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Investors and online advertising experts may want to consider for a moment what, exactly, has contributed to Google's stupendous financial success (current market cap: $180 billion). Now consider this: Google thinks mobile ad rates might surpass what's come to be deemed the industry standard. According to Reuters, Vic Gundotra, a vice president of engineering at Google, announced during a webcast, "We hope and believe that there's even a chance that we could exceed desktop in the future." Of course, this isn't the first time someone representing the search giant has spoken highly of the mobile market; CEO Eric Schmidt and CFO Patrick Pichette, among others, have emphasized its importance before. Earlier this month, a VP of advertising even claimed that desktops will be irrelevant in three years' time. Still, Gundotra's comment may signify just how much Google is betting on the success of Android and mobile advertising, and how seriously it will take threats posed by Apple, Microsoft, and other companies. Here's one last interesting tidbit: with regards to China, Pichette said during the same webcast that the country's "another great market in which Android should flourish."
Publ.Date : Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:59:27 -0400
Twitter should soon become more ubiquitous across the Web. Today, the company's cofounders announced something called @anywhere that should help integrate the Twitter experience into standard sites, and a number of impressive organizations have agreed to take part in the initial rollout. Evan Williams essentially handled the SXSW side of things this afternoon, discussing @anywhere during his keynote address. You can read our liveblogged coverage of that talk here. As for what Biz Stone was up to, he explained on the official Twitter Blog, "We've developed a new set of frameworks for adding this Twitter experience anywhere on the web. Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com." Stone then continued, "Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we've created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript." Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, The New York Times, Yahoo, and YouTube are among Twitter's first partners in this effort. Target dates and many other details remain unknown, but it looks like Twitter's set to give its own version of Facebook Connect a solid start. Publ.Date : Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:00:04 -0400
There's good and bad news for Google this morning with respect to Android and the mobile market. In terms of how many units were sold during their first 74 days of availability, it seems the Droid beat the iPhone to the million-unit mark, but the Nexus One is lagging far behind. That's the state of things according to Flurry, which claims that applications using its analytics tools have been embedded in more than 80 percent of iPhones and Android devices. And anyone who's suspicious of the firm's stats should know that Goldman Sachs has used them as the basis for some forecasts, too. So on to the comparison. You can see the results below. FYI: Flurry picked a 74-day period because that's how long Apple said it took for one million iPhones to sell. Flurry noted that the Droid enjoyed several advantages here. First, the iPhone had already taught consumers about the benefits of smartphones. Verizon also boasted more subscribers than AT&T, and the Droid launched towards the start of the holiday shopping season. Android can definitely compete with the iPhone, then. The Nexus One's lack of success just makes it hard to judge what sort of circumstances are needed to even the odds. Publ.Date : Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:43:49 -0400
Facebook's search suggestions are about to get significantly better. Rather than just suggest the names of people, events, groups, and Pages a person's already connected with, suggestions are going to draw from users' networks of friends and the entire site. It is, of course, nice not to have to type out your closest pal's 17-letter last name multiple times a day. But this change overcomes a significant flaw in Facebook's existing approach to making suggestions, considering that it's the things people aren't familiar with they probably need the most help spelling and/or tracking down. As for how the upgraded system will work, Wayne Kao, a Facebook engineer, explained on the company blog, "[I]f you start typing in 'MGM' to find the Facebook Page for the band MGMT, you may see it as the first result in the drop-down menu because you or one of your friends is a fan of MGMT on Facebook." Or, "If you are searching for something else, like the MGM Grand Las Vegas hotel or the movie studio MGM, you can select one of those instead from the drop-down menu." Look for this change to roll out over the course of the week. Then enjoy spending less time typing all sorts of stuff, and not just your best friend's name. Publ.Date : Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:25:03 -0400
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