At the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City, Viacom unveiled a new ad service called Surround Sound.
The service will enable advertisers to reach audiences across every screen on which Viacom has a presence — from television and online video to premium displays, mobile or other digital platforms.
Surround Sound will be available for Viacom media networks such as MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Spike and VH1. It is powered by Adobe’s AudienceManager platform.
“With Surround Sound we’re able to extend those audience buys across all of our properties, find those individual unique audience segments — what we’re calling ‘pinpoint accuracy’ — to be able to serve them targeted and most relevant ad experiences,” explains Josh Cogswell, SVP of digital products at Viacom.
Surround Sound offers advertisers scalable media buys across nearly 100 million homes on-air, more than 80 million unique visitors online, and the mobile and email users the company reaches globally.
A recent Pew Internet study showed that 73 percent of search users agree that a search engine keeping track of their searches is an invasion of privacy.
Google’s effort to combine its privacy policy across its properties is clearly at odds with how comfortable its users feel about how they will use personal data.
Google recognizes that it needs to gather more information about us to remain relevant and provide us with ads we care about. But people do not want to use Google+ so it has sought out data on us in ways that cause us to wonder whether they are “becoming evil.”
“The only reason anyone uses the word evil about Google, is because Google asked us to,” comments Gizmodo. “When it said that it wasn’t evil, it immediately invited an argument.”
Google has violated its users’ trust. It tracked Safari users without their permission. It has begun promoting its own products in its search results. It has given increased importance to ads over search results.
“The case against Google is for the first time starting to outweigh the case for it,” ads the post.
In a related story from the Los Angeles Times, Google users are suing the company over the “deceptive” privacy changes: “The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan by David Nisenbaum, Pedro Marti and Allison C. Weiss on behalf of Google and Android users who signed up for any Google user account from August 19, 2004, to February 29, 2012, and continued to use a Google account on or after March 1, 2012, when Google’s new privacy policy went into effect.”
According to Centris Research, one in four U.S. homes had a Blu-ray player in Q4 of 2011, an increase of 47 percent from the previous year.
DVD player ownership also showed gains, increasing to 91 percent of households, a 4 percent increase over 2010. And DVR household penetration rose 4 percent during the time period, to 38 percent.
The Centris report, which was based on 2,000 monthly survey respondents, also found that HDTV penetration grew 6 percent to 63 percent, and “high-definition TV service from multichannel video program distributors increased 11 percent to 42 percent of households,” reports Home Media Magazine.
“It is the Blu-ray market that continues to drive packaged media sales and generate higher margins for studios than standard DVD, disc rentals, transactional video-on-demand and electronic sellthrough,” explains the article. “The format also is a foundation in Hollywood’s effort to launch cloud-based digital locker UltraViolet.”
Apple is gaining ground in the mobile chip market and is expected to pass long-standing chip-maker Intel for the top spot.
“With demand for the iPhone and iPad growing at an unprecedented pace, and growth in the PC market a bit more lethargic, Apple’s mobile processor business is fast closing the gap on Intel’s. In fact, there’s not much of a gap to close,” AllThingsD reports, adding “…Apple will almost certainly pass Intel this year. And if it swaps in its own chip for the Intel chip in the MacBook Air, it may not only pass it, but claim a decent lead, as well.”
“In 2011, Apple shipped about 176 million chips in its iOS devices, capturing a 13.5 percent market share,” explains the article. “Intel shipped just .4 percent more — 181 million chips, enough to snag a 13.9 percent market share.”
It should be noted that Samsung manufactures Apple’s processors.
Intel has been trying to expand into the smartphone and tablet markets, where it so far has little presence. Medfield, the company’s new Atom chip will reportedly be sent to handsets and tablets by this year’s end.
Nokia’s Windows Phone strategy is having disastrous results where in the UK its market share has dropped from 23 percent in September 2010 to 4.6 percent in February 2012. A survey of major European markets confirms the lack of interest in Nokia’s Windows phone.
As “Nokia is Microsoft’s last gasp in mobile,” the results put into question whether Microsoft’s mobile strategy can succeed. Reportedly, Microsoft was disliked by the carrier community and this was not helped by its acquisition of Skype. “There is no coming back for Microsoft, not with or without Nokia,” comments Communities Dominate Brands — a blog of the book by the same title.
Moreover, the retail channel is not supporting Nokia’s Lumia (Windows Phone) sales, preferring to sell Android instead.
