Click chart to enlarge.

Total online advertising spend in New Zealand for 2011 was $328.11 million up 24.16% from 2010 ($257.46m, according to the IABNZ/PwC Insight report, now in its fifth year and released today to Interactive Advertising Bureau New Zealand (IABNZ) members.

For the fourth quarter 2011 total online advertising spend was $87.11 million, up 20.52% year on year.

Display advertising increased by $1.27m (4.80%) from the previous quarter (Q3, 2011) making it the biggest quarter for Display since PwC started measuring in 2007.

“IABNZ estimates that online ad spend will increase its share of the total ad spend market from its current position of 12% to 19% by the end of 2013," said IAB general manager Alisa Higgins.

Click table to enlarge.

Mobile ad spend tracked for first time
IABNZ and PricewaterhouseCoopers have released a figure for annual mobile ad spend for 2011 for the first time, IABNZ said.

In 2011, mobile ad spend in New Zealand was $632,092, not including Google Ad spend, IABNZ said. 

In Australia, PricewaterhouseCoopers was predicting that spend on mobile display advertising, excluding search, apps or subscriptions, would reach $AUD37 million in 2011, rising to $AUD219 million in 2014, it said.

Total online ad spend in Australia for 2011 was $A660 million, giving mobile a 1.39% share, it said.

IABNZ general manager Alisa Higgins told NBR in an email that New Zealand was a developing market when it came to mobile, and it had a long way to go to catch up to markets such as Australia and the United Kingdom.

"Australia are expecting mobile ad spend to increase by almost 500% in the next few years and I would happily put a stake in the ground and say New Zealand will follow suit, although we won't be talking hundreds of millions."

PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Chris Perree said compared with five years ago, the total online advertising expenditure of $328 million for 2011 had increased 143% in dollar value and represented the largest year on year growth since 2008 at 24%. 

"Online continues to be an effective advertising medium for organisations with all channels experiencing double digit year on year growth."

Mr Perree said the mobile platform opened up more opportunities to connect with consumers on the go.

"We believe New Zealand will follow the international trends of mobile online advertising spend increasing as the population of smartphone and tablet users continues to grow."

Fourth quarter highlights
In the 2011 fourth quarter display advertising was up 4.8% compared with the third quarter 2011 at $27.03 million, its biggest quarter yet, IABNZ said.

Email and online video spend increased over the period of the first to fourth quarter 2011, from $0.24 million to $0.61 million and frpm $1.9 million to $2.64 million respectively.

RAW DATA: Online ad spend by industry (PowerPoint)

Some 12.6% of total website traffic was generated via mobile device in the fourth quarter of 2011, up 102% from the 6.3% recorded a year earlier, according to the Walker Sands Quarterly Web Traffic Report. 

Google's Android operating system was the top smartphone OS during the period, accounting for nearly one-half of all mobile traffic to websites. 

Below, other findings from The Walker Sands Quarterly Web Traffic Report, based on the analysis of Web data across a wide range of B2B and B2C clients in multiple industries.

The reported 4Q11 levels were 3.3 percentage points (PPs) higher (or 22%) than the 10.3% reported in the previous quarter.

The following chart highlights the steady growth in in mobile Web traffic over the past year:

The above data are based on averages, but information from individual websites (among clients of Walker Sands) is interesting to note: 

• The site with the smallest percentage of mobile activity recorded 4.7% of total Web traffic arriving via mobile in 4Q11.
• The site with the biggest percentage of mobile activity recorded 24.9% of all traffic arriving via mobile during the quarter.

Nearly one-half (46%) of website traffic arrived via Android device in the fourth quarter, up 19 PPs from 27% one year earlier. Meanwhile, 31% of mobile traffic arrived via iPhone, down 17 PPs from 48% in 4Q10.

 

The iPad has changed the mobile playing field considerably: 16% of mobile traffic arrived via iPad during the quarter, up 6PPs from 10% a year earlier. 

Only 4% of website traffic arrive to sites via BlackBerry in 4Q11.

