Mobile Video Advertising Will Have its Challenges, But it is Coming

One issue is translating video authored for a bigger and wider PC screen, automatically, even when it might be necessary to remove some of the information.

Google Research Blog: "Pan and Scan" for Mobile Video

"Pan and scan" is a technique long used to fit wider movie images onto an analog NTSC TV screen. Engineers at Google say they now can do the same thing for video to be displayed on a mobile screen, rather than a larger PC screen.

Videos come in different sizes, resolutions and aspect ratios, but the device used for playback, may it be your TV, mobile phone, or laptop, only has a fixed resolution and form factor, Google engineers say.

As a result, you cannot watch your favorite old show that came in 4:3 on your new 16:9 HDTV without having black bars on the side, referred to as letterboxing.

Likewise, widescreen movies and user-videos uploaded on YouTube are shot using various cameras with wide-ranging formats, so they do not fit completely on the screen. As an alternative to letterboxing, several devices try to upscale the content uniformly, which either changes the aspect ratio, making everything look stretched out, or simply crop the frame, thereby discarding any content that cannot fit the screen after scaling.

Google Research, together with collaborators from Georgia Tech, says it has developed an algorithm that resizes (or retargets) videos to fit the form factor of a given device without cropping, stretching or letterboxing.

At some point, this is going to be important for providers of videos that will be viewed on mobile devices, and the business ecosystem (advertising, marketing, transactions) that will grow up around mobile video.

Official Google Research Blog: Discontinuous Seam Carving for Video Retargeting

Sprint Pushed for Deal Between Clearwire, T-Mobile - Bloomberg

Sprint Nextel Corp. supports a network accord between partner Clearwire Corp. and Deutsche Telekom AG’s T-Mobile USA, said Goldman, Sachs & Co. analyst Jason Armstrong, who met with Sprint management.

“Sprint indicated they have encouraged a wholesale deal,” Armstrong says. “Sprint would support a T-Mobile equity infusion into Clearwire."

There have been reports that Sprint's board was in disagreement about such a T-Mobile USA investment in Clearwire. On one hand, the deal would bring Clearwire cash it needs to finish construction of its national network. On the other hand, the deal would allow a competitor to proceed rapidly with a 4G service that might be tough to create any other way.

Were it to invest in Clearwire, T-Mobile USA would be able to buy capacity on Clearwire’s fourth-generation network at favored rates, as does Sprint Nextel.

Sprint Pushed for Deal Between Clearwire, T-Mobile - Bloomberg

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE at same rates

Verizon Wireless apparently will offer no-contract 4G dongle service at the same rates as the on-contract pricing, which will come as a welcome surprise for some users. The no-contract price is the same as for a contract-based service: $50 for 5 GBytes or $80 for 10 GBytes, plus a $10 per GB overage.

The only difference is that the no-contract price for the modem is $249.99, as opposed to $99.99 on a two-year contract (after a $50 mail-in rebate).

The reason for contracts in the first place always has been to offset the subsidies on equipment that mobile service providers have been paying for as marketing cost.

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE options: same rates, pricier modems -- Engadget

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE at same rates

Verizon Wireless apparently will offer no-contract 4G dongle service at the same rates as the on-contract pricing, which will come as a welcome surprise for some users. The no-contract price is the same as for a contract-based service: $50 for 5 GBytes or $80 for 10 GBytes, plus a $10 per GB overage.

The only difference is that the no-contract price for the modem is $249.99, as opposed to $99.99 on a two-year contract (after a $50 mail-in rebate).

The reason for contracts in the first place always has been to offset the subsidies on equipment that mobile service providers have been paying for as marketing cost.

Verizon confirms contract-free 4G LTE options: same rates, pricier modems -- Engadget

Google's Chrome 8: What's New

Google Chrome 8, now rolling out to users, apparently features more than 800 bug fixes and stability improvements. Some say those tweaks and other security patches make up the bulk of the progress.

One new feature that's immediately noticeable is the addition of a built-in PDF viewer. According to Chromium Engineering Director Marc Pawliger, the built-in PDF viewer lets the browser 'render [PDF files] as seamlessly as HTML Web pages,' without the need for a standalone Adobe Reader installation.

Since I use Chrome as my primary browser, and since I seem to experience Adobe issues relatively frequently on the three Windows machines I use most often, each running a different operating system, that one new feature might bring some wanted stability to my PDF viewing.

Developers also seem to say Chrome 8 is the first version of the browser to boast full support for Google's upcoming Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store will offer an array of Web-based applications -- both free and paid -- that'll be designed specifically to work with the Chrome browser and the still-under-development Chrome OS.

Google's Chrome 8: What's New, and What's Next - PCWorld

Leadership Matters for Group Coupon Sites

In general, in most businesses, leadership of any category nearly always winds up in a highly-nonlinear distribution where 80 percent or more of the revenue, profit or sales is garnered by just a few providers.

It is not uncommon for the market share gap between providers one and two to be extensive. A rule of thumb is that market share of player one is double that of provider two, for example.

It looks like Groupon already is emerging as the number-one provider in the group coupon or social shopping space.

Hitwise: Groupon Is Getting 79% Of U.S. Group-Buying Visits Vs. 8% For LivingSocial

FCC Chairman's Speech About Internet Freedom

Mobile Email Peaks Friday Through Sunday, Study Finds

Mobile email usage peaks from Friday to Sunday, and during weekdays, is most used in the morning "before work" hours and during the "after work" hours, a study by eROI has found.

