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Netflix Encodes Every Movie 120 Different Ways
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5969677/netflix-encodes-every-movie-120-different-ways
The problem with streaming video to different devices—computers, tablets, phones, and whatever else—is that they all demand subtly different streams if they’re to look their best. If you’re Netflix, which streams to 900 different types of device, that leaves you with some work to do.
According to Netflix, it has to encode each and every movie it offers in 120 different ways. Add to that the crowd sourcing of subtitles, global variation in titles and formats, and an armful of other problems, and the work Netflix has to go to makes $8 a month seem even better value. The video above was used at a Netflix recruitment fair—but gives a decent insight into how its video wends its way from Hollywood to your tablet. [GigaOm]
This Mind-Boggling Visualization Is The Best Explanation We’ve Seen About How Offshore Tax Shelters Work
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-tax-shelters-work-2012-9
Some brilliant work here from Sarah Ryley, Noreen O’Donnell, Sergio Hernandez and Willem Marx at The Daily, which has a new report and a new animated graphic on how offshore tax shelters work.
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Organic and Paid Search Can Reinforce Each Other
If you don’t already own a good position in organic, it is useful to use paid search to get a position on page 1 of google search results.
Notice that organic and paid search work hand in hand and in some cases can reinforce each other in terms of total clicks obtained.
Source: http://research.google.com/
We’re Checking Our Phones All The Time
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-were-checking-our-phones-all-the-time-2012-7
This chart comes from Business Insider Intelligence, a new research and and analysis service focused on the mobile and Internet industries. Sign up for a free trial here.
Are you constantly checking your phone for new emails, even before and after work? Even from bed?
You’re not alone. According to a survey of 1,000 working Americans by Good Technology, a firm which helps companies manage mobile devices, more than 6% of people check their phones for email for the first time before 5:00 a.m. (orange chart), and nearly 19% check them for the last time after 11:00 p.m. (blue chart.)
Looks like we’re all a little bit like Business Insider editor Joe Weisenthal, who’s always trying to stay ahead of the 24-hour news cycle.
Groupon Is Crushing Its Closest Rival (GRPN)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-groupon-livingsocial-share-2012-3
Groupon is still the dominant daily deals company by a long shot, says analytics company Forsee. It surveyed 10,000 visitors to the top 40 retail sites to find out if they use Daily Deal sites, and if so, which ones.
Of those that subscribe to daily deals, 50% bought a Groupon in the last 90 days versus 25% for LivingSocial. The survey was done over the holiday period. Both sites are up from the last time Forsee did similar research.
That’s good for them, because the daily deal business as a whole is getting smaller.
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Where Do LinkedIn Users Work? (LNKD)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-where-do-linkedin-users-work-2012-2
LinkedIn has about 150 million users. In which industries do they work? Zoomsphere has the stats. We have the chart.
By the way, our guess is that the “higher education” category includes college students.
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Facebook Fatigue vs LinkedIn Lift
Facebook Monthly Unique Visitors and Pageviews are down. Interestingly, the use of Facebook dropped over the holidays, implying that many people use it at the office and during work.
A Leak From The USA TODAY Shows How The Kindle Fire Is Blowing Away Other Android Tablets (AMZN, APPL)
Here’s an interesting look at how the platform wars are playing out across smartphones and tablets.
GeekWire landed an internal slide from USA Today that lists how many times its application has been downloaded. USA Today has a wider, more geographically diverse readership than most other newspapers, giving us insights into the ecosystem that we might not get from the typical measurement companies.
If USA Today’s internal statistics are any indication, the Kindle Fire is blowing other Android tablets out of the water. The slide shows 260,000 downloads of its app for Kindle Fire compared with only 130,000 for other Android tablets. That’s a two-to-one ratio.
The Kindle Fire still trails the iPad by some ~2.6 million downloads, but that’s unsurprising. What’s more impressive is how much headway the Kindle Fire has made in the short time since its release.