About the data: Findings from the Walker Sands Quarterly Web Traffic Report are based on the analysis of Web data across a wide range of B2B and B2C clients in multiple industries in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Nice.

Simply breathtaking.

In a conference call following Google's earnings release on Friday, the company's chief executive claimed the number of new cellphones running his company's Android software has hit another height. Mr Page told media and analysts:

Android is, quite simply, mind-boggling. 700,000 phones are lit up every day. And I'm pleased to announce 250 million Android devices in total, up 50 million since our last announcement just in November. In just two days over the holiday weekend, 3.7 million Androids were activated. And today, we're announcing over 11 billion downloads from Android markets. Wow.

Android phones are made by Motorola (recently bought by Google), Samsung, Sony, LG, HTC and others.

In its most recently reported quarter, Apple sold 17 million iPhones, indicating an activation rate of 190,000 a day - although its most recent quarter (not yet reported) kicked off with the release of the iPhone 4S, which achieved activations of 1.3 million per day over its first three days on sale.

The less stellar news for Google investors: Mr Page was vague on how his company could make money from its mobile software, which is free, or the Android Marketplace, which is dominated by free apps. He said on the call:

Obviously, a lot of those [Android Market apps] are free, but we also are having a lot of people buy stuff there, too. We've seen a lot of potential for us to make money on Android, and I think you'll see us increase that a lot over time. It's hard to give you details about that right now, but I'm very, very optimistic."

However, it was clear how Apple was making money from Android.

The conference call revealed Google is paying Apple, and others, a total of $US440 million per quarter to be the default browser on their desktop software, and on their mobile devices - which in Apple's case of course includes the iPhone. 

The vast majority of Google's revenue - which topped $US10 billion for the first time during the fourth quarter - still comes from its core search business, but the company sees adds delivered to mobiles running Android as a key area of growth.

The conference call also saw Google claim 90 million registered users for Google (aka Google Plus), its new-ish competitor to Facebook - up from 40 million in the previous quarter.

However, the company was fuzzy on how many actively used the social network each day.

NBR's anecdotal experience is that many New Zealanders, and New Zealand companies, active on Facebook and Twitter have registered Google accounts - but many don't actively post. "It's a giant hanger," one user told NBR. Another described it as a "wasteland."

Read a transcript of Google's fourth quarter earnings call here; see a webcast on Google's investor relations site here.

It must bite though to pay $440m per quarter, to companies including Apple, to be their default desktop browser software. Surely they have enough market penetration and a following to do away with those fees (people mostly use them anyway).

In 2011, online advertising has beaten out print and radio as the number two place ad dollars are spent. But how did it come to be that way? Four thousand years ago Ancient Egyptians invented advertising by carving public notices in steel. Fast forward to the present day, and in-text online ads, Facebook Like-driven campaigns and viral commercials, such as the Old Spice Guy, are common form.

This illustrated timeline, created by Infolinks, takes a walk down advertising’s memory lane.

The evolution from steel to digital took many turns along its way, such as print fliers hoping to get young men to fight in the Revolutionary War, billboards spurred by the rise of automobiles, electric banner ads following the invention of the light bulb (Times Square’s first went up in 1882) and direct marketing with the nascent postal service.

But we don’t want to give everything away. Take a look at the graphic below. Do you think any of these older forms of advertising would be successful today? Let us know in the comments.

 

 

Yes, agree...errr...what was I saying?

Okay, the geek in me loves this!

Adobe has dropped Flash development for mobile-browsers, saying it intends to focus on HTML5.

And the company has said it will cut 750 jobs in North American and Europe, primarily, as it restructures to focus on digital media and marketing.

Vice president and general manager interactive development Danny Winokur said on Adobe’s blog that the company would no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations, including chipset, browers, OS version and more, following the release of 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

Mr Winokur said HTML5 was universally supported on major mobile devices, making it the best solution for creating and deploying content in a browser across mobile platforms. 

“We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.”

He said Adobe’s future work with Flash on mobile devices would focus on enabling developers to package native apps with AIR for major app stores.

