Optimera: maj 2016

tisdag 31 maj 2016

Jewelers Close Amid Global Downturn

More than 700 jewelers closed in the past year, reflecting the industry’s continued contraction. While digital channels offer a lifeline amid that downturn, they also give larger brands an even bigger advantage.

The top ten brands in the industry generate only 40% of global sales, but control nearly 75% of traffic to Watches & Jewelry brand sites, according to L2’s e-commerce report.

https://www.l2inc.com/jewelers-close-amid-global-downturn/2016/blog

https://www.l2inc.com/research/watches-jewelry-e-commerce-2016?

The Secretive World of Selling Data About You

In fact, it’s unknown exactly how many data brokers operate in the United States, because so many keep a low profile. Credible estimates range from 2,500 to 4,000. There are supergiants in the field—Acxiom, Experian. But there are myriad smaller companies that few have heard of: Exact Data, Paramount Lists, Datalogix, Statlistics.
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There’s a fast-growing market for what’s called “consumer scores.” Instead of a straight list of names, addresses, and other info, a consumer score is a computer-generated number that attempts to predict your likelihood to get sick, or to pay off a debt. Consumer scores are similar to FICO credit scores, but aren’t regulated as to what factors can be used and how transparent the score and its contributing factors are to the scored individual.
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Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) introduced a bill last year called the Data Broker Accountability and Transparency Act of 2015.
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StopDataMining.me, offers links and instructions to opt out of what it claims are the 50 top data brokers.

http://europe.newsweek.com/secretive-world-selling-data-about-you-464789
http://www.stopdatamining.me/
http://www.stopdatamining.me/master-list-data-broker-opt-out-links/

Ranked: The 37 hottest pre-IPO ad tech startups of 2016

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-37-hottest-pre-ipo-ad-tech-companies-2016-5?IR=T

Report: There are now more people blocking ads on mobile than on desktop

Research from PageFair — a technology company that makes its money by providing ad blocking solutions to publishers — and mobile data company Priori Data estimates there are at least 419 million people blocking ads on smartphones worldwide.
PageFair estimated last year that there are 198 million desktop ad blocker users.
The most common way of blocking ads on smartphones is through browsers which block ads by default, according to PageFair, which estimates 408 million people used an ad blocking browser in March 2016.
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Mobile ad blocking is driven by users in emerging markets. PageFair claims 36% of smartphone users in Asia-Pacific are blocking ads on the mobile web.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/pagefair-mobile-ad-blocking-report-2016-5

måndag 30 maj 2016

Vice Media Traffic Plummets, Underscoring Risky Web Strategy

March 21, 2016
The irony of what’s propelling this precipitous decline is a controversial practice that Vice, as well as other digital publishers, engage in online that’s actually aimed at inflating traffic numbers.
The inventory that Vice makes available to media buyers is actually a combination of its own website, Vice.com, and a collection of other Web properties Vice doesn’t really own or operate, such as ModernFarmer.com and ThePlaidZebra.com. Comscore enables this arrangement by allowing one publisher to essentially sign away its audience to another publisher through a document known as a “traffic assignment” letter. These pacts are typically struck by smaller publishers lacking advertising sales infrastructure; in exchange for turning over their traffic, they can have their inventory represented by a bigger entity with better access to a wider range of marketers.
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While reach-hungry publishers like Vice aren’t hiding these partners from advertisers, these ad buys are considered the digital equivalent of mortgage-backed securities: mixed in with the premium inventory is lesser-quality placements.
http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/vice-media-traffic-plummets-underscoring-risky-web-strategy-1201733673/

Studie: Här är de 40 starkaste digitala varumärkena

Varumärkesbyrån LynEye ligger bakom undersökningen som ska ge svaret på vilka företag som står högst i kurs i svenskarnas ögon. I detta fall har de fokuserat på digitala varumärken, och respondenterna har fått bedöma vilka företag som de upplever har "ett högre syfte med sin verksamhet".
I topp hamnar betalningsappen Swish som de fyra storbankerna ligger bakom.

http://www.resume.se/nyheter/artiklar/2016/05/30/studie-har-ar-de-starkaste-digitala-varumarkena/

Digiday Shows There Is Money in Media if You Stay Focused

Digiday gets a relatively paltry 2 million unique visitors a month, but says it is happy with that number.

