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Online video advertising startup Jivox is upgrading its technology to become more interactive and social. Jivox’s online self-serve platform provides video advertising opportunities to clients that allow them create and embed advertisements within their videos.
Advertisers can now add custom interactions to their in-stream and in-banner video ads to try to boost user engagement and response rates. Using Jivox, creative agencies and advertisers can now add their own custom Flash or HTML applets to video ads so that users can interact with the ad without ever leaving the player. Users will now be able to embed Jivox’s “in-stream ad plug-in” into a content player to serve a video ad in-stream, with full interactive and analytic capabilities. Jivox is also making it easier to embed interactive video ads on social networks.
Currently more than thirty media groups, including Gannett, Media News Group, McClatchy and E.W. Scripps are using the Jivox’s online video ad platform. Jivox’s ads get average click through rates that range from .2 percent to .8 percent. This seems low, but we know from Brightroll that click through rates for video ads have decreased. The upside is that total advertising spend is up and Jivox is seeing the results, with the startup’s revenue growing by 600 percent in 2009 and added 3000 more advertisers as well. The startup delivers ad campaigns for a host of big-name companies including General Motors, Nokia, Microsoft, HP, Sony and Samsung. Jivox, which launched in 2007, faces competition from Mixpo and Spotmixer.
YouTube is on a roll. Last night, the world’s largest video site rolled out HTML5 support, its first video rentals, and even a nifty music feature called Disco. Today, it’s making an even bigger change: the site is launching a new ‘Watch’ page, stripping it down to its most key elements and ensuring that nothing is drawing your attention away from the video on the screen. To most people, this Watch page is really the heart of the YouTube experience — it’s where you view clips and browse for the next thing you want to watch, so any significant changes are a big deal. The new streamlined page is opt-in for now, and you can activate it here.
Many of the changes are aesthetic. You’ll find that YouTube has removed nearly all labels and extraneous text, resulting in a much cleaner feel (and one that feels more Googleish). The logo has even dropped the “Broadcast Yourself” tagline, though YouTube hasn’t committed to dropping that entirely. Things like the video description have been moved around, the all-important view counter is bigger, and nearly all ‘advanced’ information has been collapsed (you can hit buttons to reveal it again).
But there are also some changes that may affect how you use the site. First, YouTube has ditched the five star rating system it has employed for years in favor of a binary “Love It” or “Thumbs Down” system. The company has been talking about how useless its rating system is for some time now, so the move doesn’t come as a surprise. YouTube says that any rating your video currently has in the old system will somehow be transitioned to the new one, though the details haven’t been worked out.
The other major functional changes are related to navigation. The right side of the screen features a list of videos that you might be interested in watching next (just as YouTube has always done). But now it’s contextual. Say, for example, I ran a search for “Avatar”. Clicking on a result would bring up the video as usual, but instead of just showing Related Videos on the right hand side of the screen, YouTube will now show other search results from that query, making it much easier to jump between different results. You’ll also find that you no longer have to scroll within a widget to browse these additional videos, which was one of my gripes with the old design.
YouTube has also implemented a very slick feature for when you’re actually running a search. In the “old” YouTube, when you run a query you leave the video you’re watching and are taken to a results page. Now when you run a query, the currently playing video will slide to the left side of the screen while results populate the right-hand side, allowing you to queue up your next videos without having to stop the one you’re watching.
Other changes include new controls that let you specify what video resolution you want to view a movie in (YouTube will serve the “ideal quality” as the default).
Here’s a shot of the old site:
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A somewhat misleading (in my opinion) presentation of these numbers has been floating around on the web recently, and so I wanted to post this cleaner graph. (The area of the circle for each country is proportional to the number of doctor visits per person; I don't know that this information is so crucial but I included it, as it was on the original graph that I've modified.)
See here for background.
A CES Innovations Honoree in both the Media Player and Personal Electronics categories, the “Light Touch” from the house of Light Blue Optics is an interactive projector that featuring multi-touch technology turns any flat surface into a touchscreen. Liberating the multimedia content from the small screen, thanks to Holographic Laser Projection (HLP) technology, the Light Touch produces bright, high-quality video images in WVGA resolution, so you could access the content as you do on other portable devices. Moreover, you can control the projector and interact with applications by touching the image with your finger, as it comes integrated with infrared sensors which transform the projected image into a 10.1″ virtual touch-sensitive display. Be it retail, living or workplace, you can interact with multimedia content and create your own environment with minimum fuss.
Via: Light Blue Optics
(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog.)
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.
Last week, as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board meeting of a fairly successful 3.5 year-old startup. Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. It was an impressive performance.
Then the new CFO got up to give her presentation – all kind of expected; Sarbanes Oxley compliance, a new accounting system, beef up IT and security, Section 409A (valuation) compliance, etc. Then she dropped the other shoe.
“Do you know how much our company is spending on free sodas and snacks?” And to answer her own question she presented the spreadsheet totaling it all up.
There were some experienced VC’s in the room and I was waiting for them to “educate” her about startup culture. But my jaw dropped when the board agreed that the “free stuff” had to go.
“We’re too big for that now” was the shared opinion. But we’ll sell them soda “cheap.”
