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Just when you were getting comfortable with Web 2.0, it’s time to start thinking about Web 3.0.  But don’t fret:  the geeks and the gurus began shaping Web 3.0 ten years ago, when Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is largely credited with inventing the World Wide Web, envisioned what he called a semantic web, in which computers didn’t merely present or work with data, they understood it, as well.

Think of it as a computer able to read a document for context: the ability to realize a document that includes the word “teeth” is a document about human teeth, not the teeth of a gear or the teeth of a shark.  Think of it as a way to contextualize information, so that information merely doesn’t exist in a binary manner—it exists in context to some grander theme.  Think of it as the ability to find that one tiny needle in the biggest haystack you can imagine.

Perhaps now you can understand why Web 3.0 is going to be an incredible boon for internet marketers.  By giving marketers the tools to not only pinpoint, say, keywords, but tools that are able to target those keywords even better via semantics, contextual advertising will be transformed in ways that serve both marketers and consumers better.  Marketers will be able to save money by better targeting their online advertising, and consumers will receive better, more meaningful advertising from merchants with whom they want to do business.

The key to all this, of course, is the technology that enables computers to comprehend.  Already, companies like Peer39 are developing algorithms to understand web page meaning and sentiment.  MIT’s Technology Review named the company as one of the ten web startups to watch in 2008.

Except, perhaps, to answer the door when the pizza man comes.

Not to be outdone by rival Pizza Hut, who is set to launch a Facebook app that allows social networkers to order up a pie directly from their profile page, pizza conglomerate Domino’s announced a partnership with TiVo that will allow customers with TiVo broadband service to order up a pie directly from their TV screens.  The advertising-slash-interactive technology arrangement, as described in the Wall Street Journal, seems to be a way of addressing one of TiVo’s major drawbacks for advertisers:  viewers fast-forwarding over the commercials.  Now, when TiVo viewers fast-forward over a Domino’s commercial, they’ll see a pop-up ad for Domino’s, which links to a Domino’s ordering screen.

Besides being a way to profit—hopefully—from a TiVo work-around, Domino’s new TiVo partnership also addresses some o the “barriers to purchase” inherent in the food ordering business, according to Rob Weisberg, Domino’s VP of precision and print marketing, as quoted in the Journal.  In the traditional food ordering model, according to Weisberg, the consumer has to get up off the couch—or act—in order to make the purchase, and that involves searching for a take-out menu, which may or may not prompt the consumer to try a different take-out restaurant—or, God forbid—their own refrigerator, if the Domino’s menu isn’t readily available.  The new TiVo advertising arrangement gets rid of all that by putting the promotion right on the consumer’s television screen, along with an interface for direct ordering.  The consumer selects their crust, their toppings, their sauces, and voila—a Domino’s pizza shows up at the door thirty minutes later.

Other pizza chains have been moving towards digital ordering, too.  Aside from the Pizza Hut-Facebook deal, Papa John’s began taking orders via text messaging.   To play on P.T. Barnum:  Has anyone ever went broke over-estimating the laziness of the American public?  It’s doubtful.

Google launched its video and voice capabilities to Gmail’s chat function Tuesday November 11^th.  It is a basic but easy to install addition to Gmail’s chat ability.  With a quick download you can be video chatting with friends.

One potential problem is the space the application uses.  An article on cnet.com claimed the added functions made the computer very slow when using the Gmail Video and Voice, as it’s called.  It supports Firefox, IE, and Chrome on a PC and Firefox on the Mac.  As opposed to other video services, Gmail Video and Chat uses a proprietary plug-in instead of Flash.

To download the application, go to mail.google.com/videochat.         

If Kellogg Co. indeed proves to be the bellwether, for marketers, 2009 is shaping up to be the year of ROI, where instead of increasing advertising budgets across the board, companies will be narrowing their marketing focus on only those forms of advertising that have proven ROIs.  And for Kellogg, the ROI powerhouse is clearly online.

According to Ad Age, Kellogg’s chief marketer Mark Baynes claimed its ROI for a Special K digital campaign beat ROI for broadcast campaigns by a “factor of well over two.”  Kellogg spends more than $1 billion on advertising alone.

To help the company compete even more effectively in the digital arena, Kellogg has hired Pure Visibility, an Ann Arbor-based internet marketing firm specializing in website optimization and pay per click management.  The size of the Kellogg-Pure Visibility deal was not announced.

New technology and inventions always bring new methods of scamming.  When e-mail and the internet became popular we realized how small the world really is.  Internet users started receiving e-mails and instant messages from “friends” claiming to need help transferring money from a Swiss bank account.  Scary enough people trusted these scam artists, sending money overseas until the stories got to the press warning people that these requests were scams.

The latest trend with the internet is social networking, so guess what?  The imposters have found a way to users via their friends’ pages on websites like Facebook and LinkedIn.  BusinessWeek reports earlier this month a Facebook user Katrina Wells received a message from someone she thought was her friend Adrian.  His message claimed that he was stranded in Lagos, Nigeria and needed Wells to wire $500 for a plane ticket home. 

