Walter Soldierer’s Blog

Today I answered a question on LinkedIn about buying domain names and using third parties to assist with it. Here goes…

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Toy makers Hasbro and Mattel are trying to shut down Scrabulous, the most popular online version of Scrabble today. Scrabulous was created by Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla and attracts about half a million users per day. The game can be played on scrabulous.com, but most Scrabble lovers play it on Facebook, where Scrabulous is one of the top 10 applications installed. In december 2007, Hasbro sent a cease-and-desist notice to Facebook for breach of copyright.

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After 2 years and several hundred hours of feeding podcasts into my ears, my Creative Muvo mp3 player broke. Looking for a new one, the new iPod nano with video was one of the options. At first I decided against it because like the iPod Shuffle it requires Apple’s proprietary music player to store files on it, and a powered USB connection to charge it. Several weeks ago I wrote about the iPod Shuffle manager. If something like this would be available for the iPod nano, I might buy one. In fact I found a piece of freeware called Floola. It works like the Shuffle Manager but doesn’t break compatibility with iTunes. So I gave the nano a try. I also bought a USB power adapter, one third the price of Apple’s, that lets me charge it anywhere. No computer USB connection needed, and no iTunes. Nice…. using Apple’s high quality products without getting locked in.

You’ve probably heard about browser cookies (HTTP cookies) before. Web sites can use them to temporarily or permanently store information on your computer. Permanent cookies can therefore be used by advertising networks like Google’s Doubleclick to keep track of the sites you visit. Actually they track your web browser, not you personally. I don’t mind being tracked anonymously. However, it is technically possible to link anonymous profiling data to a person. Let me explain one such possibility. (more…)

What will be different 5 years from now? Let’s take a look into my crystal ball…

• More people will use the Internet but the increase will have slowed down in developed countries. Online shopping will continue to grow.
• Internet connections will be faster, also on mobile devices, allowing for more rich media marketing, audio and video.
• Effective marketing campaigns will involve users and put them in control. Interaction, not interruption. Users decide what messages they accept when, where and how.
• Internet ad spending will continue to increase. More budgets will be taken away from TV, radio and print media advertising. This trend will not be over in 5 years though.
• Ads will be more relevant, better targeted. More advertising will be placed on social networking sites and other sites that require registration and thus provide better targeting opportunities. Search engines will therefore have to give up a significant part of their ad revenues. There is better targeting available than contextual advertising can offer.
• Viral video ads with low production costs will compete with traditional TV ads.
• A high level of authenticity and transparency will be required for successful online marketing campaigns
• Recommendations and opinions will play an important role in the online purchasing process.
• Online advertising will be more entertaining, supported by rich media campaigns.
• More “Long Tail ” marketing will be done.
• Measurability of online campaigns will increase. Ads in audio and video podcasts will be measurable.
• Untargeted banner advertising will disappear or become very low cost.
• Marketing campaigns in online communities and virtual worlds will be an important part of the marketing mix.
• Email marketing will be less effective. Click rates will continue to drop, spam will stay.
• Mobile devices will support advertising that is location aware.
• Most Internet users will have mobile phones or similar devices and regularly use them for reading blogs, news, and emails. They will also often use them to update their own sites like blogs, online community pages.

A black Google home page! At first I thought there must be a problem with my monitor. But then I noticed the link to explain why it’s black. Google Germany joined the “Licht aus für unser Klima” campaign, showing their support for the idea that turning out the light on the evening of December 8 for for minutes would send a clear signal to the participants of the Bali climate conference. (more…)