the Web Chef's e-Bytes

Wacky Widgets Continue Growth

Fortune reports on the extreme valuation that T.Rowe Price and Fidelity have projected in Slide, one of the top widget producers given their recent $50 million, 9.1% stake investment in the firm.  Their 50 million widget users, with many more projected to be on the way, are seen as providing a potential monetization opportunity well beyond the keyword ad results associated with search engine giant Google.  With "engagement marketing" becoming the new mantra on the web, it is felt that what better tool to generate engagement then one where the user elects to interact for play, content acquisition or other purposes.

The article also references RockYou, "Slides" largest competitor. 

In other widget news, The Wall Street Journal references Gigya a widget distributor that recently raised $9.5 million.  In a brief report compiled by Scott Austin of VentureWire, the Journal states "The publisher can track the number of times a widget is installed, where it is placed and how many times it is viewed, among other metrics."

For more on widgets see my article "Widgets - web components for plug, play and pay" in Wisconsin Technology Network. 

Paul Gibler

Private Beta Launch - SlideRocket, web-based presentations

Tech Crunch reported on the private beta launch of SlideRocket "a presentation app that wants to recreate PowerPoint in the browser and take advantage of the web's sharing and mashup capabilities."  SlideRocket is scheduled to launch this summer. 

I took a look at their online demonstration and capability descriptin to see that they are touting a wide range of features and benefits across a wide range of presentation phases including creation, delivery, managment, analysis and community.  In the demo show they reference the following:

• online libraries for styles and presentation assets
• effects, builds, transitions and animations (including several not available in PowerPoint)
• presentation asset tagging, searching and sorting
• hyperlinks within presentations
• stylizeable charts & graphs
• ability to share presentations online

I've submitted a request to be invited to test out the application and once I have more to report I'll do so at my other blog, PPT - Powerful Presentation Techniques.

Paul Gibler

Web Tidbits - global and hispanic blogs, e-cards

I've been catching up on my blog reading and doing some general Internet exploration.  As part of this effort, I've come across a few posts that offer information on some interesting developments in e-business and marketing.

Innovation.net references IdeaBlob, a social network for idea sharing where community members vote on the best idea of the month, resulting in a potential award of $10,000.

Curious about marketing developments around the world?  Take a look at GlobalThoughtz, a consortium of bloggers from ten countries around the world (Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Russia, Scandinavia and the UK).

For a slice of the American demographic pie, you might want to take a look at Juan Guillermo Tornoe's Hispanic Trending blog.

Want to send a racier e-card?  Check out Someecards. (hat tip to Ad Freak)

Web Tidbits - Social Networks, Wikis

One year old Citizendium is hunting for a piece of the content pie seeking to be a reliable alternative to Wikipedia through the use of expert contributors.  According to the Financial Times they still have a ways to go given that the site only has 3,300 articles (compared to Wikipedias 2 million in English alone) and is growing at 14 new ones a day.  With the viral and network effects of the Internet the projections for the site are positive according to the founder Larry Sanger.

In the social networking space, Google announced the launch of OpenSocial, a consortium described by the Financial Times as "The technology that Google unveiled will let developers spread applications across any of the social networks that adopt it, removing the need to rewrite them for each one".  CNet is reporting that there are 26 companies that have joined the consortium including Google's Orkut (popular in Latin America), Hi5, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning, Beebo, Oracle, Salesforce.com, etc.

For more on social networks see my article "The expanding world of social networks" on Wisconsin Technology Network.

Video News and Views

UGC Principles
A coalition of video producers and distributers, sans Google's YouTube interestingly enough, have joined together to address copyright infringement issues on video distribution sites.  According to Adweek, the firms represented in the coalition included Microsoft, Fox, Disney, CBS, NBC, Myspace, Daily Motion and Veoh.  The set of principles that the group endorsed are posted here.  The Copyright Alliance has endorsed the principles as well according to AdWeek.

Online Video Articles
"Overcoming the Split Personality of Online Video" by Dave Graves at iMedia Connection gives an interesting overview of what's needed and what's to come with online video.

Not to be left behind, the issue of online video advertising metrics is addressed in "The Path to Better Video" by Bradley Werner at iMedia Connection.  Among the metrics reviewed in the article are the following:

1. % of Video Viewed
2. Time until first interaction
3. Brand Exposure time

Web Tidbits - Keys to Success Online, Etsy, Jellyfish

Business Week has put together an online exclusive called "The Keys to Online Success".   The series of articles includes everything from case studies on small business use of Web 2.0 tools to coverage of Podcasting to an online video on best practices for online businesses.