Lucky for Wells she didn’t buy it and alerted authorities who are now conducting an investigation.  It hasn’t been confirmed but Facebook officials believe someone acquired Adrian’s username and password though a “phishing” scheme, brining him to a dummy site and asking him to log into “Facebook”.

Officials warn that these schemes may become more common as people are spending significant time on computers and within their social networks.  It’s not difficult to impersonate someone online and since we make so much information about ourselves readily available to our “friends” down to what we are doing to the minute, these scammers can know a lot about us. 

Last year $239 million was lost through internet crime in the U.S., a 21% increase.  Of those cases 32.7% were contacted through websites, an increase from 16.5% in 2005.  As a society we trust, and it seems to be almost to a fault.  But to be honest I don’t know what’s scarier: that scam artists can hack into our private web pages, or that people trust enough to send hundreds and thousands of dollars overseas to people contacting them via the internet.

Home Depot is set to launch a Spanish-language version of its website today.  The site, which will offer a full range of full-range e-commerce activities, replicates the English version of its site.
Home Depot, according to the Wall Street Journal, is seeking to capitalize on Hispanic shoppers as a major growth opportunity.  Forrester Research reports that one fourth of Hispanics must be served in Spanish if retailers want their business.  According to Forrester, more than half of Hispanics who shop on line—7.1 million users—prefer to conduct their business in Spanish.

The move by Home Depot gives the company visibility in an arena where few retailers have dared to tread, at least thus far.  While some retailers make Spanish available on their sites, very few have sites that use Spanish for the entire ecommerce cycle.  Home Depot’s chief rival Lowe’s, for example, offers a home decorating and improvement site, but does not offer the ability to shop online in Spanish.

Home Depot, of course, does not cater only to homeowners and do-it-yourselfers; quite a large percentage of its clientele consists of building contractors, professional landscapers, and other builders who rely on Home Depot to get the job done.  As the Hispanic population increases, it’s safe to assume that Hispanic ownership of these sorts of businesses will also increase, and thus Home Depot could reap an even bigger reward:  not just from Hispanic homeowners and do-it-yourselfers shopping online and in Spanish, but Hispanic business owners as well—the ones who make the purchasing decisions for their companies.

If Home Depot has done its research and persona definitions correctly, it should do very well by beating its competitors to the punch online.

A surge in video games played on and developed for mobile phones is opening up new opportunities for advertisers, and the potential for opening up new revenue streams could be big.

“The thing with casual gaming is that it hits a much bigger demographic than console games that just tend to attract younger men, so now with mobile gaming you have an even greater potential for generating ad revenue, more than PC games ever could. More people have phones than PCs, and they’re using them more often and with more [downtime and] opportunities for gaming,” said Rob Enderle, principal of the Enderle Group, as reported by Ad Week.

Think of it this way:  seven of the ten most popular paid apps this week on the iTunes app store are game applications, offering incredible in-game advertising opportunities for the right businesses.  This week, NPD reports that the iPhone knocked the Motorola Razr from the number one spot for the first time in 12 quarters.  NPD also reports that smart phone users play more games than they use business-related applications, a usage pattern that represents the most increased use of the phone over the past three months.

And it’s no longer just about the iPhone, either.  Google’s G1 smart phone is making serious inroads in the smart phone market, and Google already has an in-game ad network in place.  Microsoft is rumored to be working on its own game-capable smart phone, and Sony, which owns PSP and Sony-Ericsson, is rumored to be working on a PSP phone while embracing in-game advertising with its own in-house team and a partnership with IGA.

Should traditional game-only hand-held device manufacturers be concerned?  Not just yet, say industry experts, who feel that smart phones, rather than replace the existing hand-held gaming market, will merely extend it by bringing in customers who might not be traditional gamers.  Still, companies like Sony and Nintendo will probably keep tabs on smart phones in the gaming market, just to make sure they don’t get leapfrogged.

Tuesday was an exciting day for Yahoo.  Not only did they find out their CEO would be stepping down from his position, stock prices rose and negotiations could be back on with Microsoft – busy day even for a conglomerate like Yahoo! 

The New York Times reports the split for CEO Jerry Yang and Yahoo to be mutual.  Roy J. Bostock, Yahoo’s chairman commented, “Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new C.E.O who can take the company to the net level.”  Although Yang is resigning from his chief position, he will continue to hold his role on the board as “chief Yahoo”.  Yang also agreed to remain as CEO until Yahoo finds a replacement, a process he will be involved in. 

Stockholders must have agreed with Yang and Yahoo that now was a good time for a new CEO because stock prices rose 7% on Tuesday after the announcement Monday evening. 

