X2iN | Digital Knowledge Mashup

.x2in, você já tem um iPhone?

2008-05-08T03:47:00.001-07:00

Olá .x2in, td bem?

Queria te contar uma novidade bem legal...

Acabamos de colocar no ar o Hands para iPhones (e iPods Touch).

É uma versão especialíssima do nosso portal móvel, com mais de 200 canais dos melhores provedors, como Climatempo, Estadão, Guia da Semana, Buscapé, Apontador, Webmotors e Update or Die.

Tudo com look-and-feel e otimizado para uma experiência à altura desse mega-desejado gadget. E o melhor: é de graça!

Acesse no próprio navegador do iPhone/iTouch, digitando http://wap.hands.com.br

Dá uma olhadinha, me diz o que achou? Queria muito ouvir suas críticas e sugestões.

Ah, se gostar não esquece de adicionar aos favoritos e de contar pra dois amigos ;o)

Muito obrigado!

Forte Abraço,
César

--
Cesar S. Cesar
Diretor de Estratégia & Inovação
Hands | www.hands.com.br

Acesse no celular: wap.hands.com.br

What makes Apple golden | Fortune

2008-03-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

fonte: http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/29/news/companies/amac_apple.fortune/index.htm

The creator of the iPod and iPhone sets a dazzling new standard for innovation and mass appeal, driven by an obsessive CEO who wants his products to be practically perfect in every way.

What makes Apple golden

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- The mass market is supposed to be dead, but you would never know it from Apple. In February the iTunes Store became the second-largest music retailer in the U.S., right behind Wal-Mart. The iPod is to music players what Kleenex is to tissue or Xerox is to copiers. Almost everything Apple makes transcends gender, geography, age, and race. An Apple Store is a demographic melting pot, with computer games for kids and a Genius Bar for their parents and so much cool stuff to touch that it's a magnet for teens and twentysomethings.

Apple scoffs at the notion of a target market. It doesn't even conduct focus groups. "You can't ask people what they want if it's around the next corner," says Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO and cofounder. At Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500), new-product development starts in the gut and gets hatched in rolling conversations that go something like this: What do we hate? (Our cellphones.) What do we have the technology to make? (A cellphone with a Mac inside.) What would we like to own? (You guessed it, an iPhone.) "One of the keys to Apple is that we build products that really turn us on," says Jobs.

With that simple formula, Apple not only has upstaged the likes of Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) but has set the gold standard for corporate America with an entirely new business model: creating a brand, morphing it, and reincarnating it to thrive in a disruptive age. Now, just seven years after it unveiled the first iPod, fully half of Apple's revenues come from music and iPods. Interest in the iPod and iPhone has rubbed off on the Mac, whose sales growth outpaces the industry's. Apple has demonstrated how to create real, breathtaking growth by dreaming up products so new and ingenious that they have upended one industry after another: consumer electronics, the record industry, the movie industry, video and music production.

In the process the company that ranks as the new No. 1 among America's Most Admired Companies has become a roaring financial success. In the five years ended last September, sales tripled to $24 billion and profits surged to $3.5 billion, up from $42 million. While Apple's stock is slumping along with the market, tumbling 40% this year on worries about less-than-stratospheric sales growth, it doesn't usually stay down for long. Apple ranks No. 1 among Fortune 500 companies for total return to shareholders over both the past five years (94%) and the past ten (51%).

The decade coincides exactly with the return of Jobs as Apple's maestro, bringing his particular mix of genius and obsession, as well as a tendency to play by his own rules. His utter dedication to discovery and excellence has created a culture that has made Apple a symbol of innovation. You won't find that word on a placard or a piece of propaganda at One Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. There innovation is a way of life. But it isn't like creating new variations on Crest toothpaste. At Apple, every endeavor is a moon shot. Sometimes the company misses, but the successes are huge. Apple's goal for iPhone sales this year is ten million units, up from 3.7 million during its six months on sale in 2007.

Apple requires a special kind of workforce. The place is divided by product but also by function along what COO Tim Cook calls "very faint lines." Collaboration is key. So is a degree of perfectionism. Apple hires people who are never satisfied. A designer has to be a borderline fanatic to care about the curve of a screw on the underside of a MacBook Air or the apparent weightlessness of the tiny door that hides its connectors. You don't get a foot in the door here unless your eyes light up when you talk about your Mac. (Head designer Jonathan Ive referred to a new MacBook Air as "this guy" as he pointed out features in a recent interview.) The place is loaded with engineers, but it's not just the skills that are important, it's the ability to emote. ("Emotive" is a big word here.) The passion is what provides the push to overcome design and engineering obstacles, to bring projects in on time -- and a peer pressure so great it sometimes causes a team to eject a weak link or revolt against an underperforming boss. "Apple," says Cook, "is not for the faint of heart."

Here there is no such thing as hedging your bets. "One traditional management philosophy that's taught in many business schools is diversification. Well, that's not us," says Cook. "We are the anti-business school." Apple's philosophy goes like this: Too many companies spread themselves thin, making a profusion of products to defuse risk, so they get mired in the mediocre. Apple's approach is to put every resource it has behind just a few products and make them exceedingly well. Apple is brutal about culling past hits: The company dropped its most popular iPod, the Mini, on the day it introduced the Nano (a better product, higher margins why dilute your resources?).

Apple might look like a high-wire act. But while success is never guaranteed, it's not random either. Ownership of its operating system gives Apple an unusual degree of control over its ability to design, change, and adapt. That allows Apple to follow the product - with no preconceptions about where it will end up. The iPod has evolved from a device the size of a deck of cards to a Nano to a Shuffle and now to a Touch. The Touch, says Cook, "has another roadmap in front of it" if it becomes, as he predicts, the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile device.

"Apple's DNA has always been to try to democratize technology," says Jobs, in the belief that if you make something "really great, then everybody will want to use it." Who would have thought that a cult brand like Apple would be resuscitating a mass market? Jobs and his true believers have proved that if you're bold enough to build it, they will come.

Everywhere and Nowhere | The Economist

2008-03-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

>
>
>
> EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
> Mar 19th 2008
>
>
> Social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life.
> That
> does not mean it is a business
>
> A LARGE but long-in-the-tooth technology company hoping to become a
> bigger force in online advertising buys a small start-up in a sector
> that everybody agrees is the next big thing. A decade ago, this was
> Microsoft buying Hotmail--the firm that established web-based e-mail
> as
> a must-have service for internet users, and promised to drive up page
> views, and thus advertising inventory, on the software giant's
> websites. This month it was AOL, a struggling web portal that is part
> of Time Warner, an old-media giant, buying Bebo[1], a small but
> up-and-coming online social network, for $850m.
>
> Both deals, in their respective decades, illustrate a great paradox of
> the internet in that the premise underlying them is precisely half
> right and half wrong. The correct half is that a next big
> thing--web-mail then, social networking now--can indeed quickly become
> something that consumers expect from their favourite web portal. The
> non sequitur is to assume that the new service will be a
> revenue-generating business in its own right.
>
> Web-mail has certainly not become a business. Admittedly, Google,
> Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL and other providers of web-mail accounts do
> place advertisements on their web-mail offerings, but this is small
> beer. They offer e-mail--and volumes of free archival storage
> unimaginable a decade ago--because the service, including its
> associated address book, calendar, and other features, is cheap to
> deliver and keeps consumers engaged with their brands and websites,
> making users more likely to visit affiliated pages where advertising
> is
> more effective.
>
> Social networking appears to be similar in this regard. The big
> internet and media companies have bid up the implicit valuations of
> MySpace[2], Facebook[3] and others. But that does not mean there is a
> working revenue model. Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, recently
> admitted that Google's "social networking inventory as a whole" was
> proving problematic and that the "monetisation work we were doing
> there
> didn't pan out as well as we had hoped." Google has a contractual
> agreement with News Corp to place advertisements on its network,
> MySpace, and also owns its own network, Orkut[4]. Clearly, Google is
> not making money from either.
>
> Facebook, now allied to Microsoft, has fared worse. Its grand attempt
> to redefine the advertising industry by pioneering a new approach to
> social marketing, called Beacon, failed completely. Facebook's idea
> was
> to inform a user's friends whenever he bought something at certain
> online retailers, by running a small announcement inside the friends'
> "news feeds". In theory, this was to become a new recommendation
> economy, an algorithmic form of word of mouth. In practice, users
> rebelled and privacy watchdogs cried foul. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's
> founder, admitted in December that "we simply did a bad job with this
> release" and apologised.
>
> So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail,
> will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts
> from
> its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the
> connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small
> programs can exploit this "social graph" to enable friends to interact
> via games, greetings, video clips and so on.
>
> COMING UP FOR AIR
> But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this
> sort of thing? "We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and
> quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn[5]
> to be social," says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy.
> Future social networks, she thinks, "will be like air. They will be
> anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be." No more logging
> on to Facebook just to see the "news feed" of updates from your
> friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS
> reader
> or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show
> them
> to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic
> address book can automatically get them.
>
> The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed
> to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be "open" toward
> independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software
> for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their
> users, because the networks' lofty valuations depend on maximising
> their page views--so they maintain a tight grip on their users'
> information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid
> internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social
> networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging
> sites,
> and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other.
> They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a
> drag.
>
> Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services,
> such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as "walled gardens" before
> they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could
> send
> messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook's messaging
> does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually
> opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning.
> Parts of the industry are collaborating in a "data portability
> workgroup" to let people move their friend lists and other information
> around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single,
> federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.
>
> The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older
> next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem
> rather
> old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now
> discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for
> social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and
> calendars of their users. "E-mail in the wider sense is the most
> important social network," says David Ascher, who manages
> Thunderbird[6], a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the
> Mozilla Foundation, which also oversees the popular Firefox web
> browser.
>
> That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and
> dynamically
> updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social
> graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old
> friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has
> access to the entire address book and can infer information from the
> frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from
> Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane's; Joe has Jane in his calendar
> tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack
> "work only" in his address book. Perhaps Joe's party photos should be
> visible to Jane, but not Jack.
>
> This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services
> on
> the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business
> out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an
> economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr
> Ascher, whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let
> users minimise what they share. Social networking may end up being
> everywhere, and yet nowhere.
>
> -----
> [1] http://www.bebo.com
> [2] http://www.myspace.com
> [3] http://www.facebook.com
> [4] http://www.orkut.com
> [5] http://www.linkedin.com
> [6] http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
>
>
>
> See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10880936

Google Sees Surge in Web Use on Mobile Phones | Reuters

2008-03-24T05:49:00.001-07:00

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google <GOOG.O> has seen an acceleration of Internet activity among mobile phone users in recent months since the company has introduced faster Web services on selected phone models, fueling confidence the mobile Internet era is at hand, the company said on Tuesday.

Early evidence showing sharp increases in Internet usage on phones, not just computers, has emerged from services Google has begun offering in recent months on Blackberry e-mail phones, Nokia devices for multimedia picture and video creators and business professionals and the Apple iPhone, the world's top Web search company said.

"We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage," Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile, said in an interview. "We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating.

The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services from companies like Google are fueling the growth, Waddell argued.

Google made the pronouncement as it introduced a new software download for mobile phones running Microsoft Corp's <MSFT.O> Windows Mobile software that conveniently positions a Google Web search window on the home screen of such phones.

Similar versions of the search software which Google introduced for Blackberry users in December and certain Nokia phones in February have sped up the time users take to perform Web searches by 40 percent and, in turn, driven usage.

The software shortcuts the time it takes for people to perform Web searches on Google by eliminating initial search steps of finding a Web browser on the phone, opening the browser, waiting for network access, and getting to Google.com. By making a Google search box more convenient, mobile phone users have begun using the Internet more, the company said.

"We are actually seeing a 20 percent increase in the number of searches by people," Waddell said.

Google's mobile plug-in software lets users customize their phones to feature Google mobile services instead of relying solely on software features network carriers have pre-installed on the devices.

"Faster is better than slow, especially on a mobile device, where fast is much better than slow," Waddell said. "Not only are we are seeing increased user satisfaction but also greater usage."

Microsoft expects to have sold 20 million Windows Mobile devices by the end of its fiscal year in June, which together with Blackberry and Symbian-based phones represent upward of 85 percent of the Internet-ready smartphones sold in the world.

Users of phones based on software from Research in Motion, Nokia's Symbian-based phones and now Microsoft Windows Mobile can download the software at http://mobile.google.com/.

Google officials said in August that they had seen a similar surge in usage of Google.com via mobile devices following the launch of the Apple iPhone last year. The iPhone offers a full-featured Internet browser unlike many phones.

Waddell said Google had seen iPhone users perform as many as 50 times more Web searches on these computer-phone devices as users of standard mobile feature phones typically do.

Reporting by Eric Auchard; editing by Louise Heavens
March 19, 2008
By REUTERS
Selection Cesar S. Cesar

Apple to Encourage iPhone Programmers | NYT

2008-03-13T08:26:00.001-07:00

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, is hoping to expand the iPhone's appeal by luring software developers to create programs for it.

John Doerr, the venture capitalist, is adding an incentive: his firm is putting up $100 million to invest in the work of those programmers.

At an event Thursday at Apple headquarters, Mr. Jobs announced a low-cost software development kit that outside programmers can use to create programs for the iPhone, much as they now write the vast majority of the programs created for the Macintosh. Until now, iPhones have officially been able to run only the limited assortment of applications that Apple includes. (Some buyers have modified the phones to add unauthorized software.)

"We're very excited about this," said Mr. Jobs, who also announced that the company was adding features to make the iPhone more appealing to business users. "We think a lot of people, after understanding where we are going, are going to want to become an iPhone developer."

Sharing the stage with Mr. Jobs, Mr. Doerr announced that his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, had established a $100 million venture capital fund for iPhone entrepreneurs. Called the iFund, it is the largest fund the company has created for a specific technology.

"The potential for iPhone is huge," Mr. Doerr said.

Matt Murphy, the Kleiner partner overseeing the fund, said he expected the fund to last two to three years, after which the company might decide to add more capital.

Mr. Jobs said Apple would offer a developer kit for $99 that would allow programmers to create everything from games to business programs. On Thursday, Sega and AOL demonstrated applications they created for the iPhone using the kit.

The programs that are created will then be available to iPhone users exclusively through a new service on all iPhones called the Apps Store, an aspect of the plan that may discourage some developers. Apple will keep 30 percent of the sale price.

Mr. Jobs said that Apple would offer only those programs that it approves, rejecting pornography, for example, and programs that might not provide adequate security for users.

He argued that developers would benefit from Apple's being the sole distributor because only Apple could give third-party programs such wide exposure to customers. All iPhone users will be able to browse the available programs directly from their devices. Customers will also benefit, he said, from Apple's weeding out of malicious programs.

"We can track the developers and we can tell their parents," Mr. Jobs said, joking about the demographic profile of many Apple entrepreneurs.

In an attempt to lure corporate customers, Apple executives also announced that the iPhone would be able to work directly with Microsoft's Exchange software, allowing it to interact closely with corporate networks and e-mail systems in much the way that BlackBerry devices do. Apple said Genentech and Nike were among the companies that were already taking advantage of this feature.

The new business abilities will be added to the iPhone in June and will come to existing owners in a free upgrade. The software will include extensive security features, like the ability to lock and erase the system remotely in the event of loss or theft.

"The majority of the objections I.T. managers have had about the iPhone have been addressed today," said Van L. Baker, an analyst with Gartner Inc., referring to corporate information technology managers. "It's a very valid and robust device, and for that reason it's a viable platform for the enterprise in competition with the BlackBerry and others."

But attracting a huge following among corporations is something Apple has not been able to achieve with the Macintosh, and it remains to be seen whether the iPhone will take sales from the BlackBerry, the popular business communicator sold by Research in Motion of Waterloo, Ontario.

"It's a better device and platform that does more things than the BlackBerry," Mr. Murphy said. If people have been questioning whether the iPhone is a business tool, the integration with Exchange "takes the issue off the table," he said.

The iPhone is already the second most popular smartphone after the BlackBerry, with a 28 percent share of the market, but its inability to communicate with corporate computer systems running Microsoft Exchange has hindered its growth in that market.

March 7, 2008

The New York Times

By LAURIE J. FLYNN

Selection by Cesar S. Cesar

ATT: How to Start a Startup | Paul Graham

2008-03-11T02:16:00.001-07:00

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

March 2005

(This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.)

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that's kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups, that's it. There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.

The Idea

In particular, you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around. The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.

Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year. [1]

There are plenty of other areas that are just as backward as search was before Google. I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.

For example, dating sites currently suck far worse than search did before Google. They all use the same simple-minded model. They seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how to do database matches instead of how dating works in the real world. An undergrad could build something better as a class project. And yet there's a lot of money at stake. Online dating is a valuable business now, and it might be worth a hundred times as much if it worked.

An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.

Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. Microsoft's original plan was to make money selling programming languages, of all things. Their current business model didn't occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.

Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.

What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.

People

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.

Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did. The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with her. You could sense them squirming on the hook, but you knew there would be no rest for them till they'd signed up.

If you think about people you know, you'll find the animal test is easy to apply. Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence "so-and-so is an animal." If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.

For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?

That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.

When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."

This technique doesn't always work, because people can be influenced by their environment. In the MIT CS department, there seems to be a tradition of acting like a brusque know-it-all. I'm told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky, in the same way the classic airline pilot manner is said to derive from Chuck Yeager. Even genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you have to make allowances.

It helped us to have Robert Morris, who is one of the readiest to say "I don't know" of anyone I've met. (At least, he was before he became a professor at MIT.) No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.

Like most startups, ours began with a group of friends, and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the people we hired. This is a crucial difference between startups and big companies. Being friends with someone for even a couple days will tell you more than companies could ever learn in interviews. [2]

It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.

If you start a startup, there's a good chance it will be with people you know from college or grad school. So in theory you ought to try to make friends with as many smart people as you can in school, right? Well, no. Don't make a conscious effort to schmooze; that doesn't work well with hackers.

What you should do in college is work on your own projects. Hackers should do this even if they don't plan to start startups, because it's the only real way to learn how to program. In some cases you may collaborate with other students, and this is the best way to get to know good hackers. The project may even grow into a startup. But once again, I wouldn't aim too directly at either target. Don't force things; just work on stuff you like with people you like.

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder. But you don't want so many founders that the company starts to look like a group photo. Partly because you don't need a lot of people at first, but mainly because the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you'll have. When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. You don't want mere voting; you need unanimity.

In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn't work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette.

Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours, and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called "business" if they would be the president. But they all said no, so I had to do it myself. And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.

I think the reason I made such a mystery of business was that I was disgusted by the idea of doing it. I wanted to work in the pure, intellectual world of software, not deal with customers' mundane problems. People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.

Once I was forced to discard my protective incompetence, I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don't need to know about those in a startup. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA. [3]

There is one reason you might want to include business people in a startup, though: because you have to have at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want. Some believe only business people can do this-- that hackers can implement software, but not design it. That's nonsense. There's nothing about knowing how to program that prevents hackers from understanding users, or about not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.

If you can't understand users, however, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. That is the single most important issue for technology startups, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else.

What Customers Want

It's not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want. Look at restaurants. A large percentage fail, about a quarter in the first year. But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?

Restaurants with great food seem to prosper no matter what. A restaurant with great food can be expensive, crowded, noisy, dingy, out of the way, and even have bad service, and people will keep coming. It's true that a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks. But that approach is very risky. It's more straightforward just to make the food good.

It's the same with technology. You hear all kinds of reasons why startups fail. But can you think of one that had a massively popular product and still failed?

In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product. For most, the cause of death is listed as "ran out of funding," but that's only the immediate cause. Why couldn't they get more funding? Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be done, or both.

When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can. But I decided not to, because that's implicit in making something customers want. The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.

The other approach is what I call the "Hail Mary" strategy. You make elaborate plans for a product, hire a team of engineers to develop it (people who do this tend to use the term "engineer" for hackers), and then find after a year that you've spent two million dollars to develop something no one wants. This was not uncommon during the Bubble, especially in companies run by business types, who thought of software development as something terrifying that therefore had to be carefully planned.

We never even considered that approach. As a Lisp hacker, I come from the tradition of rapid prototyping. I would not claim (at least, not here) that this is the right way to write every program, but it's certainly the right way to write software for a startup. In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.

Like most startups, we changed our plan on the fly. At first we expected our customers to be Web consultants. But it turned out they didn't like us, because our software was easy to use and we hosted the site. It would be too easy for clients to fire them. We also thought we'd be able to sign up a lot of catalog companies, because selling online was a natural extension of their existing business. But in 1996 that was a hard sell. The middle managers we talked to at catalog companies saw the Web not as an opportunity, but as something that meant more work for them.

We did get a few of the more adventurous catalog companies. Among them was Frederick's of Hollywood, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers. But most of our users were small, individual merchants who saw the Web as an opportunity to build a business. Some had retail stores, but many only existed online. And so we changed direction to focus on these users. Instead of concentrating on the features Web consultants and catalog companies would want, we worked to make the software easy to use.

I learned something valuable from that. It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people. Stephen Hawking's editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.

How do you figure out what customers want? Watch them. One of the best places to do this was at trade shows. Trade shows didn't pay as a way of getting new customers, but they were worth it as market research. We didn't just give canned presentations at trade shows. We used to show people how to build real, working stores. Which meant we got to watch as they used our software, and talk to them about what they needed.

No matter what kind of startup you start, it will probably be a stretch for you, the founders, to understand what users want. The only kind of software you can build without studying users is the sort for which you are the typical user. But this is just the kind that tends to be open source: operating systems, programming languages, editors, and so on. So if you're developing technology for money, you're probably not going to be developing it for people like you. Indeed, you can use this as a way to generate ideas for startups: what do people who are not like you want from technology?

When most people think of startups, they think of companies like Apple or Google. Everyone knows these, because they're big consumer brands. But for every startup like that, there are twenty more that operate in niche markets or live quietly down in the infrastructure. So if you start a successful startup, odds are you'll start one of those.

Another way to say that is, if you try to start the kind of startup that has to be a big consumer brand, the odds against succeeding are steeper. The best odds are in niche markets. Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck most. And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software, and the crap they get in return. This imbalance equals opportunity.

If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.

Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them. It's worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it. And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can't outsell an Oracle salesman. So if you want to win through better technology, aim at smaller customers. [4]

They're the more strategically valuable part of the market anyway. In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker. Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals. Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems, and now Apple is doing it to Avid. Henry Ford did it to the car makers that preceded him. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you'll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.

It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does.

Raising Money

To make all this happen, you're going to need money. Some startups have been self-funding-- Microsoft for example-- but most aren't. I think it's wise to take money from investors. To be self-funding, you have to start as a consulting company, and it's hard to switch from that to a product company.

Financially, a startup is like a pass/fail course. The way to get rich from a startup is to maximize the company's chances of succeeding, not to maximize the amount of stock you retain. So if you can trade stock for something that improves your odds, it's probably a smart move.

To most hackers, getting investors seems like a terrifying and mysterious process. Actually it's merely tedious. I'll try to give an outline of how it works.

The first thing you'll need is a few tens of thousands of dollars to pay your expenses while you develop a prototype. This is called seed capital. Because so little money is involved, raising seed capital is comparatively easy-- at least in the sense of getting a quick yes or no.

Usually you get seed money from individual rich people called "angels." Often they're people who themselves got rich from technology. At the seed stage, investors don't expect you to have an elaborate business plan. Most know that they're supposed to decide quickly. It's not unusual to get a check within a week based on a half-page agreement.

We started Viaweb with $10,000 of seed money from our friend Julian. But he gave us a lot more than money. He's a former CEO and also a corporate lawyer, so he gave us a lot of valuable advice about business, and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company. Plus he introduced us to one of the two angel investors who supplied our next round of funding.

Some angels, especially those with technology backgrounds, may be satisfied with a demo and a verbal description of what you plan to do. But many will want a copy of your business plan, if only to remind themselves what they invested in.

Our angels asked for one, and looking back, I'm amazed how much worry it caused me. "Business plan" has that word "business" in it, so I figured it had to be something I'd have to read a book about business plans to write. Well, it doesn't. At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you're going to make money from it, and the resumes of the founders. If you just sit down and write out what you've been saying to one another, that should be fine. It shouldn't take more than a couple hours, and you'll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.

For the angel to have someone to make the check out to, you're going to have to have some kind of company. Merely incorporating yourselves isn't hard. The problem is, for the company to exist, you have to decide who the founders are, and how much stock they each have. If there are two founders with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business, that's easy. But if you have a number of people who are expected to contribute in varying degrees, arranging the proportions of stock can be hard. And once you've done it, it tends to be set in stone.

I have no tricks for dealing with this problem. All I can say is, try hard to do it right. I do have a rule of thumb for recognizing when you have, though. When everyone feels they're getting a slightly bad deal, that they're doing more than they should for the amount of stock they have, the stock is optimally apportioned.

There is more to setting up a company than incorporating it, of course: insurance, business license, unemployment compensation, various things with the IRS. I'm not even sure what the list is, because we, ah, skipped all that. When we got real funding near the end of 1996, we hired a great CFO, who fixed everything retroactively. It turns out that no one comes and arrests you if you don't do everything you're supposed to when starting a company. And a good thing too, or a lot of startups would never get started. [5]

It can be dangerous to delay turning yourself into a company, because one or more of the founders might decide to split off and start another company doing the same thing. This does happen. So when you set up the company, as well as as apportioning the stock, you should get all the founders to sign something agreeing that everyone's ideas belong to this company, and that this company is going to be everyone's only job.

[If this were a movie, ominous music would begin here.]

While you're at it, you should ask what else they've signed. One of the worst things that can happen to a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. We did, and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.

As we were in the middle of getting bought, we discovered that one of our people had, early on, been bound by an agreement that said all his ideas belonged to the giant company that was paying for him to go to grad school. In theory, that could have meant someone else owned big chunks of our software. So the acquisition came to a screeching halt while we tried to sort this out. The problem was, since we'd been about to be acquired, we'd allowed ourselves to run low on cash. Now we needed to raise more to keep going. But it's hard to raise money with an IP cloud over your head, because investors can't judge how serious it is.

Our existing investors, knowing that we needed money and had nowhere else to get it, at this point attempted certain gambits which I will not describe in detail, except to remind readers that the word "angel" is a metaphor. The founders thereupon proposed to walk away from the company, after giving the investors a brief tutorial on how to administer the servers themselves. And while this was happening, the acquirers used the delay as an excuse to welch on the deal.

