The growing ranks of online marketers gathered this week
at ad:tech Chicago. Big technology players like Google, DoubleClick, WebTrends,
Omniture, and Advertising.com were present, along with email
marketing firms, large online agencies, and whole raft of smaller
players with new tools for RSS, mobile, and
video advertising.
The coolest new tech company I found there was from the Netherlands: Adjustables. They were showing, for the first time in the U.S., a patent-pending technology for placing non-intrusive ads within video streams - instead of those annoying pre-rolls or banners surrounding the player.
In a cheeky move, Netvibes has released a Facebook widget. Both Netvibes and Facebook are leading Web platforms for widgets (i.e. mini web apps that can be plugged into web pages and sites). So Netvibes is neatly trying to entice Facebook users to use Netvibes instead of Facebook as their homepage. Here is an example of the Facebook widget that Netvibes has released:
Of course it only includes Facebook data, not data from third party widgets. To be really cheeky, Netvibes should find a way to include all your third party Facebook widgets ;-) However Netvibes has actually done very well, because the only thing missing seems to be Facebook's news feed - because Facebook does not currently allow outsider providers to access the News Feed. Given that Facebook is not very open (at least outwards), this is impressive. Also it should be mentioned that you still need to click through to facebook to go through your friend requests, group invites, etc.
Bloggers have long used the blogroll as a way of linking to their compatriots and sharing traffic. But a blogroll has always just been just a static list of links, that on some blogs (especially among political bloggers, where they might be most popular) have become so bloated and long there is very little incentive for readers to click on any of it -- or even pay it any attention. Enter: rollSense. rollSense touts itself as "the Google AdSense of content," but that's actually a very poor description of what the service is.
Put quite simply, rollSense is a replacement for your normal blogroll. Instead of a static list of links, however, rollSense delivers related content from trusted sources to your readers via a javascript widget. The service accomplishes a similar goal for bloggers that the web 2.0 news ticker, which Webware launched last week on their site, does. Further, the widget attempts to tailor itself to whatever content your readers are actually reading.
A few reports are circulating that Microsoft will offer a free, ad supported version of Microsoft Works, its 'lite' office suite, within the next few months. However the kicker is that it won't be a browser-based offering - as the rumor was back in September 2006. The free version of Microsoft Works will be a desktop app; and Microsoft will go back to its tried and true tactic of pre-installing it on PCs - it's not known yet which PC makers will be involved. Adverts will run within the programs, including the flagship word processing and spreadsheet apps.
The BBC reports that the service will debut with Version 9.0 of Works, which is due to launch by the end of the year. BBC says that "the ad-supported version will have a store of adverts it will show to people while they put together documents or spreadsheets. The store of ads would be refreshed every time that computer goes online."
The web has a new news aggregation site today with the launch of Newser, a start up with an impressive team behind it. Newser is run by Highbeam CEO Patrick Spain, Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff, and Caroline Miller, who was the editor in chief of New York Magazine. According paidContent.org, the site was "born with the idea of trying to reinvent the network TV news paradigm for the Web," meaning to keep news items short, snappy, and entertaining.
Early reviews of the site have not been so favorable. Gawker especially was unimpressed, calling Newser "the dullest thing I've seen all day." But I'm not sure it's that dull.
As part of this week's Read/Write Web Files, we're looking at what may be on the cards in Yahoo's 100-day strategy for getting its house in order. In the inaugural post of the week, Richard outlined his Top 10 Yahoo! Properties. And I'd like to make the case for another one here: Yahoo! Buzz Index. This post takes a look at how the two biggest internet players, Yahoo! and Google, approach delivering content and services around a specific area: search trend data. Search engines have always had keen insights when it comes to knowing what's hot and what's not. It's as simple as analyzing the volume of search terms over time, and cutting those figures by geolocation, and often other factors. Most web users don't realize that Google and Yahoo! have created windows to this valuable data that anyone can play around with.
Our network blog last100 has an excellent feature story on Amazon's digital living room product range, including Amazon Unbox (the company‚Äôs digital video download service), "information products" like Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com), and how it could all be integrated via ‚Äúcloud services‚Ä?.
Earlier this week the Yahoo! search results pages on my laptop mysteriously began showing a completely new page design. Oddly enough, my other computers -- all logged into the same Yahoo! ID -- still showed the results pages with the plain old vanilla design. After talking to some people at Yahoo! to figure it out, it turns out my laptop was in the Yahoo! test bed for their new Search Assist feature. It was nice of Yahoo! to add me to the test bed on the week we're talking about them (actually it's completely random who gets added, but we can pretend it had something to do with our coverage this week).
Yesterday, I had a chance to chat with Kathryn Kelly, who is the senior public relations manager for Yahoo! Search, about the new things Yahoo! is doing with their search results. She walked me through some of the stuff they've launched over the past couple of months, and in this post I'll highlight some of it for you.
I'm at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit reporting for Read/WriteWeb. This afternoon there was an interesting presentation about the state of the venture capital market. Specifically, it started with a presentation by Paul Denninger, Vice Chairman of Jefferies & Co, entitled "Why Aren't VCs Happy?" and then Paul joined a panel moderated by Mark Stevens, a Managing Partner of Fenwick & West. Other panelists included Roger McNamee, a Partner at Elevation Partners (probably most famous because of their association with Bono of U2), Erik Straser, a General Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Bill Gurley a General Partner at Benchmark Capital.
I've attended a number of presentations and panels at industry events over the last six months on the state of the venture capital market. In addition, there seems to be a recurring meme in the blogosphere on the subject. To be honest, each of these panels - while interesting - seem to raise the same issues every time. They focus on how inexpensive it is to start and reach critical mass for consumer web services. Thankfully then, this panel today actually took a very different path. Paul laid out a number of interesting statistics around options for exits. It leads to some interesting questions that entrepreneurs need to evaluate.
Read/WriteWeb network blog AltSearchEngines has just published the August Top 100 Alt Search Engine list. Here is the excel spreadsheet; the full list is on ASE.
This week AltSearchEngines also published a 3 part series defining a) What is a Search Engine? (an article by Nitin Karandikar), b) What is Not a Search Engine? (by Kaila Colbin) and finally c) What is an Alternative Search Engine? (by ASE editor Charles Knight). The third article by Charles explains more of his motives behind the Top 100 List. He notes the Monthly winners to date: GoshMe, KoolTorch, AfterVote, Quintura, KartOO, dialog.us, and Omgili this month (see below). Charles wrote:
