Google Embraces Traditional Business Model for Rich Media
May 21, 2012
Online Media Daily recently reported on YouTube’s desire to attract more content deals with large media companies in the article “Report: YouTube Mulls Content Subscription Service.”
According to the article, the Google company currently has a global audience of over 800 million unique users. While YouTube has no plans to begin charging for its current content offerings, it might add premium offerings that are not already on the video-sharing site. Since it already does movie rentals and sports subscriptions, this would not be all that different.
The article states:
“In adding a new subscription service, the idea is to entice owners of high-demand programming in categories such as live sports, music and entertainment to put their content on YouTube. Much of this content is owned by big media companies, which receive the bulk of their revenues from TV advertising and subscription TV carriage fees. Many of these companies have been unwilling to put their content on YouTube, because of its predominantly advertising-only business model.”
This may not be a new idea, but it will certainly cause some changes in the way YouTube does business and may impact the way that others see the company. Will this solve the big hat, no cattle problem of YouTube?
Jasmine Ashton, May 21, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Perils of Social Media and Compliance
May 16, 2012
I’m sure Facebook didn’t mean to cause trouble, but the company’s recent implementation of Timeline for businesses has created a new compliance issue for firms subject to FINRA regulations. InvestmentNews reports on the transition, and warns that more changes should be expected, in “Social Media is Evolving by the Day.”
Regarding Facebook‘s Timeline change, the article explains:
“Among other things, it allows users to add a ‘cover’ to their ‘story,’ edit basic information, quickly jump to the past, see highlights of their Facebook existence from each month at a glance and more easily highlight events that they want others to notice.
“These changes present challenges to many firms.
“‘In general, I think that securities firms that allow Facebook are going to have to provide ongoing guidance when new features are available or they will find that the granular features may quickly land their firm out of compliance,’ Art Metzger, vice president of advertising supervision at Advisor Group, wrote in an e-mail a few weeks ago.”
Such twists and turns emphasize that social media compliance requires constant maintenance after the initial setup. Writer Davis Janowski is right to note that Timeline is just an example of the ever changing nature of social networks. Compliance advisors must stay on their toes, but at least it looks like they can count on some job security.
Cynthia Murrell, May 16, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
Still No One Stop Shop for Social Media Management
May 15, 2012
Digg recently reported on social media management monitoring, or in this case, lack thereof in the article, “Why Is Social Media Management Still An Epic Fail?”
According to the article, when it comes to viewing today’s social media landscape there are an overwhelming amount of social media management tools available. Unfortunately, there is no one stop shop for all of your social media tracking woes.
Elaborating on this point, the article states:
“You’re going to find that all the tools you evaluate are going to perform better either as a stand-alone management tool or a listening tool. Very few try to do both—and in those cases, they fail at one or the other. Most companies and small businesses will start this journey looking for a social media management tool because the first step in evolving your company’s social media brain is “awareness,” in which you identify and track your existing social media presence on social platforms.”
So it appears that social search is not a slam dunk. Now the notion of actually managing social media emerges as a challenge. Isn’t governance a nice way to say, “hey, we can’t manage?”
Jasmine Ashton, May 15, 2012
Sponsored by Ikanow
Buying YouTube Love: Is This a Step Too Far?
May 10, 2012
It seems YouTube comments are for sale.
The SEO crowd has a new angle. EzineMark announces that you can now “Buy YouTube Comments to Contribute in the Growth of Your Online Venture.” The write up starts by mentioning how useful YouTube videos can be in a marketing campaign. Naturally, the more comments a company’s video gets, the more exposure the company ultimately receives. So far so good, but such a setup begs for someone to game the system.
Now, apparently, companies are doing just that. We are advised:
“There is a revelation that social media marketing service providers design various packages of ‘buy YouTube comments’ in a different price brackets. The price of the package varies with the number of comments demanded by the owner of an online venture. You can come across packages with numbers ranging from 100 to 500 comments to choose from. You can avail the package of buying YouTube comments in tune with your requirement and budget.”
