On the "Buying in Real Time: What Are Brands Doing Here, Anyway?" panel at OMMA RTB in San Francisco today, moderator Ryan Polley, VP, corporate development, comScore, asked, "Why are brands embracing RTB?" Marcus Pratt, director of insights & technologies, Mediasmith, believes that reach and efficiency brought brands into RTB in the first place, saying that they found that RTB was effective at meeting whatever their goals were.

Talk about your lightbulb moments, Matthew Inman's inspiration for using online crowd-funding to preserve the heritage of electrical inventor Nikola Tesla came from doing battle with some pirates. The pirates, in this case, were the online copyright kind, a site called funnyjunk.com, which he says were lifting the work of online comic publisher Inman (The Oatmeal) and others without payment or even attribution. So he did what any online comic publisher would do, and created comics poking fun of funnyjunk.com.

Shocking the crowds at SXSW, a new report suggests that Apple iOS users are spending twice as much time watching videos on their devices as Android users. The finding comes courtesy of a new report from Ooyala, a venture-funded video services company founded by former Google employees. "It's a finding ... that seems to fly in the face of IDC market share data that had Android outselling Apple in 2012 by more than three to one," Fortune reports.

SXSW is buzzing with reports that LinkedIn is ready to buy the maker of the newsreader app Pulse. "The price of the acquisition is in the tens of millions, [sources] said -- between $50 million and $100 million," AllThingsD reports. On Monday, AllThingsD reported that Microsoft and Yahoo were in the running for Alphonso Labs, which makes the Pulse app for various platforms. Now, however, it looks like LinkedIn is closest to bringing Pulse into the fold.

Okay, so it wasn't actually Geordi, but it was actor LeVar Burton who played Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," who said that during the "100 Year Starship: Interstellar Travel & Beyond" panel during today's SXSW Interactive sessions.

Does telling the brand's story require credibility, a measure of believably, or. authority, a belief in something because of the source? The definitions come from the SXSW panel New Knowledge Ecosystems: How & What Do We Know, but the question is mine. I think both.

Panelists at SXSW debated information during the New Knowledge Ecosystems: How & What Do We Know panel based on the triple A's of knowledge--access, attribution and authority. The process sounds very similar to the way Google describes PageRank for its search engine. Moving from being a gate keeper to moderator, Lissa Harris, founder The Watershed Post, explained how during a natural disaster her publication began asking reading to post reports on the site to make the content more relevant to readers, which attracted national news media to pick up the information.

Did you get your yam?! In what is likely the oddest marketing gimmick in the history of SXSW, a company claiming to be "an online marketplace for yam enthusiasts and traders" -- yes, "Yamtrader.com" -- sent yams to media and press professionals in the run-up to this year's event. Those lucky enough to receive the vegetables were instructed to redeem them for a $50 AmEx gift card in Austin. As AllThingsD reports, however, it was all a ruse orchestrated by cloud services company Tri-Net. And, at least according to AllThingsD, "it worked." Indeed, "Tri-Net got people to bring in the …

YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley -- who left the video-sharing site a while after selling it to Google -- is almost ready to unveil his latest service. "I wish [SXSW] was a month later because I could unveil the new product," Hurley said during a Q&A with Digg founder and Google Ventures partner Kevin Rose on Saturday afternoon. The product is "primarily video-based ... and gives flexibility for people to work together and create content," Hurley said at SXSW, this weekend. Notes AdWeek: "Sounds like Hurley is talking about taking a second crack at creating a better YouTube." Said Hurley, however: …

Marketers need to look at the marketing mix models. Bonin Bough from the Oreo brand said at SXSW during a panel on demographics and targeting panel that the brand gets 2-times the effectiveness from TV spots when running TV and social ads together. Walgreen's Joe Magnacca said 30% of ad budgets go to waste because consumers never engage in the categories that get served to them. Marketers need to go from being single screen advertisers to multiple.