product in the roar of digital noise across many platforms is a major challenge. What's the best way to get someone's attention using social media-- and translate it into sales? What are the specific tips for different consumer use cases?
Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor, Business Insider
Katia Beauchamp, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Birchbox
Chris Bolte, VP of Demand Generation, @WalmartLabs
Brian Lee, Co-Founder & Chairman, ShoeDazzle; Co-Founder & Chairman, The Honest Company
Jason Ross, Co-Founder & CEO, JackThreads

10:00am: Product Discovery + Demand Generation

How We Used Social Marketing To Hit 1 Million Customers In 5 Months
Fab.com sprang onto the scene and suddenly became the "It" deals site for savvy shoppers. How'd they do it? And how will they keep up their incredible customer acquisition rate as they continue to scale?
Sheezan Bakali, Director of Marketing, Fab.com

10:25am: ROI

When Does Sharing Catalyze Sales?
"Going social" can be profitable, but it's up to sellers to figure out how. How can sellers track their efforts, effectively measure their impact, and plot the course for future strategy? When do fans, friends, check-ins, retweets, page- views and other metrics make a profit?
Moderator: Nicholas Carlson, Deputy Editor, Business Insider
Allyson Hugley, EVP Measurement & Analytics, Weber Shandwick
Kip Levin, EVP eCommerce, TicketMaster
Tim Mahlman, CRO, Klout
David Thomas, Director of Community & Social Strategy, Radian6

10:50am: The Brand Perspective

Revealed: The Low-Down On Social Moms Online
How does Babycenter leverage the power of online community? And balance the line between content, branding, and branded content?
Jim Edwards, Senior Editor, Business Insider
Tina Sharkey, Chairman & Global President, BabyCenter, a Johnson & Johnson Company

11:05am: Group Buying + Daily Deals; Content + Commerce

Interview: The Future Of Daily Deals + Content
Henry Blodget, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, Business Insider
Jonty Kelt, CEO, Group Commerce

11:30am: The Brand Perspective + ROI
How Social Ratings Drive Sales + Help Brands
Why would you want your customers posting reviews on your site that range from "heck yes" to "this stunk"? Because it's good for business. Learn how and why. What other social features should brands integrate onto their sites?Moderator: Julie Zeveloff, Editor, Business Insider
Erin Mulligan Nelson, CMO, Bazaarvoice (Former CMO Dell)
Johanna Murphy, VP eCommerce, Kate Spade

11:45am: Product Design + Strategy

The New Social Commerce: How Doing Good Is Good For the Bottom Line
During product development, how can you build in a social-good component that enhances the user's experience and generates more engagement and/or sales? What are best practices in using social media to promote social-good commerce?
Moderator: Arden Pennell, Program Director, Business Insider
Neil Blumenthal, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Warby Parker
Lincoln Brown, Co-Founder & CEO, SoJo Studios
Carol Cone, Global Vice Chairman, Edelman Business & Social Purpose

1:25pm: Group Buying/Daily Deals
Keynote Interview: The Future Of Daily Deals
Henry Blodget, CEO & Editor-in-Chief, Business Insider
Tim O’Shaughnessy, Co-Founder & CEO, LivingSocial

1:45pm: Content + Commerce

How Can Content Owners Leverage Social Commerce To Their Advantage?How can content owners add commerce without altering their content brand? What are the most effective tweaks to gain commerce revenue alongside content? When does it fit, and when are "readers / viewers" and "consumers" two different use cases?
Moderator: Julie Hansen, President & COO, Business Insider
Corby Fine, Sr. Director & GM, Audience Solutions & Business Development, Rogers Media
Tricia Han, GM Deals, DailyCandy
Ezra Kucharz, President, Local Digital Media, CBS
Rob Roy, VP & GM, eCommerce & Interactive Marketing, Time Warner Cable
Brian Sugar, Co-Founder & CEO, Sugar Inc.

2:15pm: Discovery + Demand Gen, ROI

Interview: The Inside Story On Gilt Groupe
How'd Gilt grow fast using social tactics? Do email, Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels drive adoption and purchase? What's most effective?
Julie Hansen, President & COO, Business Insider
Alexis Maybank, Founder & CMO, Gilt Groupe

2:45pm: ROI

Investing In Social Commerce
Where's the money in social-commerce startups? Which ideas will invent new marketplaces, and which will end up being also-rans? Will the big hits be on social platforms, or will they be stand-alone shops and services?
Moderator: Jay Yarow, Editor, Business Insider
Paul Lee, Partner, Lightbank
Adam Ludwin, Principal, RRE Ventures
Brian O’Malley, General Partner, Battery Ventures
Jon Teo, Managing Director, General Catalyst Partners

3:10pm: Group Buying + Daily Deals
Foursquare Meets Groupon: Should YOU Use Local Data In Your Commerce Strategy? The Facebook Beacon experiment showed that consumers don't always embrace the integration of social and commerce data. But what about local data? And daily deals? Hear from Yipit on things you need to consider when evaluating whether using local data will be a win for your business or publication
Vin Vacanti, CEO, Yipit

3:20pm: Product Design + Strategy

Direct Sales Go Social — And Then Virtual
How do you leverage the social networks of young, tech-savvy women to transform direct sales--then recreate the experience digitally? How can the power of in-person sales be replicated online? Will Avon 2.0 work?
Chantel Waterbury, Founder & CEO, Chloe + Isabel
3:30pm
Vendor Demo Power Half Hour
Daniel Caplin, VP Social Commerce, Cumulus Broadcasting
Jordan Franklin, Director of Social Strategy, Clickable
Jay Hallberg, Co-Founder & VP of Marketing, Spiceworks Inc.
Garth Holsinger, VP Global Sales & Business Development, Klout
Daphne Kwon, CEO, Expo Communications

4:20pm: Discovery And Demand Gen + The Future Of Social Commerce

"Collaborative Consumption": Buzzword Or The Next Big Thing?From AirBnB to Zaarly, emerging cos are seeking to connect buyers and sellers. eBay and Craigslist disrupted the marketplace in the 90s. Now we have Zaarly, where you can ask a stranger to bring you a latte and name your price, or Oodle, which brings the social layer into purchasing. Tech dudes from Ron Conway to Scott Heiferman call collaborative consumption the Next Big Thing. Is it?

Moderator: Alyson Shontell, Editor, Business Insider Craig Donato, CEO, Oodle
Bo Fishback, Co-Founder & CEO, Zaarly

4:35pm: Product Design + Strategy

What Does It Mean To Be A Social Business?
How can major companies leverage the opportunities of social media? How can social become part of SOP, rather than just an add-on? Hear case studies on businesses that successfully "went social."
Clara Shih, Co-Founder & CEO, Hearsay Social, Board Director, Starbucks
4:45pm: ROISecrets Of A Super Effective Social Channel: Email
Platforms such as Facebook aren't necessarily a bonanza for retailers, despite predictions. And while pundits have also predicted the death of email for years, it hasn't gone anywhere. And it can be an effective tool for powering social commerce. Learn how.
Neil Capel, Founder & CEO, Sailthru

4:55 ROI

Facebook: What Works, What Doesn't + What You Need To Know About TimelineHow does Facebook compares to other platforms? What will the new interface mean for retailers? What are best practices for selling through Facebook?
Moderator: Jim Edwards, Senior Editor, Business Insider
Afdhel Aziz, Brand Director, Digital & PR, Heineken USA
Gilberto Gil, eCommerce Marketing Manager, Swatch USA
Leslie Hall, President, ICED Media
Michael Lazerow, CEO, Buddy Media

Facebook Revenues Are Decelerating

2012-02-02T19:01:00.001-05:00

Mark Cashes Out at Last !!!

2012-02-02T11:34:00.000-05:00

FACEBOOK'S IPO FILING IS HERE

Form S-1 REGISTRATION STATEMENT: Facebook, Inc.

What will Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss do now?

Redbox vs. Netflix

2012-01-30T19:09:00.000-05:00

CHART OF THE DAY: Redbox, Not Netflix, Is The Nation's Largest DVD-Renter

Ask Siri

2012-01-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

Here's What Normal People Really Think About Siri

Netflix Rising

2012-01-25T17:17:00.000-05:00

NETFLIX STOCK EXPLODES AFTER IT BEATS EXPECTATIONS

According to Business Insider, these are the important take away points from the Netflix investor letter below:

Netflix expects Amazon to offer a standalone streaming service at monthly rate below Netflix.

Netflix thinks Hulu isn't a threat because it charges people and it throws in advertisements.

The biggest threat says Netflix is "TV Everywhere" like HBO GO. If popular cable channels figure out a smart streaming plan it's bad news for Netflix.

It predicts the future of TV, and it sounds cool! "Over the next few years, UIs will evolve in astounding ways, such as allowing viewers to watch eight simultaneous games on ESPN, color coding where the best action is in a given moment or allowing Olympics fans the ability to control their own slow-motion replays. A decade from now, choosing a linear feed from a broadcast grid of 200 channels will seem like using a rotary dial telephone."

The DVD business is dying: "While DVD members declined sharply over the last two quarters, the weekly rate of DVD cancellations has subsided from peak levels in September. Looking out across 2012, we expect continued attrition among our DVD members. Specifically, in Q1, we expect net losses of DVD members of approximately 1.5 million, with the sequential decline moderating in future quarters."

How Netflix will determine if its original programs are a success: "If “Lilyhammer” or “House of Cards” is popular enough on Netflix so that the fees we’ve paid for each are in-line with that of other equally-popular content on Netflix during the same time period, we’ll consider them a success."

Investor Letter Q4 2011

Helpless in Ontario

2012-01-23T08:19:00.000-05:00

RIM Posted This Video Of The New CEO Rambling About Why He Loves The Company

RIM'S CEOS ARE OUT!

SlideShare 2011 Trends

2012-01-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

SlideShare Zeitgeist 2011

View more presentations from Rashmi Sinha

Zeitgeist 2011 – a year of changes in presentation trends

TV Still Beats Web Video

2012-01-13T17:23:00.002-05:00

As Peter Kafka notes: "You Watch a Lot of Web Video. You Watch Way More TV."

from “State of the Media: Consumer Usage Reports 2011”

Microsoft Web TV

2012-01-12T13:08:00.002-05:00

Exclusive: Microsoft Web TV subscription plan on hold

(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp has put its talks with media companies about an online subscription service for TV shows and movies on hold, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer listens during a presentation
at the opening Microsoft keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show
opening in Las Vegas, January 9, 2012.

This article is worth reading for what it says about the online video competitive landscape:

The Web TV newcomers are all chasing Netflix, whose online video and DVD subscription service has grown to more than 23 million users in the United States and this week debuted in Britain.

Netflix's success has left the cable industry conflicted. While program makers welcome the big checks that online video partners offer, they also fear that in the long run cheaper online video services will cannibalize the cable TV subscriptions that generate the vast majority of their revenue and profits.

To avoid that outcome, programmers, under extra pressure from their cable and satellite TV distribution partners, have asked for costly, long-term commitments from potential online partners who want newer TV shows and movies.

Can Tumblr Make a Profit?

2012-01-11T16:31:00.001-05:00

Tumblr ended the year with 14 billion pageviews in the month of December,
a 5X increase from December 2010

All Quiet On The Tumblr Front, But Not The Back End: Here's What David Karp Has Brewing

from the interview

With a fresh infusion of $85 million, Tumblr has a lot to prove in 2012. For one, it needs to prove it can turn a profit.

Karp has a few ideas. Currently two dozen designers have been creating and selling Tumblr templates on its marketplace. Karp says the company is seeing "really meaningful revenue" even though the marketplace isn't publicly open to developers yet. "It's not even an up-to-date product," says Karp. "Our designers are always complaining about how old the marketplace tools are. But some of them are making so much money as Tumblr designers that they've been able to quit their jobs. Some of them are making hundreds of thousands of dollars.

While Karp wouldn't call it a freemium model, he said he'd like to create a platform where users can pay for enhanced features, like templates, and maybe even open an app-like store so users can make, share and profit from their own Tumblr innovations. Karp is very opposed to tacky banner ads. But he's very interested in profitable creative solutions.