Focus is something media entrepreneur Rafat Ali, founder of the travel site Skift, has also been preaching for some time. He helped start the Verticals Collective, which focuses on smaller media businesses that target a specific niche, such as Digiday does.

http://fortune.com/2016/05/02/digiday-media/

https://skift.com/digital/

Why Place Branding Is Becoming Place Doing

Around the globe, travel and tourism generated about $7.6 trillion (about 10% of the world’s entire GDP, or GWP) and was responsible for 277 million jobs (roughly one in 11) in 2014, according to statistics published in a report by the World Travel & Tourism Council.

Around the world, there are 455 metropolises, 3,000 large cities, 2.7 million small cities and towns.

Austin - Local leadership decided to nurture the burgeoning music scene and started a grassroots campaign for the city to promote itself as the Live Music Capital of the World and to play up the “Keep Austin Weird” sentiment that became popular as the city threatened to homogenize. But now, just as SXSW has grown from the small indie music festival it was when it started in 1987 into a massive, must-attend multimedia confab, the city has gone from also-ran to leading light.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/mariansalzman/2016/05/24/why-place-branding-is-becoming-place-doing-consider-austin/?ss=cmo-network#2036531f17cb

https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/keep-austin-weird

https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/keepaustinweird/

fredag 27 maj 2016

Salesforce drar ifrån SAP inom crm

Totalt ökade den globala försäljningen av programvara för crm, alltså kundvård, med 12,3 procent under 2015 och uppgick därmed till 26,3 miljarder dollar.
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Salesforce är avgjort störst på den globala crm-marknaden med en marknadsandel på 19,7 procent (det innebär att de har en försäljning på 5,2 miljarder dollar globalt i det här segmentet). Därefter kommer SAP med en andel på 10,2 procent och Oracle på 7,8 procent.
http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.659153/salesforce-drar-ifran-sap-inom-crm

SimilarTech - Bloomberg.com/europe

SimilarTech tells you what’s powering any website, alerts web companies to new leads

Over the years, developers have turned to resources like BuiltWith to help them figure out what technology is under the hood powering today’s websites – including things like shopping carts, analytics, hosting platforms and more. Now BuiltWith has new competition: SimilarTech, which not only monitors the technologies used by any site, but also automates the process of finding leads for web companies.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/25/similartech-tells-you-whats-powering-any-website-alerts-web-companies-to-new-leads/

https://www.similartech.com/

Microsoft NewsPro - Instagram

https://newspro.microsoft.com/form/search?query=instagram

Seismic raises $40 million as sales tech landscape continues to swell

Venture capitalists have pumped around $10 billion into B2B sales enablement tools in the past three years.
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Why is inside sales such a hot space? Essentially, sales has become a more challenging job in recent years, so new tools are popping up to solve these new problems — namely, figuring out how to help extremely informed buyers.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/25/seismic-closes-40-million-as-sales-tech-landscape-takes-shape/

onsdag 25 maj 2016

Adobe Adds Mobile Location Data to Its Audience Platform

The latest in a flurry of data distribution deals will insert information about consumers' movements from PlaceIQ into Adobe's Audience Manager, the marketing tech firm's data management platform.
PlaceIQ tracks when mobile devices show up at retail shops, car dealerships, grocery stores and eateries and attaches an anonymized ID to those devices. The company uses that data to measure when someone actually visits a business location and how frequently.
http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/adobe-adds-mobile-location-data-audience-platform/303929/
http://placeiq.com/

Report addresses the problem of too many SDKs for mobile apps

It’s no wonder that software development kits (SDKs) are making mobile game and app developers weary. There are hundreds of possible SDKs that developers can integrate into their apps, allowing them to exploit third-party services such as analytics, monetization, engagement, and other features. So SafeDK is releasing a report today that takes a big picture approach to the problem of “SDK fatigue.”
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In advertising, Google has the top SDK with Admob, used in over 90.9 percent of apps. Chartboost is No. 2 at 27.5 percent, followed by Facebook Audience Network at 22.5 percent, UnityAds at 19.5 percent, and Mopub at 19.2 percent.