And finally, remember a few weeks ago when Microsoft and Yahoo were in negotiations for Microsoft to buy Yahoo, Jerry Yang was a primary player who stood in the way of that deal.  Now that he will be out of the office in the near future, things look up for Microsoft to acquire the search engine giant. 

A growing body of study suggests that social networks may predict what consumers will buy better than demographics do, according to Ad Age.  While the studies are too new to be entirely conclusive, they do suggest that who a person communicates with is probably more important than who a person “is,” demographically speaking, when making a purchase decision.

The dynamic may hold true for all types of social networks, not just online ones.  In 2004, for example, a large telecom company reached out to a specific targeted market—early adaptors—in a direct mail push for a new communications service.  But they didn’t stop there.  Using their own data and resources, they identified those people who were in contact with the people they identified as early adopters, and targeted them in their campaign as well, even if they weren’t demographically identified as early adapters themselves.  The result?  Those customers were three times as likely to buy the service as those in the target market with no connection to existing customers.

Think about it a bit, and anecdotally, the dynamic makes perfect sense.  You might not be moved to buy something just because you’re a middle class Latina who drives a cross-over vehicle and dines out three times per month, but you might be moved to buy something if one of your best friends—or merely one of your friends, for that matter—crows about something he or she really likes.

Marketers and prospective marketers on the internet are beginning to take notice of this dynamic.  Joe Doran, a former Microsoft executive, recently became CEO of Media 6 Degrees, a startup hoping to tap social networking-based marketing on the web.  33Across, led by CEO Eric Wheeler, is licensing analytics technology that recognizes and quantifies friend networks to online communities.  SocialMedia.com developed a relationship-targeting technology called FriendRank to visualize where consumers’ relationships lie.

Scion has long banked on its brand attributes—customization, originality, and modification—in cyberspace, and now, they appear to be going all in on kung fu puppets.  Facing a near 40% decline in sales in October, and 2007 sales figures 25% fewer than 2006, Scion announced this week, according to Ad Age, that it has hired director Roman Coppola to produce a live-action, nine-episode puppet series called “The Fist of Oblivion” to appear on Scion Broadband.   New episodes will be posted every Tuesday until December 2008.

Scion has long been into cutting edge advertising in cyberspace.  Traditionally, the carmaker eschews main street advertising venues like broadcast television in favor of online marketing and occasional cable television ads, but this venture may represent its most daring play to date, with the American economy in disarray, and US auto sales plummeting to the lowest monthly level in 17 years.

The jury, according to Ad Age, is decidedly out.  “The fundamental issue facing Scion is that it is perceived as a niche brand, not a household name,” said Jesse Toprak, executive director of industry analysis for Edmunds.com, as quoted by Ad Age.  By marketing to the youth market alone, Scion is essentially putting all its eggs into one basket.  According to Toprak, “Those [young] consumers typically don’t have the type of credit needed to get a new car.”

Interestingly enough, Scion first made its bones on an older demographic.  Until last year, a third of all Scions were purchased by Baby Boomers, who bought Scions because they were inexpensive to buy, cheap to operate, and easy to drive.  When Scion shifted its message to gain a younger market, it alienated its early adopters; something that might just come back to bite them if this marketing campaign does not succeed.

Johnson & Johnson felt the sharp tines of the public pitchfork this week, as two days after a new campaign for Motrin triggered an online uprising, Johnson & Johnson announced it has pulled the campaign from all advertising mediums.  The offense?  Suggesting—tongue-in-cheek—? that some moms might “wear their babies as fashion accessories.”

According to Ad Age, the end of the line for the Motrin advertising campaign occurred last week, when Los Angeles blogger Jessica Gottleib, a freelance writer who has written for National Lampoon, expressed outrage over the ads via Twitter, where she has 1,018 followers.  Her outrage was picked up by others, and shortly thereafter, Katja Presnal, a New York blogger and owner of Skimbaco, a children’s clothing store, collected Twitter “tweets” from similarly-offended moms and edited them into a video she posted on YouTube, which has been viewed over 20,000 times.  From there, it caught the attention of Johnson & Johnson, and they reacted quickly.

But does the outrage truly reflect the consensus of public opinion, or does it merely represent the feelings of a few self-styled—and connected—tastemakers?  Probably a little bit of both.  The internet—especially blogging and micro-blogging—has democratized media; a collection of newspaper editors, television and radio producers, and movie makers no longer controls what eventually comes to be known as “public opinion.”  And let’s face it—that self-styled set of opinion makers was never all that different from today’s bloggers and tweeters . . . they just controlled the mass media’s means of production, so to speak.

According to Ad Age, Six Flags is going guerilla to advertise the re-launch “Superman:  Ride of Steel,” with a new alternative reality game (ARG) touting the ride.  The re-launch comes during a trouble time for amusement centers and theme parks; studies show that the value of amusement center and theme park stock has declined 44.8% in the past year—87% for Six Flags specifically.

