The results of the industry are very inspiring: internet advertising grew by 15.2% compared to the same period of 2007 and achieved $11.5 billion. Growth in the second quarter of the year slowed down a bit compared to the first quarter but still rather strong: it still increased by 12.8% versus the same period of 2007.

Search advertising accounted for the largest portion of revenue in the industry - it reached $5.1 billion which is 24 per cent higher than it was a year ago. Display advertising revenue also had a comparable growth level - 19% which brought the revenue to $3.2 billion. Video advertising category is still small compared to the first two huge categories ($345 million) but it jumped from only $100 million in the same time of 2007 which means that video advertising more than tripled already.

And of course no one can help but raise a question of what we should expect in the next 6 months given the constantly worsening economic conditions and the panic in all the industries. On Monday I raised a question of how afraid we should be that ad-supported internet businesses will all go bankrupt because of the pending collapse of internet advertising economy everyone is predicting these days. In that post I quoted a few examples from the Great Depression of the 1930s which seemed to be a solid proof of the fact that advertising is actually one of the most important measures companies rely on to keep their businesses afloat during unstable times.

We are yet to see who will predict the truth - optimists or pessimists - but of course everyone is asking questions now that the report is here and the main question is if we should expect to see growth slowed down or even replaced with decline. It is quite hard to predict anything just yet with everyone giving up to the general hysteria everywhere and market driven mainly by fear instead of common sense but I will still prefer to hope it will be better than the majority of pessimists prefer to predict for now.

At least there is a strong reason why internet advertising is very likely to draw advertisers from traditional media in the financial crisis environment. President and CEO of IAB Randall Rothenberg has formulated the biggest advantage of online advertising like this:

Compared to the trajectory in other media and in the general economy, interactive has outperformed because it delivers a level of accountability unmatched by any other advertising medium.

This accountability will probably play the key role in advertisers making their choice now that they need to make as risk-free buying decisions as possible. This will result in both advertisers shifting from older platforms like TV or radio online whenever it is suitable for their brands and it will also change the structure of online advertising industry itself.

For example, I believe that we will see further growth of the number of deals that are related to performance. In the first half of 2008 52% of all advertising deals were performance related which is 2% higher than it was at the same period of 2007 when half of all deals was linked to results. This is definitely the figure that we will see growing steadily (or maybe even rapidly) in the second half of 2008 when advertisers want to spend their money wisely and seeing exactly what they pay for - like clicks and sales versus eyeballs and brand loyalty.

The full report is available here (pdf) should you want more information.

So whenever a company is looking to start, expand or relocate a business, ZoomProspector is here to provide information on the community in this or that place to help make a thoughtful decision and just the right choice.

ZoomProspector works by aggregating various demographic, social and economic data along with information on commercial real estate. All the aspects are bundled together to provide a user with a comprehensive and meaningful dataset that will help the company make the decision on the right place to run the business. The results take into account both the workforce available in the area and the potential customers as well as various infrastructure factors that can be vital for a business to make a decision on the location.

When a business registers with ZoomProspector, the owner starts by choosing the parameters that he views as favorable for his business and searching the information available on the site to see which communities will be the best fit. It is possible to choose if you want to select between cities and counties, choose the educational background required, availability of venture capital, job growth rates, and various other parameters.

ZoomProspector also has a database of commercial real estate so it is possible to perform a complex search here - with all the parameters like the type of the property you are looking for combined with all the demographic and social background required for your business to perform best.

The business model is not particularly clear for now but I have my guess anyway. All the search operations on the site are free for businesses without any limitations. But of course there may be situations when a business is not completely satisfied with the results and is willing to drill down deeper to make sure the decision is 100% correct. For that ZoomProspector has a database of experts - to help both with site selection and economic development. A business can search for the experts on the site and contact those they could be interested in working with. The site does not serve as a marketplace that connects businesses with such experts and charge commission but I believe such experts will have to pay either for their membership or for some additional visibility of their services throughout the service - and this sounds like a reasonable potential source of revenue.