Pitch or Spec?

2012-01-11T16:15:00.002-05:00

Prof. Hong Luo from the Harvard Business School provides a compelling answer to a really critical question.

When to Sell Your Idea: Theory and Evidence from the Movie Industry

How completely should an innovator develop his idea before selling it? HBS assistant professor Hong Luo addresses this question in a theoretical framework that links the sales stage to the innovator's "observable quality." She uses the context of Hollywood movie script writing-looking at whether it's better to pitch the mere idea for a film or to write the entire screenplay and then try to sell it "on spec." Key concepts include:
Pitching an idea before a script is written can be advantageous in that it affords the opportunity to get early feedback from a prospective buyer, and saves time for the writer if the buyer thinks the idea is worthless. However, pitching comes with the risk of expropriation.
Lesser-known, inexperienced writers are excluded from the market for pitches, forcing them to either fully develop the idea or drop it entirely.
Writers who have a choice in the matter tend to sell their better ideas on spec-turning them into fully-formed screenplays before introducing them to prospective buyers. But they will pitch their worse ideas at an early stage.

download the whole paper

The Future of Web-Based Apps

2012-01-10T17:18:00.001-05:00

Twitter Photo-Sharing Went Through the Roof After Twitter Started Hosting Images

2012-01-10T16:55:00.000-05:00

Twitter Photo-Sharing Went Through the Roof After Twitter Started Hosting Images

Midway through last year, Twitter started offering its users a built-in service for sharing images. As might have been anticipated, this had a deep impact on third-party image hosts like Twitpic and Yfrog, which had previously dominated Twitter photo-sharing.

But even more significant was the tremendous 2011 jump in photo-sharing on Twitter, period.

After seeing some month-to-month data pulls, we asked the folks at social search engine Topsy to look at Twitter photo-sharing trends over the course of the full year.

The number of photos shared on Twitter grew 421 percent over the course of 2011, by Topsy’s count. In December, Twitter users shared 58.4 million photos.

read the rest of the post

Google Embeds Social Directly Into Search

2012-01-10T16:53:00.005-05:00

Google Embeds Social Directly Into Search (But by Social, It Means Google+)

Google today will start highlighting private social network content in search results by default for logged-in users. It will also displace some prominent screen space normally reserved for advertising, in order to promote relevant social networking profiles.

It’s significant for the search giant to embrace social networking so fully. But there’s a caveat. Only one social network is included: Google+.

To put this in context: The content created by users of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks is mostly inaccessible to search — due to privacy settings, limited real-time APIs and competitive reasons. Posts on social networks basically go into a black hole, save for a few efforts like Bing’s Facebook integration.

The new Google search features don’t fix any of that. What they do is make social content from Google+ more prominent in Google search.

By default, Google search results pages will show personal content
when it's available for logged-in users.

read the rest of the post

see also:

Google’s Plans to Promote Google+ in Search Get a Poor Reception

iOS Market Share Up From 26% In Q3 To 43% In Oct/Nov 2011

2012-01-10T13:16:00.002-05:00

According to a new report from research firm NPD, iOS’s U.S. market share (by sales) jumped from 26% in the third quarter of 2011 to 43% by October and November. Android, however, came out on top, with 47% market share during those two months, down from 60% in Q3.

Says NPD, over the course of 2011, the smartphone battle saw iOS and Android distancing themselves from the competition, turning it into “a two-horse race.”

Overall, smartphone sales continue to grow, NPD says, and accounted for two out of every three handsets sold in October/November 2011. For comparison purposes, that’s up from 50% in Q4 2010.

read the whole post

Google TV Signs Up TV Makers

2012-01-10T13:11:00.001-05:00

Will Robert Kyncl and YouTube Revolutionize Television?

2012-01-09T20:19:00.000-05:00

On TV, airtime is a scarce resource; on YouTube, it’s infinite.

On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns. He is the architect of the single largest cultural transformation in YouTube’s seven-year history. Wielding a black Magic Marker, he charted the big bang of channel expansion and audience fragmentation that has propelled television history so far, from the age of the three networks, each with a mass audience, to the hundreds of cable channels, each serving a niche audience—twenty-four-hour news, food, sports, weather, music—and on to the dawning age of Internet video, bringing channels by the tens of thousands. “People went from broad to narrow,” he said, “and we think they will continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.”

Read the whole article at The New Yortker.

DIY Payment App

2012-01-06T16:53:00.000-05:00

Free Spotify Music is Going To End Soon

2012-01-06T16:52:00.000-05:00

Apple trying to stop sale of Steve Jobs action figure

2012-01-06T12:53:00.004-05:00

from AppleInsider

Apple's legal team has set its sights on preventing a new lifelike figurine, designed to look like late Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, from being sold for $99.

The 12-inch figurine was set for release in February from Chinese company Icons, but according to The Telegraph, Apple has issued a "legal challenge." Lawyers from Apple have reportedly threatened to sue the toy maker if they proceed with their plans to sell the action figure.

The retail price of the plastic doll is $99, though reseller prices through eBay have been around $135. The figurine comes with a pair of black socks, glasses, a leather belt, a bar stool, a "One More Thing" backdrop, and two apples, with a bite taken out of one of them.

"The legal wrangle is over the likeness of the doll to the late Apple founder, the rights of which the company claims it owns," the report said. "Apple reportedly stipulates in a letter to the Chinese manufacturer that any toy resembles the technology company's logo, person's name, appearance, or likeness of its products is a criminal offence."

The latest spat isn't the first time Apple's legal team has gotten involved in a figurine depicting Jobs. In December of 2010, Apple shut down sales of a miniature statue depicting Jobs holding an iPhone and standing atop an Apple logo.

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Television

2012-01-06T12:31:00.000-05:00

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Television

The Super Bowl and American Idol continue to capture the attention of U.S. TV viewers. According to Nielsen’s Top 10s, Super Bowl XLV between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers was the top individual telecast of 2011 with 111 million viewers, making it the most-watched telecast of all-time. FOX’s American Idol remains the top primetime program, a spot it’s held since its fifth season in 2007.

Meanwhile, the value of timeshifted viewing was evident in 2011 as select programs nearly doubled their audience when factoring in viewing from sources such as DVR, video-on-demand and StartOver. Newcomer FX’s American Horror Story gained the highest audience share through timeshifted viewing in 2011.

Among the most engaging programs of 2011, NBC’s Chuck had the majority of online buzz with a 54 percent share of mentions, according to NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company.

Top 10 TV Programs – Single Telecast
Rank	Telecast	Originator	Date Aired	Persons 2+ Rating	Total Viewers (000)
1	FOX Super Bowl XLV	FOX	2/6/2011	37.7	111,041
2	FOX Super Bowl XLV Kickoff	FOX	2/6/2011	23.6	69,666
3	FOX Super Bowl Post Game	FOX	2/6/2011	22.4	66,030
4	AFC Championship on CBS	CBS	1/23/2011	18.6	54,850
5	FOX NFC Championship	FOX	1/23/2011	17.6	51,884
6	AFC Divisional Playoff-SU	CBS	1/16/2011	14.8	43,463
7	AFC Championship Pre-Kick on CBS	CBS	1/23/2011	13.4	39,473
8	FOX NFC Wild Card Game	FOX	1/9/2011	13.3	39,274
9	Academy Awards	ABC	2/27/2011	12.9	37,922
10	FOX Super Bowl Pre	FOX	2/6/2011	11.9	35,136
Source: Nielsen Data from January 1, 2011 – November 27, 2011. English- and Spanish-language telecasts on Broadcast and Cable. Persons 2+ estimates include Live and Same Day timeshifted viewing. Excludes telecasts under 5 minutes in duration. Read as: Super Bowl XLV on Fox averaged 111 million viewers (37.7% of U.S. TV viewers aged 2 years and older).

Top 10 Primetime TV Programs – Regularly Scheduled
Rank	Program	Originator	Persons 2+ Rating	Total Viewers (000)
1	American Idol-Wednesday	FOX	8.1	23,946
2	American Idol-Thursday	FOX	7.5	22,009
3	NBC Sunday Night Football	NBC	7.1	20,547
4	Dancing with The Stars	ABC	6.7	19,576
5	Dancing w/ Stars Results	ABC	5.8	16,856
6	Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick	NBC	5.5	15,918
7	NCIS	CBS	5.2	15,174
8	NFL Regular Season L	ESPN	4.5	13,058
9	The OT	FOX	4.4	12,877
10	NCIS: Los Angeles	CBS	4.3	12,635
Source: Nielsen Data from January 1, 2011 – November 27, 2011. Primetime English- and Spanish-language programs on Broadcast and Cable. Persons 2+ estimates include Live and Same Day timeshifted viewing. Excludes programs with less than 4 telecasts and those under 5 minutes in duration. Read as: American Idol-Wednesday on Fox averaged 23.9 million viewers (8.1% of U.S. TV viewers aged 2 years and older).

Top 10 Timeshifted Primetime TV Programs
Rank	Program	Originator	% Increase in Viewers from Timeshifted Viewing
1	American Horror Story	FX	95.3
2	Covert Affairs	USA	95.1
3	Suits	USA	94.5
4	Franklin & Bash	TNT	92.0
5	Psych	USA	90.3
6	Sons of Anarchy	FX	85.8
7	White Collar	USA	85.6
8	Justified	FX	83.9
9	Fringe	FOX	80.3
10	The Glades	AEN	78.8
Source: Nielsen Data from January 1, 2011 – November 13, 2011. Regularly scheduled English- and Spanish-language programs on Broadcast and Cable. Percent increase in Persons 2+ viewership is based on difference between Live+7 and Live. A program must reach at least a 1.0 Live+7 P2+ Rating and have at least 4 telecasts. Read as: 95 percent more viewers (persons aged 2 years and older) watched American Horror Story on FX via timeshifted viewing than Live

Top 10 Most Engaging Primetime Television Programs
Rank	Program	Network	Genre	Share of Buzz Volume
1	Grimm	NBC	Drama/Adventure	2%
2	Suburgatory	ABC	Situation Comedy	4%
3	Desperate Housewives	ABC	Drama/Adventure	16%
4	Parenthood	NBC	Drama/Adventure	4%
5	Royal Pains	USA	Drama/Adventure	2%
6	Chuck	NBC	Drama/Adventure	54%
7	Revenge	ABC	Drama/Adventure	7%
8	White Collar	USA	Drama/Adventure	6%
9	Rescue Me	FX	Drama/Adventure	2%
10	Covert Affairs	USA	Drama/Adventure	3%
Source: Nielsen and NM Incite Nielsen program engagement Data from January 1 – December 5, 2011. Program Engagement is the percentage of viewers who can recall within 24 hours the network content they were exposed to during the normal course of viewing TV. Includes regularly scheduled entertainment series with at least three telecasts, original airings and repeats. Networks included: A&E, ABC, BRVO, CBS, CMDY, CW, DSC, ESPN, FOOD, FOX, FX, HGTV, HIST, LIFE, MTV, NBC, NICK, SPEED, SYFY, TBS, TLC, TNT, USA, VH1 NM Incite buzz data from January 1 – December 18, 2011. Share of buzz volume among top 10 most engaging primetime programs only

Top 10 Primetime TV Programs – Regularly Scheduled

Top U.S. Web Brands

2012-01-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

November 2011 – Top U.S. Web Brands (Nielsen)

During November 2011, Google was the most-visited Web brand with 174.3 million unique U.S. visitors. The list of Top Brands remained the same as the month before, with the Amazon overtaking Wikipedia as the 8th ranked site by total audience in November, reflecting greater consumer activity during the busy holiday shopping season.

Top 10 Web Brands for November 2011 (U.S., Total)
Rank	Brand	Total Internet Audience (000)	Time per Person (hh:mm:ss)
1	Google	174,314	1:44:51
2	Facebook	156,247	6:59:20
3	Yahoo!	145,406	2:06:30*
4	MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	130,896	1:32:49
5	YouTube	127,004	1:36:37
6	Microsoft	98,121	0:44:31
7	AOL Media Network	87,005	2:56:06
8	Amazon	84,233	0:42:14
9	Wikipedia	79,688	0:18:42
10	Apple	74,793	1:07:03
Read as: During November 2011, 174.3 million unique U.S. people visited Google’s websites. Source: Nielsen * - Yahoo! duration data shows an artificial decrease for May – November 2011 and does not reflect the activity on these sites.