Miraculously it all turned out ok. The investors backed down; we did another round of funding at a reasonable valuation; the giant company finally gave us a piece of paper saying they didn't own our software; and six months later we were bought by Yahoo for much more than the earlier acquirer had agreed to pay. So we were happy in the end, though the experience probably took several years off my life.

Don't do what we did. Before you consummate a startup, ask everyone about their previous IP history.

Once you've got a company set up, it may seem presumptuous to go knocking on the doors of rich people and asking them to invest tens of thousands of dollars in something that is really just a bunch of guys with some ideas. But when you look at it from the rich people's point of view, the picture is more encouraging. Most rich people are looking for good investments. If you really think you have a chance of succeeding, you're doing them a favor by letting them invest. Mixed with any annoyance they might feel about being approached will be the thought: are these guys the next Google?

Usually angels are financially equivalent to founders. They get the same kind of stock and get diluted the same amount in future rounds. How much stock should they get? That depends on how ambitious you feel. When you offer x percent of your company for y dollars, you're implicitly claiming a certain value for the whole company. Venture investments are usually described in terms of that number. If you give an investor new shares equal to 5% of those already outstanding in return for $100,000, then you've done the deal at a pre-money valuation of $2 million.

How do you decide what the value of the company should be? There is no rational way. At this stage the company is just a bet. I didn't realize that when we were raising money. Julian thought we ought to value the company at several million dollars. I thought it was preposterous to claim that a couple thousand lines of code, which was all we had at the time, were worth several million dollars. Eventually we settled on one millon, because Julian said no one would invest in a company with a valuation any lower. [6]

What I didn't grasp at the time was that the valuation wasn't just the value of the code we'd written so far. It was also the value of our ideas, which turned out to be right, and of all the future work we'd do, which turned out to be a lot.

The next round of funding is the one in which you might deal with actual venture capital firms . But don't wait till you've burned through your last round of funding to start approaching them. VCs are slow to make up their minds. They can take months. You don't want to be running out of money while you're trying to negotiate with them.

Getting money from an actual VC firm is a bigger deal than getting money from angels. The amounts of money involved are larger, millions usually. So the deals take longer, dilute you more, and impose more onerous conditions.

Sometimes the VCs want to install a new CEO of their own choosing. Usually the claim is that you need someone mature and experienced, with a business background. Maybe in some cases this is true. And yet Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys "newscasters," because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than they read on the teleprompter.

We talked to a number of VCs, but eventually we ended up financing our startup entirely with angel money. The main reason was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a newscaster as part of the deal. That might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press, but what if he wanted to have a say in running the company? That would have led to disaster, because our software was so complex. We were a company whose whole m.o. was to win through better technology. The strategic decisions were mostly decisions about technology, and we didn't need any help with those.

This was also one reason we didn't go public. Back in 1998 our CFO tried to talk me into it. In those days you could go public as a dogfood portal, so as a company with a real product and real revenues, we might have done well. But I feared it would have meant taking on a newscaster-- someone who, as they say, "can talk Wall Street's language."

I'm happy to see Google is bucking that trend. They didn't talk Wall Street's language when they did their IPO, and Wall Street didn't buy. And now Wall Street is collectively kicking itself. They'll pay attention next time. Wall Street learns new languages fast when money is involved.

You have more leverage negotiating with VCs than you realize. The reason is other VCs. I know a number of VCs now, and when you talk to them you realize that it's a seller's market. Even now there is too much money chasing too few good deals.

VCs form a pyramid. At the top are famous ones like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, but beneath those are a huge number you've never heard of. What they all have in common is that a dollar from them is worth one dollar. Most VCs will tell you that they don't just provide money, but connections and advice. If you're talking to Vinod Khosla or John Doerr or Mike Moritz, this is true. But such advice and connections can come very expensive. And as you go down the food chain the VCs get rapidly dumber. A few steps down from the top you're basically talking to bankers who've picked up a few new vocabulary words from reading Wired. (Does your product use XML?) So I'd advise you to be skeptical about claims of experience and connections. Basically, a VC is a source of money. I'd be inclined to go with whoever offered the most money the soonest with the least strings attached.

You may wonder how much to tell VCs. And you should, because some of them may one day be funding your competitors. I think the best plan is not to be overtly secretive, but not to tell them everything either. After all, as most VCs say, they're more interested in the people than the ideas. The main reason they want to talk about your idea is to judge you, not the idea. So as long as you seem like you know what you're doing, you can probably keep a few things back from them. [7]

Talk to as many VCs as you can, even if you don't want their money, because a) they may be on the board of someone who will buy you, and b) if you seem impressive, they'll be discouraged from investing in your competitors. The most efficient way to reach VCs, especially if you only want them to know about you and don't want their money, is at the conferences that are occasionally organized for startups to present to them.

Not Spending It

When and if you get an infusion of real money from investors, what should you do with it? Not spend it, that's what. In nearly every startup that fails, the proximate cause is running out of money. Usually there is something deeper wrong. But even a proximate cause of death is worth trying hard to avoid.

During the Bubble many startups tried to "get big fast." Ideally this meant getting a lot of customers fast. But it was easy for the meaning to slide over into hiring a lot of people fast.

Of the two versions, the one where you get a lot of customers fast is of course preferable. But even that may be overrated. The idea is to get there first and get all the users, leaving none for competitors. But I think in most businesses the advantages of being first to market are not so overwhelmingly great. Google is again a case in point. When they appeared it seemed as if search was a mature market, dominated by big players who'd spent millions to build their brands: Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, Altavista, Inktomi. Surely 1998 was a little late to arrive at the party.

But as the founders of Google knew, brand is worth next to nothing in the search business. You can come along at any point and make something better, and users will gradually seep over to you. As if to emphasize the point, Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.

The competitors Google buried would have done better to spend those millions improving their software. Future startups should learn from that mistake. Unless you're in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. And few if any Web businesses are so undifferentiated. The dating sites are running big ad campaigns right now, which is all the more evidence they're ripe for the picking. (Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell a company run by marketing guys.)

We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in retrospect it was a good thing. The founders all learned to do every job in the company. As well as writing software, I had to do sales and customer support. At sales I was not very good. I was persistent, but I didn't have the smoothness of a good salesman. My message to potential customers was: you'd be stupid not to sell online, and if you sell online you'd be stupid to use anyone else's software. Both statements were true, but that's not the way to convince people.

I was great at customer support though. Imagine talking to a customer support person who not only knew everything about the product, but would apologize abjectly if there was a bug, and then fix it immediately, while you were on the phone with them. Customers loved us. And we loved them, because when you're growing slow by word of mouth, your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.

We officially launched in early 1996. By the end of that year we had about 70 users. Since this was the era of "get big fast," I worried about how small and obscure we were. But in fact we were doing exactly the right thing. Once you get big (in users or employees) it gets hard to change your product. That year was effectively a laboratory for improving our software. By the end of it, we were so far ahead of our competitors that they never had a hope of catching up. And since all the hackers had spent many hours talking to users, we understood online commerce way better than anyone else.

That's the key to success as a startup. There is nothing more important than understanding your business. You might think that anyone in a business must, ex officio, understand it. Far from it. Google's secret weapon was simply that they understood search. I was working for Yahoo when Google appeared, and Yahoo didn't understand search. I know because I once tried to convince the powers that be that we had to make search better, and I got in reply what was then the party line about it: that Yahoo was no longer a mere "search engine." Search was now only a small percentage of our page views, less than one month's growth, and now that we were established as a "media company," or "portal," or whatever we were, search could safely be allowed to wither and drop off, like an umbilical cord.

Well, a small fraction of page views they may be, but they are an important fraction, because they are the page views that Web sessions start with. I think Yahoo gets that now.

Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don't. The most important is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads "if the people lead, the leaders will follow." Paraphrased for the Web, this becomes "get all the users, and the advertisers will follow." More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don't put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.

To make something users love, you have to understand them. And the bigger you are, the harder that is. So I say "get big slow." The slower you burn through your funding, the more time you have to learn.

The other reason to spend money slowly is to encourage a culture of cheapness. That's something Yahoo did understand. David Filo's title was "Chief Yahoo," but he was proud that his unofficial title was "Cheap Yahoo." Soon after we arrived at Yahoo, we got an email from Filo, who had been crawling around our directory hierarchy, asking if it was really necessary to store so much of our data on expensive RAID drives. I was impressed by that. Yahoo's market cap then was already in the billions, and they were still worrying about wasting a few gigs of disk space.

When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm, you tend to feel rich. It's important to realize you're not. A rich company is one with large revenues. This money isn't revenue. It's money investors have given you in the hope you'll be able to generate revenues. So despite those millions in the bank, you're still poor.

For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs. The Aeron came out during the Bubble and was very popular with startups. Especially the type, all too common then, that was like a bunch of kids playing house with money supplied by VCs. We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.

Our offices were in a wooden triple-decker in Harvard Square. It had been an apartment until about the 1970s, and there was still a claw-footed bathtub in the bathroom. It must once have been inhabited by someone fairly eccentric, because a lot of the chinks in the walls were stuffed with aluminum foil, as if to protect against cosmic rays. When eminent visitors came to see us, we were a bit sheepish about the low production values. But in fact that place was the perfect space for a startup. We felt like our role was to be impudent underdogs instead of corporate stuffed shirts, and that is exactly the spirit you want.

An apartment is also the right kind of place for developing software. Cube farms suck for that, as you've probably discovered if you've tried it. Ever notice how much easier it is to hack at home than at work? So why not make work more like home?

When you're looking for space for a startup, don't feel that it has to look professional. Professional means doing good work, not elevators and glass walls. I'd advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment. You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?

Besides being cheaper and better to work in, apartments tend to be in better locations than office buildings. And for a startup location is very important. The key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner. Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done. Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them. So you want to be in a place where there are a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable. God help you if you actually start in that mode.

If I were going to start a startup today, there are only three places I'd consider doing it: on the Red Line near Central, Harvard, or Davis Squares (Kendall is too sterile); in Palo Alto on University or California Aves; and in Berkeley immediately north or south of campus. These are the only places I know that have the right kind of vibe.

The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. I may be an extremist, but I think hiring people is the worst thing a company can do. To start with, people are a recurring expense, which is the worst kind. They also tend to cause you to grow out of your space, and perhaps even move to the sort of uncool office building that will make your software worse. But worst of all, they slow you down: instead of sticking your head in someone's office and checking out an idea with them, eight people have to have a meeting about it. So the fewer people you can hire, the better.

During the Bubble a lot of startups had the opposite policy. They wanted to get "staffed up" as soon as possible, as if you couldn't get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title. That's big company thinking. Don't hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart. The only reason to hire someone is to do something you'd like to do but can't.

If hiring unnecessary people is expensive and slows you down, why do nearly all companies do it? I think the main reason is that people like the idea of having a lot of people working for them. This weakness often extends right up to the CEO. If you ever end up running a company, you'll find the most common question people ask is how many employees you have. This is their way of weighing you. It's not just random people who ask this; even reporters do. And they're going to be a lot more impressed if the answer is a thousand than if it's ten.

This is ridiculous, really. If two companies have the same revenues, it's the one with fewer employees that's more impressive. When people used to ask me how many people our startup had, and I answered "twenty," I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. I used to want to add "but our main competitor, whose ass we regularly kick, has a hundred and forty, so can we have credit for the larger of the two numbers?"

As with office space, the number of your employees is a choice between seeming impressive, and being impressive. Any of you who were nerds in high school know about this choice. Keep doing it when you start a company.

Should You?

But should you start a company? Are you the right sort of person to do it? If you are, is it worth it?

More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it. That's the main reason I wrote this. There could be ten times more startups than there are, and that would probably be a good thing.

I was, I now realize, exactly the right sort of person to start a startup. But the idea terrified me at first. I was forced into it because I was a Lisp hacker. The company I'd been consulting for seemed to be running into trouble, and there were not a lot of other companies using Lisp. Since I couldn't bear the thought of programming in another language (this was 1995, remember, when "another language" meant C++) the only option seemed to be to start a new company using Lisp.

I realize this sounds far-fetched, but if you're a Lisp hacker you'll know what I mean. And if the idea of starting a startup frightened me so much that I only did it out of necessity, there must be a lot of people who would be good at it but who are too intimidated to try.

So who should start a startup? Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38, and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.

I can't say precisely what a good hacker is. At a first rate university this might include the top half of computer science majors. Though of course you don't have to be a CS major to be a hacker; I was a philosophy major in college.

It's hard to tell whether you're a good hacker, especially when you're young. Fortunately the process of starting startups tends to select them automatically. What drives people to start startups is (or should be) looking at existing technology and thinking, don't these guys realize they should be doing x, y, and z? And that's also a sign that one is a good hacker.

I put the lower bound at 23 not because there's something that doesn't happen to your brain till then, but because you need to see what it's like in an existing business before you try running your own. The business doesn't have to be a startup. I spent a year working for a software company to pay off my college loans. It was the worst year of my adult life, but I learned, without realizing it at the time, a lot of valuable lessons about the software business. In this case they were mostly negative lessons: don't have a lot of meetings; don't have chunks of code that multiple people own; don't have a sales guy running the company; don't make a high-end product; don't let your code get too big; don't leave finding bugs to QA people; don't go too long between releases; don't isolate developers from users; don't move from Cambridge to Route 128; and so on. [8] But negative lessons are just as valuable as positive ones. Perhaps even more valuable: it's hard to repeat a brilliant performance, but it's straightforward to avoid errors. [9]

The other reason it's hard to start a company before 23 is that people won't take you seriously. VCs won't trust you, and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding. Customers will worry you're going to flake out and leave them stranded. Even you yourself, unless you're very unusual, will feel your age to some degree; you'll find it awkward to be the boss of someone much older than you, and if you're 21, hiring only people younger rather limits your options.

Some people could probably start a company at 18 if they wanted to. Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen started Microsoft. (Paul Allen was 22, though, and that probably made a difference.) So if you're thinking, I don't care what he says, I'm going to start a company now, you may be the sort of person who could get away with it.

The other cutoff, 38, has a lot more play in it. One reason I put it there is that I don't think many people have the physical stamina much past that age. I used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week. I don't know if I could do that now.

Also, startups are a big risk financially. If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke. By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids.

My final test may be the most restrictive. Do you actually want to start a startup? What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years, you work like hell for four. And maybe end up with nothing-- though in that case it probably won't take four years.

During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period. Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend's house for dinner. I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked.

Working was often fun, because the people I worked with were some of my best friends. Sometimes it was even technically interesting. But only about 10% of the time. The best I can say for the other 90% is that some of it is funnier in hindsight than it seemed then. Like the time the power went off in Cambridge for about six hours, and we made the mistake of trying to start a gasoline powered generator inside our offices. I won't try that again.

I don't think the amount of bullshit you have to deal with in a startup is more than you'd endure in an ordinary working life. It's probably less, in fact; it just seems like a lot because it's compressed into a short period. So mainly what a startup buys you is time. That's the way to think about it if you're trying to decide whether to start one. If you're the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.

For a lot of people the conflict is between startups and graduate school. Grad students are just the age, and just the sort of people, to start software startups. You may worry that if you do you'll blow your chances of an academic career. But it's possible to be part of a startup and stay in grad school, especially at first. Two of our three original hackers were in grad school the whole time, and both got their degrees. There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.

If you do have to leave grad school, in the worst case it won't be for too long. If a startup fails, it will probably fail quickly enough that you can return to academic life. And if it succeeds, you may find you no longer have such a burning desire to be an assistant professor.

If you want to do it, do it. Starting a startup is not the great mystery it seems from outside. It's not something you have to know about "business" to do. Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?

Notes

[1] Google's revenues are about two billion a year, but half comes from ads on other sites.

[2] One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you're not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon. Believe it or not, under current US law, you're not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence. Whereas when you're starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.

[3] Learning to hack is a lot cheaper than business school, because you can do it mostly on your own. For the price of a Linux box, a copy of K&R, and a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old son, you'll be well on your way.

[4] Corollary: Avoid starting a startup to sell things to the biggest company of all, the government. Yes, there are lots of opportunities to sell them technology. But let someone else start those startups.

[5] A friend who started a company in Germany told me they do care about the paperwork there, and that there's more of it. Which helps explain why there are not more startups in Germany.

[6] At the seed stage our valuation was in principle $100,000, because Julian got 10% of the company. But this is a very misleading number, because the money was the least important of the things Julian gave us.

[7] The same goes for companies that seem to want to acquire you. There will be a few that are only pretending to in order to pick your brains. But you can never tell for sure which these are, so the best approach is to seem entirely open, but to fail to mention a few critical technical secrets.

[8] I was as bad an employee as this place was a company. I apologize to anyone who had to work with me there.

[9] You could probably write a book about how to succeed in business by doing everything in exactly the opposite way from the DMV.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this essay, and to Steve Melendez and Gregory Price for inviting me to speak.

About iPhone Walled-Gardens | Editor's Corner - FierceDeveloper

2008-03-05T08:48:00.001-08:00

Apple is expected to formally announce its much-anticipated iPhone software development kit on March 6...and the advance word is grim. Citing multiple sources familiar with Apple's SDK plans, iLounge says the computing giant will implement a series of application development and publishing restrictions, most egregious among them maintaining complete control over which applications are formally approved or denied. Apple and Apple alone will determine which iPhone applications pass muster, publishing and distributing greenlighted apps exclusively via the iTunes Store. It's a policy that clearly favors larger, established developers, whose applications will no doubt enjoy priority status once the inevitable submission deluge begins. Still no word on whether Apple will retain control over subsequent improvements and fixes, which would slow the overall process even more. iLounge adds that Apple will also block developers from interfacing directly with iPhone Dock Connector-based accessories, a move promising to limit the scope of new apps even further.

So why is Apple looking to seize almost total control over third-party iPhone development? Maybe it's greed--assuming the same rules that dictate iTunes music and video sales are installed for iPhone apps, Apple will likely demand a significant cut of all premium downloads. Perhaps it's about control: The only way to guarantee the iPhone does not open to software and services outside of the Apple corporate sphere is to keep the device under lockdown. It could even be about maintaining the purity of the iPhone user experience, guaranteeing that complex and unruly apps don't disturb the digital feng shui so critical to the Apple mystique.

Keep in mind Apple has neither confirmed nor denied it will impose such severe limitations on iPhone application development--come Thursday's formal presentation, the company could surprise us. But assuming the worst does indeed come to pass, consider this: The iPhone, the device that rewrote the rules governing how the mobile business operates, would become a symbol of the same walled-garden paranoia that defines the industry's past, not its future. Talk about irony…or, in this case, iRony.

Be sure to check out the FierceDeveloper website Thursday for exclusive online coverage of the iPhone SDK announcement. See you then. -Jason

http://lists.fiercemarkets.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=69l,xzd3,8mh,3nek,2zfw,gg9b,hd8v

ATT: Microsoft, Yahoo Eye Larger Slices Of Mobile Pie | Online Media Daily

2008-03-05T08:32:00.001-08:00

MICROSOFT AND YAHOO SENT CLEAR signals Tuesday in separate announcements that both have set their sights on grabbing a larger piece of the mobile space, as advertising and marketing opportunities continue to rise. Microsoft signed a deal with Nokia to bring its Silverlight developer platform to the Series 60, which runs on the Symbian operating system. Nokia, the biggest seller of smartphones, also plans to offer the software in Internet-tablet devices.

Silverlight, which gives software developers tools to create animation and video for the Web, already powers thousands of applications worldwide for "Entertainment Tonight" and NBC Universal, among others. Microsoft has been marketing Silverlight to media partners, as well as dumping Flash-based content from its own sites, replacing it with applications built on Silverlight as a way to spur adoption for the technology.

Internet marketing didn't take off until ads became more graphic, visual and tied together smoothly with content. Analysts expect the same to happen for advertising and marketing on mobile phones because the deal pits Microsoft against Adobe's Flash in the mobile phone market, where its animation and video software hasn't caught on.

Strengthening its position among advertising and marketing agencies, Microsoft appears to be sending a message to designers and developers who create rich media for the Web that they are serious about online and mobile ads.

"Microsoft is trying to go after the big community of Flash developers that Adobe wants to migrate onto mobile," said John du Pre Gauntt, senior analyst at research firm eMarketer. "That's because if you want to work on Madison Avenue as an interactive designer and don't know Flash, or a program like Silverlight, people look at you as if you're illiterate."

Advertising revenue on mobile devices should reach $16.2 billion worldwide by 2011--up from nearly $5 billion this year, estimates eMarketer.

Aiming squarely at Google's advertising and search business on mobile devices, Yahoo launched onePlace, a mobile bookmarking tool scheduled to debut in Q2 that would allow users to aggregate and filter favorite content and information from across the Web. The application for mobile devices marks links, news feeds and search results. It sorts and filters content into more than 50 categories, serving up the media to cellular phones in bite-size pieces on any browser.

For example, news stories and accompanying photos--or flight information and weather for a specific region in the world--would serve-up in bite-size pieces on mobile device screens. Consumers can view the content instantly, or store and save it for later. The application complements Yahoo's mobile search tool oneSearch, and oneConnect, which integrates email, phone numbers, text and IM addresses in one location.

Bookmarking and filtering tools aren't new. Yahoo also owns del.icio.us, a bookmarking tool for PCs, but small screens on mobile devices require different views of content.

Will the two mobile apps work together if Microsoft acquires Yahoo? Probably not, du Pre Gauntt said. "You're talking about two applications built on completely different platforms; one proprietary and the other open," he says.

Despite differences in culture and applications, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told reporters Monday at CeBit in Hanover, Germany that the Redmond, Wash. company still wants Yahoo--although analysts aren't clear whether Microsoft's $42 billion bid for Yahoo, made public Feb. 1, can even work.

Laurie Sullivan can be reached at sullivan@mediapost.com

by Laurie Sullivan, Wednesday, Mar 5, 2008 7:30 AM ET
Online Media Daily

Google: Metrics Key To Keeping Web Ads Afloat In Recession, Not Clicks | Online Media Daily

2008-03-04T05:59:00.000-08:00

FRESH OFF A WEEK OF doubts about the resilience of Google's paid and
natural search value proposition, one of the giant's top engineering
brass aimed to still the hearts of financial types feeling antsy over
declining ad clicks and a slumping economy.

"If an advertiser knows that they'll make five dollars by spending one
dollar, the chance is high that they'll spend it," said Alan Eustace,
senior vice president of engineering & research at Google. "We've
stressed measurability and providing a clear return on investment
since we started our advertising business--and the growth of paid
search shows that advertisers have bought into that. That's what will
help us in times like these."

Eustace addressed attendees at the Morgan Stanley Technology
Conference in Dana Point, Calif. on Monday, acknowledging that as a
relatively young company, Google hadn't experienced a true recession--
and that the market would have to, in a sense, "wait and see" what
future performance would look like.

But Eustace said that there were factors that made Google more
resilient than other ad providers in the industry. In addition to
attracting advertisers from across verticals, "our business is
geographically diversified across the world in fast-growing, medium
and stable markets," Eustace said.

As for the declining clicks--most recently reported by comScore, but
also by Google itself, during its fourth-quarter 2007 earnings
release--Eustace reiterated that the decrease stemmed from algorithmic
improvements on the ad-serving end, as well as the reduction of
clickable space for AdSense ads.

"It would have been easy for us to avoid making those kinds of
changes, or just increase the number of ads," Eustace said. "But we
made choices to reduce the number of advertisers and decrease
accidental clicks, because the changes deliver better information to
users and make them click more in the long run."

Eustace added that while clicks had decreased, advertiser conversion
rates were much higher--partly due to the giant's requirements that
many advertisers improve their ads' landing pages. "It's a shared
revenue stream between us and the advertisers, so they've been equally
motivated to improve the user experience," he added.

When it comes to organic search, Eustace said that the market is still
very competitive. "If a bigger, better alternative came out, people
would use it," he said. "So our engineers are not feeling fat, dumb
and happy because we feel like we don't have to work at search.
Competition could come from anywhere, and we work hard because we need
to meet user expectations."

//by Tameka Kee, Tuesday, Mar 4, 2008 7:45 AM ET
Tameka Kee can be reached at tameka@mediapost.com

Survey: Business Execs Slow To Adopt All-In-One Devices | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:47:00.001-08:00

Thursday, Feb 21, 2008 8:00 AM ET

INSTEAD OF EMBRACING NEW ALL-IN-ONE devices, U.S. businesspeople are sticking with older technologies--and their employers aren't forcing them to upgrade, according to a new survey by high-tech market researcher In-Stat.

The idea that the business customers will switch over wholesale to so-called converged devices is unrealistic. But once they grasp the benefits of devices such as smartphones, adoption can proceed quickly.

The report found that 8% of business "road warriors" have given up a desk phone to rely solely on their mobile number. But before employers can insist that employees use fewer devices, manufacturers have to address battery life and ergonomics issues for mobile devices, In-Stat said.

--Mark Walsh

Google Expands AdSense For Video, Sets Deals With Tremor, YouMe, Others | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:46:00.001-08:00

by Gavin O'Malley and Joe Mandese, Thursday, Feb 21, 2008 8:00 AM ET

IN A BID TO ACCELERATE its role in the burgeoning online video advertising marketplace, search giant Google this morning is announcing a slew of deals expanding its AdSense for video beta. To date, the AdSense program has focused mainly on enabling Web publishers to serve text-only ads. The video beta version, enables publishers to serve targeted, contextually-relevant video graphical ads and text overlays, and is seen as an alternative to the pre-roll an post-roll advertising clips that have become the industry's default standard advertising format.

Google has been working on ways to expand its reach into video ever since its $1.65 billion acquisitions of YouTube in 2006, and recently began accelerating its role in TV advertising sales, as well, via its AdWords For TV program, which enables advertisers to buy addressable TV advertising on cable and satellite TV systems.

Early this morning, Google announced deals with the Tremor Media and YouMe video advertising networks, two of what are expected to be several partnership deals for its AdSense for video expansion.

Tremor said it has incorporated "one-click integration" of Google's contextually targeted ads into its dynamic ad insertion platform, Ad-inStream, for publishers in Tremor Media's network to accept targeted Google AdSense for video advertising formats with only a check-box.

According to comScore, Tremor Media provides access to consumers through their network of more than 800 aggregated sites that reach 94 million unique users every month. Publishers across Tremor Media's network can now support traditional text overlays through Google's AdSense for video beta, providing contextually targeted advertising by leveraging a video's metadata.