The history of Apple and Adobe
Adobe Flash has had a chequered history, reported the New York Times, ever since Apple refused to run it on iPhones, iPads and iPods.

Adobe countered at the time, claiming Apple was trying to make more money for its App Store as companies such as Google worked around the problem by creating apps, PC Magazine reported.

Steve Jobs retorted by posting an open letter on Apple’s website detailing reasons for Apple’s refusal to accommodate Flash.

These reasons, he said, were business driven and about technology issues, including reliability, security and performance.  Battery life was another reason, with Mr Jobs going on to say that Flash had been created for a PC world.

“But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”

Adobe replied to Mr Jobs’ points, saying Flash performed as well if not better than comparable multimedia technologies, as detailed by the New York Times.

Mr Winokur said the axing of Flash for mobile-browsers would allow an increased investment in HTML5, and innovation in advanced gaming and premium video.

Forbes said the end of Flash development for mobile had proven Apple right with HTML5, while CNN International has more detail regarding the Apple/Adobe scrap here.

750 jobs to go
Meanwhile Adobe also said it was restructuring its business, resulting in the loss of 750 jobs in North America and Europe primarily

This restructure came in order to allow better investment in Digital Media and Digital Marketing, Adobe said.

The company said it believed it would achieve fourth quarter revenue within the $US1.075 billion to $US1.125 billion range previously provided.

750 jobs. Ouch!

Facebook now lets you update Twitter

By Emil Protalinski | November 4, 2011, 2:38pm PDT

Summary: In addition to Facebook Pages being able to update a Twitter account, Facebook now lets individuals (that means you!) do the same as well.

As expected, Facebook now lets you send your status updates to Twitter. It’s all part of the company’s new Subscriptions feature: not only is the social networking giant letting you subscribe to Facebook users who you aren’t friends with, and not only is it letting you offer your own public updates to Facebook users who aren’t your friends, but it is also letting you send your public Facebook status updates to a linked Twitter account.

Palo Alto has offered this particular feature for Facebook Pages for quite some time now. It’s great for businesses, bands, public figures, and whoever else manages a Facebook Page and an accompanying Twitter account. It cuts down their workload significantly since they only have to publish updates on their Facebook Page, and the Twitter account automatically sends out the same messages.

Now, Facebook is doing the same thing for individual profiles. That means if you have a Twitter account, you can make it so that updating your Facebook status publicly will send out a tweet as well.

A few third-party apps have done this in the past, but Facebook has been meticulous at blocking them. The company has always wanted to keep content shared on Facebook strictly on the social network. Apparently, the Web giant is slowly changing its stance.

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, although I was recently told that it’s frowned upon to issue the same updates on multiple social networks. Thankfully, my Facebook friends and Twitter followers are mutually exclusive.

Here’s what you need to get started (check out this quick guide with screenshots):

1. Go to facebook.com/twitter.
2. Click the green button titled “Link My Profile to Twitter.”
3. Click the blue button titled “Authorize app.”
4. Optional: choose which Facebook items you want to share.
5. Optional: click the blue button “Save Changes.”

Once you link your accounts, your Twitter account will be updated every time you post a public update to Facebook. Although the feature is enabled at step three, I recommend you go through steps four and five as well to make sure you’re only sharing what you want to share.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the company has offered this feature for Facebook Pages for quite some time now. It’s great for businesses, bands, public figures, and whoever else manages a Facebook Page and an accompanying Twitter account. It cuts down their workload significantly since they only have to publish updates on their Facebook Page, and the Twitter account automatically sends out the same messages.

Now, Facebook is apparently going to do the same thing for individual profiles. That means if you have a Twitter account, updating your Facebook status publicly will send out a tweet as well.

A few third-party apps have done this in the past, but Facebook has been meticulous at blocking them. The company has always wanted to keep content shared on Facebook strictly on the social network. Apparently, it is slowly changing its stance.

