This idea by Coca-Cola Colombia is kind of crazy. And this is probably the reason why I like it, even if I feel the engagement model with consumers was pretty complicated. But let’s get to the point… Coke organized a live concert where the band was playing on a stage at an altitude of 50m. In order to bring the band down to earth, the audience had to literally and manually “download” them. The public was prompted to discover Coke FM, an online radio station, with the trigger that by downloading the songs of the band, the performers would have also been lowered closer to the public.

The agency is Ogilvy & Mather Colombia. Thanks Mauricio for sending this through.

With a wedding ring on his finger and his company public, is Mark Zuckerberg ready to make Facebook produce more profits, not just more social connections?

His fanfare-less marriage to long-time girlfriend Priscilla Chan this weekend would seem to indicate he won’t be getting too distracted by family life. But just before Facebook IPO’d on Friday, he announced on stage that “Our mission isn’t to be a public company.”

As the young CEO enters this next phase of his life, he faces perhaps his greatest challenge yet: building something that betters our lives while still bringing home the bacon.

The business of social networking has never been Zuckerberg’s strongest suit. In fact, beyond his backyard wedding ceremony and a townhall discussion with President Barack Obama, you’re unlikely to see the CEO in a suit. That’s partly why one of his smartest moves was bringing on Google biz wiz Sheryl Sandberg as his COO.

But no one understands the future of social quite like Zuckerberg. His uncanny ability to figure out what we want from Facebook before we do has spawned the news feed and other features critical to the site’s enduring success. What Facebook the public company needs now is for Zuckerberg to aim that foresight towards making money.

Honestly, that’s the saddest part of Facebook’s IPO — that such a pioneer of human connection would have to fracture his attention to pore over profit-loss statements.

This is the man who brought us ambient intimacy, the feeling of being closer to everyone we know thanks to indirect communication. Facebook and its promising new auto-translation features, is fostering friendships between countries with deep cultural divides. These are the kinds of things the world needs Mark Zuckerberg working on.

But now Facebook has shareholders it’s responsible to. They’ll want him looking for aggressive new ways to monetize that come to fruition fast. Don’t expect Zuckerberg to strangle users with ads, though.

With any luck, you’ll hardly be able to tell what he’s up to when it comes to increasing revenue. It will be a natural side effect of how Facebook works. Such as that all those news stories, songs, and videos you auto-share to the news feed aren’t just content to show your friends. They’re going to power ad targeting based on what you do, not just what you Like.

Mark and Priscilla have just forged one of the strongest connections of all (congratulations, seriously). They’re starting the Zuckerberg family, a lifelong journey.

And the journey to Facebook’s earnings growing to reflect its valuation will be a long one too. It will take the visionary’s focus, but investors, press, employees, and the rest should be patient. Just because you don’t see the future of Facebook’s business right now doesn’t mean it hasn’t been dreamed up. This is Mr. Zuckerberg we’re talking about, after all.

[Image Credit: AP Photo]

Over the weekend, Microsoft quietly launched an experimental social network called So.cl. It's a mix between Google+ and Storify. Users are encouraged to search for information about a particular topic, then compile the best results - textual content, images and videos - into a single post. So.cl is initially targeted to students. It may end up being useful to that market, but it's unlikely to get traction as a mainstream social network. Here's why...

Microsoft is calling So.cl "an experiment in open search," in that anything you search for on the network is viewable by other users and made available to third party developers. That description makes it sound like a direct competitor to Google+, which was Google's attempt at combining search with social networking. It certainly has similarities, but So.cl is ultimately an academic tool moreso than a social one.

To get started, you can sign up using either your Facebook or Windows Live profile. Microsoft had little choice but to leverage Facebook's social graph, given that hardly anyone uses Windows Live (Microsoft's ID platform). Sure enough Facebook gave me a good leg up into the So.cl network, giving me over 50 people to follow.

When it comes to using So.cl and finding value in it, the flaws become obvious. The Storify-like aggregation features in So.cl are nifty enough, but everything else is derivative: posting, commenting, tagging, liking, sharing (two options: to Facebook or email!).

The attempts at innovation in So.cl seem forced. An option labeled "riffing" is supposed to be "a new way to interact and improvise with content" - but in reality, it simply means to re-share a post and optionally add your own comment or content.

It is nice that you can add extra content to a post and I can see this being useful in an educational setting; for example a student in a science class adding more data to a thread about an astronomy topic. But this isn't something people need or want in a mainstream social network. When it comes to re-sharing, all most people want to do on a social network is paste that inspirational quote or solar eclipse photo to their profile page - so their friends can see it too.

Another noteworthy feature in So.cl is something called "video parties." This is basically a video playlist with a chat area - kind of like YouTube's playlists. It's probably the most innovative feature in So.cl, but that isn't saying a lot. The reality is that Facebook or Google+ could easily replicate it, if they wanted to.

So.cl is a largely derivative product and there's no way this is going to go mainstream. What slim chance it had to capture the imagination of a public that is already using Facebook (and may or may not be playing around with Google+), was dashed with the decision not to have a mobile component. As Robert Scoble rightly pointed out: "we're in the post-PC world now. Why didn't you start with just working on mobile? That would have been at least interesting."

I can see why So.cl is PC focused, with its reliance on aggregation and multimedia elements like "video parties." But that doesn't change the fact that any social network launching in 2012 that isn't mobile-based, is most likely doomed to fail if it wants to reach a mainstream audience.

So.cl comes from Microsoft's FUSE research group and the resulting product shows its academic roots. It may become a useful tool for students, with its focus on aggregating topical content. But So.cl won't get any traction outside the education sector. It's too unoriginal and wonky.

