After closing the social network platform SpotM, Yahoo has launched Meme, in English, to take on microblogging site Twitter. The company had launched this service in Spanish and Portuguese languages earlier this month.
Meme is currently in an invite-only mode, similar to few microblogging services like Tumblr, Twitter, Pownce and others. After creating the account, users get a blank blog for micro-sharing text, images, music, videos or mash up of all these things.
It also offers the facility to add new friends by searching the internet, which is quite similar to Tumblr and Twitter.
The company’s previous efforts to capitalize on the social networking domain kept failing in spite of repeated attempts. The recently launched ‘Know Your Mojo’ also failed along with the Indian social network, SpotM, which was closed down less than a year after its launch. Well Yahoo has a reputation of not being consistent with its products, they disappear and the accounts close down.
The death of Saad khan has slowly made its way to the mainstream media. I have been hearing that GEO and Dawn have recently covered it. Meanwhile there has been a lot of discussion,heated debates,questions and grief over the incident on twitter and Facebook. The news was first brought up by Farrukh Ahmed, his message on twitter made the most impact it read:
@Farrukhahmed: is thinkng while we sleep, some1 is lying in a casket in a foreign land waitng 2 return only 2 B put away 6 feet undr. RIP Saad Khan
@Farrukhahmed: 2 all blaggers: need your help in raising voice against a miserably organized game show arranged by unilever which took the life of a good friend. unilever is refusing to disclose the details / video footage of the event. pls RT
Today am trying to do my part in highlighting the freak accident that took Saad’s life. Saad a champion swimmer,a banker, and most importantly a 32 year old father of four has left behind a widow and a grieving family. One can only imagine the condition of his friends and families, their never ending questions that have only met silence so far. Saad was participant in a reality show commissioned by Unilever and mind share, two multinational giants, who still have not been able to elaborate the circumstances in which the tragic accident took place.
In their quest to produce a western copy of thrilling and adventurous reality show, Poor and substandard arrangements have become the reason of the killing of a young man Saad Khan. According to the news circulating around and the word of mouth. I got this information from a colleague who knows the victim.
Saad Khan lost his life in the recording of the show when the host Amina Sheikh (Mrs Mohib Mirza and a known actress) gave an under water challenge to him. TSaad lost his control and shouted for help but the lame safety and lifeline measures failed to rescue him from the deep water and the young man, the father of four had to suffer.
The blame goes straight to the producers of the show, apparently who are Unilever and their agency – Mindshare (Mr. Taher A Khan’s property, TV1 as well) for hiring such a sub standard team and the cheap arrangements that became the cause of his death. For now, the mainstream media has rejected to air any such news as they get a fair amount of advertising business from Unilever. And spokespersons of these two companies have been shamelessly calling the incident a mere accident.
Mansoor Khan, the cousin of the victim demands that “ALL CONCERNED PEOPLE OF UNILEVER & MINDSHARE MUST BE PUT BEHIND BARS.”
Mansoor doesn’t want you people to boycott Unilever Products, all he wants is that the culprits who gambled with the life of the participant must be brought to the court of justice.
If you’re reading this blog, the chances are pretty good that you’ve signed up for one or more email alerts, e-newsletters, or automated updates over the years. Plus, if you work inside almost any part of the media industry, the odds are also good that you or your company sends out bulk emails.
And if you’re by any chance a blogger (like me ), you’d be hard put to build an audience if you didn’t at least try the F&F approach via email now and again.
A new report from Return Path indicates that not as many of those email alerts may be reaching your intended audience as you might have expected. Based on 500,000 email-based campaigns in the first half of 2009, the company said more than one in every five — 20.7 percent –of the consumer emails never made it to the intended recipient.
B2Bemails performed even worse, with 27.6 percent undelivered.
Spam or junk filters were not a significant factor, causing only 3.3 percent of the failures, but a surprising 17.4 percent of the emails were not delivered at all. The report notes that this contrasts to what marketers are normally told, which is that the percentage “delivered” ranges from 95 to 98 percent.
The differential is whether “delivered” means the message reached the email-host as compared to whether the host passed it through to the intended recipient’s in-box. Factors that affect this include how each email provider rates the sender’s reputation, as well as a mix of other, proprietary filter settings.
Microsoft Wins, Yahoo Folds, Google Still Reigns in Search Game
Microsoft gave Yahoo bare minimum terms in their new 10-year partnership: a fortified combined search engine off of which it can sell and retain advertising revenues, and a possible exit strategy down the road. Either way Microsoft wins.
The long-anticipated search and advertising pact announced today did not include the favorable terms — primarily billions in upfront revenue guarantees– expected by disappointed Yahoo investors, who initially drove the company’s stock down 12 percent.
Whether by design or coincidence, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer played his cards well over the companies’ tumultuous three-year negotiations. Yahoo initially rejected a $47.5 billion buyout offer from Microsoft in 2008 as well as a proposed search partnership with a $1 billion upfront payout last year — both under the leadership of former CEO Jerry Yang.
By comparison, the pact finally approved by new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Yahoo board members (including five percent activist shareholder Carl Icahn) is modest, complex and unlikely to create meteoric value. It’s almost as if there is another shoe to drop in the Microsoft-Yahoo two-step.
