Marketing Pilgrim

Can you imagine how much more than $250 million Twitter would be worth if it ever figures out a revenue model?

I suspect the micro-blogging service must have something up its sleeve, otherwise why would a venture capital firm reportedly dump $20 million into the company–giving it the $250M valuation?

Personally, I hope Twitter can find a way to support itself, before the money runs out. It’s no coincidence the company is seeing incredible growth, the service is becoming an invaluable tool for communication. Heck, some people are even suggesting that it’s becoming an alternative channel for bloggers.

Just the other day, I considered how I communicated with friends and peers before the advent of Twitter. For me, Twitter has become a valuable tool for three reasons:

By Manoj Jasra.

ZunaVision is an up and coming technology that enables advertisers to dynamically display ads inside the 3D space of online videos. Zunavision was developed by 2 students currently attending Stanford University, Ashutosh Saxena and Siddharth Batra. I had the chance to sit down with both of them to get some insight on ZunaVision and their ideas behind developing it.

[Manoj]: What is your educational background?

[Ashutosh & Siddharth]: Ashutosh Saxena received his undergraduate degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur, India) in 2004, and his Masters degree from Stanford University in 2006. Currently, he is finishing his PhD at Stanford University in the area of Machine Learning and Computer Vision.

By Peter Young

According to Hitwise data released on January 21st this year, Twitter usage in the UK has increased 10 fold in just 12 months – with celebrities such as Steven Fry, Jonathan Ross, John Cleese and Richard Branson even joining the ever increasing list of Twitterers. This follows hot on the heels of Hitwise announcing Twitter usage has overtaken that off Digg in the US.

It’s time for the week in review: all the marketing news that was fit to print, but we didn’t quite get to you sooner.

• In an effort to attract and/or appease large media companies, YouTube plants to let big content partners bring their own ads. But will that be enough?
• Also in the video arena, YouTube rolls out video downloads, though they appear to be limited to the ChangeDotGov channel.
• And one more video tidbit: CNN.com is experimenting more with ads in its live streams including longer ads and in-stream (as opposed to pre-roll) ads.
• Is the long-rumored GDrive alive?
• A few challenges for Wikipedia this week. First, a brand that could really challenge them: Britannica 2.0. And yes, there’s peer editing, though registration—with names and addresses required.

Well, Microsoft, you just cut 5000 jobs and missed your Wall Street estimates. What are you going to do now? If you guessed they’re going to Disney World, you’re wrong. No, according to Steve Ballmer, they’re looking to drop some big bucks on Yahoo search.

Naturally, Ballmer isn’t naming his price quite yet. On the earnings call this week, however, Ballmer made no bones about the future for web search from Microsoft, according to the New York Times:

Asked about a deal with Yahoo on search during a conference call with investors early Thursday, Mr. Ballmer said, “We would like to do one.” And Mr. Ballmer sounded more optimistic about the possibility of coming to terms with Yahoo now that Carol Bartz, the former chief executive of Autodesk, replaced Jerry Yang as chief executiveof Yahoo. “I know Carol Bartz well from the Autodesk days and am glad to see her at the helm of Yahoo,” he said. Mr. Ballmer, who met last week with Roy Bostock, the Yahoo chairman, also said he had spoken with Ms. Bartz recently.

At the rate Facebook has been growing these past two months, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook gets more traffic than MySpace. comScore’s latest report, however, claims that not only is Facebook bigger than MySpace, it’s twice as big!

This comScore chart shows that in November, Facebook began pulling ahead of MySpace thanks to their 200 million unique visitors that month. Caroline McCarthy from CNET highlights a statement from MySpace regarding comScore’s findings:

We are laser focused on building a sustainable global business which we measure by profits and revenue–not just eyeballs. In a tough economic climate, our international revenue is up 30 percent year over year and we continue to focus on those markets with the strong monetization opportunities.