Overall 213 million Americans were active online in November 2011, and Nielsen estimated that over 274 million Americans were connected to the Internet.

Average U.S. Internet Usage for November 2011
Metrics	Total
Sessions/Visits per Person	63
Domains Visited per Person	98
Web Page Views per Person	2911
Duration of a Web Page viewed	00:01:01
Online Time per Person	29:02:30
# of People Who Went Online	213,285,000
# of People who had Internet access	274,404,664
Read as: 213 million Americans were active online during November 2011. Source: Nielsen

Top U.S. Online Destinations for Video

2012-01-06T12:29:00.001-05:00

November 2011: Top U.S. Online Destinations for Video (Nielsen)

During November 2011, there were 166.9 million unique U.S. video viewers who streamed almost 22 billion videos and spent more than 5 hours on average watching online video.

Overall Online Video Usage (U.S.)
	Nov-11
Unique Viewers	166,937,000
Total Streams	21,936,751,000
Streams per Viewer	131.4
Time per Viewer (hh:mm)	5:23
Source: Nielsen

Top Online Video Destinations by Unique Viewers (November 2011, U.S.)
Video Brand	Unique Viewers (000)
YouTube	130,775
VEVO	42,729
Yahoo!	34,383
Facebook	30,255
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	24,612
AOL Media Network	22,023
Hulu	20,834
The CollegeHumor Network	20,570
ESPN Digital Network	17,864
CNN Digital Network	10,569
Source: Nielsen Read as: During November 2011, 130 million unique U.S. viewers watched YouTube video content

Top Online Video Destinations by Total Streams (000) (November 2011, U.S.)
Video Brand	Total Streams (000)
YouTube	13,436,002
Hulu	819,544
VEVO	535,951
AOL Media Network	439,120
Yahoo!	270,422
Netflix	260,272
Cincast Digital Entertainment Websites	237,427
ESPN Digital Network	229,966
MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	229,002
Livestream	186,162
Source: Nielsen Read as: During November 2011, 13 billion videos were streamed on YouTube

Top Online Video Destinations by Time per Viewer (November 2011, U.S.) / 250K Unique Viewer Minimum
Video Brand	Time per Viewer (hh:mm)
Netflix	10:43
Hulu	3:11
GorillaVid	3:11
YouTube	3:07
Justin.TV	3:00
Celeb Junkies	2:51
Livestream	2:38
Megavideo	2:31
Cwtv.com	1:57
Tudou.com	1:18
Source: Nielsen Read as: During November 2011, Netflix video viewers in the U.S. spent an average of 10 hours, 43 minutes watching video content on Netflix

Consumer Media Usage Across TV, Online, Mobile and Social

2012-01-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

Report: Consumer Media Usage Across TV, Online, Mobile and Social

Almost one in three U.S. TV households – 35.9 million – owns four or more televisions, according to a new report on media usage from Nielsen. Across the ever-changing U.S. media landscape, TV maintains its stronghold as the most popular device, with 290 million Americans and 114.7 households owning at least one. In contrast, 211 million Americans are online and 116 million (ages 13+) access the mobile Web.

For more insights on usage and trends across TV, mobile, online, and social media download Nielsen’s State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report.

What one B'More radio station is doing to attract listeners

2012-01-04T20:51:00.000-05:00

Want Radio Play? Here’s What You Gotta Do

Your song must meet the following criteria to be featured on 92Q:

1: Register with The Library of Congress
2: Sign Up with ASCAP or BMI
3: Get Song Encoded with Broadcast Data System (BDS) or Media Base
4: Song must be Mastered and Radio Edited!
5: Call (410) 332-8200 Mondays from 1-3pm ONLY to schedule a meeting with us!

***DISCLAIMER: Following the aforementioned steps DO NOT guarantee radio play. This simply guarantees a meeting with a station music representative. The goal of these steps is to educate you on how you should approach the music industry when it comes to getting air play.

Gaga Does Harvard!!

2012-01-04T15:04:00.000-05:00

from Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, 2011 Top 10 stories:

HBS Cases: Lady Gaga

What goes into creating the world's largest pop star? Before her fame hit, Lady Gaga's manager faced decisions that could have derailed the performer's career. A new case by Associate Professor Anita Elberse examines the strategic marketing choices that instead created a global brand. Key concepts include:

In 2009, rapper Kanye West canceled plans to coheadline a big arena tour with Lady Gaga, just weeks before launch.

The case discusses the pros and cons of possible next steps for team Gaga: continue the arena tour without West, design a solo tour with smaller venues, or cancel plans to tour entirely.

Her hands-on approach to social media helped cement a bond between Lady Gaga and her fans.

For entertainment executives reflecting on how the digital age is changing the ways they market their clients, Lady Gaga might represent a winning strategy from which to learn, Elberse believes. As Interscope's Vice Chairman Steve Berman observes in the case:

"[Lady Gaga] could be a chief marketing officer for a big corporation, because she understands the brand, and how important it is to stand by that brand."

SoundCloud Just Raised A Monster $50 Million Round

2012-01-03T12:59:00.001-05:00

SoundCloud Just Raised A Monster $50 Million Round And Mary Meeker Is On Board:

Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is joining SoundCloud's board of advisors after her firm led a monster $50 million round in the music sharing service, TechCrunch reports.

The round values SoundCloud at $200 million, with GGV capital also participating in the round, according to the site.

SoundCloud is basically the YouTube for sound and music. You record sounds — music, speech or anything like that — and upload it to SoundCloud. It then crunches the sound and gives it a visual waveform component and lets you share it with your friends.

You can add a comment that will show up at a specific time in the sound file, making it useful for collaborative sound production.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:

Here's A Sneak Peek At Netflix's First Big Bet On Original Programming

2012-01-03T12:59:00.000-05:00

Here's A Sneak Peek At Netflix's First Big Bet On Original Programming (NFLX):

Netflix has been talking up their new original programming quite a bit, and now they've actually released some footage.

"Lilyhammer" tells the story of an East Coast mobster, played by "The Sopranos" actor Steven Van Zandt, who's relocated to a small town in Norway as part of the witness protection program.

Unlike most TV shows, you'll be able to see all eight episodes of "Lilyhammer" at once — Netflix is putting the whole series online February 6.

This seems to be a risky strategy: shows often build buzz over the course of the season, especially with a new series, and if "Lilyhammer" doesn't catch on immediately it could have a hard time building viewership.

Netflix might be counting on a viral audience, with subscribers passing it between each other and telling their friends they need to see it. If that's the case, it had better be good.

Please follow SAI: Media on Twitter and Facebook.
Join the conversation about this story »
See Also:

Worldwide Online Music Revenue from End-User Spending Is on Pace to Total $6.3 Billion in 2011

2012-01-03T00:12:00.000-05:00

Gartner Says Worldwide Online Music Revenue from End-User Spending Is on Pace to Total $6.3 Billion in 2011

Online Music Subscription Services Will be Main Growth Sector in Evolving Market

STAMFORD, Conn., November 8, 2011

Worldwide online music revenue from end-user spending is on pace to total $6.3 billion in 2011, up from $5.9 billion in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. Online music revenue is forecast to reach $6.8 billion in 2012, and grow to $7.7 billion in 2015. By comparison, consumer spending on physical music (CDs and LPs) is expected to slide from approximately $15 billion in 2010 to about $10 billion in 2015.

“As consumers opt for connected devices — media tablets, smartphones and connected media players — across world regions, their desire for access to and consumption of music and content is growing as well,” said Mike McGuire, research vice president at Gartner. “Music labels, artists, publishers and new distribution intermediaries are developing new business models to address consumers’ changing behavior.

“The music industry was the first media sector to feel the full impact of two major forces — the Internet and technology-empowered consumers. It has staggered through the first decade of the 21st century, and entered the second bedraggled financially and facing a powerful set of intermediaries, which are creating borderless global ecosystems that defy the industry’s previous notions of control and monetization. The primary stakeholders in the music industry are facing wrenching changes and a somewhat uncertain future. However, the next four to five years portend solid growth.”

In the past 10 years, CD sales, the largest revenue stream for the industry, have eroded, while the online music revenue share is rapidly increasing. Digital downloads and streaming music services — referred to as subscription services — are the clear drivers in the online music industry for the coming years. Gartner estimates that subscription services will account for nearly one-third (29 percent) of end-user online music spending in 2015 (see Table 1).

Table 1. Online Music End-User Spending by Type of Service, Worldwide, 2008-2015 (Millions of Dollars)

	2011	2012	2015
Subscription Services	532.1	808.9	2,218.4
Download Services	3,629.8	3,847.4	4,050.3
Personalization Services	2,172.8	2,141.2	1,460.9
Total	6,334.7	6,797.6	7,729.6

Source: Gartner (October 2011)

As the shift from physical to digital music content quickens across the world, different regions are at different stages. Online music in North America is maturing, so the double-digit growth rates will be harder to maintain, and analysts expect to see solid, but flat, growth over the next five years. Western Europe, Asia/Pacific and Japan will see similar growth, while the highest growth rates will be in regions such as Latin America and the Middle East and Africa, which have not historically been strong markets for paying for tracks or albums from online services or stores.

As online distribution revenue starts to overtake physical revenue, which will happen beyond Gartner’s forecast to 2015, Gartner analysts said stakeholders in the music industry will continue to realign their businesses to maintain their places in the value chain. Consumers are likely to continue to take advantage of the applications, devices and services that provide them with multiple ways of discovering, consuming and communicating about music. As more music-related transactions, such as concert ticket sales and merchandise, have moved online, online music services, downloads or subscription services will have to find ways to make those related transactions available to their customers.

Mr. McGuire said the key issue that will affect the fortunes of many stakeholders in the music industry is how each sector addresses consumer data (specifically their behavior patterns), and how consumers find and share data about music and information. This issue will likely remain a point of contention among labels and artists and the online music services. Stakeholders will need to agree to broadly beneficial standards, such as extensions of OpenID, to minimize the number of times a consumer has to proffer an ID/password for multiple social media tools.

“For music labels, artists and publishers, challenges abound,” Mr. McGuire said. “However, there remain real opportunities to reinvent the business based on consumers who are adopting connected devices and who are showing they will pay for content in multiple ways. These sorts of changes offer the potential for many new types of service and business models aimed at allowing music fans to manage and access their music libraries while also integrating social media and content payment options.

“In particular, communications service providers (CSPs) should focus business development investigations into the potential for providing managed services options — such as cloud storage — as part of their consumer-facing services. However, CSPs must balance these potential opportunities with a careful examination of how any deployment addresses consumer concerns over privacy and ‘net neutrality’ issues,” said Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report “Media IAS Online Music Forecast, 2011-2015: Social Media, Subscriptions and the Cloud”

The Content Industry Strikes Back

2012-01-02T19:17:00.000-05:00

What's Coming In 2012: The Content Industry Strikes Back:

This is the fourth in a series of posts this week that will highlight key people, companies and trends to watch in 2012 in the sectors we cover most, from publishing to legal, and from mobile to advertising.

Every so often, a major rule change alters how a game is played—think of basketball’s introduction of the shot clock or MLB’s decision to lower the pitcher’s mound. Next year, content owners will keep pushing to obtain a game-changing rule of their own, one they hope will shift the laws governing the digital economy in their favor. Here’s an overview plus more of what’s happening on the legal front in 2012.

SOPA and the Siege on Safe Harbors

The online content industry is shaped by a 1998 set of rules called the DMCA that is supposed to strike a balance between protecting intellectual property and encouraging online commerce and creativity. But content owners say the balance has become unfair and that other players in the digital space—web hosts, search companies, payment processors, etc—should assume more responsibility in protecting brands and IP rights.

In 2011, content owners took a double-barreled approach to changing the balance. This involved pursuing court appeals to erode so-called ‘safe harbors’ while at the same time attempting to push through a new law called the Stop Online Piracy Act that would effectively tear up the 1998 rules. The content owners came up short this December after opponents bottled SOPA up in committee and a California court confirmed that video-sharing site Veoh did not have to actively police its users.

