Advertising Relearned for Mobile

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: October 28, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO — Say you are in a strange city and need a hotel for the night. You pull out your phone, search for hotels on Google and see a nearby one listed at the top of the rankings, with a little phone icon that says, “Call.” You tap it, reach the hotel and ask for a room.

James Best Jr./The New York Times

As more of us have access to the Internet and apps through our cellphones and tablets, advertisers are looking for new ways to reach us there.

A Google search for a hotel produced a Sheraton ad.

And just like that, Google made money. That icon was a so-called click-to-call ad, and the hotel paid Google for it when you called.

As more of us have access to the Internet and apps through our cellphones and tablets, advertisers are looking for new ways to reach us there.

Some mobile ads remain just miniature versions of ads on Web sites, an echo of the early days of the Internet, when advertisers essentially slapped print ads online. But increasingly, advertisers are tailoring ads to phones by taking advantage of elements like their ability to track location, make a call, show maps with directions and add calendar alerts.

The stakes are significant for an industry that is still finding its way in the mobile world. Advertisers will spend a relatively small amount of money on ads on phones and tablets this year — $2.6 billion, according to eMarketer, less than 2 percent of the amount they will spend over all. Yet that is more than triple what they spent in 2010.

“An ever-growing percentage of our ad buy is mobile because that’s where the consumer is,” said Chris McCann, president of 1-800-Flowers.com, which has run mobile ads urging people to call or walk into a nearby store. “It’s the future for us.”

Coming up with ads that exploit the smaller mobile screen requires inventiveness from many parties — advertisers; digital publishers like Google, Apple and Facebook that sell ad space; and mobile ad networks like Millennial Media.

“What we’re trying to do is think about the on-the-go user,” said Jason Spero, leader of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, which dominates advertising online and is far and away the leader in mobile advertising. “What does that user want when she’s sitting in a cafe or walking down the street?”

A big challenge for the tech companies is that advertisers pay less for mobile ads than for those online, largely because consumers are less likely to make a purchase on their phones. Though people click on mobile ads more than on desktop ads, advertisers wonder whether that is because of what they call the “fat finger effect” — accidental clicks on tiny touch screens.

And while users’ actions can be tracked across Web sites online, it is hard to know whether someone sees a cellphone ad for an offline business and then walks in — so it is difficult for advertisers to judge how effectively they are spending their money.

As Google sells more mobile ads, the average amount it earns from each ad has dived. Facebook’s value on Wall Street was halved on fears that it was not making enough money on its mobile users. Apple’s mobile ad network, iAd, has been slow to gain traction.

Despite the problems, though, there is evidence that mobile advertising is becoming a meaningful business, and in some cases a bigger business than online advertising.

Facebook executives said last week that in the third quarter, the company earned $150 million from mobile ads, 14 percent of its total revenue. Pandora reported that in the second quarter that ended in July 58 percent of its revenue, or $59 million, came from mobile ads. Twitter executives have said that on certain days, the social network earns a majority of its daily revenue from mobile ads.

Mobile ad networks, which show ads across mobile apps and Web sites, have created new and thriving businesses. The biggest are Millennial Media, Google’s AdMob and Apple’s iAd.

Google earns 56 percent of all mobile ad dollars and 96 percent of mobile search ad dollars, according to eMarketer. The company said it is on track to earn $8 billion in the coming year from mobile sales, which includes ads as well as apps, music and movies it sells in its Google Play store. But the vast majority of that money comes from ads, it said.

“Whoever does mobile best, they’re going to be the next Google, so people are asking, ‘Is Google going to be the next Google?’ ” said Chris Winfield, co-founder of BlueGlass Interactive, a digital advertising agency. “It still is Google’s to lose.”

Google and others have had success in taking advantage of the fact that mobile phones know a lot more about people than desktop computers do — most important, their location. And with a phone in hand, a customer is probably more likely to be ready to buy something.

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A Twitter newsfeed showed mobile ads, or “promoted tweets.”

People searching on a computer for jeans, for instance, most likely want to research styles and colors, while people doing the same search on a phone want the nearest place to buy a pair, said Mr. Spero at Google.

