Sony’s VP of Realistic Movements Kevin Butler is at it again, this time in a video ad for the PlayStation Move. He’s back from the future to thank us all for the success of the motion control device, and make a few jabs towards Nintendo and Microsoft for their efforts. Here’s a few choice quotes.
“Because real boxers don’t hit like this [flails arms exasperatingly]“
“It’s also got what we in the future call buttons, which turn out to be pretty important to those handful of millions of people who enjoy playing shooters, platformers, well, anything that doesn’t involve catching a big red ball.”
“C’mon, who wants to pretend their hand is a gun. What is this, third grade? Pew, pew, pew.”
Palm has finally launch an ad campaign that looks professional and a less creepy. Palm really need this new ad campaign to give sales a little boost, because they are quickly losing marketshare to the likes of Apple and RIM.
Email hacking is a big issue for thousands of people every day. If your Hotmail account for example has been hacked there are a couple of things that can be going on with your friend’s account, one of which is that she could be the victim of what’s called a “joe job”, when someone sends out spam to a random list pretending to be you. But they’re not, and they haven’t broken into your account, they’re just using some software that lets them specify “from = x@hotmail.com” and then looks just like they’ve used your account but haven’t.
After all, if the message you got from your friend Pegah was addressed just to you (e.g., had your yahoo.com email address as the “To:”) then that would imply that they sent messages one-at-a-time to each and every person in her address book. And that would be really tedious, wouldn’t it?
However, since you two are friends it sounds like it’s probably not a joe job after all, but rather that somehow her account has indeed been compromised or broken into somehow. Not good.
First step if you think you’ve been hacked: Change your password immediately!
Now, let’s try to figure out what’s going on. If your friend didn’t need to log in to her account that suggests that anywhere she’s previously logged in to check her email (like a public computer at the library or at school) remained logged in and if the next person on the system simply went to “hotmail.com” then they might well have found themselves logged in to her account. That’s why it’s so critical not to check the “stay logged in” box on any computer other than your own secure system.
Another possibility is that she has a virus or keylogger or spyware on her computer that let someone identify her account and password, then utilize them. I suspect that’s not the case, but it’s always good to run some decent antivirus and antispyware software to see if there are any issues. One that’s a good option and is free is AVG.
Finally, and this might be obvious, never, ever, ever share your password with any of your friends. BFF or boyfriend, it’s not that they are going to do something bad but that they too might make a mistake and log in somewhere unsafe then never tell you. Not good.
Hope this helps your friend clean things up. Again, step one, your immediate reaction to anything of this nature should be to immediately change your password to something new and complicated.
The New York Times and Gothamist have united over content and advertising opportunities.
In early February, the two news organizations got into an online battle in which Gothamist publisher and co-founder Jake Dobkin blasted the New York Times for “sucking on the teat of some old rich guy (or heir).”
But now, the New York Times is prominently advertising on the Gothamist site. Interesting!
Most analytics tools measure different things using different techniques, so its rather inevitable that they wont correlate.
I don’t know what system or package you’re using for counting your banner ad impressions, but I’m going to spin out a scenario and then you can tell me in the comments if I matched what you’re doing.
You have a number of different ways through which you get traffic to your site, ranging from banner ads running on other sites to search engine traffic, and perhaps even just good old-fashioned inbound links from sites that like your content or material.
Let’s say for purposes of discussion that the traffic I get from the Internet Movie Database site (imdb) is due to a banner I have running on the site (though it’s not, in actuality. I can’t afford to run a banner ad on that site!
For this traffic, we’d see that in thirty days I had received 232 visits from that banner.
Now let’s continue our hypothetical situation and say that Amazon, owners of the imdb.com site, sent me a banner traffic report that indicated that it had been shown 1000 times and of that 350 people had clicked on it.
Here’s the dilemma I believe you’re talking about: how can the banner display site claim 350 click-thrus when Google Analytics only shows 232 visits from the site where the banner is running?
Actually, there are two common causes. The most common is that many Web browsers let you mask or completely disable the “REFERRER” data, so that some of the people who are coming from the other site show up as “direct” or “unclassified” traffic.
The second reason could well be that they don’t actually make it onto your site long enough for Google Analytics to kick in. This can happen if there’s what I call a “fast bounce”: your page starts loading and they immediately say “oh, no, that’s not what I want” and click on the back button or a bookmark or something. You’ve probably done this yourself, actually.
Those are the two main reasons I can come up with but I suggest that if you are paying for banner ads and you are finding inconsistencies like you say, ask them to justify their numbers and see what they say.
I was browsing around Technology related sites as I do nearly every morning and came across some strange changes over at Techcrunch.
