Advertising: Movies, TVs and Magazines Work Together in Web Campaign

As major marketers shift more of their advertising spending to the Web, media companies like Hearst Magazines are scrambling to keep up.

New York Times

AdMob Offers First Facebook Mobile Advertising Solution

San Mateo based mobile advertising solutions provider AdMob has announced AdMob for Facebook Mobile, a mobile advertising solution for developers of third-party Facebook applications.

AdMob has enabled optimized mobile ads for Facebook Mobile, which developers can use to monetize their mobile applications. Developers can start showing ads and earning money immediately.

AdMob for Facebook Mobile is said to be the first monetization solution for Facebook Mobile developers.

TechCrunch

EasySponsorship: DIY Fundraising

EasySponsorship is a free online application that allows users to create their own online sponsorship/fundraising pages to collect donations from anyone from anywhere in the world for anything.

Each user is given a unique web address that they can send to friends and associates as part of their fundraising efforts. Supported currencies are Pounds Sterling, US dollars and Euros. The service is completely free and all money goes straight to the user, with a revenue model reliant on site advertising.

TechCrunch

She’s Famous (and So Can You)

Tila Tequila’s grasp of the marketplace proves brilliant.

TILA TEQUILA turned 26 on Wednesday, and the reader is advised to do whatever is necessary to forget that useless fact. Wipe it, as the metaphor goes, from the hard drive. Try also to obliterate the knowledge that Tequila is not, oddly enough, her real name (Nguyen is); that she is what Wikipedia — in an entry only slightly less extensive than that on Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian novelist and 1928 Nobel laureate for literature — refers to as an “American glamour model”; that she is a former performer on the Fuse cable TV show called “Pants-Off Dance-Off”; that she is the centerpiece of a hit MTV television series “A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila,” which made its debut early on Oct. 9 and was immediately, as the Hollywood Reporter noted, No. 1 in its time period in the network’s target demographic of people 18 to 34; and that the signal reason for this breakout success may also be the basis for Ms. Tequila’s unconventional fame, her boast that she has 1,771,920 MySpace friends.

Dispose of the information. You won’t need it for long.

How, one may ask, is it possible for a personality who great hunks of the citizenry never imagined existed to build up a social network more populous than Dallas? How can Tila Tequila have become enormously famous having done little of note beyond appearing as Playboy’s Cyber Girl of the Week? When exactly in the Warholian arc of fame did we arrive at a point where we create celebrities of people so little accomplished that they make Paris Hilton look like Marie Curie?

Who says any longer that one must be able to sing or dance or emote in order to attract an audience or, anyway, a batch of new friends in the ether? Who says that only winners win? As reality TV, with its durable affection for flame-outs, car wrecks and actual losers, has made abundantly clear, even after the tribal council has voted you off their tropical island, you’re still welcome in our homes.

When Jake Halpern set out to write “Fame Junkies,” his book about what is now a universal obsession with celebrity, he was surprised to uncover studies demonstrating that 31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)

“Obviously people have been having delusions of grandeur since the beginning of time, but the chances of becoming well known were much slimmer” even five years ago than they are today, Mr. Halpern said. “There are an incredibly large number of venues for becoming known. Talent is not a prerequisite.”

New York Times

Pay Up, Kid, or Your Igloo Melts

A virtual penguin teaches kids how to spend real cash, upsetting some parents.

New York Times

Hello, India? I Need Help With My Math

In a new wave of global outsourcing, personal chores are moving offshore, and this is leading to some daunting challenges, both economic and cultural.

New York Times

AOL To Announce Internet "Do-Not-Track" List

Most consumers are familiar with do-not-call lists, which are meant to keep telemarketers from phoning them. Soon people will be able to sign up for do-not-track lists, which will help shield their Web surfing habits from the prying eyes of marketers.

Huffington Post

Who needs an ad agency when your corporation is a cult?