I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, although I was recently told that it’s frowned upon to issue the same updates on multiple social networks. Thankfully, my Facebook friends and Twitter followers are mutually exclusive. You can follow me on Twitter here: @emilprotalinski.

Vimeo, an online video service that is part of New York-based IAC, has about 150,000 paying members, according to IAC chairman Barry Diller. He revealed the numbers during a conference call with Wall Street analysts following company’s earnings for the quarter ending September 30, 2011.

The one area that I think, one unit of ours, which is Video, is one that we think can have considerable growth. And it continues to grow subscribers. It continues to grow. I think we’re up to now — we’re up to 150,000 subscribers. when you think of that, for a subscriber business, that’s not bad. I mean, that speaks to the fact that this is a service that people like and will pay for.

IAC chief executive officer Gregory R. Blatt noted that Vimeo had 50 million unique users. I am guessing he meant 50 million unique users for the entire quarter, for according to comScore data, Vimeo had about 17.35 million unique viewers who watched 44.3 million videos. In comparison, YouTube had 160 million unique viewers during the month of September 2011 who watched 18.54 billion videos.The gulf between the two companies is pretty huge and Vimeo doesn’t register amongst the top ten video destinations, currently ranked at the number 13 spot by comScore. However, that gap didn’t stop Diller from taking a swipe at YouTube. He remarked:

We grow with unique users. We grow with the fact that this is a protected, high-quality service for video. There is no other on the Internet. I mean, YouTube does a fine job and has a huge audience, but has a grab bag of a whole lot of things. This is a place where you can protect your video, when you can expose it to either family and friends, or to millions and millions of people. It’s got great opportunities. And so I kind of call that one out. I don’t know if any of my colleagues have anything else to say in this area.

>>> I think Vimeo is an excellent company (and you can tell they have a great environment by the antics in their own videos). They also had the best video quality for a long time before YouTube jumped on HD. We <3 Vimeo. Cool people. Cool product and services. If you want quality and a great set of tools to expose your videos on the web for pennies, you should check them out.

More mobile GarageBand you say? Apple heard you and lo, the music creation app is now available for iPhone and iPod touch users.

If you’ve never had the joy of playing around with GarageBand, it uses the Multi-Touch interface to create and record songs, using Touch keyboard, guitar, drums and bass. 

Smart Instruments allowed users to choose from a library of customs chords, to strum along with favourite songs, Apple said.

Check this out though: users can plug an electric guitar into an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to record through classic amps and stompbox effects, or record voice or acoustic through the devices’ built-in microphones, Apple said.

Apple senior vice president worldwide product marketing Philip Schiller said GarageBand on iPad had been a hit and the company thought iPhone and iPod touch users would love it.

“The innovative Multi-Touch interface combined with Smart Instruments makes it easy to create great sounding music, even if you’ve never studied music or played an instrument before.”

GarageBand 1.1 for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch is available from the App Store for $6.49, or as a free update for iPad users.

The app will run on iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPod touch (3^rd and 4^th generation).

Now that's cool. When's Foodstuffs and Progressive bringing one of these out? Next step an interactive shop assistant pops up on your screen: "Want fries with that?"

Many people have explained what one can learn from Steve Jobs. But few, if any, of these people have been inside the tent and experienced first hand what it was like to work with him. I don’t want any lessons to be lost or forgotten, so here is my list of the top twelve lessons that I learned from Steve Jobs.

1. Experts are clueless.

   Experts—journalists, analysts, consultants, bankers, and gurus can’t “do” so they “advise.” They can tell you what is wrong with your product, but they cannot make a great one. They can tell you how to sell something, but they cannot sell it themselves. They can tell you how to create great teams, but they only manage a secretary. For example, the experts told us that the two biggest shortcomings of Macintosh in the mid 1980s was the lack of a daisy-wheel printer driver and Lotus 1-2-3; another advice gem from the experts was to buy Compaq. Hear what experts say, but don’t always listen to them.

