Business and Marketing From Around the Web

Phil Farhi, group product manager at YouTube, announced that TrueView in-stream video ads have expanded their reach to mobile devices. TrueView in-stream videos can appear on YouTube Videos (Watch pages on YouTube), on video publisher pages in the Google Display Network (includes YouTube), and on video publisher pages outside the network.

TrueView advertisers are only charged when the video ad is seen through to completion or hits the 30-second mark if it’s a longer ad. The ads are skippable after five seconds. Google says this option allows for better engaged viewers who only watch the ads they want to and interaction rates are higher.

About.com, the first content farmer and per-curser to Yahoo! and Google, has been sold, changing hands Sunday night from one of the world’s most elite content organizations, The New York Times Co., to one of its shrewdest, Barry Diller’s IAC, which agreed to acquire it for $300 million in cash.

Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides.  You could call it a digital slideshow, but that wouldn’t be fair to Prezi. Indeed, “a digital slideshow” is the perfect description for PowerPoint: the famous Microsoft presentation program that has ruled supreme for the past 20 years.

Prezi is something different. The program was launched in 2009 and championed by TED Founder, Chris Anderson.   This month, Prezi rolled out two new features: the ability to fade text in an out, and the ability to plot your presentation along a 3D background. Your presentations will not be locked into a slide: they can be plotted across a never ending whiteboard.

I would like to see a similar approach be taken to websites. Websites have functioned the same way since the 1990’s: scroll up and down a page, click on a link and load next page. There are few exceptions and they usually involve a designer having fun with a slideshow plugin. Imagine if a website could be built like a Prezi presentation. If you could go up, down, left, right, and diagonally. In essence, if the navigation worked more like Willy Wonka’s glass elevator. 

The website design model has been fundamentally tweaked in mobile browsers. Mobile apps allow websites to load differently: often ‘flipping’ through articles, rotating, etc. On the web, the design model is more conservative.

There is a ripe opportunity for a developer to create a CMS alternative to Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr, that navigates radically differently. The Prezi design concept applied to a website navigation experience.

PREZI introduction video.

Marketers have built a temple that needs to be torn down. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century — poorly. Now, with emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioral data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, we have much better ways of targeting potential customers.

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