Hulu news

Hulu is now big. It's official:
http://www.marketingvox.com/hulu-cracks-top-3-online-video-sites-for-first-time-043940/

And they finally signed that deal with Disney. More excitingly Disney bought 30% of Hulu:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124110275139073305.html

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/04/disney_decides_to_dance_the_hu.php

Star Trek ads on your iPhone

An exclusive Star Trek ad has been launched for the iPhone, by MEC Interaction in association with VideoEgg.
As more and more people get on the mobile web I think that mobile ads will become more important in digital marketing. So keep your eyes open for similar things.

http://www.netimperative.com/netimperative/news/2009/april/star-trek-campaign-beams-up-on-iphone

YouTube introduces statistics export

YouTube's Insight tool now lets you export your statistics to CSV, which you can then in turn import quite simply into Excel or Google Docs.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/29/youtube-insight-export/

YouTube's blog post:
http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=IH_EDPBv7Ng

Wolfram hype builds

The excitement surrounding the new way to search from Stephen Wolfram: Wolframalpha is building as they show special persons in private, and now in public.

He claims the search will be a new "paradigm for the web", by answering your questions more directly. Using various Natural Language Processing algorithms it tries to give you a direct answer to your question, rather than a bunch of sites that happen to mention those words.

I believe that this is another step towards a semantic web, as I've previously blogged about. This being the search end of things, whose job can only be made easier by good mark-up, and well-structured and organised data on web-pages. The future of online is about giving all this data out there on the web some meaning.

Any Question Answered may soon be a thing of the past, if we've all got the web on our phones and Wolframalpha!

BBC article explaining more about Wolframalpha.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026331.stm

The search engine:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The crazy genius that is Stephen Wolfram:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/

Online video standards updated

IAB have published a set of standards or best-practices for online video.
They recommend the correct size, positioning and length of the following:

• Pre/mid/post-roll adverts
• Interaction in video adverts
• In-stream overlay adverts
• Branded video player skins
• Companion adverts
• Product placement and brand funded content
• Video adverts in social media
• Video sub-sites
• In-text video adverts

IAB standards:
http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/onlinevideomarketing.html


A couple of articles on the subject:
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=65259

http://www.nma.co.uk/iab-updates-best-practice-guide-for-online-video-advertising/3000364.article

Update your status 2.0

Quub is a great site and app for updating your status across networks. Like hellotxt, but much better.
It's got features for beginners - like status suggestions, and advanced features for those "power users".

Check it out:
https://www.quub.com/welcome

Spotzer

I haven't come across Spotzer before, but they've got some interesting approaches to ad campaigns. You can develop and purchase campaigns on the site for mobile and online.


http://www.marketingvox.com/microsoft-spotzer-launch-multimedia-ad-deployment-platform-043907/

http://www.spotzer.com/microsoft/

http://www.spotzer.com