Australian startup Fluc is an innovative new mobile advertising network that not only lets publishers monetize their content, but also lets mobile users opt-in to be paid to recieve targeted SMS-based advertisements.
Users provide Fluc with a profile of their tastes and interests when they sign up for the service, and Fluc uses that information as well as geopositioning data to deliver extremely well targeted ads. As the site's FAQ puts it, "You set Fast Food as a preference for content you want to receive. You are walking down the local shop or mall to get lunch and you get an SMS on your phone - 'Uncle Barneys Burger House is offering 20% off all burgers this week. Show this message to receive your discount.' - Score! -- a cheap burger. Well not only did you just get a cheaper burger, you also just received $0.30 credit for getting that message!"
There is a myth floating around that contextual advertising
is going to help Facebook justify its $15 billion valuation. The myth goes something like this: because Facebook
knows everything about us, it will always be able to serve perfect ads.
However, the reality is more like the following:
And even if all of the above were reversed, building a contextual advertising engine is far from simple - anyone who tries faces the same problem as building a personalized recommendation engine. In an earlier post on this blog, we discussed various ways that such systems work. The best example is Amazon, which uses a mix of many techniques to deliver recommendations, and took a decade to build and fine tune it to the point it is at today. So what basis is there to think that Facebook can do the same? Let's take a more in depth look at Facebook's advertising play.
Amazon Web Services, a fascinating division of the company offering a collection of commodity computing services, data storage and more - all sold in the cloud - is about to conclude their Start-up Challenge contest. The contest will award one start-up that uses Amazon Web Services a $50k cash prize, $50k worth of AWS credit and "an investment offer from Amazon." Seven startups remain and the voting (including your vote, if you'd like) ends Thursday December 6th.
Because video is generally the best medium for demonstrating anything, Amazon has made nice videos about all the finalists' companies. We've got all 7 videos embedded here below the fold. Since we were apparently unavailable to be poked in the eye with a sharp stick, the next best thing Amazon could do to us was offer embedded videos all stuck on autoplay. You'll have to pause them yourself and then watch them one at a time. (If I'm wrong, please tell me otherwise - I added autoplay=false to these silly iframe embeds - but we're still rolling!) The cognitive power to watch 7 videos concurrently is currently not available from AWS. That said, which of the following real-live startups do you think ought to win the prize?
Adobe, which celebrated its 25th birthday over the weekend, today announced the release of Flash Media Server 3, the delivery platform for its near ubiquitous Flash technology. Perhaps the most striking change to Flash Media Server is the drastically reduced price.
Because in the past Flash Media Server has cost so much (upwards of $45,000 per license), streaming flash media has long been a very cost-prohibitive endeavor. The high price, commonly referred to as the "Flash tax," led many to seek out alternative media servers like the open source Red 5. The latest version of Flash Media Sever, which will ship in January 2008, will be come in three versions, ranging from free to $4,500 -- a price drop of 90%.
A couple of amazing stats have been released about mobile phone use. Firstly industry analyst Informa Telecoms & Media revealed recently that worldwide mobile penetration will hit 50 per cent - or around 3.3 billion subscriptions. Informa estimated that mobile networks covered 90 per cent of the global population by mid-2007. According to the Telecoms Blog, this means that some 40 per cent of the world’s inhabitants are covered by a network, but not connected - which leaves just 10 per cent with neither coverage nor connection. Tomi T Ahonen noted that this means mobile growth is accelerating, as we were at 2.7 billion subscribers at the end of 2006.
In other mobile stats, the Nielsen Company today released the findings of a study on the mobile media and cross media behavior of U.S. "tweens" (ages 8-12). It found that an estimated 35% of tweens own a mobile phone. Fellow RWW author Josh Catone noted that he first got a mobile phone at age 17. I won't reveal when I got my first mobile phone, but it's fair to say that when I was a teen mobile phones resembled bricks!
In this post we will give you three reasons for that prediction, plus six specific predictions and one interesting dark horse. First, the three reasons why 2008 will be the year of Business Networking:
1. The US consumer economy will slow (maybe into Recession). Specifically this will weaken business models based on consumer advertising. Advertisers, entrepeneurs and investors will switch their attention to B2B.
