Week of June 2, 2008

Twitter and Scale

Friday, June 6, 2008

What is more important: Launching a tremendous service with wide spread adoption or making sure you have the technology in place to support such a launch? Well, we're starting to see the answer with Twitter Twitter, which launched to wide acclaim at South By Southwest last year, has been plagued by outages as its service has become more and more popular. It has gotten so bad that this is a typical (and real) title of a recent tech blog post: "A Proposal For Twitter: Shut It Down."

Clearly, an amazing product needs to be able to support its own growth. Twitter is a painful reminder of what happens when you can't.

Mobile Casual Game Advertising Has Huge Return

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Mobile gaming company Greystripe has been on the forefront of integrating advertisements with their casual games for some time now. It is in many ways doubly cutting edge, in that they are not only integrating ads with their game platform but doing it via mobile. They are set to release a report on their usage, and tech blog GigaOm was given an early look. One of the results that is surprising is the click through rate on the integrated mobile ads. It is a spectacular 10.1%. To put that in perspective, good online ad click through rates are on the order of 1 or 2%. Another element of this that makes it an amazingly compelling platform for publishers is that the demographics for casual gaming are significantly different than regular gaming: older women.

For radio professionals, this should be eye-opening data, and placing casual gaming and mobile gaming on your content platform should be somewhere on your development roadmap. Preferably on the sooner side.

Yahoo! Address Book API Released

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

While the story is relatively unsexy for radio types-Yahoo is opening up its address book platform for outside developers to build on and use-the underlying story is important. That story is one of Yahoo continuing to open up its service. We addressed this in our New Media Landscape report back in January, and it is worth addressing again: When you can be the engine of openness or you have the content that spreads via openness, you are in control of your destiny. For Yahoo, both of these descriptions fit, and it explains a lot how they plan on taking on Google. Google, which has very little content but several strong services, openness is also a battle they are fighting. For radio, attention needs to be paid here. Providing access and portability and customizability are all elements of openness that need to be on their development road map.

To Unmash Is the New Mash-Up

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Thanks to Mashable.com for pointing us to amazing look at the creativity being delivered on the web using previously created works. Most of the time we think of mash-ups as the twisting of one thing into another using new elements (horror movies presented as romantic comedies via redone trailers) or the combination of content (Mash-ups of two different music artists' works). But Mashable just highlighted an amazing site--http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/--where the artist takes a work, Garfield cartoons, and removes something, giving them a completely different feel. In this case, the artist removes all the Garfield panels, and the results are eerie. It is totally worth checking out.

Starbucks and AT&T Officially Launch Free Wi-Fi

Monday, June 2, 2008

Today, the long-awaited partnership between Starbucks and AT&T launched. The program gives Starbucks card holders two free hours of AT&T Wi-fi each day at Starbucks locations. The idea behind the partnership is fantastic: AT&T presents another reason for users to use their wireless service (free wi-fi!), while Starbucks gains users who want to access free wi-fi and-quite possibly-will drink or eat something while doing it. The nature of this competitive advantage, however, is that it relies on an uneven playing field. As more retail establishments offer free wi-fi, the value proposition for Starbucks and AT&T go down. For now, at least, they are now the easiest and most accessible free wi-fi across America.