The “Superman:  Ride of Steel” is a bit infamous; in 1999, a rider at the Darien Lake Six Flags was thrown from the ride and nearly killed, in 2001, at the Six Flags in Agawam, 22 riders were injured in a collision between two roller coaster trains, and in 2004, also in Agawam, a rider was killed after being thrown from his seat.

While details of the advertising campaign remain closely guarded, Ad Week claims the project is being headed by Susan Bonds, head of 42 Entertainment, and veteran viral marketer of DC Comics characters and theme parks.  Bonds designed the ARG for “Dark Knight,” and handled the design and development for major attractions, themed architecture, internet entertainment projects, and proprietary rides for Walt Disney Imagineering.

YouTube and MGM announced an agreement that will enable YouTube to show selected MGM television shows and films.  The partnership will be kicked off with full-length episodes of “American Gladiators,” full-length films like “Bulletproof Monk” and “The Magnificent Seven,” and clips from “Legally Blonde.”  Ads will run alongside the video, but the video itself will be free to watch.

The deal represents an interesting shift in the dynamic between content producers and YouTube, as the two camps have been at odds with each other over copyright issues since YouTube’s debut in 2005.  YouTube allows users to upload video clips without strict controls governing copyright ownership, angering many content producers, who claim this sort of arrangement has cost them dollars over the years.

Though the internet has long been a Wild West atmosphere with little regard to content ownership—at least as far as compensation is concerned—prominent video sharing sites are now trying to make good with Hollywood.  Witness the success of Hulu, a joint venture of NBC and Fox, where users can see full-length episodes and clips of NBC- and Fox-produced content.  After being acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube is now trying to catch up, inking deals with not only MGM, but Lionsgate and CBS as well.

To mollify disgruntled content producers, YouTube recently developed a system called VideoID, which allows content producers to spot unauthorized clips on the YouTube site.  When unauthorized content is found, content producers can choose to remove the clips or keep them live and advertise on them.

As quoted in the New York Times, Forrester Research analyst James L. McQuivey feels the new system is basically an apology from YouTube to the content producer community.  “YouTube is essentially saying to media companies ‘we are sorry for our past copyright stance; we weren’t thinking big enough.  Let’s see how we can make some money together.’”

Coming soon to a closet near you:  advertisements  on your clothes hangers.  But that’s not all—those aren’t your ordinary, every-day clothes hangers at all, but something called an EcoHanger, make from 100% recycled paper and manufactured in the United States.

The New York-based Hanger Network uses EcoHangers to give environmentally-conscious companies a marketing punch with an environmentally-sensitive edge.  Claiming a network capacity of over 50 million per week, the Hanger Network claims a view rate of 100%, and a viewing time three times greater than the viewing time of an ad placed in a magazine.  Moreover, as the hangers themselves are relatively durable, Hanger Network claims a response curve that yields results for months.  Currently over 35,000 dry cleaners are part of Hanger Network’s network.

Last month, Hanger Network partnered with Crystal Cruises, a luxury cruise ship line wholly owned by Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK), headquartered in Tokyo.  Under the agreement, Crystal Cruises will use company-branded EcoHangers for its guest laundering services as part of its “Crystal clean” program of environmentally-friendly cruising initiatives.

More than 30 million people use LinkedIn, widely-regarded as one of the more well-know social networking site for white-collar professionals, but until now, most marketers didn’t know exactly who those users were.  They do now.  According to Ad Age, in the first public study of LinkedIn’s demographics and pyschographics, completed by Anderson Analytics, Linked In, and SPSS,  LinkedIn has become a tool for information workers to find jobs, network with other business people, and keep in touch with old collegaues.

According to the survey, 30% (9 million) of LinkedIn users are savvy networkers who earn nearly $93,500 per year and have a work puchase-power of $88,000.  This group earns a “great” in social networking influence; 69% read blogs, and 9% maintain their own blogs.  They are most likely to use Gmail and visit technews sites like Slashdot.

The next largest group, clocking in at 28% (8.4 million), are senior executives earning a mean of just over $104,000 per year with a purchasing power at work of $99,000.  Most of this group is happily employed and uses LinkedIn for business contact networking.  This group skews male, and more likely to visit news sites like Fox News.

The third largest group, accounting for 22% (6.2 million), use LinkedIn because friends convinced them to join.  This group is careful about who they connect to, and only connect to people they know in person.  They earn nearly $88,000 per year and have a purchasing power of work of $76,000.

The smallest group that uses LinkedIn, accounting for 21% (6.1 million), are the hard-core job searchers.  Seventy percent of this group is employed full-time but actively looking for another position.  Of all four groups, this one skews the youngest and most female (52%).  They earn just over $87,500 per year and have a work purchasing power of $84,000.

To gather this data, researchers sampled 70,000 members and surveyed a sample of 800 with a 10-minute online questionairre.

