Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web

Earlier this week we wrote about the classic approach to the semantic web and the difficulties with that approach. While the original vision of the layer on top of the current web, which annotates information in a way that is “understandable” by computers, is compelling; there are technical, scientific and business issues that have been difficult to address. One of the technical difficulties that we outlined was the bottom-up nature of the classic semantic web approach. Specifically, each web site needs to annotate information in RDF, OWL, etc. in order for computers to be able to “understand” it.

As things stand today, there is little reason for web site owners to do that. The tools that would leverage the annotated information do not exist and there has not been any clearly articulated business and consumer value. Which means that there is no incentive for the sites to invest money into being compatible with the semantic web of the future.

But there are alternative approaches. We will argue that a more pragmatic, top-down approach to the semantic web not only makes sense, but is already well on the way toward becoming a reality. Many companies have been leveraging existing, unstructured information to build vertical, semantic services. Unlike the original vision, which is rather academic, these emergent solutions are driven by business and market potential.

In this post, we will look at the solution that we call the top-down approach to the semantic web, because instead of requiring developers to change or augment the web, this approach leverages and builds on top of current web as-is.

Why Do We Need The Semantic Web?

The complexity of original vision of the semantic web and lack of clear consumer benefits makes the whole project unrealistic. The simple question: Why do we need computers to understand semantics? remains largely unanswered.

While some of us think that building AI is cool, the majority of people think that AI is a little bit silly, or perhaps even unsettling. And they are right. AI for the sake of AI does not make any sense. If we are talking about building intelligent machines, and if we need to spend money and energy annotating all the information in the world for them, then there needs to be a very clear benefit.

Stated the way it is, the semantic web becomes a vision in search of a reason. What if the problem was restated from the consumer point of view? Here is what we are really looking forward to with the semantic web:

• Spend less time searching
• Spend less time looking at things that do not matter
• Spend less time explaining what we want to computers

A consumer focus and clear benefit for businesses needs to be there in order for the semantic web vision to be embraced by the marketplace.

What If The Problem Is Not That Hard?

If all we are trying to do is to help people improve their online experiences, perhaps the full “understanding” of semantics by computers is not even necessary. The best online search tool today is Google, which is an algorithm based, essentially, on statistical frequency analysis and not semantics. Solutions that attempt to improve Google by focusing on generalized semantics have so far not been finding it easy to do so.

The truth is that the understanding of natural language by computers is a really hard problem. We have the language ingrained in our genes. We learn language as we grow up. We learn things iteratively. We have the chance to clarify things when we do not understand them. None of this is easily replicated with computers.

But what if it is not even necessary to build the first generation of semantic tools? What if instead of trying to teach computers natural language, we hard-wired into computers the concepts of everyday things like books, music, movies, restaurants, stocks and even people. Would that help us be more productive and find things faster?

Simple Semantics: Nouns And Verbs

When we think about a book we think about handful of things – title and author, maybe genre and the year it was published. Typically, though, we could care less about the publisher, edition and number of pages. Similarly, recipes provoke thoughts about cuisine and ingredients, while movies make us think about the plot, director, and stars.

When we think of people, we also think about a handful of things: birthday, where do they live, how we’re related to them, etc. The profiles found on popular social networks are great examples of simple semantics based around people:

Books, people, recipes, movies are all examples of nouns. The things that we do on the web around these nouns, such as looking up similar books, finding more people who work for the same company, getting more recipes from the same chef and looking up pictures of movie stars, are similar to verbs in everyday language. These are contextual actuals that are based on the understanding of the noun.

What if semantic applications hard-wired understanding and recognition of the nouns and then also hard-wired the verbs that make sense? We are actually well on our way doing just that. Vertical search engines like Spock, Retrevo, ZoomInfo, the page annotating technology from Clear Forrest, Dapper, and the Map+ extension for Firefox are just a few examples of top-down semantic web services.

The Top-Down Semantic Web Service

The essence of a top-down semantic web service is simple – leverage existing web information, apply specific, vertical semantic knowledge and then redeliver the results via a consumer-centric application. Consider the vertical search engine Spock, which scans the web for information about people. It knows how to recognize names in HTML pages and it also looks for common information about people that all people have – birthdays, locations, marital status, etc. In addition, Spock “understands” that people relate to each other. If you look up Bush, then Clinton will show up as a predecessor. If you look up Steve Jobs, then Bill Gates will come up as a rival.

In other words, Spock takes simple, everyday semantics about people and applies it to the information that already exists online. The result? A unique and useful vertical search engine for people. Further, note that Spock does not require the information to be re-annotated in RDF and OWL. Instead, the company builds adapters that use heuristics to get the data. The engine does not actually have full understanding of semantics about people, however. For example, it does not know that people like different kinds of ice cream, but it doesn’t need to. The point is that by focusing on a simple semantics, Spock is able to deliver a useful end-user service.

Another, much simpler, example is the Map+ add-on for Firefox. This application recognizes addresses and provides a map popup using Yahoo! Maps. It is the simplicity of this application that precisely conveys the power of simple semantics. The add-on “knows” what addresses look like. Sure, sometimes it makes mistakes, but most of the time it tags addresses in online documents properly. So it leverages existing information and then provides direct end user utility by meshing it up with Yahoo! Maps.

The Challenges Facing The Top-Down Approach

Despite being effective, the somewhat simplistic top-down approach has several problems. First, it is not really the semantic web as it is defined, instead its a group of semantic web services and applications that create utility by leveraging simple semantics. So the proponents of the classic approach would protest and they would be right. Another issue is that these services do not always get semantics right because of ambiguities. Because the recognition is algorithmic and not based on an underlying RDF representation, it is not perfect.

It seems to me that it is better to have simpler solutions that work 90% of the time than complex ones that never arrive. The key questions here are: How exactly are mistakes handled? And, is there a way for the user to correct the problem? The answers will be left up to the individual application. In life we are used to other people being unpredictable, but with computers, at least in theory, we expect things to work the same every time.

Yet another issue is that these simple solutions may not scale well. If the underlying unstructured data changes can the algorithms be changed quickly enough? This is always an issue with things that sit on top of other things without an API. Of course, if more web sites had APIs, as we have previously suggested, the top-down semantic web would be much easier and more certain.

Conclusion

While the original vision of the semantic web is grandiose and inspiring in practice it has been difficult to achieve because of the engineering, scientific and business challenges. The lack of specific and simple consumer focus makes it mostly an academic exercise. In the mean time, existing data is being leveraged by applying simple heuristics and making assumptions about particular verticals. What we have dubbed top-down semantic web applications have been appearing online and improving end user experiences by leveraging semantics to deliver real, tangible services.

Will the bottom-up semantic web ever happen? Possibly. But, at the moment the precise path to get there is not quite clear. In the mean time, we can all enjoy better online experience and get to where we need to go faster thanks to simple top-down semantic web services.

Source:Read/WriteWeb.com

Go SaaS, Young Man

Venture capitalist Mike Fitzgerald says he’s more inclined to invest in software startups that embrace the service model.