But 2011 was just the opening act. Content owners are also placing their hopes on the ongoing YouTube-Viacom (NYSE: VIA) appeal (a decision is expected any day) that has the potential to tee up an eventual Supreme Court review of how different businesses must police unauthorized online content. As for SOPA, the bill’s bipartisan backing is eroding quickly in response to warnings from both liberal and conservative thought leaders about its potential consequences. But SOPA supporters have vowed they will pass it all the same in early 2012.

The bottom line is that content owners appear determined to deploy major dollars both in Congress and in the courts this year until they can bend existing safe harbor rules in their favor.

read the whole post

On This Whole “Web Is Dead” Meme

2012-01-02T19:10:00.000-05:00

On This Whole “Web Is Dead” Meme:
The Web is dead again, at least, according to a widely covered speech by Forrester Research’s George Colony.

Speaking at Le Web last week, Colony claimed that the HTML web is a poorly architected half step in the next, obvious progression of platforms: a hybrid between what we’ve come to know as the Web and the crippled chicletized place I’ve been calling AppWorld. In a stroke of nomenclature insight, Colony calls this new platform the App-Internet.

Colony argues that, unlike apps, the Web doesn’t leverage the processing and storage power of edge devices (like the iPad or a smartphone, for example. Or, say, an old school computer, like the one I’m using right now to write this post.)

read the whole post

Does Verizon's Cable Deal Spell Death of FiOS Expansion?

2012-01-02T19:07:00.000-05:00

Does Verizon's Cable Deal Spell Death of FiOS Expansion? - The New York Times Certainly Seems to Think So:

For more than a year we've noted that with the exception of markets that have signed franchise obligations (New York, Washington DC, Philadelphia), Verizon's fiber to the home FiOS build is essentially over. The company had previously stated that they wanted to ramp up user penetration in deployed markets to somewhere around 40% before continuing the build -- if they continue the build at all. Verizon's been selling off older DSL networks, and with roughly 50% of their subscribers still on DSL, there's absolutely no indication that's going to change anytime soon for those users.

read the whole post

Vevo by the numbers

2012-01-02T18:59:00.000-05:00

Vevo by the numbers: 3.7B views, $100M royalties:

GigaOM

Vevo clocked 3.6 billion video views globally in October and is expected to have reached 3.7 billion views worldwide in November, the major label-owned music video platform announced today. In December 2009, that number was at 341 million views.

Vevo also was able to achieve significant growth within the U.S. as well as on mobile platforms, but all those music videos didn’t come cheap. Here are some key metrics for the platform:

In the U.S. alone, Vevo delivered 827 million video streams to 57 million unique viewers in October.

The average Vevo viewer watches 14.5 videos on the site a month, spending 66 minutes to do so.

Vevo’s mobile apps have been downloaded more than 13 million times.

Vevo had 3.9 million active users for its mobile apps in October, with Android being the platform with the most engagement. Mobile viewers spent 55 minutes on average with the apps in October.

Vevo’s catalog includes more than 300 episodes of original music programming, which have been watched around 200 million times.

Vevo now has a staff of more than 120 people.

The company has paid more than $100 million in royalties to artists, labels and publishers, according to a report from the Los Angeles Times.

The viral video is dead. Long live the viral video!

2012-01-02T18:58:00.000-05:00

The viral video is dead. Long live the viral video!

GigaOM

So take a look at the list of the top 10 independent videos on YouTube over the past year, and what do you see? Rebecca Black, Nyan Cat and … what? Yes, there are tons of people who watched those talking babies. And yes, that mom cat hugging its baby sure is cute. But they didn’t exactly invade the cultural zeitgeist in the way that memes of the past have.

Consider Pork and Beans. Back in 2008, Weezer released the following video, incorporating some of the site’s top viral sensations … and predictably going viral itself.

read the whole post

2012: Rise Of Metrics, End Of Click-Through Rates

2012-01-02T18:57:00.000-05:00

2012: Rise Of Metrics, End Of Click-Through Rates:

Metrics and measurement will become a major tool in 2012 for advertisers looking to quantify campaigns. Industry execs have been talking about it for years, but Solve Media CEO and co-founder Ari Jacoby believes the movement will begin to materialize next year.

read the whole post

Will 2012 be the year of hypermedia?

2012-01-02T18:52:00.000-05:00

Will 2012 be the year of hypermedia?:

Andy Carvin became synonymous with a new form of media curation in 2011, retweeting first-hand accounts of the revolutions in Egypt and its surrounding countries to his tens of thousands of followers. A small group of media visionaries is now working to ensure that the next Andy Carvin won’t be restricted to 140 characters.

The hypermedia movement, spearheaded by people like HTML5 developer Mark Boas and the Mozilla Foundation’s Ben Moskowitz, wants to make the remix and curation of audio and video sources as easy as Carvin’s countless retweets. The end goal is that “someone with a laptop in a coffee shop can do a very compelling news report,” Moskowitz told me a few days ago during a phone call with me and Boas.

Text as the ultimate meta-data

The idea behind hypermedia is as simple as it is compelling: More and more media publishers are providing closed captions for video content online – a move that is both prompted by SEO strategy as well as increased pressure to make web video accessible. And in the audio space, radio networks like NPR have long had transcripts of their recordings. Boas and others simply view this text as meta-data that points to specific pieces of a recording.

The Hyperaudio Pad doesn't look like an audio editor at all - and that may be a good thing.

What if there was an application, Boas asked in a blog post earlier this year, that would help compile new videos or audio recordings based on the remix of this kind of meta-data? “Audio authoring tools and video authoring tools can be quite complex,” he argued. Boas’ app on the other hand, which he has been calling Hyperaudio Pad, could look as simple as a text editor. Just copy captions from a few sources into the same document, and the program will automatically compile an audio recording. (Check out a screencast of the Hyperaudio Pad.)

The Hyperaudio Pad is so far not much more than a simple hack, and Boas and his partners in crime don’t even have a website yet, opting instead to discuss their ideas via a Google Group. But the hypermedia idea has been brewing for a while.

read the whole post

The Threat And Opportunity Of Mobile: How Physical Retailers Can Fight Back Against Amazon

2012-01-02T18:47:00.000-05:00

The Threat And Opportunity Of Mobile: How Physical Retailers Can Fight Back Against Amazon:

As online retail sales continue to soar, brick and mortar stores are seeing margins dissipate. Online holiday sales are expected to grow 15 percent to $37.6 billion this season while retail sales in physical stores are only expected to increase by 3.8 percent to $469.1 billion. Best Buy recently reported a 29 percent drop in profits because of discounts and sales of top grossing electronics. The fact is that the electronics retailer was probably forced into offering deeply discounted deals in order to compete with e-commerce giant Amazon. And it doesn’t help that Amazon is now offering discounts to consumers on any product purchased via its price comparison mobile app, another huge blow to physical retailers.

Brick and mortar retailers need to figure out a way to compete with Amazon and other e-commerce giants that doesn’t eat into margins. Deals and coupons simply aren’t enought. And as former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson has said, retail isn’t broken, stores are. So how are retail stores going to survive? While mobile may be the technology e-commerce companies are using to jab physical stores, it is also the technology that may save these stores. Personalization and data are the two key factors that could save retail stores; and the vehicle by which these technologies can be utilized is via the mobile phone.

read the whole post

Stanford Law Review: SOPA Unconstitutional, Would Break The Internet

2012-01-02T18:45:00.001-05:00

Stanford Law Review: SOPA Unconstitutional, Would Break The Internet:

The Stanford Law Review has posted a concise and informed takedown of SOPA and PROTECT-IP, the bills currently creeping their way towards votes in their respective legislative bodies. They make many of the same objections I brought up in my article Kill Switch, but with fewer words and more authority.

The piece was authored by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post — from Stanford, Elon, and Temple Universities respectively — and touches on a few finer legal matters, such as the acts’ nullification of due process and the questionable constitutionality of the whole thing.

read the whole post

Apps Are Media

2012-01-02T18:45:00.000-05:00

Apps Are Media:

Apps have taken over the world. If you doubt that just take a look at this app map by Horace Dediu at Asymco which shows the 123 countries in the world where iPhones are available. Of course, anywhere you can get an iPhone, you can get an iPhone app. Like the Web, apps are distributed globally.

But when it comes to “media” like books, music, and movies, the distribution is much more limited on digital devices. Again, only looking at Apple, Dediu counts only 51 countries where music is available through the iTunes store, and only 6 countries where TV shows are available (see map below). My first reaction is that Apple really needs to broaden its licensing efforts internationally. But remember, iTunes started going international in 2004, and there are still more countries where you can get only apps (72) than both music and apps.

read the whole post

Facebook to Start Placing Ads in User News Feeds in January

2012-01-02T18:34:00.000-05:00

Facebook to Start Placing Ads in User News Feeds in January:

Sponsored stories are Facebook's most buzzed-about ad product and carry the promise of high rates because they have the built-in endorsement of a friend.

read the whole post

Why Marketer Love for QR Codes Is Not Shared by Consumers

2012-01-02T18:33:00.000-05:00

Why Marketer Love for QR Codes Is Not Shared by Consumers:

Quick-response codes are everywhere these days. But consumers are not nearly as excited about QR codes as marketers are.

read the whole post

Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet In China

2011-12-30T19:00:00.000-05:00

Since everyone is passing around those infographics about things that happen on the internet every 60 second, a Chinese site 17Startup made their own version of things that happen on the internet in China.

China and the internet, of course, may be the two hottest markets of the era.
This infographic was translated by PennOlsen (via Ray Kwong):

Read more at Business Insider

Google +1 Is More Popular For Retailers Than The Facebook Like Button

2011-12-30T18:35:00.001-05:00

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Digital:

2011-12-29T13:18:00.000-05:00

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Digital:

As 2011 comes to a close, Nielsen reviewed the top online destinations, social media sites, and smartphone devices. Google was the most-visited U.S. Web brand, while Facebook held its lead among social networks and blogs. Smartphones were popular in 2011, making up the majority of new phone purchases with Apple as the top smartphone manufacturer and Android as the leading OS.

**Top 10 U.S. Web Brands in 2011**
Rank	Web Brand	Avg # of Unique Visitors (000) per month
1	Google	153,441
2	Facebook	137,644
3	Yahoo!	130,121
4	MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	115,890
5	YouTube	106,692
6	Microsoft	83,691
7	AOL Media Network	74,633
8	Wikipedia	62,097
9	Apple	61,608
10	Ask Search Network	60,552
Source: NielsenData from January – October 2011, Home and Work Computers. Ranked on average monthly unique audience. Read as: During 2011, 153.4 million U.S. people, on average, visited Google sites from home and work computers

**Top 10 U.S. Social Networks & Blogs**
Rank	Web Brand	Avg # of Unique Visitors (000) per month
1	Facebook	137,644
2	Blogger	45,712
3	Twitter.com	23,574
4	WordPress.com	20,357
5	Myspace.com	17,935
6	LinkedIn	17,020
7	Tumblr	10,879
8	Google+	8,207
9	Yahoo! Pulse	8,063
10	Six Apart TypePad	7,793
Source: NielsenData from January – October 2011, Home and Work Computers. Ranked on average monthly unique audience. Read as: During 2011, 137.6 million U.S. people, on average, visited Facebook from home and work computers

**Top 10 U.S. Online Destinations for Video**
Rank	Web Brand	Avg # of Unique Video Viewers per month
1	YouTube	111,152
2	VEVO	34,580
3	Facebook	29,802
4	Yahoo!	25,324
5	MSN/WindowsLive/Bing	16,563
6	AOL Media Network	13,327
7	Hulu	13,159
8	The CollegeHumor Network	12,496
9	CNN Digital Network	8,262
10	Netflix	7,418
Source: Nielsen Data from January – October 2011, Home and Work Computers. Ranked on average monthly unique viewers. Read as: During 2011, 111.2 million U.S. people, on average, watched video content on YouTube from home and work computers

**Top 5 Smartphone Device Manufacturers**
Rank	Manufacturer	Market Share
1	Apple	29%
2	HTC	21%
3	RIM BlackBerry	17%
4	Samsung	11%
5	Motorola	11%
Source: NielsenData from August – October 2011. Read as: 29 percent of mobile phone users who recently purchased a new smartphone bought an Apple device

Why We Add and Remove Facebook Friends

2011-12-29T13:09:00.004-05:00

Friends & Frenemies: Why We Add and Remove Facebook Friends
December 19, 2011

To friend or to de-friend, that is the question. New research from NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company, reveals that there are innumerable factors that help Facebook users decide to add a friend or cull someone from the fold, though knowing someone in real life is the top reason cited for friend-ing someone (82%) and offensive comments are the main reason someone gets the boot (55%).

read the whole post

iOS Blew Away Google's Android Over Christmas

2011-12-29T12:08:00.001-05:00

The Biggest Challenge For Apple In The TV Market Has Nothing To Do With The Television

2011-12-29T11:30:00.001-05:00

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Advertising

2011-12-27T17:14:00.000-05:00

Nielsen’s Tops of 2011: Advertising:

From Volkswagen’s adorable Darth Vader-inspired Super Bowl spot to Purell’s memorable placement on The Big Bang Theory, Nielsen names the top advertisements and integrations of the year. The lists demonstrate that reality and scripted shows continued to find innovative ways to integrate brands into their broadcast primetime programming. The best liked ads reflect the enduring value of traditional ad elements that have withstood the test of time – strong creative, simple and engaging messaging, and a solid emotional connection.

**Top 10 Most-Liked New Ads**
Rank	Title	Ad Description (Seconds)	Likability Index
1	Volkswagen	Super Bowl: Passat — A little boy dressed as Darth Vader believes he used “the force” to turn on a car (:30)	231
2	Oreo	Boy wakes up father at midnight for a Father’s Day treat (:15)	201
3	St. Jude’s	Shaun White sits with kids, who wear wigs matching his hairstyle (:30)	191
4	Hallmark	Recordable Storybook — Deployed soldier shares holidays with family when he flips through recorded storybook (:30)	190
5	Real California Milk	Cow tells mom to change her “mom jeans” and show off her “bundt cake” (:30)	189
6	Doritos	Super Bowl: A man licks snack crumbs off his coworker’s fingers (:30)	188
7	Target	Boy in gecko costume uses sticky gecko hands to take all of the candy when trick-or-treating (:15)	187
8	M&M’s	Pretzel — Candy and pretzel combo prefer to be eaten by attractive woman than man they call “Hungry Eyes” (:30)	186
9	Marie Callender’s & Reddi-Wip	Boy is happy to sit at the adult table but returns to eat with the kids when they are served pie and whipped cream. (:30)	185
10	Pepsi	Pop stars like Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, Britney Spears, Kanye West, and Mariah Carey perform and drink soda. (:30)	184
Source: Nielsen Data from January 1, 2011 – November 30, 2011. Broadcast Prime. Only new ad executions considered. The Likeability Score is the percentage of TV viewers who report to like “a lot” an ad they were exposed to during the normal course of viewing TV (among those recalling the brand of the ad). These scores are then indexed against the mean score for all new ads during the period (Likeability Index). 100 equals average. Read as: With a Likeability Index of 231 the top ranked Volkswagen ad has proven to be 131 percent better-liked than the average new commercial during the measured period.

**Top 10 Most Remembered Branded Integrations – Dramas/Sitcoms**
Rank	Brand	Branded Integration Description	Program (Network/Air Date)	Recall Index
1	Purell	Sheldon uses hand sanitizer after he puts a live snake in a desk drawer.	The Big Bang Theory (CBS, Oct 27)	271
2	Red Bull	Tessa describes the official drink of suburbia; people drink it repeatedly.	Suburgatory (ABC, Sep 28)	214
3	Milton Bradley	Twister — Amy suggests that the group play the travel version of a game.	The Big Bang Theory (CBS, Nov 17)	208
4	Ferrari	Beckett drives a car after Castle explains that it is a high performance vehicle.	Castle (ABC, Feb 7)	207
5	Subway	Big Mike says that his kidnapping hasn’t been that bad because his kidnappers brought sandwiches.	Chuck (NBC, Mar 21)	206
6	Wizards of the Coast Games	Dungeons & Dragons — Wolowitz comments on the way that Sheldon plays a board game.	The Big Bang Theory (CBS, Oct 6)	205
7	Rolex	Laura comments on the price of a watch she purchased before she realizes it may have been stolen.	Pan Am (ABC, Oct 30)	204
8	Snapple	Waldon drinks a beverage while talking to Alan about his breakup.	Two and a Half Men (CBS, Oct 17)	203
9	Hasbro	Scrabble — Dick tells Susan that he’d rather play Scrabble than talk to her.	Desperate Housewives (ABC, Jan 16)	200
10	Hasbro	Monopoly — Penny wants to play a board game after getting home from a trip with Tom.	Desperate Housewives (ABC, Oct 2)	199
Source: Nielsen
Data from January 1, 2011 – November 30, 2011. Broadcast Prime. The Recall Score is the percentage of television viewers who can recall within 24 hours the brand/product of a branded integration they were exposed to during the normal course of viewing Dramas/Sitcoms. These scores are then indexed against the mean score for all integrations occurring in this genre during the time period (Recall Index). 100 equals average.
Note: For this analysis, branded integrations were only considered if the occurrence had visual elements (i.e., was “seen” on-screen) or both visual and auditory elements (i.e., was both “seen” and “mentioned”). Only first-run episodes were considered. Both planned and incidental exposures were included.

**Top 10 Primetime Programs with Product Placement Activity**
Rank	Program	Network	Total Number of Occurrences
1	American Idol	FOX	577
2	The Biggest Loser	NBC	533
3	The Celebrity Apprentice	NBC	391
4	Dancing with the Stars	ABC	390
5	The X Factor	FOX	312
6	Extreme Makeover: Home Edition	ABC	224
7	America’s Got Talent	NBC	220
8	Friday Night Lights	NBC	201
9	America’s Next Top Model	CW	178
10	The Amazing Race: Unfinished Business	CBS	161
Source: Nielsen
Data from January 1 – November 30, 2011. Primetime entertainment programming on five Broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, and NBC). First-run episodes only. As a result of coding enhancements implemented in 2009, occurrence counts now reflect the total number of show segments in which a brand/product appears or is mentioned.

Windows Phone is Superior; Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?

2011-12-27T17:05:00.000-05:00

Windows Phone is Superior; Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?:

Charlie Kindel, cek.log

People ask me all the time why, if I think Windows Phone is such an excellent product, sales appear so lackluster. My belief is Microsoft’s approach with WP7 has a impedance mismatch with the carriers & device manufacturers while Google’s approach reduces friction with carriers & device manufacturers at the expense of end users. The question is: will end-user dissatisfaction with Android’s inconsistencies and fragmentation be strong enough to allow the better product to succeed.

NOTE: This post was inspired by a comment I posted on Hacker News in response to Ed Bott’s article on the Android ICS update fiasco.

The fact that Windows Phone has, thus far, avoided fragmentation (almost every WP7 device from every manufacture r & carrier automatically got updated to WP7.5 “Mango” this fall) actually points to one of the core reasons:

The device manufacturers, mobile operators, OS providers, and end users operate in an overly complex virtuous cycle

A virtuous cycle is one where each side of the market both gives and receives positive value from the other sides. So much positive value is exchanged, with low friction, that the cycle grows and grows, like a snowball rolling down hill. The more sides to the market that exist, the more complex the system and the harder it is for the cycle to happen.

In the mobile device space the four primary sides of the market are not actually aligned very well. In fact, there is such deep misalignment that there is great instability. Android has succeeded (in raw unit numbers at least) by capitalizing on that misalignment. Apple has attempted to change the game by cutting out one of the sides of the market. Windows Phone is attempting a different strategy…

read the whole post on " The four primary sides of the mobile device market"

The End of Borders and the Future of Books

2011-12-26T19:33:00.001-05:00

An inside look at the real reasons for the once-beloved chain's demise

By Ben Austen

In September, just days before Borders Group met its end, one of the chain’s last retail holdouts, in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood, Tenn., was being liquidated, with prices slashed by 90 percent. It was difficult in the stark surroundings not to think of a battle waged and lost, of the armies of Kindle owners and e-book peddlars off celebrating victory while all around lay the carnage—two copies of a Paul Reiser memoir, the suspect Greg Mortensen book Stones into Schools, a still-brimming manga section. A couple of professional scavengers picked over the DVDs, cataloging them with their own scanners. Empty shelves were being stacked in the store’s growing hollows and themselves tagged with prices ranging from $25 to $50. The defeat felt so stunning because it seemed so nearly complete, not just for Borders but also for bookselling in general. A two-story Borders in Nashville proper, about 10 miles north, had shut its doors four months earlier. In November 2010, a 30,000-square-foot outlet of a bookstore chain called Davis-Kidd Booksellers, in business in the city for 30 years, had closed as well. With the shuttering of the Brentwood Borders, there wasn’t a store within 22 miles of Nashville that specialized in new books.

read the whole article from Bloomberg

How The Official Facebook iPad App Affected The Third Party App Market, And Use On Safari

2011-12-22T18:08:00.000-05:00

CHART OF THE DAY: How The Official Facebook iPad App Affected The Third Party App Market, And Use On Safari

Here's a look at how the official Facebook app affected usage of third party apps, and Facebook on Safari from Onavo, which analyzes data usage for users. It conducted an anonymous study of several thousand Pad 3G users, logging both web and app usage.

As you can see, the third party app usage fell, but not nearly as much as the use of Safari, which was really demolished. Apparently, people don't want to use the browser. They want native apps.

Google+ Brand Pages Begin Showing Up in Primary Search Results

2011-12-22T13:45:00.000-05:00

Google+ Brand Pages Begin Showing Up in Primary Search Results

In a move that could raise some charges of anti-competitive behavior, Google has begun integrating Google+ brand page information in primary search results.

The inclusion, noted by researcher BrightEdge, appears only for some brands at the moment. BrightEdge, which has tracked Google+ brand pages since they went live on Nov. 7, just noticed the Google+ integration on Dec. 20.(Though Search Engine Land discovered it last month.)

read the whole post on Mashable

Culture on the Go

2011-12-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

NEWBURY.- A new report, Culture on the Go, from UK web-watchers CIBER Research, shows how access to information is changing as people search for, read and use information on the move. A growing proportion of web browsing happens on smartphones like the new Mac iPhone 4S and tablets like the iPad, and no longer on PCs and laptops in homes and offices. This shift will have a radical impact on the design and functionality of websites, and will inevitably reflect back to the desktop screen itself.

Professor David Nicholas of CIBER said, "We are seeing a transformation of behaviour. We know that the mobile device will soon be the dominant platform for searching the Web and yet right now we know virtually nothing about how people seek, read and use information via these devices. The CIBER group are cyberspace voyeurs - we’ve analysed tens of thousands of visits and are making sense of these digital footprints to give us an understanding of behaviour in the virtual space."

The CIBER group has developed a bespoke deep log analysis technique for monitoring behaviours online. The group conducted their research for Europeana, Europe’s cultural heritage portal, to look at how it should be developing its information services for the Google Generation.

The report sets out to show how people search the Web via mobile devices and compares this with use of the same platform by PC and laptop users. The data was collected for visitors to Europeana.eu using deep log analysis and data mining techniques during 2010 - 2011. The main findings were that visits from users on the go are very different in the aggregate to those from fixed platforms. Visits are typically shorter, less interactive, and less content is viewed per visit. The variation between different mobile devices is huge, with information seeking on smartphones substantially different from that associated with PCs and laptops, whereas from iPads the behaviour tends more towards PC-based browsing.

Most websites have been designed for access from a PC or laptop, and accessing the Web via a mobile device is quite a different experience. Many websites from the cultural heritage sector are attracting a new demographic that includes more digital natives. This, coupled with the fact that people are used to paying for content via mobile devices, heralds a transformation in the way cultural web services will be delivered.

Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana said, "We were prescient in designing a Europeana ‘lite’ interface for users with mobile phones three years ago. However, the mobile screen is too small to get a good experience of the great books and paintings on Europeana. Tablet devices like the iPad give high-resolution display with enough screen estate to explore your favourite pictures. This report shows us that we must speed up our development for new mobile and tablet interfaces."

Culture on the Go also reported on the countries showing the heaviest mobile use of Europeana, and showed France led Europe with over 23% of mobile use. The study also shows that typically, Europeana users look at material from their own country, but that interest in other cultures varies by country and can be tracked. CIBER’s techniques have also been used to study each country’s take-up of mobile devices, and points to a greater democratisation of online access than was possible using fixed platforms.

Download the report

New Mobile Obsession: U.S. Teens Triple Data Usage

2011-12-15T15:18:00.000-05:00

New Mobile Obsession: U.S. Teens Triple Data Usage (Nielsen)

Teens have officially joined the mobile Data Tsunami, more than tripling mobile data consumption in the past year while maintaining their stronghold as the leading message senders. Using recent data from monthly cell phone bills of 65,000+ mobile subscribers who volunteered to participate in the research, Nielsen analyzed mobile usage trends among teens in the United States. In the third quarter of 2011, teens age 13-17 used an average of 320 MB of data per month on their phones, increasing 256 percent over last year and growing at a rate faster than any other age group. Much of this activity is driven by teen males, who took in 382 MB per month while females used 266 MB.

Messaging remains the centerpiece of mobile teen behavior. The number of messages exchanged monthly (SMS and MMS) hit 3,417 per teen in Q3 2011, averaging seven messages per waking hour. Teen females are holding the messaging front, sending and receiving 3,952 messages per month versus 2,815 from males. Aside from messaging, data heavy activities such as mobile internet, social networking, email, app downloads, and app usage are the most popular mobile activities.

Teens are not focused on making calls via their mobile phones. Voice usage has declined the most among this group, from an average of 685 minutes to 572 minutes. When surveyed, the top three reasons teens said that they prefer messaging to calling was because it is faster (22 percent), easier (21 percent), and more fun (18 percent).

The Rise of Smartphones, Apps and the Mobile Web

2011-12-15T14:33:00.001-05:00

Report: The Rise of Smartphones, Apps and the Mobile Web

Nielsen’s State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report provides a snapshot of the current mobile media landscape and audiences in the U.S. and highlights the potential power of mobile commerce in the near future.

Key findings:

The majority of 25-34 and 18-24 year olds now own smartphones (64% and 53% respectively);

The majority of smartphone owners (62%) have downloaded apps on their devices and games are the top application category used in the past 30 days;

The number of smartphone subscribers using the mobile Internet has grown 45 percent since 2010;

87 percent of app downloaders (those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days) have used deal-of-the-day websites like Groupon or Living Social;

Younger groups text the most. In Q3, teens 13-17 sent and received the most text messages (an average of 3,417 each month).

This report draws from a broad range of Nielsen data sources, including: Nielsen’s in-depth monthly surveys of mobile consumers (more than 300,000 consumers surveyed each year); Device metering data from the iOS and Android smartphones of thousands of consumers who have volunteered to be a part of our research panel; detailed, monthly analysis of the cellphone bills for 65,000 lines in the U.S., again, thanks to volunteer panelists.
For more, download State of the Media: The Mobile Media Report Q3 2011.

Timelinks

2011-12-15T08:56:00.001-05:00

Welcome to Timelinks from International Time Machines, Inc on Vimeo.

Timelinks: Linking 3D Interactive Timelines in the Browser

Timelinks is a new start-up, based in Brooklyn, New York. It is currently developing a new kind of 3D timeline interface that highlights the relationships between people and the moments when paths cross. The idea is that Timelinks will catalogue all the images one has stored in the cloud and on social media websites. As a unique feature, it will visually 'link' the timelines of different people with each other when images were taken together. Technically, Timelinks currently uses WebGL, but expects to later also target Stage3d (Flash).

Although Timelinks is currently in full development phase, it has recently launched the "most amazing visualization of Hollywood movies" [timelinks.me], which shows the shared histories of actors, the timing and trajectory of their careers, along with those occurrences when actors have been key players in each other's lives.

Although the concept is reminiscent of Facebook's Timeline, Timelinks focuses more on revealing the world's interconnectedness, instead of being an personalized archiving tool. However, one can easily imagine how Timelinks would be able to visualize multiple Facebook timelines at once, when they become more widely available.

50 Most Valuable Chinese Brands

2011-12-14T16:57:00.002-05:00

BrandZ Top 50 Chinese Brands Report (PDF)
Download Chinese language version
Download English language version

BrandZTM Top 50 Most Valuable Chinese Brands 2012
NEW YORK, December 13, 2011. Millward Brown today announces the 2012 BrandZ Top 50 Most Valuable Chinese Brands.

Commissioned by WPP and in its second year, the BrandZ Top 50 Most Valuable Chinese Brands ranking is unique. Combining both financial data, from Bloomberg and Kantar Worldpanel, as well as consumer opinion gathered from interviews with over 35,000 Chinese consumers, the BrandZ China Top 50 is the most robust ranking of Chinese brands available.

Measured against the MSCI China Index over the past 14 months, the BrandZ China Top 50 Most Valuable Brands Portfolio has grown by 20 percent compared with a decline of 6 percent for the MSCI China Index.

Some of the trends emerging from the latest BrandZ study from WPP's Millward Brown include:

China’s shift from maker to innovator
the phenomenal rise of online and FMCG brands
rising incomes and a rapidly expanding middle class
consumers becoming increasingly brand-savvy

Rise of the brand
While the world’s economy has struggled in 2011, the value of the Top 50 Chinese brands has grown by 16 percent to US $325 billion, representing more than five percent of the Chinese economy. Rising incomes have seen Chinese consumers becoming more informed and discerning about brands.

Trust is becoming a particularly important factor for brands in China, particular FMCG brands, since Chinese consumers are willing to pay more for a brand that they trust. As a result, brands in China have never been more important. Chinese brands have been working hard in both lower- and higher-tier cities to establish their status more broadly in China.

Online and consumer brands drive growth

China Mobile, the world’s largest telecommunications provider with 600 million customers using its services in 2011, retains the number one spot with a brand value of US $53,607 million. The remainder of the top five is dominated by banks – ICBC, Construction Bank of China, Bank of China and Agricultural Bank of China.

FMCG brands have dominated in numbers and driven the growth of the Top 50 this year, with cooking oil and rice producer Fulinmen growing by 138 percent, making it the second fastest riser and dairy giant Mengniu increasing by 66 percent, edging up two places to position 18. In fact, seven out of the 10 top risers are FMCG brands which include alcohol, food & dairy, apparel, retail, pharmaceuticals and beer brands.

With an estimated 485 million people online and a highly dispersed population, the internet is especially important in China and this is evident in this year’s ranking. Due to the rapid growth in social media over the last year, China has now become the biggest social media market in the world, which has presented challenges for advertisers, the government and society. The web portal Sina has over 220 million subscribers sending 86 million messages per day and is the top riser this year. Sina has increased by a remarkable 244 percent and climbs 15 places in the ranking.

Baidu, the country’s biggest search engine, also made it into the Top Risers with 67 percent growth in brand value. Baidu’s efforts to build strong relationships with its customers has helped it to become the top brand by Brand Contribution, which measures the proportion of financial value that is driven purely by brand equity.

Three online brands have made their first appearance in the ranking this year. These are Renren (social networking site), Ctrip (online travel site) and Sohu (internet portal).

Chinese consumers becoming more brand savvy

Due to rising incomes and a more discerning Chinese consumer, the importance of ‘brand’ is growing in China, and this is especially true in the FMCG sector since eight of the 10 brands that achieved the top score for Brand Contribution are in the FMCG sector.

Adrian Gonzalez, CEO, Millward Brown Greater China, said, “The role of brands is growing in China and the country’s increasingly sophisticated consumer is using them to make the buying decisions they are making. China is rapidly evolving from maker to innovator, and this year’s massive rise in new media brands is showcasing this change.

Many of the Top 50 brands have grown at remarkable rates this year, demonstrating the enormous influence that Chinese brands exert and their potential impact on markets worldwide.

Facebook Platas: Social Media Atlas

2011-12-14T09:08:00.002-05:00

from Information Aesthetics

Platlas - the Facebook Version [platlas.com] is not one of easiest interactive infographics around, as its attempts to provide a better understanding of the driving principles behind social media, and Facebook in particular. Branded as the "first ever social network ecosystem exploration tool", it starts from revealing the variety of actions users tend to take on the various social platforms available today.

The center is the user profile, from which users interact with the icons present in the inner-most circle. Each icon represents a specific area on Facebook, such as Events, Photos, or Apps. The outer-most ring then shows the different features that can be performed, according to the inner-most area. Lastly, the colorful dots represent actions, or ways users are able to interact with these areas. Tooltips then present detailed information about each shown keyword.

More background information is available here.

see also: Platas: The Social Platform Atlas (pdf)

GE’s Instagram Campaign

2011-12-14T09:04:00.000-05:00

Solid Strategy Behind GE’s Instagram Campaign
from Carrot Blog

GE recently launched their new Instagram campaign #GEInspiresMe… and I love everything about it! I give kudos to any major brand that adopts Instagram, but GE has beaten my expectations by demonstrating a solid understanding of how to structure a rewarding experience on the social platform. Here’s what works about GE’s approach: the campaign… legitimately brands crowd sourced content without alienating the audience rewards participants cyclically for their participation, with multiple stages to the contest engages the Facebook fan base to... Continue Reading

The Mobile Ad Market Is Astoundingly Tiny

2011-12-13T16:58:00.000-05:00

CHART OF THE DAY: The Mobile Ad Market Is Astoundingly Tiny (AAPL, GOOG, YHOO, MSFT):

The mobile display ad market in the U.S. is amazingly tiny, according to data from IDC (via the WSJ). For 2011, the total market will be just $630 million.

Below, you can see who's winning the mobile ad wars. For all of the negativity around Apple's mobile ad efforts, it's pretty impressive that it's in third place. After all, iAds only work on iOS devices.

Facebook Advertsing Hall of Fame

2011-12-13T16:44:00.001-05:00

Meet The Company That's Stealing Facebook's Ad Revenue

2011-12-13T16:41:00.000-05:00

Meet The Company That's Stealing Facebook's Ad Revenue

Facebook has sent cease-and-desist letters to Sambreel, a company that makes Facebook "skins" for folks who want to jazz up their profile pages with cool graphics and backgrounds. The move suggests that Facebook hasn't yet figured out a technical fix that might prevent its users from using Sambreel's product, PageRage, which also displays ads that cover the ads Facebook's clients have paid for.

Advertisers on Sambreel's products include Gap, American Express and AT&T.

Facebook users who are bored of the standard blue format can go to PageRage to download any of thousands of different themed Facebook layouts. The one above is titled "Lady Gaga," for instance.

. . . .
PageRage is a double threat to Facebook: Not only does the social network not see a dime from ads that run on PageRage, but the colorful skins also threaten to transform Facebook into into a buzzing, flashing maelstrom that looks a lot like the way MySpace did -- before that social network suffered a collapse in traffic.

read the whole post

MBA by Gaming: MIT Launches Free Online Simulator

2011-12-13T08:23:00.000-05:00

MBA by Gaming: MIT Launches Free Online Simulator

Want to learn MBA management skills and strategies for free? Thanks to "Platform Wars," a video game simulator created by MIT’s Sloan School of Management, anyone can learn elements of a business school education by portraying an executive at a video game console manufacturer online.
The simulator has been used for the past four years in business management classes taught by professor John Sterman. A user playing an executive Nintendo, for example, might be tasked with figuring out how how to help the Wii beat out competition from Microsoft's XBox. The ultimate goal is to strategize against your competitor to maximize cumulative profit over 10 years. The player has to make all the applicable decisions to win the market—everything from setting the price of the console to determining the royalties video game makers will pay for the right to produce games for the platform.

