Web advertising spend tops £4bn for first time

By Ramy Ghaly

Online advertisers in the UK took their annual spend to more than £4bn for the first time last year as the digital market share hit a record high.

Research published today by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the accountant PricewaterhouseCoopers showed that online advertising grew by 12.8 per cent, from £3.5bn in 2009 to £4.1bn a year later. 

The digital share of the UK's total advertising spend of £16.6bn last year rose to 25 per cent. 

The consensus expectation for online advertising for this year is growth of 7.7 per cent, although the IAB said its internal predictions were more optimistic.

Much of 2010's online growth was driven by display advertising, which increased by 27.5 per cent from a year earlier to £945.1m, as more and more companies shifted spending on to the web. 

Search advertising continues to dominate online advertising spending in the UK, which rose 8 per cent in 2010 to £2.3bn.

By THE INDPENDENT via Ctrl-News

Is Mobile BI Worth the Hype?

By Ramy Ghaly

 

If yours is like the average business, chances are your need for mobile analytics is, frankly, limited. Most companies are toward the wide end of the funnel shown in the graphic below, with many employees using mobile devices for mundane matters like email access (the classic "BlackBerry use case"); perhaps a few of them benefit from high-end functions like alerts, and even fewer from interactive mobile analytics. 

For users to benefit from mobile BI, they must be able to navigate dashboards and guided analytics comfortably -- or as comfortably as the mobile device will allow, which is where devices with high-resolution screens and touch interfaces (like the iPhone and Android-based phones) have a clear edge over, say, earlier editions of BlackBerry.

The next time your BI vendors touts its mobile business intelligence capabilities, invite them to present use cases that demonstrate these capabilities as implemented at other customers.

 

Read More: "InformationWeek" Via ctrl-News

HP To Acquire Analytics Specialist Vertica

By Ramy Ghaly 

The buyout will help HP counter IBM's recent acquisition of Netezza as analytics sector heats up.

Hewlett-Packard said Monday it agreed to acquire Vertica, a privately-held developer of software that lets businesses analyze and interpret information stored in enterprise databases. The move should help HP keep pace with rival IBM, which recently bolstered its analytics portfolio with the buyout of Netezza. 

HP officials said the deal will help enterprise customers cope with vastly increasing amounts of information coming into their organizations—through the Web, mobile phones, smart devices, and other sources.

IBM enhanced its analytics portfolio late last year with the $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza, which bundles analytics software with specialized hardware.

HP said it expects the deal to close in the second quarter.

Read More "Information Week" Via ctrl-News