In mobile apps, the average number of SDKs used in games is 17.5, followed by sports apps at 16.5, shopping at 15.1, news and magazines at 14.9, and weather at 14.4.

http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/24/report-addresses-the-problem-of-too-many-sdks-for-mobile-apps/
http://mobile-sdk-data-trends.safedk.com/full-report-2016

Google has measured 1 billion+ store visits from AdWords ads globally

To help close the online-to-offline attribution gap, Google introduced store visits tracking and measurement in AdWords in December, 2014. Since that time, the company says, it has measured more than 1 billion store visits globally in its effort to show the impact of online advertising on in-store traffic.
In addition, AdWords store visits measurement is now available to 1,000 advertisers in 11 countries, including automotive dealers, Google announced at its annual Performance Summit on Tuesday.

http://searchengineland.com/google-1-billion-store-visits-measured-250237
http://searchengineland.com/hood-google-adwords-measures-store-visits-222905

tisdag 24 maj 2016

The emporium strikes back

Platforms are the future—but not for everyone

In late 2015 the 44 platform firms based in Silicon Valley alone boasted a combined market capitalisation of $2.2 trillion, according to the Centre for Global Enterprise (CGE), a think-tank. Among them, Apple’s iPhone exemplifies best how to run a platform: anybody can write an app, but it has to pass strict tests and the firm keeps 30% of all sales.
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Second, network effects often fizzle. All sides of an online marketplace have to be nurtured in parallel to avoid imbalances, such as having far more sellers than buyers. During the dotcom bubble most business-to-business marketplaces failed because their pursuit of growth led to such lopsidedness. Even firms that had a head start, such as MySpace and Nokia, a social network and a mobile-phone maker respectively, didn’t manage to turn themselves into fully fledged platforms.
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Third, it is not always easy to make money from platforms. Misjudge how much to charge each group of customers, and the flywheel can come to a juddering halt. What is more, for a platform to make good money, switching to a rival has to be costly, argues Andrei Hagiu of Harvard Business School. This risk even hangs over Uber, the fast-expanding taxi-hailing service: using a competitor is easy for both passengers and drivers.
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21699103-platforms-are-futurebut-not-everyone-emporium-strikes-back

Washington Post Pushes Into Ad Tech With New High-Speed Ad Product

You’ve heard of Facebook Instant Articles. Think of this as Washington Post instant advertising.

The new “Fuse” ads are designed to render instantly when clicked on, without requiring people to leave the Washington Post’s desktop site, mobile site or app. Like many Web ads, the Fuse units are placed within content, such as in between paragraphs of an article. But when people click or tap these ads, they render across the majority of a person’s screen and allow for further interaction without sending users to another site or app.
These custom ads are “pre-cached” and hosted by the Washington Post, meaning they are designed to significantly reduce the latency common with most digital ads that are clicked on, said Jarrod Dicker, the company’s head of ad product and engineering.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-post-pushes-into-ad-tech-with-new-high-speed-ad-product-1463738400

Star Wars Stormtroopers Lampa

Shoutly - Blogga om din favorit och få betalt

https://app.shoutly.com/sv/marketplace?sort=newest&audience=se&search=star%20wars

Why buy buttons on Pinterest and Instagram haven't taken off for retailers

“There is so much content on Pinterest, Instagram and other discovery engines, so any individual piece of content gets very little visibility, and even less conversion.”

http://digiday.com/platforms/buy-buttons-pinterest-instagram-havent-taken-off-retailers/

Russian 'FindFace' app identifies strangers with 70 per cent accuracy

FindFace is an identification app created by Alexander Kabakov, 29, and Artem Kukharenko, 26.

FindFace can identify random passersby with about 70 per cent accuracy, given two conditions: you need to snap a photo of them, and they need to have a profile on social networking site VK.com.

Previously known as VKontakte, VK is the dominant social network in eastern Europe, especially among those who speak Russian.
The "Russian Facebook" boasts some 200 million accounts, and VK.com is the third most visited website in Russia, according to website ranker Alexa.

http://www.watoday.com.au/technology/web-culture/russian-findface-app-identifies-strangers-with-70-per-cent-accuracy-20160518-goyjjc.html

http://findface.ru/

måndag 23 maj 2016

Most Americans Don’t Know About Ride-Sharing and the ‘Gig Economy’

Pew polled 4,787 American adults on their usage and awareness of services that are variously called the sharing economy, the on-demand economy or the gig economy. For most Americans, this technology has not permeated their lives yet.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/05/19/most-americans-dont-know-about-ride-sharing-and-the-gig-economy/

Inside The Million-Machine Clickfraud Botnet

Online advertising is a multi-billion dollar business mostly ran by Google, Yahoo or Bing via AdSense-like programs. The current generation of clickbots such as the Redirector.Paco Trojan have taken abuse to a whole new level, burning through companies’ advertising budget at an unprecedented pace.
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The malware’s objective is to redirect all traffic performed when using a popular search engine (such as Google, Yahoo or Bing) and replace the results with others obtained from a Google custom search. The goal is to help cyber-criminals earn money from the AdSense program.

https://labs.bitdefender.com/2016/05/inside-the-million-machine-clickfraud-botnet/

fredag 20 maj 2016

Pomellato, Beyond Milano

Pomellato is decidedly young, in both age and outlook, for a fine jewellery house. Its signature of colourful semi-precious stones or “alternatively precious,” in the lingo of the company, cut in large unusual shapes, such as squares — an unconventional move in the fine jewellery market, where rubies, diamonds and emeralds are integral to the output of most houses — has made Pomellato unique.