Fitzgerald, founder of Commonwealth Capital Ventures in Waltham, Mass., says SaaS is a win-win for the software company and customers. Sales cycles are shorter for SaaS startups because it’s easy for potential buyers to try the product. And if a customer starts with a limited rollout, a department head can pay out of discretionary budget, or even use a credit card, instead of sending a purchase order through normal channels.

On the customer side, capital expenditures for SaaS are significantly lower than a traditional premises deployment, and the product gets into users hands more quickly. Customers begin extracting value right away.

A service model also provides a predictable revenue stream for the software company, because payments come in every month. That means the company can make more accurate predictions about its quarterly numbers.

By contrast, premises software vendors face more uncertainty. Because they get a large portion of revenue from the initial license sale, the timing of a purchase can make or break a quarter.

“Oracle taught the enterprise software crowd to buy at the end of the quarter to get a better deal,” says Fitzgerald. “And if you miss an order, you blew a quarter and now on the Street you’re a bum.”

The downside is that SaaS vendors don’t get a large chunk of license money up front. The number of new accounts a SaaS vendor has to open is a multiple of a traditional software company.

“You need to get an accumulation of payments to be large enough to support your operation,” says Fitzgerald. “It forces a SaaS company to be more productive for every dollar of sales and marketing.”

And as with any venture, SaaS startups need to identify an underserved market. Translation? Fitzgerald has no plans to invest in a CRM startup.

That said, Fitzgerald is bullish on the service model. “SaaS is the future of the software business.”

Source:

Zapoint starts as demand to automate hiring grows

by Christopher Calnan

Last week’s launch of a Brookline firm with software that converts resumes into charts for job recruiters is the latest regional entrant into an automated hiring software market that’s growing 22 percent a year.

The growth is being fueled by fierce competition to find qualified workers more efficiently, and New England firms are taking notice and carving niches.

Zapoint Inc. fired up operations with five employees and market-ready software that applies algorithms to information on resumes, to help employers compare job candidates.

“We call it a two-second resume,” said Chris Twyman, founder and CEO of Zapoint.

Zapoint’s software was developed with the help of a $250,000 angel investment, said Twyman, former senior director of solutions marketing for New York-based CA Inc. And while some companies, such as Zapoint, are focused on specific recruiter applications, others such as Chelmsford-based Kronos Inc. already offer a wide range of work force and human capital software suites. Kronos added to its arsenal this week with the purchase of Deploy Solutions Inc., a Newton-based firm that makes employee selection and hiring software.

The technologies being spun out of these companies look to effectively manage the avalanche of information the Internet has made readily available. Databases and online job boards have collected resumes beyond the point of manageability, said Art Papas, who co-founded online recruitment software company Bullhorn Inc. in 1999.

“It’s total overload,” he said. “And recruiters need tools to help them make sense of it.”

Boston-based Bullhorn now generates $8 million in annual revenue and employs 95 workers, Papas said.

Spending in the United States on automated hiring software is expected to rise from an estimated $750 million in 2006 to $2 billion by 2011, according to Lisa Rowan, program manager for human resources and talent management services at Framingham research firm IDC.

Twyman, who also helped launch UrbanFox, a United Kingdom-based online trading solution for telecommunication carriers, said Zapoint is approaching 1,000 members (users who submit resumes) after one week of operations. Revenue comes from fees paid by recruiters, which range from $2,000 to $5,000. Posting resumes is free, and workers who are selected by employers receive a $1,000 reward, Twyman said.

Zapoint’s plans include raising a $3 million to $4 million Series A round of venture capital next year.

Competition among automated hiring software companies in New England, however, is growing. Last year, Ireland-based recruitment software maker, Candidate Manager Ltd., opened a North American headquarters in Boston. And in 2005, H Three Inc., opened for business in Cambridge with a referral reward payment software system.

Other New England competitors include Zoom Information Inc., BrassRing LLC and Authoria Inc., all based in Waltham. Wayland’s Softscape Inc. and Auburndale’s Deploy Solutions Inc., also develop human resource software, including recruiting.

Nationally, the recruitment software space includes Pennsylvania-based Kenexa Corp., which bought BrassRing for $115 million last year, and PeopleSoft Inc., which was bought by Oracle Corp. in 2005.

Source:MassHightech.Biz

On ZoomInfo

(FROM www.zoominfo.com)

ZoomInfo is the premier business information search engine, with profiles on more than 37 million people and 3.5 million companies. ZoomInfo delivers fresh and organized information on industries, companies, people, products, services and jobs.

ZoomInfo Products

The premier business information search engine. ZoomInfo delivers quick and easy access to fresh, comprehensive, and accurate information on industries, companies, products, services, people and jobs – all on a single Website.

About ZoomInfo’s Products

ZoomInfo.com

Building the largest source of business information on earth – 37 million people, 3.5 million people and growing daily.

ZoomInfo is the premier business information search engine for information on people, companies, products, services and jobs. ZoomInfo collects and organizes information from the Web and makes it available to you with fresh, comprehensive and objective ZoomInfo profiles. Get all the business information you need on a single, easy-to-use site – zoominfo.com.

Key Features:

Access Information on Companies: Search for companies by company name or keyword. Search for a company by name and ZoomInfo will deliver a profile on the company that includes a description of the company, the industry it’s in, its annual revenue, number of employees, Website address, phone/fax numbers, list of key executives and top competitors. Search by keyword and ZoomInfo will deliver a list of companies that meet your keyword criteria. You can then click on any of the company results to access their ZoomInfo profiles.
<
Own Your Web Identity: Create or claim your ZoomInfo profile to increase your visibility on the Web. Your profile can include your career history, education, affiliations, Web references and contact information – all in one place – for recruiters, business associates and colleagues to access.

Find People: Search for a person by name and access their ZoomInfo profile, which will include the person’s current and former employment, education

Ensure Accurate Company Info: Claim and update your company’s ZoomInfo profile to increase your company’s visibility among potential buyers, job seekers and anyone conducting business research.

Gain Quick and Easy Access to Your Favorite Searches: ZoomInfo allows you to keep information on jobs, company and people of interest at your fingertips by saving them to your QuickLists, which you can go back to at your convenience.

ZoomExec

ZoomInfo’s free company search can help you identify and research your companies of interest. Now you’re looking to connect with the decision makers in those companies. ZoomExec allows you quick, easy and affordable access to 1.5 million VP-level executives – for just $99 per month!

Advanced People Search Go beyond name searches to find the executives you need to reach. Search for executives by company name, title, location, industry, and company size.

Contact Information: Don’t waste precious time calling around to find the person you need within a company. ZoomExec finds the executive for you and provides you with their direct contact information.

Comprehensive, Easy-to-Read People Profiles: Access ZoomInfo’s easy-to-read profiles, with in-depth information on your key contacts, including their employment history, education, user-posted biography (when available) and Web references for where the information was pulled, to help you quickly build rapport with your contact.