2. Customers cannot tell you what they need.

   “Apple market research” is an oxymoron. The Apple focus group was the right hemisphere of Steve’s brain talking to the left one. If you ask customers what they want, they will tell you, “Better, faster, and cheaper”—that is, better sameness, not revolutionary change. They can only describe their desires in terms of what they are already using—around the time of the introduction of Macintosh, all people said they wanted was better, faster, and cheaper MS-DOS machines. The richest vein for tech startups is creating the product that you want to use—that’s what Steve and Woz did.

3. Jump to the next curve.

   Big wins happen when you go beyond better sameness. The best daisy-wheel printer companies were introducing new fonts in more sizes. Apple introduced the next curve: laser printing. Think of ice harvesters, ice factories, and refrigerator companies. Ice 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Are you still harvesting ice during the winter from a frozen pond?

4. The biggest challenges beget best work.

   I lived in fear that Steve would tell me that I, or my work, was crap. In public. This fear was a big challenge. Competing with IBM and then Microsoft was a big challenge. Changing the world was a big challenge. I, and Apple employees before me and after me, did their best work because we had to do our best work to meet the big challenges.

5. Design counts.

   Steve drove people nuts with his design demands—some shades of black weren’t black enough. Mere mortals think that black is black, and that a trash can is a trash can. Steve was such a perfectionist—a perfectionist Beyond: Thunderdome—and lo and behold he was right: some people care about design and many people at least sense it. Maybe not everyone, but the important ones.

6. You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts.

   Take a look at Steve’s slides. The font is sixty points. There’s usually one big screenshot or graphic. Look at other tech speaker’s slides—even the ones who have seen Steve in action. The font is eight points, and there are no graphics. So many people say that Steve was the world’s greatest product introduction guy..don’t you wonder why more people don’t copy his style?

7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.

   When Apple first shipped the iPhone there was no such thing as apps. Apps, Steve decreed, were a bad thing because you never know what they could be doing to your phone. Safari web apps were the way to go until six months later when Steve decided, or someone convinced Steve, that apps were the way to go—but of course. Duh! Apple came a long way in a short time from Safari web apps to “there’s an app for that.”

8. “Value” is different from “price.”

   Woe unto you if you decide everything based on price. Even more woe unto you if you compete solely on price. Price is not all that matters—what is important, at least to some people, is value. And value takes into account training, support, and the intrinsic joy of using the best tool that’s made. It’s pretty safe to say that no one buys Apple products because of their low price.

9. A players hire A+ players.

   Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called “the bozo explosion” to happen in your organization.

10. Real CEOs demo.

    Steve Jobs could demo a pod, pad, phone, and Mac two to three times a year with millions of people watching, why is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe it’s to show that there’s a team effort in play. Maybe. It’s more likely that the CEO doesn’t understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that?

11. Real CEOs ship.

    For all his perfectionism, Steve could ship. Maybe the product wasn’t perfect every time, but it was almost always great enough to go. The lesson is that Steve wasn’t tinkering for the sake of tinkering—he had a goal: shipping and achieving worldwide domination of existing markets or creation of new markets. Apple is an engineering-centric company, not a research-centric one. Which would you rather be: Apple or Xerox PARC?

12. Marketing boils down to providing unique value. Think of a 2 x 2 matrix. The vertical axis measures how your product differs from the competition. The horizontal axis measures the value of your product. Bottom right: valuable but not unique—you’ll have to compete on price. Top left: unique but not valuable—you’ll own a market that doesn’t exist. Bottom left: not unique and not value—you’re a bozo. Top right: unique and valuable—this is where you make margin, money, and history. For example, the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily download music from the six biggest record labels.

Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen. When you are jumping curves, defying/ignoring the experts, facing off against big challenges, obsessing about design, and focusing on unique value, you will need to convince people to believe in what you are doing in order to see your efforts come to fruition. People needed to believe in Macintosh to see it become real. Ditto for iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Not everyone will believe—that’s okay. But the starting point of changing the world is changing a few minds. This is the greatest lesson of all that I learned from Steve.

Holy Kaw posts in remembrance of Steve Jobs.