In addition, Tremor will also support InVideo graphical and rich media overlays that aid advertisers with a consistent brand message across their traditional display advertising as well as emerging video ad formats.

Gavin O'Malley can be reached at gavin@mediapost.com

Joe Mandese is Editor of MediaPost.

[ATT iPhone Stats] Flat-Rate Plans Could Spur Mobile Growth | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:43:00.001-08:00

by Mark Walsh, Friday, Feb 22, 2008 7:45 AM ET

THE MOVE TOWARD FLAT-RATE, UNLIMITED calling plans by three of the major U.S. wireless carriers this week could help spur the growth of mobile media and advertising, say industry analysts and mobile marketing executives.

They view the unlimited $100 voice plans announced in succession by Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile as fostering greater usage, and as a step toward all-you-can-eat offers that will eventually include data services. That would help turn the cell phone into a more ad-friendly platform as more people download content, send text messages and surf the mobile Web.

Currently, only about 14% of U.S. mobile subscribers have data plans, according to December data from mobile market researcher M:Metrics. Content providers and marketers have generally been frustrated with slower-than-expected growth of mobile media.

"I think it's the beginning of game-changing," said Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO of Quattro Wireless, which operates a mobile ad network built around 60 large, branded sites as well as the newer GetMobile self-service ad platform. "(Carriers) are already bundling text into unlimited plans and it seems that they will drop in data as well."

Some observers are already predicting that the new flat-rate plans signal the start of a price war among the major carriers that could push rates even lower as voice traffic becomes increasingly commoditized. Sprint--whose CEO Dan Hesse touched off the rapid-fire round of carrier pricing moves by telling USA Today the company may introduce an unlimited, flat-rate plan--could try to undercut the new $100 plans.

"I think this will motivate some number of people who don't already have them to get data plans, and bring the overall cost of mobile plans down," said Greg Sterling, senior analyst for Local Mobile Search, a unit of Opus Research. He added that the unlimited voice plans would also encourage more people to forgo their land lines in favor of cell phones instead of paying for both. The savings could be used to add a data plan.

The new offers aren't necessarily restricted to voice minutes. T-Mobile has already upped the ante a bit by including unlimited text and instant messaging in its new $100 voice plan. Verizon, meanwhile, offers an all-in-one unlimited package covering voice, messaging, its V CAST data service, VZ Navigator GPS service, and mobile email for $140 a month.

That's a good step, said Priyadarshan, but still too pricey to sweep in a much broader base of data customers.

He pointed to smaller carriers such as Cricket, MetroPCS and Leap Wireless that already offer voice and data packages for $30 to $50. Their larger rivals might charge just as much for data services, he said. These regional operators, however, don't have the same national coverage as major carriers, and the plans don't include unlimited roaming.

Even so, their share of mobile Web browsing traffic on Quattro's network of sites is higher than the overall subscriber market, Priyadarshan said. "We see great results in user behavior in terms of mobile surfing and click-throughs. It's a vibrant mobile media and advertising environment among these folks," he said.

At the high-end, the iPhone's $60 unlimited monthly plan via AT&T has played a part in its success in opening up the mobile Web. AT&T says 95% of iPhone users surf the mobile Web, and Google recently disclosed that iPhone owners were making 50 times more searches than users of other mobile devices.

James Colby, vice president and CMO of Comverse Americas, a unit of telecom software and services provider Comverse, agreed it would take combined voice and data plans under $100 to really kick the mobile media into high gear. "If you take away the price constraints then you could see massive growth in traffic," he said. "If it's truly all-you-can-eat, then the era of the mobile Internet is upon us overnight."

As it is, he doesn't see the unlimited voice plans shaking things up much when wireless calling plans in North America already offer 1,000 minutes for $40 or 1,000 minutes for $100. "Maybe it's just a bit of marketing and hype rather than something that will impact the market," he said.

Still, the potential for upselling is there, noted William Ho, a wireless analyst at high-tech market research firm Current Analysis. He cited a securities filing by Verizon Thursday that indicated only 0.5% of its customer base currently have wireless plans for over $100 a month. "Given that, the upsell opportunity is probably greater than the cannibalization of higher-priced plan users," he said.

Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com

Mad Ave Faces Learning Curve On Incorporating Mobile Into Ad Plans | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:36:00.001-08:00

by Mark Walsh, Friday, Feb 8, 2008 8:30 AM ET

AGENCIES ARE GEARING UP FOR mobile advertising, but the process of mobile media planning and buying is still very much a work in progress according to a panel of ad executives convened at the OMMA Mobile conference Wednesday. Buoyed by growing client interest in mobile ads, agencies are starting to field mobile specialists and acquire the expertise to help elevate cell phones to must-buy media. But incorporating mobile into the marketing mainstream remains a learning process for both Madison Avenue and advertisers.

On the bright side, media buyers say clients are now more committed to spending on mobile advertising than a year or two years ago. Mobile in the past was the last line item in the media mix," said Bryon Morrison, president of ipsh!, the mobile marketing firm acquired in 2005 by Omnicom Group. "Now they realize the medium's not going to go away and they're taking a different approach."

He noted that clients were approaching the Omnicom unit in the last six months with dedicated mobile budgets.

To capture an expected rise in mobile ad dollars, Jeff Stier, senior vice president, business growth, North America, JWT, said the firm this year has begun assigning a [X2: JUST ONE] mobile marketing expert to its "core teams" across the agency. "So mobile marketing is integrated right into the mix from the very beginning," he said.

Within its "Section 64" innovation unit, JWT is also taking a proactive approach by testing mobile marketing initiatives that the agency can then use to help convince clients of the effectiveness of mobile advertising. "I think overall mobile budgets are still small compared to traditional media so we're creating platforms proving consumers want to spend time in the mobile space," Stier said.

In an earlier panel Wednesday, Louis Gump, vice president, mobile, Weather Channel Interactive, cited a recent JupiterResearch report estimating that 7% major brands would spend more than $1 million on mobile ad campaigns this year, and another 13% would spend more than $100,000. But most mobile advertisers are still spending well under $50,000 on mobile.

Compiling research on mobile consumers has been a key focus at Starcom Worldwide as well. Angela Steele, who is spearheading Starcom's mobile efforts, explained that the firm has pursued research to find out the extent of advertising consumers are willing to accept on their cell phones. "Because the device is personal, advertising really needs to be relevant," she said. The more relevant an ad or promotional offer is, the more receptive mobile users will be to the message.

James McNamara, former director of sales channels at Sprint, who recently left to help start mobile consultancy Wasabi Mobile, pointed to targeted opportunities for retailers especially in customer relations marketing. In that model, a retailer might try to cross-match data for a certain group of customers with that of a wireless carrier to send a highly targeted coupon offer, for example. In testing, that type of program has shown conversion rates better than 20%.

Of course, such an initiative would also raise privacy issues and the challenge of extending it across carriers. But McNamara said it was important for agencies to approach mobile more as a direct response channel rather than as a traditional broadcast medium. "Data is really the gold nugget of mobile advertising," he said.

Just sorting out the fragmented mobile landscape is a big part of the agencies' education process for now. Steele explained that Starcom meets with everyone connected to the mobile industry because it can't rule out any players in the emerging market. But that doesn't necessarily mean the meetings last long.

"Every company says they're a full service mobile solution, but after about five minutes of drilling down you figure out that they only have one small piece of it," she said.

Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com

Nokia Ad Chief Touts Mobile Phone's Advantages | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:29:00.001-08:00

by Mark Walsh, Friday, Feb 8, 2008 8:30 AM ET

OPENING WITH A QUIP ABOUT this being the seventh year in a row that mobile is supposed to kick into high gear, Jeremy Wright, Nokia's global ad chief, made the case for why the mobile phone should be a bigger ad venue than it is during his keynote address at the OMMA Mobile conference Wednesday.

Ticking off some of the industry's impressive stats, from 3.3 billion mobile phones worldwide to 17% annual expected growth for mobile advertising in the next few years, Wright set the stage for the third-screen's inevitable triumph as a global, yet highly targetable marketing platform.

Except for certain geographic holdouts, including the U.S. "There's a lot of cynicism (about mobile ads) in the Western world, but that's not true across the rest of the world. People are more rational and want to see what it is," he said.

Among mobile's as yet untapped strengths is its ability to generate strong ad response rates-in the range of 10% to 20% and well beyond that of the wired Internet or traditional media. "One of the most bizarre things in the market is that hardly any brands are using mobile to improve response rates from offline channels," he said.

He also stressed the importance of location-based services as a killer app for mobile phones. Marketing messages can be directed to consumers while shopping, increasing the chances of an impromptu purchase. "Acting on impulse, that's what advertising should be all about," he told the packed room.

Because mobile yields more user data than any other media, it also offers the greatest opportunity to hit the right audience at the right time with the right message. The flip side is that marketers, carriers and other mobile players have to give consumers control over what they see and hear on their cell phones. "This control thing comes up again and again," said Wright, because of the more personal nature of mobile devices compared to traditional media outlets.

Given the fragmented landscape of mobile advertising, Wright took the opportunity to tout some of Nokia's efforts to standardize and streamline ad-buying on cell phones. The handset giant late last year acquired Boston-based Enpocket to accelerate build out its mobile ad platform for publishers, advertisers and carriers.

And with 900 million Nokia phones in circulation worldwide, or 40% of mobile users, it can certainly offer extensive reach. "To make this medium work we have to deliver valuable mobile services and make them work," said Wright. "And give enough control to users so this really does improve their lives."

Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com

Publicis Adopts 'Yield Management,' Will Utilize System For Cross-Internet Media Buys | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:26:00.001-08:00

by Joe Mandese, Friday, Feb 8, 2008 8:30 AM ET

IN A MOVE TO CREATE greater "transparency" in its purchases of digital media, Publicis Groupe Media this morning announced a deal to incorporate "yield management" systems developed by Rapt Inc. The deal gives Publicis media and interactive agencies a dashboard like system to look across the inventory and pricing strategies of various media sellers they are negotiating with.

"For example, a publisher will be able use Rapt Information Services to analyze historic and expected demand for video advertising and proactively align their pricing and inventory strategies to better serve the market," the companies said.

Yield management systems have been used historically by the travel industry, especially airlines, to optimize revenue for their inventory - pricing and re-pricing airline seats, hotel room vacancies, etc., based on increases and decreases in demand. Over the years, some major media companies, including television networks, have tried to incorporate such systems into their sales operations, but are believed to have defaulted to traditional person-to-person negotiations in their deals.

Publicis claims the Rapt system will give its media buyers the advantage of "real-world metrics across the digital advertising spectrum," enabling them to make more informed purchases and plans.

"For example, in negotiating prices on behalf of a pharmaceutical company for placements on a premium online health site, a media planner can use Rapt Information Services to better understand the external market value for relevant inventories and content types," the company said.

Publicis said it would utilize the system for its Starcom MediaVest Group, ZenithOptimedia Group and Digitas units to create "greater transparency and liquidity" on an estimated $1.5 billion in cross-Internet media buys.

"Digital ad purchasing is still too opaque and inefficient," Jack Klues, chairman of Publicis Groupe Media stated, adding, "We are partnering with Rapt because we share their belief that clearer baselines, metrics, and indices will only expand the total market. We are delighted to help shape this initiative and lay the cornerstone of the program's data foundation."

Joe Mandese is Editor of MediaPost.

Publishers Try Bold New Marketing Concept: Free Samples | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:14:00.001-08:00

by Sarah Mahoney, Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 5:00 AM ET

TO ANY PACKAGE-GOODS MARKETER, OFFERING free samples is usually a slam-dunk: Customers fall in love with the freebie and then turn into paying customers.

But in the downtrodden world of book publishing, the news that Harper Collins will give away free electronic versions of best-sellers, and that Random House will be selling books by the chapter, have raised a few eyebrows.

Yet some experts say that if anything, such innovations are overdue: Just as consumers have come to expect that they can sample music online, they have also become accustomed to browsing through books, whether it's via Amazon's "Search Inside" technology or similar browsing features used by publishers.

The idea of sampling is becoming more and more widespread. In a profile of writer Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff, The Wall Street Journal this week also included a link to one of the short stories included in the collection. (Both HarperCollins and the Journal are owned by News Corp.)

"The strategy of giving content away is getting people to read more and buy more," says Thomas Woll, president of Cross River Publishing Consultants, in Katonah, N.Y. He says the National Academies Press, for example, which publishes scientific books, journals and papers, "gives away most of the books on their list for free, if you want to read them onscreen. And they've found that the more people read onscreen, the more they buy."

HarperCollins' offerings are hard to resist, prominently displayed on the main page of its Web site. Readers can tackle I Dream in Blue, Roger Director's story of life as a diehard Giants fan; Paulo Coelho's The Witch of Portobello, or The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President.

It also offers a fun "Browse Inside on Your iPhone" feature, enabling readers to page through titles by best-selling authors like Michael Korda, Faye Kellerman, Ray Bradbury, and Jack and Suzy Welch, as if they were at a bookstore.

"You can buy pie by the slice," Random House tells customers on its home page. "Why not a book?" The publisher is selling a chapter of Chip & Dan Heath's best-selling Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99.

The company says it believes this is "the first time a major trade publisher has offered readers the opportunity to buy digitized sections of a book." Consumers who buy a chapter will receive an e-mail with a link for downloading the purchased file, which it says cannot be shared electronically.

"The book business is relatively flat and has been for a number of years," says Woll. And both companies' experiments are interesting, he says, because typically--for all publishers have talked a good game about competing with Amazon--"they've sold their books at full retail price, and haven't been competitive."

But clearly, Amazon, with its easy-to-use features, browse-this-book technology and most recently, with Kindle, which allows readers to wirelessly download all kinds of content, is the one to beat. "Making an entire book available for free, or selling a book chapter by chapter--these are things Amazon isn't doing," he says.

For now, he says, it's a whole new world. "Even Harvard University is contemplating putting its scholarly research, normally published in small journals, on the Web for free."

Sarah Mahoney can be reached at sarah@mediapost.com

Scion Goes After Urban Youths With Street, Web Campaign | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:07:00.001-08:00

by Karl Greenberg, Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 5:00 AM ET

TOYOTA'S SCION DIVISION IS LAUNCHING new marketing initiatives this week. Agency Attik is overseeing a grassroots effort to promote the limited-edition version of Scion's xB car, the xB 5.0, of which Scion is creating only 2,500. All of the cars come with a mica-gold exterior paint scheme.

According to Simon Needham, Attik's co-founder and creative chief, who works out of the agency's L.A. office, the effort--visiting 10 cities in California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Oregon and Washington--has street teams in security uniforms driving campaign-branded armored transports. Street teams will give away "gold bars" that include skullcaps and passwords to a microsite where consumers can get product info and download a screensaver, instant messaging icons and a desktop background.

Separately, Scion is launching a Web campaign using widgets--transportable content windows--as part of a viral campaign for its three cars. Peter Kim, president of Pasadena, Calif.-based Web advertising tech firm Interpolls, which is hosting the effort (and created the widgets), tells Marketing Daily the ad windows can be moved from Web site to Web site. He said the goal is to give Scion a far broader reach than the company would get from a traditional online ad buy, since consumers can copy the widgets and put them on social network pages like MySpace and Facebook.

"Scion will be able to promote their three vehicles [xB, xD and tC] in the product line in a single execution. You will see in the link that there will be three vehicles you can roll over, and then click on the vehicle that interests you the most, and when you do you will see a video execution on the vehicle," says Kim.

Consumers will also be able to vote on which of the "Little Deviant" characters they like best. The animated "deviants" are gremlin-like characters that were central to Attik's most recent Scion brand campaign, launched last year. In Scion's current ad push, the little gremlin-like characters ride about in Scion vehicles. The effort will initially run on offbeat, urban youth-targeted sites, per Kim.

Attik's Needham says that there will be another round of "Little Deviants" creative coming in the spring. "The campaign will end in the June or July time frame." He adds that much of the forthcoming work will run on traditional print and outdoor media. He says a major Web-based effort will not come unless it's part of a major commitment to a new campaign.

"Obviously, there will always be online components--but my attitude right now is that we are at the point where, unless we are producing something for the Web that is genuinely unique and substantial, it's not worth the time and effort."

Karl Greenberg can be reached at karl@mediapost.com

GoFish Launches Vertical Distribution Ad Network | MediaPost

2008-02-23T08:04:00.001-08:00

by Gavin O'Malley, Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 7:45 AM ET

YOUTH ENTERTAINMENT AND MEDIA COMPANY GoFish Corp. is launching a vertical distribution ad network for marketers to reach the 17.4 million Web users ages 6 to 17.

For advertisers, kids and teens represent an important consumer segment. Teens alone have a total annual aggregate income of $80 billion, while the buying power of kids is expected to total $21.4 billion in 2010. Combined, kids and teens influence an additional $225 billion in spending by their parents. Each month, there are over 30 million 6- to-17-year-olds online in the U.S., according to comScore Media Metrix.

"The number of new sites in the combined categories of kids entertainment and teen Community grew nearly 50% from fourth-quarter 2006 to 2007," says Tabreez Verjee, president of GoFish Corp. "However, smaller sites do not always have the infrastructure to monetize their ever-growing reach, and that creates an opportunity for the GoFish Network and the sites to build mutually beneficial relationships."

The publicly traded GoFish will distribute broadband content across its network, generating additional branded inventory to support all forms of online advertising including rich media and video.

The GoFish network's reach ranks it as the third-largest audience in the kid/teen category in the U.S.--only behind Disney Online and Nickelodeon Kids & Family--and reaches over 62 million unique users per month worldwide.

In January, the 17.4 million U.S. user base spent over 657 million minutes within network sites--delivering nearly 553 million page views, according to comScore. The average of 1.2 minutes per page rivals time spent on top destination sites in the kids' category.

"The list of marketers already using GoFish to reach young people online says it all," said Jim Moloshok, the company's executive chairman. "We not only give marketers a one-stop opportunity to reach kids, tweens and teens, but an alternative to leading publishers in the space."

Advertisers that have turned to the GoFish Network to reach youth include Activision, AT&T Wireless, Build A Bear, Cartoon Network, Disney, Electronic Arts, Hewlett Packard, Kellogg's, Konami, Lego, Mead Paper, Microsoft, Nintendo, Random House, Sony and Verizon Wireless.

The GoFish Network is anchored by Miniclip.com, the Internet's largest dedicated online games Web site, as well as several popular online youth brands including Cartoon Doll Emporium, a leading dress-up game destination for girls ages 6-16; Cookie Jar Entertainment, a global independent producer, marketing and brand manager of such renowned children's properties as "Magi-Nation," "The Doodlebops," "Caillou," "Spider Riders" and "Johnny Test"; GameGecko.com and Hallpass.com, popular gaming sites; Piczo, the leading teen site for self expression; Rocketon, Whyville, the only learning-based virtual world for kids; several top sites within the Demand Media network including Arcade Town and Flowgo; and GoFish.com, the company's owned-and-operated destination featuring video content specifically programmed for the hard-to-reach youth demos.

To expand the assortment of content presented by GoFish, the company recently partnered with Viacom to offer premiere content from dozens of Viacom properties including highlights from shows like "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "The Colbert Report," "South Park," "SpongeBob Squarepants," "Ren & Stimpy," "Beavis & Butthead," "Laguna Beach," "Real World," "My Super Sweet Sixteen," and many other programs for ad-supported viewing on GoFish.com.

Gavin O'Malley can be reached at gavin@mediapost.com

Majority Of Online Shoppers Check At Least Four Reviews Before Buying | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:50:00.001-08:00

by Tameka Kee, Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 7:45 AM ET

ABOUT 68% OF ONLINE SHOPPERS read at least four reviews before making a purchase, according to data from joint research by PowerReviews and the e-tailing group. The companies surveyed 1,200 consumers who shopped online at least four times per year and spent at least $500 in aggregate--finding that almost a quarter of the respondents checked at least eight reviews or more before deciding to buy.

Some 22% of respondents said that they "always" read reviews before making a purchase, while the majority (43%) said they checked ratings and reviews "most of the time." In contrast, just 2% of the online shoppers surveyed said that they "never" read reviews in advance.

"Consumer-generated media such as those found on ratings and review sites are becoming more influential in the purchase-decision process," said Jeffrey Grau, senior analyst at eMarketer. Grau and other eMarketer analysts crunched the numbers from the PowerReviews/e-tailing group study, as well as Forrester Research and data from Avenue A|Razorfish to come up with a quick, but comprehensive look at the influence that user-generated content like reviews has had on online shopping behavior.

For example, 64% of consumers surveyed by Forrester said that user ratings and reviews were the kinds of features that they wanted to see on Web sites--just slightly edging out those who wanted special offers or coupons (61%), and trumping videos (44%), personalization (37%) and games or quizzes (29%). The data came from Forrester Research's "North American Technographics Customer Experience, Marketing and Consumer Technology Online Survey," for the third-quarter of 2007--which included consumer electronics, travel and banking sites--key drivers of e-commerce in the U.S.

Meanwhile, a recent Avenue A|Razorfish study found that 55% of online shoppers chose user reviews most frequently when conducting product research--more than double the 22% that used comparison charts or expert reviews (21%).

Tameka Kee can be reached at tameka@mediapost.com

David And Googliath | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:44:00.001-08:00

by Diane Mermigas, Tuesday, Feb 19, 2008 7:45 AM ET

YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD the name Scott Switzer but he may be David to Google's Goliath. His eight-month-old company is the only open source ad server facilitator of scale. This week he will rebrand it from the OpenAds name it has been operating under to OpenX, as part of an expansion intended to give clients more interactive heft. Switzer says his "five-year laundry list" includes initiatives to help publishers grab a bigger portion of text, video and mobile online advertising dollars, partly by aggregating them into like-minded Web communities. OpenX believes it can help "long tail" niche publishers more than double their 20% take of advertising spending over the next five years, and immediately quadruple the revenues they generate on their own simply by rotating through different ad networks.

It also can become an important helpmate to small and mid-sized publishers seeking more customized search and mobile advertising in the event of a protracted recession, says Switzer, the company's founder and chief technology officer. The global mobile advertising market is expected to top $11 billion by 2011, outpacing the rate of traditional online advertising growth as users become more engaged, according to Lehman Brothers Internet analyst Douglas Anmuth.

The London-based company was jumpstarted by an initial $5 million venture capital investment led by Index Ventures last June and a more recent $15.5 million round of funding led by Accel Partners. OpenX was born into a virtual explosion of ad networks and ad exchanges, and the move by portals and social networking sites to open their platforms to third-party developers in search of an innovative competitive edge.

OpenX's open source applications (free to download from its Web site) allow publishers freedom to control their ads and interface with multiple ad networks. OpenX makes its revenues from publisher consulting fees and a percent of advertiser and ad networks dollars spent. As a facilitator, OpenX generally receives singe to low double digit percentage commissions, compared to the booming number of ad networks that command 20% to 80% of the advertising buys.

Switzer's timing couldn't seem better. Just consider some of the developments that transpired in the last week alone:

* Comcast said it would contribute up to $70 million to join other cable operators developing an industry ad platform dubbed Project Canoe, which would enable advertisers to buy targeted national spot cable ads that leverage the addressability of their digital set-top data streams.

* The New York Times Co., Hearst, Gannett and Tribune launched QuadrantOne, a one-stop advertising portal that can place ads in the online editions of 120 local newspaper Web sites in 27 markets reaching an estimated 50 million monthly unique visitors. The buys, which exclude flagship newspaper sites such as The New York Times and USA Today, can target users by demographics, content type and online behavior.

* InterActiveCorp.'s CitySearch will share its local content and pay-per-performance ad network with AOL.

* News Corp. is preparing to launch an online network to sell advertising across all News and Fox media properties including MySpace.

Many of the new ad networks focus on vertical markets such as Time Warner's new MomLogic and IGA's in-video game ad network.

Institutions from Forbes.com to entrepreneurs like John Battelle's Federated Media now offer 60/40 splits to bloggers seeking ad support.

Players as diverse as Facebook, Martha Stewart and ZoomInfo also have entered the fray.

These ad networks are an attempt to aggregate the Web's fragmented traffic, and connect publishers and advertisers seeking to reach the same target consumers. In the process, they gather and mine personal user data in the name of marketing - the privacy limits for which are about to be tested.

The glut of independent ad networks, likely to thin, is targeting the big players: Google's AdSense and DoubleClick, Yahoo's Blue Lithium, Microsoft's aQuantive, and WPP's 24/7 Real Media.

The scramble for ad dollars ultimately may result in development of improved standardized metrics, predicts OpenX's Switzer.

"The way online advertising is bought and sold will migrate from immersions, clicks and conversions to better ways to sell based on levels of engagement and reach," he says.

For now, he says OpenX's turnkey ad management is distinguished from the pack by its open sources user-friendly software, tools and support that is a work in progress.

"The OpenX Ad Server is an application like an online bank account. Publishers use it for arguably the most important part of their job - making revenue," he said. The collective force of OpenX's 30,000 smaller niche publishers (with more than 200 billion monthly impressions) supported by the right advertisers and ad networks, can make a dent in Google's stranglehold on the online advertising business.

Envisions Switzer, "We want OpenX to become the one of three calls an agency or advertiser makes when it they want to spend money."

Google's market share declined slightly on slower fourth quarter domestic online ad sales growth for the first time in two years. It is under siege by big and small players alike, especially Microsoft, which is preparing to launch next-generation ad concepts driven by its recent acquisition of aQuantive and its proposed takeover of Yahoo.

The always innovative Google recently began testing visual ads in some of its search results. Still, Google's Achilles' heel may be the one-third of its revenue that is out of its control, coming from advertising delivered on other web sites, according to Sean Ammirati on ReadWrite Web blog.

OpenX's most potent competitive weapon in a Google dominated online ad world is "the collaborative growth" of its open source structure.

"The more open we can be, the faster we can grow, and there are so many levels of being open that we're all just beginning to explore," he boasts.

Switzer says it is an added plus that OpenX is a work in progress that responds to and is continually shaped ideas from its viral client base.

"We are building OpenX - the site and the product - for the community. We are very dependent on feedback, both good and bad. Developing in a vacuum will result in a product that nobody wants," he says.

Diane Mermigas is editor-at-large at MediaPost. She can be reached at dmermigas@mediapost.com, or 708-352-5849. Or via mail at 113 S. Kensington Avenue, LaGrange, IL, 60525.