Export Searches: For an additional $0.50 per name, export lists of executive contacts into your CRM application for quick and easy workflow.

ZoomInfo PowerSearch

In-depth people search: Target your search with over 20 different characteristics such as job title, credentials, geography, company, industry, diversity, and education.

Contact information: Find phone numbers and email addresses for companies and key employees.

Effortless data management: Export data into Excel worksheets or v-card format to move data into your CRM or ATS system.

Integrated email tools for recruiters: Use the JobCast email campaign tool to create, send and track targeted email campaigns to qualified potential candidates.

In-depth company search: Search for companies by industry, annual revenue, number of employees, geographic region and company ranking.

Build a list of competitors: Create a list of competitors to a specific company to instantly build a target list. Find the details you need to know about those companies including contact information of people within.

Networking opportunities: Create lists of people similar to the person you searched for to network into a company or industry.

ZoomInfo PowerSell

Find the decision maker. Build your pipeline. Know your stuff! Tap into the power of ZoomInfo PowerSell for fast and easy access to sales intelligence. While most sales prospecting tools give you information on a handful of top executives at large companies, ZoomInfo PowerSell delivers business intel on professionals at all levels and companies of all sizes – from the Fortune 1000 to SMBs. And because ZoomInfo crawls the Web 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year, we deliver the freshest information available.

Find Decision Makers: Uncover your decision maker in seconds using PowerSell’s search by name, title and company. PowerSell allows you to dig deep into companies with profiles, which include contact information, for contacts at all levels.

Build your pipeline: PowerSell’s advanced search criteria allows you to create targeted prospect lists by title, geography, company ranking and company size. Once your list is created, research your prospect companies with PowerSell’s 3.5 million company profiles.

Fully integrate with your CRM application:Once you have your search results, export people and company profiles directly into your CRM application to drive more qualified leads.

Get business intel that you can’t find anywhere else PowerSell delivers comprehensive results for your search by tapping into its database of 37 million people and 3.5 million company profiles. PowerSell gives you information on companies of all sizes and business professionals at all levels.

Access the freshest business information available: ZoomInfo’s fresh profiles allow you to research contacts and companies before you pick up the phone or walk into a meeting, knowing that you’re getting the most up-to-date information available. We know the information is no good to you if it isn’t fresh and accurate.

ZoomInfo Partners

ZoomInfo has partnered with the best in the industry to extend our value to our customers and to theirs. Take a look at ZoomInfo’s Search Engine & Portal, Content and Channel partners who are putting information on companies, industries, products and services at their customers’ fingertips with ZoomInfo.

Search Engine and Portal Partnerships: ZoomInfo “Business” and “People” search helps search engine and portal vendors drive traffic and deliver the most comprehensive, up-to-date information on industries, companies and people with millions of easy-to-read ZoomInfo profiles. Search partners receive full integration with ZoomInfo into their search engines and portals.

Content Partnerships: Looking for comprehensive, up-to-date and in-depth content on companies and people? ZoomInfo offers several partnership programs for content providers who want to add deeper company, industry and people information into their products – granting users easy access to information on over 37 million people and 3.5 million companies.

Channel Partnerships: ZoomInfo’s ability collect and organize business information on over 37 million people and 3.5 million companies is invaluable to HR and sales intelligence organizations across all industries and vertical markets. Our comprehensive, up-to-date and easy to read profiles are used by organizations of all sizes.

For recruiting organizations, ZoomInfo complements multiple recruiting environments by providing users with access to our in-depth people information to deliver a complete recruiting and sourcing solution.

For sales intelligence organizations, ZoomInfo is easily integrated into a number of sales applications and sales portals. ZoomInfo provides deep information on companies and people for fast and effective sales prospecting.

ZoomInfo in the NEWS

On the ZoomInfo Ad Platform

ZoomInfo, the people search engine that gets its data from gathering biographical information on just about everyone, whether you know about it or not, is launching an advertising network. And in going along with the current trend of tempting fate when it comes to controversial activity with web surfer’s cookies, ZoomInfo will be offering up these cookies to companies looking to provide more targeted ad.

There are a couple of things to consider here: you’ll need to first visit ZoomInfo in order for it to have your cookie. Additionally, you’ll have to have a general presence on the web, whether this be for social networking, your own website, or any type of e-commerce activity. So when you purchase an item from a company’s website, it could then work with ZoomInfo to compare “cookie notes” in order to provide more targeted ads to you, online, via email, and the next time you visit the company’s website.

….

With the presence of outdated information, some advertisers found that they weren’t actually communicating in a desired manner to their demographic. This could very well happen with ZoomInfo as well, though the service updates a massive amount of information on a daily basis. Nevertheless, there’s still incorrect data found on ZoomInfo, and this could prove to be an obstacle for its ad network, due to launch next year.

VentrueBeat.com

ZoomInfo, based in Waltham, Mass, has detailed personal information for almost 40 million business professionals. It gets the information by scouring the Web, gathering things such as your name, past work affiliation, and even your email address if it can find it. It tracks the industry you work in, your company, title, functional area, education, sex and location.

Going forward, this is an example of how ZoomInfo’s network, due to go live next year, will work: Say you register at Dell’s web site, to buy a computer, and provide that company with your name and email address. Dell can then draw much more information about you from ZoomInfo – and serve up advertising that can target you much more effectively.

Here’s the catch: ZoomInfo can only do this if the user has visited ZoomInfo before. Because ZoomInfo needs to place a cookies on their browser. That way they ZoomInfo can exchange information about that person with Dell, which also drops a cookie on the person. This why, they can both maintain that they’re not personally identifying individuals with their advertising campaigns (the person’s information is not traded according to their name, but by cookie), even if the effect is practically the same.

ZoomInfo can use its cookie to track the individual across other sites too.

By the way, if you haven’t already picked up a ZoomInfo cookie, you’re increasingly likely to do so. If you’re like me, you find yourself landing at ZoomInfo’s profile pages from time to time, directed there by Google after you search for someone.

ZoomInfo calls its information “bizographic,” because it is biographic data related to business identity. The company says its data is much more useful to advertisers than say, Facebook’s targeting information, because its more precise.

….

ZoomInfo updates about 3 million profiles a night, so at least its profile information is updated.

It’s also trying to avoid an association with “spooky” targeting. It insists it doesn’t personally identify you. In the Dell example above, Dell already had your name and address, and ZoomInfo provides Dell with much more personal information about you based on the cookie information.

ZoomInfo collects its data about you whether or not you “register” with that site. The company says that about 100,000 people a week are finding their profiles on ZoomInfo and then clicking on a button to confirm that the profile is about them and otherwise correct (ZoomInfo allows people to edit their profiles).

ZoomInfo has already started building a network of sties and partners that will be able to use its information to target readers, Burdick said.

The closest competitors to ZoomInfo’s ad network are the behavioral networks such as Tacoda and Revenue Science. Those companies don’t offer biographical information, however. LinkedIn, a networking site for professionals, has so far remained critical of ZoomInfo’s moves to comb the Web for names and emails, without getting users’ permission.

