Leadpile’s Blog

Believe it or not, Apple iTunes might have some competition coming from some new/old players in town!
In recent news, rumors are rumbling about Google possibly getting into the music service business. Potentially, with search results there could be an opportunity to purchase music from your favorite artist. This is big for Google and possibly something Apple will need to worry about.
If it wasn’t enough having recent news about Google and music services, Facebook is now in the news for it’s interest in music sales too! This is no rumor because Facebook has already started selling music in it’s online gift store. This is great news with the idea of how innovative online companies are trying to be, however possibly a little nerve racking for the online music mogul- Apple iTunes. May the music race BEGIN!!!!

How many people actually back up any data they have on their cell phones or computers? The answer is probably not enough do. I don’t know about you, but if I even forget my cell phone at home I feel totally “naked” and can’t wait to have it in my possession once again. We have all become so dependent on our cell phones, and even our computers as a source for any and all information we need to function. Unfortunately, those that were carrying around a Sidekick phone, and had the Microsoft service (Specifically Danger Inc), had to deal with a horrible situation of having had all their data lost. This is something none of us want to experience. So how do we prevent this kind of thing from happening to us? Really there is not a 100% way to prevent this sort of thing from happening if your data is being stored elsewhere. I think the only thing any of us can really do is look into a service or specific software that can back up our data and everything else that we store on our phones. Let’s take a guess how many people that just lost their data on their Sidekicks, don’t learn from this hard lesson of backing up your data? Do we need to all go through some scary situation like this to learn the hard way? Hope not!!!

There are some great new changes that have been added to the Leadpile seller account interface.
LeadPile has not only changed the visual appearance of our seller interface, but we have also added several convenient new features:
*Earnings Trends – simple overview of your account statistics
*Top Performing Offers – current LeadPile offers that are in high demand
*Today’s Activity Summary – overview of what happened today
*Easy to Use Navigation Bar- organized tabs to navigate efficiently
With the new interface being more intuitive and better organized, we hope that you find the new layout and design more user friendly, more appealing to the eye, and best of all more functional!

Sitting at my desk I can look around and see a LG phone, Dunkin’s cup, Apple computer, and the list can just go on and on. Whether it’s billboards, magazines, people’s clothing, or on the internet, advertising is literally everywhere. But where hasn’t advertising really tapped into yet? Your cell phone.
Mobile advertising is a market that many companies are trying to get more into. With everyone and their mother having a smart phone, it only makes sense for this to be the next big step in advertising. According to emarketer.com, the projected spend for 2009 in mobile advertising is 416 million, and it will soar up to $1.56 billion by 2013. Currently, the main forms of mobile advertising are through texting and banner ads. The mobile banner ads work in a similar fashion as internet banner ads. With mobile texting advertisers can purchase packages to meet their needs (packages can include a certain number of texts per month along with keywords) and then send them out to all their contacts.
Personally, I think that mobile advertising is great. Just the other week, I received a text for free admission to a concert because I had been at that same venue earlier that week. All I had to do is just show the text at the front door and I was in. No strings attached! Marketing strategies with incentives always seem to work the best. It gets the consumer in the door (for free in this case) and it still brings in revenue with other purchases such as food and beverages. If this isn’t a win win situation, then I do not know what is.

With all the fancy phones that we all have, there are challenges that have come up for the wireless carriers. Unlike the internet, wireless carries are concerned about regulations being implemented that would allow users to freely go to any and every website(s) on their phones. They see this as a real issue because there are designated wireless towers in specific areas that are providing the wireless service for those in the area. If wireless carries are not able to manage traffic that their users can utilize, then certain “internet surfing” is going to ultimately affect those around them. For instance, there are certain websites/applications that are considered bandwidth “hogs”. This is not necessarily an issue when on the internet, however certain sites/applications are affecting the service of those around you because of the “hogs”. For this reason, wireless companies are wanting the traffic to be managed so you can not access certain websites or applications, because they do not want the others to feel the affects from this “internet surfing”.
So what is the best way to resolve this sort of issue? Should there be regulations put on wireless customers on what websites or applications they utilize on their cell phones? My concern is this is only the beginning of what our cell phones and internet are going to be able to do, so isn’t there a way to maybe increase wireless towers around our country to overcome this potential issue? If we are facing issues with not enough bandwidth for everyone to go to any website or use any application they want, then isn’t it just a matter of adding more service?