In 2013, Kering (then PPR) took an majority stake in the Pomellato Group, which comprises the Pomellato brand and Dodo, a more accessible Italian jewellery line, with the explicit aim to “step up the pace of its growth and expand its geographic footprint,”
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Market sources estimate the company drove sales of between €200 million and €220 million in 2015.
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Pomellato will benefit from the experience Kering has gained in branded jewellery with Parisian jewellery house Boucheron, which was acquired by Gucci Group in 2000.

http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/intelligence/pomellato-kering-fine-jewellery-brand-grows-beyond-milan
http://www.pomellato.com/wx

Audio fingerprinting being used to track web users, study finds

A wide-scale study of online trackers carried out by researchers at Princeton University has identified a new technique being used to try to strip web users of their privacy, as well as quantifying the ongoing usage of some better-known tracking techniques.
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Other tracking techniques they looked at include WebRTC IP, canvas fingerprinting, canvas font fingerprinting and battery API15.
While privacy tools such as Ghostery and Firefox’s third-party cookie blocker were rated as effective by the researchers, they found “obscure trackers” pose more of a challenge, concluding that: “The long tail of fingerprinting scripts are largely unblocked by current privacy tools.”

http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/19/audio-fingerprinting-being-used-to-track-web-users-study-finds/
http://randomwalker.info/publications/OpenWPM_1_million_site_tracking_measurement.pdf

torsdag 19 maj 2016

China Fakes 488 Million Social Media Posts a Year: Study

China’s government fabricates about 488 million social media comments a year -- nearly the same as one day of Twitter’s total global volume -- in a massive effort to distract its citizens from bad news and sensitive political debates, according to a study.
Three scholars led by Gary King, a political scientist at Harvard University who specializes in using quantitative data to analyze public policy, ran the first systematic study of China’s online propaganda workers, known as the Fifty Cent Party because they are popularly believed to be paid by the government 50 Chinese cents for every social media post.
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About half of the positive messages appear on government websites, and the rest are injected into the 80 billion social media posts that enter China’s Internet. That means one of every 178 social media posts on China’s micro blogs is made up by the government, the researchers said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-19/china-seen-faking-488-million-internet-posts-to-divert-criticism

CoCycles - Google Analytics

https://cocycles.com/
https://cocycles.com/search/google%20analytics/1
https://cocycles.com/search/google%20analytics/1/unit/272408264360000956
https://www.sitepoint.com/find-javascript-code-snippets-by-functionality-with-cocycles/

The Death of the Great American Sporting Goods Store

As of 2015, sporting goods stores in the US were bringing in as much as $48 billion in annual revenue, according to IBISWorld, up from $39.8 billion in 2012.
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There are an incredible number of national and regional multi-brand sports retailers in America: Dick's Sporting Goods, Cabela's, Champs Sports, Bass Pro Shops, REI, Academy Sports, Modell's, and Big 5 Sporting Goods Corporation, to name a few — and these are just the ones that still exist today.
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The market is also now congested with brands jumping into athleisure, the booming category that has caused the athletic wear market to grow 42 percent, to $270 billion, over the last seven years, according to Morgan Stanley. Seemingly every company, from high (Tory Burch, Net-a-Porter) to low (Target, Forever 21) is getting involved, eager to capitalize on a trend that shows no signs of slowing. While a typical Sports Authority shopper might be different from a Lululemon one, Mintel senior research analyst Diana Smith believes "there's definitely more of an overlap today."
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"The lines between wholesale and retail faded from black and white to gray to nonexistent," Greg Baldwin, vice president of merchandising at sporting goods chain Schuylkill Valley Sports, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I now compete with 90 percent of my suppliers via e-commerce, physical stores, or a combination of the two. The importance of the retailer as a pipeline to the consumer has been greatly diminished."
http://www.racked.com/2016/5/18/11692166/sports-authority-bankruptcy-dicks-sporting-goods-modells