A number of traditional fast-food restaurants are beginning to make use of text messaging and rich mobile phone technology to allow customers to place online orders easily.  Pizza Hut, according to Ad Age, is even launching a Facebook app so users can place an order without leaving their profile.

According to Ad Age, quoting data from ComScore’s M:Metrics, for the three months ending in August 2008, food marketers sent nearly 1.4 million text ads, up over a third from the same period in 2007.  For restaurants, these ads have a high impact: among the various industries that advertise via text, restaurants have the best response rate—15.5%.

Some Subway chains offer ordering via text or iPhone app, and McDonald’s experimented with a text ordering system focusing on “late-night” orders.  Chipotle is creating an iPhone app to complement existing web- and fax-based ordering systems that allow customers to pay online, place group orders, and save ordering information for their next orders.

As quoted in Ad Age, according to Bob Kraut, vice president of marketing communications at Pizza Hut, the texting community tends to spend more than the average customer.  “It’s a little more upscale demographic,” said Kraut, “and a lot of people use credit.”  Through a partnership with eMusic.com, Pizza Hut is giving customers 75 free downloads if they buy a pizza online.

According to Venture Beat, iSkoot, a company that gives users the ability to make Skype internet calls from mobile phones, has raised $19 million to build a mobile platform for AT&T.  Set to launch in mid-November, the platform will provide web services like social networking, email, RSS feeds, and Twitter, for AT&T customers who don’t have feature-rich mobile devices.

iSkoot currently provides an app that allows cheap calls through a cellular voice network.  Users make a local call to connect with an exchange, and the exchange turns the local call into an internet call., thereby allowing users to make cheaper calls, and carriers to still make money on the placed call.  Skype enters the picture deep in iSkoot’s stack.

In September 2008, iSkoot bought Social.IM, a social networking software product iSkoot hopes will be able to scrape data from web services and put the data on the desktop in the form of instant messaging contacts.

New independent film studio Summit Entertainment is turning to niche social networking to bang the gong for its newest picture—“Twilight”, a film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult bestseller of the same title.  The niche social network?  Stay-at-home moms.

That stay-at-home moms might be the social network to spread the word about “Twilight” might sound a little strange, given that “Twilight” is about a young girl who falls in love with a classmate who has an unusual background—he’s a vampire.

But this vampire tale has a twist:  it’s chaste.  Meyers, apparently, is a serious Mormon, and while her Mormonism doesn’t prevent her from writing tales filled with vampires, it does prevent her from giving her vampires active libidos.  Gone, then, are Anne Rice’s lascivious New Orleans libertine vampires.  While Meyers allows her main characters to kiss passionately, they’re saving themselves for marriage.

And this is where the mom-social-networking angle plays out.  Ad Age reports that many moms use “Twilight” as a way to bond with their young daughters, and some even use “Twilight” as a way to have that first heart-to-heart talk about sexuality.  And “Twilight” seems to have the ability to transform regular fans into passionate brand evangelists, as well.  According to Ad Age, Summit arranged to have five bloggers from TwilightMoms.com—a Stephenie Meyers fan site written by mothers—spend several days on the film’s set.  That sort of goodwill has fringe benefits:  it motivates the moms to protect the film from any bad online buzz.

In the past, veterans have come home and congregated at local American Legions and VFWs to share stories, common experiences and a beer with each other, but since 1991 there has been a decrease in memberships.  In efforts to encourage the companionship among veterans the nonprofit organizations Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and the Ad Council launched a social networking site on Veterans Day, www.CommunityofVeterans.org.  This is a site that allows veterans to easily keep in touch and share experiences regardless of where they call home.

The website not only acts as a meeting place for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans but also as a resource.  For example one page on the website addresses “The Transition Home” which discusses coming back home and how to deal with the life they left, work, etc.  The site also offers information about mental health and getting help, and since users must verify their military service to participate in the network, they can feel safe with sharing personal information.

CNN reported about 1.7 million veterans have fought in Iraq or Afghanistan and one-fifth are estimated to have mental health related problems.  The military has improved its efforts to help veterans when they come home and I think this is a big step.  Some still may not want to share, but for those that do I think Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Kansas City-based VFW is correct, “Being able to blog, to go online, and to have instant information to ask questions and get an instant answer is a tremendous asset.  If the younger generation, if that’s what they want, absolutely we’re going to provide.”

CommunityofVeterans.org is not the only website for veterans being released this week.  The Veterans of Foreign Wars is also starting its own social networking site at www.myvetworks.com.  

How does 7 million views in less than 48 hours grab you?  By any measure, that’s a lot of eyeballs in a short amount of time, but according to Visible Measures, that’s exactly how many people viewed President-Elect Barack Obama’s victory speech via nearly 500 placements, which represent every video related to his speech.   McCain didn’t fair too poorly, either:  his gracious concession speech was seen by 1 million people via over 180 placements.

