With the football season fast approaching, Sprint is teaming with the National Football League to deliver live radio and television broadcasts of NFL games and other content via mobile devices. Sprint's NFL Mobile Live offering, launching Sept. 2, includes radio broadcasts of all regular season games and telecasts of eight Thursday night games on the NFL Network starting Nov. 6. The service is free for customers of Sprint's $99.99 monthly Simply Everything plan, which includes unlimited voice, messaging and data. Users can otherwise access the live NFL games by getting a data plan starting at $15 a month. In addition to the live game broadcasts, the new service gives fans access to related programming such as training camp reports, season previews for each team and shows including NFL Total Access, NFL Gameday and NFL Playbook. By selecting a favorite team, fans can also get a welcome screen on NFL Mobile Live tailored to that team including scores, players' stats and links to live coverage on game days. The initiative also extends the NFL.com's fantasy league to the cell phone. Fantasy players can track the performance of each player on the go through real-time stats, rankings, profiles and photos. For the first time, fans will also be able to watch video highlights for some players through a link on the player's main page. "The NFL continues to explore new ways to feed our fans' insatiable appetite to get NFL games, news and highlights, anytime, anywhere and on any screen," said Brian Rolapp, NFL senior vice president of media strategy. "NFL Mobile Live, exclusively from Sprint, enables fans to enjoy Thursday Night Football and other exclusive content on their terms." Meanwhile, the NFL and Verizon Communications announced a partnership under which the league will provide live broadcasts of the NFL Network's regular-season Thursday and Saturday games as well as college football and other programming through Verizon's consumer broadband service. But that deal does not extend to Verizon Wireless. Sprint has a 5-year deal to be the exclusive telecom provider for the NFL that runs through the 2009 season. The carrier's latest NFL-related initiative could help Sprint boost data usage and staunch a continuing exodus of subscribers.
MeetingWave is the latest startup that has developed an online tool aimed at fostering offline connections. The social application, found at Meetingwave.com, allows members to post potential outings like coffee, dinner or even a brainstorming session, then screen respondents and get connected. The tool, which also has a dedicated mobile Web site and a Facebook app, can synch pending appointments to a calendar, as well as import contact and company data from sites like LinkedIn. Although users do not have to become members to peruse the available meetups, they can't respond to an invitation unless they join. MeetingWave members create a profile and are encouraged to add as much relevant info as possible--particularly details about work and past education--as these identifiers help both meeting hosts and attendees to better determine whether an opportunity is right for them. Meeting hosts can require that potential attendees come from the same industry or have attended the same college, set up recurring meetings, and cancel a posted meetup for any reason. Meeting confirmations are sent via double-blind email, so both parties can decide whether to exchange contact info on their own. According to MeetingWave founder John Boyd, the app is geared mostly toward road warriors who know the ins and outs of sleeping at airports and have had more than one solitary dinner at the hotel restaurant (or in their room in front of the flat screen). "I used to travel for business quite a bit, and I'd always be going to these stark, industrial locations," said Boyd, a former lawyer. "There'd be a single hotel, with no place to find any entertainment, and the hotel restaurant would be filled with people eating alone." Boyd said he had always wondered whether the lonely diners were actually potential colleagues or business partners, sparking the idea to develop a "flexible business networking tool." Originally dubbed TravelersTable, the site launched in November 2007. But after more than six months of feedback, the tool was rebranded MeetingWave in June--complete with the Facebook app, a new interface and more than 50,000 registered users. Boyd said the application gained a considerable amount of traction from Facebook users in particular, which has caused the company to expand some of the available meetup categories. "About 20% of the posts are for business networking or people in search of a business partner or VC," Boyd said. "Another 30% of the posts are for social networking purposes--where people want to have coffee and talk. About 5% are sales pitches, like people saying here's my bar or coffee shop, come visit." And there's an odd 15% of romantic invites--posts Boyd said members don't see unless they explicitly opt in. In terms of monetization, Boyd said there was potential for contextually targeted ads, but only after MeetingWave was able to sustain a large enough member base. The company tested AdSense ads for a short time, but found them to be aesthetically lacking. There are plans to develop a lead generation-based revenue stream, as well as partnerships with various conferences and business events, Boyd said.
