Quigo prepares for IPO after signing deal with Time Inc.

Posted on June 29, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Contextual, Future, Journalism, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Tools and Services | 1 Comment

Batya Feldman reports in Globes Online that Quigo has raised $30 million from Institutional Venture Partners.

One to watch - they have c. 10% of the contextual ad market already.  I spoke with Quigo last year but it was slightly too early as they were not geared up to working in the UK.

If they get the service right I reckon this is where the majority of the large publishers will end up. The killer is that it allows publishers to retain and develop relationships with their existing advertisers - rather than pass them onto a third-party who may turn out to be a competitor (guess who?).

The key selling points from their site:

Own Advertiser Relationships

The advertisers you attract are yours. Build relationships and up-sell/cross-sell your advertisers new products. Earn revenue when they spend on other sites in the AdSonar Network.

Capture Your Brand's Value

Leverage your premier brand to command a higher cost-per-click from advertisers willing to pay for your site’s targeted, quality traffic. Set your own minimum bid – don’t dilute your site’s value on a network that doesn’t promote direct placements.

Don't Empower Your Competitors

The AdSonar solution is focused on one goal – helping you. Don’t surrender your advertiser base to networks that also compete with you for audience or advertisers. Take back control!

Viewing User Generated Content seventh most popular online activity in UK …

Posted on March 21, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Mobile, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Tools and Services, Traffic, Travel, Trends, User Generated | Leave a Comment

iLevel Internet Usage statistics - the “Activities on the Web” category is quite interesting - UGC (I guess this covers MySpace etc. as well as reading comments on news sites etc.) is seventh most popular category:

Using e-mail 25.00 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Sourcing Info on Activities/Interests 21.27 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Making Travel Plans 17.05 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at Cinema/Theatre/Concert Listings 14.88 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Listening to Music 12.12 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at Job Opportunities 11.59 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at User Generated Content 11.13 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Downloading Music (whether paid or free) 9.98 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Instant Messaging 9.41 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
To watch video clips 9.30 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
To play games 9.05 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor

New top level domain for mobile surfing

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Entertainment, Music, Search, Technology, Tools and Services, WWW | Leave a Comment

The International Herald Tribune reports on DotMobi - a new top level domain for sites that have been configured especially for mobile devices/cell phones.

Though still relatively unknown, dotMobi, which is based in Dublin, is backed by a powerful group of investors including Nokia, Ericsson, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Telefónica, Telecom Italia Mobile, Google, Microsoft and the GSM Association, which represents 700 cellphone operators around the world.

Sounds like a bad idea on many levels.  The article goes on to states that:

The World Wide Web Consortium, know as W3C, an organization that defines standards for the Web, and other proponents of “device neutrality” have argued that the technology already exists to send tailored content from existing Internet sites to specific devices with different screen sizes. The situation is further muddled, W3C argues, by the question of whether dot-mobi Web pages will link only to other dot-mobi pages.

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery

Posted on February 21, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Entertainment, Good Things, Search, Technology, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

National Archives of Japan - Digital Gallery has some great maps, photograhs and posters - this is one of a series on “Air-Raid Precautions and Civil Defense, Illustrated Posters of “Air-Raid Defense”.  

“You can run the keyword or layered search, and view the detailed descriptions and digitized images of the records preserved by the National Archives of Japan. You can, according to your circumstances for the use of the Internet, view the digitized images in the formats of JPEG2000, PDF or JPEG. You can also run the cross-file search linked to various data bases worldwide to share a wide range of information and knowledge.”

Media syndication startup Mochila gets $8M funding

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology | Leave a Comment

Red Herring reports on the new funding for Mochila.  They have an interesting model that combines good return for publishers on their licensed material when it is syndicated (70%) and a resonable 30% on any ad revenue generated from free material (40% goes to rights owner) - in both cases Mochila keeps 30%.

“The barriers into the media business are now very low. They’ve taken away the barriers of being a buyer of media,” Charles River Ventures partner Austin Westerling said. “What they’re basically doing there is creating an ad network on top of already high-quality content. I think there’s quite an interesting opportunity.” 

 

News aggregation and copyright in Europe and China

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Search, Technology | Leave a Comment

Good item from IHT on changes that are likely to reign in rampant “piracy” by Chinese web sites re-purposing content from newspaper sites and in Europe an overview of the ongoing court case by AFP against Google News.

According to one recent academic study, newspaper readership in China has declined sharply in the past three years, with the proportion of people who say they read a newspaper at least once a week falling to 22 percent from 26 percent since 2003.

A major presumed cause for the decline is that big Internet content providers, or portals, have become one- stop sources for all manner of information, from news and entertainment to blogs. Until recently, for most portals the general practice involved lifting news and other information directly from other sources, sometimes crediting the original source and sometimes not, but rarely paying for it. 

 

Decline and fall of a music empire

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Broadband, Copyright, Digitisation, Entertainment, Future, Music, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment

The FT reports on MusicZone’s slide into administration.  There is upside for the industry in terms of the growth of digital revenues but this growth is no where near enough to cover the dramatic decline in the revenue from physical formats. This will all sound very familiar to newspaper executives.

The downward trend has been clear for five years but recent figures suggest that the decline in CDs and DVDs has accelerated. The IFPI, the music trade association, reported a 10 per cent slide in physical format sales in the first half of the year around the world.

Ged Doherty, the head of Sony BMG’s UK operations, predicted two months ago that CD sales would halve over the next three years.

“We predict digital growth of 25 per cent per year but it is not enough to replace the loss from falling CD sales.”

Mr Doherty warned that, if current trends continued, by 2010 the industry’s total revenues could be 30 per cent lower than they are now. He said: “We have to reinvent.”

Yahoo and Dash hook up to provide mobile local search

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Broadband, Future, Good Things, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Wi-fi | Leave a Comment

In an interesting development Yahoo and Dash have announced a deal that will allow them to integrate local search technology within in-car SatNav and will connect to the internet via mobile phone or wireless network where available.

“It really is a new implementation of mobile search,” says Peter MacDonald, senior director of business development for Yahoo Local. “People need to find information about local businesses and what’s around them not just when they’re at their PC.”

Germany quits search engine project - aimed at developing European competitor to Google

Posted on January 3, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Future, Newspapers, Search, Technology | Leave a Comment

The International Herald Tribune reports that Germany has opted-out of the European funded research project aimed at developing a search engine that could compete with Google.

But according to one French participant, organizers disagreed over the fundamental design of Quaero, with French participants favoring a sophisticated search engine that could sift audio, video and other multimedia data, while German participants favored a next- generation text-based search engine.

“In Germany I think there was also resistance to the idea of a top-down project driven by governments,” said Andreas Zeller, chairman of software engineering at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken, Germany, which supplied advisors to Quaero. “Success in the end is something that can’t be planned but is something that begets itself.”

It sounds like the two countries disagreed on the basic objective. One of the French participants commented that:

“We wanted to develop multimedia search and the Germans wanted to develop text search. Part of the problem is that talk of a European challenge to Google exaggerated expectations.”

Interactive TV lets viewers edit shows

Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Broadband, Technology, User Generated | Leave a Comment

New interactive TV service being trialled will allow users to set preferences and even determine the outcome of programmes.

“The concept, based on technology developed by BT and a variety of broadcasting and content companies, lets the viewer structure news bulletins, documentaries and even dramas to suit their preferences, initially using text messages, though eventually through remote controls”.

keep looking »

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