IMG Publishing Partners With KlickableTV to Enhance e-Commerce Sites
Below is a press release from KlickableTV, an interesting interactive video startup and an active participant in the Digital Media MBA events. If you haven’t had a chance to check them out yet, follow the links in the release below and support our membership.
SOURCE: IMG Publishing
Highlighted Links
TennisWeek.com
NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – June 30, 2009) – IMG Publishing, a division of global sports and entertainment company IMG, has established a strategic partnership with KlickableTV, the interactive online video platform. Currently, KlickableTV is deployed on IMG’s digital property, TennisWeek.com. The platform provides visitors to TennisWeek.com’s videos with value-added information nuggets and e-commerce opportunities when they click on any of the virtual merchandise showcased.
“Our association with KlickableTV will give our visitors a more engaging experience,” said Lee Rosenbaum, IMG Publishing’s vice president of publishing. “We believe the technology will help to increase sales and add value to our featured brands. We plan to deploy KlickableTV this year on our other two digital properties, FashionWeekDaily.com and ChicReport.com.”
“IMG Publishing’s digital properties reach a wide and influential audience and we’re thrilled to be giving these visitors a new interactive way to consume video,” said Roger Wu, co-founder and president of KlickableTV.
Using Klickable TV only requires Adobe’s Flash player and an Internet connection; no software download is needed.
About IMG Sports & Entertainment
Operating in 30 countries, IMG Sports & Entertainment’s diverse businesses include: consulting services; event ownership and management; fashion events and models representation; licensing; golf course design; and client representation in golf, tennis, broadcasting, speakers, European football, rugby, cricket, motor sports, coaching, Olympic and action sports. IMG Academies are the world’s largest, multi-sport training and educational facilities, delivering world-class training experiences to more than 12,000 junior, collegiate, adult, and professional athletes each year.
About KlickableTV
KlickableTV’s interactive video platform harnesses social media to create a comprehensive viewing experience and provides unique insights into viewer behavior. With a variety of professional and semi-professional users, KlickableTV is the leading interactive video provider. Founded in 2007, Klickable TV is based in New York City. For more information, visit www.klickable.tv.
Press Contact:
Alison Levy
IMG Publishing
646-871-2492
alison.levy@imgworld.com
Click here to see all recent news from this company.
AdMob Research Emphasizes the “Long” in Long Tail for iPhone Apps
AdMob has just released a report and while the data is only representative of the iPhone apps that work with them, it’s a good sample – and it says that the Long Tail is very long indeed. For those hoping to make big bucks from iPhone apps, it’s worth noting that only a little more than one hundred apps (116) tracked by AdMob have more than 100,000 users. That’s not bad for a paid app, although with an average price from most sources at 1-2 dollars it’s certainly not retirement money, but the implications for ad supported apps are much worse as the impressions simply won’t add up to enough to matter, even at good CPMs.
from MatchStar: VP-Dir Engineering and Product Dev – NYC
We are conducting an executive search for a VP/Director of Engineering and Product Development for a SaaS company located in NYC. (Title depends upon experience.) Company has rapidly been growing to become one of the fastest growing companies in New York. Company has many well-known, reference-able Fortune 500 clients. The company has over 60 employees and is very well funded. It does not need to raise any additional capital. Corporate culture is very team oriented and results focused. There is a lot of open communication, transparency and exchange of new ideas. It is very entrepreneurial, fun, friendly, and innovative. Company needs a proven, hands-on technical leader to manage and grow its development team while driving innovation and best practices. This is an excellent opportunity to get in early with a company that is already successful and experiencing explosive growth.
Please let MatchStar know you saw the job here!
from Portfolio Media: Corporate Sales Executive
Corporate Sales Executive
Company Name: Portfolio Media, publishers of Law360
Hiring Company Industry: Media
Total Compensation: $100K+
– Base Salary: $50K
– Commission: $50K+
Location: New York, NY
Specialty: Inside/Corporate Sales
COMPANY
Portfolio Media, publisher of a daily legal newswire called Law 360 provides trusted and concise around-the-clock news coverage of major legal developments. Our publication has fast become a must-have for legal practitioners. Our subscribers include top law firms, in-house counsels at major corporations and government regulatory agencies.
