November 11, 2006
Netflix Prize
The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) prizes.
The Grand Prize is $1,000,000. To qualify for the Grand Prize, there must be at least a 10% improvement over Netflix's current Cinematch system. To keep things interesting, in addition to the Grand Prize, Netflix is offering a $50,000 Progress Prize each year the contest runs. It goes to the team whose design shows the most improvement over the previous year’s.
The Contest entry period commences on October 2, 2006 (00:00:00 UTC) and continues until the Grand Prize is awarded (the "Contest Term"). No additional registrations or Contest submissions of qualifying set predictions will be accepted after the close of the Contest Term. Netflix reserves the right to cancel the Contest after October 2, 2011 in its sole discretion.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 04:52 AM
Dove Evolution
Dove’s “Dove Evolution” viral video has brought three times more traffic to their CampaignForRealBeauty.com site than their Super Bowl ad did last year.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 04:12 AM
share your look beta
ShareYourLook is an online community for fashion addicts, trendsetters, shoppers, and designers from around the world to share looks and ideas about personal style.
See how people in Tokyo, Stockholm, or Idaho are putting their own spin on the latest trends. Discover what men and women in London and New York are coveting this season. Best of all, discover how other people’s style can influence your look. ShareYourLook is designed to inspire and inform, so we encourage helpful comments and thoughtful critiques.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 02:58 AM
Why mobile will be the largest media market of all time
There's a great article by Fierce Wireless' Monthly Columnist Gerry Purdy. In this month's column, Gerry offers his analyis of the mobile media market and speaks to his theory that "Mobile will be the largest media market for advertising of all time." While that's a rather profound comment in light of the billions of dollars spent in advertising for print, TV, radio and Internet, mobile is destined to be very important - likely the most important - media market of all time.
Go read about it on Fierce Wireless.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 02:48 AM
Helio Introduce GPS Buddy Tracking on Cell Phones
With instant messaging programs, it's easy to tell whether a friend is at the computer, ready to chat. Despite its immense popularity, the concept of the buddy list hasn't made a smooth transition to the mobile world.
Now a small cell phone provider named Helio LLC is introducing a service for its youthful target audience that not only lets you know whether a friend's phone is turned on, but tells you where that person is.
The new "Buddy Beacon" feature uses GPS satellite technology to track up to 25 fellow Helio subscribers. Their locations are plotted on a map displayed on the screen of a pricey new handset that's also being launched on Thursday.
The user can see the nearest address for each buddy's location. If one user notices that a friend is nearby, a call can be placed directly from the application. As you might expect, a person has to consent to being tracked on someone else's list of Beacon buddies.
The telecommunications bubble of the late 1990s included countless unfulfilled promises about the impending arrival of cell phones with robust location-tracking capabilities.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 02:16 AM
FashMatch
FashMatch is an online community for anyone who shares a love for clothes, fashion and dressing stylishly.
FashMatch is based on two things: The first one is fun. Creating your own looks via the terrific brands FashMatch not only provides you with an endless source of entertainment, but also saves you time finding the look that is right for you. The second one is sharing the fun! Like a great friend, FashMatch is the ideal companion, offering to the visitors an opportunity not to only be their own stylist but also an influence and inspiration someone else.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 02:03 AM
VeriSign, Coca-Cola enable mobile payments
[from FierceWireless]
The idea of purchasing a soda via a mobile phone appears to have come full circle. Six years ago everyone was looking at Japan and saying, "They even have the capability to buy sodas from a vending machine with their mobile phone! Look how far ahead Japan is!"
Well, six years later, VeriSign's intelligent software is enabling wireless customers in Austria to make purchases at Coca-Cola vending machines. It's good to see other markets finally catching up with Japan, albeit six years later. VeriSign announced a deal with wireless carriers mobilkom austria and the ONE to bring this mobile payment function to more than 2 million customers. VeriSign developed the technical interface between Coca-Cola machines, cellular operators and the payment system for the more than 100 beverage vending machines around Austria enabled for mobile payment.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 01:59 AM
Synthravels - the 1st Online Virtual Travel Agency
Tough travelers are always looking further.
And now the new frontier of travel is out of our world.
It is hidden in the invisible geography of the cyberspace.
In a few years, this geography has been expanding, broadening in every direction, configuring new territories, inhabited by new societies.
These are the territories of virtual worlds, synthetic places that exists only in cyberspace, but that exist 24 hours a day.
In virtual worlds you can find everything, the good and the bad, the poor and the rich, sumptuous castles and futuristic space bases, luscious women and rough warriors. But, most of all, you can find many lands to discover, extraordinary places to visit, that will ravish your imagination. Traveling in these territories will be like dreaming: you will see exotic landscapes where among prehistoric trees break out bizarre surrealistic architectures, strange fantasy regions where the elves built astonishing temples, synthetic deserts covered with post-atomic ruins, seas of pixels where float ghostly vessels, organic architectures that conceal undercover avatars.
Discovering these territories is a great deal, but it is not so easy.
Many worlds request specific skills to be seen in their integrity, and if you want to discover the best, you must pass many hours in front of your monitor, accomplishing weary tasks. Many problems for people who want just enjoy a trip in a virtual world, just to see how it is made, to try a new experience and tell friends about it.