Ironically, Nokia has more attractive phones including the N9, N950 and the 808 PureView (award-winner at the recent Mobile World Congress). But these are all based on the outmoded Symbian OS.
“The Microsoft strategy for Nokia is a certain road to death,” suggests the post. “The Lumia smartphones will doom Nokia. The Windows Phone OS is never going to be the third ecosystem. The sooner the Nokia Board see the facts, and make the right decision, the sooner Nokia can start onto the road to recovery.”
Casting and production has begun for a new media project called “Cybergeddon,” intended to serve as “a groundbreaking motion picture event which will bring to life the growing threat of cybercrime,” according to a BusinessWire press release.
Anthony E. Zuiker and his production company Dare to Pass teamed with Yahoo! and Dolphin Digital Studios to launch the project. Zuiker turned to Norton by Symantec for “technical credibility and security insights to help inform and guide the narrative.”
From the press release: “’Cybergeddon’ is the evolution of the crime genre,” says Zuiker. “Through an invaluable partnership with Norton and embracing the forward-thinking vision of Dolphin Entertainment, ‘Cybergeddon’ will be a motion picture event released through Yahoo!’s global online distribution. Instead of opening ‘wide’ at 5000 screens, ‘Cybergeddon’ has the potential to premiere on 50 million online screens all over the world at the same time. This global distribution model is the future of storytelling with unprecedented scale.”
“Cybergeddon” is scheduled to launch on Yahoo! this Fall as a series of sequential installments, “through an immersive storytelling, social media and gaming experience,” explains the release.
The market for card readers is heating up. PayPal recently released its competitor to Square and in response, Square has announced its international expansion.
Now there is a new player in the field. Self-service ticketing platform Eventbrite is unveiling its $10 card reader for the iPad.
Paired with the new At The Door app that tracks sales, customer info and payments, the card reader enables on-site credit card payments that are service fee-free (users just have to pay for credit card processing).
There is also the option to wirelessly print tickets and receipts if consumers invest in the compatible printer.
According to the press release: “Prior to launch, the At The Door app was tested successfully with several large, high-profile events, including Meatopia, The Orange County BBQ Festival, and the IFPDA Print Faire. The At The Door Card Reader will be part of the mobile box office solution for the highly anticipated Governors Ball Music Festival — taking place on Roosevelt Island June 23-24, in New York City.”
On Friday, Facebook’s privacy policy will change its name to “Data Use Policy.” And that’s not the only thing the social network is changing.
“The changes reflect the fact that Facebook is extending its data collecting tentacles in all directions: towards people who never even signed up for Facebook, activities that aren’t clearly defined as sharing, and mediums that aren’t clearly defined as advertising,” said Sarah Downey of Abine, an online privacy company.
According to ReadWriteWeb, changes include allowing friends to give apps access to your personal information, banning multiple accounts, and requiring users to keep their profile and contact information up to date.
There are also updates on the rules for developers, some of which Facebook doesn’t even adhere to. These include making it easier for users to remove the application and deleting user data if used in inappropriate ways or if requested by the user.
Concerned? Unfortunately, if you access Facebook on Friday or thereafter, you have agreed to the new terms and there’s no way to opt out. “This Statement is take it or leave it: users agree to it simply by using Facebook,” said Downey. “Most of them will never know when or if the Terms change, let alone what they mean.”
The new Nielsen Cross-Platform Campaign Ratings service will offer clients a way to measure cross-platform traffic over TV and the Internet to aid media planning and advertising campaigns.
“The goal is to overcome challenges posed by separate media planning, buying and analysis processes for TV and the Internet, and to answer a growing demand by advertisers for cross-platform measurement tools that help them streamline their marketing strategies,” said Nielsen and partner GroupM, a media agency.
“Cross-platform metrics are essential to both buyers and sellers of advertising,” said Steve Hasker, president of media products and advertiser solutions for Nielsen. “Every day, we’re hearing from advertisers, online publishers, TV networks and agencies that a better system of measurement is required.”
The service may also add more data from additional media platforms in the future, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Sources say that HP will be combining its printing and PC businesses into one unit. The core profit-earning Imaging and Printing Group (IMG) will be consolidated with the struggling Personal Systems Group (PSG), which HP had considered spinning off.