JOB DESCRIPTION
We are actively seeking a full time Corporate Sales Executive (CSE) to join our growing sales force. The CSE will play an integral role in increasing market presence and revenue. The CSE will be implementing sales strategies in order to grow new business as well as up sell existing subscription contracts in assigned territories. The position involves business to business cold calling from leads comprised of current clients, trial users, past prospects and other prospecting lists, developing and maintaining client relationships in the corporate legal marketplace.
Responsibilities include but not limited to: (more…)
Feeling zero Guilt over Gilt…
What do you think about when the word “sample sale” comes up?
Personally, I’m instantly hit with a series of images:
People (mostly women who’ve snuck out of the office) jamming into a temporary space on the 6th floor of some building in the fashion district. Elbows are flying, the aisle is the fitting room and a great find usually comes after digging through 3 large bins. Oh, and the sign on the door reads “Cash Only”. Returns? Yeah, right….
For those of you who know what I’m talking about, you are the exact audience that Gilt Groupe(www.gilt.com), an e-commerce company, is targeting. The site launched in 2008 and has revolutionized the way we think about sample sales. The basic idea is that the website (which is member’s only) provides users with daily sample sales which are specific to one designer and last about a day. The sales all start at exactly noon. The featured designers are both established (Calvin Klein) and trendy (Steven Alan)
Suddenly, it’s as easy as turning to the internet at noon everyday to see what’s for sale. The images are clear, the functionality (can you say ZOOM) is outstanding, the search capabilities (by size, color, style) all well thought out — and they allow returns!! Moreover, the company has done a fabulous job with the marketing and administration of the site. The marketing team puts together videos so that members get a sense of the designers that will be in the upcoming sales – though none of the actual items can be seen. Most importantly, because the sales “open” at exactly noon and items sell out quickly, it’s an and incredibly strong incentive for users to log on everyday to check it out. There is a sense of urgency. They dont want to miss out.
And it seems to be catching on. According to compete.com Gilt’s monthly uniques have grown from approximately 100K in May of 2008 to 500K in May of 2009 – and remember, you have to be a member to log on (membership is gained by invitation from an existing member).
Of course, once someone finds a good thing, others are likely to follow. Users can now log on to several sites attempting to replicate the Gilt Groupe model – www.ruelala.com, www.editorscloset.com, etc. The question now is whether the market is big enough for all the competitors and whether Gilt can use its first mover advantage and unique positioning to maintain an edge.
As far as I’m concerned, they’re all worth trying out!! Happy Shopping.
-Karis
Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned
A THOUSAND WORDS Tweets stop at 140 characters. A tweeted photo can have a fuller impact. Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the presidential election. But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or “tag,” each of their tweets with the same bit of type — #IranElection — so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth. 1. Twitter Is a Tool and Thus Difficult to Censor Twitter aspires to be something different from social-networking sites like Facebook orMySpace: rather than being a vast self-contained world centered on one Web site, Twitter dreams of being a tool that people can use to communicate with each other from a multitude of locations, like e-mail. You do not have to visit the home site to send a message, or tweet. Tweets can originate from text-messaging on a cellphone or even blogging software. Likewise, tweets can be read remotely, whether as text messages or, say, “status updates” on a friend’s Facebook page. Unlike Facebook, which operates solely as a Web site that can be, in a sense, impounded, shutting down Twitter.com does little to stop the offending Twittering. You’d have to shut down the entire service, which is done occasionally for maintenance. 2. Tweets Are Generally Banal, but Watch Out “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who is an expert on the Internet. That is, tweets by their nature seem trivial, with little that is original or menacing. Even Twitter accounts seen as promoting the protest movement in Iran are largely a series of links to photographs hosted on other sites or brief updates on strategy. Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion. 3. Buyer Beware Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so). 