by
1 Comment

NBC Goes Mobile With Investment

posted on September 3, 2009

NBC LogoNBC understands that the future of television may have less to do with TV’s. As a result, the company has made a move into the mobile ad space by investing in the mobile ad network Greystripe. The funding is said to have been made to assist the sales team headquartered in New York in selling more ads across the 1,000 mobile apps and games on over 1,400 devices that Greystripe can provide.

Gigaom reports

Greystripe, a mobile advertising network that distributes ad-supported games and applications, said it secured $2 million in funding from the Peacock Equity Fund, a joint venture fund co-founded by GE and its NBC Universal unit, ending a Series C funding round. The funding and a new strategic partnership with NBC Universal give Greystripe an edge in the hyper-competitive mobile ad world.

by
2 Comments

Google To Get Hardware to Take on eBooks?

posted on September 2, 2009

1184809_six_booksThis year, Google has made no bones about the fact that they’re looking to take on Amazon in the eBook arena. First, they made a deal with Sony (maker of the Sony eReader, top competitor to Amazon’s Kindle reader) to provide more than half a million public domain titles. Then in June, Google “signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google.” A couple weeks later, Google Books came out with new viewing and embedding features, including mobile-compatible features.

But still, all the embedding and viewing features in the world aren’t much competition for the eye-strain–preventing, ultra portable, WiFi connecting Kindle. Without some awesome hardware, Google’s eBook revolution would probably remain just a pipe dream.

by
14 Comments

Facebook: An Internet unto Itself

posted on September 2, 2009

Facebook IconFacebook has a lot going for it lately. They’ve got more than 250M users worldwide, they’re the most popular social network in almost every country in the world, they’re hiring in a down economy, and according to a new comScore report, 8.2% of all Internet ads are served on their site.

But, then, maybe this all makes sense. Since Facebook is so popular, it’s not entirely surprising that they serve one out of every twelve online ads. Even better? At least some proportion of their on-site CPC ads lead to another page on the site—so they’re getting money and traffic.

This isn’t a recent development, of course—we’ve all seen ads to “Become a Fan” of something on Facebook. But as smart as it sounds to make your advertisers pay for generating traffic to your site, the underlying logic is pretty much a stroke of genius:

by
19 Comments

Why the US Government Might Take Control of Twitter

posted on September 2, 2009

You know how I love a good conspiracy theory, so try this one on for size.

  1. Millions of people decide they don’t like the way the US government is handling a major issue–healthcare for example–they start protesting.
  2. They use social networks to voice their concerns, Twitter almost buckles under the strain of the conversations.
  3. A group of very vocal–and sophisticated–protestors start using Twitter to put together a group of hackers willing to coordinate a DDoS attack on a prominent web site–how about Whitehouse.gov?
  4. Before they can unleash their “protest” the President takes control of Twitter and shuts down one of the most important communication channels of our time.
  5. Twitter is deemed to be of national importance and so becomes government owned and sanitized nationalized.

by
7 Comments

NFL (No Fun League) Policies Around Social Media Expand

posted on September 2, 2009

OchocincoWhile it’s probably not fair to attach the “No Fun League” tag to the NFL in this instance it certainly makes for a better headline, so there. The league, which earlier this year linked itself to the US Marine Corps and others by limiting social media use by its ‘employees’ has expanded those terms before the start of the regular season. With the start of the regular season a little over a week away the premier US sports league has decided to at least say that it wants to exercise more control over how the game and its image is portrayed in the new world of social media interaction.

cnet reports

On Monday, the league announced that it had modified its social-media policy to limit Twitter and social-networking use by players, coaches, league officials, and even the media.

by
9 Comments

Google Calls Gmail Outage a “Big Deal”

posted on September 2, 2009

gmail beta no moreMany of the readers of Marketing Pilgrim likely had a rough 100 or so minutes yesterday when Google’s popular Gmail application crashed and went dark via the web. Watching the Twitter stream of panic and rage caught in 140 character snapshots was amusing for a while but when everyone tries to ‘out Tweet’ the next guy with some witty musing on the event it gets real old real quick. As I sat and pondered life without Gmail for a while I was wondering if someone in Mountain View wasn’t lamenting the removal of the beta tag from the service earlier this year.

In looking for an explanation, it’s best to turn to the source. The old adage is that “It’s not that you have a problem but rather how you handle it that is most important.”, applies here in a way that Google would like to not repeat. Here’s some official words from the official Gmail blog

by
3 Comments

Icahn Sells Off (Some) Yahoo

posted on September 1, 2009

icahnRemember all the drama between Carl Icahn and Yahoo last year? As a major shareholder, he lobbied for Yahoo to take Microsoft’s buyout offer (any offer!). And then there were some I’ll-replace-your-whole-board-of-directors threats, and some nuh uhs. And some I’ll-get-you-yet,-Yang!s and some “what-ever”s and some pbbbts and “You’re nuts”s. . . . Yeah, for a while there it was a little ugly. Eventually, Yahoo tried to placate Icahn with a luxurious spot on their board for him and two of his closest friends!

But it looks like even that wasn’t enough to keep Icahn happy for long. AllThingsD reports today that Carl Icahn has recently sold off a sixth of his shares in Yahoo at a significant loss—$125M. Although he retains his and his cronies’ seats on the board, and 63M shares (about 4.5% of the company), taking that kind of loss doesn’t look so good for Yahoo.