I had previously written about video ads and now found this interesting article on Off-the-record with some more good examples for video ads. It seems that the German market tries to go video now to sell their products. Another good site also Ikea.de, which present almost every room in short videos nowadays.
Youtube has come up with a white label YouTube called Startyourtube. Now you can just create your own YouTube with the look, feel, name, URL, content, etc. that you want such as Snowboarderstube as you can see below. To increase the capacities, number of possible views, blogs, etc. one needs to pay but it still means that you have your own Videoportal!
Some other names of similar sites are Ning, Magnify, Reality Digital, KickApps, and VSocial. Let us know if you know any other sites.
Another little GPS or “Google Penetrating System”, as one person commented quite correctly on the Google System Blog. Google is showing traffic conditions on Google Maps with the data based on historic data and statistics, which works similar to the weather forecast. This data is still insufficient for the entire world but some U.S. cities already have the system up and running as you can see in this map for San Francisco.
In the last two weeks we have received some interesting statistics about social networks and webpages in Europe, namely Germany, that might interest you:
First of all it needs mentioning that there are currently around 149 social networks in Germany according to the ranking - list of zweinull.cc.
The Forsa-Survey, which was initiated by Sevenone Interactive, concluded that the average German only visits eight sites per month. Such a high loyalty makes it very difficult for new websites to become popular, because the average man checks out 21 new sites and the women check out 13 new sites on an average per month. To see what these main websites are and which age group is loyal to which site, see the statistics.
Another interesting fact is that according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 85% of the German internet users are in some sort of social network. What makes it interesting is that these people are willing to rather receive targeted advertising instead of having to pay for the service however don’t like to be monitored/tracked while surfing the internet. In correlation to the previously mentioned loyalty of internet users, German are interested in staying the same social network for the entire life instead of joining too many new networks. To read the entire analysis of this interesting PWC study click here.
According to Bloomberg MySpace wants to enter the sphere of online retail now after having already strung a nice deal with Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group Corp. for selling music online in order to compensate for the dwindling numbers of members and decreasing advertising revenue! They are even considering their own online check-out system. Either this is a desperate try to turn the destiny around or a brilliant move. Let’s see what the Murdoch’s are coming up with.
The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, an independent council of the European Commission, has decided that Search Engines like Google and Yahoo can no longer safe user-specific information for 18 months but need to delete or make user data anonymous after only six months. The Search Engines would need to revise their datamining procedures drastically to comply with such a law in case the European Commission follows the advice of the council and passes such Act.
The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has finally decided that “Open XML” will be the international standard for information storage. The Microsoft Code “Open XML” as you can read on CNet has won the battle against the “Open Document Format” (ODF) and is now considered the file storage system for the future. This a step forward because all the different systems now will need to comply with the standard and it should make the decision easier on how we safe our Letsbuyit.com data to preserve it for the generations to come! 
The G’Day Beta version of Google.com.au has introduced a new feature. Now the Australians are using their geographic advantage of being so far ahead of time that they made the it possible to search for the results of tomorrow. That is great although it is nothing new because I already read about it yesterday!
