Akami’s first report on “The State of the Internet” is out. PDF available from here.
Daily Archives: May 29, 2008
Q: Where has Obama spent $3.5 million so far this year? A: Google ads
From ClickZ…
Barack Obama’s campaign spent at least $3.47 million on online advertising related purchases between January and April. The biggest recipient of the Democratic Presidential hopeful’s online ad dollars was Google.
The search giant scored over 82 percent of money spent on online media buys for the Illinois Senator’s campaign this year through April, according to information compiled from Federal Election Commission filings. More than $2.8 million was paid to Google, as listed by Obama for America in its itemized FEC reports.
After spending about $640,000 in January on online advertising, the campaign pumped its online ad budget up to over $1.9 million in February. Expenditures tapered to about $888,000 the following Month. Filings show spending of only around $234,000 in April. However, previous monthly reports suggest more April online ad payments will be reported in the future; Google didn’t even appear in April spending data supplied by the campaign…
Rage against the machines
Tom Chatfield has written a terrific piece in Prospect about computer gaming.
In March, the British government released the Byron report—one of the first large-scale investigations into the effects of electronic media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. Since then, however, the debate has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions. In one corner are the preachers of mental and moral decline; in the other the high priests of innovation and life 2.0. In between are the ever-increasing legions of gamers, busily buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.
The video games industry, meanwhile, continues to grow at a dizzying pace. Print has been around for a good 500 years; cinema and recorded music for around 100; radio broadcasts for 75; television for 50. Video games have barely three serious decades on the clock, yet already they are in the overtaking lane. In Britain, according to the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association, 2007 was a record-breaking year, with sales of “interactive entertainment software” totalling £1.7bn—26 per cent more than in 2006. In contrast, British box office takings for the entire film industry were just £904m in 2007—an increase of 8 per cent on 2006—while DVD and video sales stood at £2.2bn (just 0.5 per cent up on 2006), and physical music sales fell from £1.8bn to £1.4bn. At this rate, games software, currntly our second most valuable retail entertainment market, will become Britain’s most valuable by 2011. Even books—the British consumer book market was worth £2.4bn in 2006—may not stay ahead for ever.
In raw economic terms, Britain is doing rather well out of this revolution. We are the world’s fourth biggest producer of video games, after the US, Japan and Canada (which only recently overtook Britain thanks to a new generous tax regime for games companies). Here is a creative, highly skilled and rapidly growing industry at which we appear to excel. 2008, moreover, is already almost certain to top last year’s sales records thanks to the April release of the hugely hyped Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV), the brainchild of Edinburgh-based company Rockstar North. Worldwide, GTA IV grossed sales of over $500m in its first week, outperforming every other entertainment release in history, including the Harry Potter books and Pirates of the Caribbean films.
The media analysis that accompanied GTA IV’s triumph was of a markedly higher quality than it would have been even a few years ago. But truly joined-up thinking about the relationships between games, society and culture is still rare…
Worth reading in full.
Android
The Google-led project is much more advanced than I had realised.
It looks like it might give the iPhone a run for its money. And it’s open rather than closed. Hmmm…
Heading into the cloud
Bill Thompson’s most recent BBC column cast a sceptical eye on ‘cloud computing’. “In the real world”, he wrote, “national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story”.
Quite so. You’d have thought that this rather undermines Nick Carr’s confident prediction of the inevitability of ‘computing as a utility’, so one expected that he would pick up Bill’s piece on his blog. Which indeed he has. But he’s oddly uncommunicative about it, confining himself just to summarising Bill’s views. Or am I missing something?
How to get through Harvard
From John Markoff…
A variety of legends have grown up around Bill Gates’ brief career at Harvard. (He dropped out halfway through and co-founded Microsoft). On Tuesday night, during an interview at the “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Mr. Gates regaled the audience with his strategy of not bothering to attend classes and then catching up in a single intense burst during a separate reading period at the end of the term.
On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, himself a Harvard dropout, appeared to one-up Mr. Gates. Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that he had also skipped classes, in particular avoiding “Art in the Time of Augustus.”
When it came time for the end-of-term study period, he was too busy building the prototype of Facebook to bother to do the reading. So in an inspired last-minute save, he built a Web site with all of the important paintings and room for annotation. He then sent an e-mail to the students taking the class offering it up as a community resource.
In a half an hour, the perfect study guide had self-assembled on the Web. Mr. Zuckerberg noted that he passed the course, but he couldn’t remember the grade he received.
Zuckerberg’s the original one.