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Why iPhones & Blackberries Are Replacing iHop & Blueberry Pancakes

posted on August 10, 2009

If you’re an avid dayparter, you might already know that breakfast is one of the best times of day to target your advertising.

According to the NYT, more and more people are checking emails, tweeting, texting and updating their Facebook status, before they grab breakfast. Some, are even more addicted!

This is morning in America in the Internet age. After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.

Hah!

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Facing DDoS Attacks, Google Tells Regular Users “We’re Sorry…” But You’re a Spammer

posted on August 10, 2009

As you know, Twitter, Facebook and many other social networking sites fell victim to a DDoS attack last week. Well, Google was also included in the attack, but managed to stay afloat.

Now SER has word that many users–at least of the marketer variety–are complaining that Google unfairly labeled them as hackers and were shown the following error message:

I suspect this was part of Google’s efforts to thwart a DDoS attack, but perhaps they dialed the anti-spam dial just a little bit too far to the right. ;-)

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Publicis Goes Fishing for New Ad Revenue, Catches a Razorfish

posted on August 10, 2009

In a Razorfish sale, yet to be officially confirmed, both Microsoft and French ad firm Publicis look set to walk away winners.

Microsoft looks set to recoup $530 million of the $6 billion it paid to acquire aQuantive and, along with it, Razorfish.

Publicis beefs-up its online advertising offering, picks up Microsoft, McDonalds, Google, and Yahoo as clients, and celebrates its 1-year anniversary of acquiring Performics with another big acquisition.

This should be Publicis’ last big-fish acquisition for a while, according to CEO Maurice Levy, "Don’t expect any acquisitions of this magnitude in the short or medium term." Now Publicis has to figure out how to integrate Razorfish, without losing any of the marquee client accounts, and hope that it can turn around a decline in revenue during the first half of 2009.

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British Troops Encouraged to Tweet (To a Degree)

posted on August 8, 2009

twitter-logo1Since we had a rather strong response to our coverage of the United States Marine Corps’ policy to not allow Marines to access social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter on the Marines’ network it seemed appropriate to see how this is handled ‘across the pond’.

Now before going into this and making comparisons between the two reports I think it only fair to share a comment from one of our readers to the report regarding the USMC policy. Commenter Jason said

This ban has slowly been implemented across all Department of Defense systems. This is not just a Marine ban. This is strictly for government systems and in no way affects the systems used for morale. They are not saying the Marines cannot access Facebook or MySpace or Twitter on their time. They are saying that Marines cannot access these Social Networking sites while at work.

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Financial Times Looks to MicroPayments

posted on August 7, 2009

one-dollarMicropayments have worked for companies like iTunes and even Amazon.com for songs and television episodes. But could they be the solution to the newspaper industry’s pending demise?

The Financial Times is ready to find out. They currently use a hybrid paid-free model, where users can access up to 20 stories a month for free, but they’re looking to a pay-per-story or possibly subject or time period model.

The New York Times has long used a micropayments system—for much of their archive, full stories are available as PDF scans at about $4 for one story, or a package of 10 for $16. However, two years ago the NYT outlined just why micropayments don’t work.

Consumers “expect to pay for music and movies, but not so much for the printed word,” said [Mercator Advisory Group analyst] George Peabody. . .

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Razorfish on the Razor’s Edge?

posted on August 7, 2009

RazorfishMicrosoft’s interactive agency Razorfish is the subject of some varying rumors as of late. The one common thread in all of these reports is that Microsoft is shopping the company. That much we know for sure. Where they end up is the subject of much speculation.

In the Internet marketing press it depends on who you listen to and / or trust that will help you make your very own prediction. Publicis ending up with Razorfish has been favored by the folks at paidContent and they were willing to pay handsomely for the company although not quite the $800 million that it was supposed to merit. That may not be the case any longer. WPP is in the game as well but that is another that falls under the category of “to be determined”

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Twitter Outage Part of Widespread Social Media DoS Attack

posted on August 7, 2009

Twitter iconMaybe you heard the sound of the world crashing down and people actually being productive at work yesterday while Twitter was unreachable. It wasn’t long before the full explanation came out—the popular microblogging site was the victim of a DoS attack.

But Twitter wasn’t the only site targeted. As CNET reports, Facebook, LiveJournal and Blogger were all subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack yesterday, apparently to silence “Cyxymu,” one blogger from Georgia (the country not the state). Twitter was the most noticeably affected, though Cyxymu’s LiveJournal page was unaccessible.

The Chief Security Officer at Facebook, Chris Kelly, confirmed the attack to CNET: