Gimmicky? Of course. But after a day of panels and interviews, with plenty of talk of monetization and ROI and user engagement and the attention economy and just about every other ad-industry cliche you’ve ever heard of (as well as some you haven’t), it was quite refreshing to watch a bunch of YouTube videos representing ad campaigns that actually worked. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

A lot of Madison Avenue types have packed into midtown Manhattan’s upscale Mandarin Oriental hotel for the annual OnMedia NYC conference, a sort of Silicon-Valley-meets-the-ad-industry event. The conference, which started Monday and ends Wednesday, is presented by new-media trade publication AlwaysOn. At the end of the day on Tuesday, AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins announced 2007’s “Best of Broadband (BOB) Awards,” a hand-picked list of the top Web video ads that achieved viral success and actually worked.

NEW YORK–Will it blend? This innovative ad campaign sure did.

Among the winners were winners of user-generated ad contests like Frito Lay’s “Crash the Super Bowl” competition; faux-amateur clips like Ray-Ban’s “Never Hide” ad; too-edgy-for-TV spots like one of Unilever’s Dove “Campaign for Real Beauty” ads; and naturally, “Will It Blend?” The YouTube video series from blender manufacturer BlendTec had been created without the help of an extrenal agency, and had already built up quite a fan base when it published the notorious “iPhone in a blender” video.

Long story short: I plugged it into the Centro and presto, instant power. So when I spied an iPod-compatible Cellboost at Buy.com for just $5.99 (shipped!), how could I resist passing it along? Granted, it’s an eco-unfriendly solution, but it’s compatible with all dockable iPods and promises eight hours of play time. Toss one in your travel bag; you never know when you might need it.

About three years ago, at a CES show in Las Vegas, a PR flack handed me a Cellboost disposable battery for my Treo smartphone. “You never know when you might need it,” she winked.

Ick! Did I actually just write a headline with the words “disposable” and “battery”?! Let’s see…yep, I did. But before you get your environmentalist dander up, consider: one, I recycle; two, I use compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and three, I have a relevant story to share.

(Credit:
Cellboost)

Flash-forward to three weeks ago, when my phone (it’s a Centro now, but same difference) ran out of juice and I desperately needed to make a call. I pulled the Cellboost out of the glove compartment, where it had sat, untouched, for three years. No way will this thing have a drop of power left, I thought, not after three boiling summers and three harsh winters.

My first reaction was to chuckle. It sounded like something out of Seinfeld–an auction about nothing. Would anyone be so much of an egomaniac to believe anybody would care? Then again, if Rocketboom’s founder is serious about “auctioning” his Twitter account, have at it, pal. More likely, I’m sure he’s laughing about every click we waste agonizing about the supposed implications.

Credit Baron for knowing how to push the right button. He is reaping a PR windfall, generating the most discussion about Rocketboom since Amanda Congdon decided to seek fame and fortune elsewhere.

I was hoping that might be the reaction in the “Twitosphere” after finding out that Andrew Baron put his Twitter account up for auction on eBay. Silly me.

Here’s the text of Baron’s post. Make of it what you will.

The first sign of value to most people would be the number of followers I have (the audience size). At the beg. of this auction, there are 1397 followers and I am actually quite proud of the actual quality of these followers, moreso than the number. Feel free to explore everyone to see who’s there.

So basically it’s like getting a new account with your own name, but having a pre-installed audience.

What if someone started an auction and we all ignored it?

Finally, I’d just like to give props to all of you out there who are following me on Twitter. No offense what so ever - we can easily find each other again.

It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations. In terms of monetary value, I have no expectations or needs at all so I decided not to put a minimum bid on this. Whatever will be, will be.

I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven’t been using it the way I want to. Quite honestly, I feel sorry for all of my followers because they wind up with my tweets in their timelines and I haven’t been able to utilize the medium the way I want to. I also participate in another Twitter account over on Rocketboom so I’m thinking I’ll post more over there and start up a new account to do what I want to do next.

