Ballpark is now LIFT lab

I made the announcement on the company’s homepage a while ago, and it is now official. Ballpark is now LIFT lab, and many changes are coming. More people, more services, more events, and some news you probably didn’t expect ;)

I will uncover all the details in the coming weeks, the idea being that everything would be public and set around the end of August.

Welcome to LIFT lab!

Skytyping is cool

An easy way to make a splash this summer if you have a mass product to launch: Skytyping.

La grande consolidation

“la deuxième vague de consolidation [du milieu de la publicité en ligne] va arriver dans quelques mois pour une raison simple, les grands groupes de publicité traditionnelle ne pourront plus rester à l’écart de la publicité en ligne en terme de technologies et de services sous peine de disparaitre très rapidement au bénéfice des nouveaux acteurs comme Google, Microsoft et Yahoo.

Pascal Rossini

Je crois que c’est clair. Profitions bien de Pascal tant qu’il est encore à Genève, ça ne risque de pas durer très très longtemps ;)

Closing on 100’000 visits

In April 2007 this site attracted 87’909 visitors and 201’945 pageviews. Thanks to all the readers and stay tuned for a major redesign in the coming months.

Google (Newspaper) Ads

After radio and magazines, Google moves into the newspaper space, signing a deal “with over 50 papers for print ad auctions”.

Google is slowly locking all the advertising space of this planet, and will soon be the partner of choice for all the Procter&Gamble and Coca-Cola money. (via Geneva Lunch)

Ballpark déménage

Merci de noter la nouvelle adresse:

Ballpark SÃ RL
13 rue Charles Giron
CH-1203 Genève

We’ve moved!

Ballpark has a new address, please update your records:

Ballpark SÃ RL
13 rue Charles Giron
CH-1203 Genève

What you search = who you are

Microsoft’s adCenter Labs has information about and demos of “behavioral targeting system”, i.e. systems that allow you to predict what users are based on what they have done.

I found the demographics prediction demo particularly interesting. It allows to “predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information according to [...] search queries and webpage views”. Try it here, all you need it to type a URL or keyword. I tried with URLs:

Cocomment.com seems to be searched mostly by male below 18 (23.46% of users below 18 years old, vs 9.8% in the general population) while this blog is “18 to 24 oriented”.

MySpace.com gives some interesting results shown below:

I wouldn’t take this data for truth but it is interesting (and a bit scary of course) to see what advertisers are trying to do with all the data they are gathering on us.

The cost of the fake clicks

Steve Rubel points to a study revealing that advertisers lost $800MM to click fraud in ‘05. That’s a lot of money.

As I said earlier, this problem could be the one really threatening the whole web economical balance. When asked about this, Eric Schmidt – the CEO of Google – discussed click fraud and explained he thinks it is a self-correcting problem:

“Eventually the price that the advertiser is willing to pay [...] will decline because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks. In other words, the value of the ad declines. So, over some amount of time, the system is, in fact, self-correcting. [...] there is a perfect economic solution, which is to let it happen.”

Link

Is it really that simple? Self-correction demands transparent information, something 1) nobody will really have (or with six months delay) 2) Google and the others has no interests to give away.

Is Google covering the shortcomings of the economical model their survival depends on?

RSS superstar ;-)

Either I am suddenly one of the most read bloggers on this planet, or the people at Feedburner have a small problem with their numbers. Unfortunately, as 150 readers were reported a few hours ago, I am afraid the latter is much, much, much more likely.

Weird.