Patent litigation comes to Interactive TV sector

Invidi Technologies Corp filed a patent infringement complaint against Visible World and Cablevision.  They say these companies provide addressable advertising using Visible World’s “Connect” product.  Invidi says they have developed software that provides multichannel video provders with the capability to increase the efficiency of TV advertising.  This will be an interesting case to watch and its worth noting that  Invidi already raised $117 million from investors including;  Google Ventures, Motorola, GroupM and DirecTV.

Interactive Ads are coming….

Recent announcements by MySpace and and Socialmedia.com on collaboration to make ads more personalized to the user as well as the Tremor Media  in-stream interactive ad formats announcement seem to be showing progress from basic re-purposing of old ad formats into something new and meaningful for the Internet age.  Heavy hitters like Procter & Gamble, Universal Pictures and Microsoft evidently all participated in the beta test of the new formats.  The new formats showed triple digit increases in video completion rates, time spent and click-through rates.  This all sounds very exciting but Real Time Content already has a system that can perform these sorts of functions on the fly and be more highly personalized.  My experience with templates and ad formats was that they were only good at to start with and then (like windows) you wanted to break out of the formats and do more exciting creative.  Comments welcomed

Coca Cola launches new web series around pop performer

Sprite, one of Coca Cola’s leading brands gets the new media age and I applaud the new web series following Katie Vogel as she attempts to grab stardom. The web series will attract the right audience for Sprite and subtle branding will gain more brand loyalty and recognition as well as offering timely opportunities for promotions that can be tracked and managed.With new web series, Sprite plays pop impresario

Web 2.0 in San Francisco – what was happening?

Where were all the people? I won’t comment on the size – or lack of size for this show, or who did or did not show up. It is a trade show happening during the worst economy in decades, about a relatively new market. The show organizer says 8,000 attendees.

So what was good?

Video. We have been is this arena for, well, decades and video is still the holy grail of information distribution, quantification and qualification and Web 2.0 had a few good providers. The usual suspects were showing mature products/services. Adobe managed to fill seats with Flash, Flex and Air presentations. Microsoft had a good sized booth, well located and showing Silverlight (almost) 3.0. Both of these apps are good vehicles for carrying video content and they showed well.

But it wasn’t all just the big players. Coremedia was showing an impressive digital content management system for video distribution called CoreMedia WebTV an excellent tool/service for re-purposing existing video content. ooVoo demoed their API designed to deliver a tool to developers and web app builders to integrate video chat into their applications. And The FeedRoom, a company focused on delivering a content rich experience for clients. They offer an excellent service for client engagement and content distribution.

Off the beaten path stuff. No wireless services for the time I was there. Or as my younger friends like to say “Web 2.0 wireless access FAIL” I had wireless on the ferry in from Marin, I had wireless with my morning coffee but nary a bit at the show. This was a major topic of discussion both in the Web 2.0 Tweats and around the various meeting areas. Here we sit in the middle of one of the most technologically advanced places on earth, talking about the future of human connections and communication and I had to go down the street to Peets to go online.

Final words. I know I wasn’t going to make a comment about the apparent lack of attendance this year but I do have one observation. When the world became comfortable with technology and the wow factor went off and we began to actually use the great stuff coming out of the labs and factories – we lost COMDEX and Supercomm and AEC and many more of the industry specific technology trade events. Even Apple moved away from MacWorld this year. We are all about solutions now. It is now up to the people with the tools to go out and actually start putting them to work. It may be that Web 2.0 is a victim of its own success. Internet applications are totally relevant – maybe everyone was back home building new applications or putting them to use – It all just happened at Web 2.0 speed!