Some collected items
The last few days several things collected inside my reading list via Bloglines. For one, I found Heiko Hebig’s blog at hebig.com and already have some interesting items to think about thanks to him.
1\. It seems that the Samwer brothers, who already cloned eBay in Germany and sold it to eBay a few months later and who now run Jamba, an SMS/Ringtone/Mobilephone/MMS/… portal, have now gone back to the cloning route and born MyFriends.
2\. Secondly, he talk about Wallop, seemingly a blogging tool currently being developed inside Microsoft. I actually found him via a post on Marketingwonk about Wallop.
3\. Here is another pointer by him about the valuation of Friendster.com. eBay is given as a comparison there but I have to say that the look at market cap versus revenue doesn’t stick. Taking market cap versus profit, the valuation for ebay is still high but it’s probably a lot more ok if you factor in their growth. It seems though that we are getting back on track for wanting growth above anything else, which is what Friendster is really doing. Growing, nothing much more.
4\. Heise is reporting that you can now only take part in the US Greencard Lottery via dvlottery.state.gov. I already sent in my application via a german company and they actually should handle the transfer to digital of my information. I’ll better check though.
5\. Yahoo is moving it’s media budget to MindShare and actually seems to do a bit of reshuffling in the creative help too. Weird to see Yahoo going for help in terms of creatives. Ok, probably for different media but still.
6\. Marketingwonk links to a story on MediaLife about how old media has to face the facts and show ROI for advertisement, something possible on the Internet. The problem here I think is that you need to find a real method of valuing Branding on the Internet, which is not factored in for this ROI calculation most of the time. Still, good thoughts and interesting article.
7\. Searchenginewatch has an article about the Google API that actually covers a lot more APIs, something I am starting to get interested in at the moment. If you check out this site you will find some very interesting uses of the Amazon API for example. Great stuff.
8\. Another interesting item in my saved items on Bloglines is this post on Marketingwonk about selling online media to non-beliefers. Some interesting points there too, but I’d like to add one thing. The article talks about the problem the clients can’t see their ads online. The solution that I see is a lot more simple. Let the customer see their ads online. Recently, web.de had an exlusive ad (called Web.Buster , their term ;)) which resulted in Harry Potter advertisement on ALL of web.de. Every single Advertising spot (banner spot that is) was a Harry Potter ad. Now there it’s easy to show your boss that you have advertising online. But this kind of exclusivity will bring a bit of challenge to management the advertising but this is actually were it is going to go.