You will noticed from the image above Techcrunch has made some big changes to their advertising. Techcrunch was the leader in 125 x 125 advertising in the early days and now this format seems to be used nearly every blog, however Techcrunch has since removed the 125 x 125 ads from the top of their sidebar and placed them below each article.
By placing the 125 x 125 ads below each article this will decrease the visibility of these ads and also decrease the click through rate of the advertisers. Has Techcrunch decided that its difficult to sell 125 x 125 advertising? or have they just simply decided it is much easier and more profitable to add Google Adsense to the top of their sidebar, so they can gain more clicks and a higher margin on their advertising costs?
Mpire has been one of those companies to change their focus like the wind. In 2006 Mpire rolled out an online comparison shopping service for used products, then in 2008 it moved focus to WidgetBucks an online advertising network, but now its focusing on AsXpose which helps advertisers to identify whether their online ads are showing up in the proper places.
“It is one thing to tell people: ‘hey you showed up on porn. It is another thing to say: ‘hey, we guarantee you that you won’t since we proactively stop that from occurring,’” explains Kirby Winfield, chief revenue officer at the company.
This however unfortunately means the end of WidgetBucks which helps thousands of web site owners monetize their traffic (which includes Torrent Sites because WidgetBucks was one of their leading options).
While terrestial radio has suffered severe losses in listenership, satellite radio and applications like Pandora and Slacker have been on the rise. The transition was bound to happen as listeners sought after a la carte style music that played exactly what they wanted. The ability to make your own stations is the next step in this hierarchy of listener ownership of the digital airwaves.
So where does terrestial radio stand these days? Radio stations still maintain an online presence, now offering their streaming content direct from the website. So while advertisers begin to shift with the transition, radio struggles to stay relevant these days as the primary source of information, entertainment and our favorite music.
It was years ago that I was introduced to a little application called Earthtuner. I think it was around 1997 when I came across this application that allowed me to find radio stations from around the world. I remember this clearly because I loved listening to stations directly streamed over the computer from other countries. In the days before iTunes, music apps, and stations with stream content there was Earthtuner, my virtual connector to anything I wanted from around the world.
More recently there is a similar application called Antenna that runs on the Adobe Air platform and offers up similar services to Earthtuner. The application allows users to search a database or interactive map of thousands of stations. User will be able to search by country, genre, or by clicking on any area on the map. Leave ratings for other users as you browse the most popular stations that others have recommended for you.
Do apps like this make terrestial radio interesting again?
Antenna allows you to stream stations from around the world.
Last month we reported here on Crenk that Google had secured a deal will AdMob – a leading advertising company in the mobile market. They agreed to pay $750 million for the successful company.
However, the FTC has been asked to review the case as there are grounds for concern in areas such as privacy and market domination. Obviously an acquisition from Google would greatly expand the company and it’s worried that market domination could crush the mobile marketing industry along with several other large companies who currently act as competitors to AdMob.
A decision is likely to be made shortly concerning this deal between AdMob and Google which has gone wrong – however with issues such as customer privacy at steak the consequences (such as restrictions imposed on Google) could be dire.
As a website owner, one normally has to pick and choose between a range of off the shelf ‘creatives’, display ads, banners or keyword sets from ad networks like Adsense, Tribal Fusion or DoubleClick that are provided by the people who want to sell their products, Dell, Amazon, Chevrolet etc. These ads often clash with a publisher’s website, and can run out of inventory and revert to remnant or filler ads selling tooth whitening products or smileys, depending on how one sets up the account. Bedrock offers a different type of ad exchange, where publishers design their own ad slots on their website – a tech blog like ours might offer a link to a web hosting service, or an ISP, and instead of using the advertisers’ own ad format, we would provide a text link, or own-branded display ad that links through to whichever approved service provider makes the highest bid for the particular click that comes through that link. The ad will stay the same, but the advertisers bid on the inventory listed by the publisher (site owner), meaning that one click on the link saying, “buy a new laptop” might go to Amazon, and the next to eBay, depending on which of them is prepared to pay the most for the traffic, on a click by click basis.
It’s an intriguing idea, but one that depends on having a large number of advertisers on the roster to compete with one another – and Bedrock will have a tough time dragging those people away from the traditional services, abandoning the freedom to use their own ads in the process. On the other hand, it does put more power in the hands of the publishers to control the content of their own website, and push the ad content that earns them money on their own terms – after all, they know their user base best, and can adapt to serve their needs better. Another tool in the advertising arsenal can’t be bad. If you have any experience using Bedrock, please post a comment!
Mpire has been one of those companies to change their focus like the wind. In 2006 Mpire rolled out an online comparison shopping service for used products, then in 2008 it moved focus to WidgetBucks an online advertising network, but now its focusing on AsXpose which helps advertisers to identify whether their online ads are showing up in the proper places.