I guess there's not much point in doing creative development when when someone's already made your commercial, and tested it, for you. An 18-year-old student from Leeds gets his youtube video polished up a bit to be the television commercial for Apple’s new iPod Touch.

New York Times

EveryScape's 3-D Maps Take You Inside Landmark Buildings

EveryScape's 3-D maps go one step further than Google: They let you explore the insides of buildings, too. The service, launching next week, will give virtual explorers views of restaurants, hotels and landmarks in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Seattle.


Wired

Gnarley: FunnyOrDie Extends Into Extreme Sports

Will Ferrell’s FunnyOrDie video startup is spreading its wings with a new site: ShredOrDie, focused on extreme sports and hosted by pro skateboarder Tony Hawk.

TechCrunch

In Foray Into TV, Google Is to Track Ad Audiences

Google plans to announce a partnership with Nielsen to give advertisers a better snapshot of how many people are viewing television commercials on a second-by-second basis.

New York Times

WPP Group Buys a Top Digital Agency

The WPP Group, the giant advertising company, bought Blast Radius, a leading interactive agency, as part of a digital shopping spree.

New York Times

Microsoft Buys Stake in Facebook

The investment ends two months of jockeying among Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for the right to invest in and forge close ties with the fast-growing social networking Web site.

New York Times

New eBay site helps finance poor

Ebay launches a new web site that allows people to invest in loans that lift people out of poverty.

BBC News

Virtual worlds threaten 'values'

Virtual worlds for children could undermine the human values that societies need them to learn, says industry veteran.

BBC News

Facebook Experiments With Ads Targeting People’s Interests

The big promise of advertising on social networks has always been the ability to target members by their own self-proclaimed interests and demographics. Facebook, as expected, has quietly taken a step in that direction with its Facebook Flyers ads (these are sidebar advertising widgets that Facebook still controls, as opposed to the majority of ad inventory on Facebook that falls under its deal with Microsoft). In terms of revenues, these Flyers probably don’t amount to much yet, but this is one Faecbook experiment worth keeping an eye on.

TechCrunch

BlinkBox: User Generated Ads For Movies, TV (and it’s fun)

A new UK startup launches on Monday called BlinkBox. Users take pre-created clips from movies and television shows (the clips can be shortened by the user) and add a personalized message at the beginning.

TechCrunch

Google’s Purchase of Jaiku Raises New Privacy Issues

While Google’s Jaiku purchase may not seem like an earth-shaking event, some say it is the start of a truly interconnected world, where a chunk of our existence will migrate online.

New York Times

The Web as Dominant Platform: Google VP Articulates a Revolution

Jeff Huber, Senior VP of Google, talking about Google "Gadgets" (aka Widgets ) at the Web 2.0 Summit made a very telling statement about the future of computing:

“The Internet has already won. The Web is the platform–a mosaic of gadgets, APIs and container all over the Web.”

His declaration of the web as the dominant platform in computing describes an approach to software design that is kind of a no-brainer for anyone watching the trends in desktop widgets, Facebook applications and the like. However, this kind of thinking also represents a paradigm shift in the established thinking about how we use computers.

Thinking about networks as the basic platform, not as a function of computers, but as their essential identity, represents a change in how companies will approach software design, and how users' will approach their own PCs.

Reading this, I can't help thinking of Sun Microsystems' original vision of the future of computing; as network based, with applications living on the network rather than individual hard drives, and PCs being little more than dumb terminals with storage capacity for personal files.

The ramifications of such a structure, however, are far reaching, affecting computer cost and, therefore, the so-called "digital divide", collaboration and, therefore, the structure of new business, as well as security, ownership, copyright, and much more.

It's a simple statement that, as I said, seems obvious to anyone with a passing interest in the subject. The downstream effects of this thinking, however, are very significant.

ZDNet

If You Thought a Half-Hour of TV Was Worth 4 Minutes, Here’s Proof

The mini-episodes of discontinued TV programs, to be shown online, are part of a Pepsi campaign designed to celebrate the brand’s old logos, slogans and jingles.

New York Times