General Business

The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day.

At Dangerous Minds, we post anywhere from 10 to 16 items per day, fewer on the weekends. To reach 100% of of our 50k+ Facebook fans they’d charge us $200 per post. That would cost us between $2000 and $3200 per day—but let’s go with the lower, easier to multiply number. We post seven days a week, that would be about $14,000 per week, $56,000 per month… a grand total of $672,000 for what we got for free before Facebook started turning the traffic spigot down in Spring of this year—wouldn’t you know it—right around the time of their badly managed IPO.

Here's a chart summarizing Nielsen's recent findings on OS and device share in the US market.

So how does this compare to the worldwide scene? We're not sure yet, but (again according to Nielsen) apparently we're to look for a massive growth in smartphone use in Asia, Real Soon Now.

Nielsen Post

GE has this very intriguing Tumblr blog, with pix of various cool stuff from their labs. I have to admit just spending twenty minutes on this site totally changed my attitude about GE. Maybe they do have something going on after all...

In the early 1900s, electric cars outsold gas cars. We found this electric car charger in our archives - it was used in both parking and home garages.

A pulse-detonation actuator from our Energy & Propulsion lab. It produces high-pressure, pulsating supersonic jets, which help with airflow control in high-speed travel. Active airflow control reduces the drag, noise, and fuel consumption of an aircraft, making for smoother and more efficient flight.

An X-ray control panel from 1921. It was built by Victor, which was owned by GE and became GE Medical Systems.

This was one of our very early solar demonstrations - light would shine on a single photovoltaic cell, supplying enough electricity to power a motor. In 1939, GE went on to unveil the “Sun Motor” at The World’s Fair, a slightly larger version of the demo, that signaled GE’s vision for solar as a viable energy source.

From AdLab comes this news about eCoupled's wirelessly-powered on-package lightup graphics.

"eCoupled intelligent wireless power is so flexible it can actually be printed directly onto packaging. A low-cost enhancement to product packaging, printed coils allow real-time communication from the package to the store shelf, and then to the store’s inventory management system. Product quantities can be identified and tracked, expiration dates monitored, and new stock automatically ordered when supplies are low to help reduce lost sales."

Wait - weren't RFID tags supposed to make that problem go away?

via AdLab

Gizmodo post

eCoupled

Another move in the SEO wars... and perhaps a knock against eHow and so forth.

Google has updated their algorithm (which they do all the time) - this time, coming out and saying that they're targeting low-quality content farms, splogs, etc.:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites — sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other Web sites or sites that are just not very useful,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, and Matt Cutts, who leads Google’s spam-fighting team, wrote in a company blog post. “At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites — sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

NY Times

Website Magazine recommendation as to what to do next

Careful with that axe, Jeff...

An Indiana Deputy AG, Jeff Cox, has been fired for sending chilling messages via twitter and elsewhere, suggesting that riot police fire upon peaceful protesters at Wisconsin' state capitol building.

On Saturday night, when Mother Jones staffers tweeted a report that riot police might soon sweep demonstrators out of the Wisconsin capitol building—something that didn't end up happening—one Twitter user sent out a chilling public response: "Use live ammunition."

From my own Twitter account, I confronted the user, JCCentCom. He tweeted back that the demonstrators were "political enemies" and "thugs" who were "physically threatening legally elected officials." In response to such behavior, he said, "You're damned right I advocate deadly force." He later called me a "typical leftist," adding, "liberals hate police."

Only later did we realize that JCCentCom was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana.

This isn't trivial - the union-busting effort against those who serve the public is spreading to other states.

The incident seems all the more troubling now that the public-sector union fight playing out in Wisconsin is now headed to other states—including Indiana, where GOP senators Tuesday passed a bill that would abolish collective bargaining for state teachers. (Indiana's Republican governor walked back his support of the measure Tuesday after taking stock of the opposition.)

Mother Jones article, with screen captures of Cox's blogs posts and tweets

OReilly's Facebook page (here) has this snippet from a Twitter chat, part of the run-up to their Tools of Change conference:

In a twitterchat hosted by Tools of Change last week, Atwood reiterated the food chain concept. She wrote:

• author's role in publishing ecosystem: writers are the primary source for the foodchain. :) -2:08 PM
• Have heard authors referred to as "content," as if transmission medium were primary. -2:09 PM
• But w'out anything to transmit, transmission tools & networks would be dead. -2:10 PM

Conference starts Monday - would that I could go, but duty calls...

I had an interesting conversation with an old friend the other day about why a brand would write a mobile app, when there are such dynamic possibilities available for Facebook apps.

Aside from the desire to get your brand out of the Facebook sandbox, I thought of a few things you could do with an app that might be a little harder when working through Facebook, even Facebook mobile - geo-tagging and phone calls among them.

Fortuitously, here's a roundup of 6 mobile apps that stand well on their own, both for usability and branding.

Here are six companies that use the mobile web smartly, creating an altogether different experience than traditional online by using the strengths that the mobile device has to offer. They have been separated into two categories, one for advocating user purchases and the other for overall content and efficiency.

Category 1: Purchase intensive

These web pages make the buying experience extremely straightforward.

Starbucks Coffee. The Seattle-based company has been one of the industry leaders in using mobile to spread its messages and promote its brand. While using geolocation sites like Foursquare and Facebook Places to reward customers who buy Starbucks products, the company' recently expanded the value of its app by allowing customers to pay for their drinks by waving their mobile phones over an in-store reader. By providing added convenience and utility to its mobile experience, Starbucks' mobile efforts are leading the pack, while making the case for a wallet-less future.

Dominoes Pizza. Of course ordering a pizza through a mobile phone should be a no-brainer. But Dominoes has gone beyond the simple store locator feature to simplify the ordering process to a few finger taps. Not only can customers save all their credit card information and track the progress of their pizza through their mobile app, but they can also receive personal SMS texts that offer special deals and promotions based on previous orders.

eBay. The popular online auction website is trying its hand at augmented reality, a term that will likely become part of the digital vernacular in the next few years. While its mobile web page is more or less an abbreviated version of its traditional website, eBay has relied heavily on apps to help optimize its presence within the mobile realm. By downloading the Junaio app along with the eBay app, customers can monitor their favorite eBay auctions in real time through their mobile phones. If you don't think that's cool, you might need to get your cool meter fixed.

For the other three, see the
iMedia Connection post.

The good folks at Target Marketing Magazine have asked me to present on the topic of how (and why!) to use online document customization and management strategies to solve marketing problems.

I'll be focusing on how retail, franchisee and sales agent systems can benefit from the ability to customize ads, sales support materials, point-of-purchase, direct mail, etc.

If there's time, we'll look at setting up localized cross-media campaigns, and may even get into personalized URLs.

The webinar's free, but you do have to register:
Registration Page

While I've long been convinced that the modern corporation is designed to prevent productivity, it's always nice to find tools that help prove one's point.

Here's a clock that figures out how much of our clients' money we just burned through, nattering on about synergy and ROI:

Introducing Bring TIM!® (Time Is Money) - a fun yet useful office clock that tallies the dollars spent in long meetings. Simply enter the number of people in the room, ballpark an average hourly wage, and press the illuminated start button. Everyone will be amazed as the dollars pile up with every second that ticks by.

Product Page

Pair this up with Bullshit Bingo and you've got a cure for the common drone.