This particular, um, article is not really worth combing through, unless you get a chuckle from poorly written English. The very idea of buying YouTube comments, though, is an interesting tactic. How long before it is utterly impossible to differentiate between marketing campaigns and organic content? Are we already there?
Cynthia Murrell, May 10, 2012
Sponsored by PolySpot
IBM Pushing Watson Through Video Marketing: A Good Thing?
April 23, 2012
Watson, IBM’s supercomputer, triggered media furor when it defeated two of the world’s best Jeopardy players in the much-publicized “Man vs. Machine” challenge early last year. Now, the same supercomputer system is being pitched by the company as a valuable healthcare resource that would help diagnose medical conditions and recommend treatments.
Wall Street Technology Association’s abstract of the webcast “Rebroadcast IBM Watson and Medical Records Text Analytics” reports the following:
With IBM Content Analytics and its healthcare-specific solution called Medical Records Text Analytics, the Natural Language Processing technologies used in Watson are available to unleash the content traditionally locked in doctor’s notes, clinical records, journal articles, desk references, drug uses / interactions, and many other medical content sources.
This move by IBM to embrace videos to promote its products and services is effective, but will only work on video-oriented IT procurement managers who don’t have the time and patience to read through pages upon pages of product manuals. The problem with videos is that they are not the real thing. Similar to the three-part Jeopardy episode that shows a machine trumping the best human players, video marketing relies heavily on post-production. Expertly done post-production will easily allow you to forge and optimize the ambiance, background, music, and other elements.
While we know that Watson is from the technology mogul IBM and uses proven search technologies like Lucene, SPARQL, and Indri, it needs more than a winning streak in a popular game show and videos with testimonials merely from healthcare industry professionals to prove its worth in providing solutions for businesses belonging to different industries.
Tell me, IBM. How else can you convince us to purchase your costly POWER7 servers and adapt Watson if there are other proven and inexpensive natural language processing solutions out in the market?
Lauren Llamanzares, April 23, 2011
Sponsored by Polyspot
Ooyala Personalizes Video Advertising
April 18, 2012
As online video viewing continues to gain popularity, advertising tailored to users is an important factor for content producers.
Video technology company Ooyala helps brands personalize videos and profit from sharing content. An article from VatorNews, “Ooyala Launches Personalized Video Discovery Platform,” shares more about the product which aims to keep viewers glued longer by monitoring viewer habits based on length of videos viewed and content viewed. Ooyala’s product would suggest follow-up content of a similar length and related content. The article states:
“In pre-release, with select customers, Ooyala found that the tailored content was already driving a four-fold increase in consumer engagement, meaning longer viewing periods, more videos completed and ultimately improved monetization.
I sat down with Bismarck Lepe, Ooyala’s co-founder and president of products, the other day and he explained to me that as more people shift the time they are watching video content to online methods, people are going to gravitate to the services that have the best elements of television with the personalized aspects of on-demand viewing.”
This sort of tailoring makes for happy customers, discovering content that is enjoyable to them, and happy creators, seeing more revenue dollars in return. Video is a vital part of bringing consumers to sites, and an effective system like this is crucial in improving the streaming experience.
Andrea Hayden, April 18, 2012
Boxfish Brings Search to TV
April 16, 2012
Technology Review recently reported on a new startup that helps users search for words and phrases from TV in the article “Searching the Small Screen.”
According to the article, as of late March, California based Boxfish opened a beta version of its site to the public, allowing users to search through words and phrases that have been seen on television over the past month. The site also allows users to see topics that are trending and set up alerts for specific terms.
Boxfish is currently indexing TV dialogue from the US, UK and Ireland and they plan to add Australia and Canada soon.
The article states:
“The site is simple to use. If you search for, say, “cookie,” you’ll receive a list of results posted in chronological order along with a bit of the transcript in which the word appeared. On the right side of the screen you can see how many times it has been used recently, on how many channels, and also the words most commonly used in the same context. Click on a search result and you’ll see a big chunk of the transcript with bold text indicating the section that includes the search term.”