Consumers Seek Economic Relief Online, Survey Finds | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:36:00.001-08:00

by Nina M. Lentini, Wednesday, Feb 20, 2008 5:00 AM ET

LOOKING TO REACH CONSUMERS WHO are hard-pressed to buy your products? Get online and send them newsletters and coupons, because that is where they are, researching products and seeking ways to navigate the economic recession.

That's the latest word from Prospectiv, a provider of online customer acquisition solutions, which surveyed consumers online for the first time as they experienced a recession, says president/CEO Jere Doyle. "I guess we had one in 2000 for a little bit but, especially for middle or lower income consumers, now we have Internet penetration."

Of those polled, 84% said they have changed their shopping habits due to concerns about a possible recession. Rising fuel prices, fears about the real estate market and consumer debt topped consumer's list of concerns.

What are consumers doing differently?

• 66% are logging more hours online researching and comparing brands and prices

• 74% would welcome more online offers, coupons and e-newsletters from their favorite brands and products

• 79% already are or expect to dine out less frequently

• 60% are more likely to sign up/join a website or online community that offers recipes, healthy meal ideas, cooking tips and savings they can use at home

"People are using more coupons, looking for ways to save, tips, e-newsletters, online offers," says Doyle. "Seventy-nine percent are dining out less frequently so they're looking for healthy meal ideas." Even among the 15% of respondents who said they do not fear a possible recession, 30% reported that concerns about fuel costs, the housing market and consumer debt have affected their shopping habits. In fact, 40% of this group have increased their online bargain hunting and 50% said they'd welcome more e-newsletters, online coupons and offers.

Nina M. Lentini edits Marketing Daily. Email her at nina@mediapost.com

Marketers Say TV Is Dead, Long Live TV! | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:34:00.001-08:00

by Aaron Baar, Thursday, Feb 21, 2008 5:01 AM ET

THE BAD NEWS: MARKETERS BELIEVE the effectiveness of television advertising has declined over the past two years. The good news? They're more interested in trying new formats and other forms of video commercials.

According to the fourth biennial TV & Technology survey conducted by the Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research, 62% of the marketers surveyed believe television has become less effective over the past two years. However, nearly half of them have begun to experiment with technologies that work with digital video recorders and on-demand programming. Moreover, 87% of advertisers believe branded entertainment will be a big part of TV advertising in the coming year.

The marketers' response is backed up by separate data from BIGResearch, revealing that traditional media's influence is declining when it comes to influencing purchasing decisions.

For example, in the survey of more than 15,000 people, broadcast television declined nearly 14% when it came to influencing electronics purchases as compared to the year-ago period. Cable television declined more than 14% over a year ago. Conversely, blogging and instant messaging grew 21.5% and 22% when it came to influencing electronics purchases. Similar gains and declines were found when it came to car and truck purchases.

"The traditional media is declining, and that's because people are self-directed," Gary Drenik, president of BIGresearch, tells Marketing Daily. "If they want information, they'll find it somewhere. They're not watching 'American Idol' to see what flat-screen TV they're going to buy."

However, most marketers believe they're ready for the changes. According to the ANA survey, more than half of them said that when DVR penetration reaches 50% of all TV households they plan to cut advertising by 12%. In a related measure, 87% of respondents said they will increase their Web advertising spending.

And according to the survey, most marketers believe their agencies have caught up with the rapidly changing marketplace. Twenty-eight percent felt their media agency is ill-equipped to address TV, down from 47% two years ago. However, 47% of the marketers said their creative agencies were ill-equipped to deal with changes, which is only a slight improvement over the 55% from two years ago.

Mobile Gaming On The Rise, But Still Not A Critical Mass | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:32:00.001-08:00

Mobile Gaming On The Rise, But Still Not A Critical Mass

by Tameka Kee, Wednesday, Feb 20, 2008 7:45 AM ET

MORE THAN 98 MILLION MOBILE subscribers in the U.S. and Western Europe played a game on their handset last December, according to new research from M:Metrics.

Despite high demand, advances in mobile tech and the emergence of mobile marketing service providers like Medio, the market still isn't ripe enough to snag major ad dollars.

"No one has cracked the code when it comes to ad-funded mobile gaming in the U.S. or Europe," said Seamus McAteer, chief product architect and senior analyst at M:Metrics. "There's a substantial enough opportunity to capture experimental ad dollars, but I don't see mobile games becoming a real solid part of the digital media mix yet--at least not in 2008."

Part of M:Metric's logic stems from the fact that while more mobile subscribers are playing games on their phones, the number of users that have actually downloaded a game--which is typically the ad-supported operating model--has remained relatively flat. Just 14.4 million (3.3%) of subscribers in the U.S. and Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K.) downloaded a game in December 2007, versus 14.6 million (3.6%) in December 2006.

McAteer gave a number of reasons for why users were opting not to download mobile games, including pricing concerns, difficulty in finding games, and the lack of effective marketing info on the games themselves. "The extent to which games are merchandised on handsets is limited. Most of the time it's just the name of the title and one or two lines of brief description," McAteer said. And if users aren't able to try the game before they buy it, they are less likely to make a purchase.

In other cases, the trial version of a game that comes preloaded on a handset is enough. "The free version provides ample entertainment for people who are occasional casual gamers," McAteer said. "And if the experience is sub par, then they're not going to take the risk of buying another one." There's also the lack of knowledge of the pricing models--such as whether users are charged for minutes while they're playing free games, and whether the carrier charges extra just for the download.

McAteer added that while companies like Greystripe, Medio and Motricity have tried to bridge the gap between consumers, service providers and advertisers, the process of finding and playing ad-supported games is still too problematic for users. And without the critical mass, the ad dollars will still be relegated to experimental budgets. "All advertisers care about is reach," McAteer said. "When they start seeing reach in excess of 10 and 20 million, then it gets kind of interesting for them."

Tameka Kee can be reached at tameka@mediapost.com

Medio Systems Launches On-Device Portal | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:29:00.001-08:00

Friday, Feb 8, 2008 8:30 AM ET

MEDIO SYSTEMS, A PROVIDER OF mobile search and advertising solutions, is launching the Medio On-Device Portal (ODP), the first consumer "search-and-discover" experience embedded on the handset and created specifically for mass-market mobile phone users. The Medio ODP gives mobile users one-click access to mobile content including real-time news, sport scores, weather, flight status and local directory information. With an open-platform architecture, the Medio ODP also enables operators to customize their portals with the content and services to quickly respond to the need of subscribers. The Medio ODP is available now on T-Mobile USA's t-zones, and is pre-loaded on the Nokia 6263 and Motorola RAZR II phones, with additional devices expected to follow in Q1 2008.

Medio's On-Device Portal makes it easier for consumers to search and browse for information on-the-go and to customize their mobile devices. With an intuitive graphical user interface and a single, universal search box at the top, mobile users can now find, preview and purchase downloadable content including wallpapers and ringtones. They can also search for real-time information on-the-go, such as weather, news, sports scores and local directory listings. One-click access, ringtone previews, a popularity-based predictive dictionary and educational tutorial make mobile portals easier to use than ever before.

--Tanya Irwin

Discovery Adds New Portals For Mobile Phone Users | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:27:00.001-08:00

Friday, Feb 8, 2008 8:30 AM ET

BUILDING OFF THE SUCCESS OF its direct-to-consumer mobile website launched a year ago, Discovery Communications has added new portals for Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Health and Planet Green content which consumers access through their mobile phones at www.discoverymobile.com. "With our new portals, consumers can now visit their favorite channels on their mobile phone and have access to an even wider variety of content and mobile applications, such as TV listings, ring tones, SMS message alerts and more." said Doug Craig, senior vice president, Digital Media Syndication, Discovery Communications. "Complementing our television networks, the mobile website offers programming extensions that consumers can use while on-the-go, all designed to provide fans with another way to engage with Discovery's content and attract new audiences to its brands."

Built by Crisp Wireless, the improved site also features greater ease of navigation and a more user-friendly interface for consumers searching for content, brands and information. In the coming months, Discovery plans to integrate dynamic ads on discoverymobile.com using clickable banners designed to ensure the highest-quality user experience and greater appeal to advertisers.

Discovery's direct-to-consumer mobile website is part of the company's multi-faceted mobile strategy, which also includes a 24-hour dedicated mobile programming network, Discovery Mobile, available to Alltel Wireless, Sprint and MobiTV customers; on-demand mobile video clips through Verizon's V-Cast service and Helio; and streaming video channels from Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, also available to Alltel Wireless and MobiTV customers.

--Tanya Irwin

CBS Mobile Chief: Wireless Industry Is Overwhelming Consumers | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:22:00.001-08:00

by Mark Walsh, Thursday, Jan 31, 2008 7:45 AM ET

TO MAKE MOBILE A VIABLE ad platform, carriers, device makers and content providers need to simplify mobile media-buying and not try to pitch cell phones as mini-TVs or Web sites.

That was the upshot of a panel, "Unleashing Mobile Advertising," at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC conference Wednesday highlighted by a diatribe unleashed by CBS Mobile chief Cyriac Roeding against the endemic confusion surrounding the medium.

Responding to a question about the iPhone's breakthrough as user-friendly phone, Roeding assailed the rest of the wireless industry for overwhelming consumers with a dizzying array of service options and added costs that end up scaring off advertisers off as well.

"How do we expect anyone to take this seriously as an advertising device if we keep telling them about the unbelievable complexity that arises out of the fact that we have 20 carriers in the U.S., then we have fundamental technologies, GSM and CDMA..." said Roeding, continuing with a litany of technical and service hurdles familiar to many cell phone subscribers.

"So let's make it simpler--let's talk about usability, let's not talk about the next 15 menu items, and let's not try to copy another medium," he added.

Roeding's spirited rebuke of the industry was met with spontaneous applause while fellow panel members from Nokia and Virgin Mobile, among others, smiled stiffly.

The CBS executive had led off the discussion by saying that advertisers have to understand why they need to be on mobile phones. "If you can't answer that question in 10 seconds, you're out of the game," he said. The answer should be, he went on, that mobile is the only medium that people carry with them 18 hours a day.

Mobile is also starting to provide reach to advertisers as sites gain larger audiences. Roeding noted that during the last quarter, CBS Mobile's sports section drew 75 million mobile page views and 5 million unique visitors during the fourth quarter.

But he warned against trying to promote mobile as a smaller version of the computer or TV screen. "If you are trying to make this the next online page, you will fail...because this is a new medium in its own right. " To that extent, he identified location-based services as a natural fit for mobile phones.

Roeding also said mobile content providers need to provide clear measurement benchmarks to encourage marketers to spend more on mobile.

Other panel members stressed that mobile advertising must be especially tailored to users because consumers view cell phones as more personal devices than other platforms.

Scott Kelliher, director of mobile advertising at Virgin Mobile USA, explained that the prepaid service offers its youthful customers free airtime in return for watching advertising through a program called sugarmama. "You have to offer stuff to users in the way they want, and we've been very successful doing that," Kelliher said.

He also noted that branded content on Virgin Mobile targeted to its core audience of teens and twenty-somethings generates click-through rates of 6%--much higher than rates for typical Web banner ads.

In the same vein, executives from mobile entertainment content site Thumbplay and mobile marketer JumpTap stressed mobile's strength as a direct-response medium.

"A lot of the owners of inventory in the U.S. make the mistake of only wanting to sell to Ford and the big brands," said Are Traasdahl, president and CEO of Thumbplay. As with the early days of the Internet, mobile is likely to feature more direct-response advertising before major brands populate the landscape. [X2: I DON'T BELIEVE IN THAT]

JumpTap CEO Dan Olschwang said that services like Thumbplay are important because they're proving that that mobile advertising can work. "Then the big brands will come because they need to see the proof that this thing works," Olschwang said.

Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com

ComScore: Google and Facebook Big Winners in 2007 | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:13:00.001-08:00

by Tanya Irwin, Thursday, Jan 31, 2008 7:45 AM ET

ACCORDING TO COMSCORE, THE INTERNET'S biggest winners in 2007 included Google, Facebook, Wikipedia and Craigslist. The Reston, Virginia.-based company released a report Wednesday highlighting the major trends in U.S. Internet activity in 2007, including top gaining properties and site categories, and core search market growth.

Social networking giant Facebook.com saw huge growth after opening registration to all users (previously the site was only open to high school and college students.) Traffic to the site jumped 81% versus December 2006 to 34.7 million visitors in December 2007.

Wikipedia Sites gained 34% to reach nearly 52 million visitors. Leading classified site Craigslist.org jumped 74% to 24.5 million visitors, while AT&T grew 27% to 30.2 million visitors boosted by its exclusive deal with Apple as carrier for the iPhone. Yellow Book Network jumped 137% to 10.4 million visitors.

Several of the top-gaining properties were driven by the acquisition of Web entities including Everyday Health, which gained 349% driven by its acquisition of Drugs.com and other sites. Glam Media, grew 213% due in part to the addition of several new entities, including Quality Health Network, MyYearbook.com, and LifeScript.com. Yellow Book Network grew 137% to 10.4 million visitors, as visitation to Yellowbook.com Sites tripled (up 207% to 4.6 million visitors) and one new entity was added to the property.

iVillage.com: The Women's Network gained 27% with the addition of Sugar Publishing, MakeoverSolutions.com, and iWin.com, among others. Demand Media added numerous entities under its Demand Media Knowledge and Demand Media Games media titles, which contributed to its 149% growth. OfficeMax's dramatic 199% gain was driven primarily by a December 2007 surge in visitation to its popular viral holiday greetings site ElfYouself.com.

The top-gaining site categories in 2007 reflected trends in both the online and offline worlds, according to comScore analysts. The politics category grabbed the top position, gaining 35%, as the 2008 presidential election and primary season kicked into high gear.

Women's community sites also jumped 35%, as the top two properties in the category, Glam Media and iVillage.com, saw strong growth. With the ever-increasing coverage of celebrity news, from Britney Spears' meltdowns to Anna Nicole Smith's death, entertainment news sites jumped 32%. Online classifieds had a strong 2007 growing 31% versus year ago, as it continued to impinge on traditional news media's classified revenues.

In 2007, searches at the five major core search engines increased 15% to 9.6 billion searches. Google Sites led with 5.6 billion searches in December 2007, up more than 30% from the previous year. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 2.2 billion searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (940 million), Time Warner Network (442 million), and Ask Network (415 million). More than 113 billion core searches were conducted in the U.S. during all of 2007, with Google Sites accounting for nearly 64 billion, representing a 56% share of the market.

Tanya Irwin is Deputy Editor of MediaPost. She can be reached at tanya@mediapost.com

AT&T, Yahoo Agree On Ad Revenue Share Plan | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:09:00.000-08:00

by Laurie Sullivan, Thursday, Jan 31, 2008 7:45 AM ET

AT&T AND YAHOO WILL SHARE revenue from advertising on mobile phones and personal computers, according to a deal announced this week. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the multi-year deal expands an alliance the companies formed in 2001.

Yahoo will provide search and display advertising for AT&T customers on mobile devices and PCs. As part of the deal, the search engine will create a new look and feel for the carrier's Web portal.

The agreement also creates new advertising-based revenue opportunities for both companies from search and display capabilities from either a mobile handset or a PC.

AT&T spokesperson Jenny Parker says that while the agreement paves the way for an "even richer and more innovative online experience for consumers, it also reflects the changes in the marketplace where search, advertising and mobile have become increasingly important growth areas."

Consumers benefit too, Parker says. The new att.net portal will allow AT&T wireless customers--even those who don't subscribe to the carrier's Internet service plan--to establish att.net e-mail addresses. All of AT&T's 14.2 million broadband customers will gain access to co-branded versions of Yahoo's mobile Web properties and the Yahoo! Go application.

Yahoo also will become AT&T's provider for search and display on both mobile devices and the PC. Yellowpages.com becomes the lead local search engine on both screens, as well.

As for AT&T U-verse TV customers, they will continue to have access to Yahoo content through the service's interactive AT&T U-bar feature, where available. The AT&T U-bar enables subscribers to view stock quotes, weather forecasts, traffic information, and sports scores on their TV screens in an area below the program they're currently watching, without interrupting their program. While this feature provides Yahoo content to U-verse subscribers, it does not provide opportunities for marketers.

Laurie Sullivan can be reached at sullivan@mediapost.com.

Study: Mobile Bankers Should Target Low-Income Consumers | MediaPost

2008-02-23T07:07:00.001-08:00

Thursday, Jan 31, 2008 7:45 AM ET

MOBILE BANKING MUST BE AVAILABLE to a majority of wireless subscribers including pre-paid and low-income consumers if it's to be successful in North America, according to a new study by Yankee Group.

Unlike in other countries, m-banking in North American markets is typically geared toward more affluent and tech-savvy users as a convenience. Low-income consumers in North America make up 21% of all cell phone users, but technology and price barriers keep this group from adopting m-banking services.

To broaden access, the report advises mobile banking providers need to target low-income consumers-possibly by partnering with a physical bank or national retailer-and making the service easy to use.

--Mark Walsh

What's Next? | OnLine Spin

2008-02-15T00:48:00.001-08:00

Thursday, February 14, 2008
By Dave Morgan

Yes. It's true. I'm leaving AOL and heading back to the start-up world. I've had a great time at AOL and am very bullish on its future, but the prospect of starting a new company in this market was just too great. Why? What's so good about the current market? Well, it's pretty simple. While I've been fortunate to have been able to launch two successful start-ups in the online advertising market, Real Media in 1995 and TACODA in 2001, I don't think that, in either of those cases, the same level of opportunity existed that is out there today. It's too early to talk about my new company, but here are some of my general thoughts on the digital media and marketing sector:

Big market growing fast. Online advertising is already a huge market, is growing fast, and is poised to accelerate as new consumer devices and new markets come online. Every media company today knows that its future is digital -- and every marketer today knows that it needs to learn how to communicate to its customers and prospects digitally. Most analysts expect global growth rates of more than 25% per year for years. Enough said.

Lots of "white space." While the market is very big with many big players, it has grown so fast that there are many, many areas where the market and its participants lack critical tools and services, from a clunking supply chain to complex buying and selling practices to the fact that the vast majority of ads that online consumers receive everyday are irrelevant and annoying. There are enormous opportunities for start-up companies and innovators to fill these spaces and build some very interesting businesses.

Geographic market expansion. The Internet is a global phenomenon, with future growth opportunities for most media companies and marketers outside of the U.S. However, at this point, most of the major Internet companies are still quite U.S.-centric, with a heavy over-balance on U.S. revenues. Those that do operate outside of the U.S. tend to limit themselves to large, mature markets like the U.K., Japan and the large national markets in Europe. In total, the markets outside the U.S. are going to grow much faster than those within the U.S, and the smaller emerging markets are going to enjoy extraordinary growth. In several years, Internet companies that find themselves without globally balanced market penetration will have to fix that strategy -- or face losing to those firms that are globally balanced. This is a big opportunity.

Abundance of money, talent and instant infrastructure. There has never existed as much money, trained and motivated talent and "instant infrastructure" with which to launch start-ups in digital media and marketing. The venture capital sector is well-stocked and aggressive. There are lots and lots of folks available in this market that are talented, well-trained, hard-working, ready to take risks, hoping to make a difference and ready for a change. Finally, we are now in a period of instant infrastructure. It is incredible what start-ups can rent easily and cheaply or get for free these days, from server space to bandwidth to VOIP to open source software. Gone are the days of having to buy racks and racks of servers and software and hosting in a front-loaded deal to get a tech company up and running. It's never been easier to start a business.

Distracted incumbents. While the market is quite dynamic and growing fast, many of the market incumbents are focused more on battling their competitors than serving their customers and partners. You don't need to see more than one $40+ billion dollar takeover attempt to know that. Caught up in competitive dynamics, most of the large online and offline media and agency companies are playing offense and defense against each other and are losing sight of their reason for being. That is an opportunity.

Economic uncertainty. The best place to be when revenue is hard to generate is a pre-revenue company. Whether or not we are headed into (or are already in) an economic downturn, and whether or not that will impact advertising expenditures, many in the market are already exercising caution. In times like that, big companies start acting more defensively and give up more white space to start-ups. This is good for start-ups.

It's a good time to be in our business and know where you're going. What do you think?

Marketers Can Take Advantage Of Poor Economic Climate | Marketing Daily

2008-01-30T09:48:00.001-08:00

by Aaron Baar, Wednesday, Jan 30, 2008 5:00 AM ET

A RECESSION MAY OR MAY not be on its way--or already here--but either way, marketers might be well advised to be proactive with their plans. And the strong ones may even sense an opportunity to increase their market shares.

"I've been through several advertising recessions and the reactions are almost always the same," Drew Neisser, CEO of marketing consultant Renegade, tells Marketing Daily. "And the results are universally damaging to the brands that cut the deepest."

To help marketers navigate the recession, Neisser has outlined nine points to help weather an economic downturn. Some--like maintaining one's entire marketing budget--are probably impossible to accomplish, Neisser admits. But others, such as seriously reevaluating one's marketing mix, are almost no-brainers.

"The savvy marketer says, 'If I only cut a little bit, I can actually make some hay while the going is tough,'" Neisser says. Given the obvious proof of return on investment in such areas as Internet and promotional advertising, it's likely those budgets will be the last ones cut. However, trade shows and more traditional advertising--which Neisser both shamed for not having more reliable ROI models-- might be wise places to cut one's budget, he says.

Marketers also would do well to retrench and focus on their core consumers, Neisser says. "New customers are the most expensive to acquire," he says. "If you have fewer to work with, you should focus on the existing customers first." And focus on them closely. Find out how their budgets are affected by a downturn. Listen to them, and market products accordingly. "The one thing we can do is engage them," Neisser says. "Maybe the way you can increase sales is to understand how your products or services are being used as your customers' budgets are being cut back."

Marketers of personal services may also want to take note of their customers' changing needs, particularly if people have to take a second job to make ends meet. While the idea of asking a person to spend more money on a personal service, such as dog-walking, at a time when they need more income to pay bills, it may be that paying a little more for the service is what enables a customer to take a second job, Neisser says.

Marketers may also want to look at opportunities to align--or further align--with non-profits for marketing. While corporations have been turning to social marketeering and non-profit alignment recently, Neisser expects that to come to a "cataclysmic" end as budgets are tightened. Such programs, which are rarely tracked for their ROI, are likely to be among the first to experience cutbacks, he says. Those who stay with them--or find others--may be in line for some opportunity.

"No one tries to show ROI because this is goodwill. That's what's going to make it vulnerable. Rather than kill that, look at it as potential for tremendous ROI and monitor it," Neisser says. "You may be able to get more than you thought out of it because of the gratefulness of the non-profits who are truly going to be hurting."

Finally, marketers may not want to be so quick to revamp their ad message, particularly if a brand has been reliant on humor in the past. Acknowledging bad times might feel right, particularly if a recession is protracted, but consumers may not want to be reminded of that fact. And a little entertainment can go a long way, Neisser says. "If humor was right for your brand in good times, it's even more right for your brand in bad," he says.

Some of Neisser's suggestions are in line with findings from a 2005 Penn State study on marketing during a recession that found that "strong companies"--i.e., the ones set up to find opportunities in boom times--might take advantage of a downturn to gain more market share.

"If you read the paper, we used a sporting analogy. The best athletes punished the weaker opponents in the hardest part of the race," says Arvind Rangaswamy, professor of marketing at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, and one of the authors of the study. "Suppose your company is good at developing advertising, and you have some slack resources. Now is the time to exploit that. Every dollar you spend now will be more advantageous because your competitors will not be able to take advantage."

However, those that are not particularly set up to take advantage of marketing opportunities in strong times are not likely to see much gain during a downturn, Rangaswamy says. "If you are not a very strong brand, it's very hard for you to advance in a recession," he says.

Automation Of Media Buying Through Ad Exchanges: Good Idea! | MediaPost

2008-01-30T08:31:00.001-08:00

Over the last month I've stated more than once that I feel ad exchanges are increasing in their importance, so I felt this week I'd spend a little more time explaining just why I see them as useful.

First off, let me give a little back story. I've been involved in online media since 1995 and I've built online media departments for more than one agency. During that entire time I've stayed true to a few ideals. One ideal is that media and creative cannot be planned separately in the digital space; they are uniquely intertwined and one cannot succeed without the other. Another is that you could not automate the planning and buying of media and run a successful campaign. This is the ideal I am straying away from, now that I know the situation we're in.

I still maintain that planning media must be intertwined with creative, but for the most part the buying of media has become a commodity business. In the old days an agency could maintain that they had leverage over their competitors and could secure rates lower than other shops. That is no longer true. In the old days buying media was not standardized, so the bigger shops could execute larger relationships than the smaller shops because they could afford to throw bodies at the problems; but in today's market, the absence of the bodies affects everyone equally. Meanwhile the business has become standardized and the majority of the media which is bought and sold can be automated, with much of it able to be purchased on a marketplace model with a digital front-end. Salespeople are not obsolete, because they still need be in place to explain the systems and detail the value of one companies' inventory over another -- but Google has proven that the ad marketplace model, or the ad exchange model for managing the buying and selling of actual "tangible" inventory, can succeed.

Back in 1996, Flycast launched and tried to provide a dashboard for online media planners to buy and manage their own campaigns on one network. The Flycast pedigree is seen all over the industry, with the folks responsible for the development, launch and management of that tool running all sorts of companies. Each of these companies has a piece of that promise -- of a digital dashboard enabling more control over the ad budgets and subsequent spend. The Flycast Mafia (as I affectionately refer to them all) had a great idea, but it was about 10 years ahead of its time. Flycast withered away under the management of Engage and CMGI and became part of a business school case study, but the Flycast Mafia model lives on. Companies such as AdBrite, ADSDAQ, Right Media Exchange, Traffiq, and AdECN are all providing services that can useful to agencies looking to minimize the staff managing a client's media dollars, but still maintaining the level of targeting and effectiveness that they have seen over the last 10 to 15 years.

For practical purposes, let's look at it this way: Once the campaign has been planned and the paperwork has been signed off on, the campaign is placed into your ad server. The ad server is now designed -- maybe not perfectly but close enough for today's purposes -- to interface with all sorts of other systems: a bid management tool, an external ad exchange system, and a behavioral targeting system for starters. Companies like Connexion A can build actual dashboards for integrating these into a single location, or you can manage them all on your own. Google Analytics can be layered into your client's Web site to track the post-click activity, and you can manage through to a sale for all search, network and basic portal buys. If you're tracking through to the sale or action you intended and you see conversions happening as a result of a network buy, you access the dashboard of the network and ramp up spending against demographic A while decreasing spending against demographic B in another ad network. You switch over the exchange system for the CPA campaigns you're running, and you allocate a higher bid to the inventory here because you've recognized these efficiencies are not offset by volume. Then you log into your bid management system and you increase the CPC you're willing to spend because you've also identified that at a slightly higher CPC you see volume increases that outweigh the increased CPA you are effectively spending. Overall you increased your exposure to the possibility of spending, but you calculated that a higher CPC of 15% actually drives an increase in volume of 20%.