The service is only available for the US only, of course, but I do hope to see either ZoomProspector expanding to other countries where the required information is available for aggregation or some local competitors launching as this is a service that actually solves a serious problem for businesses.

It is absolutely understandable that when the general financial climate is far from healthy (as it obviously now is), companies simply can not afford making wrong decisions and learning on their own mistakes and correcting them later. Every mistake means new investments - and this is what companies try to avoid whenever possible, most of all when they simply don’t have extra funds to fund such mistakes and correcting actions.

So we obviously see a startup working exactly how Tim O’Reilly suggested all of us do: trying to build something useful instead of creating yet another funny application that makes no real-life sense and is distracting more than anything else. ZoomProspector obviously has very solid real-life value for enterprise customers and is supposed to be able to develop into a healthy startup itself if they bring enough companies to the service to make sure their experts will want to pay for visibility on the site.

Mobivox is a Montreal-based company that provides a range of various VoIP services to its customers - some free, others pretty cheap. Unyk is also based in Montreal (which sounds very much like the major connecting factor for the two companies). This company develops a smart auto-updated address book which sounds very similar to what Plaxo offers since it also imports all the contacts from various address books and sends updated information once you change your address or phone to all your contacts everywhere (as well as updating your own address books with it). Unyk claims 10 million registered users with 3 million monthly unique visitors but the impressive part is that Unyk currently manages 480 individual contacts for their users which must be some indication of the large scale for today’s partnership.

The partnership announced today means that all the Unyk users will be able to browse their contact books and place low-cost VoIP calls using any phone. An important part is that Mobivox services are voiced-activated so browsing the address book and calling a person is really done in a very simple manner here by placing commands with one’s voice.

The partnership is announced today but we should not expect the promised functionality to arrive just yet - measured beta will be available in November and the service will be rolled out to all Unyk users by January 2009.

In general I very much like the idea of someone managing (and remembering - which is even more important) all my contact information somewhere in the cloud so that next time I lose or have my phone stolen, I will still be able to find any contact. For now Plaxo is my service of choice for that but I will be sure to create an account with Unik now that they promise this voice-based access combined with VoIP calls available at a reasonable price.

Quite obviously it is not his only fault and I don’t think that in Russia it could be viewed as a sin on its own but the aggregate of his errors was enough to justify the decision. The most important misconception he has is about autonomy of the Russian Church and avoiding any cooperation with other Orthodox Churches worldwide and other confessions as well. But still the fact that he resisted progress was viewed as a serious wrongdoing as well. In addition to forbidding his parish to use cell phones and internet, he also tried to make them stop using Russian passports.

The irony is that the priest himself does not mind using some of the latest technology tools - not only does he own and use the passport himself, he also offered churchgoers to send their confessions to him by email.

In Russia Orthodoxy does not have the status of an official religion but traditionally the Orthodox Church and the State have been pretty close and the religious authorities often have strong opinions on the politics here and actively engage in lives of citizens. Lately I have noticed that the Church has started building an image of progress-friendly institution in Russia. For example, we have even been told that Russian priests now have special dating websites where girls willing to marry a priest can get to know their potential husbands (Orthodox priests are not under the vow of chastity unlike Catholic ones).

It looks like the situation with Diomid is yet another move to make sure the Church is considered to be less gloomy than it has always been. Of course it is not good to witness anyone’s life destroyed for the sake of progress but I think it is still encouraging to see even the most ancient institutions slowly adopting the latest technologies.

Via (in Russian)

Image credit - Vesti.ru TV channel

The first thing people usually express concerns about is how online advertising market will be affected during this difficult period with companies looking for way to cut expenses everywhere they can - with advertising supposed to be first item to cut. And we quickly jump to a conclusion that there will be no money to be made online (or much less money to support everyone working here now) - thus we will face a collapse or at the very least stagnation of internet industry.