Synthravels is the first organization to offer a complete guide service to all the people who want to make a tour in virtual worlds without knowing these new realities, even if they have never put their feet in these strange, synthetic grounds.
The tours and the destinations are chosen by the staff of Synthravels, composed by programmers, architects, experienced video gamers.
Posted by richard ting at November 11, 2006, 01:46 AM
November 10, 2006
Nokia: Growth opps in China
[from FierceWireless]
Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, said China provides the biggest growth opportunities for the company and the wireless industry in the years ahead, which is a sentiment in keeping with the company's strategy as outlined last month. China added nearly 49.7 million new mobile subscribers in the first nine months of 2006, bringing the country's subscriber base up to 443.2 million. Over the next three years, Nokia expects 160 million more subs in China. Current subscribers are going to want to replace their handsets: 55 percent of subs will do so this year and 80 percent will look for a replacement phone come 2010, according to Nokia.
"In China, the mobile phone is very much a substitute for a PC, meaning that people get their first Internet experience via mobile phones instead of PCs," Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasuvuo said. "I think we can take value from the PC market in this domain--maybe more easily than in the markets that are dominated by traditional PCs."
Posted by richard ting at November 10, 2006, 11:50 AM
Microsoft launches ‘Agora’ product-loading service for web search
[from internet retailer]
Microsoft Corp.’s new service for uploading product data to its Internet search index is designed to make an e-retailer’s products easier to find in the company’s new shopping search engine, Windows Live Product Search.
The new product uploading service, code-named Agora, could make it more likely that shoppers will find what they want within Windows Live Product Search, says Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp., which provides services and technology to online retailers. Using Agora should also boost retailers’ natural and paid-search rankings in Windows Live Product Search, he adds.
Search engine spiders often miss products when crawling retail web sites to capture data for a search index, leaving some shoppers unable to find what they want, Wingo adds. “So some shoppers may go instead to a comparison shopping engine,” where retailers pay listing fees, he says.
Agora is similar in function to Google Inc.’s Google Base, which retailers can use to load product data to Google’s search index. The use of both Agora and Google Base could increase online shopping directly through Microsoft and Google search engines, reducing the amount of traffic to comparison shopping engines, says Wingo, who today launched a comparison shopping engine blog, CSEStrategies.com.
Google Base has already proved to be lucrative to retailers who have used it to boost their product presence in Google searches, which enables them to cut back on the more costly route of listing products in comparison search engines, Wingo says, adding that Agora can be expected to have the same effect.
“Comparison shopping engines are at risk, because they’re used to getting a lot of traffic through search engines,” Wingo says. “If shoppers find what they need at the search engine layer, they may not need to go to the comparison search engines.”
Posted by richard ting at November 10, 2006, 03:11 AM
November 09, 2006
Lebron IV Forbidden City Limited | Nov 11 to 15
For the love of the game or the love of the shoes, for five days only you have the opportunity to score. Limited to only 23 pairs a day, You can get the LBJ IV for $230 but only through a 5-day scavenger release in San Francisco's Chinatown. Check inside.nikebasketball.com for the daily clues.
All pairs are accompanied with a limited edition shirt and are encased in a premium wooden box modeled on China's fabled Forbidden City of Kings. 100 percent of the proceeds will be donated to the Chinatown YMCA basketball program.
Posted by richard ting at November 09, 2006, 10:13 PM
Coke, Pepsi, Nike, Adidas Top-In Game Advertisers
People recalling in-game ads... that can't be a good thing.
by Dan Dormer
Gamasutra is reporting that Phoenix Marketing International have released a study examining the effectiveness of in-game advertising. The report indicated that Coke, Pepsi, Nike and Adidas were the brands the most "active adult gamers" could recall. 54% of the gamers surveyed could recall at least some of the in-game advertising from sports games, such as Madden NFL 07. It also should be mentioned that the company asked gamers to recall not specific advertisements featured in-game, but products they remembered seeing. Along with the aforementioned brands, KFC, Burger King, McDonald's, Samsung, BMW, Ford, Gatorade and Mountain Dew (Extreme!!) were also some of the popular products gamers recalled seeing. And the majority of the games players could recall ads from were sports games -- four out of the top five being not only sports games, but EA titles.
Posted by richard ting at November 09, 2006, 05:51 AM
Nokia preinstalls Yandex search engine on phones for Russia
Finnish telecommunications equipment and mobile handset producer Nokia has started offering users of its smartphones a search engine provided by Russian major Internet portal Yandex, Nokia said in a press release Thursday.
Nokia's smartphones have an application called Mobile Search, which provides users direct access to search engines. A spokesperson with Nokia's Russian representative office told Prime-Tass that initially Mobile Search had access only to Yahoo's search engine, while now users would have an option to choose between the two engines.
The Yandex engine will be preinstalled in Nokia N80 Internet Edition smartphones, which is scheduled for sale in Russia sometime in January-March 2007, while users of Nokia's other smartphones can download Mobile Search with Yandex support from the company's Web site, Nokia said.
Nokia accounted for 26.5% of the Russian market's sales in physical terms in January-June, Russia's largest mobile handset retailer Euroset reported earlier.