Display advertising: Google's Vision

Google's vision of dynamic advertising includes the ability to change offers, on the fly, based on such issues as weather.

Imagine you own a popular coffee chain in Denver that you want to promote. On Monday afternoon, it’s warm and 80 degrees in the city. You run a display ad campaign online that offers Denverites a discount coupon for an iced cold latte, with a searchable map embedded in the ad to show local branches, and a real-time feed from people who have tweeted publicly about your newest flavor.

That evening, a cold front rolls over the Rockies. Your ad automatically and dynamically adjusts to present a photo of a hot, steaming cup of hot chocolate in front of a warm fireplace, together with a home delivery number and an offer of free marshmallows.

If you live in Denver, you know a 40-degree temperature swing in a single day is quite possible. The ability to change an offer on the fly is something local advertisers have not had, up to this point.

Official Google Blog: Display advertising: towards creativity without limits

Online Video "On TVs" Lacks Ad Support

While more and more online video publishers are connecting with audiences in their living rooms with smart TV's, Blu-ray players and devices such as Roku and Google TV, advertising on these platforms is not yet in place.

Who Uses Deal-Of-The-Day Websites?

Who uses group buying or social buying sites?

You might think it is people for whom saving money is really important because they don't make as much. Actually, says Forrester Research, the three percent of U.S. consumers who frequently use deal-of-the-day sites have a lot of money to spend.

About half of them report having an average household income of $100K or more, and they expect to spend more money online this year than last year.

They are twice as likely to be influenced by what's hot and what's not, two-thirds are willing to try new things, and 62 percent agree that they often change their mind about which brand to buy after doing some research, making them the ideal target audience for deal-of-the-day sites.

But the Forrester Research data also shows that the majority of U.S. online consumers aren’t familiar with deal-of-the-day sites like Groupon or Living Social, and another 25 percent haven't used them yet.

The Data Digest: Who Uses Deal-Of-The-Day Websites?

Social Networking is Fastest-Growing App

Social networking is far and away the fastest-growing application people of most ages are adopting.

Video and audio also are noteworthy.

read more here

What People Do Online

There are generational differences in use of apps online.

"Everybody" uses email and search. You might be surprised at how high "health information" ranks.

Apparently, for most people that is a more frequent activity than using "news."

Of course, there are some things almost nobody, of any age, does.

Virtual worlds, blogging and podcasts are among those infrequent activities.

read more here

Mobile is the New "Online"

"Mobile is the new online," says analyst Paul Kedrosky. Mobile is the new ad network, the new data substrate, the new product screen, the new shopping list.

It's rapidly become the currency as well, with people more at peace with turning your mobile phone into your wallet.

But Kedrosky warns there is a serious "scaling" problem with local mobile advertising, namely the cost of reaching local advertisers to sell them programs.

There's definitely a billion-dollar hyper-local ad market but the right way to see it is there's a $15,000 local ad market. There's a whole bunch of many, many small markets.

Why Google Dropped Groupon and Local Just Doesn't Scale

Verizon FiOS TV Changes Coming?

FCC Net Neutrality Rule Creates Tiered Internet Access, Despite Not Wanting To

The Federal Communications Commission's "Open Network" rules, which inevitably will be known as the "network neutrality" rules, ironically enshrine the notion of tiered Internet access service, even when it attempts to keep the fixed-network Internet access service a "best effort only" type of product.

There are two reasons. First, the rules applying to wireless networks are more flexible. The second reason is that the rules explicitly exempt enterprise access services from the rules.

"Mass-market retail service" is covered, meaning "a service marketed and sold on a standardized basis to
residential customers, small businesses, and other end-user customers such as schools and
libraries."

"The term does not include enterprise service offerings, which are typically offered to larger organizations through customized or individually negotiated arrangements," the official document says.

That suggests we might conceivably see wireless and business access become the places where more experimentation occurs, since those are the places that differentiated access products can be created and sold.

read the whole document here

Net Neutrality: 4-6 Years of Uncertainty

Professor Tim Wu says the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules mean at least four to six years of uncertainty, as it will take that long for court challenges to the FCC's authority to bubble up to the Supreme Court for final ruling.

"We’ll get an initial indication in about two years (the length of time it will take for the initial legal challenge), but a final answer may require the Supreme Court to get involved," Wu says. Meanwhile, if the new rule is struck down by a federal court, the FCC retains the power to reenact it using a different basis of authority (its backup power, so to speak). That will effectively reset the authority question for another two years.

The ruling will have other effects. There are lots of firms that sell software allowing service providers to create services offering priority handling of packets, and custom services built on the apps users care about most. It will now, in the U.S. market not make so much sense to try and sell such products to wireline operators, as they probably will not want to bother creating services other than "best effort."

That shifts the whole focus of sales effort to other countries where creation of such services is possible. Inside the United States, only the wireless providers will be able to create many new types of differentiated service. That's good for mobile providers, but not so good for the commodity providers of fixed broadband service.

The Art Of Kicking The Can: Uncertainty Rules When It Comes To Net Neutrality

A 42-Inch Android Tablet? Seriously?

Apparently this is a test of potential demand for a 42-inch-screen Android tablet. Not sure it makes much sense for most people, but I can imagine lots of point-of-sale display applications.

Best Gadgets of 2010

Gadgets matter for lots of reasons, mostly because they frequently are fun, and sometimes help us be productive. But at least in part because gadgets drive demand for communications and communications services. And, ultimately, that demand supplies the demand that allows us to keep investing in better networks.

At the end of the day, consumers decide whether advanced communications are important, by our willingness to spend on the services.

iAd Producer Makes iAd Ad Creation Easier

Apple's new "iAd Producer" will make it easier for would-be advertisers to design and assemble high-impact, interactive content for iAd. iAd Producer automatically manages the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript behind your iAd to make creating beautiful, motion-rich iAd content as easy as point and click, Apple says.

For advanced developers, iAd Producer offers sophisticated JavaScript editing and debugging, along with a powerful extension mechanism that enables them to create and re-use their own page templates and components.

That's going to delight, or at least appease, brands that found Apple's instance on creative control stifling.

iAd Producer - Apple Developer

Can Twitter Inform Stock Trades?

A hedge fund called Derwent Capital Markets says it will launch a new fund in February that will trade based in part on analysis of Twitter sentiment. This approach is built on research from the University of Manchester and Indiana University that showed how the number of emotional words on Twitter could be used to predict moves in the Dow Jones index.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1010/1010.3003v1.pdf

Researchers said they found that a change in emotions as expressed on Twitter would be followed by a move in the index between two and six days later, and that this method had greater than 87-percent accuracy.

Someone Is Trading Stocks Based on Your Tweets

Was Skype Outage an Attack?

The ultimate cause of the Skype global outage is still unclear (or at least Skype isn’t ready to talk about it yet), but it does not appear Skype completely rules out the possibility of an attack designed to take the network down.

Skype CEO Will Offer Users Credits For Outage; Does Not Rule Out Malicious Attack

Use Android to Program Google TV