Liveblogging Facebook Advertising Announcement (Social Ads + Beacon + Insights)

I am at Facebook’s social advertising announcement in New York City, where Mark Zuckerberg is about to take the stage and tell us all what we already think we know: Facebook is getting into the advertising business in a big way. Much of what will be announced today, such as projects code-named Beacon and Pandemic have already leaked out. We’ll see how much of that leaked information was correct, and what more there is to add. Facebook is certainly pulling out all the stops with this announcement, on the agenda later on is a panel with Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson and Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes that will be moderated by Charlie Rose (who charges a lot to do these things, or so I hear).

Facebook is announcing three things: Social Ads (ads targeted based on member profile data and spread virally), Beacon (messages in feeds), and Insight (marketing data that goes deep into social demographics and pyschographics which Facebook will provide to advertisers in an aggregated, anonymous way). These three things together make up Facebook Ads. Here are the press releases for Facebook Ads, Project Beacon, and its launch partners.

Zuckerberg just took the stage (keep in mind that he is addressing advertising executives and press in the audience). The following notes are in reverse-chronological order:

3:06 PM: “Everything you have seen here is launching tonight.” Launching with 40 partners [press release says 60] (including Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, The New York Times, Sony Pictures, Verizon, Dove, and Zazzle). “This is something we have been working on for a long time. It is really good to share it with you guys.” [Zuckerberg walks off stage]

3:03: Insights. Aggregates profile data. “We look at the people your ads are reaching and break it down by age, gender, interests, and a whole lot more we are adding soon.” Says none of this will be personally identifiable. “We will be able to track how much people are talking about your brand in public forums across facebook. As you run ads on Facebook you will be able to see the exact mind share you are getting.”

2:57 PM: “Social Actions + Content = Social Ads.” They spread your message virally through the social graph. these ads will appear both in people’s feeds and as a personalized banner ad.

“Let’s talk about targeting. With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in. their location, country, city or town, interests, gender,” work history, political views [Like what they’ve already done with Facebook Flyers].

2:52 PM: Social distribution, now here is where it gets interesting. When somebody engages with your page, that os spread virally through the network. When someone says they are a fan of your brand, that becomes a trusted referral. It goes right to their Mini feed. A strong trusted referral for your brand. You will be able to craft the types of social actions you want to spread across the social graph.

“We have created a product called Beacon that let’s you do this. Beacon will let users send information to their page, we confirm it, and share it on Facebook. One partner is eBay.” Can share listinsg from eBay on Facebook. So usres can share social actions from other websites and share them on Facebook. “This will be completely free.”

2:48: “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights.”

Advertisers can build their own Facebook pages and design them any way they like: “We have photos, videos, discussion boards, any Flash content you want to bring to your page, plus any application a third party developer has made.”

2:46 PM: Messages spread virally. All you need to do is get your friends to engage with it and add it to their profiles. Gives example of how causes are spread across Facebook. Support Breast Cancer, more than 2 million members.

2:44 PM: Zuckerberg is explaining the social graph. “Where Facebook really excels is in helping you keep up with all of your connections at the same time. It is making the cost of communication so low that information can be pushed out more efficiently than it ever could from a few big companies.”

2:43 PM: Z: “More than 80 applications have more than one millions users.”

2:37 PM EST: Zuckerberg: “Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections.

“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than are recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.

“Have already passed 50 million users, doubling once every 6 months. only active users who have used facebook last 30 days. More than 25 million people are using Facebook every single day. Each person is viewing more than 40 pages a day, more than 65 billion page views a month.”

Notes:

Beacon Partners (Facebook advertising buttons that exist on other sites and when clicked are reflected in members’ feeds as a brand endorsements—how many of these brands would you bother to explicitly endorse to your Facebook friends, opr even identify with?):

eBay
Fandango
IAC brands (CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, iWon, Citysearch, Pronto.com, echomusic)
Travelocity
AllPosters.com
Blockbuster
Bluefly.com
CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter)
ExpoTV
Gamefly
Hotwire
Joost
Kiva,
Kongregate
LiveJournal
Live Nation
Mercantila
National Basketball Association
NYTimes.com
Overstock.com
(RED)
Redlight
SeamlessWeb,
Sony Online Entertainment
Sony Pictures
STA Travel
The Knot
TripAdvisor
Travel Ticker
TypePad
viagogo
Vox
Yelp
WeddingChannel.com
Zappos.com.