“HP sees the two business groups — IPG sells printers both to consumers and businesses and PSG sells PCs to consumers and businesses — as making more operational sense combined than apart the source said. The plan is to have their line of business more readily integrated so they can approach customers together and with unified product offerings,” reports AllThingsD.
The executive VP of IPG, Vyomesh Joshi, will leave the company in the reorganization and Todd Bradley, the executive VP of PSG will take over the joint venture.
The combination of the groups is an effort to cut costs. The PSG has been struggling in the PC market and IPG saw a drop in sales and earnings in the last quarter.
A study conducted by North Carolina State University found that more than half of the apps on Google Play market have “ad libraries” that put users’ security and privacy at risk.
The more aggressive ad libraries on some of the apps make users vulnerable to malware by downloading and running code from remote servers. These ad libraries also enable third parties and hackers to download harmful code.
They are also used to track users’ location using GPS for targeted advertising. Some ad libraries access personal information like phone numbers, call logs and lists of all the apps stored on the phone.
“The current model of directly embedding ad libraries in mobile apps does make it convenient for app developers, but also fundamentally introduces privacy and security risks. The best solution would be for Google, Apple and other mobile platform providers to take the lead in providing effective ad-isolation mechanisms,” said Dr. Xuxian Jiang, assistant professor of computer science at the university and co-author of the paper.
Analyst Chetan Sharma released a report that found 90 percent of tablets are using Wi-Fi, not cellular networks even if they are capable.
“One key reason is that U.S. carriers don’t allow users to share a data plan with other devices, something that Sharma said should change this year,” reports AllThingsD. “Those that offer such shared data plans will fare better than those that stick to a plan for each device, Sharma said.”
The report also found that smartphones are using more and more data, up 19 percent in the last quarter from a year ago. Today, data accounts for 39 percent of overall revenue in the U.S. cellphone market.
“However, monthly revenue per customer — a key industry metric — is tailing off. Data continues to grow, but is no longer offsetting the decline in voice revenue. The U.S. industry saw average monthly revenue per customer drop by 43 cents, as a 52-cent per customer gain in data was more than offset by a 96-cent per customer decline in voice,” the article states.
A survey from Appcelerator found that developers’ interest in the Android platform has declined, with those “very interested” now under 80 percent compared to the 89 percent who are supportive of Apple’s iOS.
On the Android platform, developers have to take into account the various formats of different manufacturers.
“Our thought is a lot of developers are unhappy with the fragmentation of the platform as well as the fragmentation of the monetization platform,” said Mike King, Appcelerator’s principal mobile strategist. “Those things make it very difficult if you’re a developer to make money on Android.”
This negative trend by developers could spell trouble for Google’s Android.
“If programmers continue to lose interest in OS, major apps could start to disappear from the Android Market and show up in competitors’ mobile stores, making other platforms more attractive to handset and tablet users,” suggests Mobiledia.
The deal has not been finalized and the details are uncertain, but sources close to the matter suggest headphone maker Beats Electronics is acquiring the subscription music service MOG.
Phone manufacturer HTC is the majority owner of Beats. The company is interested in MOG’s deals with the major music labels and its music service, which could be offered on HTC handsets.
“MOG raised a reported $25 million over the course of its corporate history, and $15 million in the last few years, as it bolted a music service onto an ad network, its original business,” reports AllThingsD. “Last spring, it went looking for another $25 million to $30 million, and apparently ended up with this deal instead.”
MOG doesn’t have a strong following with only 500,000 active users, but its collaboration with Facebook and its “frictionless sharing” program has resulted in 130,000 people using the service at least once a month. However, insiders say the subscriber base isn’t the focus but rather the deals with the labels.
The Motion Picture Association of America has accused the digital locker service Hotfile for promoting piracy, attributing it’s rapid success to the sponsoring of digital theft.
Google has stepped in, supporting Hotfile and Internet freedom. The company said that no Internet company, Hotfile included, is required “to affirmatively monitor their services for possible infringement,” and it is not their job to report users for potential copyright violation.
“Google bases its defense of Hotfile on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which provides a ‘safe harbor’ for sites like YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia when they’re accused of directly supporting copyright infringement,” Mobiledia reports.
Hollywood will continue to search for ways to protect their content, even after the failure of SOPA. Mobiledia suggests that studios work on their own practices — reducing problematic “windowing” schemes and building support for their digital storage locker UltraViolet — rather than target Internet companies.