Uh oh
I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences. No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.
This company had grown from the founders, who hired an early team of superstars, many now managing their own teams. All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes that success and growth had brought to the company.
One day the engineering team was clustered in the snack room looking at the soda machine. The sign said, “Soda now 50 cents.”
The uproar began. Engineers started complaining about the price of the soda. Someone noticed that instead of the informal reimbursement system for dinners when they were working late, there was now a formal expense report system. Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. Lots of email was exchanged about “how things were changing for the worse.” A few engineers went to the see the CEO.
The exodus begins
But the damage had been done. The most talented and senior engineers looked up from their desks and noticed the company was no longer the one they loved. It had changed. And not in a way they were happy with.
The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month the best and the brightest began to drift away.
Startups go through a metamorphosis as they become larger companies. They go from organizations built to learn, discover and iterate, to predominately one that can execute adroitly having found product/market fit.
Humans seem to be hard-wired for numbers of social relationships. These same numbers also define boundaries in growing an organization – get bigger than a certain size and you need a different management system. The military has recognized this for thousands of years as they built command and control hierarchies that matched these numbers.
The engineers focused on building product never noticed when the company had grown into something different than what they first joined.
The sodas were just the wake-up call.
As startups scale into a company, founders and the board need to realize that the most important transitions are not about systems, buildings or hardware. It’s about the company’s most valuable asset – its employees.
Great companies do this well.
Filed under: Microsoft, Mozilla, Browsers
We've all been watching the browser share trends for quite some time now, wondering when the day would come that an alternative finally shoved Internet Explorer off its perch.
It's finally happened - at least when we're talking about the most popular single version of a browser. You can see it all in the bar graph above: Firefox 3.5 has dethroned Internet Explorer 7.
Yes, we can all see the other two lengthy bars below IE7. Add them up, and it still means Internet Explorer (6,7, and 8 combined) is more popular overall. Still, for anything to overtake IE anywhere is pretty dang impressive.
We've still got 10 days left in 2009 to see where things wind up, but there's no denying that this has been a good year for Mozilla.
[via TheNextWeb]
Firefox 3.5 passes IE7 as most popular web browser originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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For a long time, Meebo has been a widely liked company with lots of funding but a fairly small amount of revenue. This year, that started to change. The company’s Meebo Bar (AKA Community IM) has now been deployed to over a hundred major sites and has helped Meebo reach nearly 100 million unique visitors monthly. And today, it’s launching a feature that will see that number take a huge jump: a self-serve tool for implementing the Meebo Bar yourself. Last week I spoke with CEO Seth Sternberg about Meebo’s recent growth, the impact of the new self-serve tool, and how he sees Meebo’s outlook over the next year.
Sternberg says that Meebo started 2009 with around 30 million uniques, almost all of which came from the site’s chat portal at Meebo.com. The Meebo Bar has added nearly 70 million more visitors in one year. The product was originally announced back in July 2008, and launched late that year on Flixster. Since then, it’s been deployed to 130 partner sites, with 150 more contracted partners ready to deploy it in the near future.
Unfortunately for small-time bloggers, the Meebo Bar had to be installed with some help from Meebo, as there was no way to integrate it yourself. Sternberg says that the site initially decided to focus on the “torso sites” of the web — sites with over 1 million unique visitors, but under 20 million. That encompasses quite a few popular sites, but it excludes the countless longtail content sites and blogs that could also benefit from the Meebo Bar. Sternberg says that Meebo receives 75 Emails a day from smaller sites requesting the bar. Today, they’re getting their wish.
For sites that integrate the Meebo Bar, Sternberg reports increased engagement and sharing across the board. He says that on sites like MyYearBook and Justin.tv, 35% of all users wind up chatting with their friends using the integrated bar. Perhaps more important to site owners is his followup stat: users tend to share twice as much content using the bar’s integrated Twitter/Facebook/Yahoo/Email sharing tool than they do using more traditional share buttons. He attributes this largely to the fact that users can simply drag and drop an item to share it with a friend, which most people are comfortable with.
But the Meebo bar isn’t perfect. Sternberg acknowledges that on some content sites (he singled out tech sites) sharing hasn’t seen such a big increase. And he says the flow to get people using the chat bar, which involves setting up a Meebo account and inputting your credentials for various chat services, could use some work.
The conversation then shifted to Meebo’s future. Sternberg calls 2010 Meebo’s “pivot year”: it’s the year that Meebo is going to start earning some serious money. Sternberg is optimistic about the site doubling up on its unique users, with hopes to reach 200 million monthly uniques. And he thinks Meebo can turn those users into added revenue: the company has been getting strong traction with major brands, who are ordering much larger ad campaigns than they were when the Meebo Bar was first launched.
The company itself is growing too. Meebo started 2009 with 35 people and has since doubled its headcount, with plans to boost that number significantly over the next year.
From the looks of things, the Meebo Bar is shaping up to be a major hit. Now the question is just how much of a hit it will be with advertisers over the long term. Meebo has nearly $40 million in funding, so investors are going to want to see that revenue stream turn into a full-blown torrent.
Graph via Quantcast.
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