I am definitely more excited about the forthcoming Blackberry 9000, but BoyGenius has confirmed pictures of a new Blackberry flip phone called the KickStart. It's due out by the end of 2008. I can't imagine going back to a clamshell - but I like that Blackberry is offering different styles and formats in an effort to capture the non-corporate user. The Pearl has been a big success.
Of course if the iPhone 3G for under $200 rumor is true... I might become a convert...?!
Two nights ago, Bob Costas hosted Buzz Bissinger (author of Friday Night Lights), Will Leitch (founder of the web's largest sports blog, DeadSpin) and Braylon Edwards (starting wide receiver on the Cleveland Browns) on his talk show Bob Costas Now. The debate became an immediate internet sensation... which is probably shocking to stubborn-minded people like Buzz and pretty obvious to web savvy leaders like Will. Once Costas leads with the blogs vs. journalism question, Buzz Bissinger goes wild:
As the founder of beRecruited (a site and service based on user-generated content), I clearly have strong feelings about this:
1. I have met and interacted with Will Leitch on a few occasions. He is smart, articulate and has built a readership larger than most journalists can dream of.
2. You might not enjoy DeadSpin's content - but Will's blog is read nearly 1,000,000 times a day. The market has spoken.
3. More proof that the market has demanded this new media: PerezHilton has a greater readership than People Magazine - the top read magazine year after year. Old Media has followed with constant streams of news and debate. For sports, SportsCenter rolls on ESPN for 6 hours while ESPN2's First Take features (very enjoyable) debate on yesterday's topics. E!, TMZ, Access Hollywood and a dozen other shows do the same things for pop culture. Old Media has moved to constant streams: their own blogs, podcasts, radio, etc.
4A. More proof (again): beRecruited is home to one of the web's largest sports blogs, SportsWrap, which has been read more than 10,000,000 times in the last six months. Look at the server logs (a fascinating part of blogging) and you will notice that people arrive on SportsWrap seeking new breaking news, commentary, and very particular (often strange) tidbits of information. In the last 120 seconds on SportsWrap, users came from Google looking for the following (and this just a small slice of the data):
Candace Parker Tattoo akin ayodele traded to the Miami Dolphins Best Air Jordans Lemans Crash Peyton Manning going insane on the sidelines Mark Jackson Knicks Coach High school football highlihts Paul Pierce fined Atlanta Hawks scorekeeper Maria
4B. Why the market demands this media: once-a-week publications like Sports Illustrated now serve a different purpose than news-breaking sources. SI is the pinnacle of sports reading and I continue to be a subscriber... despite having not found once piece of 'breaking' news in the last few years (it's always already broken and available). I read SI for the writing and commentary - I get my news through other sources: the web, mobile, podcasts, radio, etc. Here is a great example.
Dr. Z (one of the great NFL writers) published his NFL Draft Preview last week in SI. This used to be *the* way to prepare for the draft. Dr. Z is one of the most connected NFL gurus, but has to publish the article days before the draft begins. His results weren't pretty:
- 1 correct pick in the top 10 - 4 correct picks in the top 31 (first round) - predicted 5 wide receivers would go in the first round... not a single WR was picked
I am not critiquing Dr. Z. Rather, I am demonstrating that this new media that Buzz despises has value. We correctly predicted the top 6 picks in the NFL draft on SportsWrap and InGameNow. Does that make us smarter than Dr. Z? Absolutely not. But it does demonstrate the power of constant connectivity.
5. Buzz and Costas clearly don't understand how blogs work. Their attacks on Will were predicated on comments and commenters. Community is unique to blogs and, in my opinion, one of the major reasons that new media content has grown so quickly. An article on DeadSpin might only be a couple hundred words - but the dialog can go on with hundreds of comments and is fascinating. Sometimes its intelligent. Sometimes it's crass. But they are comments, not Op Eds.
6. Braylon Edwards comments on the panel also bugged me. First, like it or not, this isn't the 1960s. Athletes make $10,000,000s - and a good deal of that contract inflation is due to increased media, promotion, awareness, etc... the web plays a major part there. Second, technology is everywhere. Be aware of it. Matt Leinart is a very rich celebrity athlete (and he revels in his celebrity). He should be more than aware that people have cameras and access to publish content... he should consider this before publicly doing beer bongs with herds of females. People should think about this before publishing photos to their own MySpace and Facebook profiles.
7. Another example of why Bob Costas and Buzz Bissinger don't get it: for two smart people, they failed to get their message through effectively and caused massive backlash. Even if you agree with their sentiment (and you're more than welcome to do so) - they didn't deliver the argument well and probably caused a greater divide than existed previously. Bissinger has become an internet celebrity for all the wrong reasons: he surged to the top 10 google searches, had his wikipedia page vandalized throughout the day (hysterical stuff too) and has become the model for old-world thought 'leadership'.
An excerpt from his new Wikipedia entry, which sadly seems very accurate:
H. G. "Buzz" Bissinger (born November 1, 1954, in New York City) is a pompous windbag. He is also an American journalist.
Most recently Bissinger appeared on an HBO's Bob Costas On The Record to discuss the evergrowing sports media landscape. Bissinger then proceeded to make an ass out of himself and lose all credibility what so ever. His journalist tag has now been revoked.
Terrific parody / commercial for the new Lenovo Thinkpad X300:
We don't add stuff on. We build it in.