But for some reason this seems to be an over-simplified approach to me so since we have already started to compare the current financial turmoil to the Great Depression, I decided to see how advertising was doing at that difficult time and see if it was really that bad. To my surprise the results were contrary to what I expected to see with advertising actually looking like a relatively healthy industry for the generally bad financial environment at the time.

The first thing to keep in mind is that people will not stop buying products that are essential to them. True, people will hardly buy luxury products when they need to make decisions on what is really important and what they could live without given limited resources. But that does not mean people will not buy anything at all - it simply means the focus will change for them. So the first conclusion is that we will obviously see less luxury brands advertised. But it does not mean that manufacturers of those essential products will stop advertising as well. What’s more, they will have to compete with each other for those scarce money people will have in their disposal.

What’s more, in a bad environment consumers will be actively looking for better deals to spend those scarce money wisely. And if a company can offer a better deal to a consumer, it should advertise this opportunity because if no one knows you have something better to offer when compared to your competitor, how will you manage to make consumers make a choice in favor of your product.

There was quite a number of examples of successful brands during the Great Depression, including Chevrolet cars, Camel cigarettes and Procter & Gamble (that gave birth to the phenomenon of soap opera during those hard times). And all of them relied heavily on advertising because they realized that they needed advertising to create and maintain brand loyalty. They simply pretended there was nothing particularly wrong with the economy and consumers still had money to spend - and this proved to be the right approach for them.

We should also keep in mind that advertising is one of the measures to demonstrate to consumers that the company is healthy. After all, not all the consumers have a daily habit of tracking stock market behavior to know what’s going on - yet when they see a company spending money on advertising, they think everything is fine with the company. Say, if every time you see a T-Mobile or Blackberry ad on every single blog you visit and one day you see those ads replaced with AT&T and iPhone respectively, your first reaction is supposed to be thinking that the first two are already facing some serious problems while the competitors are in a better position.

And this explains why those companies that survived the Great Depression and even grew during the recession period were not those that were wise about their budgets and cut on advertising as much as they could - instead those were the companies that continued to push their brands to consumers, thus making those consumers choose their brands over competitors (under-advertised) when making a decision what to spend their limited money on.

Any recession is a period when everyone needs to make a decision of choosing between available options to make wiser decisions. Similarly as consumers choose what they will buy looking for better deals, companies will also want to make sure that all the investments are reasonable. So those types of advertising that happen to have good return on investment will most certainly stay appealing to advertisers. At the same time advertisers will probably avoid paying for eyeballs where they can not evaluate how many people that view the ad actually make a purchase. Companies will still want to stand out of the crowd but they will not want to through money away for the sake of it because standing out of the crowd will mean making more sales thanks to brand loyalty.

I can not be 100% sure but I think it is very much possible that forward-thinking companies will probably avoid cutting their advertising budgets. Instead, they will need to decide where advertising performs the best. I have a feeling that internet has pretty strong chances of becoming that platform advertisers will turn to as an alternative to their current old media platforms looking for easier measurable conversion rates.

Of course certain rearrangement of how online advertising market is functioning now is absolutely possible with advertisers turning to various CPC and CPA solutions where they know for sure what they pay for instead of paying for some abstract brand exposure. But that does not mean that online advertising will be severely damaged by the recession. Of course I may be too optimistic in this position but for now I would not be 100% sure predicting a doomsday of the internet economy.

Photo of the outdoor advertising during Great Depression courtesy of the University of Texas in Austin. Photo of the $.99 bargain by PetroleumJelliffe used under Creative Commons.

Last week I got yet another email from socialmedian (same as all the other socialmedian users) inviting me to take part in a survey to express my opinion on socialmedian and its functionality. The first 500 of those taking the survey were supposed to receive socialmedian T-shirts so I could not resist since I am yet to see a company that is brave enough to send any swag my way to Russia - for some reason the address scares everyone away. So I had some vested interest, I have to admit.

