Wednesday, February 27, 2008

10 Billion Online Videos Served

A recent comScore press release announced U.S. Internet users watched more than 10 billion online videos in December of 2007. The release said the average online video viewer watched a total of 72 videos in the month. Online video viewing grew a total of 34 percent in 2007.

As usual, Google shines when you break down the online video viewing share. Google sites (which includes YouTube) captured almost a third of the viewing with a 32.6 percent share. Their next closest rivals were Fox Interactive Media at 3.5 percent, and Yahoo at 3.4 percent.

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PR or Great Customer Experience?

Whether it’s simply great PR or an honest attempt to improve the customer experience, Starbucks’ decision to close over 7,000 company locations for 3 1/2 hours on Tuesday has the media and blog worlds buzzing, and it’s not from a jolt of java.

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Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex Announced

Adobe and Salesforce recently announced the new Force.com Toolkit for Adobe AIR and Flex. Although they’ve been working together for some time now, more official support for Flex within the Force.com platform is welcome. In this case, Salesforce addresses a common problem of intermittent connectivity. Like all SaaS platforms, with Salesforce.com you must have some connection to the internet for the application to work properly.  Although Salesforce.com data is accessible through APIs for use in third party applications built on Adobe Flex (among many other platforms), the data dependency still poses a considerable challenge to developers designing disconnected applications.  For example, a field representative might visit a facility in western North Dakota or some other remote location where internet connectivity is questionable. This is where the new Force.com Toolkit comes in handy.

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Praise, Misery and Humor for Punctuation Sticklers

The book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is a must-read for writers, particularly if you’re bothered by the misuse of punctuation. If you’re a bit obsessive in this area, you’ll identify with author Lynne Truss’s description of punctuation “sticklers.” Sticklers have had reasons to rejoice and cringe in recent weeks.

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Thursday, February 21, 2008

New ANA Study Calls Into Questions The Cost Effectiveness of TV

According to a new study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Forrester Research, almost two-thirds of marketers (62 percent) feel television has diminished in effectiveness over the last two years. They point to increasing DVR use and the growing utilization of the Web as distractions that are taking some of the luster out of television advertising. This information comes on the heels of another new IDC study that indicates people with an Internet connection are now spending twice as much time with the Internet as they do with TV. In addition, the IDC study points out Web use outpaces magazine/newspaper use by 8 to 1.

Other major findings of the ANA/Forrester study include:

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