Of those placement sources, YouTube accounted for the lion’s share.  Though Visible Measures tracks approximately 150 video sharing sites, YouTube accounted for 98% of those who viewed Obama’s victory speech.

Think of it as a face-off at center ice between two ads.

According to Ad Age, Ad Battle, a new Facebook app, is as simple as it gets:  put one ad up against another—video or print—and let the user decide which one is best.  The user clicks his or her favorite, finds out if he or she voted with the majority, and moves on to the next set of ads.  Users can also upload their own ads to see how they stack up against ads uploaded by others.

Brutal, frank, quick—and effective.

Granted, the app is largely a plaything, but for advertising professionals, such a set-up has unlimited potential as a quick sanity check or a consumer ad test.

During a campaign that lasted nearly two years, President-Elect Barack Obama gathered a database of nearly 3 million people who not only contributed nearly three quarters of a billion dollars to his cause, but signed up to be “agents of change” as well.  But now that the campaign is over, what happens to the database?  Does it disappear into the ether?

Not likely.  According to Ad Week, Obama’s impressive database of energized, engaged people—one of the biggest non-evangelical databases of active donors some marketing professionals have ever seen—may now be more valuable than ever.

Steve Cone, chief marketing officer of Epsilon, feels that Obama can use his massive database in three distinct ways, according to Ad Week.  More traditionally, Obama could use his database to energize Democratic voters for the mid-term elections in 2010, or use his database to drum up support for legislation he supports.  But that’s not all:  Cone believes Obama should use his database to reach out to take the pulse of his supporters right now.  By finding out, say, the top three issues on each supporters’ mind, he can use that sort of dialogue going forward to advance his agenda.

Obama was perhaps the first and most successful political candidate to tap into the vast marketing potential of social networking.  By creating a seemingly direct connection with millions of voters, Obama was able to create the sort of dynamic that, in the commercial world, differentiates mere users or satisfied customers to brand evangelists.

And Cone doesn’t expect Obama to rest on his laurels.  “My guess is that he could double or triple the size of that database if he has a team focused on that over the next for years,” said Cone, as quoted in Ad Week.

MSNBC reports MySpace and Auditude plan to announce a partnership with Viacom Inc. on Monday which will eliminate a lot of monitoring for MySpace.  Currently, MySpace tries to keep content off of its website that has been copyright-protected.  If someone asks them to remove a video from their site they take it down, but not much longer.  The partnership will allow MySpace users to upload videos of MTV Networks shows, and Auditude will detect and identify the clip and overlay an ad on it.  The technology will place a semitransparent bar across the bottom of the video displaying information such as the original air date and a link to buy the episode.  This will last for 10 to 15 seconds followed by an advertisement and the main feature. 

The original creators of the material posted will receive a cut of the revenue created from the ad played prior to the video.

Jeff Berman, MySpace’s president of marketing and sales comments on his prediction of users’ reactions to the added advertising, “People will prefer that to having copyright-protected content filtered out entirely.”

The new format of advertisement overlays is estimated to be released within the next couple of weeks.  MySpace and Auditude expect more ad formats and partners will follow.

According to CNET, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has no interest in re-opening his company’s bit to buy Yahoo, despite Yahoo’s recent steep decline in value and its termination of a deal with Google to sell online advertising.  As quoted by CNET, Ballmer said it was clear Yahoo did not want to sell its business to Microsoft, and Microsoft claims it has moved on.

Yahoo, for their part, signaled earlier this week they might be open to a renewed deal.  As reported by CNET, at Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said “I believe the best thing for Microsoft to do is buy Yahoo,” noting that “Yahoo remained open to everything.”

Clearly, Microsoft appears to be playing the part of the jilted lover in the deal.

November 4^th was a busy day.  Not only did our country choose our next president but the FCC came to a decision on a major ruling as well.  The FCC decided to open the largest amount of airwaves to the public for wireless internet usage known as white space, reports Business Week.  This ruling was pinged as a dispute between Google and Dolly Parton and Google won unanimously.  Dolly Parton, among other musicians had an interest in this ruling in fear that opening these airwaves to the public will interfere with wireless microphones and TV broadcasts. 

The fate of these available airwaves is unknown as of yet since they will not be available until February when television broadcasts switch over to digital signals from analog.  One idea is to create wireless areas within neighborhoods and possibly towns, but unlike regular Wi-Fi the download speeds will be faster and be able to handle larger files.  Google co-founder Larry Page explained the technology as “Wi-Fi on steroids.” 

Others within the industry have ideas for white space to enable consumer products like wireless internet created. Motorola for example expects to cover 15 square miles with one access point and have new gear that works in white space available within a year.

In the next few days the FCC will release rules and regulations to ensure new networks won’t interfere with wireless devices but industry professionals are still skeptical.  Jay Adrick, VP of broadcast technology for Harris Corp. calls the new rules “a recipe for disaster.”  We will have to wait until February to see how the spectrum changes wireless technology.

