Bringing accountability to the TV screen

Tivo and Amazon team up to deliver you an integrated HSN-style experience- when you watch any program. This is an interesting step in the continued blurring of the lines between TV and the Internet - it actually resembles the Google/Videoegg overlay ads very closely - just that there's only one "bidder" - i.e. Amazon and the medium is your TV. As this is limited to Tivo at this point, it will remain an interesting experiment, but I'm expecting this sort of overlay integration to become mainstream within the next 3 years. The big remaining question will be whether the merchants will be able to push this to a CPA model or whether the TV gods will insist on traditional CPM pricing. As usual, Tivo boldy steps forward with this attempt.

Twitter buying summize - let's hope it was mostly equity

A year ago Twitter consisted of 5 guys in a tiny shared office. Now they're apparently big and bold enough to buy 5 guys in an office for $15MM according to Alley Insider. Seems pretty frothy to me - couldn't they have hired 5 guys for $500k a year and done this themselves? Well, congrats to the Summize folks and all the best to Twitter.

Facebook Apps starting to open up new revenue streams

I just logged back into Biggest Brain for the first time in a while and found that they've now launched a premium version of the product that you can upgrade to right within the app. It's only $10/year - but given the marginal cost of nearly $0 that's pure profit; Kudos to Playfish for exploring this new revenue channel as an early mover. I'm a strong believer that during the course of 2008/2009 we will see significantly more advertising-supported businesses open up incremental channels besides banners, sponsorships and lead generation. I'd be curious to get my hands on some of the click rates for this attempt. As a marketer, i'm a big fan of having an upsell on the backend as it makes it easier for me to assign a budget towards getting more installs/ signups on the frontend.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Facebook Apps, Upsell, Social Gaming

Apple launches Itunes Applications for Iphone

Here's an article from Macrumors about the now live store and below is a screenshot. I'm very impressed by the broad selection of applications across several areas. There's loads of free apps but also a good amount of paid offerings. A screenshot of the health/fitness section is a here. Blackberry should get started on something similar soon if they want to maintain/ increase their market share for casual smart phone users. This is another huge step for Apple towards dominating the lifestyle smartphone users.

My first post from Scribefire

This post isn't going to be very meaningful, it's just the first time I'm testing Scribefire as my blogging interface. It's actually very easy to use. You should give it a spin. There's a handy tutorial here. Scribefire has also recently launched an ad optimization service (see: Rubicon Project); I'm not sure yet how this ties to the Firefox plugin but we'll find out. Happy 4th of July!

Germany Turkey - the redux

Germany won against Turkey on Wednesday in an exciting match. This is a pretty funny illustration of the event:



for the non-Germany speakers - it says "Failed to enter Vienna in 1529, 1683 and 2008 - admit it, you'll never get in!

Facebook adds phonebook - what it means for you

When I logged into Facebook a few mins ago I was presented with a feed item stating
"Name of friend" has changed her phone number to "123-456-789" - It's been added to your phonebook. This seems to be a new feature to me and definitely an interesting addition. It raises two questions to me:
1) Does this change the way we make friends on Facebook? I currently have a "friends plus network" policy on Facebook - and all these people could now get orderly access to phone numbers; unless you mark yours private (which, quick estimate, only 1/3 or so of my Facebook friends have done). Interesting privacy implications
2) In principle, this is a great feature - but can I sync it with outlook/entourage/plaxo/etc.?

I hope Facebook will keep on expanding this, integrate Jajah and really turn it into a "utility" feature. Let me know your thoughts on this.