Others:

ZoomInfo and XING Allow Users to Manage a Single Professional Identity Online

Business information search engine ZoomInfo™ and XING AG, the operator of XING — one of the foremost networks for business professionals — today announced the ability for users to co-register with both sites and manage their digital identity. Now professionals can manage their online identity while creating a XING profile to network with other professionals. Following the strategic partnership announced in June 2007, this release represents the first step toward the comprehensive integration between ZoomInfo and XING, expected later this year.

he partnership will provide XING members with immediate access to ZoomInfo’s profiles on over 37 million business people and 3.5 million companies. In the coming months, XING AG’s 3.5 million members will have access to ZoomInfo profiles and will be able to search for and reach out to new contacts using ZoomInfo’s patented semantic search capabilities. ZoomInfo profiles will also begin including a person’s professional network using confirmed contacts on XING.

“Based on our rapid adoption and market leadership in Europe and Asia, XING’s online platform clearly fills a need for international business people looking to network,” said Lars Hinrichs, CEO of XING AG. “Incorporating the ability for our users to search and access information across ZoomInfo’s 37 million profiles will further extend the business networking opportunities for our members. At the same time, we believe ZoomInfo’s users will appreciate the unique ways to network with XING members online, and will soon understand why so many XING users also continue to conduct business with each other offline and online.”

“ZoomInfo is looking forward to extending our search capabilities to XING’s powerful international business networking platform,” said Bryan Burdick, COO of ZoomInfo. “Once the integration is complete, we believe that ZoomInfo’s users will benefit by being able to network with people who work within the same industry, graduated from the same university, or have the same job function located in the same city or region. XING’s platform was built specifically for the business person, so it is a perfect match for our business information search engine.”

On ZoomInfo:…ZoomInfo’s semantic search engine continually crawls the Business Web — the millions of company Websites, news feeds and other online sources — to identify company and people information which is then organized into fresh, comprehensive and objective profiles….

On XING:….By focusing on the target group “business people worldwide”, the Company is able to offer tailored features, thereby making networking and contact management simpler. Besides Headquarters in Hamburg, XING AG is also represented with offices in Barcelona (eConozco, Neurona), Beijing and Zurich…

(will be updated)

 

How Facebook Can Save Face

 

By Josh Quittner

It looks inevitable that Facebook will move away from its proprietary platform to the open platform of OpenSocial. Indeed, sources tell me that representatives from Facebook and Google (GOOG) met for the first time late yesterday afternoon. And already, Facebook investor and board member Jim Breyer is indicating that the social network would be willing to join the Everybody-but-Facebook Alliance.

Meanwhile, a favorite parlor game yesterday afternoon among pundits here in Techland was playing “What Should Facebook Do?” — though most of the people I spoke to were unwilling to go on the record. Virtually everyone’s answers however, boiled down to three options:

1. Do nothing. Facebook has a surprising amount of power in this relationship. It has 50 million members and continues to grow. As long as that’s the case, developers will continue to craft apps in FBML, its proprietary platform language.

2. Surrender, totally and at once. Converting Facebook’s platform to open HTML isn’t difficult from a programming standpoint or particularly time-consuming. Besides, developers will love it. Many have privately griped that Facebook’s platform is too gnarly and they look forward to simple HTML and Javascript. And no one I’ve spoken to can find any real problem with this shift from Facebook’s perspective — indeed, the move
should benefit Facebook since its members will be able to stay put, where FB can serve ads at them, while doing more outside the walls of FB.

3. Some combination of 1 & 2.

One person who was willing to go on the record was John Lilly, COO of the Mozilla Corporation, whom I had dinner with last night. Who better to talk about the virtues
of openness? Lilly, in fact, made me think that Option 3 was the smartest way to go. If he were running Facebook, he said, “I would not let Google take the ‘open’ mantle from the world.” He said that if Facebook decides that it needs to move from FBML to HTML — “and I’m not saying I’d necessarily do that if I were Facebook.” But if he did, “I’d cause Google some problems first.”

How? “If I were Facebook, I wouldn’t let Google say, ‘We are the Web.’ I’d call b.s. on them,” Lilly said. OpenSocial isn’t open! It’s a Google-run alliance; Google is calling the shots and is in charge of running the thing. But that’s kind of bogus since theoretically, it
could cause OpenSocial to move in ways that benefited it. True open standards initiatives tend to be run by open boards.

Of course, the down side to working with open-standards boards is they tend to move very slowly. Google is known for having little patience for that sort of thing.

One person I spoke to, who asked to remain anonymous because he is close to the current action, said challenging Google on whether OpenSocial was truly open was a red herring: “It’s a false challenge,” this person argued. “Even if Google has significant control over the API, the way it’s inevitably going to get controlled in reality is by the interoperable implementations that that people actually use. Interoperability itself will be the glue that keeps it from becoming proprietary. This is a dynamic that has worked very well for Internet standards over the years including HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP itself, despite some very large and dominant vendors who would have preferred to take control of things like those. ” He also referenced this Anil Dash piece, which provides all the ammo you need to support the inevitability of Option 2.

Source:

Citizen Media: The High School Years

By Kevin Smokler

It wasn’t long ago that “citizen media” meant a gang of political bloggers fact checking Dan Rather–and maybe a chubby kid doing a wild dance with a light saber. But my stars, how they’ve grown. Citizen media is about the aggregating, licensing and management of content created by everyday people for advertisers, marketers and product developers as well as the brokering of citizen media makers for live events. It’s about the shift from a diffuse cacophony of voices to a viable business opportunity. A look around the Internet’s homerooms confirms that citizen media has plunged into adolescence with business plans, VC money, and Hollywood waiting to cash in when they become of earning age. Of course, we’ve seen this pep rally before and know that today’s valedictorian can be tomorrow’s yearbook memory. But before the zits and angst set in, we present how citizen media really is like high school.

Student council

The BMOCs angling to be the Viacom and Disney of citizen media

Pod Show: Adam Curry’s podcast network could be Citizen Media’s first conglomerate, but it risks getting passed by medium-of-the-moment videoblogging and whatever comes after it.

Podtech: Pod Tech is looking to be the digital lifestyle’s media of record with a network of corporate-branded podcasts, event coverage, and interviews with tech honchos. Most notably, it grabbed blogebrity Robert Scoble away from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). Its focus on b2b content could be more stable than consumer-focused media, but double check that after the next recession.

Weblogs Inc: AOL bought the blog publisher in 2005 and tapped founder Jason Calacanis to “save Netscape.” Netscape’s conversion this spring to a social bookmarking site has angered Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, the genre’s heavyweight.

Gawker.com: The first publishing conglomerate of the Citizen Media has slimmed down to 10 blogs and stayed proudly independent. Still making mirco-celebrities of its editors and hauling in big name advertisers but is text-based blogging the future or so 2003?

