Marketing Pilgrim

In an effort to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development, Google has announced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest at the Open Source Developer’s Conference in Brisbane, Australia.

Students can compete for prizes such as cash and t-shirts; ten grand prize winners will receive a chance to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, Ca. The contest features tasks that fall into the categories of code, documentation, research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user interface.

Over the past three years, college level students have participated in the Google Summer of Code where they have been introduced to open software development. Throughout that time, thousands of people from around the world have begun developing and writing millions of lines of code together, and now it’s time for Google to turn their attention to the younger crowds.

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In an attempt to compete with Google Apps, Microsoft has launched Windows Live Community Builder. The idea behind Microsoft’s new service is to allow businesses or non for profit organizations to obtain a more engaging and deeper connection with their community through customized applications like email, photo service, messenger, writer, livedrive and more.

Windows Live Community Builder also offers company specific domain support while enabling the ability to register a domain name via supported partners included in registration.

With Windows Live Community Builder, businesses or non for profit organisations or anyone looking at creating a community service can now achieve deeper and more engaging connections with their community through customised, branded online experiences. Whether they want branded, familiar email services for their community or a member’s only area on their web site, complete with calendaring, contacts, and mapping features; Windows Live Community Builder has what they, their administrators, and their technology partners need. It’s easy to get started and painless to maintain – and it includes the peace of mind that comes from the technology, experience, and market leadership they’d expect from Microsoft.

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Quigo, a New York/Israel-based company that specializes in ad targeting, is in the process of being acquired by AOL, according to a report in Haaretz, an Israeli daily newspaper. Time Warner Inc. is purchasing Quigo for $300 million in an attempt to better compete with Google and Yahoo.

Quigo has two main services that they provide their clients, AdSonar and FeedPoint. Adsonar is very similar to Google’s Adsense in that it provides targeted advertisements on various websites, and FeedPoint is their search engine marketing tool.

Last June, Time Inc. signed an exclusive deal with Quigo that provided their 15 web titles with a custom version of the company’s pay-per-click ad service and allowed the online magazines to be sold as a single network.

Time Inc. executives estimated that the Quigo deal will bring in $100 million in revenue over the next three years. Similarly, at the end of October, Quigo signed a multi-year contract with TheStreet.com to develop a custom version of AdSonar for the financial news site.

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The Adobe Max 2007 conference is going on right now in Chicago, and yesterday the company announced the release of their new Adobe Media Player.

The Adobe Media Player is an AIR application designed to give users the ability to view and enjoy Flash video content wherever and whenever they want, both online and offline. Instead of scraping content from the web, Adobe Media Player will be enhanced by content publishers. Additionally, publishers who would like to monetize their content via advertising will be offered a co-branded version of the player.

Adobe Labs gives a fairly explicit breakdown of how their new media player can be used and enhanced by end-users and content publishers. Some examples include discovering new Internet TV shows, automatically downloading new episodes of your favorite TV shows, and managing personal collections of Flash videos for end-users as well as dynamically delivering banner ads and increasing viewership through RSS for content publishers.

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Ingenio, Inc. announced yesterday that they will be joining forces with Network Solutions to incorporate Pay Per Call services into the Network Solutions suite of interactive marketing packages. The Pay Per Call feature will allow Network Solutions customers the ability to generate phone calls from their potential clients through their online marketing campaigns and only pay for the calls that they receive.

Once the Pay Per Call feature is fully implemented later this month, Network Solutions customers will be able to advertise to consumers who are searching for local businesses and wish to interact with a live person. Pay Per Call advertisers will also be allowed to run their ads across the Ingenio advertising network, which consists of free directory assistance service providers, mobile search, leading search engines and Internet yellow page directories.

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Sponsored search ads on mobile devices have been tested by Google for quite some time now but the company is really beginning to entice advertisers using Google Adwords by giving them free clicks until November 18^th.

Answers to questions such as how and where ads will run on mobile devices and how landing pages will be served can all be answered on Google’s new Adwords support page. Pages that are not mobile device friendly will not be available for mobile Adwords:

Each ad’s eligibility will be determined by its landing page and only ads with landing pages that can be adapted for viewing on mobile browsers will be shown. You can monitor each ad’s performance via a special performance tracking page within your account called “Performance Data: Search Ads on Google Mobile Search.”