The winner of this auction gets my account with all of my followers. The account is in my name now, but the winner of the auction can pick any other name that’s available on Twitter for the transfer. For example, you could have http://www.twitter.com/x where x=any name thats not already taken. You can change it yourself at anytime too, one of the cool features about Twitter settings.

Also, as with any dynamic group, there is obviously risk. My followers could jump ship at anytime. There is no guarantee on this part. People will come and go, thats just the way it is. Whether you represent a company, a group or just yourself, this group will not want to be sold to, Im sure. The successful winner will share a reciprocal value with the followers.

Some folks are getting really worked up over the fact that the auction will include Baron’s 1,400 something or so “followers” as well. Well, in case you haven’t heard, slavery was outlawed in the 19th century. I’m sure Baron’s “followers” will make up their own minds if there’s a change in ownership.

I fell for the bait so here’s my two cents. Everyone’s going to get their 15 minutes’ worth of fame, no matter how silly. So don’t waste any more brain cells worrying about all this. As Stowe Boyd aptly notes, it’s not like trading in hard goods. “When it comes to virtual relationships, we’re still talking about human relationship. This will go down as little more than a transparent stunt in this hair-trigger era we inhabit.

http://twitter.com/andrewbaron

Whatever happened to that chummy Wintel alliance? You know, the Microsoft Windows/Intel chip cartel that has long helped to cement Microsoft’s hold on the industry?

In a significant snub, Intel has decided not to upgrade its 80,000 desktops from Windows XP to Windows Vista.

As an inside source put it:

This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista.

Is Intel a sign of things to come for Microsoft? Will the rest of corporate America discover that Microsoft essentially stopped innovating long ago and has failed to deliver a worthwhile upgrade to XP?

Meanwhile, companies like IBM are actively exploring Windows alternatives like the Mac. Microsoft has competition on its hands for the first time, and it only has itself to blame. If it can’t build a compelling reason to upgrade, it can’t expect to remain absolute controller of the desktop universe.

Yahoo launched a new Web site aimed at women on Monday. The site, called “Shine,” will feature original blogs and content from major publishing partners including Conde Nast, Hearst, and Time.

The site is Yahoo’s latest foray into vertical sites, which include the popular Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance, as well as Sports and Entertainment, and the much less popular Yahoo Tech and Yahoo Green. Shine is also Yahoo’s first targeting a specific audience and not just a topic.

The front page of Yahoo's Shine is clean and, at least right now, light on ads.

(Credit:
Yahoo)
Yahoo aims to be the top destination site in the lifestyles category, said Amy Iorio, general manager of Lifestyles at Yahoo. Women as a demographic is a good target, particularly given the number of women who use Yahoo (40 million women between the ages of 25 and 54 every month) and the fact that females tend to blog more than males.

“This is really a key audience for Yahoo,” she said. “We’ve been calling them ‘chief household officers’ internally.”

Yahoo’s efforts at doing original content haven’t all panned out, but this site is more of a hybrid. Articles and original blogs will come from a range of sources, including Glamour, Epicurious.com, Style.com, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Health, and Good Housekeeping.

Eight editors are overseeing the various sections (such as home, parenting, fashion, culture, and career) and the editor in chief is Brandon Holley, former editor in chief of Jane magazine.

Shine readers will be able to start their own blogs and that content, if deemed worthy, can end up as some of the featured content in different sections on the site.

You will also be able to get to your Yahoo Mail on Shine, and there is integration with Yahoo Search, Food, Health, and Astrology. But there could be even more integration with things like Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Answers.

The site will compete with iVillage and fashion- and celebrity-news heavy Glam.com, but its content partners and editors will set it apart, Holley said. Shine will distinguish itself by having more of an editorial voice than the other sites and by interacting more with readers, she said.

On a quick glance, Shine looks more aesthetically appealing and less cluttered than the rival sites, despite the fact that Yahoo is not exactly known for simple site design. The site will be at http://shine.yahoo.com.

