Instant messaging grows up

"Instant Messaging has a huge user base worldwide. AOL alone carries two billion messages every day and the IM software stays open on the desktop for an average of six hours a day."

PVR owners watch more commercials

"Personally, I find myself watching at least one commercial per half hour of recorded content simply because it looked interesting during fast-forward. The popular industry folklore is that TiVo is killing the 30-second advertisement market, when my personal habits and this study contradict that."

Online Retail Officially Profitable?

"Of course, it's always easy to grow revenue when you're giving away dollar bills for seventy-five cents, which was basically the business model of many dot coms. Then, the bubble popped and many dot coms suddenly had to figure out a way to become profitable. Many went out of business, but slowly, survivors started to show quarterly reports with a lot less red ink. Now, a new study has found that the aggregate financial results from various online retailers shows that the overall industry is now profitable - not just a few of the bigger players. One of the main reasons for this unexpected profitability? The increasing use of paid search advertising. E-commerce sites have slashed their marketing budgets and have ditched costly (and useless) banner ads in favor of much more targeted text ads on search sites like Google."

IM for DM

"Yahoo! has a great IM tool for marketers called IMV. IMV integrates chat into a brand-based template or skin for their IM. So if I am a tweenage girl with a strong desire to express my individuality, I might accessorize with a "Choco-Kitty" brand skin on my IM software. Once set-up is complete, the brand appears in the IM screen as wallpaper with links ready to enable me to buy merchandise or send to my friends. The opportunity to tie brands to skins is vast. However, the key is to integrate the opportunity to transact."

Street Maps in Political Hues

"OR proof that all politics is local, look no further than Fundrace.org, which follows the political money to your front door. While records of campaign contributions have long been available online, Fundrace has a twist: plug in any address and retrieve a list of all the donors in the neighborhood, the names of their favored candidates and the amount bestowed."

Build Analytics into Your CMS

"But in my experience, the majority of CMS customers don't really need "world-class" when it comes to web analytics applications, and they can obtain a whole range of other functions that actually do help them with their business from a built-in solution. Furthermore, just because a CMS solution has a built-in web analytics module doesn't mean that customers need to turn it on - for those few cases where a more sophisticated tool is truly warranted, engineers can still integrate a higher end solution."

Game Theories

"Virtual worlds have produced some surreal rags-to-riches stories. When the on-line world Second Life launched, the players were impressed to see a female avatar industriously building a sprawling monster home. An in-game neighbour stopped by to say hello only to discover she was a homeless person in British Columbia, logging on using her single remaining possession, a laptop. Penniless in the real world, she belonged to a social elite in the fake one."

The Economist on ecommerce

"So e-commerce is already very big, and it is going to get much bigger. But the actual value of transactions currently concluded online is dwarfed by the extraordinary influence the internet is exerting over purchases carried out in the offline world. That influence is becoming an integral part of e-commerce."

Automakers and online advertising

"According to a report by TNS Media Intelligence/CMR, in 2003, the world's 15 largest automakers spent $160.3 million on Internet advertising, a 70 percent increase over just two years earlier. The news isn't good as in apparently sounds, since, despite that growth, automakers still spent only 1 percent of their total advertising budgets on the Internet, far less than companies in many other industries. However the Internet is seen as very helpful for targeting specific groups like gay people. DaimlerChrysler invested nearly 1 million $ on Gay.com, while General Motors spent on the same web site about 624,000 $. On the contrary Ford spent only $1,000 and did not advertise on any other gay-oriented sites."

Google's success not making ad industry friends

"Still, one legacy of the Internet bust is the popularity of accountable advertising like cost-per-click search campaigns. In the fourth quarter of 2003, Web advertisers devoted 41 percent of their budgets to performance deals that delivered a click or a customer, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That's up sharply from 26 percent in the same period of 2002. CPM deals comprised 40 percent of 2003's fourth quarter, down from 46 percent in 2002."

Need a job? How about a date?

"The network services, however, will be able to offer a time-trusted approach to love and labor: A set of people willing to vouch that someone is compatible with you and worth taking to dinner or putting on the payroll. Says Mayfield: 'If I go out on a date and do something inappropriate, that information will go back into the network, so any action I take will risk my social capital,' Mayfield notes. That informal but effective rule creates the sort of trust that a Match.com or Monster.com cannot duplicate. "

Instant Messaging: Slugfest on the Desktop

"'They're coming up with ways to add more creative potential for advertisers while trying to find that balance of giving advertisers a way to get the message out and making sure the core function, communication, isn't hampered,' said Joe Laszlo, senior analyst for Jupiter Research, owned by the parent of this company. 'All these guys are worth watching if you're an advertiser,' Laszlo said. 'IM windows have more of a lasting presence as opposed to a Web page someone will look at and leave.'"

Content Management System Optimized For Search

"How important is having your content optimized for search these days? Apparently, it's so important that a content management system vendor has teamed up with a search engine optimizer to make sure the content management system itself is built to be ranked higher in search engines. That, alone, should suggest just how much some people are focused on better search engine rankings."

