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Posts Tagged ‘TechCrunch’
Internet Ad Revenue Climbs to Highest Point Ever in Q4 2009
April 7th, 2010
The Internet advertising industry has seemed to have climbed out of last year’s recession in the fourth quarter hitting the highest revenue level ever. New data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau
and PriceWaterhouseCoopers shows that Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. climbed 2.6 percent annually in the fourth quarter to $6.3 billion, and were up 13.8 percent from the previous quarter. These U.S.-only numbers compare to 10.2 percent annual worldwide growth last quarter in Internet advertising revenues for the four largest Web companies as reported by TechCrunch. Industry revenues for the year as a whole were down 3.4 percent to $22.7 billion. It was the first year of declining revenues since 2001.
Does this mean the death of Internet advertising is highly exaggerated? I think so. Like many forms of advertising, the Internet is an ever evolving form of distribution, display and channels. While overall annual revenues declined from 2008 to 2009 (as shown below), the fourth quarter numbers for 2009 where record breaking.
Join the conversation with Gravity
December 17th, 2009
Earlier this week the high-profile stealth LA startup called Gravity announced their private beta. Initially started earlier this year and named Blue Rover Labs, the startup of former MySpace executives has been much anticipated and attracted venture capital for two top tier firms, Redpoint and August. Gravity is a new way of approaching conversational data on any given topic and is a bit of cross between forums and groups, with a social media angle of course. Gravity lets users create conversations around certain topics.
You can access Gravity via their website or in a distributed manner via widgets and APIs. In addition, Gravity plans to offer analytics services called Insights for any hosted conversation like you see in Twitter, FriendFeed and Google Wave. At its core, Gravity is creating a new way to think about conversational data and maximizing its value. Hear more about Gravity from the founders courtesy of TechCrunch below:
Ohai launches City of Eternals, bringing MMOGs to Facebook
November 11th, 2009Ohai is launching a new game that promise to take social gaming to the next level. 
City of Eternals, a vampire inspired massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), is currently in an invite-only Alpha mode – but is set to be released to the public later this year. This has clearly been a year of the social game leveraging Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, hi5 – to name a few. But this new release is a bit different. Ohai is taking social games to the next level by launching a MMOG that will have synchronous play on Facebook and on its own website, meaning live games with constant movement and action – effectively bringing the undead to life.
Ohai’s timing for the City of Eternals launch is perfect – jumping on the vampire craze of Twilight as the latest movie is set to release – The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Surely, hordes of Twilight-crazed teenage girls and boys will flocking to the City of Eternals launch.
Google runs Droid ad on homepage
November 6th, 2009Google, the undisputed king of internet advertising, has always maintained a clean ad-free homepage – until now. Under the famous Google-themed logo and search function is the “New! The Droid is on sale now. Learn more.” link.
This link takes you to a landing page where you can learn more about Google’s Droid features as well as order your Droid phone directly from Verizon.
Not a big deal for a little link on the homepage right? It really wouldn’t be other than the fact that Google has quite famously declared in the past that the Google homepage would remain ad free, compared to other portals. Google has run promotions in the past on their homepage, for instance in October, 2008, Google promoted the T-Mobile G1 — the first Android-based phone on the homepage. Plus, the release of the Droid is a big play against the Apple iPhone.
The real-time search wars continue – Twitter coming to Google soon
October 21st, 2009It only took Google a few hours to respond to Microsoft’s announcement from earlier today that their search engine Bing is now integrated with Twitter for real-time search results. Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience posted RT @Google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my! on the Official Google Blog.
The post by Marissa Mayer is short, to the point and clearly to attempt to rebut Microsoft’s announcement from earlier today. An excerpt from her post announcing the partnership is below:
“… we are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.”
Droid takes aim at the iPhone
October 19th, 2009Over the weekend, Google, Verizon and Motorola launched their public campaign for their new smartphone – which is targeted directly at Apple’s iPhone. The new Droid Android collaborative effort looks to be the first really threat to the iPhone and will be available later this month (the rumor is that it will launch at midnight on October 31). The targeted “iDon’t” marketing campaign, which highlights the features the iPhone does not deliver but the Droid does, took off this weekend with the following ad:
The Droid looks a bit thinner than the iPhone 3GS and has a number of features the iPhone doesn’t – like the ability to take flash pictures. The two biggest advantages the Droid has over the iPhone are the slide out physical keyboard and the coverage of the Verizon network which is much more pervasive than AT&T.
A new wave of real time search
October 7th, 2009When we think of search on the web players like Google, Yahoo and Bing site come to mind
. These players built their search dominance (some more than others) by approaching the web as network of documents that needed to be indexed. This approach of crawling the web and indexing content and analyzing link behavior has worked for years.
A lot has changed on the web since then. We now live in an age of real time content and streaming conversations. In this age, the traditional search players like Google, Yahoo and Bing can’t keep up with the ever-changing content and conversations on the web. In addition to an army of bloggers (yours truly included) site and services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg, MySpace and many others are adding to the flood of rapidly changin
g content. The result of this change if that more and more people are searching on these sites and services – as noted by TechCrunch earlier this year.
Social networking plus, online mobile gaming and location based services – who’s ready to play Foursquare!?
October 5th, 2009Foursquare has been making a lot of noise lately. They have assembled a number of “rock-star” angel investors which include; Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, angel inve
sting legend Ron Conway, delicious founder Joshua Schachter and Digg founder Kevin Rose – along with venture firms Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures as reported by TechCrunch. It seems like almost daily there are new, wonderful stories about how Foursquare is going to revolutionize social networks. Needless to say, the buzz being generated over the last few weeks has been pretty relentless.
So what is Foursquare? A social networking app – an online gaming app – a location based service? The answer is all of the above. Foursquare is merging elements of a social networking platform with elements of an online game all tied together with a cool location based system. Users compete for “mayorships”, and try to earn “badges” and get virtual points for checking in more places. By syncing their service around a “check-in” rather than GPS point alleviates the “stalker” element that surrounds most location based services.
Interactive Google iPhone Maps
October 3rd, 2009Google has just introduced user-generated content and ads into their iPhone Maps application. With this move, Google is taking another step in more closely linking the PC and mobile experience as they’ve been striving to do for the last several months.
See an example of a “Sponsored Link” – or ad to you and me – for a sushi restaurant in New York City.
In addition to these new sponsored ads, Google also introduced user-generated content in the iPhone Maps application. As noted by MG Siegler from TechCrunch, the feature is somewhat random and delivers info about people you may not know – not very useful in its current form. However, one would assume that since Google released this new feature without any fan-fare they are planning on making a few improvements and changes. See an example of the user-generated content feature below:
