It's time to announce the winners of our contest this week. Congratulations to AJ (comment 32) and Anne Helmond (comment 13), who won a free ticket to Under the Radar | Mobility event and a Microsoft software pack, respectively.
We got a lot of great comments on your favorite Mobile Web apps in the contest post, which we will analyze soon. Keep telling us the Mobile Web apps you use, e.g. in this comments thread too, because it's great to know.
In the hit movie The Truman Show, the 24-hour, commercial-free television show that chronicled the lead character's life (Jim Carrey, unknown to him) was monetized in a clever way: everything you saw in the show was available for purchase via a companion catalog. Or in other words, product placement.
Yesterday, our friend Ryan Stewart posted about the soft launch of San Francisco-based Ooyala's new video management, delivery, and advertising system, Backlot.
Online reputation company Rapleaf sent us some interesting statistics about the most prominent OpenSocial companies, along with Facebook. Rapleaf gathered data on users of MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5 – five social networks on the OpenSocial platform – and also gathered data on Facebook users. Some highlights, followed by full details below:
PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Interactive Advertising Bureau released their 3rd quarter numbers estimating total ad buys online today. Big growth continues, but take it with a giant grain of salt. Last quarter the number exceeded $5.2 billion according to the study, up 25% over Q3 last year.
According to the IAB, the glory days are here. "Marketers large and small have come to accept digital media as the fulcrum of any marketing strategy," says Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. That seems like a real exaggeration to me. In fact, Google reported Q3 revenues of $4.3 billion just by itself, that up 57% from Q3 2006. The vast majority of that is in advertising sales, so industry growth is based on Google growth, apparently. Either someone's numbers are off or we're all insane trying to make a living in this industry. All of us but Google, that is.
As time on the television continues to drop and time online rises, I think we've only seeing the beginning of the online advertising economy. It's hard to get too excited about the health of the industry, however, when one company's own growth makes up so much of the story.
In July, when this blog ran our Facebook Week, there was one article that I had planned that never made it to press. The article, called "The Facebook Office," was going to take a look at how to use Facebook as a groupware app for your team. Unfortunately, except for a handful of applications that didn't really seem to play nice together (such as the ones I highlighted in in my Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work list), there was no way to create a cohesive groupware environment in Facebook.
The best I could come up with was to use a private group to keep everyone in the loop, use 30 Boxes's Calendar app to share important dates, and Zoho's Online Office app to share documents. Hardly a Basecamp killer.
Today, AllFacebook points to a new application from DivShare called Projects. Basecamp it is not, but we're getting there.
IBM has released a survey of 2400 consumers, called the End of Advertising Survey, that found that %11 of respondents would pay a small fee to remove advertisements from their online video viewing experience. A YouTube Premium subscription option? It could make sense.
It's widely believed that the web 2.0 era marked the end of paid content and software - that advertising would now fund all future media if not online activity in general. As online advertising begins to take hold meaningfully, though, some number of people wish they could go back to the good old days of paying a small sum.
This will likely be an even more pertinent question when the wall separating billions in TV advertisement comes down, flooding the world of online video. Online video is already a lot more mainstream than many web-heads admit, and the mainstream is more savvy than we might think. Tivo has been a paradigm changer and I have no doubt that a substantial percentage of people will pay to remove ads in a media future increasingly centered on online video. Give me access to my viewing history, preferences and recommendations and I'll happily pay too. Likewise, some users may be willing to pay for an ad-free publishing platform, increased length limits and higher quality playback. I've long been an advocate for paying for software, but now the 89% of the people who say I'm crazy can know that IBM says I am not alone!
E-Consultancy.com did some math and argues that at $2 per month, or $24.95 per year, 10% of YouTube's 50m unique users per month would equal a $137 million annual revenue stream from subscriptions. We did a little more math over here and found that advertisements, on the other hand, at a very generous rate of $10cpm would equal $38m in annual revenue from those 11% of YouTube's viewers. In other words, if (and this is a big if) all these numbers were correct then YouTube could increase its proffits by $100m annually by offering a premium subscription.
Yahoo!, who has been a key contributor to open source distributed computing framework Hadoop, today announced an academic research partership with Carnegie Mellon University that will give students access to Hadoop and other open source tools running in a supercomputing-class data center. The data center, named M45 after the Pleiades star cluster, is a 4,000-processor cluster supercomputer with 3 terabytes of memory and 1.5 petabytes of diskspace. Yahoo! claims that the M45 cluster is one of the top 50 fastest supercomputers in the world, capable of performing at 27 teraflops.
According to Yahoo!, universities have not had access to the type of hardware and software infrastructure necessary for web-scale distributed computing research. Yahoo! intends for Carnegie Mellon to be first school in a broader academic research partnership program. CMU and Yahoo! also plan to hold a Hadoop Summit in the first half of 2008, to which they say they would invite major Hadoop users such as Facebook and the University of California at Berkeley.
Google today announced a $10 million challenge for developers to build mobile applications for its forthcoming Android mobile OS. Android was announced last Monday, instead of the widely expected GPhone handset. The SDK is here and information about the challenge are here.
Earlier this fall, Google dedicated $30 million to the X Prize to get to the moon. Today's Android announcement may be more modest, but it's exciting none the less.
Read on for details and a video with a demo of some in-house developed Android apps.
Angel-funded ActiveSymbols is a privately held company that was founded in 2003 to develop a visual search platform. Four years and six key patent filings later, the company is ready to release phase one of that platform, focusing on facial recognition.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company, which enjoys a healthy research partnership with the University of Washington, is not aiming to create a destination site. Instead, ActiveSymbols aims to provide the technology for integrating facial recognition and image detection into image intensive web sites, or in the enterprise (for example, searching a large news photo database).
The company has released a tech demo, however, called Eyealike to show off their facial recognition platform. The site features two rather whimsical applications designed to put ActiveSymbols' technology to the test, Celeb Match and Dream Date.
The Under the Radar | Mobility event is coming up this week. It's on November 15, 2007, at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, California. Read/WriteWeb has a couple of giveaways for our readers:
1) One free ticket to the event, valued at $695.00;
2) And for those of you who won't be in California at the time, we're also giving away a free Microsoft software pack, featuring Microsoft Vista and Office 2007.
So we'll select 2 winners - one for a local Silicon Valley resident or someone in the area on 15 Nov, and the Microsoft prize for someone who can't make the Mobility event.
To enter, all you have to do is tell us - in the comments here - what is your current favorite Mobile Web app, and why. It's that easy. I'm really curious to know what peoples favorite Mobile Web apps are - e.g. what is your best iPhone app, or what you play with most on your Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, etc! Simply leave a comment here and you're in the running for the two prizes. Please also tell us if you can attend Under the Radar Mobility, so we know whether to consider you for that prize. The two winners will be randomly drawn.
Thanks Dealmaker Media for the two prizes. We also have a $100 VIP discount for the Mobility event - click here to get that.
UPDATE: The winners have now been announced.