“Platform Wars” proved to be so popular at the business school that in late November, MIT—the home of the renowned OpenCourseWare program—decided to make the simulator available to the public on the MIT Sloane Teaching Innovation Resources website. Users can play as an individual or as a class. To fully equip gamers, Sterman is also providing free case studies and video explanations for both students and teachers.

Platform markets “are increasingly common in settings besides video games,” so Sterman says that the skills users can learn through Platform Wars are “applicable in many markets." Figuring out how to ensure your product’s price, features, and complementary products stay competitive is in every business' best interests. After all, we all know what happened in the real-world platform war between VHS and Betamax.

Windows Phone Development

2011-11-30T10:08:00.001-05:00

Seminar and Networking Event on Windows Phone Development MoDev@TU Seminars

The Department of Computer and Information Sciences presents a lecture on:

The New Kid on the Block: Windows Phone
Speaker: Ed Donahue, Microsoft Corporation

About the talk: Come learn about the new kid on the block, Windows Phone 7 and the free developer tools. Also, learn about the new Metro interface, the Marketplace experience and the features of the Mango release. Be one of the first to get your idea into the marketplace! Build an app for your chance to win prizes!

Date: Monday December 5th, 2011, 5:30pm (refreshments), 6:00pm (presentation)
Location: 7800 York Rd, Room 459

More details at: http://triton.towson.edu/~smart/modevtu

About MoDev@TU Meetup:

This event is part of a larger effort to bridge Towson University students and the IT industry and to increase opportunities for both groups. We find that software development meetups in Baltimore have little student representation and this group is aimed at filling that void. Please contact modev@towson.edu for more details.

RSVP is required (please use the meetup website). We hope to see you there!

Big data

2011-11-30T08:36:00.001-05:00

DJ Patil explains a visualization of a person's LinkedIn network, where different groups

of contacts are illustrated by different colors. Patil developed big data projects for LinkedIn — like algorithms to determine whom you might know. He now recruits mathematicians for a venture capital firm

from NPR

What do Facebook, Groupon and biotech firm Human Genome Sciences have in common? They all rely on massive amounts of data to design their products. Terabytes and even zettabytes of information about consumers or about genetic sequences can be harnessed and crunched.
The practice is called big data, and as the term suggests, it is huge in both scope and power. Analyzing big data enables anything from predicting prices to catching criminals, and has the potential to impact many industries.

read the whole series:

Following Digital Breadcrumbs To 'Big Data' Gold (part one)

The Search For Analysts To Make Sense Of 'Big Data' (part two)

companies / software mentioned in the series

Memelog

2011-11-29T12:14:00.001-05:00

memelog on Prezi

New media on iPad

2011-11-29T12:09:00.000-05:00

Branding agency 160over90 is using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and Adobe InDesign CS5.5 software to bring the sights and sounds of higher education to the iPad.

The children are our future, and they don’t pay for TV

2011-11-18T15:04:00.000-05:00

The children are our future, and they don’t pay for TV (GIGGAOM)

A weak economy is putting pressure on the pay TV industry, as it struggles to get new users to sign up for cable, IPTV and satellite services. But the short-term issue around the affordability of cable is hiding a bigger trend of young people who are choosing not to pay for TV. The latest evidence of this comes from statements made by Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen, who’s trying to figure out how to keep pay TV subscribers who are increasingly watching over-the-top video.

While there’s still some debate over how many users are ditching pay TV in lieu of cheaper online options, Ergen said on Monday’s earnings call that there’s a bigger macro trend developing, with young people choosing to forgo pay TV subscriptions altogether:

“Young people who move to an apartment or get a house for the first time don’t subscribe to any MVPD (multichannel video programming distributor) and they just… get their network programming from Hulu and they get Netflix… As an industry where people pay between $70 and $92 a month, that’s a lot of money to a young person today who is getting their first job when they can go out and watch Hulu for free and Netflix for $7.99. So it’s a threat.”

We’ve written about this phenomenon before, as operators must convince these so-called “cord nevers” — recent college and high school grads moving into their first homes and paying their own bills for the first time — that subscribing to pay TV services is worth it. For many of these users, who likely grew up watching content online — on mobile devices and on their own time — the concept of paying close to a hundred dollars for access to linear programming might not be a winning formula.

read the whole post

To succeed at TV, Apple will need to embrace ads

2011-11-18T15:02:00.000-05:00

To succeed at TV, Apple will need to embrace ads (GIGGAOM)

Apple has long referred to its streaming TV set-top box as a hobby, but there are indications that could soon change with the launch of a full-fledged HDTV. But if Apple hopes to succeed at getting content providers on board with a new TV platform, it’s going to need to open up Apple TV — and whatever iTV may be coming — to allow third-party ads to be served.

Take a look at the current content on Apple TV, and you’ll notice that it’s either subscription-based or pay-per-view. In addition to Apple’s own iTunes video store, there are apps like Netflix, MLB.tv, NBA Game Time (on hiatus due to the current strike) and NHL GameCenter, all of which are subscription-based services. But even sites that serve ads online — like YouTube — have yet to monetize views on Apple TV in that fashion.

read the whole post

Comcast’s XfinityTV.com gets an HTML5 facelift

2011-11-18T14:59:00.000-05:00

Comcast’s XfinityTV.com gets an HTML5 facelift (GIGGAOM)

Comcast has launched an all-new interface to its XfinityTV.com website, providing users quicker access to content and more tools to connect their online viewing with what they watch on TV and on its video-on-demand service. The updated user interface, which was built in HTML5, puts more emphasis on graphical elements, provides one-click viewing from the front page and allows users to add content to a queue to be watched later.

read the whole post

Q&A: How Comcast is adjusting to our changing TV habits

2011-11-18T14:50:00.000-05:00

Q&A: How Comcast is adjusting to our changing TV habits (Greek Wire)

Comcast's Tom Blaxland oversees products including XfinityTV.com and apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

How are people actually using the web and mobile apps to interact with traditional television content? What’s next for the set-top box? And why isn’t Comcast supporting the Kindle Fire out of the gate?

Those are some of the topics we discussed this week with Tom Blaxland, senior director of product management for Comcast Interactive Media, who was visiting Seattle from the company’s home base in Philadelphia.

Blaxland oversees the user experience and roadmap for sites including XfinityTV.com and the Xfinity TV apps for iPad, iPhone and Android. We talked about the evolution of those apps, how viewing habits are changing, and some of the company’s upcoming rollouts, including the availability of television programming on Microsoft’s Xbox Live system.

Continue reading for edited highlights

Time Spent Streaming Outpacing Number of Streamers

2011-11-18T11:39:00.001-05:00

Time Spent Streaming Outpacing Number of Streamers: Nielsen

In the U.S., the amount of time spent streaming videos online is growing at a much faster rate than the number of video viewers, according to Nielsen. Over the last three years, time spent watching video from home and work computers has more than doubled while the number of unique viewers increased 26 percent over the same period.

“The greater increase in time spent viewing compared to the number of unique viewers is likely due to an increase in the amount of video content available for viewers to watch, especially long-form content like movies and TV shows on sites like Netflix and Hulu,” said Jo Holz, SVP, Client Research Initiatives, Nielsen.

During August 2011, viewers aged 18-34 accounted for nearly 40 percent of total streaming time, with males 18-34 contributing 23 percent. Video viewers aged 35-49 made up 26 percent of total steaming time during the month, followed by viewers over the age of 50 – the largest segment of the online video population – who spent over 9 billion minutes watching, 22 percent of total streaming time from home and work computers.

9 Reasons You Should Blog

2011-11-18T08:31:00.001-05:00

Dan Reich, Forbes

I think everyone should blog, especially entrepreneurs, so here are my top 9 reasons why you should be blogging if you aren’t already.

read the whole post

Here's The Information Facebook Gathers On You As You Browse The Web

2011-11-18T08:20:00.000-05:00

Here's The Information Facebook Gathers On You As You Browse The Web: Business Insider

Facebook stirred up privacy concerns when it came out that its "Like" and "Share" buttons appearing all over the web actually report your visits back to Facebook servers.

Now Facebook engineering director Arturo Bejar has shared what personal information the company retains with its tracking cookies, as reported by USA Today.

When you're logged in, Facebook will keep a timestamped list of the URLs you visit and pair it with your name, list of friends, Facebook preferences, email address, IP address, screen resolution, operating system, and browser.

When you're logged out, it captures everything except your name, list of friends, and Facebook preferences. Instead, it uses a unique alphanumeric identifier to track you.

read the whole post

Pandora Wants Its "Fair Share" Of Ad Dollars

2011-11-18T08:19:00.000-05:00

Pandora Wants Its "Fair Share" Of Ad Dollars - Business Insider

Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy says the company just wants its "fair share" of the radio advertising market.

Speaking on stage at the Billboard FutureSound conference, Kennedy said that the radio ad market today is between $13 and $14 billion.

Pandora has the equivalent of 3.7% share of all radio listening.

That means Pandora should be collecting at least $480 million a year in ad revenues.

It's not. In its last quarter, it had ad sales of $66 million, for a runrate of about $260 million a year.

read the whole post

IPO Flipping

2011-11-16T16:58:00.001-05:00

Here's How Traders Did Flipping Groupon, LinkedIn, And Pandora Stock On IPO Day

IPOs are rigged. They're set up so that the banks who underwrite them can get their best clients in before the stock inevitably pops.

This reality does not, however, keep traders from trying to take advantage of that pop. It doesn't always work out.

For example, according to SigFig, most people who bought and then sold Groupon stock during its IPO lost money. Just more than 1.16% of them got a 10% return.

Traders who played the IPO game with LinkedIn were more likely to be winners. Only ~5% of them lost money. A tiny slice of them – 0.76% – actually doubled their investment.

Protect-IP Act

2011-11-16T14:40:00.000-05:00

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Tablet in Touch

2011-11-16T14:20:00.001-05:00

A major study by media communications agency UM London has revealed the impact tablet computers have had on the behaviour of UK consumers and casts light on the opportunities & challenges for brands.

The research “Tablet inTouch” which covered five thousand UK consumers, found those who owned the devices were almost evangelical about their benefits, with more than a third of owners saying their tablet computer has changed their lives.

While tablet and e-reader technology is changing the lives of their owners, the majority of UK consumers remain to be convinced of their benefits. UM found only 18% of consumers in the UK now own a tablet or e-reader, with Apple and Amazon dominating the markets.

UM London’s study clearly shows that tablet computers are used primarily for play not work, but owners are using their devices regularly for a diverse range of activities. 41% of tablet owners think of their device as a “toy” but just 17% of e-reader users do so.

Loraine Cordery at UM London commented:

“For those who already own them, tablet computers and e-readers are clearly having a major impact on their lifestyles, but technology brands face a major challenge persuading those who don’t own one of the benefits of the devices.”

Read the Press Release

see also:

Tablet market will be bigger than PC market?

Google VP: Google+ is 'more than a social network'

2011-11-16T07:56:00.001-05:00

By Rachel King | November 14, 2011

Summary: Google+ is rolling out to business customers, which might make it a much more useful product overall.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. — An overwhelming force changing the world is that the role of consumer technology has eclipsed the enterprise in important ways, according to Google vice president and CIO Ben Fried.

read the whole post

Android Market Share

2011-11-16T07:52:00.001-05:00

Android now has 52.5% of the global smartphone market. No matter how you want to slice it, that's amazing. It's stealing share from every other smartphone operating system other than iOS, which is basically flat.

Online Music Subscription Services

2011-11-11T09:58:00.001-05:00

Gartner Says Worldwide Online Music Revenue from End-User Spending Is on Pace to Total $6.3 Billion in 2011

Online Music Subscription Services Will be Main Growth Sector in Evolving Market

read full report

STAMFORD, Conn., November 8, 2011— Worldwide online music revenue from end-user spending is on pace to total $6.3 billion in 2011, up from $5.9 billion in 2010, according to Gartner, Inc. Online music revenue is forecast to reach $6.8 billion in 2012, and grow to $7.7 billion in 2015. By comparison, consumer spending on physical music (CDs and LPs) is expected to slide from approximately $15 billion in 2010 to about $10 billion in 2015.

