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Windows Mobile’s Incredible Death Spiral

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/YplxNHBy8r0/windows-mobiles-incredible-death-spiral

Before Windows Phone 7 was even an embryo of a concept, Windows Mobile was king: It powered nearly half of smartphones in use, a led the industry in features. Then, in 2007, things started to go wrong. Very, very wrong.

Silicon Alley Insider has charted Windows Mobile’s platform share, which is to say the proportion of users who were using it at a given time, over the last four years. For showing decline, figures like these are more telling than sales—they mean that, for years now, people haven’t been buying Windows Mobile phones nearly as fast as they’ve been ditching them.

More interesting than what it shows is what it projects: Windows Mobile 6.x phones have been collectively kneecapped by Microsoft’s announcement yesterday, and rendered spectacularly unbuyable outside of enterprise circles. In other words, that line—the one that dragged down past RIM in 2008, and that dropped past Apple last year—is going to keep plunging for the rest of this year, until Windows Phone 7 tries to haul it back up. And until then, it’s only going to get steeper. [Silicon Alley Insider]

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Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

iFail

Source: http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/28/a-16-year-olds-view-of-apples-ipad-ifail/

Tonight when I picked up my son in Petaluma we started talking about the Apple iPad and he told me he thought it was a “fail.” This reaction was interesting coming from Patrick (he was first in line in Palo Alto for the iPhone and has been an Apple fan for as long as I remember.)

Anyway, I asked him if I could record our conversation, he said yes, and this is the result. It’s in two parts, because when we uploaded the first part we got a lot of reaction on Twitter so followed it up with a second part. Here’s the two audio recordings, sorry for the poor quality, we recorded that while driving.

Part I.
Part II.

His major points are:

1. That it isn’t compelling enough for a high school student who already has a Macintosh notebook and an iPhone.
2. That it is missing features that a high school student would like, like handwriting recognition to take notes, a camera to take pictures of the board in class (and girls), and the ability to print out documents for class.
3. That he hasn’t seen his textbooks on it yet, so the usecase of replacing heavy textbooks hasn’t shown up yet.
4. The gaming features, he says, aren’t compelling enough for him to give up either the Xbox or the iPhone. The iPhone wins, he says, because it fits in his pocket. The Xbox wins because of Xbox live so he can play against his friends (not to mention engaging HD quality and wide variety of titles).
5. He doesn’t like the file limitations. His friends send him videos that he can’t play in iTunes and the iPad doesn’t support Flash.
6. It isn’t game changing like the iPhone was.

Anyway, revealing conversation with a teenager who got extremely excited about the iPhone (and saved up to buy his own) the day he saw that.

What do you think?

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Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

Contextual Help Bubble – Dictionary, Thesaurus, Wikipedia, Amazon, Google Translate, Clip2Send

Dead simple, handy tool for adding contextual help to any web page or entire site. It is installed on this blog — so go ahead and select something with your mouse.

Install on any webpage or blog by way of 1 line of code:

<script src=”http://64.202.162.213/bubble/bubble.js“></script>

Select any text, contextual bubble appears, click Wikipedia to get more information about the selected text

contextual-bubble-wikipedia-1contextual-bubble-wikipedia-2

When more than 5 words are selected, other options are grayed out and clip2send is the link to click to send the selected part of the page via email. Type in the email address; the subject line is autofilled, but editable; the source URL is automatically cited>

contextual-bubble-clip2send-1contextual-bubble-clip2send-2

Select text, contextual bubble appears, click Amazon link to bring up results on Amazon.

contextual-bubble-amazon-1contextual-bubble-amazon-2

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Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Non-viral videos of funny wedding dances.

Notice the shape of the youtube stats curve – each of these has 8+ million views, but notice the straight line of views that were accumulated over almost a 2 year period.  Notice they each also got a bump in view count recently due to being listed as related videos on the #JKWeddingDance video.

non-viral-video-wedding-dance-1

non-viral-video-wedding-dance-2

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Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

What viral videos look like; what non-viral videos look like — by the stats

The first 2 are viral videos – notice the shape of the “total views curve” (quick rise and approaches the max asymptotically). The last 2 videos are not viral, and supported by paid advertising and promotion. It is a straight line that grows steadily over time. The 2 examples of non-viral videos were chosen simply to have similar view counts as the first and second examples.

Viral video examples – notice the asymptotic curve towards the max on the total views chart.

Frozen Grand Central ImprovEverywhere viral video – 18 million views – added on Jan 31, 2009.  ”Other/viral” gave it its first big boost and embedded views gave it another big push.
frozen-grand-central-improveverywhere-viral

No Pants Subway Ride ImprovEverywhere viral video – 9 million views – uploaded January 13, 2009; got onto YouTube homepage and got a major boost from it.

no-pants-subway-ride-improveverywhere-viral

NON-viral video examples – notice the straight line of the total views chart.

corbin-bleu-non-viral-video

ashley-tisdale-non-viral-video

Perfect example of NON-viral video that had help with paid media – in this case, GoDaddy supported these videos with costly Superbowl ads — which led to nice bumps-up in total views.

