Recently, Clearspring Technologies [disclosure: I used to work there.] publicly announced its new direction as an audience buying platform, leveraging the widespread distribution of its AddThis social sharing tool to aggregate intent-oriented data from keyword searches performed by web users (AddThis accomplishes this by capturing search query information contained in the referring URL string when ...

Google’s acquisition of YouTube in October 2006 was supposed to usher in a new era of opportunity for video creation, distribution and monetization that leveraged the power of the internet. Now, three and a half years later, the biggest benefactors of the boom in online video consumption have primarily been YouTube’s founders and investors as ...

2010 is likely to go down as the Year of the Audience in online display advertising as marketers, looking for better returns from their investments in a challenging economy, are turning to search advertising’s strengths to help reach specific individuals across the internet. Search is the largest, and continues to be the fastest growing, segment ...

The future of the mobile industry is pretty clear- it’s all about data. Data revenues have allowed U.S. carriers to keep subscriber ARPU’s relatively stable in the face of 30% declines in voice revenues over the past five years. Look no further than Verizon Wireless’ recent announcement to allow unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls over its ...

Now that the long-rumored Apple tablet has finally been unveiled as the iPad, we can turn our attention towards figuring out what Apple’s next big product launch might be. Based on the evolution of the company’s devices, software and recent business discussions the answer actually seems pretty clear: Apple should build a true web-enabled home ...

While the media has enjoyed positioning the recent launch of Google’s Android-based Nexus One “superphone” manufactured by HTC as a direct competitive threat to Apple’s iPhone, I agree with Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital that this is the wrong question to try to answer as Apple and Google are taking very different approaches to the ...

Last month Joe Marchese, President of SocialVibe, authored a guest article on MediaPost entitled The Widget is Dead. Then earlier this month Clearspring announced that it was deprecating Launchpad, its original widget sharing platform [disclosure: that company pays my bills], adding fuel to the question- have widgets become relics of the Web 2.0 era? The ...