valleypropertysale.com

Among the winners were winners of user-generated ad contests like Frito Lay’s “Crash the Super Bowl” competition; faux-amateur clips like Ray-Ban’s “Never Hide” ad; too-edgy-for-TV spots like one of Unilever’s Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty” ads; and naturally, “Will It Blend?” The YouTube video series from blender manufacturer BlendTec had been created without the help of an extrenal agency, and had already built up quite a fan base when it published the notorious “iPhone in a blender” video.

NEW YORK–Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.

Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and interviews, with plenty of talk of monetization and ROI and user engagement and the attention economy and just about every other ad-industry cliche you’ve ever heard of (as well as some you haven’t), it was quite refreshing to watch a bunch of YouTube videos representing ad campaigns that actually worked. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

The full list is here. But what I’d like to know is, for every one of these runaway hits, how many equally creative Web video ad campaigns flop? I’m still a believer in randomness on the Web. But then again, I can’t see any way that a guy putting an
iPhone into a blender and hitting the “smoothie” button couldn’t have been a huge hit.

A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan’s upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007’s “Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards,” a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.

It appears T-Mobile has started a trend. On Monday Verizon Wireless
announced a new parental controls program for family plans. Usage Controls will allow parents to limit how phones on the family plan are being used. Features include controlling when calls can be made and how many minutes can be used; setting limits for text and multimedia messaging, instant messaging and data use; blocking numbers and creating a list of trusted numbers; and employing content filters. The service is available on all Verizon phones for a fee of $4.99 per month.

The carrier also has added to its Chaperone child locator service. The new Chaperone 2.0 will allow parents to track multiple phone at once and it even will give turn-by-turn directions to a child’s location using VZ Navigator. Convenient, sure, but also a bit creepy. Chaperone 2.0 will cost an additional $9.99 per month for each family plan.

Amazon has at least one major advantage over Apple: Apple’s DRM-free tracks are available only from EMI Music, while Amazon offers unprotected MP3s from all four of the major record labels. Also, Amazon sells digital music at a higher bit rate and its songs are often cheaper.

The big question now is whether Amazon can continue to grow without snatching away customers from Apple.

Amazon may be enticing its existing customers to the music store, Crupnick noted. He said that a Superbowl promotion that Amazon held in February may have drawn regular shoppers to check out the new music service. He also speculated that many music fans are visiting out of curiosity.

Only about 10 percent of the people who shopped at AmazonMP3 in February were previous Apple shoppers, NPD said.

But Amazon has a long way to go, says NPD. MP3 sales at iTunes are more than 10 times larger than at Amazon, the research firm said.

“We’ll have to wait to see what Amazon can do with those people,” Crupnick said. “Does the traffic snowball or does it wane?”

This is a “healthy indication that the digital music customer pool can expand into new consumer groups who have not yet joined the iTunes community,” Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD said in a statement.

Apple’s iTunes remains the No.1 digital music store. AmazonMP3, which launched in September, slipped past Wal-Mart to take over the No. 2 spot in February when comparing the individual music tracks downloaded by consumers in the U.S., according to NPD.

Amazon.com’s MP3 service is growing but not at the expense of Apple’s iTunes, according to a report issued Tuesday by market researcher NPD Group.

Amazon.com’s MP3 site

(Credit:
Amazon)

I’m joined byEugene Ciurana, director of systems infrastructure at Leapfrog. We’ll talk about how enterprises bring SOA outside the firewall and how the Cloud comes into play. It’s a good time for all.

We’re on today September 30, 2008 at Noon PST/3pm EST. Yes, I should have posted this sooner.

I’m doing a session on “The Borderless Enterprise” today as part of InfoWorld’s Reinventing Enterprise Architecture: How to hit the Reset Button.

Some new smartphones fully support the Privus Mobile service, meaning you get the names of your callers before you pick up. Other models provide the names and numbers once you hang up or miss a call, allowing you to forward their info to your contact list automatically. (Click here for a list of approved smartphones and wireless networks; the service is available throughout North America and should be announced in many European Union countries by the end of 2008.)

(Credit:
I D You)

But how much are you willing to pay for that extra bit of wireless privus-y? Three months of service will set you back $24.95, while 12 months go for $89.95–and for those rates it just might be worth it to gamble and pick up the phone. Those who are interested can visit the I D You Web site and get a free three-day trial.

The service also provides information on many international calls, but from what we can gather, blocked numbers will remain blocked.

Enter Privus Mobile. The new downloadable caller ID service for smartphones provides names and numbers of incoming callers–and not just for those stored in the phone’s contact list.