In addition, Google has benefited from the fact that one main way people use Google on phones is to search for nearby businesses, a prime source of advertising. Thirty percent of restaurant searches and 25 percent of movie searches are done on mobile devices, according to Google.

One of Google’s most successful mobile ad types is the click-to-call ad. After running these ads, Starwood Hotels’ mobile bookings grew 20 percent in a month.

Google also shows ads on the mobile version of YouTube, including video ads like movie trailers before YouTube videos. If someone watches the movie trailer, Google makes money.

The company has also hinted that it could show ads through other services like Google Now, which sends unprompted alerts to cellphones. It coaches advertisers on how to do things like build mobile Web pages.

Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, told analysts this month that thinking about mobile ads versus desktop ads is the wrong approach.

“We want a seamless experience that goes across mobile, desktop and TV, and that’s what we’re building,” he said.

Pandora, the Internet radio service, is second only to Google in mobile ad revenue, according to eMarketer, which predicts it will bring in $229 million in mobile ad revenue this year from both audio and on-screen ads.

An audio ad, for example, told Pandora listeners to tap the screen for the location of the nearest Whole Foods and a sushi lunch special. StubHub, the online ticket marketer, recently ran an ad on Pandora’s app. Those who clicked on it received reminders for coming concerts to their cellphone calendars.

Gaining traction in mobile advertising is particularly critical for Facebook; 60 percent of its users log in on phones. But making the transition to the small screen has been a challenge: most Facebook ads appeared on the right side of the Web page, so there was nowhere to show them on a mobile device.

That is one reason Facebook started running ads in the newsfeed, like sponsored stories, which are notices that a friend likes a certain brand. It is also starting a mobile ad network to show ads on other cellphone apps, based on things Facebook knows about a user, such as what they like and where they live.

Twitter has inserted ads labeled “promoted” in its newsfeed from the beginning. On advertisers’ behalf, Twitter can show ads only to people using mobile devices, like ads to download a mobile app.

Samsung showed an ad just to people using its Galaxy Note device, directing them to search and download Android apps for the phone.

Next, these companies must figure out how to persuade advertisers to spend more than 2 percent of their budgets on mobile devices.

“It’s reminiscent of the Web in 1996, ’97,” said Michael Moritz, an investor at Sequoia Capital who financed companies like Google and LinkedIn. “People weren’t interested in ads, and prices were low. But advertisers don’t have a choice. They’ve got to go where audiences are.”

Challenging Apple by Imitation

By SUE-LIN WONG

Published: October 29, 2012

BEIJING — When Lei Jun, the head Xiaomi, one of the fastest-growing smartphone companies in China, talks about Steven P. Jobs, he is full of praise — and a hint of envy.

“When Steve was alive, he was the best,” Mr. Lei said during a recent interview. “Nobody could surpass him. Nothing could surpass the iPhone.”

Apple and its late co-founder have no shortage of challengers — not to mention emulators — in China, a country that analysts expect will overtake the United States this year as the world’s largest market for smartphones.

Chief among the rivals is Xiaomi, whose newest smartphone has been expected to go on sale this month for 1,999 renminbi, or $320 — less than half the starting retail price of an iPhone 4S in China. Pricing for the iPhone 5 in China has not been set.

Less than three years since it was founded, Xiaomi, meaning “little rice,” has become a rising star in the Chinese smartphone market. The company predicts that by the end of 2012, sales will reach nearly seven million phones and revenue will be at 10 billion renminbi — impressive for a company that sold its first smartphone in August 2011.

The scene at a Xiaomi event in August of this year was reminiscent of Apple’s typical product introduction under Mr. Jobs, who died last October. Mr. Lei strode onto a stage in the trendy 798 art district in Beijing to show off the Mi-Two to a roomful of cheering fans. He was dressed in a black polo shirt, jeans and black converse shoes, not much different from Mr. Jobs’s trademark outfit.

Xiaomi’s marketing strategy has been to ride on the back of the “cult of Apple” and of its creator, said Wei Wuhui, a technology industry expert at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

“Many Chinese consumers have come to idolize the Apple brand, and Xiaomi has been there to provide a similar product at a much cheaper price,” he said.

Fans — and critics — have been known to refer to the Xiaomi smartphone as the “Chinese iPhone.” In one of Beijing’s many China Unicom stores, a sales representative describes Xiaomi as “the little brother of Apple.” And customers are happy to buy into this image.

