Some of the most popular Twitter accounts (with followers well into the millions) come from well-known faces such as Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry. And of course, the president of the United States Barak Obama. He has over 2.6 million followers who will be disappointed to learn it’s not him behind the Twitter account.
I think everyone knew that he didn’t tweet all of the time but he actually said that he has ‘never’ used Twitter before!
It happened during a meeting with Chinese youth when somebody put a question to him about the freedom of the internet and information in China through networks such as Twitter. He then replied:
“I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”
To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if he got into a bit of trouble with his publicists who would have preferred to have people think he tweets. Oh well, half the celebrity Twitter accounts are fake anyway – at least this one is actually coming from somebody in the White House.
Here at Crenk we have decided that we’ll share our knowledge about technology and related subjects with you our readers. So we’ve released the first of what will be a collection of PDF manuals for you to enjoy. The first one is our Ten Minute Guide to the Blogosphere.
In it we detail such things like choosing you blogging platform, promoting your blog, using social networking for a blog and keeping your blog going once you’re over than initial hump.
The other day here on Crenk with did a post about the major Internet giant Google buying AdMob - a mobile advertiser and we predicted that internet advertising was due to come up. Well it seems like it most definitely has – thanks to search.
Google reported the first rise in advertising revenue in over two quarters. The third quarter of 2009 stabilized the sector. However, as I mentioned above it was all due to the advertisements in the search results pages not so much the advertisements on websites.
While this is good news it’ll still be a while until the other advertisers such as AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft recover from the recession – these being the weakest of the search engines.
So it appears that the advertisements on web pages still aren’t doing as good as what they used to simply because there are less ‘big’ companies using them. As such, people don’t want to click on them. Crenk’s advice for bloggers and webmasters? Use Google AdSence to put advertisements on your website’s search page!
It has been a very big day in acquisitions for both Google and Accel partners. Google has announced that they have acquired Admob and Gizmo5. Admob is a mobile advertising network in which cost Google $750 million.
AdMob founder Omar Hamoui sent the following letter to customers:
Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our advertiser, developer and publisher partners.
AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to deliver successful campaigns for you and to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns. Our business development team will keep working to maximize ad revenue for the more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications that make up AdMob’s publisher network.
After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our advertisers, developers and publishers by:
*Increasing our investment in building innovative and engaging ad units across platforms and to further improve targeting and tracking.
*Building even more powerful relevance and optimization capabilities, and more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.
*Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.
*Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our advertisers, developers and publishers.
Im very surprised that Admob sold out to Google on this occassion. I know that $750 million is not an average sum of money, but with Googles track record of advertising products that aren’t Adsense is pretty terrible. Back in February 2007 Google purchased Adscape, which still hasn’t really taken their in-game advertising product to the next level. Additionally, Google killed Feedburner’s very profitable advertising network and replaced it directly with a much worse product for the type of market, Google Adsense. Accel partners won out big on this acquisition as they and Sequoia Capital were the early investors.
Gizmo5 Acquisition:
Gizmo5 was the other company in which Google purchased today, but for only around $30 million in cash. Gizmo5 is a VOIP infrastructure. In previous months Gizmo5 was in talks with Skype about a potential sale, mainly because Skype was having big issues with their current infrastructure. This is a very interested move for Google, I’m not entirely sure why they purchased VOIP infrastructure. The only possible solution is that they are thinking about tying it in with their current Google Voice offering.
EA purchase Playfish:
After lengthy negotiations, Electronic Arts closed it’s anticipated acquisition of social gaming startup Playfish for $275 million in cash. An additional $25 million in stock will be set aside for retaining the top talent at the startup, and another $100 million in earnouts are part of the deal as well if the business hits certain milestones. This has no reaffirmed how lucrative this market current is. I would not be surprised to see a Zynga IPO or Playdom acquistion in the first half of 2010.
The fight against piracy has been ongoing in Europe since late last year when countries such as the Netherlands started to ban Pirate Bay. In Ireland, the main ISP Eircom, limited internet access to just 20 minutes per day for any of their customers found using the service and the owners of Pirate Bay were wanted men in the Scandinavian countries.
However, it appears as though the Danes are now “throwing in the towel”.
The main reason for this is the lack of adequate evidence which they can use to prosecute. Because, in terms of the law, the internet and the piracy associated with it are fairly new, there are no constraining laws which make it easy to prosecute. As it stands now, if the defendants don’t actually admit to having being organisers in piracy then they’re free to go.
