Fake Videos and Genuine Successes
Last Friday
Adrants reported that McKinney & Silver extended their Pherotones campaign,
a thinly disguised promotion for Oasys Mobile to viral video with a clip seeded
through Emily's Eatmail. “While ringing cell phones in the middle of a wedding
ceremony certainly cause reaction, the reaction to this ring tone...excuse
us...pherotone causes a different sort of reaction with the groom.” I don’t know how many downloads they’ve had
to date, but I hope it exceeds the number of gullible clients served.
Today,
various bloggers reported the unveiling of Edgeio, a blog-based classified
listing service which uses tags as its categorization structure. As Om Malik noted, much has been written
about this already, but it’s not just hyperbole. Edgeio gives individuals the ability to
distribute and control their own content. Edgeio aggregates and organizes content, but doesn’t require that it conform
to the rules of a particular transaction platform like eBay or Craigslist. In short, it connects buyers to sellers
directly, without a third-party intermediary. That sure sounds like the basis for a genuine “Web 2.0” service to me.
Finally,
the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that CBS is launching a
new service which will enable customers to receive news alerts via their cell
phones. According to the Journal, the
service will include content from CBS News and "Entertainment
Tonight" for monthly fees of 99 cents and $3.99, respectively. CBS noted the alerts will be available for
all mobile phones and wireless carriers next week. Today’s New York Times (subscription
required) reports that the News Corporation has created a mobile entertainment
store called Mobizzo and a production studio to focus exclusively on developing
cell phone entertainment in much the same way that 20th Century Fox creates
movies and television. Given analyst
predictions that the number of cell phones will double in the next five years
to more than 5 billion phones, both moves appear to be shrewd strategies for
tapping into an enormous market opportunity.
While these
may appear to be completely unrelated, in fact they’re all part of the
continued momentum towards differentiated and distributed content and the
on-demand economy. Each of these
services offers users the ability to get exactly what they want, when and where
they want it. For all the critics, the
ideas and concepts behind “Web 2.0” seem to be taking shape in a variety of new
offerings.
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