ecpm blog

“Google Should Lever Up”

ecpm blog — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:56:34 +0000

Am I the only one who thinks that Felix Salmon and Joe Weisenthal are missing the point here? via Harvard Business School Teaching Dangerous Nonsense About Leverage. There’s nothing really hilarious about the statement to me. Take a look into any good finance textbook and there’s never really a good explanation for what the right debt to [...]

What is AOL Ventures? Tim Armstrong explains

ecpm blog — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:50:51 +0000

What is AOL Ventures? We’re still deciding what goes in there. AOL Ventures serves three purposes: one, to connect us with the innovation community across the globe. Ventures is not just a U.S.-based thing – it will be European, Israel, India, Asia. The second thing, assets we have inside the company that were acquired or [...]

Economics of wireless handsets

ecpm blog — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:29:39 +0000

Underlying the winners-take-all nature of the market are fat subsidies from phone carriers, particularly in the U.S., which lets manufacturers maintain hefty average selling prices even as consumers pay as little as $100 a smart phone — not much more than for many basic phones. The higher subsidies reflect the carriers’ ability to charge higher [...]

MobiAD » Mobile Advertising News » Is “Ring Back Advertising” The Future For Google?

ecpm blog — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:59:07 +0000

Very interesting: The question of course is how will Google generate a profit from these activities. The recent publishing of a Google patent application titled “Ringback Advertising” may give a good indication. via MobiAD » Mobile Advertising News » Is “Ring Back Advertising” The Future For Google?.

ESPN.com Tests “Multidomestic” Strategy

ecpm blog — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:49:50 +0000

This ESPN effort to test local websites has very important strategic implications. The economics of entirely different and the business will definitely have to organize itself differently if it chooses to go further down this path. For example, scale efficiencies will be lost, control and content will all become more decentralized, etc. Compare that to the [...]

Why Japan’s Smartphones Haven’t Gone Global – NYTimes.com

ecpm blog — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:36:48 +0000

The Japanese have a name for their problem: Galapagos syndrome. Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galapagos islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University. via Why Japan’s Smartphones Haven’t Gone Global – NYTimes.com. I sat in a room full [...]

Bing is really a marketing effort (not technology)

ecpm blog — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:19:25 +0000

A marketing expert quoted in this NYT article: “What people know from marketing experience now and what people now understand as a practical matter is that it is very good when people use your name as verb.” Ballmer on Bing: The name, he told The New York Times, “works globally” and has the potential “to verb up.” That [...]

Whimsley: Googling Barbie Again

ecpm blog — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 02:02:08 +0000

Independent sites are out there in their millions of course, but they are unfortunately being pushed to the periphery of our field of vision by commercial efforts – of Mattel in this case. It should be no surprise that as the web has become mainstream, and as corporations realise the necessity of investing in their [...]

Millennial Media June Scorecard: Entertainment Top Ad Spender, iPhone Top Device | Local Mobile Search

ecpm blog — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:33:38 +0000

Here’s a link to the report that I just blogged about. Mobile ad network Millennial Media’s May scorecard showed the Samsung Instinct as the top device on the company’s network, which I found strange. The June report shows that the iPhone has overtaken it as the top device, which brings this data more in line with [...]

“When it comes to mobile ad spending, the entertainment sector led the way”

ecpm blog — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:32:13 +0000

Entertainment Tops Mobile Ad Spending Sectors- When it comes to mobile ad spending, the entertainment sector led the way in the second quarter followed by telecommunications, Web portals, dating, and retail. Continues: Within entertainment, movie studios accounted for nearly two-thirds of spending, followed by games (16%), TV (9%), other (7%) and music (4%). The big summer movie [...]