Semantic Technology Conference & Expo Announces Amdocs, BBC, and the Department of Defense to Keynote June 5-9 in San Francisco

Semantic Technology Conference & Expo Announces Amdocs, BBC, and the Department of Defense to Keynote June 5-9 in San Francisco

How “mobile Ads 2.0″ Will Let You Take Control of Your Monetization

By Ramy Ghaly

Along with the growth on the product side, monetization has followed, as Google's recent earnings call demonstrated. We were fortunate to join the team at AdMob that pioneered some of the first mobile smartphone banners, which have driven results for advertisers and publishers alike for years. 

However, now that smartphones are increasingly consuming users' attention and discretionary purchasing dollar, we are starting to see a shift in how advertisers and publishers think about monetization in mobile. This is resulting in a new wave of mobile advertising innovation – "mobile ads 2.0" – and with it, a wide range of novel approaches. 

The key theme of mobile ads 2.0 is publisher control.

Mobile monetization is not just about ads though.

Mobile ad networks are a component of successful monetization but can't be everything

Even for large publishers, these ad products can complement the rest of a publisher's ad targeted strategy to achieve optimal monetization with modest effort.

Mobile Ads 2.0 will be characterized by publishers increasingly taking control of their monetization strategy to drive more revenue and create better experiences for users.

By:  Via ctrl-news

How to Create a Technology Based Company: Prepare the NewCo Slide Show

How to Create a Technology Based Company: Prepare the NewCo Slide Show: "As a follow up to the article on developing your business plan, you may have searched the web and found sites which offer software, advice, ..."

Global ad spend 'hit by Japanese earthquake and Middle East

By Ramy Ghaly

 

ZenithOptimedia cuts forecast for worldwide ad market by almost £1.5bn, as Egypt and Japan almost halt commercial ads

The Japanese earthquake and ongoing turmoil in the Middle East will strip almost $2.5bn (£1.5bn) from global advertising spend this year, according to a new forecast from Publicis Groupe's media buying network ZenithOptimedia.

ZenithOptimedia reckons that Japan's ad market is set to dip by 4.1% this year and Egypt shrink by 20%, but in 2012 the two will rise by 4.6% and 12% respectively.

The company also said that internet advertising will overtake newspapers to become the world's second largest ad medium – behind TV – in 2013 .

ZenithOptimedia forecasts that newspaper ad expenditure will fall from $95bn in 2010 to $91bn in 2013, while internet ad spend will rise from $63bn to $94.5bn over the same period.

 

By   Via Ctrl-News

RockMelt Makes Browsing a Social Experience

By: Ramy Ghaly

More than 500 million people are on Facebook, and Twitter adds 500,000 accounts a day.

Mountain View's RockMelt is betting big that a lot of them are, and will want to use its social Web browser. Backed by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and made available in March, RockMelt is a new browser with Facebook, Twitter and other applications built in. 

The browser market has been shaken up more as users increasingly access the Web from their smart phones, particularly Apple's Safari on the iPhone.

RockMelt isn't the first or only Web browser to add social elements.

Dubbed the Facebook browser, it's easy to see how it earned its nickname. One of the first steps to using RockMelt is signing in to Facebook and giving the browser permission to access data from the social-networking site. 

RockMelt features a thin vertical bar on the left side of the browser that shows the user's Facebook friends, including the ones who are online and available to chat. 

The two started to look into developing a browser soon thereafter, with Andreessen as an adviser.

By SFGate Via Ctrl-News

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