Catching up on my reading, I found an article in Business Week reviewing Etsy, an online marketplace for arts and crafts.  According to the article, the site doesn't use an auction model, but collects a .20 listing fee and 3.5% commission.

Madison-based Jellyfish, a comparison shopping site with a twist has been acquired by Microsoft according to the Capital Times.  The deal was apparently worth $50 million and for those of us that live in and love Madison, Microsoft will reportedly keep the company in town.  ZDNet's blogger Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft reports that it fits nicely with their focus on shopping results.

Web Tidbits - Mobile Marketing

Mobile Metrics
M:Metrics and AdMob have released research that finds that 65.5% of the recipients of ads delivered over the AdMob mobile network of over 2000 mobile sites delivering 1.4 billion ads found they are in the hard-to-reach 18 - 34 year old age group.  The research results include audience composition by age segment based on the network web site type - community, downloads, entertainment, news/info and portals. 

Mobile Marketing
In a related story, James Briggs, CEO of Briabe Media, points out that African American and Hispanic 18 - 34 year olds "consume far more mobile services than other groups". Among their activities are downloads, SMS, MMS and web browsing.

One Potato Two Potato... Couch to Web Potato

Couch potatoes are being joined by web potatoes and intermixing in the media consumption fields.  I'm more of a web and print potato myself, so was interested to read a recent posting in Business Week's Blogspotting on how offline is driving search according to research by iProspect. 

Their research found the following:

• 37% of searches result from television
• 30% of searches are generated from print ads
• 36% of searches are generated by word-of-mouth

Given that the Online Publishers Association says that only 4.6% of our Internet activity is search-related this isn't necessarily the biggest win for offline content providers.  They'd be better off looking at the growing percentage of time spent with content online.  This has grown from 39.6% of all consumer Internet Activitiy in July 2006 to 50.9% in July 2007, a startling shift away from communications and search among the four major items that the OPA tracks in their bucket of activities (communications, search, content and commerce). 

If I were a print publisher, I'd be ramping up my online content to an even greater extent. 

Web Tidbits - Video, Music

It has been a big week in the web content world with announcements all week about new services and agreements impacting video, music, mobile content and other web areas.

Video - French YouTube competitor, Dailymotion has received $34 million in venture capital funding according to PC World. The Wall Street Journal reports that they have 37 million visitors a month.

Meanwhile YouTube has reached an agreement to license 10 million pieces of music for a flat fee from the UK-based MCPS-PRS Alliance according to Forbes.

Fox and NBC Universal announced the name for their new video sharing service - Hulu according to Digital Trends.  The site is scheduled to go into private Beta in October.

Music & Beyond - Not to be left behind, Nokia has launched a new web brand, Ovi (or door in Finnish) that will provide music downloading and other services in direct competition with Apple's iTune and other web service providers according to VNUNet.  The service is expected to go live in the fourth quarter of 2007 with music, games and maps according to the Nokia Press Release (PDF).

Newspapers and the Internet - Good, Bad and Ugly

Editor and Publisher has an interesting article "Web Editors Reveal Flops and Failures" discussing the ways that newspapers have succeeded and failed with their online initiatives.  For anyone with an interest in online content strategies the article is quite interesting in describing the lessons learned.  Among those referenced are the following:

1. Blogs can backfire - typically from lack of reader interest or from content that doesn't connect
2. Technology can flop - interesting discussion of how the The Denver Post added a feature where content was refreshed every ten minutes in an effort to be very timely only to find that crossword puzzle lovers complained after losing their work or the failure of contextual ads for example where one paper had a story about unusual adult coated brownies only to find a Google ad next to it for brownies.
3. Readers can get ugly - with reader opinions ready to go ( I know I've added my voice once in awhile), content filters that editors provide have been missed with racy or inappropriate comments.
4. Not everyone wants to chat
5. Local content might be limiting
6. Pay for content can backfire
7. Print stories don't always translate to the web
8. Be selective in Podcasts
9. Manage the obits
10. Watch out on the types of databases that you provide
11. Separate Web and Print Sales Staffs Don't Succeed
12. Traffic spikes can cause unintended consequences

Read the article for specific case studies for each lesson learned.