AT&T vendors here pass out Chapstick and cup cozies with the company’s logo. Delegates wander around in CNN caps. Lanyards for official credentials sport a Qwest logo. Coca Cola tote bags are carried into the Pepsi Center, while entrepreneurs hand out free samples (or sometimes try to sell them).

The Big Tent, where bloggers are spending most of their time, has become a veritable trade show of tech-oriented products and businesses.

Kary and Gerhard Rivera are Denver locals–they’re both spouses and business partners–who are taking advantage of the convention events to promote their site Fling It Girl, which launched last month. Kary describes the site as a kind of “Digg for women.” Formatted like Digg, the site lets users submit, vote for, and bury items items from the Web. Most “flung” items are female-oriented, including fashion and home decor, though the site does have a “guy stuff” section.

“It’s exciting to have the convention here in Denver,” Kary Rivera said. “It’s a right-place, right-time sort of thing, so we wanted to take advantage of it the best we can.”

The Riveras were asked to volunteer at the Electric Vehicle Rolling Showcase but ended up at the Big Tent on Tuesday. Along with meeting the founders of Daily Kos and Colorado Rep. Jared Polis, the couple ran into actress Daryl Hannah for a second time this week and gave the celebrity a Fling It Girl tank top.

“Fling it Girl is not a political site at all, so we looked at this as more of an opportunity for us to shake hands and see faces,” Kary Rivera said.

Andrew Hunter was at the Big Tent on Tuesday to promote the the Change Ring, a product capitalizing on Barack Obama’s popularity and his theme of “change.” The Change Ring is a key ring or pendant modeled after Delta, the mathematical symbol for change.

The Change Ring is a key ring inspired by Barack Obama's campaign. Naturally, its creators are pitching the product at the Democratic convention.

(Credit: The Change Ring)

The key ring comes with key retrieval system called Boomering SMS. A dog tag with a serial number is attached to each ring, and the owner of ring is supposed to enter the serial number, along with their cell phone number and e-mail address, onto the company Web site. The dog tag has instructions for anyone who finds a lost Change Ring to text the Boomering SMS code to the company’s short-code. Change Ring then bridges communication between the owner and the finder of the key ring.

Two Change Rings can be purchased for $19.99, and a portion of the cost goes to Obama’s campaign, and a portion goes to American charities.

While start-ups were on display in the Big Tent, the delegates are benefiting from the eagerness of corporate America to participate in the political process.

Florida delegate Amy Mercado on Wednesday carried around an Oracle tote bag. The Silicon Valley company, along with Florida Power and Light and Disney, is sponsoring Florida’s efforts to send a “green delegation” to Denver.

The delegates from Washington state were treated to a reception hosted by Microsoft.

“There’s lots of companies here pitching themselves and their businesses to their state delegations,” said Washington delegate Patrick Gunning. “Most of (the delegates) are pretty influential in their home states.”

His fellow Washington delegate, Caitlin Ormsby, said she didn’t mind the corporate presence, “as long as they’re on board with Democratic policies.”

Gunning said it was important for the Democratic party to have a strong relationship with large employers like Microsoft, but added, “It’s definitely a big party for corporate America here, and I’m not entirely sure what to think of it.”

Apple co-founder and sometimes Steve Jobs antagonist Steve Wozniak was characteristically outspoken when talking to reporters this morning in Sydney at a tech conference. According to a transcript posted by APC Magazine, on the subject of the new MacBook Air, Woz minced no words, telling a group of reporters:

“At first, I thought, it’s so feature-missing…I burn DVDs a lot to pass files to other people. I watch movies on airplanes. I need one that will go an entire flight and switch batteries, when there’s sometimes no power on the plane.”

But he liked how the keyboard worked with the thinner design, saying, “For some reason, the way its keyboard is, I can type faster, it’s a more comfortable, positive experience,” and he extolled the virtues of the backlit LED display: “I love the whiter-whites of the LED backlighting, which I don’t have in my laptop yet.” The stripped-down features seemed to be the biggest deal-breaker, with Wozniak saying:

“So I’m trying to figure out a way to make the Air part of my life, because I’m a one-laptop-only person. I’ve got to now change my approach and have a desktop tower computer at home, keeping all my big data, which I don’t have enough disk space on the Air for, and I can finally take my Air around with me and use it.”