4. Watch Your Back Not only is it hard to be sure that what appears on Twitter is accurate, but some Twitterers may even be trying to trick you. Like Rick’s Café, Twitter is thick with discussion of who is really an informant or agent provocateur. One longstanding pro-Moussavi Twitter account, mousavi1388, which has grown to 16,000 followers, recently tweeted, “WARNING: http://www.mirhoseyn.ir/ & http://www.mirhoseyn.com/ are fake, DONT join. … #IranElection11:02 AM Jun 16th from web.” The implication was that government agents had created those accounts to mislead the public. ABCNews.com announced that Twitter users who said they were repeating (“retweeting”) the posts from its reporter, Jim Sciutto, had been fabricating the material to make Mr. Sciutto seem to be backing the government. “I became an unwitting victim,” he wrote. 5. Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more and, as shown above, can expose others who are suspected of being fakers. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques. Of course, Twitter is a certain kind of community — technology-loving, generally affluent and Western-tilting. In that way, Twitter is a very poor tool for judging popular sentiment in Iran and trying to assess who won the presidential election. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presumably has some supporters somewhere in Iran, is losing in a North Korean-style landslide on Twitter. 6. Twitter Can Be a Potent Tool for Media Criticism Just as Twitter can rally protesters against governments, its broadcast ability can rally them quickly and efficiently against news outlets. One such spontaneous protest was given the tag #CNNfail, using Internet slang to call out CNN last weekend for failing to have comprehensive coverage of the Iranian protests. This was quickly converted to an e-mail writing campaign. CNN was forced to defend its coverage in print and online.
Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.
Second Life now Utilized to Disseminate Health Care Information
As a health care provider, I was fascinated to discover that many governments, health care agencies, and private groups are increasingly using Second Life as a medium to communicate health-related information.
A study that analyzed the depth and breadth of this information (using the second life search engine), categorized all health care related activities into five groups: education & awareness, support, training, marketing, and research. The education sites offered information on many health topics and links to other websites. The support sites provided direct access to doctors, other health care professionals, and peer-support groups. The training sites were directed primarily to people in the health care industry and consisted of classrooms, lectures, simulations, etc. Some even offered real academic credit. The marketing sites mainly promoted health care services, fundraising, and health care initiatives. The research sites were used as recruiting tools for health care research.
I would expect the support and marketing sites to me the most useful. The peer support communities offered in second life can offer the anonymity and supportive functions of a real-life group in addition the convenience of the internet. Health problems are extremely sensitive issues and many people may feel more comfortable interacting with people through Second Life than any other medium. In this sense Second Life truly adds to the health care community. The marketing sites also seem important, because it allows for special groups to be targeted. This, however, is less unique given the use of social networks such as facebook.
The other sites do not seem as unique given the vast amount of health care services dispersed throughout the rest of the internet. For example, as search engines became more sophisticated, the availability of health information increased dramatically. Second life adds to this availability, but it does not appear to provide more accurate or appropriate information.
File Sharing Case Fines woman $1.2 Million
In Prof. Kagan’s 5th lecture when we were reviewing Music Downloading and Peer to Peer Networks it was mentioned that it was hard to find and sue the large foreign P2P network sites responsible for illegal file sharing because new sites are constantly popping up and the file downloading is between computer to computer with servers outside the US. A comment I was thinking about during the lecture was that it is still easy to place the blame on individuals and it seems that continuing suing individual people could provide a scapegoat to attempt to reduce the number of illegal downloads. In class it was discussed that “despite all of the advances in online music sales, tens of billions of illegal files were still swapped in 2007 maintaining the ratio of unlicensed tracks downloaded to legal tracks sold at about 20:1.