At a technical conference last week, according to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft announced plans to enter the realm of cloud computing, thereby joining chief cloud computing players Amazon.com and Google in a market that could grow, according to some research firms, 16% per year until 2012.

Windows Azure, the new service, will offer Microsoft software hosted by technology providers online to a wide range of companies, from start-ups to very large companies.  “It’s a transformation of our offerings across the board to fundamentally embrace services,” said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief architect and former founder and CEO of Groove, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Venturing into the cloud, however, puts Microsoft into the unusual position of competing against itself.  By offering some of its software suite online, Microsoft risks cutting into the same software offerings and services companies purchase, download, and install in the traditional sense.  These traditionally-delivered products and services account for the bulk of the company’s $60 billion plus in revenue.

However, Microsoft has been virtually forced into the market in order to compete with Google.  Google currently offers a good deal of free software via the cloud, including office productivity software that rivals Microsoft Office.  Google supports the free software with advertising from other areas.

October 24, 2008 may go down as watershed moment in the life of Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader: the day the device received the imprinter of Oprah Winfrey.  Why’s that?  In the heyday of Oprah’s Book Club, with its legions of dedicated fans, a recommendation by or hint of approval from Winfrey could transform an unknown novelist into an acclaimed—and rich—author overnight.

According to Ad Age, after announcing on her Friday, October 24th show that the Kindle was “absolutely my new favorite thing in the world,” visits to Amazon.com were up 6% over the previous Friday.  Eighty percent of the blog posts about Kindle following that show mentioned Oprah’s ringing endorsement, and Google Insights reported a 479% bump in search traffic for the word “kindle.”  Even more telling was the bump in US web traffic from Oprah.com to Amazon.com—15,458%.

While Amazon.com will not say how many Kindles it has sold thus far, or how many Kindles are in use, it will state that the number of titles available for Kindle use has more than doubled since the Kindle was launched.  Amazon currently offers around 190,000 titles for use on the Kindle.
In September, Lyons Press, an imprint of Morris Communications, offered biographies of both prospective First Ladies—Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama— exclusively in Kindle editions, with the idea that the biography of the wife of the winner of the 2008 US Presidential election would later be published in a traditional print edition.  It’s unclear whether this exclusivity did any good by way of sales; the Obama biography was ranked #2,240 by sales in the Kindle store, while the McCain biography was ranked 49,884.

Number one, however, was Barak Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope,” whose other titles, “Dreams from My Father” and “Change We Can Believe In,” came in at number five and number thirteen, respectively.

Even in the best of economic times, it’s reasonable to say that the Kindle itself would be a tough sell.  First of all, there’s the hefty price tag.  Amazon currently lists the Kindle reading device at around $360: that kind of money can get you 25 or so reasonably-priced traditional books.  But even if money’s no object for you, would you really want to carry around an extra device whose primary function is displaying things so you can read them?  You already carry around a phone–maybe even a smart phone.  And you probably already carry around a laptop.  Do you really want to schlep around another device, too?  Probably not: the functionality of “readers,” per se, is probably best absorbed into a device we already carry.

The Kindle is probably a long shot.  But if anyone can turn it into a success, it’s Oprah.

Bloomberg reports this morning that after failing to win support from the US government, Google has dropped plans to place ads on Yahoo.  This news comes a day after reports stating that in order to appease US Justice Department officials, Google and Yahoo had submitted a list of concessions that would restrict its new internet advertising partnership.

Chief among the concessions was that Google and Yahoo would be willing to limit the amount of revenue generated from its partnership, and shorten its duration.  Yahoo would be limited to generating no more than 25% of its search advertising revenue from Google; Google advertisers would be given the choice to “opt out” of advertising on Yahoo; and the length of the partnership between the two search giants would be two years, instead of the 10 stipulated in the original contract.

However, according to Bloomberg, regulators and advertisers’ concerns over the deal may have hurt Google’s long-term interests.  In September, the US Justice Department hired attorney Sanford Litvack, former antitrust chief under Jimmy Carter, indicating they might be exploring an antitrust challenge to the Google-Yahoo deal.  Backing away from the Yahoo deal now helps Google avoid a confrontation with the government, and may help to allay fears that Google itself is growing too powerful and monolithic.

According to the Wall Street Journal, at a technical conference in Redmond, WA last week, Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows Seven, the next generation of the Windows operating system to follow Microsoft’s much maligned Windows Vista.  Microsoft hopes to release Windows Seven by January 2010.

Along with Windows Seven, Microsoft hopes to launch an online version of its Microsoft Office productivity package, perhaps to counter Google’s similar online offerings.  Though Office is one of Microsoft’s strongest and most products, Microsoft would offer its online Office package for free.  Microsoft feels the free online offering would not affect sales of downloadable Office, as they expect the online offering to be less responsive for large, complex files.