His final word on the subject pretty much mirrors what we’ve heard from talking to both current Air users and potential customers, with Wozniak saying, “I don’t think it’s going to be a hit; I know some people love it and it works great, they have a computer at work, and they use their Air to give presentations, but I don’t see a mass swing over to them.”

Ever wonder how many YouTube videos vanish from alleged copyright violations? A Massachusetts Institute of Technology research project called YouTomb can show you some.

“While many YouTube videos that contain non-original material are blatantly violating copyright (e.g., exact rips of TV shows), many others have a more complex legal status because of the fair use provision of copyright law,” the group said. “The sampling and remixing of non-original material have often led to great cultural accomplishments, so protecting this fragile aspect of copyright law is very important to us.”

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act shields Web sites from legal action based on content published there by site users if the Web site operator removes the content upon receipt of a “takedown” request by the copyright holder.

(Credit:
YouTomb)

(Via Google Operating System blog.)

The MIT Free Culture group said it became more interested in the YouTube takedown issue after Google launched a tool that scans to see if uploaded videos match fingerprints of copyright content.

The site, an effort by the MIT Free Culture group, scans the most popular YouTube videos for the metadata Google inserts after a video has been taken down. YouTomb shows a list of recently removed videos (which you can’t actually view), who requested their removal, when they were taken down, and how long they were up beforehand.

Read why chairs are the biggest barrier to innovation in the Fortune 500 and more.

As a follow-up to my recent post on the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Report, I wanted to share what my colleagues at frog design, a global innovation firm, think. When we heard about a so-called innovation gap, we asked all four of our US studios what they thought. In one hour more than 50 “frogs” responded. Here’s our crowdsourced blitz survey response to the current innovation gap debate.

Despite an over-abundance of media coverage about the importance of innovation in recent years, it seems the business media may not have gotten its point across. Instead of hailing innovation as The Next Big Thing, journalists and book authors now wonder if there’s an Innovation Gap in U.S. business. The September 22nd issue of BusinessWeek, “Keeping America Competitive,” is coupled with online articles like “Firing Up America’s Idea Economy” and “Can America Invent Its Way Back?.” Judy Estrin also examines flagging innovation culture in her new book, “Closing the Innovation Gap.”

Intel Capital has funded Red Hat, SuSE Linux, JBoss, MySQL, Zend Technologies, Fonality, CollabNet, and Black Duck. SAP Ventures? Black Duck, JasperSoft, Intalio, Groundwork, MySQL, Ping Identity, SocialText, Zend, Red Hat, and Sistina. These two companies have funded a large swath of open source’s top companies. Not all by any stretch, but many.

Perhaps the big story out of the Alfresco and REvolution investments is the activity of Intel and SAP in financing open-source companies.

So here’s Intel, which apparently owes its existence to Microsoft, and SAP has gone on the record over and over in downplaying open source’s significance, both funding the open-source revolution. Money speaks more loudly than words do. SAP and Intel clearly think there’s something to this open-source thing, even if one accepts the argument that financial investments are separate from their strategic product directions.

I suppose the big news for me today, as an Alfresco employee, should be that we just closed a $9 million Series C round with SAP Ventures leading the round. But since we didn’t need the money (not even remotely) and I didn’t want the dilution, it’s not my favorite news of the day. Let’s just say that companies don’t always raise money for the money.

commentary

Not always. Both companies use their venture arms to place strategic bets. If I’m an industry observer, it’s evident that both companies are placing big bets on open source. What does this mean you should be investing in?

Exactly.

I was actually much more intrigued to see Zenoss add $11 million in Series B funding. Or Intel Capital’s Series A investment in REvolution Computing, which provides an open-source statistical tool with commercial support and leverages parallelism.