The Unfolding Saga of the Web

"Now we're moving back -- and forward -- toward sharing applications. The big change will be services, being able to do most of what you need and want to do in your life on the Web. We've already seen that happen with travel and banking. We're starting to see it with health care. Government Web services is about five years out. But eventually we'll be able to conduct much of the business of our lives online."

12 Laws of Customer Loyalty

"Gartner Group estimates that 70% of North America's call centers will migrate to multi-channel contact centers by 2005. This means that those agents need to be as equipped to write a well-written email reply and navigate the company Web site as they are in being helpful and friendly on a phone call."

Personalization for Joe Public

"This points to the other reason CMS vendors are moving away from personalization: it is hard and expensive. Personalization is expensive at design-time (to account for permutations); at author-time (adding scads of metadata, just right -- errors here can lead to embarrassing results); at release-time (testing all those permutations); and at run-time (you may need several multiples of server power for the degree of dynamism you're seeking). So make sure you are really adding value for your customers, and calculate your ROI very carefully..."

Trying to Prove Value of Web Ads

"Consumer Direct is being run in tandem with ACNielsen's Homescan unit, which records the off-line purchases of roughly 60,000 consumer volunteers. About 19,000 of those have also agreed to let Yahoo track their surfing behavior and offer feedback on purchases to Consumer Direct advertisers. From late 2002 through early 2003, Yahoo and Homescan tested marketing campaigns for a handful of companies, including Pepsi and Purina, to see if online ads encouraged consumers to choose those brands of soda and pet food. Buoyed by the initial results, the companies sought out more of the top makers of consumer goods late last year and refined the program."

Urban Atmospheres/Urban Probes

"'There is little doubt that laptops, PDAs, and mobile phones have enabled computing to become a truly mobile experience,' says the Lab's Web site. 'With these new computing devices, we emerge from our office, work, and school into the urban fabric of our cities and towns. We often view these urban areas as 'in-between spaces' -- obstacles to traverse from one place to another. However, not only do we spend a significant amount of time in such urban landscapes, but these spaces contribute to our own formulation of identity, community, and self. Much of the richness of life transpires within our own urban settings. Similarly, there is a growing body of work within the field of social computing, particularly those involving social networking such as Tribe, Friendster, and Live Journal. At the intersection of mobile and social computing, we seek to provoke discussion aimed at understanding this emerging space of computing within and across our public urban landscapes -- Urban Computing.'"

News Media Calls Mobile Content a "Problem"

"If anything, publishers are actually angry at new media outlets, especially news delivered to mobile phones. At a conference in Italy, publishers from around the world complained that 'non-traditional communications' are quickly outpacing traditional print, radio, and even television news media. Mobile phones don't just change the delivery medium, they also change expectations regarding news content."

Online Teens Shape Trends

"The report identified different habits among the online boys and girls. While teen boys spend 150 percent more time per week playing online games than girl, the girls are spending 22 percent more time online. Sehgal comments on the gap in the breadth of online activity usage between teen girls compared to teen boys: 'According to an online activity index, an aggregate of a variety of online activities, more 14 year-old teen girls are actively involved in various online activities than 17 year-old teen boys.'

A multichannel mix of online and television would likely reach the teen population. The report reveals that 12 to 17 year-olds spend seven hours per week online versus 10 hours watching TV, an online-to-TV gap that is wider than that of adults. Teens also more regularly engage in instant messaging, Weblogs, gaming, music and movies than adults."

The Engine That Drives Success

"And what about Web services, which Carr says will further commodify software? Evidence to date suggests the opposite. This revolution in software is changing the Web from a medium for presentation of information (that's what HTML was about) to a computational platform. Yes, the Net is becoming an infrastructure, but a programmable one! This will create infinite opportunities for custom software development, new business design and competitive differentiation. Software companies in the future will build components, enabling their customers to deploy custom functionality."

How Much Does Information Technology Matter?

"In my view, companies cannot afford to ignore information technology, or relegate it to the back burner. Commoditizing it does not necessarily mean innovation slows. If anything, it could accelerate as more and more innovators experiment and tinker with those cheap, ubiquitous information technology commodities."

What's The Buzz?

"Companies have long recognized that word of mouth is one of the most potent weapons in a marketer's arsenal. The trick has been to harness that power in a disciplined, strategic way. A two-year-old Boston company, BzzAgent LLC, aims to do just that; it has assembled a nationwide volunteer army of natural-born buzzers and will channel their chatter toward products and services they deem authentically worth talking about."

Playing Politics in Alphaville

"Alphaville is one of the oldest and most densely populated towns in the Sims Online, a massively multiplayer version of the most successful game franchise of all time. The game’s creator, Will Wright, has often said that he did not have any idea what would happen when he put the Sims online. He knew players would become deeply invested in their characters and their communities. He could not have projected that organized crime would run rampant, that community leaders would organize against con-artists and prostitutes, or that the elections would devolve into mudslinging and mutual accusations of manipulation."

