Marketing Pilgrim

Unlike last time, there’ll be no snafu about whether the time is right to reveal the new MSN Homepage–it’s now officially live for all.

New features include:

• TrendWatch – Highlights the day’s top trends and movers on Twitter
• Hyper-local Tweets – Uses the power of Bing to highlight tweets from your location, available on the new Local Edition
• My Cities – Personalize MSN Local Edition and save up to 3 cities to follow – making it easy to keep up with your friends or family across the entire country

You should already see the new design at MSN.com or you can head here: http://www.msn.com/preview.aspx

Thoughts?

While you may be aware of WPP in general it may be worth a look to see just how big this media conglomerate is. Last week the company stated that digital will account for 2/3 of its business over the next three to four years. Considering they did about $13 billion in revenue in 2009 this is no small statement.

Those of us on the Internet marketing side of the fence tend to see this kind of announcement and scoff by saying “No kidding! You finally figured it out, huh?” which can be fun for a moment of over time starts to sound childish. The world has moved at breakneck speed to the digital side of the ledger and in the process is undoing how media has been bought and sold for the past 60 years or so. Nothing that big and entrenched changes overnight.

Leave it to Yahoo’s CEO Carol Bartz to stir up a little controversy from time to time. It seems like that’s the best way for Yahoo to get in the news these days. In recent months most stories are more about what Yahoo used to be and people trying to figure out what it will be. For any business, especially in the Internet advertising space, news of progress and innovation is a better message wouldn’t you say?

So when AdAge sat down with Bartz she had boat loads to say and the most interesting came at the end of the interview when she called out the advertising industry.

Yahoo celebrated its 15 year anniversary yesterday and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz decided that it would be the perfect time to take a swipe Facebook.

When asked why Yahoo wasn’t as hot as Facebook, she replied: "Facebook? What’s their revenue?"

Oh no she didn’t!

Well, as if on cue, Inside Facebook comes up with some compelling calculations that suggest Facebook will hit $1.1 billion 2010.

First, their calculations for 2009–keep in mind these are simply guestimates.

Then, estimating revenues for ads, partnerships, virtual goods, and such, they come up with their 2010 prediction:

A wide variety of sources we spoke to expect Facebook to pass $1 billion in revenue this year, possibly reaching $1.1 billion. This is significant growth, but likely still the start of the hockey stick.

And boy, it is some hockey stick!

The battle between Google and Apple is heating up and how it shakes out is likely to influence how a lot of online business is done both now and in the future. You know things are serious when one of the partners, in this case Google’s partner HTC, gets hauled into court by Apple for alleged patent infringement and Google, who is not even named in the suit, comes to support HTC.

TechCrunch provides some intel

As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, Apple has filed a lawsuit against device-maker HTC over 20 patents they control. As you might imagine, Google has something to say about it too.

“We are not a party to this lawsuit. However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it,” a Google spokesperson emailed us.

If you were using Chrome, you’d already know what that headline means. (Okay, probably not.) Chrome is integrating a translation tool in its latest beta version. If you browse across a site that’s not in your default language, it’ll offer to translate it for you. Which may or may not help you understand it . (Since this page is in English, it probably won’t help you with the title. Sorry.) Other improvements in this edition of Chrome include better access to your privacy settings.

The translation tool will use Google Translate. While machine translation is growing by leaps and bounds, however, it may not be enough to help you understand the page. We’ve seen many times that, like all machine translation, Google Translate isn’t a perfect tool—and many times, it can’t even convey the gist of the page.

I gave it another shot this time around. This one was pretty good (original):

Apparently Google’s promise to bring ultra-fast broadband to select communities has small towns in a tizzy.

I was pleasantly surprised to see neighboring Durham, North Carolina step up to the plate:

After Google put out an RFI, or request for information, on the company’s blog on Feb. 10, about 50 people gathered at the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce last week to form groups helping the city of Durham gather information for an application.

The possibility of getting Google Fiber in Durham has also generated much enthusiasm online. A Facebook group has been formed with nearly 700 fans, and a Web site has been created at www.hifiberdurham.com, where people can submit ideas on how they would use the ultra-high speed network.

Oh Durham, you’re going to have to try harder.

Apparently the people of Topeka, Kansas, want Google broadband so bad, they are willing to change the city’s name to Google, Kansa–albeit not officially:

Manoj Jasra discovered this entertaining video that takes recent research and puts it into a format that is actually enjoyable to consume.

Some of my favorite statistics:

• 90 Trillion emails sent in 2009, 81% of which were spam
• 4 billion photos hosted on Flickr
• 148,000 zombie (think botnets/click fraud) programs created each day!

What catches your attention?