Snowcrashing

About Twitter In-stream Advertising

Posted on 24. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

A NYT article, published over the week-end, sparked a heated debate over the legitimacy and value of an in-stream advertising model on Twitter.

-This idea has no official blessing from Twitter, yet.

-Back in September, the start-up changed its TOS to include the option of integrating advertising, in its service and search. And that time is approaching.

Open questions on the in-stream advertising models, and advertising on Twitter:

• Ambiguity- Can a 2chars hashtag (#ad) disambiguate an advertisement  inside a stream?

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The New Retweets: From The EgoSystem To The DataSystem.

Posted on 20. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Twitter did not invent retweets. Its users did: they created a mechanism, to allow word-of-mouth within the 140 chars world. Retweets are the vehicle for virality: you like an article, you pass it to your followers,with or without your comments, and they do the same.

Like in real-life, the original retweets followed the subject-object syntax: “I” recommend “you” read this, which was recommended by @friend1 which was recommended by @friend2, etc.

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The Promise Of Mobile BarCodes Apps.

Posted on 20. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Traditional advertising is becoming increasingly ineffective. And so much we all know.  But there is a new wave of mobile apps, which has the potential to accelerate its demise: Mobile BarCode Readers.

The first examples are two apps, now both available on the Iphone: RedLaser 2.2 and ShopSavvy. What they do, is allow users to scan a bar code (UPC code) and retrieve real-time data on the product scanned. The main features, common to the two apps, are:

-Price comparison through online shopping engine.

-Map of nearby stores that offer the same product, with relative pricing info.

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The Power Of Mobile CrowdSourcing. Waze and CitySourced.

Posted on 19. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

According to the Wikipedia definition, in a crowd-sourced model, problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users—i.e. the crowd—form communities and submit solutions. Individuals, who participate, are rewarded economically (think of the Netflix challenge) or by means of social rewards (think of the Ted Open Translation Project, where translators are allowed to have a prestigious Ted profile).

There are various examples of companies, that have been entirely built on crowd-sourcing. Wikipedia itself is one. The Internet has provided us with an unprecedented ability to create networks of previously unreachable experts and connect their brain power.

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The Future Of Payments: Who Will Be The Winner?

Posted on 15. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

In our connected ubiquitous future, what role will cash have? Are we moving towards a cash-less society, where payment will happen through your mobile device? PayPal, Amazon and Google seem to think so.

PayPal was the first to move into the space with its 2006 launch of the PayPal Mobile Checkout. But it’s only a few weeks ago that it unveiled its real ambition to become the payment method of the future, with its PayPal X platform – a set of API that lets third-party developers incorporate its online payment system into their own applications, online or mobile, Iphone included. PayPal X’s ‘enhanced’ pricing structure – a 50-cent flat-fee price point for a 3-day settlement, and a 75-cent fee for an immediate settlement – is also a direct shot at Amazon, the most direct competitor in the space.

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How Many FourSquares Do We Need?

Posted on 14. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It’s the promised Mecca of Mobile: Local Advertising. Companies of various sizes are all scrambling to create the Killer App, that will allow users to search for surrounding businesses and events from a mobile phone.

FourSquare paved the way, by creating a disruptive user-driven ecosystem that combines:

• Local discovery
• Social filters
• User engagement

Check-ins and Badges, with their basic simplicity and social reward dynamic, have been a social revolution and a turning point in the local advertising industry. Still, FourSquare is a young model with many unanswered questions:

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Droid, AdMob and Android

Posted on 11. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Is the Droid the Iphone killer? Is it not? How do 100,000 Droids sold in one weekend compare versus the 1 million Iphones? Frankly, it is not relevant.

Iphone and Droid

Questioning the supremacy of the Iphone sounds like an heresy today and it will be for a few more months (maybe 12, maybe less). But who is creating a healthier and open-source  application store eco-system for developers, OEMs and carriers ?

If you doubted the answer was Google and Android, Monday’s announcement on the Google acquisition of AdMob for $750million will make you think twice.

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Kevin Kelly On The Next 5,000 Days Of The Web: Bridging The Gap Between Virtual and Real.

Posted on 09. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It’s that time of the year again, when we’re about to get bombarded by predictions for the next 12 months, 99% of which, let’s say it, are going to be wrong.

In this TED video, recorded at the Entertainment Gathering in December 2007, Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired , writer and futurologist, starts by observing that the Web is only 5000 days old, and offers predictions for the next 5,000 days. That should spare us up from a few years of wrong blabbering about unlikely futures.

Kelly postulates that the next Web will differ from the actual one because it will be:

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Mobile: The Inbound Marketing Missing Chapter

Posted on 08. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

HubSpot, a Boston based start-up, is on a roll to conquest the Long Tail of small and medium–size businesses to digital marketing, and help them convert visitors into leads and sales.

The founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, recently published a book, not surprisingly titled Inbound Marketing: Get Found In Google, Blogs, and Social Media, which spells out the basic techniques to make the Internet an efficient business driver. As with HubSpot itself, the book’s innovative nature is not to be found in new or unheard of marketing principles, but in its attempt to empower everyone with the right knowledge. And since knowledge is power only when applied, the Inbound Marketing book is all about execution. Just as a text book, the book break inbound marketing up into 4 fundamental parts: decide who you are and why your story is remarkable, get found, convert, analyze & repeat. Examples and to-dos aim at making the reading easy and actionable.

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Google And Facebook War To Win The Long-Tail And Your Mind.

Posted on 06. Nov, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

Social networks are quickly morphing from destination to distributed networks around data, aka sites (the “shared” interests) and like-minded people. It’s not a user-driven innovation. The drivers of this (r)evolution are economic, and both Facebook and Google are upping the ante of the game, in the hope to be the ones who know you better, i.e. influence and make advertising money out of you.

If  Facebook has a clear advantage in terms of consumer adoption and existing social network functionalities, Google has the power of existing business relationships with millions of site owners through AdSense, and a sophisticated advertising platform that monetizes users’ intentions and behaviors. Its roadmap is therefore focused on piecing together existing or new social networks features. in order to make the world wide web its social network advertising net.

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