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Glide Crunch—Closing the Gap Between Online and Offline Spreadsheets

Web-based spreadsheets like Google’s are great for collaborating, but slow you down when it comes to clicking through cells quickly or creating really big spreadsheets. It doesn’t even have a search function other than what your browser can do on its own (try finding a name in a list of 500). Desktop-based spreadsheets like Microsoft’s Excel give you all the features and speed you want, but are not easy to share. (Yes, there is SharePoint, but most people resort to e-mailing the bulky files around, creating a version-control nightmare).

Tomorrow at noon, Transmedia, a New York City startup, will take a step towards bridging those online and offline worlds. It is adding a spreadsheet to its Glide service called Glide Crunch. (Good name!). So far, all of the apps on Glide—including a Word processor, presentation software, e-mail, calendar, contacts, and online photo, video, and music sharing—have been completely Web-based. But with Glide Crunch, the spreadsheet will operate as a local application on your desktop that is automatically synced to your Glide Webtop without you having to do anything special other than create a spreadsheet as you normally would.

Glide Crunch is not based on Adobe AIR or Google Gears, the two main platforms for creating offline, Web-like apps. Transmedia coded the application from scratch using C/C++. In contrast to something like Google Gears, Glide Crunch is not trying to download data into the browser. “We have left the browser,” says CEO Donald Leka. “The browser is limited. It can only hold so much data.” Google Spreadsheet, for instance, only supports 100,000 cells and up to 40 sheets, says Leka. Glide Crunch, in contrast, can support 16.7 million cells and an unlimited number of sheets in a single spreadsheet.

Glide Crunch also supports advanced formulas, pivot tables, various printing formats, and, yes, you can search within a spreadsheet. Leka is really going after Excel users with a powerful local spreadsheet that syncs automatically to the Web, where it is shareable with others. He thinks his new spreadsheet will meet the needs of 60 to 70 percent of the market. “Scientists and financial-modeling experts can continue to use Excel,” he allows. But Glide Crunch is robust enough for him to use to manage Transmedia’s P&L. “We use Glide for everything,” he says.

Glide, which is free for the first two gigabytes and $50 for 12 gigabytes, comes with all of the Web apps listed above and also works on the iPhone and other mobile devices. (it is great for showing PowerPoint slides on your iPhone, which you previously could not do). Later this month and next, Transmedia will be rolling out local versions of its other productivity apps, starting with Glide Write, then e-mail, and Glide Presenter. Glide may not have the user numbers of Google Docs (Glide has about 500,000 total users, 14 percent actually pay), but it is pushing the envelope in terms of functionality and in terns of fusing the Web and the desktop. The company’s revenues are closing in on $4 million a year, with no VC money. The $6.5 million it has raised has all been angel investors, including several ex-Wall Street analysts like Harold Vogel.

Here are some of the advanced functions and features Glide Crunch will support:

Function
Sin - sine function
Cos - cosine function
Tan - tangent function
Asin - arc sine function
Acos - arc cosine function
Atan - arc tangent function
Sinh - hyperbolic sine function
Cosh - hyperbolic cosine
Tanh - hyperbolic tangent function
Asinh - hyperbolic arc sine function
Acosh - hyperbolic arc tangent function
Atanh - hyperbolic arc tangent function
log2 - logarithm to the base 2
log10 - logarithm to the base 10
log - logarithm to the base 10
ln - logarithm to base e (2.71828…)
exp - e raised to the power of x
sqrt - square root of a value
sign - sign function -1 if x<0;>0
rint - round to nearest integer
abs - absolute value
if - if … then … else …
min - min of all arguments
max - max of all arguments
sum - sum of all arguments
avg - mean value of all arguments
and more…

Operator
and logical and
or logical or
x or logical xor

>= greater or equal
!= not equal
== Equal
> greater than

+ Addition
- Subtraction
* Multiplication
/ Division
^ raise x to the power of y
! factorial

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Source: TechCrunch

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Apple Working on Tablet?

One of Apple’s contract manufacturers, Asus, is working on a Mac tablet, according to the Crave blog. It is not clear if this is going to be a major product, when it will be available, or whether this is just a prototype for now.

I love the idea of a tablet computer, but the market has not been going crazy for Windows-based tablet PCs, which are pretty slick. It will remain a niche device, unless touch computing takes off. But touch computing is a compromise. It may work on small devices like iPods and iPhones. It is not clear you need it for larger machines.

God invented the keyboard for a reason. But all the graphic designers who use Macs will probably like it. Call it the iPod Large or the Biggie Touch. Just don’t call it a Newton.

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