9 Rules: Older and scrappier than Gawker or Weblogs Inc, 9 rules doesn’t broker ads for its network of blogs but acts as a curator and promoter of independent content. Non-commerical and proud of it.

A/V Club

The video kids that want to create your home for uploading, hosting, and sharing video.

YouTube: The Library of Congress of citizen video clips and a ton of professional ones illegally uploaded too. If you haven’t heard of them, we can’t help you.

Dailymotion: Think Friendster with videos as the currency. This may be a prime example of late-to-the-party-piggybacking or just the mashup the space currently lacks.

Blip.tv: If YouTube is the public access cable of the Internet, then Blip is taking a TV-network approach. It focuses on serialized programming, distributing videos from such folks as CNN, Conde Nast and William Shatner’s SciFi DVD Club (!) to iTunes, Dabble and other content aggregation spots. Producers can include opt-in advertising and license their videos through creative commons.

Vimeo.com: A subsidiary of New York-based Connected Ventures (who also has a little-known project called College Humor), Vimeo claims nearly 70,000 registered users but is, at the moment, yet another site for sharing video clips. The madness created around a Google-You Tube acquisition may make short work of their anonymity.

Grouper: Sony’s August acquisition of this YouTube lookalike may foretell what will happen to the online video space once the big boys crash the party.

(Class of 2007) FireAnt.tv: Will bring the “network TV” model to video, catapulting it to success like those who followed this model for audio (Podshow) and blogging (Gawker Media).

Campus radio

These audiophiles want to make creating podcasts as easy as Web surfing.

Hipcast: Its simple interface lets bloggers create audio and video posts in seconds. Formally audioblog.com, Hipcast predates Odeo and was created by citizen journalism pioneer Eric Rice.

Libsyn: An open-source podcast creation and hosting site. It offers four tiers of paid memberships, podcast length, and audio quality.

Class of 2007 Odeo.com: Has all the tools and talent to bring podcasting further into the mainstream, giving us no shortage of “Will Clear Channel (NYSE:CCU) buy Odeo?” rumors next year.

Newspapers

Their blogging tools began the citizen media revolution. How will they evolve?

WordPress: The latecomer to blogging software is now the platform of choice among the blogerati and a San Francisco-based, five-person company headed by former Web 1.0 veteran (onetime Outpost CEO) Toni Schneider.

Six Apart: The husband-and-wife-founded company behind popular blogging tools Movable Type, Typepad and Vox, it acquired Web-based news aggregator Rojo this fall and mobile blogging client Splash data in the spring. Valley buzz predicts more grabs for this “little giant” of citizen media, long rumored a target themselves.

Blogger.com: Has the the Model T of citizen media gotten too comfortable at the Googleplex while social and mobile devices alter the meaning of the verb it helped invent? Or will potential new sibling You Tube rev it up again?

Playground

Where the media you create becomes the center of socializing

Dabble: Aggregates video from YouTube, blip.tv and other hosting services and lets members tag and organize their clip collections into playlists. It could become the flickr of video, but are we ready for another media locker to keep tidy?

Imeem.com: Social networker Imeem has many of the same moves as its competitors (blogs, photos, media swapability) but is looking towards music sharing and hosting communities around large media properties to set it apart. For example, it’s recently partnered with Virgin Records and Warner Independent Pictures.

(Class of 2007) Yelp.com: The people-powered Citysearch is grabbing more metros by the day. Its Myspace take on cities could make local expertise the new digital currency.

Clubs

City guides, dating and whole worlds created entirely by users. They just hand ‘em the tools.

Second Life: Only two years old, this user-created universe has a GDP of $64 million and the real-world recognition that its forerunner Everquest never had. Marketers are suitably obsessed: The latest X-Men movie had a Second Life premiere and Adidas and American Apparel sell their virtual wares here. Maybe-presidential candidate Mark Warner has also been making the rounds.

People Aggregator: This pet project of Macromedia co-founder Marc Canter, People Aggregator’s looking to be the giant bucket for your digital life. It includes a downloadable component for creating your own social network or stitching together others. The big question: Is this a great leap forward for an already crowded space or a ho-hum lateral slide?

Vox: The newest entry into Six Apart’s portfolio of blogging tools, Vox gives personal publishing easy photo and video integration and a social network of private “neighborhoods.” Still in invite only beta, Vox may be the all-in-one digital life People Aggregator is after or an even smaller slice of the blogging pie.

Consumating: Ostensibly began as a dating site for the geekily inclined but it’s evolved into the too-old-for-MySpace social network of choice for nearly 20,000 users. CNET (NASDAQ:CNET) Networks acquired it last year.

Future Entrepreneurs

If there’s gold in citizen media’s hills, these guys are selling both the map and the shovels.

(Class of 2007) Federated Media: CEO John Battelle’s standing in the blogosphere helped him build a boutique ad network on tech, parenting, business and automotive sites in just over a year. The Internet’s the limit.

The Deck: An advertising network of bloggers with A-list standing in the Web and design communities. Run by Chicago-based agency Coudal Partners.

Blogads: An early advertising network for bloggers and other citizen mediamakers to build an ad-based business model to support their content, it became the preeminent player, repping citizen celebs like Daily Kos, Perez Hilton, and GoFugYourself. But recent gains by Federated Media and The Deck indicate that its hold on the social media advertising space is hardly firm.

Fruitcast: Aiming to be the Google AdSense of sound by making it easy to insert small ads in podcasts. Will need to develop critical mass or savvy partnerships soon. Company blog hasn’t been updated since May.

Feedostyle: Turn rss feeds into syndicated content! Post that content on your blog! Premium members get content ad-free!

Feedburner.com If it can reassert that the RSS feed is the backbone of both podcasting and video blogging, it could set itself up as a prime acquisition target. But thus far, the geeks have done a terrible job of explaining what a feed is and what it’s good for.

Radiotail: Utilizing more of an agency-model than competitor Fruitcast, Radiotail sells podcast advertising for both independent broadcasters and manages campaigns for media companies. Nikon (OTC:NINOY) and Microsoft have bought time.

Guidance counselor’s office

Taking media to the next level by putting a price tag on it

Blogburst: Syndicates blog content to major media outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Gannett newspapers, and Parade Magazine. Its parent company Pluck also sells a number of tools for building communities around user-generated content, from user blogs to community photo galleries.

(Class of 2007) SocialRoots.com: If it can get the right partners and management lined up, plan on seeing them invent the monetization of citizen media content the way Ebay (NASDAQ:EBAY) did for the junk in your attic.

Hall monitors

Who’s worth paying attention to and who’s still a kid with a light saber? Ask them.

Tailrank: “Finding the best content from blogs so you don’t have to” is the motto of San Francisco-based Tailrank. It ranks the top 150,000 blogs according to its own algorithm, and then publishes a scrolling ticker-tape of influential technology, political and general news memes. Users can also create their own news filters.