Among the expected new features in Windows Seven is a feature called “libraries,” that purportedly will give consumers a way to access music, videos, photos, and other types of files stored on many different storage devices, whether on removable drives or home networks.  Another feature called “homegroup” will enable users to move a laptop between office, home, and other networks automatically, by eliminating the need to adjust network settings manually.

Most importantly, perhaps, is Microsoft is working to ensure Windows Seven works faster than Vista, as one of the major raps against Vista, when it was released in 2007, was its sluggish performance.  Microsoft is also working hard to ensure that Windows Seven is compatible with peripherals out of the box—again, a major rap against Vista when it was first released.

An election that will possibly go down in history is expected to bring record breaking voters to the polls today, but are the polls ready?  Cnet.com has reported Virginia has had problems with the optical scanning due to the wet weather, and the board call center has been malfunctioning and dropping voters’ calls.

OurVoteLive.org is recording complaints from voters from all over the country.  By 9 a.m. EST there had been more than 9,000 complaints of voting problems, of which 500 dealt with voting equipment.  The website reported that some precincts didn’t have enough voting machines while others just weren’t working.

In Florida the St. Petersburg Times reported a paper jam with the ballot scanner which held up 200 voters for 45 minutes.

To follow the campaign with the latest results go to websites like Google’s 2008 Election Map and CBS News Campaign ‘08to see what the next four years will bring.

As reported in Ad Age, The Washington Post will  lead an online newspaper syndicate in producing and airing six hours of online live video election coverage.  Coverage will be produced by the Washington Post and Newsweek, with other content produced by syndication partners including the Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Denver Post, and international newspapers including the Australian and Canada’s National Post.

According to Ad Age, the unusual partnership may be signaling the beginning of a new era in which newspapers are willing to pool their online resources to concentrate on strengths and marginalize weaknesses.  The Dallas Morning News, for instance, concedes that its only big election-season draw is a local voter guide; it outsources whatever it cannot do itself, including RealClearPolitics.com for polling data, and PolitiFact, from the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, for fact checking.

However, it remains unclear whether people prone to going online to keep up with real time political news will start first with their local newspaper’s website.  Online viewers looking to draw from a wider-casted net might turn to cable news outlet sites like CNN or Fox News, and hardcore political junkies might turn to political blogs like FreeRepublic.com.

As reported by Ad Age, Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor for news video at WashingtonPost.com, concedes that it might be a struggle to win users.  However, “the only way we’re going to convince people we have this type of stuff is to have this type of stuff,” he said.

Cell phone companies come out with new models of phones every few months.  As consumers we always want the latest model with the most up-to-date features and technologies.  Never mind the promotions wireless companies run to entice consumers to purchase new phones every couple of years, the average person holds onto a cell phone for one to two years.  Then what?  Most people do one of two things: put them in a drawer with the rest of the electronics that are never used, or donate them so they will be distributed to people in need.  The latter is being promoted more and more because disposing of cell phones is hazardous to the environment, but there is not much information out there on how to correctly dispose of cell phones.  For this reason the EPA released new guidelines on October 31^st for donating cell phones, reports BusinessWeek. 

Consumers who donate their cell phones are doing a good deed, so why should they have guidelines to follow? -  To protect them.  Think of the many roles cell phones play today, especially with smart phones – calendars, internet, e-mail – and all the information they hold.  In a survey held in September of 160 donated mobile phones, one in five devices held sensitive information.  Blackberrys were the worst, with 43% containing data that could be considered a threat to the individual or organization. 

Mike Newman, a VP at ReCellular, a large recycler and reseller of cell phones comments, “Companies have tended to put a lot of emphasis on how to handle their older laptops and desktops but have not thought about the fact that their phones tend to have as much sensitive information as computers.”  Mobile device manufacturers don’t make the information readily available on how to erase information but ReCellualr has put these instructions on their website for over 23 manufacturers.

The lesson here: do the good deed and donate your mobile devices to be reused or recycled, but make sure you completely remove any sensitive data to protect yourself.

Microsoft announced new details about its Oslo project at last week’s Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference in Los Angeles.  One of Oslo’s goals is to empower many people to create and maintain distributed applications.

For the first time, Microsoft made the three components that make up Oslo available to developers.  Oslo will include a new design tool code-named “Quadrant,” a new domain-specific language code-named “M,” and a new relational repository.

Quadrant is a design tool to enable people to define and interact with models in a rich, visual manner.  According to eWeek, Robert Wahbe, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Connected Systems Division, “Platform applications and software are becoming more and more model-driven.  From my point of view, this is the next big step to raising the abstraction.”

“M,” the new textual domain-specific language, will enable users to write down the models in a textual format.  M can be translated to XAML and other code that can be executed by runtimes.  The relational repository, based upon Microsoft SQL Server, will make models and metadata available to tools and platform components.

According to Wahbe, Oslo will reach across all Microsoft core platforms to allow developers to create applications for SharePoint, Live Mesh, and Microsoft’s cloud platform.