Merry christmas
Hi everybody, just wishing you merry Christmas and taking the chance to post through the iPhone wordpress application. Checking out how it shows up.
Have a great 2010.
The onion network news: Babysafe Ball
Just superb, another jewel from the onion network guys. Have fun with the clip, it’s worth it.
New BabySafe Ball Makes Shaking Your Infant Guilt And Injury Free
The new Truvo has launched!
At the beginning of the month we went live with our new user proposition, a local search and community site called -guess- Truvo.
The New Truvo
The site is live in Belgium -for now-, and we will soon launch Portugal and Ireland.
It allows user to leave comments, reviews, ratings and pictures about places in Belgium. The database cover almost 800,000 ‘places’, and we got about 5,000 good quality reviews in the first weeks.
As searching and surfing habits are changing, Truvo is our attempt to satisfy such changing habits and youngish demographic that feels more comfortable in searching, contributing and sharing than just searching or looking up.
Truvo belongs to the same product domain that players like Yelp and Qype are occupying, and that -fresh off the press- also AT&T is rushing into (possibly later this year?).
From my point of view, the biggest difference between a yellow pages site and a site like Truvo is in content control and ownership.
While in yellow the site owner controls (but doesn’t necessarily owns) the content, in a site like Truvo (or Yelp, or Qype), the site owner owns the content (contributors usually give up IP), but doesn’t control it - the user does-. Therefore the balance shifts toward the user, whereas in sites like yellow pages there is a general tendency to cater more for the advertiser needs.
This creates quite a dilemma from a monetization standpoint: if you control the content (like in yellow), then you have a ‘credible threat’ in front of a prospect not to publish its site, it therefore follows that you can ask for some consideration for inclusion into the site. When you don’t control the content, such threat doesn’t exist, as any user can add content about a place, or even a place itself (and therefore a business). The advertiser can therefore add itself to the index, and the implicit ‘no-censorship’ commitment from the publisher toward the user cannot be broken by taking the listing offline without undermining the user proposition and the nature of the site itself. At the end of the day, an advertiser is also a user.
It means that different products need to be used and developed to monetize the usage in a local search and community property versus a commercial look up property. I will stop here though, I don’t want to bother you with the details 
Augmented reality
Isn’t this just bloody cool?
A mobile application overlay on camera contextual information alllowing you to know more about reality, and to integrate what’s available online with what’s in front of you in the real world. Just imagine walking down the streets to see available houses for rent matching your search criterias? Or looking up relevant content when visiting a new place, like information about monuments etc etc.
Imagine also the possibility to stick company logos on top of building and locations. Imagine the numerous possibilities for advertisinment, but also the risk to negatively impact the user experience if you overload him.
Cool stuff indeed.
Check layar.eu.
Social media spend at 500mn euros in Germany
According to Webmarketstoday, social networking websites are harvesting more than 500mn euros in Germany this year, out of 33bn page-views, which are about a quarter of the total monthly page-views in Germany! Considering the online admarket is estimate at 2.2bn euros, it sounds like social networks have a higher monetization level than the rest of the display. Here is why:
Search is estimate at 1.5bn euros and it is known for very high monetization rates. It means the remaining 750mn euros of ad spend is display. As search doesn’t make up 70+% of the pageviews, but does make up 70%+ of revenues, and as social networks count for 25% of the total page-views and revenues, it goes without saying that the rest of the page-views are monetized at a much lower rate than on adnetworks (i.e. they make 10% of revenues for 50%+ of page views, which would be 1/5 of monetization than social network). Back of the envelope calculation, but directionally correct.
It would be interesting, if confirmed.
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