Nice. Amen to 8 too.

Want a Speedy Start-up? Try New Zealand or Rwanda

How can the U.S. ease the process of starting a business? Take a note from countries like New Zealand that are using a "one-stop shop" approach encourage entrepreneurship.

"The U.S. is still incredibly efficient for starting a business, but there’s always room for improvement," says Syliva Solf.

One-stop shop: Get everything you need in one place. It's a simple concept embraced by supermarkets and drugstores. It's also a concept employed by countries around the world that want to attract entrepreneurs and ease the process of starting a business, according to new research.

In a dozens of far-flung countries, from New Zealand to Rwanda, the goal of the one-stop shop strategy is to put all the agencies that an entrepreneur needs to start a business—such as tax offices or employee and property registration bureaus—in one place. In some cases that's a physical space (a shared office with electronic kiosks, for example) or a digital one, say, an online portal site. 

"The fewer interactions an entrepreneur has to have with agencies, the less running from office to office they have to do, the easier and faster it is to get their business off the ground," says Sylvia Solf, lead author for the World Bank's 2012 Doing Business study, which was released last week. The annual report ranks the ease of doing business within 183 countries based on business-friendly regulations—including those that ease the process of starting up.

"This year, of the 183 countries we researched, 83 economies have simplified business registration into some sort of one-stop-shop approach," Solf says. And that doesn't include the United States.

In addition, 100 of those countries use an electronic process for registering a business. In 2005, only 38 countries of the 145 surveyed, or 26 percent, had a one-stop-shop approach.

According to the study, the easiest country to start a business in is New Zealand.

"In New Zealand...you have to start your business online. It's required," says the study's co-author, Karim Ouled Belayachi. "They collect the information once, and it goes into a shared database. They then submit the information to the appropriate offices. For the approval process, they basically employed computer logic to verify certain points as being compliant with the law. So, in a lot of cases, the registration is immediate."

This means that an entrepreneur isn't wasting time filling out forms (which often ask for the same information over and over) for both the tax office and customs—it's done in one step.

Another example is Macedonia, which ranks sixth in the report for ease of starting a business. According to the data, in the last seven years, the nation has cut the process for registering a company and its employees from 13 steps to  three, which means starting a business takes just a few days.

A leader in East Asia, the report finds, is Malaysia. The government has set up an electronic filing system for commercial and civil courts, and has merged the company, tax, social security, and employment fund registration into a one-stop process.

Other countries that currently use the one-stop-shop model include large economies such as Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Developing nations are also catching on. Rwanda ranked in the top-10 for starting a business this year, thanks in part to an online process.

"Take Tonga, for example, a small island country near Fiji," says Belayachi. "It is currently piggy-backing on New Zealand's one-stop shop. Literally. So to start a business in Tonga, you go online and your registration actually goes through New Zealand's online infrastructure. It's an innovative solution to a major problem for smaller economies."

Where does the United States stack up in this global trend? Ranking 13th in the study for start-up friendliness, the U.S. currently has most agencies an entrepreneur would need throughout the process of starting a company—such as state offices for registering a name—online. But they aren't linked together, according to the researchers.

"The U.S. is still incredibly efficient for starting a business, but there’s always room for improvement," says Solf.

And while the one-stop-shop approach is all about looking at the world through the entrepreneur's lens, there are certainly incentives for governments as well.

"The countries that we've seen use this approach for the flow of information can get a new revenue stream," says Belayachi. How? They can package and sell this information to credit bureaus and other companies that might be seeking information on companies.

That doesn't mean this strategy is a magic wand to generate entrepreneurship.

"For it to work, the country has to have the legislation in place, the cooperation of agencies, the ability to have payments online, and so on," Solf says.

So in most cases, this approach, which began to gain traction in the early 2000s, has happened in stages.

"For example, a country might first link all the agencies together on one screen, but the databases are still separate. It isn’t ideal but its a step closer to the one-stop shop," says Solf.

As for the future of global start-ups, Belayachi says: "With technology, the sky’s the limit."