Category Archives: Innovation

Advertising, Artificial Intelligence, Business Development, Innovation, Mobile & Telecom, MyOrbit Blogs, New Media, Online Marketing, Sales & Marketing

Phone Calls = Page Views?

Scott Hamilton, president and CEO of VoodooVox believes: “Phone calls are the new page views, and VoodooVox’s In-Call Network is the next breakthrough advertising channel. We strongly believe that most telephony services that consumers currently pay for can be delivered profitably and for less with advertising support. Our In-Call Media represents the new standard by which all voice-based marketing will be gauged.”

The idea is interesting and we will wait and see how consumers react to voice ads, while they are waiting on hold to speak with their bank or pay the utility bills. Meanwhile, Voodoovox has closed $8.1M Financing Round led By Softbank Capital.

Steve Murray, partner, Softbank Capital feels: “The potential for ad-supported telephony extends far beyond directory assistance applications….Over time, we expect VoodooVox to help drive new applications, improve customer experiences, and decrease pricing for consumer telephony services of all kinds while raising profitability for the call publishers that provide these services.” The full news release is on their website.

So what’s the takeaway for you? There are more and more options of advertising, and reach audience at the most suitable time and space. Following the Internet, the telephone services got online, and in a few years, we can have “personalized” digital TV channels (more about that sometime later). So for any product or service that you want to market, consider all possible alternatives – they are increasing all the time.

Automotive, Innovation

Paris-London High Speed Run by EuroStar

On September 4, Eurostar made history and broke the record for the fastest-ever train journey between Paris and London. For the first time in history, a Eurostar passenger train travelled from Gare du Nord, Paris to St Pancras International, London on the new High Speed 1 line. The average speed all along was 300kmph. Watch this great video that captures this historical journey that was made just a week back!

Innovation, Internet, MyOrbit Blogs, Start-ups

Google buys Feedburner

By PureVC
If you haven’t heard already, Google has purchased Feedburner. Fred Wilson gives some color to the deal on his blog. While terms were not disclosed, Fred admits that his firm made about 3 times its money on the deal. That doesn’t sound like a “homerun” but he clearly outlines how rewarding the investment was for him and his firm in terms of personal satisfaction and in learning about the new media feed world.

This transaction confirms what few prescient VCs have known is the next wave of startups that take advantage of new media. Several years ago no one knew what a widget was or what a feed was. We were all using email and looking at portals and webpages. A very small iteration occurred, and that included the “blog”, the “feed”, and the “community”. In the past few years these have taken off and it remains an undercapitalized investment category simply because a lot of VCs don’t understand the power of this space. Continue reading →

Advertising, Business Development, Innovation, Internet, Market News, MyOrbit Blogs, New Media, Online Marketing

Online Video Ads have big growth ahead

A study by Insight Express carried out for Advertising.com (the number one online advertiser) found that news and video streams were the most popular types of content for viewers.

  • News clips were favored by 48% respondents
  • Music videos were preferred by 47%
  • Movie trailers were next with 32%

While ads pay for some of the content that drove streaming growth last year, eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman believes that the market for streaming ads may have built in limits.

“The current video ad inventory shortages both create higher CPMs and hold back a fuller flourishing of this market”

Last year in June 2006 McKinsey & Co. reported that Internet video ads were 80% sold out in 2005! “Assuming that marketers don’t increase the number of ads they place in each video stream, the maximum supply of video ads is currently about $600 million a year – far less than future demand,” noted McKinsey & Co.

My conclusion is that those new media players, who can make the production of video ads easy, have an opportunity to exploit. Microsoft Movie Maker is the easiest so far. But there is a need for better-effect templates that can make video editing on microsoft platforms easy for the marketing teams of most non-tech savvy companies. And once that is done, the growing presence of established Internet video channels like www.Youtube.com and niche channels like www.MyOrbit.tv (for business) make it easier to reach large or focused audience.

About the  author: Shankar AVSB is the CEO of MyOrbit and actively tracks the online new media markets and advises businesses on how to benefits from the new market developments.