Marketing Pilgrim

Congratulations!

You did it!

You made it to Friday!

Yay for you!

Your reward? Here, I prepared this Picks just for you. Enjoy!

• IBM to Acquire Unica Corporation
• Apple iAd partners say they’re happy with early results
• Facebook Launching Official Live Streaming Channel: Facebook Live
• Magpie, the first service to offer in-stream ads on Twitter, is up for sale
• Newsletter Readers Do Click Ads
• Google accuses California of rigging bidding process for e-mail contract
• Judge orders identities of commenters be revealed
• Google’s Lame Defense of its Net Neutrality Pact

Tú me amas, realmente me encanta!

That was the cry from Twitter execs when they read the recent report from comScore on the growth of the service worldwide. Latin America is up 305% over last year with a large portion of the users coming from Brazil and Venezuela. They say much of the growth comes from the fact that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez joined Twitter in April.

Another country caught up in the Twitter boom is Indonesia. 20.8% of that country’s population visited Twitter in June (the month the survey was conducted). Overall, Asia showed an uptick of 243%, way above the Middle East, Africa, Europe and even North America.

Since the survey was designed to measure the growth over the past year, the US and Canada landed in last place with only a 22% change in the number of people using Twitter.

Facebook is an American success story. Started by a Harvard dropout (isn’t that how all big tech / Internet stories begin?), fraught with intrigue (which in the US means lawsuits and payoffs to hush potential rabble rousers) and something that goes beyond the walls of the US (sorry, but that was not an immigration reference unless you want it to be).

According to Royal Pingdom’s ‘research’ Facebook is truly a global company with the US leading the way, for now.

There are those who wonder whether the US has seen as much growth as it can for Facebook which may or may not be a real concern. Certainly the growth will slow (unless there is some deal where the government requires Facebook accounts so we can all be on the same playing field ) in the US because it grew up here.

So, apparently there’s a real movie being released in the fall, all about Facebook.

No seriously! The Social Network will cash in on Facebooks popularity–and Mark Zuckerberg’s exploits–and likely make millions of dollars.

Will I go see it. Maybe. I’d at least be able to write off the ticket, the 32oz Diet Coke and the jumbo popcorn as a business expense.

What I would like to see is this parody trailer for a fictional movie about Twitter, turned into a real movie.

Funny stuff!

So two small companies are about to get caught up in a copyright/patent infringement lawsuit.

You may have heard of the companies: Google and Oracle.

Now, lawsuits like this don’t just come out of the blue. They’re expensive and cause a lot of distraction for both the plaintiff and defendant, so you can bet that Oracle has had many “behind the scenes” conversations with Google about its alleged Java IP infringement.

You can also bet, that Oracle has very good reasons to sue the pants of Google. Not only is the search giant using Java-derived technologies without a proper license, but there’s more to it:

The latest Internet Retailer 500 directory is here. Each year this is one of every industry player’s prime sources of data about how the Internet ‘big boys’ are performing and, more importantly, what they are doing to be ranked in these Top 500.

One additional metric added this year to the many that are provided regarding the overall performance of these online e-commerce high flyers, is a category rating SEO effectiveness for the sites. It rates this area using a simple excellent, good, fair and poor system and here are the overall results

While two-thirds of these ‘top’ companies (approximately 330) rate as excellent or good that leaves a lot of elite online players with some work to do.