2. Consumer-focussed Web 2.0 start-ups are in a “digestion phase“. We don’t really need more innovation. We want innovation, its fun and interesting, but what we need is monetization of existing innovation. Entrepreneurs will turn to the quicker monetization options within B2B.
3. Advertisers (and the media that serve them) will seek increasing diversification from 'faith based advertising' (aka CPM); and business markets will offer better options for subscription and transactional models. There is room for 'quick payback innovation' in this area.
Now for the six specific predictions about Business Networking:
Controversial "word of mouth marketing" company PayPerPost, which
we called "a sketchy operation" in a post in October, told users via email that they had reached 100,000 members (or, as it refers to them, "posties"). The company is also nearing 13,000 advertisers, sitting at a little over 12,500 right now.
Negativity toward PayPerPost has generally come from the top-tier of blogs, the so-called A-Listers, many of whom have long struggled to gain journalistic credibility. PayPerPost, which pays people to review products on their blogs with questionable disclosure polices (many advertisers require "no in-post disclosure"), is seen as potentially damaging to a reputation that bloggers can deliver accurate information that some have worked hard to build.
Yet, despite all the criticism and the negative stigma surrounding the company, it has enjoyed very impressive growth and remains extremely popular with the long tail of bloggers. As our own Alex Iskold pointed out last week, making money in the long tail is very hard. So guaranteed cash for a post is attractive to bloggers who can't rely on traffic to sell advertising. Meanwhile, for advertisers, PayPayPost offers an opportunity to take advantage of the distributed nature of the long tail and get their brand message out to all corners of the web.
Nominations are now open for the first annual Crunchies, the competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. It promises to be a great show!
What I like about the Crunchies is that it's all about startups and innovation. We're aiming to recognize things that are important to startups - web innovation, best bootstrapping, best use of viral marketing, and so on. There are also product type categories - e.g. mobile, video.
So how can you participate?
Last week we wondered if maybe MoveOn was a bit premature in declaring victory when Facebook changed their Beacon advertising system to be explicitly opt-in. Was Facebook still gathering information on your purchasing behavior, even if you had opted out of the program? Computer Associates blogger Stefan Berteau, who reported that Facebook was being sent data about activity on affiliate sites, even when not logged in, wondered the same thing.
Facebook later emailed Stefan the following statement:
"When a Facebook user takes a Beacon-enabled action on a participating site, information is sent to Facebook in order for Facebook to operate Beacon technologically. If a Facebook user clicks "No, thanks" on the partner site notification, Facebook does not use the data and deletes it from its servers. Separately, before Facebook can determine whether the user is logged in, some data may be transferred from the participating site to Facebook. In those cases, Facebook does not associate the information with any individual user account, and deletes the data as well."
While some commenters on the CA blog aren't buying it, Facebook's promise that they aren't collecting user data except from those who opt-in to the program essentially puts to bed fears that the company is gathering user behavior data from outside sites without user consent. But if they were, it would likely violate a number of the privacy policies of their partner sites.
Wikipedia is formulating a plan to pay contributors of selected illustrations, according to a report this morning in the NYT. It's a big move, in principle at least, away from the site's longstanding all-volunteer content creation. Backers of the plan, however, say it's a vital step that must be taken in order for Wikipedia to close the quality gap with print reference materials. Scientific articles in particular are not getting the volunteer illustration they need with the current model.
The plan is reportedly being funded by a donation from MIT Prof. Philip Greenspun. Greenspun says he gave made a $20,000 donation earmarked specifically for paying illustrators but was envisioning $5 payments to illustrators in the developing world instead of Wikipedia's stated plan to pay $40 per illustration. Greenspun says no one from Wikipedia has contacted him since his check cleared.
This sounds like a great idea to me. I presume some Wikipedia purists will argue against it and it could lead to some kind of slippery slope - but I expect the program to run smoothly in time. It reminds me of sports blogging site Sportingo's mixed model of free user generated content augmented with licensed sports images and statistical databases. Wikipedia already has a fascinating Graphics Lab department where images are improved collaboratively (for free!). I can't help but wonder about for Wikipedia is checking for copyright of visual images. That may become more difficult than it had been previously.