Rapleaf.com: No one has been able to communicate to the old media what are the most influential blogs, which is what Technorati should be doing. Rapleaf could grab this ground right out from under Dave Sifry and co.

The Attendance Board

Technorati.com: If you’re not on technorati, you don’t exist.

Student who makes the morning announcements

Conversations Network: The non-profit wing of for-profit GigaVox Media, the Conversations Network has been called “The NPR of Podcasting.” Plans are in the works for GigaVox to distribute nearly 60 monthly programs of recorded lectures and presentations on business, technology and social entrepreneurship by the end of 2006.

Work crew repairing and cleaning up around school grounds

Wikimapia: Combines Google Earth and Wikipedia. Pick any spot on the planet and give it a tag. This is either mindless fun–if used for good–or the beginning of 1984 if used for evil.

Reader Riff
“Napster just doesn’t have it anymore. No matter what they try, they aren’t going to be the ‘rebel’ company that they were–and that’s what attracted people to it. Anybody can do what they are doing; why would anybody want to do it through them?” –Gary Bourgeault

Source:

Web Travel Resources

By A. Martin

Practically every airline trip today begins on the Internet. But with so many travel-related Web sites, if you don’t know where to look, you can end up experiencing information overload, wasting time, and getting frustrated.

Travelocity.Travelocity Business promises 24-hour-a-day phone support for business travelers at no additional charge. Its FareWatcher Plus gives you automatic updates on fare changes and deals for up to ten destinations. Windows Vista users can install the Travelocity Desktop FareWatcher gadget to receive alerts.

Expedia. This popular site also offers tools and services for business travelers. In addition, it includes helpful tips and information on 65 airports worldwide, to help you figure out how to spend your time during layovers.

Orbitz. Orbitz’s Traveler Update provides a dashboard-style overview of current security wait times, local traffic, weather, flight status, parking rates, Wi-Fi network accessibility, and other information for U.S. airports. Traveler Update combines information generated by users as well as reports from the FAA, TSA, and other sources. You can use the service on your computer and on Web-enabled phones.

SideStep.This site searches over 200 travel booking and airline sites–including Expedia, Travelocity, and JetBlue–and displays results in its downloadable toolbar. When you research a trip on a travel booking site, SideStep’s toolbar automatically pops up to show you the itineraries it recommends so you can easily comparison shop. You can search for airfares, hotels, cars, vacation packages, cruises, and more.

Airfarewatchdog.com. The folks at Airfarewatchdog.com claim that “real people” compare airfares on airlines that booking Web sites don’t typically include, such as Southwest Airlines. The site also includes smaller airlines, such as Allegiant Air and international carriers, which don’t usually share their best fares with the big travel booking sites. The site is no-frills but includes useful features, such as Fare of the Day and Top 50 Fares.

LastMinuteTravel.com. The name pretty much sums it up.This siteis designed to help you find the best fares for airlines, hotels, cruises, rental cars, and vacation packages, particularly for those traveling with little advance notice.

Mobissimo. Unlike some travel booking sites,Mobissimo lets you search for international trips as well as domestic U.S. jaunts. The site is limited to airlines, hotels, and rental cars.

Flycheapo.com. This bare-bones site is useful for finding low-cost carriers within Europe.

WhichBudget. Going beyond Flycheapo.com,WhichBudget helps you find low-cost carriers in 124 countries. The site’s text-heavy interface will give you flashbacks to the mid-nineties, but it’s worth a visit nonetheless.

I wrote about the following sites in my July column.

Farecast. This site charts recent airfare history for the itineraries you enter and predicts what your trip is likely to cost in the immediate future.PC World named Farecastone of the 20 Most/ Innovative Products of 2006.

Kayak. Use Kayak to search multiple travel booking sites. The Buzz section reveals the best prices others have found using the site. Kayak was named one of PC World’s Top 100 Best Products of 2007.

ITA Software.This site is known for being objective (unlike some travel sites) and makes it easy to find itineraries that combine the lowest fares and convenient routing.

Yapta. You can use Yaptato get alerts whenever an airline itinerary you’ve booked drops in price. Armed with that knowledge, you may be able to receive a refund or credit for the difference between what you paid and the lower fare.

FlightStats. Head to FlightStats for on-time performance records for major airlines.

SeatGuru. Peruse seating diagrams for domestic and international planes at SeatGuru.

15 Essential Mobile Web Sites: Ever needed to make, shall we say, a pit stop when you’re on the go? The mobile browser version of MizPee may help you find the quick relief you need. Read about MizPee and 14 other great Web sites for mobile browsers in our roundup.

The Best Mobile Browsers: You might not be surprised to learn that Apple’s Safari Mobile, for the iPhone, earned our thumbs up among mobile browsers. We also reviewed Palm’s Blazer, the RIM BlackBerry browser, and others. Which browser came in last price? You might be surprised.

Mobile Broadband Explained: Quick–what’s the difference between EvDO and EDGE? If you’re not sure, read our “Business Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Broadband.”

Stuck in an unfamiliar town? These sites help you get the most out of your business trip.

Menu Pages.This guide to over 25,000 restaurants in eight metro areas provides user reviews and downloadable menus.

OpenTable.com. Want to book a table for four people tomorrow night at 8 o’clock?OpenTable.com lets you quickly discover which restaurants in a given city (20 in the U.S., a few internationally) have availability at a particular time, then book a table. Members earn points that can be redeemed for discounts at participating eateries. OpenTable.com includes links to reviews in Zagat.com and other sites.

Zagat. The famed guide to restaurants, featuring consumer reviews and ratings, is available digitally in several forms. You can get restaurant details for freeon your laptop(but no ratings or reviews) or cell phone Web browser. For $5 (for 30 days) or $25 (for 12 months), you can access Zagat’s reviews and ratings on a laptop or cell phone browser. Other options: Download the Zagat application and database ($30) onto your Palm, BlackBerry, or Pocket PC handheld; or buy a CD-ROM for your computer ($30). Go to the Zagat Survey Shop for
info on these service.

Chowhound. Thisfoodie sitefeatures reviews and tips from diners around the world, plus interviews with experts; forums; videos; and blogs

TripAdvisor. Here’s where hotel junkies trade secrets, reviews, tips, and photos. Users rate hotels on such things as service, value, and cleanliness.The site features forums, in which travelers pose questions to other travelers. You can also book hotel and airline reservations.

USAToday.com. The newspaper’s Hotel Hot sheet blog is ideal for keeping up with the latest hotel trends and news.

HotelChatter.This blog has tons of hotel news, gossip, and reviews, as well as annually updated lists of the best and worst hotels with Wi-Fi.

Google Maps. I’ve had mixed success with all the mapping/direction sites. But I use Google Maps most often, because I love the satellite and street view features and the real-time traffic updates. I also use Google Maps on my Treo for on-the-go driving directions without a GPS.

Weather.com. For thousands of cities worldwide,Weather.com lets see how local weather will affect outdoor activities; allergies; skin
conditions; even weddings.

YouTube. There are thousands of user-posted videos in the Travel & Places categories.

