Marketing Pilgrim

YouTube, EMI and Apple are all over the news today, linked together in different stories. For your reading convenience, I’ll bring all those stories together.

YouTube + Apple = better Apple TV?
Google and Apple announced a deal yesterday to make YouTube clips available on Apple TV. Just yesterday, CNNMoney/Fortune magazine was taunting Apple TV’s failure. The YouTube deal called to mind one of the harshest indictments from CNNMoney/Fortune:

Apple TV’s most highly touted feature is its weakest one: It requires an HDTV, but the video you download is so low-res that it looks as fuzzy as plain old broadcast TV.

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As we reported, Google Maps has enabled street-level views for certain cities, but are they invading your personal space?

Take a look…

I’m sure privacy laws don’t apply to public places, but it’s still kind of big brotherish, don’t you think?

Thanks to Dan.

If you happen to reside in the beautiful State of Hawaii, or just need an excuse to head that way, be sure to check out the seminar I’m giving on June 12th.

The seminar is called “Radical Marketing for an Online Hawaii” and I’ll be discussing search, blogs and social media, as well as taking your questions. It’s being held at the BYU-Hawaii campus on the north shore of Oahu.

Registration is free to current BYUH students and just $7 for everyone else!

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By Paul Bennett

According to a study conducted in February 2007 by Arbitron/Telephia nearly 90% of mobile audio listeners think that advertising is “a fair price to pay” for free or subsidized content.

eMarketer has used the ‘Mobile Audio Media Study’ as part of a new report to investigate key questions like the potential size of the mobile music opportunity and the potential wild cards that marketers need to understand.
Senior Analyst, John du Pre Gauntt says,

“… a surprising level of receptivity to ad-supported content make(s) it difficult to declare the precise direction of (the) mobile music market.”

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One of the biggest problems with switching your life to Google’s suite of applications is that, the moment you go offline, you lose access to email, calendars, docs and your RSS feeds. Well, according to SEL, Google is finally ready to start solving that problem, with the release of Google Gears.

Google Reader is the first online application to offer “Gears-enabled offline capabilities,” Google told me. So you would load up Google Reader while you are online, it will download your feeds. Then you can go to the beach, away from all Internet connections, open your browser and browse through those feeds. When you are back to your Internet connection, Google Reader will sync up through Google Gears and update Google Reader with the feeds you read while offline, as well as download any new feeds you have not read yet.

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One way to ensure your new human-powered search engine is a success is to give it a Hawaiian name. It worked for Jimmy Wales - Wikipedia is a huge success and “Wiki wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick” - and it could work for Jason Calacanis’ new search engine, Mahalo.com (Hawaiian for thank you).

The site has just launched in “alpha”, and Calacanis is quick to let us know what exactly that means…

Mahalo.com is in ALPHA–that means not ready for users, but looking for feedback.

Calacanis’ business buddy, Michael Arrington, has a comprehensive write-up on Mahalo (he’s not invested, but working with Jason on another project).

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The recent concern surrounding privacy laws is now making waves in Australia.

The European Union announced last week it was investigating whether Google has breached European privacy laws, and now the Australian privacy experts have added their opinion, as reported in the Australian Financial Review:

“Australians using US-based internet search engines are exposing themselves to privacy laws that are routinely bypassed by the US government and opening themselves to invasions of privacy that would never be allowed in other countries”

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As TechCrunch predicted (and we mentioned in passing earlier), eBay announced their acquisition of StumbleUpon today. eBay states that the “aggregate transaction value” was around $75M.

In the official announcement, eBay states that this deal “will provide eBay with in-depth exposure to a fast-growing community-based service with approximately 2.3 million users. StumbleUpon gives people a new way to discover relevant and entertaining content based on personal preferences and community recommendations.”

eBay explains why this is such a good fit:

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GoDaddy will inherit some 850,000 of the domains originally registered by RegisterFly according to this week’s ICANN agreement. RegisterFly has been struggling for some time. Last month, a federal judge issued an injunction enabling ICANN to terminate RegisterFly’s accreditation. This came after many different problems and customer complaints, not the least of which were fraud accusations.

E-Commerce Times describes one of the fiascoes well:

Those problems include allegations of fraud and that RegisterFly aggressively cajoled customers to purchase upgraded services. Some customers complained to ICANN that they missed deadlines for renewal of domains, only to see those domains transferred to a company owned by RegisterFly CEO Kevin Medina, who then offered to sell the domains back at a higher price.

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Still working on getting your blog readers to stick around? If you’re on WordPress, you’re in luck. Technosailor’s Aaron Brazell has compiled a list of plugins designed to help improve your blog’s stickiness. What do these plugins do?

• Greet visitors from search engines with a list of relevant posts.
• Enable visitors to subscribe to comments.
• Display your most popular posts.
• Easily interlink series of posts.

ProBlogger led me to the post, and there are even more useful plugins mentioned in the ProBlogger comments, including ones that enable you to:

• Greet returning visitors/commenters.

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How many saw that headline and heaved a sigh of relief? “Oh good,” you thought, “one less thing on my to do list.”

Web Analytics World has 21 reasons that you do not need web analytics. Any of these sound like you or your clients?

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.
• You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.
• Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.
• Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.

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Fox Interactive Media, parent company of MySpace, has finally confirmed their acquisitions of Photobucket and Flektor.

We were already pretty sure about the Photobucket deal. After the rumors began flying at the beginning of the month, ValleyWag & TechCrunch reported the deal was confirmed on May 8. Just a week later, we started afresh with the rumor that Flektor was next.

Today, CNET reports that Fox Interactive finally confirmed both deals. They didn’t comment on purchase prices.

Photobucket, one of the most popular online photo sharing sites, and Flektor, a photo/video/audio editing and slide show producing site, might well be merged into one product. Their services, individually or combined, will doubtlessly be used by many MySpacers.

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