“Xiaomi is the real fake,” Oliver Jin, a university student in Shanghai who hopes to buy a Xiaomi, said approvingly.

Apple opened its first store in China in 2008 and began selling the iPhone in the country in 2009. It originally had plans to open 25 stores by 2012 — but only six Apple Stores are in operation in mainland China. Among the company’s headaches in the country have been the sale of fake iPhones to copycat vendors who set up unlicensed “Apple Stores.”

Despite challenges like that, Apple has still experienced phenomenal growth. China has become Apple’s second largest market, after the United States, and the company now earns about a fifth of its revenue there. Apple’s sales in the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan — mainly China sales — rose to $25.7 billion in the nine months before the end of June, up 60 percent from a year earlier.

And there is plenty of room for more growth. According to figures from the technology research company Gartner, the Chinese smartphone market will double this year to at least 150 million units, up from 76 million in 2011.

Analysts say part of what helps Xiaomi stand out from the pack of challengers to Apple is Mr. Lei himself. A billionaire and an engineer by training, Mr. Lei co-founded Kingsoft, one of the best-known Chinese software companies, more than 20 years ago and remains its chairman. He has also been a successful investor in several other Chinese start-ups. One of the firms Mr. Lei founded, Joyo.com, largest online retailer of books, music and movies in China, was sold to Amazon for $75 million in 2004.

A self-proclaimed phone addict, Mr. Lei says he has owned more than 60 mobile phones, including the very first Motorola “brick phone.” While he was using a phone from the Finnish company Nokia in 2004, he says, he had a friend who worked there to whom he gave 1,500 suggestions about how to improve the phones. Nokia did nothing. Mr. Lei points to that experience, combined with the realization of “the potential for smartphones to replace computers,” as inspiration for him to set up Xiaomi.

Xiaomi differs from other smartphone companies in that it allows users to help design their operating systems. Every Friday at 5 in the evening local time, Xiaomi releases a new round of software updates for its own Android-based operating system — MIUI — to users in China and in Western countries. Within hours, thousands of fans are on Xiaomi forums to describe bugs and give feedback.

In the past, fans have been asked to weigh in on how much memory they want in their phones, how thick the next generation model should be and whether there should be a flashlight on the back of the phone. “Apple is very conceited,” Mr. Lei said. Their attitude is, ‘I don’t need any feedback.”’

Mr. Lei’s bet on smartphones has attracted big-money backers. A fund- raising round from major venture capital investors in June valued the company at about $4 billion, a little less than half the current market value of Nokia ($9.57 billion) and on par with that of Research In Motion ($3.49 billion), the maker of BlackBerry phones. The company’s institutional investors include Temasek, a Singaporean government-owned investment vehicle, and the Chinese venture capital funds IDG Capital and Qiming Venture Partners.

“Xiaomi has exceeded our original expectations,” Hugo Shong, a founding partner of IDG, said in an interview. “I think other investors feel the same way — you just have to look at the numbers. Xiaomi went from zero revenue to 8 billion renminbi in just a year.”

Xiaomi’s big test will be how well its phones are accepted beyond mainland China. Executives say the company plans to start rolling out its phones in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore by the end of the year, but its ambitions do not end there.

As for the rest of the world, Mr. Lei said, “We’ll take it one step at a time.”

Clare Pennington and Wang Xin contributed research.

Get energy directly into space

In recent years, the debate rages on in geologists and specialists in energy resources. Will we run out of petroleum?  The subject divides and is far from unanimous, but one thing is clear: the reserves of fossil energy have taken millions of years to create, reduce visibly as global demand continues to increase.



For example, the European Union represents 16% of global energy. It imports half of its energy needs in the region making it the largest importer in the world. A question arises: how to deal the increasing demand from emerging countries like China and India in addition to developed countries?

Well engineers Astrium, EADS Space subsidiary have revealed a old project of good thirty years and brought responses to technological failures of the past: collect solar energy directly into the space and feeding on Earth via an infrared beam. A crazy project? Not that much.



