As a form of advanced procrastination, I did a great deal of research on Flash video codecs this morning. I was spurred by reaction to a presentation I made last night where a young lady quite bluntly said, “You can do better [quality Flash video compression].”
The short answer: yes, one can do better than the [...]

When NBC and Fox announced their ‘me too’ online video joint venture, Hulu, I was understandably skeptical. After all, Joost had already launched to much fanfare with top partners like Viacom’s MTV and Turner’s Cartoon Network. YouTube had quite a niche already, and I satisfied all my TV time-shifting needs via BitTorrent.
“What would the big [...]

The current iteration of the San Francisco Examiner — the free, tabloid-sized print daily focused primarily on San Francisco news and events — is top notch. It’s a quick read, conveniently sized and simple but effective in delivering a local news update.
Here’s a sample:

Sure, the Examiner won’t win any awards for ground breaking investigative journalism, [...]

Online ad sales reps enjoy using the term “engagement” in their sales pitches. “OurSite.com’s users are highly engaged with our content, and so shall they be with your ads!”
What does “engagement” really mean? Some part is puffery — it’s an abstract term. Anyone can claim they have engaging content, but it’s hard to measure. But, [...]

Last.fm is a top-rate music streaming service that suggests music based on your previous last.fm plays, songs you play in iTunes (”scrobbling”), and songs your friends like.
But, it’s frustratingly tied to your computer. You have to listen to via the flash app in your browser or the equally computer-tying downloadable app.
Here would be a better [...]

In the world of online buying of offline video ads, Google announced they’ve publicly released their experimental TV ad buying service. TV buying is now integrated with an advertiser’s existing AdWords buying interface, making buying as simple as they did when Google released their revolutionary radio media buying interface.
This is some significant competition for SpotRunner, [...]

PaidContent.org has a great rundown of differing views regarding online advertising networks.
Any analysis I could make is already well reflected in the collected views, so without further ado here it is:
Link

So, Facebook knows my favorite TV shows, my favorite authors, my favorite music, my zip code, telephone number, gender, age, work history, education history, friends and personal pictures.
Given all this information, you’d think that Facebook would be able to tailor advertisements uniquely relevant to me, right? Wrong!
I’m not sure how they’ve been messing this up [...]

When I worked in ad agency land, one of the most excruciating parts of my job was working with poor, poor web interfaces to accomplish relatively simple tasks. This was severely magnified by our lack of bandwidth which slowed down bad web interfaces even further.
DoubleClick’s ad planning and reporting web interface was one of the [...]

The WSJ among others reported on Revver’s sale to LiveUniverse for $5 million, a loss from the total of $12.7 MM invested in the project.
What went wrong with Revver?

Clear overspend: I’m confused as to why they needed $12.7 MM in capital funding. Reportedly they only gave $1 million toward content creators since project inception and [...]