You surf just like a woman

"A habitue of Craigslist, Rachel says she has used the Net to find a roommate, find her apartment in Hayes Valley, and find her part-time job. If she gets lost and doesn't have Net access, she'll call a friend who does and ask her to go to MapQuest and get directions. She pays all her bills online and reads the news on S.F. Gate and N.Y. Times.com, two sites she doesn't even bother to refer to by the names of the newspapers they represent. She's selling a car online right now. One exec asks Rachel, who first logged on in 1994, when she was 12, "What percentage of your life is influenced by the Internet?" Her answer: 100 percent."

SuperGoogle: When All Is Known

"Against a backdrop of pervasive information about everything and everyone, and the emergence of SuperGoogle-like technologies and services, privacy must be redefined. Focus on whether there should be contextual ads next to our e-mail or whether a cookie is placed on a computer by a browser so it can track preferences is analogous to using a garden hose to put out a forest fire."

The Future Of Customer Relationships

"In the heyday of the dot-com era, many believed that the old laws of business and relationships had been revoked. In their highly influential book Blown to Bits, Evans and Wurster proclaimed that there was no longer a trade-off between 'richness' and 'reach,' and that henceforth companies could reach as many customers as they wished without sacrificing richness of interaction."

The weakness of Google

"In search, Google is now vulnerable because the barriers to entry to its market are low. This is the big difference between Google and eBay, the firm held up by the bullish analysts as a valuation benchmark. The auctioneer keeps ahead of rivals due to "network effects" that draw traders to the most liquid market, whether in shares, cars or second-hand junk. In search, network effects do not apply. Hence, in the late 1990s, Google was able to displace the cognoscenti's engine of choice, AltaVista. Hence, too, Google may in turn be ousted-perhaps by a bright new upstart, such as Mooter, an Australian engine that draws on psychology to improve search results, or, more likely, by Yahoo! or Microsoft."

Behavioral Targeting Works

"Ads targeted by user behavior drove 73 percent greater brand favorability and 29 percent more purchase intent when compared to ads placed in content areas, a Dynamic Logic study of a Snapple campaign on iVillage found. Despite the lack of public research backing up its effectiveness, behavioral targeting has become one of the most talked-about areas in online advertising."

Star Wars Galaxies Economic Data

"MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) economies are hard. It's kinda become a truism by now. There's models for closed economies and open ones, there's terms lifted from real economics thrown around, and lots of theory about faucet-drain economies, mudflation, and whatnot. Why bother? Well, mostly because the game gets more boring when the economy is out of whack. If too much money is entering the system, then players tend to have more stuff than they should be able to afford, and that makes the game easier, which then can make it kind of dull. So the health of the game economy is something that we pay pretty close attention to."

BBC TV on the internet

"Viewers will be able to scan a guide on their computer screens and download any show they want to see. Programmes will be viewable on a computer screen, or could be burned onto a DVD to be watched through a television set. 'If we don't enter this market, then exactly what happened to the music industry could happen to us, where we ignore it, keep our heads in the sand and everybody starts posting the content up there and ripping us off,' he said."

Is Everything Becoming A Service?

"However, he can't believe service providers haven't figured out that they should be giving out the phones for free to encourage more service usage. He says other physical goods will follow the same pattern. He even predicts that you may get your car for free, but you'll have to pay for the service to make it run - such as alerting you that it's time for an oil change, and telling you that the nearest garage is ready and waiting for you. "

What Makes a Good CIO

"A good CIO doesn't just understand IT, but understands how to knit the technology into the fabric of the organisation. You need somebody who can think strategically, who has vision and who understands the length and breadth of the business, so they are spotting where it is that IT can be applied to achieve a business advantage."

Downloading Again

"One effect of the recording industry's campaign has been to shift users' downloading preferences. Based on data from comScore Media Metrix, the Pew survey estimates that between November 2003 and this past February the number of people actively using the free service Kazaa dropped by five million. By contrast, use of eMule and BitTorrent increased."

E-Biz Strikes Again!

"Uh-oh -- the threat is back. Net companies have survived their nuclear winter, and throughout the economy, big companies are again under assault. Again, the Web is threatening to force down the prices charged by traditional players, squeeze their margins, and even put some out of business. New technology, new ways of doing business, and new approaches to cutting out the middleman mean the old pricing power is collapsing in a series of industries -- and existing leaders will be forced to find new ways to make money."

Women and the Web

"The Real Women. Digital World. Research revealed that the landscape of the women's daytime audience has changed dramatically over the last 30 years, as more women have entered the workforce. According to the research, women rely on the Internet to manage all facets of their work, family and social lives. Women indicated that their total time spent on individual activities in one day added up to 38 hours of activity inside a 24-hour day. The Internet has enabled women to multi-task while facing this 38-hour day and has become a central fixture within their lives. Despite the increased time at work and online, one-quarter of the women surveyed are actually spending more time with their family than they were a year ago. The women surveyed indicated one reason the work-life balance seems to be shifting in a positive direction is the efficiency and empowerment that the Internet affords them."