The survey was nothing special - simply yet another survey of a startup trying to have their users more involved in the future of the product looking for their feedback on the existing functionality of the product and the potential new features the community was interested in seeing in the future. I answered all the questions myself and just imagine my surprise when I saw another email a few minutes ago announcing some new features based on users’ feedback in the survey.

The functionality launched today is called “Mood” and is intended for every user to be able to express how they feel on every item submitted and discussed on socialmedian. Under every submitted item you will now see two smiling faces - one of them actually smiling, the second one sad. If you click the smiling face, you will like the story while clicking the sad face will be an equivalent of disliking it. Clicking the word “Mood” near the smileys will open up a special pane showing which users liked and disliked this particular item.

The best part is that expressing mood about a news piece was actually the feature the majority of users named during the survey as one of the most desirable ones only last week - and mere days after the survey itself we see this feature implemented already. Of course it is no rocket science and adding the functionality may not be particularly difficult to implement but still it is good to see a startup listening to its users and actually doing something based on the feedback. And this latest addition is definitely an example of reacting pretty fast - and doing something instead of promising to do something is a rare talent these days so it should be admired.

If you use socialmedian yourself, I invite you to follow me here as well.

eBay is paying $820 million in cash and will also add $125 million in outstanding options. The deal will be completed by the end of the year.

It is obvious that the acquisition of Bill Me Later is supposed to complement the company’s online payment solutions portfolio where eBay already owns PayPal. The resulting PayPal and Bill Me Later combination will allow for web users to buy multiple products on eBay or elsewhere and choose if they want to pay for them immediately or over time.

In general this acquisition definitely looks like a reasonable one: not only Bill Me Later sounds like a great addition to PayPal, it also draws comparable revenue on its own - in 2009 eBay expects Bill Me Later to generate an estimated $150 million of revenue. You will find more details in the press release.

UPDATE: PaidContent also reports that eBay is having some more acquisitions today with two Danish classifieds sites purchased for $390 million.

The latest attempt of such a redesign was Ask3D back in June 2007 which showed results in three columns instead of a traditional long list of links. One of the columns displayed images and video results for the search terms while other two columns displayed links to the search results as well as various blocks to narrow or expand the search. Understandably the search engine result pages looked rather cluttered and this approach also damaged speed of displaying results. Unfortunately for Ask many users complained about the speed issues and chose not to use the slow search service.

So today we are seeing yet another attempt by Ask to achieve more impressive results in the search market by increasing speed and relevance of search results. Today’s overhaul reflects results of work that was initiated in January. Starting today users will experience reduction of search results download speed by 30% which is supposed to be the most important result of the overhaul. The majority of changes introduced today will remain invisible to users since they are about increasing the number of pages Ask indexes along with some improvements of the ranking algorithm (no additional details on that unfortunately).

But the most visible result of the overhaul is replacing cluttered 3-column view for search results with 2-column one where the largest space is given to the traditional list of links to the relevant pages while the smaller right column also offering some related search phrases that could probably help find better results. The search results column also offers a selection of tabs for user to choose what type of content is needed for the search - general web pages, images, news, or Q&A where results are served from various places that answer questions related to your search term. Searching other sections is also possible via the drop-down More menu.

Ask CEO Jim Safka explained that the initial tests of the revamped search engine proved that user retention has been improved and people enjoy using the new version much more than the previous 3D version. Of course he expressed confidence that the new approach will help the search engine keep more users. But unfortunately this was exactly the opinion the team shared when launching the now abandoned Ask3D so chances are only time will tell if the overhauled search engine lives up to the team’s expectations.

In general Strands offers all the basic functionality that you expect to see in a lifestreaming aggregator - after registering you add your profiles on the supported services and add those that are not supported as standard RSS feeds. For now the number of services is not particularly huge but the selection seems to be perfectly enough, especially with support of arbitrary RSS feeds. All the services can be marked as private right when you add them instead of making your whole feed private as it is on FriendFeed. In this manner you will be able to see some services only for yourself and only share some selected items with your followers manually if you so choose.

