Companies will spend more than one in five U.S. ad dollars this year to purchase display ads in Facebook, displacing Yahoo for the first time as the No. 1 revenue generating site. David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst, estimates display ad revenue for the social network will rise 80.9% to $2.19 billion this year. Although Bing is gaining revenue, Google's share is still rising as the combined revenue at Microsoft and Yahoo continue to fall," he says.
Read more here
Tuesday, March 1
Game on, here, there and everywhere
The popularity of games on Facebook and other social-networking sites coupled with the proliferation of games on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is powering a mini-explosion in the video game industry.
More people are playing video games on more platforms than ever, even as hardware sales of traditional game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii — not to mention the games for many of those systems — have declined from $21.4 billion in 2008 to $18.7 billion in 2010.
"The business model is changing," says Ray Muzyka, co-founder of game developer BioWare.
Video games are played by as many as two-thirds of Americans, says The NPD group, a market researcher. As many as half of U.S. homes have a console video game system. Meanwhile, one in five Americans age 6 and up have played games on social networks such as Facebook, according to NPD. Then there are the 21 million-plus Americans who research firm ComScore says play video games on smartphones.
Read more at USA Today
More people are playing video games on more platforms than ever, even as hardware sales of traditional game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii — not to mention the games for many of those systems — have declined from $21.4 billion in 2008 to $18.7 billion in 2010.
"The business model is changing," says Ray Muzyka, co-founder of game developer BioWare.
Video games are played by as many as two-thirds of Americans, says The NPD group, a market researcher. As many as half of U.S. homes have a console video game system. Meanwhile, one in five Americans age 6 and up have played games on social networks such as Facebook, according to NPD. Then there are the 21 million-plus Americans who research firm ComScore says play video games on smartphones.
Read more at USA Today
Monday, February 28
How to Get Started with Usenet
Usenet is a wonderful service for finding and downloading digital media, giving you speed and reliability you won't find with other file-sharing options.
Usenet was originally designed as a bulletin-board service, and so there's a ton of text content available on Usenet, but once binary newsgroups made their way into Usenet, it quickly became a popular place to find any sort of files that interest you. A site called Newzbin started indexing the binaries available on Usenet and creating the NZB file format. When you download an NZB, you're simply downloading a file that points to files available on Usenet. Applications supporting the NZB format can use them to make downloading Usenet binaries a piece of cake.
There are two controversial issues attached to writing about Usenet: 1) the first rule of Usenet is that you don't talk about Usenet, and 2) it's commonly used to download copyrighted material.
Unlike most file-sharing services nowadays, Usenet is not peer-to-peer. While in rare cases you might get some poor level of access through your Internet service provider, you're going to want to pay for Usenet access that will actually prove useful. Currently I use Newshosting, several more (and potentially better) choices exist, such as GigaNews and Astraweb.
Read more here
Usenet was originally designed as a bulletin-board service, and so there's a ton of text content available on Usenet, but once binary newsgroups made their way into Usenet, it quickly became a popular place to find any sort of files that interest you. A site called Newzbin started indexing the binaries available on Usenet and creating the NZB file format. When you download an NZB, you're simply downloading a file that points to files available on Usenet. Applications supporting the NZB format can use them to make downloading Usenet binaries a piece of cake.
There are two controversial issues attached to writing about Usenet: 1) the first rule of Usenet is that you don't talk about Usenet, and 2) it's commonly used to download copyrighted material.
Unlike most file-sharing services nowadays, Usenet is not peer-to-peer. While in rare cases you might get some poor level of access through your Internet service provider, you're going to want to pay for Usenet access that will actually prove useful. Currently I use Newshosting, several more (and potentially better) choices exist, such as GigaNews and Astraweb.
Read more here
Double-Digit Growth Ahead For Online Retail
Research firm Forrester estimates that both US and European online retail (representing 17 Western European nations) will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015.
Read more here
Read more here
Sunday, February 27
DAR.fm
Michael Robertson is a longtime provocateur of the music business. A decade ago, the music labels successfully sued his landmark startup, Mp3.com, over a feature that gave users a digital copy of any song they could prove they owned on CD. In 2007, Robertson walked into another nest of litigation with Mp3Tunes.com, which allows consumers to upload their songs into cloud-based digital music lockers and then stream their tracks to any smartphone or computer.
Now the San Diego entrepreneur is lobbing another sonic grenade. Robertson is taking the wraps off his newest startup, DAR.fm—short for digital audio recorder—that he planned to launch on Feb. 23. It'll be a centralized Web-based TiVo (TIVO) for radio. Users can go to DAR.fm to search through the programming schedules of about 600 music and talk-radio stations around the country and schedule the site to record up to four hours of any broadcast. The recordings, complete with ads and DJ chatter that users can fast-forward through, are then deposited into a user's password-protected account that can be accessed from any PC, smartphone, or Internet-connected radio. "Radio is dying because it's inconvenient and limiting," says Robertson. "The content is not interactive, and it's available on only a limited number of devices."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218035568306.htm
Now the San Diego entrepreneur is lobbing another sonic grenade. Robertson is taking the wraps off his newest startup, DAR.fm—short for digital audio recorder—that he planned to launch on Feb. 23. It'll be a centralized Web-based TiVo (TIVO) for radio. Users can go to DAR.fm to search through the programming schedules of about 600 music and talk-radio stations around the country and schedule the site to record up to four hours of any broadcast. The recordings, complete with ads and DJ chatter that users can fast-forward through, are then deposited into a user's password-protected account that can be accessed from any PC, smartphone, or Internet-connected radio. "Radio is dying because it's inconvenient and limiting," says Robertson. "The content is not interactive, and it's available on only a limited number of devices."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_10/b4218035568306.htm
The Leaky Corporation
The WikiLeaks threat and the persistent leaking of other supposedly confidential corporate information have brought an important issue to the fore. Companies are creating an ever-growing pile of digital information, from product designs to employees’ e-mails. Keeping tabs on it all is increasingly hard, not only because there is so much of it but also because of the ease of storing and sending it. Much of this information would do little damage if it seeped into the outside world; some of it, indeed, might well do some good. But some could also be valuable to competitors—or simply embarrassing—and needs to be protected. Companies therefore have to decide what they should try to keep to themselves and how best to secure it.
Firms are increasingly investing in “systems of engagement”.
“Technology can’t solve the problem, just lower the probability of accidents,” explains John Stewart, the chief security officer of Cisco, a maker of networking equipment.
Read more at The Economist
Firms are increasingly investing in “systems of engagement”.
“Technology can’t solve the problem, just lower the probability of accidents,” explains John Stewart, the chief security officer of Cisco, a maker of networking equipment.
Read more at The Economist
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