We’ve all seen unrecognizable numbers pop up on our cell phone screens, but to answer or not to answer? It’s probably a marketer or a wrong number, but there’s always that slim chance it’s the Pulitzer committee, Google human resources, or that one true love who dumped you but finally decided he made a giant mistake.

Many times, you’ll receive a call from a number that you haven’t already saved, and it shows up sans a name. Privus Mobile–offered by Accudata Technologies subsidiary I D You–promises to deliver up to 95 percent of names for callers, individual or corporate, not in a user’s directory.

The numbers speak for themselves, with 60 percent of the 35,000-strong Alfresco community running MySQL.

Dave Rosenberg once wrote that the winner in a given open-source category (ERP, CRM, etc.) takes all. There’s no room for second place. The first mover to get critical mass tends to horde the community and media resources.

It would be easy to discount these results if these were no-name mom-and-pop SMBs, but they’re not. Alfresco’s customers include Kaplan, Electronic Arts, US Federal Aviation Administration, Boise Cascade, and a wide swath of the world’s largest financial services, media, education, and government organizations. 60 percent of which are happily running MySQL.

As the previous Open Source Barometer showed, in open source at each level of the stack there is a clear leader. If you say open source linux, database, app server, enterprise content management, crm most people will be pushed to come back with more than one name. For open source database that name is MySQL.

The Barometer now comprises a data set of 35,000 enterprises, a significant percentage of which hail from the Global 2000. In the case of open-source databases, these enterprises are overwhelmingly voting for MySQL, as Ian Howells writes:

I’ll be posting more data from the most recent Open Source Barometer report tomorrow, but in the meantime it’s worth considering the what’s at stake in coming in second place. It may well be the difference between $1 billion or nothing.

commentary

That said, I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom for everyone but the front-runner. Instead, I think it’s clear that the “also-rans” need to run a different race. Their community outreach must differ from that of the front-runner. Their go-to-market strategy needs to differ, too. Basically, they need to find a different way to sell their products, and to different types of customers, than the front-runner has chosen.

I didn’t believe Dave at the time, but after looking through the data from Alfresco’s Open Source Barometer survey, I’m becoming more and more convinced.

(Credit:
Alfresco's Open Source Barometer)

(Credit:
Ask.com)
“Today, we unveiled a new direction for Ask.com,” Ask.com Chief Executive Jim Safka said in a statement. “Moving forward, we will focus on our core customers, and what they come to Ask.com for most: answers. Our loyal base of 45 million unique users come to Ask.com for answers at a rate that is three times more than any other major search engine.”

Although, Ask.com has undergone more cosmetic surgery than most, changing its name from Ask Jeeves, dropping the butler logo, redesigning the site numerous times and shaking up management along the way.

The Wall Street Journal
first reported the layoffs.

As expected, Ask.com is cutting 40 jobs–8 percent of its work force–as part of a restructuring to refocus the search company toward providing answers to its core audience of women searching on entertainment, health, and reference topics, the company said on Tuesday.

Given that Yahoo laid off more than 1,000 workers last month, Google is suddenly looking at some surprising slow growth in paid search ad numbers, and Microsoft is looking to buy Yahoo to better compete in search and ads, it’s not such a surprise that the No. 4 search engine would be hitting snags of its own.

The reorganization, Safka’s first move since assuming the CEO spot from Jim Lanzone in January, is aimed at helping Ask.com grow its market share from the current 5 percent. Competing head-on with the Google and the others hasn’t narrowed the gap, so the idea is to focus on a core demographic and answers to questions, specifically.

Meanwhile, the company said it will be hiring some new employees to help with the transition, as well as add more community-generated responses and look for partners. Teoma will remain part of the search technology, the company said.

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Saleforce.com)

The new components to the development platform are designed to give programmers more sophisticated tools for on-demand applications, Gross said.

Salesforce also announced enhancements to its Eclipse-based development tool that are designed to make it easier to write the user interface portion of a Web application.

Saleforce.com’s Force integrated development environment for building hosted Web applications.

Programmers can also save their Force code into source code management systems. It also added Force “Sandbox,” a service for testing applications during development.

Right now, the fee to use applications written for Force–Salesforce’s hosted development platform–is $50 per user per month for an unlimited amount of time.

Salesforce.com on Thursday introduced a cheaper way to access applications written with its Force.com platform and detailed an Eclipse-based development tool.

The company added another option, in which applications cost $5 per log-in with a maximum of five log-ins per month. This option is meant for applications that are accessed only occasionally, like vacation request programs, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at the company.