Travelistic.com. This is probably the most travel-focused video sharing sit, with over 5000 videos shot by and for travelers.

USAToday.com. The newspaper’s Travel site aggregates tons of tools and information for travelers, including MileTracker, a downloadable application for tracking frequent flier miles and MileMarker, a calculator that helps you determine how many miles you’ll need to fly from points A to B.

Town and Country Travel. The high-end travel magazine’s Web site features a useful directory of linked travel resources. Ask the
Concierge, an online feature in which concierges at renowned hotels aregrilled about what to do and see in their city, is worth a read. The
site recently launched, however, so you’re likely to find only a few Ask the Concierge entries.

Concierge.com. The Web site for Conde Nast Traveler features helpful tools, including a database of travel agents, destination video clips, and Suitcase, an interactive travel planning tool.

Have I missed your favorite Web travel-related sites? If so, share them with me at james_martin@pcworld.com. Please be sure to include your full name and location.

Fall’s Sleek Cell Phones: Our pictorial guide to this fall’s Apple iPhone competitors includes the Sprint Touch, manufactured by HTC. As its name implies, the Windows Mobile 6 Touch uses a touch screen to speed navigation. Though you can’t pinch or squeeze with the Touch interface, as you can with the iPhone, it does offer some cool
shortcuts.

More $200-ish Laptops: Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative isn’t the only inexpensive portable in the news. Intel’s Classmate PC will cost about $200 to manufacture and will be aimed at least initially at school kids in Brazil, Nigeria, and some Asian countries (it won’t be sold to consumers). Asus’s Eee PC, now available for preorder, costs $260 to $400.

How to Remove Craplets: Craplets are those unwanted programs and utilities that come preinstalled on many consumer PCs. They hog hard drive space and can slow your system. Among the 20 (mostly free)downloads you can’t live without isPC De-Crapifier, which will remove most if not all of those unwanted programs.

Source:

BusinessWeek:Looming Online Security Threats in 2008

by Aaron Ricadela

It’s nearly enough to make you long for the days of typo-ridden e-mails pretending to come from your bank.

As Internet users display more of their personal information on social networking Web sites, and office workers upload more sensitive data to online software programs, computer hackers are employing increasingly sophisticated methods to pry that information loose. In many cases, they’re devising small attacks that can fly under the radar of traditional security software, while exploiting the trust users place in popular business and consumer Web sites.

In September, the names and contact information for tens of thousands of customers of Automatic Data Processing and SunTrust Banks were stolen from Salesforce.com CRM, which provides online customer management software for those two companies. The incident occurred after a hacker tricked a Salesforce employee into disclosing a password.

The assaults on consumer sites are getting more unnerving as well. A security researcher reported Nov. 8 that hackers had hijacked pages on News Corp.’s social networking site MySpace, including the home page of singer Alicia Keys. Clicking nearly anywhere on the page would lead viewers to a Web site in China that tries to trick them into downloading software that can take over their PCs. “We’re going to see a lot more of this in the consumer space,” says John Pescatore, an Internet security analyst for Gartner IT.

Exploiting Trust

These kinds of targeted attacks on Web-based services may constitute the top computer security threats of 2008, according to security experts. “One of the biggest challenges of 2008 will be, how do you do business online when you know there’s a bad guy in the middle?” says Chris Rouland, chief technology officer in IBM’s Internet security systems division. “The personal computer isn’t the target of 2008; it’s the browser,” he says. IBM sees the landscape changing profoundly enough that the company plans to spend $1.5 billion next year to develop security suites that can address a broad array of threats rather than different products aimed at specific security risks.

Although a rash of e-mail-borne virus outbreaks in recent years have made most PC users wary of opening attachments or clicking on links in suspicious messages, it may be harder to prevent attacks that exploit the Web-based lists of friends and business contacts that users store in widely used services and social networks. “We’ve definitely seen the bad guys use malware to go after friends lists on MySpace and Facebook,” says Pescatore. “They’re exploiting trust.”

By targeting a relatively small number of users at a time—tens of thousands vs. millions—new hacking strategies can elude efforts to detect them. Hackers also are employing more professional approaches to maximize damage without being caught. These include division of labor by hacking expertise and wider use of black-market sites to hire programmers and purchase professional malware-writing tools.

Hackers Shift Attacks

Factor in the growing variety of places where people are connecting to the Internet—from work, from home, from Starbucks —and the growing array of devices they’re using to do so, and the coming year could present a potent brew of problems.

Although traditional PC software such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and Office programs still present the broadest target because of their hundreds of millions of users, hackers are increasingly attacking online services, says Scott Charney, Microsoft vice-president for trustworthy computing. Worse, traditional virus attacks that crash PCs or issue floods of commands to overwhelm Web sites are being augmented with malicious software that can swipe personal information, such as bank and credit-card numbers.

To be sure, it’s in the interest of companies that sell security software to maximize fears that there’s a cyberthreat lurking behind every mouse click. At the same time, the sheer size of attacks is getting larger, and the Web’s incursion into nearly every facet of daily life presents attackers with more ways than ever to strike.

Cellular and Corporate Caution

For consumers, it’s not just their profiles on social networks that can be mined for personal information. Sophisticated smartphones that run full-fledged operating systems and e-mail applications, and hence store more valuable data, could present tempting targets. Security researchers have found numerous ways to break into prominent mobile-phone platforms from Symbian and Microsoft, and quickly demonstrated ways to hack into Apple’s new iPhone. “All of a sudden on that phone is the stuff the identity
thieves go after,” says Gartner’s Pescatore, noting security vendors have been hyping the cell-phone threat for years, while the damage hasn’t amounted to much.

In the corporate world, criminals are hunting for more of the valuable information stored on companies’ servers. A computer breach at T.J. Maxx in 2005 and 2006 may have handed hackers access to credit- and debit-card numbers for up to 94 million of the retailer’s customers—double what the company originally reported, according to court documents filed by Visa and MasterCard  in October.

Cyberthieves are also attacking corporate databases in search of undisclosed financial data or proprietary design and engineering information that can be sold, says Phil Dunkelberger, CEO of security software company PGP. “The really big money now is going to be in stealing intellectual property,” he says.

Viruses: More Sophisticated Bait

Hackers are also unleashing viruses that can recruit armies of consumer PCs into larger networks of remote-controlled machines. These “botnets” can distribute spam, attack database software, or keep a record of users’ keystrokes. One of the worst, Storm Worm, has infected tens of millions of PCs this year.

Even the messages containing virus payloads are getting slicker. In the past, as compared with the sophistication of the viruses, the e-mails carrying them were rather crude. That made users less likely to follow their instructions, says David Perry, director of global education at security software vendor Trend Micro. “These were really well-written viruses, but nobody in the U.S. would click on them because they sounded like they came from Boris and Natasha,” he says, referring to Cold War characters from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. Now, he says, “they’re hiring professionals” to write the e-mails.

