Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Marcel Reichart asks how big the german online advertising market will be in 2006, citing a post by John Battelle that talks about a 32% increase in the US.

Interesting question that is, but I think one thing is important to note in relation to where the growth will come from. Some part of it will obviously be from bigger companies, but a lot of that will go the route of performance marketing budgets, not standard CPM bookings. There will be more creative solutions and more measured ones as this is just what is possible on the internet. A good part of the growth will come from new entrants in the advertising space though, again enabled by the internet allowing for new markets to be built and allowing for syndication and aggregation. This is the game we are playing with Ormigo. Enabling new players to enter this market is also what fueled a lot of growth with Google and the like. Suddenly Joe from around the corner can advertise, and sometimes even profitably. All this space will become more professional, and there will be more competition and the local players will have to improve how they manage things. It’s an interesting time to be in advertising as things are changing rapidly and accountability is increasing. Online advertising is sales they say, and I’d extend that to internet connected advertising, or advertising with a live backchannel is sales.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, Google, Ormigo, Performance Marketing, Online Advertising

This labs thing is starting to become a common thing to do and now Heiko pointed me to Reuters Labs, which have some interesting little apps for you to try out. There is for example an Apple Widget to get quotes and news, or podcasts, or a system to integrate a video feed from them on your site. Building your news site gets easier and easier.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple Widget, Labs, Podcasting, Reuters, Video Feed

Nico pointed me to Feed Icons which is being established as the standard icon for feeds and it looks nice. I suggest everyone using it because this will start to get noticed and people will understand what to do with it.

Technorati Tags: Feed Icons, Atom, RSS, Syndication

Thanks to Heiko I now have a confirmed place at this years Digital Lifestyle Day 2006. The list of speakers is impressive and I am looking forward to some good discussions.

Technorati Tags: Digital Lifestyle Days, DLD, Burda

I just finished an article in the newest issue of Brand Eins and this one was about Mike Milken, the guy that quasi invented the junk bond and made billions in the process. The interesting thing is that after having been to prison for insider-trading, market manipulation and the like, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, given 18 months to live and survived. This seems to have changed his life and he has since started several foundations. As the article pointed out, he is currently revolutionizing the medical research market and really speeding things up. FasterCures is one of his ventures, and The Milken Family Foundation is focusing both on medicine and on the other part, education.

I can totally relate to his idea that education will gain evermore importance in the future, but I have to admit that he is thinking big. He has founded Knowledge Universe in 1996, together with his brother and Larry Ellison, with a total of $500 million it seems! Ellison is said to be a silent partner that just has access to Milken for an hour a week … including his rolodex which is impressive to say the least.

This company was a $1.75 billion empire in 2001 and had 14k employees. You can take a look at this Forbes article on KU, because as you will have seen if you clicked the link, Knowledge Universe’s website has nothing but a contact eMail. They don’t really like publicity. For some people they are even starting to be too big. A report from the Arizona State University from April 2004 entitled Knowledge Universe and Virtual Schools: Educational Breakthrough or Digital RAid on the Public Treasury? goes a bit deeper into finding out how the company is structured. What Milken seems to be banking on is that human capital is both untapped enough and not included enough in the balance sheets of company, something my knowledge management tutors would love to hear.

If you want to read a bit more about KU quasi from their web site, check out this page from Luna Design who seem to have done an earlier relaunch and still have that in their portfolio.

All this gets really interesting if you take all the basic idea about web 2.0 into account, the basic idea that we have the internet now, that it can be used to connect things. KU is already using that via subsidiaries in tracking what children are learning and what their status is, updating the courses on a learning device on a regular basis with the most fitting learning material. This can be tracked through the lifetime of a person on this earth and learning will be a central part of life in the future. A billion and billion dollar industry. You can interconnect all those companies and really find out how people learn, how they improve, what they find, notice who the major intelligent ones are, even push them in the right direction if you are evil. But all in all knowledge about knowledge and knowledge creation is a very powerful knowledge.

It’s a business that is challenging enough for somebody who invented junk bonds and believes in technology. It should be something to take notice of.

Technorati Tags: Brand Eins, FasterCures, Forbes, Knowledge Universe, Milken, eLearning