Well, it seems that is the tactic of a music industry on its heels, as a verdict of $1.2 million dollars in damages was awarded to the Recording industry Association of America (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading) in a jury settlement that claimed that a Minn woman who illegal shared 24 songs was responsible for $80,000 per illegal shared song. In 2005 the RIAA declared, “Pretty much everyone who uses such services is now a target of the IFPI. Initially, it is chasing what it calls “uploaders“, who let files on their machine be available for download by anyone else using the services.”Age doesn’t seem like a deterrent to the RIAA as well. When a woman denied downloading illegally and said it was actually her 13 year old daughter, the RIAA dropped the case and instead decided to go after her daughter!
While this is a long heated debate, this hefty fine should ripple throughout the community in the coming weeks. While the $3,500 settlements hardly deterred P2P sharers, I think this example will scare the parents out there , who’s kids might cost the family a lot of money and troubles, into opening their wallets a bit wider and using the traditional means of purchasing music. In addition, the music industry has had some success in attacking the large P2P sites and having them convert to a legal distribution model, however, going the personal route might be the most effective means though this could lead to a backlash by programmers and lead to even newer technologies to get music.
What impact will virtual world bring to the real world?
What impact will virtual world bring to the real world?
A major controversial and debatable point about the development of virtual world is what impact will it bring to the real world.
Second Life seems to be quite the progressive tool. Everyone seems to be very positive about this new technology and the impact that it already has on the world in terms of significantly improving communication, social networking and business platforms. However, people are beginning to raise concerns about the possible effects of the booming of virtual world. Will it negatively affect human behavior in terms of bringing violence to the real world the way other computer games do? Will it undermine some basic social concepts like marriage, family, ethics or even morality? Since virtual worlds use the same resources in real world like time and human power, will the flourishing of the virtual world reduce or even deplete the resources and productivity in the real world?
The bright side of the virtual world is quite easy to see and to be excited about. Many believe that “Second Life” is where society and technology should be headed – simply because the possibilities are endless. Who wouldn’t want to go to a place where all of your imperfections in real life are nonexistent; a place where you can look as slim and as sexy as you always wished you were; a place where all of the problems of the real world (e.g. pollution, climate change, hunger, genocide, over population, war, etc.) do not exist? It may be wonderful to take just the good aspects of the real world and build an alternate reality with them. Virtual worlds have allowed us to do so – but is that good? We may still be distant from the extreme of computers taking over mankind, but we cannot deny the possibility of a situation arising one day when we have to choose between the red or blue pill as Neo did in the Matrix.
Facebook Vanity Plates
I am pretty sure I am the only person with my name in the world. 99.9% of the time having such a difficult to spell/pronounce first and last name combination is a big pain: I constantly receive misplaced letter; have my name mangled by strangers to the point that I don’t even recognize it; and even have classmates/friends spell my name incorrectly on group papers and correspondence from time to time. But then there’s the .1% of the time that having such an unusual name actually pays off: case in point, I was very easily able to secure my Facebook vanity plate this past weekend.
I tell you this not to rub it in the noses of you that weren’t able secure your name, but because I recently found out that Facebook had originally planned to auction of these vanity plates to the highest bidder. I am fairly certain that I personally wouldn’t have paid to have my vanity plate even if I had a more common name like Sally Jones, but I am also fairly certain that most people out there would have been wiling to pay money for this perk and that I am probably the exception.
So given that a significant percentage of users would probably be willing to pay, why then did Facebook give these away for free? The official reason that Facebook executives eventually changed their minds was because they (a) didn’t want to seem elitist by giving richer people a leg up and (b) feared that hosting several million mini auctions (one for each name) simultaneously would have overloaded the system. I personally think this was a real poor business decision on Facebook’s part. With over 6 million users out there Facebook could have potentially made millions of dollars on this deal (even by just charging something nominal like a one-time charge of $10/ a name (in the US- adjusted to in other parts of the world, or perhaps free in some countries)). Surely, charging a nominal fee like this wouldn’t have been an issue to a large number of users, especially since the service is free. At the very least, Facebook should have charged corporations for vanity plates. Even this would have made the company thousands (if not millions) of dollars. I personally think Facebook made a huge mistake and its only a matter of time until Facebook executives started kicking themselves in the butt for passing up this great opportunity to monetize.
