Archives: March 2009

Life Magazine has been reborn on the Web.

Life.com will be a joint venture between Time Inc. and Getty Images Inc., pairing both companies’ 7 million strong photo collections to create a comprehensive online photo experience. Some photos date back to the 1850s. 3,000 new Getty photos will be added daily.

Life began its life as a general interest magazine in 1883. It was purchased by Henry Luce in 1936 and transformed into a glossy with a strong emphasis on photojournalism. It appeared weekly until 1972, occasionally until 1978, monthly until 2000; returned as a newspaper supplement in 2004 before ceasing publication entirely in 2007.

“Whatever you want to look at, whether it happened an hour ago, a century ago, or any time in between, you’ll be able to find it quickly, easily, and for free, says CEO Andrew Blau in a press release. “LIFE.com’s mission is to allow you to explore your world through the world’s greatest images.”

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Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Disney’s TV arm has signed a deal with YouTube that will bring short-from content from various Disney properties to the site.

As part of the deal, ESPN clips will turn up on YouTube next month and ABC News and entertainment content will begin appearing in May.

The NYTimes’ Brian Stelter also reports, “Disney is in negotiations with Hulu to take an equity stake in the site, which is a joint venture of NBC Universal and the News Corporation, according to a person close to the talks who requested anonymity while discussing internal deliberations. A Hulu spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.”

TVWeek reports the Disney/ABC and ESPN channels will be available to U.S. online viewers and will launch with YouTube’s already established InVideo overlay ads and regular display graphics. Disney Media also will be allowed to test pre-roll video ads under the agreement.

Revision3, the Web video producer, and iWidgets, the social syndication company, are teaming up to bring Revision’s 3 hit web show Diggnation directly to fans. As part of the deal Revision3 will syndicate Diggnation clips to Facebook for the first time.

The Diggnation widget can be found on the Diggnation Facebook Fan Page.

Diggnation is a weekly tech/Web culture show based on the top Digg social bookmarking news stories, featuring hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. Episodes air every Wednesday at 6pmET. The show is seen by more than 250,000 viewers per week.

The AP’s Rachel Metz writes breaks down a report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP about online ad revenue. It totaled $6.1 billion during Q4 2008. That’s up $154 million or 3% from the same period in 2007.

In the most recent quarter, revenue from search ads, which make up the largest segment of the online advertising market, rose 13% to $2.8 billion. Revenue from graphical “display ads,” the second-largest segment, fell 4% to $2 billion.

Mobile ad network Mojiva is crowing that it has added several Nielsen Business Media sites to its premium publisher network. The new additions include mobile editions of The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek and Brandweek. Other sites that are part of the Mojiva Premium Mobile Marketing Network include NBC local, Star Tribune, iSports and HopStop.

Mojiva also shared the news that it has delivered two billion ads to mobile consumers. It hit the new milestone just eight weeks after serving up its one-billionth ad. Not bad for a company that only launched the service 10 months ago.

Black Beat magazine publisher Dorchester Media is bringing content related to its coverage of urban, hip-hop and rap music to mobile phones. The company hooked up with Skycore, which operates the Cellyspace mobile messaging platform, for the launch of Black Beat‘s Pimp Your Phone lineup of mobile wallpapers.

The debut collection includes wallpapers of Christina Aguilera, Nelly, Katy Perry, Pretty Ricky’s Spectacular and a few others.

Each wallpaper is assigned its own keyword. To purchase one, users text the keyword to 33563. The wallpapers cost 99 cents each plus whatever messaging charges apply. Details and keywords are on Black Beat‘s Web site.

Wanting to help iPhone application developers get their goods noticed among the tens of thousands of available applications, mobile ad platform AdMob has unveiled the AdMob iPhone Download Exchange.

The new service essentially lets iPhone app developers in the AdMob network “allocate a portion of their ad inventory to our new iPhone Download Exchange and begin helping each other drive downloads,” according to AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui.

More specifically, the iPhone Download Exchange is meant to:

* Drive application downloads for developers in a new way.

* Maximize effectiveness of exchange ads by ensuring they only run on devices that do not already have the same application installed, as well as by targeting the correct OS version, geography and device (iPhone vs. iPod touch).

* Simplify the ad creation process by automatically developing the ad creative.

* Provide reporting on the ad impressions allocated by developers to the exchange and the number of downloads generated.

*Give developers detailed control over the ratio of exchange ads to paid ads running in their application.

AdMob will allocate Download Exchange ad inventory among the exchange members based on various criteria. More info is at admob.com/exchange.

Mobile social community MocoSpace has topped six-million registered users, just over three months after it reached the five-million-user milestone.

MocoSpace users can create profiles, upload and share pictures, chat, IM, blog and otherwise communicate from within the application. According to a recent report from Openwave on the North American mobile social network market, MocoSpace members spend an average 6.05 minutes per session – much longer than they spend with social network leaders MySpace and Facebook. The Openwave report found that MySpace mobile users average 3.79 minutes per session, while Facebook mobile users spend a mere 1.89 minutes.

The Boston-based MocoSpace credits word-of-mouth, with its current members inviting their friends to join, for much of its recent growth.

MySpace has teamed up with business directory Citysearch to create a socially-oriented search portal within the MySpace community. The result is a new section called MySpace Local. This new directory is not yet available, but will be launched in beta later on this week.

Citysearch is bringing its database to the table, while MySpace is going to be “socializing” the whole affair. In doing so, businesses will be able to connect with each other, and users will be able to connect with businesses. MySpace Local will over listing pages for small businesses, which will cover three categories at launch: Restaurants, Bars and Nightife. On each listing page, users will be able to rate, review and share media for each business. Users will also be able to add the business to their profile, share a business listing with friends, and add it to their bookmarks.
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Cricket Communications is offering its customers some new perks. Actually, it launched a new opt-in service called MyPerks that delivers free content like weather, gas prices, trivia or celebrity gossip to the phone’s idle screen. The content is accompanied by “occasional offers” from Cricket’s advertising partners including Jack in the Box, 1-800-Flowers, ESPN, Wal-mart, Dairy Queen, Progressive Insurance and Jiffy Lube.

All content and offers are currently tailored by location. Cricket anticipates adding targeting by user preference in the near future to make the service more relevant.

Once users have downloaded the MyPerks application, they’ll start receiving their desired content when the phone is idle and have the option to click on the banner ad or ignore it to get right to the content. Because the service takes advantage of the phone’s idle time, it doesn’t interrupt phone calls, text messaging or other activities.

Cricket MyPerks is powered by Mobile Posse and is currently available for download on select Motorola, Samsung and UTStarcom phones.