Readers say IE's market-share numbers depend on how, and what, you count
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If Internet Explorer weren't bundled with Windows, some Computerworld readers wonder what the browser's market share would be.
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Interesting data  this morning (thanks Dan ) on weblogs:  "Blog readership shoots up 58% in 2004 6 million Americans get news and information fed to them through RSS aggregators But 62% of online Americans do not know what a blog is"  Read the PDF  for more stats (man I hate PDF).  "27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers. Much of the attention to blogs focused on those that covered the recent political campaign and the media. And at least some of the overall growth in blog readership is attributable to political blogs. Some 9% of internet users ...
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It was indeed an astounding quarter for Microsoft, with operating income having grown last quarter at an annual rate of 32%. A big part of that growth is attributable to Windows Vista. But does the fact that customers are adopting it truly signal that customers are embracing it? Yesterday, the company's chief financial executives offered some very revealing data.
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Blog: Policymakers like to boo-hoo statistics showing the nation trails many foreign counterparts in per capita Net subscribers. A Washington think tank calls for measuring the situation in a new way.
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A lot of consumers across the country wouldn&#39;t purchase a lawn-mower, a van, a leaf blower or a laptop without thumbing through the pages of Consumer Reports, which they consider a bible of independent assessment for thousands of products.
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DISPLAY WINDOWS for holiday shoppers can be found more and more on 17-inch computer screens. The number of Americans who regularly use the Internet for shopping rose dramatically this year, with one market
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A new study released by Macrovision Corporation finds that US software publishers and enterprise software buyers have differing expectations regarding the future of subscription and licensing models.
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International markets account for more than half of the conglomerate?s sales.
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Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer(IE)is facing some stiff competition from Firefox as web analysts have revealed that the proportion of surfers using Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer (IE) has dropped to below 90 percent.
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The basic fact that Internet Explorer comes preinstalled on all machines shipped with Windows Platform is a good enough pointer to why it is the most used browser out there.
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Hitwise&#8217;s Bill Tancer recently posted about the distribution of Google&#8217;s traffic across its many properties. As you might expect and has been historically true, that distribution is dominated by search.  Right now, Google owns the &#8220;brand&#8221; in search. But Yahoo and Microsoft have more &#8220;diversified&#8221; traffic across multiple properties. Without some more effort and &#8212; dare I [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Ensuring publisher transparency, increasing advertising quality, and embracing video are key to maintaining a strong U.S. online advertising market, where revenue grew 35 percent in 2006 over 2005, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau official. Marketers spent almost $17 billion advertising on U.S. Web sites in 2006, the fourth straight year of expansion for this market, the IAB said in a report issued Wednesday. "A 35 percent year-on-year growth is fantastic. We're very pleased," said Sheryl Draizen, the IAB's senior vice president and general manager. But to continue the successful run, some things need to be improved, and opportunities must be seized, Draizen said. For example, too many marketers fail to test their online ads with the same stringency with which they test their ads for other media like television, radio, and print publications. This is a big mistake because testing online ad campaigns before launching them is critical to ensure they are effective. Marketers often ignore the characteristics of a good online ad, she said. Publishers also must make marketers increasingly aware that online advertising can help them throughout the entire sales process for their products and services. The Internet is a tool to build brand awareness and gauge buying intent as well as for actual purchasing and subsequent fostering of customer loyalty, Draizen said. As such, online advertising deserves a bigger slice of companies' overall marketing budgets, she said. As things stand now, companies spend less than they should in online advertising, which made up only 6 percent of the total ad revenue in 2006. "This is disproportionately low if you look at the total Internet audience and the amount of time people spend online," Draizen said. By comparison, marketers spent almost $58 billion in direct mail advertising and about $51.2 billion in newspaper ads in 2006. Ultimately, marketers tend to stick to strategies that have worked for them, and they consider shifting ad dollars to the online medium as a risk mostly because it represents a change in tactics, she said. However, with each passing year, online advertising is perceived as less and less of a gamble, she said. It's also critical for publishers to deliver "the highest level of transparency and accountability" so that advertisers' confidence will continue to grow, she said. On this topic, click fraud incidence is currently very low and isn't having an adverse effect in online ad spending, Draizen said. Other industry observers, however, say click-fraud incidence is significantly high and seriously hurts the effectiveness of search advertising. Click fraud occurs when someone clicks on a pay-per-click ad without any intent to do business with the advertiser. Reasons for engaging in click fraud include the desire of a site publisher to increase commission revenue or the attempt by an advertiser's competitor to drive up its ad spending. One of the biggest growth opportunities in online advertising this year and next year will be video ads, which offer marketers an ad format that packs the appeal of TV ads and the targeting precision of Internet ads, Draizen said. Some highlights of the study include: *Â Search engine advertising made up 40 percent of online ad revenue in 2006, ranking as the biggest segment of the market. *Â Display advertising, which includes both banner and rich-media ads, generated 32 percent of the total revenue. *Â The 10 largest ad-selling companies grabbed 69 percent of total revenue, and the top 50 companies nabbed 93 percent. *Â Ads billed per impression generated 48 percent of revenue, while those billed per a specific action, like a click, made up 47 percent.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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A US study compares the news agenda of the mainstream media with that of three user-driven sources.