It sounds very complex, but with a simple database managing the data, you really aren't too overwhelmed! You need to know what to look at, what to ignore, and try not to get too focused on the minor data points that can cloud your judgment. It's basically more like day trading than media buying, but the model works -- and with the tools at your fingertips, you can manage twice the inventory with half the people.

Of course these examples are slightly theoretical and are based on the idea that your media team is trained on these tools and probably trained in statistical analysis, which is training most media teams haven't received. This requires training and time, which are two things the online media professionals today are sorely lacking. Agencies will need to invest in this education in order to find the efficiencies that will come from these systems, and they will need to focus their energies on the companies that offer these tools rather than the ones who don't.

If you doubt my ideas, take a look at the biggest player in online, Google. Google is spending oodles of money trying to build a marketplace model for radio, TV and print to supplement the one it has built for online and is already using, to command upwards to 60% of the search business. Add this to the portion it is controlling with Ad Sense and its other products, and then see if you still doubt the viability of these models.

And of course the naysayers will state, "You can't automate the integrated sponsorships that are so effective in this market" and to that I respond, "You are correct." However, those dollars only account for up to about 25% of the total online spend, which leaves 75% of the budgets open to this sort of a system, which is enough to make me want to make it work. Don't you agree?

By Cory Treffiletti
MediaPost
Wednesday, January 30, 2008

ZUMOBI ANNOUNCES NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH MICROSOFT

2008-01-30T08:09:00.001-08:00

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE [1])--Zumobi today announced a partnership deal with Microsoft. Under terms of the business agreement, Microsoft will distribute the award-winning Zooming User Interface and mobile widget platform with Windows Mobile. This distribution agreement builds on the content partnerships Zumobi announced in December.

"Currently shipping on devices from more than 48 device makers with 125 mobile operators in 55 countries, Windows Mobile is one of the most accessible and familiar mobile computing platforms," said Eric Hertz, CEO of Zumobi. "This strategic partnership benefits all of our constituencies — consumers, developers, content providers, carriers and advertisers — and enables us to continue building momentum quickly with our audience of techno-culturists and mobile business users."

Today, more than 140 devices in the marketplace worldwide are based on Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile-based phones are designed for people to be productive on-the-go, all while having the ability to stay in touch with colleagues and friends. Windows Mobile-based phones also include mobile versions of Office Outlook, Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint and Internet Explorer, giving people access to critical business data such as documents, contacts, e-mail, calendar items and tasks. Zumobi is compatible with Windows Mobile versions 5.0 and newer.

"Zumobi originated in our IP Ventures program as the work of a world-class research team, and demonstrates how Microsoft works with innovative independent companies to provide people with some of the best sets of services and applications available," said John O'Rourke, General Manager, Mobile Communications Business at Microsoft. "Zumobi is a strong complement to Windows Mobile in that both it and Microsoft offer our customers innovative yet easy ways to access all their information while they're on the go — making their phone the best companion for their entire life."

Zumobi revolutionizes the way people access, retrieve and share Web-based content on their mobile phones. Through an intuitive, lush user interface, Zumobi allows people to easily "bounce" in and out of snack-sized bits of the entertainment they want and to stay on top of the information they need throughout the day, while offering advertisers a better way to connect with consumers through their mobile phones. Zumobi offers content from a broad range of mobile widgets or Tiles, including many from partners such as MTV Networks, AccuWeather.com^®, Traffic.com, FlightStats.com and OTOlabs, who developed Tiles for Vail Resorts and Fox Television's "Family Guy."

About Zumobi

Zumobi is the open platform that is reinventing the mobile content experience. A highly-acclaimed innovator in the mobile industry, Zumobi provides developers with a device-neutral platform for building and deploying rich content for mobile phones; enables a better way to connect consumers and the brands that define their lives; delivers a new set of benefits that carriers can offer to their customers; and gives consumers an experience that makes their mobile phones more useful and fun. More information on Zumobi is available at www.Zumobi.com [2].

Source URL:
http://www.fiercewireless.com/press-releases/zumobi-announces-new-partnership-microsoft
Published on FierceWireless (http://www.fiercewireless.com)

AdMob East To Focus On Expanding Mobile Brand Advertising | MediaPost

2008-01-28T10:41:00.001-08:00

AdMob East To Focus On Expanding Mobile Brand Advertising

by Mark Walsh, Monday, Jan 28, 2008 8:00 AM ET
MediaPost

SEEKING CLOSER TIES WITH MADISON Avenue, San Mateo, Calif.-based mobile ad network AdMob has opened a New York branch.

The AdMob East office will be led by ad sales veterans Adam Schneider and Robyn Borok, and will focus on expanding brand advertising on AdMob's mobile platform. Much of that effort will involve continuing to educate agencies about mobile marketing opportunities, according to Tony Nethercutt, AdMob's vice president of sales.

"We are spending a ton of time on education about mobile, what the possibilities are and best practices, and just trying to demystify it," he said. "People make it way too complicated. It's a lot like interactive, but with a few more subtleties about what you can do."

Started in 2006, AdMob now sells banner and text ads on more than 3,000 mobile Web sites from big-name marketers including Ford, Procter & Gamble, BlackBerry and Best Buy. The company says it is serving 2 billion impressions per month. With growing interest in mobile advertising, Nethercutt said the time had come for the company to have a physical presence in the ad industry's capital.

The larger agencies AdMob has worked with to date are GM Planworks, Avenue A|Razorfish, OgilvyInteractive, MEC Interaction and AKQA. "All of these agencies have groups they're starting and assigning mobile expertise to," Nethercutt said. "So we're talking with a lot of players in the [mobile] space, and expect those relationships to grow."

In the last few months especially, Nethercutt said he has seen agencies incorporate mobile into broader interactive media buys through media planning tools like aQuantive's Atlas and DoubleClick's MediaVisor. "It's definitely becoming more of a staple on interactive buys as advertisers take advantage of the things mobile can bring to the table," he said.

Making face time with the agencies on behalf of AdMob will be ad sales directors Schneider and Borok. Before joining AdMob, Schneider was a founding executive at mobile startup Cellfire, and previously was vice president of sales at online rewards network MyPoints.

Borok was previously advertising director for Child magazine and has also held ad sales-related positions at Primedia and iVillage.

During the last year, AdMob has grown from a dozen to 60 employees, including some working overseas, Nethercutt said.

Mark Walsh can be reached at walsh@mediapost.com

[Trend] Consumers Searching for Circular Entertainment | KenRadio

2008-01-22T11:55:00.001-08:00

Up to a quarter of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than coming out of traditional media groups. This phenomenon, dubbed 'Circular Entertainment', is part of a new global study by Nokia. The study, entitled 'A Glimpse of the Next Episode', carried out by The Future Laboratory, interviewed trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles signposting emerging entertainment trends. Combining views from industry leading figures with Nokia's own research from its 900 million consumers around the world, Nokia has constructed a global picture of what it believes entertainment will look like over the next five years.

This circular sharing is described in the report like this:

* Someone shares video footage they shot on their mobile device from a night out with a friend
* That friend adds an MP3 file soundtrack of the evening - then passes it to another friend
* This friend edits the footage by adding some photographs and passes it on to another friend

As part of the research we have identified four key driving trends; Immersive Living; Geek Culture; G Tech and Localism. These trends are currently sitting on the edge, but as these trends become more mainstream, they will have a collaborative, creative effect on the way people consume entertainment which leads to the Circular Entertainment phenomenon.

Emmersive Living
Immersive Living is the rise of lifestyles which blur the reality of being on and offline. Entertainment will no longer be segmented; people can access and create it wherever they are.

Geek Culture
This triumph marks a shift as consumers become hungry for more sophisticated entertainment. Geek Culture rises, consumers will want to be recognized and rewarded - the boundaries between being commercial and creative will blur.

G Tech
G Tech is an existing social force in Asia that will change the way entertainment will look. Forget pink and sparkly, it is about the feminization of technology that is currently underway. Entertainment will be more collaborative, democratic, emotional and customized - all of which are 'female' traits.

Localism
The report uncovered a locally-minded sprit emerging in entertainment consumption and Localism will become a key theme of future entertainment. Consumers will take pride in seeking out the local and home-grown.

// by KenRadio, Jan 2008

[Stats] Global Advertising & Marketing Spending | KenRadio

2008-01-15T13:59:00.001-08:00

Advertising spending in US measured media is expected to increase almost 4% in 2008 compared with 2007, when spending was up about 3%. Worldwide spending is expected to go up 7% in 2008, after an anticipated 6% increase in 2007, according to a new study by GroupM. US advertising spending is expected increase 3.7%, to $168.6 billion, in 2008. Spending in 2007 is expected to come in at 2.8% higher than in 2006. Worldwide spending is expected to go up 6.8%, to some $479 billion.

Television and the internet are the primary engines of global ad growth, with 50% and 30%, respectively, of additional new investment in 2008, Spending on marketing services, such as sponsorships and public relations, is growing at a faster rate than for traditional advertising. 5% of global ad investment is expected to shift from developed to emerging economies in 2008, the largest such shift ever recorded:

* The main geographic contributors to growth next year are predicted to be China, with 21% of all new money.
* Russia and Brazil will each contribute 6%.
* India will account for 3%.
* The US remains the second-highest contributor at 20% of all new money.

The 2008 spending expectations largely reflect the Olympics and the US election, says the report:

* The Games are forecast to bring $1 billion in ad spending to national TV and $200-$300 million to local broadcast
* The election is even more important to local broadcast and is expected to inject nearly $2 billion in 2008 before facing a tough adjustment in 2009
* Internet ad spending is expected to exceed 10% of global ad investment in 2008 for the first time ever
* Search will comprise 65-70% measured online advertising in 2008, up from 50% in 2005.
* Another first, in one country, Sweden, Online advertising is expected to be the largest single medium. The UK and Denmark are likely to be the next in line
* Advertising spending in newspapers is expected to continue to suffer, and new softness is already evident in some large categories such as automotive, airlines, and retail. The continued heavy loss of classified advertising to the internet continues to do the most serious damage

Advertising Statics
$61 bln will be spent on interactive marketing by 2012
12% of ad money to be spent online in the US in 2010
33% of European advertisers to have social networking presence
80% of TiVo owners and 82% of other DVR owners likely to skip commercials
Ad engagement for online shows is 25% higher than TV shows
Click fraud reached 16.2% in Q3 2007
Global ad spending on social networks to top $4 bln in 2011
Mobile ads to generate $1.2 bln in Japan in 2012
Online ad spending to grow 29% in 2008
Online video ads to generate $1.3 bln in 2007
Russian online ads generated $151 mln in the first half of 2007
UK Internet ad spending to grow 30.8% in 2008
US interactive marketing spending to reach $61 bln by 2012

by KenRadio

Jan 2008

[Stats:Wireless Broadband] Next Generation of Wireless Broadband | KenRadio

2008-01-15T13:32:00.001-08:00

SDPA 101
HSDPA, or high speed downlink packet access, is a beefed up flavour of 3G capable of delivering downlink speeds of up to a theoretical maximum of 7.2Mbps. Typical speeds achieved are between 800Kbps and 3Mbps.

Next Generation of Wireless Broadband
3.5G is driving mobile broadband growth around the globe, with a rapid increase in the number of commercial HSDPA networks being rolled out. The number of commercial HSDPA networks launched worldwide grew by 69% in 2007, according to Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA). There are now 166 commercial HSDPA networks in 75 countries and a further 38 networks are committed to rollouts - which will bump the total to 204 HSDPA networks in 89 countries. Commercial HSDPA networks are widely available in Western Europe (61 networks), Asia Pacific (35), Eastern Europe (34), the Middle East and Africa (20) and the Americas and the Caribbean (16).

HSDPA, or high speed downlink packet access, is a beefed up flavour of 3G capable of delivering downlink speeds of up to a theoretical maximum of 7.2Mbps. Typical speeds achieved are between 800Kbps and 3Mbps. The rise of 3.5G is driving mobile broadband services globally - adding that HSPA (referring to both HSDPA and HSUPA) operators around the world are reporting strong subscription growth and increased profitability. But it's not just network numbers - speed is also on the up. 62% of existing commercial HSDPA networks support downlink speeds of 3.6Mbps or more, while 21% support the peak downlink speed of 7.2Mbps. HSUPA (high speed uplink packet) is rarer than HSDPA - with just 26 commercial networks launched in 22 countries. 60% of HSPA operators combine with GSM/EDGE to bolster their network coverage. HSDPA rollouts can be achieved by a software upgrade to existing 3G networks - giving 3.5G a headstart over WiMax which requires dedicated network infrastructure. At present there are just two commercial mobile WiMax networks in the world, both in Korea. Rising sales of HSPA-enabled mobiles - helped by more-generous-than-expected operator subsidies of the hardware - are helping to drive the 3.5G market in Western Europe. Most new 3G phones will be HSPA-enabled moving forward.

Global HSDPA Networks

Argentina
* Movistar

Aruba
* Setar

Australia
* Telstra
* Vodafone Australia
* Hutchison's 3

Austria
* T-Mobile
* Mobilkom Austria
* One
* 3

Bahrain
* MTC-Vodafone

Belgium
* Proximus

Brazil
* Claro
* Telemig Celular

Bulgaria
* M-tel
* Globul
* Vivatel

Canada
* Rogers Wireless

Chile
* Entel PCS

Croatia
* VIPnet
* T-mobile

Czech Republic
* T-Mobile
* Eurotel

Denmark
* 3
* TDC Mobil

Estonia
* EMT

Egypt
* Etisalat
* Vodafone

Finland
* Elisa Oyj
* Sonera
* DNA Finland

France
* SFR

Germany
* T-Mobile
* Vodafone
* O2
* E-Plus

Greece
* Cosmote
* Vodafone
* Wind GR

Hong Kong
* SmarTone-Vodafone
* CSL

Hungary
* T-Mobile
* Pannon
* Vodafone

Iceland
* Novator

Indonesia
* Excelcom
* Indosat
* Telkomsel

Ireland
* Vodafone
* O2
* 3

Isle of Man
* Manx Telecom
* Cloud9

Israel
* Cellcom
* Partner
* Pelephone

Italy
* 3
* Vodafone
* TIM
* WIND

Japan
* SoftBank Mobile
* DoCoMo
* EMOBILE

Jersey
* Jersey Airtel

Kuwait
* Wataniya

Liechtenstein
* Telecom FL

Lithuania
* Omnitel
* Bite

Malaysia
* Maxis Communications
* Celcom

Malta
* GO Mobile

Netherlands
* T-Mobile
* Vodafone
* KPN

New Zealand
* Vodafone

Norway
* TeliaSonera

Peru
* Claro

Philippines
* Globe Telecom
* Smart Communications
* PLDT

Poland
* PTC/Era
* Polkomtel/Plus
* Centertel/Orange

Portugal
* TMN
* Vodafone
* Optimus

Romania
* Vodafone Romania
* Orange Romania

Saudi Arabia
* AlJawal
* Mobily

Singapore
* MobileOne
* SingTel

Slovakia
* Orange
* T-Mobile

Slovenia:
* Mobitel

South Africa
* MTN
* Vodacom

South Korea
* SK Telecom
* KTF

Spain
* Orange
* Vodafone
* Movistar
* Yoigo

Sri Lanka
* Dialog Telekom
* Mobitel Lanka

Sweden
* 3
* Tele 2
* Telenor

Switzerland
* Orange
* Swisscom

United Kingdom
* 3 UK
* O2
* Orange UK
* T-Mobile UK
* Vodafone

United States
* AT&T
* Edge Wireless
* T-Mobile USA

By KenRadio

Jan 2008

[Stats:Video Broadband] What is being Watched on Broadband | KenRadio

2008-01-15T13:28:00.001-08:00

61% high speed Internet users watch/download online video content at least once a week and 86% do so on a monthly basis, compared to 45% and 71%, respectively, in the 2006 study, according to a new study by Horowitz Associates. News and user-generated, non-professional content are the most often viewed genres, followed by movie previews/trailers, music videos, and previews/segments of TV shows. Weekly viewing of full episodes of television shows doubled from last year, with 16% of high speed Internet users watching TV online on a weekly basis.

NBC and ABC are the networks Internet users mention the most frequently for online TV content, with Grey's Anatomy being the most often mentioned TV program viewed online. While consumption of broadband video has grown, the study shows that television is still the preferred platform for traditional TV content. The vast majority (70%) of Internet users who watch TV online say do so because they missed the episode on TV. 18% of these respondents say they watch TV shows online to watch them a second time (after having watched them on TV), or that they watch TV shows online just when they happen to find them or when someone else tells them about them (20%). Conversely, 13% Internet users who watch TV shows online say they watch them directly online, and not on regular TV.

Penetration of video-enabled handheld devices is on the rise; concomitantly, so is viewing of video content on these devices. 27% of Internet users have a cell, iPod/MP3 player, or PDA with video capability, and an additional 23% do not have this capability but are interested in getting it. Among those with video-enabled handheld devices, 35% watch video on their devices at least weekly and 62% do so at least monthly, translating to 18% of Internet users overall who watch video content on a handheld device at least monthly. This figure is up from 8% just one year ago.

There is a dynamic relationship between broadband access, broadband content and broadband consumption. More and better broadband content, particularly entertainment content in video form is bringing more consumers to the platform, either on their computers or on their handheld devices. This, in turn, creates an even greater demand for and expectations regarding broadband video. Importantly, the data suggest that broadband video is not cannibalistic to linear video, but rather, an enhancement to the consumers' "traditional" TV experience".

Television Statics
69% of Americans think PCs are more entertaining than TV
47% more engage with TV ads online
17 mln IPTV subscribers in China by 2011
90% of US cable operators offer HDTV
165.3 mln LCD TVs to sell in 2011
1.2 bln HDMI-enabled devices by 2010
Consumer electronics sales to grow 6.1% in 2008
Americans choose smaller 1080p TV over a larger 720p
80% of TiVo owners and 82% of other DVR owners likely to skip commercials
48% of US households aware of digital TV transition
US DVR penetration is at 20%
More than 50% of US households have digital TVs
38% of US consumers watching TV shows online
Ad engagement for online shows is 25% higher than TV shows
12.1% of Americans have 2+ HDTVs
US HDTV sales to top $65 bln by 2009
1080p LCD TV to generate $75.4 bln in 2011
30% of cable subscribers would drop cable if shows were available over broadband
Japanese and Americans watched 4.5 hours of TV a day in 2006
Digital television to reach 64% of US households by 2008
771k LCD TVs with backlight to ship by Q4 2008
52% of urban males do not get enough international content on their TV
78% of mobile TV users are in Asia-Pacific
34-inch plasma display panels ASP to decline to $124 by 2011
13.7% of Americans have HDTVs

by KenRadio

Jan 15th, 2008

[Stats: Internet Ads] Internet Advertising to Continue Double Digit Growth | KenRadio

2008-01-15T12:31:00.001-08:00

Total U.S. measured advertising spending is projected to increase 4.2% in 2008 and measured expenditures are forecast to grow by 3.6% in the first half of 2008 followed by a gain of 4.7% in the second half, according to a new study by TNS Media Intelligence. 2008 is shaping up as a year of contrasts, aside from the continued double digit growth rate of Internet display advertising, spending gains will be driven predominately by the powerful combination of Summer Olympics and record-setting levels of political advertising. Offsetting this by, a weakened economy will have a dampening effect on the broader, core advertising market.

Internet display advertising is forecast to continue growing at double-digit rates in 2008 with Spot TV, Spanish Language Media, Outdoor and Cable Network TV also exceeding the overall market average. Consumer Magazines and Network TV are projected to post small gains versus 2007, while Business-To-Business Magazines and Newspapers are expected to experience outright declines in ad spending.

The Internet will continue to gain share, principally at the expense of newspapers. Tracking share of spending on a rolling two-year basis, in order to control for the biennial fluctuations associated with the Olympics and elections – events that disproportionately benefit television media. Projections for the 2007-08 cycle indicate television and magazines will maintain their shares, while the Internet will move past radio.

Advertising Statics

$61 bln will be spent on interactive marketing by 2012

12% of ad money to be spent online in the US in 2010

33% of European advertisers to have social networking presence

80% of TiVo owners and 82% of other DVR owners likely to skip commercials

Ad engagement for online shows is 25% higher than TV shows

Click fraud reached 16.2% in Q3 2007

Global ad spending on social networks to top $4 bln in 2011

Mobile ads to generate $1.2 bln in Japan in 2012

Online ad spending to grow 29% in 2008

Online video ads to generate $1.3 bln in 2007

Russian online ads generated $151 mln in the first half of 2007

UK Internet ad spending to grow 30.8% in 2008

US interactive marketing spending to reach $61 bln by 2012

by KenRadio - IQ Reports

Jan 2008

[Stats:Teen Online] Living La Vida Super Communicators | MediaPost

2008-01-15T12:24:00.001-08:00

When you think teens, you automatically think they are online, right? Can you guess what percentage of teens are using the Internet? A whopping 93%, according to a recent study by The Pew Internet & American Life Project . In fact, the Internet is said to be a part of a teen's social life where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others.

The study finds teens (12 - 17) to be "super communicators" who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email.

Among the latest survey findings:

39% of online teens share their own artistic creations online, such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos, up from 33% in 2004.
33% create or work on Web pages or blogs for others, including those for groups they belong to, friends, or school assignments -- a stat basically unchanged from 2004 (32%).
28% have created their own online journal or blog, up from 19% in 2004.
27% maintain their own personal Web page, up from 22% in 2004.
26% remix content they find online into their own creations, up from 19% in 2004.

In addition to those core elements of content creation,

55% of online teens have created a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace.
47% of online teens have uploaded photos where others can see them, though many restrict access to the photos in some way.
14% of online teens have posted videos online.

According to PEW, 64% of online teens have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey conducted three years ago.

So you think teen girls talk a lot? Well they do so in an online environment, too. They are considered to be "content creators."

Other gender-related findings include:

35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys.
54% of wired girls post photos online, compared with 40% of online boys.
19% of online boys post video content online, compared to 10% of online girls who have posted a video online where others could see it.

47% of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least "some of the time." Many teens, however, limit access to content that they share.

Teens are savvier than most of us think -- at least about their online activities. They are aware of the dangers of sharing personal information online. Many make it available for friends only.

That being said, they tend to think about safety less when posting pictures online. 39% say they restrict access to their photos most of the time -- whereas 38% say they do "sometimes," and 21% say "never." Before you cringe as I did, they are better than adults on this one. 38% of adults say they never restrict access to the photos they post online. Eek.

I was also surprised to see that teens still use landline phones. In fact, 46% say they use their landlines. Perhaps that figure is due to parents monitoring their cell phone minutes?

The use of email is diminishing in this group. Only 14% say they email daily. We need to tweak our lens when we look at this reality. Teen are not communicating less, they are communicating differently. They ping each other on instant messenger clients and email via social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

So when it comes to targeting this fickle bunch online, watch their behavior -- how and where they communicate. Visit social networking sites and take a look around. You may not be able to see their profiles, as access is restricted, but you'll see why 55% of teens online are on social networking sites. Oh, and be prepared to feel old or need ear plugs.

MediaPost

Online Spin for Monday, January 14, 2008

By Seana Mulcahy

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry | Wired

2008-01-15T12:13:00.001-08:00

Photo: Landov

The demo was not going well.

Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn't just buggy, it flat-out didn't work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, "We don't have a product yet."

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs' trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. "It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill," says someone who was in the meeting.

The ramifications were serious. The iPhone was to be the centerpiece of Apple's annual Macworld convention, set to take place in just a few months. Since his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs had used the event as a showcase to launch his biggest products, and Apple-watchers were expecting another dramatic announcement. Jobs had already admitted that Leopard — the new version of Apple's operating system — would be delayed. If the iPhone wasn't ready in time, Macworld would be a dud, Jobs' critics would pounce, and Apple's stock price could suffer.

This 4.8-ounce sliver of glass and aluminum is an explosive device that has forever changed the mobile-phone business, wresting power from carriers and giving it to manufacturers, developers, and consumers.

And what would AT&T think? After a year and a half of secret meetings, Jobs had finally negotiated terms with the wireless division of the telecom giant (Cingular at the time) to be the iPhone's carrier. In return for five years of exclusivity, roughly 10 percent of iPhone sales in AT&T stores, and a thin slice of Apple's iTunes revenue, AT&T had granted Jobs unprecedented power. He had cajoled AT&T into spending millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create a new feature, so-called visual voicemail, and to reinvent the time-consuming in-store sign-up process. He'd also wrangled a unique revenue-sharing arrangement, garnering roughly $10 a month from every iPhone customer's AT&T bill. On top of all that, Apple retained complete control over the design, manufacturing, and marketing of the iPhone. Jobs had done the unthinkable: squeezed a good deal out of one of the largest players in the entrenched wireless industry. Now, the least he could do was meet his deadlines.

For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.

But by the end of the push, just weeks before Macworld, Jobs had a prototype to show to the suits at AT&T. In mid-December 2006, he met wireless boss Stan Sigman at a suite in the Four Seasons hotel in Las Vegas. He showed off the iPhone's brilliant screen, its powerful Web browser, its engaging user interface. Sigman, a taciturn Texan steeped in the conservative engineering traditions that permeate America's big phone companies, was uncharacteristically effusive, calling the iPhone "the best device I have ever seen." (Details of this and other key moments in the making of the iPhone were provided by people with knowledge of the events. Apple and AT&T would not discuss these meetings or the specific terms of the relationship.)

Six months later, on June 29, 2007, the iPhone went on sale. At press time, analysts were speculating that customers would snap up about 3 million units by the end of 2007, making it the fastest-selling smartphone of all time. It is also arguably Apple's most profitable device. The company nets an estimated $80 for every $399 iPhone it sells, and that's not counting the $240 it makes from every two-year AT&T contract an iPhone customer signs. Meanwhile, about 40 percent of iPhone buyers are new to AT&T's rolls, and the iPhone has tripled the carrier's volume of data traffic in cities like New York and San Francisco.

