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There are 4 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" Adobe AIR crosses 100 million successful downloadsAt this year's Adobe Max gathering in Tokyo, Adobe announced that Adobe AIR, their cross runtime environment for RIAs crossed the 100 Million successful download mark. As far as developers went, they claim that there were over 1 million downloads of the AIR software development kit, open source Flex framework and Adobe Flex builder. This is a massive achievement for AIR, whose public beta launch (it was then called Apollo) was in March 2007 and since then close to 400 Adobe Apps have been made by developers all over the world. At the same time more than 55% of the computers in the world now have Adobe Flash Player 10 installed, and Adobe is expecting this to go up to 80% by mid 2009. As of now, Flash is anyway the most popular software platform with 99% penetration into the world's computers if this study is to be believed. Adobe said that none of this would've been possible without the help of some amazing AIR applications since they claim that it's these applications that have helped the downloads reach such a number rather than the Adobe.com website Your browser may not support display of this image. Here are some cool Adobe AIR apps that you must try out: Tweetdeck &Twirl: If you're a twitter nut then Tweetdeck and Twirl are by far the best twitter clients out there. Tweetdeck also has a built-in re-tweet option. Google Analytics: With this app you can now open multiple tabs for viewing your reports and can also change the date range faster. Apart from this there's Yammer, which is basically a twitter for business organisations and eBay desktop which makes it easier to shop and sell on eBay. For the complete list of the top Adobe AIR apps(by number of downloads) go here So what other cool Adobe AIR apps do you use? Do discuss in the comments section below. Most Commented Posts Also Check Out: Q3 09 Results Roundup 2 - UTV, CyberMedia & Web18As the earnings season continues so does the dismal results for new media companies in the Indian Space. Here are the results of 3 companies which have a sizeable exposure on the digital media front. UTV - UTV has had a good quarter and the same is reflected by the consolidated net profit of December quarter which grew 29.55% to Rs 29.90 crore when compared to same quarter last year. For the nine-month period ended December 31, 2008, the company registered a consolidated net profit of Rs 87.77 crore, a 76.49 per cent growth over the corresponding period last year. We had interviewed the new media head of UTV Mr.T.N. Prabhu recently and he had stated that UTV New Media expects to breakeven in 6-8 months. They have already done a revenue of Rs.14.3 crore for the 9 month period till 31st Dec, 08. They also have a gaming division which had acquired Indiagames in India and true games in US. Indiagames has been following the strategy of subscription based revenues via gaming for sometime now and have been seeing decent success as well. According to the earnings release Indiagames has reported a growth of around 20% QoQ. All in all this has been a good quarter for UTV New Media and Gaming divisions and the future looks bright with UTVi.com becoming the 2nd most visited business news site and with Techtree gearing up for mobile revenues. You can download the earnings release here CyberMedia - Cyber Media has announced its third quarter results. The company’s Q3 net profit is down at Rs 1.77 crore (Rs 17.7 million) from Rs 1.99 crore (Rs 19.9 million) quarter-on-quarter, QoQ. Its Q3 net sales are up at Rs 21.9 crore (Rs 219 million) from Rs 20.9 crore (Rs 209 million) QoQ. The big news on the Cybermedia front is the upcoming launch of Technology Review website and magazine. The agreement was signed between Cybermedia and Technology review over 6 months back. The trend for bringing International B2B magazines seems to be catching one with even 9.9 Mediaworx looking at launching Inc Magazine to India. The entire release can be downloaded here Web18 - Web18 has had a tough quarter reporting a loss of over Rs.21.2 crores on a reported revenue of Rs.17.4 crores. Their earlier quarter loss was also Rs.24 crores approx. Web18 has plans to go for an American Depository Receipts (ADR) issue and has filed a draft registration statement for an IPO and listing on the NASDAQ exchange. Though the amount expected to be raised via this IPO isn’t yet disclosed. Web18 has been consolidating all its propertied under the singular basket of in.com. Currently In.com is the second largest Indian portal in terms of traction. The only vertical site that Web18 has still not integrated with In.com is their finance portal moneycontrol.com which continues to be the moneyspinner. In.com has also got several content tie ups now with sister concerns or affiliated companies of Web18 and Capital18. To name a few Bookmyshow.com and Burrp.com (which is invested in by Harsh Chawla of Capital18). According to our sources In.com spends a lot of money acquiring music rights for its music streaming player which is a major attraction as well as a major cost factor. All in all In.com which is Web18’s biggest bet has done well to garner traction but advertising dollars are hard to come by in these times so it will be interesting to see how well the next few quarters are for Web18. You can download the entire earnings release here. Related PostsAlso Check Out: Recognising Advertising Creativity - Yahoo Goes Uncanny with Uncannies.com
The official Yahoo word came through Nitin Mathur, Director – Marketing, Yahoo! India, “An excellent creative speaks for itself. Uncannies from Yahoo! India brings together all creative minds of the industry to share their best advertising work. It's also a great platform to discover fresh ideas and showcase top talent in advertising," he said in the release. More than just being a portal, Uncannies is also a recognition and award forum and is running a contest to find the best creative piece of advertising in each media with some exciting prize for the winners. In order to take part in this contest, participants must submit their work before 28th February' 2009. The entries can be at an individual or agency level, with a maximum of 200 entries per person. Also, the entries will be judged by an independent panel of experts from industry. Users will also get a chance to rate the shortlisted creative for the entire contest duration. However, the expert panel's decision would be final. Top 3 winners will walk away with an Apple iPhone each, while the next top 100 participants will get interesting Yahoo! merchandise as consolation prizes.
While Afaqs already has a showcase of advertising creatives on their website, it is not a benchmark of quality nor is it a platform to judge. Knowing what the best practices are and a judgment on what’s cool has been one of those areas which wasn’t addressed till now. Yahoo has put itself in a position where it can address this divide, whether it will of course needs to be seen. Related PostsAlso Check Out: The Idea of Sequential Advertising - Moving Beyond the ContextThe growth of contextual advertising online was a major landmark in the growth of the Internet itself. It to my mind democratized the web like no other, giving opportunity for the smallest of web publishers, (while the big ones made acquisitions cool) breaking the stigma on text advertising and on a general note improving information spread on the web. Indeed it took online advertising to a whole new level from flashy banners and blue purple links that website owners pleaded their visitors to click to keep their site free. It also in a way led to YouTube, Blogger, perhaps Flickr all becoming the web 2.0 success stories as the leading online advertising machines hunted for more context within the content. It’s been over 5 years now since contextual advertising really took off, which itself was 5 years after the biggest name in contextual Google took off, the decade of Google. And perhaps it is time for advertising to move beyond the context, not completely but relatively. Now I am a big fan of using information and user intellect as a medium of advertising. That is to not pitch rather just present information when you want to promote your idea, brand, product or USP. This is also perhaps the reason contextual advertising worked in the first place. However, with the advent of CPA and CPL ways of working the whole idea of information spread limits itself to a only for conversion campaigns (which is not bad). The fallout of this is that a lot of potential leads (people who could be leads) don’t get through to the system, because the landing page is so well targeted, that they don’t have an avenue to additional information. However, imagine a campaign which works in sequence. It satisfies a certain requirement of information, bait the user/reader to dig for more information, and then involve him enough to introduce the business side of the campaign. Let me put this in an example.
The idea of sequencing information is to build the context and ensuring the context is correct, I think this will improve targeting. This isn’t a radical concept of course, but it isn’t new either, but it is just the way contextual advertising became contextual advertising. For advertising has always been contextual, it just wasn’t targeted with the precision that PPC campaigns on websites and search engines gave. Similarly sequential advertising has been tried in various media and for that matter even on the web. I consider the Dell campaign on Taking Your Own Path a case in pertaining to this thought. I beleive this kind of advertising, where we use the web’s forte which is to dispel information as the primary tool of advertising and create campaigns which aid the web users in finding information and thereby building both leads list and the brand as the way forward for online advertising. I admit to not keeping track of a variety of campaign trends as much as a blogger on online advertising should, but like I have mentioned before my judgment and opinions follow what I see and experience myself, and I believe this kind of advertising comples me to not be blind towards them and therefore effective. Related PostsAlso Check Out: More Recent Articles
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