To see how their landing pages will display on mobile phones, advertisers can visit http://google.com/gwt/n. Simply enter the URL for a preview.

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If you could influence or manipulate your search ranking, would you? Of course you would. That’s our main goal as search marketers. Sproose, a search engine that allows users to vote and rank the listings in their index, has just launched their voting technology for their video search.

Sproose delivers a “human popularity voting” model where each user may influence the ranking of the index creating improved search results. The more users that vote a site the further up in the ranking it moves. The same voting technology is now being applied to the Sproose video search index.

So basically, here’s how it works:

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Yesterday Frostfire announced the launch of Frostfirehive.com, a personal homepage application that’s initially designed to target Internet and technology users. Much like the way you can customize your Google homepage, Frostfirehive.com allows users to create personalized start pages. But, it also takes things a few steps further, making it easy to organize your news, websites, videos, games, photos, search engines, email and much more.

“We will see a move away from generic start pages as niches need guidance with their content. Single page aggregators are too rigid and generic customizable pages offer little help to users. The Frostfirehive.com default start page consists of basic instructions that can be removed once a user is familiar with the site,” said Chris Frost, Frostfirehive.com’s chief executive.

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Analytics software can be confusing, and it is often difficult to decipher what you really need to pay attention to. Comparing data from multiple sources can be even more complex because of inconsistencies in reporting techniques. Yesterday at SES, the Web Analytics Association (WAA) offered a potential solution to these issues.

The WAA announced the availability of their new report that will provide standardized definitions for 26 of the most widely used terms in analytics tools and software. WAA members, agencies, vendors, practitioners, and thought-leaders have collaborated for the past 11 months to create these definitions.

The Association’s previous release of web analytics definitions in 2006 focused on three of the most important metrics across all analytics tools and software—unique visitors, page views, and visits/sessions. These terms were defined by the industry and agreed upon and now the WAA has expanded their attention to the other metrics that rely on the original three definitions.

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The quality of your ad campaign is becoming a bigger factor in your paid search listing, more so than just paying for results. David Pann, Vice President of Marketplace Design and Matching for Yahoo! Search Marketing announced yesterday at SES some new enhancements and updates for Yahoo Search Marketing’s new advertising platform.

New Payment Option: PayPal

PayPal, which is a secure and flexible online payment option, will be available to all advertisers. Yahoo knows that a lot of their advertisers in the retail space already use PayPal so this feature will allow them an easy option.

Enhancements to Writing Ads

Advertisers will now have the capabilities to create, delete, edit and copy all saved ads (up to 20) for a particular ad group in one place. Advertisers will be able to compare performance and keywords of each ad against one another with one click.

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What do the University of North Carolina Greensboro, Clemson University, University of Texas San Antonio, Kennesaw State University and Arkansas State University all have in common? Yesterday they announced the launching of Google Apps Education Edition on all of their campuses. Web-based applications on their university domain will allow students to have access to school-related information on any device, anytime they need it.

Google Apps Education Edition includes the Google Docs & Spreadsheets Program, Gmail, Google Calendar shared calendaring, Google Talk instant messaging and the Google Start Page for a customizable home page on a specific domain.

In an effort to increase awareness, Google kicked off Google@School, which allows educational leaders and IT professionals to hear from other universities that have already made the switch on their campuses.

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Hitwise, a company that offers their clients from around the world insight on how customers interact with competitive websites, has just launched a new widget called Hitwise To Go. This new widget is the first in a series of widgets to be launched by Hitwise, and its RSS-based service will provide information about user behavior for the US, UK, and Asia Pacific markets.

“Releasing our data via desktop widgets makes it easy for digital enthusiasts to stay informed about key online trends as they happen. They also serve as a gateway to access a full archive of online statistics and other publicly available Hitwise data sources such as the Hitwise Analyst Blogs and our Data Center.” said Tessa Court, chief marketing officer for Hitwise.

Hitwise To Go will cover a slew of industry topics such as:

• Growth of newly launched websites
• Recent search trends

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