Instant messaging grows up

"Instant Messaging has a huge user base worldwide. AOL alone carries two billion messages every day and the IM software stays open on the desktop for an average of six hours a day."

PVR owners watch more commercials

"Personally, I find myself watching at least one commercial per half hour of recorded content simply because it looked interesting during fast-forward. The popular industry folklore is that TiVo is killing the 30-second advertisement market, when my personal habits and this study contradict that."

Online Retail Officially Profitable?

"Of course, it's always easy to grow revenue when you're giving away dollar bills for seventy-five cents, which was basically the business model of many dot coms. Then, the bubble popped and many dot coms suddenly had to figure out a way to become profitable. Many went out of business, but slowly, survivors started to show quarterly reports with a lot less red ink. Now, a new study has found that the aggregate financial results from various online retailers shows that the overall industry is now profitable - not just a few of the bigger players. One of the main reasons for this unexpected profitability? The increasing use of paid search advertising. E-commerce sites have slashed their marketing budgets and have ditched costly (and useless) banner ads in favor of much more targeted text ads on search sites like Google."

IM for DM

"Yahoo! has a great IM tool for marketers called IMV. IMV integrates chat into a brand-based template or skin for their IM. So if I am a tweenage girl with a strong desire to express my individuality, I might accessorize with a "Choco-Kitty" brand skin on my IM software. Once set-up is complete, the brand appears in the IM screen as wallpaper with links ready to enable me to buy merchandise or send to my friends. The opportunity to tie brands to skins is vast. However, the key is to integrate the opportunity to transact."

Street Maps in Political Hues

"OR proof that all politics is local, look no further than Fundrace.org, which follows the political money to your front door. While records of campaign contributions have long been available online, Fundrace has a twist: plug in any address and retrieve a list of all the donors in the neighborhood, the names of their favored candidates and the amount bestowed."

Build Analytics into Your CMS

"But in my experience, the majority of CMS customers don't really need "world-class" when it comes to web analytics applications, and they can obtain a whole range of other functions that actually do help them with their business from a built-in solution. Furthermore, just because a CMS solution has a built-in web analytics module doesn't mean that customers need to turn it on - for those few cases where a more sophisticated tool is truly warranted, engineers can still integrate a higher end solution."

Game Theories

"Virtual worlds have produced some surreal rags-to-riches stories. When the on-line world Second Life launched, the players were impressed to see a female avatar industriously building a sprawling monster home. An in-game neighbour stopped by to say hello only to discover she was a homeless person in British Columbia, logging on using her single remaining possession, a laptop. Penniless in the real world, she belonged to a social elite in the fake one."