And, so, while Yahoo’s founder Jerry Yang has been characterized as milquetoast in comparison with the big, beefy, and loud Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he does have two directors who have been through the go-around before sitting by his side–not to mention a virtual army of advisers.

Wilson, in fact, is currently serving on a dissident shareholder board for The Children’s Investment Fund (TCI), a London-based hedge fund and shareholder activist that has launched a proxy fight against railroad transportation company CSX.

Ultimately, Kerkorian took the lead on that effort, waging a proxy fight for Chrysler.

Hmm…Yahoo’s stock is down. It’s obviously a juicy takeover target in the eyes of Microsoft. Maybe the software giant needs to enlist the help of Wilson.

One member of Yahoo’s board, Gary Wilson, is battle-tested - he’s waged proxy wars in the past.

Editor’s note: This post incorrectly listed Yahoo director Ron Burkle as having been involved in a proxy fight against Southern California grocery chain Stater Bros. According to a spokesman for Burkle, he was never involved in a proxy fight at Stater Bros. and left the company prior to 1986.

“The idea of a Chrysler buyout first surfaced in October, the brainchild of Gary Wilson, co-chairman of the company that controls Northwest Airlines Inc. After talking with his old pal Robert A. Day, head of Trust Co. of the West, owner of 7.6 million Chrysler shares, Wilson decided the company was a juicy takeover target. It’s stock was down, and its cash approached $7 billion. Wilson decided to propose a management-led effort to take Chrysler private.”

And in 1989, Wilson played a key role in the buyout of Northwest Airlines, according to a Fortune magazine article.

As Yahoo and Microsoft prepare to do battle now that the software giant’s Saturday deadline has come and gone, don’t think of the Internet pioneer as a 20-pound weakling when it comes to takeover attempts.

CSX will hold its annual shareholders meeting on June 25 in New Orleans. Wilson is one of five TCI opposition slate directors aiming for a seat on CSX’s 12-member board.

According to the BusinessWeek article:

Turning the clock back a few years further, Wilson, according to a lengthy May 1995 BusinessWeek article by David Woodruff and Ronald Grover, played a key role in a Chrysler buyout attempt that ultimately went to Kirk Kerkorian.

Apple observers claim that a notebook refresh is coming in October, and it is anticipated that updates to the Air will include larger solid-state drives and newer Intel processors.

The 80GB version is priced at $595. Though expensive, these drives deliver performance far better than the standard 4200rpm hard-disk drives used in ultraportables to date.

Wilkison said high-volume 128GB SSDs may get “closer to the $400 range.”

The sleek silver 3-pound notebook was announced with great fanfare back on January 15 with configurations that sported older Merom-class Intel low-voltage processors and a 64GB Samsung solid-state drive.

On the processor front, Hewlett-Packard may offer some guidance. HP has just refreshed its 3-pound ultraportable lineup with the newest low-power Intel silicon based on the Centrino 2 platform. The EliteBook 2530p line offers Core 2 Duo LV (low-voltage) and ULV (ultra-low-voltage) processors including the 1.6GHz SL9300 and 1.86GHz SL9400. Both are 45-nanometer processors that come with large 6MB caches to speed performance. Current processors in the Air are based on 65-nanometer technology and have smaller 4MB caches.

“I think everyone had widely anticipated that there would be some other product announcements in Steve Jobs’ address (on Monday) on the notebook or computing side,” said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, a supplier of high-performance solid-state drives.

Meanwhile, Intel is shipping high-performance “X” series SSDs in 80GB capacities now. The drives achieve up to 250MB per second read speeds and up to 70MB per second write speeds.

Solid-state drives are the other big question mark. New solid-state drives are hitting the market in quick succession. “Our drive was in mass production in early Q2. Looks like Samsung had theirs ready for the Dell launch, maybe mid to early Q3 timeframe,” Wilkison said.

Dell’s 128GB SSD option on its XPS M1530 notebook goes for an extra $450, though performance numbers are unknown at this point.

Whether Apple will turn away from Intel chipsets is a rumor still in play, though Apple is expected to stick with Intel for the main CPU.

STEC’s drives come in capacities up to 256GB. Dell offers a 128GB SSD with its new ultraslim Latitude E4200. (Dell E4200 “fits in an envelope too” video here.)

The EliteBooks use Intel’s Mobile Intel GS45 Express Chipset with integrated graphics.

The cutting-edge MacBook Air is not so cutting-edge these days. The high-profile, ultraslim notebook still comes with the same hardware that was offered initially by Apple nine months ago.

“But it’s gotta be coming. They’re certainly very committed to the notebook space,” he said.