by Andrew Frank | May 20, 2010 | 1 Comment
As expected, Google announced Google TV at its Google I/O conference today, with the tagline “TV MEETS WEB. WEB MEETS TV.” Now, these two have met before, and they didn’t exactly hit it off. In the pile of failed consumer tech gear lays a device called WebTV, which launched in 1996. Microsoft later rebranded it [...]
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by Andrew Frank | April 11, 2010 | Comments Off
“Most mobile advertising really sucks,” declared Steve Jobs in his preamble to the iAds unveiling. Sure enough, the demonstration iAds drew a sharp and heady contrast with the incumbent WAP banner model, combining, as Jobs pointed out, the emotional impact of television with the rich functionality and transactional possibilities of a native application. Much was [...]
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by Andrew Frank | March 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
Patent fever has gripped the blogosphere as, on the heals of Facebook’s News Feed patent, Google won a broad patent for, “Determining and/or using location information in an ad system.” (The story appears to have been broken by VentureBeat, which discusses it here.) Much of the chatter is focused on the question of whether Google [...]
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by Andrew Frank | February 5, 2010 | Comments Off
Big industry changes are often best captured in the smallest exchanges. Case in point: during a Congressional hearing to investigate the proposed acquisition of NBCU by Comcast, Jeff Zucker, the embattled CEO of NBCU, was asked by Representative Rick Boucher about the company’s prevention of Boxee users from accessing Hulu content. (Boxee is a service [...]
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by Andrew Frank | January 27, 2010 | 4 Comments
(This post was co-authored by Allen Weiner and Mike McGuire) Rumors being what they are, much of what Steve Jobs announced at the iPad launch event didn’t come as a surprise to the overload crowd at the Yerba Buena Center insane Francisco. The iPad is a “tweener” that fits nicely between an iPhone/iTouch and netbook [...]
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by Andrew Frank | January 12, 2010 | 1 Comment
CES2010 was packed with innovation – from 3D TVs to myriad e-readers and mobile computing devices of every shape and size. No one stole the show, but almost every vendor I saw put something impressive on the table. In the end I couldn’t fully escape the wistful sentiment, “if only the world economy would start [...]
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by Andrew Frank | December 8, 2009 | 2 Comments
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the prescience of futurist Alvin Toffler, who coined the phrase “information overload” in the late 1960s. While some predictions, like human cloning and genetic architecture, are still way out there, IO is arguably the defining quality of our current culture. The most recent exhibit comes from Google, which just [...]
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by Andrew Frank | November 21, 2009 | 4 Comments
Blogging is sometimes a great way to get interesting dialogs going, and yesterday’s post, Will Microsoft Exit the Ad Server Business?, drew a notable response from Harrison Magun, Director, Advertiser Tools and Technologies Specialist Sales at Microsoft. Harrison takes me to task for failing to make a crucial distinction between ad servers for publishers and [...]
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by Andrew Frank | November 19, 2009 | 5 Comments
When Microsoft acquired aQuantive in 2007 for roughly $6 billion – an 85% premium – ostensibly to counter Google’s then-recent purchase of DoubleClick, some wondered whether competitive instincts were clouding judgment. AQuantive consisted of the interactive agency Razorfish, which Microsoft recently sold to Publicis for about $530 million, DrivePM, a performance ad network that Microsoft [...]
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by Andrew Frank | October 26, 2009 | Comments Off
Apple’s recent patent application to incorporate advertising into an OS as a potential subsidy is creating quite a stir: “Apple Prepares to Rock the Market with Hardware Subsidizing Program” “Apple applies for patent on OS with embedded advertising” “Apple Patents Ad-Supported, Subsidized Mac OS” “Gimme a minute — just two more ads before it lets [...]
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