• Sharing Is (Health) Caring
    Dr. Mehmet Oz and Oprah Winfrey are itching to get into the burgeoning world of health social media. But true to form, they want to do it in their own controlled way. Oz is partnering with Winfrey's company Harpo Productions, Discovery Communications and Jeff Arnold, who founded WebMD and left in 2000, on a new Web site that will provide crowd-sourced and edited answers to user-submitted health questions. The answers will come from celebrity physicians, hospitals, high-profile health authors, local health providers, brand sponsors and other users. Sharecare.com is due to launch at the end of summer; its first sponsor …
  • The Million-Dollar No-No
    For joystick jockeys, all that's required to play pro baseball is $60 and access to a video game console. But in recent seasons, with Xbox 360 seamheads straying from the system-exclusive and quality-challenged MLB 2K series, 2K Sports made a bold move to amp up earnings and announce the game's comeback. To showcase confidence in the revamped and much-improved pitcher-batter interface, 2K gave gamers the chance to earn big-league bucks with MLB 2K10 by offering up a whopping $1 million to the first person who could throw a perfect game - retiring 27 straight batters without one reaching base.
  • Coming Back Around Again
    For all the attention Chatroulette has garnered in the media lately, close observers may have noticed that it all seems a bit familiar. That's because Chatroulette, a site launched in November that randomly connects strangers for a chat, is little more than a video-enabled version of Omegle, which made its own, much smaller splash when it debuted in March of last year. The difference is that Chatroulette seems to be catching fire where Omegle quickly flamed out (The former had nearly a million unique visitors in March; the latter 302,000, according to Compete.com). The lesson? Visuals matter. Because users see …
  • Mob Wars: The Mobile Ad Nets
    With its proposed $750 million acquisition by Google, AdMob would be the biggest mobile ad network with a 21 percent share of the U.S. market, according to an IDC estimate last December. Especially key is AdMob's ability to serve ads into iPhone apps. The iPhone operating system generates half of AdMob's smartphone impressions worldwide, making it the network most closely associated with the popular Apple device. Whether Google will close the deal remains to be seen, as the acquisition has come under greater FTC scrutiny than expected. U.S. audience: N/A No. of publishers: 15,000 Monthly impressions (worldwide): 10 billion Targeting …
  • The Third-Party Cookie Monster
    In the very active debate over online consumer privacy the voices of the agency and, by proxy, the marketer. are absolutely crucial. Matthew Greitzer, vice president of search marketing and head of Atom Systems, recently sat down to chat with Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai to discuss privacy, best practices, and agencies' roles in the great debate.
  • Page Turners
    So you got a Kindle for Christmas and downloaded Ulysses for free and thought, This isn't so bad. Then you bought an iPad and a New York Times subscription and thought, Gee, this is pretty convenient. You might even think the the reading experience is just as good or even better. But what about the mixed medium that relies on pictures as much (if not more so) than words to tell a story? We are talking of course about comic books and graphic novels where, according to artist Frank Santoro, "the background is as much a character as anything else." …
  • Creative Roundtable: Slightly Revisionist
    Whether you're a World War II buff looking for photos of B-17 bombers, an Ax Men fan who missed last night's episode, or a high school student doing research for a term paper on King Tut (due tomorrow!), the new history.com is the site to visit - at least that's what A&E Television Networks, which owns History (formerly known as The History Channel until it got grandiose), hopes.
  • Ballad of the New Troubadour
    The new troubadour sits behind his computer clicking a mouse, angling a webcam and strumming a guitar, while he spills his heart out from a stage that could be anyone's bedroom. The digital age - in a record industry that's still indelibly fractured - has forced a swing of independent artists to become more clever and ambitious than ever before, and ultimately reliant upon no one but themselves to get their audiences.
  • Behind the Numbers: That Rising Feeling
    Mobile phones are getting all the action these days. Consumers eagerly buy them, bloggers can't stop talking about them, and advertisers who are savvy enough to spend some dough on the small screen are reaping early rewards. According to research firm Dynamic Logic, advertisers who use mobile phones to peddle their products are enjoying big bumps in brand awareness, especially when compared to online advertising.
  • DSP Focus: A Multitude of Possibilities
    DSPs, or demand-side platforms, are hot. The online trade press is full of articles and commentary, but the definition of a DSP is still amorphous. Is it an agency exchange buying business unit like Cadreon or VivaKi? Or is it a technology platform that enables exchange buying?
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