"As consumers opt for connected devices — media tablets, smartphones and connected media players — across world regions, their desire for access to and consumption of music and content is growing as well," said Mike McGuire, research vice president at Gartner. "Music labels, artists, publishers and new distribution intermediaries are developing new business models to address consumers' changing behavior.

"The music industry was the first media sector to feel the full impact of two major forces — the Internet and technology-empowered consumers. It has staggered through the first decade of the 21st century, and entered the second bedraggled financially and facing a powerful set of intermediaries, which are creating borderless global ecosystems that defy the industry's previous notions of control and monetization. The primary stakeholders in the music industry are facing wrenching changes and a somewhat uncertain future. However, the next four to five years portend solid growth."

Table 1. Online Music End-User Spending by Type of Service, Worldwide, 2008-2015 (Millions of Dollars)

	2011	2012	2015
Subscription Services	532.1	808.9	2,218.4
Download Services	3,629.8	3,847.4	4,050.3
Personalization Services	2,172.8	2,141.2	1,460.9
Total	6,334.7	6,797.6	7,729.6

Source: Gartner (October 2011)

As online distribution revenue starts to overtake physical revenue, which will happen beyond Gartner's forecast to 2015, Gartner analysts said stakeholders in the music industry will continue to realign their businesses to maintain their places in the value chain. Consumers are likely to continue to take advantage of the applications, devices and services that provide them with multiple ways of discovering, consuming and communicating about music. As more music-related transactions, such as concert ticket sales and merchandise, have moved online, online music services, downloads or subscription services will have to find ways to make those related transactions available to their customers.

"For music labels, artists and publishers, challenges abound," Mr. McGuire said. "However, there remain real opportunities to reinvent the business based on consumers who are adopting connected devices and who are showing they will pay for content in multiple ways. These sorts of changes offer the potential for many new types of service and business models aimed at allowing music fans to manage and access their music libraries while also integrating social media and content payment options.

"In particular, communications service providers (CSPs) should focus business development investigations into the potential for providing managed services options — such as cloud storage — as part of their consumer-facing services. However, CSPs must balance these potential opportunities with a careful examination of how any deployment addresses consumer concerns over privacy and 'net neutrality' issues,” said Stephanie Baghdassarian, research director at Gartner.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Media IAS Online Music Forecast, 2011-2015: Social Media, Subscriptions and the Cloud" at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1794215.

Warner Bros. turns to Twitter to promote #UltraViolet

2011-11-11T09:50:00.000-05:00

The next step in Hollywood’s effort to educate consumers about its UltraViolet digital rights locker came from Warner Bros., which is taking to Twitter with a promoted trend aimed at getting Harry Potter fans excited about streaming the title to their computers and other devices.

The #UltraViolet Promoted Trend was launched to coincide with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which goes on sale on Friday. With the release of the final installment in the popular Harry Potter franchise, Warner Bros. is promoting the ability to own a digital copy for streaming to computers, tablets and smartphones.

read the whole post at GigaOm

Is There a Future for Choose-Your-Own-Ad Ventures?

2011-11-11T09:47:00.000-05:00

Is There a Future for Choose-Your-Own-Ad Ventures?(AdWeek)

The New York Times had an interesting read this weekend on experiments by Hulu and YouTube to let viewers pick which ads they're forced to endure. In some cases, this means selecting a spot from a list of brands, but it also includes letting viewers choose whether to watch several short ads or one long one. In pretty much every case, it sounds like the results are underwhelming. Hulu's new "Ad Swap" button, which lets you switch to an ad that's more pertinent to you, is nice in theory, but as the Times notes, "The system isn’t perfect. By the time users decide to go with an alternative, they may have already seen a good portion of the first ad. Beginning a second one means a longer commercial break." Another Hulu approach is to let you pick a 150-second ad in place of several shorter ones, but the site admits this too has not proven to be a popular process. YouTube is also testing an ad unit that lets you choose from three commercials when watching a long-form clip, but relatively few brands have signed up. More popular (for obvious reasons) is the site's "Skip This Ad" option, which lets viewers bypass boring spots and leaves brands feeling confident that the ads they pay for are being watched by willing participants instead of being cursed at by a captive audience.

How Do Your Listening Efforts Stack Up?

2011-11-11T09:39:00.000-05:00

How Do Your Listening Efforts Stack Up? (Forbes)

Social media is changing the way companies interact with their customers so fast that many continue to hold back, waiting to see what their competitors do. It’s an understandable response to ongoing uncertainty, but the nature of social media means that the only interactions they can observe are external. What’s going on inside the companies that are using social media to engage with their customers?

New Social Video Services

2011-11-11T09:35:00.000-05:00

Spreecast and LiveLead Tackle Social Video From Different Angles (Wall Street Journal)

A couple of new start-ups, Spreecast and LiveLead, are focused on the social side of video, working on helping groups of people broadcast themselves or enjoy videos together, respectively. They both have a lot in common with Google+ Hangouts.

San Francisco-based Spreecast is StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr’s next act, and it offers live group-video sessions that are instantly archived. It’s focused on people who want to be broadcasters — like bloggers or offline personalities — and who can attract an audience.

Spreecasts, which are by default public, have up to four people on camera at a time, while others participate in text chat through their choice of Facebook, Twitter or Spreecast account. The person who starts the conversation gets access to a producer control panel that brings in new questions and speakers.

All sorts of companies have tried this sort of thing with varying degrees of success, like Tinychat, Paltalk, Livestream (now more focused on events), Socialeyes (haven’t heard from them in a while) and Operator11 (now defunct).

read the whole post

Mobile Advertising

2011-11-11T09:29:00.000-05:00

When Placing Ads, Don't Underestimate the Value of Mobile (Ad Age Digital)

Marketers, take note: While you're spending pennies to the TV dollar in mobile advertising, swathes of U.S. consumers are heads-down buried in their iPhones, Androids and BlackBerrys.

Guidelines on Facebook 'Like-gating'

2011-11-11T09:25:00.001-05:00

Ad Industry Group Issues Guidelines on Facebook 'Like-gating' (Ad Age Digital)

Facebook's advertising ecosystem is still the frontier from a regulatory perspective, but a new decision by the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division should offer guidelines for advertisers to follow when looking to drive up "Likes" on their fan pages.

AppNexus Creates 'App Marketplace' for Online Ad Campaigns

2011-11-11T09:25:00.000-05:00

AppNexus Creates 'App Marketplace' for Online Ad Campaigns (Ad Age Digital)

At launch, AppNexus' "App Marketplace" will include data providers Brilig, Exelate, Lotame, Proximix, uKnow and TARGUSinfo as well as privacy enablers Evidon and Truste.

Adobe confirms Flash Player is dead for mobile devices

2011-11-11T09:24:00.000-05:00

Adobe confirms Flash Player is dead for mobile devices (Engadget)

We heard the talk and now here's the confirmation: Flash Player for mobile devices is officially dead. Adobe is reaffirming its commitment to "aggressively contribute" to HTML5, a platform with broader support and capabilities than Flash was ever able to deliver. Adobe will of course also be pushing developers to work in its AIR platform for a more native experience, and the company will continue to work on Flash Player for desktop operating systems, but one can't help but see the platform as a whole standing on fairly shaky footing at this point.

Here come Google+ Pages for business, at last

2011-11-11T09:19:00.000-05:00

Here come Google+ Pages for business, at last (CNET)

The Web giant finally lets businesses set up shop on its social network to build brands and reach out to consumers who opt in.

For Brands On Facebook, Fan Quality Trumps Quantity

2011-11-11T09:11:00.000-05:00

For Brands On Facebook, Fan Quality Trumps Quantity (Fast Company)

Whenever someone asks me to be their friend on Facebook, I’m flattered. Who would have thought so many people like me? Then I realize why: the act of friending simulates the ultimate act of opting into a conversation.

No wonder so many brands are obsessed with converting you into one of their "friends" or "fans"; there are even "fan farms" that get paid to generate fans for the lowest dollar amount (though if you take this approach, rest assured you'll get what you pay for).

But what brand wouldn’t want to have an ongoing conversation with loyal consumers, who, in turn, can advocate on behalf of the brand and amplify its reach amongst their own friends? The impressive rise in attention and dollars that marketers have been pouring into social media marketing lately suggests that the answer is "not many." According to eMarketer, social media ad spend grew 55.6% to $5.4 billion in 2011, up from $3.56 billion a year earlier. The total market is expected to reach $10 billion by 2013.

However, are these Facebook "likes" really meaningful and, if so, what is their true value to a brand?
One company, Virtue, a social media marketing platform, took an approach that converted the value of a fan to media dollars by using its data to determine a wall post to fan ratio. On that basis, they arrived at an average value for a Facebook fan of about $3.60 a year. Not so much.

Two other companies, Syncapse and Hotspex, took a different approach and identified five key contributors to Facebook fan value: product spending, brand loyalty, propensity to recommend, brand affinity, and earned media value. They calculated the average annualized value of an individual Facebook fan at $136.00.

Even allowing for the fact that all averages are dangerous, $3.60 versus $136.00 is an impressive disparity.
Each of these formulas has merit, but it’s going to be tough to find one that works for everyone. Simply put, in assessing fan value, it’s difficult to know what metric to look for, what to leave out, why it's relevant to the fan equation, and where true causality lies. (Are the babies coming because the storks are nesting on the chimneys? Or are the storks coming because fires are lit for the babies?)

read the whole post

Concert Revenue Bigger Than Recording Sales

2011-11-11T09:10:00.000-05:00

Live Music Needs A Tuneup To Entice The Audiences Of Tomorrow (Fast Company)

Everybody has a concert story. Whether it’s lifting Wayne Coyne aloft in his human-sized gerbil ball at a Flaming Lips show, camping out all night for Springsteen tickets, or being hypnotized by Skrillex’s beats, you’ve probably got a story, too.

Though individuals' narratives about their concert experiences remain in many ways unchanged, the concert industry itself has evolved over the past 10 or 15 years, because now, it's overtaking album and record sales (digital or otherwise) as the primary source of revenue for big names in the music industry.

In the past, concerts were little more than promotional appearances for record, tape, or CD sales. Popular artists blew into town, played one underpriced show, which guaranteed a sellout, and created a vacuum of envy among those who couldn’t go. That, in turn, made the unfortunate masses go out and buy those little pieces of plastic or vinyl that enabled them to at least hear their heroes, since they hadn’t been lucky enough to see them in the flesh.

But it’s not like that anymore. Which makes marketing and pricing concerts right critical to the health of the music business overall.

In the early 2000s, people stopped buying those previously lucrative little pieces of plastic and vinyl, or at least, much less than they used to. From 1999 to 2009, sales of recordings in the United States dropped from a little more than $14 billion to just over $6 billion.

Meanwhile, the concert business grew, according to this Live Nation investor presentation and Pollstar data, from about $1.5 billion in 1999 to almost $5 billion in 2009. Numbers on this vary from source to source, but the general trend of the 2000′s is clear: recordings plummeted and concerts soared.

read the whole post

How Blinkx Is Creating Internet TV For Couch Potatoes

2011-11-11T09:08:00.000-05:00

How Blinkx Is Creating Internet TV For Couch Potatoes (Fast Company)

Internet TV has mostly been a lean-forward experience. A new set of channels from the video search giant is making it more like the boob tube.

Internet television has historically been a mostly lean-forward experience. You pretty much need to know what you want to watch in order to find something good on the 'net tube.

But sometimes when you’re ready for a little TV, you just want to flip on your favorite channel and kick back while it serves up a bunch of delicious goodness. Until now, that kind of experience hasn't really been possible online. While there have been plenty of quality shows produced for the Internet, there haven’t really been channels, not in the conventional sense.

Video search engine blinkx, however, is beginning to change that. Its new acquisition, Burst Media, just released 12 internet video channels with TV-style programming. One is aimed at moms with kids at home, for example. Another at car enthusiasts. And a third for foodies. There are also channels focusing on travel, games, and fashion. Users can click on a channel and then lean back and watch a stream of uninterrupted programming.

read the whole post

New Yahoo / Razorfish Mobile Study

2011-11-11T08:47:00.001-05:00

Read the whole study, including 'Implications for marketers"