But as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T, its real impact is on the structure of the $11 billion-a-year US mobile phone industry. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them. Handsets were viewed largely as cheap, disposable lures, massively subsidized to snare subscribers and lock them into using the carriers' proprietary services. But the iPhone upsets that balance of power. Carriers are learning that the right phone — even a pricey one — can win customers and bring in revenue. Now, in the pursuit of an Apple-like contract, every manufacturer is racing to create a phone that consumers will love, instead of one that the carriers approve of. "The iPhone is already changing the way carriers and manufacturers behave," says Michael Olson, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray.

In 2002, shortly after the first iPod was released, Jobs started thinking about developing a phone. He saw millions of Americans lugging separate phones, BlackBerrys, and — now — MP3 players; naturally, consumers would prefer just one device. He also saw a future in which cell phones and mobile email devices would amass ever more features, eventually challenging the iPod's dominance as a music player. To protect his new product line, Jobs knew he would eventually need to venture into the wireless world.

If the idea was obvious, so were the obstacles. Data networks were sluggish and not ready for a full-blown handheld Internet device. An iPhone would require Apple to create a completely new operating system; the iPod's OS wasn't sophisticated enough to manage complicated networking or graphics, and even a scaled-down version of OS X would be too much for a cell phone chip to handle. Apple would be facing strong competition, too: In 2003, consumers had flocked to the Palm Treo 600, which merged a phone, PDA, and BlackBerry into one slick package. That proved there was demand for a so-called convergence device, but it also raised the bar for Apple's engineers.

Then there were the wireless carriers. Jobs knew they dictated what to build and how to build it, and that they treated the hardware as little more than a vehicle to get users onto their networks. Jobs, a notorious control freak himself, wasn't about to let a group of suits — whom he would later call "orifices" — tell him how to design his phone.

By 2004 Apple's iPod business had become more important, and more vulnerable, than ever. The iPod accounted for 16 percent of company revenue, but with 3G phones gaining popularity, Wi-Fi phones coming soon, the price of storage plummeting, and rival music stores proliferating, its long-term position as the dominant music device seemed at risk.

So that summer, while he publicly denied he would build an Apple phone, Jobs was working on his entry into the mobile phone industry. In an effort to bypass the carriers, he approached Motorola. It seemed like an easy fix: The handset maker had released the wildly popular RAZR, and Jobs knew Ed Zander, Motorola's CEO at the time, from Zander's days as an executive at Sun Microsystems. A deal would allow Apple to concentrate on developing the music software, while Motorola and the carrier, Cingular, could hash out the complicated hardware details.

Of course, Jobs' plan assumed that Motorola would produce a successor worthy of the RAZR, but it soon became clear that wasn't going to happen. The three companies dickered over pretty much everything — how songs would get into the phone, how much music could be stored there, even how each company's name would be displayed. And when the first prototypes showed up at the end of 2004, there was another problem: The gadget itself was ugly.

Jobs unveiled the ROKR in September 2005 with his characteristic aplomb, describing it as "an iPod shuffle on your phone." But Jobs likely knew he had a dud on his hands; consumers, for their part, hated it. The ROKR — which couldn't download music directly and held only 100 songs — quickly came to represent everything that was wrong with the US wireless industry, the spawn of a mess of conflicting interests for whom the consumer was an afterthought. Wired summarized the disappointment on its November 2005 cover: "YOU CALL THIS THE PHONE OF THE FUTURE?"

The Apple Touch
Apple has created two music phones. The ROKR, made with Motorola in 2005, respected the traditional relationships between manufacturers and carriers. The iphone, released last summer, completely overturned them.

ROKR		iPhone
Won't hold more than 100 songs, even if there's memory left. iTunes Music Store purchases must be synced from a PC. Clunky interface is sluggish and hard to navigate. Design screams, "A committee made me."		Can hold about 1,500 songs — as much as its 8-GB drive allows. iTunes Music Store purchases download wirelessly, directly to the phone. Just tap and go; no user manual required. C'mon. Look at it. It's gorgeous.

Even as the ROKR went into production, Jobs was realizing he'd have to build his own phone. In February 2005, he got together with Cingular to discuss a Motorola-free partnership. At the top-secret meeting in a midtown Manhattan hotel, Jobs laid out his plans before a handful of Cingular senior execs, including Sigman. (When AT&T acquired Cingular in December 2006, Sigman remained president of wireless.) Jobs delivered a three-part message to Cingular: Apple had the technology to build something truly revolutionary, "light-years ahead of anything else." Apple was prepared to consider an exclusive arrangement to get that deal done. But Apple was also prepared to buy wireless minutes wholesale and become a de facto carrier itself.

Jobs had reason to be confident. Apple's hardware engineers had spent about a year working on touchscreen technology for a tablet PC and had convinced him that they could build a similar interface for a phone. Plus, thanks to the release of the ARM11 chip, cell phone processors were finally fast and efficient enough to power a device that combined the functionality of a phone, a computer, and an iPod. And wireless minutes had become cheap enough that Apple could resell them to customers; companies like Virgin were already doing so.

Sigman and his team were immediately taken with the notion of the iPhone. Cingular's strategy, like that of the other carriers, called for consumers to use their mobile phones more and more for Web access. The voice business was fading; price wars had slashed margins. The iPhone, with its promised ability to download music and video and to surf the Internet at Wi-Fi speeds, could lead to an increase in the number of data customers. And data, not voice, was where profit margins were lush.

What's more, the Cingular team could see that the wireless business model had to change. The carriers had become accustomed to treating their networks as precious resources, and handsets as worthless commodities. This strategy had served them well. By subsidizing the purchase of cheap phones, carriers made it easier for new customers to sign up — and get roped into long-term contracts that ensured a reliable revenue stream. But wireless access was no longer a luxury; it had become a necessity. The greatest challenge facing the carriers wasn't finding brand-new consumers but stealing them from one another. Simply bribing customers with cheap handsets wasn't going to work. Sigman and his team wanted to offer must-have devices that weren't available on any other network. Who better to create one than Jobs?

For Cingular, Apple's ambitions were both tantalizing and nerve-racking. A cozy relationship with the maker of the iPod would bring sex appeal to the company's brand. And some other carrier was sure to sign with Jobs if Cingular turned him down — Jobs made it clear that he would shop his idea to anyone who would listen. But no carrier had ever given anyone the flexibility and control that Jobs wanted, and Sigman knew he'd have trouble persuading his fellow executives and board members to approve a deal like the one Jobs proposed.

Sigman was right. The negotiations would take more than a year, with Sigman and his team repeatedly wondering if they were ceding too much ground. At one point, Jobs met with some executives from Verizon, who promptly turned him down. It was hard to blame them. For years, carriers had charged customers and suppliers for using and selling services over their proprietary networks. By giving so much control to Jobs, Cingular risked turning its vaunted — and expensive — network into a "dumb pipe," a mere conduit for content rather than the source of that content. Sigman's team made a simple bet: The iPhone would result in a surge of data traffic that would more than make up for any revenue it lost on content deals.

Jobs wouldn't wait for the finer points of the deal to be worked out. Around Thanksgiving of 2005, eight months before a final agreement was signed, he instructed his engineers to work full-speed on the project. And if the negotiations with Cingular were hairy, they were simple compared with the engineering and design challenges Apple faced. For starters, there was the question of what operating system to use. Since 2002, when the idea for an Apple phone was first hatched, mobile chips had grown more capable and could theoretically now support some version of the famous Macintosh OS. But it would need to be radically stripped down and rewritten; an iPhone OS should be only a few hundred megabytes, roughly a 10th the size of OS X.

Before they could start designing the iPhone, Jobs and his top executives had to decide how to solve this problem. Engineers looked carefully at Linux, which had already been rewritten for use on mobile phones, but Jobs refused to use someone else's software. They built a prototype of a phone, embedded on an iPod, that used the clickwheel as a dialer, but it could only select and dial numbers — not surf the Net. So, in early 2006, just as Apple engineers were finishing their yearlong effort to revise OS X to work with Intel chips, Apple began the process of rewriting OS X again for the iPhone.

The conversation about which operating system to use was at least one that all of Apple's top executives were familiar with. They were less prepared to discuss the intricacies of the mobile phone world: things like antenna design, radio-frequency radiation, and network simulations. To ensure the iPhone's tiny antenna could do its job effectively, Apple spent millions buying and assembling special robot-equipped testing rooms. To make sure the iPhone didn't generate too much radiation, Apple built models of human heads — complete with goo to simulate brain density — and measured the effects. To predict the iPhone's performance on a network, Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.

Through it all, Jobs maintained the highest level of secrecy. Internally, the project was known as P2, short for Purple 2 (the abandoned iPod phone was called Purple 1). Teams were split up and scattered across Apple's Cupertino, California, campus. Whenever Apple executives traveled to Cingular, they registered as employees of Infineon, the company Apple was using to make the phone's transmitter. Even the iPhone's hardware and software teams were kept apart: Hardware engineers worked on circuitry that was loaded with fake software, while software engineers worked off circuit boards sitting in wooden boxes. By January 2007, when Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld, only 30 or so of the most senior people on the project had seen it.

The hosannas greeting the iPhone were so overwhelming it was easy to ignore its imperfections. The initial price of $599 was too high (it has been lowered to $399). The phone runs on AT&T's poky EDGE network. Users can't perform email searches or record video. The browser won't run programs written in Java or Flash.

But none of that mattered. The iPhone cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers — and potentially the carriers themselves. Consumers get an easy-to-use handheld computer. And, as with the advent of the PC, the iPhone is sparking a wave of development that will make it even more powerful. In February, Jobs will release a developer's kit so that anyone can write programs for the device.

Manufacturers, meanwhile, enjoy new bargaining power over the carriers they've done business with for decades. Carriers, who have seen AT&T eat into their customer bases, are scrambling to find a competitive device, and they appear willing to give up some authority to get it. Manufacturers will have more control over what they produce; users — not the usual cabal of complacent juggernauts — will have more influence over what gets built.

Application developers are poised to gain more opportunities as the wireless carriers begin to show signs of abandoning their walled-garden approach to snaring consumers. T-Mobile and Sprint have signed on as partners with Google's Android, an operating system that makes it easy for independent developers to create mobile apps. Verizon, one of the most intransigent carriers, declared in November that it would open up its network for use with any compatible handset. AT&T made a similar announcement days later. Eventually this will result in a completely new wireless experience, in which applications work on any device and over any network. In time, it will give the wireless world some of the flexibility and functionality of the Internet.

It may appear that the carriers' nightmares have been realized, that the iPhone has given all the power to consumers, developers, and manufacturers, while turning wireless networks into dumb pipes. But by fostering more innovation, carriers' networks could get more valuable, not less. Consumers will spend more time on devices, and thus on networks, racking up bigger bills and generating more revenue for everyone. According to Paul Roth, AT&T's president of marketing, the carrier is exploring new products and services — like mobile banking — that take advantage of the iPhone's capabilities. "We're thinking about the market differently," Roth says. In other words, the very development that wireless carriers feared for so long may prove to be exactly what they need. It took Steve Jobs to show them that.

Contributing editor Fred Vogelstein ( fred_vogelstein@wiredmag.com) wrote about Facebook in issue 15.10.

By Fred Vogelstein 01.09.08 | 9:00 PM

Wired Fed 2008

Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic | NYT

2008-01-15T11:37:00.001-08:00

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Of all the iPhone's features, none had reviewers gushing more than its Internet browser. It was the first cellphone browser that promised something resembling the experience of surfing the Internet on a PC. Santa helped deliver on that promise.

On Christmas, traffic to Google from iPhones surged, surpassing incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device, according to internal Google data made available to The New York Times. A few days later, iPhone traffic to Google fell below that of devices powered by the Nokia-backed Symbian operating system but remained higher than traffic from any other type of cellphone.

The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.

The iPhone has taken the frustration out of browsing on a mobile phone, said Charles Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Company.

Other companies confirmed the trends, if not the specific data, observed by Google. Yahoo, for instance, said iPhones accounted for a disproportionate amount of its mobile traffic. And AdMob, a firm that shows billions of ads on mobile Web sites every month, said it saw traffic from iPhones surge drastically around Christmas.

"Consumers are going to demand Internet browsers" as good as Apple's, said Vic Gundotra, a Google vice president who oversees mobile products.

Mr. Gundotra said Web browsers as capable as the iPhone's could also prove a boon for developers of mobile software, who have long struggled to adapt their programs to different types of phones. As it does on the PC, he said, the browser could provide a more homogeneous "layer" for programmers.

"The reason no one considered this seriously is that the Web layer on mobile devices was terrible," he said. Google has taken advantage of the capabilities of the iPhone browser to create a product, internally called Grand Prix, that it says provides easy access to many of the company's services, including search, Gmail, Reader and Picasa.

Google, which developed the first version of Grand Prix in six weeks, is introducing a new version on Monday, just six weeks after the first one. That is a speed of development not previously possible on mobile phones, he said.

The New York Times

January 14, 2008

By MIGUEL HELFT

John Markoff contributed reporting from San Francisco.

Study: Mobile Subscribers Taking Note Of Ads | MediaPost

2008-01-11T05:18:00.001-08:00

ONE IN THREE U.S. MOBILE subscribers, or 78 million people, saw or listened to an ad on their cell phone during the last three months, according to a study.

The report is the first in a series of quarterly updates on mobile advertising to be issued by mobile entertainment company Limbo in partnership with Britain-based market research firm GfK NOP Research.

Among other key findings, the report confirmed that SMS text messaging remains the dominant non-voice service used by U.S. mobile subscribers, with 56% tapping away on phones. Mobile gaming and surfing the mobile Web were both about half that percentage, while less than 10% watch mobile TV.

Of the one-third of cell customers who have seen mobile ads, most received them via SMS or MMS text messaging. "A third of mobile phone owners saying they've seen advertising on their phones is significant," said Rob Lawson, CMO at Limbo, which creates games and other mobile content. "It means the first hurdle has been crossed to reaching the mass market."

But he acknowledged that marketers are still trying to figure out the best way to reach consumers on mobile phones, where media and ad formats are still evolving. "Brands are just waking up to the medium, looking at what works and what doesn't work. Hopefully, we can provide some data that helps to solve that conundrum," Lawson said.

The study found those who recalled seeing mobile advertising, one-third remembered brands being promoted. Among the brands with the highest recall were familiar names such as Verizon, Motorola, MTV, Coke, McDonald's and Chevrolet.

In terms of demographic data, men were found to have 20% higher advertising recall than women. Meanwhile, African-Americans had twice the recall of whites and those under 24 had twice the recall of those over 50.

When it comes to SMS texting, 82% of active users were under 24 and African-American and Hispanic consumers were 50% more likely to be SMS users than white ones. Single people were half again as likely to text as married people.

The study conducted by GfK NOP on behalf of Limbo was based on a survey of 1,000 adult U.S. mobile subscribers interviewed by phone.

by Mark Walsh, Friday, Jan 11, 2008 7:15 AM ET

www.mediapost.com

From Why To How |Mobile Insider

2008-01-10T14:06:00.000-08:00

A FIREWALL IN MY THINKING about mobile has been breached recently. For years, my default question regarding new forms of mobile media, from video to Web access to social networking to cyber-dating was, why? Why would someone want to do this on their phone? The device was so thoroughly hobbled with usability issues, a hopelessly poor interface, and overall sluggishness compared to any other platform. Theoretically, there just seemed to be no reason that comfort-driven, 300-thread-count, padded-toilet-seat, swivel-car-seat Americans would put up with this as a real data channel. As the women in my life have trained me to understand, there are countless reasons why I am so consistently wrong about most things. Daughter: "Dad, you're old, get over it." Ex-Wife: "Honey, you were born wrong." Girlfriend: "Oh, my God, how can I be dating a guy this old and this wrong?" I have given up trying to pinpoint the real source of my error. Now I simply try to correct them and move on to the next mistake. And so with mobile, it has been fascinating and humbling to see so many niche audiences for all these unlikely formats embrace the world's worst media device. Instead of asking why, now I just ask how? How will social networking migrate to mobile? How will banking, video, social networking, blogging, etc.? I think now it is clear that most of us value immediacy and mobility over usability. If a generation will embrace SMS as a fundamental conversation platform, then I think it is safe to say that just about any digital media format is going to find some place on phones. The question now is just how? M-commerce is one of those last categories that still left me scratching my head. It doesn't seem clear to me why someone needs to hit the buy button on their phone for a chunk of electronics or a book. Isn't online commerce generally something that can wait until you get to a PC screen to fulfill? You aren't getting the goods any faster, so instant gratification isn't the compelling reason to buy, is it? But apparently mobile retail enabler mporia had a pretty good Christmas servicing companies like GameStop and SecondAct electronics. "Those with a marketing plan tend to do very well," says CEO Dan Wright. Video games and electronics sold well via their mobile storefronts not only because they hit the prime 18-to-30-year-old demo that is using phones for everything, but because the companies are integrating the mobile option into their marketing. A successful plan usually involves giving users a special discount for trying the mobile store or a cash-back offer. Curiously, the urge to shop by phone is not necessarily tied to mobility but to what we might call second-screen behaviors. This isn't being driven by people on the go who decide that they must order that new "Pirates" DVD by phone. "They are sitting at home watching TV, and they casually browse the mobile Web, and part of that experience is to shop." Some of the better mobile shops in the mporia stable, like mporia.com/ebgames or 2ndact.mporia.net, have a kind of hot-or-not experience. They let you quickly browse items visually, a casual filtering activity that has proven very popular for mobile dating (i.e. Crush or Flush). And with the youthful embrace of all things digital and mobile, this target market is much less averse to entering their credit card information over a cell phone. Wright says mporia is putting together an initial case study for an electronics retailer that used an email blast of 20,000 messages to customers promoting the mobile store over the holiday. That essentially no-cost initiative produced $70,000 in sales, in large part because 15% of the users who came to the site converted to buyers. Some of the behaviors Wright is describing are in line with Deloitte's recent "Media Democracy" survey that suggested mobile is acting as more of a first or second screen for many young users, rather than a third screen. It also jibes with anecdotal evidence I hear from companies offering college campus services that users are looking to bypass the Web altogether and have more functionality available directly on their phones. I would add that part of the experience of m-commerce browsing is very visual. Just as large, full frame images and galleries are tremendously attractive at mobile media sites, flipping through a good mobile catalog of product shots has an addictive quality. Perhaps in 2008 we will move beyond the "third screen" moniker for mobile and start thinking about it first and second screen role more seriously. Because I have to be right about something sometime, right? "Why?" my ladies reply in unison "And how exactly would that happen?" +++ by Steve Smith , Thursday, January 10, 2008 MediaPost MobileInsider

Online Profiles of Social Networking Sites | IQReport by KenRadio

2008-01-07T06:36:00.001-08:00

Over the last five years, a plethora of social networking sites (SNS) has appeared, the most popular of these sites are currently ranked as some of the most-viewed websites on the internet, attracting millions of users around the world. The top three social networking sites in the U.S. according to Alexa's traffic rankings were MySpace (No. 3 overall), Facebook (No. 5) and LinkedIn (No. 34), as of December 1, 2007. The Pew Internet Project has reported extensively on teenagers' use of social networking websites, finding that 55% of online teens have created an online profile and that most restrict access to them in some way. Looking at adults, creation of social networking profiles is much lower (just 20%), but those who do maintain profiles appear to do so in a much more transparent way. Looking at all adult internet users who maintain an online profile, 82% say that their profile is currently visible compared with 77% of online teens who report this. Among adults who say they have a visible profile, 60% say that profile can be seen by anyone who happens upon it, while 38% say their profile is only accessible to friends. However, teens with visible profiles appear to make more conservative choices with respect to visibility, just 40% said their profile was visible to anyone, while 59% restricted their profile to friends only.

50% of 18-29 year-old internet users have created a social networking profile, compared with 15% of 30-49 year-old internet users and 8% of 50-64 year-old internet users. Overall, 47% of adult internet users say they think it would be "pretty easy" for someone to find them, compared with 29% who think someone would have to work at it, but could find them eventually. Another 17% believe it would be "very difficult" for someone to locate or contact them based on the information they found online. Men are somewhat more likely than women to think that it would be "pretty easy" to locate them using online resources; 50% of online men reported this compared with 43% of online women. About half of internet users age 30 and older think it would be pretty easy for someone to locate them, compared with one third of younger internet users. Teens who maintain an online profile are relatively confident about their level of accessibility online. Fully 36% say they think it would be "very difficult" for someone to identify them from their online profile. Forty percent of teens with profiles online think that it would be hard for someone to find out who they are from their profile, but that they could eventually be found online. And 23% of teen profile creators said it would be "pretty easy" for someone to find out who they are from the information posted to their profile. When asked a more general question about the availability of personal information online (not only that which is posted to a profile), internet users age 18 to 29 nearly match their teen counterparts: 25% say it would be "very difficult" for someone to locate or contact them based on the information they find online. Forty percent of internet users age 18 to 29 say someone would have to work at it but they could locate them eventually. And 33% of young adult internet users say it would "pretty easy" for someone to locate them based on online information.

Social Networking Statistics
55% of portal visitors might defect to social networks
34% of companies do not monitor employee usage of the Internet
67% of tech journalists cite blogs as their sources
Social networks made $400 mln in revenues in 2006
72% of social networking users would never pay to use the site
33% of European advertisers to have social networking presence
39% of Web users know what widgets are
Global ad spending on social networks to top $4 bln in 2011
65% of video consumers prefer professional video to user-generated

by KenRadio.com | IQ Reports

12/17/2007

Email Blows Away All Other Social Networks

2008-01-07T05:13:00.000-08:00

With the explosive excitement and high valuations of Facebook and the like, it's time to take a step back and acknowledge the mother of all social networks: email. Yes, plain-vanilla email.

Sure, a few of the big social networks have really taken off recently, but email is still by far the dominant and most practical platform for social connections. A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey found that 91% of Internet users between the ages of 18 and 64 send or read e-mail, far more than any social network.

In fact, email is so dominant that it's the single open-source backbone of nearlyevery social network. Think about it: Most social networks require your email address to sign up. Then they try to upload your email address book in order to communicate with your contacts. I can't think of a social network I belong to that doesn't ask me for my email address every time I log in. In fact, I find myself turning off the default email notifications in most social networks I sign up for!

There's a lot of hoopla about email losing relevance with younger generations, and therefore heading toward extinction. Baloney. The fact is that kids' primary communication devices are mobile, not computers optimized for email. Therefore they use those devices' best application: SMS and voice. But once kids graduate, take on business responsibilities and (many) sit in front of a PC all day long, email becomes a hard fact of life. Scott Karp at Publishing2.com noted that "Most people over 30 don't have many (or any) business or personal relationships that don't involve communicating by email." Scott also underscored Research In Motion, whose revenue rose year-over-year to $1.67 billion from $835.1 million -- by selling email devices. There's something to the social network known as email.

Now consider the natural, authentic and deeper social connections inherent in email. Steve Hodson, who blogs at WinExtra.com, noted that his email connections "have risen up the ranks of the network over time and as such have more of a trust factor associated with them that you will never find elsewhere." Actual writing, thoughtful interaction and more manual contact management lead to connections far more significant than superficial layers of distributed pokes and passive status feeds.

And as proof that social-networking dominance just might lie with email, the major Internet media companies have acknowledged plans to turn their email services into social networks. Saul Hansell reported on the New York Times Bits blog that "Yahoo and Google realize they have this information (email address books) and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts." Joe Kraus, who runs Google's OpenSocial project, conceded "there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social. It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand." Yahoo has been more forthcoming with its "Inbox 2.0." I'm not sure of Microsoft, but it could have a hand at the table with its massive customer base across Hotmail, Exchange and Outlook.

Finally, considering my ongoing bout with Socialnetworkitis, I'm more thankful and bullish on email than ever before. I believe online social networks have a big future, and they're a critical part of my personal and professional life today. But email still is the most reliable and manageable platform for social interaction. It is my default.

In the future, I hope the benefits of the latest wave of social networks will begin to merge seamlessly with the simplicity, compatibility and utility of email. That includes integrated profiling, information feeds, social-network analysis, privacy and controls. Of course, the big hurdle will be the ongoing fight against spam. Spammers may validate significance, but they're also preventing email from becoming a truly great social network.

Will any social network ever become more important than email?

Friday, January 4, 2008
By Max Kalehoff

MediaPost

Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy | EFF

2008-01-03T16:12:00.001-08:00

Flashback: Privacy Issues When Searching | Eletronic Frontier Foundation

Google, MSN Search, Yahoo!, AOL, and most other search engines collect and store records of your search queries. If these records are revealed to others, they can be embarrassing or even cause great harm. Would you want strangers to see searches that reference your online reading habits, medical history, finances, sexual orientation, or political affiliation?

Recent events highlight the danger that search logs pose. In August 2006, AOL published 650,000 users' search histories on its website.¹ Though each user's logs were only associated with a random ID number, several users' identities were readily discovered based on their search queries. For instance, the New York Times connected the logs of user No. 4417749 with 62 year-old Thelma Arnold. These records exposed, as she put it, her "whole personal life." ²

Disclosures like AOL's are not the only threats to your privacy. Unfortunately, it may be all too easy for the government or individual litigants to subpoena your search provider and get access to your search history. For example, in January 2006, Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft reportedly cooperated with a broad Justice Department request for millions of search records. Although Google successfully challenged this request, ³ the lack of clarity in current law leaves your online privacy at risk.

Search companies should limit data retention and make their logging practices more transparent to the public, ⁵ while Congress ought to clarify and strengthen privacy protections for search data. But you should also take matters into your own hands and adopt habits that will help protect your privacy.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has developed the following search privacy tips. They range from straightforward steps that offer a little protection to more complicated measures that offer near-complete safety. While we strongly urge users to follow all six tips, a lesser level of protection might be sufficient depending on your particular situation and willingness to accept risks to your privacy.

1. Don't put personally identifying information in your search terms (easy)

Don't search for your name, address, credit card number, social security number, or other personal information. These kinds of searches can create a roadmap that leads right to your doorstep. They could also expose you to identity theft and other privacy invasions.

If you want to do a "vanity search" for your own name⁵ (and who isn't a little vain these days?), be sure to follow the rest of our tips or do your search on a different computer than the one you usually use for searching.