Same as with other lifestreaming services, on Strands you can easily search for your existing email contacts already on the service and follow them here as well. There is also a selection of other ways to find people you may be interested in following - like the most followed, the newest members, or posters in various different categories of content so that you could follow people that post most videos or photos if that’s the type of content you want to be exposed to.

There is also a special section to find people you may possibly know (with Strands recommendation engine choosing the people you will probably be interested in following). From the very beginning you will find the lists functionality here (they are called groups on Strands): you are offered to add any user to any particular group right at the moment of following this user. An additional advantage for the future could be sorting people based on the topics they are engaged in in addition to the types of content they post so that I could easily find all the technology-savvy people and follow those I want to hear more from.

There are some obvious similarities with FriendFeed in the way you view what people you follow do online but there are also some things that are different here. For example, you can both like and dislike items where on FriendFeed you can only like pieces of content. But as Jennifer Van Grove mentions, disliking is definitely a sensitive issue since it is done publicly here so people will probably avoid disliking items not to offend other people.

Another difference is that liking an item here won’t push this item to all your followers that may not see this item otherwise because they don’t follow the people you follow. But instead there is a special sharing functionality that will send the item to all your friends here as well. Of course once the service is open to all, chances are we will see some abusers that will start forwarding their own blog posts or videos to everyone to get some extra visibility from Strands so hopefully there will be a way to report multiple abuse cases.

What is particularly good about Strands is the availability of various filters for you to consume only the content you are interested in at this or that given moment. In addition to looking at content posted by friends only belonging to a certain group you added them to or only people that follow you, you can also choose what type of content you want to see - like only blog posts or only bookmarks (both from the selected group of people or even from one user only). This is definitely a big advantage since it allows you to decide what level of noise you want to face.

It is worth noting that Strands lifestreaming service is only one of the products in quite a wide range of social and recommendation products by Strands Inc. and if they continue to integrate their other services into this lifestreaming application, it may be a very different option than what FriendFeed now has to offer. For example, right now Strands allows to broadcast what music you are listening to with their iTunes tracker but probably other services will be integrated eventually in this or that form (the company also offers personal finance and business solutions).

This is exactly where true potential for Strands could be: since the company specializes in developing recommendation solutions for various types of content (with their primary initial specialization in music), Strands could really serve best in discovery of content that could be useful to a user. Actually this is exactly what the company focuses on when describing the new service in FAQ section - and there is no doubt that social discovery of content is gaining in strength and popularity with many people saying that they stopped using feed readers completely and chose FriendFeed as it is perfectly enough to get all the latest news (often faster than what you will get with a usual feed reader) from the people with the most authority in any given field. So it is no doubt good that there is now a service that pays particular attention to this aspect and this can be the aspect that will help Strands stand out of the crowd eventually.

You can read more about Strands in these detailed reviews by Louis Gray, ReadWriteWeb and Ars Technica. If you are interested in joining Strands to see what it has to offer, leave a comment below - I already have a few invites and I’ll try to get more from the team if the interest is here.

UPDATE: use the code “drew” when requesting an invite and you will soon get an invitation link in your inbox.

And of course if you join or are already there, I invite you to follow me as well.

In addition to simply tracking news AOL toolbar provides functionality to easier access information on both candidates and all their latest speeches, statements or actions. There is also certain interactivity in the toolbar as it allows all users to participate in various new daily polls.

The toolbar works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Flock and can be customized by adding some additional buttons and RSS feeds of your favorite political sites and blogs. The toolbar is available for download here.

Of course there is nothing particularly unique in a topical toolbar like this but it may be quite a nice option if you do not really want to spend all day watching the constantly updated election-related tweets on the recently launched Twitter election site - at least the toolbar will quietly work in the background attracting your attention with some particularly important words.

But of course this toolbar shares the common shortcoming of all toolbars that push some continuously updated information at you - they tend to be rather distracting and may steal your attention from what is really important for your work. But if you are accustomed to multi-tasking, this might not be a disadvantage anyway.