Solar station in orbit
By 2020, scientists from the company Astrium counted well launch their first prototype satellite in space. Equipped giant photovoltaic panels it will capture the sun's rays, the concentrate then will deliver to Earth by an infrared laser that goes directly to the sensors. They then convert solar energy into electricity to power our network.
The prototype currently under development will acknowledge a power of 20 to 50 KW. Ultimately, the goal of engineering is to build outright space stations collector of solar energy. In geostationary orbit to 35,000 km altitude, solar panels 50 feet of long will provide energy 24h/24. These orbital complex could reach a power of several gigawatts, equivalent to several nuclear power plants

.An inexhaustible reserve without danger
Sun not likely to turn off within a few million years, which makes it an excellent energy source for Earthlings. A question still deserves to be asked: energy transmission via an infrared laser is not it dangerous to health? The beam has a wavelength of 1, 5 micron placing it in the invisible, without damage to man especially his eyes.



The Japanese were already on the spot of a similar project, which cost a whopping $ 21 million. The only difference: solar energy will be conveyed to the ground by microwave and not infrared.

This energy collection system does not tend to replace fossil energy but is designed to complement renewable energy to meet the energy bulimia hosts this planet, namely us!

Mind & Brain / Depression & Happiness

The Brain An Electric Cure for the Mind

Why does shock therapy beat back depression? New experiments show how such a blunt 
treatment can have such positive effects.by Carl Zimmer

From the November 2012 issue; published online October 25, 2012

an Reid, a psychiatrist at the Royal Cornhill Hospital in the Scottish city of Aberdeen, has treated people with severe depression for 25 years. “It’s a very nasty illness, depression,” he says. “I have worked with people who have cancer and depression, and more than one of them has said, ‘If I had to choose one of those two diseases, I’d go for the cancer.’ ”

When patients come to Royal Cornhill with major depression, they’re first treated with psychotherapy and antidepressants. Only about 40 percent respond to their first medication. Sometimes a different one will do the trick, but in Reid’s experience, about 10 to 20 percent of depressed people respond to no drug at all. In those cases, Reid regularly shifts to a third option. It’s officially called electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT—better known by its unofficial name, shock therapy.

Reid is an expert on ECT, and over the years he has received plenty of grief for it. “There are people on the Internet who describe me as a Nazi, as a barbarian,” he says. “And there’s one person who suggested I should get ECT so I know what I’m doing.”


Reid is not surprised by the reactions. For many people, the sum of their knowledge about ECT comes from the 1975 movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack Nicholson plays Randle McMurphy, a criminal hoping to escape hard labor by spending his term in a mental institution. But McMurphy gets more than he bargained for, including a harrowing session of ECT. The hospital staff straps him down, puts a piece of rubber in his mouth so he won’t bite off his own tongue, and delivers a blast of electricity to his temples. He writhes in agony and then slumps back, his body limp.That scene bears no resemblance to what Reid does for his patients. For one thing, he gives them anesthesia and muscle relaxants so they don’t experience any flailing. But most crucially, ECT works. “You can watch someone going from being unresponsive and soiling themselves to being completely transformed,” Reid says.

In Scotland, a country of 5 million, 400 people receive the treatment each year. And for about 75 percent of them, it brings relief. “ECT outperforms psychotherapeutic treatments and antidepressant drugs,” Reid notes. Yet its effectiveness is a mystery. “It doesn’t sound intuitive at all,” he admits. “Making someone have a seizure, giving them an electric shock, and making something as complex as depression better just seems crazy.”

Shock Therapy in Analysis

Fortunately, we don’t have to understand why a treatment works before using it. “Captain Cook was handing out limes to his crew for scurvy before anyone knew what vitamin C is,” Reid says. But since ECT is so invasive, and since its effects can fade, he has long wanted to figure out how shock therapy works, in the hopes of tapping the same mechanism to find a longer-lasting, less arduous means of beating back depression. “Always in the back of my mind has been the thought that it would be awfully nice to know what was going on here,” he says.

Doctors in Italy first used electroconvulsive therapy in 1938 to treat schizophrenia; in the decades that followed, the treatment spread to other countries and other disorders, especially depression. Although ECT was clearly effective, it could be a frightening experience. Patients remained conscious until their seizures made them black out. Sometimes they broke bones during the process. In the 1960s, psychiatrists added anesthesia and muscle relaxants to ECT to eliminate some of this trauma, but memory loss was still a common complaint. Amnesia became less of a problem in the 1980s, when pulses were reduced to brief, sharp stimulations.