Late last week, beRecruited registered it's 200,000th user - a huge milestone for the team. As we continue to build out a world-class team, beRecruited is growing both internally and within our user-base. The last few months have been particularly exciting for the beRecruited team and we are quickly approaching our 3,000,000th recruiting connection! Here is a subset of the official press release:
beRecruited.com, the nation's largest free online network for high school athletes seeking recruitment from college coaches, has surpassed 200,000 registered users, including more than 180,000 high school athletes and 10,000 college coaches. beRecruited user-friendly, networking platform has made more than 2.6 million connections between athletes and coaches from all 50 states and more than 30 different countries, helping to facilitate thousands of NCAA athletic scholarships annually.
"Because of beRecruited, I found a Division I school which fit my profile perfectly. I am excited to be a Privateer next year at UNO," said John McMahon, a swimmer from Walnut Creek California who is going to attend the University of New Orleans on a scholarship. "I would not have heard of UNO if it weren't for this service."
"I have signed 13 recruits to scholarships from the beRecruited website and have recently found more potential recruits in the past couple of weeks. This site has helped us branch out and be a national recruiter," said Jason Challeen, assistant football coach at Jamestown College in Jamestown, North Dakota.
beRecruited provides a networking community for like-minded athletes and coaches, where athletes can create and share verified athletic and academic profiles throughout beRecruited's vast community of college coaches, athletes, high school coaches and fans. In the aggregate, beRecruited provides the most comprehensive look at the nation's elite high school athletes, making the recruiting process more efficient and effective for college coaches and athletes.
beRecruited averages more than 6,000 connections per day between users and has made more than 2.6 million connections overall. The site currently has athlete profiles representing more than 14,900 high schools and 58,000 high school teams from more than 9,000 U.S. cities and 20 countries.
Congratulations to the Adify team - who I've gotten to know through their YardBarker Network relationship (which beRecruited has used).
TechCrunch is reporting that Adify was acquired for $300mm by Cox Enterprises. The interesting part of this acquisition is that, like the ad-network acquisitions, it was in that $250-$300mm sweet spot... but Adify isn't an ad network like Blue Lithium and Tacoda - Adify is unique because they enable companies to power their own ad networks (sales, payments, units, tracking, etc).
Again, congrats!
Two exciting new launches from Widgetbox:
1. If you have an iPhone (unlike my), you can now place widgets directly on your home-screen. There are currently 16 widgets available - but more are coming! iPhone users can go to http://iphone.widgetbox.com to get started.
Read more on TechCrunch, WebWare, and Mashable.
2. We redesigned Widgetbox.com. It's much more dynamic - and frankly, it's much more fun. You can now browse through our 50,000 widgets with a variety of different sorts (for instance, take a look at the hottest widgets page).
After being disappointed by Will Ferrell's Semi-Pro (and the box office results agree), I was excited to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall... but the box office response was far from overwhelming (although I thought it was great). This past weekend, it placed 2nd ($17.3 million) behind the Forbidden Kingdom. In fact, movie ticket sales in 2008 have been down and year-over-year growth has been flattening:
So what's the connection between Forgetting Sarah Marshall and GTA IV? First, I had seen these Sarah Marshall billboard ads everywhere:
And then I saw the below GTA ads placed on a series of LA buildings (from Kataku). Not only has Rockstar created an awesome mural ad - video games are a big, big business. Grand Theft Auto III has sold 14.5 million units - at $50 a copy, that's $725mm in sales. Titanic is the highest grossing domestic film ever at $601mm.
As noted in my last post, Google's latest paid search data demonstrates that power of ad quality and dynamic pricing requirements. This email just arrived from Yahoo - explaining that they are changing their paid search pricing models (a reaction to Google's latest data? of course): Pricing Update: Minimum Bids are no Longer Fixed at $.10
What you need to know... • Sponsored Search minimum bids are no longer fixed at $.10. • Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10. • Higher ad quality may help you receive lower minimum bids. • Currently applies to U.S. accounts only. • Sign up for a pricing update webinar. • Log into your account regularly to check keyword status.
Starting today, the minimum bids for some Sponsored Search keywords are no longer fixed at $.10. Minimum bids can now be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10. Throughout the next week, you may start noticing new minimum bids on some of your keywords. You will be notified by email and within your account when the status of any of your keywords is affected.
The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as: • The number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market • The quality of your keywords, or their relevance to advertisers, as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them
How it Works • Your keyword is active—or eligible for display—when your current bid is equal to or greater than your minimum bid for that keyword. • Your keyword becomes inactive if your bid falls below your minimum, and won't be displayed unless your minimum bid is met. • You'll be notified when your bid is too low, and will have up to several days to adjust your bid.
Read more at Yahoo.
The most interesting outcome of yesterday's strong Google earnings came from Efficient Frontier, who released a report on Q1 search engine performances:
In Q1 2008,Google accounted for 77 percent of total search spend, gaining 3.3 percentage points in share of search spending from Q1 2007. Return on investment (ROI) on Google improved by 24 percent, click-through rates (CTRs) improved by 19 percent, and cost per click (CPC) rates increased by 11 percent in the period between Q1 2007 and Q1 2008, suggesting that large-scale advertisers are benefiting from Google's quality updates and can continue to afford its higher CPCs, particularly given the increase in ROI.
Google has improved conversions (24%), click-throughs (19%) and CPCs (11%) - a consequence of strictly enforcing advertising quality measures (which Comscore noted led to declining paid search clicks). By removing the clutter of untargeted ads (particularly on generic or branded terms) leads to more effective, premium placements (at premium prices).
Equally interesting, it appears that Yahoo has now implemented more restrictive ad pricing requirements - on a dynamic basis (just like Google). A reaction to Google's earnings and Efficient Frontier's data?
