the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Web Tidbits - MMA Announces New Ad Guidelines

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has released their new Mobile Advertising Guidelines (PDF).  The 14 page Guidelines include standards for SMS and MMS ads. 

Web Tidbits - IE and Internet Status

The Global Information Technology Report was released today.  The report prepared by INSEAD and sponsored by the World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. as fourth in Internet infrastructure following Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland.  China advanced in the rankings to 57th.  Other country rankings show up in their table "The Networked Readiness Table 2007 - 2008".  Ranking at the bottom of the list was Chad.  The Executive Summary of the report finds a world of growing interconnectivity with Less Developed Countries leapfrogging older technologies with the installation of WiMax. 

In other interesting statistics, Forrester Research reported a precipitous drop in Internet Explorer's market share with a drop of 11% in 2007 from 88.7% to 77.7% as Mozilla Firefox continued to gain share not only in the consumer market, but also in the enterprise market according to Information Week.  The article also reported that many companies had not migrated to IE7 sticking with the less robust IE6.

Where the Guys and Gals are...

Richard Florida, author of "The Rise of the Creative Class" and "Who's Your City?" has posted some very interesting demographic information profiling cities by their balance of men to women.  The map is intriguing in that it shows a pronounced east west divide with more single women east of that line and more single men west of that mythical line.  Data is for singles ages 20 - 64.   

I'd love to see an overlay of other geodemographic information about women-owned businesses, patent filings etc. to see how this correlates with other business information.

The data has some interesting implications for consumer marketers targeting singles of either gender.