Reuters have introduced a search engine powered by Viewdle that enables the user to search though film footage for people. Within the results it shows you how many videos have been identified featuring the person you’re interested in, date of the video, the context, overall length and time the person is on screen for.
The search box includes predictive text (like Google suggest) letting you know what is availabke and helping you find the person you are looking for quickly. The search functionality is limited, I cannot for instance search for George Bush but exclude anything with Tony Blair in it.
There are a number of companies emerging in this space and there is an obvious route to monetising indeed Viewdle state “easily indexing, searching & monetizing video assets.” I wrote a blog recently on Ooyala a contextual video application that goes a step further than this indexing objects as well as people. It would be interesting to see what the technology is behind this i.e. is this utilising facial recognition or simply someone tracing the appearance of people within a video (like the photo tag function in Facebook but in video.)
Video search is certainly useful and will enable advertisers to successfully monitize an otherwise untapped medium. It will take a large and established search based company to successfully integrate this, perhaps the big G? Watch this space…
Bebo has signed a deal to partner with Yahoo! selling advertising for the social network. It will also integrate Yahoo! Answers within its platform and develop a Bebo-branded browser toolbar.
Yahoo! Says it will sell the “majority” of Bebo’s display advertising in the UK and Ireland, which has a reach of around 11.6m users in the UK, according to Bebo. It’s the first such deal Yahoo! has struck with a social network.
“The partnership enables us to focus on custom sponsorship campaigns and groundbreaking original productions with the knowledge that our display advertising is handled by a partner that guarantees the highest quality ad for each user interaction,” said Joanna Shields, president international at Bebo.
Yahoo’s rival Google has already signed an advertising deal with MySpace allowing contextual PPC and display ads to be placed within the site as part of its Adsense network. Microsoft has also entered into similar agreement with Facebook.
The search engine recently purchased internet marketing firm BlueLithium for $300 million in a further attempt to strengthen its advertising credentials. Yahoo doesn’t currently have any major stake in social networking properties, a rumour had been circulating that the comapny were looking to buy Bebo for a reported 1 billion dollars.
Google have included what is known as an “Easter egg” (a “hidden” facility in the application) within Google earth. The flight simulator can be accessed by getting a download of the latest version of Google earth and then holding down the “ctrl” “alt” and “a” key simultaneously.
It is not clear whether the flight simulator is available on all versions of Google earth or whether you need Google earth pro or Google earth plus versions. I got a download of the most recent version and couldn’t get t to work… if anyone unearths (excuse the pun) how to do this please let me know.
Anyway looks pretty cool addition to the standard functions (map, zoom etc.) that are available. Check it out on youtube here: google earth flight simulator
Some ex Google bods have taken contextual video to the next level. A number of companies are wrestling with how to “monetise” video content. Google video are inserting supposedly unobtrusive ads within youtube content for instance. Nothing has of yet been truly pull adevrtising as well as contextual until now.
Calif.-based company Ooyala has developed a new interface whereby viewers can click on various images — a car, a necklace, a wristwatch, an actor — within a video to get more information about the specific product or person.
If there is a technology behind this that understands what an object is and then contextually relates it to ads then it is very advanced. Some people have speculated that it utilises RFID technology, other than that it would be a really laborious task studying each frame.
With the launch of Yahoo Panama there is a upcoming change to sponsored search ranking system for Yahoo.
The week commencing July 23rd, 2007, Yahoo are introducing a new ranking model in the UK that considers an ad’s quality and bid amount. Instead of just bid amount, both bid amount and ad quality will now determine an ad’s rank.
Visit http://help.yahoo.com/l/uk/yahoo/ysm/sps/migration/tips_rank.html for more Information . Yahoo recommend that you review your current max bids. Keep in mind you may be charged up to the amount of your max bid.
Hello,
As you may or may not know uploading a new account into Yahoo Panama through the “Import Campaigns” function is a bit of a nightmare. I downloaded an account in CSV from editor today, altered it to make it Yahoo Panama friendly and then uploaded to Panama successfully! You can also upload your Google download through “Convert Third Party Campaigns.” This will spit out a Yahoo friendly upload sheet pointing out all the errors that need to be fixed before you upload.
This is certainly better than doing it from scratch and If you are running a search campaign on Yahoo you are bound to be on Google!
Cheers
Loads of new features, read on the adCenter Blog post:
URL - http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com
§ Editing your keywords in bulk and previewing ads
§ Creating multiple account performance reports and new information on misspelled keywords
§ Importing campaigns from other search advertising programs
The Microsoft adCenter Team
importing campaigns from other search advertising programs sounds good…
Check my Yahoo Panama post for more detail on using editor to format bulk sheets.
Stumbled accross this nasty little error on a client’s installation of OsCommerce. The problem occurs when a new user is signing up, so this can be a real show stopper and cost sales!
Anyway thankfully I quickly found the solution and the fix is pretty quick and simple
catalog/includes/functions/database.php. Find the line relating to tep_db_insert_id and change it to:
function tep_db_insert_id( $link = 'db_link') {
global $$link;
return mysql_insert_id($$link);
}
By the looks of the solution, perhaps problem occurs because of a non persistant database connection, or other subsequent queries having run.
Just to let you know that there is a new report within Google that gives you visibility on all search queries that have resulted in a click. Its called Search Query Performance and its in the reports section.
I have already noticed that a phrase where we aren’t bidding on any component, is being displayed for my client… and it is a competitor brand!
On a more practical note this will give you guidance on long tail exact match keywords to add to your accounts.
