Daily Bits

Archives for March 2008

TV Phones a Huge Hit in Japan

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Mobile TV technology in Japan claimed another milestone when it breached the 20 million mark since the program was started in 2006.

An excerpt from PC World:

The service is favored in portable gadgets over the conventional high-definition digital TV service because the processing power needed to handle the OneSeg signal is significantly lower. The maximum OneSeg data rate is about 416k bps (bits per second) versus about 20M bps for terrestrial HDTV.

OneSeg comes in the QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels) format. Nevertheless, the mass adoption of the service may be cues to users wanting more content rather than content with great quality when it comes to video on mobile.

Streaming TV is being seen as the next hot trend that is to take off with the proliferation of mobile devices. The popularity of OneSeg shows that much consideration has to be given to power consumption as well.

Awareness Test

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The Internet is the land of short attention spans. No doubts about that. What about you, do you think you aware of everything that is going on around the websites that you visit? Check the video below, basically you need to count how many passes the white team makes.

Interesting eh? Via Seth Godin.

Topicle: Community Powered Search Engine

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There is an argument going around the Internet that says that Google has its days counted. Basically these people argue that you can not search the Internet algorithmically. That is, you need to have some human input in the process if you want to make sure that the results are relevant.

Following that spirit with also have a myriad of human or community powered search engines emerging these days. Last week I came across Topicle, which is a pretty interesting one. Basically users can create sub-search engines, hand picking the URLs that should be considered for a given topic.

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Suppose you know all the cool sites that deal with digital photography. You could go there and create a search engine called “Digital Photography” and specify the URLs that should be used on the search queries. In a matter of seconds the search engine is functional and you and the other users can use it.

New Twist To Online Product Promotion

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Social Networks have been quoted as the potential melting pots for advertising but the recent approaches have not exactly paid off. FaceBook, the popular social networking site had tried a strategy at advertising that most of its users found to be too intrusive. But the approach being tried by a firm called bSocial may finally throw some light on how to approach product promotion in the social networking space.

An excerpt from LA Times:

The program, called Market Lodge, revolves around the notion that consumers are more likely to buy merchandise or services recommended by someone they know and trust.

Market Lodge, made by a startup called bSocial Networks Inc., will pay Facebook members a 10 percent commission on all sales made on their recommendations.

Beacon had failed to take off because it was tracking users interactions, which was perceived by many as a blatant invasion on their privacy. But using the whole strength of social networks implies making the whole promotion act advantageous to the user as well.

The Market Lodge program allows users to maintain online stores where they can choose to recommend several products. The online promotion method may pay off more than the pure advertising mechanism.

Online products such as social networks are valued more for their scale of memberships. However, in recent times there were worries that social networks may not be the best medium for advertising. This had led to much speculation that social networks were valued too highly as well (Consider FaceBook’s value being set at $15 billion, from the price that Microsoft paid for a stake in the social network).

Now however, it does seem that innovative products developed on the social networks as a platform could leverage the community power for furthering the marketing of products. And that would mean good advertising potential for social networks.

AOL Acquires Social Networking Site Bebo for $850 Million

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AOL will be acquiring the social media network Bebo for 850 million dollars. The deal comes in the aftermath of Yahoo’s reported courting for the site.

An excerpt from Mashable

Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO at AOL explains the move:

“What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers.”

This is one of the major deals to go through in the social networking space and follows on the prediction made by several industry analysts that social networking sites by themselves may not be able to generate enough revenue to sustain operations. Bebo was by no measure a struggling site, enjoying a membership of over 40 million with immense popularity among the Europeans (it is number one social network site in Ireland).

There is a lot of speculation on how the deal would perhaps make the chances of a Yahoo AOL partnership unlikely. The acquisition will boost the total network of AOL’s social media services to 80 million.

An excerpt from Associated Press

Ron Grant, AOL’s president and chief operating officer, said the deal should help AOL expand internationally and Bebo grow in the United States. He said the all-cash deal, expected to close in a month, also should give AOL an engaged audience from which it can generate additional advertising revenue.

“This is going to be the cornerstone of our strategy to really go after the social media space,” Grant said in an interview, adding that AOL would be looking to integrate Bebo with its instant-messaging communities, AIM and ICQ.

The move will enable AOL to expand revenues from its advertising services and Bebo, the third most popular social networking site in the US, will be a perfect complement to AOL’s behavior based advertising platform. While MySpace and FaceBook have had their share of trouble in effectively advertising to their vast audience, AOL would look to apply a very effective strategy to benefit here.

With Bebo, AOL is looking forward to international growth. Bebo supports the FaceBook platform and is also part of the Google inspired OpenSocial platform. The whole 80 million social graph that comes to AOL with this acquisition falls short of only MySpace’s scale.

Social networking sites have been a major attraction for internet media companies. But it is to be seen how they design the perfect advertising strategy that is acceptable to their users and gets results at the same time.

Google Search Comes to More Nokia Phones

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Nokia and Google announced their partnership to integrate Google search into search applications on more Nokia mobile phones.

An excerpt from Pocket-lint

The team-up will begin with the Nokia N96, Nokia N78, Nokia 6210 Navigator and Nokia 6220 classic. Google search will be extended to additional Nokia handset models in the future.

Ultimately, Nokia says it will make Google search available to its customers in over 100 countries around the world, serving mobile owners speaking more than 40 languages.

This partnership does not do away with the fierce rivalry that the firms are gunning at with Google’s Android platform set to come to market this year and many of Nokia’s competitors having signed up for that.

Nokia phones already offer Yahoo and Windows Live search as well.