By the 21st century, the negatives surrounding ECT had been mitigated to a large degree. In a 2010 study, Maria Semkovska and Declan M. McLoughlin of Trinity College in Dublin reviewed 84 studies of 2,981 patients who received ECT. The only significant memory troubles they found occurred within three days after treatment; by 15 days, the patients’ memories actually improved.

With safety questions put to rest, Reid and his colleagues have been trying to find out how ECT works. Beginning in 2009, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of patients prior to treatment for depression; they then followed the patients through the course of therapy, generally for four weeks. Successfully treated patients, nine in all, returned for follow-up scans. Reid knew from previous studies that depression reduces the size of certain brain regions, including the hippocampus and gray matter, both generally implicated in emotion. After ECT, Reid’s team measured the volume of each subject’s brain. The researchers found an increase in hippocampus size but not in gray matter.

They also investigated a second, potentially more significant change: how ECT altered the brain’s ability to talk to itself. Each region of the brain specializes in certain mental tasks. The hippocampus, for example, helps us encode and retrieve memories. If we try to recall a memory while lying in an fMRI scanner, the machine can detect extra activity occurring in the hippocampus.

If brain regions are like self-contained computers, then the brain as a whole is a computer network. The activity in one region is influenced by neurons sending signals from other regions. This communication can lead two regions to work together closely. When one region is active, so is the other; when one is quiet, the other tends to be as well.

An effort to establish the relationship between this interconnectivity and neuropsychiatric disease was already under way. Researchers found that some disorders, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, appear to alter the connectivity of certain networks. In 2010 University of Aberdeen neuroscientist Christian Schwarzbauer measured brain connectivity in people who have lost consciousness. He found that the connectivity of people in permanently vegetative states turns out to be different from that of people who eventually regain awareness.
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In 2011 Schwarzbauer teamed up with Reid on a new ECT study. His job was to analyze the brain scans for changes in connectivity. It would be the first time anyone looked for such a link and also the first time Schwarzbauer used a new method he had devised for measuring connectivity. Typically neuroscientists select a few large regions of the brain to study before they start their experiment. They then compare the activity in these regions by measuring the flow of blood into them. Schwarzbauer came up with a way to conduct a much more fine-grained survey. Instead of picking out regions in advance, he divided the entire brain into 25,000 chunks. He then measured the links among all of them, looking for significant changes before and after ECT.

This approach revealed much more than Reid’s study of brain size. “The communication structure of the brain dramatically changed after treatment,” Schwarzbauer says. ECT weakened the same connective network in all nine patients—a network that surrounds a single hub located above the left eye, in a brain region called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Relieving an Overwired Brain

Reid and his colleagues didn’t know it at the time, but in St. Louis another team was also studying the connectivity of depression. Yvette Sheline and her colleagues at Washington University scanned the brains of 18 people with major depression and compared them with the brains of 17 healthy individuals. They found evidence that in depressed people, the network centered on the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was “hyperconnected.”

When Reid and Schwarzbauer found out about Sheline’s research, it got them thinking about how ECT rewires the brain. When people are depressed, they speculated, these hyperconnected regions might bounce thoughts back and forth around the brain. “This could cause an internal information overflow,” Schwarzbauer says, making it hard to process external information. By getting rid of those hyperconnections, ECT might let depressed people get out of their own head.

Reid is testing this hypothesis by following his patients and waiting to see if they relapse. If he and Schwarzbauer are right, a relapse ought to include the detectable return of hyperconnectivity in the depression network.

Reid’s study leaves unanswered the question of how a jolt of electricity gets rid of hyperconnections. But he hopes that brain scans and other sophisticated methods will eventually reveal how ECT works. From there, it might be possible to come up with a less invasive way to get the same effect.

“If you could put it in a bottle,” Reid says, “that would be great.”

the difference between LCD and LED TV

LED LCDs are part of the family of LCDs. It is simply the backlight neon tube is replaced by a matrix of tiny LED bulbs. This new range of televisions or computer screens does bring benefits?