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Are crowds really wise? A growing number of businesses are betting they are. The latest venture is a new incarnation of The Industry Standard, the poster child for the rise ? and precipitous fall ? of the dot-com boom.                                                    Published by International Data Group (InfoWorld?s parent company), the new Industry Standard won?t be the telephone-directory-sized magazine of 1999; in fact, it won?t be a magazine at all. The Industry Standard, which launched this morning, is a Web site featuring editorial content about online business, with social networking components and an online ?casino? where readers make mock-currency bets based on their predictions about trends and events in the world of technology.You might think that bets placed with Monopoly money wouldn?t be meaningful. You?d be wrong. A significant body of academic research supports the idea that predictive markets ? such as Iowa?s Electronic Markets, which features small wagers in real money on national politics ? actually outperform conventional polls, whether or not real money is involved. Moreover, the data generated by those markets has real value.Hewlett-Packard, for example, has been experimenting with an internal predictive market for at least seven years. In one early trial, sales people were encouraged to bet on the number of printers the company would sell. The result? The bettors? predictions were closer to the actual sales numbers than HP?s own internal forecast, said Bernardo Huberman, director of information dynamics at HP Labs.Emile Servan-Schreiber, a cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence engineer who co-founded NewsFutures, a five-year old, online predictive market, says that Google, Microsoft, and perhaps 100 other companies are also experimenting with internal predictive markets. And HP, said Huberman, plans to monetize its work by selling predictive market software and possibly running markets for other companies.Indeed, the global equities markets are, in effect, predictive markets, said Stanford University?s William Sharpe, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Prices, he said, are very efficient accumulators of information. What about predictive markets for politics and other arenas? ?I?d much rather look at the Iowa market than any of the polls. It?s more accurate,? he said.Betting on the White House ? and more It?s generally illegal in the United States to bet real money in a predictive market. But the Iowa Electronic Markets was granted an exemption because it is widely used for academic research.It works like this: A given candidate ? say, Hillary Clinton ? is represented by shares of virtual stock. In the event that she actually wins the nomination, each share will be worth $1 in real money. If she fails, the stock becomes worthless. Until the day of the actual nomination, traders can buy and sell ? and even short ? her stock.On the evening of Feb. 1, her shares were selling for a bit more than 59 cents, while rival Barack Obama?s were valued at a bit below 48 cents. On the Republican side, shares of John McCain had soared to 82 cents, well above his closest competitor, Mitt Romney, at 12 centsThe money at stake in the Iowa market isn?t large; the maximum investment is just $500. But it attracts legions of savvy political junkies, whose opinions are remarkably prescient. How prescient? The University of Iowa?s business school recently audited the market and found that, since 1988, it beat the conventional polls? accuracy by an average of 74 percent. Bet2give, part of NewsFutures, also uses real money, but any winnings go to the charity of the trader?s choice.Readers of the new Industry Standard will be able to bet fake money on a variety of topics related to online business.? For example, a prediction might state, ?Apple will ship 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008? or ?High-tech venture funding will decrease by 15 percent in Q2 2008.?The predictive market is just one leg of the new publication?s offerings. It will also feature news stories and columns by influential industry thinkers such as Guy Kawasaki, an entrepreneur most famous for his former role as Apple's ?chief evangelist,? and Mark Anderson, CEO of the Strategic News Service.Optimum conditions for wise crowds Remember the old IT dictum ?garbage in, garbage out?? The same applies to predictive markets. After all, ?the problem with the global village is all the global village idiots,? a saying that blogger Paul Ginsparg popularized.The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, whose book The Wisdom of Crowds is widely credited with igniting the boom in predictive markets, said crowds can be smart if they address four conditions: diversity, independence, decentralization, and aggregation.Why decentralize? Good decisions (or good bets) are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge. The open source software development process is an example of decentralization in action.Diversity is achieved largely through the absence of hierarchy (markets don?t have vice presidents) which ensures that no single person has too much influence and that diverse viewpoints don?t get shut out, said Surowiecki.That may be why the new Industry Standard won?t have is an editor in chief. ?No single voice will dominate the discussion, which is why we decided to forgo the somewhat print-centric idea of an editor in chief, despite talking to some great people for the position,? said Managing Editor Ian Lamont. ?We want readers to get viewpoints from the widest range of contributors possible, with the common theme being that these contributors are all people who believe that the Web is a major paradigm shift in business.?Turning crowd predictions into revenues HP has refined Surowiecki?s ideas, developing a methodology that may improve the quality of predictions while using a group, instead of a crowd. Assuming that more knowledge equals a better prediction, HP?s Huberman and researchers Leslie Fine and Kay-Ute Chen select participants with knowledge of a specific area ? supply chains, for example ? and then have them play a stock-market-based game.The results of the game let the researchers grade traders on their willingness to take ? or avoid ? risk. They then participate in a market, and their predictions are adjusted by their risk scores. The players win real money, and their predictions are of real use to the company, Huberman said.One of the most successful predictive markets, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, takes play-money bets on weekly movie grosses, Oscar nominations, and the like. Traders? predictions of opening-weekend returns are more accurate than the movie industry?s forecasts, and the exchange has done a good job of foreseeing nominations as well. In 2002, its traders correctly predicted 35 of the 40 Oscar nominees in the top eight categories, Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker several years ago.The exchange monetizes those predictions by slicing and dicing the data collected on the site and selling (in very real money) it to movie studios and other interested parties, said NewsFutures? Servan-Schreiber. The exchange is private, so there?s no way to estimate how much cash it generates, but it?s successful enough to have been purchased by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, a major private equity firm.Taking a leaf from that playbook, the new Industry Standard expects to sell slices of the data it collects on the predictive market via IDC, IDG?s market research arm, said Derek Butcher, The Industry Standard?s vice president and general manager.
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The commercial web is 10 years old, yet the online publishing industry still hasn't figured out how to measure accurately the number of people visiting each site. What's at stake? More than $8 billion a year. Commentary by Adam L. Penenberg.
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London: Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer(IE)is facing some stiff competition from Firefox as web analysts have revealed that the proportion of surfers using Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer (IE) has dropped to below 90 percent.
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Customers share what's working for them, and analysts weigh in about best practices.