Further, you can see that the iPhone app is still beating the Android app in downloads. And Windows Phone has a lot of work to do.
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See Also:
- iPad Magazine App Zite Reportedly Selling For $20-$25 Million To CNN
- The NBC iPad App Finally Supports Streaming For Full Episodes
- Magazine Publishers Are Basically Just Stealing Cable’s Business Model For Their Tablet Plans
P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It’s Free To Advertise On Facebook (PG)
Reality appears to have finally arrived at Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest marketer, whose $10 billion annual ad budget has hurt the company’s margins.
P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald finally seems to have woken up to the fact that he cannot keep increasing P&G’s ad budget forever, regardless of what happens to its sales.
He told Wall Street analysts that he would have to “moderate” his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be “more efficient” than the traditional media that usually eats the lion’s share of P&G’s ad budget.
This is coming from the man who increased P&G’s adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.
Note that P&G’s revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company’s costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.
P&G’s staggering ad budget has become a bit of an issue among analysts. On the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times! . McDonald eventually said:
As we’ve said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we’re quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available.
In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.
P&G’s Old Spice campaign is a textbook example of what the entire company should be doing. The problem is that the entire company isn’t doing it. Check out Mr. Clean’s Twitter stream, for instance. Oh, right—he doesn’t have one.
McDonald’s recent discovery that digital media is free comes after the long-delayed launch of Tide Pods, now scheduled for a month from now but with only a limited supply. It was originally planned for July 2011. The ad budget for that campaign is estimated at $150 million and will come from agency Saatchi & Saatchi.
The problem is that while P&G has struggled to get a single U.S. pod out the factory door, several of its competitors have already launched competing laundry pod products.
- WANT MORE? Check out Business Insider’s new Advertising news channel.
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See Also:
- Deutsche Bank: More Layoffs Planned at MDC Partners’ Ad Agencies
- Here Are The Ads You Will See On Super Bowl Sunday
- YES! David Lynch Premieres Second Strange Commercial For His Coffee Company
Gamers Redesign a Protein That Stumped Scientists for Years [Science]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5878459/gamers-redesign-a-protein-that-stumped-scientists-for-years
Folding: it’s detestable and boring, as any Gap employee can tell you. But it’s also a totally fun thing you can do in a video game! And today it’s particularly exciting because players of the online game Foldit have redesigned a protein, and their work is published in the science journal Nature Biotechnology.
It seems nobler than shooting people in the face, somehow. Granted, Foldit attracts a unique kind of gamer who enjoys obsessing over biological protein folding patterns. Proteins get their function from the way they are folded into coils like in the image above. When the amino acids in a protein interact, they create that coiled, three-dimensional structure. Scientists can manipulate the structure to make the protein more efficient. In Foldit, designs that create the most efficient proteins garner the highest scores.
University of Washington in Seattle scientists Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker developed Foldit (which is different from Folding@home, Stanford software that lets people donate their idle computer processing power to create a protein-folding supercomputer). By playing it, at-home gamers have redesigned a protein for the first time, and they did it better and faster than scientists who have trained their entire careers to build better proteins. Justin Siegel, a biophysicist in Baker’s group told Scientific American:
I worked for two years to make these enzymes better and I couldn’t do it. Foldit players were able to make a large jump in structural space and I still don’t fully understand how they did it.
Here’s how it works: Researchers send a series of puzzles to Foldit’s 240,000 registered users. The scientists sift through the results for the best designs and take those into the lab for real-life testing. They combed through 180,000 designs to get to the version of the protein published today. The paper details an enzyme that thanks to the crowdsourced redesign is 18-fold more active than the original version.
Now for the anticlimactic part: this particular enzyme doesn’t really have any practical uses. But the researchers say it’s a proof of concept, and future Foldit designs will be more useful. In fact, Baker has fed players a protein that blocks the flu virus that led to the 1918 pandemic—and their puzzle solving for this one could lead to an actual drug.
Nature via Scientific American
Image: Foldit
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Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
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