Since the product is so new, Boxfish still has a few kinks to work out. However, this could be a cool new way for TV watchers to keep up with anything from politics and current events to the latest celebrity gossip.
Jasmine Ashton, April 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Video Search: An Open Opportunity for GreenButton
April 9, 2012
New Zealand is known for its beautiful countryside and all the popular movies filmed there, sheep, and Dot Com. Business Insider reports there is another item to add to the island nation’s “list of reasons to be famous,” “Tiny New Zealand Company Brings Cool Microsoft Video Tech to the World.” The small startup GreenButton used search technology from Microsoft Research and created InCus, a service that transcribes audio and video files to make them searchable. It is aimed at corporation enterprises to make their digital media libraries searchable. We learned:
“InCus is based on Microsoft’s Audio Video Indexing Service (MAVIS), which was previously only being tested by a few government agencies. That makes this the first commercially available use of MAVIS, GreenButton CEO Scott Huston told Business Insider. Naturally, inCus is running on Windows Azure.”
GreenButton also sells an Amazon-like cloud and other cloud applications—they specialize in 3-D rendering apps. Other companies like Cisco and Autonomy have similar services for video and audio, but GreenButton’s InCus is the only one for the cloud. GreenButton has a corner in the market now, but it won’t be too long before a bigger company develops their own video indexing service. Things are heating in this part of the cloud market.
Whitney Grace, April 9, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Geospatial Intelligence: Autonomy and SharePoint
March 16, 2012
I must admit I don’t associate Hewlett Packard Autonomy with Microsoft. I know I should. Autonomy technology has been adding functionality to Microsoft SharePoint for years. I was reminded of Autonomy’s ability to “play well with others” when I read “Information Discovery Improves Search Capability for the Largest Database of Geospatial Intelligence.” If you are not involved in intelligence activities, you may not know what “geospatial intelligence” embraces. If you don’t know, I am not going to explain it to you.
The write up makes three points.
First, the use case described in the document performs what I call data fusion. For the azure chip crowd and the self appointed search experts, you can probably figure out that Autonomy technology is facilitating the integration of images, data, and other information. Without Autonomy, the merged outputs would not be possible.
Second, the use case makes clear that search is an essential component of information discovery. Everyone wants the outputs to tell the user what she or he needs to know. Won’t work. So outputs lead to search and search leads to more outputs. The use case explains that text and source data have to be “augmented”; specifically, entity extraction, categorization, geo-tagging, and reverse geo-tagging.
Third, the system handles open source and secure content in compliance with a Department of Defense metadata specification. If you like codes, here’s the one you need: DDMS 2.0.
Net net: Autonomy has some interesting capabilities for outfits who use Microsoft SharePoint.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Why Read? Images Are Stronger
March 14, 2012
I came across an article about the value of Facebook profile pictures as opposed to text, and was amazed by the new research that shows that words simply do not matter; it is all about image.
“With the Right Photo, Your Facebook Text Profile Hardly Matters,” covers a couple of studies by Brandon Van Der Heide and two other Ohio State graduate students. The studies look into how people make impressions of others on social networking sites, and it seems that is primarily done through photos.
Apparently, people already have certain expectations of the photos they view on social networking. We expect people to highlight successes and social activities. The study went on to show that if a photo fits what someone expects to see, then the rest of the profile doesn’t have much impact on the viewer. If it doesn’t fit what they expect, that is when people will decide to look closer at what you wrote. The article continues:
Van Der Heide [lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University] said he believes the results apply beyond Facebook to dating websites and other social networking sites. It should also apply to other traits beyond extraversion and introversion, such as social desirability and even political orientation. It all depends on what is shown in the photographs, and what clues viewers can glean from them.
According to the research, when people use text or photos alone to build an impression, text will typically have a greater influence. As more businesses head to social networking to build strategic relationships and strengthen customer bases, this is something that should be kept in mind. Be sure to highlight exactly what you want the customer to take away at first glance, because that may be the only glance you get.
Andrea Hayden, March 14, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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