Apple, the company that has found itself in the limelight over recent weeks for the antenna trouble experienced by some iPhone 4 users, has said that it will hold a news conference this Friday, according to the Wall Street Journal. While the company has kept tight-lipped about the conference, it was acknowledged one thing - that the iPhone 4 will be at the center of attention.

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Within hours of the iPhone hitting owners doorsteps last month, the reports and YouTube videos showing the then-unconfirmed issue began showing up all over the Internet. Since then, the issue has grown and grown, with everything coming to a head this week when Consumer Reports said it wouldn't recommned the phone and the R-word ("recall") started being heard. Although Apple has said that the issue was one seen across various cell phone models and was actually a software error in its reporting of signal strength, the hoopla over the phone's antenna issues has continued to grow. This week, the iPhone 4 debacle (which some are now calling "antennagate") hit mainstream audiences when it made it/> [...]

Thu Jul 15, 2010 07:14 am

This could be the year of the display ad. That's not to say that display ads aren't prevalent every year, but Google has only been involved with that for a little while, and if analysts' projections are accurate, this will be the year that Google's display ad business tops $1 billion in sales.

Last summer, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that display ads would be Google's next big billion-dollar business. According to BusinessWeek, a Barclays Capital analyst says display ads will account for about 4% of Google's total sales in 2010. This would be a 40% increase from their contribution in 2009. BW's Douglas MacMillan reports:

Sales of video and banner ads on YouTube, the world's most popular video site, are expected by analysts at Barclays to contribute the bulk of Google's display revenue this year, about $700 million. And with DoubleClick, Google acquired a technology that handles the placement of display ads on sites across the Web. "Display is now a key business for us," says Susan Wojcicki, Google's vice-president of product management and one of the company's earliest employees.

Neal Mohan, the executive in charge of Google's display business, says Google will draw on its strength in search-related advertising to expand in display. It became the leader in search by using algorithms to help it know which ads to place where. "Our goal is to bring the science of search to the art of display," Mohan says.

Advertisers will probably not be shy about getting on board with that. "Research has shown that exposure to both search and display ads from the same advertiser results in a 22 percent increase for conversion rates over search alone," Rich Kahn, CEO of display ad provider eZanga told /> [...]

Mon Feb 08, 2010 22:20 pm

Recently I highlighted and reviewed a report by Frost & Sullivan which talked about the impact of collaboration on overall business performance.  The report was created a few years ago and was thus slightly dated.  Fortunately someone from Verizon sent me a more updated version of the report, this one was conducted in 2009 and provides more insight and information into how businesses are collaborating and how effective that collaboration actually is.  The new report talks much more about UC&C or Unified Communications and Collaboration and also introduces ROC or return on collaboration.  As with the previous report, there is no mention of Enterprise 2.0 anywhere, just collaboration.  Let’s dive right into it.

What I find fascinating about this diagram is that over 43% of UC&C tool deployments happened in the past 12 months.

In my opinion this helps crystallize the Enterprise 2.0 market and shows that companies are indeed taking this seriously and that collectively companies are moving towards more enhanced collaboration.  Now keep in mind that this only speaks to tool deployment and says nothing about strategy, results, adoption, or effectiveness.  This is simply the percentage of companies that have deployed these tools within the organization.  Frost & Sullivan also point out that this shift towards UC&C tools was probably facilitated by current econo/> [...]

Wed Apr 07, 2010 14:10 pm

Using Twitter Grader's database of over 9 million Twitter accounts, I analyzed how genders behave differently.

To prevent celebrities from skewing the results, I looked at Twitter users who have between 100 and 10,000 followers. I also used the interquartile mean to control for users who are following or Tweeting far more than the average.

I found that while men and women have basically the same number of followers, there are significant differences in two other numbers: Following and Tweets.

 In our database, women follow 2% more people than men do on average.

I found a more dramatic difference when I looked at the number of Tweets men and women made over the life of their Twitter accounts. Women posted over 12/> [...]

Tue May 25, 2010 04:25 am