godaddy-viral-non-viral-videos

In the case of Smirnoff’s Tea Partay, it was not supported by paid media so it took longer to grow and the shape of the curve is a nice blend between the straight line of a non-viral video and the asymptotic line of a viral video.

tea-partay-partially-viral-video

Finally, blatant ads don’t go viral – Sony’s grand central product demo stunt. And even if they are discussed in dozens of blogs it is not enough to get past the first tipping point.

sony-grand-central-stunt-video

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Friday, July 31st, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

Occasions and Holidays Drive Movie Box Office Sales, Not Advertising

Taking the top box office results for each of 52 weekends from the past 10 complete years (1998 – 2008; Source: IMDB.com) we see consistently that occasions like Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving show increased movie going activity. People have more time during these holidays to go to the movies and Valentines is a date+movie occasion. Also, during the summer, many people go to the movie theatre to escape the heat so there is an overall hump every year during the summer months — from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

movie-box-office-2


People go out during Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving. And they still spend what they planned to spend — 2 tickets for movie — they didn’t buy 2 more tickets and see a second movie on the same date or holiday weekend.  If they had several good movies to choose from (often, they don’t), they would choose to spend the finite dollars on the one movie they really wanted to see. The overall movie spending “pie” did not increase much, if any, year over year.

1998 $4,055,194,733 n/a

1999 $4,253,601,768 5%

2000 $4,496,554,005 6%

2001 $5,003,433,737 11%

2002 $5,489,974,199 10%

2003 $5,581,797,720 2%

2004 $ 5,697,299,530 2%

2005 $ 5,524,566,579 -3%

2006 $ 5,660,826,625 +2%

2007 $ 5,968,027,963 +5%

2008 $ 5,887,193,490 -1%

The chart below shows a red line which is the average of all 10 years. The 10 thin blue lines are the annual lines from1998 – 2008, inclusive and these are plotted as actual dollars. They come out right on top of each other.

movie-box-office-2-overlay

Movie advertising, which runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has failed to noticeably increase the overall spending year-round or even during specific times. The chart below shows the differentials (difference between an annual line and the 10-yr average line). These all hover closely in the +$50M and -$50M band. The amplitude of the 10-yr average (red line) is larger than $50M in the summer hump — implying that the average change in movie ticket sales due to normal seasonality is larger than the change in amplitude caused by ALL movie advertising combined.

movie-box-2-differentials

And the summer “hump” is due to actual demand (people going out to movie theatres, some to escape the heat) not due to advertising. The only effect of advertising is to share-shift from one movie to another — the total spending remains consistent and even seasonal variations are consistent — a “zero-sum game.”


All-Time USA Box office

Source: IMDB.com

Rank Title USA Box Office
1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824
2. The Dark Knight (2008) $533,316,061
3. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665
4. Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036
5. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) $434,949,459
6. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace(1999) $431,065,444
7. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) $423,032,628
8. Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375
9. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) $380,262,555
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King(2003) $377,019,252
11. Spider-Man 2 (2004) $373,377,893
12. The Passion of the Christ (2004) $370,270,943
13. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) $367,614,540
14. Jurassic Park (1993) $356,784,000
15. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) $340,478,898
16. Finding Nemo (2003) $339,714,367
17. Spider-Man 3 (2007) $336,530,303
18. Forrest Gump (1994) $329,691,196
19. The Lion King (1994) $328,423,001
20. Shrek the Third (2007) $320,706,665
21. Transformers (2007) $318,759,914
22. Iron Man (2008) $318,298,180
23. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) $317,557,891
24. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull(2008) $317,011,114
25. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring(2001) $313,837,577

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Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

is your brand name a generic word?

if it is, it’s a LOT harder for users to find you

TAG – men’s personal care line from Proctor & Gamble – hard to pick out from other search results on “tag.” The brands have to use paid search ads to show up.

tag

tag-search

serch engine optimization is critical, otherwise, looking at the following graphs, there is no way to tell when a brand launched or when they have campaigns in market, because the volume of search on the generic term is so great, the lift in search volume due to paid advertising is not detectable.

intel

axe

virgin

open

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Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

last-ad accounting, last-ad-attribution model

Why the Click Is the Wrong Metric for Online Ads

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134787

There is a whole ruckus around ad networks getting too little credit for helping to drive customers’ awareness and clicks for advertisers. In the past, ad networks wanted to claim credit for type-ins (people going to an advertiser’s site by typing the URL instead of clicking on an ad). They called this “view through” and the ad networks wanted these to be attributed to their showing the ad somewhere on their network.

Now they claim that getting credit for only the last-ad is not enough — the ad the user actually clicked on to get to the advertiser’s site, the one that can actually be tracked and properly attributed.

What’s at stake is the relatively large piece of “direct” or referrer-less traffic. Analytics packages can only assign these to type-ins or bookmarks since there was no referring site to attribute them to, let alone ad creative version, etc.

But while there is demonstrable lift in click rates when display ads and search ads are running at the same time — i.e. they reinforce and complement each other — it does not mean that ad networks can or should claim credit for the lift. After all, advertising running on another network COULD also cause a lift in results of ads running on another network if they are run simultaneously.

So the bottom line is if the click or the visit is not directly attributable, it should not be attributed.

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Monday, February 23rd, 2009 display advertising No Comments