The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘its-integration’

Online productivity suite Zoho has been open to allowing users to use their Google, Google Apps and Yahoo accounts to log-in to Zoho Apps. Zoho says that most of its users are using their log-ins for other applications to use Zoho’s offerings. Today, the productivity suite is adding a social layer to its suite by integrating the ability to login with Facebook Connect.

Similar to its integration with Google apps, Zoho users can login to Zoho using their Facebook credentials. Users with existing Zoho accounts can now link the two accounts so that they can login with Facebook credentials alone. But the plus of using Facebook Connect now allows Zoho to transcend platforms. So you can now share documents with Facebook users who don’t have a Zoho Account. Of course this isn’t Zoho’s first foray into Facebook’s territory. Zoho’s Facebook app allows users to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations from within Facebook and includes the ability to view and edit all existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations (both personal and shared) from Zoho Writer, Sheet and Show.

Of course, you can add a social layer to Google Apps, a competitor of sorts to Zoho, with Socialwok. But the plus of using Zoho’s applications is that suite ties into its other productivity applications seamlessly. And Zoho is affordable, with a free version of the suite. Last year, we wrote that Zoho has continued to implement an intelligent strategy to launch new products and add-ons to its existing offerings, partly to keep users from flocking to Google Apps and Microsoft’s Web-based version of Microsoft 2010. It looks like Zoho is continuing this strategy in 2010.

The adoption of Facebook Connect makes sense for a number of reasons. First, productivity apps in the enterprise are naturally becoming more social. Second, Facebook, with 400 million users, could bring more traffic to Zoho. Last year, startup unveiled a new version of Zoho Reports; launched a deeper integration with Google Docs; rolled out Zoho Discussions, a online forum tool for businesses; and debuted Zoho Recruit.

And over the past two years, Zoho has added support for Sharepoint, mobile, Google and Yahoo IDs and group sharing. According to out latest states, Zoho has definitely reached over 2 million users is even catching the attention of its competition.

I’m here at Facebook’s office in downtown Palo Alto, where the company is holding a special Technology Tasting to announce and demonstrate its latest APIs and other features it is going to begin offering developers. In the last two days we’ve heard about some of the announcements, including its decision to grant developers access to full streams - a big step for a service that has previously been quite reserved about exporting its data. And earlier today we learned about its decision to fullly embrace of OpenID, which is a huge leap forward for the initiative.

I’ll be streaming the event live using Qik, during which we will be shown demos of some of the first implementations of the full Facebook streams and its integration with OpenID.

Update: Facebook is using Plaxo as an example of enabling two-way flow between Facebook Connect, so you can share activity between 3rd party sites and Facebook via linking accounts.

Showing Facebook desktop powered by Adobe Air. Loic Le Meur, creator of Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop, is presenting how Seesmic Desktop is integrating Twitter and Facebook together into its desktop client. He says you should be able to post video to Facebook from the Seesmic Desktop. This pretty cool because they did this within 72 hours.

Luke Shepard is now talking OpenID and Facebook Connect are working together. See our earlier post.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Our own MG Siegler is attempting to shoot live video of the ongoing MySpace all hands meeting where the new executive team, including new CEO Owen Van Natta, is addressing the troops.

The result? Total failure. We had to try since the meeting is being held outside. MySpace’s Los Angeles headquarters has no place for a thousand or so people to congregate, so they are holding the meeting outside in the courtyard, facing a public street. So far, so good. But security put up a fence around the courtyard and checked everyone’s badges carefully. MG tried, and tried again, but was turned away.

Ever diligent, MG then tried to video the event from outside the fence. But the audio is so bad that nothing could be heard. On the upside he was kicked out by security and told he’d be arrested if he didn’t leave the property. He’s now trying to find a back way into the courtyard, and I’ve promised to bail him out if it comes to it.

The full video, which contains absolutely no useful content whatsoever, is below. Next time we’re renting a helicopter.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

The ad rates for online video keep coming down, and that is a good thing. Video ad network BrightRoll is about to release some data from the first quarter of 2009 which shows ad rates as measured in cost-per-thousand impressions (CPMs) dropping 12 percent annually. The rate of decline is slowing from the 25 percent drop that video ad CPMs experienced during the fourth quarter of 2008. But if they fall farther that could be a good thing.

In a survey of 150 advertising executives in the U.S., more than half (53 percent) expect video CPM rates to be “marginally lower” a year from now, while another 20 percent think CPMS will drop in half. Video CPMs range broadly depending on whether the ads are being sold directly by sites with large video inventories or by ad networks, but a $20 CPM is a broad industry average. These still need to come down to between $7 and $9 to roughly match what advertisers are paying for commercials on TV on average (more like $15 for primetime, and as high as $50 for niche, targeted cable channels). These declining CPMs probably have something to do with the downward revision in ad video revenue estimates that we are starting to see.

The high price of online video ads is only one factor limiting its growth, however. Others include poor targeting capabilities, and a still somewhat limited reach for those mostly professionally-produced videos that companies want to place ads on. In the survey, here were the biggest limiting factors:

In your view, what are the factors limiting online video advertising’s growth today?

• Lack of targeting capabilities: 31%
• High price of video: 27%
• Limited reach of online video: 18%
• Ad format limitations: 12%
• Poor inventory quality: 7%
• Other: 5% 


 



And here are the factors corporate clients are worried about. Again, targeting comes up top. Corporations don’t seem as concerned about price as ad agency executives, but overall they have roughly the same concerns.

Which aspect of online video do your clients have the most significant concerns about?

• Targeting capabilities: 28%
• Reach: 24%
• Price relative to TV: 17%
• Other: 15%
• Ability to reuse creative: 9%
• Ad unit format: 7%

But let’s get back to falling prices because it is really important to understand how that will play out. The lower the rates fall, the more comfortable advertisers are buying online video ad inventory in bulk, and if the prices come down to be more in line with television ad rates then it will be easier for them to think of TV ads and online video ads in the same vein. In fact, 71 percent of the survey respondents think of online video ads as complementary to TV ads. Like anybody else, ad executives like to feel comfortable about what they are buying. The more that online video ads look like TV ads and are priced like TV ads, the more comfortable Madison Avenue and its corporate clients will be.

This rigidity partly explains why the pre-roll ad is more dominant than ever. During the first quarter, pre-rolls (video ads that appear in the player before the actual clip) accounted for 81 percent of campaign budgets, up from 63 percent a year ago. In the survey, ad executives perceived the pre-roll as delivering better response rates than other video ad units and “easier to compare it apples-to-apples to a TV: 30 spot.” They also like the fact that they can re-purpose their TV ads for the Web. In other words, they’ve learned nothing about the benefits of molding their advertising to the medium.

Everyone in the advertising industry may love pre-rolls, yet very few of them have even done studies to measure their effectiveness or that of any video advertising. According to BrightRoll’s survey, 87 percent have not done any in-house research on online video effectiveness. However, 56 percent believe clients would spend more on online video advertising if they could prove its effectiveness with data. If they did conduct research, here is what they would want to find out:

What areas of online video advertising do you believe need to be researched further?

• Impact on offline purchase behavior: 39%
• Change in purchase intent or brand lift: 36%
• Performance vs. TV advertising: 25%

Those all sound like important and reasonable things to start measuring. So what is the holdup?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0