Category: marketing

Game maker Acclaim hopes the answer is an emphatic, “yes”. It plans to invade this week’s Wimbledon championship with twenty Virtua Tennis 2 branded birds, the BBC reports. The homing pigeons will fly down during pre-match warmups, sporting spray-painted logos, and then return to a secret location in south west London.

Acclaim officials assured the BBC that no harm would come to the birds. The flying rats will merely be coated in a water-based paint.

[The Register]

Certainly original thinking here…and perhaps(?) a bit more classy than the naked streakers used by Golden Palace Casino, but not as fun…

Corporate executives like Alan M. Meckler, the chief executive of Jupitermedia, are starting to publish their own Weblogs. [New York Times: Technology]

The ISP will provide Trellix Web site building software to dial-up, broadband and hosting subscribers at no charge. [internetnews.com:]

Pushing for retention and differentiation…

BlogAds: Best Click-through Last Hour

BlogAds, a service that allows advertisers to build their own classified-like ads on participating small web sites (mostly weblogs), has introduced a new feature that shows which ads are performing best on a click-through basis, updated hourly. CEO Henry Copeland said he was not aware of any other ad network exposing their best-performing ads like this (and neither am I) and it served the purpose of educating advertisers using the system as to what kinds of ads are likely to stimulate clicks (as well as to generate himself some PR, he shrewdly notes, as an ex-journalist).

[marketingfix]

A class-action lawsuit filed yesterday against Nestlé contends that Poland Spring bottled water, described on the label as natural spring water found deep in the woods of Maine, is little more than tap water that comes from ground water sources surrounded by “asphalt parking lots.”. [New York Times: Business]

The Federal Trade Commission will soon take requests from consumers who want their phone numbers made off-limits to telemarketers. [New York Times: Technology]

Good news for us all…

The chipmaker ushers in three new chips for wireless and mobile thin-and-light and full-size notebook computers. [internetnews.com]

The new mobile chips are the first to take advantage of the 802.11g standard, which was formally approved last week. 802.11g is the high speed (54Mbps) wireless networking technology that is backward compatible with the slower 802.11b (sometimes referred to as Wi-Fi). AMD says it had been waiting for the standard to be finalized before announcing compatible products.

Subscribe before June 20, 2003, and get the first year of service for just $10.99. That’s 63% off the regular service fee of $29.99. If you subscribe after June 20th, 2003, you may experience an interruption in service and the price will increase to $29.99.

Just retrieved as it was nicely fitered to the junk folder on hotmail. I guess I can finally let this account go to rest as paying for this is not in the cards for me. The free service side is coming to an end. I just wonder how long other .Net focused initiatives from Redmond will stay free.

Changes to MSN messenger can only be around the corner…

Seattle’s online retailing giant launches new business-to-business e-commerce division to help partner sites. [internetnews.com: Top News]

Amazon.com said the group would also provide fulfillment and customer service operations as part of the range of services available for merchants that want to sell on the Amazon.com site.

Major news… Not sure why InternetNews is so negative on this. Seems like a logical extension of ZShops and in my humble opinion is a total package with fulfillment and customer service. Yahoo Stores is simple by comparison and no where near as comprehensive for a small to medium business and their customers.

Software giant makes another run at providing interactive software for digital set-top boxes. [internetnews.com]

Microsoft said its software would allow cable operators to generate new revenues by offering services, such as on-screen TV guides, movies-on-demand and a new generation of interactive advertisements, coupons and other sales and marketing incentive programs. It said the software allows cable operators to offer a variety of video-on-demand services, including films and episodes stored in computer video vaults, and functions that allow users to pause, fast-forward or rewind programming from their remote control.

As more high-speed households wake up to intrusion vulnerabilities on their PCs, AOL takes up arms with a pitch for new built-in security. [internetnews.com: Top News]

The security tools in AOL 9.0 include:

Customized Firewall: In partnership with Network Associates’ (Quote, Company Info) McAfee unit, AOL Broadband subscribers will get a free customized firewall. The Personal Firewall Express promises protection against hackers and unauthorized intruders. Firewall options would allow users to block access to sensitive files, financial records and personal data and create records of intrusion attempts.

Automatic Anti-virus Scanning: AOL 9.0 will automatically scans all e-mail attachments to detect viruses and fix or block infected attachments before they reach a subscriber’s inbox. While the automatic scanning is free, AOL is also marketing a premium integrated service with McAfee Security to block infection from P2P file sharing, Web site downloads, infected CD-ROMs and disks and other multi-media files.

Anti-spam protections: On top of its proprietary server-side anti-spam filters, the company is adding adaptive spam filtering — that learns and adapts to the type of e-mail that each individual member considers spam. AOL Mail will come with a new spam folder to automatically route and separate unsolicited mail and a new feature for word-specific and URL filters.

There will be an additional fee of $2.95 per month for these features…

The chipmaker is examining whether it should create a separate consumer brand for chips used in handhelds and smart phones. [CNET News.com Personal Technology]