At best, Yahoo will realize $500 million in annual operating profit and is guaranteed only 88 percent of ad sales from its affiliated and owned search business in the first five years. Yahoo will see $275 million in cost savings and $200 million less in capital expenditures annually once the companies’ businesses are fully integrated in about two years. Weak advertising and shaky initiatives will depress 2009 operating cash flow 10 percent and drive down revenues 13 percent, analysts estimate.
Microsoft and Yahoo have reached an agreement on a 10-year search deal. The agreement which will allow both companies to focus on their core strengths: Microsoft’s Bing will become the default search engine on Yahoo.com, and Yahoo will eventually take over the ad inventory on all Bing search results, eliminating complexity for advertisers (and internal overhead).
The Department of Justice still needs to sign off on the deal, but executives of Microsoft and Yahoo are reportedly confident that will ultimately happen. The agreement will probably take months to finalize, but since Google currently claims 65 percent of U.S. searches (which i will agree), and Yahoo and Microsoft 19.6 and 8.4 percent, respectively, the sooner they can start to catch up, the better.
People in NewZealand are as bad as drivers in Los Angeles. They cant drive properly! Let alone they would be able to drive the right way in the rain. The following video showcases work done by an advertising agency “BBDO” for the district of Papakura. In order to create awareness amongst the drivers to drive their cars safely, they tried to send a message across by placing a billboard on major freeways which showed a face of boy, which actually bleeds when it rains, Creativity at its best.. Enjoy!
“Hello I am starting my own social networking site would you like to join? please please please get registered and make your friends do the same!! It has got all the features that you can find on facebook, you can upload videos, pictures, news, text and even pdf fileS!!! see how cool is it and what more you need you can twitter there as well!! . Its the perfect solution to all your social networking needs, you will have your own MYSPACE and create a LINKEDIN profile there yay! All in one webiste – Now thats social networking at its best!”
Its not new that you get such spam messages in your mail box daily. With the addition of such social networking sites on daily basis, one needs to identify or rather get themselves famaliar with certain DO’s and DON’Ts. As the number of sites are growing daily therefore, the ‘Unspoken Rules’ of online networking evolve accordingly. But Alas! only if one knew where to look for these rules.
Worry not my friends you have come to the right place, here your’s truly (that happens to be me ) will enlighten you all with maistakes not to make if you wanna be good at online networking, so here goes: Read the rest of this entry »
It took a child to stump the creators of the BlackBerry, one of the world’s top selling smartphones and a part of most executives’ attire.
“Are you going to make a phone more for kids so that my Mom will let me get one?” the child said from the packed audience at the annual general shareholders’ meeting at Canada’s Research in Motion on Tuesday.
The world’s No. 2 smartphone maker has so far aimed its near-ubiquitous BlackBerry mobile phone mostly at executives, with U.S. President Obama being its highest-profile user.
The child’s question met with hums and haws by RIM Co-Chief Executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis before they summoned up a vague response.
“There’s lots of opportunity and, you know, if the current BlackBerries aren’t acceptable to your mother, hopefully the next ones will,” Lazaridis said.
At the otherwise uneventful shareholder meeting, RIM said it was advancing its campaign to win over more people to its devices, which includes sponsorship of the U2 360 Tour by one of the world’s most popular rock bands ever.
The RIM CEOs said they spent the last 25 years, since RIM was founded, catering to highly demanding industries, and for three years to the general consumer market.
Matthew Robson a 15-year-old intern at Morgan-Stanley & Co. International, is shaking up the financial and media industries in London upon release of his report about teen’s media habits today. So far, much of the news coverage seems to be centered on his finding that Teens don’t use Twitter, although this has been documented in previous studies. What he has to say about all media channels is of interest.
Plus, like certain other precocious teens I know, Matthew presents his conclusions in a straight-forward, unambiguous writing style that more senior, highly educated financial analysts rarely achieve. Here are a few of Matthew’s main points , from the report.
Radio. “Most teenagers nowadays are not regular listeners to radio. They may occasionally tune in, but they do not try to listen to a program specifically.” The reason? “(W)ith online sites streaming music for free they do not bother…” (Except when in Dad’s car going to and from summer camps, school, or dog-walking chores.)
Television. Teens watch less TV nowadays “because of services such as BBC iPlayer, which allows them to watch shows when they want. Whilst watching TV, adverts come on quite regularly (18 minutes of every hour) and teenagers do not want to watch these, so they switch to another channel, or do something else whilst the adverts run.” (Except when ads come on that they actively enjoy like those by Comcast in the U.S. market.)
Newspapers. “No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV.” (Except for the comics section and for The Onion, which is sort of a newspaper.)
Gaming. “Whilst the stereotypical view of gamers is teenage boys, the emergence of the Wii onto the market has created a plethora of girl gamers and younger (6+) gamers…As consoles are now able to connect to the internet, voice chat is possible between users, which has had an impact on phone usage; one can speak for free over the console and so a teenager would be unwilling to pay to use a phone.” Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re reading this blog, the chances are pretty good that you’ve signed up for one or more email alerts, e-newsletters, or automated updates over the years. Plus, if you work inside almost any part of the media industry, the odds are also good that you or your company sends out bulk emails.
), you’d be hard put to build an audience if you didn’t at least try the F&F approach via email now and again.
The Department of Justice still needs to sign off on the deal, but executives of Microsoft and Yahoo are reportedly confident that will ultimately happen. The 
) will enlighten you all with maistakes not to make if you wanna be good at online networking, so here goes: 