2. Don't use your ISP's search engine (easy)

Because your ISP knows who you are, it will be able to link your identity to your searches. It will also be able to link all your individual search queries into a single search history. So, if you are a Comcast broadband subscriber, for instance, you should avoid using http://search.comcast.net. Similarly, if you're an AOL member, do not use http://search.aol.com or the search box in AOL's client software.

3. Don't login to your search engine or related tools (intermediate)

Search engines sometimes give you the opportunity to create a personal account and login. In addition, many engines are affiliated with other services -- Google with Gmail and Google Chat; MSN with Hotmail and MSN Messenger; A9 with Amazon, and so on. When you log into the search engine or one of those other services, your searches can be linked to each other and to your personal account.

So, if you have accounts with services like Google GMail or Hotmail, do not search through the corresponding search engine (Google or MSN Search, respectively), especially not while logged in.

If you must use the same company's search engine and webmail (or other service), it will be significantly harder to protect your search privacy. You will need to do one of the following:

Install two different web browsers to separate your search activities from your other accounts with the search provider. For example, use Mozilla Firefox for searching through Yahoo!, and Internet Explorer for Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! service accounts. ⁶ You must also follow Tip 6 for at least one of the two browsers.⁷
For Google and its services, you can use the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the CustomizeGoogle plugin software. Go to http://www.customizegoogle.com/ and click "Install." Restart Firefox and then select "CustomizeGoogle Options" from the "Tools" menu. Click on the "Privacy" tab and turn on "Anonymize the Google cookie UID." You must remember to quit your browser after using GMail and before using the Google search engine. ⁸ In addition, be sure not to select the "remember me on this computer" option when you log into a Google service.

If you are using a browser other than Firefox, you can use the GoogleAnon bookmarklet, which you can obtain athttp://www.imilly.com/google-cookie.htm . You will need to quit your browser every time you finish with a Google service. Unfortunately, we currently do not know of similar plugins for other search providers.⁹

4. Block "cookies" from your search engine (intermediate)

If you've gone through the steps above, your search history should no longer have personally identifying information all over it. However, your search engine can still link your searches together using cookies and IP addresses. ¹⁰ Tip 4 will prevent tracking through cookies, while Tips 5-6 will prevent IP-based tracking. It's best to follow Tips 3-6 together -- there is less benefit in preventing your searches from being linked together in one way if they can be linked in another.

Cookies are small chunks of information that websites can put on your computer when you visit them. Among other things, cookies enable websites to link all of your visits and activities at the site. Since cookies are stored on your computer, they can let sites track you even when you are using different Internet connections in different locations. But when you use a different computer, your cookies don't come with you. ¹¹

From a privacy-protection perspective, it would be best to block all cookies. However, because cookies are necessary for accessing many websites, it may be more convenient (though less privacy-protective) to allow short-lived "session" cookies. These cookies last only as long as your browser is open; therefore, if you quit your browser, re-open it, and then go back to your search engine, your search provider will not be able to connect your current searches with previous ones via your cookies.

Use the following steps to allow only "session cookies," and remember to quit your browser at least once a day but ideally after each visit to your search provider's site. We recommend that you use Mozilla Firefox and apply these settings:

From the "Edit" menu, select "Preferences"
Click on "Privacy"
Select the "Cookies" tab
Set "Keep Cookies" to "until I close Firefox" ¹²
Click on "Exceptions," type in the domains of all of your search sites, and choose "Block" for all of them

If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer to surf the web:

From the Internet Explorer "Tools" menu, select "Internet Options"
Click on the "Privacy" tab and then press the "Advanced" button
Click on "Override automatic cookie handling"
Set both "first party" and "third party" cookies to "Block"
Select "Always allow session cookies"

5. Vary your IP address (intermediate)

When you connect to the Internet, your ISP assigns your computer an "IP address" (for instance, EFF's web server's IP address is 72.5.169.162). Search providers -- and other services you interact with online -- can see your IP address and use that number to link together all of your searches. IP addresses are particularly sensitive because they can be directly linked to your ISP account via your ISP's logs. Unlike cookies, your IP address does not follow your computer wherever it goes; for instance, if you use your laptop at work through AT&T, it will have a different IP address than when you use it at home through Comcast.

If your ISP gives you a changing, "dynamic" IP address,¹³ or you surf from an office computer that is behind the same firewall as lots of other computers, then this concern is diminished. However, if you have a dynamic IP address on a broadband connection, you will need to turn your modem off regularly to make the address change. The best way to do this is to turn your modem off when you finish with your computer for the day, and leave it off overnight.

On the other hand, if you have an unchanging, "static" IP address, you will certainly need to use anonymizing software to keep your address private; see Tip 6.

6. Use web proxies and anonymizing software like Tor (advanced)

To hide your IP address from the web sites you visit or the other computers you communicate with on the Internet, you can use other computers as proxies for your own -- you send your communication to the proxy; the proxy sends it to the intended recipient; and the intended recipient responds to the proxy. Finally, the proxy relays the response back to your computer. All of this sounds complicated, and it can be, but luckily there are tools available that can do this for you fairly seamlessly.

Tor (http://tor.eff.org) is a software product that encrypts then sends your Internet traffic through a series of randomly selected computers, thus obscuring the source and route of your requests. It allows you to communicate with another computer on the Internet without that computer, the computers in the middle, or eavesdroppers knowing where or who you are. Tor is not perfect, but it would take a sophisticated surveillance effort to thwart its protections. ¹⁴

You also need to make sure that your messages themselves don't reveal who you are. Privoxy ( http://www.privoxy.org) helps with this, because it strips out hidden identifying information from the messages you send to web sites. Privoxy also has the nice side benefit of blocking most advertisements and can be configured to manage cookies. (Privoxy comes bundled with Tor downloads.)

You can also use web proxies like Anonymizer's (http://www.anonymizer.com) Anonymous Surfing. This option is more user-friendly but possibly a less effective method of anonymizing your browsing. Anonymizer routes your web surfing traffic through their own proxy server and hides your IP address from whatever web sites you visit. However, Anonymizer itself could in principle have access to your original IP address and be able to link it to the web site you visited; therefore, that service is only as secure as Anonymizer's proxy facilities and data retention practices. While there is no reason to believe that Anonymizer looks at or reveals your information to others (we know the people currently running Anonymizer and they are good folks), there is little opportunity to verify their practices in these regards.

Using Tor and Privoxy is more secure because one untrustworthy proxy won't compromise your search privacy. On the other hand, web proxies like Anonymizer are slightly easier to use at present.

Tor and Privoxy downloads and instructions can be found here: http://tor.eff.org/download.html.en

Conclusion

If you've implemented all six tips, congratulations -- you're now ready to search the Web safely. These steps don't provide bulletproof protection, but they do create a strong shield against the most common and likely means of invading your privacy via your search history.

By Peter Eckersley, Seth Schoen, Kevin Bankston, and Derek Slater.

¹ For more on the disclosure, see http://eff.org/Privacy/AOL.

² See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html .

³ See http://eff.org/Privacy/search for documents related to Google's challenge. The logs were to be used as evidence in a case in which the government is defending the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). See also http://news.com.com/FAQ+What+does+the+Google+subpoena+mean/2100-1029_3-6029042.html and http://news.com.com/Judge+Google+must+give+feds+limited+access+to+records/2100-1028_3-6051257.html.

⁴ The search providers' have so far been unreasonably tight-lipped about their specific practices regarding search logging. For some insight, see http://news.com.com/Verbatim+Search+firms+surveyed+on+privacy/2100-1025_3-6034626.html?tag=nl andhttp://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/15315062.htm.

⁵ Or your MySpace profile, personal blog address, or other similar personal information.

⁶ Advanced tip: you could also use two profiles for one browser. For instance, if you run Mozilla Firefox with the -ProfileManager flag, it will let you choose a profile. To learn more, visit http://mozilla.org/support/firefox/profile. Mozilla Seamonkey has a "Switch Profile" command in the "Tools" menu. Pick a different theme/skin for each profile so you can tell which one you are using. To learn more, visit http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager. With Internet Explorer, you may need to use two separate Windows user accounts.

⁷ Otherwise, your two separate browsers' activities could be linked by IP address, as discussed below.

⁸ Mail.google.com and google.com leave some additional cookies that will identify you while searching, but which CustomizeGoogle (and GoogleAnon) will not anonymize. Unless you remember to quit your browser, some of those cookies persist even if you logout of Gmail. Future versions of these privacy-protection tools may help fix this problem.

⁹ There is another Firefox plugin intended to protect your search privacy called TrackMeNot ( http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/). At present, we cannot recommend TrackMeNot. For one thing, it may actually make it easier for search engines to link your searches together (the fact that you're using the plugin is distinctive). Moreover, although it may create some uncertainty about aspects of your search history, it does not hide personally identifying information or the bulk of your most sensitive searches. For further criticisms, see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/trackmenot_1.html.

¹⁰ The search engine may also be able to pick you out of the crowd based on an unusual browser, operating system, language setting, or other atypical HTTP headers. The software recommended in Tip 6 can be used to impede these methods as well.

¹¹ So long as you haven't logged in; see Tip 3.

¹² You can select "ask me every time" if you want more control, although the current Firefox user interface is not very good for this purpose. At this time, the Mozilla Seamonkey browser is more suitable if you wish to have fine-grained control over cookies.

¹³ You can find out your IP address by visiting a site like http://myipinfo.net. Ask your ISP if you have trouble determining whether your IP address changes.

¹⁴ For a technical discussion of this subject, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sjm217/papers/oakland05torta.pdf .

// Eletronic Frontier Foundation

// September, 2006 // http://www.eff.org/wp/six-tips-protect-your-search-privacy

Trojan Hijacks Google, Redirects Browsers To Different Ads

2007-12-21T11:03:00.001-08:00

// by Joe Mandese
// Friday, Dec 21, 2007 7:30 AM ET

// Media Post

IN A DEVELOPMENT THAT COULD potentially destabilize Google's AdSense system, antivirus experts have detected a new Trojan that hijacks Google text ads and replaces them with ads from a different provider. The threat, which was discovered by security software developer BitDefender, was identified as Trojan.Qhost.WU, causes an infected computer's browser to read ads from a server at a "replacement address" instead of from Google. "This is a serious situation that damages users and webmasters alike," said Attila-Mihaly Balazs, a BitDefender virus analyst. "Users are affected because the advertisements and/or the linked sites may contain malicious code, which is a very likely situation, given that they are promoted using malware in the first place. Webmasters are affected because the trojan takes away viewers and thus a possible money source from their websites."

A trojan, an abbreviation for the term Trojan horse, is computer industry terminology for a piece of software that appears to perform a certain action but covertly performs another.

"Contrary to popular belief, this action, usually encoded in a hidden payload, may or may not be acutely malicious, but Trojan horses are notorious today for their use in the installation of backdoor programs," reads the current definition of Wikipedia. "Simply put, a Trojan horse is not a computer virus. Unlike such badware, it does not propagate by self-replication but relies heavily on the exploitation of an end-user."

It was not clear at presstime how much impact the trojan might be having on Google's ad system. Google had not issued any statements, and there were no posts concerning the trojan on the Google Blog.

Joe Mandese is Editor of MediaPost.

Anatel termina leilão 3G e arrecada R$ 5,3 bi

2007-12-20T12:13:00.001-08:00

SÃO PAULO - A Claro foi a operadora que mais comprou licenças 3G, nove no total, seguida por TIM (8), Vivo(7) e Oi (5).

O governo arrecadou cerca de 5,3 bilhões de reais com o leilão de licenças de telefonia móvel de terceira geração (3G), organizado pela Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações (Anatel) e concluído nesta quinta-feira.

A soma dos preços mínimos dos 36 lotes em disputa era de aproximadamente 2,8 bilhões de reais. A terceira geração da telefonia móvel permite serviços avançados como a realização de teleconferências pelo celular.

O leilão começou na terça-feira, dia em que houve maior disputa pelos primeiros lotes ofertados, para os quais o ágio médio superou 160 por cento.

Nesta manhã foram oferecidas oito licenças para cobertura em cidades de Minas Gerais e do Paraná. As empresas Claro e TIM compraram dois lotes cada, para ambas as áreas. Telemig e Oi também levaram licenças de Minas, enquanto Vivo e Brasil Telecom adquiriram os lotes restantes para municípios paranaenses.

Oito grupos disputaram o leilão de frequências promovido pelo governo, segundo a Anatel, mas nem todos tiveram sucesso.

Na briga pela cobertura na maior parte do Estado de São Paulo, as quatro principais empresas de telefonia móvel do país conquistaram licenças para operar a terceira geração.

Também foram elas que arremataram, no geral, mais lotes: a Claro, do grupo mexicano América Móvil, ficou com nove. A TIM, do grupo italiano de mesmo nome, levou oito. A Vivo, joint-venture da Portugal Telecom e da Telefónica, comprou sete licenças, e a Oi ficou com cinco.

A CTBC adquiriu três licenças e a Brasil Telecom e a Telemig, recentemente comprada pela Vivo, ficaram com duas cada.

Até o momento, apenas a Oi se manifestou oficialmente sobre o resultado do leilão.

"Com as novas licenças, a Oi fortalece sua atuação nos estados em que já está presente e garante uma entrada vigorosa em São Paulo, com uma gama de serviços que irá atender todos os segmentos de consumidores", afirmou em comunicado o presidente da empresa, Luiz Eduardo Falco.

O maior ágio na disputa pelas licenças foi pago pela TIM, que desembolsou 1 milhão de reais para ficar com um lote da área que cobre a cidade de Paranaíba, no Mato Grosso do Sul, e municípios de Goiás, 370,1 por cento acima do preço mínimo de 212,7 mil reais.

Já o maior valor por uma licença foi desembolsado pela Claro, que se dispôs a pagar 612 milhões de reais por lote para a região que engloba os Estados do Rio de Janeiro, Espírito Santo, Bahia e Sergipe.

Antes do início do leilão, na terça-feira, o presidente da Anatel, Ronaldo Sardenberg, chegou a afirmar que a licitação de 3G deveria gerar investimentos de cerca de 10 bilhões de reais, incluindo 5,3 bilhões de reais pelas licenças e compromissos de cobertura e outros 4 bilhões de reais na melhoria da atual rede de celulares, segundo o Telecom Online.

// Por Cesar Bianconi, da Reuters
// Quinta-feira, 20 de dezembro de 2007 - 14h34

<p><a href="http://info.abril.com.br/aberto/infonews/122007/20122007-9.shl" rel="bookmark" title="INFO Online">Anatel termina leilão 3G e arrecada R$ 5,3 bi</a>, Por Cesar Bianconi, da Reuters - SÃO PAULO - A Claro foi a operadora que mais comprou licenças 3G, nove no total, seguida por TIM (8), Vivo(7) e Oi (5). [...]</p>

Study: To Online Shoppers, Price Is Everything | MediaPost

2007-12-14T07:44:00.001-08:00

WITH UNCERTAINTIES ABOUT THE ECONOMY creeping into more and more holiday purchase decisions, a new survey of online shoppers finds that price trumps everything. About 43% of online shoppers say a product's price is the most important factor in making a purchase, according to the poll conducted by Synovate of Chicago for Guidance, a technology advisor based in Marina del Rey, Calif. And 18% named free shipping.

"Because newer online retailers can focus on market share and revenues and not profitability, they are an emerging threat for brick-and-mortar retailers," says Jason Meugniot, Guidance president and CEO. "Endless.com., for example, can give customers $5 for the privilege of shipping to them overnight. That makes it tough for a brick-and-mortar retailer, which may be generating less than 10% of growth online, to compete."

When the same respondents were asked to select their second-most important factor, 41% chose free shipping, and 24% named price. A much smaller number--just 8%--mentioned special promotions or coupons are the most important factor, 7% cited features (such as recommendations or product reviews), and 4% said speed/efficiency of checkout is most important. And that in-store pickup and return option, so highly touted by many retailers? Just 1% said that is most important to them.

While it's no surprise that the economy is driving such bargain hunting, Meugniot says, there were some surprises, including who's buying and who's not. Nearly 19% of the total sample said they don't buy anything online (22% of men and 16% of women.) That's significant, since all the 1,000-plus poll participants are online. And those who were most likely to rank price as No. 1? The highest income brackets: 53% of those earning $50,000 to $75,000 named price as most important, while just 37% of those earning less than $25,000 did. Those in the South (46.5%) place greater emphasis on price than those in other regions.

Eggheads go for free shipping: Nearly 26% of those with graduate degrees ranked free shipping first, compared with 14% of those with high school or less.

While price may currently be top-of-mind with many shoppers, Meugniot says, and retailers should certainly be mindful of the demand for lower prices and free shipping, "increasingly, it's becoming clear that consumers want multi-channels--a store experience, an online experience, and maybe a catalog experience. Retailers need to offer consumers as many ways as possible to understand and experience their products in a way that is compelling to the consumer."

// by Sarah Mahoney,
// Friday, Dec 14, 2007
// http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=72717&Nid=37404&p=412316

How to leverage YouTube for Search | MediaPost

2007-12-14T07:30:00.001-08:00

YouTube's director of advertising Suzie Reider is a display marketing expert with her eyes on the search marketplace.

She aimed to prove that although keyword search on YouTube doesn't work the same way that it does on Google — you can still buy ads in specific categories and have them show up when users search. For example, if you chose the health and beauty category, when users search for content like the Dove Evolution video, your ad will run against it.

So here are the four tips for crafting good, searchable ads for YouTube and the ads that illustrate them :

1 - create commercials that work as content — Jump It by Xbox 360 (didn't look like an ad until the very end)

2 - let users know that you understand the context — Saw III by Lion's Gate Films (allows users to come and create their own responses)

3 - encourage interactivity — Tax Rap by Intuit (sponsored a contest for people to rap about their taxes)

4 - be ready for what comes back — Slob Evolution (a parody of the Dove evolution ad that showed how to create on obese unhealthy image using booze, cigarettes and Photoshop)

// by Tameka Kee
// December 13th, 2007
// http://blogs.mediapost.com/raw/?p=366

Mobile Experience: A Google Seduction for iPhone [MobileInsider]

2007-12-07T11:13:00.001-08:00

I HAD ABOUT FIVE OTHER topics in queue to write about today... until Google seduced my iPhone. Word circulated quickly yesterday that iPhone users going to the portal now got their own mobile Safari Web app. I saw several off-handed ho-hums from the blogopshere, and figured Google was just tossing more alpha version spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck. File under "check it out sometime."

But I am the kind of guy who had offbeat romantic tastes. When my fellow high school classmates were gushing over Farrah Fawcett, I was singling out that cute Terri Garr in "Young Frankenstein" and Kathleen Quinlan in "Lifeguard." When the '80s male veered towards Madonna or Cindy Crawford, I was a lot more interested in the Go-Gos. So, sue me, I sorta fell in love yesterday. Sorry to disappoint the fashionable skeptics, but Google's new entryway for iPhones is a nice piece of work on several levels that suggests where other mobile development might head, both on and off the iPhone interface.

I may have offbeat tastes in women, but I am as lazy a lover as Groucho Marx ever was. She has to be accessible. Google's Web app interface reminds me of Facebook's tabbed approach to the iPhone, with top-line buttons for the Home search box (with Web, Image, Local and News verticals included) Gmail, Calendar, Reader, and More button that offers up direct access to your Google Docs, Notebook, the voice search Goog-411 service, Google News and more.

First off, Google for iPhone excels at speed and efficiency, and the app shows how much this matters in pulling a user in. They use an AJAX-like approach that requires minimal page reloads (which are torture on mobile). Granted, I have been testing this on the home office WiFi connection (I don't get out much), but dancing across the top line buttons brought each service up instantly. Likewise, I can run across the verticalized results on a search in the main window with the same speed.

Apparently, the designers of this app had speed as a main goal, and they are on target. In using scores of mobile phones over the past four years, it has become clear to me that snappiness in the response of both the network and the application translates directly into increased use. The old saw on the Web used to be that for every additional click a Web site required, expect to lose half your audience. That goes double for mobile, I suspect, and I think that the expectation of a lag for every operation on a phone dissuades many users from drilling beneath the surface of many WAP sites and applications.

Once I am signed into my account, the Local search vertical automatically brings up localized results and a call button to the service, all neatly formatted. And the search suggestions from the Google Web and Toolbar experience are here as well, although they often collide with the iPhone's pop-up keyboard. The missing element is mapping. Ideally, we would want the results to tie into the superb Google maps that are already embedded into the iPhone deck. Regardless, they have made Web search extremely flexible and easy just by surfacing and accelerating the major functions. This is what mobile application development should be about but too often isn't.

Arguably, much of the functionality in the iPhone app has been available to mobile users from Google for a while, but pulling all the pieces into one very efficient package does precisely what Google wants; it effectively merchandises its other services.

The Gmail implementation is superb, for instance. Not only do I get the full functionality of the Web application in a mobile format, but it opens Word or PDF attachments for viewing much more effectively than the iPhone's own email client. Similarly, the Google docs and Reader apps, which I otherwise ignore, are so clean and easy to use here that they invite me to start using them. I even installed Picasa so I could access my photos more easily within a singular interface. Like a good relationship, you should be discovering more good qualities in your mate over time, or at least cultivating new bedroom moves.

The longstanding mobile fantasy of AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo has been to make a mobile app that effectively leverages the existing Web relationship the publisher already has with the user and then use the mobile app to deepen the involvement into more services.

In most cases, the portal extensions I have seen do a good job of the first part of the equation but fail at the second. Like well-coiffed singles bar denizens, they are better at one-night stands. Yahoo Go, for instance, is just too cluttered for me, although it gives me my email and good search. AOL's new WAP page is cleaner and more inviting, but its services are more oriented toward searching than functional applications.

At the risk of over-praising Google (which seems to be a digital sin these days) it seems to me that the integration of functions on the new iPhone app comes closest to the second part of a good mobile portal strategy. Its simplicity, speed, compactness and integration make me want to put more of my life into the neat package.

Now obviously, an iPhone Web app works at an unfair advantage when compared to most handset interfaces. The touch screen, screen real estate, and simple mechanics of Web 2.0 mechanics of the interface make it easier to design speed and simplicity into this format than the more challenging handset. And there are technical problems. I keep getting weird screen flickers during some operations, and for some reason most of the Google App pages seem to be in a constant state of loading. The lack of mapping is a real missing link as well.

But the fact of the matter is that Google's iPhone app reeled me in. I went deeper and spent more time with this portal simply because it convinced me at page one that it was responsive and substantial, good looking but also smart. Which I think means that a good mobile app should work something like sexual seduction.

Yeah, I just gotta get out more.

// Mobile Insider
// A Google Seduction
// by Steve Smith , Thursday, December 6, 2007

Pain Over Complexity Will Drive Advertising Innovation | MediaPost

2007-12-02T15:27:00.001-08:00

One of the most difficult tasks in life is to boil a complex idea down to its essence. Reducing noise and deconstructing a concept to its core enables raw value to emerge, and allows resonance with our most precious human assets: attention and time. Which is precisely the problem with online advertising and where it's taken us thus far.

As we enter the inevitable clichéd wasteland of year-end reflections and New Year's predictions, I can't help but conclude that 2007 was the year of complexity for online advertising. Nothing else stands so strong. From new online ad formats, splintering media sources, devices, intermediaries, distribution and targeting platforms, it's getting to be a pretty darn complicated ecosystem to get your head around -- especially if you're an advertiser.

The situation has gotten so severe that a marketing trade magazine this month devoted a full two pages of text to highlighting parallels in the complexity and specialization among search marketing professionals, medical doctors and surgeons. That's about as preposterous as saying only highly skilled mechanics should drive cars!

Sure, there will always be specialists with important roles to play, but it's a massive problem when an industry begins to characterize itself by inaccessible silos and geekery. Perhaps the biggest problem with this mentality is that it spawns black boxes and breeds a "keeper of the flame" mentality. That ultimately thwarts advancement.

But this complexity epidemic has spread to virtually every corner of online advertising -- not just search. The result is a darkening cloud of frustration, inefficiencies and skepticism building among many marketers small and large, despite undisputed benefits and unprecedented ROI. I'm not suggesting all the great new advertising technologies and capabilities aren't wonderful and exciting, but the blunt, underlying pain of convolution is nearing its threshold. Marketers don't need any more features, options, solutions or clutter. What they need is relief and clarity.

It is for that reason that I'll go out on a limb and suggest that 2008 will be the year where complexity gone amuck will drive some of the most important innovations in online advertising. But realizing such innovations won't come easy at all. Inventing and embracing sophisticated technologies and systems, and funneling them into simple, powerful solutions is a massively tough job. But those who succeed will achieve massive traction and competitive advantage. There are a number of new advertising companies seizing this opportunity, and several existing ones realigning along this path.

Of course, the very same problem of complexity that is crippling many marketers also is creating nuisance for consumers. As I suggested, complexity is the enemy of our most precious human assets: attention and time. In this coming enlightenment around simplicity, I hope that marketers keep their own pain in mind when advertising to us consumers. I, too, could use some relief and clarity.

How about you?

// Friday, November 30, 2007
// By Max Kalehoff
// http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1183

Google Helps Callers Find Themselves With Maps App [MediaPost]

2007-11-29T11:29:00.001-08:00

GOOGLE ON WEDNESDAY ANNOUNCED A new version of its popular mobile maps application that includes a new feature giving users their approximate location.

The "My Location" feature allows people without GPS-enabled phones to find out where they are by pressing "0" on their device keypads.

The technology uses information broadcast from cell towers combined with Google algorithms to determine location within a neighborhood. In relation to privacy issues, Google says that it doesn't gather any personally identifiable information or link any personal information with location data through the new My Location feature. "So that means we don't know name, phone number, email or even account log-in as part of this feature," says a Google spokesperson.

It can also be disabled when the new version of Google Maps for mobile is downloaded, or through the application's help menu.

Launched two years ago, Google Maps for mobile lets users find nearby businesses such as restaurants and hotels through interactive maps and satellite imagery. The My Location feature is aimed at simplifying searches by saving uses from having to enter their locations manually. "Google is trying to push this [Maps for mobile] application out to the masses, and this new feature makes it more accessible for people to use," says Greg Sterling, founding principal at Sterling Marketing Intelligence, who has tested the My Location option.

Though not as accurate as GPS, less than 15% of phones sold in 2007 come equipped with GPS technology. Google says My Location also kicks in faster than GPS so users can figure out where they are faster.

The new technology is available on most smartphones including all color BlackBerry devices, most Windows Mobile devices, newer Sony Ericsson models and some made by Motorola.

