Hornswaggled

So Google decides to have a little fun at eBay’s expense and holds a ‘Freedom Party’ right before eBay hosts its own eBay sellers event. This was an attempt by Google to gain some momentum in allowing Google Checkout as a payment method in the eBay marketplace. Well eBay didnt take to this idea to fondly and abruptly pulled ALL their ads on Google, they have a lot of ads by the way and I would be suprised if eBay isnt one of Google’s biggest advertisers. On the other hand, I would bet that Google is eBay’s largest traffic source.
I for one wouldn’t want to piss off Google too much, Google could just counter and drop eBay and all thier properties from their index. Then what would eBay counter with?

I think eBay is in the wrong here, and Google took the high road when they could of played this game and everyone would of lost, especially eBay.
You can read more over at TC.

In the last year or so, there’s been plenty of talk about creating mobile phones for the elderly where their needs may be different (bigger buttons and bigger displays are a frequent request… along with fewer features). However, who knew that one of the complaints of the elderly (at least according to Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo) is that the people they were talking to talk too fast?

Apparently it’s an issue, and for some reason, asking them to speak slower wasn’t an effective solution. So, the wizards at Fujitsu have built a special phone for DoCoMo which will be targeted at the elderly that (no, seriously) will slow… down… the… speech… of… the… person… you’re… talking… to. It’s designed to slow down their speech to about 70% of the speed that they’re actually talking, elongating each word. However, to avoid too much of the “lag” problem, it makes sure that you never get more than 1 full second behind. If it hits a second, it speeds back up to real time.

The phone has all the other standard features of a phone for the elderly (large display, large buttons), and also a built in pedometer and an 80-decibel alarm in case they “they should fall over and need to attract attention.” Unfortunately, when someone comes to help them in person, the elderly person (apparently) won’t be able to understand their rescuer since they’ll probably be speaking too fast and there’s still no tool for them to slow down the speech of the person standing in front of you.

From Techdirt.

I just noticed that eBay is promoting StumbleUpon directly within the eBay marketplace. See the screen shot below.

Here is another image of the small ad, notice the lower right hand

button.

Melodeo is proud announce a new mobile and web service called nuTsie beta, this currently FREE mobile music service allows consumers to get their entire iTunes library on their mobile phone. The nuTsie free public beta allows anyone to easily shuffle through all of their iTunes music and playlists in hi-fi quality on their mobile phone or on the Web.

Here is a short video Melodeo has produced that explains nuTsie.

[youtube]apIogJrGTRw[/youtube]

nuTsie allows users to access all of their favorite iTunes music on a wide variety of today’s most popular phone models, with no expensive device upgrade required.

Typically, when you buy a song on iTunes, it can be played only on an iTunes device, such as an iPod or a cellphone that comes loaded with iTunes (and only a few such devices exist). With nuTsie, you are shifting only your playlist — and not the music tracks themselves — from iTunes to your cellphone, allowing you to get around DRM issues. The music streams from Melodeo’s servers. In essence, you are listening to Melodeo’s copy of the song, not the encrypted one you bought from iTunes.nuTsie does not download actual iTunes song files, so there are no storage issues, sideloading hassles or piracy worries. Instead, nuTsie works by referencing a consumer’s iTunes library and playlists and then making the same track titles available for streaming from nuTsie’s servers via the Web and mobile phone.

nuTsie combines Melodeo’s innovative streaming music technology with an enhanced “radio rules” shuffle algorithm that ensures artists, record labels and music publishers are paid for every use of a song. nuTsie is also the only non-Apple music service to play “Fair Play” music purchased by download from iTunes.

The nuTsie service can also be accessed via a browser on any Web-connected computer. Consumers can listen to their iTunes music just about anytime and anywhere with nuTsie.

Hey Guys. I have been asked for a ton of Joost invites and I figured by now everyone that wanted one already was on board. If your still looking for Joost please go here.