It looks like big brand names are maybe seeing that technology (the internet specifically) is where they need to look to to promote their products bigger and better. In recent years, luxury brands have not had to look at using the internet to generate business. They would do costly things like high end fashion magazine layouts or lavish displays at their stores. However, when times are tough (and you see a lot of traffic on your website) you brainstorm on ways you can generate business for the smallest cost. This is why many luxury brands are now looking at the internet as a way to generate more interest in their “brand”. Previously, businesses could solely depend on traditional sources of revenue, but never the internet. Adage.com reports that less than 33% of luxury companies were using the internet to generate business. I can not imagine this, but it seems it is in fact true. The future of the internet is really where it is at, yet some are just a little slower at seeing the “light” it seems. I guess better late than never!

iPhones and Blackberry’s are everywhere. It seems like you can not turn your head without seeing one or the other, but which is better? In most cases, when people are looking to purchase a new phone, they look at two main points; service and phone capabilities.
When the iPhone first came out there were thousands of people who switched from providers such as Verizon to AT&T, just because of the exclusive deal that AT&T has with Apple. Currently, you can not get the iPhone through anyone except for AT&T. I have yet to meet a single person who does not love their iPhone, but there is one huge problem – no service! Constantly AT&T users are complaining about this. I see people putting their phones only in certain parts of their house, because they know that is the only place they can get and take a call.
According to Brandweek.com, some AT&T users have had enough. Their quality score has dropped where Verizon has been staying steady. With Verizon offering great deals on their “app” friendly BlackBerry’s, there is no reason to suffer without service any longer! I agree that the iPhone couldn’t be more unique and user friendly, but what is the point of having a cool phone if you can’t even use it? For those of you who are just too brand loyal to give it up, that’s fine, but don’t go crying to the Verizon users when you are broke down on the side of the road in the middle of know where with no service and no way to get help.

Two of the most popular search engines have both released a new and innovative way to look at your search results . Bing.com and Google.com just introduced “visual search”. Visual search is going to allow the users to select search images rather then typing in key words.
The visual search lets users sort through popular search categories by using pictures. Yet Google’s new Fast Flip will show thumbnails of pages when searching for news stories, instead of the short descriptions and headlines the company usually provides.
With this new and unique way of searching topics and articles it is sure to bring more web traffic to both of these sites. People are always looking to check out new ideas, and this is definitely a fun new way to utilize both Bing and Google!

Keeping up with the fast pace of the Internet advertising world is a challenge for anyone let alone a huge conglomerate such as Google. Google, which is constantly under a close eye by many in the online-marketplace for changing trends and new directions to follow is once again advancing in ways to attract consumers.
According to MediaPostNEWS Google has been advancing the advertising opportunities offered in many ways such as upgrades to its search engine, mobile, Adwords and AdSense platforms. Google has recently also re-vamped the placement of text ads making the over all look of the search page cleaner with less gaps improving the search experience.
Good news for Google investors is the hope that improvement in analytics and the Web site optimizer will prove to increase consumer spend by tracking traffic patterns and pin-pointing sites that attract high volumes of visitors. I mean really does this mean anything to the internet world, or is this something that they SHOULD be doing to stay in competition with the other search engines? Hopefully this sets the precedence that you have to continue to improve what you have and not take advantage of the fact that you are #1. Really Google could just sit in the first place of search engine use, and not look internally to improve, but instead they are being proactive to always look at ways to enhance what they have.

Yahoo has come out ahead in a recent court case involving it’s Launch Media division and major record labels. These record labels wanted to be able to mandate a “status” of the media division (Launchcast Webcasting Service) as an “interactive service”. This title would have then made it a requirement for Launchcast to pay higher fees to broadcast it’s music. Instead the court ruled that the webcasting service would be treated as that, a web service, and only be required to pay some small royalty fees. This is great news for Yahoo who could have had to pay a lot more money to run their internet radio service.
This court case, and others involving major record labels, has really put a damper on the record label’s ability to earn revenue from their music being played. This opens up more conversations in the fact that how can record labels continue to earn revenue? Are we potentially looking at a whole new outlook on record labels and what they do to create music? What about the idea of them being run by internet companies? Distribution of CDs has really dropped off in recent years, and court cases like this one will continue to add fuel to this uphill battle the record labels and their artists are going through.

Google announced today that they have been working on a faster search engine.  Never a company to stand pat, this latest effort is hoping to improve results for developers and power searchers.  You can try the new search engine here. The project is called “Caffeine” and is hoping to improve speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.  It may also be an effort to search parts of the Web that have not normally been accessed.  As with many things Google, stay tuned…

Sounds like the employees of ESPN have gotten busted by the “twitter police”. ESPN has recently rolled out some new guidelines for acceptable behavior with social networking sites such as Twitter. The goal of these new guidelines was to provide guidance on how websites, blogs and social networking sites should only be used in a way to benefit ESPN.
This brings up a good point about employers and the use of these social networking sites. A couple items come to mind when I think about these guidelines being implemented. First, there are a lot of people that might occupy a lot of work time to keep their fellow “tweeters”/Facebook “friends” etc updated on their daily activities. This affects them in their jobs and performing what they are paid there to do… work not Tweet. Secondly, social networking really has not been a part of our daily lives till recently, so there has to be some sort of guidelines implemented to help control what company information/news can be funneled through the social networking sites. If there are not guidelines, then sometimes the common sense factor will not come into play when releasing possibly some private information. However, there are a lot of companies that will use Twitter as a source of promoting their product or service, and I believe that is a different conversation. Promoting your company’s product or service should be okay, but there has to be guidelines on how much time is actually done doing that while working.
Leadpile does work on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, but in a way that does not violate any information that should not be disclosed improperly. It will not surprise me if we continue to hear stories like this one, because employers are having to set a precedence on how to effectively use the social networking sites while conducting business.