To be honest, I’m still waiting to see if there will ever be a real prosecution and take down of a main service – anywhere.
SPAM is one of my pet hates. In fact I think that everyone reading this hates those annoying e-mails, comments left on our pages, tweets and clearly misleading advertisements that promise you a months salary in a few hours. I really, really hate SPAM. It’s useless and in this day and age it achieves nothing with its instantly recognisable language format, strange links and oh yeah, the promise of a few million bucks for transferring money.
Twitter and Facebook hate SPAM too. At the same time, both of them published posts to their blog that clearly announce plans to go on the offensive against spammers on their networks.
Twitter is due to start crating tweets and organising the trending topics section. This could mean one of two things:
Either they’ll simply remove an entire trending topic if it becomes too spammed.
Or they’ll painstakingly monitor tweets in trending topics with the first filter being a computer and the last a human.
They told us that the changes may not be apparent immediately – but I can assure you, it’s happening as you read this post.
Meanwhile, Facebook are targeting SPAM and scam ads on their network. This is a really big problem for two reasons. Firstly it lets users make their own ads and publish them – with so many it’s hard to catch all the scams. And secondly, they’ve gotten into bed with some shady advertising networks recently and are having a spot of bother breaking the relationships. Although they have assured us they’re in the process of ending two of them.
Let’s all pray for a SPAM free Internet in the mean time.
Google Wave has not been a big hit so far – everyone though it would be…but it hasn’t. The interface is complicated, buggy and unpractical. People aren’t staying long enough to build a community and worst of all – nobody is quite sure what exactly it’s for yet. However the development team are still making strides.
They have just opened up Wave to third party companies by releasing an API package. This allows companies to host their own Wave like services on their own servers and interact with other companies API Waves. This is currently only in sandbox testing and isn’t live on the internet as of yet.
One thing which concerns me is that this could mean the start of SPAM on Wave. Since its launch people have been confined to specific waves but now we’re seeing a growth in access. Although this growth isn’t enough to start a spamming campaign it could be the start of it. I’m pretty sure that soon the hackers and spammers will descend on Google Wave – then it’s up to Google to stop them on a platform which will supposedly be more open than e-mail.
This article was just written over at TheNextWeb. I didnt want to just rewrite the article for everyone so here is what they said. I was wondering if anyone has any answers, mainly because this is a Gmail account and could affect millions of people.
BBC Watchdog is British TV program that investigates viewers’ reports of problematic experiences with traders, retailers, and other companies around the UK. A recent investigation has discovered that wi-fi hot spots across the country are not secure – leaving tens of thousands of users at risk of fraud.
In this particular case they reveal how easy it is to hack into someones GMail account over Wifi, sending emails and changing their password. According to Danny Sullivan who shared the link on Twitter, if he’d signed via secure https, he’d probably have been safe – can anyone verify?
Here at Crenk we have noticed that our page rank has gone up to a PR 5, and a lot of other people have also been writing about the update. However, does anyone still actually care about Page Rank? or is it now all about building a brand and hitting the long tail keywords?
Over at Techcrunch they reported yesterday that the New York Times are now receiving nearly a quarter of their total revenues from online advertising.
The New York Times announced third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were down 17 percent to $571 million. Of that advertising revenues decreased 27 percent to $291 million, and the online advertising portion was down 8.2 percent to $68 million.
Last quarter, advertising revenues declined an even steeper 32 percent, and online advertising was down 15.5 percent. So maybe this is the first step on its way back to positive territory. Here are the year-over-year declines in online advertising revenues for each of the past four quarters.
Annual Decline In Internet Advertising Revenues
4Q08: -3.5%
1Q09: -6.1%
2Q09: -15.5%
3Q09: -8.2%
Another interesting data point is that because its print advertising revenues are shrinking at a faster rate than its Internet advertising revenues, the Internet portion is actually a bigger percentage (23.5%) of the New York Times’ total advertising revenues than it was year ago (when it was 18.6%).
I have been a firm believer that print business will slowly leave only the major players in each market and all the smaller business will have to move online or close. However, with these latest figures I now think even the major players could be in big trouble!
Some of the most popular Twitter accounts (with followers well into the millions) come from well-known faces such as Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry. And of course, the president of the United States Barak Obama. He has over 2.6 million followers who will be disappointed to learn it’s not him behind the Twitter account.
