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Behavioral targeting is all the rage with online display advertising right now, and video search engine blinkx is bringing it to video. For the past few years, blinkx has offered contextual video advertising through its Ad Hoc program, which matches ad keywords against a speech-to-text translation of the video, as well as all the tags and titles associated with that video. “We are extending targeting in Ad Hoc from contextual to behavioral,” says CEO Suranga Chandratillake.
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Amid all the media attention given to the iPhone, Android, and other ‘superphones‘, it’s easy to forget that the vast majority of the cell-phone toting population is carrying something decidedly less exciting. But many of these more generic phones, though they lack touchscreens and flashy graphics, are still quite capable. Enter Snaptu,a platform for mobile phone applications that is compatible with the vast majority of phones available, including newer Windows devices, Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry, and more.
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Over the last few months there have been non-stop rumors about Facebook finally launching its location feature (an announcement may well come at f8). But a startup called Glympse has already beaten them to the punch (well, sort of). The service now allows you to share you location with Facebook friends via the News Feed, using a nifty widget that plots your position on a map and updates it in real-time.
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Here’s a ray of product sunshine in an otherwise overcast MySpace world. Tonight they are launching a new MySpace events and calendar platform that integrates technology from MySpace Music, iLike, Social Plan and Facebook Connect (told you). It includes new tools for Artists to add concert events and allows users to add those events, share them, and even purchase tickets right from MySpace.
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Twitter investor Fred Wilson’s post about too many Twitter developers simply “filling holes” instead of building killer apps became somewhat literal today. The company that has probably funded more hole fillers for Twitter than anyone else – Betaworks – has a huge hole outside of their office in New York. And that’s a picture of that hole. OATV partner Bryce Roberts took the picture this morning while he was at Betaworks for a Bit.ly board meeting, and tweeted about it.
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The winners of the 2010 Streamy Awards were announced in a ceremony in Los Angeles this evening. We’ve got the complete list of winners below.The Streamys are awarded to web TV series by the International Academy of Web Television — they’re similar to the Oscars, Emmys or Grammys.
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Remember Google’s Hell-froze-over, critically acclaimed Super Bowl ad Parisian Love? The one that managed to use a series of basic search queries to tell a touching love story? Now you’ve got a chance to tell a story of your own. Some time in the last few days Google launched a new feature called the “Search Stories Video Creator“. And damn if it isn’t fun.
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Twitter has just announced that it acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone . The application will now be called “Twitter for iPhone” and will drop from $2.99 to free, with developer Loren Brichter (who makes up the one-man startup Atebits) joining the Twitter mobile team. Twitter also plans to launch Twitter for the iPad, which Brichter will be involved with. It’s a move that manages to be both jarring and unsurprising at the same time.
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The FCC acknowledged on their official blog today that the court’s decision on the Comcast deal could hamper their national broadband plan. General Counsel of the FCC, Austin Schlick says that the court’s ruling that the FCC does not have the authority to enforce net neutrality was an “important ruling.” “It undermines the legal approach the FCC adopted in 2005 to fulfill its statutory duty of being the cop-on-the-beat for 21st Century communications networks.
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A group of researchers has linked a huge, China-based cyber espionage ring to the theft of thousands of documents — including classified information, visa applications, and personal identities — from “politically sensitive targets” around the world.The command-and-control infrastructure of this so-called Shadow Network used platforms such as Twitter, Google Groups, Blogspot, Baidu Blogs, blog.com and Yahoo Mail to maintain persistent control of infected computers.
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