Editor’s note: Dan Scholnick is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures where he invests in early stage cloud computing and consumerized IT companies such as New Relic, dotCloud, StackMob, Cloudscaling, and Loggly. You can read more about Dan at the Trinity Ventures website or follow him on Twitter @dschol. He is not an investor in Facebook, though he wishes he were.

Judging by many of the headlines on Friday, you might think that Facebook’s IPO was a miserable failure.  The Wall Street Journal declared, “Facebook’s IPO Sputters,” and our very own TechCrunch declared that bankers were “struggling” to keep the share price up. Nevermind that it was the highest ever IPO valuation and one of the largest sums of money ever raised by a U.S. company. According to the pundits, what really matters is that the stock price didn’t increase in value–or “pop”–post IPO and is being propped up by banks. Taking bets on whether an IPO will “pop” provides entertaining fodder to help pundits promote their interests, but it misses the point. This view represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and economics of an IPO. By the correct measures, the Facebook IPO was a resounding success. Let me explain why.

1. The best IPOs maximize capital raised by the company while minimizing dilution for existing shareholders and employees. An IPO is a capital raise for the company in the same way that a seed round or a Series A is a capital raise for an early stage startup. Simply stated, the success case is that the company raises as much money as it can at the highest price the market will bear. Anything less means that the company has less money to invest in itself and existing employees and shareholders are taking more dilution than necessary. No “pop” means finding the market clearing price for the stock, a strong signal that the company got the best deal it possibly could. It’s hard to imagine that Facebook could have raised more money at a higher price.

2. The best IPOs minimize the fees paid and value transferred to third parties. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did a masterful job orchestrating the IPO so that the value went to the company, not the bankers and their clients. The bankers get a fee for marketing the stock, generally a percentage of the total money raised, which in Facebook’s case was a lot. How hard could that be when investors all over the world are clamoring to “like” Facebook? The banks will make an astonishing $176 million on the IPO for doing arguably not a lot. That said, even though the banks will collect a lot of money, Facebook negotiated them down on fees. Historically, bankers have gotten a 7% fee for tech IPOs. Facebook paid just over 1%.

The lack of a “pop” means that Facebook didn’t needlessly give up value to third parties. When a stock “pops”, the people who profit are the clients of the investment banks, usually large institutional investors and wealthy individuals who were lucky enough to get access to IPO shares. Bankers often underprice IPOs on purpose so that their clients are guaranteed to make money. What did those investors do to deserve an instantaneous profit? While those lucky few laugh all the way to the bank, employees and shareholders end up worse off because they’re taking more dilution or because they have less money to grow the business (or both). In the case of a company as highly valued as Facebook, even a small percentage “pop” would represent an enormous amount of money the company could have otherwise raised.

(While there’s lots of talk of sad bankers having to prop up the stock, don’t feel bad for them; bankers are good at making money. They’re just making use of the greenshoe, a complex mechanism that allows them to buy up the issuer’s stock on the public market without taking any price risk, thereby creating more demand. This means they can prop up the stock without having to spend any money. Rest assured, that support will go away the minute it becomes unprofitable for the banks. In the meantime, they get their $176 million deal fee, not to mention all the commissions they get on stock trades. One analyst estimated that the banks made $8 million in trading fees on Friday alone!)

3. The best investments are determined over months and years, not hours and days. So what about the investors who bought in at the IPO who are at break-even or, heaven forbid, are underwater come next week? Well, presumably they’re investing in the IPO for the same reason that VCs invest in early stage companies–belief in the long term potential of the business. When this is the case, everyone wins. The company has a shareholder base that doesn’t pressure it to make short-sighted decisions and those like minded investors don’t care about short-term share price movements. Anyone investing in an IPO (or a private company for that matter) looking for a “pop” is trying to predict short term market behavior. That’s just fine, but it’s a high class form of gambling. Investing is risky business, particularly when it’s based on factors that are impossible to understand. I’m guessing that many of those IPO investors are bullish on Facebook’s future. Any company that controls online distribution for nine hundred million people and counting has got to be pretty valuable. I’d put my money on that.

The amount of video uploaded to YouTube has increased steadily over the last few years. In early 2007, users were uploading six hours of video every minute to the site. By January of 2009, that number had grown to 15 hours. By March of 2010, the total reached 24 hours, only to go up to 35 hours by November of that year.

YouTube officially launched in May of 2005, but the first video was actually uploaded on April 23 2005. It shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, and is still available on the site. Check it out below:

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Cable networks have griped for years that it’s past time they achieved parity in ad rates with broadcasters—and at some conglomerates (namely, NBCU), cable outshines broadcast. But despite cable’s sturm und drang about showing the big boys who’s boss, it all hinges on CBS’ CPM gains, says Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser, formerly lead forecaster for Interpublic. “The negotiation for the cable players is relative to that number,” he explains. “If you believe you deserve a premium, it’s a premium to that number.” Following are upfront week highlights among cable’s key players.

NBCU]]> http://www.mad42.com/2012/05/21/handicapping-the-cable-upfront/feed/ 0 http://feeds.adweek.com/~r/adweek/all-news/~3/IY7UuQ9UgIg/nets-prime-pump-140661 http://feeds.adweek.com/~r/adweek/all-news/~3/IY7UuQ9UgIg/nets-prime-pump-140661#comments Mon, 21 May 2012 04:04:41 +0000 MadisonAnd42nd http://www.mad42.com/?guid=85b9ee55789f68c13e9c019a751b1c8b

Trying to gauge the quality of a 22-episode television series by watching three minutes of foot-age culled from the pilot is akin to declaring your major when you’re in kindergarten. And yet, this is what media buyers and clients do every year in May, when the five English-language broadcast networks host their respective up-front presentations in New York.