If for any reason you cant get one there let me know and I can help you out.

I just logged into an Adwords account that I manage and saw the above image. Click the image to see the larger legible version. I did not sign up for the beta access to this product and really don’t know much about it. It is very interesting though. I know Google was having a difficult time getting into traditional advertising outlets such as newspaper and radio but this look like a big step forward in that direction.

If I choose to ‘Learn More’ I am taken to this page.

I am not really interested in Radio spots as I have tried them in the past with zero results. I am interested to see Google’s approach on this so I may be looking into this in the future. Especially if they are willing to foot the initial bill, they are offering a 400 dollar credit to try out the system.

Here is a quick Overview:

• Google Launches Audio Ads (Radio Ads for now)
• Google will credit you 400 bucks if you create and run a spot by June 30, 2007
• the Audio Ads FAQ’s

It looks like the lock is off on Joost. I received this email earlier today and according to the email they have given unlimited invites to all. If you would like an invite just leave a comment and I will send them out tonight. See the email below:

Hello casey,We hope you’re enjoying your Joost experience.We’d like to share some good news and celebrate the launch of the new
Joost beta – Now For Friends. This means you can now invite as many friends as you want to try out Joost. To access your invites, log onto Joost, go to My Joost and fill in your friends’ details in the Invite Friends widget box.

If you’re running out of friends, you can make new ones by letting people know you’ve got invites. To help with this, we’ve made a few goodies especially for you, which you can find at http://www.joost.com/share/goodies.html.

Last but not least, we invite you to enjoy the variety of new shows we’re introducing each week. This week will bring you a host of over 40 new channels in the US including Adult Swim, five new channels from National Geographic, new channels like Spike TV from Viacom, great comedy from Heavy, and classic series from Hasbro such as The Transformers.

And that’s just the beginning.

This is good news to all you that were waiting for invites!

In case you are unfamiliar StumbleUpon is a user driven network to find new sites.

The basics are as follows:

• Install Toolbar
• Click a few categories you are interested in
• Hit Stumble
• You are whisked away to a new site that users with similar interests liked
• You can vote thumbs up or thumbs down on the new site
• The system learns your likes and dislikes while showing you more and more interesting sites.
• Advertisers can pay to have their sites show up during your stumbles and you still have the ability to thumbs up or thumbs down the site.
• You can pay 20 bucks a year to get a premium membership to skip the ads.

On a side note eBay acquired them in a bidding war with Google about a month ago.

For the advertiser its great. A highly targeted, attentive audience. The only problem is that you must be showing something of interest, otherwise guess what; they stumbled on to the next site, or even worse gave you thumbs down. Once you have the campaign up and running you can see the outcome of your efforts with these graphs.

This next graph is for a software company targeted in the entrepreneur category.

I have used Stumble Ads for 3 to 4 different sites and have had great success with acceptance in the community. One campaign has over a 90% acceptance rate with about 20 people per day liking the site enough to thumbs up it.

Now for the bad part, as far as conversions go I haven’t seen much yet. Brand recognition is where StumbleUpon shines.

When setting up the account you can choose from an assortment of preset categories.

As you can see from the above images you can really limit where your ads are shown. You should try and be as specific as possible when doing this to get the best result.

I would recommend Stumble Ads for brand marketing. You may not get a lot of sales off the bat but you can measure your efforts and get that nice warm and fuzzy feeling inside when the community likes what you are offering.

If your answer is yes then this is all you need to wipe away that frustration with a good laugh. Just take this foam brick and toss it at that annoying colleague or even at that new plasma TV that you shelled out 3k for when the signal drops from 1080p to 480i, nobody likes that.

This is one of those things that every office should have. A word of caution though, I would suggest throwing this at someone who has heart problems. I dont think that causing heart failure is something you want to be responsible for.

These foam bricks can be yours for about 20 bucks. Click the image to go to the fake brick homepage.