Lotame, a platform for targeting ads to social media audiences, today is expected to announce it has closed $13 million in series B financing. Emergence Capital Partners led the round, along with previous investors including Battery Ventures and Hillcrest Management. The new funding will be used to support product enhancements, marketing and business development efforts, according to Andy Monfried, Lotame founder and CEO. "This new investment from Emergence amplifies the immediate opportunity for Lotame," Monfried said. "Another important piece of this event is the addition of Emergence's Jason Green as a respected and pivotal team member to our board." Lotame's proprietary Crowd Control technology is designed to help brands and ad agencies to direct campaigns to audiences that have demonstrated recent interest in topics relevant to the campaign. "Lotame has demonstrated leadership and a track record of success in monetizing the biggest opportunity in online media since the advent of search advertising," said Green, general partner at Emergence Capital. In addition to general information offered by users of social media during registration and interests implied by the sites the users visit, Lotame anonymously collects data points on users' social media participation, such as posting pictures, commenting on blogs or watching a video. "Forty percent of Internet use is on social networks," Monfried. "This is no longer a wild frontier, and will soon be the primary use of the Internet."
Strengthening its "green" media and marketing presence, ad network NaturalPath Media today is expected to announce partnerships with 22 sites--chief among them being DrGreene.com, an online information site that brings an earth-friendly approach to children's health and parenting. NaturalPath will exclusively represent ad sales for DrGreene.com, which will become the flagship publisher in NaturalPath's newly launched "Moms and Family" channel. Launched in 1995 by Dr. Alan Greene and his wife Cheryl, DrGreene.com is now attracting 700,000 unique visitors a month. Total traffic for the "Moms & Family" channel is presently just over 1 million unique visitors. According to Cheryl Greene, NaturalPath was better suited to the company's interests than its most recent partner, WebMD. "We respect the people at WebMD, but we requested that we only wanted green advertisers, and they decided that wasn't the direction they were going." NaturalPath Media's sales team is now creating custom packages targeting national and endemic CPG and health brands, delivering "conscious" mothers seeking healthy products for their families. "The combination of DrGreene.com and our other 'Moms and Family' channel sites gives us a targeted, highly effective way to engage this affluent and influential audience," said NaturalPath Media founder and CEO David Phillips. Advertisers presently working with NaturalPath include Seventh Generation, Sharp, Chevrolet, Brilliant Earth and Equal Exchange. NaturalPath's network is made up of some 80 publishers with a reach of over 20 million monthly unique visitors. Other green, sustainable and healthy lifestyle mom sites now joining NaturalPath include Sophie Uliano's GorgeouslyGreen.com, Diane MacEachern's BigGreenPurse.com, Green Options Media's EcoChildsPlay.com, GreenMomFinds.com and NatureMoms.com. DrGreene.com has been cited by the American Medical Association as "the pioneer physician website," and serves as an online expert for American Baby, Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, and Ladies Home Journal. The site also provides community elements including the Parent's Network, the Kids' Zone and Teens Only, offering discussion boards and chat.
Pre-roll advertising is highly effective when paired with the right content, according to new proprietary research from online video ad network Tremor Media. A study of more than 100 campaigns with nearly 65 million pre-roll impressions showed pre-roll video completion rates of around 80% for both 15- and 30-second streaming video advertising. "We've seen slightly higher completion rates for 30-second ads than 15 seconds," said Tremor CEO Jason Glickman in a statement. "While we wouldn't suggest it as a best practice, it is proof that audiences are willing to accept pre-roll advertising in exchange for the content they want, on demand." The findings are similar to another recent study of video ad units by Break Media and video ad technology provider Panache, which showed that completion rates for pre-roll video ads approached 90% and click-through rates averaged 10%. The Tremor Media study tracked campaigns in the automotive, entertainment, technology, CPG, business/finance, and food and beverage verticals. Vertical categories with only 15-second pre-roll data included travel and tourism, teen's interest, men's interest, and women's interest campaigns. According to a recent Ipsos MediaCT study, consumers are showing an increased willingness to watch advertising in exchange for free online video content. Two-thirds of the respondents said it was reasonable to show advertising in front of professionally produced content such as music videos, news and sports clips. More than half (52%) said that it was not reasonable to have advertising surround user-generated content--the type of content that is not offered by Tremor Media. Tremor Media offers advertisers both in-banner and in-stream video advertising opportunities on over 1000 top-tier publisher sites with more than 105 million unique visitors per month. Tremor also offers the Acudeo Video Monetization Platform for publishers, a suite of products and services to monetize streaming video and maximize ROI.