Security Tips

Given the assortment of nasty behavior befouling the Internet, what’s a PC user to do? BusinessWeek.com consulted the experts, who offered the following advice:

• Don’t give away any valuable or sensitive personal information on your MySpace or Facebook profile, or within messages to other members of the network. And don’t click on any links in social network messages from people you don’t know.
• No reputable company will ask for your password, account number, or other log-in information via e-mail or instant message.
• Use one of the many antivirus, antispyware, and firewall programs on the market. Often, vendors offer all three functions in a single package. And many Internet service providers offer them free with your monthly subscription.
• Upgrade your browser to the most current version. From Microsoft, that’s Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla’s Firefox is on version 2, as is Apple’s Safari browser.
• Pay attention to the messages from Windows that pop up on your screen, especially in the new Vista operating system. They often contain helpful security information that many users overlook.
• Turn on Windows’ automatic-update function to get Microsoft’s regular security patches.

Source:

IBM: The End Of Advertising As We Know It

IBM Global Business Services unveiled its new report, “The End of Advertising as We Know It,” forecasting greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next five years than occurred in the previous 50.

To examine the factors influencing advertising and explore future scenarios, IBM surveyed more than 2,400 consumers and 80 advertising executives globally. The IBM report shows increasingly empowered consumers, more self-reliant advertisers and ever-evolving technologies are redefining how advertising is sold, created, consumed and tracked.

Traditional advertising players risk major revenue declines as budgets shift rapidly to new, interactive formats, which are expected to grow at nearly five times that of traditional advertising. To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mind-set to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices. Advertising agencies must experiment creatively, become brokers of consumer insights, and guide allocation of advertising dollars amid exploding choices. All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

“Digital entertainment is experiencing faster adoption than anyone had previously anticipated. The advertising community needs to dramatically re-orient its business to serve consumers who increasingly access content in non-linear formats,” said Bill Battino, Communications Sector managing partner, IBM Global Business Services. “Companies must re-look at how they serve content to consumers with business models based much more on engaging consumers in a relationship.”

The report observes four change drivers tipping the advertising industry balance of power: control of attention, creativity, measurement, and advertising inventories. As shown in IBM’s global digital media and entertainment consumer survey released in August, consumers’ attention has shifted, with personal Internet time rivaling TV time. Consumers have tired of interruption advertising, and are increasingly in control of how they interact, filter, distribute, and consume their content, and associated advertising messages. IBM’s survey findings demonstrated that half of DVR owners watch 50 percent or more of programming on re-play, and that traditional video advertising doesn’t translate online: 40 percent of respondents found ads during an online video segment more annoying than any other format. Amateurs and semi-professionals are increasingly creating low cost advertising content that threatens to bypass creative agencies, while publishers and broadcasters are broadening their own creative roles. Advertisers are demanding accountability and more specific individual consumer measurements across advertising platforms. Self-service advertising exchanges are attracting revenues that were once exclusively sold through proprietary channels or transactions.

Advertising Experts’ Expectations in Line with Global Consumer Trends

IBM’s research found that advertising experts recognize the changing nature of consumers and also anticipate dramatic changes on the horizon. More than half of ad professionals polled by IBM expect that in the next five years open advertising exchanges (currently led by companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL) will take 30 percent of current revenues now commanded by traditional broadcasters and media. Nearly half of the advertising survey respondents anticipate a significant (greater than 10%) revenue shift away from the 30-second spot within the next five years, and almost 10 percent of respondents thought there would be a dramatic (greater than 25 percent) shift. Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

Saul Berman, IBM Media & Entertainment Strategy and Change practice leader, said, “Advertising remains integral to pop culture and continues to fund a significant portion of entertainment around the world. But it needs to morph into new formats and offer more intrinsic value to consumers, who will have more choices. The wealth of new advertising outlets means consumer analytics will have a more prominent role than ever regardless of where you reside in the value chain. Young people in particular have grown accustomed to not paying for content. Despite greater consumer control over content and advertising, we envision a world where consumers will continue to prefer to view advertising rather than pay for content directly.”

The report indicates by 2012, the landscape of the industry will change so profoundly that to survive, advertising industry players need to take aggressive steps to innovate in three key areas:

• Consumers: making micro-segmentation and personalization paramount in marketing;
• Business models: how and where advertising inventory is sold, the structure and forms of partnerships, revenue models and advertising formats;
• Business design and infrastructure: All players need to redesign organizational and operating capabilities across the advertising lifecycle to support consumer and business model innovation: consumer analytics, channel planning, buying/selling, creation, delivery and impact reporting.

IBM believes that all players will need to invest heavily in consumer analytics and automation to gain more insights about the consumer and how to reach them. For example, interactive advertising paired with consumer analytics provides compelling knowledge of who viewed and acted on an ad rather than estimates of impressions, allowing advertisers to maximize revenue and yield management. Industry players will also need to examine if they have right resources and capacity to handle increased marketing promotions and integrated advertising sales. Finally, IBM observes that the dramatic increase in both the number and variety of promotions is leading to greater investment in tools to digitally transform and reduce the cost of companies’ workflows including content management, creative development, production and sign-off processes.

Download the research here

ParAccel Seen As A Promising Startup In BI Database Market

By Antone Gonsalves

Startup ParAccel has launched an analytic database that at least one expert sees as a potentially disruptive technology in the data warehouse and database management system markets.

The San Diego-based company officially launched itself and its first product last week by announcing the general availability of the ParaAccel Analytic Database, a DBMS capable of all types of decision processing, from traditional data warehousing and analytics to operational business intelligence, online analytical processing, and high-speed query processing.

In addition, ParAccel announced a partnership in which Sun Microsystems would offer a DBMS appliance with ParAccel software, which is also available as a standalone database or as a drop-in database accelerator.

In addition, the software can be configured for all-in-memory analytical processing, or for traditional disk-based database-execution deployments, James Kobielus, analyst for Current Analysis said in a recent research note. “It can run on a single massively parallel processing-capable compute node or on multiple distributed nodes with scale-out and high availability.”

Kobielus said the potential impact of the ParaAccel Analytic Database is high on the DBMS and DW markets because of its innovation, flexibility and scalability. “This new release could prove truly disruptive to established segments in which rivals offer point solutions rather than flexible, appliance-ready, analytics-processing solutions,” Kobielus said.

Nevertheless, ParAccel has its shortcomings. For one, it can operate as a drop-in accelerator only with Microsoft SQL Server, and not with the top two enterprise databases: Oracle and IBM DB2, the analyst said. In addition, ParaAccel’s offering competes with products in several market niches, and the startup has yet to prove that its technology is truly the best of breed in any of those segments.

However, ParAccel’s announcement “sends a signal that innovation is alive and well in the DBMS arena,” Kobielus said.

“Rival DBMS/DW vendors should rethink their go-to-market strategies in light of the release of ParAccel Analytic Database,” the analyst said. “This radically flexible new release could prove truly disruptive to many established market segments.”

Source:Intelligent Enterprise