Google says the current release of Mobile for maps has no associated advertising. But Sterling notes that the My Location feature could help to provide more targeted advertising. "Google is keen on monetizing mobile search," he says. "The more precise nature of the location information will allow more precise search results to come up." Stay tuned.

// Mark Walsh, Thursday, Nov 29, 2007 7:00 AM ET
// http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=71753&Nid=36807&p=412316

Flashback: Did Google Slap You? (Sep/2006 ref. Affiliate Landing Pages)

2007-11-28T03:15:00.001-08:00

Are you an affiliate who uses Google's Adwords to promote your affilate program? Then this article is for you.

According to the blogs, forums and a variety of other news sources affiliate advertisers are getting slapped around by Google big time!

Google Adwords costs are skyrocketing, sponsored listing placements have hit rock bottom or are disappearing altogether.

What about you? Has your site been affected? Do you want to know the real reason why this happened? Would you like to prevent this from happening to your affiliate site, or regain your Adwords placement?

Then listen up.

Because contrary to what you might have heard, "Google's Slap" has absolutely nothing to do with squeeze pages or other sign-up forms on your landing pages. Nothing!

Then what's the problem? Relevance. It's all about your landing page's relevance people.

Technically speaking, Google changed their "Quality Score" standards. The change mostly effects marketers who point their AdWords campaigns to simple sales pages and squeeze pages (AKA lead capture pages). These marketers have lost a lot of traffic and impressions and have seen their cost per click skyrocket.

Google has made it crystal clear about its requirements that you make your pages relevant to the keyword, title and description used in your ad.

Where does it say that?

Right in Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines:
https://adwords.google.com/select/siteguidelines.html

Following is an excerpt from those guidelines:

"If users don't quickly see what they clicked on your ad to find, they'll leave your site frustrated and may never return to your site or click on ads in the future. Here are some pointers for making sure that doesn't happen:

Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.

Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text.

Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.

Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.

In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.

You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site). For more information, see our affiliate guidelines."

Here's the summarized version: If all of the affiliate links are removed from your site does your site still provide relevant, informative and valuable content for visitors?

It really doesn't get any clearer than that what Google wants to see, now does it?

All Google is trying to do is get you to improve the quality of your site. Having quality content on your site like articles, reports, news, etc., will also help your AdWords listings.

In addition, content rich web sites rank well in organic search engine listings.

Through the placement of your site in the search engines, you will be able to attract more and better targeted traffic.

Content rich sites are also more likely to obtain incoming links from outside sites. Google loves incoming links. These links will also pull in targeted traffic.

Speaking of links, when you add content to your site, link directly to a content page from the landing page. My research has shown, sites with a considerable number of pages have been less effected by Google's Slap.

Also, add a "Contact" page to your site and link directly to this page from the landing page.

Finally, create a "Site Map" and link to all your content pages directly from the site map. In addition, the content page you've linked to from the landing page, should link to the site map.

I contacted a few affiliates I know, while doing research for this article and here's what I discovered:

The affiliates who provide relevant, valuable content on their landing pages have found their efforts are actually being rewarded during this latest Google Dance.

I also discovered, their Adwords costs are actually decreasing, while their placement in the sponsored listings are increasing, thus making their ads more visible.

In closing, if you want to avoid Google's Slap, just provide quality content throughout your site, link directly to the content from your landing page, and make your landing pages relevant to the keyword, title and description used in your ad.

Dale King is the owner of the new Internet Marketing website, GuruKnowledge.org

Want More Sales? Get A Free Sales Copy Evaluation Today!

By Dale King
Published: 9/23/2006

NYT: Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far

2007-11-27T11:01:00.001-08:00

ON the surface, the mobile Web is a happening place. There's the iPhone in all its glory. More than 30 companies have signed up for the Open Handset Alliance from Google, which aims to bring the wide-open development environment of the Internet to mobile devices. Nokia, which owns nearly 40 percent of the world market for cellphones, is snapping up Web technology companies and has made an eye-popping $8.1 billion bid for Navteq, a digital mapping service. There are also the requisite start-ups chasing the market.

It all looks good, but the wireless communications business smacks of a soap opera, with disaster lurking like your next dropped call.

In 2000, the wireless application protocol was supposed to bring the Internet to the cellphone. Our hero turned out to be a flash in the pan. That was attributed to a lack of high-speed cellular data networks, so a frenzied and costly effort to build third-generation, or 3G, networks ensued. But at a recent conference, 3G was called "a failure" by Caroline Gabriel, an analyst at Rethink Research. She said data would make up only 12 percent of average revenue per user in 2007, far below the expected 50 percent. (The 12 percent figure does not include text messaging, but you don't need a 3G network to send a text message.)

Similarly, surveys by Yankee Group, a Boston research firm, show that only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web more than once a month, while 70 percent of computer users view Web sites every day.

"The user experience has been a disaster," says Tony Davis, managing partner of Brightspark, a Toronto venture capital firm that has invested in two mobile Web companies.

While many phones have some form of Web access, most are hard to use — just finding a place to type in a Web address can be a challenge. And once you find it, most Web content doesn't look very good on cellphone screens.

Even the iPhone's browser can disappoint. It has a version of the Apple Safari browser that doesn't support Flash, a programming language widely used on Web sites, so users are limited in what they can see on the Web. And, you pay a lot to experience the pain of surfing the mobile Web. Lewis Ward, an analyst at the International Data Corporation, compares the mobile Web today to AOL before it went with flat-rate pricing in the early 1990s. Most people surf on a pay-per-kilobyte model, which encourages them to surf as fast as they can, he says.

The carriers, however, seem to be having a change of heart about the mobile Web. AT&T has allowed Apple unusual control over the network in the iPhone, and Sprint and T-Mobile have signed on to the Android development platform of the Open Handset Alliance.

Industry watchers think that having started, the mobile Web will inexorably open over the next five years, solving many current problems.

For instance, there's the challenge of finding things on the Web from a mobile phone. John SanGiovanni, founder and vice president for products and services at Zumobi (formerly ZenZui), which was spun out of Microsoft Research, says his company hopes to make it easier for phone users to find phone-ready versions of sites they want. On Dec. 14, it plans to introduce the beta, or test, version of its slick-looking software. It will include colorful "tiles" that phone users can "zoom" into and out of quickly as they move from site to site. (The tiles resemble the iPhone's widgets, or icons on a desktop computer.)

Zumobi hopes that cellphone users will adopt tiles as their entry point to the Web; the company offers a scrolling interface of 16 such tiles that provide information with mass appeal, but users can set their own preferences. Software developers will be able to build a tile — in fact, Amazon.com has 12 ready to go — and put it on Zumobi's platform. Tiles can carry ads as well, creating revenue potential for carriers and developers.

THE chairman of Zumobi's board is Tom Huseby, a longtime entrepreneur and investor in the mobile business and now managing partner at SeaPoint Ventures. Mr. Huseby says the mobile Web is going through a predictable cycle involving the development of handsets, networks and markets. Now it is in the last phase of innovation: figuring out how customers want to see the Web from their phones. He says the answer will be to give people what they want, when they want it.

"You got to have open systems, to allow the vast creativity of people to take place," he says. Zumobi, Android and other developments, he says, will help create such openness.

Other approaches to solving this problem include Yahoo Go, a mobile Internet product certified to display Web pages correctly on more than 300 handsets, and another from InfoGIN, an Israeli company whose product automatically adapts Web pages to work on cellphones.

The plot has plenty of time to twist yet again. Nathan Eagle an M.I.T. researcher, is working on mobile phone programming in Kenya, where he's teaching computer science students how to build mobile Web applications that don't use a browser. Instead, they rely on voice commands and speech-to-text translation to surf the Web

"People talk about the mobile Web, and it's just assumed that it'll be a replica of the desktop experience," Mr. Eagle said. "But they're fundamentally different devices." He says he thinks that the basic Web experience for most of the world's three billion cellphones will never involve trying to thumb-type Web addresses or squint at e-mail messages. Instead, he says, it will be voice-driven. "People want to use their phone as a phone," he says.

For now, widespread use of the mobile Web remains both far off and inevitable.

// November 25, 2007

// New York Tim - Prototype - By MICHAEL FITZGERALD
// http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/technology/25proto.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

Study Analyzes Social Engagement Marketing

2007-11-26T14:16:00.001-08:00

THAT SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE MONOPOLIZING an ever greater share of consumers' time is clear. It is less clear exactly how marketers in the United States and abroad can most effectively measure their engagement across these burgeoning channels.

JupiterResearch recently analyzed the European market for social and engagement marketing, which highlights key findings about how marketers and their agencies measure the effectiveness of engagement in marketing campaigns.

The JupiterResearch report states: "Engagement marketers' two most commonly tracked metrics are those provided on all standard ad-serving reports: click-through rates and impressions. While these metrics can contribute to marketers' understanding of engagement, on their own they are simple and unenlightening direct response metrics."

"Technology continues to lead and expand into new markets, with careful attention to Europe as we track the growing demand for Premium Rich Media across the globe," says Patrick Vogt, CEO of Viewpoint, parent of Unicast and its User Engagement Index, which was cited in Jupiter's study as a useful resource for marketers.

User engagement refers to the level of attention and interaction an advertisement draws from a customer. The Unicast User Engagement Index measures a number of metrics, including interaction rates, ad display time, video play time, click-through rates, and both positive and negative user interactions. Positive interactions can include mouse-overs, banner expands, video plays and average display time.

Negative interactions can include the "click to close" actions. With this Index data, clients can compare their ads' performance against the average performance for each ad format and campaign, as well as compare engagement levels for all ads within a particular industry.

// by Gavin O'Malley, Monday, Nov 26, 2007 7:00 AM ET
// http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=71495&Nid=36676&p=412316

Google AdSense implements Ad Management Sytem | Marketing.fm

2007-11-18T12:10:00.001-08:00

Google recently announced they would be rolling out AdSense ad management. I had no idea this was even happening until I saw "Manage Ads" in my AdSense account. First impressions are that it is a good service that was needed for AdSense for some time. It seems indicative of many more changes to come from Google, and could foreshadow a bigger tie in with other media types and of course the DoubleClick situation.

What is Ad Management in Adsense?

In simple terms it allows you to place advertising code once and make many changes from the AdSense admin area. In the past if you wanted to make changes to the size, color, shape, or content of your AdSense ads you had to always modify the code. This actually allows you to create an advertising container and make changes in your control panel to the ad itself without touching the code.

Why is this important?

This brings up a feature that is currently present in many other advertising handling networks - customization options without affecting the code.

Webmasters like myself can easily go in and edit my themes codes and drop in a new ad placement. Many enterprise level sites have site builds that happen every few days and this allows publishers faster editing time of their ads.

I foresee this system being used as a ad clearinghouse for multiple ad networks. Similar things are currently possible using other scripts such as openads and companies like adbrite, RubiconProject, AdPeeps , and others. Some of these are ad rotation software systems and others are slightly different.

The goal is to be the single clearinghouse for all your ads regardless of the network they originate from. This means that Google will perhaps one day be that clearinghouse - acquiring all the knowledge of eCPM's, click data, and impressions from other networks. The same fears will most likely be present when this change occurs similar to what we saw when Google Analytics came out.

Conclusion
I think this is a system that was needed from Google. I have no problem running all my ads through a system that I trust will not go offline. I do however want to know what they will do with all the ad data. After all, if you know how another network is performing, then all you have to do to beat their clicks is modify the dials to that specific site.

This will hopefully evolve into a multimedia handling ad delivery system that people will get for free. The current ad handlers out there are cumbersome, expensive, and hard to implement for most users. Even openads (free) is tricky for some beginner users.

Since Google has the largest contextual ad network out there, this new ad management system will most likely become the lead javascript ad management utility on the market today.

What do you think?

// Posted by Eric in : Marketing.fm , trackback
// November 10, 2007
// http://www.marketing.fm/2007/11/10/google-adsense-implements-ad-management-sytem/

Moving The Free Line | Entrepreneur's Journey Blog

2007-11-18T11:53:00.001-08:00

In the Internet marketing world the concept of the sales funnel is well known. The process of moving customers from free resources, into paid front-end products down to high margin back-end items, has made millions for many Internet entrepreneurs. I covered the entire sales funnel process in some depth, which I suggest you read as prior study to this article if you have not done so already - part one begins here: The Sales Funnel Explained.

The sales process begins with free resources and nearly everyone online has experienced this part of the sales funnel, in fact you are experiencing it right now reading my blog. This blog is a "free resource" that I offer to the world that at least in some part, contributes to bringing people into my sales funnel.

One thing I learned very early on when studying Internet marketing, and again David DeAngelo from Double Your Dating was instrumental in teaching this to me (see the sales funnel article series for more about this fellow), is that you need to give away lots of free value to convince people you are worth buying from.

This made complete sense to me from the beginning and as I would later study, many business online use this formula as the foundation of their success. Blow people away with free content and then sell them on your paid stuff once they trust and value you.

The Free Line

In recent months a term has floated around the Internet marketing community that encapsulates the idea of providing free value upfront. It's called the Free Line, and the best way to illustrate it is with a picture, taking my original sales funnel image and including the free line like thus -

The idea is that there is a line, a point on your sales funnel where you distribute free value and below the line comes all the paid-for products, moving from front to back-end.

The first person I heard mention this concept was Eben Pagan, who in case you didn't know, is actually David DeAngelo (Eben used a pseudonym for his Double Your Dating business), which makes for a fitting connection since it was "David" who demonstrated the concept to me, and Eben who then labeled and taught others how to do it.

I've also heard Brad Fallon of StomperNet recently use the term Free Line and given Brad and Eben are friends, I suspect it's a term that most Internet marketers now use and no credit for its creation is really necessary - what we need to know is how it can help our businesses.

Moving The Free Line

Presentations at conferences I've watched and podcasts I've listened to from Internet marketers, talk about the idea of the free line moving further and further down the sale funnel. What was previously a front end product you had to pay for, becomes a free resource now sitting above the free line.

Here's the illustration of the free line moving further down the sales funnel, converting what previously were paid for products into free resources:

The argument put forward by guys like Eben and Brad is that moving the free line ever further down is one of the techniques companies will use to beat and eventually eliminate their competition.

If one company has the resources and a well constructed sales funnel that they can distribute ever more value for free, then that company can out-value other companies and offer better commissions to affiliates, securing more traffic and customers. The battle will be fought and won by the company that can extract the highest profit from the back-end and provide the most value above the free line.

Give Away Your Best Stuff

I was listening to a great call between Eben and Andy Jenkins, Brad's partner in crime at StomperNet, where Eben revealed some awesome insights about his Double Your Dating business, including details on how he constructed his very famous namesqueeze page, which in my opinion is the definitive example of such a page (check it out at doubleyourdating.com).

The whole purpose of the call was to demonstrate the concept of moving the free line, since the call was given away for free and it was full of great ideas, there's no doubt it could have been included as part of a paid-for product.

The principle is quite simple - as online marketers, and certainly bloggers understand this concept very well since we do it every day (or at least you should!), you must give away some of your best content in order to capture attention. Content is the force that drives traffic online, and if you give so much quality for free, the fruits of your labor come in the form of more links to your site, more traffic, enhanced credibility, more exposure, and hopefully, more sales too!

The World Wide Web has a history of being free. Many of the dot com crashed companies had a foundation in providing free stuff, but failed because they had no way to effectively monetize what they offered. Today's web is a little bit more cautious when it comes to profitability, but the mentality that you should get things for free online hasn't changed.

Free email, free websites, free content, free telephone calls, free instant messaging, free videos, free music - the web is built on a foundation of free, and web users expect things to be free. This is why if you intend to do anything online and expect people to pay attention, you better be giving it away for free.

The Free eBook

Moving on from Eben, another trainer in the free line concept was Rich Schefren, although I never heard him use the term (and he didn't need to - he led by example). By releasing the Internet Business Manifesto Rich stormed on to the Internet marketing scene out of nowhere. To me, he was a complete nobody before the Manifesto, now I class him right up there as one of the best Internet marketers because of how he launched himself online and what I've learnt from him since.

I replicated Rich's model earlier this year for my own business, releasing the Blog Profits Blueprint to the blogging world. As I write this a few months later, it's clear that this one book full of some of my best stuff, has firmly placed me on the map as a leading blogging figure in the professional blogging industry.

I could have attempted to sell the Blueprint just as Rich could have sold the Manifesto and his other reports, but the windfall and preeminence building exposure that came from releasing the content for free, firmly demonstrates that the free line is a concept that works - you can launch entire businesses on it.

Replication Will Not Suffice - Innovation Is Necessary

Just releasing a free eBook and replicating what others have done will become less and less effective. Free content of a very high standard can still drive huge amounts of attention - and the eBook format won't go away - but it is harder and harder to make a splash using the same resources and formats that are currently distributed. This is exactly why the concept is about MOVING the free line - we need to find new and innovative ways to provide and distribute value.

Often one of the best ways to make a splash when offering free value is to use new innovative delivery methods. Rich did so by conducting a live web-stream of his event earlier in the year. The StomperNet guys did it by releasing a ton of great video content for free as part of their launch process and broke the mold by asking for your email address AFTER showing the video, rather than namesqueezing before the video. Ed Dale is doing the same right now for the re-launch of Dominiche, which is now part of StomperNet.

Don't be surprised if what you currently pay for becomes free in the near future. Entire courses, membership sites, videos, audios - even physical product like home study courses, DVDs and audio CDs, may float above the free line, used as lead generation and market dominance tools by savvy companies.

As always, expect the first adopters of these techniques to come from the Internet marketing industry, since this niche is already saturated with free content, so constant innovation and reinvention is necessary in order to keep attracting attention. From there it will trickle down into other industries, which is why it pays to study the work of leading Internet marketing teachers, especially if you operate in non-Internet marketing niches. Imagine how you can dominate using a concept like the free line if none of your competitors understand it!

How Does Moving The Free Line Impact You?

If you currently run a business online then no doubt you already work on some level to provide free resources. If you don't, I expect you are having a lot of trouble building traffic and converting customers. Consider what you currently provide for free and brainstorm how you can go one step further, innovate and wow your potential customers with your free content, use unique delivery methods and always plan to offer more for free in the future.

For some of you deciding what to give away and then what you can actually sell to make money may be a challenge. If you haven't yet established enough free resources then your job now is to work on building up a store of value for others. As time progresses your previous efforts will continue to offer value, while your current activities can move towards producing content for front-end products and eventually back-end offers.

As a blogger your main free value is the content you publish to your blog. The next step might be building up a free email autoresponder course, with seven training emails set to go out in a sequence. Perhaps you can build up a catalogue of videos or audios, distribute them for free and then go to work writing your book or compiling your membership site as your first paid-for product.

The options are limitless. What's important is that you understand in order to build traffic, establish credibility and then beat your competition to eventually lead your industry, you must constantly over deliver and expect the free line to move further down over time. If your competition can deliver the same thing as you, but do it for free while you charge money, you won't be in business for long. It's not easy to stay in business if you are not always moving forward, innovating, breaking in new ideas and asking for nothing in return but attention.

// October 7, 2007 on 11:14 am | In Marketing, Business & Entrepreneurship, Online Marketing & Internet Business Guides | | Written by Yaro
// Moving The Free Line: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/820/moving-the-free-line/

Scobleizer: The serverless Internet company

2007-11-16T14:05:00.001-08:00

I'm sure this isn't the only one, after all, SmugMug's CEO told me that they had moved pretty much everything over to Amazon's S3 a while back.

But I always assumed that companies would have at least one server keeping things up, just in case Amazon went down. Or just because.

I was wrong.

Last night Mogulus's CEO, Max Haot, was here at my house to film something fun for my show. Mogulus is the company that, yesterday, provided the live video for Om Malik's NewTeeVee conference. It was so good I stayed home and watched almost the whole day on the NewTeeVee channel. But more on that when we get the video up.

At one point Max seemed like he was joking around with me when he told me "we don't own a single server."

I asked him FOUR more times to make sure I heard him right. I even got incredulous with him at one point saying something like "what the f*** do you mean you don't own a server?" and "you mean not a single bit of your Web site comes from servers that aren't owned by Amazon?"

He nicely and calmly explained that, yes, every server the company owns is actually running on Amazon's S3 and EC2 services.

The world has changed. Now ANYONE can build an Internet company and get it up to scale. No more spending nights inside data centers trying to keep servers running.

Let's go over to Mike Arrington's CrunchBase and do some research. They pulled in $1.2 million in funding. Yet they don't own a SINGLE server!

They have about 15,000 people already creating live video channels. They have one of the most innovative Web sites I've ever seen.

But they don't own a server.

How else has the world changed? Where the hell is Microsoft in this whole business? How did Microsoft screw this up so badly? Let's get this straight. Amazon used to be a book store. Now they are hosting virualized servers for Internet companies. So much for having billions of dollars in the bank, some of the smartest people in the world working in your research arms and having "monopoly" market share in operating systems.

Heheh, maybe now Amazon can use that money to buy some decent PR. According to Read/Write Web Amazon needs the help in that department.

Oh, back to Max. One tip he gave us is that when using Amazon's services you have to design your systems with the assumption that they will never be up and running. What he means by that is services are "volatile" and can go up and down without notice. So, he's designed his systems to survive that. He told me that it meant his engineering teams had to be quite disciplined in designing their architecture.

How many other Internet companies are out there that are "serverless?"

// by Scobleizer
// November 16, 2007
// http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/the-serverless-internet-company/

X2iN | Digital Knowledge Mashup

.x2in, você já tem um iPhone?

What makes Apple golden | Fortune

The creator of the iPod and iPhone sets a dazzling new standard for innovation and mass appeal, driven by an obsessive CEO who wants his products to be practically perfect in every way.

Everywhere and Nowhere | The Economist

Google Sees Surge in Web Use on Mobile Phones | Reuters

Apple to Encourage iPhone Programmers | NYT

ATT: How to Start a Startup | Paul Graham

About iPhone Walled-Gardens | Editor's Corner - FierceDeveloper

ATT: Microsoft, Yahoo Eye Larger Slices Of Mobile Pie | Online Media Daily

Google: Metrics Key To Keeping Web Ads Afloat In Recession, Not Clicks | Online Media Daily

Survey: Business Execs Slow To Adopt All-In-One Devices | MediaPost

Google Expands AdSense For Video, Sets Deals With Tremor, YouMe, Others | MediaPost

[ATT iPhone Stats] Flat-Rate Plans Could Spur Mobile Growth | MediaPost

Mad Ave Faces Learning Curve On Incorporating Mobile Into Ad Plans | MediaPost

Nokia Ad Chief Touts Mobile Phone's Advantages | MediaPost

Publicis Adopts 'Yield Management,' Will Utilize System For Cross-Internet Media Buys | MediaPost

Publishers Try Bold New Marketing Concept: Free Samples | MediaPost

Scion Goes After Urban Youths With Street, Web Campaign | MediaPost

GoFish Launches Vertical Distribution Ad Network | MediaPost

Majority Of Online Shoppers Check At Least Four Reviews Before Buying | MediaPost

David And Googliath | MediaPost

Consumers Seek Economic Relief Online, Survey Finds | MediaPost

Marketers Say TV Is Dead, Long Live TV! | MediaPost

Mobile Gaming On The Rise, But Still Not A Critical Mass | MediaPost

Medio Systems Launches On-Device Portal | MediaPost

Discovery Adds New Portals For Mobile Phone Users | MediaPost

CBS Mobile Chief: Wireless Industry Is Overwhelming Consumers | MediaPost

ComScore: Google and Facebook Big Winners in 2007 | MediaPost

AT&T, Yahoo Agree On Ad Revenue Share Plan | MediaPost

Study: Mobile Bankers Should Target Low-Income Consumers | MediaPost

What's Next? | OnLine Spin

Marketers Can Take Advantage Of Poor Economic Climate | Marketing Daily

Automation Of Media Buying Through Ad Exchanges: Good Idea! | MediaPost

ZUMOBI ANNOUNCES NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH MICROSOFT

AdMob East To Focus On Expanding Mobile Brand Advertising | MediaPost

[Trend] Consumers Searching for Circular Entertainment | KenRadio

[Stats] Global Advertising & Marketing Spending | KenRadio

[Stats:Wireless Broadband] Next Generation of Wireless Broadband | KenRadio

[Stats:Video Broadband] What is being Watched on Broadband | KenRadio

[Stats: Internet Ads] Internet Advertising to Continue Double Digit Growth | KenRadio

[Stats:Teen Online] Living La Vida Super Communicators | MediaPost

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry | Wired

Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic | NYT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Of all the iPhone's features, none had reviewers gushing more than its Internet browser. It was the first cellphone browser that promised something resembling the experience of surfing the Internet on a PC. Santa helped deliver on that promise.

Study: Mobile Subscribers Taking Note Of Ads | MediaPost

From Why To How |Mobile Insider

Online Profiles of Social Networking Sites | IQReport by KenRadio

Email Blows Away All Other Social Networks

Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy | EFF

Flashback: Privacy Issues When Searching | Eletronic Frontier Foundation

1. Don't put personally identifying information in your search terms (easy)

2. Don't use your ISP's search engine (easy)

3. Don't login to your search engine or related tools (intermediate)

4. Block "cookies" from your search engine (intermediate)

5. Vary your IP address (intermediate)

6. Use web proxies and anonymizing software like Tor (advanced)

Conclusion

Trojan Hijacks Google, Redirects Browsers To Different Ads

Anatel termina leilão 3G e arrecada R$ 5,3 bi

// Por Cesar Bianconi, da Reuters// Quinta-feira, 20 de dezembro de 2007 - 14h34

Study: To Online Shoppers, Price Is Everything | MediaPost

How to leverage YouTube for Search | MediaPost

Mobile Experience: A Google Seduction for iPhone [MobileInsider]

Pain Over Complexity Will Drive Advertising Innovation | MediaPost

Google Helps Callers Find Themselves With Maps App [MediaPost]

Flashback: Did Google Slap You? (Sep/2006 ref. Affiliate Landing Pages)

NYT: Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far

Study Analyzes Social Engagement Marketing

Google AdSense implements Ad Management Sytem | Marketing.fm

Moving The Free Line | Entrepreneur's Journey Blog

The Free Line

Moving The Free Line

Give Away Your Best Stuff

The Free eBook

Replication Will Not Suffice - Innovation Is Necessary

How Does Moving The Free Line Impact You?

Scobleizer: The serverless Internet company

// Por Cesar Bianconi, da Reuters
// Quinta-feira, 20 de dezembro de 2007 - 14h34