Since people are more likely to be on the go during the weekend, almost all results showed that from Thursday afternoon through Monday morning subscribers were engaging with email on mobile devices at a much higher rate than during the standard workweek (9 a.m. Monday to 4 p.m. Thursday), eROI says.

read the study here

Huge Margins at Groupon

CNBC reports that Groupon, the local advertising firm Google wants to buy, has 60 percent gross margins, keeping half of all the money generated when Groupon users buy merchandise in advertiser stores as part of the group coupon offers.

Every Company Now is a "Media Company"

In the future every company will need to behave more like a media company, argues Larry Kramer, author of "C-Scape." That should strike you as an odd statement, as it implies virtually any company is, in part, a "media company."

But the argument is that "every kind of storytelling, from news stories to family news, from mass entertainment to literature, including every tool we use to describe a product or a shape a relationship between business and customer," now assumes a different shape in an online world where a company's brand and product are shaped online.

Organizations and individuals increasingly are creators and distributors of news and information.

“When marketers create fan pages or communication with prospects and customers, they’re no longer just advertisers, they are publishers of content.

When they create an app or widget, they are software companies. And when they listen to what customers and critics are saying back to them, they are public relations, customer service and even product development.

Several years ago, for example, I began arguing that in a world where most information was online, Google became a publisher. Several years later, I'd go a bit further and argue that in a world where it is easy and relatively inexpensive for any company to produce its own media, there is as much logic to creating media as there is to allowing other firms to create media, assemble audiences and then spend money advertising with those media.

As we began to see several years ago, when small businesses began to divert "advertising" funds to creating better websites, now firms of almost any size, but especially larger firms that sell on a continental or multi-continent basis, it might well make as much sense to create "media" themselves rather than "advertising in other companies' media."

You'd have to have spent more than 25 years in ad-supported media to fully realize what a change that is. Observers used to say that, in a world of inexpensive blogging tools, "anybody can be a publisher." What most seem not to have realized is that the same tools mean every business can be a publisher.

Where today nearly everybody might agree that a business must have a website, someday a significant percentage of larger businesses will simply assume they need to create media themselves, directly aggregating audiences that potentially buy their products.

This is more than a simple matter of showing "industry leadership" or "thought leadership." This will become a matter of directly creating the audiences that in the past would be seen as "lead generation" tools. The older ways will still work. The point is that a "C-Scape" business environment also allows firms to do it a new way, by becoming media themselves. It's a big deal.

 read more here

Local Media Disruption: Mobile Could be Key

Not so long ago, small business was at the mercy of newspapers, TV & radio when they wanted to advertise their local businesses.

But that’s increasingly a challenged view, and mobile and online are going to be bigger factors. Local marketing budgets increasingly will be in flux as location-specific offers can be made to users equipped with mobile devices, based on their expressed profiles and interests.

Mobile, with location capabilities, also will offer promotion opportunities in addition to "awareness" functions. Instead of blasting messages indiscriminately, advertisers will be able to target users with greater need for a particular product, at a particular time, at a location. Advertisers increasingly will be able to provide "instant" inducements, such as discount offers, and increasingly pay only for the offers that produce an action.

The old "spray and pray" model will be sorely challenged as such capabilities are more common.

Local Media Disrupted: How TV, Radio and Newspapers Could Be Disrupted

"Content Plus Distribution" Now is King

Media observers always argue about whether "content" or "distribution" is king of the ecosystem, and views tend to swing back and forth over time.

Henry Blodget, editor of Business Insider, just sidesteps the whole argument, arguing that "content plus distribution" is king. To be more specific, right now Google is king, as it has the best balance of distribution and content assets.

New media companies running the gamut from Google to Gawker Media are now collectively worth $289 billion, nearly as much as the total market value, $296 billion, of traditional media companies like Time Warner, Disney, and News Corp. The two groups are “neck and neck,” said Blodget.

But the bulk of that new-media value lies in Google, not ventures like Huffington Post, Sugar Inc., or Gawker, which resemble traditional content-creating publishers. That’s because, Blodget said, content isn’t king: “Content plus distribution is king.

Henry Blodget: New media and old media are “neck and neck” in value | VentureBeat

Netflix Now Worries Studio Execs

You knew it had to happen: senior executives at three of the big six television and movie studios said they were seeking ways to contain Netflix, which now is starting to look like a too-powerful distributor.

The studios will try to delay the DVD release window for Netflix, and try to make access to that content more costly for Netflix, as well.

After the music industry's experience with Apple iTunes, everybody basically expected video and movie content owners to be wary of giving too much power to any of the distributors.

'The problem is that Netflix is not the company we thought it was when we started doing these deals a few years ago. It has changed,' said a studio executive quoted by Reuters.

Cable TV and other distributors likely have almost as much to fear. If Netflix can get rights to enough content, and can get rights that allow relatively quick access to content on a "day and date" basis (close to real time or at the same time as TV networks show content), Netflix becomes a replacement for a cable TV, satellite or telco TV subscription.

Netflix scrambles future of TV and films | Reuters

U.S. Cable Industry Grabs $5 Billion of Small Business Communications Revenue

It wasn't so long ago that one could hear competitive local exchange carrier executives, even accomplished execs, doubt the ability of cable companies to make a dent in the business services market.

Granted, most of those execs were running firms that made a living selling to multi-site enterprises, an area where cable operators remain a bit handicapped.

But $5 billion a year indicates that cable companies have grabbed a foothold in the very-small business segment.