On TV, LCD LED belong to the family of LCDs. It is simply the backlight fluorescent strips which is replaced by a matrix of tiny LED bulbs. This new range of televisions or computer screens she brings real benefits?

In recent years, small LED bulbs take the place of conventional lighting. It's the same for our TVs LCD panels.

The five main advantages of LCD LED are:

•  Reduced thickness: The LED screens allow a significant reduction in the thickness of the screen. In addition to aesthetics, it can hang the TV on a wall as a simple table.

•  LED bulbs consume less than fluorescent tubes. End of 2009, consumption is already reduced by 50% compared to fluorescent tubes. This is a clear advantage in the summer of no longer having a computer screen that serves as a radiator.

•  Better contrast. Due to their small size, LED light sources are less sensitive to diffusion. Suddenly, the blacks become deeper and the contrast increases, but qualitatively.

•  The matrix of tiny LED bulbs ensures greater uniformity of brightness on the slab. If this improvement is not essential on a TV, it is a definite plus on a computer screen, especially in a professional graphics use.

•  Ability to reproduce highly saturated colors: The color space or gamut small LCDs has grown thanks to the LED technology. This is not a priority for a TV benefit (see below), but a breakthrough for professionals working on computer graphics industry.

The LED backlight has today reached maturity and has a bright future ahead of him for at least 5 or 6 years before it is eaten by the technologies of the future. Its main advantage is to offer deeper blacks than LCD technology based on the classic neon tube. With the old fluorescent tubes, there is inevitably an effect of light scattering even where the pixels are completely black, that due to the scattering of light from one pixel to another. the conventional LCD is not capable of displaying a perfect black, but a very dark gray which reduced the quality of contrast even though marketing offers huge numbers to describe this contrast.

There are two philosophies in the replacement of tubes by LED diodes. The first is the desire to take advantage of the efficiency of the LED to have a limited consumption and favorable ecological impact. In this case the number of LEDs will be limited and they are often placed on the sides of the screen rather than behind. The second philosophy is to take maximum advantage of this technology and especially power through a large number of LEDs, define areas that will be considered numerically to artificially increase the contrast.

LEDs are small diodes (LED: Light Emitting Diode English) or LED (light emitting diode electro) in French. The matrix consists of small light sources can limit the contagion effect of light on the neighboring pixels. And this quality can be further enhanced digitally by a process which detects dark areas of the image and reduces the intensity of the backlight in these areas. This increases significantly the depth of black. The phenomenon of afterglowing is reduced by exploiting this type of scanning light.

On LCD LED, LCD panel technology is only the light source is changed and of course the quality of LCD LED will be directly proportional to the amount of LED bulbs that the manufacturer will kindly introduce behind screen. LED LCDs entry level remain very close to the LCD screen with a limited number of diodes to reduce the cost, while the high-end performance look with a large number of LEDs. The number of LEDs is very important and it is he who makes the difference with the conventional LCD technology. Screen input range will be happy with 40 LEDs while the high-end LED ask 2000 or more.

Future technologies

The ideal diode is a diode course for each pixel, but if we can build such a screen, the system placed in front LCD which is used to control the brightness and colorimetry becomes useless. Indeed, it suffices to assign this task to each LED coupled to a pixel. This technology already exists that LED technology is very promising, but also OLED, the same technology, but with a variation in the design of the diode. Obviously, the manufacturers do not hesitate to maintain the confusion between LED and LCD LED screen because the term is very seller.

Conclusion

Users computer screen requiring precision will benefit from real progress with increased color gamut and contrast ratio natural, but also a significant improvement in the uniformity of luminance, which was a weak point the high-resolution LCD large as 76 cm (30 ").

LED TV users will be disappointed, because unlike computer screens, the proposed models are often constructed with a limited number of LED or sometimes with LED lighting side. It did not improve the homogeneity light or very little. On the other hand, any increase in the gamut of the slab (number of colors in the color space) is superfluous in the field of TV, because TV sources are only in the sRGB standard, which limits the number at source colors available. And finally, with the diodes in small numbers, the real contrast is not improved, only the dynamic contrast (obtained artificially digital image) will use LED lighting. It remains for fans of television or home theater power consumption really down and aesthetics more likely with a slab thickness that tapers.