5.3 Billion searches > $16.2 Billion sales

Our friend Maheshmurthy's Pinstorm has released its year end holiday season forecasting for 2005. I have already blogged about pinstorm in this blog here . This time going thru their blog, using their proprietary technology, they have predicted based on this year's Valentines' Day and Mother's Day for this year.

They predict around 5.3 Billion searches for gift articles and items and this will result in the revenue generation of $16.2 Billion in online sales. Seems to me, a bit heightened figure to work with, but still i trust their technology. They also predicted the cost per click will be 25% higher than 2004, which means, you will pay more per click and that hits your margin in the long run.

Read the complete whitePaper

Technorati Tags: SEO, Online Advertising, PPC

10 Trends for the Marketing/Advertising

It is interesting to read forecasts. With iMedia connection on myside, Peter Sealey predicts the 10 trends that are going to change our professional and personal lives. iMeida Connection is for the marketing community in the digital medium. His trend forecasting can be debated separately, but i can certainly 3 out of 10 is already a possible trend.

His top 10 trends are:

1. Three Mega-Trends -- bandwidth, the cost of storage and processing power
2. Three Media Sub-Trends -- media is becoming digital, personal, and controllable
3. A revolution in the motion picture, television, and recorded music industries
4. IPTV: Internet Protocol Television
5. Performance based marketing
6. The demise of ad-supported TV
7. The rise of Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
8. New and accurate ratings system
9. Ad-ID and RFID
10. A Marketing Renaissance

To me, the third is an interesting point. iTunes rewrite the rules of the audio distribution. with the new iPod Video, there can certainly be a new generation of "shorts" like the one did by Coke or BMW. "shorts" will be a new medium for advertisers. Like ringtones, with youth, shorts will be a viral idea. How movie making & motion pictures will change is a case we need to wait and see.

The second, seventh and ninth is already on. With digital agencies controlling majority of stakes on global brands, media subdivision is happening. VoIP and RFID are already in and are in testing.

Performance based marketing is the most imporatant of all the things. Today's advertising agencies are far less accountable than their actual spending. Marketing agencies are agencies which work on the strategy, positioning of the product/service. Already this turf is beeing brutally fought between management consultants and big ad. agencies. Like Google's AdSense, people finally are started looking digital performance let mediums for marketing. But real performance based marketing is more than just Adsense. Performance based marketing will work more than just a search query. With RSS/Atom Feeds spearheading the globe, it will be interesting to watch how the feeds are being used by the marketing fraternity for their advantage.

Read the full interview

Technorati Tags: Trends, Marketing, Advertising,

Beware Splogs are in

The scourge of e-mail--spam--has reinvented itself for the world of blogs, in a phenomenon experts have dubbed "splog." And Google is in the hot seat. Offlate, my blog is one of the victims of the splogs. Sploggers or the attackers used automated tools to create thousands of fake blogs loaded with links to specific websites (mortgage, poker, sex sites). The counterfeit blogs also triggered thousands of RSS--Really Simple Syndication--feeds and e-mail notifications, swamping RSS readers and in-boxes.

You can help kill splogs by providing the fake URLs here at Splog Reporter. There is actually a Firefox extension available to report Splogs with Splog reporter here.

Splogs are polluting the blogosphere. "Splog" was gained importance in late August 2005. The idea of all these Sploggers are by providing fake IDs with URLs listed in their comments, the no. of web URL linking is increased. This directly affects the PageRank algorithm, with which Google ranks the websites.

News.com has a detailed report on this

Technorati Tags: Splogs, Google, Spam

Flash Lite is BREWing now!!

From yesterday's MAX conference, one most important and interesting development in the mobile platform has been announced. BREW is one of world's fastest growing mobile platform & framework from Qualcomm. Macromedia and Qualcomm have signed an MoU to port Flash Lite (mobile Flash player) to the BREW platform. In India, both the CDMA providers Reliance Infocomm and Tata Indicom are using Qualcomm's CDMA technology along with a bigger development team for working on applications in BREW. It will be exciting news for Flash development companies in India to look at one more future revenue stream.

This is very significant move, since the mobile technoloy wars between GSM and CDMA is hotting up worldwide. Already for GSM mobiles, Flash Lite is available. With this move, Macromedia has flattened the platform choices for running mobile applications, games, video in the CDMA arena. For developers, now they can look into serving both the platform customers with single development framework.

Excerpts from the Press release

Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) and QUALCOMM Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) today announced an agreement under which Macromedia® will create a version of Macromedia Flash Lite™ as an extension for BREW. As a result of this agreement, the large BREW developer community and more than two million Flash® developers will be able to create rich, engaging mobile content on the Flash Platform for the BREW solution, QUALCOMM's established content delivery and monetization system.

Expected to ship next year, this new extension of Flash Lite for BREW will help further evolve the wireless value chain worldwide. BREW developers will realize the benefit of rich mobile experiences and the return on investment when they add Flash to their applications, while Flash developers will have a new channel to monetize their mobile work. Subscribers will ultimately benefit from a wide array of the richest services and content possible. The announcement today builds on an existing QUALCOMM and Macromedia agreement.

"By providing an extension of Macromedia Flash Lite for BREW, mobile developers will have a prime opportunity to bring compelling Flash services and content to mobile devices globally," said Al Ramadan, executive vice president and general manager of mobile and devices, Macromedia. "We are excited to extend our partnership with QUALCOMM to bring great mobile experiences to more than 56 operators."

Macromedia has been an important industry player when it comes to providing a great mobile experience. The combination of our two technologies will be a boon for developers and subscribers alike," said Gina Lombardi, senior vice president of marketing and product management, QUALCOMM Internet Services."

Qualcomm's Press release

Technorati Tags: Macromedia, Qualcomm, Flash, Flash Player

Yahoo! Podcast

Yahoo! joins the podcast bandwagon with their own podcasting location. Seems what Apple said when they launch the podcast is coming true [Radio Reborn]. Listen Yahoo! Podcast

Tags: Podcasts, Yahoo

Microsoft Turns 30

With this month started, Microsoft turns 30. It's interesting to note that Myself and Microsoft share the same age. Blitz did a wonderful job in celebrating Microsoft turns 30. Look into the video and predictions for Microsoft 50, although i don't share Microsoft's enthusiasm for next 20 years it is interesting to watch.

Tag: Microsoft

Writeboard goes live

Jason Fried and his team at 37 signals have launched their fourth web application in the series. Writeboard is a simple note sharing application thru which you can share your information with people and do collaborative writing. Quite useful for screenplay writers, document developers among others.

Back on the successful BaseCamp, BackPack, TadaList, Writeboard does only one thing and it do it better.

Take your FREE writeboard