Toblerone Runs Social Mobile Campaign

Kraft Foods' Toblerone is sponsoring a "Play it, Forward it, Share the Gratitude" mobile promotion that encourages consumers to extend gratitude to loved ones by uploading mobile video and text messages and have them broadcast on digital walls in Greenbelt and Bonifacio High Street in the Philippines.

There is a Web site for the Toblerone ‘Play it, Forward it’ promotion with brand information, details about the promotion, upload and entry forms, desktop widgets, contact details and tallies of uploaded videos, texts and votes.

Consumers can send their thank you videos and text messages to the mobile phones of families and friends from the Toblerone campaign site.

Customers can use bar codes on the candy’s packaging to retrieve discount mobile coupons as well. Social apps supporting the campaign also are available on Facebook and Friendster.

The campaign is powered by TMSfactory.

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/advertising/2805.html

Working Americans Use Social Networking; Not Much for Business, Yet

Of 10,000 working American’s surveyed by Compass Intelligence in late November 2008, nearly 60 percent said they were active on a social networking site, but most are not yet using social sites for business purposes.

The most popular site, according to research, is FaceBook, with nearly 35 percent of respondents being registered members of this site.

http://is.gd/hrUr

Federal Telecom Spending $47 Billion in 2009, Growing

Federal information technology spending on IT reached $129 billion in 2008, and will increase in the mid single-digits through 2013, when spending will reach $159 billion, say analysts at Compass Intelligence.

The largest category of Federal IT spending is in the telecom segment, which will receive a big boost due to new Federal policies regarding broadband.

Telecom spending by the Federal government will reach $47 billion in 2009, ramping up faster than many other categories to reach $59 billion by 2013."

Time Warner Cable Shelves Bandwidth Caps

Time Warner Cable appears, for the moment, to be retreating from its bandwidth cap tests in four U.S. cities, temporary ending a controversial experiment that would have created new usage buckets.

Those plans would have featured a lighter user plan featuring 1 Gbyte per month of usage for $15 per month. About 30 percent of Time Warner Cable customers use less than 1 Gyte per month.

Other plans would have featured caps of 10, 20, 40, 60 and 100 GBytes, plus an unlimited plan for the highest-speed 50 Mbps service.

Twitter Usage Explodes in March

The number of visitors to Twitter.com jumped 131 percent in March to 9.3 million visitors, up from five million in February.

We call that an inflection point!

Consumers Sending "Price" Signals to Apple?

Economists are fairly unanimous about one element of human behavior. When prices of any product are raised, demand tends to drop. The salient exception is "luxury" goods, where higher prices sometimes stimulate demand. But early evidence suggests that consumers believe 99 cents is the "right" price for a single song.

Last week was the first week of iTunes’s new, steeper pricing on some tracks, and consumers voted with their wallets, according to Billboard. Sales figures from iTunes show that tracks that now sell for $1.29, up from $0.99, sold 12.5 percent fewer units than during the previous week, while tracks whose prices were unchanged sold 10 percent more than the week before.

Overall revenue was up three percent during the week, so it might not be possible to blame the "economy" for the changes. It appears that unit sales for the top-100 songs were up for the week.

http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-is-the-price-right-itunes-price-hikes-impact-first-weeks-sales/

YouTube As Monetizable as a Newspaper?

"User-generated content" is proving to be a financial albatross, says Farhad Manjoo, Slate's technology columnist.

YouTube, for example, sells ads on fewer than 10 percent of its videos, according to analysts at Credit Suisse. But the costs of storing and serving up 75 billion video clips a year costs Google $360 million a year, the analysts estimate. Add in all other expenses, and the cost of running YouTube for one year exceeds $700 million. But YouTube will make about $240 million in revenues for 2009.

Oddly enough, YouTube loses more money on its content than a daily newspaper.

http://slate.com/id/2216162