Class 11, 19 March 2008

Thanks for the presentations this week. They included:

• Online Vault with tiers of service
• Online Newspaper publishing and UI platform,
• Out-of-Home Digital Video Ad Network
• iPhone Personal Productivity Tools
• An online web application for video editing
• A presentation about how online advertising works.

Relevant to out-of-home advertising, I was surprised to discover in my online research wanderings, that Google filed a Patent Application (705014000; 705001000) for “Allocating advertising space in a network of displays”. Here is the abstract:
“Advertisers may upload advertisement messages to a server specifying information such as budget, price per impression, preferred billboards and/or other constraints. One or more keywords or other descriptors are specified for each advertisement message. The system then generates an advertising campaign specifying where the advertisement message is to be output and send the messages to the specified displays. The output may consist of various forms including video, audio, printed incentive, interactive data transfers and/or combinations of these.”

Turns out that Google has a similar patents covering advertising in almost any situation.

The 20 March, LA Times had an article (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-fi-apple20mar20,1,4485461.story) discussing how Apple is considering moving to a subscription music service for the iPhone. I personally think this is inevitably how it will go. I believe bundled subscriptions, especially via mobile carriers will become a dominant model for music distribution. Nokia is already doing it as well as carriers in other parts of the world.

One of our book reports covered THE FUTURE OF MUSIC by Gerd Leonhard. The book also argues that this “music as a utility” users subscribe to is inevitable.

Also noted this past week is Time Warner’s AOL acquisition of bebo.com the third largest social network with 40 million users for $850 million in cash. No doubt AOL is looking to leverage its 80 million AIM/ICQ users in new ways. Sphere: Related Content