“My name is S. Claus, and I’m a switcher.” Great new Apple Switch spots featuring Will Ferrell.
Category: Media (Page 7 of 8)
Steven Den Beste has an explanation of cell phone technologies with damning evidence against GSM.
Stewart Alsop writes an advocacy of CDMA as an eventual worldwide success.
Meanwhile, AT&T just introduced GSM in the U.S., calling it “is beefing up their mMode service.”
Is my next phone obsolete before I even buy it?
I attended the Content Management Summit yesterday and had a good time. Learned some interesting things. Among them:
~ The Internet is still a learning space. Different media sites have vastly different concepts of the best way to make money and present information. Marketing ploys are still widely created and debated. Ye olde Web is still a nascent sales venue.
~ Of the presentations I saw (from Technowledge, eMeta, and others), few actually said much about the products being hawked. Lots of explanations were given: here’s why you need this service. With the exception of Microsoft, no one explained how said service would help my business.
~ The term du jour these days is “pay per drink.”
~ No one can really agree what the heck a weblog is, and lots of people still haven’t heard of them. John Hiler actually had the chutzpah (naivete?) to declare, “Weblogs only cover interesting things,” using “interesting” to mean “technology and terrorism and not much else.” Hiler also described his company, Xanga, as attracting “a lot of [age] 50-plus people because they have nothing to do.”
I also enjoyed catching up with Cam and meeting scores of new people, including Nick Denton and several folks who thought I was the other David Wertheimer.
Jason Calacanis throws a good conference, and I am looking forward to Brian Alvey’s next Meet the Makers assembly in November.
The 1 Percent Solution? in Clickz.
The most important line in this article is one the author glosses over: “There’s nothing wrong per se with charging for online content, provided you charge for the right things and do so in the right ways.”
The article then goes onto dissecting sites such as Salon, which charges users to not see ads, which is entirely counter to the basic ad-sales model, which asks for a definable viewing audience in order to proffer an effective purchase.
Still, an interesting read, and one worth considering for us media folks.
In fashion, logos are becoming scarce. “[Fashion executives] decided to go back to their roots by promoting only their companies’ high quality, unobscured by tacky symbols.”
I am not a fan of financial shilling on a personal Web site. I don’t have a PayPal donation link or an Amazon tip jar or a wish list (although I can nod embarrasedly toward the growing wedding registries that appear elsewhere on this site).
That said, if there’s one gift I’d ask for, something that I should buy but haven’t, a gift I don’t need and wouldn’t use often but would be cheery and proud to own, an item where the creator deserves a thank-you and a few dollars for the effort, it’s Sam Brown’s Wish for something better (third item). Exploding Dog remains fascinating, enduring, and wonderful.
P.S. I dig the “original shirt” too.
Rock of Abraham, indeed
This month’s Fantastic Four comic book reveals that The Thing is Jewish. Growing up my mind wandered the most with Mr. Fantasticâgray temples, don’tchaknowâbut I always felt like I could relate to Ben Grimm just a little bit more. Fascinating. (via BoingBoing)
Nielsen Media Research and TiVo have agreed to measure viewing habits through the collection of TiVo recording data. This is huge: For the first time, when viewers record shows to watch later, their viewing will be counted in the total audience.
Nielsen should be proud of this move on both a technical and intellectual level, as it is an acknowledgement of viewing habits and a way to more precisely measure them. TiVo can brag about the TV-industry validation this deal will bring its equipment.
Click the “read more” link below to read the text of the memo sent to Nielsen clients this morning (passed to me by a colleague in the industry).
Nielsen Media Research and TiVo have agreed to measure viewing habits through the collection of TiVo recording data. This is huge: For the first time, when viewers record shows to watch later, their viewing will be counted in the total audience.
Nielsen should be proud of this move on both a technical and intellectual level, as it is an acknowledgement of viewing habits and a way to more precisely measure them. TiVo can brag about the TV-industry validation this deal will bring its equipment.
Below is the text of the memo Nielsen sent its clients this morning (and passed to me by a colleague in the industry).
August 5, 2002
To Clients of Nielsen Media Research:
I am pleased to report that Nielsen Media Research and TiVo have achieved a milestone in the measurement of Personal Video Recorder (PVR) activity.
Working together, Nielsen Media Research and TiVo have developed software that will enable the extraction of tuning, recording and playback information from TiVo’s PVR system. TiVo has downloaded this new software as part of a normal system upgrade via phone lines to existing TiVo subscribers across the country.
This software would be used only by Nielsen Media Research to retrieve data from sample households, and only with permission from the household, as is the case with all homes in our samples. It is otherwise inactive in non-Nielsen homes.
Extracting data from TiVo devices is an important first step. The next steps are more extensive in scope, because they require that Nielsen Media Research develop entirely new business rules, editing and crediting criteria, new calculation and data processing software, and, ultimately, implement “playback-based” reporting systems. The goal is to fully credit PVR and other “time shifting” usage by integrating the data into our syndicated reports – the currency for more than $60 billion in advertising spending in the United States. This is a significant undertaking, as I am sure you will agree, requiring maximum cooperation between Nielsen Media Research and our clients.
There is no timetable yet for achieving these next steps, and we will be working with our clients to establish priorities. For the near term, we will continue to exclude households with PVR devices from our metered samples. In the first half of 2002, we have bypassed approximately 80 “basic” households from our metered samples of approximately 30,000 households, so the penetration of PVR devices is relatively small.
We have made progress, however, in developing some of the necessary business rules and editing criteria. This has been accomplished through work with national and local client advisory committees. We also recently installed 10 off-line test households equipped with TiVo PVR’s, and we have been collecting data on a daily basis. In July, we began introducing TiVo free of charge into another 10 homes as they normally exit our National People Meter panel. By analyzing data from these sample households, we can determine the impact of the TiVo PVR upon established viewing patterns. And with TiVo data from 20 test households, we can begin to examine the influences of this PVR technology. We are now in the early stages of looking at data, and we intend to share our findings with clients.
Working with our clients, through established national and local client committees, we will map the path toward making data from PVR’s and other “time-shifting” technologies fully reportable in Nielsen Media Research systems. Our success with TiVo is vital to this effort. There is a great deal of work before us, and Nielsen Media Research looks forward to sharing information about our progress with all of our clients.
Susan D. Whiting
President and Chief Executive Officer
Nielsen Media Research
OJR: News Sites Hustle for Profitability. “Most news sites are going with the conventional wisdom: Users won’t pay to see your site; you have to find other ways to make money.”
DesignChain magazine: Inside the Apple iPod Design Triumph. Interesting to note that Apple went form-first, figuring out the mechanics after determining the necessary aesthetic.